by Blake Banner
“Now, we have to act fast, and there can be no mistakes. This has got to go like clockwork. Team one, you will go with Inspector Newman and make the arrest on Senator Carol Hennessy.” There was a muffled gasp. I stared hard at them. “If she has prior warning that we are coming I will hold each one of you responsible. You will proceed directly from this room to the cars, you will speak to no one, and you will make the arrest.
“Team two, you will go with Detective Dehan and make the arrest on Anthony D’Angelo, Carol Hennessy’s personal secretary. Team three, you will come with me and make the arrest on Jackson Lee. Team four, detectives, Inspector Newman will give you the warrant to go into the Hennessy Foundation offices, freeze their assets, and conduct a far-reaching investigation into their financial activities. The warrant was granted at five forty-five this morning, and the judge wasn’t too happy. So your powers are extensive.”
There was some muted laughter. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was twenty after six. “Okay, let’s go!”
And we scrambled.
Within half an hour, shortly before seven AM, Newman and his four patrolmen had stormed into Senator Carol Hennessy’s apartment in Manhattan, dragged her from her bed, cuffed her, and marched her downstairs to the waiting cars.
Almost simultaneously, D’Angelo, four blocks away, was intercepted while doing his morning run along the banks of the Hudson. He struggled and tried to run, was restrained, and Dehan cuffed him and read him his rights.
Lee was also out running, in Morningside Park. We waited in the cars, in the dark, cold morning before sunrise, and as he exited onto Manhattan Avenue, intending to cross to his apartment block, I climbed out of the car and approached him. He stared at me in astonishment.
“Detective Stone? What on Earth…?”
“What’s the matter, Mr. Lee? Had you heard rumors of my death? They were greatly exaggerated.”
He stammered a moment. “No! I…it’s just, at this time of the morning…”
“There is no good time for being arrested, Mr. Lee.”
“What?”
I pulled out my cuffs and the team climbed out of their cars.
“I am arresting you for the murder of David Thorndike, Mr. Lee, for conspiracy to murder an officer of the law, and for concealing evidence of murder and conspiracy to murder.”
He was shaking his head and staring at me goggle-eyed.
“No! No, that’s not true!”
“Turn around!” Two patrolmen spun him around and I cuffed his wrists behind his back. “Okay, let’s get him to the station.”
It went like clockwork, and as we drove away from Morningside Park back toward the Bronx, the team of detectives were taking control of the Hennessy Foundation and starting their long, methodical investigation into one of the most corrupt institutions ever to be created.
By eight o’clock, we had our three major suspects in custody, and Lee in interrogation room number three. Dehan and I were sitting in Newman’s office. The expression on his face said he was somewhere between elation and terror at what he had just done.
“I don’t mind telling you, detectives, that I will be very glad to hand this over to the Bureau.”
I nodded that I understood, but said, “Can you give me an hour, two at the most, sir? I need to talk to Jackson Lee.”
He shook his head. “He’ll lawyer up, John. Hennessy and D’Angelo did it straight away.”
“I know, sir. But I think I can get to him. And if we have a confession, that will clinch it.”
“Well, I suppose I owe you that much. But the fall out has started already. We’re going to have the White House and the Feds all over us before very long. You’d better make it quick.”
“Thank you, sir.”
We grabbed some coffee and made our way to the interrogation room. Lee’s attorney was already there with him. He was a big man in his fifties who looked like he’d been around the block a few times and knew his way blindfolded. He drew breath but I raised a hand as I sat down and Dehan sat next to me.
“Please, counselor, we haven’t much time and you and your client need to hear what I am going to say. Pretty soon the Feds are going to claim jurisdiction over this investigation. When they do that, Hennessy is going to start pulling strings and your client and D’Angelo are going to have the buck passed firmly into your hands. This is a one-time opportunity for you to get in first, before the big Hennessy machine starts rolling.”
They exchanged a glance. They must have been telepathic because his lawyer looked at me and said, “What do you want and what are you offering?”
“I want the full story: what happened to David’s article? Where is it now? What happened to his laptop? Where is it now? Exactly how he killed David and, above all, his motivation.”
Jackson leaned forward. His counsel put a hand on his arm but he ignored him.
“I can tell you about the article and the laptop, but I don’t know who killed David.”
Dehan said, “Bullshit.”
Counsel said, “Jackson, stop talking.”
I leaned forward and looked into his face. “He told you about his investigation. He told you he had met the hit man, Philips, he told you Philips had given him everything and Hennessy was going down…”
Jackson was nodding. “Yes, yes that is all correct. I asked to see the material. Obviously, it was a bombshell. The repercussions were going to be seismic. I told him I needed to review it. He brought it to me, left it with me, and when I read it…” He shook his head and laughed. “It was beyond anything I had imagined.”
“So you went and warned Hennessy…” But even as I uttered the words, sitting there looking into his deceitful, slippery face, the truth dawned on me. He was watching me, reading my expression. I stopped dead. “Son of a bitch! You didn’t go to her at all, did you? The directorships, they weren’t gratitude. You were blackmailing her!”
“But I didn’t kill Dave.”
Counsel sighed. “For God’s sake, Jackson. I can’t help you if you keep talking.”
He ignored him and stared at me. “I’ll talk, but I want a deal. And I did not kill Dave, Detective Stone. You have to understand that.”
Dehan said, “Where are the documents?”
“Have I got a deal?”
I said, “I’ll recommend it to the DA. Do I need a search warrant for your house? The minute I pick up the phone to get a warrant, the offer is off the table.”
“They are in my safe at home in Oyster Bay. I will hand them over to you along with everything I know. But you have to believe me. I did not kill David.”
I shook my head. “You had a multi-million dollar scam. You were going to be rich beyond your wildest dreams, but as long as David was alive and wanting to publish his article, you couldn’t pull it off. He had to die so that you could blackmail Hennessy.”
He was shaking his head. “No, for God’s sake, Detective! I didn’t decide to blackmail Hennessy until I heard he was dead! He was my friend! I couldn’t have looked him in the face and shot him in the head like that! I couldn’t do it to a perfect stranger, much less Dave!”
His attorney spoke up. “Okay, now that’s enough. Do not say another word, Jackson, until we hear from the DA.” He turned to me. “And if you want my client to incriminate Hennessy and D’Angelo, forget about the murder charge. You heard the man, he did not kill his friend. Now, this interview is over.”
We left them to confer and Dehan and I went to our desks. She looked exhausted and I felt wrecked, but my mind was racing. Suddenly, things were beginning to slot into place. I sat in my chair and saw David’s notebooks and diary that Samantha had given me. I picked up the diary and started leafing through it. The question that Ananda had asked Dehan was scrawled across one page. “What is justice?” And below it, “Morality does not exist in nature. It is a human construct.”
Dehan had her eyes closed. I said, “David was going through a moral crisis.”
She opened her eyes and looked at me
. “Yeah, you said.”
I nodded. I thought a moment, then sighed. “Well, I guess this is all just about sewn up. Whatever I recommend to the DA, she is not going to offer Lee a deal. Not now that he has confessed to blackmailing Hennessy. His motive for killing David is too strong. The Feds will wrap it up.”
She nodded. “I need to sleep. Are we about done?”
“Just about.”
I picked up my phone and called Frank at the lab.
“Hey, Stone, how’s it hanging?”
“Pendulous. Listen, remember the letter I sent you?”
“Yup.”
“Did you look at it? Was I right?”
“Aren’t you always? Yes. You were right.”
I sighed. “Thanks, Frank.”
I hung up. “Okay, Dehan, my friend, let’s go home. But can we go and see Katie on the way? I’d like to fill her in, give her some closure.”
“Sure. You’re a kind man, Sensei. Let’s do that.”
So Dehan phoned Katie to see where she was and I phoned the District Attorney to give her my recommendations on offering Lee a deal, and as we half-staggered out to the Jag, political pandemonium broke out behind us and the case slipped from our hands and into the hands of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
TWENTY SIX
The brief respite from the rain was over and an armada of low, sagging clouds in various shades of gray, heavy with water, were moving in from the Atlantic. Droplets accumulated on the windshield, and occasionally the wipers stirred into life and pushed them to one side. We were headed for Vincent Avenue in Randallfield, where Katie had a house.
Dehan shook her head and gave a small laugh.
“So it was that simple all along. You know? Sometimes I think that things are never complicated, it’s just that we can’t always see that they are simple, because of the way we are looking at them.”
I gave a couple of nods. “You may well be right, Dehan.”
She thought for a minute longer. “Dave had entrusted the stuff to his childhood friend, who saw the potential to become fabulously rich. He killed Dave and blackmailed Hennessy. We had it there, right in front of our eyes, all along.”
We came off the Cross Bronx Expressway and onto East 177th. As she turned left onto East Tremont, she said, “But you know what’s still eating me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
She glanced at me. “Is he? Is he Philips?”
I thought about that for a long moment as she accelerated toward Randall Avenue. With anybody else in the world, it would be a simple question of identity, but with him it was somehow impossible to consider it on that level. It became a philosophical question about the very nature of identity itself, even if you didn’t want it to be. In the end, I shrugged. “Logically, it’s him. But I never saw anyone so certain of the fact that they were not somebody.” I spread my hands. “And it does not seem to faze him at all that he is going to face Hennessy and D’Angelo in court.”
She turned onto Randall Avenue and we crossed the bridge, and next thing, we were turning into Vincent Avenue, heading north and looking for Katie’s house.
It was a large, white, double-fronted clapboard affair with black gables and black shutters. We parked out front and climbed the stairs to her porch. She opened the door before we had time to ring and led us to a spacious, comfortable living room, where she gestured us to a couple of sage green armchairs. We refused coffee and she sat on a matching sofa.
I watched her a moment. She looked anxious. I smiled and said, “Should I call you Katie or Kathleen?”
Her answer surprised me. She smiled back and gave her head a little shake. “Kathleen is dead. I am Katie.”
I gave a small bark of a laugh. “So it is possible to die and be reborn within a single lifetime.”
“I guess it is.”
“Katie, we tracked down David’s source. He may be Adrian Philips, the man who killed your family, or he may not. At the moment we have no way of knowing for sure. It seems Philips repented for the things he had done, and turned to Buddhism as a way of atoning. It also looks as though he was killed in a bomb blast in Pakistan in 2007. If that is the case then this man, Dave’s source, was his spiritual teacher.”
She made no expression with her face, just blinked several times. “So, the man who broke into our house… He might be dead?”
“There is a good chance. The case is now in the hands of the FBI. They have the resources to find out for sure. If the source we have found is in fact Philips, he will be arrested and tried.”
She seemed to digest that information for a bit, then asked, “And what about Hennessy?”
I smiled again. “She has been arrested. So has D’Angelo.”
She stared at the carpet for a while, then turned to look out at the gray rain that had started to fall outside, leaving long streaks like tears on the panes.
Dehan had frowned at me briefly, and now said to Katie, “We also arrested Jackson Lee, Dave’s friend.”
Katie looked surprised. “Really?”
“Dave had entrusted the article to him, along with all his notes and his research, everything he had learned from his source. Lee stole it and murdered Dave, so that he could use it to blackmail Hennessy.”
An expression of dawning realization washed over her face and she slowly leaned back on the sofa. In a very small voice she said, “After all these years…”
I spoke quietly. “Does it make sense at last?”
She nodded.
“Something that intrigued me for a while,” I went on, “was the way in his diaries and his notes, he went on and on about these moral quandaries, questioning what was right and wrong, what morality was.”
She gave a small, sad sigh. “In his own, twisted little way, he was a very moral man. Trouble was, he could only think of morality on the grand scale, how it affected society, history, culture. He was all about the law, democracy…” She trailed off, looking at the rain again. “But when it came to individual human beings, he was blind. Hennessy had to be brought to justice, not because she had killed a little girl’s father, not because she had robbed a good man of his life and a wonderful woman of her husband, no. She had to be brought to justice because she had betrayed her sacred office as a secretary of state, as a congresswoman. Because she had betrayed democracy. He was a very moral man, in his own, twisted way.”
We were all quiet for a moment, listening to the patter of the rain in the street. My voice sounded too loud when I spoke.
“And then he met Ananda Sri Pannasiha. Or it may be Adrian Simon Philips, the poisonous Asp. And he began to question all his morals, everything he had ever believed in, didn’t he?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“And the only reason you were with him began to dissolve.”
She nodded again.
“And the one hope you had cherished, that your father, your sister, and your mother, and you, might finally get justice, began to slip through your fingers.”
It was almost a whisper. “Yes…”
“There is one small piece that I am missing, but I think I can hazard a guess. “He fell in love with you, didn’t he?”
She nodded.
“Ananda, Philips, whoever he is, had a deep impact on him. He is that kind of man. And I think David started to question just about everything. But two things were clear for him, I think. He was in love with you and he had in his hands the opportunity to become very, very rich. I think what he proposed to you was that he would leave his wife, and you and he could be together, living like kings. Making Hennessy pay.”
She sighed. “This monk he was seeing twisted him somehow. He said he had been liberated. Why should we publish the article when we could use it as blackmail and become rich. The Hennessys were billionaires, if we were clever, we could live in luxury for the rest of our lives without ever having to work again. This, according to Dave, was how she should pay for what she had done to me and to my family.”
“You tried to r
eason with him. You wanted justice and retribution.”
“I wanted her exposed for the monster she was, and I wanted her punished. But as ever, he was blind to anything except his own grand visions. I pleaded with him, begged him. But he ignored me.”
“And that was why you split up with him. It had nothing to do with his wife.”
She shook her head.
“So he handed all the material over to his attorney as the first step in his blackmail scheme. The old standard: if anything happened to him, his attorney was to publish the material and make it available to the FBI.”
She smiled without humor and nodded again, more slowly.
“I can imagine that the rage must have been building inside you until it was impossible to control. And the solution seemed obvious. If he wouldn’t listen to you, there was only one course of action open to you. You went there on the Wednesday with the pretext of collecting books and CDs…”
“I also gave him one last chance and begged him to reconsider. But he was so arrogant and obstinate. He was convinced that once he was rolling in money and had divorced his wife, I would come back to him.”
“And you took the gun away with you. Then, on the Friday, you returned late at night. I am guessing you were wearing surgical gloves. When he opened the door, you stepped in and shot him once in the head. Then left the gun on the bookcase and walked away. In your mind, this would trigger the instructions he had given to his attorney, to release the material for publication and an investigation by the FBI. What you could not possibly have imagined was that his attorney would go ahead with the blackmail, and there would be no investigation.”
“All these years I have been wondering what happened, what went wrong. I assumed she had people in the FBI who sat on the evidence. Then when you came ’round…”
“And that’s why you sent the anonymous letter. That’s why you couldn’t let us know who you really were or how deeply involved you were in his investigation, because it could end up incriminating you. But your prints, Katie, were all over the letter, and all over the copy you handled. I found out this morning, and confirmed what I already suspected.”