Friendly Fire (6 page)

“And you say you're not a murderer, either.” Culligan sensed that the conversation was turning darker than he wanted it to, so he waved the topic away as if shooing a fly. “Put all of that on a back burner. All of those considerations are for later. Wendy will be visiting you in the next couple of days. Just promise me you'll talk to her.”

“I can't afford to pay her.”

“Don't worry about that. She's done pro bono work for me before, and she'll do it for me again. Won't cost you a penny.”

Ethan scowled. “Why would someone do that for me?”

Culligan matched the angle of the kid's head exactly. “Well, if it's important, and you really need to know, she won't do it for you. She'll do it for me.”

“Why?”

Culligan waited for it.

“Oh. You two are . . . friends.”

Culligan let it go. “So, are we good? You'll talk with Doctor Wendy when she shows up?”

A shrug, the ultimate gesture of noncommitment. “Sure.”

“Good. One last thing. The Commonwealth is likely to send a shrink of their own to evaluate you. Don't know who it's going to be, but whoever it is, they'll give you some line about being on your side, and about being off the record, but don't believe it.”

“The cops can lie to me in here and it'll stand up in court?”

“Absolutely,” Culligan said. “Cops, guards, lawyers, psychologists, every one of them can lie, and everything you say will still be held against you.” He felt a pang of guilt and backed up a little. “Well, okay, the prosecution's psychologist won't reveal the specific things you say, but what they will do is report to the court whether or not, in their professional opinion, you are competent to stand trial.” He leaned in closer. “Hint: Everybody is always competent to stand trial in their eyes. And then that shrink will work with the prosecution on ways to counter everything and anything we try to put together for your defense.”

“So, what am I supposed to say?”

“You answer the questions that anyone else would answer, but if the shrink starts sniffing around the details of your past, or the kidnapping you allege, I need you to lock up and tell them you want to see your lawyer before you answer any questions.”

“And they'll do that?”

“Yes. Well, they might sniff around your answer a couple of times, but once you invoke your right to speak to your lawyer, they'll stop.”

“But you said they can lie.”

“Not about this.” Culligan smiled. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “It gets confusing.”

* * *

Jonathan Grave loved his office atop the converted firehouse in Fisherman's Cove, Virginia. Featuring dark woods and leather furniture, it had the feel and the look of a gentlemen's club. The windows looked out on the marina, where the masts of pleasure boats seemed to be engaged in a slow-motion sword fight. Down to the right, maybe four blocks from the front door, crews of commercial fishing vessels and dock workers toiled to keep the residents of Virginia's Northern Neck—and parts beyond—stocked with seafood. Jonathan wished sometimes that he was more of a boat person than he was. It seemed wasteful to possess such a view yet enjoy so little of the activities. He found peace in the rhythms of the waves and the masts and in the foreverness of the horizon.

Much as he enjoyed the view of the world through the windows behind him, he desperately hated the view of the piles of papers that cluttered his desk. As president of Security Solutions, a major player in the world of high-end private investigations, he had to stay at least reasonably versed in various ongoing investigations, and he most certainly had to sign all the checks, though even that was something of a formality.

While most of the administrative matters were handled by Venice Alexander, and most of the standard investigatory issues were expertly managed by Gail Bonneville—his one-time nemesis and subsequent lover (until they broke up—no awkwardness there! )—Jonathan had learned from his father a long time ago that one should never cede control of one's money to a third party. It was one thing to write the checks—any bookkeeper could do that—but it was something else entirely to sign them. He kept that duty for himself.

And there were
a lot
of checks to be signed. Between the 0300 mission to rescue the Johnson girl, and an op right before that to separate a Mexican banker from some mean-spirited drug lords, he'd been away from the office for ten days, and he was shocked by the speed with which administrivia could stack up. The good news was that Venice and Gail both had arranged their respective stacks of paper more or less in the order of their importance.

Security Solutions was in every sense a legitimate private investigation firm, providing confidential services to some of the world's most recognizable companies, none of which knew anything about the covert side of the business which interested Jonathan infinitely more. The firm's name was not well-known to the private investigations industry, but it was known among the quarters where it mattered. Security Solutions specialized in obtaining the most sensitive kinds of information through means that were always successful and rarely discussed. That meant the kinds of fees that allowed him to pay his employees very, very well.

Jonathan's office resided in a corner suite that he called The Cave. He shared the space with Venice and Boxers, the latter of whom rarely spent much time in the office. Of everyone on the payroll, Boxers was the most . . . action-oriented.

A light rapping on his open office door pulled his eyes from his papers, happy for some relief. Venice stood in the doorway with Dom D'Angelo. “Have you got a minute?” Venice asked.

He didn't like the expression on her face. “What's wrong?”

“We need to talk,” Dom said.

“Uh-oh.” Jonathan had known Venice since he was a teenager and she was a little girl with a crush. Her mother—Mama Alexander—had officially been Jonathan's family housekeeper, but in reality became Jonathan's surrogate mother after his own mom died when he was very young. He'd known Venice long enough to translate her facial expressions into emotions, and she was upset. Dom had been Jonathan's roommate through college, and close friend ever since.

They started for the guest chairs in front of his desk, but he stood and diverted them to the conversation group in front of the fireplace. “Let's get comfortable,” he said. “My back's beginning to ache anyway.” That's what happened when you spent a career jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. His chair of choice was a wooden Hitchcock rocker marked with the Seal of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, his and Dom's alma mater. He swung it around a few degrees so he could face them as they sat next to each other on the green leather love seat.

“Who died?” Jonathan asked. Sometimes, the quickest, most merciful way to the point was to steal the punchline.

They seemed startled. “No one,” Venice said. “It's not like that.”

“Well, sort of,” Dom corrected. As was his habit when off duty, Dom wore a regular collared shirt and jeans.

“Someone is sort of dead?”

“I mean that's not the point,” Venice said.

“Then how 'bout you get to the point,” Jonathan said.

“Do you remember Ethan Falk?” Venice asked.

Jonathan looked to Dom and scowled. “Why does that name ring such a loud bell?”

“He was the precious cargo on a rescue mission about ten, eleven years ago.”

Jonathan winced, feeling busted. He'd made it a point over the years not to think much about the people he rescued. They were all just PCs—precious cargo—the points of the missions for which he would risk his life. To get too close was to lose perspective, and getting distracted was the surest way to come home dead.

“James Stepahin,” Dom said.

And that did it. Jonathan rarely forgot a bad guy. “Kid-toucher, right? Sold boys into slavery?”

“That's the guy,” Dom confirmed.

“And Ethan was the PC we snatched.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay. What about him?”

“James Stepahin was killed yesterday,” Venice explained.

“Good,” Jonathan said. The details of the operation were coming back to him. “He and his buddies were sick sons of bitches. I think we toasted one of them and one got away. That was Stepahin, right?”

“Three were killed and one got away,” Venice corrected. Jonathan admired that she had just pulled that detail from memory.

“So, why the long faces? Where's the champagne?” Jonathan shot an uncomfortable glance toward Dom. “Meaning no disrespect, but I think we can agree that Stepahin won't be impacting Saint Peter's day.”

“This is where Ethan Falk comes in,” Venice said. “He's the one who killed him.”

Jonathan laughed. “Really? Well, good for him. Justice the way it's supposed to be done.”

“The kid is being charged with murder,” Dom said.

Something snagged in Jonathan's gut. He said nothing, choosing instead for them to play the rest of their hand.

“He's trying to claim self-defense,” Venice explained. “He told the police about his kidnapping and his rescue, but no one's listening.”

Jonathan brought both hands to his head and pulled his hair back from his forehead. “Because there's no record,” he said.

The others nodded in unison.

“Well, shit,” Jonathan said.

Chapter Six

A
t Jonathan's request, Venice summoned Boxers from his home in Washington, and within two hours, the team sat in the War Room, a teak conference room that sported every high-tech gadget that Venice thought worthwhile to own. She sat at the end of the long oval table, at what Jonathan called the command center, directly across from the enormous screen that dominated the far wall. Jonathan sat at the long side to her right, his back to the door. Boxers sat directly across, and Dom sat on Jonathan's right.

The big screen displayed images of four men who looked only vaguely familiar. They were black-and-white mug shots of four tired-looking white guys, aged between twenty-five and thirty-five, their images displayed as a grid, Brady Bunch style. They all wore the same sullen expression of every mug shot.

“Which one's our boy?” Jonathan asked.

“The one on the bottom right,” Venice said. That guy fell between the others age-wise, and he by far looked like the most intelligent of the lot. The measurement scroll on the wall in the background showed him to be just a touch over six feet tall, and he sported a shock of blond hair combed straight back in a style reminiscent of old greaser movies. “The other three are Gabriel Potts, Raymond Stanns, and Samuel Din-klage.”

“They're the ones we killed, right?” Boxers asked.

“Better be careful, Box,” Dom said. “When you've killed so many that you can't remember what they looked like, it might mean you have a problem.”

“People look a lot different when parts of their heads are missing, Padre,” Boxers fired back. “Judge not lest ye be judged, remember?”

Dom held up his hands in surrender. “No offense intended.”

“Those assholes were slave traders,” Big Guy pressed. “They sold kids to the highest bidder. My bullets let them off better than they deserved.”

Dom looked to Jonathan. “Slave traders? Is that right?”

Jonathan looked down at the table. “Some of the baddest bad guys we've ever run across.”

“But we didn't know that at the beginning,” Venice prompted.

“No, not at the beginning,” Jonathan concurred. “The case came to us as they usually do, through the normal cutouts.”

“We were a lot easier to reach back then, too,” Boxers said.

“True.” The higher their profile got, the thicker and more numerous the safeguards. “We got word through the kid's father that he'd been kidnapped.”

“Lawyer,” Venice said.

“What?”

“The father didn't contact us, his lawyer did.”

Jonathan shrugged. “Fine, his lawyer.” A memory bell dinged. “There was something strange about the contact.” He looked to Venice.

She clicked a few keys on her computer to bring up whatever she was using for notes. “The first contact was to make a phone call, but when we made the call, they pretended that we had the wrong number. Then they tried to call that number back and were stymied by the rolling numbers we use to prevent detection.”

“That's right,” Jonathan said. “I got pissed off that they were trying to double-cross us somehow. At least that's what I thought at the time.”

“Another day passed before they reached out again,” Venice said, picking up her momentum. “I suggested we ignore them, but you insisted that we give them a second chance.”

“We were still trying to learn our own business,” Jonathan explained. He heard the apology in his voice. “Jeeze, that really was a long time ago.”

“They wanted a face-to-face, but you drew the line on that,” Venice continued. “It turned out that eleven-year-old Ethan Falk left school on his own to walk to football practice. His folks didn't know he was missing until he didn't come home for dinner.”

“Did he show up at the football practice?” Dom asked.

Venice shook her head. “No. And the coach didn't call because why would he? Kids miss practice all the time.”

Venice explained, “The kidnapper called Porter Falk from a payphone along the highway and made a ransom demand for five hundred thousand dollars—more money than the Falks could possibly pull together—with the standard threat not to involve the police. Porter called his lawyer, and then they put the wheels in motion to get Security Solutions involved.”

“What were the directions for ransom delivery?” Dom asked.

“They were bogus, as I recall,” Jonathan said. “A suitcase of money left under a tree in some park in rural New York.”

“In three days,” Boxers added. “That was the real warning bell. They didn't want the money right by God now the way most assholes do. They gave us too much time.”

“That made me think that it wasn't about the ransom at all,” Jonathan said. “That was just a delaying tactic.”

“Delaying for what?” Dom asked.

“Sex trade,” Boxers said. “When it comes to kidnapped kids, if it ain't about ransom, then it's about sex.”

“We moved heaven and earth on that case,” Venice recalled. “We even got help from Doug Kramer. He wasn't chief yet, but he pulled some strings for us.” Currently, Doug Kramer was the chief of the Fisherman's Cove Police Department. Jonathan wasn't sure exactly how much Kramer understood of the details of Security Solutions's covert activities, but over the years, Jonathan had seen indicators that the chief knew more than he let on.

“Actually the entire company got involved in that,” Jonathan said. “We worked a lot of leads, wore out a lot of shoe leather. A fingerprint from that payphone—one of many fingerprints—led us to look into Stepahin.”

“The guy was sort of a nobody,” Venice read from her notes. “Petty criminal, in and out of jail seven, eight times. He was the beneficiary of bad police work, lazy prosecutors, and generous juries. I don't think we knew about the others in the mug shots until after the fact, did we?”

“No, we just pretty much stayed focused on Stepahin,” Jonathan said. “The harder we pushed, the closer we got to him. We finally tracked him down to a crappy little farmhouse in the middle of a field outside of Nowhere, Ohio.”

“They tried to put up a fight,” Boxers remembered. “It was in the mix that Stepahin got away. We found the boy in a stone cellar that was accessible through a hatch in the basement floor.”

“How was he?” Dom asked.

Boxers looked away. “I don't want to talk about it.”

Dom looked to Jonathan, who warned him away with a flash from his eyes.
Don't go there
.

“Okay,” Dom pressed, “you said there was a sex ring. Did you find other kids there as well?”

“Jesus, Padre, let it go, will you?” Boxers said.

Jonathan explained, “Apparently, we missed a few others by a couple of hours. But we had our PC, so it was mission accomplished.”

“And the others?”

Boxers was turning red.

“I called Wolverine to let her know, and then we declared victory.”

“We should have kept investigating,” Boxers said. His voice resonated with barely controlled fury.

Jonathan didn't bother to reply. What was done was done, and that was a long time ago. He decided to change the subject. “So, Ven, do we have any idea why Stepahin was back in town?”

Venice leaned back in her Aeron chair and crossed her arms. “That's not the question you should be asking.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. He's something of a miracle man.”

Jonathan recognized that she was dangling bait, but he chose not to go for it. Given a few seconds, Venice would explode if she didn't share whatever the interesting tidbit was.

She grinned. “He died nine years ago.”

* * *

Jed Hackner cocked his head and scowled. “I don't understand what you're trying to tell me.”

“What's not to understand?” Pam said. She'd stopped by his office to update him on the results of the shoe leather she'd been eroding in her search for answers in the Ethan Falk case. “There are no records of the man he killed. None.”

Hackner offered a tired glare. “Anything more on the kid?”

Hastings shook her head. “Now that he's lawyered up, it's tough to get much beyond his juvie record. Petty stuff. Acting out. His parents divorced when he was thirteen, and by the time he was seventeen, they were both dead. Dad of suicide and mom of breast cancer. With Ethan being as old as he was, he aged out of foster care before he could really even get into it. Not that it mattered because by all accounts, he was what you might call a free spirit.”

“Thus the record,” Hackner said.

“Exactly.” Pam took a deep breath. “I'll tell you what, though. There is nothing in that kid's past that even hints at violence.”

“He certainly made up for lost time.” Hackner's body language said that he was ready to move on to something else. This case was something north of a slam dunk, and he'd started to shift papers on his desk. Then he looked up at Pam, who continued to watch him. “What?”

“What do you mean, what?” Pam said, matching his tone. “This case reeks of bad things.”

Hackner sat up straight, then leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms. “What it reeks of is a closed case. We've got about a million eyewitnesses and a confession. I'm not a lawyer, but I think that's all very good for us.”

“I mean the rest of his story. About the kidnapping, and the rescue and the abuse? Where is that all coming from?”

“I don't know. Delusions, maybe? Wasn't it David Berkowitz whose dog told him to kill? Maybe Ethan Falk has a talking dog. Or a goldfish. I never did meet a trustworthy goldfish.”

Pam smacked his desk with her palm. “Are you seriously going to tell me that your inner Sherlock is not going nuts over this?”

Hackner smiled. He wasn't a bad guy when he wasn't being an arrogant asshole. Presently, he was skating through the no man's land in between. “My inner Sherlock is a pragmatist. We build the prosecution's case. Let the defense fend for itself.”

Pam recognized a lost cause when she saw it. She stood.

“Don't look so glum,” Hackner said. “There are plenty more cases to solve.”

The details of this case bothered her. She'd
seen
the look in the kid's face when she arrested him. If she was going to be a party to sending a young man away to become an old man in prison, then she owed it to him to dig a little deeper.

A bizarre childhood story combined with the lack of identity for the man he killed was at least two too many levels of oddity. Plus, she believed Ethan's story.

If the kidnapping happened, then it left evidence. All she needed to do was find it.

* * *

Jonathan caught himself gaping, his mouth open just wide enough that he was sure he looked stupid. Venice laughed at what she saw, and he snapped his jaw shut again.

She continued, “Okay,
died
is the wrong word.
Evaporated
is better. According to what I've pulled together off of ICIS, the decedent in Braddock County is in fact no one. He never existed. His fingerprints trace to nothing.”

“What about facial recognition software?” Jonathan asked.

Venice shrugged with a single shoulder. “Death does funny things to a face, as you know,” she said. She tapped her keyboard. “I can pull up the death photo for you.” The screen blinked and a dead guy appeared, the standard naked shoulders-and-head photo from every autopsy. His eyes drooped, one an unfocused slit and the other a bloody hole, and his facial features sagged from lack of muscle tone.

“Look familiar to you?” Dom asked.

Jonathan looked to Boxers, whose scowl spoke for him.
What, are you kidding me?

“I don't know,” Jonathan said. “I could be talked into either a yes or a no. That was a long time ago.”

“That was a lot of people ago,” Boxers added with a chuckle.

“This gets better,” Venice said. She leaned in toward the table, as if to reveal a secret. “According to official documents and records, even the guy we know to have been Stepahin in fact never existed.”

Dom rattled his head. “Okay, I'm lost. How can you know that if there's no record? I mean, how can you prove the negative?”

Venice beamed as her fingers returned to her keyboard and started to fly. “Because I'm a thorough researcher,” she said. She hit enter with a flourish, and the big screen blinked to reveal a list of a bazillion files.

Jonathan's shoulders sagged. With all the windup he'd expected a bigger delivery. “Um, what is that?”

“Those, Mr. Grave, are copies I made of all the research we did on Stepahin.” She widened her eyes and leaned in again, as if expecting applause. Exasperated, she pointed to the screen with both arms outstretched. “This is all the stuff that no longer exists. Wiping it from the Interwebs doesn't delete anything from my files and my backups.”

Jonathan smiled. Yet more evidence that all the countless thousands of dollars he'd spent over the years to build Venice's Fortress of Solitude hadn't been wasted. “And if I know you as well as I think I do, one of those files is a summary of what you gleaned from all the other files.”

“Indeed,” she said.

“How about a photo?” Boxers asked. “Before we go too deeply down a rabbit hole, do you have a picture of the guy from eleven years ago? One that's not a mug shot?”

“Of course I do,” she said. More clicks, and there was the photo of a man who looked nothing like the monster that he was. “This is from his driver's license.”