House Justice (23 page)

The florist had once been very good with a pistol—with any weapon, for that matter—but except for shooting Benny Mark in the foot, he hadn’t fired a pistol in years. He hoped he hadn’t lost all his skill. He
pulled the trigger and the bullet passed so close to the left side of Whitmore’s head that it actually tugged at her hair. He wasn’t worried that her neighbors would react to the sound of a single gunshot.

Whitmore’s eyes grew wide with shock and she clamped a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming.

“Why did you print the story?”

“Because, because… because it was news. Because an American company was trying to sell banned technology to Iran and the CIA wasn’t doing anything about it.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Why did you print the story after the CIA told you that doing so could harm their operations?”

“Because I didn’t believe them. That’s what the CIA always says when you ask them to comment on a story.”

“But why would they lie to you?”

“Because they’re the goddamn CIA! That’s what they do, they lie.”

The florist shook his head. “I don’t believe you. I think you published the story to help your career and you didn’t care what the consequences might be.”

Sandy Whitmore opened her mouth to argue, but then stopped. She didn’t have an argument.

“Who are you?” she asked again.

This time he told her.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said.

He shot her. He shot her in the center of the forehead, right above the bridge of her nose. He was still very good with a pistol.

Looking at her sitting there on the couch—her thick legs splayed wide, her gross features slack in death, the ugly red-black hole in her forehead—he noticed he didn’t really feel anything, that there was simply an emptiness in his chest. He certainly felt no remorse for killing her, but at the same time he didn’t feel the satisfaction he thought he would feel for avenging Mahata. If he felt anything, he felt diminished by what he had done, the same way he had felt when he was forced to torture that little man Crosby.

There was an old Chinese saying he recalled: Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves—meaning one for your enemy and one for yourself.

Be that as it may, and regardless of how he might feel, before this was all over more than two graves would be needed.

Two hours after having dinner with Angela—an hour of which was spent driving around to confirm that no one was following DeMarco —they checked into adjoining rooms at the Sheraton in Crystal City. Considering the CIA’s budget, DeMarco said he’d been expecting a suite at the Four Seasons in Georgetown; this comment caused Angela to make that unattractive snorting sound she made whenever he said something stupid. When they reached their rooms, she handed him the CIA’s files on Rulon Tully and Ray Rudman and, in a you-better-do-it tone of voice, told him to read the files before falling asleep.

The file on Rudman was so boring it was almost impossible to keep his eyes open. It contained Rudman’s biography from the time he left high school to the present, noting that he’d been married for twenty-five years to the same woman and had two children and two grandchildren. He’d been a semi-successful real estate agent before vectoring off into politics, and was a one-term mayor of Anaheim before being elected to Congress.

Rudman’s personal and campaign finances were analyzed in detail. The conclusion in both cases was that Rudman didn’t appear to be doing anything either illegal or immoral. There was no evidence he had ever broken his marriage vows; he didn’t gamble online or spend hours on the Internet looking at porn; he didn’t purchase silky underwear for himself at Victoria’s Secret. He had taken a couple of
congressional junkets paid for by lobbyists, and the trips appeared to be complete boondoggles, but Rudman had been operating in compliance with those weak laws that governed the relationship between lawmakers and lobbyists.

The report noted that Rulon Tully and the people he employed were Rudman’s biggest financial backers. Rudman represented the Forty-seventh Congressional District, which included Santa Ana and parts of Fullerton and Anaheim. The author of the report concluded that Tully’s reasons for supporting Rudman mostly likely had little to do with the fact that Rudman was a Democrat or the geographic area he represented. Rudman had seats on three congressional committees: the House Committee on Appropriations, the Subcommittee on Defense, and the Select Intelligence Oversight Panel—and two of these committees, Defense and Appropriations—could steer business Tully’s way and initiate legislation favorable to Tully’s concerns. It appeared, however, that all of Tully’s contributions to Rudman— the documented ones, that is—were legal.

There was one innocuous-sounding sentence in the report that provided an indication as to how far the CIA had gone in its research. The sentence read: “Medical records reviewed; nothing found worth pursuing.”

Rulon Tully’s file was ten times bigger than Rudman’s, as befitted a man worth several billion dollars. Half the report was taken directly from articles written by the mainstream media and all these articles documented Tully’s genius or his ruthlessness or both. Tully had graduated from MIT at the age of twenty-two with double degrees in electrical engineering and business and by the time he was twenty-four he had patents on two devices, both worth millions. The irony was that both devices had medical applications; this was ironic because nothing DeMarco had read about Rulon Tully suggested that Tully cared in any way about the health or welfare of his fellow man.

Tully started his own company at the age of twenty-eight and immediately thereafter began gobbling up other companies like some sort of financial Godzilla. His attitude toward his competitors—and
the world in general—was: take no prisoners. He had allegedly used industrial spies to best rival companies and been accused of patent infringement and stock price manipulation. He’d been sued numerous times for his tactics but won in court almost every time, and when he didn’t win, the appeals would stretch out for years because he could afford the stretching. Employees who had been fired and who had the courage to talk to the press made it sound as if Bangkok sweat-shops had better working conditions than Tully’s companies.

The one-night affair that Tully’s wife had had with Marty Taylor was also documented extensively. From what had been written, it appeared as if Taylor was the kind of man who would screw any woman that was convenient and appealing, and he didn’t bed Tully’s wife because he was trying to hurt Tully or because he had been deeply in love with the woman. Taylor just had an opportunity to lay her, and lay her he did, apparently never thinking that fucking the wife of one of the wealthiest men in the Western hemisphere might not be a wise thing to do. DeMarco was also surprised by the appearance of Tully’s ex-wife: she was cute but she wasn’t the knock-your-socks-off trophy wife you might expect to find on the arm of a multibillionaire. Regarding the appearance of the billionaire himself, DeMarco could not recall seeing a more homely individual. In fact, to call Rulon Tully homely was being charitable.

However, and just as it had been with Ray Rudman, the CIA’s researchers had not been able to prove that Tully was doing anything illegal, which didn’t surprise DeMarco, because the Department of Justice, the SEC, the IRS, and numerous private law firms had never had any luck in this same regard.

There was one document in Tully’s file that stood out, and it was a copy of a police report related to the death of a prostitute in Ventura. The prostitute had been beaten to death in a motel room. According to the report, the clerk at the motel had seen a man who resembled Rulon Tully going into the room with the prostitute—and very few people bore a resemblance to Tully. Later, the clerk recanted his story and the prostitute’s pimp was eventually convicted of murdering her.
It was clear, however, that the cop who wrote the report was convinced Tully had been with the prostitute prior to her death.

It was after two a.m. when DeMarco fell asleep.

The sound of a hard, insistent little fist beating on his door awakened him. Thinking it must be some sort of emergency, like maybe the hotel was on fire, DeMarco jumped out of bed, tripped over one of his shoes, and stumbled to the door. He struggled to undo the security gizmo that wouldn’t allow the door to open completely, and when he finally opened it he saw it was Angela who had awakened him.

“Sandra Whitmore’s been killed,” she said.

“What?”

“I said, Sandra Whitmore’s been killed.”

“What?” he said again.

“Wake up! Get dressed and meet me down in the restaurant.”

“What time is it?”

“Six thirty. Now get moving.”

He noticed then that she was wearing a sweat-soaked T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes. She must have been exercising or jogging and this was the first time he realized that she wasn’t perfect. Nobody who wakes up at dawn to exercise is perfect—they’re nuts. He also noticed she had fantastic legs and, when she spun around after flinging orders at him, he also concluded she had a marvelous, trim little butt as well. Which made him wonder what she thought about how he looked in his ratty old Redskins T-shirt and boxer shorts, his face unshaven, his hair all matted down on one side from the pillow. He was guessing she wasn’t fantasizing about him like he was about her.

But six thirty? She was out of her mind. He closed the door, stumbled three steps to the bed, and collapsed back onto it.

“Who killed her?” DeMarco asked.

“We don’t know,” Angela said. “It could have been a burglar.
Nothing appeared to have been taken from her apartment but maybe she walked in on a robber and he panicked and killed her, and then took off before he stole anything.”

“Do you think that’s what happened?”

“No. We think—and so do the cops—that she was killed for some reason related to the story she published. Maybe some superpatriot whacked her because he held her responsible for Mahata’s death. Or maybe the same guy who killed Acosta killed her, although we can’t think of any reason why he’d do that.”

“I can think of somebody who might have killed her.”

“Oh, yeah. Who’s that?”

“You guys. The CIA.”

“That’s not funny, DeMarco.”

“I wasn’t trying to be funny. Who had a better motive for killing her than the agency?”

“The CIA did
not
kill her.”

“Okay,” he said but his tone implied that he wasn’t totally convinced. “Did Mahata have any relatives, somebody who would want revenge?”

“No. Her family was killed in Iran when she was four, after which she was adopted by an American-Iranian couple and brought to the States. The details are skimpy but her biological father was an academic involved with some group that opposed the government’s policies, and in Iran political opposition often means death. At any rate, Mahata didn’t have any living biological relatives, the couple who adopted her was killed in an automobile accident four years ago, and because she’d been in Iran for the last six years she didn’t have any close friends here, either. So we don’t know who killed Whitmore or why, but it wasn’t the CIA, and it wasn’t someone related to Mahata. The agency will keep the heat on the NYPD to find Whitmore’s killer but right now our priority, yours and mine, is getting Rudman to admit that he leaked the story.”

“Why do we have to get him to admit it?”

“Right now we’re pretty sure Rudman did it—my boss is sure and so is Mahoney—but before we destroy Rudman’s life we need to be
more than
pretty
sure. We need to be
positive
. So if we can’t prove he leaked the story in some other way, we need a confession.”

“And how do we make him confess?”

“I’m thinking we just Taser the shit out of him.”

DeMarco raised an eyebrow in surprise and she said, “I’m joking.” But DeMarco wasn’t too sure about that.

“You looked at Rudman’s file,” she said. “Did you see anything in it we could use to pressure him?”

“No, but I have to tell you, that file’s kinda skimpy. Most of what’s in there is a matter of public record. But I know a guy. He calls himself an information broker but he’s really a hacker, and he can get stuff your guys might not be able to get.”

Angela laughed. “DeMarco, who do you think you’re talking to here? What’s in those files you read is what we learned; you have no idea what we did. We have hackers that can run circles around your hacker.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” DeMarco said. He couldn’t believe he was actually defending Neil, one of the most arrogant, obnoxious people he knew.

“Well, I would. Anyway, since we didn’t get anything looking at records, right now we have two guys following Rudman. Maybe they’ll come up with something.”

“You have CIA agents tailing a United States congressman?”

“No. We have two private detectives tailing him.”

“Jesus. You guys, you’re…”

“Hey!” Angela said. “One of our people was killed. She was tortured and raped and killed. So we’re not screwing around here, and you better get used to it.”

“I know but…”

DeMarco didn’t exactly know how to say what he was trying to say. He wasn’t a man that normally occupied the moral high ground— in fact, he wasn’t sure he had
ever
occupied the moral high ground— and yet here he was, standing on that high hill all by himself. He tried again.

“Look, I know you want payback for what happened to Mahata, but you’re part of the United States government—a government that supposedly believes in the law and due process and … and whatever. You don’t get to act like some street gang that does a drive-by shooting when another guy in the gang gets killed.”

Angela just looked at him for a moment, then said, “I think you need to see something.”

They went to Angela’s room. She booted up her laptop, made DeMarco take a seat in front of the computer, and put in a CD.

When Mahata’s executioner pulled back the veil exposing her face, DeMarco had to stand up and walk away. Angela waited until he came back to the chair and made him watch the whole thing again, from beginning to end. After he saw Mahata fall to the floor, the blood pooling about her head, he just sat there, numb, unable to express all the emotions he was feeling. All he knew for sure was that nobody deserved to die like that.