Senior had attempted to have Marsh killed shortly after he was granted asylum in Batanga, but the mercenary he’d hired had backed out of the contract. President Baptiste made a lot of money portraying Batanga as a safe haven for the most wanted. It only took a little research for the would-be assassin to learn the fate of those who attempted to end the lives of the fugitives whose safety the president guaranteed. The killers who were caught in-country met a fate too grisly to describe. A Dutchman who had murdered one of Baptiste’s guests had been pursued relentlessly by agents of the National Education Bureau. When they caught him, he earned a PhD in torture before his body parts were scattered around the tourist attractions of Amsterdam, guaranteeing that Baptiste’s message would be communicated worldwide. Try as he might, Senior could find no one who would risk Baptiste’s wrath. Now it appeared that his quarry was coming to him.
Senior pushed himself to his feet. At seventy, his joints were stiffening and his back had tightened up. Walking was a chore but he didn’t let anyone see his discomfort, because he never showed weakness. After completing the laborious climb to the second floor, he worked his way slowly and painfully to the room at the far end of the corridor, where Junior had spent his boyhood. Now it was a shrine. The shades were always down in this room and the ceiling fixture was coated with dust. When he flipped the switch, muted light cast a yellowish glow over the pictures on the walls and the trophies, medals, and mementos that filled the shelves. Across the room was a bed whose sheets never needed to be changed.
Senior sat on the bed and stared at a picture of Junior with the first President Bush. Senior was a good friend of the ex-president, who had spoken on Junior’s behalf at a fund-raiser during his son’s first congressional campaign. Other notable politicians had helped his boy get to Congress. They knew he was the future and they flocked to embrace him. Senior, who almost never cried, felt tears well up as he thought about what might have been had Junior not been cut down in the prime of his life by that…He took deep breaths until he was back in control of his emotions.
Pope shifted his attention to another photograph, Junior in his dress uniform shortly before his discharge from the Marines. If ever there was a man who looked like he should be president of this great country, it was Arnold Pope Jr.
Next to the picture of his son in his dress uniform was a picture of Junior holding a child in his hand as he would a football. It had been taken when Arnold Pope III was two weeks old. That bitch had named Junior’s boy Kevin out of spite, but his grandson would always be Arnold III to Senior. Just thinking of his only grandchild made Senior’s fists clench. Junior’s whore had kept Senior away from his grandson with restraining orders and by putting the Atlantic Ocean between them, but he had photographs and videos taken surreptitiously through telescopic lenses. What he did not have was his grandson, the future of the Pope clan and the last of his bloodline.
Junior was dead. Senior faced that fact every day. His boy had been a candle whose light would have guided America to a radiant new day of decency and honor. Charlie Marsh and the whore had snuffed out that candle and they would pay. Senior knew that he could never get his son back, but he could get revenge.
CHAPTER 25
Herb Cross’s wife was a CPA in the Portland branch of a national accounting firm. When she was promoted to a position in the firm’s national headquarters in Atlanta, Herb regretfully resigned. The regret went both ways. After Herb left, Frank used several investigators but none of them had been satisfactory. Then Amanda told Frank about Kate Ross.
Kate had a degree in computer science from Caltech and had been recruited by the Portland Police Bureau to investigate computer crime. After a few years of pounding a keyboard for a living, Kate had asked for a transfer. While working in Vice and Narcotics, she was involved in a shoot-out at a shopping mall that had left civilians and an informant dead. The Bureau had made Kate the department’s scapegoat and she’d been driven off the force.
Kate’s computer skills and police background helped her secure a job as an investigator at Oregon’s largest law firm. When Daniel Ames, a first-year associate at the firm, was charged with murder, Kate asked Amanda to represent him. After the two women cleared Daniel’s name, Jaffe, Katz hired Kate as the firm’s investigator and Daniel as an associate, and Kate and Daniel started living together.
Kate was five seven, with a dark complexion, large brown eyes, and long, curly black hair that made her look faintly Middle Eastern. She usually dressed in jeans and man-tailored shirts that showed off her athletic figure. When Amanda returned from her meeting with Karl Burdett, she poked her head into Kate’s office. The investigator had her feet up on her desk and was immersed in a police report.
“How would you like to work on the case of the century?” Amanda asked casually.
Kate looked up, her expression blank. “I’ve gotta pass, Amanda.” She held up her police report. “I’ve pledged my life to helping a dipsomaniac insurance executive avoid conviction for his fourth DUI and I won’t rest until he’s back on the highway endangering the lives of all of Oregon’s citizens.”
“Gee, I hate to interfere with your mission, but I’m going to pull rank and insist you give my case priority.”
“Okay, if you insist. But you’ve got to square it with Ernie. This guy is repeat business and he refers a lot of his alcoholic buddies to the firm.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
Kate put her feet on the floor and swiveled her chair in Amanda’s direction. “So, what’s this big case you want me to work on?”
Amanda told the investigator about her meeting at the airport with Martha Brice and the editor’s recent phone call. Kate knew about Charlie Marsh because of his book, but she only had vague memories of Sally Pope’s trial, so Amanda brought her up to speed on the old case.
“I’m flying to New York tomorrow morning to meet with Marsh,” Amanda said. “While I’m gone I’d like you to go through the file and start organizing it for trial. Burdett indicted Sally Pope on a conspiracy theory, so, to get a conviction, he had to prove that Marsh murdered Congressman Pope. That means he’ll be presenting many of the same witnesses he used in Pope’s trial. See if you can have a trial book ready by the time I get back.”
AS SOON AS Kate finished her work in the drunk-driving case, she carried a mug of coffee and her laptop into the conference room. She sighed when she saw the mass of materials piled high on the long table. Then she booted up her laptop and went to work.
Kate spent the first few hours typing a synopsis of the police, lab, and autopsy reports, witness statements, and trial testimony into her computer. Then she organized the digested materials into categories. When she was through, she went back to the reports and made a list of those that dealt with different time periods or subjects.
One category had to do with testimony concerning the murder weapon. The initial mention of the ivory-handled.357 Magnum was in a statement by Mickey Keys, who said he’d first seen the gun in Texas when Charlie was given the weapon as a gift. He told the police that Charlie played with the gun in his hotel room but never took it out, because he was on parole. The literary agent said that Delmar Epps, Charlie’s bodyguard, got a kick out of toting the weapon in public when he was guarding Charlie. Keys remembered seeing Epps with the gun in the limo on the way to the Westmont.
In Tony Rose’s report of his run-in with Charlie at the Dunthorpe seminar, Rose told the police that Epps had flashed the gun when the bodyguard was manhandling him. He remembered it because of the fancy grip.