The Breakthrough (22 page)

Someone must have asked for something, because she came hurrying past him again toward the front of the cabin. Boone’s arm caught her at the knees.

“Excuse me, Mr. Booker! I’m sorry. Need anything?”

He motioned her close and managed, “Wha’ d’you ask me?”

“Sorry?”

“You, um, axed a queshion.”

“Did you take a sleeping pill, sir?”

He nodded.

“You probably won’t remember any of this. I just asked if you wanted another blanket. You shook your head. You want one?”

He shook his head again, his eyes finally surrendering to the light. And as Boone felt himself cascading into a creamy, dreamy cocoon, he realized the flight attendant was no one in disguise. He had merely . . . he had just . . . he was just so, so . . . tired.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!” Kevin Kenleigh said as Jack Keller helped pull him to his feet. “Don’t arrest me, don’t read me my rights, and I promise I’ll tell you everything I know. I can’t go back to prison, man; I just can’t.”

“Kevin Samuel Kenleigh?” Jack said.

“Yes! Now, please! Don’t!”

“AKA Knives?”

“Yes!”

“AKA Johnnie Bertalay?”

“Yes, now don’t—”

“AKA Alfonso Lamonica?”

Kenleigh sighed loudly. Keller grabbed his shirt and pulled him close. “You know I need a yes on that one, Kevin.”

“Okay! Yes! But don’t—”

“You’re under arrest for the—”

“Why are you doing this? You Mirandize me and I’ll lawyer up and you’ll get nothing!”

“—kidnapping of Max Lamonica Drake. You have the right to—”

“See? Now you’ve done it! Why do you guys always have to be so stupid? I could have made a sweet deal with you, told you more than you need, even. Everything. Man, I got to stay out of the joint.”

“Tempting as that is, you’re not gonna con me, Kevin. Even if you told me everything from soup to nuts, if I can’t say I properly arrested you and read you your rights, you wind up walkin’. I can’t have that.”

“Sure you can, ’cause I’m small-time. I know who you want, and I can give him to you.”

As Tidwell’s squad crunched its way around the building to the scene, Kenleigh stood there hands cuffed behind his back, chin tucked to his chest, vigorously shaking his head. Jack completed the Miranda warning and asked if he understood.

“Yes, I do, but you’re going to regret this.”

Keller asked Tidwell if the two plainclothesmen could deliver Kenleigh back to Hammond, where he and Lefty could interrogate him. The two veterans followed in their own cars, and half an hour later it was just the three of them in an interrogation room about half the size of the one at the 11th in Chicago.

“If I ask Lieutenant Tidwell to uncuff you, will you behave?”

“Yeah.”

Tidwell freed him, and Kenleigh flopped loudly into a chair. “Now we’ve got to wait for my lawyer. Is that what you wanted?”

“You know what I want, Kevin. The phone’s right there. You know all you’ve got to do is pick it up and get your counsel in here before we can move another inch.”

Kenleigh shook his head again. “You could have avoided this.”

“C’mon, Knives. You think I’m new at this? I’ve got to cover my tail just like you do. Now are you calling your man or not?”

“Well, it’s a woman, but no. Not yet.”

“Are you waiving your right to counsel, and will you talk to us of your own accord?”

Kenleigh looked to the ceiling and appeared to be thinking about it. “I reserve the right to—”

“Stop this and call her at any time, of course,” Jack said. “But you stipulate that anything you say in the meantime can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

“I do.”

“I don’t know why, Kevin, but I’m gonna shoot straight with you. And I mean totally straight. I didn’t do that with Mannock.”

“What an idiot.”

“The very reason we misled him. He was easy. We told him whatever we needed to to get him to—”

“Perfectly within your rights,” Kenleigh said.

“But let me give you your props before we get too deep into this. I get it. I appreciate your gifts. You’re too smart to be misled, to be played. That’s why I didn’t try to fool with you at the club. I knew as soon as you heard who I said I was, you’d know the jig was up.”

Kenleigh nodded and his face softened. Maybe he was easier than Jack had thought. One thing his type loved was appreciation of his skills.

“Lieutenant Tidwell here and I are too old and too tired to play games with you. We’re not gonna pull the good cop–bad cop routine, not gonna tell you that we’ve got everybody else ready to testify against you. But I need to be even straighter with you, Kevin. You want that, don’t you?”

“We’ll see.”

“I’m not gonna blow smoke. You were going back to prison from the minute you took that boy out of the sight of his sitter, and you know it. You may have thought you could pull this off, and maybe now you think you can trade information for your freedom. Well, you can’t. You
can
help yourself, and your lawyer would tell you the same. But whether we arrested you or read you your rights or not, nothing was going to be different.”

“You don’t know what I have to offer.”

“I can only imagine. But I’m way past being bribed.”

“You wouldn’t have been way past the numbers I could have talked about. Think about that when I’m back in Michigan City and you’re still covering your beat.”

“I only want money I earn, Kevin. Now listen, here’s what I’m prepared to offer you.”

“I can tell already it doesn’t sound like much.”

“If you don’t want to hear it, fine.”

“I’m listening.”

Jack signaled Tidwell to hand him a legal pad, and he pulled out a pen. “I’m prepared to put in my own handwriting a document you and your lawyer can present to any prosecutor or judge and even enter as evidence at trial. It will stipulate that you cooperated to the fullest extent and that you should be accorded every accommodation possible in your sentencing.”

“What’ll that get me?”

“I told you I wouldn’t make empty promises, Kevin. But you know what I need. I’ll tell you everything we know up to this point; you tell me everything you can about what’s to happen next. If and when we get that boy back and have the perpetrator in custody, I sign this document.”

“All those words and you still didn’t answer my question,” Kenleigh said.

“I can’t answer it. I’m not a lawyer. You’re a chronic, repeat offender. But kidnapping is the most serious rap on your sheet, and I’m not going to sit here and tell you that any judge worth his robe is going to let you plead down to probation on a charge like that. I’m gonna say this one more time, just so we’re crystal clear: this is all predicated on your giving up Pitts and helping us get Max back. Then, if I was a betting man, I’d say that you might get your sentence reduced from life to something more akin to a slightly lesser offense.”

“Like what?”

“Well, the abduction of a minor for reward constitutes aggravated kidnapping, a felony in the first degree. That’s typically punishable by life in prison. We’ve got too much on you for you to credibly be able to say you voluntarily released the victim in a safe place, which might get your charge reduced to a second-degree felony.

“The problem is, we recorded you telling one of your accomplices that you knew where the victim was headed and what his predicament would be.”

“Which is not dangerous to him, by the way.”

“Because now he gets to live in luxury, is that it?”

“Just sayin’.”

“That’s not the kind of an attitude that’s going to get a prosecutor, and certainly not a judge, to consider a lesser charge.”

“Then what is?”

“Some show of remorse, but mostly cooperation that goes beyond our having to plead for it. Here’s the deal, Kevin. You have come to realize the enormity of your crime. You can’t believe what you have put this child through. You know you can’t change your part in it, but you are now willing to do absolutely everything in your power to get that kid back where he belongs.”

Jack let silence hang in the air. After a beat, during which Kenleigh appeared to seriously weigh his options, Jack said, “Listen, you know this has all been recorded. I’m willing to let your lawyer hear it and advise you. She’s going to want to know what we have on you, and I’m happy to give her every detail. She’ll agree with us, Kevin. She’ll urge you to help yourself.”

Kenleigh nodded, but that wasn’t good enough for Jack. He didn’t want Kenleigh to merely accede to this, be forced into it. He wanted the man to embrace it, to enthusiastically change his mind, to throw himself into giving Jack everything he needed.

“You know what happens when somebody kills a cop, don’t you, Kevin? It brings us together like nothing else. Everybody responds; everybody rallies. Well, let me tell you, kidnapping a cop’s kid is the same thing. You were never going to get away with this. There was nowhere to hide.”

“Let me call my lawyer.”

Jack turned the phone around and slid it in front of him.

Constance Wells proved to be a heavyset woman of about fifty, no makeup, no jewelry, and wearing a black sweat suit. “Give me a minute with my client,” she said.

Jack and Lefty exited, but they could hear the conversation. “I’m just thrilled to be called away from home at this time of night, Kevin. What now?”

“Felony kidnapping, and I’m guilty. This is about damage control now.”

“Have you said anything?”

“They got me, Connie. Thing is, they want more, and they’re saying it’s the only thing that’ll help me.”

“I smell liquor on you. I can get them for coercing a confession from an inebriated man.”

“I think you’d better listen to how it went down.”

Ms. Wells turned toward the two-way mirror and beckoned Keller and Tidwell. “Let me hear it,” she said.

“Can I ask you something first?” Keller said.

“It depends.”

“Are you a mother?”

“I’m not only a mother, Chief. I’m a grandmother. Why?”

“Just curious.”

Tidwell brought her into the next room and issued her a set of earphones. She sat at a small desk and took notes. Jack camped out where he could watch Kenleigh—who seemed to be dozing—and his counsel, who seemed to be writing faster as the recording went on.

When she finally removed the buds from her ears, Constance Wells, Esq., sat writing some more. And shaking her head. Finally she rose and made her way across the hall. As she passed Jack she said, “You’re a very lucky man.”

“How so?”

“I’m not a religious woman,” she said, “but I know that one verse from the Bible, the one the CIA has in its foyer, about truth. It says something about that you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. You’re lucky because I was going to play the jurisdiction card on you.”

“Kidnapping and crossing state lines, not to mention national borders—”

“Trumps that; yeah, I know. But I’m really good at throwing wrenches into the cogs of the legal system when it suits me. Making you claw your way out of a jurisdiction bag would have been fun to watch, but we clearly don’t have time for that, do we?”

“Not if we want that kid back,” Jack said.

“Give me another minute with Kevin.”

He appeared to rouse when she opened the door. “We bothering you?”

“No. Just hammered.”

“You ought to be.”

“What?”

“Why did you come back to me, Kevin? I wasn’t able to keep you out of prison the last two times. Isn’t it time you gave up on me?”

“Nah. Those were my fault, not yours.”

“Well, so’s this one, and you know it, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“Keller shot straight with you, and he’s right. Best you can do now is cooperate. You ready to do that?”

“Yeah.”

“Do this because it’s right. And I’ll help Keller draft that document he promised so it’ll do you the best good. I don’t know if I can get this down to second-degree, but that’ll be my aim. Even that carries a whopper of a sentence.”

“How long?”

She shrugged. “You may still serve twenty years.”

“Wow.”

“You deserve it.”

“Hey, you’re my lawyer! You supposed to say that?”

“It’s something I’ve never told a client. Now do the right thing, and do it fast.”

The cops joined them, and Jack pulled out all his notes. He had Kenleigh walk him through the kidnapping from the time he met Jasper “Jammer” Pitts to the afternoon he delivered Max Drake to the woman who called herself Virginia Tuttman.

As forthcoming as Kevin Samuel Kenleigh, AKA Knives, AKA Johnnie Bertalay, AKA Alfonso Lamonica was, Keller was frustrated to discover that even his knowledge of the Max Drake abduction virtually ended with his delivery of the boy to Ms. Tuttman at O’Hare.

“I hadn’t met her before,” Kenleigh said. “All I knew was that she worked for Jammer. I got the impression she was like his personal assistant, handled all the paperwork, and had done lots of deliveries of kids, overseas and back. Maybe she’s like his office manager? One time, when Pitts was in a good mood and maybe a little lubricated—he wasn’t much of a drinker as a rule—he said something about how he gets to Asia on his own for the big transactions and she accompanies the kids in case anybody’s watching.”

Jack narrowed his eyes at Kenleigh. “We found she came back on the next available flight. Are you saying Pitts got to Beijing before she did and was waiting to pick Max up at the airport?”

Constance Wells interrupted. “He’s telling you all he knows, Chief. How would he know what happened halfway around the world?”

“I’ve got to ask, counselor. I’m trying to make this make sense and see how many people are working with Pitts on the other end.”

“You can ask,” she said, “but you know Mr. Kenleigh is just guessing now.”

“We’re all just guessing now,” Lefty Tidwell said, and Jack noticed that both Kenleigh and Wells looked up quickly, as Jack had, having nearly forgotten the old Hammond detective was there. Lefty wasn’t one to say much, but he tended to nail the truth when he did. “Am I right?”