The Guise of Another (9 page)

As they headed back to the precinct, Billie and Alexander discussed the muddle of facts they had in their heads, none of which made much sense. Billie suggested stopping off in Hell's Kitchen for a cold one. “I sometimes think better with a longneck in my hand,” she said.

“You'll get no argument from me,” Alexander said.

He expected Hell's Kitchen to be the gritty, tough neighborhood he knew from the movies and was a bit surprised to find a vibrant and upscale village with walkups and stores and offices. Billie led them to a pub on West Forty-Sixth Street, quiet, no televisions, no band, just food and a large selection of beer. “What's good here?” Alexander asked.

Billie flagged down a waitress and said, “We'll have a couple Brooklyn Lagers…and some wings.” Looking at Alexander, she confirmed, “You like wings don't you?”

“Love ’em,” Alexander said. The waitress gave them both a nod and left.

“I don't think I've ever met an Alexander before,” Billie said. “I've known a few Alexes and a lot of Als, but no Alexander. You ever go by a nickname?”

Alexander rolled his eyes and chuckled, “No.”

“Oh, now you're lying to me,” she said. “So what was it?”

He contemplated the odds of this information ever making its way back to Minnesota. In the end, he told Billie his nickname for no reason beyond the fact that he liked talking to her. “When I was a kid,” he said, “my older brother, Max, started calling me Festus.”

“Festus.” She said the name slowly, letting it breathe. “I like it. Festus. You should use it. I mean, Festus is the kind of guy I could have a cold beer with.”

“And not Alexander?” he said.

“Alexander is a nice name and all, but it sounds a bit…I don't know…stiff.”

“And you don't like stiff ?”

Billie grinned. “I'm a woman of many moods, Festus. Sometimes stiff just isn't my thing.” Then she leaned forward and the corners of her grin took a wicked upturn. “But then again,” she said, “sometimes stiff is exactly what I'm looking for.”

Alexander snickered at the innuendo. “So a guy just needs to catch you in the right mood?”

She shook her head. “Slow down there. You may be my type—I mean you're cute as hell and have both a pulse and a job, but I'm a detective, remember? I spotted that ring on your finger a long time ago.”

“I'm not thinking about me,” Alexander said. “I was thinking about my brother, Max, back home.”

“The guy who named you Festus?”

“That's the one. He's like a better version of me, if you can believe that. Kind of an Alexander 2.0.”

“A better version, huh?” she said. “And it's what, a thousand miles from here to Minneapolis?”

“Give or take. But if you're ever in the neighborhood, you should look him up. He likes women with that I-don't-give-a-shit attitude.”

“So what's his problem that he can't find a woman? He have a third eye in the middle of his forehead?”

“He used to have a woman…a wife. She died three years ago—a hit-and-run. They never caught the driver. All we know is that it was a 2008 Toyota Corolla because they left part of a headlight behind. And the worst part is…my brother's a homicide detective.”

“Jesus. And he never caught the guy?”

“I think it still eats at him. He never talks about it, but I know that he still goes around to junkyards looking for that Corolla.”

“Perfect. I always wanted to date a guy obsessed with his dead wife.”

“He's not obsessed; that came out wrong. He's a really good guy—as brothers go. I just think you two would hit it off. That's all. You're sassy, like his wife, Jenni, was.”

“Yeah, we sassy gals are interchangeable that way.”

Alexander put his face into his hands and grunted. “I didn't mean…oh, I give up.”

“Take it easy, Festus, I'm just fucking with you. I promise if I'm ever in Minnesota, I'll be sure to look your brother up.”

The waitress broke into their conversation, placing a bottle of beer on a cardboard coaster in front of each of them. After she left, Alexander slid his notes in front of him and tapped on them with an anxious finger. “So where do we go next?”

“Let's narrow down what we know for sure.”

Alexander said, “We know that Jericho Pope lived in Red Hook with his roommate, James Erkel Putnam. They were both students at Pace University. Jericho had a part-time gig as a first mate on the
Domuscuta
. Just a couple of normal college kids trying to make ends meet.”

“And then Patrio International shows up and rents the yacht,” Billie said. “The
Domuscuta
goes out for a weekend tour, and that changes everything.”

“Not a tour,” Alexander said. “Remember, the captain said it was more of a sales job. Garland was trying to…to what? Buy a yacht?”

“Or talk his partner, Ashton, into wanting one. That's the vibe I got from Rodgers.”

“Stroking his ego?” Alexander suggested.

“Maybe. Guys like that stuff, you know.”

“They were co-owners of a multi-million-dollar company. And as co-owners, all profits fall in their pockets alone. No shareholders, no board of directors.”

“But that means that all decisions have to be agreed to by both guys.” Billie pointed her beer bottle at Alexander. “So if they don't agree on something…”

“One guy might try a little schmoozing to sell the point. Take his partner out on a yacht, wine and dine him, show him the potential reward for giving in.”

Billie said, “And maybe to sweeten the pot you invite a hot redhead to take him around the world.”

“So that would explain the yacht and the hookers,” Alexander said. “But what about that Prather guy—the banshee security consultant?”

“Yeah. What name did Rodgers say that Garland called him?”

Alexander flipped to the next page of his notes. “Drago,” he said. “What's his role in all this?”

“He sounds like a fixer to me, the kind of guy you have around to get his hands dirty when no one else will, the kind of guy who will go to Coney Island to pick up hookers for you. Garland and Ashton were important men, probably married. They couldn't be seen sneaking candy like that onto the yacht.” Billie took a drink of her beer, letting the mouth of the bottle linger on her lower lip before she spoke again. Then she said, “Can we get dark for just a second?”

“Be my guest,” Alexander said.

“What if the dinghy explosion wasn't an accident? Two owners minus one owner, equals one owner,” Billie said.

“Explosives?”

“It's a thought.”

“What about Pope?” Alexander asked. “You think he helped blow the dinghy up?”

“Why would he disappear? If he was part of the plan, he could just swim back to the
Domuscuta
. They would have had a cover story already going.”

Alexander added, “And from the way Captain Rodgers talks about Pope, it doesn't fit his character to be part of that plot.”

“Well, if it was a bomb, there'd be residue on the remnants. They collected some of the pieces of the raft when they did the original investigation. I'll see if those are still in evidence.”

Alexander thought about that and then said, “Garland and Prather know more about this than they told you guys back in 2001. Maybe if Garland gets smacked on the nose with what we now know—about Jericho, or the hookers—maybe he'll slip up and give us something.”

“Hold on a second. Let me call my partner.” Billie pulled out her cell phone and dialed a number. “Marcie, this is Billie. Look up a number for a Mr. Wayne Garland. He's the CEO of Patrio International.
I believe they have an office in the city. See if you can set up a meeting. If he wants to know why, tell him that we've reopened the investigation into the death of Richard Ashton and Jericho Pope. No…it's just a little side deal I'm doing to help out a detective from Minnesota. Call me if you get something set up. Thanks.” Billie hung up the phone and said, “That should get things rolling here. You have any leads back in Minnesota?”

“I have some bank records to look into. Jericho made money in the stock market, but there are some huge deposits that look criminal to me. Every December, he received a bunch of mysterious deposits totaling half a million dollars. When I get back, I want to see if I can track them to a source. And I also have Jericho's girlfriend, Ianna Markova. I don't think she knows much, but now that I know what I'm looking for, I'll talk to her again.”

The waitress returned with a basket of hot wings, seasoned with sauces ranging from spicy to mouth-on-fire hot. Billie and Alexander stopped talking about the case and dug into the food, neither conceding that the yellow ones brought a trace of perspiration to their hairlines. They returned to their conversation when Billie's phone rang.

“Yeah. Hi, Marcie…uh huh…you did?” Billie gave a thumbs-up signal to Alexander. He could hear the squeak of a voice on the other end of the phone but couldn't make out the words. Then Billie said, “Four o’clock tomorrow? Perfect.” Billie grabbed a pen, wrote “Patrio” and an address. “Damn, you're good, girl. Thanks again.” Billie hung up the phone.

“We have a meeting with Mr. Wayne Garland at the New York headquarters of Patrio International tomorrow afternoon. Marcie got through to Mr. Garland. I have a feeling we're going to rattle a chain or two.”

“Sorry, Billie,” Alexander said. “I can't be there tomorrow. I turn back into a pumpkin if I'm not on the morning flight back to Minnesota. I wish I could, but I'm on kind of a tight leash with the boss right now. They still think this is just some piddly identity-theft case.”

“Identity theft?” Billie said. “I'm thinking this goes way beyond identity theft.”

“And Garland is the key,” Alexander said. “He knows what happened on that yacht. He has to.”

“Well, Festus,” Billie raised her beer and winked at Alexander. “I'll take a run at him, but it won't be the same without you.”

Drago Basta sat in a reclined leather seat, the only passenger in the Gulfstream G650, which rested on the tarmac of the Daniel Oduber Quirós International Airport in Liberia, Costa Rica. Two hours earlier, he had been swimming in the pool of his hillside villa, naked and, of course, not alone. His companion, a onetime Argentinean beauty contestant turned private escort, had been with him for a week, during which he made sure he got his money's worth from her. She was everything he wanted in a woman: hot, sexy, flexible, and temporary—and she cooked.

She understood the employer/employee covenant, and didn't complain when one minute they were relaxing in the cool, blue water, recovering from yet another round of energetic sex, and the next, he was showing her to the door, her bags packed and her commercial airline ticket to Buenos Aires in her hand. She made no fuss. Why would she? Drago paid well, and he could be a kind and gentle lover as easily as he could be rough and powerful.

The phone call that interrupted his evening came from a restricted number. The caller, a voice Drago knew well, merely said, “Got a call regarding our friend in the wind. You should be here. Transportation will be ready in an hour.” Drago had been waiting for that call for years, and now with those few words he found himself savoring the prospect of killing a weed that should never have been allowed to grow.

On the jet, he found a sealed envelope with no writing on it. He tore it open to find a passport and a wallet. He looked inside the wallet and saw a driver's license with the name he would be using on this trip—Walter Trigg, from Wilmington, Delaware. He also found three debit cards with access to as much cash as he might need. The jet, leased by
a deeply buried subsidiary of Patrio International, had no flight attendant—the fewer people who knew of Drago Basta, the better.

The captain came on the intercom and informed his sole passenger that they would be landing at the Teterboro Airport in New Jersey just after 6 a.m. Friday morning. He then invited Drago to partake of the full galley and the well-stocked liquor cabinet, but Basta never drank on assignment. Alcohol, even a little nip to calm the nerves, could slow a man's reaction time. All it took was a second's hesitation to turn success into failure. He touched the scar that ran along his cheek, remembering another man's hesitation, a pause in combat that saved Drago's life. He had survived that fight because he had kept his wits when his drunken attackers had not.

Drago was a boy of sixteen that day, living with his mother and father in the country outside of a village called Štrpce on the southern border of Kosovo. They lived within a day's bike ride of both Macedonian and Albanian soil. And even at that age, Drago understood that his village of mostly ethnic Serbs grated against the skin of the neighboring Albanians who would love to do them harm.

His father was a twitchy man, an intellectual who wrote about Serbian nationalism and their right to land that the Albanians claimed as their own. His writing received praise from none other than Slobodan Milošević himself. Unfortunately, his work also caught the attention of a disorganized band of Albanian and Macedonian thugs—men with mismatched uniforms and surplus Russian Kalashnikovs.

Four of those men burst into Drago's house just after sunset on a chilly autumn night. One man, a husky, bearded goon wearing a beret, stood at the door with his arms folded around his rifle and shouted orders to the others, who ran through the house collecting its inhabitants—Drago, his mother, and his father. A man with large hands and a strong smell of alcohol on his breath caught Drago and dragged him to the kitchen, where the others had gathered.

They tied Drago's father's hands behind his back with a bootlace, strung a thin rope around his neck like a dog's leash, and forced him to kneel. One of the men held Drago's mother by her hair with one hand and used his other hand to twist her arm behind her back.

The man in the beret stepped in front of Drago's father, pulled some leaflets from his shirt pocket, and threw them to the floor between them. “You write for the murderer Milošević,” he said, curling his upper lip into a sneer.

“I write for the Serbian people,” Drago's father stammered. “I do not limit who reads my words.”

“Your words are lies!” The man slapped Drago's father hard, knocking his glasses to the floor.

Drago looked at his mother, who had cast her eyes down, refusing to watch what she knew would happen. The man grabbed Drago's father by the hair, tipped his head back, and spat into his face. “For your crime, I will share your wife with my men. You will watch. If you move, I will kill her and the boy. If you do not move, I may let you live.” The man in the beret then pulled out his knife and cut the cord that bound Drago's father's hands.

His mother did not fight when they forced her over the kitchen table. As the men began to rape Drago's mother, the man holding Drago's father let go of the noose and walked away, testing Drago's father to see if he would try to rescue his wife. He did nothing. Drago watched as his father remained on his knees, his hands untied but still behind his back. Drago couldn't understand why his father didn't jump to his feet and charge the men. Why was his father not moving?

The brutality seemed to go on and on. Before long, Drago's mother stopped screaming. And then she stopped crying. When the third man began his turn, the fourth man slightly relaxed his grip on Drago's wrists but still held a knife to Drago's throat.

Drago's mother looked up at one point and found Drago's eyes. She said nothing with her lips, but her eyes, bereft of the desire to live, told him everything he needed to know. She told him that these men would not let them live. She told him that his father was weak. She told him that what these men were doing to her was far worse than death.

At that moment, somewhere in the universe, a spigot opened and Drago Basta could feel part of his soul draining away. And with that loss, he discovered a sense of clarity that he'd never known before.

On a nearby counter lay a meat fork with two prongs about six inches long. Drago could have it in his hands if he could break free from his captor. In a single motion, Drago pulled his hands apart with every ounce of strength he could find. Only one hand broke free of the man's grip, and he used it to push the knife away from his throat. At the same time, he lunged for the handle of the meat fork.

The man didn't react as fast as he should have, as fast as he would have had he not been drinking, and that one second of hesitation gave Drago the advantage he needed. He grabbed the meat fork with his right hand at the same moment that the man yanked Drago's left wrist to pull him back.

The man slashed his knife at Drago's throat, catching Drago's cheek and ear instead. Drago drove the meat fork deep into the man's groin, spearing his testicles. The man dropped his knife and fell to the floor, his face folding in on itself in agony.

Drago dove for a Kalashnikov leaning against the wall. He had fired his father's old Hungarian M44 many times while hunting, but he'd never even seen a real Kalash before. The man raping Drago's mother had his eyes shut and didn't know that Drago had broken free. The other two men, however, charged in opposite directions, each hoping to get to their own guns before Drago could shoot them.

Drago aimed at the man closest to a rifle and pulled the trigger. The bullet opened a window into the side of the man's skull, and his dead body bounced off the wall. The second man, the man in the beret, had reached his gun and managed to get off a round before having his gun level. The bullet splintered the wall above Drago's head. Drago centered the muzzle on the leader's chest and fired three times. The man's torso exploded, peppering the wall behind him with blood and sending the leader to the ground in a dead heap.

The last man standing still had his pants around his ankles, his act interrupted, his complete attention now focused on Drago. He shook his head slightly as if willing Drago not to shoot. Drago fired a single round, which split that man's chin on its way to his brainstem. After he fell, Drago turned to the man with the meat fork in his crotch and dispatched him with a bullet to the head.

Then Drago brought the gun around to his father, who still blubbered like a child. This man, who challenged his fellow Serbs to sacrifice their lives for the cause, hadn't the simple courage to fight for his family. He stunk of weakness and hypocrisy, and it sickened Drago every bit as much as did the Albanians’ savagery. His father hadn't moved from his knees, hadn't made a sound other than to cry into his shirt. The man knelt there and allowed Drago's mom to be dehumanized. An uncontrollable surge of contempt welled up in Drago's mouth, causing his teeth to clench. He spat the bitterness onto the floor in front of his father and then shot the coward in the head.

Drago's mother didn't move from her place on the table. Her clothes had been completely ripped from her body, and blood dripped from her nose and mouth. Drago stepped to her side, wanting to reach out and touch her, but at the same time wanting to turn his back on what he saw. He held the AK-47 slack at his side and closed his eyes, unable to look at her.

That's when he felt the tip of the muzzle start to rise. He opened his eyes to see his mother's fingers gently pulling the barrel of the rifle up to her own head. She placed the muzzle to her temple and closed her eyes.

Drago whispered, “No.”

His mother uttered a single word: “Please.”

As Drago pulled the trigger, he felt the last trace of his soul leave his body, and in its place grew an all-consuming hatred for a world that had lost its color.