The Fix

  Both men watched the players for a few minutes.

  Mars said, “Their wideout is one fast dude with moves and good hands. You see the post-route stutter he just did before taking it downtown?”

  “Reminded me of you. But then you could always just run over someone too, if the moves didn’t work.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s ancient history.”

  “You been thinking about what you want to do?”

  “Sure. No answers yet. Just taking it one day at a time. How’s your case coming?”

  “It’s taken a couple of twists, actually.”

  “Things starting to gel for you yet?”

  “Just when they start to, something else comes along and screws it up.”

  Mars patted Decker on the shoulder. “My money’s still on you, bro.”

  Decker said, “You want to go see someone who likes football?”

  “Sure, who?”

  “You’ll see.”

  * * *

  An hour later they pulled into the parking lot of Dominion Hospice.

  “Hospice?” said Mars as they climbed out of the car.

  “Come on, Melvin.”

  Minutes later they were sitting in Joey Scott’s room.

  Mars stared down at the boy in obvious distress, but Decker said to Joey, “This is my friend Melvin Mars. He was an All-American running back at Texas and was a Heisman Trophy finalist a while back. He never got to play in the NFL, but he would’ve been a Hall of Famer.” He pointed to the picture on Joey’s nightstand. “Like your buddy Peyton there.”

  “Wow,” said Joey. He held up his hand for Mars to shake. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Mars.”

  Mars’s hand swallowed the boy’s as he gently shook it. “Just call me Melvin,” he said, glancing at Decker.

  Decker said, “Joey played football too. Would’ve been a heckuva player.”

  “Yep, I can see that,” said Mars. “I bet you were fast, Joey. You got that build.”

  Joey nodded. “I was really fast.” He coughed and tried to sit up. Mars bent down to help him.

  “And I could throw too. I played quarterback in Pop Warner.”

  “Probably the most important position on the field,” said Mars. He pulled up a chair and sat down next to the bed. “I remember one game where we were behind the whole way. We were all discouraged. Pretty sure we were going to lose. Well, our QB comes into the huddle after a timeout and says, ‘Okay, guys, we’re going to win this game because we’re eleven men with one goal. And nobody can stop that. I’ve got this and I’ve got your back, so let’s do this thing.’ And you know what?”

  “What?” asked Joey breathlessly.

  “We won that game and every one after that, including the Cotton Bowl.” He held up one finger. “’Cause one guy believed in us. That was all it took.”

  Joey smiled as Mars held out his fist for Joey to knuckle smack.

  Joey looked over at Decker. “Thanks for bringing Melvin to see me. He’s cool.”

  “Yeah, I think so too,” said Decker.

  * * *

  After they left Joey and were walking back to the car, Mars asked quietly, “So he’s got no shot?”

  “Apparently not,” said Decker.

  “Shit, he ain’t even had a chance at a life.”

  “I know,” said Decker. “Life sucks. A lot.”

  Mars looked over at Decker. “I guess we both know that.”

  “You made his day, Melvin.”

  “He did the same for me.”

  “How so?”

  “Just makes you think about the future. What I’m going to do. Joey doesn’t have that chance. So it makes me not want to screw up with mine. I mean, you only get one shot, right?”

  Decker slowly nodded.

  They climbed into the car and Mars drove off. “Back to your apartment?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Alex is there. You got dinner plans?”

  “Yeah, actually I do.”

  “Brown?”

  “Harper.”

  Decker cracked a smile. “Harper.”

  “Maybe we could do a double date down the road.”

  “That requires two couples. And Alex and I are not a couple. I’m more like her big brother. Her really big brother.”

  “I know that. It would just be hanging out.”

  Mars dropped Decker at the apartment and drove away. Decker watched him go for a bit. He saw Jamison’s car in the parking lot, so he knew she was there.

  But he didn’t go in. Instead, he turned to the east and started walking. Twenty minutes later he was standing outside of Cecilia Randall’s row house.

  The police and FBI were finishing processing the scene. Decker’s creds got him inside. He stood in the small front room and looked around.

  An FBI tech closed up her evidence kit and looked over at him. “You were here before, with Special Agent Bogart.”

  “That’s right. What can you tell me?”

  “One shot to the back of the head. Instant death. She was found in her bedroom.”

  “On the bed?”

  “No, next to it.”

  “Did she fall off?”

  “No, all forensics point to her being on her knees next to the bed.”

  “Whoever killed her probably made her do that?”

  “That’s my thinking. She was in a long shirt and pajama bottoms. The bed had been slept in.”

  “And I understand no forced entry. All locks work? Windows?”

  “All secured. This is not the safest neighborhood. And while she didn’t have a security system, she had extra locks on the front and back doors. All the windows had security pins.”

  “If she was asleep then someone either picked the locks or had a key.”

  “We checked the door locks. Even the best pick guns will leave some marks behind. We found none.”

  “So a key, then?”

  “Looks to be.”

  “Anything stolen?”

  “She had lots of knickknacks. But there was no jewelry to speak of. No prescription drugs in her medicine cabinet. Her purse was found, and her wallet, credit cards, and cash were still in it.”

  “So no robbery, then. They just came to kill her.”

  “I understand this might be connected to a case you’re working on?”

  “It could be very connected.”

  “Well, good luck. Hope you find who did this.”

  Me too, thought Decker.

  CHAPTER

  61

  “WE CAN’T FIND HIM. It’s like he’s vanished off the face of the earth.”

  Bogart looked immensely frustrated as they sat in his office at the WFO. Decker, Jamison, and Milligan sat across from him.

  The FBI special agent’s hair was mussed, his tie was crooked, and he had a couple days’ worth of beard stubble. These were distinct cracks in the man’s normally spit-polished appearance.

  “Alvin Jenkins had maybe, at most, a half-hour head start,” said Jamison. “We weren’t with Joey all that long before Decker figured it out with the book. How could he have disappeared so fast?”

  “He must have booked it right after he left you,” said Milligan. “We found his car in the parking lot, which means he had assistance. He didn’t hoof it on foot. This looks like a well-executed plan already in place. He probably made a call and help arrived.”

  Bogart added, “We searched his apartment. It was nearby in Herndon. If you think Berkshire’s place was bare-bones, you should have seen Jenkins’s digs. There was nothing in the fridge, one set of clothes in the closet, some underwear and toiletries. The furniture was all rented and came with the place. We still tore the place apart and took his toothbrush and other relevant material to run through our databases to try to get a match. Nothing’s come back so far. Like Berkshire, I doubt he’s on any database.”

  “But he got to work at the hospice,” pointed out Jamison. “They had to do some background checking there.”

  “Not as much as you might think,” replie
d Milligan. “The pay’s not great and they have a hard time finding employees. I think they let things slide on the checking-out phase. But like Berkshire, it could have all been falsified anyway. I can tell you that nothing has come back on this guy yet.”

  Jamison looked at Bogart. “So we’ve got nothing, then?”

  “What we have is a mess,” said Bogart.

  Decker answered, “We have far more than nothing, even if it is messy right now. If we can just piece it all together.” He eyed Bogart. “Someone had a key to Cecilia Randall’s home. No forced entry. She was asleep when the killer struck. She didn’t let anyone in at that hour.”

  “The killer could have gotten a key any number of ways.”

  “Possibly. And we’ll need to check them all out.”

  “You spoke with Natalie,” said Milligan. “And she told you the story about the ambulance ride her father recently brought up before everything happened. What do you think that meant?”

  “He was trying to tell her something. He couldn’t do so directly without implicating her.”

  “Implicating her?” said Jamison. “How so?”

  “He stole secrets to pay her gambling debts, or which he thought were his son-in-law’s gambling debts. I doubt he told her how he was acquiring the money. But he knew it was paid, because she was alive. And she told him everything was good on that. But in the course of getting the money to pay off that debt, Dabney ran into Berkshire, somehow, some way. I think in fact that Berkshire was in this from the beginning. I think she knew about the debts—hell, maybe she and her cohorts encouraged Natalie’s addiction and thus got her to run up these massive debts, knowing she’d have to turn to her father for help.”

  “Wait a minute, if that’s the case, then Berkshire must have been targeting Dabney for a while. Yet we can show no connection between them.”

  “Doesn’t matter. For argument’s sake, let’s assume there was a connection. Dabney goes to Berkshire with the secrets. He sets his price. She agrees to it, knowing that it won’t cost ten million to resolve the debt. The secrets are passed, the money goes out, some of it goes to pay off the debt. Hell, for all we know, whoever Berkshire was working for might have bought out the debt from the original source, so the payee and the payer might well be the same. So money-wise it’s a wash for them.”

  Jamison said, “So if the transaction was successfully completed between them, why would Dabney murder Berkshire?”

  “Because while she had the upper hand on him vis-à-vis the truth about the gambling debts, he knew something that she didn’t.” He paused. “He knew he was dying.”

  Bogart said, “So he killed her because he knew he would never be tried for the crime? He intended to kill himself instead of letting the cancer kill him?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Jesus, Decker, this is getting more complicated than an algorithm,” exclaimed Milligan.

  “I think it’s actually quite linear. Yes that he wanted vengeance because she was a spy that he had sold secrets to and he couldn’t live with that. He couldn’t get the secrets back, but he could stop her from ever spying on this country again.”

  Bogart interjected, “Okay, that’s the ‘yes’ part. What’s the ‘no’ part?”

  “The ‘no’ part is how he did it. He lured her somehow to the FBI building and shot her on the spot.”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “He wanted to send a message to someone. A clear message that enough was enough. He wasn’t going to do this anymore and they had better back off.”

  Bogart sat up straight. “Wait, you’re saying they were going to make him spy for them again?”

  “Of course. Once they had him do it the first time, they had him for good. If he didn’t cooperate they would release incriminating information and evidence that would bury him. Berkshire would be long gone by then, so she wouldn’t suffer. But Dabney would. And his family.”

  Bogart nodded. “So he decided to take the bull by the horns and cut off this possibility. Berkshire dead and him dead. And this was made possible because they didn’t know he was already dying?”

  “Yes. I’d love to know the answer to two questions right now.”

  “What’s that?” asked Bogart.

  “What was Dabney trying to communicate to his daughter with the ambulance story, and why didn’t he just tell her straight out?”

  “And the second question?”

  “Who was the damn clown?”

  CHAPTER

  62

  “YOU LOOK MISERABLE,” said Jamison.

  She was driving and looking over at Decker, who was scrunched in the passenger seat.

  “I’m not miserable, just in pain. I’m going to help you buy a new car, Alex. I can’t take too much more of this. I think I’m getting blood clots in my legs.”

  “Remember when you used to take the seat out and just sit in the back?”

  “Not really practical since it takes four tools and an hour to do that.”

  “What kind of car?” she said animatedly.

  “I don’t care so long as it’s at least twice the size of this one, with decent legroom.”

  The rain was pestering them again, snarling traffic and making gloomy thoughts seem even gloomier. Decker closed his eyes.

  “So you said Melvin got to meet Joey Scott?”

  Decker opened his eyes and nodded. “When I told him that Melvin nearly won the Heisman and would have been in the Hall of Fame, I thought Joey was going to burst with excitement.”

  “I’m sure. That makes it even more awful that Berkshire would have used Joey like that. I mean, it would be heartless with any terminally ill patient, but Joey was the only kid in the whole place. And she sat and read to him just so she could use that book to communicate stolen classified information.”

  Decker’s response to this was extraordinary: “Alex, turn the car around. We’re heading to Virginia.”

  “Virginia? Where?”