Hostage Zero

“We all have something to hide, don’t we?” she countered. As she asked the question, she offered a coy smile.

He acknowledged her with a little nod. “Yes, I suppose we do.” He regrouped. “I do know who Sammy Bell is-and for the benefit of the transcriber, I’ll note that you, too, Mr. Transcriber, have also probably heard of him-but Sean O’Brian still means nothing to me.”

Off to her left, Gail noticed that Marie had relaxed a little. She looked like a dental patient whose procedure hadn’t hurt as much as she’d feared.

Frank continued, “But if you believe in six degrees of separation, I’m only two away from Sammy Bell.”

Marie sat tall in her seat. “Holy shit, Frank.” Relaxation gone; welcome, raw horror.

“Actually, maybe I’m three degrees separated. I guess it depends on how you count.”

Marie said, “As your attorney, I am advising you in the strongest possible terms to shut the fuck up.”

Frank laughed-a deep, throaty laugh that showed he was genuinely amused. “Marie, I love you. And I agree that ‘shut the fuck up’ ranks right up there with the strongest possible terms.”

Gail found herself laughing along with him.

When the moment passed, Frank continued, “My wife, Marilyn, used to work for one of Sammy’s mouthpieces. One of his attorneys.”

Gail clicked her pen open. “What was his name?”

Frank’s face folded into the now-familiar faraway scowl. “Navarro,” he said, snapping his fingers as the name returned to him. “Bruce Navarro.”

Gail made her note. “Do you know what his legal specialty was?”

“Keeping crooks out of jail, I would guess.”

Obvious enough, Gail supposed. “I was hoping for something more…”

Frank waved off her words. “I know what you were looking for. I was just being an asshole. He did contract law, whatever that means.”

“It means five hundred bucks an hour,” Marie grumped.

Gail continued, “And what did your wife”-she consulted her notes-“Marilyn do for him?”

He shrugged. “Clerical stuff. Secretarial stuff. Nothing terribly important. I just thought it was interesting that Bell’s name came up.”

Something churned in Gail’s distant memory, something from the notes she’d read from the research file. Something about Bruce Navarro. More specifically about Navarro amp; Associates.

“Aaron Hastings,” Gail said.

Marie groaned, “Oh, please shut up.”

“Marilyn’s lover,” Frank said. “He’s also the man who I think killed Marilyn and framed me for it.”

Gail had read that such had been Schuler’s claim all along, but there’d always been problems with his argument. “But you don’t know why,” she reminded.

“The whole world doesn’t know why, because the police decided from the very beginning that I was their man. They never bothered to investigate anyone else.”

Gail looked to Marie for confirmation and got a nod. “From Day One, Frank was the only suspect in their crosshairs,” she said. “Remember how the system works: The Commonwealth doesn’t have to be right; they only have to convince a jury that they’re right.”

To someone outside the system, the statement might have seemed overly cynical, but Gail understood that Marie was stating fact. The entire industry of private investigation-such as it was-was built around the all too frequent occurrences of prosecutorial misconduct. At the end of the day, lawyers on both sides were merely human; and humans were hardwired to reject failure. Gail had known a dozen or more prosecutors in her time-at both the local and federal levels-who would consider a win at the expense of justice to be a perfectly fair deal. Even the venerated FBI had recently been caught fabricating evidence for the purpose of convicting those who were presumed guilty.

Gail didn’t want to let him go that easily. “You have a theory, though? For why Aaron would have killed Marilyn?”

He gave a tentative glance to Marie, then took a deep breath. “Theory is too strong a word,” he said. “I have questions, though, and I think that by stitching them together with answers, you’d have her real killer.”

“I’m listening.”

“Did you know that Bruce Navarro disappeared around the same time that Marilyn was murdered?”

“What do you mean, disappeared?”

“I mean just that. He was around one day, fat and happy with a flourishing practice, and then he was gone. Nobody ever heard from him again, as far as I know.”

“You think he was killed?”

“I don’t know one way or the other,” Frank confessed. “But there’s a guy in here who swears that there’s a contract on Navarro’s head that would pay a fortune. You don’t put that out for someone who’s already dead.”

“Anyone can say anything,” Gail observed.

“True enough. But this is a guy who would know.”

“Who?”

Frank shook his head. “Not your concern.”

“But if I could talk to him-”

“No. Being in this place on these terms, I don’t have much, but I won’t turn into a rat in my last days on the planet. You’ll have to take it from me that if you talked to him, he’d tell you what I just said. I got no reason to lie. Not to you, anyway.”

Gail searched his face.