House Rivals Page 10

  DeMarco hated to do this over the phone but he called Thorpe.

  “Mr. Thorpe, it’s Joe DeMarco. I’m sorry—”

  “What the hell did you do?” Thorpe said. He didn’t scream like Mahoney had. He spoke quietly but DeMarco could hear the cold fury in the man’s voice. He also remembered the way Thorpe had sounded when he’d said that he would kill the people who had mauled Sarah and threatened her. His voice was the same when he asked what DeMarco had done.

  “Mr. Thorpe,” DeMarco said, “I don’t know if I did anything that got her killed, but the truth is, I don’t know for sure. The cops here think she was killed by a drug addict who broke into her house to rob her. I don’t believe that but . . . Look, the reason I called, is that if you’re coming here for . . . for her body, I’m going to wait for you and we’ll talk when you get here. If you’re not coming, I’ll—”

  “Of course, I’m coming. I have to bring her home, then make funeral arrangements. I’ll bury her next to my wife and daugh—”

  Then Thorpe started sobbing and hung up on DeMarco—and ­DeMarco had a vivid image of Doug Thorpe standing in front of three headstones in a small Montana cemetery.

  Heartsick.

  DeMarco returned to the Holiday Inn and got his room back. He unpacked his clothes and threw them into a couple of plastic bags he found in the closet and headed out to find a laundromat. He had no idea how long he was going to be in Bismarck. While his clothes were washing, he went to a nearby coffee shop and tried to figure out what to do next. Only one idea occurred to him.

  Using his phone, he found out that he couldn’t get a direct flight from Bismarck to Great Falls, Montana. The best flight he could find stopped in Denver and would take five hours. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to drive from Bismarck to Great Falls, which would take nine hours. When it came to air travel this part of the country was like Siberia.

  He called the Bismarck airport and after getting bounced around a bit found himself talking to a woman who had a voice deeper than his. He told her what he wanted: a pilot to fly him to Great Falls tomorrow morning.

  He returned to the laundromat and tossed his clothes into a dryer. He was feeding quarters into the dryer when his phone rang. It was Mahoney.

  “The FBI has a satellite office in Bismarck,” Mahoney said, “but there are only a few guys there, and they’re all busy. The main field office for North Dakota is in Minneapolis but—”

  “Goddamnit,” DeMarco said. “I have to go to fucking Minneapolis to talk to an FBI agent?”

  “Shut up. An agent named Westerberg will be in Bismarck this evening. He’ll call you when he gets there. He’s got your number.”

  “Thanks,” DeMarco said but Mahoney had already hung up.

  Mahoney must have pounded on someone over at the Hoover Building and Mahoney was a hammer too big to ignore. At the same time, DeMarco couldn’t help but think: too little, too late. This is what he should have done in the first place: gotten the FBI involved before somebody killed Sarah Johnson.

  DeMarco returned to his motel with his freshly laundered clothes. There wasn’t anything for him to do until he talked to Doug Thorpe and the FBI. He pulled out his laptop and looked at Sarah’s blog, hoping that she’d updated it since he spoke to her the night before. She hadn’t. The last entry she’d made was when they were traveling from Rapid City back to Bismarck, and then she’d just rambled on about the depressing state of American politics.

  DeMarco had fallen asleep reading Sarah’s blog and was awakened by his ringing phone.

  “This is Doug Thorpe,” the caller said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at my motel,” DeMarco said. “I was just waiting for you to call. Tell me where you are and I’ll meet you.”

  “I’m down at the morgue,” Thorpe said.

  “Oh,” DeMarco said.

  “I need a drink. I gotta get the smell of this place out of my nose. I’ll meet you at . . .”

  DeMarco was on his way to meet Thorpe at a restaurant near the Bismarck morgue when his phone rang again. The caller ID showed a 763 area code.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “This is Special Agent Westerberg.”

  Westerberg turned out to be a she and not a he as Mahoney had said.

  “I’ve been ordered to meet with you.” She said this like she wasn’t happy that some politician had squeezed her boss’s nuts. “I’ll be in Bismarck by seven this evening. I’m staying at the Radisson. I’ve stayed there before and there’s a place called the Pirogue Grille on Fourth Street. Meet me there at eight.”

  Westerberg said this like she was issuing an order, not making a request.

  “Okay,” DeMarco said. “How will I recognize you?”

  “I’ll probably be the only woman in the bar packing a gun in a shoulder holster.”

  With that, she hung up.

  DeMarco saw Thorpe sitting at a table by himself, staring out the window. The sky was overcast and it looked as if a lightning storm might start any moment. Thorpe’s face looked like the sky: like a storm cloud. DeMarco sat down across from him. Thorpe was drinking whiskey out of a shot glass, taking small sips.

  Before DeMarco had a chance to say how bad he felt about Sarah’s death, Thorpe said, “So what happened?”

  DeMarco told him what he and Sarah had been doing before she died, how they had attempted to talk to four people, trying to find whoever Curtis was using to make payoffs to judges and politicians. DeMarco admitted that it had been his idea.

  “I thought that if we could identify Curtis’s fixer, we might be able to force him to testify against Curtis,” DeMarco said. “But I don’t know if that’s why she was killed.”

  DeMarco watched as the blood rushed to Thorpe’s face, turning his normally tanned complexion an angry shade of purple. “Are you telling me you think some robber—”

  “No, Mr. Thorpe, I don’t think she was killed by a robber. I’m saying that while I was with Sarah, she didn’t find anything new. Nobody would talk to her. She didn’t get any new evidence against Curtis or anybody else. The other thing is, as far as I know, nobody knew I was working with her or that she was talking to these people. So maybe Curtis ordered her death, but if he did, it was something he set in motion before I got here or maybe as soon as I got here. But the other thing is, Curtis would have to be crazy to have her killed. Sarah never found a thing in the two years she was going after him that could cause him a significant legal problem.”

  “So if Curtis didn’t have her killed, who did?”

  “I don’t know. Sarah accused a lot of people in her blog about being in collusion with Curtis. Maybe one of them killed her. Or maybe Curtis’s fixer somehow found out that we were looking for him. I don’t know. But the main thing I wanted to tell you is that Mahoney talked to the FBI today and I’m meeting with an agent this evening.”

  “Why didn’t you and John get the FBI involved in the first place?”

  “Because we didn’t have anything to get the FBI involved. Sarah had no evidence any crimes had been committed, but now—”

  “Yeah, now you got a crime. Somebody killed her.”

  “I’m sorry, Doug. I’m sorry about everything.”

  Thorpe finished the whiskey remaining in the shot glass. He winced when he swallowed, as if he wasn’t used to the taste. As he rose from the table he said, “I’m going to take care of Curtis.”

  DeMarco knew Thorpe wasn’t talking about pursuing a legal case against Leonard Curtis. He was talking about killing the man.

  “Leave Curtis alone,” DeMarco said. “You do something to him, you’re just going to end up in jail.”

  “With Sarah and my daughter both gone, DeMarco, I don’t care about jail.”

  “Doug, I don’t know for sure that Curtis had anything to do with your granddaughter’s death. So I’m asking you to give me a cha
nce to find out who killed her before you do anything. Please? I know I screwed this up but give me a chance. And let me get the FBI engaged before you do something you’ll regret. I’m also flying to Great Falls tomorrow morning.”

  “Why?”

  DeMarco told him why he was going to Great Falls—but Thorpe didn’t seem impressed. At this point Thorpe had no confidence in DeMarco, and DeMarco couldn’t blame him.

  “Just give me a few days,” DeMarco said. “Okay? You take care of Sarah. Let me know when the funeral is. And I’ll keep you informed of what I’m doing.”

  “Well, you better do something, son, because if you don’t, I will.”

  DeMarco watched Thorpe walk away. The first time he met Thorpe at his cabin near the Yellowstone River, DeMarco had been struck by how he looked: over seventy years old but strong, fit, and vigorous. Now he just looked like an old man that time had run over. He was a person who’d served his country in an extraordinary way and—unlike John Mahoney and Joe DeMarco—had probably lived a blameless life. But here he was in the waning days of his existence, stripped of everyone he’d ever loved: wife, daughter, and granddaughter. If there was a God, DeMarco had to wonder about His grand plan.

  14

  There were five women in the bar of the Pirogue Grille. Three of the women were with men. The fourth was a young lady with a blue streak in her hair, a ring through her left nostril, jabbering in a high-pitched voice on a cell phone. DeMarco doubted that blue hair and nose rings were allowed by the Bureau’s dress code. The last woman was sitting alone at a table with her back to the wall.

  The woman looked like she was about forty and had dark red hair, the color of mahogany. She was wearing a navy blue suit with a skirt—she had good legs—a white blouse, and a blue-and-white scarf tied to resemble a man’s tie. Her face was narrow with high cheekbones and a wide, sensual mouth. She was attractive, but DeMarco’s first impression was: tough cookie.

  She appeared to be drinking a martini, and DeMarco decided to have one, too. He waved at her to let her know that he’d seen her, then walked up to the bar and ordered a drink. After it arrived, he walked over to her table.

  “Agent Westerberg, I presume.”

  “Yeah,” she said. Instead of pulling out her ID, she pulled back her suit jacket and showed him the Glock in the shoulder holster.

  “I’m Joe DeMarco. Thanks for meeting with me.”

  “I wasn’t given a choice. And all I was told was that a young woman named Sarah Johnson was murdered last night and the former Speaker of the House isn’t happy that no one’s solved the crime yet. So what’s going on?”

  DeMarco told her about Sarah’s blog and how she’d been on a crusade the last two years to nail a rich gas guy named Leonard Curtis who was buying off lawmakers and judges to get his way.

  “But she never found any hard evidence that Curtis had done anything illegal because he makes these tricky under-the-table deals with politicians that you would never be able to prove are bribes. Let me tell you about the seed drill.”

  “Seed drill? What the hell’s a seed drill?”

  He told her what a seed drill was, and how one state legislator miraculously changed his vote after he got a bargain on one.

  “You gotta be shittin’ me,” Westerberg said.

  “No. And everything Sarah found was like that, a circumstantial case for bribery based on the coincidence of a politician benefiting at the same time Curtis had some luck with a law or a lawsuit. But the harassment campaign against her was real. The hacker who fucked up her blog for a month was real, and the three guys who threatened to rape and kill her were real. And now she’s dead and I’m ninety-nine percent sure it wasn’t some meth head who broke into her house and used a silenced weapon to put two bullets into her heart.”

  “But Curtis may not have been the one responsible,” Westerberg said. “You said she named a lot of people in her blog. Maybe one of them was the person who killed her.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” DeMarco said.

  “What have the Bismarck cops got on her murder?”

  “I have no idea,” DeMarco said. “They consider me a suspect because I admitted I was probably the last person who saw her alive, other than her killer, and I’m the one who found the body. They don’t seriously think I killed her but they’re not talking to me about their investigation.”

  “Do you understand that Ms. Johnson’s murder is a local police matter and that the FBI has no jurisdiction?”

  “Yeah, and I don’t care. And neither does John Mahoney.”

  Westerberg shook her head. “So what do you expect me to do, DeMarco?”

  “Start by reading Sarah’s blog. That’s going to give you a migraine but it will tell you everything she suspected about Curtis. Lean on the Bismarck cops to make sure they’re doing everything they can. Take a look at Curtis’s phone calls and emails and . . .”

  “That would require a warrant.”

  “That’s your problem,” DeMarco said. “I’m just saying do whatever you have to do to find who killed her.”

  “Okay,” Westerberg said—but DeMarco got the impression that her definition of do whatever you have to do wasn’t the same as his. “Anything else?” she asked.

  “No.” DeMarco thought about telling her about the trip he was making to Great Falls tomorrow, but he didn’t want to give Westerberg the chance to tell him he shouldn’t go.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll give you a call in a few days and let you know what I’ve found.” She handed him a card and said, “If anything else occurs to you, call me at that number. But don’t call and ask for progress reports. When I know something, I’ll let you know.”

  DeMarco could see that her attitude needed a slight adjustment. “What’s your first name?” he asked.

  “Agent,” she said.

  Tough cookie. “Okay, Agent, let me explain something to you. Right now, as far as John Mahoney is concerned, you are the Federal Bureau of Investigation when it comes to Sarah Johnson. But Mahoney isn’t going to talk to you. He’s going to talk to your boss’s boss’s boss. In other words, Mahoney, who is a good friend of the president of the United States, is going to call the director of the FBI and tell him that he—meaning me—isn’t satisfied with your performance in solving the murder of the granddaughter of a man who saved his life in Vietnam.”

  “Are you threatening me, DeMarco?”

  “Well, yeah. I thought I was being pretty clear about that. I’m threatening to destroy your career if I don’t get the sense that you’re busting your ass on this case. I liked Sarah and I admired what she was trying to do, and I think it may have been my fault she was killed. So this is personal for me—and I’m making sure you understand that it’s personal for you, too.”

  DeMarco stood up. “I’ll be calling you, Agent.”

  “Now what’s going on?” Marjorie said. When Heckler called, she had been trying to get a grass stain out of a pair of Bobby’s jeans that had cost seventy bucks. She was going to wring her son’s neck if he didn’t change out of his good clothes when he got home from school.

  “I don’t know,” Heckler said. “About an hour ago he met with a tough-looking old guy and had a drink with him. I ran the plates on the guy’s truck and he’s from Montana and his name is Doug Thorpe. Thorpe is a fly-fishing guide. I have no idea why he was talking to ­DeMarco but based on the way they both looked, they weren’t talking about fly fishing. I’m trying to get more info on Thorpe, and when I do, I’ll let you know. Then after he met with Thorpe, he met with a tough-looking gal in the Pirogue Grille.”

  Marjorie rolled her eyes: everybody DeMarco met with according to Heckler was tough-looking, like DeMarco was the leader of some kind of street gang.

  “So he met a woman in a bar,” Marjorie said. “Maybe he was trying to get laid again, like he did with the teacher.”

  “I do
n’t think so,” Heckler said. “I couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other, but judging by the body language, it wasn’t a friendly conversation. I think she could be a cop.”

  “Why would you think that?” Marjorie said.

  “Because when DeMarco first sat down with her, I caught a glimpse of a gun she’s packing in a shoulder holster. So I think she could be a cop, but I don’t know for sure. DeMarco left the bar before she did and I followed him, but I’ll go back to the bar later and see if I can find out who she is.”

  15

  Marjorie hadn’t seen Bill all day yesterday, the day they discovered Johnson’s body. She was concerned that he was off on a bender but when she called him, he told her he was in Belcourt. He’d driven up there to talk to Buchanan, the state senator who needed his septic system fixed and a contractor who could fudge the necessary permits. Marjorie had forgotten about Buchanan with all the stuff going on with Sarah Johnson.

  Bill finally dragged himself into the office at ten thirty, unshaven, bloodshot eyes, obviously hung over.

  “How’d it go with Buchanan?” she asked.

  “Okay, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “It went okay. He’s our new best friend.”

  Bill dropped down in his chair but then just sat there, looking like he didn’t know what to do next—and Marjorie snapped. “Hey! You have to get back on track. You need to knock off the boozing and the moping and get refocused. Johnson’s out of our hair, and Curtis will be happy about that, but . . .”

  “Out of our hair, Marge? She’s dead.”

  “I don’t wanna hear it. Did you send Murdock the rest of his money?”

  “Hell, yes. You think I want him coming up here to collect?”

  “Then we’re done with that whole . . . thing. Now get to work.”