Concrete Evidence (41 page)

They asked to see her scuba equipment. When she’d arrived home, she’d rinsed her wet suit and dried it in the dryer. She would have dumped the suit in the garbage on the way home, but the cleaning crew might have seen the suit, so she had to produce the items for the FBI. She showed them her tank and pointed out a hole in the regulator hose, damage she claimed came from Jake when he’d trashed her apartment. She didn’t think they believed her, but she wasn’t arrested, which was an improvement over the last time she’d fled Jake’s boat in the middle of the night.

Finally, they left. She locked the door and leaned against it. Then she began to shake. She staggered to her bedroom, lay down on the pile of blankets, and rolled into a fetal position.

She wanted to be held.

Hell. She wanted Lee to hold her. He’d said he loved her. Had his words been just another manipulation? She wanted one person to care about what happened to her.

Somewhere along the line, she’d fallen desperately, hopelessly in love with him and realized she could forgive him for everything if he stood by her now. She picked up her cell phone and started to dial his number, then stopped.

He was the senator’s stepson, and she was embroiled in a scandal. If he loved her, if he truly cared, he’d contact her. But if he didn’t, he’d avoid her at all costs.

She snapped the phone closed and set it down as the tremors became convulsive spasms. Hugging a tattered blanket to her chest, she tried to stop the quaking, all while wishing, praying, hoping her phone would ring. The endless shaking loosened the block of ice she’d clung to since her mother betrayed her, and pent-up tears from that disaster began to fall like snowmelt, forming first a stream, then a river. She cried until she was empty, then drifted into an exhausted slumber.

She woke up in the early evening and forced herself to eat a few bites of dry cereal, but the meager meal threatened to come back up. She paced her empty living room, fighting nausea.

She had no TV, no radio, no idea of what was going on in the world. She didn’t know if Novak had been caught or even if the press had learned of the raid at the marina.

All day she’d clung to memories of whispered words and intimate kisses, touches that made her feel beautiful…worshiped…loved. The sun had risen and set without a phone call, confirming those declarations of love had been made by a man whose every word was a lie.

She doubled over, broken with pain.

Her deepest darkest shame slipped through the cracks in her heart: there was something so terribly wrong with her, even her own mother had hated her. Lee hadn’t called because she was nothing more to him than a means to an end.

L
EE STOPPED PACING AND STARED
at the television, which had been tuned to the news all day to catch updates on the investigation at the Menanichoch marina. “I’m going to call her.”

JT grabbed Lee’s cell phone from the coffee table. “You know you can’t. Face facts, Lee, she’s been in on it from the start.”

In spite of the evidence he’d seen with his own eyes the night before, he couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe Erica was guilty. “No.” He held out his hand. “Don’t make me beat the crap out of you, JT. I’d like to beat on someone right now, and you’ll do.”

JT swore and handed him the phone.

The words “Breaking News” flashed across the screen, and an anchorman oozing gravitas faced the camera. “We’ve received confirmation from an unnamed source that the FBI recovered over one hundred million dollars from the boat that was raided at the Menanichoch Tribal Marina last night. For those of you just joining us, we will again explain the connection between the boat, owned by treasure hunter Jake Novak, and Maryland Senator Joseph Talon, who announced last night his candidacy for president at a gala event that took place only a half a mile away from the marina where the money was found…”

The anchor went on to trace the connections Jake had to Talon & Drake, starting with the recent project proposal and ending with Erica, his former employee, who was rumored to be an artifact thief. They showed the same footage they’d aired all day long: Erica emerging with Lee’s help from the limousine after JT and Alexandra; pictures of Erica and him on the red carpet—she glowed with radiance while he looked down at her with proprietary lust; both of them standing near the senator as he made his speech.

The fact Lee was nuts about her was plain on his face in every single frame, and the press made much of the senator’s stepson’s involvement with a “person of interest” in the smuggling.

“It appears,” the anchor said, “based on the serial numbers of the bills recovered from Mr. Novak’s boat, the money is a portion of the twelve billion dollars of American money shipped to Iraq in 2004 and then lost in the war zone. We have confirmation the FBI is investigating Talon & Drake employees working in Iraq, who may have found a large portion of the missing money and then smuggled the bills back to the states. An FBI spokesperson has released a statement saying: ‘We have yet to determine how this money got into Mr. Novak’s possession, but we have a theory, which we are investigating.’”

Lee knew exactly how those bags of money ended up on Novak’s boat. They had been tossed with the last regular garbage dump from the aircraft carrier on Thursday afternoon. The dump had occurred within fifty miles of shore, which was closer than naval regulations allowed, and Lee suspected the seamen doing the drop had been paid-off. The seamen would have used a GPS device to record the location of each bag as it was dropped, then, after the carrier was in port and the men released from the vessel, one would have given the coordinates to someone at Talon & Drake—Lee suspected Ed Drake—who then transmitted the information to Jake in a series of text messages.

Lee wouldn’t be surprised to learn each bag contained a sonar beacon, making it even easier for Novak’s divers to find the money. On Friday afternoon, Novak and his crew took the
Andvari
out on what was probably the easiest, most fruitful treasure hunting trip ever recorded. One hundred million dollars for a day’s work. The number floored Lee. It made the artifacts they thought Novak had been smuggling seem paltry in comparison.

Jake Novak’s picture filled the TV screen. “Mr. Novak and two unknown accomplices are still at large.”

Every time he thought about the fact Novak had escaped, he wanted to break something. After a thirty-minute chase, the Zodiac had been recovered, empty of passengers. Novak and his accomplice had jumped from the boat and presumably swam to shore.

“I hope the bastard was eaten by sharks,” Lee spat.

“And I hope he’s alive and kicking,” JT said. “He needs to be caught and take the blame, or Talon & Drake will suffer. I never thought I’d see the day when Talon & Drake would make Halliburton look good.”

One hundred million dollars. He remembered the news stories about the money, embarrassing at a time when Iraq teetered on the edge of civil war. Twelve billion US dollars, imported to Iraq by the American government, had been lost in that country and had probably funded the insurgency that killed so many American troops and Iraqi civilians.

Twelve billion dollars which could have been put to good use at home or abroad, but now it had come back to the U.S. as contraband, ready to line the pockets of greedy men like Jake Novak and power-hungry men like Edward Drake. But the worst was the possibility the money had been destined for laundering through the Menanichoch casino by Sam Riversong. Had Sam intended to use the money for Joe’s campaign?

The damage to Joe’s reputation could be insurmountable. He hoped the FBI would act swiftly and find the guilty parties, but right now it seemed the only person they wanted to investigate was Erica.

He gripped his phone tighter. He was desperate to call her. But he shouldn’t contact her while she was being investigated. Anything he told her would be suspect, could change the investigation, even make her appear guiltier. He was supposed to stay away even though it meant she would believe he’d abandoned her.

He started to dial her number.

A knock at the door interrupted. JT admitted FBI Agent Roger Pratt, the man who had agreed to keep them informed in exchange for their silence to the press. Lee glared at the man, unable to hide his anger.

“I take it you’ve seen the news,” Pratt said.

“Nice to know Anderson Cooper knew what was on that boat before I did,” Lee said through gritted teeth. “I’m the one who found the boat. I’m the one who handed you that arrest—which your team fucked up.”

“I don’t need your shit right now, Scott. I just spent the past four hours trying to convince my boss not to arrest your girlfriend. I’m probably the only person in the department who believes she’s innocent, and if you want to keep her out of custody, I need your help.”

He felt uneasy, wondering if this was a ploy to get him to admit he’d recognized the scuba diver was Erica. “What do you want?”

“Another agent and I interviewed Ms. Kesling this morning. She was talkative. She knows more about Novak’s operation than anyone still alive.” Lee didn’t like the way he stressed that last point. “She even gave us photographs of his crew. The photos are a lucky break; they could save all our asses.

“We’ve suspected for a long time that Novak’s underwater salvage business was little more than a cover for a drug smuggling operation. But the DEA came up empty each time they searched his boat—thanks to you, we now know how he pulled that off, dumping the drugs overboard for later pickup—and he did enough real treasure hunting to appear respectable. But the DEA was ready to pounce last summer when he hired Ms. Kesling and managed to produce a bona fide excavation permit.”

No wonder Novak was so damn careful with the Internet. He knew he was being monitored by the DEA.
Then the horror of Erica’s situation sank in. She had spent a summer on a boat with drug smugglers. Novak hadn’t been interested in the Manila galleon excavation; it had all been a farce, Erica merely his cover, his legitimate reason to be in Mexican waters for an extended time. Then, when Erica found something worthwhile, the bastard got greedy and decided to take that too, destroying her in the process. “Erica’s work was legitimate; she couldn’t have had anything to do with the drug operation.”

“I’m inclined to believe her, and my boss is coming around,” Pratt said. “I don’t think she has a clue about the drug smuggling. Listen, she said she told Novak about the photos when she saw him last night. Novak must have shit a brick.”

“Why?” JT asked.

“One of his crew—Marco Garcia to her, but with her photo we’ve identified him as Marco Delgado—is the brother of a nasty Mexican drug lord. Marco is a brutal killer, suspected in at least a dozen execution-style murders, but we’ve never had the proof to nail him.

“We believe Delgado fled with Novak this morning,” Pratt continued. “We had no idea Delgado worked with Novak, or rather, Novak worked for Delgado—the Delgados work for no one—or that anyone from the Delgado cartel was even in the states. If we can catch Marco Delgado, it will be Al Capone-like ironic that Erica’s photos and testimony can nail the bastard for artifact smuggling—especially given that treasure hunting was just a front to begin with.”

Lee slammed his fist onto the table. “A Mexican drug cartel might be after her, and she’s not in protective custody?”

“Her apartment is under surveillance, and we’ve got undercover security everywhere in her building. She’s safe. What’s important now is the artifacts. Ms. Kesling said she believed you had Sam Riversong remove the artifacts from the casino before the Aztec Room opened. We need the artifacts and fake provenance if we’re going to prove Delgado and Novak stole them.”

“Sam Riversong said he thought the paperwork was real,” JT said. “He had no idea Jake stole them from a shipwreck.”

“Where are the artifacts?”

“In a safe at tribal headquarters until we can authenticate the provenance.”

“Good. Now here’s what I need from the two of you. To Delgado, Kesling is a loose end. Right now, we can’t connect him to the money, but Kesling and her photos can connect him to Novak. He’s not the type to leave witnesses who can testify against him, but he won’t approach her at home. They’ll come after her in a public place, where they can hide in the crowd. I think they’ll wait for her outside the office. Wisconsin Avenue is busy, difficult to secure—”

“That’s why you haven’t arrested her.” Cold fear gripped Lee. “You want to use her as bait.”

“Yes. And we need your help.”

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