Long Shadows (Amos Decker, #7)(113)

Langley turned and stalked out.

White let out a breath and said, “Okay, I thought I was going to have to pull out my karate again. Though it would have given me great pleasure to put my foot right against that jerk’s square jaw.”

“He’s a bully. You pop him in the nose, he runs away crying. That’s not really important. What is important is does he have it in him to stab a woman ten times?”

“And remember the card left behind with that legal phrase. He’s a lawyer. That fits.”

“But the blindfold with holes? How does that tie into Langley?”

“I don’t know,” confessed White.

“Neither do I. But that may be because he didn’t do it.”

“Then there must be someone else out there that we’re not aware of yet, Decker.”

“Maybe we are aware of them.”





Chapter 85



LATER THAT NIGHT WHITE KNOCKED on Decker’s door. He let her in and they sat across from each other.

“Andrews left the hospital today. He’s starting rehab.”

“Good. Hope it goes well.”

“And I got a call back from DC. No one matching the description that I got from Deidre Fellows worked at Senator Tanner’s office or on his campaign.”

“At least that anyone can remember.”

“Right. But we end up in the same place—nowhere,” said White.

“If he wasn’t working on the campaign, what was he doing in Tanner’s room cleaning up that mess?”

“A good Samaritan passing by would not have stuffed a woman into a suitcase. They would have called the police. Same for someone working at the hotel.”

Decker said, “There’s something we haven’t thought about yet. Why would Tanner, on the very night of his big fund-raiser with the president, and all those Secret Service agents around the hotel, have invited a prostitute up to his room? Why take that chance? He could have done it another night, or at some hideaway of his. The guy was rich.”

“You’re right—it doesn’t make sense.”

Decker pulled out his phone and made a call. “Ms. Fellows, Amos Decker. Thanks for getting back to us on that photo, but I have another question to ask you, and some new information to share. Please don’t take it the wrong way, because it might be shocking to you…Okay, all right…Thanks. We found out that the woman you saw in your father’s hotel room that night might well have been a prostitute. Her body was never found. Now, I know you were just a teenager back then, but was that something you could see your father doing? Hiring a prostitute?”

Decker listened for quite a while before saying, “Well, thank you for being so candid. We’ll let you know what we find.” He clicked off and looked at White.

“Well?” she said.

“She said she wasn’t aware at the time of her father’s sexual endeavors. But she said as she got older she discovered that her father had a wandering eye as a younger man, though he and his wife apparently worked through those issues, at least according to Deidre. And they did stay married all these years.”

“So that was why Wanda Monroe was in his bed?”

“Not necessarily. She still might have been placed there.”

“But you just said the man had a wandering eye?” she pointed out.

“Even if he did, like we just discussed, would he risk having a prostitute in his bed on the night of his big event with Reagan, and while Secret Service agents and media people are swarming all over the place? That’s just too risky.”

“So they knew he was promiscuous and they set him up.”

“Tanner was running to be a U.S. senator. That’s a useful position if you want to blackmail someone.” He took out his phone and performed a search. “Mason Tanner was a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and ended up chairing it for four years.”

“Meaning he would be privy to national security intelligence,” said White.

“Right. And back in Miami he ends up with a dead woman, possibly a prostitute, in bed. Then this man shows up to take care of things. And then Kanak Roe appears and together they get rid of the body.”

“So they were setting up Tanner for blackmail, and Roe shows up by chance and they enlist him to help? Why not just kill Roe? How could they be sure he wouldn’t pull his gun and arrest them all? I mean, I know we went over this before, but that’s what I would have done. It’s what you would have done.”

“The Secret Service is a little different. Reagan was Kanak Roe’s boss, the most powerful man in the world. The repercussions if the truth came out might have been really bad. Better to bury it than have it become a national scandal. And Roe probably only had seconds to make a decision. And keep in mind that he might not have known that anyone had set up Tanner or was planning to blackmail him over this. He might have only been told that the woman had died by natural causes and they just needed to get her out of there to save Tanner’s reputation and chance at winning his election. She had no obvious wounds, so he might have believed that she had a heart attack or maybe overdosed. And they might have made him an offer of payment, or he might have come back later with that sort of demand. Since he might have wanted to confess decades later, my thinking is he decided to demand payment for his silence. Tanner had enough money to pay him off. And that’s also why they didn’t just kill Roe. Maybe you could make a prostitute disappear without consequences, but you can’t do the same with a Secret Service agent. There would have been a scorched-earth investigation and they couldn’t chance that. So they paid him off.”