Mitch still had his hand on the door, but he was no longer moving in the direction of the hallway. He had turned his body back toward the table.
“What . . . what’s this about?” he asked.
“Why don’t you have a seat,” Hall suggested.
“Why don’t you tell me what the hell is going on.”
“Well, Mr. Dupree, that’s your wife—”
“I know that, asshole.” Mitch bristled, then looked at Hines. “Stop the damn recording.”
Then he turned his gaze on me. “Do you know anything about this?”
“Not a thing,” I said. “I swear.”
Mitch was still near the door. He had yet to take a step back in our direction.
“Have a seat, sir,” Hall said, this time more firmly.
Whatever brief argument Mitch was having with himself soon ended. He walked back to his still-warm chair. He sat.
“Okay,” he said. “Start talking.”
“I think you’re aware we’ve been keeping an eye on your wife,” Hall said. “Not all the time. We don’t have the staffing for that. But we occasionally go by her new house and point a parabolic her way. And we’ve had a sporadic tail on her in the hopes that she leads us somewhere we don’t know about yet.”
Mitch’s jaw muscles flexed as his back molars ground together.
“A few days ago, on Saturday night, we had an agent on her. We often find that subjects who suspect they may be followed are a little more careless on weekends, because they think we’re not going to be working. Anyhow, we captured an interesting series of photographs. To be honest, we weren’t really sure what to do about them. Especially once Mr. Drayer approached us on Monday. They were . . . an inconvenience, really. Maybe you’d like to have a look.”
Hall began placing glossies on the table. They were all this odd shade of green, like they had been shot in the dark by a night-vision camera. But they were plenty clear. The first showed Natalie Dupree in the driver’s seat of a Kia, parked in front of a vast brick house adorned with white columns.
“I believe you’re aware that’s Thad Reiner’s residence,” Hall said.
Mitch didn’t reply. In the next photos Hall placed down, Natalie had the gun in her hand. Then she was returning the gun to the bag.
“She’s about to break the law for the first time right here,” Hall said. “In the state of Georgia, you’re allowed to carry a handgun in your residence or your vehicle. But the moment she steps out of the vehicle with the handgun on her person, she needs a carry permit—which, according to records, she doesn’t have. It’s only a misdemeanor. But it’s a start. So here we go.”
Another photo. Natalie was now out of the car, her hand on the front gate of that big brick house, her head turned back toward the street, checking one last time to see if anyone was watching. I didn’t know what was going to come next, but if I was on a jury, I would have been ready to convict. It was like a director had told her, “Actually, could you try to look a little more guilty, please?”
Hall was clearly enjoying himself. “So now we’ve got her for criminal trespassing, because she’s entering someone’s property uninvited, with the intent to break the law. We got prints off that gate, by the way. It was high-gloss paint, so she left some nice fat ones for us.”
In the next shot, she was striding up the front walkway. The angle was such that you could only half see her face. Her determination was still unmistakable.
“And now we get to the felony,” Hall said, placing down four photos in rapid succession.
Natalie Dupree aiming the gun at the house. Natalie depressing the trigger. Then Natalie with her eyes half-closed and the barrel of the gun raised slightly from the kickback. The final one was a close-up of a stone lion that had stood guard next to the front entrance of the house. It had been taken sometime later, in daylight. A small chunk of the lion’s face was missing.
“We found the bullet, in case you’re wondering,” Hall said. “It was a little deformed, but our forensics people are good. They’ll be able to match it to the gun that fired it, no problem.”
Mitch had been braced like he was expecting more, like this was going to end with blood-and-gore crime scene shots or Thad Reiner’s autopsy photos. Now that it had turned out to be benign—at least relative to that—he was on the attack.
“She shot the lion,” Mitch said. “So what? Half the people in that neighborhood probably wanted to shoot those stupid lions.”
Hall shook his head, like this somehow saddened him. “In the state of Georgia, the threatening of a witness is a serious matter.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mitch said.
“There are two parts of the statute,” Hall said, ignoring him. “One deals with the attempted murder or threatening of a witness. It’s punishable by ten to twenty years. Was this attempted murder? There is case law where discharging a weapon at someone’s domicile can be considered an attempt on their life. It would be up to the prosecutor how to charge it, of course. Given the enmity Mrs. Dupree clearly has for Mr. Reiner, I could certainly make the case.”
“She shot the damn lion,” Mitch repeated, practically shouting now.
“Ah, but then we get to the other part of the statute, which deals explicitly with what we’re looking at here. It talks about a person who threatens to damage or damages the property or household of a witness. The property or the household, Mr. Dupree. In this case, we’d be talking about both. The mandatory minimum listed in this part of the statute is two years. Plus, there would be enhancements to the sentencing because she used a firearm in the commission of a crime. The statute allows for up to ten years.
“Whatever the number, your wife would be a convicted felon. She’d be heading for the state penitentiary. We understand her parents are disabled, so Social Services would be unlikely to consider them appropriate caregivers. And according to your presentencing report, you have no other family members in the state of Georgia. Your kids would go into foster care. Children older than five are notoriously tough to place. Yours would end up in a group home.”
“Okay, I get it, I get it, stop,” Mitch said. “Why are you telling me all this?”
Agent Hines stepped back in. “It’s really pretty simple, Mr. Dupree. Part of our deal would be that we’d forget we have these pictures. Right now, Thad Reiner suspects your wife is the one who shot his lion, but he doesn’t have any evidence. We’d make sure it stayed that way. The last thing we’d want is a cooperating witness who was worried about his wife’s prosecution. Plus, once Mrs. Dupree entered WITSEC and established a new identity, it would be impractical to have her returning to Georgia to face criminal charges. It would be much easier for us if this never happened.”
Mitch put it all together: “So basically, you’re offering me not only my freedom but my wife’s freedom as well.”
He shook his head. His body rocked slightly with each breath he took.
“You people are scum, you know that?” he said. “Following around my wife and then using these photos to extort me. I really don’t know how you sleep at night.”
“I don’t like to play it this way, Mr. Dupree,” Hines said. “But it doesn’t compare to what this cartel has done. And by withholding those documents from us, you are enabling them to continue their operation. The murder, the terror, the drugs, all of it. I’ll do anything within my legal power to stop them, and I sleep just fine, thank you.”
“Just hand over the documents, Dupree,” Hall said acidly. “It’s time.”
Mitch actually laughed, then shook his head, a sound and a gesture as sardonic as it was resentful. He looked down at the table, shook his head a few more times, like he couldn’t believe this was happening. Then he brought his gaze up again.
“You’re right,” he said. “It’s time. It’s time I tell you the truth.”
He stopped. For a moment, he was a man whose finger was hovering above a detonator. Then he pressed the button:
“The truth is, I don’t have any documents.”
Like any good performer would, Mitch followed that utterly staggering bit of dialogue—I don’t have any documents—with another pregnant pause.
He wanted to give his audience a beat to absorb this information in their own fashion. No-nonsense Lia Hines had adopted a look of fastidious concern. Tough-guy Chris Hall’s square jaw had suddenly gone asymmetrical, as if this revelation may have been too much for even his composure to handle.
It was certainly too much for mine. I had confessed to an invented crime so I could go to prison at the behest of impostors to uncover the location of something that existed only in a fabrication. The whole thing was a series of frauds stacked on top of each other like layer cake, then iced with irony.
“I’d love to turn over the documents, but I can’t turn over something I don’t have,” Mitch said. “What I told Pete here—or whatever his name is—was true. I was a very dutiful little compliance director. I put together those SARs, which included scanned versions of the deposit slips, for years and years. I sent them along to Thad Reiner, thinking he was forwarding them to FinCEN. But it was all on computer. I destroyed those deposit slips. Every single damn time. I can’t tell you how often I’ve wished I saved even one of them, because I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be here right now. But, no, I shredded them. It just never occurred to me I was going to be double-crossed by my boss. I thought eventually FinCEN was going to come in, do a look-back, then shut down the whole thing. I thought worst-case scenario for me was that I’d be looking for a new job, because my relationship with Reiner and the people above him would have become too toxic. But I’d be doing that job search as the hero who saved his bank a huge fine because he had been self-reporting the whole thing.
“When I finally realized Reiner hadn’t been submitting those SARs, I thought I was going to have time to assemble more examples of illicit transactions and collect more deposit slips. But the next thing I knew, the morning after we had that confrontation in his office, I was followed to work by these Mexican guys. I thought I had to be imagining it at first—like, this couldn’t be real, right?—but, yeah, they were following me. So I was pretty spooked. And then, as I’m still trying to get things in order so I can blow the whistle, Reiner beat me to it and you guys rode in with your badges and your warrants and arrested me.”
He gave a derisive eye roll, then continued: “You obviously had the black hats and the white hats confused, but there was no way I was going to convince you of that. Objectively, the evidence against me was pretty overwhelming, and I knew I was going down no matter what. Especially once I figured out that the SARs no longer existed, that Thad not only hadn’t filed them, he had been using his VP access to erase them from the server. He was covering his tracks well. And I knew eventually I was going to be just another liability and that the cartel was going to eliminate me—one less loose end. I worried about my family, too, because those Mexican guys knew where I lived. So I made up the story about having kept the SARs and the deposit slips and blabbed about them whenever I suspected there was an open microphone nearby. It was the only way I could keep myself and my family safe.
“My wife and I developed this whole routine about how she wanted to go into WITSEC and I didn’t, and how I knew where the documents were and she didn’t, and how I had put this codicil in my will. But it was all an act. So you can try to blackmail me into turning everything over, but I have nothing to give. All you’d be doing is compounding the error you’ve already made and punishing a family that has been through more than enough pain.”
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. Agent Hines still looked like she had swallowed something that tasted bad. It was Agent Hall who spoke first.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. “You’re just trying to save your wife’s skin.”
“Would you get your head out of your ass for just one second?” Mitch said. “Think about it: If I actually had the SARs and the deposit slips, don’t you think I would have used them at trial to prove my innocence?”
“No, because you wanted to cover for the cartel, just like you’re continuing to do now,” Hall shot back. “You’re going to serve your time and follow your orders, knowing they’ll reward you for it in the end.”
Mitch threw up his hands. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you: I don’t work for the—”
“Sure you don’t,” Hall spat. “You have the language skills. You had the access. You had the contacts. There were all those trips down to Mexico—”
“All of which were legitimate bank business,” Mitch protested. “I was in the Latin American division. Where was I supposed to go? Australia?”
“And then I suppose you’ve come up with a new explanation for the account in Jersey? Let me guess. You inherited the money.”
“Would you listen to me for once? I didn’t know anything about that stupid account. That was Thad Reiner. It was all—”
Mitch interrupted himself with an exasperated sigh before resuming: “Never mind. This is pointless. You want to prosecute my wife for shooting a statue? Go ahead. Make my kids orphans. If that’s what it takes to move your career forward, I hope you’re real, real proud of your next promotion, you heartless son of a bitch.”
“I’m not the one who pulled the trigger,” Hall said superciliously. “I’m not the one who—”
Agent Hines placed a hand on Hall’s arm for a moment, stopping him midscreed.
“Okay, gentlemen. I think we’re done here,” she said. “Mr. Dupree, if you change your mind, talk to Mrs. Lembo. She knows how to reach us.”
“It’s not about changing my—”
Ignoring him, she turned to Hall and said, “Let’s go.”
Hines stood, bringing up a briefcase from under the table and opening it. Hall began collecting photographs.
This meeting was over. The rest of my incarceration, all eight years’ worth, would now commence. I knew, in a very sure place in my heart, that Mitch didn’t have any documents. The Mitch Dupree I had come to know so well over the last two months would have done anything to save his wife from prison and his kids from foster care.
But whether or not the agents ultimately believed Mitch had already become a fringe issue, at least where my reality was concerned. If Mitch didn’t have any documents, I was simply stuck here. I could wail and moan about being tricked by Ruiz and Gilmartin, I could make accusations about David Drayer, I could try to get the courts to pay attention to my plight.
None of it would matter. It would always come back to the same thing: I had pleaded guilty, ergo I belonged here.
Mitch was watching the agents with a forlorn expression, the kind he had mastered thoroughly during a life that had been so unfairly sideswiped off its chosen road. His anger was fading fast, rapidly swapping out for desperation.
“What are you going to do with my wife?” he asked.
The agents kept packing up their things.
“What’s going to happen to Natalie?” Mitch asked again.
Hines had snapped the briefcase closed. Hall was buttoning his jacket.
“Please,” Mitch said pathetically. “She’s all my kids have. You’ve already taken their father from them. Don’t take their mother, too. I swear to you, I don’t have any documents. If I did, I would have surrendered them a long, long time ago. Please believe me. I can’t create something that doesn’t exist. Please.”
His voice was trembling. And I was so absorbed in his drama, I almost didn’t hear the most important sentence he had spoken all day:
I can’t create something that doesn’t exist.
It was giving me an idea. Not a well-formed one. It was lumpy, misshapen—wet clay, at best. Were this any other kind of meeting, I would have just kept my mouth shut until I could think it through.
But I didn’t have that kind of time. These FBI agents from Atlanta weren’t going to come running back to West Virginia simply because a lowly convict declared he had fully concocted a marvelous scheme. Half-cocked was going to have to do.
I can’t create something that doesn’t exist.
The idea was in my brain, somewhere. If only I could wrestle it more fully from all the folds and wrinkles in which it was currently trapped.
I can’t create something that doesn’t exist.
And then I finally asked myself the right question: But what if we could?
The agents were rounding the table, heading for the door. They had said good-bye to Mrs. Lembo and thanked her for her hospitality. She had returned their courtesy. In five more steps, maybe less, they were going to be out the door and forever out of my life.
If I was going to speak, now was the time.
“Wait,” I said. “I think we’re all missing a golden opportunity here.”
That was enough to halt the agents. They had turned their heads toward me. My words came out in a rush.
“I believe Mitch when he says the documents don’t exist anymore. But it actually doesn’t matter whether you do or not. The important thing is that New Colima believes they exist. Mitch has done a brilliant job making them believe it. Let’s use that against them.”
I had everyone’s attention. I kept going.
“I assume the FBI would be interested in arresting two cartel members who have been posing as FBI agents and are responsible for killing an assistant US Attorney named Kris Langetieg. They admitted as much to David Drayer. I’m sure he would testify to that.”
“I’m listening,” Agent Hines said.
“Good. Because right now, my fake FBI agents think Mitch is currently weighing an offer from them: a million bucks, plus witness protection and blah-blah-blah in return for the location of the documents. They have no idea I’ve met with you. I can call them and say something like, ‘Hey, guys, the jig is up. I figured out you’re not real FBI. But Mitch is willing to play ball anyway. He wants five million dollars in exchange for the documents. And I want five million for brokering the deal.’ They’ll want to see the documents first, of course. And we’re going to give them what they want, because Mitch is going to forge some SARs and some deposit slips. You could do that, right?”
Mitch didn’t have to think about it. “If I had access to a computer? Sure. I spent four years filling those things out every day. I could do it in my sleep.”
He then turned to Hines. “Actually, if you could have someone go to some casas de cambio in Mexico and get some blank deposit slips, I could really make it look good. The signatures were all fake anyway. It was like they had a random Spanish name generator. Juan Carlos Pablo José whatever. Some of them would come in a little wrinkled, like they had spent time in someone’s pocket, but that would be easy enough to simulate.”
Mitch was now back to me. “The only problem is, I was submitting these SARs for four years, pretty much every day. I even invented the number of them I supposedly had: nine hundred and fifty-one. So they’d be expecting to retrieve nine hundred and fifty-one SARs. That’s going to take a long, long time to fake. It’s a three-page form. I could probably fake one in about twenty minutes. But even if that’s all I did, it would still take months to—”
“You don’t need to do that,” I said. “The SARs are worthless without the deposit slips. We can tell Danny you only kept the deposit slips and you brought them with you to prison. It’s believable enough. We’re allowed to bring legal documents in with us. Nine hundred and fifty-one deposit slips could probably fit in a shoebox.”
“So we use the fake deposit slips as the bait, then swoop in and arrest these guys?” Hines said.
“Exactly,” I said. “What do you think?”
No one spoke for maybe ten seconds, until Mitch doused my enthusiasm with a cold bucket of his reality.
“Sorry, I just don’t see what’s in it for me,” he said, then nodded toward the agents. “They get a couple of cartel members. You get some help proving you didn’t belong here in the first place, which maybe sways a judge somewhere. What do I get, exactly? I’d just be poking the bear. You may have noticed I have enough problems without doing that.”
“But if you cooperated in this, it would prove you weren’t working for the cartel,” I said.
“Yeah? So what? They name me Citizen of the Year and give me a bright blue ribbon? It’s too big a risk for zero payout.”
“Not zero,” I said. “I’m sure these agents would graciously promise to deep-six those photos of your wife.”
Mitch grimaced at the mere mention of that evidence. But Hall said, “I think we could agree to that.”
More deliberative silence followed. We didn’t absolutely need Mitch for this plan to work. We could fake deposit slips without his help. They might not be quite as good, but they’d be good enough.
But I could tell this plan wasn’t really exciting anyone very much. Ruiz and Gilmartin may have been everything to me. To New Colima, they were little more than midlevel foot soldiers. Cartels were designed to be able to lose guys like them and keep right on ticking. Hines and Hall would get a nice little pat on the back from their supervisors. I might or might not get out of here. It was all relentlessly small-time.
I needed to think bigger. A lot bigger.
This was when that wet clay I had been playing with transformed into the David.
“What if I tell Ruiz that Mitch will only turn the deposit slips over to El Vio himself?” I said. “So the story becomes: Mitch is demanding five million bucks and a meeting, because he wants El Vio’s personal assurance that if he gives up the deposit slips, he and his family won’t be immediately killed. We could tell them we want the exchange to happen at Dorsey’s Knob Park in the middle of the night. Gilmartin is familiar with it. We made an exchange there before.”
It was fair to say this electrified the agents. As it should have. To be the agents who captured El Vio? That was fame everlasting, both inside and outside the bureau.
Books would be written.
Movies would be made.
Glory would be achieved.
Hall was acting like someone had put tacks in his shoes. Hines had just barely managed to wipe the dreamy look off her face.
“So you arrange for El Vio to come here to West Virginia,” she said. “We lie in wait and grab him when he shows up.”
“That’s right. Though you’d have to be damn careful. El Vio would be looking for a trap. If he got even the slightest suspicion you were hanging around . . .”
“Forget about us,” Hall said. “We know how to do this. You really think you can pull off your end? You think you can convince them to get El Vio to come here?”
“Yes,” I said, sounding more filled with brio than I perhaps felt.
And then I added: “However.”
Hines focused on me. Hall stopped his tack dance.
“I would need an ironclad assurance from you,” I said.
“What’s that?” Hines asked.
“We both go free,” I said. “It wouldn’t be safe for Mitch to be here any longer once word got out he double-crossed El Vio. And I never should have been here in the first place.”
The agents conferred through brief eye contact. Then Hines spoke:
“If you can deliver us El Vio? I’ll personally see to it you’re taken out of here in limousines.”