The Wrong Man (15 page)

When Jenna came back from mailing the envelope, Bishop explained what he had in mind for the afternoon and asked if she wouldn’t
mind helping out. Jenna didn’t need much persuading. Less than two hours later, she was driving Bishop down a quiet, residential
street in Brooklyn’s Ridgewood district. A long row of pre-war, two-storey
townhouses lined each side, mostly with well-kept
front yards. Sam Chaney’s was No. 92. Bishop knew he had a small garden out back, too. He’d come out here once before when
Chaney had organized a weekend barbecue for his teammates while they were between assignments. It had been one of the few
times they’d all socialized together. To Bishop, it felt like a lifetime ago.

‘It’s the one on the right with white fencing,’ he said. ‘But don’t slow down.’

‘Gotcha,’ Jenna said and kept the Honda at a steady fifteen.

Adjusting the visor on his cap, Bishop studied the house as they got closer. He knew Chaney still lived there because Jenna
had got into the Land Registry server again and checked. A silver Chevy SUV
was parked on the street out front. Same model
as his last one. Just newer. Chaney had always been a creature of habit where cars were concerned.

The upstairs drapes were drawn, which further indicated that Chaney was in there right now. The guy was definitely a night
owl, which is why Bishop had decided to check his place first. Tennison would wait. Right
now he’d be at his office where
there were far too many variables. Too many people who might recognize Bishop. Home turf was always better in these situations.
Fewer witnesses.

Bishop scanned the other parked vehicles as they passed by. All empty as far as he could make out. But that might not mean
anything. He’d have to see.

There was an intersection about a hundred yards up ahead. Bishop saw a small store on the corner with a couple of spaces next
to it. ‘You want to park up over there for a minute?’

‘Sure.’

Bishop liked how Jenna kept unncessary questions to a minimum. Or at least waited for an appropriate time to ask them. Not
many people had that ability.
Bishop felt she would have made a great soldier. When she pulled in, he turned to her and said,
‘Do me a favour, huh? Can you go and grab me a copy of today’s
Times
?’

Jenna looked at him and smiled. ‘All the way to Brooklyn to buy a paper. You sure know how to treat a girl.’ With the engine
still running, she climbed out and disappeared into the store.

Bishop used one hand to adjust the rear-view mirror until he could see everything behind him. Specifically, the vehicles they’d
just passed on the opposite side of the street. More specifically, the dark grey Crown Vic with tinted windows, parked a few
houses down from Chaney’s. This time Bishop smiled to himself.
I see you
.

Less then a
minute later, Jenna got back in, handed him the paper and said, ‘You’re still front page news, if you’re interested.’

‘I’m not.’

‘So why did you want the paper?’

‘I needed to confirm something and thought it’d look suspicious if we stopped here for no reason. Check the rear-view. See
the dark grey sedan back there?’

Jenna
moved the mirror to its original position. After a few moments, she said, ‘The one with the tinted windows? Is that
a guy in there?’

‘Uh, huh. He must have ducked down in the seat when we passed by.’

‘Police?’

Bishop smiled. ‘That’s a Crown Victoria. Number one choice for cab drivers and law enforcement, and that doesn’t look like
a cab to me.’

Jenna puffed out her cheeks. ‘So what do you think it means? That Thorpe reported your meet with him yesterday?’

‘Possibly. More likely the Marshals are making sure all the angles are covered. That’s what I’d do. But it means they’ll also
have Tennison under surveillance, which means I can’t do anything except check back in a day or
so and hope they’ve lost interest.’

Jenna nodded. ‘So where to next?’

‘Back to yours, I think.’

‘Okay,’ she said. She pulled out towards the intersection. ‘Still, at
least you’ve got the Cortiss lead to follow up. Maybe he’ll be able to shorten the list of suspects for you.’

Bishop looked out the window and said, ‘Stranger things
have happened.’

‘How can they call this rush hour if nobody’s
mov
ing?’ Jenna said, tapping the brakes. It was Tuesday morning and they were sitting with all the other commuters on the northbound
lanes of Cross Island Parkway.

He turned and looked at her as she patted both palms against the wheel. She was wearing a simple tan T-shirt
and blue jeans,
although her natural curves made the clothes look anything but ordinary. He liked her casual attitude towards her own appearance.
It made her even more attractive.

Bishop was wearing one of Owen’s suits she kept stored in the back of her bedroom closet, awaiting her brother’s release a
few years down the line. The arms were a little
long, but it was a good fit, overall.

‘Relax,’ he said. ‘It’s not even eight thirty.’ He knew the post office at Little Neck didn’t open until nine.

‘I know, but it’s at times like these I wish I’d gone for an automatic transmission.’

‘A city girl going for a stick shift
is
different. Seems you never take the easy option.’

Jenna looked at him and smiled. ‘That’s me all over.’

She turned in her seat and reached into her shoulder bag on the back seat, pulling out a small notebook with a picture of
a young Elvis on the cover. That was another aspect of her character that intrigued him: this fascination with a white rock
’n’ roll icon who’d been dead for over thirty years. She definitely
wasn’t run-of-the-mill. Far from it, in fact. He watched,
amused, as she also retrieved a pair of thin-framed reading glasses and put them on.

‘Anybody stares at a monitor as much as I do ends up needing these sooner or later,’ she said. ‘Usually sooner.’

‘They suit you,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘Flatterer. I don’t how interesting you’ll find
it, but I did
a little research while you were asleep. Your Randall Brennan wasn’t exactly a saint, was he?’

‘Who is?’ Bishop said. ‘And I wasn’t being paid to protect anyone’s morals. All I knew about Brennan was that he was a successful
arms broker who persuaded developing countries to sign long-term deals for their weapons. And that he was established enough
to be able to do most of his work without leaving his upstairs office. And I know that when his family noticed strange people
following them whenever they left the estate, he went to RoyseCorp for help.’

‘
Fin
ally,’ Jenna said as the vehicles ahead started moving, gradually picking up speed. She kept pace and said, ‘You ever meet
him? Morgan Royse,
I mean.’

‘Once. Not long after I signed up with the company I got introduced to him briefly. It was pretty uncomfortable. Neither of
us had much to say, although I found out later it was down to him that I was offered the job in the first place. Maybe he
got a recommendation from somebody and sent the word down. Then a few months later he turned into a recluse.
Nobody really
knows why. Nowadays he communicates with his top execs, a few VIP clients, the occasional head of state and that’s about it.
Commutes daily to his forty-storey office building by personal helicopter, never ventures below his penthouse suite and hasn’t
had his picture taken in years. Unless I missed one while I was inside.’

‘Maybe he’s
shy,’ she said. ‘You know he and Brennan were in Vietnam together?’ She opened the notebook on her lap to a specific
page and looked down. ‘Both were colonels, too.’

Bishop took a sharp breath as the car in front braked and Jenna followed suit with about an inch to spare. ‘You want me to
take that?’ he asked. She frowned at him, then passed the notebook over.
‘Yeah, we heard some rumours they knew each other
from the Marines.’

‘Okay. How about this, then? I found a twenty-year-old puff-piece in the
New York Times
archives about Alicia Brennan and her involvement with a big AIDS fundraiser. Randall gets a brief mention as the proud husband
taking time out from his heavy work schedule to support her.’ They were
travelling at forty now and Jenna removed her glasses.
She leaned over to Bishop and tapped the notebook, her finger marking a passage. ‘Read the part I wrote down. And the date
of publication.’

Aloud, he read, ‘“. . . easier said than done, since the day-to-day administration of the midtown private security firm Randall
and his
partner started up
only three months ago takes up most of his waking hours these days.”’ Underneath, Jenna had written
April 17, 1987
. Bishop turned to her. ‘RoyseCorp opened its offices in January 1987.’

‘January 15, to be exact.’ There was a sign for exit 31E and Jenna moved them into the right lane. ‘Because the company and
Royse aren’t mentioned by name, I guess nobody worked out
that they had a history when they were investigating the murders.
The cops already had you, so they didn’t bother digging any deeper. Interesting, no?’

He nodded slowly, digesting the information. ‘Yeah, although I don’t see how their history is connected to the murders, or
me.’ He paused, then said, ‘I guess Brennan and Royse split up when Brennan went into
the arms business. Royse must have bought
him out. Although there can’t have been too much bad blood between them if Brennan turned to Royse for protection later.’

‘He probably figured he qualified for a discount. I doubt we’ll ever know for sure; trying to get any kind of concrete info
on Royse is almost impossible, and that’s a rarity for me.’

‘He’s probably got an entire staff devoted to covering his tracks. Anything else?’

Jenna took the exit for Northern Boulevard and Douglaston. ‘Only an odd obituary in Brennan’s home town paper, the
Thornton Gazette
. It turns out Brennan was the sole surviving heir of one Helen Gandy at the time of her death in July 1988.’

Bishop frowned. ‘Never heard
of her. She famous or something?’

‘To conspiracy buffs, Gandy’s practically the holy grail. She was J. Edgar Hoover’s personal secretary for over fifty years
until his death in 1972. She was also the first person called when his body was discovered and was suspected for years afterwards
of removing the most inflammatory files from his office before anyone even knew
he was dead.’

‘Well, it’s an interesting footnote. Not much more than that.’

Jenna smiled. ‘Not a believer in conspiracies then, I take it.’

‘I’m more a believer in Ben Franklin. He was the one who said three can only keep a secret if two of them are dead. Conspiracies
work fine in movies. Not so easy in real life.’

She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘Still, she might have had
some
files worth stealing when she died and passed them on to Brennan.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t buy it. Sure, certain information is worth
money, but files from the 1970s? Any government secrets that old would be for curiosity value only. Often the simplest answer’s
the one to go for, and in this case I think
it all comes down to money. Brennan had plenty of it and a secret vault almost
nobody knew about. Combine the two and you’ve found your motive.’

‘Yeah, you’re probably right,’ she said. They stopped at lights on the Marathon Parkway intersection. ‘We’re almost there.’

Bishop scanned the buildings on the right, past the intersection. There was a large,
nineteenth-century-style timber frame
building on the corner. Squatting next to it was a small, anonymous-looking, single-storey white building that Bishop guessed
would be the post office. Federal funding didn’t run to inventive architecture.

The lights turned green and Bishop said, ‘Park up in the first available space.’

She did, and after
turning off the engine reached back into the shoulder bag again and pulled out a cell phone.

‘Forgot to give you this.’ She handed it to him along with two spare SIM cards. ‘Twenty bucks from a 7-Eleven, but it’s not
too bad. It’s charged and comes with an hour’s worth of calls and a few other things, like voice record and camera. I know
you probably won’t want
to use it much, but I programmed my number into it if you need to contact me for any reason.’ She
shrugged. ‘You never know, right?’

‘Thanks,’ Bishop said and gave it a brief once-over before putting it in Owen’s jacket pocket along with the SIM cards.

He pulled out his sunglasses, put them on and reached for the door handle.

‘Sure you
don’t want me to wait? What if he doesn’t show up today? You can’t just wander around.’

‘I’ll think of something. This is a situation where I’m better off on my own.’

Finally, she nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Be careful.’

‘Sure,’ he said, and got out. He watched as she pulled into the traffic and drove away. Then he crossed the street to look
for
a store that sold outdoor gear.

At 11.27 on Tuesday morning, the man who used to be Adam Cortiss stood in front of the stamp-vending machine next to the wall
of mailboxes, opened the envelope he’d just taken from Box 46533 and realized immediately he should have sold that house years
ago.

Sold it to someone other than himself, that is.

He just couldn’t do it, though, could he? Tenants came and went, but his old man’s place in Nassau never stayed vacant for
more than a couple of weeks. And to be honest, he’d gotten used to that nice little windfall every month. Even after Stillson
and the letting agency took their cuts, he still had more than enough to see him through those tight periods that cropped
up every now and then. Like now, for instance. Always by cashier’s cheque too, as per his original instructions to Stillson.
And always a different time each month, since he’d learned from an early age that a set routine could get you killed quicker
than a bullet.

And as the house was the only connection left to his previous identity, somebody from
his former life had now tracked him
through it. No other way it could have happened.

Cortiss gave a deep sigh and lines appeared on his forehead. His face had filled out since Bishop’s file photo had been taken,
and the wavy brown hair had turned salt and pepper and was cropped close to his skull, receding at the temples and thinning
at the back.
But the body underneath was still as taut as a man’s half his age.

At his right were five cashiers’ windows, but only one was currently active. The same two people in the line as when he’d
come in less than a minute ago. The patient woman behind the glass window of number two was still serving the stooped old
crock dressed in his best suit, and the forty-something
mom waiting behind him was attempting to ignore the hyperactive brat
at her side. Just two customers and him. So whoever was waiting for him would be outside. And the blank sheets in the envelope
meant they didn’t care that he knew. As it was, he could name
at least three people from his past who’d like nothing more than to see him dead, and any one of them could be out there.
He knew the rear exit only led round to the front again, via a side alley, so it was through the front or nothing. Besides,
the Lexus he’d parked outside was practically new. Damned if he was going to abandon it without a fight.

Cortiss locked his mailbox and then bent down as if to tie his shoelaces. He pulled up his black jeans a couple of inches
and removed his trusty Colt Mustang .380 automatic from the ankle holster before standing up again. Flicking the safety off,
he held it in the pocket of his sports jacket and walked towards the front of the post office.

Through the glass double doors he could see a steady stream of traffic flowing past the parked vehicles lining the kerb on
this side.
His tan Lexus was a few cars down on the right. He scanned the vehicles in front and behind for occupants, but
saw nobody.

He pulled one of the doors open and stepped outside, turning his head in each direction. To his left several pedestrians were
walking away from him, towards the lights. On the right there was even less foot traffic. Just a guy in a dark
suit about
a hundred and fifty yards away, moving this way.

With his right hand still gripping the Colt in his pocket, Cortiss made for his vehicle, not taking his eyes off the approaching
man. The guy was about six foot, mid-thirties, with glasses and short dark hair. He seemed to look in every direction except
Cortiss’s and moved at a steady pace
like someone with a purpose. Both his hands were in his pockets.

Everything felt wrong and Cortiss’s throat felt dry. He increased his pace. Within seconds he’d reached the car and unlocked
the driver’s door. Then he turned so he was leaning against it at a slight angle to the guy. Twenty yards away, the man casually
brought his right hand out and let it
swing at his side as he walked. The other hand stayed in his pocket. Cortiss figured
he could take this guy out and be on his way before anybody noticed. The Colt was loud, but so was the sound of a car backfiring.

Ten yards away now and Cortiss had the barrel pointed at the man’s midsection. He was ready. The guy still looked straight
ahead and didn’t slow
his pace. Cortiss kept watching his left side, waiting for the merest twitch that would serve as his
cue to fire.

Five yards and still no movement from the man’s left hand. Cortiss
kept his eyes on him and then frowned when the man passed by. And continued walking away from him.
What the hell?
Cortiss watched him climb the single step to the post office double doors,
push one open and step inside.

The door closed and Cortiss breathed out again.

Okay. So he was mistaken. But whoever wanted him was still around and he was right out in the open. Cortiss reached behind,
opened the driver’s door and quickly slid in. As he inserted the key in the ignition he thought about what he would do if
the positions were
reversed. Not enough time to attach a nasty surprise to the starter motor. Best bet would be to place a
tracking device under the vehicle and then follow him home and take it from there. Except he wouldn’t go home just yet. He
knew of an industrial park just two miles from here that would serve him better. He’d drive on over there, see what kind of
company he’d attracted
and deal with it.

As he started the engine he felt the familiar touch of cold steel against his neck and the man in the back said, ‘Good idea,
Cortiss. Let’s go for a drive.’