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 sexualendeavors. 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 theyknewhe 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 whatyouwould 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.”
White shook her head. “God, dirty all around. And Lancer and Draymont?”
“They were already in the blackmail business. I think they stumbled onto all this, or maybe something else just as incriminating, and believed it could be a big payoff for them.”
“So you think the fix-it guy in Tanner’s hotel room is down here now?” asked White. “And they tried to blackmail him?”
“I do. Only this guy decides to bite back. Hard. He kills Draymont. And then snatches Lancer from the hospital, and kills her after getting whatever information they could out of her.”
“But why the Slovakian money?”
“Whoever is behind this might have seen it as Kanak Roe’s having taken the money years ago to build his empire, then deciding to rat them out. They would not have been happy about that. And that’s why they killed him.”
“Okay. But trying to implicate Kasimira?”
Decker said, “If she goes down for murder, what happens to Gamma Protection Services?”
“It would probably go down the tubes. And you still think the murder of Julia Cummins is unconnected to all this?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Damn, Decker, this is getting to be the messiest case I’ve ever been involved in.”
Decker didn’t respond to this. He was thinking something else entirely.
Maybe in some ways, it’s finally beginning to clear.
His phone buzzed. Decker listened, mumbled a few words in response, and then clicked off.