murky figures in the 4Runner. Might be the pale man and the same driver, or two additional players, which would make a total of six. Crews cost money. Pike wondered who mounted a six-man crew to kidnap Isabel, and why they had made such a hefty investment.
Karbo’s Challenger had been towed to a lot on the eastern edge of the Valley. Pike started the Jeep, and headed for the freeway.
25.
Elvis Cole
Cole grabbed a pastrami on rye from the little deli on the ground floor, and climbed four flights to his office. The building had an elevator, but Cole took the stairs. Stairs made you tough.
Cole let himself in, closed the door, and settled behind his desk with the sandwich. He took a bite. Nothing to write home about. He found two packets of Chinese hot mustard in his desk, and applied the mustard. Better. Cole glanced at the Pinocchio clock.
“What do you think? Witness protection?”
Pinocchio’s plastic eyes slid from side to side. Pinocchio wasn’t impressed.
“Yeah. Me, neither.”
The odds were too crazy small. Like most experienced investigators, Cole did not believe in coincidence, so the notion that Hollis—Hollis being the first and only friend of Uncle Ted Kemp he had met—happened to mention a witness from Houston felt way too coincidental.
On the other hand, Kemp was a drunk who talked too much, and likely told the same stories to everyone. If Kemp’s buddies knew the same stories, then any of them could have told him about the Lone Star witness, or the kleptomaniac pimp from Biloxi or the mom-killing bank bandit from Detroit.
Cole ate the sandwich, and thought through the facts.
Kemp had been with the Marshals Service. Check. Uncle Ted Kemp had been a longtime friend of the Rolands. Check. The Rolands rooted for the Houston Astros baseball team. Check. All of which added up to nothing. Check.
One man’s coincidence was another man’s probability.
Cole felt he was making progress. If the Marshals suspected Kemp had been tortured to reveal a witness’s identity, they likely didn’t know which witness, if any, Kemp gave up. If they suspected the Rolands of being the compromised witnesses, they would have been all over Isabel. They weren’t, which suggested the Rolands were simply civilians or the Marshals were clueless.
Cole finished the sandwich, and opened the French doors to his balcony. A low haze hid the sea. The heavy clouds he’d seen earlier had grown into towering giants.
Cole opened his laptop and went to work.
Identifying federal trials related to counterfeit pharmaceuticals proved to be easy. Cole ran an Internet search, limiting results to stories in Texas appearing more than twenty years ago.
A list of links appeared, most referencing a case tried in the U.S. District Court in Houston. The People of the United States v. Jonathan Dennis Darnel and Samwell Lockhart Fundt, M.D. Darnel and Fundt were described as the owners of New Way Healthful Choices, Inc., a distributor of nutritional supplements. Together, the defendants had been charged with one hundred sixty-eight federal counts including fraud, conspiracy, sale and distribution of fake or illicit medicines, smuggling of same, trafficking of same, money laundering, and nine counts of manslaughter, the manslaughter counts derived from deaths caused by contaminants found in the counterfeit medicines. At the end of a three-week trial, the jury returned guilty verdicts on all one hundred sixty-eight counts.
Cole read the first three stories, and skimmed the rest. Twenty-three witnesses appeared for the prosecution. Identifying information was minimal, but names and ages were given. Cole ran individual searches, and found her.
DeeAnn Ryan had been Darnel’s twenty-four-year-old office manager and bookkeeper. Cole found DeeAnn’s high school graduation portrait. She looked so much like Isabel they could have been clones.
Cole tipped his chair back, and grinned at Pinocchio.
“The World’s Greatest Detective strikes again.”
As with five other New Way employee witnesses, DeeAnn had not known the pharmaceuticals distributed by the company were fraudulent until the FBI approached her. She cooperated willingly, and agreed to provide ongoing information regarding Darnel and Fundt, as well as information regarding the quantities and sources of pharmaceuticals and weekly accountings of monies received and disbursed by the company. The monies received had been large. The prosecution alleged New Way collected as much as three-point-four million dollars each week. In cash.
Cole felt uneasy, and wondered if he had missed something obvious. The Marshals had been investigating Kemp’s murder for two weeks. Maybe they knew exactly who Kemp gave up, and had taken steps to protect them. The men in the dark SUV Isabel mistook for