showed the distance she traveled was consistent with a round-trip from Spokane to Victor, but this was not conclusive. Next the FBI looked at motels in and near Victor to see if Maria Hernandez had rented a room. No joy. So the FBI platoon started questioning motel clerks and maids and found one young clerk who recognized Bianca’s picture. He said the woman paid cash when she checked in and used the name Elena Mendoza. She never showed him an ID or used a credit card, but the clerk was positive that the picture of Bianca Castro was Elena Mendoza. He remembered her because ‘she was hot!’ — young men out west being fairly consistent in both their appreciation and their description of members of the opposite sex.
Gotcha! the boys from the Bureau said. They had two eyewitnesses who saw Bianca in a deputy sheriff’s uniform enter the junkyard office at the time Jubal Pugh was killed. They had statements from those witnesses that no one had entered the office after her or before the bodies were discovered. And they had proof she’d traveled to Victor and had stayed there. Yep, they had more than enough to arrest and convict Bianca Castro for the murder of Jubal Pugh, and they hadn’t even started gathering whatever evidence they might find when they searched her house.
The first FBI agent who interrogated Bianca didn’t realize it, but he said one thing that was pivotal in getting Bianca to give up Oliver Lincoln. Actually, he didn’t really interrogate her — he made a speech. In his speech, he laid out all the evidence against her and told her she was going to get the death penalty for killing Jubal Pugh and the Indian who owned the scrap yard. He added, ‘I’d suggest you hire a very good lawyer.’
Bianca concluded that there was no way she was going to waste her money on a lawyer. She knew the FBI had her cold for killing Pugh, but they couldn’t get her for killing Rollie Patterson. Most important, they had no evidence at all that she had planted the fire bomb under the bed of Senator William Broderick’s mistress. She wished she hadn’t popped the guy who owned the scrap yard, but when it came to Jubal … hell, he was a drug dealer who had been involved with the fake terrorist attacks and the deaths of at least eight people. No one cared about him. And she was
So she told the FBI she was willing to deal. No more than twenty years in prison, she said, and she had to be eligible for parole in ten. Twenty years was plenty of time for killing Jubal and one junkyard Indian. But in addition — and this she said was a deal breaker — the government had to agree not to touch her assets and allow her time to move her money into long-term investments before she went to prison. If they didn’t agree to that they could threaten to throw her in jail forever, and she still wouldn’t tell them a thing.
The Cuban was forty-two years old. If she served twenty years, she’d be sixty-two when she got out of prison, younger than that if she could get paroled. Her mother was still going strong at sixty-seven and her grandmother had been ninety-two when she died. Bianca came from a line of long-living whores, and her greatest fear had always been being old and poor. So she’d take the twenty years, provided she got to keep her money.
The FBI agreed to Bianca’s terms — and she gave them Oliver Lincoln.
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Nick Fine — Senator Nicholas Fine — beat them all to the punch.
Fine found out that Oliver Lincoln was going to be arrested long before the FBI placed the handcuffs on his wrists; he found out as soon as Bianca Castro gave him up. And as soon as he did, he called a press conference.
Fine looked very good standing behind the lectern, dressed in a gray suit, tall and lean, devilishly handsome with his arched brows and his perfectly shaped goatee. The cameras loved him — as did more than a few female reporters.
Fine told the assembled news hawks that he had just come to a ‘very disturbing realization.’ He said that after he was appointed to fill William Broderick’s seat in the U.S. Senate, he eventually got around to looking at how much money was available in Broderick’s war chest. Well, Fine said, he was shocked — absolutely shocked — to discover that Broderick had vectored approximately eight million dollars to an account in the Cayman Islands. The fact that the money had been sent to an offshore account — well, that just smelled of ‘monkey business,’ he said.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Fine said to the reporters, ‘just two days ago I discovered that the account in the Caymans belonged to a man named Oliver Lincoln.’
A reporter’s hand shot up. ‘How were you able to find out that the account belonged to this man? I thought that’s why people put their money into offshore accounts, so nobody could figure out who the money belonged to.’
Fine chuckled. ‘A United States senator is not without influence, sir. I simply called up the president of the bank and told him that I very much wanted to know the name of the owner of the account. I don’t remember my exact language, but I may have hinted that it would be a grave mistake for the bank to, ah, annoy me.’ (The bank president later admitted that he did indeed tell the senator the name of the account holder, believing it was, in this very, very special case, in the bank’s interest to ignore its normal disclosure policies.)
‘Anyway,’ Fine said, ‘the name
‘I was just trying to decide what to do with the information I’d obtained when I was informed, this very morning, that the FBI had arrested Oliver Lincoln as the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks. I also found out that Lincoln has a history of carrying out complex operations, sometimes to help criminal cartels, and other times, unfortunately, to aid the American government, in particular the CIA. And that’s why Senator Broderick had wanted to look at past meeting minutes, so that he could research Lincoln’s past.’
The reporters started to buzz like angry bees around a ruptured hive. A dozen voices called out, which Fine ignored.
‘I believe-’ he said. Then he paused and repeated himself to increase the drama. ‘I believe — and I’ve told this to the FBI, and I say this with great regret — that William Broderick, in order to pass his bill, a bill as you all know I never personally approved of, paid this man Lincoln to orchestrate these terrorist attacks so American Muslims would get the blame.’
Whoa! the reporters cried. Why the hell would Broderick do that?
Fine said it was fairly obvious: Broderick was determined to make a name for himself in politics. He figured the best way to do it was to get his bill passed, and the best way to do
But then why was Broderick killed? a reporter asked.
Fine shook his head. ‘My answer to that question, sir, is that I do not know.’ It was possible, Fine said, that a disgruntled Muslim had indeed killed Broderick just like the note found in his car had said. That would be ironic but also fitting. But it was also possible, Fine said, that there had been some sort of falling out among thieves, that Oliver Lincoln had killed Broderick for some reason. ‘I just don’t know why Senator Broderick was assassinated,’ Fine concluded. ‘That’s a mystery the good men and women at the FBI will have to unravel.’
‘One last question, Senator. Why on earth would Broderick have left records showing money going from him to this account in the Caymans?’
Fine hesitated. ‘Well,’ he said, and paused again as though struggling for words. ‘I hate to say this, but Bill Broderick was not the smartest guy I ever met.’
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