“Frankly, Garland, I don’t give a damn,” I said. “There’s nothing between Jess and me, never has been, never will be. She’s happily lesbian, in case you didn’t know.”
He snorted. “Yeah, right. Tell that to the guy I saw her wrapped around in the bar of the Hilton last week in Chattanooga.”
I tried not to be surprised at that. “Good-bye, Dr. Hamilton.” I turned and began walking away.
“Don’t you walk away from me,” he yelled. “I’m not finished with you!” I kept walking. “Do you hear me? I’m nowhere near finished with you!”
CHAPTER 33
THE PHONE ON MY desk jangled, startling me from a daydream that mostly involved Miranda, Sarah, and Jess Carter, with occasional nightmarish interruptions by a deranged medical examiner hell-bent on revenge.
“Dr. Brockton?”
“Yes.”
“This is David Welton.” I struggled to place the name. “The FBI’s district counsel.”
“Oh, yes. Sorry.”
“No problem. Listen, I may have some good news for you.”
“I can always use some.”
“Angela Price and I were talking about your Cooke County homicide case. As you know, we’re up against a sort of catch-22 on obstruction of justice, and that’s frustrating.”
“Frustrating for the FBI, or frustrating for me?”
“Both. Despite what you may think, Price is a dedicated agent, but she has to work within fairly strict protocols. Also, there’s a lot more politics involved in law enforcement than most people realize, especially in places like Cooke County. Nearly everybody up there is related to everybody else in some way or other, and they have their own notions of justice, as you’re painfully aware.”
“Right. And even the TBI can’t touch them, sounds like.”
“Well, that’s a little cynical, but it is true that an obstruction case would be really tough for the state to win up there.”
“That doesn’t sound like the good news you mentioned.”
“Sorry, I’m just getting to that,” he said. “We might have more options than we thought. I was trying to figure out some creative way for us to turn this into a federal offense, and I remembered a pretty creative maneuver the Bureau used a few years ago to prosecute one of our own guys.” He had my attention. “The name JJ Smith mean anything to you?”
“No, ’fraid not. Should it?”
“If you worked for the Bureau, it sure would. JJ Smith was an FBI agent in Los Angeles who was handling Chinese spies.”
“Their spies, or our spies?”
“Exactly. Thereby hangs the crux of the matter,” he said. “Or the crotch of it, you might say. Smith was giving one of his female assets, code-named ‘Parlor Maid,’ some very special handling. They would meet and have sex, and sometime in the course of those encounters, she would take classified papers from his briefcase, copy the information, then relay it to Beijing.”
“Sounds like Mata Hari,” I said.
“Very like. There’s a name for a female spy who uses her charms to seduce sources and obtain secrets. She’s called a honey pot.”
“Hmm. My grandpa used to call my grandma that. Although the only secrets he had were the bottles of Jack Daniels he had tucked away in the barn, and I’m pretty sure she never seduced those away from him.”
“Well, then, your grandma wasn’t as shrewd as this Chinese agent, ’cause she plucked JJ Smith like a turkey. We were having one hell of a time building an espionage case against him, though. The thing we finally got him for was mail fraud.”
“Which spelling of the word are we talking here?”
He laughed. “The mail fraud statutes make it a crime to use the U.S. mail, radio, telephone, or other communications over an interstate carrier to commit fraud. And fraud is defined very broadly—so broadly, it can include simply depriving a person of what’s called the ‘intangible right of honest service.’ In JJ Smith’s case, having hot sex with a Chinese spy, on the Bureau’s clock and at taxpayer expense, hardly counts as ‘honest service.’ Sounds like grasping at straws, but it worked.”
“Sort of like Al Capone eventually serving time, not for murder or bootlegging but for tax evasion?”
“Exactly. If Plan A doesn’t work, switch to Plan B.”
“And how does this relate to Sheriff Kitchings? We send Price up there in something by Victoria’s Secret?”
“Whoa. If she ever even suspected you’d said something like that, you’d need emergency admission to the Witness Protection Program.”
“Sorry. The ‘dishonest service’ charge just seems a little vague.”
“It is,” he conceded. “That’s why I’m hoping to relegate that strategy to Plan B.”
“Does that mean you’ve got a Plan A?”
“We’ll see,” he said. “I’m looking at a map of Cooke County right now. Think you can steer me to the cave where the woman’s body was found?”
I described the route east from Knoxville on I-40, directing him to the Jonesport exit and then taking him along the winding river road. “Okay, about six or eight miles upriver, look for a right-hand turn that heads up into the mountains,” I said.