Chapter 85
“I WANT TO TALK about all of it. I don’t have a wire on me, Jezzie. Obviously.”
She half smiled at that. Always the perfect actress. “I can see you don’t,” she said.
My heart was booming at a tremendous rate. “Tell me what happened. Just tell me why, Jezzie. Tell me what I spent almost two years trying to find out, and you knew all the time. Tell me your side of this.”
Jezzie’s mask, which was always her perfectly beautiful smile, had finally disappeared. She sounded resigned. “All right, Alex. I’ll tell you some of what you want to know, what you just wouldn’t leave alone.”
We continued to walk, and Jezzie finally told me the truth.
“How did it happen? Well, in the beginning, we were just doing our job. I swear that’s true. We were babysitting the secretary’s family. Jerrold Goldberg wasn’t used to getting threats. The Colombians made a threat against him. He acted like the civilian that he is. He overreacted. He demanded Secret Service protection for his entire family. That’s how it all began. With a surveillance detail that none of us thought was necessary.”
“So you assigned two lightweight agents.”
“Two friends, actually. Not lightweights at all. We figured the detail would be a boondoggle. Then Mike Devine noticed that one of the teachers, a math teacher named Gary Soneji, had made a couple of passes by the Goldberg house. At first we thought he had a crush on the boy. Devine and Chakely thought he might be a pederast. Nothing much more than that. We had to check him out, anyway. It was in the original logs that Devine and Chakely kept.”
“One of them followed Gary Soneji?”
“A couple of times, yes. To a couple of places. We weren’t really concerned at that point, but we were following through. One night, Charlie Chakely tailed him into Southeast. We didn’t connect Soneji to the murders there, especially since the story never made any splash in the papers. Just more inner-city murders, you know.”
“Yeah. I do know. When did you suspect something else about Gary Soneji?”
“We didn’t suspect a kidnapping until he actually picked up the two kids. Two days before that, Charlie Chakely had followed him out to the farm in Maryland. Charlie didn’t suspect a kidnapping at the time. No reason to.
“But he knew where the farm was located now. Mike Devine called me from the school when it all came crashing down. They wanted to go after Soneji then. That’s when it struck me about taking the ransom ourselves. I don’t know for sure. Maybe I’d thought of it before. It was so easy, Alex. Three or four days and it would be over. Nobody would be hurt. Not any more than they’d already been hurt. We’d have the ransom money. Millions.”
The way Jezzie spoke about the kidnapping plot so casually was scary. She downplayed it, but it had been her idea. Not Devine’s or Chakely’s idea, Jezzie’s. She was the mastermind. “What about the children?” I asked. “What about Maggie Rose and Michael?”
“They’d already been kidnapped. We couldn’t stop what had already happened. We staked out the farm in Maryland. We were confident that nothing could happen to the kids. He was a math teacher. We didn’t think he’d hurt them. We thought he was nothing but an amateur. We were completely in control.”
“He buried them in a box, Jezzie. And Michael Goldberg died.”
Jezzie stared out to sea. She nodded slowly. “Yes, the little boy died. That changed everything, Alex. Forever. I don’t know if we could have prevented it. We moved in and took Maggie Rose then. We made our own kidnap demands. The whole plan changed.”
The two of us continued to walk along the edge of the shimmering water. If anyone had seen us, they probably would have thought we were lovers, having a serious talk about our relationship. The second half of that was true enough.
Jezzie finally looked at me. “I want to tell you how it was between us, Alex. My side of things. It’s not what you think.”
I had no words for her. It felt as if I were standing on the dark side of the moon again, and about to explode. My mind was screaming. I let Jezzie go on, let her talk. It didn’t really matter now.
“When it started, down in Florida, I needed to know whatever you could find out. I wanted a connection inside the D.C. police. You were supposed to be a good cop. You were also your own man.”
“So you used me to watch your flanks. You chose me to hand over the ransom. You couldn’t trust the Bureau. Always the professional, Jezzie.”
“I knew you wouldn’t do anything to endanger the little girl. I knew you’d deliver the ransom. The complications started after we got back from Miami. I don’t know exactly when. I swear this is the truth.”
I felt numb and hollow inside as I listened to her. I was dripping with perspiration, and not because of the beating sun.
I wondered if Jezzie had brought a gun to the island? Always the professional, I reminded myself.
“For what it’s worth now, I fell in love with you, Alex. I did. You were so many of the things I’d given up looking for. Warm and decent. Loving. Understanding. Damon and Janelle touched me. When I was with you, I felt whole again.”
I was a little dizzy, and nauseated. It was exactly the way I’d felt for about a year after Maria died. “For what it’s worth, I fell in love with you, too, Jezzie. I tried not to, but I did. I just couldn’t have imagined anybody lying to me the way you did. Lying and deceiving. I still can’t believe all the lies. What about Mike Devine?” I asked.
Jezzie shrugged her shoulders. That was her only answer.
“You committed the perfect crime. A masterpiece,” I told her then. “You created the master crime that Gary Soneji always wanted to commit.”
Jezzie peered into my eyes, but she seemed to be looking right through me. There was just one more piece to the puzzle now—one last thing that I had to know.
One unthinkable detail.
“What really happened to the little girl? What did you, or Devine and Chakely, do with Maggie Rose?”
Jezzie shook her head. “No, Alex. That I can’t tell you. You know that I can’t.”
She had folded her arms across her chest when she’d begun to reveal the truth. Her arms remained tightly folded.
“How could you kill a little girl? How could you do it, Jezzie? How could you kill Maggie Rose Dunne?”
Jezzie suddenly whirled away from me. It was too much, even for her. She headed back toward the beach umbrella and towels. I took a quick step and I caught her arm. I grabbed the crook of her elbow.
“Get your hands off me!” she screamed. Her face contorted.
“Maybe you can trade me the information about Maggie Rose,” I shouted back. “Maybe we can make a trade, Jezzie!”
She turned around. “They’re not going to let you open this case again. Don’t kid yourself, Alex. They don’t have a thing on me. Neither do you. I’m not going to trade you information.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you are,” I said. My voice had gone from loud to close to a whisper. “Yes, you are, Jezzie. You’re going to trade information…. You definitely are.”
I pointed up toward the barranca and the palm trees that thickened as you got farther from the sandy beach.
Sampson stood up from his hiding spot in the deep island brush. He waved something that looked like a silver wand. What he was actually holding was a long-distance microphone.
Two FBI agents got up and waved, too. They stood beside Sampson. They’d all been out in the bush since before seven that morning. The agents were as red as lobsters around the face and arms. Sampson probably had the tan of his life, also.
“My friend Sampson up there. He’s recorded everything you said since we started our walk.”
Jezzie closed her eyes for several seconds. She hadn’t expected I would go this far. She didn’t think I had it in me.
“You’ll tell us now how you murdered Maggie Rose,” I demanded.
Her eyes opened and they looked small and black. “You don’t get it. You just don’t get it, do you?” she said.
“What don’t I get, Jezzie? You tell me what I don’t get.”
“You keep looking for the good in people. But it’s not there! Your case will get blown up. You’ll look like a fool in the end, a complete and utter fool. They’ll all turn on you again.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, “but at least I’ll have this moment.”
Jezzie moved to hit me, but I blocked her fist with a forearm. Her body twisted and she went down. The hard fall was a lot less than she deserved. Jezzie’s face was a brittle mask of surprise.
“That’s a start, Alex,” she said from her sandy seat on the beach. “You’re becoming a bastard, too. Congratulations.”
“Nah,” I said to Jezzie. “I’m just fine. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
I let the FBI agents and Sampson make the formal arrest of Jezzie Flanagan. Then I took a skiff back to the hotel. I packed and was on my way back to Washington within the hour.