“Okay,” Mel said once we had our shoes back on. “Dortman’s on the eleven forty-five flight for LAX. When he gets there, he’s scheduled to connect with an overnight Copa Airlines flight to Caracas, Venezuela. Booked his tickets yesterday. Paid full fare.”
“In a hurry to get out of town?” I asked.
“Do you think?”
The whole time we’d been going through the search procedure, Mr. Cross had been speaking into his walkie-talkie. “Okay, Ms. Soames,” he said, leading us in the direction of the D gates, “I’ve talked to baggage. They’ve got Mr. Dortman’s baggage isolated. If he doesn’t fly, neither will his luggage.”
A guy from TSA was doing all this? That absolutely put me in my place and made me realize Mel Soames was even more out of my league than I had thought.
As we approached the gate area I didn’t think it would be difficult to recognize Thomas Dortman. I had never seen any of his on-air commentary, but he had posted his photo all over his Web site. He was seated at the end of the bank of seats nearest the ticket agent’s counter and the door leading out to the jetway. He huddled there with his back to the window, looking as inconspicuous as possible.
His Web site photos must have been either very old or Photo-shopped into the male equivalent of Glamour Shots. The man depicted there had been younger and far leaner than this one. He also had a full head of hair. This one was jowly and slightly balding. He also looked haggard and bleary-eyed-as though he hadn’t slept in several days.
I could see we were arriving just in time. The departure door was already latched open and the gate agent was preparing to make her first boarding announcement. The nod she gave to Mr. TSA Walkie-Talkie indicated he had been in contact with her as well. Despite his unassuming appearance, Mr. Cross was obviously a go-to kind of guy.
Without any discussion, Mel and I approached Dortman from either side, effectively boxing him in.
“We somehow missed each other in the Board Room, Mr. Dortman,” Mel said, casually flashing her ID in his direction. “I must have misunderstood.”
The gate agent made her announcement. Dortman started to rise. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “They’re calling my flight.”
“Have a seat, Mr. Dortman,” Mel said. “You paid full fare. If you miss this flight, you can always rebook.”
Unhappy about it, Dortman sat while nearby passengers studied us with open curiosity. Beads of sweat suddenly popped out on the man’s forehead.
Mel slipped onto the seat next to him. “So is your publisher putting out a Spanish edition of The Whistle-blower’s Guide?” she asked conversationally.
Dortman looked at her as though she were nuts. “No,” he said. “Why?”
“With a book coming out a few weeks from now, I’d think you’d need to be available for interviews and appearances. Won’t that be difficult to do from so far away, especially since you didn’t bother to book a return flight?”
“I have a meeting with a source in Caracas,” he said indignantly. “For my next book. In addition, my flight information is supposed to be confidential. You have no right to-”
It was time for me to step up. “When’s the last time you saw Carol and Jack Lawrence?” I asked.
“Who?” he returned.
“Wrong answer, Mr. Dortman,” I said.
I nodded toward Cross, but it wasn’t necessary. He was already picking up his walkie-talkie. “Okay with the luggage,” he said. “Take it off the cart and bring it to my office.”
“My luggage!” Dortman yelped. “You can’t touch my luggage. You don’t have a warrant.”
“They can’t touch your luggage,” Cross said pleasantly, glancing at Mel and me. “But I can, particularly if there’s a chance a traveler’s luggage will be on a flight when he isn’t.”
“But I haven’t missed my flight,” Dortman objected.
Darrel Cross smiled. “I believe you’re about to,” he said. “You need to come with us, Mr. Dortman.”
For a second or two, I thought Dortman was going to bolt and make a run for the jetway. Not that it would have done him any good, but desperate people can make some pretty stupid decisions at times. In the end he thought better of it. He shrugged and stood.
I was about to ask him to put his hands behind him. “This is my jurisdiction, Mr. Beaumont,” Cross said. “If you don’t mind, we’ll do the honors, but you’re welcome to read him his rights.”
Two more TSA agents appeared out of nowhere, patting Dortman down and cuffing him. You would have thought that, having cleared airport security, Thomas Dortman would have been unarmed. That wasn’t true, however. In the pocket of his jacket they found a plastic cheese knife that, wielded properly, could have done a good deal of damage to soft body tissue.
Dragging Dortman’s two fully loaded pieces of carry-on luggage with us, Mel and I followed Dortman and his TSA contingent back down the concourse and out past security. On the way, my phone rang. It was Lander.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“We’ve got him,” I said. “He’s in custody. TSA has him for carrying an unauthorized weapon through security, but you’d better come up with probable cause pretty damned quick. I’m guessing he’ll be lawyered up before we ever get to the TSA office. That’s where we’ll be talking to him.”
I’ve seen jail cells more welcoming than Darrell Cross’s windowless hole of an office. It was carved out of otherwise wasted space between a men’s restroom and the back of an abandoned ticket counter and furnished with grim gray-green federal building castoffs. Two enormous suitcases were tucked into one cramped corner of the room. We took seats around a scarred Formica-topped conference table. One of Darrell Cross’s TSA minions removed Dortman’s cuffs.
Had he called for a lawyer, we would have gotten him one. And had an attorney appeared, his first bit of advice would have been for Dortman to shut the hell up. But no attorney had been summoned, and by the time we seated ourselves around the battered tabletop, Dortman was in tears.
“I didn’t mean to,” he blubbered, lowering his head onto his arms.
Sure, I thought. Firing off that whole barrage of shots was an accident. So was going around the crime scene collecting your brass.
Fortunately for all concerned, I kept my mouth shut. Sitting behind his battle-worn desk, Darrell Cross seemed content to let Mel and me take over the questioning process. “Maybe you’d like to tell us about it,” she suggested.
“Jack was going to go public,” Dortman said. “He was going to spill his guts.”
“About what?” Mel asked.
Here it comes, I thought. I’m finally going to find out what really happened to Tony Cosgrove.
“Jack was completely paranoid,” Dortman continued. “Once someone started looking into his wife’s ex-husband’s death, Jack said he was sure they were going to come after us, too. I tried to tell him that the statute of limitations had run out long ago and there was no way for anyone to lay a glove on us. He was retired. Since I’m still working, I was the one who’d get hurt in the deal. If I got linked back to that whole scandal thing, that would be the end of my credibility.”
“What scandal thing?” I asked.
Dortman shook his head. “There was so damned much money floating around,” he said. “Those were the days when planes didn’t get sold unless someone’s palm got greased. Since Jack was in sales, he knew all about the kickbacks. We figured out a way to skim some off the top. Not very much, in the big scheme of things, but enough.”
“Enough for Jack Lawrence to retire early?”
Dortman nodded. “I would have been all right, too, but I got caught up in the dot-com bubble. Lost my shirt. And I’m still working. So when Jack threatened me, I had to do something. I tried to convince him to keep quiet. When I went to talk to him about it, he came after me. What happened was really self-defense. All I was doing was protecting myself.”