“I’ll do that.” Lori slipped out of the car and headed back inside.
David had watched in silence as the last part played out. “Clue me in, Evie.”
“She’ll never say it, but I think she’s the WITSEC death attorney. Or was. She must have retired.”
David turned to look at Lori reentering the building. “You think . . . ?” He tapped his fingers on the wheel, then nodded and carefully pulled back into the heavy traffic. “Explain what you mean so I don’t say something in reply that tells you more than I want to say.”
Evie smiled. “She truly is an estate attorney, but she’s also a US Marshal. Her clients were all in witness protection. She’s the one who figures out how to settle their estates without compromising the program. The people in their lives from before WITSEC don’t know where they went, their new name, and those who meet them after WITSEC have no idea of their former life. The wills get complicated when you’re distributing money and belongings from someone who has to remain a ghost to those receiving an inheritance. I’ve heard rumors the position existed. But to meet someone who’s held that role, that’s a pretty big deal.”
“Lori Nesbitt.”
“It fits. Just shift what she said from being, ‘Oh my, my client was in WITSEC and left me a letter, what shall I do?’ to that being a normal part of her job description. It makes better sense.”
David thought about it, smiled. “Theoretically, yeah, it would flow better. I’ve seen one of those WITSEC on-death letters,” he mentioned. “About four years ago. A man died, and the letter arrived through channels to the NYPD. It was ten pages long, detailing crimes he knew about firsthand or had heard about. He’d been in WITSEC for twelve years, and it was clear he wanted to have the last say in life, was writing mostly to get even with old adversaries rather than to clear his conscience. We were able to make fifteen arrests based on the details in that one letter, even with the rather dated information.”
“I’ve seen one in my career too. A shorter letter, about six years ago. It had information about a series of vandalisms to farms, a guy causing damage to grain silos, destroying airflow so that the feed inside them would rot. The damages ran into the millions of dollars, and there wasn’t a single lead. The one who wrote the letter entered witness protection after testifying in a murder case. He wanted to get even with his cousin, who was doing the vandalisms, but had promised his mother not to rat on a relative, so he waited until he died to get even.
“I asked Ann about the letter when it arrived, and she said she’d dealt with a handful of them during her career. Apparently, to encourage those in WITSEC to be detailed in their on-death letters, there’s a deal made. If the material is ever used while they’re alive, they get immunity for everything in the letter. If I’m right about Lori, she would have been the one getting her clients to write those letters.”
Evie looked over at David while he steered through the lanes of traffic. “Say in this case Philip Granger was one of her clients. She wrote his will. She also talked him into writing an on-death letter. She would have read that letter in order to decide if it was worth giving him immunity to use the information while he was still alive. So his letter describes a past crime with a buried body. Maybe the body gets found by other means, and cops make a case against Philip as the murderer. Oops, we gave him immunity. So the decision in his case is to let the letter sit there alongside the will and hope the body gets found by other means.
“A few years pass. This Philip now dies in Houston. Lori hears the news. She happens to be in Chicago working for Nathan. So Lori knocks a hole in the wall and gives cops the body. She must know scores of secrets like that one. If I’m right, the on-death letter Philip Granger wrote—or whatever his real name is—will arrive in due course through whatever official path those things take. Lori simply saved us some time and used what she knew to give us the body sooner rather than let some random construction worker get the scare of his life and possibly damage the evidence.”
David thought about that sequence of events. “I’ll accept that Lori somehow came to know where the body was and ‘found him’ in order to give the skeleton to the cops in a neater fashion than some construction person might have done. The rest of it is . . . well, conjecture and speculation.”
Evie shrugged. “No one would ever confirm I’m right, even if I was. The WITSEC death attorney knows an enormous number of interesting secrets. The identity of that person, even after they retired, would have to be carefully protected. It does make me wonder, though, if Lori Nesbitt is even her real name.”