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“I am slammed for time. I have a meeting with the director,” Mahoney said, glancing at his watch. “I can wait until he’s back at the federal holding facility later this afternoon.”
I said, “I’d like to see why he’s so insistent on talking now.”
“Me too,” Sampson said.
“Okay,” Mahoney said, “but get it all on video.”
The marshal led us through a door, down a flight of stairs, and past a series of holding cells. Tull was in the third cell on the right, waiting for us with conviction in his eyes.
His attorney went to him. “I advise you again to say nothing, Thomas.”
Tull looked past her at us. “I didn’t kill the Kanes. Ask Volkov.”
“We tried,” said Sampson, who was filming the conversation with his phone. “Volkov’s a hard man to find.”
“I told you that.”
“Explain your relationship with him.”
Tull said he had interviewed the Russian four years before when he was considering changing course in his writing career and doing an in-depth study of the world of modern organized crime.
“The book never went anywhere, but Volkov and I stayed in touch because he could help me with my … vices. That’s it. Look, I’m a victim here, I’m being framed, and Volkov will corroborate that I was nowhere near the Kanes’ home that night.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Please, Thomas. DNA, video, website searches, and the smoking gun?”
He shook his head violently. “I’m telling you, I’m being framed, Dr. Cross, and I think I know by who. My research assistant. She has access to the research laptop, my DNA, all of it.”
I frowned. “I didn’t know you had a research assistant.”
“Lisa Moore has worked with me on and off since Boston, since the electrocution murders,” he said. “But we go back even farther.”
“I read the acknowledgments in your books and I can’t say I remember you mentioning anyone named Lisa Moore. Or a research assistant, for that matter.”
Tull closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “She wanted it that way. In return for more money. Lisa cares nothing for acclaim.”
“Then why would she frame you?”
He hesitated. “Revenge. Because I would not keep increasing her pay.”
Sampson said, “Has she asked you for more money lately?”
“Constantly. Once on the day after I’d given her a raise. And she … uh, she recently threatened to reveal certain things about the way we work together unless I gave her a fifty percent increase in her salary. Fifty!”
His attorney said, “Thomas, you told me none of this. I advise you to—”
“I advise you to shut up or you’re fired, Counselor,” the writer shot back. He returned his attention to me and Sampson. “I’m not proud of this, but I used Moore in the past to … gin things up. In the stories, I mean.”
My brows knit. “Give us an example of ginning things up.”
He took an uncomfortable breath. “In Boston, she staged a break-in to heighten the public tension in the case. She did the same kind of thing in South Carolina during theDoctor’s Ordersmurders. She’s meticulous, though. Doesn’t get caught. She’s trained not to get caught.”
“Who trained her not to get caught?” Sampson asked, sounding incredulous.
“My suspicion is either DIA or CIA. Certainly one of the alphabet agencies. When I met her, I was working for NCIS on a case that required travel to Iraq and Afghanistan. Moore was a, quote, ‘private contractor’ who pointed me in the right direction a couple of times in my investigation. We hit it off. A year later, in an op gone wrong, she evidently killed two civilians, a motherand a daughter, but she avoided jail by ending her contract with the U.S. government.”
I said, “And going to work for you?”
“She came to visit me at Harvard and told me what had happened. I needed someone smart, someone …”
