Abuse of Power - Michael Savage [53]
The only ones making any real noise about the whole thing were the talk radio hosts and their listeners. Many of them were convinced that there was a cover-up afoot, and Jack certainly couldn’t disagree. But all they had were theories, from a mob hit to an SEC investigation conspiracy—and Jack knew the truth.
Bob Copeland had been killed by the very same people who had killed Jamal Thomas. The same people who had broken into his boat and put that noose in his shower stall. The very same people who were behind William Clegg and his ridiculous charge against the Constitutional Defense Brigade.
The way Jack saw it, those smoke bombs had been used as a distraction while Copeland was kidnapped from his home. He’d been drugged and interrogated and somehow managed to escape before he was found again and promptly eliminated.
Now three people were dead, and Jack was convinced it was all because of the message Copeland had left for him in Carolyn Cassady’s autobiography.
All because of Operation Roadshow.
* * *
“So here’s what I started with,” Maxine said.
Jack had phoned Tony and asked his friend to meet him at Max’s place. He didn’t tell him why and Tony was hooked. The two were looking over her shoulder as she punched a key on her computer. The large rectangular monitor on the wall came alive with the video that Leon shot with his cell phone. The image seemed less shaky than before, and on the big screen the guy with the sunglasses was easier to distinguish. About forty or so, with a muscular frame and a military bearing. And to Hatfield’s mind, there was something off about the guy. Call him crazy, but the man didn’t strike him as American.
South African, maybe?
“He looks private,” Tony said, confirming Jack’s earlier assessment. “Definitely no amateur.”
They were all sitting in task chairs, surrounding Max’s desk in her video editing booth, which was really nothing more than a spare apartment bedroom jammed full of specialized electronic equipment.
“This is normal HD resolution,” she said. “I applied a stabilizing filter to steady the image and try to cut down on Leon’s crappy camerawork. If he’d been thinking, he would’ve included the Escalade’s license plate and saved us all a lot of trouble.”
“If wishes were horses,” Tony murmured …
Max looked at him as if she had no idea what he was talking about, then pointed to a corner of the screen.
“That right there is our target,” she told them. “Looks like a standard parking sticker, about half the size of a playing card. It’s hard to tell from this distance, but I’d say that that black-and-white blob is probably a logo of some kind. And that’s what I went to work on.”
Jack clucked in disgust. “I still can’t believe how ballsy these guys are. Broad daylight and they don’t give a damn who sees them.”
“I already told you,” Max said. “People in that neighborhood make a habit of not seeing things. And even if someone picked up the telephone, who would listen? A teenage kid died of an overdose. Case closed.”
Jack felt the rage building inside of him again and wanted very badly to put his fist through a piece of Max’s equipment. He knew that the same thing would eventually be said about Bob Copeland’s death. In the end it would be blamed on misadventure in the City by the Bay, a drunk wandering off the beaten path, then everyone would forget about the guy.
Case closed.
“Anyway,” Max said, “back to our parking sticker.”
She stabbed a key and the video image froze. Shifting her hand to a small dial next to her keyboard, she carefully rotated it and stepped backward through several frames until she found the cleanest—and clearest—of the lot.
“So then I doubled the magnification,” she said, punching another key.
The image doubled in size and Max adjusted the frame, centering the Escalade’s windshield on the screen. Everything was bigger, all right, but it was also a lot fuzzier, and it still wasn’t big enough to make out what was printed on the parking sticker.
“Anyone feel the sudden