Bonnie - Iris Johansen [5]
“And she’s drawn Catherine Ling into that universe as a satellite,” Dickson said harshly. “Let her find her own kid.”
“She never asked Catherine to help her.” To hell with diplomacy. He’d known Eve Duncan for years, and she’d done favors both for him and the agency. She deserved better than Dickson’s condemnation. “Look, Eve Duncan pulls her own weight, and she’d keep Catherine out of it if she could.”
Silence. “You like her.”
“You’re damn right I do. She loved Bonnie more than life itself. Having her kidnapped and murdered could have destroyed her. She didn’t let it. She went back to school and earned a degree in Fine Arts at Georgia State. She now has certification as a computer age-progression specialist at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Arlington, Virginia. She also received advanced certification for clay facial reconstruction after training with two of the nation’s foremost reconstruction artists. Do I have to tell you how many more degrees she’s earned since then? She’s world-famous, dammit. She’s an icon. Don’t you think she deserves to get this one thing she wants in the world?”
Another silence. “Maybe. But if she’s been searching all these years, why does Catherine Ling have to be involved? What makes her think that she can help?”
God, he was stubborn. But at least he was listening. That was a start.
“Catherine started investigating Bonnie’s kidnapping and came up with a suspect that no one had uncovered. John Gallo, Bonnie’s father, had not been killed while in the Army as reported. He’d been captured and thrown into a North Korean prison, where he’d been subjected to seven years of starvation and torture. When he escaped from the prison and landed in a hospital in Tokyo, he was diagnosed with severe mental problems, blackouts, schizophrenia, hallucinations…”
“Imagine that,” Dickson said sarcastically. “Poor bastard.”
“But a prime candidate for a suspect if he bore resentment toward Eve. What better revenge than killing her child?”
“Catherine’s reasoning?”
“Yes, sound reasoning. You agree?”
“Yes, so Catherine’s after Gallo?”
“She was, but after hunting him down, she decided that she might be wrong. So she decided to go after the two very dirty Army Intelligence officers who sent Gallo to Korea. Nate Queen and Thomas Jacobs. They were into smuggling artifacts and drugs and sent Gallo to retrieve an incriminating journal held by the North Koreans. He was just a patriotic nineteen-year-old kid at the time, and he thought he was doing his duty to his country. As I said, he was captured and thrown into that prison. It was years after he escaped and fought his way through a hell of a lot of mental problems that he became suspicious of Queen and Jacobs. He went after them.”
“I can see why he’d want to put them down for setting him up and letting the Koreans get him. But what the hell did that have to do with the killing of Eve Duncan’s little girl?”
Venable could understand Dickson’s impatience. The search for Bonnie Duncan’s killer had become as complicated as a spiderweb. Keep it as simple as you can. “Queen and Jacobs wanted to get rid of Gallo and remove a possible witness against them. They hired a contract killer, James Black, to go after him. But Gallo is very, very tough, and Black ended up with Gallo’s knife in his belly and egg on his face with his employers. Black was furious, and after he recovered, he started planning on hurting Gallo in any way he could.”
“So Black killed the kid?”
“That’s the way it looked, that’s what Gallo and Eve Duncan, Joe Quinn, and Catherine thought. They hunted him down in the Wisconsin woods.”
“And put him down? So what’s the problem? Catherine should be free now.”
“Except that Black swore before he died that he hadn’t killed Bonnie Duncan, that John Gallo had done it.” He paused. “Evidently he was very convincing. Both Eve