Donnally let him finish reading it, then turned toward the side gate leading to the driveway.
“Wait,” Hale said. “I still don’t understand. Who is Mauricio Quintero?”
Donnally stopped. Images of Mauricio clicked through his mind like falling dominoes, ending with the little man’s lifeless body in the Mount Shasta hospital, his sad brown face framed by the starched pillow, his handwritten confession lying in a drawer next to him.
Who Mauricio Quintero had been was the question that started Donnally on the trail that had brought him to this spot. And in understanding Anna’s life and death he’d found an answer, but it wasn’t one Hale had the right to hear, much less one he’d understand.
Donnally started walking toward the street and the declining sun that would soon abandon Hale to an empty twilight, and then said over his shoulder:
“Let’s just say he was a friend who asked me to deliver a letter.”
Note to the Reader
The idea for the story told in Act of Deceit arose out of a number of events.
In 1986 an individual I will identify as X walked into a furniture store in California and stabbed a clerk. He fled, leaving the broken blade in her body. X was arrested, charged with attempted murder, and sent for psychiatric treatment. After X completed counseling, the district attorney moved the Superior Court to dismiss the charges, which it did.
A year later he slashed his next-door neighbor to death.
On the motion of the public defender, X was sent under 1368 of the California Penal Code for an evaluation of his competence to stand trial for the homicide. He was found to be both mentally ill and developmentally disabled. He was returned to court a year later and was again found to be incompetent.
Since that time, no court has made a determination on whether X has recovered his competence to stand trial. Indeed, for more than a decade the Superior Court had not received a report of his mental condition. The most recent report I found in his court file concerned another defendant altogether.
This all came to light a couple of years ago when a friend of mine, who had spent his career working in the mental health field, reminded me of the concerns he had back in 1988 that X was pretending to be mentally ill, malingering, in order to avoid trial for the homicide. Indeed, the head psychiatrist at the out-patient facility that X was attending at the time of the crime had warned the staff prior to the murder that X was not mentally ill, but was a sociopath who was a danger to others at the facility.
My friend’s more general complaint was that since so many sociopaths claim mental illness to excuse their crimes, the public has come to believe that the mentally ill are more dangerous than everyone else. And this is not, in fact, the case.
After this conversation with my friend, I decided to find out what happened to X.
Because of medical and psychiatric confidentiality rules, this was not an easy task. The details of my investigation are unimportant, but in the end, I discovered that X was housed in a developmental center in a county far from the one in which he was arrested and being detained solely under a California civil code that allows developmentally disabled violent individuals to be held until a civil court determines that they no longer represent a danger to the community.
Based on information from those I interviewed in the course of looking for X, it seemed unlikely that X was developmentally disabled, since the symptoms first appeared, not when he was a child, but when he was in his twenties. And based on the fact of his transfer from a psychiatric to a developmental center, it was clear that state psychiatrists had already determined that the mental problems that had otherwise justified his detention had been resolved.
I interviewed X, who acknowledged to me that he had killed his neighbor. Although he referred to the crime as a “murder,” he offered a manslaughter defense: that he hadn’t taken his medications, that he was under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and that he had “blacked out.”
More likely than not, he went to his neighbor’s house to rob her of money to buy drugs. A felony murder and a capital crime.
X also told me that he had been advised by his attorney on the morning of our conversation that there was a good chance that the civil court judge hearing his case on the following day would grant her motion to set a date for his release.
I made sure that didn’t happen.
At X’s next hearing, I understand, the positions taken by the state and by his attorney reversed: the state arguing for his release from the center and his return to the county of his arrest for trial, and his attorney arguing for his continued detention.
As of this writing, no court has yet been asked to rule on whether X is currently competent to stand trial. I don’t know whether he is or he isn’t, but the integrity of the justice system requires an answer.
It then crossed my mind: What if one of the many criminal defendants in civil detention around the country was, unlike X, factually innocent of the crime with which he or she was charged?
As always, when the innocent have been wrongly prosecuted, the guilty escape punishment.
This suggested the idea of using the civil commitment of a mentally ill but innocent person as part of a cover-up.
At the same time as I had these thoughts, my wife was engaged in one of her numerous investigations on behalf of victims of Catholic-priest child molestations. Many of her investigations required her to locate witnesses and documents relating to incidents that happened as long as forty years ago. In the course of her work, and with the help of Catholics disturbed by the church’s defensive and immoral response to the allegations, she was able to develop contemporaneous evidence of the crimes.
In a separate context, and unrelated to the molestation cases, I was asked to investigate whether, and to what extent, there existed corporate and financial links between the Vatican and the church’s operations in various countries. I learned that the Vatican had structured itself in a manner to insulate it from liability for acts committed in the church’s name and had employed banks and private bankers in the main money laundering and tax evasion centers around the world in an attempt to do so.
In a very few instances, the church has accepted responsibility for not turning the guilty over to the criminal courts for prosecution and for reassigning molesters from one parish to another.
In many cases, however, representatives of the church destroyed personnel records containing complaints of abuse and the names of the victims and witnesses; spent tens of millions of dollars on teams of lawyers (it once sent five law firms up against a single plaintiff’s lawyer, and still could not prevent an adverse judgment); attempted to mislead judges, juries, and the public about the facts of the cases; and while building in Northern California the most expensive cathedral in the nation at a cost of nearly two hundred million dollars, complained that the plaintiffs were financially ruining the church.
There were, of course, many more victims of abuse than have come forward. Some declined out of embarrassment, some because they didn’t want to have their suffering reduced to a matter of cash value, and some because they didn’t want their lives flayed open by church lawyers.
And until the church begins to treat the abuse of parishioners as a matter of moral inclusion, rather than of legal combat, and fulfills the duty of confession that it imposes on its members, the number of victims will never be counted and justice will never be done, either in the United States or abroad.
At the same time, the church has no monopoly on the abuse of children. In the course of my work, which took me to many parts of the world, I interviewed victims of sex trafficking—Thai, Chinese, Indian, Mexican—and met those who were complicit in their abuse—business leaders, parents, smugglers, government officials, police officers—and I wanted to display the roles of at least some of these coconspirators in this story.
In particular, I made Sherwyn a medical professional not only because I knew of a molested child who was again molested by the psychiatrist to whom he was
sent for treatment, but also because, like doctors who keep prisoners healthy enough to be tortured, there are doctors, particularly in the Third World, who assist sex traffickers by keeping children healthy enough to be abused.
Acknowledgments
An investigator’s task ends when the facts have been discovered. A writer, on the other hand, can’t leave well enough alone. It was during my migration from one to the other that I conceived this novel.
Helping me in doing so were: fishing and environmental writer Seth Norman, a master of character and meander. Rick Monge, a master investigator and barbecuer. Bruce Kaplan, whose “What about …” has made me a better writer. David Agretelis, whose keen hands are as deft with an editorial pen as they are on the keys of a saxophone and the grapes on the vine. Denise Fleming, who understands that the first fifty pages are a lifetime. Melissa Buron, European Art Curatorial Assistant at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco, for help in locating the particulars of Goya’s “Hunting for Teeth” in the Los Caprichos etching series.
Special thanks to my editor, Gabe Robinson, whose insights helped me weave together the sometimes disconnected threads of my story; to Pamela Spengler-Jaffe and Wendy Ho, who have done such a magnificent job of introducing my books to readers; to Eileen DeWald, who guides their production; and to Eleanor Mikucki, whose last, careful reading of the manuscripts has been invaluable.
Thanks also to those whose good selves, great work, and useful lives have brought light first to an investigator’s life, then to a writer’s, spent too long in the shadow of evil: Gail Monge, Margie Schmidt, Judy Barley, Gary Cox, Jean Rogers, Julie Quater, John Beuttler, Barbara Marinoff, and Kristi Bradford.
I borrowed from my mother-in-law, Alice Litov, her use of spreadsheets to keep track of elderly or homebound members of her church for whom she organizes visits.
As always, I borrowed from my wife, Liz, her good judgment.
About the Author
STEVEN GORE is a former private investigator whose thrillers draw on his investigations of murder, fraud, money laundering, organized crime, political corruption, and drug, sex, and arms trafficking, in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Gore has been featured on 60 Minutes for his work and has been honored for excellence in his field. He is trained in forensic science and has lectured to professional organizations on a wide range of legal and criminal subjects. To find out more, please visit www.stevengore.com.
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Praise
FINAL TARGET
Phillip Margolin, New York Times bestselling author of Supreme Justice
“Steven Gore bursts onto the international thriller scene with a captivating debut… . Lightning paced, deftly plotted, and compulsively readable… . We will be hearing much more from Steven Gore.”
Sheldon Siegel, New York Times bestselling author of Judgment Day
“With his command of storytelling and insider’s knowledge, Gore can go up against Nelson DeMille and Daniel Silva and come out a contender.”
Library Journal
“A smart, riveting, knock-your-socks-off debut thriller—James Bond for grownups.”
Cornelia Read, author of The Crazy School
ABSOLUTE RISK
“Absolute Risk continues Gore’s winning ways… . A truly thrilling thriller.”
San Jose Mercury News
“Masterful… . Sharp, smart writing and convincing economic detail put this in the front rank of genre fiction.”
Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)
“Steven Gore, himself an international private investigator before he turned to writing, brings a credibility to his high-octaned action.”
Washington Post (online)
“Gore stuffs a lot into his plot … but he manages it well, with a winning protagonist and a plausible premise.”
Booklist
“Gore has effectively introduced the reader to the world of the private investigator… . [He] has crafted a solid thriller.”
Salt Lake City Deseret News
“A brisk pace and an intriguing plot make the pages turn themselves.”
Richard North Patterson, New York Times bestselling author of Silent Witness
By Steven Gore
Act of Deceit
Absolute Risk
Final Target
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ACT OF DECEIT. Copyright © 2011 by Steven Gore. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 9780062096302
FIRST EDITION
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Ch
apter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Note to the Reader
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
By Steven Gore
Copyright
About the Publisher