by Dale Nelson
“I say we go in,” Tomlinson announced, as though there had been a debate about it and it was his turn to offer an opinion.
With some trepidation, Danzig nodded her head in the affirmative.
“Go,” was all she said.
The highway patrolman that accompanied Tomlinson to the door—Danzig hadn’t bothered to learn his name—brought the battering ram up and smashed in Frank Fischer’s front door. The wood exploded around the deadbolt with a sharp crack that split the dry morning air and seemed to echo down the quiet street. Six highway patrolmen boiled into the house, shouting their presence and hearing nothing in return. Danzig and Riordan ran in immediately on their heels, cognizant that they needed to grab the suspect first.
The shouts from the police were met only with silence.
Danzig moved through the quiet, dark home, the morning light now beginning to stream into the windows. She visually verified in every room that the suspect was nowhere to be found. From the master bedroom on the second floor she distantly heard the voice of a patrolman saying there were no cars in the garage.
They rallied in the kitchen where she issued instructions—sweep the home. Someone asked her what they were looking for. Danzig doubled down. She ordered them to upend every drawer, every cabinet, and every box in every closet. They were looking for jewels, finished stones, and jewelry, and they were looking for passports not named “Frank Fischer.” They were looking for cell phones and computers. She admonished them to be cognizant of false bottoms and panels. Whatever they were looking for would be well hidden.
Danzig started in the bedroom, knowing that psychology often led people to keep their secrets in the place they felt the safest, the most secure, which was the place they slept. She started with his drawers, dumping the contents on the floor and tapping every part of the bureau and the drawers for false bottoms or hidden compartments. She asked Riordan to help her move it away from the wall to make sure it wasn’t hiding anything either on the wall or in the floor.
Riordan’s phone buzzed, and he stepped over the window for a better reception. Danzig moved to the closet.
She heard Riordan end the call. When he didn’t immediately say anything, Danzig turned around and looked at him.
Riordan wore a flat expression. “That was the overnight watch in LA Somebody set fire to Reginald LeGrande’s home in Long Beach last night and burned it damn near to the ground.”
Danzig looked away from the house, knowing the answers would be found elsewhere. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Oh,” Riordan said, “it gets better.”
The next few days evaporated into the ether for Danzig as they spent nearly every waking hour trying to piece together what in the hell happened to their case. What had been a fairly straightforward investigation had, overnight, become a municipal, state, and federal clusterfuck. The Long Beach Fire Marshall determined, almost immediately, that the fire was arson, and that it had been set by turning the gas range on and then having an open flame in the room, likely from a candle. Neighbors also reported seeing a man run out of the house, get into a vehicle—a rather unsubtle Ferrari California—and speed off. Long Beach PD recovered the Ferrari a few miles from the house, ditched on a side street. The car’s owner was none other than one Paul Sharpe who, until June, had been the CFO of Kingfisher Wines and was the subject of an embezzlement investigation. Sharpe had been hiding out in the Hollywood Hills, rather luxuriously and essentially in plain sight, as he figured out his next move. When pressed jointly by Long Beach PD and the Highway Patrol, Sharpe couldn’t produce a convincing argument as to how he’d come to relocate to Hollywood in such style. CHP arrested him on the embezzlement charge and suspicion of arson.
Sharpe did try to argue that his car had been stolen, though there was no corroborating report with LAPD, Long Beach PD, CHP, or the LA County Sherriff. Sharpe also claimed to have gotten a mysterious phone call from a towing company in Long Beach alleging that his Ferrari was illegally parked and that he’d have to come get it. The responding officers assured him that no tow truck operator on Earth was that magnanimous and told Sharpe directly they thought he was lying. Sharpe offered no other explanation for having been in Long Beach that night.
Things didn’t get weird until the police opened up the fire safe that LeGrande had in his office. It was one of the few things in his house to survive the blaze. Inside were the notebooks that LeGrande kept on the various identities he’d created for people over the years, something of an accounting ledger for a master forger. It initially struck Danzig and Riordan as odd, given that it amounted to an admission that Reginald LeGrande had, in fact, been creating fake identities for over a decade. But it was Riordan who figured out why. LeGrande had been trading people to various authorities for years, and he needed a way to keep track not only of the ones he was selling out, but also the identities that they’d be living under. It was probably the only way that he could keep things straight in his own head. The notebooks weren’t all they found in that safe, however. There was also a sheet of passport-sized photos of none other than Paul Sharpe.
Once they’d made that discovery, theories began to coalesce.
Sharpe embezzled tens of thousands of dollars from the winery over a five-year period and one final amount of ten million before he disappeared. Burdette/Fischer—Danzig refused to think of him any other way—reported the crime to CHP when it happened. Burdette’s attorney, Coughlin, had actually filed charges with the Sonoma County DA’s Office in June, who had, in turn, kicked it up to a state investigator where it was in a queue.
Sharpe’s connection with LeGrande was still unclear to Danzig and Riordan. Was it Sharpe who initiated the contact, approaching LeGrande to create the travel documents necessary to get out of the country on an assumed identity? Or was it LeGrande who enticed Sharpe with the promise of an easy score for a cut of the profits. That was the likely theory in Danzig’s mind, given that Sharpe had no prior criminal background and didn’t seem like the person to have access to a passport forger. What was clear was that LeGrande had the materials necessary to make a passport for Sharpe. But why would he need to? No law enforcement agency was looking for Sharpe yet, otherwise he wouldn’t have been living in a rented four-million-dollar home in the Hollywood Hills and driving a Ferrari.
Unfortunately for Danzig, it appeared they’d stopped listening to her.
Riordan’s working theory, which was the one the brass had latched onto, was that Sharpe initiated the contact and was likely bragging to LeGrande about how much he was taking in from the winery. Riordan challenged the assumption that because Sharpe had no record, this was his first criminal act. Riordan knew that embezzlement was rampant in the wine industry and used that to bolster his argument. He suggested that Sharpe had likely been running this scam for years with various unknowing clients. To be a successful wine maker, one had to be part artist, part chemist, part marketer, part salesman, and part businessman. It stood to reason that very few people could do most of those things well, so they hired out the things they couldn’t to the Paul Sharpes of the world. Riordan argued that it was an embezzler’s paradise.
LeGrande then, according to Riordan’s hypothesis, decided to see if there was anything left in the well and tried his own blackmail game. Fischer corroborated this in their interview. Sharpe panicked once he learned that the FBI was involved. He wouldn’t know that LeGrande had been an informant for the better part of a decade. He traveled to LeGrande’s house and set fire to the place, hoping to destroy any evidence of his and LeGrande’s relationship, not knowing that LeGrande had the fire safe.
Times like this, Riordan said, it was a wonder that society still needed cops.
In a last effort to save her investigation, Danzig pointed out that there was still no conclusive link between Sharpe and LeGrande, but Lattimore shut her down quickly. He said that would come out in the interrogation and that it didn’t appear the Gem and Jewelry Program had any remaining interest in this invest
igation.
She’d asked about Burdette.
Lattimore’s response had been final. “What do you have other than the word of a con man?”
Danzig still believed that Burdette was behind all of this. Though, she kept those suspicions to herself now. SAC Lattimore believed “Jack Burdette” was a fabrication LeGrande created to sell his blackmail. Danzig argued that was a convenient story to fit the facts, but the SAC wasn’t hearing it. She wasn’t one of his agents, and he wasn’t about to go out on the ledge for a jewelry cop from New York. Sharpe had motive and intent and was seen in Long Beach not two miles from LeGrande’s house. When they interviewed him, Sharpe repeated the same bullshit story about a towing company that he’d initially given to the Long Beach Police. Even Danzig had to admit that sounded like something a bad liar would make up on the fly. Long Beach asked the court to include LeGrande’s phone records in their search warrant and discovered a phone call made from LeGrande’s home to Sharpe’s cell about the time he said that he’d received the call from the mysterious, benevolent tower.
Lattimore cancelled the warrant on Frank Fischer.
They arrested LeGrande on the forgery charges and conspiracy to commit blackmail. In parallel, the State of California was pursuing a decade of parole violations.
Lattimore wanted them to arrest Sharpe as well, but Long Beach PD and CHP were flexing to see which agency’s charges had primacy. It looked like Long Beach was going to win that particular bout of urinary Olympics, since CHP couldn’t prove they were actively investigating Sharpe for the embezzlement charges first. Sharpe was looking at twenty-five years in state prison for arson and another ten years of federal time for the embezzlement.
It appeared that all the FBI was going to come away with was a forgery and a conspiracy to commit fraud conviction on an informant CHP had run for ten years. The State would get him on the conspiracy to commit blackmail.
They were already expecting LeGrande’s attorney to call attention to CHP’s running him as an informant and had simply handed him over to another agency for prosecution, a strategy that would make it look the one government agency had used him and then handed him over to yet another government agency to arrest him on something else. It would look to a jury like dirty politics.
And no one was talking about jewels.
Danzig didn’t care.
Frank Fischer didn’t add up. Whatever these clowns were doing out here was fine, but Fischer would remain a person of interest to the Gem and Jewelry Program, and she would use that to dig into his background. She was certain that, given time, they’d discover he was a fabrication. But was he one of the world’s most notorious jewel thieves? Danzig believed he was, but she also doubted that a single person could possibly have pulled off the Carlton job. That also gave her hope because they and their allies at Europol would eventually start to piece together how that job was pulled, and from there, who was involved. In fact, she’d already gotten approval to go to Cannes. She’d be meeting Castro there in a few days.
Danzig knew that when she stripped the layers off Frank Fischer’s story, she’d find a jewel thief named Jack Burdette. That identity would line up with several unsolved jewelry heists alleged by LeGrande. It was just a matter of time. Time, she had.
And time it would take, because right now, no one was talking about jewels.
Twenty-Three
The tasting room was cool and quiet beneath the soft overhead lights. The last guests were finishing their glasses, and Jack was in no hurry to kick them out. They were a nice local couple who he’d seen there more than once. The husband was a chef and the wife was in commercial real estate. They were finishing their second comped glass of Osprey and chatting it up with his tasting room manager. Burdette hung back and busied himself with inventory. Real work was a welcome distraction from the last few weeks, and Jack was happy for it.
The couple finished their glasses in time, bought a few bottles to take home, and thanked Steve for his time. They promised to be back soon, and the chef said he’d like to have their wines on his menu to see how they did. Steve beamed and took the man’s card. Jack walked over, introduced himself, shook hands, and said they were honored and would send a case over for them to try out.
Then he sent Steve home, saying he’d finish closing up the tasting room.
Jack poured himself a glass of Osprey that Steve had left and enjoyed the silence. It took him the better part of a day to clean up the mess the FBI made in his house, and Coughlin was practically frothing at the mouth with righteous indignation to sue them for falsely accusing his client. Of course, Jack wanted nothing to do with that and was laboring to come up with a justification for pulling Coughlin back. It was the sort of thing that an outraged private citizen would do in this day and age. The idea that was gaining traction in his mind was not suing because they would not want to further cloud their case against Paul Sharpe.
Jack’s phone rang. It was Meg. He stared at the screen, at her face, for a long second before answering.
“Hey,” he said tentatively.
“Hi Frank, or…” her voice trailed off. “I don’t even know what to call you.”
“Just call me, Frank,” he said, but the name sounded strange to his own ears.
“Where are you?”
“Tasting room. I’m just closing up.” Then he said, “You could come by? Have a drink?”
Meg was quiet for a time. “I don’t know.”
“Look, I know this is…strange…but I think we can figure it out.”
“Can we?” she said, and Jack detected a hint of anger in her voice. “I care about you, Frank, and I often thought that we’d have some kind of a future together. Running the winery…and us. But now, I’m just not sure of that. Of anything.”
“Meg,” he started.
“Let me finish,” she said. It was clear to Jack that she’d been working on this for some time. “I thought I was in love with you, but now I don’t know what that was based on, now that I know that man doesn’t exist. Not really.”
“Of course I do,” Jack protested.
“No you don’t! You made up Frank Fischer up like he was in a story or something. None of the things that make Frank real are real. Then I wonder how much of that is Frank and how much of it is you, I mean, is Jack. And, Jesus Christ, Frank, I can’t even keep this straight in my own head.”
“Megan, it doesn’t matter what my name is. I changed it once to help me hide from something, to start a new life, this life. That’s all that matters. All of those things that you loved about me are me.”
“I don’t even know who you are,” she said.
“I’ll admit,” Jack said, looking around the empty tasting room, “I’m not sure I do either right now. Let’s find out together,” which was a great line for the end of a movie, but less so in real life. Once again, he imagined the words floating in the air between them, and him hastily trying to pull them back in.
“Goodbye, Frank.”
Megan hung up, and it was very clear to him that what he’d said was not what she’d wanted to or needed to hear.
Jack alternated between rubbing a bar rag on the polished granite surface and absently sipping his wine. He looked up into the dark room and felt both tense and at peace. It was a feeling for which there were no words. Jack had the money to keep his winery afloat. They decided to go forward with the acquisition of the Sine Metu plot because they were amazing, nearly legendary grapes, and they would be able to sell the entire harvest. Coughlin was quietly putting the word out to some wine makers that Kingfisher may need some help after the crush, so at least they wouldn’t be completely bereft if Megan decided not to return. It wouldn’t be the same, but they would survive.
Jack was contemplating survival when Special Agent Katrina Danzig walked through the tasting room door.
Jack stared at her with a blank expression for a matter of moments while she stood somewhat awkwardly in the threshold. When she didn’t say anything, Jack gingerly s
et his bar rag on the counter and picked up his wineglass. “There’s a line about gin joints that seems applicable.”
Danzig wore an expression that suggested the bureau had not issued her a sense of humor.
“You’d better have a really compelling reason for me to not call my lawyer.”
“I just wanted a word.”
“Hugh tells me that the bureau dropped the investigation into me when they realized it was all bullshit that LeGrande fellow made up. So, unless you came here for a couple cases of wine, I have to say,” Jack paused, “this feels a lot like harassment.”
“I don’t drink,” she said.
“So, it’s the other thing then.”
“I just wanted to ask you a question.”
“I thought Hugh was pretty clear that if you wanted to talk to me again, you needed to go through him. Let’s find out for sure.” Jack reached into his front pocket and made to pull out his phone.
Danzig’s hand went to her hip.
“Easy,” Jack said with a voice that was equal measures lost patience and simmering anger. “It’s a phone.”
“Put the phone down, Jack.”
Jack flashed angry eyes at Danzig but thumbed the phone open and said, “Hey Siri. Dial Hugh Coughlin’s mobile.” The phone informed him that it was dialing his attorney.
“This isn’t necessary.”
“Like hell it isn’t. You took your swing and you missed, and now you’re harassing me at my place of business,” Jack said as he waited for Hugh to pick up. He tapped the speaker function so she could hear but grimaced when it went to voicemail. Jack looked up to find a haughty smirk on the agent’s face. “Hey Hugh, so I know you said that if the FBI had any more questions for me they needed to go through you, but Special Agent Danzig seems to have forgotten that because she’s here at the winery and wants to talk to me. Call me back when you get this. Or, come over with a restraining order. Either one.” Jack hung up and returned her smug look with a shrug. He turned around, set the phone down, grabbed a glass from the counter, and refilled his glass from the open bottle of Osprey. “Want a glass, since this is obviously an informal chat?”