20.
Little Fish, Big Fish
I have an eleven A.M. appointment with Vasily in his office at Atocha Securities on Fifth Avenue South in downtown Naples (he suggested eight A.M., no way; maybe he’s on Moscow time). I drive there, park in an adjacent garage, and ride the elevator to the top floor, and enter the firm’s office.
The receptionist, an attractive young woman, leads me to Vasily’s large corner office. He stands and comes around his desk to greet me. He looks every inch the member of Russian nobility that he is not: mid-to-later sixties, dark hair flecked with grey, matching Van Dyke beard, wearing a dark blue suit and open-collared light blue shirt.
“So Jack, now you are chasing politicians, oil companies, and a Russian oligarch who’s richer than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates combined.”
“Nice to see you, too, Vasily,” I say, shaking his extended hand.
He gestures toward a sitting area in the corner. His dog, Sasha, is sleeping on one of the two club chairs. I take the other one and Vasily sits on the sofa.
“I see that Lena offered you a beverage (I’m carrying the Evian bottle) so let me tell you what I’ve learned so far,” he begins. “Using family connections, here and in Russia, I’ve ascertained that Sergey Pavlov does indeed have the background you described. He is a member of Putin’s inner circle, which makes him especially dangerous if someone annoys him, much less tries to implicate him in murders. There are stories about men who opposed him on business ventures and who can no longer be found. My contacts believe these stories.”
“What surprises me about all this,” I say, “is how easy it is to connect the dots from the Hendersons to Russell Tolliver to the state oil drilling bill to Arthur Wainwright to the American Energy Independence Coalition to Oil Patch to Pavlov. It’s as if the bad guys—if, in fact, they are the bad guys—just don’t seem to care if anyone finds out about them.”
“That is curious, but it is the mark of the men like Sergey Pavlov who rule Russia today,” Vasily informs me. “They do what they want and make no attempt to cover up their harsh tactics because it makes people afraid to oppose them.”
“Even so, proving that Pavlov and his co-conspirators are responsible for my three murders won’t be easy—even with the trail they’ve left.”
“If I remember what you taught me during the Naples investigation, if you can catch a little fish, sometimes that little fish will lead you to the big fish.”
“Just what I’m thinking. If I can find the trigger man, he might be persuaded to identify his employers.”
“Especially if one of my family members questions him.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Vasily.”
You could lose body parts you need when being questioned by Vasily’s people.
But I’m a long way from having Sergey Pavlov’s assassin in an interrogation room at Fort Myers Beach police headquarters, or in some back room or alley in Brighton Beach. So I decide to ask a certain FBI agent I know for help.
21.
A Hacker of My Own
When Special Agent Sarah Caldwell answers my call the next morning, I say, “I’m going to be in Tampa tomorrow, Sarah. Can I buy you that dinner I owe you?”
“Sure, Jack,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I need a favor related to my murder investigation.”
“The way to a girl’s heart is through the fish-and-chips at Captain Jerry’s Seafood Shack.”
“Done and done.”
We are at a table on the deck, overlooking Tampa Bay, seagulls wheeling overhead hoping that diners will drop some food. While we munch on our fish-and-chips, I update Sarah on my investigation.
“Holy Russkies, Batman,” she exclaims. “You’re up to your ass in global intrigue.”
“Way out of my depth, Sarah. What would you do?”
She dips a french fry into ketchup. “No offense, Jack, but the world has changed since you were on the job in Chicago. All the investigative action now happens in cyberspace.”
“I’ve heard of that, but I have no idea how to get there.”
“How are your computer skills?”
“After some effort, I’ve got e-mail down pat.”
“Just so happens I know the perfect candidate to be your tour guide.”
“What’s his name and where can I find him?”
“Her name is Lucy Gates. No relation to Bill. You can find her in the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, serving a three-year bid for transferring funds from a bank into her own account in order to pay off her college loans. I know because I’m the one who arrested her.”
“Do you think she’d help me?”
“Lucy’s a good kid. If I remember correctly, she’s got maybe two months left on her sentence. There’s no parole for federal prisoners, so we can’t offer that, but maybe she’ll help just to do a good deed, or to get extra chocolate pudding at dinner. Or, more likely, because she’s bored.”
“How are her skills?”
“She’s world-class. We only caught her because she was overcome with guilt and turned herself in.”
So that really does happen. Wouldn’t it be nice if Sergey Pavlov did the same? That’s not likely, so I ask Sarah to arrange a visit for me at FCI Tallahassee.
AFTER SPEAKING with the warden, Sarah calls to tell me I can see Lucy Gates the following Wednesday morning. Sarah also made a call to Lucy’s lawyer, Janet Spelling, who thinks my plan is a good idea, providing that we can get a judge’s permission for Lucy to touch a computer keyboard, something her sentence has prohibited her from doing for life, and also providing that no one will know that she will do more for me than researching public documents. Sarah assured her that I will agree to those terms.
Google informs me that FCI Tallahassee currently houses 1,104 female inmates in a minimum-security setting. That isn’t hard time, but a prison is a prison, and the loss of liberty weighs heavily on a person, even if you’re not in a max security lockup with small cells stacked in tiers and some old con singing, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” into the night.
Sarah found a federal judge she knows in Tampa who approved my project, or at least the project he was led to believe I was undertaking. Sarah didn’t lie, she just didn’t volunteer more information than the judge requested. He issued an order, sent to the warden, authorizing Lucy to use one of the prison’s computers for the project. That computer’s Internet connection is closely monitored, Sarah said, but Lucy is good enough to defeat that surveillance and make it appear she is searching public records to aid in a police investigation.
The next morning, I collect my mail from a box at the end of the dock. I flip through the envelopes and junk-mail flyers on the way back to the boat and notice that the return address on one envelope says it’s from the Boyd & Boyd Insurance Agency in Jacksonville.
I toss the mail onto the galley table and open that envelope to find a handwritten note on agency letterhead, and a business card saying that Harlan Boyd is a partner in the agency. The note reads: “Jack, thanks for taking over the case and keep me in mind for all of your insurance needs. Harlan.”
Boxers, pro football players, and cops tend to stay in the game too long, and some get irreparably damaged. Harlan Boyd got out in time. Good for him. No more dead bodies to haunt his waking hours and his dreams. I envy him for that.
I head north on I-75 and then merge west onto I-10, heading from Fort Myers Beach to Tallahassee, a six-and-a-half-hour drive.
I turn into the prison’s visitors’ lot and park. From the outside, the redbrick main building with a gold-domed cupola could be a college, but the “students” are there to learn the error of their ways, and not academic subjects. Graduation earns sweet freedom, not a diploma.
I walk up a flight of steps, enter the building through a glass door, pass through a security portal, having left my pistol in the trunk of my car, show my badge to a female guard seated at a desk, and tell her who I am there to see.
S
he checks a visitors’ list and buzzes me through a metal door leading to another female guard seated at a table who checks my name against a list on a clipboard and explains the rules for visitors: no exchange of goods not approved by her, physical contact limited to a hug and a kiss upon arrival and departure, and visits limited to one hour.
“Is that clear?” she asks.
“Crystal,” I answer, a reference to another favorite Tom Cruise flick, A Few Good Men, which, apparently, she hasn’t seen, or maybe saw only once and so hasn’t memorized the dialogue like I have.
The guard buzzes me through another metal door that leads into a visitors’ lounge. It is a large room with white walls, windows covered with wire mesh, and groupings of tables and chairs and sofas. There is a table containing a coffee urn, cups and saucers, bottled water, doughnuts (!), and cookies.
Around the room are groups of women of all ages, wearing orange coveralls with the word “Inmate” stenciled in black on the back, and white sneakers without laces (would someone in minimum security hang herself? Never know.). The inmates are sitting and standing with people in civilian clothing. There are a number of small children, including an infant, in the arms of one of the inmates, drinking from a bottle.
I’ve been in prison visitors’ lounges before. They are pleasant enough places, compared to the rest of the institutions, where an inmate can feel almost normal until visiting hours end and their friends and loved ones depart.
I scan the room, looking for a young woman in orange, by herself, when a door at the other end of the room buzzes open and a woman in an orange jumpsuit, appearing to be in her midtwenties, with short dark hair and wire-rimmed glasses, walks in.
I approach her and ask if she is Lucy Gates.
“That’s me.”
“I’m Detective Jack Starkey.”
She looks me over and says, “I knew you weren’t Brad Pitt.” She gestures toward two upholstered chairs near one of the windows: “Let’s sit over there and talk about exactly what you want from me.”
When we’re seated, I tell her.
“I’ll do it just to get back online, if only for a short time,” she responds. “I miss it.”
“I can’t promise you anything in return for your help,” I tell her. “Except maybe a CARE package containing a file in a cake.”
She smiles, pushes a strand of hair behind her left ear, and says, “Not necessary. In minimum security, we can pretty much walk away whenever we want. Nobody does, or at least not since I’ve been here, because this is easy time and it’s better to serve out your sentence than to become a fugitive.”
“If you get caught doing what I’ve described, you’ll be in here longer,” I warn her. “Or maybe transferred to a place without tennis courts.”
I’d noticed two tennis courts near the parking lot as part of an exercise area behind a high chain-link fence with coils of barbed wire on top. The gate in the fence I drove through was open.
“I don’t play tennis,” she says. “And I won’t get caught.”
We chat for a while and have coffee and doughnuts. There is still fifteen minutes left before visitors have to leave. I sense that Lucy Gates doesn’t get many visitors, so I tell her something about myself and give her more details about the crimes I’m investigating, even though she doesn’t need to know about that. I trust her to keep that confidential. After all, she had the moral character to turn herself in.
She tells me she is from Jacksonville and graduated from Rollins College in Winter Park with a degree in history.
“I wanted to go to law school but couldn’t afford it,” she says. “I was a self-taught computer nerd. I planned to just ‘borrow’ (making air quotes) enough money to pay back my student loans from the Jacksonville National Bank and Trust Company. It was easy to hack into the bank’s computer system, but, after pulling off the cyber heist, my goddamned conscience got the better of me and I turned myself in.”
So Lucy has a good angel on her shoulder too.
“Before the bank job, the worst thing I’d ever done was to change the organic chemistry grade of a friend who wanted to go to medical school from a C to an A,” she continues. “The rest was just breaking into secure servers for the sport of it. Well, except for the time I changed the orders of a friend’s brother who was in the Marine Corps from Afghanistan to embassy duty in Paris.”
There is a loud buzzing from speakers mounted on the walls.
“Time to go,” Lucy says.
“The deal with the warden is that you can use the library computer for an hour a day for a week,” I tell her, standing to leave. “And then I’ll come back and you can tell me what you’ve found.”
She stands up, winks, and says, “I won’t need nearly that long, Detective.”
So I thought I’d take advantage of what time I had to work on Bill’s manuscript. I didn’t get very far. When Lucy said she wouldn’t need a week, she knew what she was talking about. I’m back in the visitors’ lounge two days later.
“He’s good, but I’m better,” Lucy tells me as we sit with our coffee and doughnuts.
“Who’s good?”
“A dude called Peter the Great in the cyber community. A living legend. He covers his tracks, but he has certain signatures that ID him as a Russian hacker who does jobs for the government and for private clients. Clients like Sergey Pavlov, for example.”
“How do you know he’s a he?” I asked.
“Because sometimes he taunts his targets by signing himself as Peter Alexeyevich, the full name of the czar Peter the Great. He’s saying that he rules the Internet.”
“So you were able to hack into the Oil Patch server?”
“I was. At first glance, there was no evidence that Pavlov or Oil Patch are doing anything illegal. According to the info that’s on the surface, the company’s various businesses pay their taxes and follow all the rules. Oil Patch is a member in good standing of the American Energy Independence Coalition. It does pay annual dues much greater than any other member, but that’s not illegal. Sergey and his company also make legal contributions to political action committees around the US, including in Florida, in support of election campaigns and ballot initiatives. They contributed the maximum allowable amount to Arthur Wainwright’s last reelection campaign, which is ten thousand dollars from Petrov, and another ten from Oil Patch. Petey Boy leaves that kind of info out there as a red herring, to make anyone good enough to hack into their servers think they’ve gotten everything there is. But I found a path into a secret cyber cavern, so to speak, where the real story lies.”
“Which is?”
“Which is evidence of secret payments to certain people of influence in all the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico—people connected to permits and other approvals for Oil Patch projects. And all that is definitely not legal.”
“Including payments to Arthur Wainwright?”
“Yes. Big money into his offshore banking and investment accounts.”
Perhaps big enough to motivate him to protect his cash cow by any means necessary, including murder.
I thank her again for her good work and ask if she wants me to write a letter to the warden, or to anyone else who might make her life in prison, or after she is released, easier.
“Nope,” she tells me. “Getting the best of Peter the Great is reward enough.”
“What will you do after you’ve served your time?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to set myself up somewhere with a laptop and do legitimate consulting work. But that’s not allowed, and I never want to be in a place like this again. Maybe I’ll be a bicycle mechanic or operate a food truck. I’ll find something.”
I decide I will try to help her by writing a letter on Fort Myers Beach Police stationery and ask Sarah to do the same on FBI letterhead, expressing our gratitude to Lucy Gates for helping us with an important investigation. We’ll provide the letters to Lucy’s lawyer, to be used however she wants.
As I’m leaving, Lucy says, �
��By the way, you’ll find three million bucks in your bank account at Manatee National.”
I stop and look at her.
“Just kidding,” she laughs. “But from your back account, it’s obvious you could use the dough.”
22.
The Bodyguard
“Don’t do what you did during that Naples case,” Marisa tells me as we stroll along the beach on Sanibel Island, watching the tourists collect seashells. I’d gone undercover as a wealthy member of Naples high society in an attempt to draw the fire of whoever was murdering people with that profile. It worked, but I’d almost gotten killed myself.
When I don’t respond, she says, “Jack, you weren’t thinking about that until I mentioned it, were you? Going undercover, I mean.”
I wasn’t, but it’s a good idea, and I don’t have another, so I want to believe that I would have thought of it, eventually.
She punches me on the arm. “You’re going to do it, aren’t you? Aren’t you?” She stops walking and her face clouds over. “If something happens to you, big guy, I’ll have to go through the hassle of finding a new boyfriend, just as I’m beginning to have you properly broken in.”
“I’d hate to inconvenience you by dying, but I’m sure you’d have no shortage of suitors. Like that boy-toy who takes care of your pool, for one. I’ve seen how he looks at you. And that lawyer who handles your real estate closings. And the guy who delivers your spring water …”
She puts her arm through mine, begins walking again, and says, “Yeah, I guess you’re right. But keep your head down anyway. Funerals are such downers.”
I decide that another visit with Lance Porter, the newly minted state representative, will be a good start on Marisa’s undercover idea. I’ll get his thoughts on how best to pull it off. After all, I’m one of his constituents. Maybe he’ll throw in an American flag lapel pin and a tour of the state capitol building.
When I call his office in Tallahassee, the woman who answers assures me she’ll relay my request for a meeting to Representative Porter’s administrative assistant and someone will get back to me. So now that Porter is a VIP, I have to go through at least two gatekeepers to get to him.
The Dollar-a-Year Detective Page 9