The calling card was a small crystal cube, smooth on all sides, white as a sugar cube. They were a novelty item from the late 1800s made as a promotional item for a gaming company. They had shipped as a box with fifty cubes. Nothing there they could trace.
His lady shooter now had a partial name, Miss L.S. If it wasn’t an assumed name and courtesy title, his lady shooter was single, and while Paul had figured that, it was useful to have it confirmed. The first letter L wasn’t the most popular for a woman’s name: Laura, Linda, Lisa, Lois, Louise. They were creating a master list of possibilities from census data. The search of the case file had come up dry so far, but the initials would be useful when they located the middleman’s home and could search his records.
The day planners gave him a price for murders twenty-five and twenty-nine. His lady shooter had made a lot more money over her career than Paul had thought a month ago. The idea she had retired after the thirtieth murder was becoming a more interesting idea to consider. They had speculated she was either dead or in jail as reasons she had stopped, for she would have been in her forties at the time of the last shooting they could be certain was hers. They watched for shootings where there was no calling card left, but over the years had found no case which stayed open. It looked like she had stopped after thirty kills.
Sam took the seat beside him.
“Do you think Flint Meeks could have afforded to pay two hundred fifty thousand to kill his wife?” Paul asked, voicing the question he had been mulling around.
Sam considered it. “No. Maybe a hundred fifty thousand, but not that additional hundred.”
“So he’s off the likely list. Who on our suspect list could afford this hit?”
“Not many. Three, maybe four.”
“That’s what I was thinking. The price bothers me. Why this much? If you have a casual hatred, ‘I wish this lady was dead,’ you might pay five figures to have her killed. But two hundred fifty thousand? That was a significant amount thirteen years ago. Instead of a hit, we have a high-priced assassination. There’s got to be something about the murdered wife we don’t know.”
Paul looked to the board for murder twenty-nine. “The same problem exists for the Victor Ryckoff murder. The price for the hit doesn’t make sense, given what we know about the victim. We’re missing something. I’ve reread the two bios, but I’m not picking up what it might be.”
“I’ll tug Peter in, and we’ll build out the timeline of their lives. If we can’t account for a few years, maybe that will give us a place to focus on.”
“Good. Something is there, Sam.”
“Boss, we’ve got something,” Rita called, excited. She rolled her chair between tables to switch databases she was searching while Paul walked over with Sam to join her.
“Two good ideas are intersecting,” Rita said. “This guy’s been dead going on five weeks now. No one has reported him missing, but lots of people are beginning to feel the fact he is dead. He hasn’t paid any bills. His electric bill, gas bill, water bill, phone bill, cable bill. He’s going to go late and then delinquent on everything at the same time. He lives somewhere.
“Facial recognition started generating matches overnight. I’ve got sixteen drivers’ licenses with different names, different addresses, across different states, but all are his picture. Buried under all these aliases is his real name and address. Only one of the addresses stopped paying bills five weeks ago. Our middleman has a tentative name, Gordon Whitcliff, and he lives in Reston, West Virginia.”
“Nice job, Rita.” Paul turned to scan the room. “Listen up, people. Rita has a name and address.” A collective cheer went up at the news. Paul smiled. “Let’s see if it holds. Arnett, Daniel, Sullivan, any activity on Whitcliff’s credit cards, phones, or bank accounts since the day of the crash?
“Christopher, we need a local cop to make a check of the property. Send him the picture of our guy and have him show it to the neighbors. Is the photo the man they know as their neighbor?
“Kelly, give me a fast bio. Married? Ever? Have kids?”
Paul paced the front of the conference room as the first answers filtered in from around the room.
“Two phone numbers in his name. No calls out on either one since the day of the crash.”
“Boss, his finances are dead quiet. A few checks cleared, but all were written before the date of the crash.”
“He’s drawing Social Security. No wife or dependents are listed. Never filed a joint tax return. Nobody but him holds a driver’s license with that address. He’s seventy-four years old. I can’t find a marriage license or divorce decree for that name, but it’s not conclusive since records that far back would be on paper.”
“I can’t find any credit cards issued in his name. There’s a gas card with no activity on it in the last month.”
“Paul, I’m on the phone with the police officer at the address. Neighbors on both sides confirm the photo is Gordon Whitcliff. According to one neighbor, Gordon has lived in that house for at least thirty-five years. They thought he was away on business. He had asked a neighbor to collect his newspaper and mail, hadn’t indicated how long he would be gone.”
“Okay, people. I’m satisfied,” Paul said. “We’ve got our middleman.
“Christopher, see about getting the property secured until we arrive. We’ll be there before dark.
“William, find Whitcliff’s dentist and get us X-rays for the ME to use in comparison. We’ll bring back a toothbrush and hairbrush for a DNA match as well.
“I need volunteers for a road trip to West Virginia.” So many hands lifted he had to smile. “If you want to go, I’ll make room for you—just don’t expect to get much sleep once we’re there. Close down what you’re working on, then go home, pack, and be back here by three. I want us to be in the air by four.
“Sullivan, I expect he’s got at least one safe-deposit box under his real name. See if you can find it.
“Kelly, rip apart his phone records and identify anyone he has ever called. Any names with initials L.S., T.M., G.N., call me and start diving deep on who they are.
“Peter, his financials. Tax returns. Bank accounts. Any sizeable deposits and payouts, I want to know where they originated from and went to.
“Arnett, I need to know what other properties, if any, he owns.
“Sam, open a feed with Treasury and keep them copied on the phone and financial records. The recent flow of calls and cash may intersect with their currency thief. I’ll leave you to run things here.
“Any questions?” Paul scanned his team. “Okay. It’s solid progress. You are one step away from making your boss a very happy man. Now I just need a name for Miss L.S.”
Paul put in a quick call to Arthur, then headed down two flights of stairs and stopped at his office to sign the paperwork and get the travel department busy making arrangements. A box on his guest chair was from Dave. Ann’s books. Paul took the box with him and went home to pack.
“That’s the house, sir. The brick ranch with the flagpole and petunias along the sidewalk.”
Paul had been expecting something different. His middleman had lived all this time tucked in the center of a subdivision. The dusk of late evening showed there were still people out walking dogs, and kids riding bikes. The officer in the patrol car stationed at the street came to meet them.
“Thanks for staying, Officer Marson. No one has been inside?”
“No, sir. Not since we received your call and secured the premises. The neighbor on the west, Mr. Olson, had a key to the property, as he took the mail inside each afternoon. I took the liberty.” He held out the key.
Paul walked to the house and unlocked the front door.
It was a neat, tidy house—that was Paul’s first impression as he stepped inside. The drapery on the windows were heavy fabric, formal, the floors hardwood. Furniture in the rooms he could see from the door was sparse, and there was no clutter on any surface. The interior was hot and smelled a bit musty. The air-cond
itioning must have been left off or set high.
“Jason, I want photos of everything before we start. Walk through the place with video and also get me stills of his desk, anyplace he likely handled his mail.
“Rick, bring in those boxes and make a call to get more delivered.
“Christopher, take the attic and garage. Franklin and Rita, the home office. Larry and Kim, the bedrooms. Sidney, the kitchen and commons areas. I want a careful and thorough search of this home. He had reasons to hide items of value where they would be difficult to find. So until we locate a document trove and a very large hidden cache of money, I will assume we haven’t looked hard enough.
“Anything that is paper, look through it, then put it in a box and set it in the dining room. We’ll take it all back with us. Keep a close eye out for anything that suggests he has another property—photos, insurance paperwork on a different address, contact numbers for repair people in another town—anything suggesting this isn’t his only residence and that we need to be searching somewhere else as well.”
His team spread out. Paul walked through to see the layout, then went outside to see the backyard, finally coming around through the garage. The man had lived here a very long time, and he hadn’t planned on not coming back. He would have taken precautions when he traveled, but he wouldn’t have removed things from the house. It wasn’t as big a property as he had feared, and his middleman had lived a contained life, by the look of what was here. They could find what was here. It might just take a day or two.
To give his team time to work, he walked out to speak with the officer and discuss security for the next few days. Twenty minutes later, Paul returned to the house, and went back to the room serving as the home office.
Franklin was sitting at the rolltop desk looking through drawers. He glanced over and held up papers. “He’s a record keeper, and neat. I just pulled the last four months of phone bills from a folder marked Phone Bill. We’ve got two address books filled with names and numbers. Rita is checking them. And we’ve found taping equipment on the phones. There will be recordings of his phone calls—his own version of insurance—somewhere around. Probably a safe since I’m not finding anything so far in the office but blank tapes. The paperwork in these files is current to this calendar year, nothing before that. There are more records somewhere. He has no computer that I can find, and there are no cables suggesting a laptop is used here, no printer, no backup power strip, nothing suggesting Internet service. He may have stayed old school and simply not used one.”
“I already like this guy. Rita?”
“Dining room, boss.”
Paul found her at the table, making lists of names from the address books.
“So far I’ve got a Linda Surette, Lisa Simkins, and Laura Saranoff for Miss L.S. Arnett is checking them out. I’ll run the books for T.M. or G.N. next.”
Kim came into the dining room with a gallon Ziploc bag full of matchbooks from different restaurants. “There’s a safe in the master bedroom closet, no attempt to hide it, but it will have to be drilled out to open it. Do you want me to make a call?”
“Very big safe?”
“Six by eight. The kind you tuck in jewelry to keep it from the casual burglar.”
“We’ll wait to make the call until he can do his job without getting in our way.”
“Boss, I’ve got a gold mine.”
Paul followed the voice back to the second bedroom. A four-drawer file cabinet stood in the closet, and beside it six stacked white banker boxes. Larry had one box on the floor and another with the lid off.
“Old bank records. He kept everything in date order back to 1982. A quick scan shows the two hundred fifty thousand deposit in July 1999, and the three hundred thousand deposit in August 2002. Assuming they all went through the same middleman, I can give you the amount the lady shooter was paid for each of the thirty murders.”
Paul handed him the pad of paper from his pocket. “Good news. The file cabinet?”
“Old tax returns. At least thirty years. Insurance and warranty information. One drawer looks like personal history, playbill to a Broadway show from twenty years ago, old photos in a shoebox, that kind of thing. We’re going to want to take all of this.”
“I’ll get you more boxes to empty that file cabinet.”
Christopher came down the hall to join them. “The attic is empty. There is no sign anyone’s been up there in the last five years. But I did find a safe in the utility room. It’s behind the water heater and behind the clipboard hanging on the wall that lists where fuses go in the electric panel. Pure fluke I found it. The light in the attic wouldn’t come on, and I was checking the fuse box. I don’t think we get the safe open without finding the combination. We would have to move the water heater to get enough access to drill it open.”
“Boss. I need a hand in here—master bedroom.”
Paul followed Christopher down the hall to see what Kim had found.
She had moved the bed, and the rug beneath it. “There may be a cache here. The floor is soft, dead center of the room, and the boards don’t feel linked into the rest of the hardwood floor. About two boards wide and four feet long.” She was rocking one of the boards, and it shifted a fraction higher than the rest of the floor.
It took five minutes of careful work and they got the first board to lift out. They easily lifted out the second board.
“What do you think? Thirty thousand, maybe forty? I don’t know dimensions for hundred-dollar bills.”
“Is it real?” Kim picked up a packet. “It doesn’t look like it has been in circulation. You think it might be some of the stolen cash?”
“What better way to pay your bills than with stolen money? Both of you count it, agree on the amount, then get it sealed and on its way to the Treasury guys to check out the serial numbers,” Paul said.
“This is one task I won’t mind.”
Paul left them to it and returned to the dining room to see how Rita was doing with the names. They had found the kind of document stash and cash that could break a case wide open.
Paul brought in pizza and gathered his team together at the dining room table. He snagged two pieces from the second box before he took a chair. “Eat while it’s hot and listen. I’ll run through my list, then you let me know what I’ve missed.” He scanned his notepad.
“He made it easy on us. There were records, and a lot of them, all neatly organized.
“We need to drill out two safes, and move the water heater to get to the one. There could be something very interesting in that one. Jason, make some calls and make that happen.
“We’re still missing the phone tapes. Rick, I want you to head to the bank when it opens. Sullivan found one safe-deposit box in this guy’s name. Let’s see if he kept the tapes there.
“Daniel, Larry, we need the old bank records and phone records scanned tonight and distributed to Treasury and others in the sandbox. It will take you a few hours, so get a pot of coffee. Get them scanned and distributed, and then you can sleep in.
“Kim, make arrangements for secure transport. I want all the paper we’ve found shipped to Chicago. We can go through the records there in a more organized fashion.
“Local PD is going to provide security here for the night.” The pizza was making him thirsty, and he glanced toward the kitchen. “Didn’t we shove a case of soda in the freezer to fast-chill about three hours ago?”
Kim dropped her pizza and shoved back her chair to dart into the kitchen. “We did.” She returned carrying a case of soda. “They haven’t gone to ice, but they are close.” She passed the soda cans around.
“Thanks.” Paul drank half of his, appreciating the icy coldness, before looking back to his list. “Almost done. Rita, I want you to interview the neighbors tomorrow. Where did he shop, eat lunch, and go for coffee? What was his routine? Then find any security cameras in those areas, and let’s see if anything is still available going back more than five weeks. I’d love to have six months’
worth of time to see who visited him.
“Franklin, Christopher, Sidney, work the address book, have Peter generate a quick profile on those who live locally, and go interview those that don’t have a criminal record. How long were they friends, did they ever travel together, what did he do for a living, did he have family in the area? Anything useful you can get that will give us a picture of the guy. Those with a criminal connection, I want us to look at more carefully before we show up for an interview.”
He reached the end of his list, and finished his slice of pizza. “We have rooms at the Hyatt over on Juniper Street, and Wilson volunteered to shuttle us around. If we push, we can wrap this up in a couple of days. Anything else?”
He looked around the table at the group and smiled. “You’re too tired to think if you can’t come up with something I missed. Get squared away for tomorrow, then let’s head on to the hotel.”
Paul tugged out his folded list and scanned what was not crossed off. It had been a good three days. “We’re still missing the phone tapes. I want a final search of the house for another safe—floors, walls, and stairs.”
“On it, boss.” Those waiting for their next instructions dispersed to the search.
Franklin slid a document box into the van. “That’s the last one.”
“Do me a favor and open desk drawers and file cabinets just to make sure nothing got overlooked.”
“Will do.”
Paul’s phone rang. He glanced at the caller ID. “Hello, Kate.”
“Ann was right.”
“Yeah?” Paul felt a smile forming. Good for her.
“Eric Lorell, doing twenty-five years for murder, paid Andrew Waters to kill Officer Ulaw. We’ve got the money transfer traced back. The lawyer for Lorell’s cell mate helped him make the arrangements. Eric just smiled when we put it to him that we knew, didn’t waste time with an argument. He gave us a written confession. He’ll move to death row, but I’m afraid it’s not much justice.”
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