The Lazarus Trap

by Davis Bunn

  “It occurred to me that if we couldn’t get information on who got toasted in the explosion, we could at least find out who was still walking around. You with me?”

  “Go on.”

  “I did a run through the local precincts. Just to be sure, you know, since your guy has a rep for going wild when he’s up in the big city. I thought, okay, maybe he wasn’t at the dance because he was held up somewhere else.”

  “You found something.”

  “A possible only. The precinct station in question is very far from the trail you’d expect a highflier to take. In the borderlands between Morningside Heights and Harlem.”

  Terrance huffed out each word separately. “Do. They. Have. A. Name.”

  “Jeffrey Adams.”

  Terrance staggered across the room and clutched the wall.

  “I’ve never met Val Haines face-to-face. I been working from a company mug shot. And I couldn’t be sure. But I thought, you know, it was worth checking.”

  “You were right.”

  “This guy Adams was comatose when they brought him in. Apparently he was in a bar that caters to the hard core. Carrying a wad of cash and a driver’s license. No plastic. You with me?”

  Terrance’s senses were in hyperdrive, the same power he saw there in Don’s gaze. “Using a fake ID to stay anonymous.”

  “Exactly. Some cops were there undercover. Apparently they saved this mark from a bad end. Only Adams took a swing at an undercover cop. So they brought him in. I’m not clear on why he wasn’t charged. But they let him go. They’ve got a mug shot, the name I gave you, and a Des Moines address.”

  “Do you have a scanner?”

  “Up and rolling.”

  “E-mail it through.” Terrance watched as Don scrambled for pen and paper. “Use this address. And stay by your phone.” He hung up.

  Don powered up the flatscreen on the wall opposite his desk. He keyed in net access, watched the screen a moment, then said, “Here it comes.”

  They stood side by side. The download seemed to take eons. Finally front and side mugshots illuminated the office.

  Don moved in close and intently studied the image. “I can’t tell.”

  “It’s him.” Terrance pressed his fist to his gut, pushing against the nausea.

  “You can’t be positive. His own mother couldn’t make a definite ID from this.”

  “I’m telling you. This is Val Haines. And his mother is dead.”

  Don slumped onto the sofa. “Tell me what you know about this guy.”

  “We’ve been through this before.”

  “It’ll help me think.”

  Terrance walked behind Don’s desk. The first time ever. He slid into the high-backed leather chair. Propped up his feet. Twisted the chair slightly so he was aimed at Don and not his nemesis. “Valentine Joseph Haines. Mother died when he was twelve. Father and he were very close. No other siblings. One aunt. They are not close. Father died, let’s see, nineteen months ago. Val took it very hard.”

  “Get your feet off my desk.”

  Terrance remained as he was. “About a week after the funeral, his wife of four years filed for divorce. It becomes very messy here.”

  “Nineteen months, that’s about the time you beat Val out of the promotion, am I right?”

  “As I said. Messy. The divorce turned into a battle over a child that Val apparently did not know his wife was carrying.”

  “Your child.”

  “In court it was revealed she had been having an affair for some time. Val’s lawyer demanded a DNA test to determine parentage. Which was when everything came into the open. Things became quite vicious.”

  Don’s gaze could pierce Kevlar. “She was having an affair with you, and Val found out when the DNA test came back?”

  “Val took this very hard.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “No, actually, you can’t. In court that day, Val became unglued. We’re talking totally insane. He accused me of everything except murder.” Terrance’s voice remained steady. But inside he felt the old acid biting deep. “He was yelling so loud guards showed up from three courtrooms away. He actually accused me of stealing his child as well as his wife by tampering with the DNA test results.”

  “Did you?”

  “Don’t be absurd. When they finally silenced Val, the judge handed down a restraining order.”

  “So Val loses his father. His wife files for divorce. He discovers she’s carrying his child—”

  “I told you. The child is mine.”

  “Far as Val’s concerned, it’s his. Am I right?” Don picked up the coffee mug from his desk and pointed with it at Terrance. “To top things off, he loses his place on the corporate ladder because he got stabbed in the back.”

  “That promotion was mine as well.”

  “What we’re talking about is what Val thinks.” Don smiled grim approval. “No wonder the guy went bad.”

  There was nothing to be gained from holding back. Not now. “I never expected Val Haines to steal. He was always one for the straight and narrow.”

  “That’s simple enough. You pushed him over the edge.”

  “The plan had always been to snare Marjorie Copeland. Marjorie was a desperate woman who basically endured the corporate life only to get her pension. I left just enough of a trail for her to realize the pension funds had effectively been drained. If she went public, the company would be pushed to the brink. Whether it actually folded or not, Marjorie’s pension was history. You know all this. We’d planned for her to steal what she could and disappear. Then we’d blow the story, only increase the amount she stole from a few million to half a billion.”

  “Then Val discovered what she was up to and went along as well,” Don said.

  “Which is the only item that has not gone according to plan.”

  “You mean, other than our Val missing out on the bomb.” Don drained the remainder of his coffee like medicine. He said to his empty mug, “Remind me what your personal take is from this operation.”

  Terrance repeated the words, anchoring the moment, giving a solid sense of reason to what was about to go down. Which of course was what Don was after. “Eighty-three million, two hundred thousand dollars.”

  Don motioned to the image on the far wall. “There’s no chance you could be mistaken about that being our Val?”

  “None.”

  Don tapped the mug’s rim on the desk. Slowly. Deliberately. In time to his words. “Do I need to tell you what has to be done here?”

  In response, Terrance picked up his cell phone and punched in the number. When Wally came on the line, Terrance said, “We need to talk. I’m coming up to New York. In the meantime, see if you can quietly locate this Jeffrey Adams.”

  “I need something more to go on.”

  “He has to be sleeping somewhere.”

  “And if he’s moved on?”

  Terrance thought hard. “My guess is, he’ll try to reach England.”

  “The precinct ID’d this Adams guy on his driver’s license,” Wally mused aloud. “It was the only form of identification he was carrying. If he’s headed to Europe, he’ll need a passport.”

  “You know where he would go to get fake papers?”

  “Sure.” Wally paused, then added, “My contacts at the precinct want to know if this is our man.”

  “I think it’s safe to tell them,” Terrance replied, his eyes steady on his partner, “that Val Haines is dead.”

  VAL LAY ON HIS HARD PALLET ON THE HOTEL ROOM FLOOR. HE HELD Audrey’s letter flattened against his chest. Growing daylight filtered through slatted blinds. He stared not at the ceiling, but at the images circling him from all sides. Audrey’s letter had released a hurricane of fragmented memories.

  Before his life had fallen apart, Val and his wife had attended Orlando’s Thirty-third Street Baptist Church, which had moved to a new larger structure out by Isleworth. It was a good place. Good people, nice social life, growing fast as the city itsel
f. His wife, Stefanie, was involved with this and that. He had played in the church basketball league. Their friends all went there. Which made the gradual revelation that their marriage was falling apart that much more public and harder to endure.

  His father’s death, the divorce, the revelation that his wife had been having an affair with the same man who then stole a promotion Val should have received—one blow followed another with merciless consistency. Val’s days held to the same empty pattern, just going through the motions, waiting for the next strike of life’s wrecking ball.

  Fourteen months after the divorce, a church friend concerned about his lonely state introduced him to a visitor from England. She was over to see her mother and brother. A wonderful lady. The friend failed to mention she was also sister to Val’s arch nemesis, Terrance d’Arcy. If he had not been trapped by agony, Val would have laughed himself sick at life’s awful irony.

  The desire to use Terrance’s sister as a means of revenge for her brother’s actions had been strong as lust. But Val couldn’t bring himself to do it. Audrey d’Arcy had been the one good thing in a dismal and storm-swept era.

  Audrey was what in Britain was called a Christian counselor. She had both a private practice and a government contract to work with prisoners coming up for remand. She extended her stay in Orlando four times, not masking her growing love for Val. Audrey had accepted his tale of woe with the tragic recognition of her brother at work. Val had feasted upon a woman who wanted only to care and comfort and succor.

  So why had he forced her to leave? Val searched and found nothing save a clearer recollection of their last day together. Outside the church, Audrey had held him for what had seemed like the lifetime he refused to share with her. The way she had touched his face, the taste of her final kiss, the soft sound of her broken farewell, all drifted now in the hotel room’s dusty air. Val rose from his pallet and stared in the mirror as he dressed. Silently he condemned the man before him for ever sending her away.

  Vince was not on duty when he arrived downstairs. Val left the hotel just as the sky overhead began going dark. The thunderheads rolled and boomed their way down, ready to devour the higher buildings.

  Val entered the diner and took a booth from which he watched the first drops strike the glass by his side, big as bullets. They dimpled the glass and chased the pedestrians to an even faster pace. Further memories rained down, a jagged-edged deluge. Val could no more halt the torrent than he could the thunderstorm outdoors. He ordered the first thing that caught his eye on the menu and remembered how, four months earlier, he had caught one of his most trusted employees with her hand in the honey jar.

  Marjorie Copeland was a single mom, abandoned by her former husband soon after she had given birth to a severely handicapped boy. The child was now ten. The day nurse cost almost half her salary. Marjorie clung to her job with desperate fervor because she needed the medical. Since his divorce, the two of them had shared a silent bond over life’s raw injustice. That morning four months back, Marjorie had looked more rumpled and exhausted than usual. Val laid out what he had discovered, hoping against hope she could show how he had gotten everything wrong.

  Instead, Marjorie had shut and locked his door, drawn the blinds over his inside window, and asked him to cancel his appointments and hold all calls. Then she laid it out for him. How someone had been dipping into the company’s pension fund. Gradually siphoning off the employees’ retirement money into a series of false accounts and dummy investments.

  Soon as the shock had eased, Val had supplied the name behind the scheme. “Terrance d’Arcy. He did this.”

  Marjorie had nodded slowly. “You’re probably right.”

  “No probably about it. I can smell his hand all over this.” The certainty opened like a poisonous bloom. “I have to stop him.”

  “If you go public,” Marjorie said, “I’ll kill myself.”

  “Don’t talk insane.”

  “Take that pension away from me, and I have nothing to live for.” She had the fathomless gaze of one already dead. “I’ve checked carefully. The money is gone, Val. And there’s nothing definite to pin it on anyone.”

  “That’s still no reason to talk about suicide.”

  “Isn’t it? I have got to keep my pension. Otherwise my boy is going to be imprisoned in some concrete cage for the rest of his life.” Her eyes were so drained of hope their color was a lie in physical form. “I want to take what’s mine. That’s all. Not one cent more. Just let me get out and then you can do whatever you please.”

  “I can’t believe you’re planning to steal from our company.”

  “It’s not stealing and it’s not my company.” Emotional exhaustion had pounded her voice to a toneless drone. “They owe me.”

  “How much are we talking about?”

  “I’ve worked this out. If I live to the median age, my pension payment would be a million three. Down in Costa Rica that would take my son through a long, full life.”

  Then she waited. Not saying it. Just letting him taste the unspoken for himself.

  Val tried to push the thought away. “I’ll find a way to pin it on them.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m good at my job. You know that. I’ve checked. All we’ve got is a drained pension fund and false trails that lead nowhere. So you get some minor evidence, so what? There will be a lot of suspicion and maybe some talk. They’ll have four hundred million and change to hire the best lawyers. Sooner or later they’ll skate.” She let him mull that over, then added, “There is another alternative.”

  He glanced at his watch. Twenty-three minutes past nine on a Tuesday morning. Marking the time when he went from dedicated employee to criminal. “I’m listening.”

  “You caught me because I can’t do this cleanly on my own. You sign off on all the transfers. You have connections with all our banks.”

  He nodded, but not to her words. The fact was simple and unavoidable. Terrance would walk. He knew this with the utter certainty of someone who had fought the man and failed. Terrance d’Arcy was a master of the dark arts. The only way to capture the man was to obtain all the answers. Which meant following his trail. Doing exactly the same. Then laying it out for the authorities. The bloom of vengeance sprang so easily from this putrid seed.

  The second thought followed naturally on the first. What if he failed? What then?

  The answer to this came just as easily.

  Val refocused on the woman seated opposite him. “You’ve done the same calculations for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Assuming the same median age thing, what’s my take?”

  “Two million, two hundred and eighteen thousand dollars.”

  “You can get this out?”

  “With care.”

  “You’ve tracked how they did it?”

  “All the dummy fronts run through one guy at Syntec Bank in New York.”

  “We can follow the same pattern,” Val said, thinking aloud.

  The two of them realized together what he had just said. We. Marjorie’s features crumpled. Val let her sob quietly for a time, then said, “How were you planning to disappear?”

  “I found out how to obtain a false birth certificate on the Web.” She took a handkerchief from her purse and repaired some of the damage. “I’m using a Des Moines temp office for an address and applying for a driver’s license. After that, getting a passport is a breeze.”

  “Can you do the same for me?”

  “Of course.” Her mascara had run, leaving her face painted with the grief of ancients. “I never dreamed you’d go for this. I mean, I’m glad and all. But I just don’t understand.”

  Val rose from his chair. “You don’t need to.”

  When Val returned to the hotel from breakfast, Vince was behind the counter. The lobby was empty. Vince watched him approach the counter. There was a change to the atmosphere, a charged compression that signaled business about to be done.

  Val walked straight up to the goatee
d weightlifter and demanded, “Where’s my watch?”

  “The watch is being checked out.” Vince handled the question with his standard calm. “Forget the watch. Far as you’re concerned, the watch is history.”

  “So you’ve found a guy who’ll do me a passport?”

  Vince did a thing with his shoulders. “Maybe yes, maybe no. Things are tough in this town. You hear what I’m saying?”

  “I hear the words but they’re not connecting.”

  “Especially since the Rico Act. I introduce you to somebody and you get caught, I go down with you.”

  “So how much will the passport cost me?”

  “You need to focus here. We’re not talking about the passport yet. We’re not even close to that point. First you got to take care of me.”

  “You’re telling me an eight-thousand-dollar watch isn’t enough?”

  “Forget the eight. Your watch is maybe gonna bring two-five on the street. So yeah, the watch makes for a nice down payment.” He studied Val. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “Obviously not.”

  He moved forward. It was a fractional shift, just a slight inching forward onto his toes. But the man’s menace reached across the counter and gripped him hard. “Where’d you hide your stash, Jeffrey?”

  “My money?” Val’s voice sounded strangled to his own ears. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “Tell me, don’t tell me. It makes no difference.” He did that thing with his eyes again. Opening them into a blank void. One large enough to swallow Val whole. “If I want it, it’s mine.”

  “I thought—”

  “You’re in the city now. This means you got to learn a different way of thinking.” Vince’s words punched at Val with silken fists. “It cost you money to get into this town, right? It’s gonna cost you a lot more to get out. You got no place to run, no place to hide. You’re an easy mark.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You been straight with me. An honest sucker. So I’m gonna lay it out. I look at you, I know you’re sitting on serious money.”

  “All I’ve got—”

  “No, wait. Just hear me out. I’m not talking about what you’re carrying in your pocket or got hidden away upstairs. Most guys in my situation, that’s all they’d be interested in. How much are you carrying and how are they gonna take it from you? Gun, knife, alley, lobby, it’s all the same.”