A Town Called Malice

by Adam Abramowitz

  “I guess you do. Makes perfect sense, right? They’re not driving their own cahs to hit the banks,” Solarte purposely butchering the word. “Anyhow, Klaussen says he’s pretty good with names so we went mailbox reading, rang a few doorbells. Most everybody in the neighborhood, at least the people we met, hadn’t been there more than ten, fifteen years tops.”

  “Did Klaussen recognize Camilla’s place?”

  “You mean her parents’? Barely. It had been fixed up, pretty much like every other house on the block. I’d live there in a heartbeat if I could afford it. We checked the mailboxes. The Islases, as you know, are deceased. Nobody answered when we rang. We asked whoever answered the door in the houses closest to Camilla’s if they knew the family back in the day.”

  “Did anybody?”

  “One old lady, who must have been confused, said the daughter had moved back a long time ago. Poor thing. It looked like she lived alone and I could smell the cats from the porch. Hers might have been the only house on the block that hadn’t been renovated. Honestly, I’m surprised she answered.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “There must have been a half dozen fliers in her mailbox, those cash-for-your-house deals, reverse mortgage, all that bullshit. I’m sure there are vultures who go by that house every day just waiting for her to kick.”

  “How long ago did Polishuk say Camilla’s parents died?”

  “Eighty-six? The dad died in a car crash. The missus a few years later? Cancer, I think it was.”

  “You ran the deed? Record of sale?”

  “Sure.” Solarte had picked up a pencil off her desk and begins to tap it on the side of her head like it might jar a thought loose.

  “What?” I open my hands at my sides.

  “I didn’t really think anything of it when I looked, but now that you mention it, that might be the only thing that was strange.…”

  “What’s that?”

  “There wasn’t a record of sale, per se. It was a transfer. Like in a will.”

  “To who?”

  “Nobody named Islas, I remember that. I just assumed it must have been somebody else in the family. Didn’t think it was important.”

  “Do you now?”

  “Not particularly. But I’ll follow up anyway. At this point it’s all I have unless that file tells us something new.”

  We open it. It doesn’t. Except for what’s not there: my father’s name missing or redacted from any of the paperwork that makes up the FBI file and any connection to Camilla Islas’s murder. Confirming what Polishuk said about being warned off by the FBI and his superiors: one of his two leading suspects was declared off-limits and Karl Klaussen vanished, whereabouts unknown to everybody except my father, safely across the Mexican border with a new name and identity. Only to resurface thirty-some-odd years later, hoping loss would be his guide to exhume Camilla’s bones and usher her soul to heaven in time for Día de los Muertos.

  Is Klaussen a religious man? He doesn’t strike me as one. But death has a way of forcing that conversation. At least it has with me. Maybe not religion in the organized sense, but the start of a relationship with what lies beyond, the living’s responsibility to the dead. And it also dawns on me at that moment that I know next to nothing about my responsibilities to my father when his time comes to pass. Nothing about his wishes for his burial or what to do with his remains, or the ceremony he’d like to mark his passing, the words he’d prefer were spoken over his mortal coil.

  His end is nearing. Why can’t I face that? Even Zero seems to have come to some form of acceptance of this inevitability. No. It’s more than acceptance. He’s preparing himself. Without me. Because I haven’t been strong enough to face the truth.

  I close my eyes and think of my father and the choices he’s made over the years, not a single meaningful decision that hadn’t drawn blood or pain. It would be comforting to think that Lee was right, that I’m more like my mother than I know, at least trying to do the right thing, to swerve hard to the choices that don’t burn anyone else, or make matters worse than they are. But Lee only knew my mother like I did, through newspaper clippings and files and stories. Meaning, through other people’s eyes.

  “What’s wrong, Zesty?”

  “What?” Solarte startles me out of my thoughts.

  “You’re crying.”

  “I am?” I reach to my eyes, touch the wetness that I hadn’t felt streaming over my cheeks, and look down to see the accumulation forming almost an arrow of a stain on my sweatshirt. I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out, so we sit there together in silence, until the motion-sensor lights in Solarte’s office click the room into darkness and I come to realize that the bitterest thing I’ve ever tasted are my own tears, which just won’t seem to stop falling.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I make it clear to Anitra Tehran that she has to meet me on my turf this time, my insistence delivered with a guarantee for her safety that only a cop bar like JJ Foley’s affords.

  I’d stopped back home, changed into my messenger gear, and when I arrived at the bar, stashed my bike next to the side door that opens off the alley. Jerry’s not working tonight, but his youngest son, Jeremiah, fills in capably for him, a third generation of Foley behind the stick, as professional a bartender as you’ll find anywhere in this city. Shirt. Tie. Apron. Bar rag.

  Anitra Tehran looks amused. And alluring. She’s ditched her Pats hoodie and Kevlar for dark jeans and a black sweater, her hair loose around her shoulders. Patent leather unlaced Doc Martens rest on the rail below our high chairs at the bar.

  “What is it?” I say to her after introducing Tehran to Jeremiah, who before serving our drinks and making himself scarce had shifted into wingman mode and talked me up like I was the second coming of Ryan Gosling.

  “You must be a big tipper.” Tehran holds up her shot of Jameson and we clink glasses and throw them back with a chaser of Guinness. “And he didn’t even ask you what you wanted. This is your place, huh?”

  “Continuity,” I say. “It’s an underrated quality.”

  “I’ve got a lot to learn.” Tehran looks around again, though when she’d first come in, she’d made a circuit around the bar looking at all the pictures, jerseys, and clippings as if she were at a museum. “I didn’t even know this kind of place existed anymore. It’s the real deal. And if I was to listen to Jeremiah, so are you.”

  “Take it with a grain of salt,” I say. “He hasn’t seen my bank statements and he probably thinks this is a date.”

  “Common mistake lately,” Tehran complains lightly, a shade of mischief in her eyes that I haven’t seen before, maybe the Jameson going straight to her head. “Should we pretend?”

  “You haven’t seen my bank statements, either.”

  “What makes you think that matters to me?” The twinkle is gone, replaced by something else.

  “I dunno, I’m sorry.”

  “No, really, I want to know. What are you trying to say?”

  “We’re just different is all. You’re an accomplished professional, educated.…” My words drift off and I let my open hands say the rest.

  “Oh, I get it.” Tehran downs half her beer in one pull, wipes her ringless fingers across her lips. “We’re divided by what, class, is that it? Upbringing? You were raised by wolves?”

  “Practically. Where did you go to school?” I ask.

  “Harvard. What difference does that make?”

  “I did two years at UMass-Boston. Barely. Tell me the last three dates you’ve been on, what did those guys do for a living?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah. Stop buying time trying to come up with something to say. What did they do?”

  “Bond trader, lawyer…” Anitra Tehran bites her lip and squints in thought. “High-tech start-up.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “What’s that prove? I’m not dating them now. And I didn’t go out with them because they flashed me their bank statements.”
Anitra turns the question around like any good reporter would. “Give me your last three dates.”

  “They weren’t exactly dates,” I say.

  “No? So what are you telling me, they were hookups? Internet flings?”

  “No. No Internet. I’m just saying it was more…” I stall to find the right word. “Organic,” I choose poorly, regretting the sound of it the second it comes out of my mouth.

  But Anitra Tehran only laughs. “You mean there was alcohol involved?”

  “Exactly.” I point at her.

  “What do you think this is?” Anitra rattles her empty shot glass on the bar.

  “Okay,” I say. “You win.”

  “Win what?”

  “I dunno, whatever point you’re trying to make, debunking whatever the hell I was trying to tell you.”

  “Which was what, remind me.” Tehran angles her head a little, looking up into my eyes with a neutral smile on her lips, still with a dab of Guinness foam that she’d missed.

  I shake my head. “I’m sorry, I’m bad at this.” I look down the bar where Jeremiah is tending to a couple of Gang Crime officers with shaved domes and matching BDP windbreakers.

  “Your friend can’t save you, Zesty. You’re on your own with this. Come on, you can do it.”

  “All right,” I say, giving up on Jeremiah. “After all this is over, I mean the Rambir Roshan thing, the Russians, can I maybe, like, ask you out?”

  “Out where?” Tehran’s not going to make this easy.

  “On a date?”

  “Aw, aren’t you cute. That was really hard for you, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I admit. “Usually I just go with ‘baby, let me be your bad-boy mistake.’”

  “That’s pretty terrible.” Tehran laughs. “So let’s see just how bad you are. What’s that phone you got there, you’ve been treating it like a hot potato since we got here. There something you want to show me?”

  There is. I do.

  “I don’t understand,” she says. “Whose phone is that?”

  I tell her and watch Anitra trying to piece things together, but coming up empty except for, “It’s about timing, isn’t it?”

  “In comedy and in life,” I say, and explain the significance of the picture’s locations in case she doesn’t recognize them.

  “Your brother’s got something on FBI Agent Lee?” Tehran connects a few of the dots on her own. “And we can assume he gave you the phone because he’s got those pictures saved elsewhere.”

  “I figure.”

  “Have you considered…” Tehran slides off her stool and whispers in my ear, so close that I can smell the Jameson on her warm breath. “… that maybe he’s listening to our conversation with that thing right now, or at the least tracking you with the signal?”

  No, I shake my head, I hadn’t considered that at all. Except now it was my turn to slide off my chair and whisper in Tehran’s ear.

  “No,” Tehran says, “not paranoid. Cautious.” She waves Jeremiah over and asks him to stash the phone somewhere next door for a few minutes, which he does without question. Like I said, Boston’s most professional bartender.

  “So tell me about your deal with Lee.” Tehran is satisfied enough now to speak in her normal voice, sliding back up onto her chair. I want to tell her I preferred the whisper and the warmth, but I’m not nearly that confident. She’d sidestepped my asking her out like a pro. Gentle. No hurt feelings. Then again, she hadn’t said no.

  Zesty Meyers, optimist in training.

  I tell her everything I’d learned at MIT and through Lee, some of it cross-referenced with what she already knew, having talked to many of the same people before being escorted off campus by Rosalinda Worth’s ever-present force.

  “Wow, some reporter I am.” Tehran’s clearly impressed with what I’d garnered, though she shouldn’t be. My father had always maintained that an emblem of authority—badge, license, press card—automatically makes people wary, especially people who have something to hide. And most everyone on the MIT campus had something to hide. What held Tehran back was the reporter’s rulebook and the lanes in which she operated, but to me, a messenger at heart, every street runs both ways, regardless what the signs say. But Tehran is smart and she’d been busy, too. And as I already knew, in touch with Detective Wells. Share and share alike.

  “First of all, it looks like I’m in the clear, safety-wise. Batista’s put out the word that whatever someone thought only I knew is now shared knowledge. Getting rid of me won’t stop anything. I’ll start with the account numbers, just for the sake of sequence, to keep everything straight in my own head, though you know about the ATM and account hack scam already through Lee and Worth. By the way, Worth is no joke. That lady was straight-up CIA, posted in Libya for a stint, Turkey, Poland. She’s covered some ground.”

  “Should I be surprised?”

  “No. MIT, beyond hosting heads of state and presidents, which requires some serious knowledge of security measures, has a pipeline of engineers and government contracts for defense, weapons, cyber-warfare; anything you can think of, they’re pretty much spearheading it. These contracts are worth billions of dollars and billions more if we start talking endowment money from big-ticket donors. It’s no surprise they’d cover up this hacking scheme Rambir thought up, maybe with Professor Fuji, using those idiots at the card game. There’s your Russian connection, coke and whores. It didn’t take a genius for Katanya to realize there was way more money being thrown around than there should be and to work it back to Rambir and Fuji to cut him and his boss, Namestnikov, a slice. And I’ve been told Namestnikov is probably dead?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “So who could kill a Russian crime boss and his right-hand man and think he can get away with it without retaliation?”

  I don’t have an answer to that, but I say, “Left-hand man. They only found his left.”

  “Ugh, Zesty, that’s terrible. You do that a lot?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Put shit out there to see what sticks, gets a rise out of people?”

  “Beats small talk,” I say.

  “Who told you that?”

  “I know, ‘you love me, I’m perfect, now change.’” I finish my beer and smile at Tehran with a foam mustache.

  “God, Zesty. You really are a piece of work.” Anitra Tehran shakes her head with a bemused frown on her face. Or is it disgusted? “Worse even than Batista told me.”

  “You asked?” A glimmer of hope.

  “Try to focus, please. Katanya dead. Namestnikov gone. Who could make this happen?”

  “And don’t forget Powers and McGowan trying to catch the Roshan case so bad they’d drag his body across to their side of town.”

  “Right. Excuse my shitty Shakespeare, but methinks something stinks in Cambridge.”

  “Amen to that.” I wave Jeremiah away as he gestures to our glasses. I’ve got about two hours before my set at the Hong Kong and tipsy won’t work well for me, though I’d probably burn off the alcohol by the time I bike it up Mass Ave.

  “Well, here’s what I got.” Tehran produces a small leather-bound reporter’s notepad, flips it open. “It seems like those one hundred and thirty-seven account numbers were months old and unless there are other files with other accounts on them, it looks like Rambir hit the brakes on the money train a while ago.”

  “Why would he do that?” Did Worth warn him off? Cut a deal that everything could go back to normal if he just ceased and desisted, could even keep his windfall from the scam? That kind of deal would have had to involve Worth’s overseers at MIT and Lee’s handlers at the highest levels of the FBI, too. Those were federal crimes. Money laundering. Mail fraud. Old hat for the Boston branch of the FBI. Nothing they hadn’t done before with a lot more bodies to bury.

  Tehran’s answer is not something I expected: “Those files that Rambir had on there? The Monopoly names? He’d moved on to another scam, something he didn’t need to share to get
the money out.”

  “Which was what?”

  “Ransomware.” Tehran’s juiced now, having caught the missing pieces I provided, fitting everything together. “Do you know what that is, Zesty?”

  “I’m assuming it still involves hacking into somebody’s computer,” I say. “Beyond that…”

  “It’s actually pretty old-school in nature, but yes, it starts with a hack. Rambir could target a computer, pretty much any computer he wanted, and send the user something they’d click on, which would then download a compromised file onto their hard drive. Anything, really, it could be a PDF, a picture. Or he could entice them to join an infected file-sharing network, like a pirated music- or video-streaming service. Let the algorithm figure out what the user was interested in and send them something to click on. Once it’s embedded, the ransomware actually searches and filters files that are likely to be valuable to the owner of the computer, like old photos, compromising or just sentimental, tax filings, investment data—”

  “Files with Monopoly names. Shell companies. LLCs.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay, so the computers are infiltrated. What then?”

  “The files get compromised. Rambir encrypts the data and then offers to unencrypt it, basically sell back the data to the owner. Literally ransoming the information, just like kidnappers sending a ransom note demanding payment.”

  “Except now instead of a live body it’s information they’re holding.”

  But the issue with kidnapping is always about getting paid. Kidnapping generally fails because the kidnappers have to collect their money at some point. And that’s when they either get smoked or arrested. So how did Rambir get paid? Or is that when he was killed, when he went to pick up his payment?

  “Do you know what Bitcoin is, Zesty?”

  “Some new Internet currency?”

  “Exactly. Rambir takes his payments in Bitcoin and it’s basically untraceable. At a later date he can sell off his collection of Bitcoins on a private exchange, which is pretty murky to begin with, and walk away with cold hard currency.”

  “That’s fucking insane,” I say. “There’s no guarantee Bitcoin is going to be worth anything in two days, let alone two years. It’s not regulated, right? It’s not recognized by any country. It’s a fucking scam. Those Monopoly names? He might as well be paid in Monopoly money. It’s not real cash, it’s a fucking computer program!”