“And what about Scanlon?”
“I don’t know,” he says, “But their level of interest sure went up when that explosive was found in his apartment.”
Jessie comes in to join the club, but by the look on her face, my guess is she hasn’t solved the crime. “I have a little strange news and a lot of bad. Which do you want first?”
I would opt for bad, but Bradley chooses strange.
“We’ve been checking into life insurance policies on the victims,” she says. “The strange one is Helen Mizell. We can’t find the third beneficiary, besides the two sons. Her name is Marcia Carnow, and it was just fifty thousand.”
“Why can’t you find her?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe she was using an assumed name, but there is no Marcia Carnow that fits the circumstances. The address given was bogus.”
“Can you follow the money?” Bradley asks.
“Not so far. An account was opened and then closed, apparently only to receive this money. Then it was wired to an offshore account; we can’t trace it.”
“So what do you make of it?” Bradley asks.
“No way to tell, obviously. Could be we’re just not seeing something that’s right in front of us. There’s just no one else to ask.”
“This whole thing can’t be about fifty thousand dollars,” I say. Then, “That’s the strange news; what’s the bad?”
“There are no similar situations among the other victims. Most of them had life insurance policies; in fact, they all did except for Decker, the gas station owner. But every one checks out; they all had spouses or kids as beneficiaries. Nothing suspicious, and only Brookings and Randowsky had policies for substantial amounts. I don’t think this is the answer,” Jessie says.
Another unproductive meeting breaks up, leaving me disappointed that my insurance idea, even though I knew it was a longshot, didn’t pan out. Phelan, Scanlon, and the now-deceased Gero have to be getting something out of this, but we’re not getting any closer to finding out what that is.
The phone rings, and I can immediately hear the anxiety in James McKinney’s voice. He gets right to the point.
“Julie called me.”
Rather than conduct the conversation on the phone, Nate and I go to McKinney’s house.
At this point, a call from Julie Phelan qualifies as a major development, and we’re going to want to go over every detail carefully.
When we arrive and knock on the door, McKinney opens it without exposing himself to anyone outside; he stands behind the door to shield himself. This is one scared, careful guy.
He had said he was going to hide after hearing that Phelan threatened him personally. I thought he meant he would leave his home, and that’s the first thing I ask him about.
“I stayed in a hotel for a couple of days, but it was near here and didn’t feel any safer,” he says. “So I came here to get some things, and now I’m leaving for a good long time.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not going to share that information with you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t trust it won’t get in the wrong hands. I’m sorry, Lieutenant, and this is nothing against you personally, but do you realize what happened the last time? I told you that Phelan might be in the cabin, and the next thing I know he’s threatening me for turning on him. Somehow he found out that I spoke to you.”
“Maybe Julie told him.”
“Julie didn’t know.”
“When did Julie call you this time?”
“Right before I called you. So just like forty-five minutes ago.”
“What did she say?”
“That I had to trust her, that she was going to do what was right. She sounded scared, almost panicked.”
“What else?”
“She said that something terrible was going to happen if she didn’t stop it. She said she didn’t know what it was yet, but her father said that ‘all of them would pay.’ Then she said she had to get off the phone, but that I should trust her. I had the feeling that she heard someone coming and couldn’t talk.”
“Were there any background noises? Anything that might help identify where she was?” Nate asks.
McKinney thinks for a few moments. “You know, I think so … yeah. It made it a little hard to hear her. It sounded like there were cars going by, like she was on a highway or something.”
“Anything else?”
“No, not that I can remember. I wasn’t thinking too clearly; she sounded like she was in over her head on this, like she was trying to stay in control of something but couldn’t do it. She doesn’t deserve this.”
“What phone did she call you on?” I ask.
“My cell phone.”
“Did your caller ID show you what phone she was on? Was it hers?”
“It said ‘Unknown Caller,’ so it couldn’t have been hers. Hers comes through with her name on it.”
“We need to examine your phone records to determine where the call came from. We can get a warrant, but it would be faster if you would authorize it now.”
“Of course. Absolutely. Whatever you need, and whatever gets us beyond this. But I’m out of here. I’ll be back when I see Phelan in handcuffs or worse on television. And maybe not even then.”
He gives us the cell number that received the call and signs a note authorizing complete access. We could obviously get the information without it, but it will save us a couple of hours, and hours could be important if Julie’s warning is right and something big is going to happen.
Nate and I ask him a bunch more questions, but he has no more answers. He seems to calm down some as we talk, but clearly the stress of it all is getting to him. He mentions a few times that he “didn’t sign on for this.” I think all of this may be having an effect on the idyllic relationship; fear has a tendency to do that.
As we’re about to leave, I tell him to be careful.
“Oh, I will,” he says. “This is embarrassing … but I bought it online.”
With that he opens a couple of buttons of his shirt, revealing a bulletproof vest under it. “I don’t know if it would work, and I sure hope I don’t find out, but it makes me feel better. I’m just glad no one in the office has seen it; they’d mock the hell out of me.”
“Looks pretty solid,” Nate says. “What kind of work do you do?”
“I’m a broker.”
Nate points to me. “You should talk to him; he’s got all the money.”
McKinney’s recounting of the conversation with Julie puts her role in question.
We’ve been operating under the assumption that Julie is neck deep into the conspiracy with her father. It seemed that, even though she may not have been in it from the beginning, she at least moved to the point where she was abetting it.
We believed this because of the note in the cabin that Phelan left when he committed the murder. In it he threatened McKinney, in effect vowing revenge for McKinney going to the police and revealing his whereabouts at the cabin. The only way that Phelan could have known that McKinney was talking to us is if Julie told him.
But there is always the possibility that Julie had become her father’s prisoner and had no choice but to tell him about McKinney. It seems less logical than our original theory, but the recent call supports it.
Like everything else in this frustrating case, it could go either way. And bottom line: it doesn’t matter. We are doing our best to find Julie, and once we have, we’ll figure out where she stands.
Jessie comes in to update Nate and me on the check into McKinney’s phone records. The call from Julie to him lasted thirty-two seconds, a time which is consistent with his recounting of the content.
“It’s from a burner phone,” Jessie says. “Purchased almost two months ago from a 7–Eleven in Elmwood Park. Paid for in cash.”
“Obviously Phelan was planning ahead,” Nate says.
“Was there a GPS in it?” Almost all phones have GPS s
ignals which the phone company can use to locate it. The only exceptions are certain primitive burner phones.
Jessie nods. “There was. The call was made from a rest stop off of Route 80, near Parsippany.”
“So they’re on the move,” Nate says.
Jessie nods. “They might be, but the phone isn’t. It’s still there. They must have thrown it away after she made the call.”
So “there” is where Nate and I go. It’s about a twenty-five-minute drive, and according to Jessie’s reading of satellite photos, the rest area is in a secluded, wooded area.
My hope is that we find the phone; my fear is that we’re going to find a body along with it. There is always the possibility that Phelan discovered Julie making the call and killed her for it. Knowing that she made the call would be a clear reason for discarding the phone; if he were savvy enough to buy a burner phone in advance, he would likely have known that a phone GPS can be tracked.
It doesn’t make sense that she would have discarded the phone after using it. If she really is trying to stop what her father is doing, then she has no reason to avoid detection.
On the way, Nate calls and requests that four other officers meet us at the rest stop. The phone might not be easy to locate; if it were, it would probably have been found and taken by someone else. And while it is still giving off GPS signals, that might end soon. Once the battery runs out, the phone will no longer be able to be seen by the satellite towers.
Nate and I arrive first. There is a small building which includes men’s and women’s bathrooms, with vending machines outside. Two cars are in the small parking lot; a man and woman are in the front seat of one, about to drive away.
Nate goes over to them to make sure they didn’t find the phone, while I look to see if there are any security cameras in the area. Once I determine that there aren’t, I go into the men’s room to see if I can find at least one of the people from the remaining car.
The open doorway leads to a hall that bends around a corridor into the restroom. A stall door opens and a guy, probably fifty years old, comes out and sees me, reacting with surprise. He hadn’t heard me come in because there had been no sound of a door opening and closing.
“I didn’t—” he starts, but doesn’t finish.
“State police,” I say, and based on his reaction, I have turned his surprise into shock. It’s lucky he’s finished in the stall, this experience will probably keep him constipated for a week. He seems so scared that I half expect someone else to come out of the stall after him.
“What’s the matter? I…”
“I need to know if you found a missing phone, here at the rest stop.”
“No, I…”
He hasn’t finished a sentence yet, but the ones he’s started haven’t been too promising. “Thank you,” I say, and leave. He follows me out and gets in his car, driving off. There must not be anyone in the women’s restroom; either that or he left her behind, since there are no cars remaining.
Nate and I start to search for the phone; there aren’t that many places it could be. When we don’t find it in the immediate area, we expand our search to the wooded area near the parking lot. Within five minutes, Nate finds it on the ground. It has 4 percent remaining in the battery.
We search the same area for any other evidence that can be of value, like maybe a map showing exactly where they were going, or a signed confession. We don’t find either.
The cops that we called to the scene are no longer needed, so when they show up a minute later, we send them away. Nate carefully places the phone in an evidence bag, and we head back to the station.
“He must have caught her with it,” Nate says. “Why else would he throw it away?”
I can’t think of any other reason. He’d be worried we could trace it, so he got rid of it. It also cements the idea that Julie is not there of her own free will, and might well be in significant danger. Phelan does not seem to be the sentimental-father type.
The forensics people come in to check for prints on the phone and run them for identification. It doesn’t take long, mainly because there is no running necessary. The phone has been wiped clean of prints.
“Why the hell would he bother to do that?” Nate asks. I’m not keeping an exact count, but that probably makes three thousand questions about this case that I can’t answer. So Nate continues, “The only way anyone who found that phone would check the prints is if we got it, and he’d be aware we already know whose phone it is. Any passerby who found it is not going to dust it for prints.”
“At least we didn’t find a body,” I say. “And it now seems more likely that Julie is not part of this. She clearly made the call in secret, though Phelan found out. She wouldn’t have done that if they were partners.”
All that is left for us to do is send cops to check if Phelan got gas east or west of the rest stop, or if they stopped to eat. Even if we get lucky, we’ll only learn which direction they were going—but then again, you never know.
In this case, we unfortunately know. Our guys find no record of gas or food purchases.
We still have no idea where Phelan is, or what “terrible thing” he and Scanlon are planning.
Rod Scanlon was freaking out.
He had just watched on television as some state police captain identified him and Julie Phelan as persons of interest in the hunt for the killers. That flew in the face of everything that he had been promised, and was of such huge significance that he needed time to process it.
An absolute guarantee of anonymity is the reason he signed on, that and the obvious lure of becoming wealthier than he had ever imagined. He initially had just one job to do, and though it was the climactic and most important job of all, it would be easy to accomplish.
Then Gero was killed, which in itself was scary enough. Gero was as tough and ruthless a guy as there was on the planet, there were a lot of Iraqi terrorists who could attest to that. But he went down, and Scanlon reluctantly filled in when called upon.
He took the shot at Meyer, Phelan’s boss. But Scanlon felt there was no way the cops could have made him as the shooter; he was in and out of there quickly, and there were no pain-in-the-ass neighbors around. Meyer could not have gotten a good look at him; he was sure of that.
But the cops sure as hell knew about him; there was his face on goddamn television. Of course, that face had changed somewhat; he now had a beard and was wearing glasses, just in case of an eventuality like this. Their photograph obviously did not reflect those changes.
He was only going to have to go out once more, and then he would disappear, so he wasn’t so worried about being seen in the short term. But what about the rest of his life? Are the arrangements foolproof? Apparently not, if Gero went down.
But he kept going back to the question: How could the cops know about him? Could they have guessed it, just because he and Gero and Phelan were buddies in the army? That was certainly a possibility; once Gero went down, then they would look for connections to Phelan. Scanlon figured his name could have come up then.
He briefly considered turning himself in. Except for firing the shot at Meyer, he hadn’t committed a crime. He could go to the cops and tell them everything he knew in return for lenient treatment. He might even avoid prison time.
But then he wouldn’t get the money. The money was what it was all about; he just simply wanted to live life as a rich person. Working a job, or punching a clock, or struggling to pay the rent … that was not the way Scanlon wanted to live.
But the rules had changed. He wasn’t going to be stranded on this island, not knowing what was going on. And he was not going to take on all of this new difficulty without being compensated for it.
So he would go after the money; he would do his job.
But then he would get some answers.
The thing about explosives that not many people understand is that they’re not dangerous.
That is to say that most of the individual chemicals and compounds that make the
m up are not dangerous, until and unless they are combined in specific ways.
That is why they often can be purchased without any real scrutiny. Each of the ingredients has other, harmless uses, so there is no need to regulate them. If someone came in and asked for TNT, that would be noticed because it’s licensed and regulated. But fertilizer, as one example, can be used in explosives or to grow corn.
To further make the point, you can use a scissors to stab someone to death, but scissors have other functions, therefore sales of scissors are neither regulated nor prohibited. So it is with the chemicals in the bomb that our experts think Scanlon was making.
We’ve sent a bunch of cops out to all relevant retail stores within fifty miles to show Scanlon’s picture and try to identify any purchases he might have made. It is no surprise that they’ve learned nothing. A search of credit card records also comes up empty; if Scanlon made such purchases, he either used a fake name or paid in cash.
We’ve also put a tap on McKinney’s phone. I’m sure this required a bit of maneuvering with the judge, since McKinney is not under suspicion. But the nature of the situation, with the prospect of many more killings, must have put irresistible pressure on that judge. Fortunately, McKinney had signed over permission for us to access his phone records, and I had deliberately written up that authorization in a wide, all-inclusive manner. I suspect that was a significant factor in getting the judge to sign off on the tap.
We’re interested in McKinney’s phone for a few reasons. First of all, we want to be able to find him if we need him. He’s going into hiding, which is all well and good, but we don’t want him hiding from us.
More importantly, if he gets another call from Julie, we want to know it in the moment. We can’t afford to wait for him to report the call, or decide not to. We want the number it comes from, in order to trace the GPS location if possible.
We also want to know what is said on any such call. McKinney is compromised by his feelings toward Julie, and while we don’t currently consider it likely that she is complicit in her father’s crimes, she could say something that McKinney might not want to promptly relay to us, if at all. We want to know the content of the calls firsthand.
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