by John Douglas
Weller hit the button and the picture froze, jittering on a single frame. “You want me to back up?”
“No, no. Look at this.”
Weller knelt next to me. “What? What am I looking at?”
“The paper on the desk. Look at the paper.”
“It’s too blurry.” Weller fished out a pair of reading glasses, perched them on his nose, and got so close to the screen that his breath fogged the glass. “It’s aUSA Today.”
“Mook? You hand outUSA Today?”
He straightened, proud of the corporate largesse he was allowed to dispense. “It’s complimentary with the room.”
“But you have a stack on the desk here?”
“Yes, but not today,USA Today doesn’t print on Saturday.”
“That’s okay. Do you have Thursday’s paper?”
Mook looked confused. “No, I’m sure I threw it away.”
Mariposa looked up from her hands and said,“USA Today?”
“Sí, tiene usted USA Today?”
Mariposa went to her cleaning cart, into the plastic trash bag suspended on the handle, and withdrew a paper, stained with coffee. She handed it across the desk to Weller.
“It’s from Thursday,” Weller said. We looked at the front page of our paper and the front page of the paper on-screen. It was impossible to read the headlines, but we could see the layout, and they weren’t the same.
“But if that’s Thursday’s paper, and that was taped Thursday evening, either someone is reading old news,” Katie said, “or this videotape has been switched.”
Weller looked at me with a big smile. “God, Donovan, she’s not only great looking, she’s smart, too.”
Katie narrowed her eyes. “Are all men pigs, Weller, or is it just men in law enforcement?”
My cell phone rang. “Jake? It’s Trevor.”
“You at the tech lab?”
“They stopped me at the security gate.”
“Show them your badge.”
“I did. We’ve been locked out, Jake, all of us, due to national security.”
“Great.”
“It just gets better, Jake. The local FBI office has confiscated all the files.”
“What about the employees?”
I heard the rustle and shift as Trevor shouldered the phone and checked his notes. “I got a list of employees from the guard at the gate.”
“Good work.”
“She thought I was cute,” Trevor said.
“We all think you’re cute. Have you talked to anyone?”
“The first place I went was the receptionist’s, because they know all the dirt. Guess who beat me there?”
“The FBI.”
“I got to admit you’re good, Jake. A damn psychic.”
I ignored the sarcasm.
“They’ve told all the employees not to talk to us.”
“Any other news?”
“Yeah, Jake. I think I found a little birdie up a tree.”
“Huh?”
“Call me from a pay phone, Jake.” He gave me a number.
9
“Why the cloak-and-dagger?”
“I just have this feeling, you know?”
I’ve learned to respect Trevor’s gut. It’s saved me twice. Once, when a man we thought was dead turned out to be very much alive, and once when Trevor talked me out of a car that had been wired with explosives.
When Trevor answered, I heard the thump of dance music in the background. “Where the hell are you?”
“A place in Raleigh.” I heard a smile creep into Trevor’s voice. “You’ll like this, Jake.”
“What have you got?”
“I’ve got Bob Shumfeld, the dead man’s partner, that’s what I’ve got. I went to his house, staked it out, and then I followed him, not having anything else to do.”
“Okay, so where are you?”
“It’s called the Honey Tree.”
“Sounds like a strip club.”
“How would you know what a strip club sounds like?”
“That’s classified.” Half an hour later I pulled into the parking lot under a sign that announced a free lunch buffet. The lot was jammed with cars, including Bob Shumfeld’s Porsche 911.
Trevor was just inside the door. The beat of the dance music spilled into the lobby, and I had to holler into Trevor’s ear for him to hear me. “I figured you’d be inside, dollar bills in your teeth.”
“My mama told me that if I ever went into a place like this, I’d see something I shouldn’t see. So I went the first chance I got and damn if she wasn’t right.”
“Yeah? What did you see?”
“My father.”
We paid the membership fee, twenty bucks each for the free buffet, and walked into the main room. On one wall was a long bar and steam table. In the center of the room, ringed in tiny lights and dazed men clutching bills, was the stage. A girl, naked except for a sequined G-string, hung upside down in the center of the stage, her legs wrapped around a brass pole. Along the left wall, opposite the bar, were tables.
Trevor pointed out our man. He was small, maybe five-seven, carrying thirty pounds of extra weight and sporting a blond mustache that curled up at the ends. He was shoveling in prime rib as a girl who should have been in school danced between his legs, her breasts swaying just inches from his face. The little man’s eyes glittered.
I shouted into Trevor’s ear, “When I was working out of the Detroit office, the guys used to cross the river into Canada where the women dance naked. They called it the Windsor Ballet.”
Trevor laughed. “But you didn’t go.”
“I was new to the Bureau, and just married. I don’t know who I was more afraid of finding out, Hoover or my wife.”
“Well, here you are, Jake, this is what you missed. Nice, huh?”
I grimaced. “It’s not the same when you have a daughter. Not the same at all.”
We waited until the song ended and the girl left fifty bucks richer. Trevor sat on one side of Shumfeld and I sat on the other. Trevor flashed his federal agent ID and said, “We’d like to talk to you.”
Shumfeld looked from Trevor to me, bored. “Can’t a guy eat his lunch in peace?”
Another girl approached the table. “Hi, Bob.”
“Hi, Mary,” Shumfeld said. “Gentlemen, this is by far the finest young lady in the entire South. I get wood just saying her name. Mary, these men here are federal agents.”
Mary wiggled, giggled, and said, “LikeCSI?”
“No, like FBI,” Trevor said. “Real cops. Not TV cops.”
“How about a table dance? On the house. Nothing but the best for our heroes in blue,” Mary said.
“Does your mother know where you work?” Trevor said.
Mary smiled. “You want to meet her?”
Trevor growled and Mary scurried away with a bounce and a rippling finger wave. Trevor stood up, tugging on Shumfeld’s arm. “Come on, let’s get out of here. She could poke someone’s eye out with those things.”
“But I’m not done,” Shumfeld whined, and grabbed at a plate piled high with cheesecake.
I pulled out a pair of cuffs and let them dangle from my finger. “We can make this real embarrassing, if that’s what you want.”
“No, no, I’ll go. Someone might think I’m into kinky.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t want that, would we?” Trevor said.
A bouncer the size of Maine came up from the west. “Everything okay here?”
“Yeah, Sammy, everything’s fine.”
Trevor flipped open his wallet for the third time. “Federal agents, Sammy. We’re not arresting anybody, we just want to talk to Bob here. You watch his cheesecake, huh?”
Sammy raised an eyebrow. “You be okay, Mr. Shumfeld? You want me to call someone?”
Shumfeld assured Sammy everything was fine. Trevor and I walked him out into the parking lot where the sun made us shield our eyes from the glare. The Southern summer air was so thick you could use it for seat cov
ers.
“In the car.”
Trevor sat behind Shumfeld and I sat behind the wheel. I cranked the AC and Shumfeld adjusted the vent to blow on his outstretched neck.
“I don’t know how much more I can tell you than I told the police.”
“When was the last time you saw your partner?” I said.
“Monday night.”
“Did you think anything was out of the ordinary?”
Shumfeld thought a moment, then shook his head. “No, nothing.”
“How well did you know your partner?”
“Not well. But nobody knew him all that well.”
“But you were partners.”
“I was the moneyman, that’s all. I raised over six point two from VCs.”
“Venture capitalists,” I said.
“Right.”
“What about Ms. Callahan?”
Shumfeld softened. “Everyone loved Janice. She was the sweetest woman I’d ever met. Not to mention cute, like a kitten. The kind you’d like to come home to, you know?”
I noticed he talked about her in the past tense. “But your partner was coming home to her, right?”
Shumfeld snapped back. “Jesus, no way. I mean, they had a great working relationship, but romance, get outta here. My partner was a lot of things, but charming he wasn’t. To tell the truth, he didn’t take very good care of himself. Brilliant, but not exactly a social animal.”
“So why would Mr. Callahan want to kill him?” Trevor said.
Shumfeld looked back, slower this time. “Who knows? Maybe the guy believed those pictures. Christ, he was stupid enough.”
“Are you saying those pictures were fakes?”
Shumfeld nodded, as if I were particularly slow. “Yeah, Sherlock, they’re fake. Haven’t you looked at them?”
“Not closely, no.”
“I thought you were a big-shot investigator, Hollywood Jake Donovan, and you couldn’t tell those pictures were phony? Jesus.”
Trevor leaned forward until his voice was right behind Shumfeld’s ear. “I looked at those pictures, and they looked real to me, asshole.”
Shumfeld got as far away as the Lincoln’s dashboard would let him. “Okay, what about the tattoo?”
“What tattoo?”
“Exactly.” Shumfeld smiled and crossed his arms. “No tattoo. That wasn’t Jan’s body. It was Jan’s face, sure, but not her body. Jan had a Carolina Tarheel tattooed on her butt, everyone knew that. It was a big joke in the office because of so many Duke fans, you know?”
“Apparently not everyone knew about the tattoo,” I said.
Shumfeld laughed. “And I saw my partner naked in a steam room, once, and trust me, that wasn’t his body either. Christ, the guy in the picture was hung like a horse. Made me think of my boyhood back on the farm. And Bill, well, Bill was hung more like a duck.”
Trevor stifled a laugh.
“Okay, so they weren’t having an affair. Who would benefit from your partner’s death?”
Shumfeld snorted. “A lot of people. Competition, foreign governments, anyone who believed in personal hygiene.”
“So he had a lot of enemies.”
“People didn’t like him, Mr. Donovan. He was irritating, you know, like crabs.”
“Can you tell us what you’re working on?”
“I can’t.” Shumfeld zipped his lips. “No can do. What I know, which isn’t much, is classified. I can tell you that it is a weapon. Space-age, Jetsons stuff. Bill was talking to people in D.C. this week and it looked like we were going to get the green light for a prototype.” Shumfeld looked down at his hands, folded together in his lap. “I guess that’s all over now.”
“What do you mean?”
Shumfeld looked up at me, tears brimming, ready to spill. “Because without Bill, we’ve got nothing.”
“But you must have files, schematics, whatever it is you design with.”
Shumfeld clenched his jaw. “We looked everywhere. It’s what the FBI is looking for, I’m sure. And believe me, when they don’t find Bill’s files, I don’t want to be there.”
“Do you know who he talked to in D.C.?”
“Guy from DARPA.”
When I looked puzzled, Trevor said, “The Defense Acquisition Research Project Agency. They’re fast-track in weapons systems development.”
That fit with what Mrs. De Vries and the congressman had told me. “Do you have this DARPA man’s name?”
“Uh, yeah, I think maybe. In my laptop.”
Trevor laughed. “You mean Little Miss Teen in there?”
For the first time, Shumfeld seemed to relax. “Ha ha. Right. I get it.” He pointed across the lot. “It’s right over there, in my car.”
We got out of the Lincoln, but before we could move across the lot, three gray sedans pulled in. One stopped in front of us. Two young men in dark suits got out and I could almost smell Quantico Creek on them.
One of the dark suits saluted us, a finger to his brow. “Jake, Trevor, good afternoon. I hope you’re enjoying the show.” He smiled and glanced up at the Honey Tree sign. “I hear the buffet is excellent.”
“Hi, Tim,” I said. “How’s Margie?”
“Fine, Jake.”
“The boys?”
“Tim junior is starting middle school this year. Joseph is in kindergarten.”
“They grow up too fast, Tim. Give Margie my best.”
“Will do.”
The second suit moved in and put a grip on Shumfeld’s arm. “We missed you at your house.”
Shumfeld looked at me and said, “Merry Christmas, Mr. Donovan.”
Four other agents spread out and put us into a nice triangulated kill zone as Shumfeld was stuffed into the back of the first sedan. As quickly as they had come, they were gone, a swift little motorcade hauling away our witness.
“What do we do now?” I said.
“We break into his car and get the laptop,” Trevor said.
“Okay. With what?”
Trevor smiled, popped the trunk of the Lincoln, reached into his big black bag, and pulled out a slim jim. “Man’s got to be prepared.”
10
“That’s all he said, ‘Merry Christmas, Mr. Donovan’?” Katie was tapping out passwords on Shumfeld’s laptop, without success.
“Yeah. In August.”
We were back in my hotel room, Trevor and I hunched over Katie’s shoulders so close I could smell her shampoo.
“Do you think you guys could give me some air here?”
Trevor and I stepped back.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s try, Santa…elves…stockings…”
“Candy cane,” Trevor said, “carols…holly…wreathes…”
“Jesus…Bethlehem…manger,” I added. Each time we gotINVALID PASSWORD . “I had no idea how much cultural baggage comes with Christmas.”
“What if we look at it another way,” Katie said. “How about happy holidays…season’s greetings.”
“Feliz Navidad,” Trevor said.
“Still nothing.” Katie slumped back in her chair. “We could be here until New Year’s.” She leaned into the keyboard and typed, “Happy New Year.” The screen, in response, readINVALID PASSWORD .
I paced from the bathroom to the windows and back. “Wait a minute. Why would a guy named Shumfeld wish me a merry Christmas? Isn’t he Jewish?”
Trevor opened his file and found Shumfeld’s data. “Yeah. He’s Jewish.”
“So why would he do that?”
“I’ll try Hanukkah.” Katie typed it in. Still nothing.
“What about Rosh Hashanah?” Katie and Trevor stared at me. “Jewish New Year. You people need to widen your circle of friends.”
“How do you spell that?” Katie asked.
I told her. Katie typed. Nothing.
“Wait a minute. That girl at the club. What was her name?”
Katie looked over her shoulder. “Jake, did you meet a girl at the club? And did she shake her moneymaker?”
“Try Mary Christmas, as in the name Mary.”
Katie entered the name, the screen blinked, and up came Mary, the girl at the Honey Tree, dressed in a Santa hat, black boots, and whatever God and a good cosmetic surgeon had conspired to give her. “Mary Christmas,” Katie muttered. “Someone should kick this guy’s Christmas ass.”
“Nice talk. Can you get his calendar or should we look at Mary a little longer?”
In a few minutes we had Shumfeld’s full schedule, including his partner’s flights out of town. There were three, all to D.C., all within the past month.
“Get the flight manifests. Find out if Janice Callahan went with him.”
Trevor made the call, giving the airline his identification number. “They’ll get back to us,” he said.
In the meantime, we cruised through Shumfeld’s e-mail. There were the usual pornographic sites promising uninhibited farm animals and cheerleaders. Business mail was uninteresting except for one from a man named Ted. In it, there were several mentions of meetings, a restaurant, and reservations for three for the previous Tuesday.
“I know that restaurant,” Katie said. “It’s in Old Town Alexandria.”
“Can we find Ted’s full name?”
Katie opened Shumfeld’s address book. “Ted Baker. And guess where he works?”
“DARPA,” Trevor said.
“DARPA it is.”
We called DARPA offices and were told that Ted Baker had been home sick since Wednesday morning. Katie made sympathetic small talk and asked for Ted’s home number. With this, we found his address in Alexandria.
“God bless the Internet,” Katie said, “the investigator’s best friend.”
“Not to mention child pornographers’,” Trevor said.
“Trevor, Trevor,” Katie said, “the glass is always half-empty with you, isn’t it?”
I dialed Ted Baker’s home number and got his answering machine. His voice sounded young, confident, and all business.
I hung up and Katie said, “By the way, Mrs. De Vries called while you were out. I told her you were at a strip club and would get back to her.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she hoped you wouldn’t put that on your expense report.”