The Step Between

by Penny Mickelbury

  What they had to tell Paolo instantly mitigated his annoyance at having sat in the truck waiting for them for ninety minutes. They had, they told him while profusely apologizing, forgotten that he was waiting for them. So shocked had they been at Beth Childress’s willingness to open up and share information with them, they’d forgotten practically everything else.

  J. D. MacDonald was a Canadian, Beth Childress told them, and his real name was Jimmy Sanderson—he’d confessed that soon after finalizing the partnership. He had an arrest record in Canada, he said—he’d embezzled funds from the trucking company where he’d been a vice president—and hadn’t wanted to risk losing the chance to partner OnShore. Harry had met him on a fishing trip just after his partner of twenty years had been killed.

  “Hold it a second.” Jake had raised his hand. “This guy admits he lied about something as serious as his identity and your husband didn’t kick him out the door then?”

  She smile ruefully. “To Harry, that was a sign of true honesty, of integrity. The man ’fessed up, owned his mistakes, and was just hoping for a new chance. Harry believed everybody deserves a second chance.” Besides, she’d added, J.D. was a lot younger than Harry, who thought that was a key benefit.

  But Harry hadn’t liked J.D. initially, Beth said, because he was a braggart and Harry was anything but. However, beneath the braggadocio was an astute businessman, despite his youth, with a knowledge of trucking and a willingness to make a cash infusion into a going concern. “That was one of J.D.’s favorite phrases: ‘going concern.’ And he seemed to know quite a lot about the packaging industry, which I thought odd but which didn’t bother Harry.”

  “Why did you think it odd, Mrs. Childress?” Carole Ann had asked, and had been rendered speechless by the answer.

  “What do you know about the packaging industry, Miss Gibson?” And when no reply was forthcoming, the woman had nodded her head in a confirming manner. “My point exactly: nobody outside the industry knows anything about it and J.D.’s expertise was trucking. And I guess I’d better tell you the other half of why I was a little put out with Harry: right after he loses Gordy, who’d been his partner for all those years, he’s ready to take up with this J.D. character. ‘That’s what you’ll do if something happens to me,’ I told him. ‘Take up with some other woman before I’m cold in the ground.’ ”

  “So you think,” Carole Ann had asked, “that the meeting between your husband and J. D. MacDonald—or Sanderson—was no accident?”

  “Harry went out on the bay every chance he got. He’d play hooky from work if he heard the blues were biting. J.D. not only would refuse to go with him, he never went fishing again as far as I could tell.”

  Additionally, said Beth Childress, the sudden interest of Seaboard in the affairs of OnShore rang hollow. Seaboard was a big company and had been in business longer than OnShore and had never even acknowledged the existence of the smaller company, and didn’t need to. Then, within six months of J. D. MacDonald’s arrival, Seaboard wanted to merge with OnShore and MacDonald was so supportive of the plan that Harry Childress started looking for the money to pay back his partner’s investment and get rid of him.

  Carole Ann and Jake had always believed that Jake’s insistence on John MacDonald’s presence at the ill-fated Monday meeting had somehow triggered Grace’s kidnapping; now they had something solid to hang that belief on. Childress himself was suspicious of MacDonald, enough that he was angling to be rid of him.

  Who was John David MacDonald aka Jimmy Sanderson and what was the reason for his interest in OnShore? And what was his relationship to Seaboard? And where was he, the man calling himself J. D. MacDonald, because he hadn’t been seen since the Monday morning that all hell had broken loose? Harry’s widow had managed to locate one photograph of her husband’s partner, taken at a company picnic, and the attempt by MacDonald to avoid the camera was obvious: just as he realized the camera was aimed his way, he’d turned aside, so that only half of his face was visible. But it was enough. It was a clear, close-up shot that showed Harry Childress, half of Sanderson’s face, and another man whom Beth identified as the shipping supervisor, seated at a table before a Monopoly board. Sanderson was young, with a thin, angular face and light brown, almost blond hair.

  Carole Ann studied the photograph, thinking that there was something familiar about that profile, then chastised herself for wishful thinking. Jake had looked at it, and while he readily identified it as the man who’d brushed past him on the loading dock at OnShore, he didn’t place him in any other context. He didn’t look to Jake like anybody but J. D. MacDonald. Or Jimmy Sanderson.

  Paolo let them off at the door of the office building and drove the truck around to the service bay. They stood on the steps, neither of them reaching for the card that was required for entry. Carole Ann inhaled deeply several times, taking the cold air into her lungs and feeling it clear her head. Jake watched her, waiting for her to tell him what was on her mind.

  “Jake?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Since there’s no longer an OnShore, we’re going to have to go after Seaboard, to find out who and what they are. Maybe if we know that, we can know—”

  He patted her shoulder like he was an old man and she a young child; it was awkward but gentle and kind and loving. “We’re gonna know all there is to know, kiddo,” he said, a strange new note in his voice. “And you wanna know how I know this?”

  “I’m listening,” she said, in perfect imitation of him.

  “ ’Cause we’re a couple of bad asses who don’t scare easy and who don’t take shit off nobody. That’s how I know.”

  “Thanks for sharing,” she said dryly, and reached into her pocket for the coded security card that would open the door.

  7

  CAROLE ANN AND JAKE HAD different responses to the reaction of the Maryland authorities to their visit to Harry Childress’s widow. Sandra Cooper expressed blatant disbelief that the two of them were just paying a condolence visit to the grieving widow of a corporate client. She pointed out that a condolence call to a perfect stranger doesn’t take an hour and a half. Jake, as usual, bristled and took offense, especially at the veiled threat of some kind of legal action. But Carole Ann viewed the threats, veiled and otherwise, as posturing—standard blow-hard lawyer stuff—and swatted them away much as she would a swarm of gnats.

  Paolo’s give-and-get relationship with the state investigator named Teague was proving beneficial. In exchange for the information that the man calling himself John MacDonald was a Canadian named Sanderson and that, according to Beth Childress, he was unmarried, that he was allergic to bee stings, that his birthday was July first—Canada Day—and that he was thirty-three years old, they learned that the three top officers of Seaboard had been charged under the RICO statute with money laundering, but that the charges had been dropped—that was the sealed indictment that had showed up in Patty’s research.

  Carole Ann pondered the possibilities. There was a time when a RICO charge, almost by definition, signaled an organized crime connection; in fact, the Racketeer Influences and Corrupt Organizations Act had come about precisely to “provide new weapons of unprecedented scope for an assault upon organized crime and its roots.” Currently, however, disorganized crime was more the norm: freelance crooks these days believed themselves crafty enough to devise means and methods of embezzlement or drug trafficking sophisticated enough to escape the notice of the most sophisticated crime-fighting machinery in the world. Granted, that machinery was extraordinarily overworked and grossly underpaid, but often enough the established crime-fighting organizations cast nets wide and deep enough to bring to a bad end the careers of both categories of criminals. And that machinery also was not averse to making short-term deals designed to generate long-term results. Which, to Carole Ann, herself a past broker of many such deals on behalf of several kinds of crooks, was what the Seaboard matter smelled like.

  With Jake in pursuit of the three Se
aboard execs whose names and addresses had been supplied by Teague, Carole Ann went in search of the deal that had netted Seaboard a sealed indictment. A too expensive dinner at an embarrassingly tacky and overrated restaurant in what was left of the exclusive Maryland hunt country produced the answers that she sought. From a lawyer friend who now was an acquaintance—owing to Carole Ann’s diminished status as “some kind of private eye these days, and not a real lawyer”—she learned that Seaboard had been used to launder money for one of the big East Coast drug operations—the organized kind. That operation had tentacles that stretched from New York to Florida and it targeted the small towns of the Eastern Seaboard, ignoring what was now considered the risky proposition of doing business in Baltimore and Philadelphia and D.C. and Richmond. In exchange for a walk, Seaboard agreed to allow itself to be wired, to have an ATF agent inside on its payroll, and to help the Feds locate the other laundering centers of the drug cartel.

  “Is Seaboard that big a player in the organized crime game on the East Coast?” she asked, true astonishment creeping into her voice.

  “Look, C.A.,” her dinner guest hissed testily—her guest since she was paying for the meal—“this wasn’t my case. Why do you think I would know details like that?”

  “Because you’re the biggest and best and the baddest in this neck of the woods, Ben. And because I was wondering why it wasn’t your case, since you are and have been the attorney of choice since forever in these parts. Are these Seaboard guys new in town, that they didn’t know to call you?”

  The thick lathering on of praise succeeded. After several seconds of preening and puffing, he was ready to get down to business. “Everything about Seaboard is new except the name: it’s old and established. These new guys arrived three, four years ago with legit credentials and too much money for it to be legit.”

  “Did they by any chance come from Canada?”

  He looked at her wide-eyed and admiring. “You may not be a lawyer anymore, but you haven’t lost your touch. How’d you know they were Canadian? That’s supposed to be a deep, dark secret in the souls of the AG staff.”

  So that’s why Teague is so willing to deal, she thought, shrugging off her annoyance at the crack about her no longer being a lawyer. “It’s the missing piece of the puzzle, the upside-down question mark that’s been staring us in the face for weeks.” She could see him winding up to probe her about her case, and she handily deflected him. “But that doesn’t explain why they didn’t come to you. If they’ve got money and smarts, wouldn’t it be smart to hire the best and brightest from the local talent pool?”

  He shot her a lazy half-grin, the kind that indicates recognition of bullshit, then shook his head in resignation. He’d been bested. He acknowledged it and allowed it. “They did hire locally, in a manner of speaking. And given the deal the old bastard worked out, he couldn’t be too dumb. Though there’s no question that I would have loved to bill that one to my account.”

  She shared his chagrin, imagining the potential in legal fees for such a case: Ben billed in the five hundred dollar an hour neighborhood. “So, who was the lawyer? Somebody you know?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Some old geezer from out in Alexandria or Arlington, name of Archibald Wilson.”

  “Damn!” Jake whispered after Carole Ann filled him in on the results of her dinner meeting. “So it looks like our ol’ buddy J.D. for certain set out to get his hooks into OnShore once Seaboard was closed down by the AG.”

  She nodded. “That’s what it looks like. But it still doesn’t explain what they wanted with us. What were we supposed to tell them about Seaboard that they didn’t already know? After all, Sanderson already was partners with—what are their names? The three Seaboard execs.”

  “Huey, Louie, and Dewey,” Jake said with all the bitterness of a hunter whose prey remains elusive. “The way I figure it, Childress’s suspicions of Sanderson were growing. Here’s this guy pushing for a merger with this big company that couldn’t have needed tiny, insignificant OnShore. Childress was a smart guy, C.A. He was doing the math but the numbers weren’t adding up.”

  “And when you insisted on seeing both Childress and MacDonald together—”

  “MacDonald panicked, took out Childress, and covered his tracks by burning the whole thing to cinders.”

  “So who’s the John Doe who burned with Childress? And you’re assuming, by the way, that Childress was an innocent. Suppose he was part of the scheme, too?”

  “And MacDonald killed him why?” Jake posed, sounding like the homicide detective he’d been for two decades. “And who the hell is that John Doe? I think he’s important. I think he was the one who was dangerous to MacDonald, not Childress. At least in terms of what he knew, because I don’t think Childress knew diddly about money laundering.”

  “Hmmm,” Carole Ann replied, the business of thinking etched in her face. “But he knew something, Jake. Remember what Beth said? They’d argued quite a bit, disagreed on how to handle things. Childress was so displeased with whatever MacDonald was doing that he was looking for the money to buy him out.”

  It was Jake’s turn to ponder. “Yeah, that’s true, as far as it goes. But I think Childress was the kind of guy who, if he thought something illegal was going down, would call the cops so fast he’d make himself dizzy.”

  Carole Ann took that in and accepted it; after all, Jake had met the man, and had responded positively to him. And despite her initial misgivings about the OnShore/Seaboard job, she had never questioned Jake’s character assessment abilities. “But why burn down the building?” she asked. “To conceal money laundering, all you have to do is download the computer. What we have here is overkill. Why?” And for an answer, she received a knock on her office door. “Come on in,” she called out, and the door opened to admit Paolo Petrocelli looking like the proverbial cat with bird feathers stuck to his whiskers.

  “Could you look any more pleased with yourself?”

  “I could,” he said, expanding his grin, “but it wouldn’t be in keeping with my normal humility.”

  “Jesus, humor from the FBI?” Jake said.

  “I don’t work for the FBI,” Paolo said self-righteously, “I work for funny people.”

  Jake snorted and Carole Ann laughed and Paolo made for the coffeepot, poured himself a cup of what he knew would be fresh-brewed Ethiopia Sidamo, and took his cup to the sofa.

  “Truthfully, as much as I’d like to, I can’t take the credit for this one. And I urge you, whatever you pay Patty Baker, she’s worth double that! Maybe even triple! The woman is unbelievable. And . . .” he lowered his voice conspiratorially, “the most competent safecracker I’ve ever met.”

  Jake adopted his “I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t care anyway” look while Paolo continued to gaze at him penetratingly. Carole Ann looked from one to the other expectantly. “Safecracker?” she finally asked.

  Paolo shook his head and his ponytail flipped back and forth. “Not that kind. The new kind. The people who break into coded computer files.”

  Carole Ann cleared her throat. “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Only if you get caught, I think,” Paolo responded with a laugh and a flick of his hand that dismissed his employers with an “I don’t want to know” message. “Anyway. As I was saying, Patty found Eve Islington for me. She’s calling herself Ruth Simmons, which, I suppose, isn’t technically a pseudonym, though she’s never officially been divorced from Dicky Rae.”

  Carole Ann sat up straight. “She hasn’t?” She recalled how much Patty had said Islington was worth and shuddered at the potential for disaster. But, she reminded herself, there were no dead bodies connected with the Islington matter. Just a missing one. “Any word on Annabelle?”

  Paolo shook his head again. “Nope. But I figured maybe you could ask Eve—Ruth—when you see her.”

  “When I see her? Who said I’m seeing her?”

  “You ever heard of the Garden of Eden?” Paolo asked.


  Her forehead wrinkled in a slight frown. “That beauty salon-spa-health club place way out in the country somewhere, out Route 66?” Carole Ann asked, then shock overtook puzzlement as reality dawned. “That’s Ruthie Eva’s? From a cosmetology certificate to the most glamorous day spa in the metropolitan area?” She laughed out loud.

  “And glamorous doesn’t begin to tell the truth about the place. It really is a paradise. And it’s out I-81, past 66.”

  “You’ve been here?” Jake’s eyebrows had inched up to his hairline. “On whose budget?”

  Paolo grinned and raised his coffee mug toastlike in Jake’s direction, then he turned back to business. “Eve sees only a few customers personally, most of them of long standing. But on occasion she’ll see someone new if . . .”

  “. . . the price is right,” Jake completed the sentence. “And how much does it cost to get tended to by Eve herself?”

  Paolo shifted his position and turned more toward Carole Ann, hoping that’s where he’d find the necessary amount of understanding. “Seven-fifty.”

  The three of them sat quietly, each imagining what aspect of paradise could be had for seven hundred and fifty dollars. “Do they do mud baths?” Carole Ann asked almost dreamily, and Jake got up and stormed out of the office, closing the door not quietly.

  Paolo reported how Patty’s exhaustive search finally turned up a fifteen-year-old Virginia driver’s license with Eve Islington’s name on it. With that license, he’d been able to dig up a fifteen-year-old address. And with that address, he’d been able to backtrack and then track forward to locate the woman who now called herself Ruth Simmons and who had not, since she left her Ohio hometown, used her Social Security number on anything, using, instead, a federal tax ID number. “Shades of difference,” C. A. thought to herself. Use of a Social Security number had destroyed Harry Childress and his business; nonuse of her own Social Security number had provided almost two decades of protection for Eve Islington. Then she thought about Bill Williams and what a crafty old guy he was. It was probably on his advice that Ruth Simmons/Eve Islington lived behind the safety of a federal tax ID number. She paid her taxes, like a good citizen, and like most wealthy ones, lived her life under the legal auspices of her business. Not a thing wrong with that. Anybody less skillful than Patty Baker would have lost track of Ruth/Eve fifteen years ago, the last time she existed under her own Social Security number.