Unleashed

by David Rosenfelt

  “Thirty?” asks the waiter.

  I nod. “He doesn’t want to spoil his appetite for dinner.”

  I’m ready to go to my room an hour later, just about the time Marcus is starting on his third entrée, so I tell the waiter to charge the meal to my room. “The whole thing?” he asks.

  I nod. “It’s fine; I took out a mortgage on the meal.” When I get back to the room I fall asleep immediately. It’s been a tiring and mostly wasted day.

  In the morning, I head to the restaurant. Marcus is in there eating; for all I know he’s been at it all night. I tell him my plan, such as it is, which is to head for the local police to tell them at least part of what I know.

  The nearest precinct is just a short drive from the hotel. I debate whether or not to have Marcus come in with me and decide that he should, though my plan is to do the talking. I don’t discuss this with Marcus first, since asking Marcus not to talk seems a tad unnecessary.

  I tell the sergeant at the front desk that I have some information about a local resident named Donald Susser, who might be involved in criminal activity. I put it that way for a couple of reasons. In my experience, cops prefer to receive information rather than answer questions, and “criminal activity” is something that they have an instinctive interest in.

  Whatever I said, it works. The sergeant says, “Give me a second,” then picks up the phone and talks softly into it. Less than a minute later, another officer comes out and takes us back to the office of Captain Luther Ketchell.

  We introduce ourselves, but he barely looks at me; his focus is on Marcus. Finally he says, “Talk to me about Donald Susser.”

  I lay it out for him, from Barry Price’s murder, to my representation of Denise, to the connection to Donald Susser and his phone conversation with Laurie, to the situation at Peaslee’s with Susser, Jordan, and Ellis, and finally to the murder they have apparently been hired to commit. Pretty much the only thing I leave out is the forceful means that Marcus used to get the information. “I thought you should know all this,” I say.

  Ketchell thinks about this for a few long moments and then says, “Good thinking. Too bad you didn’t come in a little earlier.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Susser, Jordan, and Ellis are dead. They were found in Damariscotta State Park last night with one bullet in each of their heads. Lying side by side, staring at the moon.”

  Ketchell decides there’s no way he can let us leave there without completely debriefing us on everything we know but may not yet have revealed. To do so, he separates Marcus and me so we can be questioned separately. It’s the first break I’ve gotten all day; watching them try to get answers out of Marcus would be too painful to witness.

  After almost four hours, we’re finally told that we can go but that we might be hearing from Homeland Security. Protocol calls for Ketchell to contact them once the word “assassination” was raised.

  We get a four o’clock flight out of Portland. It was a very worthwhile trip, except for the part where we lost our only promising lead, and the three people we talked to all got killed.

  Everything’s really going according to plan.

  The system is set up to work against us. I think it is pretty clear already that our main hope is to prove that Denise is not guilty, or at least credibly point to someone else as the killer. We will obviously also try to create reasonable doubt as to Denise’s guilt, but it’s unlikely that will be enough.

  The situation in Maine leads me to believe very strongly that Denise did not murder her husband. Having met Susser and studied his background, I am sure that he was not someone Barry would have had investment business with. It seems far more likely that he was somehow involved in the reason that Barry needed a criminal attorney.

  I have no way of knowing why Barry called Susser and then arranged to see him. They lived in different worlds, geographically and financially, and it is crucial that we find out Barry’s motive for making the connection.

  The fact that Susser, Jordan, and Ellis were killed, and so soon after Barry’s murder, makes the coincidence way too great for me to believe all the deaths are unrelated. And of course it’s unlikely that Denise broke out of prison to murder Susser and his friends.

  But there are evidentiary rules in a trial, much as I like to break them. For us to bring in outside evidence, such as Susser’s death, we need to show relevance. That is always difficult to do, and in this case will be even tougher.

  Laurie and I are taking Tara for a walk when she says, “I wonder how they found Susser.”

  I ask her to explain, and she says, “He was scared and obviously in hiding. Yet the other two guys knew where he was going to be and when he was going to be there.”

  “They weren’t necessarily bad guys; they were apparently his friends. Don’t forget, they’re just as dead as he is.”

  She shakes her head. “But he was in hiding from everyone. If they knew where he was, they wouldn’t have had to show up at your meeting to find him. They could have done so at any time.”

  “An excellent observation,” I admit.

  “Somehow they knew in advance that he was going to be there, and based on how he sounded on the phone, I doubt that he told them.”

  “Susser said that this guy Carter sent them to kill him. Carter must have been the one who knew about our meeting. Maybe Susser’s phone was tapped.”

  She shook her head. “You have to know where somebody is to tap his phone. Unless…”

  She doesn’t have to finish the sentence. It’s crazy, but I know that she’s considering the possibility that our phone is the one that is tapped. “You have someone who can check it out?” I ask.

  “Of course. Tony Vazquez is the best.”

  “He won’t find anything,” I say.

  “That would be the preferred outcome.”

  “Call him.”

  She nods.

  It sounds like somebody is screaming in the background when Sam answers the phone. “What the hell is that?” I ask.

  “Rage Against the Machine.”

  I have no idea how I know that Rage Against the Machine is a band, but I do. And I also know that Sam’s idea of a wild night out is seeing Fiddler on the Roof at the dinner theater.

  “Your taste in music is evolving,” I say.

  “Crash likes alternative rock. It mellows him right out.”

  “Then he must have a lot of it on his iPod, because he’s the most mellow dog I’ve ever seen.”

  “Externally, yes. But inside he has a lot of stress. And he’s been through a lot—the accident, the surgery…”

  I take a moment to silently give thanks that Tara likes Simon and Garfunkel, and then I say, “I need you to do something today, unless you’re taking Crash to a Metallica concert.”

  “No, I’m on the case.”

  “Okay. I want you to dig into the lives of three guys who lived in Augusta. Their names are Donald Susser, Billy Jordan, and Teddy Ellis.”

  He already knew Susser’s name, but he pauses as he writes down the others. “Okay, good. I’m heading down to the bunker now.”

  “The bunker?”

  “Yeah, you remember, at the Holiday Inn. That’s where the team is.”

  “Right. How are they doing?”

  “Great. Hilda’s upset that room service doesn’t have potato latkes, but other than that it’s going really well. What do you want to know about the Augusta guys?”

  “Everything. Employment, family, criminal record if they have one, financial dealings. Anything you can hack into will help.”

  “And they all live in Augusta proper?”

  “I’m not sure ‘live’ is the verb that applies anymore, but that’s the general area where they’re from.”

  He promises to get right on it, and I head out to interview some of Denise and Barry’s friends, a number of whom are on the prosecution’s witness list.

  It’s a depressing afternoon. Each of the people I speak with is in retrospect w
ell aware of Denise and Barry’s marital problems and not totally surprised that things ended in violence. I don’t believe them; they are all employing twenty-twenty hindsight.

  I don’t come on strong with them, just listen to what they have to say. I’ll be seeing some of them on the witness stand, and I certainly don’t want them to consider me a particular threat going in.

  When I get home, there’s a car that I don’t recognize in the driveway. I get out of my car and see that Laurie has come out on the porch to greet me. She’s obviously missed me terribly, the poor thing.

  “We need to talk,” she says.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Tony Vazquez is inside.”

  For a second the name doesn’t connect to anything, but then I remember that he’s the security guy who’s a friend of Laurie’s and who was going to check the phone for bugs.

  “So why are we out here?”

  “He’s coming right out.”

  The door opens as she finishes the sentence, and he appears on cue. Laurie introduces us, and then he gets right to it. “Your phone is compromised,” he says. “Somebody is listening to every word you say.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. It’s a very sophisticated device; you’re dealing with professionals.”

  “How professional?”

  “Let’s put it this way: there are governments that don’t have access to this kind of stuff.”

  “Was somebody in the house?”

  “Not for this; the device is off premises.”

  “So why are we talking out here?”

  “Tony hasn’t checked the house for bugs or cameras yet,” Laurie says, “so I figured it’s best we talk out here, just in case.”

  “Did you leave the tap on the phone?”

  He nods. “I did. There’s no way they would know that you know about it.”

  “Unless there are cameras in the house, and they saw you checking it out.”

  “Right.”

  Tony goes back in to finish his work, and Laurie and I go in as well. He is incredibly thorough and takes three more hours to completely check out everything in the house.

  “You’re clean,” he says and heads down to the office to find out if the phone there has been similarly compromised. I call Hike on my cell phone and ask him to be there to let Tony in.

  When he leaves, Laurie and I discuss the latest developments. These conversations are important to me; talking about things out loud helps crystallize my thoughts.

  They apparently have crystallized Laurie’s as well. “Barry was obviously into something very deep and very dangerous. And now you are in the middle of it.”

  “No question about it.”

  “Which means Denise Price is innocent.”

  I nod. “All I have to do is prove it.”

  The office phone is also compromised. Tony Vazquez called Laurie on her cell phone to tell her. It presents us with an opportunity. The fact that we know somebody is listening means that we can control what he hears.

  This situation causes me to have a number of conflicting emotions. The invasion of privacy is infuriating, and even though I have no idea who is doing it, I make a silent vow to get revenge when I find out.

  It’s also revealing, in what it says about Denise’s situation. Because she is my only client, there’s no doubt that whoever is listening is related to Denise’s case. Although I really don’t need any further confirmation after the murders in Augusta, this provides it.

  Dangerous people are watching.

  All of the events are more than a little scary. If Susser and the others were killed just to prevent them from talking first to Barry Price and then to me, I have to be at least a little concerned about my own safety. Since I was born without a courage gene, I’m not feeling too good about this.

  Pretty much the only positive to be found in all this is that if the bad guys have been listening in on the office phone, they’ve had to suffer through Edna’s conversations. For instance, the other day she spent an hour and a half talking to her cousin Cecelia about the upcoming crossword tournament.

  I heard only a portion of Edna’s side of the call, and I wanted to scream. If someone had to listen to both sides of the entire conversation, my guess is he would have preferred to be waterboarded.

  I give it careful thought and make the decision to have the taps removed. Tony Vazquez had said he could do so easily, though of course whoever is listening in will be aware we discovered the taps and got rid of them.

  I don’t want to worry about what we say on our phones, and I can’t control what callers say to us. I’m giving up the chance to set a trap by saying what we want the bad guys to hear, but there’s a good chance we might never spring that trap anyway.

  Sam comes in with his initial report on the investors in Barry Price’s fund. I had asked him to find out who they are, in as much detail as he could. He’s not happy with the results.

  “About sixty percent of the money is easy to trace,” he says. “They’re big-time investors, pension funds, that kind of thing. The other forty percent is not so easy.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s all foreign companies; Cayman Islands, Belize, Barbados, Switzerland…”

  “Tax shelter stuff?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so. We’re not talking about big-time companies; I haven’t even heard of any of them. I’m checking them out, but I think this money has been hiding under a rock.”

  “Laundering?”

  He shrugs. “Could be.”

  “So let’s think this through and assume it’s laundering,” I say. “Foreign entities were laundering money through Barry’s company, and he found out about it. He wanted to understand it better, so he needed a financial guy outside his company he could trust.”

  Sam nods. “So he called me.”

  “Right. And he was afraid he might have legal jeopardy if he revealed it, so he was interested in a criminal attorney.”

  “Makes perfect sense.”

  “So why was he going to see Susser?”

  “Maybe Susser was going to be on the receiving end of some of the money, as payment for the murder he was going to commit.”

  “How would Barry know that?”

  “Barry was smart.”

  “Too bad he’s not around. He could help us solve his own murder.”

  “I think we got something here, Andy. Hilda said it and she was right: those foreign companies are going to lead us to the answer.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe those companies will just turn out to be rich people hiding their money so they can stay rich.”

  Some people believe Homeland Security is an uncoordinated mess. They think that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. This is as a result of anecdotal mistakes, sometimes comical, that are then publicized. Two-year-olds are stopped from flying because they’re on the terrorist watch list, wrong houses are raided … the list goes on.

  The truth is the communication among departments is good approaching excellent, and getting better all the time. It’s a vast bureaucracy but not nearly as unwieldy as commonly assumed and capable of swift and coordinated action.

  Thus it was that within hours after Luther Ketchell reported to Homeland Security that Susser and his pals had talked to Andy Carpenter about a possible assassination, the information was funneled to the FBI.

  Eight hours later, that same information found its way to the office of Special Agent Ricardo Muñoz, at that time on temporary assignment in Concord, New Hampshire. Muñoz had been assigned to investigate the murder of undercover police officer Drew Keller, because the specter of assassination had come up in that case as well.

  Muñoz did not consider it likely that the two cases were related. The Augusta, Maine, case was limited to an accounting by a lawyer that the victim mentioned the word “assassination.” It was most likely a botched case of murder for hire.

  But there were two possible connections that made it worth followin
g up on. One was that both cases were in small northeastern cities that happened to be state capitals, and the other was that the suspected assassins were themselves murdered.

  One of the negative aspects of good communication among government agencies is the overwhelming amount of that communication. Agents are often flooded with information that could conceivably relate to the cases they are working on, and full attention cannot be paid to each situation.

  So the information bit that related to the murders in Augusta was relegated to near the bottom of the investigative totem pole. One of Muñoz’s assistants would at some point analyze it and decide if it was actually worth following up on.

  But that would not be any time soon.

  A trial date is like a car in a passenger door mirror … it’s always closer than you think. Denise’s insistence on a speedy trial complicates matters, but really not that much. The trial could start three years from Wednesday, and I wouldn’t think it was enough time.

  The case against her is strong but primarily circumstantial. The Prices were known to have a troubled marriage, one that she wanted out of. Her previous job as a pharmaceutical assistant likely gave her the ability to make the poison, and her being in the house with Barry certainly gave her the opportunity to administer it.

  I’m operating on two tracks. One is to prepare Denise’s defense against the testimony that the prosecution’s witnesses will offer. That is an area that I am comfortable with; it’s what I do. I certainly wish I had more ammunition with which to do it, but I can be fairly resourceful in compensating for that.

  The other area is at least as important but much less in my control. Barry Price’s business dealings with his foreign investors are proving difficult for Sam and his team to penetrate. That difficulty is frustrating but at the same time tends to confirm my view that there is something to be found. It is something that I believe relates directly to Barry’s murder.

  Tonight is like every other night in trial preparation. I’ve spent hours going over the discovery documents and witness reports. It’s at least the fifth time I’ve read each piece of material, which probably represents only half the times I will eventually do so.