The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  It hadn’t taken long to get things sorted out. I was who I said I was, and I had a carry permit. They were looking for Harvey. I was still waiting to find out why.

  Ling glanced up at me. “Do you know that your name comes up more than a thousand times in Google?”

  “Doesn’t the FBI have anything more efficient than Google?”

  Dude, “There is nothing more efficient than Google.” When he smiled, tiny pleats formed at the edges of his eyes. They stood out against the smooth, flat planes of his face.

  “I’m going to try Harvey again.” I probably didn’t have to announce it, but the circumstances of our meeting had encouraged me to avoid making sudden moves. I flipped open my phone, called Harvey’s cell number, got voice mail again, and flipped it shut without leaving yet another message.

  Ling spoke without looking up from his work. “Maybe his phone is off.”

  “It probably is.” He could never remember to turn it on. “But he never leaves the house. He hardly ever leaves his wheelchair. I don’t even know how he got upstairs.”

  “You said his wife was here.”

  “Ex-wife.”

  “Maybe she helped him. Maybe the two of them were reminiscing, spinning some old tunes, and decided to go out for a mochachino.”

  “He doesn’t drink mochachinos, and he sold his car a couple of years ago.”

  “What about her car?”

  I sat back in my chair, disappointed and annoyed that I didn’t know if she had a car. I didn’t know how she had gotten to the house. I didn’t have her phone number or her address. I knew nothing about the woman, except that she had suddenly appeared just ahead of the FBI and that she had concocted a story to get me out of the house. Now Harvey was gone.

  “I told you she sent me off on a wild-goose chase.”

  “You also said you found them in a clinch this morning. It could be they wanted a little alone time together.”

  “He wouldn’t have lied to me like that.”

  Ling said nothing, but he wore an expression I had seen before on law-enforcement types, the one that comes from the deep and abiding belief that everyone lies. He wasn’t that old, but he must have seen enough already to know that we were all capable of ghastly things and that lying was the least of them. Maybe so, but…

  “Harvey wouldn’t leave the house without telling me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a fifty-four-year-old man with the body of an eighty-year-old. Because leaving the house is a big deal for him. Because I’m the one who gets him ready. I’m the one who takes him out. I’m the one who makes sure he has food when he’s hungry and medicine when he’s sick. I’m the one who gets him a pillow when he’s sore and a blanket when he’s cold. I’m the one who has been with him a good part of every day for at least the past two years, because there is no one else.”

  Ling blinked at me. “You must really care about him.”

  “What?” I had somehow ended up out on the edge of the seat.

  “You must care about him a lot.”

  “I do.” Of course I did. I cared about Harvey. I cared about him deeply. I unballed my fists and sat back. But our relationship was more complicated than that, and it had gotten more so as he’d gotten sicker. From the beginning, ours had been a bargain built on mutual need, but over the years, his needs had grown to dominate both our lives, and even though I fought for him and protected him and, had it come down to it, might have even died for him, we were as far apart from each other lately as we’d ever been, and it was because of me. When it came to Harvey’s emotional needs, he was a black hole, one that grew ever deeper and more fathomless as the disease grew stronger. Sometimes it made me feel cold and unfeeling to keep him distant, but I also knew his emotional needs could swallow me whole. I had to protect myself. Apparently, Rachel didn’t have that problem.

  “He wouldn’t have gone out without his chair,” was all I said. “And he wouldn’t have gone out without letting me know. Something’s happened to him.”

  The basement door slammed shut. A few seconds later, the second agent came into the office, wiping his hands with a handkerchief. He was taller than Ling. His craggy face made him look at least ten years older, and he had squints for eyes. He was the one who had thrown me facedown on the floor upstairs.

  Ling pushed the tea service aside to make space for his laptop on the table. “What’d you find, bro?”

  “Nothing.” Southern addressed himself pointedly to his partner, not even looking at me. “The house is empty. No signs of forced entry or struggle.” He spoke in a slow and measured way, every word a sigh of resignation. He cocked his head in my direction. “What about her? Did she give you anything?”

  “We were waiting for you. Come on in and join us.”

  Southern came into the office but didn’t sit. He ended up leaning against one of the bookcases with his arms folded tight across his long torso. As cold a presence as he was, I was still happy to see him. It meant I was finally about to find out what was going on.

  Ling turned his laptop in my direction. “Have you ever seen this man?”

  On the screen was what looked like an enlarged photo page from a passport. Pictured was a fifty-nine-year-old man—his birth date was right there—trying to look thirty-five. The face he should have had, the one carved with the chisel of experience and the hammer of time, had been so relentlessly smoothed and polished you could look at it for a long time and never see the man he was supposed to have been. His hair was obviously dyed, his sun-tinted face was remarkably unwrinkled, his teeth were perfect, and he looked out through what were undoubtedly LASIK-corrected eyes.

  “I’ve never seen him. Who is he?”

  “His name is Roger Fratello. Has Harvey ever mentioned that name?”

  “No.”

  “What about Stephen Hoffmeyer?”

  “No. Who are these people?”

  “Possibly the same person. Have you come across any files or records with either name?”

  “Never.”

  “Does he keep files anywhere else?” Southern lobbed his question in from across the room. “An archive? Extra storage that you might not know about?”

  “I would know about anything Harvey was involved in.” I directed my answers to Ling. Southern made me nervous. “I told you, there’s nothing that goes on here that I don’t know about.”

  “You wouldn’t have known about this. This all went down before your time.”

  “How do you know what my time has been?”

  He nodded toward his laptop. “You haven’t exactly kept a low profile since you’ve been in Boston.”

  Right. Google, more than a thousand hits, and wi-fi rules, man. “What is it that happened before my time?”

  “Roger Fratello was the chairman and CEO of a firm called Betelco.”

  “I’ve heard of it.” I felt a tiny bubble of confidence from having recognized at least something. “It was an electronics firm that went bust after the boom.”

  “They went bust,” Ling said, “because Fratello embezzled all the firm’s money.”

  “I never heard that part.” I thought they were just one more start-up with no real product, no real market, and too much unearned investor confidence.

  “Not many people knew the whole story.”

  “He raped that company,” Southern said. “Turned it inside out and took everything except the potted plants from the front lobby.”

  “It was grim,” Ling said. “We had the guy cold, but before we could indict him, he left the country. He hasn’t been seen since.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Four years.”

  “Four years?” I looked at Southern and back to Ling. “Did you get lost on your way over?”

  Ling ignored the jab. “About a week ago, we found a safety deposit box in Brussels. Inside was a bunch of stacks of banded U.S. currency. We think it’s some of the money Fratello used to flee the country. His fingerprints were all ov
er it.”

  I shrugged at Ling, waiting for the punch line. Southern was the one who dropped it. “So were your partners.”

  “My partner’s what?”

  “Your partner’s fingerprints were right there on the cash with scumbag Fratello’s.”

  Ling and Southern both stared at me. It was so quiet I almost longed for the Temptations. “You’re thinking what? That Harvey gave this man money to flee the country?”

  Ling looked as if he hoped I could explain it. Southern looked as if he hoped I couldn’t.

  “What would his motive be?”

  “I was going to ask him that.” Ling turned the laptop back to face him and started tapping offhandedly at the keys. “I thought maybe it had something to do with the ex-wife.”

  “Ex-wife?”

  “She was Betelco’s auditor.”

  “Rachel was Betelco’s auditor?”

  “She was the partner on her firm’s Betelco account.” Ling was looking at me now, watching for reactions as he dribbled out his bits of crucial and surprising information in his casually calculating way. His words didn’t come spewing at you like rounds from a machine gun or ripping through the atmosphere like bolts of lightning. They drifted out and bobbed lazily like a raft on a turquoise ocean. If you didn’t watch out, he could lull you to sleep. I stood up and started moving around. I didn’t want to fall asleep. I wanted to start back at the beginning. “Roger Fratello embezzled money from Betelco.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He took that money and left the country.”

  “Correct.”

  “And now, four years after Fratello disappeared, you’ve found a bunch of cash with Harvey’s and Fratello’s fingerprints on it.”

  “All true.”

  “Rachel Ruffielo, the woman I told you showed up here this morning and sent me on a fool’s errand just before Harvey disappeared, was Betelco’s auditor?”

  “She was the partner on her firm’s Betelco account.”

  “Which means she knew Fratello.”

  “She worked with him closely.”

  “Was she involved in the embezzling?” It wouldn’t have surprised me one bit. “How could she not have been? If what you say about Betelco is true, she was either involved in the fraud or the world’s worst auditor.”

  “We can’t prove any involvement on her part.”

  “And yet you’re trying to connect Harvey to Fratello through Rachel.”

  “It’s the prints on the money that connect him, and so far, the facts say that Harvey helped him run, not Rachel.” Ling looked as if he felt bad about the whole situation. Somehow, I didn’t think he really did.

  “First of all, that makes no sense. Second”—I ended up behind the wingback, leaning over its high back—“Harvey’s prints on that money prove nothing. Harvey is a forensic accountant. He handles money all the time, and you can’t tell when he might have handled those bundles or for whom. Third, Rachel did this. I don’t know how, and I don’t know what, but things started to go sideways the second she walked through the door this morning.”

  “Things went sideways four years ago,” Ling said. He was in the process of shutting down his computer. “Before you were on the scene.”

  “So?”

  “Think about it. The ex-wife showed up just after the money was found in Brussels and just before we got here, and now the two of them are gone.” He stood up and tucked his computer under his arm. Southern had already headed for the door without bothering to say goodbye.

  “What are you saying?”

  “Sometimes we don’t know people as well as we think we do.”

  “You’re wrong about Harvey,” I said. And yet I couldn’t shake the image of Rachel perched on Harvey’s lap, and the thought of how much it had surprised me. Ling seemed to know it.

  “Here’s my card,” he said. “When he comes home, give us a call.”

  Chapter Five

  I walked the two special agents to the front door, mostly to make sure they left. Then I went straight back to Harvey’s office, pulled the regular rolling chair from the corner, and slid in behind his desk. The desk was old and well used, and it showed. The brass door pulls were tarnished in the middle where they had been touched most. There was a similar bald spot in the finish on top where he used to lean over his work.

  I sat for a moment to collect myself. I was trying not to freak out. Ling was right about one thing: there was absolutely no sign that Harvey had been taken by force. Maybe he was with someone he knew. I called Dan at the airport.

  “Hey,” I said when he picked up. “You haven’t heard from Harvey, have you?”

  “Since you called? No. Why, have you lost him?”

  I didn’t know if it was the phrasing or the question that choked me up. I had to take a second.

  “What’s wrong, Shanahan?”

  “He’s not home, and the FBI is looking for him.”

  “The FBI? What did he do?”

  “He didn’t do anything, Dan. Rachel did something and dragged him into it.”

  “Jeez, all right. Jump down my throat, why don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, but I came home, and his wheelchair was downstairs, and someone had been playing 45s upstairs, and then the feds came in, saying something about a missing embezzler and some cash they found in Brussels that had Harvey’s prints, and it happened four years ago, and—”

  “Stop, you’re making my head hurt. What about Rachel? Maybe he’s with her. You said they were making out.”

  “He might be with her, but not because he wants to be. That trip she sent me on to Quincy was a setup. There was nothing down there. When I got back to the house, he was gone.”

  “Why would she take him?”

  “When I find her, I’ll ask her, which brings me to my next point. I need Felix.”

  “I think he’s covering a double.”

  “Can’t you spring him for a few hours? I need him to run some things down for me.”

  “The guy whose shift he’s covering is already out sick, and I’ve got another one on vacation.”

  “All I need is for him to run a license plate.” The only useful thing that had come out of my visit to Quincy that morning. “He can probably do it between peaks.”

  “You know that’s not how it will turn out. He’ll give you what you need, and then you’ll have more questions about that, and because he’s so fucking good at what he does, he’ll figure out a way to get you something else that you don’t even know you need, and pretty soon the shift will be over, and I’ll have a ramp full of dirty airplanes, a bunch of ticky-tack delays, and a shitload of mishandled bags.”

  “Dan, it’s Harvey.”

  “Jesus Christ, Shanahan. What do you think I’m doing over here? You of all people should know you can’t run this operation without supervisors. Son of a bitch.”

  I waited. I didn’t know where he was. It sounded like the bag room. Wherever it was, I knew he was striding purposely in circles. That’s what he did when he was upset.

  “He saved my ass,” he said quietly.

  This was a hallmark of a discussion with Dan. Just as he often did quick cuts and maneuvers to speed through a crowded concourse, he often did the same kinds of quick cuts in conversation. You had to pay close attention.

  “Harvey?”

  “My ex’s lawyer had her convinced I was hiding assets. Like I’ve got assets to hide. I work in the goddamn airline business. If Harvey, God bless him, hadn’t proved to the world just how fucking broke I was, they would have doubled or tripled my alimony.”

  Finally, a deep sigh.

  “I’ll stay and cover Felix for as long as you need him. Give me a few minutes to track him down. But you’ve got to do one thing for me. You have to call me when you find Harvey so I don’t sit and worry all fucking night.”

  He hung up.

  Every once in a while, Dan let his big heart show. That’s why I loved him.

  Harvey’s Rolodex was on the d
esk. He had no use for Microsoft Outlook. I pulled it over and found the card for Rachel. When both numbers listed turned out to be disconnected, I called information and asked for a listing under Rachel’s name. No luck. I turned to Harvey’s computer. It was old and slow, with a boxy monitor, but it would still access the Internet. Harvey and I had subscriptions to all kinds of private information services and databases. I quickly found Rachel’s maiden name—Kleinerer—and tried to find a listing under that name. Nope. While I was in the proprietary databases, I searched for and found her marriage licences and her divorce decree.

  While those were printing, I sat down with the list of Harvey’s doctors and therapists that I kept with me. I went through all of them, dialing the numbers and asking if they’d heard from him. None had. It took a while. Then I checked the major hospitals, worried that I might find him there, but maybe more worried that I wouldn’t. I didn’t, so I turned back to the Internet.

  A homicide detective once told me how to look for people on the run. “Focus on three things,” he said. “Where they’re living, who they’re talking to, and how they’re funded.” With that in mind, I accessed records of Rachel’s real estate purchases, pre-Harvey, the names and addresses of her parents and siblings, and other facts and tidbits that might or might not be helpful.

  I thought about Rachel’s vacant unit and one of the few clues she had left behind: the cat litter box. I got out the phone book and called every vet in Quincy. Of the ones that answered, none had Rachel’s cat as a patient. For the others, I left a message saying I was Rachel and that I needed to check on a prescription for my cat. Would someone call me back, please, at this number? Then I flipped over to Brookline and did the same thing. She’d been in Quincy for months. She’d been in Brookline for years, a realization that gave me the best idea of all.

  I was halfway out the front door when I remembered the two cups I’d left on the floor. The tea had gone beyond tepid to cold. I took the cups into the kitchen, picking up the tea service on the way. I tossed the paper cups, then washed the pot and the china cups, careful to erase Rachel’s lipstick completely. The pieces were too delicate for the dishwasher, and I didn’t want Harvey to come home and find anything broken, so I left it all to dry on a towel on the counter.