The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  The Brookline Pharmacy was just a few blocks from Harvey’s house. I spent so much time there picking up Harvey’s prescriptions that I had gotten to know everyone well, including the pharmacist. Kelly always asked about Harvey, whom she had known when he was still doing his own pickups.

  “I need your help,” I said to her. “Harvey has taken a turn for the worse, and I need to find his ex-wife, Rachel.”

  “Oh, no. How can I help?”

  “Has she been in recently?”

  “I haven’t seen Rachel for months. Hold on.” She tapped into her computer and stared at the monitor. “We moved her prescriptions to a Walgreens in Quincy. They can probably get in touch with her for you.” She jotted what I assumed was the phone number for Walgreens on a scratch pad, ripped off the page, and tried to hand it across the counter to me.

  “Would you mind calling? They won’t give me information over the phone, and I’m not sure we have enough time for me to drive down there.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  I gave her a concerned sigh. She called right away and spoke to a fellow pharmacist. I heard her recite the address of the empty duplex in Quincy. No help there. But she also got two phone numbers, neither of which was the same as any of the ones on Harvey’s Rolodex card. She hung up and handed me the notes.

  “I hope Harvey’s going to be all right.”

  “Me, too.”

  Back in the car, I called the first number. Disconnected. I tried the second. When it started to ring, I closed my eyes and squeezed the phone and willed someone to answer.

  “Gary Ruffielo.” I opened my eyes in disbelief. Hoping and wishing and pure strength of will hardly ever worked. But before I could speak, the voice of the ubiquitous computer woman interrupted. “—is not available to take your call. Please leave your name, number, and the time of your call, and—”

  I hung up. Disappointing, but at least it was something to follow up later.

  Felix was next on my list. I started the ignition, checked my blind spot, and pulled out into the flow of traffic. I had been trying to cut back on my use of Felix Melendez, Jr., and his black-bag cyberspace skills, but desperate times called for desperate measures. I’d met him on a case in Miami several years before. He’d been trying to fulfill his ambition of working for an airline by taking a job as the breathtakingly underemployed acting general manager at an airport hotel. He helped me on my case, and I got him hired by Majestic Airlines in Miami.

  But the airline business went bad, and Felix was a casualty of the cutbacks after September 11, 2001. When I asked Dan to talk to him about working in Boston, Dan had flatly refused. He had neither the inclination nor the authority to hire someone in the days of bankruptcies and billion-dollar losses. I introduced the two of them anyway. Dan liked Felix so much he built a job for him, but it was only part-time hours. That was good with Felix. As long as he was still in the business, he didn’t care where he lived or how many hours he worked. It was good with Dan. He had a part-time employee who worked as hard as three full-timers. But it was best for me. I got to use Felix, the smartest hacker in the world, on a contract basis when I needed him. I needed him now. When I got to the next red light, I turbo-dialed his cell phone.

  “Hey, Miss Shanahan. What’s up?”

  Even answering the phone, he sounded optimistic, as if he just knew there would be good news at the other end of the line. It was always good to hear his voice. “How are you, Felix?”

  “Great. I’m fixing some handheld radios for the crew chiefs.”

  “I didn’t know you did that kind of thing.”

  “I don’t. I mean, I didn’t, but we can’t buy any new ones because of the budget, so the only way I could figure out how to have communication on the ramp, which, you know, we really, really need, was to fix the ones that were broken, and that was just about all of them, so I found this site with, like, diagrams and stuff. Anyway, I’m getting pretty good at it.”

  That had to be an understatement. Given how fast Felix learned about all things electronic, he could probably build his own radio at this point, if given the tools and the parts. Or maybe just given the parts. He was pretty good at fashioning his own tools.

  “I need you to run down a plate for me.”

  “Right now? Because I’m working a double this afternoon and tonight, and—”

  “I already spoke to Dan. He said it was all right.”

  “Outstanding. What’s the plate number?”

  “Give me a second. The light just changed, and I have to drive the car again.” I dropped the phone into the seat next to me so I could free up a hand to unzip my backpack and get out my notebook. I balanced the little spiral pad on my thigh and flipped through the pages until I found the one I needed.

  “Hold on, Felix,” I yelled in the general vicinity of the cell phone. I was heading into the short tunnel under Mass Avenue. That little stretch of Commonwealth Avenue required two hands, mainly because the road was nothing but a field of gigantic potholes but also because cabbies liked to fly through it, and they weren’t picky about whose lane they did it in. I emerged unscathed on the other side, stopped at the light at Gloucester, picked up the phone, and read off the plate number.

  The keys clacked on his end as he took notes the way he always did: straight into his laptop. “The usual time frame?” he asked.

  “As fast as you can. Harvey’s missing.”

  “He is? Wow, that’s a bummer. What happened?”

  I filled him in. “I think his ex-wife might have something to do with it, and I’m trying to track her down. The guys with the plate I just gave you were watching her house.”

  “Ex-wife? Harvey had a wife? No way.”

  “Way. Her name is Rachel, and they divorced a few years ago. I met her this morning.”

  “Whoa. If she had something to do with someone taking him, that is harsh.”

  Harsh was a good word for it. Leave it to Felix to state the situation in the simplest, most powerful terms.

  “Does she have a cell phone? Because I could totally track her that way.”

  “How could you do that?”

  “There’s a chip inside all cell phones. Most people don’t even know it’s there, and unless you know specifically how to turn it off, if your phone is on, the chip is on. All it is is GPS technology. Piece of cake.”

  “How does it work? Caller turns on phone…”

  “…Chip transmits signal to satellite. Satellite transmits location to receiver. Simple.”

  “Where’s the receiver?”

  “At the phone company, but that’s not a problem. My friend on the network can access what we need.” That was the hackers’ network he was talking about, a pretty powerful group of guys.

  “What you’re saying is you need her cell-phone number.”

  “Big time. Unless she’s using a burner. People who know what they’re doing usually use those phones you buy at the Store 24. No way to trace those.”

  Rachel didn’t seem like the Store 24 type to me. If that was true, we had another option. “All right, Felix, here’s what you do. Query the Walgreens Pharmacy database, and find out what medicine Rachel is taking. Her last name is Ruffielo.” That was code for Please hack in and steal the information. “Once you get that, call this number.” I read Gary Ruffielo’s phone number off the note the pharmacist had given me. “That’s Rachel’s husband. His name is Gary.” I spelled Ruffielo for him. “Tell him your name is Kelly and you’re the pharmacist at Walgreens in Brookline. It’s urgent that you get in touch with Rachel because her medicine, whatever it is, has been recalled. Ask him if he’s got a number where we can reach her.”

  “Heh. Sly, Miss Shanahan. Get someone else to do the legwork. I like it.”

  “Leverage, Felix. It’s all about leverage. Call me when you have something on that license plate.”

  “You got it.”

  Chapter Six

  Back in my apartment, I checked my messages on the home machine. Nothin
g but a recorded voice from the Red Cross saying it was time to give blood again. I called Harvey’s house and didn’t get him. Then I went through the same routine on his cell phone. I thought about calling my friend Bo but dismissed the idea, at least until I had a better sense of what was going on. I didn’t want to bring in the big guns until I knew for sure Harvey wasn’t at the Coolidge Corner theater catching a matinee with Rachel. I knew that wasn’t the case. I could feel in every part of me that Harvey had not left that house on his own. But my Bosnian enforcer friend and colleague was not a resource to be used lightly.

  The speed of my DSL connection was liberating after Harvey’s poky dial-up service. I started punching the keys, doing searches and cross-references on names and phrases, looking for connections, and trying to find anything that would help me locate Rachel.

  The first thing that came up was a piece in one of the smaller trade publications announcing that Rachel Ruffielo had joined a midsize local accounting firm as a partner. This was four, almost five, years ago, so it must have been shortly after she’d left Harvey.

  There was a second, splashier announcement three years after that, when Rachel was named managing partner of the firm. The announcement listed several of the larger accounts she had managed during her tenure. Sure enough, one of them was Betelco. The final articles were all about the dissolution of Rachel’s firm in the wake of the Betelco scandal. When Betelco went down, it took its accountants with it.

  I did a search for Betelco and got so many hits I cross-referenced with the name Fratello and words like indictment, embezzlement, and fraud. It seemed that Roger Fratello had inherited the controlling interest of a company founded by his father in 1944. The Lightway Company manufactured parts used to make lightbulbs. Roger found lightbulbs boring, so he used a good portion of the company’s substantial pile of cash to go on a spending spree. One of the companies he bought made semiconductors, and that put Roger right in the middle of the tech boom. He took on new investors to shore up his cash position and, when the technology sector went bust, took off with their money. In his wake, he left faked financial reports, fabricated customer lists, and a lot of very unhappy investors.

  I searched hard for any reports on the Betelco fiasco that mentioned Rachel. Her company took a few direct hits in articles toward the end, but she was never mentioned by name. Inquiring minds wanted to know where the auditors had been throughout this ongoing fraud. Another good question to ask when I found her.

  I hit the enter button several times, stacking up the Betelco articles for printing, then I went into Google Images to see what pictures I could find. Roger and his wife, Susan, had apparently been quite the presence on the Boston social scene, back before he had slithered out of town with other people’s money. The two of them had been regulars at fund-raisers, charity balls, and other excuses to wear black ties and gowns. Roger looked the same in all his pictures. More interesting were the pictures of his wife. I put the name Susan Fratello in and found several more recent photos of her. The difference in the images pre- and post-disgrace were startling. You could look into her eyes and see that she had suffered greatly for the sins of her husband. What better source of information could I hope to find?

  I went back to the private databases to see if she was still in the area. She was not only still in the area, but she was in the same house in Newton she’d shared with her husband. I printed out the address. She would be my next stop.

  When I could think of nothing else to search for, I checked my notebook. Ling had also mentioned the name Stephen Hoffmeyer as a possible alias for Roger. I put that into the Google box and got about a zillion hits. When I tried to cross-reference it with Fratello, I got nothing. I tried a few more combinations. Just when I was about to give up, I tried Stephen Hoffmeyer and Brussels, the city where Ling had found the cash. What I got in return might have been interesting to anyone, but for a former airline person, it was fascinating. A man named Stephen Gerald Hoffmeyer had been one of the passengers taken hostage in the Salanna 809 hijacking. Salanna Airlines was a small Belgian carrier that had gone out of business, driven there primarily by the bloody terrorist hijacking of Flight 809.

  I started skimming the articles, refreshing my memory of the details. Seventy-nine passengers and crew had boarded their scheduled flight from Brussels to Johannesburg. One hour in, five members of the radical Armed Islamic Martyrs Brigade pulled out ice picks and took over the plane. Unfortunately for everyone, things began to go wrong almost immediately. The plane took a mechanical and ended up making an emergency landing in Sudan. The Belgians immediately ticked off the Sudanese by dispatching an elite military team to take charge. The Sudanese immediately invited in several high-profile terrorist groups, including Hamas, to help with the negotiations. This ticked off the Belgians.

  Ten excruciating days later, with only the Western hostages still onboard, the Belgians stormed the plane without permission from the Sudanese government. In the conflagration that followed, seventeen people died—nine passengers and eight hijackers, the original gang of five, plus three that boarded later. The plane was destroyed.

  I found a photo array of the storming and the aftermath. It had happened at night, so the pictures of the initial bombing and the fireball that followed were particularly vivid. The pictures shot in the cold and dreary light of dawn were quite a contrast. The grotesquely twisted hulk of what had once been an airplane was prominent. The debris field that surrounded it was blackened.

  It was hard to believe anyone had walked away from that, but eight hostages had made it out. I searched several articles for the list of survivors. Once I found it, I checked the dates, then I sat back and tried to figure out what it all meant.

  Salanna 809 had happened four years ago. If this was the same Stephen Hoffmeyer whom Ling had asked me about, and if it was an alias for Roger Fratello, then the embezzler had himself become the victim of a terrible crime. He had been caught on a hijacked aircraft, held hostage for ten days, and then killed in the fiery inferno that had resulted from a failed rescue attempt. He had not been one of the survivors.

  Talk about karmic retribution.

  Chapter Seven

  Roger Fratello’s old address was a large white Victorian down a shady street in the affluent suburb of West Newton. It had a vast front lawn and a wraparound covered patio with a wooden porch swing. Susan Fratello answered the door. It was the same woman I had seen in those tuxedo-and-gown photos with her once-respectable husband, plus twenty years and a blue velour housecoat zipped up the front.

  “Mrs. Fratello?”

  A small terrier with wisps of brown hair in its eyes yapped from behind her leg as she scanned the street. “Have they found him?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Aren’t you a reporter?” Her voice conveyed nothing but calm curiosity, a direct contrast to her nearly hysterical pooch.

  “I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for information about your husband.”

  “Read the papers.”

  She started to close the door, but I put my hand on it, a gesture that made the tiny canine go nuts. He was a smart dog. He could spring and yap at the same time. Mrs. Fratello stared at me until I took my hand off her door.

  “I’m sorry, but I have read the papers. I’ve done lots of research.” I held up my backpack. “It’s all in here. But it doesn’t give me what I need to solve my case.”

  “What kind of case?”

  “Someone I’m close to was abducted. My partner. I’m trying to find him.”

  “What does my husband have to do with it?”

  “That’s why I’m here. I need to figure that out.”

  She pushed her head out again and looked up and down the quiet street. “Have you seen the FBI? They’ve been here. And they watch. They’re always watching. Did you see them out there?”

  “I was questioned by the FBI a few hours ago.”

  “About what?”

  “About your husband. They have some new in
formation about him.”

  “Down, Trudy. Quiet.” The dog went silent. It was miraculous. “What did they say?”

  “Perhaps if I came in, I could answer some questions for you as well.”

  Susan Fratello lived what appeared to be a modest existence in a large house. While she went to change, I perused the photos lined up across the mantel. Her children were handsome and healthy, tan in the summer, red-cheeked in the winter, and always affectionate and close in their poses. It looked as if it had been a comfortable life, easy to be in, and without ever a thought in the world that it could all go away. There were no pictures of Roger.

  Susan came in with a tall glass of water. Trudy, the tiny terrier, was right on her heels, and I wondered if she ever got stepped on or lost in Susan’s longer gowns and robes.

  I took the glass from her. “Thank you.”

  She had put on a pair of white slacks, a dark blue, long-sleeved, scoop-necked top, and a string of white beads with matching earrings. She was also wearing lipstick. I sensed that she didn’t get many visitors. She sat on her couch and patted her thighs. The springy dog had no problem leaping up there. Then the two of them sat and looked at me. Susan’s smile gave her the appearance of one of her photos—posed and two-dimensional.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “to bring all this up for you—”

  “It never really went away. Besides, you’re not the only one. That awful Agent Southern was here. He brought a new one this time. He was completely bald.”

  “Special Agent Ling,” I said. “That’s the team that interviewed me this morning.”

  “That Southern is a sour man. I wonder what makes him so sour. Do you know?”