Midas w-2

by Russell Andrews

  “You better get a story ready for where you’ve been this morning, Colonel.”

  “Who answered the phone?”

  “Things have just gotten even more complicated. So here’s my suggestion. The lieutenant had some kind of breakdown. You’ll have plenty of witnesses for that. Just say he got out of the car and ran, maybe he threw the keys away and it took you twenty minutes to find them before you could go looking for him.”

  “Who answered the phone, son?”

  “The Justice Department,” Justin said quietly. “The attorney general’s office.”

  “Son of a bitch,” the colonel whispered.

  And Justin, in much the same whisper, said, “Yeah. I think that pretty much sums things up nicely.”

  25

  He didn’t like being back at the house. For one thing, he wanted to get the hell out of Washington and back to East End Harbor. Not that East End would be any safer. But at least it was smaller. Here he felt like he was swimming around in a large fish tank, the only non-shark in the water. And all around him were people watching, just waiting for him to be eaten.

  For another thing, being here felt too much like violating the dead.

  Justin didn’t believe in ghosts, but sitting in his rental car, staring out at the slightly overgrown lawn with its wintery patches of brown, looking at the silent white two-story house, the suburban lot felt haunted. Justin felt haunted. Right now the whole world felt haunted.

  But he knew he didn’t have much time. The place would be cleaned out soon, and Theresa Cooke was beyond caring about anything as trivial as breaking and entering, so Justin forced himself to open the car door and step out into the quiet street. Not breaking stride, determined to look as if he belonged there-as if he weren’t an intruder; as if he weren’t the reason the house was empty and silent and dead-he went up the walk to the front door. It didn’t take him long to break in. Then, inside the foyer, he closed the door behind him and stood still, just listening. All he heard was the silence.

  He went upstairs. There were three bedrooms, one master and two for the girls. He was momentarily stymied; he’d only been expecting one extra room, but he figured out which one was Hannah’s-he checked the bookshelves; Reysa, the twelve-year-old, had a higher reading level-and he began his search. It didn’t take long. He tried not to disturb her things. It didn’t make sense, someone would be disturbing them soon enough, packing them up, giving them away, saving them, tossing them into the garbage, whatever, but Justin wanted no part of it. After a few minutes of combing through the dolls and toys, he shifted a large pink stuffed dog off to the side, away from the drawer it was blocking, and inside the drawer he saw what he was looking for.

  He’d brought a manila envelope in his gym bag, along with a small piece of bubble wrap, and soon the envelope had a bulge in it. He’d put several dollars’ worth of stamps on it before he left home, figuring that would be plenty. Justin sealed the envelope, and left the little girl’s room, closing the door behind him. Then he was downstairs and out the front door, not bothering to lock it behind him-it made no difference now whether it was open or shut-and he walked back to the car.

  Twenty minutes later, he noticed a mailbox on the street, in front of the entrance to a minimall. He pulled the car over, hopped out, and shoved the envelope into the box. He pulled into the mall when he saw a cell phone store. It took him less than fifteen minutes to buy and pay for a new phone with prepaid minutes. He didn’t want to be traced, not for this call, anyway. Using the new phone, he got the number for Bruce’s Gym in Boston. When a woman answered at the other end, Justin said, “Leyla?”

  “Hold on, I’ll get her,” the voice said. And momentarily, another female voice was on, saying, “Yup?”

  “I need to speak to Wanda Chinkle,” he said. “This is-”

  “Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup. . no need to gimme your name,” Leyla told him. “You the troublemaker?”

  “Yeah,” Justin said. “That’s me.”

  “I ain’t seen Wanda lately.”

  “But you know how to get in touch with her.”

  “Not so much. Not for the last forty-eight hours or so.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause she ain’t where she said she’d be. And I don’t know where else she’d be goin’.”

  Justin didn’t say anything for quite a while, started to hang up, remembered that this woman Leyla was still holding on at the other end, so he just said, “Thanks,” very softly and clicked the red off button on the phone.

  She ain’t where she said she’d be.

  Wanda was missing.

  He took a deep breath, felt a sharp pain rattle his chest-realized it was pain that stemmed from fear-and exhaled, hoping the pain would go away. It didn’t. But he decided to ignore it. Decided to ignore the news about Wanda, too, because it was the only thing he could do right now. And thirty minutes after that he was at St. Joseph’s Hospital, which is where he knew he had to be, Wanda or no Wanda, because the news had reported that this was where the girl was being cared for.

  At the front desk, Justin asked for the doctor who was in charge of Hannah Cooke. The nurse at the reception desk looked him over carefully, then lifted a phone and spoke into the receiver. It only took a few minutes after that for a youngish doctor to approach him, introduce himself as Dr. Graham, and say that he was looking after Hannah. Justin asked if there was a place where they might have a couple of minutes of privacy, and Dr. Graham took him into a nearby office.

  Justin didn’t bother to sit down, he just said, “I want to make sure the girl gets the best care possible, and I’ll pay for it.”

  “Are you a relative?” Dr. Graham asked.

  “No.”

  “A family friend?”

  “I’ve met her,” Justin told him. “It doesn’t matter what my relationship is, does it, as long as I’m willing to pay?”

  “I suppose not. But Hannah was badly injured. Parts of her body were badly burned and there’s some disfigurement-”

  “Is she going to survive?”

  “I don’t know yet. Not for certain. But I believe so.”

  “I want her to have whatever reconstructive surgery is necessary. When this is over, if she lives, I’d like her to be as close to normal as possible.”

  “The bills are going to be-”

  “I don’t care what they’re going to be.” Justin handed over a credit card. “Run this through. If you reach any kind of a limit, which I don’t think you will, just let me know and I’ll provide more.”

  “Mr.”-the doctor looked down at the card-“Westwood, this is fairly irregular. It would help if I had a little more information.”

  “Well, you’re not going to get any. I want to be out of here in five minutes. All I want to do is make sure this little girl gets as well as she possibly can get. And I want no publicity whatsoever. This stays strictly between you and me and whatever hospital administrators you have to deal with.”

  “Do you want to see her?”

  “Is she conscious?”

  “In and out. Not really.”

  “I’d like her to have twenty-four-hour nursing. I don’t want her to be alone.”

  “I understand.” The doctor kept silent for a moment, they both did, then Graham said, “So do you want to see her?”

  Justin nodded, just the smallest of nods, and the doctor escorted him down the hall and down the elevator to the intensive care unit and down another hallway until he was standing not far from a bed, on it the small form of a young girl. Her face was bandaged, her head shaved, a seemingly endless maze of tubes running to and from her body. Her chest was rising and falling in short, rhythmic bursts, the only sign that inside the bandages was a living thing.

  “You can talk to her,” the doctor said. “I’m a believer in that. Even if they can’t respond, sometimes they know when we talk to them. And even if they don’t know, sometimes it just makes us feel better.”

  “When it’s over,” Justin said.
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  “When what’s over?” the doctor said.

  But he didn’t get an answer. Justin was already heading back down the hall.

  Graham was about to call after him, decided against it, instead he let the guy turn toward the elevator and disappear. Strange, the doctor thought. Strange guy all around. He seemed so. . tormented. So determined.

  Graham decided part of the strangeness was that he couldn’t figure out exactly what this guy Justin was so determined to do.

  Oh well, he thought. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Better get back on my rounds.

  But as he walked off down the hall, smiling at two nurses hurrying past him, he realized he couldn’t quite get Hannah Cooke’s new benefactor out of his mind. And, turning into a patient’s room-he checked his chart to make sure he got the name right; a Mrs. Isadora Sashaman-he thought, I wonder what he meant by “over.”

  26

  When Justin stepped into his living room at five-thirty that afternoon, it looked like a hurricane had swept through the house. Papers were scattered everywhere. As were beer cans and two pint containers of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream.

  “Make yourself at home, why don’t you?” he said to Reggie Bokkenheuser.

  “You can’t have it both ways,” Reggie said. “You want neatness or you want results?”

  She was in jeans and a T-shirt, on the couch, her black boots curled under her. He smiled at how natural she looked, and how earnest. Her hair was kind of a mess, one lock kept falling over her eye and she kept blowing it away.

  “Any calls for me? Any word from someone named Wanda?”

  “No calls, no women named Wanda banging down your door. Sorry.”

  “Okay, what have you got for me?” Justin said.

  “I haven’t moved in, like, eight hours. How about a ‘thank you’ or ‘how are you’ or something good for morale like that?”

  “Thank you. How are you?”

  “Fine. Thanks for your sincerity.”

  “What have you got for me?”

  She blew out a breath. “A lot.”

  He gave her a “gimme” sign with his hands and her response was to lift her right hand to her mouth and mime drinking from a bottle. He went to the kitchen, came back with two bottles of beer. She nodded a thank-you, and then she began to roll off what she’d learned from reading through Roger Mallone’s suitcase full of material.

  She told him that there was some financial material she just wasn’t capable of understanding, but she’d tried to note anything of relevance, even if she couldn’t quite follow it. Mostly, she said, she had tried to follow his instructions and trace connections between people and organizations. Three hours later, she was still reading from her notes and interpreting and he was still inputting info into his computer, dizzy from the information he was trying to absorb and translate into workable patterns.

  He tried to organize everything into his preexisting lists and some things fit nicely into the categories he’d already set up. Other pieces of information required their own separate organization. Reggie had done a superb job of sifting through Mallone’s research. She provided him with charts detailing Phil Dandridge’s long relationship with EGenco-as well as the company’s ties to other government officials. She also provided a kind of political family tree for him, with Dandridge the head of the family. The interconnection between EGenco and the vice president stretched all the way back to his days at Yale University. Yale was the breeding ground and seemingly the genesis for the political and economic ties that appeared to be at the core of everything that was now going on around them. Dandridge had been at the college at the same time as Bradford Collins, the EGenco CEO who’d been killed in the blast at Harper’s. Dandridge and Collins had both been members of the tight-knit and secretive campus organization Skull and Bones. Jeffrey Stuller, the attorney general, had also attended Yale during those years, but was not a Bonesman. Stephanie Ingles, the current administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, was also a Yalie from those days, and although Justin could not see any relevance she might have to his investigation, he entered the connection into his computer. He would worry about information overload later.

  He’d asked Reggie to scrutinize the main lawsuits that had been filed over the past three years against EGenco and she’d provided background on three of them. He now had six pages of facts, figures, and names relating to the environmental group Save the Earth and its suit against Dandridge. EGenco was only a peripheral part of that legal action, but their connection was substantial. STE was suing Dandridge to provide a list of the attendees and the input given by those attendees at the Conference on Energy the vice president had organized at the beginning of his second term in office. The suit had taken nearly two and a half years to get to the Supreme Court, where it was quickly dismissed. Dandridge fought to the bitter end to keep all information about that conference secret and confidential. And he won.

  As a kind of subset of that suit, Justin had asked Reggie to put together information on the Saudi royal family. His dad had practically blown a gasket talking about the Saudi role in U.S. energy policy, and Justin knew enough to know that Saudis were never far away when it came to any kind of terrorist acts. He didn’t know if those connections would apply now, but the links couldn’t be ignored. If they were there, he wanted to know what the possibilities were. In Reggie’s list of information about the Save the Earth suit, she’d included the fact that there was a specific request to subpoena Mishari al Rahman, a Saudi royal, as someone who might have information about Dandridge’s conference. Mishari, a longtime friend and business associate of Dandridge, was supposed to be representing the entire royal Saudi clan. In particular, the suit was claiming that the White House, in conjunction with the Saudis, was manipulating oil prices. The intent, the suit said, was to bring the cost way down before the next presidential election, using the ensuing economic advantage as a further boon to Phillip Dandridge’s campaign. The main argument against this allegation was that oil prices weren’t going down. They were rising like crazy, and until the bombing attacks, that fact had unquestionably been hurting Dandridge’s campaign.

  There were several pages related to the lawsuit New York City had filed against EGenco. The suit was complicated and detailed and Reggie had done her best to simplify things, but there were gaps that Justin wasn’t quite able to bridge. The gist of the suit was that New York had pension fund money-firemen’s and police pension money in addition to that of many other city employees-invested in EGenco. The suit charged that EGenco was violating federal law by doing business with countries that supported state-sponsored terrorism. Justin couldn’t follow every step, but the suit traced over a trail of shell companies that existed only to launder money and circumvent the law. The suit emphasized the fact that post-9/11, the city couldn’t allow its money to be invested in countries and businesses that were responsible or supportive of that attack.

  The third major area that Reggie had done her best to condense was the Justice Department’s investigation into EGenco’s business practices, stemming from the financial improprieties that Roger Mallone had explained.

  By eight-thirty that night, the living room was even messier, Reggie was chomping on her third piece of pizza from the pie she’d gone out to pick up at the Italian place on Main Street, and Justin had to turn away from his computer screen and say to her, “Okay, enough. I have to stop.”

  “What have you put together?” Reggie asked.

  He shook his head. “In some ways too much, in some ways not enough.”

  “You want to talk it out?”

  “I don’t know if I can even make sense of it. I can see the threads, see some of the corruption, I can even see where people are making a shitload of money they shouldn’t be making, but Christ, tying it in to the bombings and the plane crash. . it’s inconceivable.”

  “The bombings, Jay? I thought you were just looking at the crash.”

  “It’s all tied together, Reg
gie. I can’t prove it, but I know it.”

  “Maybe the McDonald’s thing, I know you think it was all meant to kill the Cooke woman, but come on, Harper’s and La Cucina?”

  “I know. I know. It’s crazy. But. .”

  “Talk.”

  “Okay, look. Bradford Collins is the head of EGenco. The company’s under investigation by the Justice Department for huge, mind-boggling financial misconduct.”

  “The misconduct hasn’t been proven yet.”

  “A lot of things haven’t been proven yet. But let’s go with it for a minute. Let’s just say it’s justified, that they’re heavily in debt and they tried to hide it, that they screwed around with pension funds. Let’s just say they’re Enron. I heard a good case made for that. Plus, in a separate suit, they’re being sued for illegal dealings with terrorist-supporting countries.”

  “Nice company.”

  “Yeah, they’re sweethearts. But it’s not hard to see why someone wanted Collins dead.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was going to talk.”

  “To who?”

  “To the Feds. . Wait, hold on a second.” He went back to his computer, called up his file on the case. He didn’t find what he was looking for, went on the Net, back to the New York Times site. He went to a story in their files that he’d looked up before, one that had had the names of the people killed in the Harper’s bombing. He scanned the list and the brief bios that went along with them. “Damn!” he said, when he came to what he was looking for. “He wasn’t just going to talk to Justice. He was going to talk to Elliot Brown.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The New York City comptroller. He was killed in the explosion, too. I’ll bet the house he was one of the people at Collins’s table that day.”

  “All right, so he was going to talk. Who’d want to stop him? I mean, stop him badly enough to kill him.”

  “The Justice Department.”