by David Grace
“Yes, we have but he wasn’t able to help us. Did Neddick have any tattoos or distinguishing features?”
“I don’t think so,” she said in a flat voice, “except for the little scar near his right temple, but I’m sure you saw that on his driver’s license picture.”
“Neddick’s not his real name, or if it is he never got a driver’s license.”
“You don’t have a picture of him?”
“No,” Virgil said, then cocked his head to one side. “Do you?”
“Give me a moment.” She stood and hurried from the room. From someplace near the back of the apartment they heard drawers opening and closing. A couple of minutes later she returned and headed over to the TV.
“I have a daughter to think about,” she said and plugged a USB drive into the back of the set. A minute later a video of a dark-haired, Caucasian man in his late twenties played across the screen. “I never leave anyone completely alone in my house. My little girl is six. That’s from my nanny cam. Would you like me to make you a copy?”
* * *
“You know why she asked for our business cards?” Virgil said as they headed back to their car.
“You mean do I know that the next time she gets busted for identity theft or bad checks or receiving stolen property or whatever scam she’s got going that she’s going to call me and ask if I’ll help her out?”
“Pretty much. If, when, she does, what are you going to say?”
“If this video gets us Kyle Neddick, hell, I’ll post her bail,” Stan said, laughing.
Chapter Forty-Five
The target’s name was Randall Bryce, and his Tuesday night companion was not a girlfriend. She was the daughter of one of the men he had served with in the closing days of the war in Vietnam. While making dinner three months ago her husband had dropped dead from a bursting aneurism. They had two kids under the age of ten and no life insurance. In the normal scheme of things none of that would have been Randall Bryce’s concern, but also outside the normal course of things was the fact that in 1972 her father had pulled a wounded Bryce out of harm’s way an instant before a burst of AK-47 fire would have surely taken his life. So, now Randall paid half her rent and visited her every week in remembrance of her departed father who, so many years ago, had saved his life. You have a debt, you pay a debt, Randall thought as he pulled into the space that once had been reserved for Diana’s husband.
He was just about to close the Lincoln’s driver’s door when a voice called from behind him, “Excuse me, Mr. Bryce?” When Randall turned he saw a man dressed in an expensive, dark wool coat approaching from eight or nine feet away. The man was of average size and indeterminate age and, in fact, only two things about him differed from the norm. The first was that he was wearing a ski mask and the second was that he was lazily holding a nine-millimeter pistol in his right hand.
“Please be calm, Mr. Bryce. I have no intention of hurting you. This,” he raised the gun an inch or so, “is only to keep you from doing something foolish before you’ve heard what I have to say.” A quick glance confirmed that the garage was deserted. Bryce took a long look at the gun and raised his hands.
“Please toss me your keys.” Bryce gave them an underhand flip and they bounced off the gunman’s chest. “I’m not going to steal your car,” he said, nodding at the burgundy MKZ. “As I said, I don’t want you doing something foolish. Let’s sit down in there for a minute and have a little talk, and then I’ll be on my way.”
Danny waved Bryce toward the driver’s seat with the barrel of his gun. Bryce hesitated a moment then carefully complied. “Close the door,” Danny ordered once he was in the passenger seat.
“What’s this all about?”
“A business discussion.”
“I don’t usually conduct business at the point of a gun.”
“This is not your usual sort of business. You see, Mr. Bryce, I sell life insurance. A very unique kind of life insurance. The kind where if you pay the premium the insureds don’t die and if you don’t pay, they do.”
“Extortion,” Bryce said.
“If you like. I’ve brought some sales aids.” Danny Cathcart pulled a 9 X 12 manila envelope from underneath his coat. “I’m going to put my gun on the seat beside me. Don’t get any ideas. I don’t want to shoot you but I will if you try something foolish.” Bryce grimaced, then shrugged.
Danny pulled out three sets of 8 X 10 color prints. When he handed over the first packet Bryce noticed that he was wearing flesh-colored latex gloves, then he forgot all that when he got a look at the pictures. Cathcart played a mini-flashlight over the images.
“That’s Herbert Samuelson. My associates cut his throat after they raped his wife.” Bryce gasped and pushed the picture aside. “That’s her, Natalie. Notice that she’s still alive in that picture.” Bryce glanced briefly at the naked, terrified woman, then turned away.
“I included that so you would know that I’m not just showing you police crime-scene photos as part of some scam. I can assure you that these images were taken by my associates before the police were ever involved. Mr. Samuelson was offered the opportunity to avoid this situation by purchasing one of our policies. Sadly, he refused. Maybe he thought we weren’t serious or perhaps that we would pick another insured, his sister or one of his children. You see, Mr. Bryce, we deal with a pool of subjects under the theory that the customer can’t protect them all.”
Bryce scowled and threw the pictures to the floor.
“I understand your reluctance to view these materials, but if there is the slightest doubt of our determination, of our ability and our will to carry through with our threats then you should take a look at these.” Danny held out the other two packets but Bryce slapped them away.
“You’re what the papers are calling the Mad Dog Killers.”
“Then you know that we can and will do what we say. Which brings us to our business today. You have a girl friend, four children, three of them married with children of their own, and your parents are still alive. We consider all of them part of our insured pool. If you don’t buy our policy one of those families, and I stress the word ‘families’, are going to end up like Mr. and Mrs. Samuelson. You won’t know which one until it’s too late. But that won’t be the end of it. After the first deaths the premium will go up. If you still don’t pay there will be another event. And another. Until you pay or everyone is dead.”
“You’re animals!”
“What’s that line from the Godfather? ‘It’s not personal. It’s just business.’ Now, are you going to buy a policy or do you want people to die?”
Danny held out another set of gruesome pictures.
“How much?” Bryce asked.
“Two million dollars. You’ll pay it by a wire transfer to a numbered account in a country that has a commitment to the anonymity of banking transactions.”
“What’s to stop you from coming back after you get the money and asking for more?”
“The knowledge that if we did that you wouldn’t pay a second time and we wouldn’t waste our time when there are so many other customers in the world.”
“Two million would buy my family round-the-clock protection for years. I could just wait until the police catch you or you move on to other victims.”
“But you’d never know for sure. No security is perfect and you can’t be certain that we will ever be caught. Do you want to take the chance that we won’t be able to get to your family when the penalty is so extreme? Isn’t that why people buy insurance in the first place? To reduce risk?”
“I’d rather spend the two million on security than give it to monsters like you.”
“I’m sincerely disappointed that we can’t come to some agreement. Are you sure that’s the answer you want to give me?”
Bryce scowled and looked away. Danny’s hand was on the door handle when Bryce called out, “One million and not a penny more.”
Danny turned back and in Bryce’s face he saw anger and bitter
determination but no hesitation and not a fragment of fear.
“For that kind of a discount payment would need to be wired within twenty-four hours.”
“All right,” Bryce agreed after a long pause. “I’ll need the routing number.”
“It’s all here.” Danny pulled a slip of paper from the bottom of the manila envelope and handed it over. Bryce squinted at it for a moment then gave an angry shrug.
“I need my reading glasses.” He patted his chest, then reached into the recessed compartment near the bottom of the driver’s door. He pulled out a small, grease-stained cloth bag, peeked in then muttered, “Finally!” and stuck his left hand all the way to the bottom.
When it emerged it held a Beretta PX4 subcompact pistol. Firing left-handed felt awkward but from less than three feet away he couldn’t miss. He put the first bullet into Danny’s stomach because he didn’t want him to die right away. He paused for a single second to enjoy the look of shocked surprise that he imagined was distorting the monster’s face. Then Bryce raised the barrel and fired a second forty-caliber slug dead center into Cathcart’s forehead. It kept on going out of the back of his skull eventually starring the Lincoln’s passenger window on its way through the glass.
I’ll have to get a new car, Randall Bryce thought idly as he pulled out his phone to call the police. For an instant, he remembered what it was like to be a soldier and set out to take a life. But this was different. Over there the enemy had been human. Tonight, he had killed a monster.
* * *
Kyle tried watching some porn but even the action on-screen couldn’t slow the spinning in his brain. The game was over. Latwan was circling the drain so maybe he’d get lucky there. Paulie and Anderson were out of the way, so that was good. Dion was MIA. Did the cops have him? Kyle hated leaving any witnesses behind. Then there was Danny. He’d have to go too, after they got the last score.
Kyle looked at his watch. Ten o’clock. Danny should have made his play by now. Kyle pulled out his latest cell and checked the log. No calls. Ten-fifteen. Nothing. Finally, around ten-thirty, Kyle punched in Danny’s new number. It rang six times then was answered with a grunted “Yeah?” Kyle held his breath against the silence. In the background he heard a man’s voice say, “Get those reporters back!”
Kyle immediately punched off the phone and pulled out the battery and the SIM card. Cops! Danny fucked it up. Shit! Kyle took a breath. It was obvious what he had to do. Time to run. Time to run.
Chapter Forty-Six
At a quarter after nine Tuesday night Virgil checked his email, his text messages, and his voice mail, the same way he had done at eight-thirty and five to nine and that he knew he would do again at nine-thirty or twenty to ten, and, he knew, with the same results. Nothing.
Had the BOLO actually gone out? Was anyone looking at it? Had the patrol cops just glanced briefly at Kyle’s picture from the nanny cam and then gone back to watching for guys making illegal left turns?
Virgil forced himself to return the phone to its charging cradle and turned back to the computer screen. It turned out that no single federal agency monitored prescription drug sales, but most states had some sort of a program. Out of the fifty states, thirty participated in a unified database program with access restricted to authorized personnel.
Separate databases specialized in monitoring cancer medications for the purpose of evaluating side effects and efficacy. It had taken Virgil hours of emails and calling in more than a few favors to obtain a valid username and a password that would give him access, but that was the easy part.
Peter Fineman pulled some strings with the DPD IT department and one of their techs had cobbled together a script that ran the names he had obtained of the mothers of new female elementary school students against the list of cancer-drug prescription patients for the states that participated in the database. Another piece of code ran the resulting hits through social security and DMV files, filtering for white females of Helen’s approximate age and rough height and weight. The result was eighty-seven names of women who could have been Helen who had driver’s licenses across twenty-two states and an additional fifty-two candidates who did not have driver’s licenses and thus could not either be ruled in or ruled out based on physical characteristics.
Virgil started with the list of women with driver’s licenses and called up their ID photos one-by-one. The problem was that even if Helen hadn’t disguised herself, nobody really looked very much like their DMV picture, plus he hadn’t seen her in nine years. Is this Helen? Virgil asked himself time after time. Is this her? Is this her?
Around eleven he reached the end of the DMV list. Depending on the level of disguise – hair length, style and color, cotton balls inside her cheeks, makeup – he had eleven possibles and four likelies scattered over nine states. He added these names to the fifty-two women for whom there were no DMV photos at all.
He stared at the list, thought Sisyphus and his rock, then turned off the computer. He was halfway to his bedroom when the phone rang.
Is that about the BOLO? he thought. Did they get him?
“Quinn . . . Yeah, we’ve got the Samuelson murders. . . . . What? . . . . He’s in your office now? . . . . I’ll be there in ten minutes.” Virgil disconnected and called Stan.
“Some guy claims that one of the Mad Dog gang tried to blackmail him, told him that if he didn’t pay them a million dollars that his family would be next.”
“Sounds like he’s running a scam.”
“The blackmailer had pictures of the victims, from just before and just after they were killed.”
“Jesus! Extortion? That’s what this was all about? . . . Do we have a line on him?”
“In a way. The victim put a bullet through his head,” Virgil told him. “You’d better grab some coffee. It’s going to be a long night.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
It was barely dawn when Kyle switched cars and headed out. He hated to give up the Mercedes, but he just couldn’t take the chance that Danny had memorized the plate number. Maybe Danny wouldn’t talk. Maybe Dion was with some whore and not locked up, but only a fool counted on stuff like that, which was why he’d bought the Infiniti when he and Danny had started the whole thing all those months ago. The G35 was nine years old but it ran like new; the insurance was paid up, and the tags were registered to a junkie who would sell his mother to the Taliban for a vial of rocks.
Danny crossed the I-30 and briefly considered turning east and losing himself in Chicago until the heat cooled down, but he wasn’t sure how far away they’d be looking for him. In the end he decided to keep on heading southwest, maybe grab a plane out of Oklahoma City or Albuquerque. His ID should be plenty good enough to get him through one of those second-level airports.
For the hundredth time he wondered what had happened to Danny, how he’d fucked up, not that it really mattered now. Cathcart was one of those guys who were so smart about some things that they made you forget that they had a streak of stupidity as wide as the Grand Canyon. Kyle remembered the first time he’d met Danny in the bar at the Westin Cadillac Hotel, of all places. . . .
* * *
Kyle wore his best outfit, a black leather jacket, black shirt, pants and shoes. All his fence had told him was that the guy was white, good looking, around thirty, thoroughly bent, and had a score that he needed some help with. When he entered the bar half the guys fit that description but only one turned in his seat and gave him a little wave.
“Danny?” Kyle asked in a voice barely above a whisper.
“Kyle? Have a seat.” Without waiting for a reply he signaled one of the waiters. “What would you like? It’s on me.”
“Scotch, the good stuff.”
“Bring him a Dewars,” Danny told the waiter, “and another one of these for me.”
“Jerry said you needed some help with something,” Kyle began once the waiter was gone.
“In a way. I have an idea about how to make a lot of money, but I need the right man t
o make it work. Jerry said you might be that person.”
“What did Jerry tell you about me?” Kyle asked in a deceptively soft voice.
“Just that–” Danny stopped when the waiter arrived. “Nothing specific,” he continued a minute later. “Just that you were a man who could do whatever was necessary if the price was right.”
A few months before, Kyle had paid a bookie for the name of a degenerate gambler who ran a high-end janitorial company, and the loser had been feeding him information on when people were going to be out of town ever since. After the first job Kyle had enough leverage to strong-arm the guy into leaving a window or door unlocked or slipping him the alarm codes.
For two months now Kyle, Paulie Sturdevant and Latwan Monroe had been looting the targets of whatever they could carry away. On the second to the last job a private patrol guard had spotted their van, but he didn’t live long enough to do anything about it, though Kyle had no intention of telling Danny anything about that.
“What’s this plan of yours?” Kyle asked instead.
“I work at a bank,” Danny began, giving the room a quick glance, “wealth management. I help people invest their money, move it around. The bucks they have are amazing,” Danny held up his palms, “and it’s all just sitting there! Unfortunately,” Danny’s lips thinned into a tight line, “I can’t get my hands on it. I know how much they’ve got and where it is but I don’t have the credentials to actually take it. That’s where you come in.”
“How’s that?” Kyle said as if asking about the weather.
“I identify the target, give you his address and how much he’s got available in liquid funds. You get him to give you the access codes. You give them to me and I wire the money to a bank in the British Virgin Isles or someplace like that – I can set that up – and we split it 50-50.”