Heart of a Killer

by David Rosenfelt

  It was clear that Tammy had not hung up, but was not responding to Denise’s pleas. The call was traced to Dubuque, Iowa, and the FBI was responding, but none of that was going to matter to those people in the air.

  Whitaker could only watch as the plane reached 55,700 feet, sputtered, and died. He braced himself and geared for what would come next; the plane would dive and he would have to bring it back to life. But he would only have a chance if it had reverted to his control.

  The plane began its plunge, and with the screams of the passengers behind him, he grabbed on to the controls and got to work.

  There was a full four-minute interval between the time he realized that the computer was still in total control and the moment the plane smashed into the earth.

  All Tammy said before hanging up was, “Next time you better listen to me.”

  Sheryl was less enthusiastic than I expected. I had come there that morning to give her the good news, hoping she would hear it from me first. At this point I could pretty much come and go as I pleased; the fact that the case was prominent in the media meant that the prison authorities would try to appear accommodating.

  But Sheryl reacted if not coolly, then matter of factly, to my report, and that was probably because I never seemed to give her credit for being as smart as she really was.

  “You did well,” she said.

  “I thought you’d be euphoric.”

  “Is the lower court going to rule in our favor? Are they going to order that I can give Karen my heart?”

  “It’s very, very unlikely,” I said.

  “Then why exactly should I be overjoyed? We either win it all or we lose, Harvard.”

  She was right, of course, but I didn’t want to fully give her that. “Because, and you should pardon the expression, right now this keeps us alive. And as long as we are alive in the courts, there’s a chance for public pressure to build.”

  “And then what?” she asked.

  “And then maybe they’ll cave. If we haven’t come up with anything else in the meantime.”

  “Like what?”

  I ignored the question, at least for the moment. “Where did Charlie keep his personal papers?”

  “Why?”

  I hit it straight on. “Because I’m working with the cop that arrested you. He’s doesn’t think you murdered Charlie, and I don’t either.”

  She was clearly annoyed. “We’ve been through this.”

  I nodded. “And now we’re going through it again. Look, there’s a two percent chance we’ll uncover something to get you paroled. But that’s double the chance we have of winning in court, so I’m going to pursue it.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Sheryl, my job is to protect you, which in this case means getting you what you want. This is the best way for me to do it, to go down both avenues. If that doesn’t work for you, then you need to get yourself a different lawyer.”

  I’d never been that forceful with her, and she seemed taken aback by it. She took time to gather her thoughts, and I realized that, just like with every woman I’ve ever met, I had absolutely no idea what she was going to say.

  Finally she said, “He had a desk in the room he used as an office. There were drawers that locked, and he kept important stuff in there.”

  “Where would it be now?”

  She laughed. “Good question. After I was arrested and he was dead, the house was empty. Within two days, I was told that someone had broken in and ransacked the place. The bastards must have read about what happened in the papers, and they swooped in. It’s like when they read the obits, so they’ll know who to rob during the funeral.”

  I didn’t know why Novack had asked the question about Charlie’s papers in the first place, but I was immediately suspicious about the robbery. It seemed very possible, even likely, that it was not a theft of opportunity by predators who knew from the newspaper that the house would be unoccupied. They could have been after whatever Novack was after; unfortunately they got there six years ahead of him.

  “What about a safe-deposit box? Did he have one of those?”

  She thought about it for a while, and then nodded. “I think we had one together, though I never used it. I remember when we took it out.”

  “Do you have the key?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t think I ever did.”

  “What bank?”

  “Probably Citizens Trust on Broadway. That’s the branch I always used.”

  “Thanks, Sheryl,” I said, and then had an idea. “Would you talk to the cop if I brought him in here? His name is Novack.”

  “Believe me, I remember him.”

  “Would you talk to him? I’d be in the room as well.”

  “I’d rather not,” she said.

  “I’d rather you would,” I said.

  “You’re turning into a pain in the ass, Harvard.”

  “Not true. I’ve always been a pain in the ass. You’re just learning it now. Where have you been?”

  She smiled. “In here.”

  “So maybe we can change that. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  I started to leave, but then stopped at the door before the guard saw me. I turned back to her, and came fully back into the room. “Sheryl, I’m sorry to be difficult about this, but I just can’t see you slitting someone’s throat.”

  She shrugged but didn’t say anything.

  “How did you do it?” I asked.

  “With a knife.”

  “No, I mean, well … was he lying on his back or his stomach?”

  “Do I really need to relive this?” she asked.

  “This is the only time I’ll ask you about it; I promise,” I said.

  “He was on his stomach.”

  “And where were you? Did you just walk up to him and raise his head?”

  “Yes. He was sleeping.”

  “So you were standing next to him?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I knew from Novack’s description, and from the discovery documents, that the killer made knee imprints in Charlie’s back. “You’re lying, Sheryl. You don’t even know how the hell it happened.”

  She yelled “Guard!” and when he came in, she added, “We’re finished with our meeting. Get my lawyer the hell out of here.”

  I didn’t wait for the guard; I left on my own. I had done what I needed to do; I had shaken her up. I was pleased by that.

  Ten more times and we’d be even.

  “We’re going to have to work together on this.”

  Novack just laughed when I said it, as if the idea was too absurd to warrant an actual verbal response. But I knew that I was going to have to get my way on this, ever since I left the prison that morning.

  We were sitting and eating pancakes in Paula’s Pancake House, on Route 4 in Elmwood Park. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and we were at one of only two occupied tables in the place. The other patron, sitting on the other end of the room, was an elderly man in his seventies, drinking a cup of coffee so slowly it seemed it might last into his eighties.

  I would assume that pancake consumption decreases as the day goes along, and at Paula’s that day it had apparently ground to a halt. The ones I was eating seemed as if they were cooked around 9:00 A.M.; at that point they were somewhere between pancakes and hockey pucks. Novack was suffering through his as well.

  The lack of other customers was a good thing, since it meant we didn’t have to whisper. Arguing in hushed tones always seems awkward.

  I had called him here, so I was the one with the agenda, and I was going to push it. “I’m serious,” I said. “It’s the only way that works for me, and for you as well.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “You’re going to need access to Sheryl; she’s the only one that can answer questions about Charlie. She won’t talk to you without me there; she trusts me and knows I’m on her side. She doesn’t see you as her best buddy; you put her where she is.”

  “She put herself th
ere,” Novack said.

  “True. But I’m crucial to you and her getting along. And there’s a more important factor.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “The only way to do this in time, at least from her point of view, is to use whatever we can come up with in her parole hearing. I’ve got to prepare for that hearing, so I must know what’s going on as soon as you do. You not including me is a deal breaker.”

  I was pushing it, but I had nothing to lose. If I didn’t have immediate access to everything he came up with, he did me no good.

  He laughed. “Why would I care if you break the deal? You think I have nothing else to do?”

  “I think this thing has been bugging you for six years, and you want to get to the bottom of it. So I think you’ve got plenty to do, but this is at the top of your list, and you want to cross it off.”

  He thought about it for a few seconds, and then said, “When can I talk to her?”

  “When you tell me why you want to.”

  He took me through his trying to find William Beverly by going to what was supposed to be his home in King of Prussia, and his listed place of employment. He had done some further checking, and still could not find anyone who had been in physical contact with Beverly, or had any recollection of him. Yet his life was chronicled in cyberspace in fairly significant detail; there was far more evidence of him than just an ID in Charlie Harrison’s wallet.

  “Weird,” I said.

  “Wow … that could be just the insight we need,” he said. Then, “And it gets weirder. I’ve been checking into Beverly’s brother, James. He died two weeks before Charlie Harrison.”

  “Murdered?” I asked.

  Novack shrugged. “Depends on your definition. He was admitted into a hospital in Camden for blood clots. They put him on some medication, and within ten minutes he was dead.”

  “Did the drugs cause the death?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t seem like it,” he said.

  “So what did he die of?”

  “Nothing. As far as I can tell he didn’t die at all, because he was never in that hospital. At least nobody there remembers him, and they swear that’s the kind of event that they would never forget. But he’s in their computer; he’s in a bunch of computers, just like his brother William. But nobody remembers either of them. Nobody.”

  “Any theories?” I asked.

  “Not yet. How about you, counselor?”

  “James Beverly supposedly died at about the time Charlie quit his job, and he quit his job because he believed he was coming into a bunch of money. It seems logical to infer that the two things are connected.”

  “Unless they’re not,” he said.

  “Look, I’ve never done this kind of stuff, and I’m certainly not going to tell you your business. But the timing here is such that we’re not going to be able to cross the ‘t’s you usually cross, or dot the ‘i’s you usually dot. We’re going to have to trust our gut instincts.”

  He seemed amused. “You have a gut instinct?”

  “A few more of these pancakes and I’ll have a gut. The instinct will follow.”

  Novack asked me what I had found out about Charlie Harrison’s personal papers, and I related what Sheryl had told me. He already had learned about the robbery, and was as suspicious about it as I was.

  “What about the safe-deposit box?”

  “They had one together,” I said. “But Sheryl never used it; she doesn’t even think she had a key. I could use my power of attorney to get into it.”

  He nodded his satisfaction with that. “Good. Let’s do that tomorrow.”

  We talked some more, and Novack said that if he could gather more information, he could go off vacation mode and officially open the case, which would bring the resources of the department to bear on it. Then we discussed the public relations side of things.

  “Your publicity campaign took a hit,” he said.

  He was referring to the fact that we were no longer page-one news. An airline had crashed near Charlotte, North Carolina, killing fifty-nine people. The authorities were claiming to have no idea what caused the crash, but conspiracy theorists were already calling it an act of terrorism, and no one was denying it with any vehemence.

  People are always interested in plane crashes, and when there is even a hint that it might not have been an accident, it crowds everything else out of the news until that possibility is credibly discounted.

  “You think it was terrorism?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Beats the shit out of me. We’ll know soon enough what the government thinks.”

  “You think they’ll tell the truth?”

  “It’s not what they say, lawyer, it’s what they do. And what’s really important is who does it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If the FBI takes the lead, it means they think it was terrorism. And then your story goes to page forty.”

  He was right, of course. Sheryl’s was a fascinating human interest story, but humans are far more interested in something that could threaten them personally, and since most people get on airplanes at least once in a while, the plane in Charlotte was a huge news event.

  We made plans for Novack to talk to Sheryl at the prison the next morning, and were out of Paula’s by three-thirty. We both had a lot to do, and if I sat there and waited until I could digest the pancakes, it would be way too late.

  The NTSB was already taking an uncustomary backseat on Flight 3278. Whenever there was an aviation accident, or near accident, the National Transportation Safety Board completely and immediately took over the investigation. They were famously and sometimes annoyingly painstaking and thorough.

  The drill was replayed over and over. After a serious incident with multiple fatalities, with the public clamoring for an explanation, an NTSB official would hold a press conference and make it crystal clear that the answer was a very long ways off, and that no speculation would be forthcoming.

  But this case was different. While it was unclear exactly how the ability to control the aircraft was taken away from Captain Whitaker, nobody in a position to know was under the illusion that it was an accident. The plane was intentionally taken down, which meant the FBI would be the preeminent agency.

  Within twenty minutes of Flight 3278 hitting the ground, Special Agent Mike Janssen was in the air, heading for Charlotte. Working out of the Chicago office, Janssen had a number of attributes to make him the logical choice to head up the investigation, besides being tough, smart, and relentless.

  Janssen had successfully investigated the crash two years earlier of a Brazilian jet near São Paulo. The FBI traditionally offers its superior resources to allies in particularly difficult cases, especially in situations like that one, where two Americans were among the dead.

  Terrorism was suspected in the Brazilian crash, and Janssen had brought the investigation to a successful conclusion, determining that lax security measures had allowed a passenger to bring an explosive on board. The deranged individual, not representing any terrorist organization or cause, but merely wanting to commit a spectacular suicide, had detonated the device and brought the plane down.

  Another key quality that Janssen possessed was an antipathy for the press, coupled with an ability to effectively control it. Actually, he pretty much had a disdain for all people, including those he worked for. Every time there were politically motivated executive changes at the Bureau, he likened it to the daily event at Buckingham Palace, but referring to the personnel shuffles as the “changing of the assholes.”

  Janssen had handled quite a few high-profile cases in his career, and his unwillingness to share things with the media enabled him to be successful in maintaining a wall of secrecy when the situation required it.

  And this situation certainly required it.

  Janssen had the ability, or the curse depending on one’s perspective, to singularly focus on an issue, to the exclusion of everything else. It was why his colleagues nicknamed him “Laser,” and
why he did not have to call his wife and tell her he was heading for Charlotte. Janssen wasn’t married; he had tried it once and his wife simply could not deal with his devotion to his job.

  It was not that he worked twenty-four hours a day on a case, though he came close. It was more that the case of the moment was all he thought about, ever. Which left very little time to think of his wife, or friends, or anything else.

  By the time he reached the scene, he had digested all available information, such as there was. The phone call from “Tammy” was traced to a home in Dubuque, Iowa, in which Kyle and Stacy Danforth lived with their five-year-old daughter, Tammy. Federal agents descended on the house, at which point they were told by the petrified Stacy that little Tammy was at preschool.

  A trip to the preschool confirmed that Tammy Danforth had been finger-painting at the time the plane went down. It was an embarrassing moment for the agents and Bureau, though less so since it had not been made public.

  Though it could not be proved at that point, there was no doubt in Janssen’s mind that the voice of Tammy was filtered through a voice synthesizer. It was determined to be the voice quality of a child less than five years old, and no person of that age would be capable of conducting such a conversation, even when prompted.

  The reason that the perpetrator would have felt it necessary to use that voice was, like everything else at that point, completely unclear. Perhaps it was felt that it would seem even more bewildering and terrifying, and strike more panic into people that heard it. Or perhaps it was simply an amusement for the killer, or a sign of some personality defect or derangement that would become more clear later, and might even lead to the killer’s downfall.

  Certainly, the voice synthesizer could have been programmed to sound like any kind of voice, and it would have masked the real voice just as completely.

  The more important questions, of course, were how the plane was taken down and why. The NTSB investigators were working on the first part of that, and it was obvious to them from the transcript of the incident itself, especially Captain Whitaker’s description of what he was facing on board, that it was a computer issue.