‘I want to acquaint all of you with the latest on Lawrence Lipton. The most important development is that he doesn’t seem to have any known connections to the KGB or any Russian mobs. He isn’t Russian. Maybe something will turn up later; or maybe he’s just that good at hiding his past. In the fifties, his father moved to Texas from Kentucky to seek his fortune on “the prairie”. He apparently found it under the prairie, in West Texas oil fields.’
Nielsen stopped and looked around the meeting room, going from face to face. ‘There is one interesting recent development,’ he went on. ‘Among its holdings, Micro-Management owns a company called Safe Environs in Dallas. Safe Environs is a private security firm. Lawrence Lipton has recently put himself under armed guard. I wonder why? Is he worried about us, or is he scared of somebody else? Maybe the big bad Wolf?’
Chapter Ninety-One
If it wasn’t so incredibly terrifying, it would be mind-boggling. Lizzie Connelly was still among the living. She was keeping herself positive by being somewhere else – anywhere but here in the horrid closet. With this complete madman bursting in two, three, sometimes five times a day.
Mostly she got lost in her memories. Once upon a time, and it seemed so long ago, she had called her girls ‘Merry-Berry’, ‘Bobbie-doll’, names like that. They used to sing ‘High Hopes’ all the time, and songs from ‘Mary Poppins.’
They had endless positive-energy thoughts – which Lizzie called ‘happy thoughts’, and always shared them with one another, and with Brendan of course.
What else could she remember? What? Anything?
They had so many animals over the years that eventually they gave each one a number.
Chester, a black lab with a curly tail like a chow was number 16. The lab would bark constantly, all day and all night until Lizzie merely showed him a bottle of Tabasco sauce – his kryptonite. Then he would finally shut up.
Dukie, number 15, was a short-haired, orange calico who Lizzie believed had probably been an old Jewish lady in another life and who was always complaining, ‘Oh no, no, no, no.’
Maximus Kiltimus was number 11; Stubbles was number 31; Kitten Little was number 35.
Memories were all that Lizzie Connelly had – because there could be no present for her. None.
She couldn’t be here in this horror house.
Had to be somewhere else, anywhere else.
Had to be!
Had to be!
Had to be!
Because he was inside her now.
The Wolf was inside her, in the real world, grunting and thrusting like an animal, violating, raping, for minutes that seemed like hours.
But Lizzie had the last laugh, didn’t she?
She wasn’t there.
She was somewhere in her memories.
Chapter Ninety-Two
Then he was finally gone, the terrible, inhuman Wolf. Monster! Beast! He’d given her a bathroom break, and food, but now he was gone. God, his arrogance in keeping her here in his house! When is he going to kill me? I’m going mad. Going, going, gone!
She peered through teary eyes into the pitch-blackness. She’d been bound and gagged again. In a strange way, that was good news. It meant he still wanted her, right?
Good God, I’m alive because I’m desirable to a horrid beast! Please help me, dear God. Please, please, help me.
She thought about her good girls and then she turned her mind toward escape. A fantasy, she understood, and therefore escape in itself.
By now, she knew this closet by heart, even in total darkness. It was as if she could see everything, as if she had night sight. More than anything, she was aware of her own body – trapped in here – and her mind – trapped as well.
Lizzie let her hands wander as much as they could. There were clothes in the closet – a male’s – his. The closest to her was some kind of sport coat with round, smooth buttons. Possibly a blazer? Lightweight, which reinforced her belief that this was a warm-weather city.
Next was a vest. A smallish ball was in one pocket, hard, maybe a golf ball.
What could she do with a golf ball? Could it be a weapon?
A zipper on the pocket. What could she do with a zipper? She’d like to catch his tattooed dick in it!
Then a windbreaker. Flimsy. Strong, sickening smell of tobacco on it. And then, her favorite thing to touch, a soft overcoat, possibly cashmere.
There were more ‘treasures’ in the overcoat’s pockets.
A loose button. Scraps of paper. From a notepad?
A ballpoint pen, possibly a Bic – blue, black or red. Coins – four quarters, two dimes, a nickel. Unless the coins were foreign? She wondered endlessly.
There was also a book of matches, with a shiny cover and embossed letters.
What did the embossed letters say? Would it tell her the city where she was being kept?
Also, a lighter.
A half pack of mints which she knew to be cinnamon because she smelled it on her hands.
And at the bottom of the pocket – lint, so insignificant, yet important to her now.
Behind the overcoat were two bundles of his clothing still covered in plastic from the cleaners. A receipt of some kind on the first packet. Attached by a staple.
She imagined the name of the cleaners, an identification number in red, writing by some dry-cleaning store clerk.
All of it seemed strangely precious to Lizzie – because she had nothing else.
Except a powerful will to live.
And get her revenge on the Wolf.
Chapter Ninety-Three
I was a part of the large surveillance detail near the house in old Highland Park, and I thought we were going to take Lawrence Lipton down soon, maybe within hours. We’d been told that Washington was working with the Dallas police.
I stared absently at the house, a large two-story Tudor on about two and a half acres of very expensive real estate. It looked pristine. A redbrick sidewalk went from the street to an arched doorway, which led inside to a house which looked as if it had a dozen rooms. Interestingly, the big news that day in Dallas was about a fire in Kessler Park that had incinerated a 64,000-square-foot mega mansion. The Lipton spread was less than a third that size, but it was still impressive, or depressing, or both.
It was around nine in the evening. A supervisory agent from the Dallas office, Joseph Denyeau, came on my earphones. ‘We just got word from the Director’s office. We have to back off immediately. I don’t understand it either. The order couldn’t be any clearer, though. Pull back! Everybody head to the office. We need to reconnoiter and talk about this.’
I looked at my partner in the car that night, an agent named Bob Shaw. It was pretty obvious that he didn’t understand what the hell had just happened either.
‘What was that?’ I asked him.
Shaw shook his head and rolled his eyes. ‘What do I know? We go back to the field office, drink some bad coffee, maybe somebody higher-up explains it to us, but don’t count on it.’
It took us only fifteen minutes to get to the field office at that time of night. The Rangers were playing the Angels, and Agent Shaw turned on the game as we rode. We needed to hear something, anything, that seemed a little organized and sane, even a baseball play-by-play on the car radio.
We filed into a conference room at the field office, and I saw a lot of weary, confused and pissed-off agents. Nobody was saying much yet. We’d gotten close to a possible break on this case, and now we’d been ordered to pull back. Nobody seemed to understand why.
The ASAC finally came out of his office and joined the rest of us. Joseph Denyeau looked thoroughly disgusted as he threw his dusty cowboy boots up on a conference table. ‘I have no idea,’ he announced. ‘Not a clue, folks. Consider yourselves debriefed.’
So about forty agents waited for an explanation of the night’s action, but one didn’t come, or wasn’t ‘forthcoming’ as they say. The agent in charge, Roger Nielsen, finally called D.C. and was told they would get back to
us. In the meantime, we were to stand down. We might even be sent home in the morning.
Around eleven o’clock Denyeau got another update from Nielsen, and passed it on to us. ‘They’re working on it,’ he said and smiled wryly.
‘Working on what?’ somebody called from the back.
‘Oh hell, I don’t know, Donnie. Working on their pedicures. Working on getting all of us to quit the Bureau. Then there’ll be no more agents, and, I guess, no more embarrassing screw-ups for the media to write about. I’m going to get some sleep. I’d advise all of you to do the same.’
That’s what we did.
Chapter Ninety-Four
We were back at the field office by eight the next morning. Several of the agents looked a little messed-up after the night off. First thing, Director Burns was on the line from Washington. I was pretty sure the Director rarely, if ever, spoke to the troops like this. So why do it now? What was up?
Agents around the room were looking at one another. Brows crinkled, eyebrows arched. No one could fathom why Burns was so involved. Maybe I could. I’d seen the restlessness in him, the dissatisfaction with the ways of the past, even if he couldn’t effectively change them all at once. Burns had started as a street cop in Philadelphia and worked his way up to Police Commissioner. Maybe he could change things at the Bureau.
‘I wanted to explain what happened yesterday,’ he said over the speakerphone. Every agent in the room listened intently, myself included. ‘And I also wanted to apologize to all of you. Everything got territorial for a while. The Dallas police, the mayor, even the governor of Texas, were involved. The Dallas police asked that we pull back, because they didn’t have full confidence in us. I agreed to the action because I wanted to talk it through with them rather than force our presence there.
‘They didn’t want mistakes, and they weren’t sure that we have the right man. The Lipton family has a good reputation in the city. He’s very well connected. Anyway, Dallas was surprised that we listened to their concerns – and now they’ve backed off again. They respect the team we’ve assembled.
‘We will continue our action against Lawrence Lipton and, believe me, we’re going to take that bastard down. Then we’re going to take Pasha Sorokin down, the Wolf. I don’t want you to worry about past mistakes. Don’t worry about mistakes at all. Just do your job in Dallas. I have the utmost confidence in you.’
Burns went off the line and just about every agent’s face in the room wore a smile. It was quite magical, actually. The Director had said things that some of them had been waiting years to hear; especially welcome was the news that he believed in their ability, and wasn’t worried about mistakes. We were back in the game; we were expected to bring down Lawrence Lipton.
Minutes after the phone call ended, my cell went off. I answered and it was Burns himself. ‘So how’d I do?’ he asked. I could hear the smile in his voice. I could also almost see the cocky upturn of his lip when he grinned. He, he knew how he’d done.
I walked away from the group and into a far corner of the room, and told him what he wanted to hear. ‘You did good. They’re pumped to do the job.’
Burns exhaled. ‘Alex. I want you to turn up the heat on this punk. I sold you hard to Dallas as a key member of the team. They bought you, and your reputation. They know how good we think you are. I want you to make Lawrence Lipton very uncomfortable. Do it your own way.’
I found myself smiling. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘And Alex, contrary to what I said to the others, don’t make any mistakes.’
Chapter Ninety-Five
D on’t make any mistakes. It was a hell of an exit line, I had to give him that. Kind of funny, in a sadistic, hard ass way. I was starting to like Ron Burns again. Couldn’t help myself. But did I trust him?
Somehow, I got the feeling that Burns wasn’t that worried about the mistakes, though. He wanted to catch the kidnappers, especially Pasha Sorokin – even if we didn’t yet know who he really was, or where he lived. According to his orders, all I had to do was figure out a way to break Lawrence Lipton down, do it in a hurry, and not embarrass the Bureau in any way.
I met with Roger Nielsen on possible next strategies – we had already resumed surveillance on Lawrence Lipton. It was decided that it was time to put real pressure on him, to let him know we were in Dallas, and that we knew about him. After Burns’s phone call, I wasn’t surprised that I had been chosen to confront Lipton.
We decided that I would go and see Lipton at his office in the Lakeside Square Building at the intersection of the LBJ Freeway and North Central Expressway. The building was twenty stories high with lots of reflective glass. It was practically blinding down on the street as I looked skyward in the Texas sunshine. I walked inside at a little past ten in the morning. Lipton’s office suite was on the nineteenth floor. When I got off the elevator, a recorded voice said, ‘Howdy.’
I stepped into a large reception area with half an acre of red-wine-colored carpeting, beige walls, dark brown leather sofas, and matching chairs everywhere. There were framed, signed photos of Roger Staubach, Nolan Ryan and Tom Landry on the walls.
I was told to wait in reception by a very proper-looking young woman in a dark blue pants suit. She sat self-importantly behind a sleek walnut desk under recessed lighting. She looked all of twenty-two or twenty-three years old, fresh from charm school. She acted and spoke as properly as she looked.
‘I’ll wait, but let Mr Lipton know it’s the FBI. It’s important that I see him,’ I told her.
The receptionist smiled sweetly, as if she’d heard all this before, then she went back to answering the phone calls coming in on her headset. I sat down and waited patiently; I waited for fifteen minutes. Then I got back up again. I strolled over to the reception desk.
‘You told Mr Lipton that I’m here?’ I asked politely. ‘That I’m with the FBI?’
‘I did, sir,’ she spoke in a syrupy voice that was starting to rub me the wrong way.
‘I need to see him right now,’ I told the girl and waited until she made another call to Lipton’s assistant.
They talked briefly, then she looked back at me. ‘Do you have identification, sir?’ she asked. She was frowning now.
‘I do. They’re called creds.’
‘May I see it, please? Your creds.’ I showed off my new FBI badge and she looked it over like a fast-food counterperson inspecting a fifty-dollar bill.
‘Could you please wait over at the seating area?’ she asked again, only now she seemed a little nervous, and I wondered what Lawrence Lipton’s assistant had told her, what her marching orders were.
‘You don’t seem to understand, or I’m not making myself clear,’ I finally said. ‘I’m not here to fool around with you, and I’m not here to wait.’
The receptionist nodded. ‘Mr Lipton is in a meeting. That’s all I know, sir.’
I nodded back. ‘Tell his assistant to pull him out of his meeting right now. Have her tell Mr Lipton that I’m not here to arrest him yet.’
I wandered back to the seating area, but I didn’t bother to sit. I stood there and looked out on magnificent, Technicolor green lawns that stretched to the concrete edge of the LBJ Freeway. I was burning inside.
I’d just acted like a D.C. street cop back there. I wondered if Burns would have approved, but it didn’t matter. He’d given me some rope, but I also had made a decision that I wasn’t going to change because I was an FBI agent now. I was in Dallas to bring down a kidnapper and killer; I was here to find out if Mrs Elizabeth Connelly and others were alive and maybe being held somewhere as slaves. I was back on The Job. I heard a door open behind me and I turned. A heavy-set man with graying hair was standing there and he looked angry.
‘I’m Lawrence Lipton,’ he said. ‘What the hell is this about?’
Chapter Ninety-Six
‘What the hell is this about?’ Lipton repeated from the doorway in a loud-mouth, big-shot way. He was speaking to me as if I was a door-to-do
or brush salesman calling on his company. ‘I think you were told that I’m in an important meeting. What does the FBI want with me? And why can’t it wait? Why don’t you have the courtesy to make an appointment?’
There was something about his attitude that didn’t completely track for me. He was trying to be a tough guy, but I didn’t think he was. He was just used to beating up on other businessmen. He wore a rumpled blue dress shirt and rep’s tie, pinstriped trousers, tasseled loafers, and was at least fifty pounds overweight. What connection could this man have with the Wolf?
I looked at him and said, ‘It’s about kidnapping, it’s about murder. Do you want to talk about this out here in reception? Sterling.’
Lawrence Lipton paled, and lost most of his bravado. ‘Come inside,’ he said and took a step back.
I followed him into an area of cubicles separated by low partitions. Clerical personnel, lots of them. So far this was going just about as I’d expected. But now it would get more interesting. Lipton might be ‘softer’ than I had expected, but he had powerful connections in Dallas. This office building was in one of the upscale residential/commercial parts of the city.
‘I’m Mr Potter,’ I said as we walked down a corridor with fabric-covered walls. ‘At least I played Mr Potter the last time we talked in the Wolf’s Den.’
Lipton didn’t turn, didn’t respond in any way. We entered a wood-paneled office and he shut the door. The large room had half a dozen windows and a panoramic view. A hat rack near the door held a collection of autographed Dallas Cowboy and Texas Ranger caps.
‘I still don’t know what this is about, but I’ll give you exactly five minutes to explain yourself,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t think you know who you’re talking to.’
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