by David Grace
He took Eustace’s phone, watch, wallet and ring with him to make it look as much like a robbery as possible. The real questions were: How much did Eustace know about him and who had he told? Hopefully, the agent’s phone with its call log, texts and emails would tell him if HS was running a formal operation on the Hopper woman or if Eustace had just been doing a routine check and something had spooked him. That would make sense since formal stakeouts were always handled by two-man teams and Eustace was clearly operating alone.
Well, Donald thought, I’ve got two more weeks to run the operation if I need them. Let’s just take this one step at a time.
While Donald was planning his next move, back in the Metro Station lot, unnoticed, Grant Eustace was slowly and quietly cooling down to ambient temperature.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Kane showed up at work the next morning in an oddly disassociated state – vaguely tired, slightly hung-over, and guardedly excited. It didn’t last. As he had expected Danny wasn’t able to retrieve anything useful from the surveillance cameras around the bus-station parking lot where Brownstein’s Volvo had been found. All they got was a grainy image of a broad-chested male in a hoodie and sunglasses and probably latex gloves.
Sandra Cray had given them a list of the forty-two substances that were on the new exclusion roster that her boss had been scheduled to sign two weeks from now. Most of them were beyond Kane’s ability to even pronounce and he certainly had no clue which, if any, of them might be the motive for Brownstein’s disappearance. And then there was the blurry image from the camera across the street from Brownstein’s building of a man who might or might not be Mearle Farber, a mystery that teased Kane like a tongue worrying a loose tooth.
If it was Farber then he must have been paid to help Ryan Munroe escape. If so, then maybe Farber’s old phone records and credit card receipts would give them some kind of a hint on where to go next. Kane could try to subpoena them and hope that Immerson didn’t find out and have him fired for illegally working the Munroe case or he could call any one of the three agencies, City, State and Federal, who, theoretically, had jurisdiction over the presumed murder of two law enforcement officers and the escape of a man charged with both state and federal crimes. The question was, which of the multiple investigators was likely to give him the least amount of shit?
Kane had just brought up his address book when Immerson materialized in front of his desk. Usually these appearances were triggered by some real or imagined misbehavior on Kane’s part but he could think of no one he had recently sufficiently insulted to trigger his boss’s ire. Then he took a good look at Immerson’s face and realized that they were in a whole different ballpark here. Worry and fear radiated off Immerson like heat from a stove. Kane shelved the smart-ass remark that was always simmering just below the surface and stood up.
“What’s happened?” Greg asked.
“In my office.” Kane followed him, drawing nervous stares from every agent they passed. Everybody knew something was up but, clearly, nobody knew what. Kane closed the door behind him without being told then stood in front of Immerson’s desk, his hands clasped behind his back in something akin to “parade rest.”
“Sit down.” Uneasily, Kane sat.
“What was Eustace doing yesterday afternoon?”
Oh, crap, what jackpot has Grant gotten himself into now?
“I don’t know,” Kane said in as innocent a tone as he could manage. “He was gone when Rosewood and I got back around four.” Eustace was, well, useless, but you still covered for your partner.
“Stop fucking around with me! What the hell was Eustace doing, God damn it!”
If Eustace had screwed up, punched out a citizen or gotten caught drinking on the job or whatever, Immerson would have been pissed but not enraged, not like this. He looked like he was ready to shoot somebody. Hell, Eustace could have been caught robbing a bank and Immerson wouldn’t have been this upset. Kane studied his boss’ face and now saw more than anger. There was sadness there as well. It wasn’t something Eustace had done. It was worse than that, much worse. It was something that had been done to him.
“He’s gone missing?” Greg asked. Immerson shook his head.
“No. Now, answer my question!”
Shit!
“He was helping us look for Brownstein’s Volvo, checking the train and Metro parking lots. I called him when we found the car and told him that he could stop and go get something to eat. He’s been kind of obsessed with the threats against Justice Hopper and he asked me how I’d go after Hopper if I wanted to kill him.”
“And you told him that it was none of our business? No, where would the fun be in that? You decided that it would be a good joke to get him all wound up, didn’t you?”
“No! . . . I mean I wasn’t trying to yank his chain. We had too much work on our own case to have him screwing around with something that the Secret Service was never going to let us have a piece of anyway.”
“What did you tell him, Kane?”
Greg took a breath. “He wouldn’t let it go. He just kept grinding on it so I gave in and told him that if I’d wanted to get to someone like Hopper I do it through his family.”
“Brilliant! Just fucking brilliant! And what did Eustace say to that?”
“He said that it sounded like a good idea and that he was going to check out the Justice’s daughter. I tried to tell him not to be an idiot but he had already hung up. . . . How bad is it?”
Immerson paused and a look of profound sadness transformed his face.
“Homeland Security Agent Grant Eustace’s body was found at seven-twelve this morning in the back seat of a department vehicle in a parking lot near the main Amtrak station,” he said in a strained voice. “The cause of death appears to be a sharp object, probably an ice pick, being shoved into his brain.”
It took Kane a moment to process Immerson’s words and when he did he was almost drowned by a wave of guilt. Eustace was a man with a limited horizon and pedestrian goals, flawed and, if not the prisoner, at least the confidant of base desires, but beyond all that he was a cop and Kane’s partner. When it came time to choose up sides, Grant Eustace had chosen to stand with the men and women who had sworn to protect the sheep and fight the wolves. A profound ache swelled in Kane’s gut.
First Ralph Amoroso then his nephew and now Grant Eustace – the wolves were tearing his guys apart and it was all too much to bear. Almost physically sick Greg slumped down in Immerson’s thinly-padded chair.
“Son of a bitch,” Kane muttered, his shoulders hunched forward, his eyes closed.
“Did Eustace say anything else about what he was going to do yesterday?”
Kane opened his eyes. “No.”
“Was he working on anything else?”
“No.”
“Did he have a girlfriend he might have gone to visit? A bar he liked to hang out at? Is there anything you know about his life that might give us a clue what he was doing yesterday afternoon or evening?”
“No. What was the TOD?”
“Based on liver temp and lividity he was killed sometime between eight and eleven last night.”
Kane’s eyes went blank for a moment. “It wasn’t anything in his personal life,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because Eustace was street smart. No run-of-the-mill punk was ever going to get close enough to shove an ice pick into his head. Whoever did this was a pro. Your average mutt, if he decides to kill a cop, he uses a gun. He doesn’t think about how loud it is, who’s going to hear it, how hard it is to hit a fatal spot, whether the target is wearing a vest, none of that. He just pulls it and starts banging away like some moron in the movies. And if he doesn’t use a gun it’s some punk-ass switchblade. Who carries an ice pick?” Kane paused a second then stared at Immerson. “Were there any defensive wounds?”
The boss shook his head. “None. And there was no blood in the car so he was killed someplace else and put into the backseat.”
/> “He was killed near the car because he was too heavy for the doer to carry him more than a few feet. That kind of wound doesn’t bleed much but it does bleed a little and there would be cast-off when he pulled the pick out. So, Eustace was parked someplace. It was dark. He was walking back to his car or getting into the car when somebody blind-sided him, killed him, and shoved his body into the back seat. That spells professional all the way – military, special forces, army ranger, something like that.” Dirty cop, Kane thought, picturing Mearle Farber in his head.
“That doesn’t get us any closer to finding out who did this,” Immerson complained.
“Yes, it does, or at least we know where to start.”
“How do you figure?”
“Grant wasn’t visiting a girlfriend or getting drunk. He was working.” Greg studied his boss’ face but Immerson seemed confused. Jesus, am I the only person around here who can add two plus two and get four? “Hopper’s daughter, he was following Hopper’s daughter and he saw something or someone he wasn’t supposed to and they killed him for it.”
“If I tell the Secret Service that story they’ll scream bloody murder and then order us to stay the hell away from Mr. Justice Hopper’s family.”
“So don’t tell them,” Kane said, standing.
“Where are you going?”
“Out to find out everything I can about Kathryn Hopper because one way or another something about her got Eustace killed.”
“You can’t go into the field without a partner.” Kane looked at Immerson as if he had discovered a bug on his sandwich. “You’ve pissed off too many people too many times for me to let you run around out there alone. You’ve brought this on yourself Kane. I’ll go through the transfer requests and get somebody in here to take Eustace’s place in a day or two.”
“Don’t bother.”
“Is that your way of quitting?”
“I’ve got work to do. I’ll partner with Rosewood.”
“Rosewood’s got other duties.”
“They can wait. He works hard and knows how to run the computers.
“He’s not a field agent.”
“He’ll do until one comes along. If you don’t like it, fire me.”
Kane didn’t bother closing the door behind him. Immerson considered his options but after a minute or so, no matter how he figured it, he realized that he didn’t have any. He pulled Rosewood’s file and confirmed that the kid had satisfied the firearms qualification requirements and then he started the paperwork to requisition Danny a gun.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Just before lunch Ryan Munroe received an innocuous text message that contained the number “four.” It could have been any number between one and five, each one of which corresponded to a different prearranged set of Metro stations, times, tracks, trains, and car numbers. The number four translated to the Potomac Avenue Station, the eastbound platform, 2:10 in the afternoon, the third car from the front. He had had to commit all of the details to memory. It wouldn’t do to have the Gestapo search his place and find the list.
In the movies the spies met in public places and exchanged information while wandering around some park. That was a sloppy way to do it. The Feds could focus a directional mike on you from a hundred yards away and record every word. Cars were just as bad. They could be bugged and the cops could record a conversation by bouncing a laser off the windows. Besides that, in a park you were exposed and your escape routes were limited. If you were in the Metro once you hit a station you could disappear into the crowds or jump on another train. And unlike your car, they couldn’t bug the train in advance.
There were hundreds, probably thousands of train cars in the Metro system and even if they could wire them all, given the ambient noise and the fact that Munroe’s contact always used a different seat, they wouldn’t be able to get anything useful. Inside a station you were almost invisible. Thousands of people poured in and out of them every hour. Once you were on a train you could turn your coat inside out, stick your green baseball cap in your pocket and put on a black knit hat and at the next stop emerge invisible, just another shape in the herd. On balance Munroe appreciated the system his contact had set up. When you were at war with the government you had to be careful. Not that it mattered, personally, to Munroe. The cops didn’t need to record his conversations. He was already a wanted man and if they caught him he was dead meat. But that was not the case for his employer.
Munroe spotted his man at the rear of the car, two seats up from the door. The contact always looked the same, mustache, neat beard, dark hair under a black baseball cap, long-sleeved shirt and jeans, black athletic shoes. Because of the cold today he wore a black-nylon winter coat unzipped halfway to his waist. Munroe made a quick scan of the car but nobody seemed to be paying any attention to either himself or his contact.
“Give me an update,” the man said, looking straight ahead, his lips barely moving.
“The contractor finished the job.”
“I’m instructed to ask for the details.”
“I leave operational matters to the man doing the work. All I care about is that it gets done on time.”
“That’s not good enough in this case. We have to be sure that we’ll get the time we need. There are a lot of moving parts.”
“The job is done. There’s no link to my contractor. They’re not going to find the subject, ever. That’s all there is to it.”
The contact frowned then looked toward the door.
“All right. I’ll be in touch.”
“Wait a minute,” Munroe said, half ready to grab the man’s arm. “I need to know when we’ll get the material. I’ve got my own moving parts to line up before I can begin distribution.”
“I’ll give you two weeks’ notice. That should be enough,” the contact whispered with an expression that seemed to add: for a low-life drug dealer like you.
“It’s not. I have people who’re sitting on their hands waiting for product and not getting paid. I’ve shut down my business to get the network ready for this. I need to know when we’re going to have something to sell. My guys can’t wait forever.”
The train pulled to a halt but the contact made no move to leave.
“You know how important this project is,” he said.
Hell yes, Munroe thought. Of course I know. The big money was, as always, in drugs. People would buy drugs before they would buy milk for their kids. Hell, junkies would rather shoot up or coke up than eat, sleep or fuck. The big challenge was moving the cash.
Before the cops had grabbed him Munroe had mostly solved that problem by buying up bodegas and mini-marts, a few check cashing joints and, just before he was busted, a payday loan company. If a mini-mart took in $500 in cash you deposited $2,000 in the bank. Selling cigarettes and beer was a cash business. Short of comparing your inventory purchases against your sales tapes how were they going to prove anything? And Munroe even had a fix for that. He overbought cigs and beer from the wholesalers and ran the fake sales through his registers. Then he sold the extra inventory off the back of a truck. He wrote off the tax on the phantom sales as a laundering fee. Of course, he needed a place to store the additional inventory.
That’s when he bought the farm and stocked the barn with steel shelves and a couple of forklifts. With more money he got more merchandise and with more merchandise he got more money. It only made sense to branch out – prescription drugs, both real and fake, more weapons, kiddie porn, whatever people wanted that the government wouldn’t let them have.
He moved the money through the system as quickly as possible – cash to local banks, wire transfers from there to a bank in the Cayman Islands, hand-carried cashier’s checks from the receiving bank to other Cayman banks – but the cash was like an incoming tide that never stopped.
When the cops grabbed him he still had ten million in currency buried in a hole he had dug in the wilderness of the Patuxent River State Park. As he was shoveling the dirt back in he couldn’t help but think ab
out Black Beard the Pirate and all the loot he was supposed to have buried on nameless Caribbean islands. Munroe wondered if he were hit by a bus or struck by lightning might someone a hundred years from now stumble over his stash of moldering hundred dollar bills. That would be a hell of a thing, he thought and smiled.
After he went on the run he used a front man to hire a lawyer who scoured the court records. His farm and his bodegas and the payday loan service and all his domestic bank accounts had been seized under the RICO statutes. They were all gone. He had made sure that the Cayman money had disappeared into a tangle of anonymous accounts. It was still there, waiting for him, but he was afraid to touch it. The way the government worked these days he figured that the NSA was tracking every wire transfer into U.S. banks out of the Caribbean, the Jersey Islands, Monaco, and the like. The instant he wired any of his money to a bank in the USA the G was going to know about it. Maybe the NSA would tell the FBI and maybe they wouldn’t, but he wasn’t going to take that chance any more than he was going to start digging up his buried stash.
For now, he was leaving his money right where it was. Some day maybe he’d use a false passport to disappear into Costa Rica or Crete or the South of France and then he’d make an annual trip to George Town and pick up a cashier’s check. From there he could take a hop to Antwerp, Brussels or London and deposit it in a corresponding European bank and from there wire it someplace more easily accessible. By then maybe bitcoins would have the rough edges worn off and would be an even better alternative but for now Munroe thought the cyber currency was too risky.
Before they grabbed him he had stashed a million in cash in safe-deposit boxes under fake identities. Half of that had gone to Farber. His freedom was worth it. The money wasn’t going to do him any good in jail. Now he was living on the fees his contact paid him, keeping the rest of his cash handy in case things turned sour and he needed to make another run for it. For now that was fine. He was too young to just lie on a beach all day. He needed something to do and freeing the country from the yoke of laws and rules, making it a place where the cream could rise to the top and the dregs would sink into the muck and people could do whatever they were strong enough to get away with was important work.