by David Grace
“Do you mean like Michael Corleone,” Kane asked, totally lost, “meeting his wife on that road in Sicily where he took one look at her and knew, instantly, that she was the one? The thunderbolt?”
“Yes, wouldn’t it be nice if things were that way in real life,” Allison said in a wistful tone. “Then we could get all the nonsense behind us and live happily ever after.” He heard the bitterness beneath her words like a sour aftertaste from a swallow of cheap wine.
“How would that work? What would you say if you turned around one day and saw some guy and you knew that he was the one? Would you take his hand and look into his eyes and whisper ‘Thunderbolt’ and if he said it back to you then, well, that was that?” Kane asked.
“Thunderbolt? No, that’s how a man would do it. I’d go up to him and . . . .” Allison noticed a look of contentment mixed with desire on Kane’s face and felt a little jolt of fear, suddenly wishing that she had never started this conversation. I can’t let this relationship go anywhere, she thought and decided to turn the whole thing into just a silly joke.
“I’d say, ‘Hey, sailor, buy a girl a drink?’“
“And you think that the guy would understand what that meant?”
“The right guy would. Of course, he’d have to be in the right place when I said it.”
“In a bar I suppose.”
“No, never in a bar, or a restaurant.” Allison looked toward the window. “Or in a hotel room.” Neither of them said anything for several minutes. Finally, Allison broke the silence. “I notice that you didn’t bring a bag.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“So, you’re not planning on spending the night?”
“I guess not. Should I bring a bag next time?”
“That’s up to you,” Allison said, still looking away.
“There is going to be a next time, right?”
“Again, that’s up to you.”
“So, just to be absolutely clear, when, not if, we see each other the next time you’re good with me bringing a bag?”
“Knock yourself out.”
“I’m glad that’s settled,” Kane said.
“So, you’re going now?”
“Not just yet,” Greg answered, pulling the sheet from her body and pinning her beneath him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Up until a week ago everything had gone according to Donald’s plan. A million and a quarter dollars in untraceable, untaxable bitcoins had appeared in his account. They should call them NOs, he thought, No rules, No records, No taxes, or maybe AMs – Anarchist Money. He began planning the project immediately. It was always difficult to hit a high-profile target. Difficult but not impossible. Like every tough problem you just had to break it down into pieces and attack them one by one. There were only so many ways to kill a protected person and get away with it: (1) sniper shot; (2) bribe or become a guard; (3) bribe or become a member of the support staff; (4) bribe a relative or become a friend or some other person who had access to the target.
Sniper shots were possible with politicians who had to give speeches and cut ribbons and attend functions. Supreme Court Justices did none of those things and he had learned from his research that there were very few long-shot opportunities on the route between the court and Hopper’s home. So, number one was out.
The idea of corrupting a member of the Secret Service protection detail was laughable. So forget that. There was no way that any of the clerks or staff at the Supreme Court were going to accept money to poison Hopper’s tea and his housekeeper had been with him for almost twelve years so that was out. That pretty much left family and friends. The trick was to get Hopper out of his comfort zone, away from his usual protection detail, someplace where he was accessible, vulnerable. Hopper and his wife had divorced a dozen years ago just after he had been appointed to the Court. She was still in Denver. Before that they apparently had been staying together principally by inertia and she had no interest in uprooting her life and moving to Washington in order to be with him. So, the wife was out.
The daughter was another matter. She had entered UCLA while he was still on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals but her college career hadn’t worked out as hoped. Parties, drugs, and a loser boyfriend whom she followed to Chicago in her sophomore year had all conspired to screw up her life. Of course, members of the Court of Appeals couldn’t afford to have drug-addicted children so after two expensive stints in rehab Kathryn followed her father to D.C. where he would be able to keep an eye on her. He thought. He got her an acceptance to George Washington University which agreed to give her credit for her first year at UCLA. But that didn’t last.
The next three years were a succession of bad men and worse drugs, another stint in rehab culminating in an inconvenient arrest and messy headlines: “Supreme Ct. Justice’s Daughter Caught With Drugs.” Hopper finally gave up, refusing to hire an attorney for her or even post her bail.
The Public Defender eventually got the charges reduced to misdemeanor possession and, for the first time in her life, Kathryn found herself completely on her own. Calls to Dad were answered politely but requests for money, loans, cars or any other material items were rejected. It took her two years to realize that she was really, actually, truly on her own. Her life over the next five years was a succession of low-level jobs – telemarketer, receptionist, waitress, bartender, then three years ago she started her Personal Essentials franchise where she actually achieved some moderate success.
The fact that she had finally managed to both stay clean and support herself paved the way to rebuild her relationship with her father. Over the past two years she had been a frequent visitor to his home and they had begun again to share birthday and holiday dinners and do the normal things that normal parents and kids did together. It wasn’t exactly a scene out of a Norman Rockwell painting but it wasn’t one from American Gothic either.
After researching Kathryn’s history Donald watched her for two days. Slowly, a plan began to take shape. That’s when things turned to crap. He didn’t worry when the cop showed up. The girl already had a bored minder from the Secret Service. Donald had expected that and he was working out a way to deal with him. The problem was that the new Fed spotted him. Donald wanted the babysitter bored, complacent, just going through the motions, but now the Feds knew that someone might be watching her.
Donald had two choices – do nothing and hope that the guy couldn’t identify him and wouldn’t sound the alarm or take the fed out and dump the body someplace that wouldn’t connect the murder back to the girl. He figured there was no more than a ten-percent chance of the second option actually working. Great choice – do nothing and be screwed or do something and probably be screwed. Sometimes, Donald thought, life doesn’t give you any good options, just less bad ones. Well, if your only choices are driving off a cliff and crashing into a telephone pole, you choose the pole and hope for the best. An hour later Grant Eustace was dead.
A week later Donald was periodically and discretely checking on Kathryn Hopper and he didn’t like what he found. The Secret Service now had two agents on her and they were taking their jobs seriously. Well, there was no help for that. Court decisions in big cases were often announced toward the end of the term which was in June. It was now mid-February. He would have to wait them out. With any luck in two or three weeks they would decide they were wasting their time and they’d cut the girl’s protection detail back to a single agent. One babysitter he could handle and once he had the girl she would take him straight to the target.
Donald dialed Mr. Green’s burner phone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Greg felt Rosewood’s eyes on him when he wandered into the bull pen tingling from too little sleep and too much sugar and caffeine. The kid was wearing a “Daddy, look what I did” expression.
“What have you got, Danny?” Greg asked, pulling a chair up to the side of Rosewood’s desk. Danny’s face morphed into a How did you know I’ve found something? look and for an instant Kane con
sidered telling him never to play poker for money then let it go. After a second’s pause Danny handed Greg a sheaf of papers.
“I went through the public comments on the proposed HHS regulations like you asked me,” Danny began, “and I weeded out all the ones from companies located outside of our immediate area because it would take us too long to meet with them.” Danny paused.
“Good thinking,” Kane said. Pleased with the verbal pat on the head Danny smiled and continued.
“Next I excluded all the comments that came from lobbyists or trade groups because they would only lead us back to lawyers or PR people. Then I–”
“Danny,” Kane cut in, feeling his grip on his temper starting to slip, “let’s skip all the people that I don’t want to talk to and go straight to . . . .” Kane looked at the top page of the printout, “EcoSafe Technologies.”
“They’re headquartered in the Virginia Bio-Technology Research Park,” Danny said, disappointed that he had lost the chance to explain the brilliant steps he had taken to come up with a suitable candidate.
I can read, Kane thought and clenched his jaw. “Well, anyway,” Danny continued a moment later, “They were founded by a Professor Elliott Bellingham. He was on the faculty at Yale.” Danny smiled as if proud of Bellingham’s Ivy League accomplishments. “I printed out his bio from the company’s website.” Danny pointed at the pages in Kane’s hand. “I figured that he’d be a good person to talk to us about the excluded materials list, him being a Yale professor and all.”
It had been Kane’s experience that scientists were often the worst people to try to get a clear explanation about anything technical. Usually they gave you five minutes of mysterious jargon and then responded to your questions with “I can show you the math,” secure in the knowledge that you would understand their hen scratching about as well as you could read Sanskrit.
Kane thought back to the half an hour he had spent on the phone with his friend, Marty Fouchet. He had called Marty in the hope that Fouchet might be able to give him some insight on the chemicals on the new exclusion list. By the end of the conversation it was all Kane could do to keep himself from running screaming from the room.
“If you’d like me to pick somebody else . . . .” Danny said, responding to Kane’s frown.
Oh, shit. It’s like dealing with a Golden Retriever, Kane thought, then forced his lips into a smile.
“No, Professor Bellingham will be perfect. Great. Good job.”
Danny broke into a smile.
“I can make an appointment for us. When would you like to do it?”
“I’ll handle it. I’ve got another job for you.”
“Another job?”
“I need you to run a deeper search on that Baltimore County Deputy Sheriff, Mearle Farber.”
“Shouldn’t we talk about this outside?” Danny whispered.
“It occurs to me that since you turned up his picture on the Brownstein surveillance video now we can treat him like any other person of interest.”
“But there’s only a 61% chance that it’s him. What if–”
“Sixty-one percent’s good enough for me.” Kane broke in. “When you checked him out before you had to tiptoe around. That didn’t turn up anything useful. Now you can go after him full bore. Use his social to check for any credit cards, bank accounts, safety deposit boxes or cell phones. If you find any new accounts get those records too. Oh, and see if you can find any credit cards or bank accounts that might be linked to a debit card and if you do, pull those debit card records and check all the charges.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Things that break the pattern.” Kane could feel the gears turning inside Danny’s head. “Charges that don’t fit his normal lifestyle.” Kane searched Danny’s face for some sign of comprehension. Nope, not yet. “For example, suppose that every month there are ten charges at the same Safeway a mile from his home. That’s a pattern. That’s normal. Scratch those out. Every month there’s an eighty dollar payment to Verizon. Normal, scratch that out. Then you run across a one-time charge to a Safeway thirty miles from where he lives. That doesn’t fit the pattern. Find out what he bought.”
“I don’t think they keep detailed records that long.”
“If he used his Club Card the list of his purchases is still probably somewhere in the computer. Subpoena it.”
Danny thought about that for a moment and made a note. “OK, delete all the normal repeat purchases and follow-up on everything that’s left. Got it.”
“I especially want to know if he bought any burner phones. If he did, contact the manufacturer and get all the numbers for all the phones shipped to that store that were activated near the date of purchase. Then get the call history to and from each of those phones.”
“That could be a dozen phones. I don’t know if we can get a warrant for something like that.”
“Not a regular warrant,” Kane agreed. “A FISA warrant. This is a matter of national security, possible bio-terrorism, weapons of mass destruction. Issuing those warrants is the reason FISA was set up in the first place. A piece of cake. And don’t forget gas stations,” Kane continued while Danny furiously took notes. “We want the address of any gas stations he used outside of his own neighborhood. The same with any other vendors, restaurants, any purchases away from his home or work. Mark them on a map with the dates. I want to know where he went and when he was there. Pay special attention to patterns and repeats.”
“Repeats?”
“Suppose that the fourth Saturday of every month at ten a.m. he always bought something at a 7-11 in Arlington. What was he doing there? What else is in that neighborhood? Is there a bank across the street? If so, did he set up an account there under another name? Make a list of what you find and we can have somebody canvas the neighborhood with his picture and see if we get a hit. Police work is mostly legwork, running down leads, talking to people, checking records. This guy lives someplace. He’s got a credit card and a bank account in another name. He’s got a car and an Easy Pass. He’s got a new social security number. His life is like a sweater with a loose thread. All we need to do is find that thread, a name, a social, a VISA number and then one good pull will unravel it all. Do you understand?”
“Got it,” Danny said, pausing long enough to give Kane another of his happy-puppy looks.
Oh, Jeez, Greg thought and flipped to the “Contact Us” web page for EcoSafe Technologies.
* * *
The Bio-Technology Park was near Richmond in a semi-futuristic glass building with patios and fountains and busy people in suits and lab coats buzzing about. Did the Hollywood designers invent these kinds of buildings to populate their Sci-Fi movies or did the architects design them to look like the ones they’d seen in the Sci-Fi movies? Chicken and egg Kane finally decided. There were about a hundred companies in the tech center, mostly start-ups. Eco-Safe’s offices were on the fifth floor overlooking the fountain.
“Dr. Bellingham will be right with you, Agent Kane,” the receptionist told him and went back to reading her magazine. From someplace beyond the wall behind her Kane heard a muted phone ring once then cut off. Greg was the only person in the small lobby and the receptionist didn’t seem overworked. Their product was still in the design phase, Kane decided, no customers yet. He spent five minutes watching people scurry around the plaza below like little bugs in search of crumbs, then he heard a door open behind him.
“Detective Kane?”
The man was about six-two with receding hair streaked with gray, a thin, lined face, and brown-framed glasses.
“Agent Kane,” Greg corrected him. “Homeland Security.” Greg extended his hand.
“Of course. I’m Elliott Bellingham.” Kane noticed that Bellingham’s skin was as soft as a woman’s and his shoulders seemed hunched as if he were carrying an invisible weight. “Let’s go back to my office.”
The door behind the receptionist’s desk opened onto a long hallway that extended all the way to a d
istant glass wall. Apparently EcoSafe rented this entire portion of the fifth floor. Doorways studded both sides of the corridor and Bellingham led Kane through the second one on the left. The far wall was all glass from the waist up with Bellingham’s desk tucked into the right-hand corner. Across from it was a small couch, a coffee table and two client chairs. Bellingham took one of them and waved Kane to the couch.
“Would you like coffee or tea?” the professor asked.
“No thanks.” Kane gave the desk and the nearby bookcase and filing cabinets a quick scan.
“We run a pretty bare-bones operation here, Agent Kane,” Bellingham said, misinterpreting Kane’s gaze. “Actually, this is a lot fancier than my little cubbyhole at Yale, but then professors don’t get the perks that CEOs do.”
“When did you leave teaching?”
“About five years ago but it feels like it’s more than that. It’s a long road from a successful laboratory experiment to a mass-produced product.” Bellingham looked vacantly toward the window then returned to the here-and-now. “But we’re almost there. We hope to be shipping product in nine to twelve months, subject to EPA and Department of Agriculture approvals of course.”
“What is your product exactly? I scanned your website but it didn’t make a lot of sense to me,” Kane said, feigning simple-minded confusion. It was an old interrogator’s trick – let the subject think that you’re stupid and then get him talking about something that he’s an expert in. Once people are at ease they’re more likely to give you the information you’re really after. Cops make people nervous and Kane wanted the professor relaxed and talking.
“Our mission is to eliminate pests without poison.”
“Pests without poison?”
“Maybe that should be our slogan,” Bellingham said, smiling. “How much do you know about insects, Agent Kane?”