“This is the guy Mrs. Rail thought had emphysema?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where’s he now?”
“That’s the question.”
“You like him?”
“So far, I love him. Especially the news bureau experience. It fits. In late August, ANS laid him off and closed their Philadelphia operation a week later. Haskell’s on the phone right now with a reporter who used to work with him in Philly. We’ll have more shortly. Another thing—the breeder said he was a strange guy with a stiff, peculiar gait. Paranoid. Talked to himself under his breath, accused her of ripping him off without rational basis.”
“What have you told the breeder?”
“She and her husband know it’s obstruction of justice if they discuss what they’ve told us with the media or anyone else.”
Franklin picked up the remote and turned off his television.
“Kick a Code One, Brandon.”
“Did it.”
“Call VICAR?”
“Did it.”
“Put everything on the hot line?” Franklin heard a bell ringing upstairs in his home office. It was the telex coming in.
“Did it.”
“Fire up the Tactical Assault Team?”
“They’re rolling now.”
Franklin turned to Mrs. Franklin and pointed. “Get my driver.”
“Call me in my car in five minutes,” he said to Brandon, and he hung up.
He found himself standing.
He turned to a worried-looking Mrs. Franklin. “Here we go.”
104
Dawn
Friday, October 27
Philadelphia
The houses along the stretch of Roosevelt Boulevard where Martin Muntor lived had been built in the 1920s on poorly compacted soil. Three-quarters of a century later, the houses were aslant and collapsing. Many had been condemned by the city.
The bright orange No Trespassing signs were invitations to crack heads and their dealers. They moved in as residents moved out. Some homeowners stayed, mostly the older ones, die-hards, because they wanted to. The neighborhood was theirs. Others, like Martin Muntor, stayed because they had nowhere else to go.
Neighbors on both sides of Muntor’s house were quietly evacuated by the authorities. All telephone service on the block was temporarily interrupted to prevent a neighbor from calling Muntor or the media.
The FBI’s Tactical Assault Team assembled in predawn darkness on a side street just off the boulevard. The team commander told his men that their entry should be safe and surgical. The plan was to use stun grenades to temporarily incapacitate Muntor and reduce the risk of him destroying evidence. Even if Muntor was not there, he said, fragile evidence needed to be protected.
“Preserve your own asses first, evidence second, subject third,” he said and made each man repeat it to his face. Then his men got ready and checked their equipment. The VHF headsets, the thirty-pound Door-Down sledgehammer, the plastic rope, the ballistic armor, the firearms with night scopes.
If Martin Muntor was home, he was theirs.
Franklin and Rhoads stood together next to an unmarked FBI van a quarter-block away from the Tactical Assault Team staging area.
“A cat hair. Good work, Rhoads.”
Rhoads nodded. “Thanks. But do you really think he’s going to be sitting in his kitchen wearing his slippers and eating Rice Crispies? Give me the word, and I’ll go up and knock on his front door.”
“Okay, thanks for the information,” said Franklin. “I’ll order eighteen highly trained members of the T.A.T. to stand down because Rhoads has X-ray vision.”
“I hope he’s in there, I really do. But he’s been ahead of us the whole time. He’s dying. What’s he going to be doing at home? This is a man with a mission. I’ll be surprised if he’s not still out there somewhere trying to complete it.”
“Even the best of them slip up. You know the profile as well as I do—most serial killers want to be caught, either because they want someone to stop them, or because they want to brag to the cops.”
Rhoads lit a cigarette. “He gave us the cat hair. What are there, four or five thousand of these Bengal kitties in the U.S.? How many breeders? Twenty, thirty? It’s inevitable that somebody would remember a nasty, wheezing man. Especially a nasty, wheezing man who calls up the breeder, a breeder who knows who he is and where he lives, and reminds her that he’s a nasty wheezing old man. Therefore,” Rhoads said, flicking ashes into the street, “you can bet he isn’t coming back here.”
“Everything suggests that he keeps coming back home after each incident, probably to feed his cat. And we know he just hit St. Louis.”
“Okay, I’ll stand out here quietly. You do your big SWAT number. If he isn’t there, you let me see the place. Deal?”
“Deal.”
At first light, the team commander gave the signal. A climber on the roof dropped three percussion grenades down the chimney that rocked the houses near Muntor’s. Besides a number of broken windows, there was no other damage. T.A.T. members moved through the house, the first floor, second floor, basement, attic, garage, checking behind every door and in every room and closet, every possible place a human could hide. The premises were unoccupied. By the second hand on the team commander’s diving watch, thirty-nine seconds later the Two Squad leader radioed that no humans were in the house, although they did find a cowering, spotted silver cat.
In the kitchen, Franklin, Rhoads, and one other agent, an evidence technician, all wearing latex gloves, examined the room, touching as little as possible. Franklin lifted the lid off a pot on the stove.
An agent popped his head into the kitchen. “There’s a small stack of newspapers on the floor in the dining room,” he announced. “Don’t step on it. It covers a hole that’ll drop you ten feet into the garage below. Might have been part of some escape plan. But it hasn’t been disturbed. Be careful.”
“Right,” Franklin said. Rhoads went out into the dining room to see the newspaper-camouflaged hole, then returned to the kitchen. Without looking up from where he stood at the stove, Franklin said, “Muntor’s fussy.”
Rhoads and the evidence tech turned to him.
“What?” Rhoads asked.
“Remember that Virgil mailed a disposable syringe to the Wall Street Journal reporter? Disposables are good enough for the cigarettes. But not for whatever it is he’s shooting up.”
Rhoads walked over and looked into the pot.
A glass syringe and several needles sat in an inch of water. Rhoads shrugged, distracted by something he had noticed before Franklin called his attention to the pot. He went back to the telephone mounted on the wall near the door that lead into the dining room. Next to the telephone, also affixed to the wall, was a message board with an erasable marker. A coupon for a Jiffy Lube oil change was thumbtacked to it, as well as an 800-number for the local branch of the auto club.
“Franklin!” Rhoads half-shouted. “He’s got this note board here. I think I’ve got a partially erased telephone number.”
105
Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc.
World Headquarters
At Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc., the news that the FBI had found the residence of the man suspected to be Virgil roared from the Fifth Floor down like a boulder in a rockslide.
Anna Maria Trichina was at her desk, getting last-minute details out of the way before going to New York for the investor relations meeting.
A company electrician popped his head into her office and interrupted her train of thought by shouting, “Ms. Trichina. They found Virgil! The FBI found a guy up in Philadelphia! Just heard it on the radio.”
It was not a wholly accurate report.
Trichina reached Arnold Northrup and learned that the FBI had raided a property believed to be the residence of Virgil.
Sh
e resisted the implication. It sunk in slowly and reached her consciousness with the same jolt that wakes you up when you’ve overslept through an important event. Now that Virgil’s house had been found, she assumed, his capture wouldn’t be far behind. That meant Pratt’s paranoia would crest as the FBI intensified its investigation into Benedict’s whereabouts.
There’d be nothing stopping Pratt from going berserk, sending his mad dogs to search every possible person and place for copies of Midas documents. And, Trichina realized, there’d be little to stop him from silencing anyone who knew what they contained forever.
Trichina chastised herself for not going all out earlier, when she had the chance, to find the Midas disks Mary took and bring them to Pratt.
She was going to do something about it. Right now.
She screamed for her secretary. “Get me Mary Dallaness. She’s in New York at the Royal Carland.”
While she waited for the call to go through, Trichina fantasized about reaching through the phone. taking Mary by the throat and squeezing the truth out of her. This was, after all, a matter of life and death.
In New York, a steady undercurrent of anxiety distracted Mary. She fought it by busying herself in her room with the material for the investor relations meeting.
The telephone rang. It was Trichina.
“There you are. I’ve left you a thousand messages, Mary, but you haven’t returned my calls.” There was a pause, and the soft tone came off Trichina’s voice like a sheath being pulled off a knife. “If you’re too idiotic to protect yourself, why stop me from protecting myself? The disks you have can save us both. Now tell me where they are.”
“I’m hanging up,” Mary said.
Trichina lowered her voice. “Mary, don’t. Listen. With this Muntor lunatic about to be arrested, Pratt will stop at nothing to protect himself. At nothing! He knows the FBI is going ballistic trying to figure out what happened to Benedict, and Pratt will risk anything to protect himself.”
“I told you. I don’t have the disks.”
“Who does?”
Mary didn’t answer.
“It’s T.R.,” Trichina said.
“No.”
“Liar.”
“He doesn’t have them, and I won’t tell you who does.”
“Bitch,” Trichina shrieked. “How stupid can you get? Our only chance is to give them back. And even that might not be much of a chance.”
“You can’t even keep your story straight,” Mary said. “One minute we need them to protect ourselves, the next minute we need to return them. What plan will you have for tomorrow? Sell them to the National Enquirer?”
“You’ll get us both killed.”
“Good!” Mary said. “What would you do with the disks? Turn them over to Mr. Pratt? I think you’re the one who’ll get us killed.”
Mary slammed down the telephone before Trichina could say anything else.
106
FBI Headquarters
On one wall in the ERC, there was a huge poster of a three-year-old Commonwealth of Pennsylvania driver’s license photo of Martin Muntor. On another wall, an enlargement of the partial telephone number lifted from Muntor’s kitchen message board, and next to it an equally large print of a thoroughly burned sheet of newsprint, developed in high enough contrast to be somewhat legible.
The conference table was more crowded than ever with agents, consultants, and representatives of other federal, state and local agencies. Franklin spoke from a podium at the front of the room.
“I want to be cautious about this,” he said, “but I think things are starting to break our way. As you all know, we now have a name, a face, and a house. We’re still working on it, of course, but the subject’s house was remarkably clean. This is a very careful man. His name is Martin Muntor. M-U-N-T-O-R. Here’s what else we’ve learned. The Bengal cat hair recovered from the briefcase in Harrisburg is an exact match with that of a Bengal cat we took out of Muntor’s house. Muntor has an ex-wife, two daughters—we’re talking to them now—and a mother in a nursing home in Long Island. The mother’s dementia is profound, and she’s not likely to be able to help to us whatsoever.”
Several late-arriving agents entered the room and found seats. Another agent approached the podium, a file folder in hand, waiting to be introduced.
“That’s not bad, that’s not bad at all,” Franklin said. “And, I believe, that A.S.C. Maharis is going to show us that we have even more than that.”
Maharis stood up and opened a folder. “Until eight weeks ago, Muntor was a reporter for the American News Syndicate in its Philadelphia bureau. Then the roof fell in on him. In the course of a single week, he got laid off, found out his health insurance was in jeopardy, and received diagnoses of terminal lung cancer and emphysema. Obviously, this made him mad.”
Dr. Sorken slammed his open palm down on the table. “I’ll handle the psych profile if you don’t mind.”
Most of the room laughed. Franklin saw the laughter as a sign the agents were, for the first time since CYCIG began, beginning to feel relieved and hopeful. Except for Rhoads. He sat stone-faced.
Maharis ignored Sorken and went on. “We even have his cat in custody. Also a wild animal.”
Maharis rolled back his shirtsleeve to show claw marks. “A neighbor’s boy had been feeding it. But the really good news is it is very likely that we now know the target of Muntor’s so-called grand finale.”
Rhoads frowned. Maharis saw it.
With the click of a slide-projector remote control, Maharis displayed an extreme close-up of the partially erased telephone number Rhoads had discovered in Muntor’s kitchen.
“Our friend Mr. Rhoads,” Maharis said, “found this on a message board in Muntor’s kitchen next to the telephone. I know it doesn’t look like much, but based on characters taken from samples of Muntor’s handwriting, we’ve been able to reconstruct the telephone number. These first three digits are seven-oh-two, the area code that includes Las Vegas. The remaining digits are two-five-two, seven-seven-seven-seven. That’s the number of the Brasilia Hotel and Casino in Vegas.”
He clicked the remote again. An enlargement of a piece of charred paper appeared. Maharis picked up a laser pointer.
“The telephone number alone tells us very little. However, we also found the remains of a sheaf of papers in the fireplace. And these papers were burned pretty thoroughly. If Muntor had even touched them once with a poker, we’d be out of luck. But our Identification Section, with the aid of high-contrast photography, was able to read some of them. All but one of the pages contained newspaper or magazine stories about Virgil and the murders. The exception was a page from a brochure that included a registration form for attendance at the Specialty Retailers Marketing Symposium tomorrow. We’ve heard about that event before. It’s being sponsored by the Association of Tobacco Marketers. Retailers who attend will be trained in positioning tobacco products in their stores to bring in more customer traffic. And guess what. It’s taking place in Las Vegas. At the Brasilia Hotel and Casino.”
The noise level in the room rose as those present commented to one another.
“Hang on, hang on,” Maharis said, quieting them down. “As a final confirmation, it’s clear he’s working his way west right now. He may have been seen in Pittsburgh. He’s hit Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis in the last four days. He won’t get too many more before we get him.”
Rhoads, uncharacteristically, raised his hand. Maharis nodded at him. “Mr. Rhoads?”
“It’s a false trail.”
“We’re aware of your reservations, Rhoads,” Franklin said.
“I know. But hear me out. The house was devoid of clues except the phone number and the paper. Do we really believe that a guy this careful would leave such perfect clues? They’re just tough enough that we get to feel we achieved something by figuring them out, but both of th
em point to Vegas. Really? He burned the page from the brochure but left it so we can read it? Why not just put it in the trash and take it out to the curb? Can you really imagine a man this careful tossing the brochure into the fire and not sticking around long enough to make sure it was reduced to ash?”
“As I said, we’re familiar with your theory. But this is a solid lead, and we’re going to chase it down,” Franklin said.
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t. But you should also keep looking at other scenarios in case we’re wrong. Virgil is a murderer. That’s his sin. You know what ours is? Pride. He knows that, and he’s using it to lead us in the wrong direction.”
“Noted. How about this—you think Vegas is a dead end? Don’t come. Follow the case wherever you think it leads. I can’t give you field agents, but Bureau techs and analysts will do whatever you ask while you’re chasing Virgil. Fair?”
“Fair,” Rhoads said. “Thank you. And good luck in Vegas. I hope I’m wrong.”
107
From the Boston Globe, Friday, October 27
FBI: ‘VIRGIL’ IS PHILADELPHIA JOURNALIST MARTIN MUNTOR
Former Reporter Dying of Lung Cancer
108
Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc.
World Headquarters
The main auditorium had been crammed with all the apparatus of a major press conference—microphones, cameras, lights, and more than one hundred reporters, cameramen, and audio technicians from news organizations all over the world.
On the stage, Nicholas Pratt stood flanked by four other Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc. executives sitting in chairs. He fumbled with a slip of paper an aide had handed him before he entered the auditorium. Old Carolina common stock had been falling precipitously.
Closing price, Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc. Common Stock
169 –3 1/4, Volume 20,588,000.
Find Virgil (A Novel of Revenge) Page 26