by M. P. Cooley
“That’s an old glove factory downtown, by the way. Until June spotted the stuff stashed at the barn, we had no idea where it came from. Our one mistake”—Hale saw me glare—“our one big mistake was not having someone on Danielle that night.”
“Anyone poking around the meth lab?” Dave asked.
“No, and we haven’t heard anything from our informants in other parts of the distribution chain as to when the next supply is coming.”
“Distribution?” I asked. “Bikers?”
“Bikers to truckers and back to the bikers again. They’ve got a pretty tight lock on it, and yeah, it’s the Abominations. If Danielle and Ray had lived, I’m not sure how things would have played out. I suspect, based on some other intelligence we have, that the two of them and Marty were splintering off, trying to set up their own score.”
I wanted to keep Hale talking. “So who was running the show?”
“Well, Danielle wore the britches in that family, but she had no experience making meth. Ray had the family connections, but was hardly a criminal mastermind. But Marty, he gets my vote, mostly because this is how it went down last time. Hands off, let the others take the fall, a move he learned at Daddy’s feet, when Daddy was willing to let him take the hit on that lab.” Hale checked his notes. “Which is why I wanted to keep him out there on the streets, although with Daddy in town, the operation may have a new boss. And lo and behold, Craig got a text from a burner phone telling him to pick up the drugs as planned tomorrow night.”
“The wire transfer the guy mentioned,” Dave said. “Danielle already paid for everything?”
“She did. The Abominations have a long relationship with the gangs in Mexico, but Danielle was making her own deal on her own terms with groups with ties to Asia—to build credit, in a way. She had to prove she could be trusted.”
“Like you’re doing now?” I said. Everything he was saying fit with what I knew, and Hale seemed like he was playing ball, very probably with spitballs.
Before he could answer, Jerry walked in, acting, as he always did, like he owned the place.
“Let’s start,” Jerry said, tapping the edge of the table like a gavel.
“The chief?” Dave asked as Donnelly entered, carrying a cup of coffee.
The chief sighed the sigh of the deeply put upon. “Did you solve the murders? The governor is ready to make this a state operation.”
“And I tend to agree,” Jerry said. “Both of your careers are ruined. Not that you”—and he smirked at me—“had much of one to destroy.”
Dave cleared his throat. “Well, it appears we have an international drug operation moving into Hopewell Falls.”
Jerry rolled his eyes. “Tell us something we don’t know.”
Hale picked up on Dave’s lead. “I don’t believe that you understand the scale of this. We’re talking about an operation to rival the Juarez cartel. Or the Hells Angels in the eighties.” Hale leaned back in his seat. “Did I ever tell you about Marty’s daddy?”
“Jim Fizzeller,” I added, helpfully. “Used to run the Abominations.”
“Until he had his ‘accident.’ ” Dave could use air quotes with the best of them, and made the three of us seem like we were in the know.
“Yeah, tragic how that happened as Zeke and Jim were coming back from that meeting where they set up the roach coach distribution,” Hale said.
“Roach coaches?” asked the chief, appalled.
“They were carts,” I explained. “Vans actually, where they sold good cheap food. Sometimes Mexican. Great tacos.” The chief wasn’t convinced. He was raised on boiled beef and cabbage, so even really good Mexican food held no appeal. I pulled out the rough outlines of the operation from my long-ago memory. “Instead of ordering a number fourteen—carne asada tacos—you could order a number seventy-seven and get some crank. The Abominations supplied all the drugs until five or six years ago.”
“So they lost out to the competition?” Jerry asked, as if he expected outlaw bikers to be up on the laws of economics.
“In a way,” Hale said. “The Hells Angels firebombed them when they got a little too friendly with folks in Oakland. This”—Hale emphasized each word with a sharp tap on the table—“was supposed to be their big comeback. Unless Danielle, Ray, and Marty cut them out.” Hale explained his suspicion that the three were making their own deals.
“And it goes down tomorrow. We get the Abominations, there will be more RICO indictments than we’ve seen since the Teamsters.”
Chief Donnelly shifted in his chair. “Agent Bascom, I was on patrol when heroin showed up in the seventies.” He seemed lost in thought. “That tore up lives, and good folks . . . they lost their souls. And we still can’t get that out of here.” He stood up, collecting his pad and coffee cup. “I’ll give you twenty-four hours.”
“But the governor will need to be briefed,” Jerry added.
“Sir”—and unlike the times when Hale had called Jerry “sir” before, this time he sounded respectful—“this information needs to stay in this room.”
Dave leaned forward, and got right in Jerry’s face. “I trust Hale. He had our back at the Jelicksons’ today”—which I knew was patently untrue. But Dave knew what I did. We needed Hale. Not just the resources of the FBI, but him, and his headstrong, headlong ways.
“We need to take down this drug ring. Don’t you think that’s best, Jerry?” Dave asked.
Dave’s magic worked.
“I will give my okay, but only”—Jerry glanced at the chief—“for another forty-eight hours.”
The chief nodded. “For you, I’ll stall them for an extra day. C’mon, Jerry, let’s go have another conference call.”
Jerry stood up, and Hale extended his hand. Jerry seemed confused, but after a moment shook it. He shook Dave’s readily. He ignored mine. I didn’t care. Jerry could ignore me all he wanted as long as we had the time we needed to solve this case.
“YOU HAVE A LAPTOP in the laptop terminal?” Dave said from the passenger seat of Hale’s big-ass SUV. “I thought that space was just a good place to rest a pizza slice.”
“Oh, I do that, too,” Hale said. “I put it on top of the laptop.”
We were on our way to the capitol to visit Marty Jelickson at work. Hale seemed to know his way through South Albany. The streets were empty. During the day, tens of thousands of state workers flooded the area, crunching numbers, sending out tax notices, eating hotdogs for lunch because they didn’t work for the state for the salary, they worked for the benefits. The Egg reflected the moonlight, Rockefeller’s avant-garde half dome squatting like a spaceship among the Hellenic columns and ornate cornices of the Victorian buildings that surrounded it. I’d taken Lucy to see Peter Pan in its theater, but she was much more interested in trying to figure out how the two little poles kept up the bowl of cement. I didn’t have an answer for her.
We drove to the front gate of the capitol, which was chained shut, with a sign telling us to enter via the garage, and Hale put out an official tag, letting us park right in front. Apparently that’s what it took to get parking in downtown Albany.
We walked around and down the garage ramp, ducking under the security gate, which at this hour required a state ID. The garage was empty of vehicles except for a couple of clusters: one near the elevators, and all the official state cars at the edge of the lot. In the middle of the structure was a glassed-in security desk.
With no Marty.
Hale darted ahead, almost running up to the door, but I grabbed his arm before he could enter. Another crime scene, I thought. We stood in the doorway. The room had windows on all sides. The guards probably didn’t look out much, because mounted on the ceiling was a wall of security screens, flicking from picture to picture: the front entrance with the locks in place, a darkened hallway, and Marty sitting behind the security desk monitoring the cameras.
Wait. What?
The views on the screens flicked again. Another hallway, light spilling from o
ne of the offices, the majority leader’s suite still brightly lit with people working late, and a maintenance man mopping a hallway. Flick. The first scenes returned: the hallway, the front entrance, and Marty sitting at the desk, a desk that was now empty. The three of us were nowhere to be seen on the screens.
Someone had doctored the security feed.
CHAPTER 19
THE RIDE BACK TO Hopewell Falls was quiet. Dave and I floated past the Watervliet Arsenal, spiked gates and cannons keeping the site safe from long-deposed foes. Of course, those were just for show—the best-in-class tanks behind those walls could hit a target in Pennsylvania.
“Marty’s our man,” Dave said. We were on our way home to catch a few hours’ sleep. Hale had dropped us off at the station before going to meet Craig at the airport for a preflight check.
“So it seems,” I said. As we crossed the Watervliet/Hopewell Falls border, progress seemed to stop. We were in the same old rotting economy filled with a bunch of falling-down buildings.
“He was at the crime scene—”
“He had the means to be there. We have no confirmation.”
“Fine. But why’d he go to all that trouble? He was one motivated man.”
Dave had a point—our visit to the capitol more or less confirmed Marty as a suspect. A few clicks and Hale was able to find the source file that was endlessly looping, showing Marty, diligent and alert, at his desk. It was located between the incident reports of February 14—a couple having a loud, angry fight on the plaza—and February 15—when one young man assaulted another young man with a meatball sub.
“He’s been doing this since February fourteenth,” Hale said, and began to unplug the desktop so the FBI’s computer labs could do a complete search. Stan Shay, the manager of security at Building Two of the capitol, was not happy to see that, once he arrived, but got over it when we told him we were going to take a close look at his recordkeeping for the last few months. Stan loved keeping records.
“The problem, of course, is vehicle 12992,” Stan said. He was reviewing, for the fourth time, the complete list of state vehicles that were currently in stock.
“It’s missing?” My voice echoed through the concrete garage.
Stan stopped, flipped the pad back three pages, and wrote down my question. He recorded every question we asked, including “Where’s the bathroom?” He flipped back to his pad before answering.
“No,” he said.
I was having a hard time keeping my attention on Stan and his ponderous ways. The nature of security was to check and double-check—and triple-check and quadruple-check—and Stan was missing nothing. Next to me Dave was on high alert, and Hale kept walking away, looking behind pillars, under cars, all the while within earshot.
“But the plate on the Cobalt isn’t a state plate. ALB792 . . .”
“Thank God he did something illegal,” Dave said. “We can get him and hold him.” He hopped on the radio, putting out an APB for a 1992 Honda with state plates. Hale opened his phone, jogging toward the exit ramp. The garage carried sound, and even from the gate I could hear him repeating the information.
“Geez,” Stan said, once the two of us were alone. “I’m going to have to cover the rest of his shift, and with no computer. I knew that kid was trouble from the very start.”
“Why’d you hire him?” I said.
“The congresswoman asked. He’s her son-in-law? Or he was. She said we could fire him if he didn’t do right by us.”
“Any problems with him before?”
“One time I showed up early, and he came back in a rush, he said from a patrol. Protocol says we should call in the Albany police first thing, but sometimes you observe someone or something, and it’s easier to go check it out yourself, ’cause it’s usually nothing. We used to always have two guys on at one time, even at night, but once they got the cameras and card reader there”—he pointed to a swipe machine that was next to the elevator—“well, you couldn’t get into the building at night unless you had a pass, and the guys had to sit in their seat and do their job. I mean, we have to give the guys on the night shift a break so they can go to the can since that’s their human right, but anything more than a few minutes and they’d get written up. They knew I reviewed the video every morning.”
With the feed loop of him sitting at his desk, Marty could be away for longer than a bathroom run. “Any other times he wasn’t where he was supposed to be?” I asked.
“The cleaning staff said they saw him regular. They get out of here around one, though, so maybe after? We can pull the scan card records for the last month.”
“Last three months,” I said. “His whole employment history.”
“Last three months.” He wrote it down. “You know, I wouldn’t have tagged him as a problem employee. He’d cover all sorts of shifts. He kept good notes, and did good recordkeeping.” He tapped his pad with his eraser. “That’s half the battle with these guys—most of them can’t write in complete sentences. He could and he did.” He cheered up. “So maybe he didn’t murder her.”
LORRAINE’S VOICE RANG THROUGH Dave’s car. “C-1 and C-12, what is your 10-20?”
“You C-1?” I asked Dave. He was. I radioed Lorraine our location.
“C-12, I need you at a 10-53P . . .”
Why in the world wouldn’t she send one of the on-duty patrol cars for a vehicular accident that only involved property?
“. . . related to cases 13-478 and 13-484 . . .”
Danielle’s and Ray’s cases? I listened closely.
“At the corner of Vesey and Halston.”
I signed off and turned to Dave. “Get to the pharmacy. Fast.”
WE ARRIVED AT THE alley behind the pharmacy to find twisted metal and smoke: the snowplow operator puffing away on a cigarette next to an idling plow, which was filling the air with exhaust, and a Dumpster, crushed sideways across the alley, with its contents spilling out into the snow. Finally, some luck, I thought as I spotted the bloody boots and hat with earflaps the driver had called in. Our luck ended there, as Denise Byrne, inside filling some emergency prescriptions, came out to check on the ruckus.
She was now pleading her case to me, while Dave took the snowplow driver’s statement.
“I don’t understand how this happened,” she said. “It’s impossible. People trust us not to let outsiders tamper with their medical information . . . even . . . especially, the police. You know you’re making a mistake.”
I was willing to let Denise Byrne complain a bit. It wasn’t going to change anything. What Denise didn’t realize was that privacy wasn’t our primary concern. The murder was. Tired from another all-nighter, I needed to save my energy for the real fights. I was going on hour twenty-four in the same outfit, and the way it was itching, my skirt was as sick of me as I was of it.
“Denise, I cannot believe that you wouldn’t follow all regulatory guidelines to a T.”
“No, we’re compliant in every way,” she said. “But we struggle to compete with the chains, and if it got out we broke confidentiality, well, I couldn’t show my face!”
I tried to calm her down. “Privacy, not confidentiality.”
“Same difference.”
“No. It’s not.” I pointed to several crushed pill bottles in a fan pattern in the snow. “I bet there’s no way to see who used those or even what was in them. You would never improperly dispose of pharmaceuticals.”
Her pale eyebrows shot up. “Of course not.”
“Because you plan ahead. You’re careful. The fact that your patients use medicine isn’t a secret.”
She seemed to consider this. The light sprinkling of snow coming down dusted her gold hair, curls releasing themselves from their tight blowout into soft waves. “I want to help, June, I really do, but you need to understand, my reputation’s on the line. People will say, ‘Oh, those Byrnes. You know how they are, you can’t trust them.’ It would kill my husband if we lost this business. The pharmacy has been in his family for thre
e generations, I can’t lose it.”
“I promise you, Denise, we’ll do everything to make sure you aren’t pulled into this investigation unnecessarily.” She smiled triumphantly, but her smile disappeared as I continued. “But we are investigating. We’re thinking, unless you can explain otherwise, that those boots are related to the murder of Ray Jelickson. Now we need to discuss how they got there.”
The crime scene unit’s van whipped around the corner and screeched to a halt. Annie clambered out of the driver’s side. She didn’t acknowledge any of us, disappearing behind the back of the van. I was happy to see her—Annie wasn’t going to miss a thing. She was also going to complain a lot, and she needed to be kept far away from Denise Byrne.
“Is there somewhere we can have some privacy?” I asked Denise.
We agreed to go inside. I signaled to Dave and checked in with Annie.
“Oh, it’s you.” Annie snapped her rubber gloves like a mad scientist. “You don’t need to tell me to maintain biohazard protocols or to sweep the entire alley. I know.”
“The snowplow operator—”
“A snowplow? I would never have known.”
“The boots and hat are the most obvious find, but more—”
“Yes, yes. For kicks, I’ll go ahead and catalog everything.” Annie’s words were muffled as she pulled the biohazard suit over her head. “And I’ll get the gorilla and his machine on his way as soon as possible. And I’ll do my job, which I’d bet, although I can’t promise, that I can do better than you. And we’ll get this case solved, and hopefully not have to trudge through snow searching for clues for months. Sound good?”
“Sounds good, Annie.”
Annie rolled her eyes.
DENISE LOCKED THE THREE dead bolts behind me. Just as we were getting settled—Denise propped on her Roman emperor stool and me on a folding chair—my radio beeped.
“C-12,” Dave said, “can you join me outside for a second?”