“No, I haven’t… They passed an airport currency exchange booth, for whatever that’s worth. There’s probably nothing wrong with them—I’m just trying to look out for an old friend, is all,” Stan said.
“Currency booth? Ha! Chimps. They couldn’t tell the difference between a good counterfeit and the real thing if you painted the fake red. Although it’s pretty hard to dupe the newer bills.” He thought about it. “You could take them to a bank, but even they could be fooled depending on who’s working and the quality of the fake. Any high-grade counterfeiter would know most of the standardized tests… we actually saw some out of Russia in 1995 that were pretty good, passed all the field exams, and some Iranian ones that were exact—there have been rumors circulating for years that the CIA gave the Shah a set of genuine plates in the early seventies that got abandoned when he abdicated. That’s one of the reasons we came out with new tests a few years back, and with new bills in 1996.” Stan heard Saul eating something, the crinkle of a wrapper and some chomping, swallowing. “There’s a lot of detail in the newer bills, and quite a few hidden gotchas that only Treasury knows about.” Saul paused. “And of course that I know about. I’ve been out of the loop for seven years but I still remember a trick or two.”
“I’m going to pick them up Monday, at noon. Why don’t I bring them by and we can have lunch? Say one-ish? My treat?” Stan knew the mention of food, and free food at that, would be too much for Saul to resist. Not that he would have turned Stan down anyway; they’d been friends for too long. Still, he would appreciate getting a bite out of it.
“You’re singing my song. Although I have to watch what I eat—my doctor put me on a diet. Sometimes I wonder why I even try; he looks worse than I do.” There hadn’t been a day in the last twenty years Saul hadn’t been on a diet. And he broke his diets a lot.
A lot.
Stan smiled. “Then it’s a date. Your place around one, one-thirty, you pick the restaurant. Have a nice weekend.”
“And you as well. See you Monday.”
~ ~ ~
Sunday morning, Ron Stanford’s cell phone went off as he was reading the paper over cereal. Since his divorce a couple of years back he’d largely enjoyed his time alone; he could do whatever he liked, whenever he felt like it, without having to consider anyone else. The job had been the end of the marriage, the usual story: his wife had felt increasingly estranged over the years as he put in weeks or months of eighteen-hour days catching bad guys.
She’d been game for it at first, but had seemed preoccupied for the last three years they’d been together. One day he’d come home and she’d announced that she’d fallen in love with another man and wanted out of the relationship. It shouldn’t have surprised him; all the signs had been there, but he’d been too busy to care. The divorce had gone through amicably, everything very civilized and adult. He’d gotten his solitude, and she’d gotten her CPA, and presumably free tax returns for life.
He looked at the number and sighed. Sundays were often busy days, as the fallout from the weekend was discovered and the bodies floated to the surface. He pressed redial.
“What is it this time? Better be good,” Ron said.
“Sorry to bug you, Detective, but we have a 187 that looks like something you should be in on. This is Sergeant O’Keefe, sixth precinct. It’s the same as Harlem a few days ago.”
Damn. He’d been hoping for some kind of a lunar cycle, more time between bodies to fit the puzzle pieces together. “Same M.O.?”
“You got it.”
“Where?” Ron grabbed a pen.
“Avalon club, around the back. West 20th.”
“I’ve seen the place. Be there in half an hour.” He was thinking about the geography. The first killing had occurred uptown in the 23rd precinct, Spanish Harlem. This one was on the opposite end of the island. Two very different scenes.
The timing was disturbing. Why two killings here and now, so suddenly, and why so close together? Usually serials following a ritual did so in some cyclical manner, gradually accelerating as they became more brazen or craved more stimulation. This wasn’t a cycle at all, at least that he could tell.
He wondered if the killer was a recent transplant to the city, some new crazy who’d decided to make the Big Apple his hunting ground. Or perhaps it was some high-pressure guy in a suit who just had a traumatic event and couldn’t make the voices in his head stop commanding him to kill. Who knew? He’d seen it all. Truly had. Every ugly sort of malfeasance and viciousness that could be imagined, he’d savored, up close and personal.
He caught a cab downtown from his apartment on West 71st. Traffic was mild by NY standards and the cabbie knew the club. When he arrived, Ron approached the team and saw Amy had been called in on this one, too.
“Hey, Amy. Round two, huh?” he asked.
“Good morning, Ron. Yup, this is our boy again.”
“Tell me what we’ve got.”
“Caucasian female, twenty-something, in the dumpster. Looks like she’s been there for at least thirty-six hours, so this is a Friday night case, not Saturday.” Amy grimaced. “It’s ugly, Ron, worse than the last one. The heat’s not our friend.”
“Thanks for the ray of optimism, Amy. What else?”
“Same deal. Eyes, hair and breasts gone. You wanna take a look?”
“Yeah, I suppose. Let’s see the damage.” Ron hated this part. He steeled himself for what he knew was under the tarp in the dumpster. They hadn’t moved the victim yet, as they were still prepping the crime scene, dusting for prints—a long shot, with God knows how many janitors and others having touched the stinking receptacle.
He donned a surgical mask doused with menthol, climbed up the stepladder to look at the remains, and lifted the tarp.
In spite of the years on the job, he retched. It was bad. She’d swollen from the heat and was grossly distended, her skin split in multiple spots. Ants had invaded the cavities where her eyes had been, as well as the top of her head and her chest. The stink was unbelievable, even through the mask. Ron didn’t envy Amy her gig one bit. The girl’s dress had been sliced up the center to allow access to her chest. He noted that her panties were still on, and that there was no evidence of any stabbing or other violence—save for the obvious.
He stepped down, pulled off the mask, and staggered to the mouth of the alley, gulping fresh air. Amy came up beside him.
“You never get used to it, do you?”
“I don’t know how anyone ever does, Amy. Good Christ, that’s vile. How do you do it?” he asked her.
She considered her answer. “Somebody has to do the ugly parts; that’s us. And somebody has to figure out why he’s doing this, how he’s selecting them and killing them. That’s you.” She turned and looked back at the dumpster. “He’s not going to stop, Ron. This is just the beginning. He’s picking them out for a reason, and my bet is he’s done this before—or done some pretty horrible things before.”
“I get the same feeling.”
“He’s careful about how he cuts them, and yet he’s doing it in alleys. Reckless. Calculated risk, maybe part of the thrill?”
“Dunno. I’m going in to the office to run this through the computers, see if anything comes up out-of-state. I’m wondering, why now? Why here, all of a sudden?” Ron’s Sunday was ruined, but rather than sitting in some bar trying to drink away the stain on his psyche, he’d try to discover something about the animal loose in his city.
“I’ll get in touch once I know more. Wanna bet cause of death was indeterminate?” Amy had already moved on to how he was killing them.
“Not today, thanks. You see if you can figure out how he’s doing it, I’ll work on the why and who.”
“It’s a deal. Have a nice Sunday, Ron.”
“You too, Amy.”
He walked toward the subway, considering the implications of the second killing. Two bodies, three nights apart. A pattern? Did that mean some other girl was going to wind up butchered on Monday? And wh
y do it in alleys, if he was taking trophies and being so careful with the cutting?
He could already tell it was going to be a long day. Whenever he got on a case like this, it became a fascination, something almost personal, and he clicked into obsessive-compulsive mode. That’s what made him impossible to live with, but good at what he did. He hated the bodies, hated the grotesque violence, was disgusted by the whole thing—and that was what motivated him to find the perp and make it stop.
His mind bounced to Amy. She was in her mid-thirties, and he knew through the grapevine that she’d also had a marriage blow up within the last few years. She was attractive in a mousy way, but he’d never gone for her type in the past, instead favoring the vivacious type.
How’s that working for ya, Ron?
Touché, he thought.
For now, though, eye on the ball. Time to catch a monster.
Chapter 8
The flight from LAX arrived at JFK on time and its passengers emptied into the terminal. The two Asian men collecting their luggage at baggage claim were unremarkable, dressed conservatively, likely engineers or technical workers.
They walked out to the curb and the shorter one placed a call on his cell. He spoke rapidly into the small handset, and five minutes later a dark gray American sedan rolled up. The trunk popped and another Asian man jumped out of the driver’s side and ran around the front, greeting them and bowing.
Once on their way, the taller of the pair gave the driver the name of their hotel and requested they swing by an address in midtown first. His partner lit a cigarette, inhaling the smoke greedily. It had been a long flight. The American cigarettes tasted good and he made a mental note to pick up a carton on his way back to Myanmar .
An hour later they reached 47th Street, and the two men surveyed the target’s shop. They instructed the driver to drive down the block and turn the corner; he complied, and they got out and circled back around, pretending to look into windows. They arrived at the address and peered through the metal grate that protected the small storefront. Not much to it. A few blocks off the beaten path, and deserted on Sunday.
They moved around the corner looking for an alley or rear entrance. Nothing, just more buildings, more stores. They’d have to enter through the front. Much more dangerous, but who’d be watching? And more importantly, who’d remember a couple of nondescript Asian men? They all looked alike to the round eyes, wasn’t that common wisdom?
They returned to the car and got dropped at a hotel off Times Square. The driver told them to call if they required anything—money, weapons, women. They thanked him for his courtesy and assured him they’d be in touch.
~ ~ ~
Gordon Samuels was running hard on the treadmill, contemplating his next move. He’d already bought into his position on the oil futures over the last twenty trading days; there was no way to call it off at this point without losing a fortune.
He’d weighed the likelihood of the test batch of bills being caught in time to ruin his plans, and concluded it was unlikely.
Then again, it had been equally unlikely that the bills would materialize in New York in under a week. They were in an unknown location with some watch dealer, who right now could be spending them, leaking them into the financial system, where at some point they might be flagged by someone at a clearing bank and sent to Treasury.
That was a lot of things that had to go wrong in a very short period of time. The odds were inestimably small.
On the positive side, Myanmar was scheduled to begin their oil futures purchases within three weeks, and was already printing the first runs of the production bills. They were planning to start with smaller buys and spread it around, to avoid suspicion of where all the newfound wealth was coming from. What would inevitably happen is that the spot market cost would increase as new demand indicated by the futures outstripped supply— Myanmar would actually want delivery of the oil, not just the profit resulting from the increase in value of the futures contracts.
They weren’t especially price-sensitive, given they could literally print money at will, so the price would run up quickly once the sellers realized they needed to deliver the oil instead of creating more contracts in infinite quantities. He’d taken massive futures positions ahead of the trading, positions where just a five-dollar move would double his investment. Once the oil play was done, he would buy massive options positions in several companies that were going to be acquired like mad by a group of hedge funds working on behalf of Myanmar 's government, driving the stock prices through the roof and making Gordon and the Asians rich in the process.
Again, leverage was key. He could turn two hundred million into almost a billion on the right three companies.
He’d already begun those options purchases as well, accumulating quietly. Once he accomplished his objective and made the upside, he’d sell call options and buy puts in those same companies. He’d short them to crater the stock, making money as the price fell, too.
It was all about moving cash through the system, turning a few billion into tens of billions. They could then rinse and repeat on another half-dozen companies, chosen almost at random.
By the time anyone became suspicious of all the new dollars floating around, they’d have converted their holdings into Swiss francs, locking in their gains, and he’d be obscenely rich for his role in orchestrating it. He had chosen the companies, had recommended the futures, and was instrumental in the success of the venture. He’d earned every penny of what he would make.
The plan was to keep pumping money into the system for years, using the U.S.’s markets to build wealth for the Myanmar state and satisfy their requirements for oil and other commodities.
Given that Myanmar ’s gross national product was in the thirty-billion range, the addition of five to ten billion per year was a huge increase—and one that was required for the regime’s survival. While Myanmar hoped it would be damaging for America to have the currency supply diluted, the truth was that ten more billion per year wouldn’t even move the needle.
Either way, he’d be a billionaire before it was over, and holding it in francs and yen and gold, not dollars.
The only hitch was the test run leaking out.
He stepped off the treadmill and walked toward the steam room of the ultra-exclusive club, thinking that perhaps a massage would work some of the kinks out. It was, after all, a day of rest.
And he’d been a hard worker all week long. He deserved a little pampering. A massage was just the thing.
Chapter 9
Tess was up at 6:15 a.m., coffee maker dripping away while she brushed her teeth and prepared for her day. Nick was still out cold, which wasn’t unusual, as he didn’t have to be at work until much later.
It was Monday, and she needed to take off a few hours to visit her father, check in to see how he was holding up. She always had mixed feelings about their visits; she loved him tremendously, but got irritated when he inevitably started in about her life. He could go on for hours about her needing to become responsible, stop what he referred to as “this bike idiocy,” and go back to a real career—in short, to behave “like an adult.” And don’t even get him started on her relationship choices and biological clock and the like.
Right now she wasn’t interested in complications; she liked the simplicity of living in the moment and not having to think about the future. Her life was distilled down to food, sleep, work, sex, fun. That was more than enough. She wasn’t in a hurry to grow up, especially after experiencing the joy of ten-hour days sitting in a cubicle. That wasn’t for her, and she had the emotional scars to prove it.
She acquired her first tattoo when she was nineteen and attending college, on a dare—the little yin-yang on her back. She’d gotten the tongue piercing two years later, during her experimental phase, when she’d burned through a dozen boyfriends in six months. The last two years of college she’d done the whole drinking, drug thing, and discovered she liked her sex dirty and rough, but that she also was c
omfortably monogamous by nature.
As she was giving the middle finger to the planet in her personal life, she’d gravitated to computer science for her major. There was something about getting a string of code right that she really enjoyed—the concentration required, the focus, and the satisfaction of creation, the independence. It was all her own work, no one else involved, and that was gratifying.
She supposed a good therapist could have had a field day with it all. Hers had.
The truth was Tess really didn’t have a lot of reasons to be pissed at the world. Bad things happened to everyone else, but not her, not really—other than her depressive episode, which you could easily argue was self-inflicted (the big bad world hadn’t delivered on her every expectation, boo hoo). Daddy hadn’t touched her in the bad place, Mommy hadn’t been an alcoholic or beaten her, and life hadn’t been especially traumatic growing up. True, she hadn’t seen her sister in California for almost half a decade, and didn’t really like her much, but that hardly qualified as an emotional disaster. Tess had just never gotten along with her, and over the years, as the family calamities had piled up, she’d become more distant. They simply didn’t have much in common.
Tess snuck into the bedroom and kissed Nick on the forehead, then carried her bike down to the street. It was 6:45, and the day was looking like another scorcher.
She hit the front door of the depot at 6:59 and clocked in. It would be a short morning shift for her, off by 9:45, and then back on from 12:00 to 5:00.
Frank waved her over. He was talking to some guy in a sports jacket—mid-thirties, brown hair, maybe six one. She approached and Frank introduced him as Detective Stanford, who wanted to have a word with her about Loca.
Her heart dropped and she blanched. Why would the police want to talk to her about Loca unless something had happened?
Fatal Exchange (Fatal Series Book 1) Page 6