by Todd Ohl
Tears began to form in his eyes again, and he told himself that he did not have time to become a little girl right now. He tried to find a rationalization for the cause of his emotions. Finally, he decided to make himself believe that it was hard to watch someone he worked with, and thought was an ally, go down like that. He took a deep breath and let himself believe the lie.
Looking for some task to occupy his mind, he decided to take the risk of checking his voicemail and talking to Harry. There would be few repercussions from using the cell at this point; he was on the move and would only be on the grid a few seconds. In the end, he simply needed to hear something from Harry that might give him some hope.
John brought the cell phone out from underneath the stinking hobo-coat. As he stood at a crosswalk, waiting for the green light, he noticed a man in a business suit on his immediate left. The man was staring at John, or at least the odd picture of a bum with a cell phone.
John extended his hand and grunted, “Any spare change? The roaming charges are killing me.”
The man stopped waiting for the light and headed toward a bagel shop.
John had a hunch that the man did not really want a bagel. He grunted loudly after the man, “Really, who expects to see roaming charges in this day and age? Help me out, man.”
The man disappeared into the shop as if he had not heard anything.
After snickering a bit, John waited for the voicemail cue to play on the cell phone. The first message, from Harry, said, “John, call me. It’s all gone; everything I collected is gone.” John’s heart sank. Harry was his only hope; he knew now, that he was screwed.
The second voicemail was from Kim. It said, simply, “John, call me.” She sounded annoyed at having to talk to voicemail, as usual. John surmised that probably meant she was fine, and perhaps came home to find her apartment slightly disturbed from his visit. He hung up and headed back toward the diner. Based on his read of Kim’s terse message, he would wait to deal with her anger when things settled down.
As he limped along, the phone rang in his hand. He looked at the caller ID to see it held the name Amy Ritter. He grimaced, and pressed the button to answer the call. He then put the phone to his ear, and said, “Damn it, Amy, I told you to use the diner phone.”
“Sorry. I didn’t see any reason to bother anyone, since I had my cell phone here. I was worried about you, OK?”
John rolled his eyes. He knew that her desire to not bother Effie for the phone could get her killed. “No, it’s not OK. We don’t know who we’re dealing with here. If they have the right connections, they can locate you. Right now, they can pinpoint you. Turn the cell phone off.”
“Should I get rid of it?”
“No! We may need it, just turn it off. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“OK, bye.”
The words “get rid of it” resonated in his mind. John looked down at his new cell phone, and then to a blue pickup at the stoplight. The bed of the truck was loaded with furniture. The driver stared at the red light. Leaving the cell phone on, he limped up to the stoplight and dropped the phone into the pickup’s bed.
John thought this was sheer genius. If these people could track him, a live cell phone in the back of a random pickup might lead them on a goose chase and buy him a little time. Even if not, it was no loss, since they still had Amy’s cell.
He turned the corner, and through the window of the diner, he saw Amy paying the bill.
He considered what he should tell her: Kim had very little from the autopsy, Harry had nothing left to help them with, and Shalby took what he knew to the grave.
John stopped and thought about that phrase a second. He had heard it somewhere else recently. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out Hallman’s papers and flipped to Trumbull’s letter.
John mumbled to himself, “Trumbull said he arranged it so Evan Fields took the secret of the lock to his grave. It was literal; he wanted to convey the fact that Fields took it to his grave.”
John flipped through the stack. It had been in front of him all along. The exhumation request told him that Hallman had made the connection.
John knew where he had to go next.
Chapter 30:
Harry Goes to Work
“I have the letter,” Fanelli bellowed as he slapped a manila envelope onto Harry’s desk. “It was in her out box—in an interdepartmental mail envelope.”
Harry thought about that fact. If someone could drop a letter in her outbox, that person either worked in the building or could get into the building with limited risk.
“Is there any way you can trace this to a printer?” Fanelli panted.
“Yes, but that will take time. Moreover, we don’t even know if it was printed in the building.” After a few seconds of silence, Harry continued, “I have a better idea. George, I want you to run a string search on some computers in the city government; check the temp files.”
“Harry, um… we’d need a warrant to do that, legally,” George stammered as his eyes darted between Fanelli and Harry.
“As far as I’m aware,” Fanelli growled, “this is a case of hot pursuit.” He eyed George over, and he knew what would work on the little technician. “Now, do you know enough to do it, or do I need to get someone in here that understands computers?”
“Well,” George sneered, “since the government was stupid enough to buy the operating system it did, I suppose I could break into any machine on the network in a matter of minutes.” He walked over and plopped down at the terminal. “It may take some time to search through all of them, though.”
Harry shook his head and countered, “Not if we guess right. A new lieutenant replaced Murphy and then suspended John; who is he?”
George began typing, and asked, “Is he in the Roundhouse?”
“Yes.”
“Homicide division,” George murmured to himself. “Ah, it looks like Murphy is still in the address list, but there is a Lieutenant Sanford on the duty roster with the same phone number as Murphy’s.” He clicked a few buttons. “I have his workstation ID.” With a few keystrokes, George brought up a box on the computer screen, and said, “OK, I’m in.”
Harry handed George the letter and directed him toward a string that would be the perfect search phrase. It was long enough, and unique enough, that it would bring up few other documents that contained the same series of words. “Use line four, it looks like there is a double-space—”
“I’ve got it,” George interrupted.
Fanelli leaned in, and asked, “Wait, what if he never saved it, or he deleted it?”
“You need to understand how things work,” George laughed. “The word processor that we use creates a file on the disk every time the person types something. It’s a temporary file that the computer uses to compensate for its constant crashing. That way, it can pull the document back up so you can recover your work. The file gets deleted when you are done, but deletion only really removes the first character. It’s just enough for the system not to recognize it as a file. The rest of the document sits on the drive in full—like a little seed waiting for water to bring it back to life. So you just run a scan for files that can be undeleted and then scan those for a string that is unique.” A beep erupted from the terminal, and George said, “Nothing—the thing’s clean.”
“Now what?” Fanelli probed, rubbing his forehead. “We scan the whole network?”
Harry shook his head. “Not yet. John got to the scene late because he wasn’t supposed to take the call. Who was the detective on call? Who should have shown up for the call last night?”
Fanelli looked at George, and directed, “See if you can access the duty roster and—”
George cut Fanelli off by raising one hand, while he continued to type with the other. “Already there—it was a Benjamin Shalby.” After a few more strokes on the keys, George chuckled, “He’s not on his system. This should be easy.” George sent the computer looping through files on the machine, leaned back in the chai
r, and crossed his arms.
After a few seconds, the computer beeped once.
“Bingo,” George uttered. He leaned forward in his chair and smiled. “We have a match. There’s the temp file, and the saved file too; it’s not even deleted. What a moron.”
“Does the duty roster show Shalby on duty today?” asked Fanelli.
George tapped a few commands into the terminal. “No, looks like this is his day off.”
“Pull up his address. I’ll make a call and get a warrant to pick him up.”
While George offered Fanelli an unwanted map to Shalby’s place, Harry dialed John again, just as he had done three times since Kim’s call. After four rings, Harry heard the click that indicated a redirect of the call to John’s voicemail. To Harry, who was trained to notice small things, this was significant; he knew that if the phone was off, or if John had no signal, he would have been sent to voice mail without hearing more than one ring.
“Hey,” Harry beckoned to the two other men. “McDonough’s on the grid. George, can you tap into E911 from here to find him?”
George proudly grinned, and sighed, “Yeah, but it will take a few minutes.”
Chapter 31:
A Shopping Trip
John limped across the street toward DiFlore’s Diner. Upon reaching the curb, he tossed the foul-smelling coat into a green wastebasket and hobbled into the eatery.
The girl behind the register handed over Amy’s change with a smile, and said, “I hope you two have a nice day.”
“Thanks, you too,” Amy returned with a bright smile. Turning to John, she winked and looked him over, “Hey! Is everything…” Amy’s gaze fixed on his shoes and her happy expression suddenly went blank.
John looked down to see tiny droplets of blood sprayed on his shins and shoes—the only thing that stuck out from under the bum’s clothing. Apparently, John had caught some of the flying debris when the bullet blew through Shalby. He reached out to Amy and gently pushed upward on her chin, so that her eyes met his. After smiling widely, he shook his head once, and with a cheerful voice, he asked, “So, are you ready?”
She forced a smile and nodded, then followed him out of the diner and onto the sidewalk.
“What happened?” she asked in a hushed tone.
“Just ran into an old friend; it didn’t go well. Do you still have those tissues from yesterday?”
“No, you used them all.” Amy dug in her purse for a second, and handed him a paper diner napkin. “Do you start every morning by wiping blood off of yourself?”
John stopped, bent over, and wiped most of the micro-spatter off his gray scotch-guarded slacks with a few quick swipes. The rest he would let fade into the dark wool of his pants.
“Well, at least it’s not my blood this time.”
“What happened?”
“The cop I saw was Ben Shalby, and he was the one that had been inside the police force screwing with things. Unfortunately, he was unwilling to share anything, and was willing to fight to keep his secrets. That approach went badly for him—very badly.”
“So, you got nothing out of him?”
“I got enough to understand that he was in on it, but other than that, nothing but blood.”
Amy stared blankly at the sidewalk for the next couple of paces, and then asked, “So what do we do now?”
“We buy a shovel.” John nodded toward a big-box hardware store that had an “Open 24 Hours” sign blinking on its facade. He started gimping across the parking lot.
“What do we need a shovel for?”
“Well, Shalby made me think.”
“Yeah?”
“He told me he would take what he knew to the grave. That phrase made me think about some papers that Hallman stashed in his apartment. There were a few things in them that the kid didn’t have time to make notes on. I guess these people got to him first.”
They entered the store and found the gardening aisle. There, he pulled a shovel off the rack.
“What are you going to do with that?” she groaned.
“Dig up an old friend. Anyway, Hallman had the Key of David all along, and he even knew where to use it, though he didn’t spell it out in his notes. I suppose he didn’t want to hand-deliver the location to the wrong people.”
Amy grabbed his arm and looked at him with huge eyes. “You really have it? He talked to everyone about it, but he never said he had it,” she said, with a broad grin. That smile then began to fade away, and she sighed, “He said it would make him famous.”
“Well, so far, it’s just made him dead. Getting back to my point, there was an old letter, in which this one guy says that he made sure this other guy took the lock to the grave. I only thought of that…” John stopped, and winced from the pain in his ankle.
“Will you be all right?”
“Yeah, can you run over to hardware and grab a crowbar? I’ll meet you at the register.”
Within minutes, Amy plopped the crowbar down on the counter.
Just as the woman behind the register opened her mouth to tell John the total, she noticed that he was wearing a tattered and dirty business suit. She peered over her bifocal glasses at him.
“I know; I have to stop wearing my best suits to dig ditches.” He handed her the money and waited.
After a few seconds, the woman handed him the change and watched them leave.
When they were back in the parking lot, John continued his story. “Anyway, this old guy, named Trumbull, wrote a letter that said this young guy they had just buried, Evan Fields, took the secret to his grave. Trumbull knew Fields took the secret to the grave, so that would mean Trumbull knew what the secret was. If Trumbull knew it, and was still alive, why wouldn’t Trumbull say he, meaning himself, would take it to his grave? It just seemed weird.”
She shook her head. “I think I’m confused.”
“I was, but then I remembered Hallman’s exhumation request to dig up Fields. Then it all made sense.”
Amy shot a glance at the tools and then turned pale. She stopped in her tracks, and said, “Oh my God, John. Please tell me that we are not—”
“Yes we are, and I don’t have time to wait for court approval.” He knew that the graveyard was only about fifteen blocks away, but limping that far was out of the question. Through a grimace of pain, he asked, “Can you hail a cab?”
Chapter 32:
Good Luck
Harry Mulgrew watched as George Pew’s fingers danced about the keyboard. George quickly dismissed several security layers, and took a few seconds to caress others so there would be no trace of his entry. Harry was sure that he would have the location of McDonough’s cell phone triangulated within minutes.
While he watched George, he listened to Lou Fanelli’s phone conversation with the officers that were trying to arrest Shalby. Fanelli’s tone was changing; it was becoming softer, and somewhat bewildered. Harry guessed that the officers were finding something unexpected.
With a blank look, Fanelli hung up the phone and sat on the desk. After saying nothing for a few seconds, Fanelli finally breathed, “Shalby is dead.”
George stopped typing and looked at Harry.
The silence in the room lingered until Harry gave George a nod. “Get us in the cell grid fast, George.” Harry turned back to Fanelli, and asked, “Do you have any idea what happened?”
Fanelli shook his head.
“Well,” Harry continued to probe, “who would possibly want to, or have to, kill him?”
“Somebody who wanted to keep him quiet would be my first guess,” Fanelli muttered, avoiding the real answer.
“There is another option that complicates things a little.”
Fanelli nodded.
After a few seconds of silence, George stopped typing and posed the question, “Would one of you two mind sharing this ‘other option’ with me?”
Fanelli answered, “We figured out Shalby might be the one working inside the department. Perhaps Detective McDonough figured that out as w
ell and…”
After a second or two of silence, Harry filled the gap. “John might have figured out that Shalby was involved and confronted him. Without speculating too much, John might have killed him.”
“I’d hate to see what you two cook up when you speculate a lot,” George grunted with a roll of his eyes.
Fanelli smirked.
“I don’t know this guy,” George sighed. “Is there a possibility that McDonough had something to hide?”
“Anything is possible, but I doubt it,” Harry replied. “More likely, there was some kind of scuffle, but we’ll know more when we have time to gather the crime scene evidence. That will come with time, which we don’t have right now.” Harry walked over to the chair by his desk, collapsed in it, and sighed. He then said, “Even worse, if John did confront Shalby, then he also probably suspects other cops are involved in this. After all, we suspected Sanford.”
Fanelli nodded. “We may still be proven right about Sanford.”
“Right, but Sanford’s guilt or innocence is irrelevant at this point. Look at it from John’s point of view; you have one cop that may have messed with your personnel record and another, with which you just had a life-or-death encounter. Now, you start to ask how many others are involved.”
“He won’t know who to trust,” Fanelli sighed.
“That’s right. That’s why I called you, Fanelli; he trusted you on the stakeout. If, and remember, we are still not sure, but if John almost got killed by one cop and suspects that another has worked to destroy his career, that leads to an association problem. He’ll be wondering whether every cop he sees is there to help him or kill him. To John, the possibility that someone is there to harm him may seem more likely than the possibility that someone is there to help him. Therefore, he may not respond well to a cop suddenly showing up; every animal’s instinct is self-preservation.”