by Derek Fee
‘The young woman was the old lady in the wheelchair on the way into the rest room,’ Moira said. ‘And Gardiner was in the wheelchair when they exited.’
‘We need to find that young woman,’ Shea said.
‘Why?’ Moira asked.
‘She can lead us to the others.’ Shea was excited.
‘I doubt it,’ Moira said. ‘If I put this together I’d hire a penniless young actress for the gig. Someone who badly needs the money and won’t even think to ask any questions. I bet she has no idea who hired her or where the burka-clad women went when they left her.’
‘Another dead end.’ Shea slumped back on the couch. ‘They could be anywhere by now.’
‘They could,’ Brendan said. ‘But I don’t think so. They believe they’ve covered their tracks and probably feel safe to hang around. They don’t know that anyone is investigating Gardiner’s former secretary, and the police are working on the same assumption that you started with that Gardiner has been either abducted or murdered, or both. So they have no reason to run. My guess is that they are lying low in Florida until they are sure that their plan has worked. Anyway, I think we should call it a night.’ He motioned to Moira. ‘Tomorrow is another day.’
‘I have plenty of room here,’ Shea said. ‘You could spend the night.’
Moira looked at Brendan and saw that he wasn’t enamoured of the idea. ‘I think we should go home. I need a change of clothes.’
‘And I need to go to my office in the morning to clear my agenda for the next few days,’ Brendan said. ‘Moira can check the Florida estate agents tomorrow. If she’s lucky, then I want to be around for the denouement.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
‘I need a drink,’ Moira collapsed into an easy chair as soon as she and Brendan entered the living room of their apartment. They had caught a taxi outside Shea’s building and returned to Cambridge.
‘Gin and tonic?’ Brendan asked, making for the bar.
‘Sounds perfect.’ She watched him as he made his way across the room. ‘You were pretty awesome today. Before you arrived we were ready to throw in the towel. Just shows what a fresh pair of eyes can accomplish. Now we’re off in a completely new direction.
Brendan made a strong gin and tonic for Moira and a stiff whiskey and soda for himself. He wasn’t as enthusiastic about his contribution as Moira was. Something told him that it would be better for him if the investigation had been in the bin. He walked over to Moira and handed her the drink. Even in her exhausted state she looked beautiful. A few short days ago he had considered himself the luckiest man in the world because she was his partner. She was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. She was the woman that he wanted to have his children with. Frank Shea had put that perfect picture into doubt. But he should have anticipated that. After all, Moira was a beautiful woman and it was natural that she would attract lots of attention. He had always assumed that their love would be enough to keep them together, but now he wasn’t so sure. He pulled one of the easy chairs over beside her. They touched glasses and drank.
‘God, I needed that!’ Moira let her body totally relax. The chair seemed to enfold her.
‘Is there something going on between you and Frank?’
Moira’s body tensed involuntarily. Ever since puberty she had been pursued by boys trying to get into her pants. She had kissed quite a few frogs but hadn’t yet found her prince. She had been wondering whether Brendan was ‘the one’, always afraid that what seemed like everlasting love might morph into jealousy and ultimately into violence. Following Brendan to Boston was an experiment. If it failed, she still had a job she loved in one of the most interesting cities in the world. All she had to do was recognise the experiment as a failure and go back to Belfast a little older and perhaps a little wiser. As for Shea, she couldn’t deny that she found him attractive and interesting. And if she were single, she would definitely have gone for the option of an affair with him. But was he relationship material? He had no track record and if he hadn’t had that life-changing spell in prison, women may never have featured seriously in his life. She looked into Brendan’s puppy-dog face. She wanted to tell him that all is well and that she would always be his, but couldn’t. ‘There is nothing going on between Frank Shea and me.’ It was such a definitive statement that she hoped it was true.
Brendan relaxed and sipped his drink.
‘You’re good at what you do,’ she smiled. ‘You would have been a pretty good police detective or do you see yourself as one of those gifted amateurs so favoured by some English authors, the college professor with a knack for solving murder.’
‘It’s been done by Dick Van Dyke, no less, on TV. I think it was called Murder 101,’ Brendan said. ‘But I’ve never solved a crime in my life. I’ve spent my professional life trying to look into the criminal mind, not attempting to resolve particular crimes. I leave all that plod stuff to people like you.’
‘So, we’re the plods,’ Moira was smiling. ‘You picked up more in Belfast than a bit of the accent. After all this looking into the criminal mind, what have you come up with? Should we all have our brains scanned to identify which of us has criminal tendencies.’
Brendan laid his glass on the coffee table. ‘I have only one conclusion. We all have a propensity for crime. It just manifests itself in different ways.’ He went into lecture mode. ‘Is the employee who goes to the company stores each September and withdraws pens, pencils and notepads that he intends to pass on to his children for school a thief? Technically he is. So by extension he’s also a criminal. How many people cheat on their taxes? Gregory Gardiner was a church-going husband and father, but he was involved in bilking investors, who weren’t themselves paragons of virtue, out of millions of dollars. We’re all waiting for that opportunity to display our propensity for crime. I don’t go to church anymore because I was always wondering what these good people were up to when they weren’t on their knees begging God’s forgiveness.’
‘My God, I never thought you were so cynical.’
‘I’m just being realistic. I want to be there when you catch up with this guy Gardiner. What I despise most is his willingness to toss his family’s lives into the toilet.‘
‘Maybe it’s just as well that you’re not a police officer. What I’ve learned is that being human means being frail and vulnerable.’ She finished her drink and was about to pick up Brendan’s glass when her phone indicated a message had arrived. It was a terse message from Shea: Lawrence airport 7 a.m. car 6 a.m. She showed the message to Brendan. ‘You coming?’
‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
Moira picked up their glasses and deposited them in the sink. ‘Now I’m about to take this frail and vulnerable body up to bed. You can join me if you wish but don’t get any ideas – it’s way past “I’ve got a headache” time.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
T he sun had already been up for several hours and the clear blue sky presaged another perfect day on the south Florida Keys, but not for everyone. The alarm bell that had been ringing intermittently in her head was now clanging at one hundred and twenty-five decibels. There was no question of ignoring it. She and Greg needed to move, and move fast. The bags were packed and in the hallway of their rental on Longboat Key. The plane was fuelled and ready at Tampa Executive Airport. And the rental in Placencia was stocked and waiting for them. Louise dispensed with breakfast. There were a couple of lounges at the airport and they would pick up something to eat there. She was still baffled by the source of the alarm. It had to be Frank Shea. Damn it! She had been the one to suggest that Greg plant the thought in his wife’s head that if he ever went missing then she should get Shea to look into it.
‘What’s the rush?’ Greg sat back in the rear of the stretch limo that would take them to the airport. He looked at Louise. She was wearing a cream silk dress that perfectly set off her tan. The dress was just open enough at the neck to expose her cleavage and the swell of her stunning breasts. Greg
had noticed the look the driver had given her as he’d opened the rear door of the limo. How could a woman like that have fallen for him? He had given up everything for her and he had absolutely no regrets. He would have chosen to spend one full day with her over a lifetime with anyone else. He rarely thought of Jean. Their intimate relationship had ended several years before and they had become more housemates than husband and wife. Thoughts of not seeing his children again made him sad. They were good kids. His daughter would be at college in a few years. There would be lots of special days in their lives that he would miss, but the price for this would have been to continue sharing his life with a woman he didn’t really love. The kids would drift away and have lives of their own. And then what? He had chosen himself over them. Was that selfish? Maybe, but he had only one life and if it ended tomorrow, the part he would miss most was the past six months. Why had Louise picked him? He had had no previous thoughts of larceny. In fact, before he met her he had never stolen a dime in his life. But the buzz of conning people who considered themselves to be über-smart was intoxicating. And he loved Louise all the more for giving him the best moments of his life.
He was dressed in a white shirt open at the neck, white cotton trousers and Sebago loafers. His normally mousy brown hair was coloured blond and his skin had transformed from the alabaster colour it had in Boston to a healthy-looking light brown. But the biggest change was inside. He had a confidence in himself that he had lacked all his life. He wondered how many of his former clients would recognise the transformed shy accountant. He looked out the window as they travelled north on the I-75 skirting the eastern shore of Tampa Bay. He had been out of the United States only once in his life, the abortive trip to Caracas. He wondered how he would adapt to life in Belize. Normally, he would have felt fear of the unknown. But the new Gregory Gardiner didn’t fear change, he embraced it. He turned and looked at Louise. She was so damn perfect. He leaned across and kissed her on the lips.
‘Excited?’ she asked.
‘I can’t wait.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
M oira was beginning to hate the early morning starts. They were ‘wheels up’ at exactly seven a.m., and thirty minutes later they were enjoying bagels and smoked salmon accompanied by piping hot freshly brewed coffee. Shea’s pilots had filed a flight plan for Miami but were ready to amend that plan at a moment’s notice. It was Brendan’s first time on Shea’s Lear and he was suitably impressed. His father and brothers habitually used this kind of transport, but it was rare for junior Harvard professors to find themselves in anything other than economy class on a regular airline.
Back in Boston, Carmichael had been given the job of calling the estate agents that Ricky had identified from Gardiner’s Internet surfing history. The first cut would be whether the agents had rented a property to a man and a Latino woman within the past six weeks. Moira reckoned that such a wide request would furnish lots of possibilities. The second cut would be the approximate ages of the couple. If that matched, Carmichael was instructed to forward the picture of the Latino woman. Moira was waiting anxiously when her phone informed her that she’d received mail. Shea’s phone sounded at the same time. Moira reacted first. ‘It’s O’Malley. There’s an attachment.’
Shea took out his laptop and pulled up the attachment. His laptop was tied into the Wi-Fi system of the plane and a local printer. He printed out three copies of the attachment and then passed a copy each to Moira and Brendan.
Moira saw that the document she was holding was the official police file of a Maria Hernandez. The image at the top of the file was of a younger version of the woman whose photograph Faith had taken in the shop in Concord. Hernandez had been born in Guadalajara in 1977, which made her thirty-nine years old. I hope I look so good approaching forty, Moira thought. Hernandez had first appeared on the police radar in 1995 when, at eighteen years of age, she was arrested for soliciting in the border town of El Paso. She was sent on her way with a slap on the wrist and advice to get out of the sex trade. Two years later she had changed her name to Elena Marquez and was arrested with a grifter called Dwayne Holman for running a scam where her partner extorted money from married men whom he photographed having sex with Hernandez. She received a fine and a year’s probation. After all, the law viewed a con was really a victimless crime, something akin to pedestrians being cheated out of ten dollars by a three-card monte shill. There was also a mystique in the US around the con artist since the days Honest Joe bilked the emigrants coming off the boats. Just out of her probation and now calling herself Teresa Ruiz, she was next picked up in Chicago as part of a gang running a promissory note scam. This time there was no probation and she was sentenced to eighteen months in a federal correction institution after being treated leniently by the judge. In the intervening years, she had been interviewed at least six times relating to membership of a team in various sophisticated scams, but she had never been indicted. After her one bout of incarceration, she appeared to have developed a Teflon coating as far as indictments and prison sentences were concerned.
‘Some lady.’ Shea was the first to finish reading the rap sheet.
‘I agree,’ Brendan said. ‘If I were a Hollywood producer I’d be thinking of making a film of her life. It would give Catch Me If You Can a run for its money.’
‘What bothers me about this whole business,’ Moira said. ‘Is typified by the remarks you guys have just made. You actually like her. She’s come from nothing and she and Gardiner have just managed to separate some very savvy people from their money, so you have a grudging respect for her. But what you should realise is that Maria Hernandez is a very clever criminal. The victims in this case probably won’t end up in the poorhouse, but there are old ladies out there who have been taken for every dime that they have by people like Hernandez. A criminal is a criminal despite what the law might think. There was a reasonable attempt to rehabilitate her. It just didn’t work. There is no myth of the grifter. The kindly Paul Newman of The Sting doesn’t exist in real life.’
Brendan smiled. ‘The gospel according to Moira McElvaney. Well, having read her file, I, for one, can’t wait to meet the lady in question.’
Shea folded the rap sheet and put it in his jacket. ‘I don’t think that Brendan or I need a lecture on the damage people like Hernandez can do. Don’t forget, I’ve been inside and my ears weren’t closed during the encounter sessions. Where there’s a crime there has to be a victim.’
Moira’s phone rang. She listened without speaking. Afterwards she turned to Shea and Brendan. ‘We’ve got them. They rented from Tampa Bay Properties, a villa on Longboat Key. They’ve paid up until the end of the month.’
Shea picked up the intercom. ‘David, redirect us to Tampa.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
T he Tampa Bay Properties office on Doctor Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, close to the Hillsborough River, is the kind of prestigious building that would turn away the riffraff at the reception. Shea and Moira obviously passed muster as potential clients as they were directed to the sizeable office of Darlene Gove, the wooden block with the brass plaque on her desk identified her as a principal estate consultant. Brendan had remained outside. Gove’s neck said that she was in her fifties, but a skilful plastic surgeon had taken ten years off the rest of her. Moira recognised a breast enhancement, a facelift and a lip augmentation and was pretty sure there were additional surgical improvements under the black two-piece suit she wore so elegantly. The smile she greeted her new potential clients with was radiant.
‘Can I get you some coffee or something else to drink?’ she asked as she gestured towards two chairs in front of her desk. Moira was struck yet again by the over-exuberant greetings Americans give each other. In Belfast, one would be lucky to get a grunted “good morning” in a similar circumstance. And if you wanted a drink, you had better bring your own. ‘Thank you, but I think we’re alright.’
‘What can I do for you good folks today?’ Gove asked. She thought Shea reminded
her of someone, and wondered whether the couple were married.
‘We’re interested in renting a substantial property that will be coming on the market at the end of the month,’ Shea replied. They had discussed the appropriate approach to take and decided that the straightforward one would not be the best. Tampa Bay Properties was the kind of business that catered to the needs of discerning clients and as such would not be inclined to hand out information on them. As soon as Moira saw the offices, she made a note to ask Carmichael how she had got the information in the first place. Her mind boggled at what the answer might be.
‘Did you have any location in mind?’ Gove asked.
Shea looked at Moira and then back to Gove. ‘We have a preference for Longboat Key. Money is no object.’
Gove’s smile widened. ‘It just so happens that I have a very desirable property that appears to fit your criteria.’ She took a file from her desk and flicked through a series of plastic sleeves before stopping at one. ‘This property is right on the ocean, and the couple renting it are leaving in a few days.’ She pulled out a sheet of paper from the plastic sleeve and passed it to Shea. ‘It’s a five bed, six bath on the shore with a private pool and Jacuzzi. The kitchen is fully equipped and the furniture is of exceptional quality. It rents for fifteen thousand a month.’
Shea took the paper that Gove proffered. The house was beautiful. He liked Hernandez’s style. She’d come a hell of a distance from poverty in Guadalajara. He could tell that Gove was flirting with him and made a drama of showing the paper to Moira. ‘What do you think?’ He played with the idea of adding ‘darling’ but backed out at the last minute.
She took the paper from his hand. ‘It looks perfect, darling. But I really think that we should take a look at it before making a decision.’