by John Case
He would have sworn he hadn’t been thinking during the race. His mind had been a blank. And so, as he tore off the Tyvek strip that bore his number and handed it to an official, he was surprised to realize that somewhere on the run he’d come to a decision. As he walked between the tables of orange juice and power bars, cooling down, he turned the decision over in his mind. He was going to take time off. A leave of absence – for as long as it took, a week, a month, whatever. As long as it took to find out why Kathy and Brandon had been murdered, and who was behind it. That was the decision, and it was a done deal. He was already gone. The company just didn’t know it yet.
He walked into the school building and found his sweat clothes on the windowsill where he’d stashed them. By the time he had them on and began to stretch out his legs, he was shaking his head over how long it had taken him to reach the decision – even if he couldn’t remember thinking about it. What was the point of owning an investigative agency if you didn’t use it? If Wall Street wanted to find something out, they came to him. And so did half the lawyers on K Street. So why should Joe Lassiter leave something as important as Kathy and Brandon to the cops?
When he got to his car, it was covered in snow. He used the side of his arm to brush what he could from the windshield and then got in. His body was hot from the run, and by the time he found the keys and started the car, the windows were gray with steam. It took a minute for the heater to clear the glass, and then he was on his way.
The wind was beginning to roar now. Stoplights rocked on their cables, and the traffic signs rattled wildly. Snow flew at his headlights in a steady, horizontal stream. Across the slate-gray river, the city was invisible. Only the red light atop the Washington Monument showed itself, blinking on and off, like an evil eye.
He drove directly to his office in Foggy Bottom, taking the Fourteenth Street Bridge to Independence Avenue and then heading west. The power had failed, leaving what little traffic there was to crawl hesitantly through one blind intersection after another.
Fortunately, there was a generator in his building and everything was working. He parked his car in the cavernous space of the underground garage and walked quickly to the elevators. Even belowground he could hear the wind howling, and a chill passed through him. The sweat on his back was beginning to freeze as the elevator carried him to the ninth floor.
There was a shower in his office suite, and he made good use of it. Though his muscles were tight from the run, they softened under the hot water’s pounding, and after a while he could feel the lactic acid draining away. Because he ran on the Mall four or five days a week, he kept a selection of clothes in his office closet. Rubbing his hair with a towel, he pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater, and went to his desk.
For the first time that he could remember, his office annoyed him. The bookcases, the wainscoting, the lithographs – who was he trying to impress? There were a dozen exquisitely framed photographs in the room, but not one of them was of Kathy or Brandon. They were all pictures of himself with famous people: Lassiter conferring with Prince Bandar; Lassiter shaking hands with the President’s National Security Adviser; Lassiter in a helicopter with a clutch of JCS generals; Lassiter in Forbes – as if he were a restaurant review.
Pride of place went to a joke, a posed photograph of Lassiter and the Senate Minority Leader teeing off at the Army-Navy Country Club. The senator – chin raised, club high, ankle pronated – was archetypal: a poster boy for old money and American values. Whereas Lassiter appeared to be insane. He stood a few feet away, lips curled and eyes wild, swinging a nine-iron as if it were a Louisville Slugger.
Next to the infamous ‘PGA shot’ was a gift from Judy: a Washingtonian piece about the town’s most eligible bachelors, mounted in a heart-shaped frame. (Lassiter was number 26 – which was flattering, when you thought about it. Or maybe not.)
All of this had been important to him once, or at least amusing, but now – what was the point? To open more offices, make more money, build an even bigger house? What for? The truth was, he didn’t even like Bandar – so what was the guy’s picture doing on his wall?
He took down the photos and stacked them in the corner. Then he went back to his desk and took out a piece of paper. Drawing a vertical line down the center of the page, he wrote Company on the left side and, on the right, Investigation.
He sat for a moment, thinking about what he should do. The hard part about replacing himself, even temporarily, was that his responsibilities were broad, deep, and not very well defined. In effect he did whatever he had to do to make things work, which meant that he was a rainmaker and a fireman, a supervisor and a case manager. You could say that he did a little of everything, or you could put it differently and say that he did whatever he liked. And how, he wondered, do you delegate that?
Under Company, he wrote Bolton – all M&A’s, and beneath that he wrote, Rifkin – All Other Cases. Leo and Judy were ambitious people, with equal stature in the firm. If he gave either of them precedence over the other, one of them would walk. Even so, it wouldn’t be enough to divide the cases between them: there were administrative matters involving cash flow, new business, and client relations. Lassiter decided to parcel out those responsibilities to Bill Bohacker. He was in the New York office, but he could do the job from there. Nearly half of the company’s billings were sent to Wall Street, anyway.
Bohacker – Admin.
He thought about it for a moment, and made a note to have Bill come to Washington on Monday. He could take the shuttle and be there by nine. The four of them would meet in the conference room, and they’d sort out the details.
Turning on the computer, he entered the day’s password and scrolled through the cases that were being worked on in the Washington office. He was directly and substantively involved in only two of them – but each was for a major client. He’d have to call them and explain about the leave of absence. He didn’t think there’d be a problem, but if there was, he’d refer them to Kroll – no hard feelings.
Lassiter made another notation on the left side of the paper – AFL-CIO (call Uehlein) and AmEx (call Reynolds). He thought awhile longer and wrote a little more. Then he got up and walked to the windows, where the snow had turned to sleet. He watched a Lincoln Town Car fishtail across Pennsylvania Avenue, and listened to the sleet ticking against the glass.
Returning to his desk, he sat down and looked at the right side of the page, where Investigation was headlined. There was nothing under it. With his eyes closed, he leaned back in the chair and thought. What was there? Was there anything Riordan hadn’t chased down, anything he could do that the police hadn’t already done? He sat in the chair for half an hour before he wrote a word, and the word he wrote was bottle.
Only two things had been found on John Doe’s person – a big knife and a little bottle. The police knew everything there was to know about the knife, but the bottle meant nothing to them. Riordan was retesting the contents, so there wasn’t anything for him to do about that – but maybe the bottle itself was worth pursuing. It looked expensive, or at least unusual. Maybe he could get some pictures and have one of the field people chase it down.
The next words he wrote were Comfort Inn. He remembered asking Riordan if John Doe had made any telephone calls from his motel room, but he didn’t remember getting an answer. In all likelihood this meant that there weren’t any calls, but he ought to check. After all, he thought, looking at the list, it wasn’t as if he had too much to do.
13
LASSITER WOKE TO a ringing noise and a cloud of blinding sunlight, a wall of brilliance so bright that he reeled from it, slamming his eyes shut even as he climbed out of bed. The telephone was trilling, and like a vampire trapped by the sun, he staggered across the room with his eyes closed. Finding the phone, he fumbled with the receiver, cleared his throat, and mumbled, ‘Yeah?’
The person on the other end didn’t say anything for a moment, and then: ‘You asleep?’ It was Riordan.
&nbs
p; ‘No,’ he lied. It was automatic. He didn’t know why, but whenever he was awakened by a telephone call, he always denied that he’d been asleep. Even if it was three in the morning, he felt guilty, as if the world expected him to be constantly on alert. If the caller was up, why wasn’t he?
‘You sure?’ Riordan said.
‘Yeah – wide-awake – what time is it?’
‘Oh seven hundred.’
‘Hang on for a minute.’
The electricity had gone out the day before, and Lassiter had forgotten to reprogram the timer that controlled the shades and shutters on the clerestory windows and skylights. Through the windows he could see the trees, their trunks and branches, twigs and leaves, encased in ice. They dripped and sparkled, the light ricocheting off them with painful brilliance. All in all there was a tidal wave of sunshine pouring into the room. Lassiter reached for a switch on the wall, touched it, and heard a low hum overhead. Slowly, the room dimmed, and he returned to the phone. ‘What’s up?’
‘I’m off the case.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Well, there’s two reasons. First – You sure I didn’t wake you up? Sometimes I call people –’
‘I’m positive.’
‘You must be an early riser. Like me.’
‘Crack-a-dawn.’
‘Anyway, the way they see it downstairs, the case is solved. If it was up to me –’
‘It isn’t solved.’
‘I know what you’re gonna say, but the other thing is: we got a double homicide in Annandale, and one of the victims is a cop.’
‘I’m sorry –’
‘Twenty-four-year-old kid – nice kid – new to the force, stops at a convenience store for a cup of coffee.’ Riordan paused. ‘Guy’s got a two-month-old daughter, he’s on his way home, wife’s keeping dinner for him and – wham! – he gets whacked buyin’ a cup of coffee.’
‘That’s terrible –’
‘You ain’t heard the half of it. The other victim’s Thai. Got her citizenship two days ago. She’s working the register on Thanksgiving, five eighty-seven an hour, and – bim bam boom! – she takes three in the face. Welcome to America! Happy Thanksgiving! Rest in Peace.’
‘Look, Jim – I know what you’re saying, but –’
‘The other thing is: I got invited to a conference – so I gotta prepare.’
‘A “conference”?’
‘Yeah. It’s, like, one of those hands-across-the-sea deals. Interpol’s running it. In Prague. You ever been to Prague?’
‘Not for a while. What kind of conference?’
‘They got me on a panel with a couple of frogs, a Russky. I’m your typical American detective or something. Talkin’ about “Policework in a Democratic Society” – on account of the Czechs haven’t had one, y’know? Not for a long time.’
‘Think of that.’
‘Anyway, Andy Pisarcik’s gonna take over your sister and nephew’s case for a while. He’s a smart kid. He’ll handle the mop-up and – here, I’ll give you his number.’
Lassiter wanted to argue. Riordan was one of the best homicide detectives in northern Virginia, but it was pointless to go back and forth with him about it. For one thing, decisions about case assignment were not up to Riordan.
‘Can I ask you about a couple of things – while I’ve still got the chance?’
‘Okay,’ Riordan said in a noncommittal tone.
‘Our boy – you ever check to see if he made any calls from the motel he was staying at?’
Riordan hesitated. ‘I don’t know . . . let me see. The Comfort Inn. I know I requested it. I’m just getting the file together for Pisarcik. Hang on.’ Lassiter heard the rustle of papers. ‘Yeah. Here it is. One call. He made one call to Chicago. Less than a minute. It was nothing.’
‘So who’d he call?’
Riordan hesitated. ‘Well . . .’ The detective was obviously uncomfortable. ‘What the hell – he called a hotel. Embassy Suites.’
‘And?’
‘What do you think? He got the switchboard. If they connected him to anyone else, it doesn’t show – which it wouldn’t.’ Riordan’s voice had a defensive edge. ‘I didn’t take it any further. I mean, there’s – what? – two hundred rooms in the place. And one minute? For all I know, it’s a wrong number.’
‘What about the bottle?’
‘We got some partial prints off it. They’re all Doe’s. The lab took a second shot at the contents, and it came back water again. Trace impurities. So the bottle adds up to a big “so what”?’
‘You took photographs of it, right? Any chance you could get me some copies –’
A big explosive sigh. ‘Look, I’ll see what I can do. But that’s it, Joe – I’m off the case. From now on you talk to Pisarcik.’
‘Absolutely. But what about the rooming house in Florida? Where “Gutierrez” got his mail. You got an address?’
Riordan laughed. ‘Get outta here,’ he said, and hung up.
As it happened, there were four Embassy Suites in Chicago, and Lassiter didn’t have the heart to pester Riordan for the right one. So he called the office and sent one of his investigators, a former FBI agent named Tony Harper, down to the Comfort Inn. Lassiter was pretty sure that Tony could get a copy of the motel bill from the desk clerk – though it would probably cost a bit. And he was right. Two hours later Tony faxed him a copy of the bill and a receipt for a hundred dollars. The receipt was for ‘Services Rendered.’
Besides a single call to the 312 area code, the bill included the number of the Visa card that ‘Juan Gutierrez’ had used to guarantee the room. For twenty-five dollars, Lassiter knew he could buy a credit history on Gutierrez; but for a couple of hundred, he could get something even more useful – an itemized list of every charge that Gutierrez had made on the card. And his other card, too – if he remembered right, Riordan said Gutierrez had two cards, each of which he’d had for only a couple of months. The Agency – they’d find the second card through the first card, and any others, too – no problem.
This wasn’t entirely legal, but then neither was speeding. In the Information Age, violations of privacy were the moral equivalent of jaywalking: if you got caught, you paid the ticket and walked away. Lassiter flipped through his Rolodex until he found the number for a data retrieval firm in Florida, a bucket shop called Mutual General Services.
Mutual was an information broker specializing in black data. If you wanted bank records, unlisted telephone numbers, copies of credit card charges or telephone toll records, they could get it for you – quickly and cheaply. According to Leo, they did this ‘the old-fashioned way – they bribe people.’ By all accounts, they had someone on the payroll of every major credit card company and long-distance carrier in the U.S. ‘It’s a nice niche,’ Leo had said. ‘They only do one thing, but they do it well.’
Lassiter dialed Mutual General, volunteered his account number, and told the woman on the other end what he wanted: copies of Gutierrez’s credit card receipts for each of the past three months. He gave her the card number, and paid extra to have it expedited.
This done, he turned his attention to the telephone call on the Comfort Inn’s receipt. The charge was $1.25: a single long-distance call that was billed for a minute – which meant that the call had lasted something less than that.
He thought about the possibilities. One minute, probably less. It took longer than that to make a reservation. And if it was a guest he’d been calling, he probably hadn’t gotten through: the hotel operator would have taken a while to connect him, the phone would have had to ring in the room. . . . So it looked like whoever he was calling had been out. Unless . . . unless John Doe had come to Washington from somewhere else. In which case maybe he was calling ‘home.’ Most suite hotels have voice mail – so maybe Doe was checking his calls.
Lassiter had a voice-mail system at the office. He dialed his own line, pressed in the various codes to work through the system, and timed it on his watch to see how long it too
k. He had two short messages and it took ninety-two seconds. He wrote down the messages, pressed ‘D’ to discard them from his voice mail, and called back. Fifty-one seconds.
Then he dialed the hotel.
‘Embassy Suites, how may I direct your call?’
‘I’m trying to reach a guest. Juan Gutierrez.’ He spelled it.
‘One moment, please.’ There was a long wait, filled with bad music. Then: ‘Sorry about that. I’m afraid we don’t have anyone by that name.’
One of the things that made him a good investigator was thoroughness. If something seemed to be a dead end, he always tried to make sure that it didn’t have a back way out. So, instead of hanging up, he pushed it. ‘This is the last number we have for him. Could you check again? I know he was there a few weeks ago, and my understanding was that he’d be in Chicago for a while. Maybe he left a forwarding number. Could you check?’
‘Are you a friend, or –’
‘No. I’m an attorney for Mrs. Gutierrez. She’s very worried.’
More bad music. He wasn’t sure what he expected to learn, even if he found out that Doe had been staying there. But maybe there’d be another bill, more phone calls.
The music stopped and the desk clerk came back on the line. ‘You’re right. We did have a guest by that name – but he didn’t check out. I mean, not really.’
Lassiter pretended not to understand. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t –’
‘Well, he left without checking out.’
‘You mean, he skipped? That doesn’t sound like –’
‘No no – that’s not what I mean. We took a credit card impression when he checked in. The problem is – do you mind if I get your name?’
‘Of course not. I’m Michael Armitage. Hillman, Armitage, and McLean. New York.’
‘And you’re Mrs. Gutierrez’s lawyer?’
‘I’m her attorney, yes.’
‘Well, the problem is that Mr. Gutierrez exceeded the limit on his Visa card. We wanted to discuss this with him, but – we haven’t seen him.’