Buzz Killer

by Tom Straw

  After a few minutes on safer topics: Englischer Garten, Neuschwanstein Castle, and tweens with surgically embedded IEDs, they said their “love yous” and Macie hung up to tap for an Uber.

  The phone hail app displayed a pickup in six minutes, not bad for the shank end of a Midtown morning rush. Headlights flashed, pulling her focus up from her scan of e-mails to the black MKX drawing up to the curb. The app said she still had three minutes to wait, and she took the early arrival as an omen of a good time-management decision. “Foley Square, right?” asked the driver when she got in.

  “Yeah, thanks. Actually it’s a block off the square past the courthouse. I’ll direct you when we get close.”

  “You got it.”

  In what felt like a blink, they got off the FDR at the Brooklyn Bridge exit as Wild composed her last e-mail. On send, she closed up her mobile office, looked out her side window and then the rear. “’Scuse me. I think you missed the turn for Foley Square.”

  “Construction,” he said. “I’ll have to detour. I won’t charge.”

  But his next turn took them north. They were looping back uptown, moving farther away from her destination. Wild always trusted her instincts, and they were flashing warning signs. As they approached the underpass beneath the Manhattan Bridge, she saw the stoplight turn yellow ahead. Macie slid her fingers around the door handle and looped the strap of her bag through her wrist so she could bolt when he stopped. The door locks shot closed and, instead of stopping, the driver floored it. She called out, “Hey!” which felt stupid. It was also ineffective. The engine roared deeply and her head lightly bumped the passenger window as the driver wove back and forth across lanes, threading the needle between slow cars and oncoming traffic. “Stop. Let me out! Now!”

  He ignored her completely, and whipped the steering wheel in a hairpin turn into a street she didn’t know in a neighborhood she didn’t recognize. He pressed a garage door opener on his sun visor and a wrought iron gate rolled aside on the driveway of a moving and storage warehouse. They took the curb cut with a bounce and flew into the opening. Macie caught a glimpse of a man in a black suit monitoring the door as they shot past.

  The driver braked to a hard stop and got out without a word, leaving her locked in, then walked somewhere out of her view. The man in the dark suit was still standing inside the garage entry, just watching her through the rear window as the draw chain clanked and the rolling metal gate slammed shut. He crossed over to her and the lock buttons snapped up so he could open the door for her. He held an ID out for her. Jermaine Stack, it said, FBI.

  “If you’ll come with me, please, Ms. Wild.” He smiled pleasantly, but in a way that left little doubt what he expected her to do.

  Special Agent Stack escorted her at a respectful distance between a pair of parked moving vans to the back of the warehouse where bright fluorescent light spilled out of an open office door. Another agent, a female in a blue suit with her credentials on a lanyard, stepped aside when she got to the threshold, and when she did, Macie could see Gunnar sitting on a folding chair facing a desk. He gave her a neutral nod. He wasn’t handcuffed and didn’t seem harmed. The female FBI agent gestured to the empty seat beside Gunnar and Wild took it. Stack shut the office door and leaned his hips on the desktop to face them. “I want to know what right you have to kidnap and hold me without probable cause,” she said.

  “Let me guess. The attorney,” said the female agent to her partner.

  “I’d like to keep this informal, OK, counselor?” said Special Agent Stack. “We’d just like to ask a few questions, and then you both can be on your way.”

  “I want a lawyer,” said Cody. Then he turned to her. “Oh, hi. You’re already here.” He shrugged to the agents. “I’m guessing she’s going to advise me not to answer anything.”

  “You about done?” Stack waited for his point to land, then said, “We want to know what your interest is in Pyotr Trifonov.”

  Gunnar leaned over to Macie and stage whispered, “He spoiled my surprise. We hit pay dirt with that Gait Analysis.”

  C H A P T E R • 30

  * * *

  “You know that comedy routine would play better if you were actually still a cop,” said Stack.

  Cody shrugged, “You know, it’s so hard to please audiences these days.”

  “Special Agent Nemec and I will find our entertainment elsewhere, thanks the same. Right now we’d just like to ask you two a couple of questions.”

  Macie stood. “Special Agent Stack, Special Agent Nemec. This constitutes confinement without cause. Citing our legal rights under the US Constitution, we are not answering any of your questions. Gunnar?” She then made to take a step toward the door but he just sat there.

  “What do you want to know?” Gunnar asked them. Macie blinked at him in disbelief. He stayed put; she sat down.

  The two FBI agents traded looks and then regarded Cody with a degree of suspicion. Nemec spoke this time. “We’ll ask you again,” she said. “What’s your interest in Pyotr Trifonov?”

  Cody said, “What makes you think we have an interest in Pyotr Trifonov?”

  Stack replied, “Come on, don’t bullshit me. You ran a Gait Analysis on him last night. Tell us why.”

  “Interesting,” said Cody. “An RTCC database search lit up FBI radar? How come?”

  “Once again, we ask,” persisted the other agent. “Why a Gait Analysis?”

  “How about he had a smooth gait, and I wanted to know who that bad boy was?”

  “Do you think we’re fooling around here?” asked Nemec.

  Stack worked his jaw muscles. “You are both interfering in a federal investigation. And we want to know why. Why Trifonov? And bear in mind, any false statements to federal investigators could result in charges of obstruction of justice.”

  Macie said, “And I’d like to get a statement from you on why you think you can just snatch citizens off the street and bring them in for interrogation without a warrant or probable cause.” The two just stared at her. “All right, my turn. What is the FBI’s interest in Jeffrey Stamitz?” That got a quick exchange of looks between the pair, so she pressed it. “I recognize you two. You were at Stamitz’s body dump in the marsh near Co-op City.”

  Gunnar seemed to like this feisty Macie. He picked up his cell phone. “I have a visual aid if you need a memory jog. Here it is. I got your pictures. Nice suits.”

  Stack scrambled to regain the upper hand in his interrogation. “Once more. What is your interest in Pyotr Trifonov?”

  “Growing,” Cody said with a grin. “More and more, the longer you keep asking. I think we’re done here.” His interrogators reacted with severe looks. Gunnar stood and said, “You two are free to go.” Then he quickly added, “Oh, wait! Aren’t you supposed to warn us to keep our noses out of your business?”

  Special Agent Stack opened his wallet and withdrew a business card for each of them. “If you change your minds and want to cooperate . . .”

  Macie finished for him. “. . . Stand on any corner and wait to be kidnapped?”

  Gunnar gave her a firm nod of approval. “Macie Wild, showin’ me something.”

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  Back at the Manhattan Center for Public Defense, twenty minutes later, Wild called a team meeting and invited Gunnar to attend. “The man who is likely being shielded by Exurb Partners LLC and is, therefore, the probable owner of the penthouse at The Ajax is a Russian named Pyotr Arkady Trifonov.”

  While Macie block printed his name on the Case Board, Tiger sung out, “Got him right here,” and spun his laptop screen so the others could see the Google page he had just pulled up. He rotated it back to skim-cite from the article. “‘Oligarch,’ they call him, of course. Let’s see, ‘Industrialist . . . Profited from the post-Glasnost era of entrepreneurial possibilities in former Soviet Bloc nation-states . . . Expanded reach to newly opening markets around the globe . . .’” Tiger smiled and looked up. “I think it’s fair to say Mr. Trifonov won’t h
ave to conduct a bake sale to pay for that luxe condo.”

  “Mr. Cody also got that much off the Internet this morning when his source came up with Trifonov’s name,” added Macie.

  Soledad Esteves Torres said, “That’s a big break. How’d you get it?”

  “From the FBI.” As soon as she said it, Gunnar’s eyes widened at the risky disclosure.

  Soledad said, “Fine, then, don’t tell us.” Then she laughed. “The FBI . . . that’ll be the day.”

  “Wherever you’re getting all this,” said Tiger with an approving eye on Gunnar, “keep it coming.”

  “Now,” said Wild, drawing an oval around “Trifonov” on the board, “am I the only one here to see something I don’t believe in? By that I mean coincidences.” She used a red marker to draw a long arc from Trifonov’s name to Borodin’s and back.

  “It’s raining Russians,” said Gunnar.

  “Coincidental? Not buying it.” She turned to her MBA-investigator. “I want to drill down. Jonathan, I want you to give me a workup on this man.”

  “You mean drop everything else?” His question carried the cardinal sin of an investigator: an absence of curiosity outweighing effort.

  Gunnar must have had enough because he pushed himself off the wall and flopped forward, leaning at Monheit. “That is exactly what she means, and you know why? Because right now Pyotr Trifonov is the hot lead. And, as every detective worth his wrinkled ass knows, when all else fails, you solve cases by what? By following the hot lead.” A tense stillness descended on the room. Gunnar felt it and sat back again, addressing the team’s investigator with a more collegial tone. “Jonathan, we’re looking at a murder beef against your client, Jackson Hall, right? And that forms a nexus with the two deceased members of Mr. Hall’s burglary crew. Which, following it all along, points to some sort of retribution, a ransom gone wrong, or a deadly attempt at property recovery after their string of burglaries. Good so far?”

  “Good.”

  “Great. Of all the burglaries we know of, the only one that doesn’t fit the pattern is The Ajax. Why?”

  “Because they denied there was a burglary.”

  “These days we call those alternative facts. But now I have reliable sourcing that points to an actual burglary.”

  Monheit wagged his head, quizzing himself. “That makes no sense. Why would they claim otherwise?”

  Gunnar snapped his fingers. “There you go. You have just asked the question that IDs the what?”

  “The hot lead.”

  “The hot lead indeed. Yes to dropping everything else, brah. X-ray Trifonov. More than that. Full-cavity search. Get it while it’s hot.”

  “On it,” said Jonny Midnight.

  Macie gave Monheit a two-hour deadline before dismissing him to dig while she turned her attention to a thread of her own she wanted to follow. “I also want an X-ray of the crew chief, Jeffrey Stamitz. Today. Chip, you take the lead on that.” The law student’s eyes widened, so she added, “And so I’m not throwing you in the deep end, your life raft is going to be Tiger.”

  Jackson Hall’s absence continued to cast a pall over everything, so Wild directed Soledad to make another run and recontact his missing girlfriend’s coworker plus anyone else who might be a connection to the runaway Buzz Killer. “The clock’s working against us, Sol. The longer he’s out there, the more danger he faces from whomever he’s hiding from—and that includes the police.”

  For lunch, she and Gunnar camped in her office, feasting on expired yogurts from the break-room fridge while they tried to make some sense out of the morning’s fed encounter. Macie wondered about its basic logic. “I don’t even want to know how the FBI hacked my Uber app. But why Uber-nap me when they could have come here to the MCPD or summoned us both to Federal Plaza for an interview on their turf?”

  “One simple reason,” answered Gunnar. “Either they wanted to intimidate us or they needed to firewall us from the official records.”

  “That’s two reasons.”

  “Correct me, fine. I’m filling in as I go. It’s part of my process.”

  “And it’s a beautiful thing. Talk to me about your firewall theory.”

  “Let’s start with a premise. Every organization, whether it’s the FBI, your MCPD, or . . .”—Gunnar traced an air circle with his spoon until he landed on another example—“my merry band of scruffy disrupters at VICE Media . . . They all have compartments. Little pockets of folks with hidden agendas who work their dark magic behind closed doors or at dive bars after hours. Sometimes it’s as mundane as office politics; sometimes it’s more than that.”

  “I’m with you. But I’m still stuck on why.”

  With an impish grin, he said, “At the risk of expanding this to three reasons, here’s the best I can do. Back when I was a detective, the only time I would work a shakedown like we got was when I wanted to keep it off the books. Either because I wanted to rattle someone—you know, get them jumpy so they’d talk—or I was going against orders. Or the orders were not to leave a trail that leads back to the unit. Or the commander.”

  “Hold on, are you saying they could be doing this clandestinely because they’re up to something illegal?”

  “Not necessarily. It could be, but it could also just be something internal that they don’t want the other FBI boys and girls to know about.”

  She gave that a careful ponder and asked, “Which was it with you when you did it?”

  Ex-Detective Cody gave her a deadpan look and said, “I respectfully invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, on the grounds that answering such questions may incriminate me.” She waited for him to laugh, but he didn’t.

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  Gunnar Cody’s tough-love talk must have lit a fire under Jonny Midnight. The nerd, universally viewed as punching above his weight, called the defense team back to the conference room exactly two hours later and blew them all away. Including Gunnar Cody, his chief doubter, who later called it the Midnight Miracle.

  The lead investigator, a scant year out of business school, stood before the group on the solid rock of his MBA training. “I have prepared the X-ray you asked for on Pyotr Arkady Trifonov,” he began. “I confess I had a bit of a head start. Although I was no expert on Mr. Trifonov at lunchtime, for my International Business Studies courses at the University of Washington, I did extensive research into post-Glasnost Russia, so a lot of what I’ll be telling you about here was top-of-mind. The material I have on him, specifically, I got through deep diving the Internet plus some long-distance calls to my old professors and what stuck from my essay on one of our class resource books, Putin’s Kleptocracy by Dawisha. I got a ninety-eight.” He took a swig from his CamelBak and turned to the portable whiteboard he had rolled in.

  “OK, who is Trifonov? Years before Wikipedia called him an oligarch, he was a member of what they call in Russia, the Nomenklatura. That’s the elite of the elite in the former Soviet Union.”

  “Like a Kardashian is to us?” kidded Tiger.

  “Even bigger. If that’s possible,” replied Monheit, who enjoyed his own quip before he pushed forward. “Pyotr Trifonov ranks just slightly behind Afanasy Glebov, Bogdan Yerokhim, Ermolay Letov, and—and I can see these names mean nothing to you, but take my word, these are the tight group of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. And what makes this group so tight? Simple. They have been made very, very, very wealthy under a Russian leader whose personal slogan is, ‘Reward your friends; punish your enemies.’ So. Pyotr Trifonov is in the friend category. How did he and his buddies get so rich?”

  Gunnar raised a lazy hand. “I’m going to guess illegally.”

  “Probably,” said Monheit. “I only hedge because, under the system they are using, it’s so easy to see, and so hard to prove. But here’s the best model I can build to speculate: Putin is formerly KGB out of Saint Petersburg. After Gorbachev and Yeltsin, he gets political. But what else went on in Russia after the Soviet breakup? The KGB gets dissolved
, and is now reincarnated as the FSB. And, as it morphs, the FSB teams up with the organized-crime factions that have been taking advantage of all the economic instability of the transition.” He laced his fingers together to illustrate. “So you have the ex-KGB coming together in union with the Russian mob. And who was Comrade KGB himself? Vladimir Putin. You don’t have to be a genius to infer what that could mean.”

  Chip said, “That the head of government controls the secret police and organized crime.”

  “Like he said, you don’t have to be a genius,” said Tiger. During the laughter, Macie tried to math-out the ramifications for Jackson Hall’s case and everything connected to it, but decided not to get ahead of herself. She needed an open mind to absorb it first, and went back to jotting notes from the surprise guest expert.

  “All these people I told you about from that inner circle not only have longstanding relationships with the Russian president, they are either involved in finance, intelligence, drug enforcement, or military.”

  “Everything you need to run the table,” said Macie.

  “And do they ever. Yeltsin had tried to build a different economy by letting government-run companies go private. Putin came to power and wanted to get control of those pesky oligarchs who had the audacity to make a profit, so he took back the companies—like Gazprom—turning them into state-owned giants. Then he sold off the assets to his buddies. Remember? ‘Reward your friends; punish your enemies.’ Problem: there was allegedly so much corrupt money being siphoned, they had to get it out of the country to hide it. So what might you do if you were Putin’s pals? Set up offshore companies of their own, not just to make more profit, but to stash the billions and billions in black money getting pilfered out of the Russian economy. Which now brings us to Pyotr Trifonov.”