The Big Exit

by David Carnoy

  “Come on.”

  She heads back to the kitchen and decides to open the bottle of wine after all. She needs something to do with her hands, afraid what they might do if they’re not occupied. But just as she’s about to give the screw cap a twist he says, “Hold up,” and takes the bottle from her.

  “Here’s the deal,” he says. “The guy was in the hospital almost two years ago. I pulled his chart. Nothing too exciting. They prescribed antacids, referred him to a GI, told him he might consider getting an endoscopy for piece of mind. Who knows, it could be severe heartburn, an ulcer, maybe even an anxiety attack. Whatever. They discharged him the next afternoon. I figure I’m going to leave it at that but then I decide what the hell, I know one of the nurses, Janie, who did the blood work on him the next day, maybe she remembers something.

  “I find out she’s on duty so I swing over to have a chat with her,” he continues. “And I say, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you noticed but this guy McGregor who got killed the other night and who’s been in all the papers spent the night in the cardio wing about two years ago. And I figure she’d draw a blank but instead, you know, her eyes open wide and she asks me whether the police have talked to me. I shake my head, and playing it dumb I say, ‘Uh, no. Why, have they talked to you?’

  “She kind of mumbles something and I can’t quite tell what she’s saying, so I ask her to say it again. And then she tells me she put in a call. They had some sort of tip line and she put in a call. And, you know, I’m a little surprised. I say, ‘Why would you do that?’”

  Now Carolyn’s the one with the wide eyes.

  “She spoke to the police?” she asks. “Why?”

  “I’m getting to that.”

  He says Janie didn’t want to talk about it in the hospital so he met her a little while later for a cup of coffee outside in the courtyard. That’s when she told him why she remembered the guy: He’d said some things in the hospital that had concerned her at the time. She didn’t know if he was joking or exaggerating but he said a few things that were a little disturbing.

  “To her? What, did he try to pick her up or something?”

  “Actually, no. He wasn’t talking to her. She just overheard him talking in the room.”

  “To whom?”

  Cogan explains that McGregor had apparently asked for a private room but they didn’t have one so they stuck him in the bed they had available, which was in a room with this guy in his thirties who’d tried to commit suicide. He’d gone to a motel and taken a bunch of sleeping pills and if a maid hadn’t seen him through the drapes lying there on the bed, he probably would have succeeded.

  A nurse was sitting in a chair in the room near the door when McGregor got there. He noticed the woman sitting there and asked Janie about it when she came in to give him some dinner. She quietly explained that his roommate had tried to harm himself so they had to keep a nurse on watch to make sure he didn’t try it again. It was the manifestation of the term “suicide watch.”

  McGregor seemed impressed. It suddenly occurred to him that he was in a real hospital with real people who were really sick and that he wasn’t in some convalescent home or something like that. And he was joking around about the seriousness of the place when he said, “What if someone is trying to do harm to you, would you get a nurse like that?”

  What did he mean, someone? Janie asked.

  “Like another person,” he said.

  And she said no, you’d probably get an actual police officer. And he said something like, “Oh come on, you look tough, you’d protect me, wouldn’t you?”

  “So he was hitting on her,” Carolyn interrupted. “What’s this Janie look like?”

  “She’s fine. She’s married and has two kids.”

  “Never stopped you.”

  “Please.”

  “Sorry. That wasn’t nice. Go on.”

  “Well, the guy wakes up the next day, and they bring in a psychiatrist to speak with him. That’s standard procedure.”

  Because there was only a curtain divider in the room, McGregor could hear the whole conversation. Janie came back later that morning and heard the two of them talking. McGregor was asking the guy about what it was like to wake up and find out he wasn’t dead. And then he said something to the effect of “Well, at least you don’t have your wife wanting you dead.” And Janie realized from the way he said it he might not be joking. Innocently enough, she asked:

  “Where is your wife, Mr. McGregor? Has she been here to visit you?”

  “I didn’t even tell her I was here,” he said. “I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. She’s probably hoping I drove off a cliff.”

  She vividly remembered him saying that, which really got to her. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.

  “But she didn’t say anything to anybody at the time?” Carolyn asks. “There’s no formal record of this? No police report or anything?”

  “I don’t think so. I think she just called this tip line now because she saw the number in the paper.”

  She’d heard from Madden that they’d received several hundred tips about people who’d either seen Richie Forman with Beth Hill the day of the murder or claimed to have information related to the murder. She somehow doubted a conversation in a hospital room nearly two years ago would have made it high on their call-back priority list. But chances were good one of the detectives would eventually speak with Janie to check whether there really was anything to the tip.

  She’s asking herself that question now. So what, the guy spouts off about his wife two years ago in his hospital room. If it had happened a week or two ago, even last month, it would have carried more weight. But a couple of years? Big deal. People were always spouting off about their spouses. She had a friend who said she could never have a gun in the house because she was afraid she’d shoot her husband. She was completely serious, though that hadn’t stopped her from being married to the guy for twenty-one years. They were mostly good years but he sometimes pissed her off so much that she didn’t know what she was capable of.

  “If McGregor thinks his wife wants to kill him, he doesn’t leave her most of his estate,” she says to Cogan, thinking aloud. “That just doesn’t make sense.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe it was a rough patch. I’m just telling you what I overheard and how it relates to your new client. But you figure that if he’s saying this stuff to a nurse in the hospital, he’s probably told other people the same thing. That’s the way it usually works.”

  He has a point, she thinks, her mind drifting to what Beth told her back at the hotel. That drug is incredibly intense and wonderful for about twenty minutes. It’s awesome. But the side effect, the hangover, whatever you want to call it, is just brutal.

  “Look, I gotta go,” he says. “But a card is going to accidentally fall out of my pocket on my way out, which means I didn’t give it to you. It’s got a name on the back of it. If the guy hasn’t managed to off himself yet, at least you’d have a second witness to go to if something like this becomes a factor.”

  He slides the card onto the kitchen counter, then kisses her on the cheek and turns to leave.

  She looks at the card, which has the Parkview Medical Center logo on the front but isn’t personalized in any way; there’s just an address and phone number. Suddenly, she realizes he’s taken her bottle.

  “Hey, my wine,” she calls after him.

  “Requisitioning it,” he says, his back to her, holding it up above his shoulder as if to toast her. “I’ve got a birthday to go to. Jim Toumey’s turning fifty. And I’m late. Thanks.”

  “No fair.”

  “You’ll get it back. Soon. I promise.”

  Then he’s gone. Fucker, she thinks, wondering if he slipped her the card as a misdirection play. She half expects to turn it over and see nothing on the back. But indeed there’s a name and number on the other side and she does what most people would do after reading it: she goes to her computer in the other room and t
ypes the name into the Google search bar.

  “Okay, Mr. Paul Anderson,” she says to herself as she types. “Let’s see if you still exist.”

  28/ A RADICAL FORM OF CAPITALISM

  “GO HOME, HANK,” SAYS CARLYLE, STANDING BEHIND HIM IN FULL uniform, radio clipped on. He’s just started his regular shift. “Go see your wife and kids. I’ll keep an eye on him on tonight.”

  “I’m going,” Madden says. “In a minute.”

  He’s sitting at the desk in his small office, watching the little blip on his computer screen that’s Richie Forman, who appears to be making his way back to Tom Bender’s house. The pace of the blip on the map had thrown him at first. It had seemed to be moving too slowly for Forman to be in a car but too quickly for him to be on foot. Madden guessed bike, and sure enough, when he diverted a squad car to do a drive-by, the officer confirmed that Forman was cruising along on a mountain bike.

  It seemed like an odd thing to do, riding around after dark, but it had been a day filled with oddities. They’d tracked Forman to the Equinox gym, then the offices of Crune, McGregor’s old company, a second office building in Mountain View, then on to a series of more mundane stops at Long’s Drugs in the Town and Country Shopping Center and some shops along University Avenue in Palo Alto.

  He was momentarily stunned when he found out Forman was palling around with Bender. It seemed beneath Lowenstein to swing such a deal. But then again, if he was in his shoes, he probably wouldn’t have wanted to scrape together $2 million in cash or collateral for a pro-bono client—or drop two hundred grand on the 10 percent non-refundable fee for the bail bond. Which didn’t leave him much choice. But Bender? Christ.

  Carlyle’s radio crackles behind him. The dispatcher mentions something about a house alarm going off. Although last year they did have a string of burglaries over a period of three months (two guys from way out in Merced were behind them), Madden thinks the owner probably tripped it. Armed it when he thought he was disarming it. The usual bullshit.

  “He still over at Stanford?” Carlyle asks.

  Madden shakes his head. “On his way back to Bender’s.”

  Forman hadn’t gone far on the bike. Using mainly side streets, he’d ridden about two and a half miles from Bender’s house in Menlo Park to Angell Field, Stanford’s track-and field site, where he’d run around the track for around thirty minutes.

  Now he’s almost back. Madden takes note of the blip’s location, then switches to another window he previously had open and brings it front and center on the screen. It’s a close-up of the snake tattoo on McGregor’s hip. Sedition 1918. It’s been vexing him. There seems to be no question that the wording on the tattoo refers to the Sedition Act of 1918, which he’s spent a little too much time researching. According to various websites, on May 16, 1918, Congress, in an affront to First Amendment rights, amended and extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to make it against the law to say anything “disloyal, profane, scurrilous,” about the U.S. government. This included the flag and military institutions.

  What’s so troubling is that he still has no clue what “sedition” has to do with McGregor. As far as he can tell, the term refers to subversion or a subversive act, and though it occurs to him that some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs view themselves and their products as disrupting markets, McGregor, from what he’s learned about him, wasn’t exactly the subversive type.

  He imagines some sort of secret society whose members run around with snake tattoos on their hips symbolizing their radical form of capitalism. Or a secret order of hackers. That seems more plausible in light of the word “Hack” written in blood near McGregor’s body. The only problem with this theory is that if Forman committed the murder, he’d have likely written the word as a diversionary tactic. Should he be discounting its presence as much as he has? Probably not. Nevertheless he fixates on different clues.

  But the more he contemplates the tattoo’s potential symbolism, the more absurd each guess seems, or as Billings put it: “Hank, man, you’ve been reading too many Dan Brown novels.”

  Alas, he’s never read a Dan Brown book in his life. Or seen the movies.

  “Anything come up?” Carlyle asks now.

  Madden shakes his head. “There’s one political cartoon with a snake in it.”

  He’s calls up the image on his computer for Carlyle.

  The cartoon bears the caption “As gag-rulers would have it” and has a drawing of a large snake with the words “Sedition Bills” written on its tail. The snake’s tongue is wagging menacingly at three Little Rascals–looking kids holding small sticks in their hands. The kids represent “honest opinion,” “free speech,” and “free press.” As for the snake, it looks a little like the one in the tattoo, but it’s far from being a match.

  Carlyle looks at it for moment, shrugs, and says, “For all we know the guy got drunk one night and ended up pointing to something in a book.”

  Madden doubts that. “I had Billings email this picture to every tattoo parlor around here and a few up in the city. Nothing so far.”

  “Do you know if he got it in the Bay Area?”

  No, he doesn’t. That’s the problem. He tells him that Beth wasn’t exactly sure when or where her husband got it, though she was pretty certain it was after they got married. When she told him about it, she just said he had “a little snake tattoo on his hip.” She didn’t mention any words.

  “You’re wasting your time, Hank,” Carlyle concludes. “Send it to the feds. Who’s your buddy there? Santorum?”

  “Santoro,” Madden corrects him. Carlyle, a staunch Republican, has been watching one too many Republican presidential debates.

  “They’ve got a serious fucking database. If it’s some sort of cult or secret society, they’re going to have something. Do it tomorrow. Go home now. Google will only take you so far.”

  Carlyle’s right. He is wasting his time. He closes out the window and calls up the tracking map again. The blip has stopped. Forman’s back at Bender’s. He minimizes the window, revealing the Google Docs spreadsheet underneath it that Billings has put together for the tips that have come in. Madden’s gone through all the tips, one by one, and placed a 1, 2, or 3 in the column marked “priority.” Billings, Burns, and a couple of other officers have been working through them, inputting their comments on the spreadsheet and flagging promising leads that may be worth an in-person interview. Most of the tips marked with a 1 have remarks in the comments box and probably a quarter of the tips designated 2 have also been investigated.

  Once more he skims past the name Janie Cowen in row 241. The tip associated with her name, “Woman overheard McGregor saying wife wanted to kill him approx. two years ago,” continues to fail to make much of an impression (he’d graded it a 3). Later, he’ll realize he dismissed it mainly because whoever had taken down the tip had been too vague in his or her description. If it had read, “Nurse in hospital overhears …” he would have rated it higher.

  As it is, only a handful of the tips have proven helpful. They’ve had more luck with some surveillance footage from one of McGregor’s neighbors’ security cameras that caught his car driving past followed by a bicyclist twenty minutes later. Because the video was low resolution it didn’t have much detail, but the biker appeared to be Forman. After arriving at 4:28, he left the area eight minutes and forty-two seconds later.

  Crowley thinks the ID will stand up in court, and they’ve also lifted a pair of partial prints from the buzzer box outside McGregor’s home that matched the prints on Forman’s middle and index fingers on his right hand. He appeared to have pressed the button with his thumb while briefly laying his other fingers on the metal part of the box.

  He closes the Google Docs window, takes a look at his email inbox, then closes that out, too.

  Carlyle continues to hover over him. “You’re leaving, right?”

  Madden calls up the map one more time. The blip remains motionless, parked at Bender’s address.

  “If he he
ads out, I’ll call you,” Carlyle says. “I’ll tail him myself if he leaves.”

  Madden nods, reluctantly shutting down his computer. He puts on his coat, picks up his keys from the desk, and drops them in the right front pocket of his coat. Carlyle walks him out through the empty office. It’s after seven, everybody else has punched out. Most have been gone at least an hour.

  “There’s one thing that’s been bothering me,” Madden says, walking out to his car.

  “Just one thing?” Carlyle replies.

  “Well, a lot of things. But one thing I was thinking about was what does the guy do with the weapon? He’s got a bag, right? So, what, he wipes the hatchet down, sticks it in his bag, rides off on the bike, and what, dumps it in the woods up there in Woodside?”

  “Sure. He could have wrapped it in a shirt. Or a newspaper or something. Presumably, he has something in the bag or else he wouldn’t be carrying the bag.”

  “I realize that. But we’ve got the bag and it’s clean.”

  Carlyle considers that. “Look, the thing isn’t huge,” he says. “It’s not a full-on ax. In a lot of ways it’s perfect. It’s easily concealable. It’s easier to use than a hunting knife, does a heck of a lot of damage.”

  “He could have just left it there. It was McGregor’s after all.”

  “He could have.”

  “I wanna send someone up there.”

  “Where?”

  “Along his bike route.”

  Carlyle’s radio crackles again. The dispatcher reports they’ve gotten a 911 call from someone saying he’s captured a “wanted man.” She gives an address and he and Carlyle look at each other. It sounds awfully familiar.

  Carlyle engages the microphone that’s clipped onto his uniform near his clavicle and turns his head to speak into it. “Carlyle here. Can you repeat that address, please?”

  She calls it out again. It’s Bender’s all right.

  “Did the caller give a name?” Carlyle asks. “Please confirm.”