The Informant

by James Grippando

Fields leaned back and stared at the ceiling, thinking. “Tough call,” he said, sighing. “What you’re proposing, Mike, probably can’t be defended if it turns out your informant really is just an anonymous source out to make a buck, no matter how mercenary or reprehensible we think that is. Are you willing to go out on a limb over this?”

  Mike’s eyes became lasers. “I know this much. I’m not willing to sacrifice another victim if there’s a chance we can help catch this psycho. Are you?”

  The room went silent. Fields drew a deep breath and glanced at Gelber. But there was no more argument. “I’ll arrange the meeting,” he said.

  Chapter 7

  nightfall made mirrors out of the windows overlooking Biscayne Bay, and without the vista the newsroom had the stark and gaping ambience of a high school gymnasium. Beige walls were the perfect complement to the industrial carpet and fluorescent lighting high overhead. A twisted network of dividers compartmentalized the room into open workstations for nearly a hundred fifty reporters and staff writers, each with their own video display terminal, gray metal desk, and modern telephone that emitted a muffled chirp instead of the good old-fashioned ring. It was relatively quiet now, but in peak business hours the incessant buzz of a hundred different conversations swirled above them. Mike’s pod was somewhere in the middle, like the wedge of cheese in a sprawling rat maze.

  He leaned back in his chair, his face lighted only by the glow of his computer terminal in the screen-saver mode. He smirked at the familiar preprogrammed message that flashed across the screen in big green letters from left to right, an old Vince Lombardi quote that Aaron Fields had drilled into his brain from day one. “Be fired with enthusiasm. Or you will be fired—with enthusiasm.”

  For thirteen years that creed had kept him working late, night after night. How many times had he called Karen to cancel plans at the last minute? How many times had he simply forgotten to call, or even apologize?

  He glanced at her photo on his desk—a honeymoon shot taken six years ago, back when he thought divorce was for the other fifty percent. Karen, wearing shorts and a cable-knit sweater, was perched atop a pile of huge gray boulders along the coast of Maine, the surf crashing in the background. There, he’d truly fallen for her: He slipped after snapping the photo and tumbled into a crevice. She climbed down to him, recklessly, as if the most important thing in the world was to reach him.

  He was okay, so they sat there on the jagged coastline and watched the sun set, just talking. They were great talkers back then, took pleasure in exchanging small secrets.

  Karen had a theory about that—one that made perfect sense to a newspaper reporter who dealt with anonymous sources. “Only two kinds of people can talk without inhibitions,” she said. “Strangers or lovers. Everyone in between is just negotiating.”

  “So,” he said, “unless there’s love—”

  “In some ways, you’re actually better off being strangers.”

  After six years of marriage, he had to wonder when it was that they’d been reduced to “negotiating”—and whether they’d finally reached the point where they were better off strangers.

  His phone rang and he snatched it up, thinking maybe it was Karen. To his disappointment, it was Aaron Fields.

  “I knew I’d catch you at work,” the publisher said with approval. “Listen, I just wanted to let you know I’m making a slight change in your proposal to the FBI.”

  “What kind of change?”

  “I agree that we can’t have the FBI eavesdropping on your phone conversations. The idea of a bug in a newsroom makes me very nervous. But instead of you just passing the informant’s tip along to the FBI, we’re proposing that the FBI get its information just like everybody else—by reading your stories in the Tribune. We retain exclusive control over what we print and don’t print.”

  “What do you mean ‘print’? Who says this guy is telling the truth?”

  “He’s proven himself reliable with Gerty Kincaid.”

  “Come on,” Mike scoffed. “You always insisted we verify—”

  “Things change,” Fields interrupted. “I’m not telling you to abandon your standards. Throw in all the qualifiers you want—‘unconfirmed reports…it’s alleged’…all that. But the paper needs the sales bump this story will give us.”

  Mike was speechless.

  “Charlie’s in agreement with me on this,” said Fields. “Printing a story after each call from your informant is more in line with our role as independent journalists than passing tips directly to the FBI anyway.”

  “I’m still not comfortable—”

  “Mike, your instincts were right: We have to help stop this killer. But if we pay money for the tips and don’t write the stories, your informant will know we’re working with the police. Trust me, okay? This is the only way it’ll work. Now, get back to work, you slacker,” he joked, then hung up.

  Mike breathed a heavy sigh, not sure what to think. He switched off his desk lamp.

  Somehow, he didn’t feel much like working late anymore.

  A slushy rain had been falling all day. By 9:00 P.M. temperatures were in the teens and downtown Atlanta was encased in ice. Most businesses had closed early that afternoon so that people could get home safely before dark. Those who hadn’t left fast enough were now parked on the interstate, cursing the winter storm and a five-car pileup that had traffic blocked for miles.

  A blast of cold wind nearly knocked Cybil Holland to the frozen sidewalk as she emerged from the Ritz-Carlton on Peachtree Street. No vacancy. It was the same at all of the downtown hotels. At this point everyone, Cybil included, had given up any hope of getting home tonight.

  She cinched up her Burberry trench coat, turned up the lapels and headed directly into the chilly north wind toward the subway station at Peachtree Plaza. The Ritz had promised her a room at their Buckhead Hotel in midtown, but it was up to her to figure out how to get there. MARTA was her only hope.

  She walked with her head down, bucking the wind and intermittent icy flakes that bit her on the cheeks and forehead. It was too dark and windy to tell for sure, but the precipitation seemed to be falling heavier in the streetlamps’ fuzzy light. Across the street, the store windows at Macy’s had glazed over with a thick layer of ice. The Ritz was only a block behind her and already she felt like she’d trudged a mile, freezing and suddenly nervous—increasingly aware that she was alone on the streets.

  Without gloves her hands were stinging. She blew on them and her breath steamed, fogging a big heart-shaped diamond in a platinum setting with emerald baguettes. Out of street smarts she turned her ring inward to conceal the stones. She walked as fast as she could, planting her high-heeled shoes carefully on the ice-slicked sidewalk. The incline was slight, but the ice and gusty wind made it like climbing a ski jump. Her feet slipped as she reached the corner. To break the fall she threw her hand out in front of her when, out of nowhere, someone hit her broadside and knocked her to the sidewalk.

  She was facedown, sliding then bouncing down concrete steps, bearing the weight of whoever had slammed into her. They landed with a thud at the base of the steps in the pitch-dark bowels of a restaurant delivery pit, somewhere below street level. A gloved hand muted her scream as she stared up in fright at the man in a ski mask.

  Kneeling beside her, he grabbed her by the hair, snapped her head forward and back, slamming it against the concrete. He watched the eyes roll up into her head, then rifled through her purse. A nice wad of bills—a couple hundreds and some crisp fifties.

  “Rich bitch,” he mumbled.

  He pitched the empty purse aside and took her hand, which she’d clenched into a fist. He pried her pudgy fingers open to reveal the heart-shaped diamond cupped in her hand, like an oyster housing its pearl. He tugged at the ring, but it wouldn’t budge. Another tug, but it was stuck on her knuckle.

  “Come on, fatso.”

  He twisted it, even spit on her finger to help it slide off. No dice.

  Quickly, he unzippe
d his leather jacket and pulled a diving knife from its sheath, exposing an eight-inch blade with a serrated edge. Then, just for an instant, he pressed the flat side of the shiny steel blade against her lips. It steamed. She was breathing, still alive. His eyes lit, as if he preferred it that way.

  Like a butcher with his block, he flattened her hand on the bottom step, palm down, spreading the digits to isolate the ring. He positioned the blade directly on her knuckle, got up on his haunches and came down with all his weight. The bone cracked like a frozen twig, and the blade broke through to the icy concrete. He slid the ring off the bloody stub and gave the stones a closer look, smirking with satisfaction. A diamond and emeralds.

  He stuffed the prize in his pocket and clutched the wad of cash. “California, here I come,” he said quietly, then peeled off into the night.

  Chapter 8

  victoria wasn’t invited to the meeting in Miami with Aaron Fields. The Special Agent in Charge of the Miami Field Office attended, accompanied by David Shapiro, chief of the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit in Quantico. Not every payment to an informant was handled at this level, but the Tribune’s proposal was a bit unusual. Victoria heard about it that same evening, when she checked in with Shapiro for a routine status report. The decision, she was told, was flatly no.

  The FBI headquarters was in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, but no one had ever called it that, even before the cross-dressing allegations. Most simply called it “ugly.” The unsymmetrical tetrahedron covered an entire city block between Ninth and Tenth streets on Pennsylvania Avenue, seven stories high in the front and eleven in the rear, giving the impression that it was about to fall over backward. The exterior walls were unfinished concrete, punctuated with pock marks that looked like machine-gun fire. Victoria entered through the employee entrance on Pennsylvania at 9:00 A.M. and went directly to the office of Tom Dougherty, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division.

  Dougherty was several levels of authority above her, outside her normal chain of command. His division directed the work of nearly eighty percent of the Bureau’s agents, and he personally reviewed the undercover review board operation minutes to determine whether every category-one proposal was worth the expense and risk. Ordinarily, Victoria would no more try to see him without an appointment than she would just drop by the Oval Office. The bottom line, however, was that she liked the Tribune’s proposal, and she couldn’t in good conscience let her supervisors kill it simply because it lacked the one thing the FBI valued more than anything else: precedent.

  Dougherty was a distinguished fifty-five years old, two years away from the Bureau’s mandatory retirement age, with thick gray hair and a cleft in his chin. He dressed conservatively in a dark blue suit, white shirt and berry red tie. He was rushing out the door to a congressional hearing on Capitol Hill when she caught him outside his office. With his implied permission—he didn’t tell her to get lost—she followed him down the hall, down the elevator, and out the door. His limousine driver was waiting at the curb, a handsome young man who was downright obsequious, showing Dougherty even more deference than she was. She followed him all the way to the open car door, trying to get his ear Finally, he agreed to let her ride along.

  She was nearly out of breath from nonstop speaking as the limo pulled into traffic. “I want you to know, sir, that I’m not one to go over the heads of my supervisors lightly.”

  “I appreciate that,” he said dryly. “Because I’m extremely busy.”

  He seemed impatient as she continued to plead her case, checking his watch several times, signaling that time was short. She gave him as much information as she could compress into the short ride, but he seemed unmoved.

  “I can’t emphasize it enough,” she said. “It’s not every day we get this kind of cooperation from the media. It could provide the breakthrough we need. And compared to the amount of money this investigation has cost so far, the proposed payments to this informant are a bargain.”

  He looked up from the open file in his lap; the mention of money seemed to have grabbed his attention. “Obviously, the amount of the payments isn’t the whole issue. The Justice Department pays about a hundred million dollars a year to informants, most of whom, frankly, are scumbags who never produce squat. The real problem is that we can’t pay him a dime if he’s the killer. We’ll have political hell to pay if it turns out he’s the killer and he gets away with the taxpayers’ money—possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars when all is said and done.”

  “I totally agree. That’s the key issue: Is the informant the killer.”

  He looked annoyed, but it was his normal expression. “Well, what do our analysts think?”

  “They’re leaning toward the view that he is the killer.” Her voice grew tighter, and she looked Dougherty in the eye. “But I think they’re wrong.”

  “Is that so?” he said with a condescending smile. His smirk slowly faded. “How long have you been with the CASK Unit?”

  “Eighteen months. But I spent five years in hostage and crisis negotiation, where I learned a few things about the way the criminal mind works. The truth is, no one has thought more about this case over the last four months than I have. And I just don’t believe this guy’s the killer.”

  “Why not?”

  “A lot of little things that I don’t have near enough time to explain. But the best reason is Ernest Gill.”

  “Who?”

  “Gill—it’s a phony name the informant is using. I checked with a historian at the Smithsonian last night. Turns out there was an Irish sailor by that name on the SS Californian, back in 1912. His salary was five English pounds a month. A Boston newspaper paid him five hundred dollars for his story that Lord Stanley, the captain of his ship, saw distress flares fired from the Titanic, but he just kept on going.”

  “Seems strange that someone demanding money for his story would tie himself to a historical precedent.”

  “That’s the point. Gill’s story led to three formal government investigations into Lord Stanley, one in the U.S. and two in Britain. The newspaper may have paid him a lot of money for what sounded like an unbelievable story. But as far as anyone could tell, it looks like everything he said was true.”

  “So Mr. Gill is back again, getting paid to tell the truth.”

  “I guess that’s his message.”

  “But—you’ve lost me now,” he said with a grimace. “How does his use of the name Gill lead to the conclusion that the informant’s not the killer?”

  “Simple: It’s too cute, amateurish, something you’d come across in a bad movie. It’s the ploy of someone fairly dull-witted who thinks he’s being clever. The killer’s not at all like that. He’s far more intelligent, far more savvy. At least, in my view he is.”

  Dougherty’s look was incredulous. “That’s all you’ve got to go on—his chosen alias is inconsistent with your profile?”

  “Sometimes that’s all it takes. It’s like the Yorkshire Ripper case in the late seventies. Obviously I wasn’t around back then, but I studied it in one of my courses at Quantico.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It was in England. After four years of investigation, the police had eight serial murders on their hands with no suspects—until someone mailed in a tape recording, claiming to be the killer. The Brits jumped all over it. They broadcast it on television and radio, hoping someone would recognize the voice. Hundreds of police officers went out in the field playing the tape for people who lived in the victims’ neighborhoods, hoping they’d recognize the voice. Then finally, as a favor to the experts at Bramshill, one of our agents listened to it. Instantly, he knew it was bogus. There wasn’t any scientific way for him to know that. But he was sure he was right, because the tape was inconsistent with the profile of the killer he’d constructed from the evidence. And you know what? He was right. The guy on the tape wasn’t the killer. It was a hoax.

  “I feel just as strongly about Mr. Gi
ll. I’m not saying the informant’s a crank. Somehow, he does appear to have some insight into the killings. But he’s not the killer. Not in my book.”

  Dougherty breathed a heavy sigh. Victoria watched nervously as he mulled it over in his mind. The silence seemed insufferable. He shook his head and was about to speak, but she cut him off.

  “I know I’m right, sir.” She spoke firmly and with complete confidence.

  He gave her a long, discerning look, but she didn’t flinch. The car rolled to a stop at the guard gate at the Capitol.

  “All right,” he said finally, almost begrudgingly. “Put it in writing. Send me a memo requesting that we pay this informant based upon your firm professional opinion that the informant is not the killer. If you’re willing to put your neck on the line, I’ll get the money approved.”

  She smiled with relief, then opened the car door and shook his hand. “Thank you, sir. You won’t regret it.”

  “I know I won’t,” he said flatly. “That’s what your memo’s for.”

  She stepped down from the limo and closed the door. Her smile faded as she stood alone at the guard gate, watching the big black limo pull away.

  Chapter 9

  victoria arranged to meet Mike Posten at Mango’s Café in Fort Lauderdale at 2:00 P.M. She’d wanted their first meeting to be out in the open so that their rendezvous would appear casual, and Mike had wanted it out of Miami so that he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew.

  Mango’s was a corner café in the heart of the upscale shopping area on east Fort Lauderdale’s Las Olas Boulevard. It was an older area that had gone up and down with the economy over the decades, but these days it was definitely up. Trendy art galleries, boutiques and antique shops flourished beneath a canopy of bushy palms and sprawling oaks that pointed the way to that famous beach where Connie Francis first sang “Where the Boys Are.”

  Victoria stopped at the entrance to the outdoor seating area, a cluster of little marbletop tables surrounded by a railing and manicured hedge running along the sidewalk. She’d seen Mike’s picture in advance, but she would have spotted him without it. He had to be the guy munching on tortilla chips, nervously looking around as if trying to figure out which one was the FBI agent, the wrinkled old Canadian speaking French to his left or the Claudia Schiffer look-alike to his right.