The Informant

by James Grippando

  Victoria identified herself and flashed her badge. “Are you Edith Malone?”

  Her brow furrowed with concern. “Yes,” she said shakily. “What’s this about?”

  “Please don’t be alarmed. I’m here for your daughter.”

  “My daughter? Why? I hope she’s not in some kind of trouble.”

  Victoria tucked her badge away, then answered without emotion. “None of her own doing. May I come in please?”

  Her hands were shaking as she opened the door. “Yes, sure. Come inside.”

  Victoria drove to the airport, where she and Karen boarded an eight-seat prop Buplane. Karen seemed bewildered, and Victoria was certainly sympathetic. Here was a woman whose marital problems alone had driven her to her mother’s for a week of reflection. Victoria tried to imagine how she would feel if some guy had chased her through a Metrorail station one week, only to have the FBI track her down halfway across the state the next. She explained everything, though, on the flight to Miami.

  “Why wasn’t I told any of this before?”

  Victoria paused, considering her response. “The minute we learned that the informant planted the latest message in the glove compartment of your car, we felt you were in sufficient danger that we had to tell you. Your involvement was no longer indirect. It would be impossible for us to give you the level of protection you need now, unless you know what’s going on. And you need to be able to take your own precautions, to protect yourself. For your own safety, we acted immediately, even before we had time to consult your husband.”

  “That wasn’t my question. I want to know why I wasn’t told before.”

  She started to respond, then checked herself. “That was a joint decision between your husband and the FBI.”

  “You mean Mike actually agreed to that?”

  “Yes, but I don’t want to speak out of turn. I think I’ll let him explain when we land.”

  “I can’t wait to hear this,” she huffed.

  They sat in silence for several minutes, each in her own thoughts as the engines hummed. Victoria glanced across the narrow aisle several times discreetly, and Karen seemed to be cooling down. Finally, their eyes met, and they exchanged awkward smiles.

  “So,” said Karen, “how do you like working with Mike?”

  “Fine. No problem.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Like him? Yeah, sure. Then again, I spend most of my day trailing psychopathic sexual sadists. Let’s face it: Saddam Hussein would be a breath of fresh air.”

  Karen smiled. “Yours is an unusual career choice. I can’t help but wonder—”

  “Why do I do it,” Victoria finished the thought for her. “Your husband asked the same question. I gave him the ten-cent version.”

  “Nobody gives Mike the ten-cent version of anything.”

  “So I learned. He wasn’t too happy. Made some crack about how I must have something in my background that makes me feel like a victim.”

  Karen’s eyebrow arched with interest. “Meaning you do this for revenge?”

  “I’m not a vigilante, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that. I just meant I wouldn’t fault you for feeling angry, you know, if you were a victim. I could understand how a woman would feel that way.” She rubbed between her eyes, like a woman with a migraine. “If she were a victim.”

  Victoria blinked with confusion. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, fine,” she said with a “chin-up” smile. “I was just thinking how quickly people forget about the victims. That’s the worst part about being one, I would imagine. Being around people who’d rather forget something you can never forget.”

  Victoria hesitated, then touched her lightly on the forearm. “Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

  “No, not really. I guess the thought of a serial killer having just rummaged through my glove compartment has me a little spooked. I’m genuinely curious, though, one woman to another. Has doing this serial killer stuff helped you?”

  “Helped me what?”

  “With whatever it is that drove you to do it.”

  “I don’t want you to think there’s some big ugly secret here.”

  “I don’t. I’d just really like to know.”

  “I’m not one to talk about myself,” she said wearily. She glanced across the aisle and caught Karen’s eye. She seemed sincere, not nosy. “Well, if you really want to know, I think it has something to do with my…shall we say, family history. I’m what they call a Jewban—half Jew, half Cuban. Sometimes I think my boss wishes I was handicapped, just to cover another minority, but that’s another story.

  “My maternal grandfather died in Auschwitz. My uncle—my father’s brother—spent twenty-six years in one of Castro’s political prisons. Family reunions were a real blast. A bunch of old drunks guzzling down Sangria made with Manischewitz wine, arguing over who was the most persecuted. At least that’s how I saw it as a kid. As I got older, though, the stories started to fascinate. It made me want to understand the criminal mind—especially the minds of men who know the difference between right and wrong, yet who kill and kill again, with no remorse or any sign of a conscience.”

  “So you’re one of those cops who likes to think like the killer.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I try to understand the killer by looking through the eyes of the victim. Which means I may not crawl as far inside the killer’s head as some investigators do. But it gives me the passion to keep on looking when others might give up.”

  Karen nodded slowly. “I figured you were like that.”

  “Pro-victim, you mean?”

  “No. The kind of woman who never gives up.”

  Victoria thought she sensed something in her tone, a defensiveness she sometimes got from wives of the men she worked with.

  Silence lingered as they exchanged ambiguous glances. Then each just looked away, peering out the little oval window over the wing, toward Lake Okeechobee below.

  Chapter 18

  for the first time in two months, Mike went home. Fortunately, Karen was a creature of habit, so he’d had no trouble finding her car at the airport—she always parked on level K, “for Karen,” so she wouldn’t forget her spot.

  Had he not been carrying an envelope with the names of two more victims, it would have felt good to pull into the familiar driveway and walk up the curved path of stepping stones that cut across the front lawn. Whatever might come of their marital problems, he would always think of this pink stucco house with white gingerbread trim as a happy place, filled with memories of happier times. He remembered the day he and Karen had planted the little hedges around the flower bed, five or six years ago. It rained like a hurricane halfway through the job. They ended up laughing and rolling in the mud, then they chased each other inside, scrubbed each other clean and spent every ounce of remaining energy making love to each other the rest of the day.

  It pleased him to see everything still looking the same. Karen hadn’t changed a thing. A good sign, he thought. The only problem was that the invitation home had come not from Karen, but Victoria Santos.

  “Come on in,” said Victoria, answering the door.

  “Thanks. Nice of the FBI to invite me into my home.”

  Her phone call had been appropriately cryptic, though Mike had gleaned enough from her innuendo to know that Karen would be there and that she was finally in the loop. Still, his heart skipped a beat when he saw her sitting on the living-room couch. He wanted to give her a hug, but she rose slowly and seemed a little standoffish. Her coolness only heightened the guilt he felt for not having told her the truth from the beginning.

  “I’m sorry you had to find out this way,” he said softly.

  “Me too,” she said in a clipped voice.

  Victoria stepped forward. “Just so you know, Mike, I picked Karen up this morning on orders from Washington. As soon as we heard that the informant had left the latest predictions in Karen’s
car, we figured it was only a matter of time before you told her everything. So we told her.”

  He was still reading Karen’s expression, searching for some opening to seek her forgiveness. He suddenly turned toward Victoria, as if her words had just registered. “Let me stop you right there,” he said sharply. “How in the hell did you know the informant had left something in Karen’s car before I even called to tell you about it?”

  Her expression fell. “I—I was on an airplane, unreachable. I guess I assumed you’d called somebody else.”

  “If I had called somebody else, don’t you think they would have told me they were sending you to pick up my wife and tell her everything? I never called anybody.”

  She blinked hard, thinking. “Well, it’s not really important how we knew. Somehow, we knew.”

  “You tapped my telephone, didn’t you.”

  “No!” she said.

  “You’re lying. You promised to respect my integrity as a journalist. The deal was that the FBI supplied the money, and the only information you’d get was whatever I decided to print in the Tribune. You broke your promise not to eavesdrop on confidential conversations between me and my informant.”

  “I don’t know that, Mike, and your mere accusation doesn’t make it true.”

  “The only way you could have known about Karen’s car is if the FBI had listened in on my phone call with my informant.”

  Victoria sank in silence, unable to argue.

  Tension filled the room as Mike’s look of disbelief turned quickly to anger. He started pacing, then forced himself to speak calmly. “You know, up until now I was having second thoughts about whether I should go public with the profile of the killer that my informant gave me. I remembered what you said last time, how my printing the details of how the tongue was extracted might impede your investigation. I thought revealing the kind of person the killer is might also be detrimental. Of course, the FBI doesn’t need me to print anything, since you’re listening to my conversations. But now, as far as I’m concerned the FBI can go straight to hell. If you can’t keep a promise, then I’ll print whatever I damn well please.”

  “Mike, I swear, if there was a wiretap, I personally knew nothing about it.”

  “Sure,” he scoffed. “If you’re going to continue lying to me, I think it’s best if you just leave, Victoria. I need to speak to my wife.”

  “I understand you two need to talk. But we have business to discuss.”

  “I said it was time for you to leave,” he said sternly.

  She was about to protest, but one glance at Karen’s mortified face made her think twice. “Fine,” she said stiffly. “Good-bye, Karen.”

  Karen nodded, then Mike led Victoria to the foyer and opened the door. She stopped at the threshold and looked him in the eye.

  “Let me tell you something, Mike. It’s really unfair to make me out the bad guy in front of your wife. But let’s put that aside. Whatever you decide to tell Karen about our arrangement, the fact remains that we’ve got a serial killer to catch. And whether you recognize it or not, the stakes have just gone up—way up. There was absolutely no logical reason for your informant to put the names of those victims in Karen’s car. He could have FedExed them to you again, or used your computer again—or he could have put them in your glove compartment. His only purpose in using Karen was to demonstrate an increased level of control. He’s telling you that he knows who your wife is, where she is, what she’s doing.”

  “I know that.”

  “But I don’t think you’ve thought it through. To be blunt: This means that if our experts in Quantico are wrong—if it turns out your informant is not the serial killer—then you’re dealing with an informant who is himself exhibiting serious sociopathic tendencies. That’s not a good thing,” she said with a tinge of sarcasm, “and this is no time for you and I to be at each other’s throats. So call me when you’ve cooled off. Because it’s a little dangerous to quit the game before you even know who you’re playing against. And I assure you: We don’t know.”

  She turned quickly and headed down the steps.

  Chapter 19

  the Sunday-morning Tribune landed with a thud on the Baines’s doorstep. Brenda normally slept in on Sundays, but she was up early today. She’d been working on an investigative piece on Florida’s death penalty for nearly two months, and the first of a five-part series was scheduled to run on page one in Sunday’s edition. It was her biggest project in more than two years, and she was crawling out of her skin eager to see it.

  Brenda had come to the Tribune nine years ago from the Milwaukee Journal. She was immediately tagged as the snowbird from the Dairy State with the milky white skin, but her shiny black hair and big green eyes made for an exotic combination worthy of a magazine cover. Both she and Mike had been single back then. They started the lunch routine soon after her arrival, which quickly led to dinners, dates, and three nights a week at Mike’s apartment. It was while lying in bed that he’d told her the Tribune needed to fire its incompetent associate publisher. It was while lying in bed that she’d passed that along to the associate publisher.

  Since then, she and Mike hadn’t really seen eye to eye, so to speak.

  She fumbled for her glasses on the nightstand and rolled out of bed as quickly as she could without waking her husband. They’d made love last night and she couldn’t find her panties, but the slinky top to her silk nightie hung just low enough to cover the essentials. She hurried to the porch, and the wind lifted her negligee up to her face as she reached for the paper. She stood there on the porch, oblivious to her nakedness, stunned by the headline.

  SERIAL KILLER STRIKES AGAIN. VICTIMS 8 AND 9 FOUND IN SOUTH CAROLINA. The kicker she read aloud: “A Tribune Exclusive, by Michael Posten.”

  Her face flushed red as she flipped frantically through the paper, searching for her piece. It wasn’t there. They’d pulled it. “Son of a bitch!” she shrieked, sending the cat scurrying off the porch.

  She tucked the paper under her arm and stormed back inside, slamming the door behind her. She went right back to the bedroom and threw the paper on the bed, waking her husband.

  “Look at this.”

  He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, then read the headline and shook his head. “I’m so sorry, honey. Looks like that jerk went out and paid for another exclusive.”

  “Oh, no,” she said with an angry glare. “He hasn’t begun to pay for this one.”

  Victoria was growing tired of seven-day workweeks, but she was well overdue for a status report. At noon on Sunday she drove to her supervisor’s house in rural Virginia.

  February wasn’t the prettiest time of year, as the scattered forest and rolling fields were bare and brown. The white frame house was two stories with a high-pitched roof, an old stone foundation and a wraparound porch. Built in the late 1700s, it had all the charm and inconvenience of a historic landmark plucked from a Williamsburg village.

  She and David Shapiro sat in matching leather armchairs in the downstairs study. The dark wood decor would have made any time of day feel like midnight, but the cozy glow from the fireplace warmed their faces. Out of respect, Victoria had eschewed her usual weekend scruffies for dark wool slacks, heels and a cashmere turtleneck. Shapiro dressed more to her liking in jeans, hiking boots and an old Duke sweatshirt. A coffee-stained mug and crumpled pack of Camels lay on the end table beside him.

  Shapiro was forty-nine years old with twenty-five years of law enforcement experience, mostly in violent crime. He’d started with the FBI in the Identification Division longer ago than he cared to recount. Impressive bronze plaques on the cherry-paneled wall commemorated his service as president of the International Homicide Investigators Association, program director of VI-CAP within the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and, currently, chief of the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit. At five foot eight he was shorter than Victoria, but his piercing eyes could easily intimidate. He was a chain-smoker who rarely smiled.
Even those who liked him said he had the jaundiced edge of a man who’d seen more unsolved murders than anyone in the world.

  “Why didn’t anybody tell me about a wiretap at the Tribune?” she asked pointedly.

  Shapiro took a long drag from his third cigarette since her arrival. “There’s no wiretap at the Tribune. The good old days of J. Edgar are gone. The FBI doesn’t just slap a wiretap on a newspaper.”

  “Are you denying any eavesdropping on Mike’s conversations with his informant?”

  “I’m saying that it’s been limited to Zack Newman’s apartment. I wouldn’t even bother trying for electronic surveillance at the Tribune, but it’s a little easier to persuade a magistrate that you need a phone tap at a penthouse suite of an unmarried black male who flies seaplanes in and out of Miami.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “We promised Posten that his conversations with his informant would be private. Period. We didn’t limit it to conversations in the newsroom. If you didn’t intend to honor the agreement, you should have told me.”

  “Why?” he said with a sharp glance. “So you could go over my head again? Maybe ask Assistant Director Dougherty personally to kill the proposed wiretap?”

  Victoria sighed and averted her eyes toward the fire. “I’m sorry you’re still angry, but I didn’t go to Headquarters to make you look bad. I just felt it was a terrible mistake to reject the Tribune’s offer. You presented your decision to me as final. I had nowhere else to turn.”

  He sipped his coffee. “I’m not saying that second-guessing me was wrong. I’m just saying it has consequences.”

  “What kind of consequences?”

  “The wiretap’s a good example. Agents who are in the habit of going over their supervisor’s head shouldn’t expect to be made privy to every little detail of the operation.”