The Informant

by James Grippando

  “Sure. Kids can be cruel, man.”

  “All because I grew thirteen inches in eleven months. Fucking old man made me wear that back brace. Made me walk like a monster. Frank-Hannon-tein,” he said bitterly. “That was me.”

  “Look at you now. You look like a stud.”

  “That’s not what you told Mike Posten,” he said sharply. “Your profile said I was impotent.”

  He smiled awkwardly. “Okay, I said that. But that’s the beauty of this scheme. I keep feeding them enough correct details about the murders so they keep on paying me, but I give them totally wrong information about the murderer, so you’ll never get caught. I been throwin’ ’em off the trail from the very beginning, when I called that yokel in Georgia and pretended like I was the killer. It’s like I said, man: We can keep this up forever.”

  “Or until you rat on me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You ratted on me before.”

  “We were just kids. Nine years old. I learned my lesson after you…well, you know.”

  Hannon’s eyes suddenly lit up. “That’s how you knew it was me, isn’t it. The threat. I told you I’d cut out your tongue.”

  Rollins’s mouth curled into a clever smile. “I heard about the murders on TV—and, yeah, it rang a bell. So I checked up on you, found out you’d just gotten out of prison, right about the time these tongue murders started. Tracked you down and started following you. That’s when I got the brainstorm. I figured I’d scope out your next, uh, target in advance—and sell the story to some news creep.”

  “Posten certainly fills the bill,” Hannon said dryly.

  Rollins recognized dangerous territory. He decided to steer past the remark. “I figured you’d kind of be tickled by what I was doing, actually. You know, seeing as how the whole thing added to the publicity the killings were getting.”

  “Looking after my best interests, were you?” Hannon said. His eyes narrowed. “You don’t fool me. Once that well ran dry, you’d turn me in—for the big reward.”

  “No. I was never going to rat on you.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “Because…” He swallowed hard, racking his brain for an answer. “Because there were lots of other times I didn’t rat on you, when I had the chance.”

  “When?”

  “Back in school. I was onto you, Frank. You may have got good grades, and maybe you even had your old lady fooled into thinking you wanted to grow up to be a vet, like her. But I knew it wasn’t a future career in medicine that made you wanna—you know, do those things. Like, remember in eighth grade, when somebody broke into the biology lab and cut off all those snakes’ tongues? Principal never found out who did it. I knew it was you. But I didn’t tell.”

  Hannon ran his finger lightly along the sharp blade. “Snakes,” he said with a bemused smile. “Did you know that if you cut out a snake’s tongue, it can’t smell a thing? Even the most dangerous snakes get completely disoriented, can’t find their prey. A snake couldn’t hurt a flea without its tongue.” His eyes turned cold as he looked right at him. “Kind of like a snitch.”

  “Listen to me, man,”—Rollins’s voice shook—“I’m not a snitch. I hate snitches. I went to fucking jail as a cop for selling the names of government informants to the cocaine cowboys. I was never gonna turn you in. This is about money, pure and simple. It’s business, that’s all.”

  Hannon scooted to the edge of the chair and leaned forward, bringing the tip of the knife to Rollins’s chin. He turned the blade slowly, drawing tiny drops of blood as it nicked a quivering lower lip.

  “Please,” Rollins whimpered.

  “Business, huh,” he said in a low, steady voice. “If that’s all it is, I’d say you’re about outta business—permanently. Unless you tell me exactly where that money is.”

  Chapter 32

  it took several hours for the Fairfax County Sheriff to request assistance from the FBI, but by midafternoon Victoria finally got her orders. She drove right from her office in Quantico to the busy crime scene in McLean. Overcast skies darkened the brown winter landscape in the day’s waning moments. Two county sheriff cars were parked across the street from the redbrick house with the brown shingle roof. A deputy with a flashlight was directing traffic, both cars and pedestrians, keeping the rubberneckers moving along. A van marked FAIRFAX COUNTY CORONER’S OFFICE was blocking the driveway. Victoria parked her Oldsmobile at the curb, just on the other side of the bright fluorescent police tape that marked off the front lawn. She flashed her credentials to the deputy on the street. He directed her to the sheriff, who was standing by the coroner’s van. Victoria buttoned her coat and approached him directly, but cordially.

  “Victoria Santos,” she said, extending her hand. “FBI.”

  “Sheriff Woodson,” he said brusquely, “busy as hell.” The baritone voice matched his heavyset frame. He had a clean-shaven, clean-cut look, right down to his polished shoes, pressed pants. Victoria guessed he was ex-military, probably a Vietnam vet. He turned away, returning his focus to the crime scene diagram on his clipboard.

  She moved closer, glancing over his shoulder. “You’ve marked off a fairly large crime scene for a homicide that took place inside the house. Was the victim abducted outside and brought inside?”

  His nose stayed in his clipboard. “Maybe.”

  She smiled to herself. Another local sheriff who isn’t about to be overrun by the FBI. “I hear there may be a witness,” she said.

  He flipped the page and scribbled in the margin. “Maybe. The victim was Pamela Barnes, a thirty-three-year-old divorced mother who lived with her eleven-year-old-son, Alex. The boy wasn’t hurt. The killer locked him in the closet, drugged him.”

  “What kind of drug?”

  “Blood test showed ketamine. Special K is what they call it on the street.”

  “I know. It’s an animal tranquilizer. I’m beginning to think our killer may have some veterinary training, or at least some connection with animals. That’s the second time we’ve seen that same drug.”

  The sheriff looked up from his clipboard, showing his first sign of interest. “Where’d you see it before?”

  “We had a similar situation out in San Francisco—the Timothy Copeland murder. The killer drugged the victim’s roommate and put him in the closet. Unfortunately, Copeland’s roommate didn’t remember a thing.”

  The sheriff tucked the clipboard under his arm. “Well, this may be a little different situation.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The boy seems to remember something.”

  Her heart thumped. “What does he say?”

  “At this point he’s basically incoherent. Which is understandable—he’s pretty traumatized. But I think he knows a lot more than he’s able to tell. A lot more than he probably wants to remember. The question is how to draw him out of his shell.”

  She thought for a moment, then her eyes lit with an idea. “I know just the right person to help you with that. One of the polygraph agents in Washington is a friend of mine. We went through the Academy together. She’s trained in hypnosis, and she’s excellent with children. We’ve used her in some of our abduction cases.”

  “Hypnosis? I don’t want no hocus-pocus. I’d rather just wait and see if the kid remembers something.”

  “This isn’t the kind of case where you can wait around for anything. We have a killer who we know is going to kill again.”

  “Maybe,” he grumbled. “But that doesn’t mean we should hold a séance.”

  “It’s not a séance. We don’t conjure up spirits or pump him full of drugs or anything like that. It’s just a psychological tool to help the boy relax, remove his anxieties. If nothing else, do it for the boy. Let’s find out what he knows right now, before the nightmares, so the counselors can help him deal with it.”

  He sighed, but her last point had seemed to make an impression. “I’m still not too keen on this.”

  “Let’s leave it up to his fa
ther,” said Victoria. “The boy’s a minor. We’ll need parental consent. If the father will go along—will you?”

  He paused, mulling it over. “I suppose. But we’ve been working with this boy all day. Let’s at least give him and his dad a night to grieve. We can meet in the station tomorrow morning.”

  “What time?” said Victoria.

  “Say ten o’clock?”

  “I’ll call my friend. We’ll be there.”

  The sheriff nodded. Victoria was gone in an instant, headed for her car phone before the sheriff could change his mind.

  At dusk the mountain air had dropped below forty degrees. The cabin was cold enough to steam Rollins’s breath, yet little beads of sweat had gathered on his upper lip. A trace of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. He was still seated on the floor, braced against the post, hands tied behind his back. Hannon sat in the chair facing him, tapping the flat side of the blade into his gloved hand as he spoke.

  “This is your last chance, Curt. How’d you hide the money?”

  Rollins licked his dry lips, then swallowed hard. “It’s like I said. I’ve seen lots of money laundering as a cop, so I knew how to do it.”

  Hannon dragged the blade like a razor over the whiskers on Curt’s chin. “I want details.”

  Rollins’s lips quivered. “I didn’t think Posten would call in the cops, but just in case he did, I couldn’t take cash from him in a suitcase. They might mark it. So I had him deposit it in Citibank. The first fifty thousand was cash, but the bigger deposits I had wire-transferred, so Posten wouldn’t look like a drug smurf toting all that money. I withdrew some of it with my ATM card, just to get my hands on some cash. But for the bulk of it I wanted to do it right.”

  “What does that mean—doing it right?”

  “Doing as many wire transfers as I could without eating up my funds, to throw any tracers off the trail. Three thousand to a bank in Wyoming, seven thousand to a bank in New York, and so on, every day. When I got to a quarter million, I wired it all offshore to Antigua. If anyone was tracing it, they sure couldn’t get through Antigua’s bank secrecy.”

  “How do you get it back?”

  Rollins swallowed, felt his terror rise. He knew that if he gave Hannon the means to secure the money, he’d be issuing his own death sentence.

  “I asked you a question, Curt,” Hannon repeated, bearing down on each word. The tip of his knife pricked Rollins’s skin.

  “Antigua,” Rollins said desperately, “I go to Antigua, withdraw the cash, buy a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar boat for cash money, and sail it back to Miami.” He was hyperventilating now. “The IRS doesn’t track big cash purchases outside the United States. If the bank secrecy laws don’t throw the stiffs off my trail, turning the cash into a yacht sure will. Then I either keep the boat, sell it, use it as collateral for another loan. Whatever I want.”

  “Where are all the account records?”

  Rollins’s eyes lit with faint hope. “My apartment in Brooklyn. Hey,” he said, trying to smile, “I’ll take you there, man. Come on, you and me. Like old times. Buddies. Partners.”

  Hannon looked at him coldly, then rose from the chair. His six-and-a-half-foot frame towered over the prisoner. He bent down and slowly lowered the knife. With a quick flick of the wrist he cut the ropes from Rollins’s hands.

  Rollins was shaking with fear and giddy relief. He rubbed his raw wrists and looked up gratefully.

  “Let’s go,” said Hannon. “I want the records.”

  “I know you do,” said Rollins as he wobbled to his feet. The apparent reprieve was allowing him to think more clearly, and he found himself improvising. “Of course, you know that without me the records won’t do you any good. This isn’t a normal bank with a checking account and ATM card. I went there personally to open up the account, and I set it up with special restrictions so that I have to go there personally to close it out. You can’t wire it out or ask for a check in the mail. You need me. I’m the only guy who can walk into the bank and withdraw the funds.”

  Hannon’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a pretty good bluffer, considering the circumstances.”

  “It’s no bluff. There are too many feds who want that money back. I couldn’t take the risk that one of them would just walk in and withdraw it.” He looked for signs that Hannon was buying his explanation, then continued. “Come on, old buddy. This will be a beautiful partnership. Let me show you the records, and then we’ll talk about how to keep the gravy train running.”

  Hannon stared coldly, then his mouth curled with a semblance of a smile. “All right. You’ve bought yourself some time.”

  “Good. Now can I use the bathroom?”

  “’Fraid not,” he said, shaking his head. “Back in the trunk.”

  Rollins grimaced. “All the way to Brooklyn? Come on, man. It smells like those rats you threw in there.”

  Hannon was deadpan. “Like you, Curt. You smell exactly like a rat.”

  Chapter 33

  hannon reached Brooklyn before 10:00 P.M. and parked the Volvo on the street outside the old brownstone flat. It was a mild night for February, much warmer than the Virginia mountains. The streets were wet, but the scattering of white that at first looked like snow was actually trash that had collected in the gutters. Several streetlamps were burned out, and the row of parallel-parked cars across the street looked as if they hadn’t moved since Reagan was president. Fifty years ago it had probably been a quaint neighborhood, but times had changed.

  Hannon saw no one walking the sidewalks, but he didn’t want to risk opening the trunk. The Swedish car had a small hatch that opened in the middle of the backseat so that snow skis could lay flat, partly in the trunk and partly in the backseat. He popped the latch, then winced immediately at the pungent odor.

  “Where’s the key, Curt?” he said as he waved off the stench.

  “Untie me, okay? I can’t stand it in here.”

  “Shut up or I’ll gag you again. Where’s the key?” Seconds passed as Rollins shifted around in the darkness. The odor was getting worse. “Curt!”

  “There’s no key. Combination padlock. Twenty-eleven-seventeen.”

  Hannon closed the latch, crawled out of the car and headed up the cracked sidewalk. Rollins had the basement apartment, down the cement steps behind the black iron gate. It reminded Hannon of those stairs in Atlanta where he’d cut off that woman’s finger for her diamond ring. The front door was padlocked, like Rollins had said. There was a hole where the old key lock had been. It looked like somebody had taken a crowbar to it.

  He popped the lock and the door opened to an efficiency apartment that smelled nearly as bad as the trunk of his Volvo. It was garbage. Strange, he thought, the way everyone’s garbage seemed to smell the same. He switched on the light and went straight to the kitchen, the source of the odor. He picked up the trash basket and dumped the mess in the middle of the floor. Old coffee grounds, milk cartons, tin cans and a big glob of something that looked like a year’s supply of creamed corn spilled onto the linoleum. He shook everything out, then looked inside the can. As Rollins had promised, fastened securely to the bottom of the garbage can was a watertight pouch with something inside.

  Hannon took the pouch to the counter and opened it carefully. Inside were three big manila envelopes. The first contained bank records. A detailed log showed a series of wire transfers through FedWire, CHIPS, and SWIFT, all funneled to a secret numbered account at Charter Bank in Antigua. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It wasn’t exactly like winning the lotto, but it gave him the option to ditch Valerie if she got too nosy. In truth, the amount wasn’t the issue. It was simply his money; he’d earned it by giving old Curt something to snitch about.

  The second envelope contained a birth certificate, Florida driver’s license and Social Security card for a man named Ernest Gill. The picture, however, was Rollins with big eyeglasses, a heavy mustache, and added gray to his hair that made him look older. The Citibank account.


  The third contained similar ID for “Eric Venters,” including a U.S. passport, voter’s registration and New York driver’s license. Again, the picture was Rollins wearing a convincing disguise. The Antigua account.

  Hannon smiled as he stuffed the envelopes back in the pouch. Decision time. He could let Rollins be Venters and withdraw the funds, or he could become Venters and do it himself. The birth certificate and Social Security card were reusable—no photo, and they looked legitimate. All he needed was a passport, which in New York was as easy as finding pastrami on rye. He could become Venters before the sun came up.

  The open issue, of course, was the height. Rollins was five feet ten inches tall, and as he was being put back into the trunk back at the lodge he’d mentioned that the bank had some record on file with the customer’s—Rollins’s—height on it. That could be true. But from what Hannon knew about offshore banks, they’d be unlikely to focus on height—and even if they checked, what were the chances they’d challenge him?

  That left just one question: What to do with Curt.

  Hannon sealed up the pouch and started toward the door, smirking at the possibilities.

  Just after 11:00 P.M. Valerie St. Pierre returned home. An afternoon of shopping at the mall had turned into dinner and a movie with her girlfriends. Her face was flushed red from a little too much wine, and she was humming a tune from Phantom when she dropped the bags from Lord & Taylor on the kitchen table.

  “Charlie?” she called out.

  The house was quiet. She checked the den, then flipped on the hall light and started upstairs to the bedroom.

  “Honey, come look what I bought you.”

  The bedroom was dark, and so was the bathroom. A puzzled look came over her face, then she noticed the message light blinking on the answering machine. She sat on the edge of the bed and hit the play button.

  “Hi, babe, it’s Charlie.” She perked up immediately at the sound of Hannon’s voice. “I’m really sorry, but I got an emergency call from that accounting firm I did the network for. Some weird computer virus has the whole system running slower than shit. Anyway, I had to drive to Pittsburgh this afternoon. Not sure when I’ll be back. But I’ll make it up to you. Promise.”