His hand was still gripping the phone as he sat in the booth, thinking. A part of him—a very small part—wished there were some other way to handle the only woman who’d never embarrassed him, who’d never pressured him for something he simply couldn’t deliver. She’d been perfectly content with his tongue and the vibrator, never even trying to coax him out of his underwear. She’d just always known when to dim the lights, close her eyes, and turn her backside submissively, where he could have his way with no one watching, where the fit was tight no matter the size.
There was no erasing from her mind, however, the little things that could convict him. Cybil Holland’s ring. His supposed business trips out of town that, if anyone were to check, would turn out bogus and would coincide with the murders. And now the FBI agent’s phone number.
The only question left was how he would kill her.
His eyes brightened as he walked away from the telephone, and his mouth curled into a smile of anticipation. Might as well enjoy it, he thought.
Chapter 46
one floor directly below the Academy’s gun vault, Victoria was at her cluttered desk eating an early lunch or, quite possibly, a late breakfast. For all she knew it was dinner. Her watch said eleven-fifteen, but her internal clock still thought she was in Antigua sparring with the local police. This morning’s shower had been at the locker room at the Academy, and she was wearing the spare suit she kept in her office closet. She wasn’t sure when she’d be home again. This was why she had no pets. Hell, this was why she had no life.
While sipping a Diet Coke she scanned complete background checks on the passengers on the Lower Deck of SS Peninsular II. Ten had already been killed at the hand of Frank Hannon. Another six had died of natural causes. Her eyes popped when she saw the report on cabin 515.
She immediately dialed Mike’s pager. He called back in thirty seconds.
“Nice exclusive you guys gave to CNN,” he said. “I would have thought I at least rated a courtesy call.”
“I’m in no mood for shit from anyone, okay? I would have called you if it had been our plan to take this story to the media, but it was a damn leak from one of our field offices that put it on CNN. Believe me, that was the last thing we wanted. We’ve lost the element of surprise. It’ll be ten times harder to catch him now. Anyway, don’t be giving me hell about not calling you. Why didn’t you call me about passenger Karen Malone—your wife’s maiden name?”
Mike sighed, chagrined. “I was about to call you.”
“She’s on our ‘Hot List’—people within Hannon’s targeted area. Her cabin was across the hall from the rape, down just a few doors. She’s in potential danger, Mike.”
“More than you think. She was my informant.”
Her jaw dropped, but she said nothing.
Mike spoke first, heading off her anger. “I haven’t been playing games with you. I just found out this morning it was her. That’s between me and Karen, and I don’t want to get into all that. The only thing you need to know is that she’s the one who saw him. It was three o’clock in the morning. She was a little seasick and couldn’t sleep. She thought she heard a scream and looked out the peephole. That’s when she saw Hannon coming out of 503.”
Victoria’s brow scrunched in thought. “Could Rollins have known your wife was the source? Is that why you were the reporter he chose to feed his information to?”
“I considered the possibility, but it’s too much of a stretch. Rollins probably did make the connection between the choice of victims and Hannon’s rape conviction—it would have been easy enough to get hold of Hannon’s police record. But prior to the payoffs, his financial situation wasn’t healthy enough to permit background checks on all the likely passengers. Remember, just following Hannon from place to place was expensive. My guess is, Rollins came across my name in the coverage of Hannon’s trial, and picked me as a kind of dig. It has the smell of one-upmanship. It’s possible the two knew each other and there was no love lost.”
“It makes sense,” said Victoria. She glanced up at the ship diagram with the cabin configurations. “Better that Rollins never knew, I’d guess, because Hannon might have wormed it out of him. If I had to guess, the only reason Karen’s still alive is because Hannon hasn’t figured out yet that Karen Malone is Karen Posten.”
“I know. That’s why I’ve been brainstorming for a way to throw him off the trail. Maybe I could write an article saying my informant is deceased. I don’t know. There’s ethical issues there, too. I’d be writing a lie.”
“Just don’t do anything, okay? I think he’s in a down cycle right now, after the Antigua murders and the CNN coverage. If he reads that the informant is dead, you could set him off into a rage that’s worse than anything we’ve seen.”
“Yeah,” he said pointedly. “That’s a possibility. The other possibility is that Karen Malone is the next name on his list. Do you really expect me to sit around and do nothing?”
Victoria sighed. “Just talk to me before you do anything. Please.”
“Deal. So long as you talk to me before the FBI does anything.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“And you know I can’t give you a veto over what I print and don’t print.”
“All right,” she said with a reluctant sigh, “I’ll give you this much: You won’t know everything, but from here on out, you won’t hear a thing on CNN that you don’t already know.”
“Sure,” he said. “You know how to reach me.”
They said good-bye, but as Mike hung up the phone he had no illusions. He knew what she was really saying.
From here on out, she wasn’t telling anyone squat.
The phone conversation with Mike left Victoria with an uneasy feeling. She wondered whether, with his wife a potential target, he could simply report events and not try to influence them.
She managed just two bites of her pita-pocket sandwich when a young agent with his ID clipped to his white shirt appeared in the doorway.
“I have the Hannon photos you asked for,” he said proudly.
She smiled politely and waved him in. He couldn’t have been more than six months out of the Academy, and he looked about six months out of high school—something that Victoria took as a sure sign of her aging.
“Thanks, Marc,” she said as she took the manila envelope. “Shapiro went ballistic when he saw that CNN broadcast this morning. I think the only thing that pissed him off more than the leak was the lousy old photograph CNN dug up. They might as well have run that old sketch of the Unabomber. Probably about as good a likeness.”
He watched eagerly as Victoria opened the photo envelope and removed the glossies. “The top one’s from his high school yearbook, which is pretty old,” Marc volunteered. “But at least he doesn’t have a beard and mustache, like he does in his mug shot and prison photo.”
“He also looks thinner,” said Victoria.
“Yeah. The lab guessed he put on about fifty pounds after high school. That’s why the real gems are on the bottom, the face-aged computer likeness created by headquarters. They based it mostly on the old high school yearbook photo, since he’s covered with facial hair in every picture we have that’s more recent. The computer enhanced the lines in his face, made the skin a little less pink, gave him a more contemporary haircut.”
Her expression froze as she stared at the image. The hair was blond, the eyes were blue. But she could see past the things that hair dye and colored lenses could easily change. “It’s him,” she said quietly, almost to herself.
The young agent looked at her curiously. “Of course it’s him.”
She stared at the computer image, not really listening. Her mind was racing, and the pieces were finally fitting together. “Now I’m certain of it,” she said, still staring at his image. “I’ve seen him before.”
She looked up. Marc was about to speak when she sprang out of the chair and bolted out the door, face-aged photograph in hand.
“Where you going!
” he shouted, chasing after her.
She was streaming down the hall at full speed, her two-inch heels clicking on the hard tile floor. She hit the stairwell without slowing down, never responding, never once looking back.
It was just one flight up to the auxiliary surveillance center. She slid her access card through the electronic security checkpoint and rushed through the doorway. The technician behind the counter knew her by sight. He was a skinny old black man wearing a short-sleeve dress shirt and incredibly wide tie. His warm smiled faded as she rushed toward him. She slid to a halt and leaned across the counter, speaking right into his face.
“I want the transcripts,” she said, still trying to catch her breath, “from the phone tap I put on Valerie St. Pierre.”
Chapter 47
a three-foot tail of perforated computer paper flapped behind her as Victoria ran back downstairs and down the long corridor. It had only taken a few minutes for the surveillance department to print out a verbatim transcript of Valerie’s telephone conversations, and in just a few seconds Victoria realized she had exactly what she needed. Her hair was falling and her face flushed with excitement as she landed at the door to David Shapiro’s office on a dead run. She gave one quick knock, then rushed inside.
“I’ve got him!” she blurted.
Shapiro flashed a startled look from behind his desk. Steve Caldwell was seated on the couch beside his boss’s potted prickly cactus plant. His mouth was hanging open as if Victoria had caught him in midsentence.
“He’s on the MS Fantasy—a cruise ship out of San Juan.”
The two men exchanged glances. “How do you know?” asked Shapiro.
“Long story.”
“Make it short,” he said with urgency.
She stepped farther inside and closed the door, then spoke quickly. “Last month, I met a guy in the airport bar in San Francisco. We got to talking, and I gave him my phone number, thinking he was a nice guy. I never heard from him, but a week ago I got an angry call from some woman claiming to be his girlfriend—very jealous type. She scared me a little, so I retrieved her name and phone number from my caller ID service and wrote it down, just in case she kept harassing me.”
“What does this have to do with Hannon?”
“At the time, I didn’t think it had anything to do with him. But then, fast-forward: Two days ago, I saw Hannon’s mug shot and prison photo. It didn’t hit me at first, because the beard and mustache made it hard to make a comparison, but the longer I stared at the photographs, the more I saw a resemblance between Hannon and the guy at the airport. That’s when I really started to think about it. He was the right height, the right age. We were both flying out of San Francisco, right after the Copeland murder. And what really got me thinking was…” She stopped for a moment, measuring her words. “Well, we talked about his penis.”
Shapiro looked at her strangely.
“In an innocent way,” she said defensively. “He was just saying things like how his ex-wife didn’t seem to notice he had one. It’s not like he came out and said he had Marfan’s syndrome, for crying out loud.”
Caldwell smirked. “Gee, Victoria. You never asked me about my penis.”
“You see, dammit?” she said angrily, shaking her head. “That’s precisely the reason I didn’t want to say anything about this. I didn’t want it to turn into the next big Victoria joke, and then for the next ten years have to put up with the bullshit from every penis in the Bureau. So I pursued it on my own. Once we focused on Hannon, I had a reasonable suspicion that he was the guy I’d met at the airport, but I wasn’t sure. So I just had surveillance tap the girlfriend’s phone in Maryland, figuring that if something panned out, then I’d bring it to your attention. Well, it did pan out. Frank Hannon is on the cruise ship. And here’s the transcripts that prove it.”
“Transcripts of what?”
“Just this morning, a guy using the name ‘Charlie’ called his girlfriend from the cruise ship. Charlie is the guy who I met at the airport.”
“I still don’t see how you make the leap to Hannon.”
“It’s his old high school yearbook photo and the face-aged computer image,” she said, spilling them onto his desk. “I just saw them this morning. Now that I’ve seen Hannon with no beard and mustache, I’m convinced that he was the guy I talked to at the San Francisco airport. That means ‘Charlie’ is Hannon. And Charlie’s on the ship.”
Shapiro gave her an assessing look. “Are you a hundred percent on this?”
“I don’t know. The high school shot is almost sixteen years old. The computer image has Hannon blond and blue-eyed, and the guy in the airport had brown hair, brown eyes. But that’s an easy disguise. I’m ninety-five percent sure, I’d say.”
He nodded pensively, seeming to mull it over. It took just a few seconds until he looked her in the eye. “Get your sunscreen, Victoria. We’re going on a little Caribbean cruise.”
At Karen’s invitation, Mike spent the rest of the morning at the house. He borrowed one of her disposable razors and showered in the guest bathroom. The guest bathroom—a tantalizing reminder that he wasn’t quite home yet.
He still had some clothes buried deep in the walk-in closet, just things he’d left behind to make their separation seem temporary. Most of them had been mothballed for years, like the pastel linen jackets with colored T-shirts and rolled-up sleeves from the heyday of Miami Vice. He wasn’t sure which was harder to believe, the fact that he’d once worn them or that Karen had actually allowed them into her closet. Fortunately, he found some khakis that still fit and a timeless old tennis shirt.
Since Victoria’s phone call this morning, Mike had been bursting inside. He sensed something was afoot, and it wasn’t his style to sit around waiting for the telephone to ring. But he could see in Karen’s eyes that she didn’t want to be left alone. For once, he was determined to put her first without telling her he was doing it.
They made a team effort at lunch. Karen cooked the fusilli pasta and created the dressing while Mike chopped up the tomatoes, carrots and broccoli. He pretended she was out of cauliflower; the broccoli was compromise enough. They ate at the blond knotty-pine table in the breakfast nook. Karen kept the room like a miniature greenhouse, with plants draping down from the skylight like ever-growing tentacles.
“I was thinking about my grandfather last night,” said Mike, going heavy on the grated Parmesan.
Karen sipped her iced tea. “What about?”
“Remember toward the end there, the way his mind was kind of slipping?”
She raised an eyebrow. “You mean before or after he asked me to marry him?”
Mike smiled. “He was like a schoolboy, with those crushes he developed. I was thinking about how nuts he was for Diane Sawyer. He thought she was the total woman. A beautiful, smart journalist. Personable. And to top it all off, an incredible cook.”
“Diane Sawyer can cook?”
“I doubt it,” he said with a shrug. “But who had the heart to tell poor old Grandpa that the woman on television with all those great recipes was actually Martha Stewart?”
She laughed to herself. “A perfectly honest mistake for a ninety-seven-year-old man.”
“Hey—he was in love, he was happy. I could have set him straight, if I’d wanted to. But you have to make a judgment call on these things.” He paused to catch her eye. “Telling the truth isn’t always better. The important thing is that your intentions are good.”
Her smile faded. She lowered her eyes toward her pasta salad. “Nice try, Mike. But what I did to you isn’t even in the same cookbook.”
He looked at her with concern, until finally she looked up. A soulful expression filled her eyes.
“I was twenty years old,” she said, “a punky little sophomore on spring break from Cornell. When I got off the ship I saw your article in the Tribune about the rape, saying the police had no suspects. That’s when I decided to call you. How could I know that five years later I’d actually lay eyes
on you, when I almost literally ran into you at that fund-raiser for the Miami Ballet? My first reaction was to get the hell out of there.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. It was a strange feeling. Your being a stranger, really, and yet knowing my deepest secret. I guess I felt like I had the right to know something about you. At least talk to you a little, find out what kind of person you were.”
“It must have been a shock when I asked you out.”
Her eyes widened. “Boy, was it.”
“Well, at least now I know why you turned me down.”
“But then when I ran into you at happy hour the next week, I started to think it was fate or something. It wasn’t until after I finally said I’d go out with you that my friend Terri told me you’d called her to find out where I went after work on Fridays.”
“Reporters,” he said. “Can’t trust ’em.”
“That was sweet, really. And for the first few dates I was able to put the history aside, even though in my heart I really wanted to tell you the truth.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I was afraid. I was never publicly connected to the rape or the shooting. The newspaper in New York had a policy against printing the names of rape victims, and…well, he was technically a juvenile, so his name wasn’t printed either. I left Cornell and moved closer to home. The only people who really knew anything were my parents, and even they didn’t know that what I had done was as much revenge as it was self-defense.”
“Call it whatever you want. It doesn’t change the way I feel about you.”
“Back then it might have. What if we’d broken up? I didn’t want you—a reporter—knowing who I was and what I’d done. So I kept putting off telling you the truth about how we met. I said to myself, I’ll tell him if we date six months, if we date nine months, if we get engaged. By the time we got married, I’d kept it secret for so long that I couldn’t tell you—not after having concealed it for so long. Keeping the secret became as bad as the secret itself.”
The Informant Page 27