Invisible
Page 5
“Can’t this wait? It’s really not a convenient time, right now.”
“When a person of interest in a case shows signs of fleeing the jurisdiction, we’re not too worried about their convenience.” Kanchelskis took a step toward the door. “Not as a general rule.”
“I’m not very interesting. Trust me. And I’m not fleeing anything. I’m arriving. I have no travel plans at all. Why don’t you check with the airlines and leave me alone?”
“We just have a couple of questions.” Atkinson’s tone was more conciliatory. “They’re important, or we wouldn’t be bothering you at your hotel like this. They won’t take long. And it would be a lot more convenient to talk in your room, rather than having to relocate to our station house.”
I sighed, then opened the door the rest of the way and gestured for the detectives to come inside. Atkinson flashed a smile at me, then slid past, pulled a chair out from under the desk, turned it around, and sat down. Kanchelskis stayed by the door, his hands in his pockets. I returned to the armchair near the window.
“Is this about my father?” I leaned back against the unsupportive cushion.
“Why would you assume that?” Atkinson glanced at his partner.
“Well, here’s the thing, Detective.” I straightened up again and rubbed my spine. “I’ve been a civilian for less than eighteen hours. Nine of those I spent on a plane. Four, in a car. One, talking to an old lady. And say another one dealing with rental cars and airport bullshit. That leaves under three hours, and there’s a limit to how much trouble a person can get themselves into during that length of time. I mean, it’s conceivable that I broke a couple of speed limits earlier. Maybe ran a red light. But are those the kind of things that would bring a pair of detectives running to my doorstep?”
Atkinson raised an eyebrow.
“And there’s the fact that only one person knew I was going to stay at an airport hotel tonight. Mrs. Vincent. My father’s housekeeper. I was just with her, up at his home. I did nothing suspicious while I was there. Nothing to make her think a call to New York’s finest was necessary. Which means she was acting on instructions. I’m guessing yours. Look, I get how this works. A man suddenly dies. You have to rule out funny business, so you play the percentages. You talk to the family. Which in my father’s case is just me. And you can add to that the fact that I wasn’t around in the aftermath of his death, so you didn’t get the chance to question me before.”
“That’s right.” Kanchelskis glared at me and folded his arms. “You weren’t around. You and your father were on bad terms. You had been for years, from what we hear. Plus you were in the army, meaning you have the kind of know-how to make someone disappear. If you had the correct motivation. Which you did, because you stood to lose a lot of money if your father went ahead and sold his company on the cheap to his partner, instead of leaving it to you.”
“Oh, cui bono?” I nodded as if I’d been hit by a profound revelation. “Who benefits? You are playing this by the book, aren’t you, Detective? But you’re way off the mark. My father wasn’t going to sell on the cheap. The reason he brought in a partner was to guarantee a fair price, and to ensure the company would continue in good hands. He knew I had no interest in the business, but was going to leave me the proceeds anyway. I had absolutely nothing to gain by killing him. Here, let me show you something.”
I reached for my pocket, and right away the detectives went for their guns.
“Settle down, gentlemen!” I held up my hands. “They do say the pen is mightier than the sword, but there’s no need to panic. I have a letter here, from my father. You need to read it. Then you’ll understand the background to the whole situation.”
I handed the letter to Kanchelskis. He read it slowly and passed it to Atkinson.
“That thing’s two years old.” Kanchelskis’s expression was hovering somewhere between suspicion and disgust.
“I know. But I only just got it. The army has a system for—the details don’t matter. Long story short, the letter got sent to all kinds of places around the world before it reached me. I came as soon as I could after finally getting it.”
“It’s ancient history. There’s nothing in it we didn’t already know. But one thing does really jump out.” Kanchelskis narrowed his eyes. “You don’t show up for your father’s funeral, and then come running as soon as there’s a mention of money?”
My father’s funeral. What was wrong with me? I hadn’t even thought about that. Where had it been held? When? Did anyone come? We don’t have any other family. Did anyone speak? The sudden rush of questions was bad. But worse was the knowledge that my father must have gone into the ground still believing I’d forsaken him.
“It wasn’t like that.” I shook my head and dragged my mind back to the present. “I didn’t even know my father was dead. If there was a letter telling me, then that was delayed, too. I only found out just now, when Mrs. Vincent told me.”
“Really?” Kanchelskis’s voice was heavy with disdain. “You were waiting for a letter? What century are you living in? No one could call you? Send you an email?”
“Actually, no. I was posted to some sensitive areas overseas. The only kind of permitted contact was snail mail.”
“I can believe that.” Atkinson cleared his throat. “My brother’s in the navy. He’s a weapon systems techician. We’re never allowed to know where he’s stationed, either. We can’t call him. Or use email. Not even his wife can. And if any of us want to send him anything, like for his birthday or whatever, it has to go via some central place. It can take ages to reach him. Two years for a letter is extreme, though.”
“The army mail system is not the issue here.” Kanchelskis scowled. “Tell me, Mr. McGrath, where were you on March 5th?”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the day your father died.”
My father died on March 5th? I hadn’t known the exact date. It was like I was being crushed beneath all these unknown details. I could feel them like a weight on my chest. I took a moment and focused on continuing to breathe. Then I thought back to early March. I’d been in Afghanistan the whole first week. Most of it bivouacing in a cave. I’d been waiting for a contact to show up. He was supposed to bring me a “borrowed” laptop. I was there to make a clone of it, so that we could unscramble the data and read the contents without the owner knowing.
My contact was days late. I waited for him way longer than procedure dictated I should. But the kid did appear in the end. I ran the copying process as quickly as I could, but by the time the kid left to return the laptop he knew he’d have to hurry so it wouldn’t be missed. Its owner was due back from a trip to Kabul on March 8th, which was cutting things close.
I was surprised to see the kid retracing his steps ten minutes later. Then I understood. He realized he’d just then picked up a tail, so had started back toward the rendezvous point in the hope that whoever was following him would think he hadn’t delivered the laptop yet, meaning the contents weren’t compromised. It was a crazy plan. The only way for it to work was for him to be killed before he reached the cave. It was agony, watching him weave his way through the rocks and gullies at well below his previous pace.
The kid’s plan worked. He took two rounds in the back. So when I returned his attacker’s fire, I made sure to miss. I needed the guy to report back that he’d foiled the delivery, or the kid’s death would have been in vain. In the end I made sure it was worth something, though. The information we pulled from the cloned computer saved at least a dozen other lives.
“I can’t tell you where I was on March 5th.” It took a conscious effort to push away the memory of the kid’s body sprawling between two giant rocks, his blood soaking into the sand from the gaping holes between his shoulder blades. “Only that I was deployed overseas.”
“How convenient.” Kanchelskis’s lips twisted into a sneer.
“Claiming you were overseas isn’t good enough.” Kanchelskis folded his arms. “We need more.”
“OK.” I nodded. “I’ll have my ex-CO get in contact with you. He can vouch that I was on an operation, outside of the United States, on the relevant date.”
“That’s still not good enough.” Kanchelskis shook his head.
“It’s the best you’re going to get.”
“Give us your CO’s contact information. We’ll get in touch with him.”
“Fine.” I held out my hand. “Pass me that pad from the desk. I’ll write it down.”
“And we’ll be back if we have any more questions. So don’t leave town.” He nodded to Atkinson. “You ready?”
“Mind fetching the car?” Atkinson drummed his fingers on the desktop. “I’ll meet you out front in a minute.”
Kanchelskis grunted, then left, and Atkinson waited for his footsteps to die away along the corridor.
“I apologize for my partner.” He shot me a weak smile. “Kanchelskis was born extra suspicious, I guess.”
“That’s an understandable trait in a detective.” I nodded. “You’re telling me you’re not suspicious, as well?”
“Maybe I am.” He looked away. “But in a different way.”
“Different how?”
“Kanchelskis, he thought maybe you had something to do with your father’s death, and then stayed out of sight till the dust settled. Me, I come from a military family, too. I know how long it can take to hear news, and then get away from your posting. And I know how some army people think. They can get used to coloring outside of the lines. And to finding violent solutions to certain kinds of problems. So I thought, maybe you’d come back to look for your father’s partner, given what happened.”
“What did happen, exactly?” I paused. “You’ve got to understand, when I came back—today—I thought my father was still alive. The fact that he’s not is news to me. I’m still processing it. So why would I look for his partner? I don’t know anything about the guy. All I heard is that my father apparently had a screaming match with him on the night he died.”
“The screaming match part is correct.” Atkinson’s fingers drummed a little louder on the cheap wood. “OK. I’ll give you some background. You’ve read your father’s letter, so you know he was planning to sell his company to his partner. The price was going to be based on a formula they signed up to at the outset. Now, from what our finance guys tell me, your father was pretty old-school. These days, most businesses try to avoid owning too many assets. They prefer to lease their buildings and equipment and so on, to keep the value of their balance sheets as low as possible. That way, all the things their shareholders care about, like return on investmest or whatever, appear much greater. Your father wasn’t like that.”
“I can believe that.” I could hear my father’s voice in my head. “I remember his lectures, from way back when he was still hoping I’d join the business. He didn’t have any shareholders, so he could run the company whichever way he wanted. He thought those accounting tricks were bullshit. And to him, it was always better to have something than not to have it. He was like a handyman with a garage full of nails and screws and nuts and bolts. If you have the spare parts, you can use them somewhere down the line. If you don’t, then you can’t.”
“That makes sense.” Atkinson closed his notebook and slipped it back into his pocket. “But it was a problem for Pardew, his partner. I guess he hadn’t done his due diligence very well because the company had a lot more assets than he expected. Meaning the purchase price was going to work out a lot higher, too. So Pardew started cooking the books. He was moving fringe assets between old subsidiaries—your father apparently bought lots of other companies over the years, and never officially closed any of them down—and recording the transferred assets at much lower values. Here’s an example. There’s a brownstone in Hell’s Kitchen. Your father acquired it years ago as a sweetener for another deal. He never did anything with it, but its value skyrocketed with all the development that’s going on. It’s now worth north of thirty million dollars. Pardew moved it to a different subsidiary and booked it at twelve million. The discrepancy came to light when your father heard about a developer sniffing around for properties to buy in the area and thought about off-loading it. He started looking, and found lots more examples. That’s why he summoned Pardew to the meeting at his house. It’s what led to the confrontation they had. After Pardew left, your father dismissed his housekeeper for the night. He demanded to be left alone. Then he collapsed. He was dead thirty minutes later. Now, it’s theoretically possible that someone else—you, in Kanchelskis’s version of events—was there and finished your father off once they were left alone. In Kanchelskis’s version, that would be to stop him selling the company at the cheaper rate Pardew’s scheme would have resulted in. But if you ask me, that’s unlikely. To me, it all falls on Pardew. Covering up a multimillion-dollar fraud is a powerful motive. He wanted to stay out of jail, and probably hoped to still buy the company from your father’s estate at a knock-down price.”
“This Pardew guy sounds like a twenty-four-karat asshole. I’m surprised my father ever hooked up with him. Did he have any priors?”
“No. He was a big shot at a rival firm when your father brought him on board. His nose was completely clean. No red flags after they became partners, either, except one thing last year. A DUI bust.”
“My father hated drunk drivers. I can’t believe he didn’t cut him loose. The old man must have been getting soft.”
“There was no cause to dissolve their partnership. The case was dropped. It never went to court. Your father might not even have known about it.”
I moved to the window and pulled back the curtain, but all I could see was the white outside wall of a parallel wing of the hotel. It was glowing unnaturally bright in the paranoid glare of the airport’s security lights. “Where’s Pardew now? I’d say he has a lot to answer for.”
“That’s exactly how I thought you’d react.” Atkinson nodded. “But no one knows where he is. We arrested him after the autopsy was complete. The ADA agreed to charge him. She was hoping for murder in the second, but was sure that manslaughter at least was a lock. The case went to court. It was tricky—fraud always is, even when it’s just to establish motive—but everything was going well. Then, right before the prosecution was due to rest, some critical papers went missing. As far as anyone knew, they were there at the courthouse. But no one could find them. So the judge declared a mistrial. And two days leter, Pardew disappeared.”
“This asshole got off because some papers were lost?” I took a step toward him. “Are you serious?”
Atkinson shrugged. “That kind of thing happens more often than you’d think. What can I say? The system’s not perfect.”
“Something needs to be done about it.”
“I agree.”
“What do you suggest?”
“First thing, we need to find those papers. They’re the key. The ADA won’t waste time trying to re-file the case without them. And given that they contain most of Pardew’s financial records—a lot of which he deleted online when he realized he was going to be arrested, so we can’t get them anywhere else—they might give us a clue as to where he’d run to. If we’re lucky.”
“Have you looked for them?”
“Of course. The best we can. It’s complicated, jurisdiction-wise. We need the cooperation of the court guys. No one’s got the manpower to search the place, top to bottom. And a lot of the people who work there aren’t too happy talking to cops.”
“Why not? Surely judges and lawyers talk to cops all the time?”
“They do. But I’m no
t talking about them, so much. I mean the people who really know what’s going on. The invisible guys. The clerks. Security guards. Janitors. Guys who make the cappuccino at the coffee bar, and spend all day chatting to everyone who passes through.”
“You really think they’re the guys to talk to?”
“I do. If someone outside of the NYPD could spend some time down there, bend a few ears, you never know…”
I turned back to the window.
“Let me give you an example.” Atkinson stood up. “A while back, there was this case that hinged on getting DNA evidence off some clothing that had been taken to the courthouse as an exhibit in a trial. The problem was, the box of evidence had disappeared. No one knew where it had gone. The place got turned upside down. No one could find it, and the case was about to get kicked out. Then a janitor heard a couple of lawyers talking about the problem, and he led them to one of the judges’ chambers. There the box was, right on a shelf. Of course, that time it led to the accused guy getting cleared. But you see what I mean?”
“I do. Still, it sounds like a long shot.” I thought for a moment, then held out my hand. “All right. If it’s the only angle we have, give me your card. I’ll spend some time at the courthouse. Keep my ears open. And if I hear anything, you’ll be the first to know.”
Chapter Five
Innocent until proven guilty.
That’s an important assumption in civilian life, from what I’ve heard. Most of the time. But in the army—in the Intelligence community, at least—we lived by a different mantra. Lying, cheating bastard until proven otherwise.
The importance of this principle was hammered home about nine months into our initial training program. It came with our first ICT, or Integrated Competence Test. The idea was that up to that point the instructors had taught us a number of separate skills, so the next step was for them to see if we could put these together under mission-like conditions. To find out, we were taken one at a time from Fort Huachuca to a small town in New Mexico. The first task was to interpret satellite photographs to determine the location for a dead drop. Next we had to retrieve the message from its hiding place and decode it. The decoded message gave the specifics for a covert rendezvous, which meant we had to not only show up at the correct place and time, but also dress and act in such a way as to win the confidence of the contact who’d be waiting there. The guy was playing the role of an aerospace engineer who’d been approached by a Russian spy who was trying to steal the engine design for the next generation of US stealth fighter. Once his trust had been established—which wasn’t easy, given his twitchy, paranoid geekiness—he dropped a pair of bombshells. Another technician had sold out and was preparing to hand the plans over to the Russian, that night. And one of our handlers—he didn’t know which one—was a double agent, so if the information was passed through our regular channels, it would be compromised and the opportunity to capture the traitor and retrieve the plans would be lost.