The Loot (Charlie McCabe Thriller)

by Craig Schaefer

  “They also didn’t figure that the ‘bad weather’ in question would later be known as the Great Boston Blizzard of ’69,” Charlie said.

  Dom nodded. “One of the worst storms in the city’s history. They bargained for a storm; what they got was six-foot drifts, zero visibility, and a completely paralyzed city. That was outside; inside, things went bad from the jump. The guns came out, and the janitor, the manager, and two cops ended up dead on the showroom floor. The SPD had a six-person crew, including the janitor. Well, six known. Those were the ones who got caught, but the authorities never figured out if they had any other help.”

  Beckett studied the press clippings. “Help like Sean Ellis.”

  “You got it,” Charlie said. “His name never comes up, but here’s a familiar one.”

  She handed him another clipping, with one line marked in yellow highlighter.

  “Kimberly Hutchens,” Charlie said. “Fellow student. After they set off the alarm and caused a bloodbath, the thieves split up, presumably hoping the cops couldn’t chase them all down. Kimberly, they didn’t have to chase. She got lost in the blinding snow, on foot and underdressed for the weather. She was found five days later when the storms started to clear.”

  “Dead in a snowbank.” Dom poked her finger at the highlighted part. “Hypothermia. Bet I don’t have to tell you the curious part.”

  “The curious part,” Beckett echoed. “That’d be how the authorities failed to find any of the stolen diamonds on her, I assume.”

  “According to Kinzman’s testimony, they split the loot and split the team up when they ran, hoping to get away with as much as they could.”

  Charlie sat back. She held the folder open on her lap, cool air-conditioning washing over her face as she wandered through fragments of the past.

  “If you want my guess,” Charlie said, “Sean Ellis was the one that got away. He was there, and he and Kimberly ran together. She started to slow down as the hypothermia set in—she was only wearing a windbreaker, in no condition to be out in a blizzard—and Ellis took the loot. He left her to die out there.”

  “Wouldn’t she have tried to take shelter?” Dom asked.

  “Maybe she did. Locked doors, no way in, nothing to break glass with. Or maybe she thought she could make it to safety if she just kept moving. She was probably more afraid of the cops than she was afraid of the weather.”

  Beckett touched his fingertips to his lips as he nodded. “It scans. Kinzman and the others wouldn’t rat on him, because if they did, the cops would snatch him and the missing diamonds. Besides, looks like the professor stashed at least some of his portion before going behind bars. Better to stay patient. Serve that revenge up nice and cold.”

  “He got out of prison two months ago,” Dom said.

  “Giving him operating capital—the stash he was able to hide—and one hell of a motive for payback,” Charlie added. “But now we know why Sean said the treasure he’s looking for doesn’t exist. He sold the diamonds, laundered the money somehow, and used it to launch his career in capitalism. Deep Country is the missing loot.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Charlie leaned forward and passed the rest of her folder up to Beckett in the driver’s seat. His stereo was on but turned down low, so only the soft, disconnected strains of a saxophone drifted over the hum of the air-conditioning. Like the faint reminder of a once-loved song, hovering on the edge of memory.

  “Here’s what we’ve got on the rest of the SPD,” she said. “Professor Kinzman was arrested with two of his students, Leon Guster and Sally Weinstein. Guster was a rich kid playing at being a socialist revolutionary; his parents got him the best lawyers money could buy, they severed his trial from the others, and he almost walked. In the end, he did ten years in minimum security. These days he’s a real estate agent in New Bedford. Sally, on the other hand, was a true believer and then some. She had to be removed from the courtroom for standing up and singing ‘The Internationale’ at the top of her lungs. She got out a while back and vanished off the grid.”

  “Stayed in touch with her good old professor, I’m guessing.” Beckett leafed through faded mug shots. The last in the stack filled the frame, glaring at the camera with tiny, piggish eyes and uneven bristle on his cheeks. “Who’s this guy?”

  “Brock ‘the Brick’ Kozlowski,” Charlie said. “All-star Boston University Terriers running back. His best friend, Guster, got the best lawyers; he got the worst. They convinced him to cop an insanity plea. Landed him in a state institution, where he received a decade or so of regular electroshock treatment and a regimen of antipsychotic drugs.”

  Beckett glanced over the folder at her. “I’m guessing he wasn’t actually crazy.”

  “Not before he went in, he wasn’t.” Charlie nodded at the mug shot. “Given his size, I’m guessing that was the one who came at me with the stun gun.”

  “These people were all students? They’d have to be in their late sixties now, just like Ellis.”

  “A sixty-year-old can still pull a trigger,” Dom said.

  “And Kozlowski can still hit like a sledgehammer,” Charlie said, rubbing the side of her head. “Trust me, he’s been keeping in shape. So that’s where we’re at: The professor’s spent the last forty years waiting to catch up with our client and get those missing diamonds back. Diamonds the client spent and turned into a corporate empire while his student union buddies were rotting behind bars.”

  “He’s a lousy socialist,” Beckett said.

  “A lousy human being all around,” Dom said, “but we don’t get to pick our clients. Not in this market, anyway.”

  “One of ’em doesn’t care about the money. Which one do you peg as our bomber?”

  “Can’t say,” Charlie replied. “Could be any of them. None of the gang showed any past proclivities for explosives; they didn’t use them on their heist, and the worst thing any of them had been arrested for before that was trespassing and vandalism. That’s the kind of knowledge they could have picked up since, though, either behind bars or once they got out.”

  “How did the canvass go?” Dom asked Beckett. “Those fences have anything good to say?”

  “Came up empty. Sounds like Kinzman hasn’t made his move to divest just yet. Probably waiting until he gets the rest of the diamonds from Ellis.”

  “The diamonds he doesn’t have,” Charlie said. “Okay, so we know the who and the why. The million-dollar question is, What are we going to do about it? If we can find out where Kinzman and his gang are holing up, we could make an anonymous phone call and sic the cops on ’em. I mean, wherever they are, they’re sitting on enough illegal guns and plastic explosive to send them all right back behind bars.”

  “True, true,” Beckett mused, “but you’ve got to consider the siren song of self-righteous payback. If Kinzman goes back inside for the long count, well . . . the only reason he’s stayed silent about Sean Ellis for the last four decades is because he wants those diamonds.”

  “Forty years,” Charlie said. “He’s got to know there’s a good chance Ellis spent the money a long time ago.”

  “When a man goes inside,” Beckett said, “he needs something to cling to, to keep himself sane. Maybe it’s family waiting on the outside, or a woman. For Kinzman, it was the loot. But once he realizes he’s never going to get his hands on those diamonds, nothing’s stopping him from dropping a dime on his former compadre. A civilian and two cops died in that heist, and there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  Dom narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m not seeing a downside. Sean Ellis abandoned a classmate to freeze to death in a blizzard so he could cover his own ass. He’s a prick—screw him.”

  “The downside is that Deep Country is Boston Asset Protection’s sole client at the moment, and sole source of income. We need this job to end smooth, clean, and with glowing references, or Sofia and Jake are looking at closing up shop once the next round of bills comes due.”

  “I appreciate that,” Charlie ar
gued, “and your loyalty to them, but we can’t take risks. We aren’t the only operatives handling security. There are two dozen people—our people, including Jake himself—out at Deep Country right this minute, and they have no idea what kind of danger they’re in. Not to mention the innocent people working for Ellis himself. The longer we wait to fix this, the more time we give Kinzman and his gang to launch another attack. They won’t make the same mistakes twice.”

  “Well, they’re not giving up and going home, not without those diamonds,” Dom said.

  Something occurred to Charlie. It was a nasty little voice, cold and reptilian, whispering from the back of her brain. An idea she would normally never contemplate. That said, she’d taken a few brisk steps over the line of the law since coming home.

  One big leap didn’t feel like such a transgression anymore.

  “There is something we can do,” she said.

  Beckett and Dom turned in the front seats, giving her their undivided attention.

  “We walk into Ellis’s office,” Charlie said, “we shut the door, and we tell him what we know.”

  Dom tilted her head. “To what end?”

  “He’s got something better than stolen diamonds: he’s got the corporation he turned them into, with a ready cash flow.”

  “You want to blackmail him?”

  “Yes,” Charlie said. “But not for us. We tell him that he has to make a deal with Kinzman and his former classmates. He’ll come to an agreement on exactly how much money he owes them, pay up, and end this before someone gets killed. If he does, it’s all settled. No harm, no foul. And if he doesn’t . . . well, if he doesn’t, we’ll tell him that we’ll drop a dime on him ourselves.”

  “You think he’ll go for that?” Dom asked.

  “A little pain in the wallet is better than disgrace and prison. He’s not afraid of the bombs or the kidnapping attempts, because we’re there to protect him. So we make it clear that his free ride is over. He needs to worry about us now.”

  “He’s not exactly going to give us a five-star performance review after that,” Beckett said.

  “Sure he is,” Charlie replied.

  She startled herself when she spoke. Her voice was colder, harder, than it needed to be, as the stress of the last few days found an outlet. Her reptile mind woke up and wrapped her brain in leathery dragon’s wings.

  “One anonymous call to the right person will trigger an investigation,” she said. “That investigation will end in Sean Ellis’s arrest, his trial, his incarceration, and the destruction of everything he’s ever loved or cared about. We have a weapon we can hold over his head for the rest of his natural life, and after all the shit he’s pulled, he is damn lucky that all we want is what’s fair. As it stands, he’ll do what we tell him to do, when we tell him to do it.”

  Dom looked to Beckett, silently following his lead. He met her gaze with an inscrutable expression. Something wordless passed between them.

  “Let’s do it,” Beckett said.

  Before Charlie could say a word, he held a hand up.

  “But,” he said, “not at his office. Not where he feels like he’s in control. If you’re going to put the screws to a man, you need to do it right. Have to put him on the defense from the jump, and keep him there.”

  “Where, then?” she asked him.

  “Where he’s most vulnerable. Where he sleeps. We do it tonight, after hours. And once we lay down how things are going to be, we keep him locked down tight until he holds up his end. He’s going to call Kinzman right in front of us, on speaker, and we’ll supervise every aspect of the deal. We’ll even play the middle and deliver the cash for him.”

  “You’re both forgetting something,” Dom said. “One member of the professor’s gang wants Ellis dead. They aren’t going to go away for a payoff.”

  “Which is why we’ll handle the transfer. That’s our chance to get a good look at these people up close and ferret out which one’s the mad bomber.”

  “And then?” Charlie asked.

  “And then Professor Kinzman can clean up his own backyard, or we’ll have to do it for him. We’ve got options.”

  He didn’t go into detail. Charlie didn’t ask him to. One problem at a time.

  “Be in the lobby of the Grandview at eight sharp,” he told them. “Wear your ID cards; the staff won’t give you any hassle. I’ll go up first and smooth things with whoever’s working the door, then call you up. But wait for my call, just in case. Never know with this kind of deal.”

  “How many ‘this kind of deals’ have you done?” Charlie asked him.

  He sidestepped the question. “I’ll tell the operatives on door duty that Jake sent us around to ask the client some follow-up questions about next week’s security detail.”

  “What if they call Jake?” Charlie asked.

  “They won’t. They’ll take my word for it. And that’s our ticket for as much alone time in the man’s penthouse as we require. We’ll make our case; then the ball’s in his court.”

  Charlie strode through the doors of the Grandview with a purpose. Despite all the turmoil in her life since she had come home from the service, all the danger, she felt buoyant. They were about to lay a major problem to rest, once and for all, and that would give her the breathing room she needed to focus on getting her father out of trouble.

  One problem at a time, she told herself.

  Dom was already there, sitting on a sofa in the lobby with her legs crossed and a newspaper unfurled in her lap. She glanced up, nodded Charlie over, and patted the empty seat next to her.

  “Beckett just went up to clear the way for us,” Dom said. “He’s going to see if he can get the guards on the door to take a smoke break. Once they’re out of sight, we move in.”

  “Not sure why. We work for the same outfit, and his story about needing to follow up with the client is airtight. Why the extra trouble?”

  “Deniability,” Dom told her. “In the remote chance that this plan goes sideways and Ellis flips his lid, nobody needs to know we were ever here. We are about to blackmail him. Not sure if you’re aware of this, but that’s kind of illegal.”

  That didn’t bother Charlie. And it bothered her that it didn’t bother her. She felt like she should have some moral gag reflex, some natural aversion to what they were about to do.

  What she had, instead, was clarity of vision. This was a mission. She’d do what she had to, to make sure she and her people survived. At the end of the day, coming home safe was all that mattered.

  “But they’ll know Beckett was here,” Charlie said.

  “And he’s got big, broad shoulders, and he doesn’t mind loading trouble on ’em. It’s you and me he’s trying to keep—”

  Her phone chimed. She put it to her ear. Then she snapped it off and jumped to her feet, letting the newspaper flutter to the floor. “C’mon. Upstairs. Now.”

  Charlie followed her in a sprint to the lobby elevator doors. Her ID card flapped on its lanyard, trailing behind her.

  “What’s going on?” Charlie asked, tight on her heels.

  Dom punched the call button and looked back over her shoulder.

  “They didn’t wait to make their next move. We just lost our client.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Dom and Charlie burst from the elevator on the penthouse floor and raced down a corridor of ivory lined with brass-numbered doors and pristine crown molding. Beckett wasn’t alone. One man was flat on his back on the freshly vacuumed carpet, out cold. Another sat propped up with his back against the wall. He kept his eyes squeezed shut and the heel of his hand pressed to his forehead, like he was fighting off a migraine.

  “She was, like, somebody’s grandmother,” groaned the sitting man. “Can’t believe we got jacked like that. We’re getting fired over this for sure.”

  “Nobody’s getting fired,” Beckett said. He lightly slapped the other man’s cheeks until he started to stir.

  Charlie crouched down beside the conscious one. T
o his left, the door to Ellis’s penthouse hung lazily ajar. Not kicked in: they’d either picked the lock or just knocked, posing as his minders, and gotten Ellis to open up.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Stupid distraction. This old lady comes over, starts making small talk; she was . . . I don’t know, nice. Suddenly somebody grabs me from behind, and there’s this wet towel over my mouth and nose, cutting off my air. Next thing I know I’m waking up on the floor with a jackhammer inside my skull.”

  “Chloroform,” Dom said. “You’ll live. The client?”

  “Gone.”

  Dom pushed through the open door to see for herself. Charlie followed. Ellis’s penthouse was a gorgeous span of polished oak and antiques, floor-to-ceiling windows offering an elite view of the Boston skyline. Nothing was broken, no signs of a struggle.

  “They probably stuck a gun in his ribs and walked him right out of here,” Dom said. She threw her hands in the air. “Fuck.”

  “There’s a security camera in the lobby,” Charlie said.

  “Sure, we can pull the footage, and it can tell us what we already know.”

  “We know who took him,” Charlie said, “but the footage will tell us what they look like now. Except for Professor Kinzman, all of our photos are forty years old. It’s a lead.”

  “A lead to what?” Dom shot a glance over Charlie’s shoulder, toward the open penthouse door, and dropped her voice. “We can’t call the cops. We call the cops, at best they rescue Ellis, and he fires us. Or they rescue Ellis, figure out the connection between him and the kidnappers, and he goes to prison. Same outcome: we’re screwed.”

  “We can’t not call the police, Dom. It’s one thing to keep quiet about an assassination attempt. When Ellis stops showing up for work, his own people are going to file a missing persons on him, at which point we’re a party to the kidnapping if we don’t report it.”

  “I know. I know.” She paced the floor in front of the windows, an angry shadow backlit by the city lights. “I know. Damn it. We’re out of options.”