Heart of a Killer (10 page)

We started talking about Karen, and Sheryl said that as far as she knew, Karen was still unaware of the furor. “This is the longest she’s been in the hospital,” she said. “Each time gets longer.” It was an obvious sign that her condition was growing ever more serious.

When she had exhausted her questions, I told her about my meeting with Timmerman and his offer to pay for her representation, as long as it wasn’t by me.

She barely gave it a moment’s thought. “No, I want you.”

“There are better lawyers out there.”

“But none that I can manipulate so easily,” she said, and laughed, even though she probably wasn’t joking. “And that Medal of Honor thing you used on the media was cool … I liked that.”

“I was pretty pleased with that myself,” I said, smiling, before I dropped the bomb. “Why did you confess to killing your husband?”

She flinched slightly, or maybe not, and said, “Because I killed him.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “And the cop that arrested you isn’t so sure, either.”

“Well, you’re both wrong, so drop it, okay? Keep your eye on the ball, Harvard.”

“I’m doing just that,” I said. “Public opinion is on your side, which means the politicians making this decision would like to be on your side as well. But they most likely see themselves as trapped, because their lawyers are telling them that you don’t have a legal leg to stand on.”

“So?”

“So they just might want to have a way to do this that doesn’t break the law, or at least gets you off their plate. Getting you off their plate means getting you out of prison.”

“So you think I’m innocent, and that you’re going to prove it in time to save Karen? What the hell are you smoking, Harvard?”

“I do think you damn well might be innocent, but I don’t have to prove it. All I have to do is give the parole board enough evidence, enough of an excuse, to let you out.”

“That’s not the way things work, Jamie. And even if they did, they don’t work fast enough.”

“Sheryl…”

“Harvard, I killed the son of a bitch.”

While it might seem unusual for a lawyer, at that moment I was glad that I thought my client was lying.

Novack spent the better part of the morning digging into Charlie Harrison’s financial life. It had taken a substantial, albeit strange, turn about six months before his death. Prior to that time, his only source of income appeared to be his work at the Chevy dealership, which earned him a decent, if unspectacular, living. Each December there was an extra amount in the middle of the month. It was of varying size, and Novack suspected it was a bonus, dependent on sales for the year.

But nine months before he died, he received a wire transfer in the amount of $50,000. He subsequently received four more payments, also of $50,000, at odd times in the remaining months. They were also wire transfers, and the last one was three weeks before he got his throat slit.

Novack was able to accomplish a lot of this work on the police computer, something he would have been far less able to rely on six years earlier. But there was a limit to what could be found, or at least what he was capable of finding. Fortunately, he had other resources at his disposal.

Novack called Sandy Barone, an FBI agent in the Newark office. They had met when their paths crossed on a murder case Novack was working on. The suspect was also one of the targets of a large-scale fraud investigation the Feds were knee-deep in, and Barone had approached Novack about it.

Her specialty was in financially related crimes, and as is the FBI’s policy, she tried to get Novack to, if not back off, be deferential to the Bureau. At first Novack thought she was joking, since his case was a murder, and he learned in Police Work 101 that killing was worse than stealing.

Barone’s position was that she was not trying to hurt Novack’s case, but that the fraud investigation involved many people, huge amounts of money, and had international implications. She was of the opinion that the Bureau should have some leeway, and that Novack’s case would not be imperiled, merely delayed a short time.

They clashed, not exactly a news event since Novack clashed with everyone, but ultimately they worked it out. Novack even developed a respect for Barone, one reason being that she was one of the rare federal agents who didn’t threaten to go over his head. All of this brought the total number of FBI agents that he respected to one.

From Barone’s perspective, once she got past the fact that Novack was the most annoying person on the face of the Earth, she recognized that he had at least two worthwhile qualities that were in short supply in the population: He was a dedicated, talented cop, and if he told you something, you could absolutely take it to the bank. Of course, very rarely did you like what Novack told you.

“It’s your favorite cop,” Novack said when he got her on the phone.

“That’s a short list to be on top of,” she said. “How are you? More importantly, how’s Cindy?” Barone and Cindy had met and immediately hit it off.

“She’s fine; still hopelessly in love with me.”

“The woman is a saint,” Barone said.

“Are we through chitchatting? I need some information on a company.”

“What a surprise; the man needs a favor.”

“You know, I could have called a hundred other people,” Novack said.

“You want me to transfer the call?”

“No, you’ll do,” Novack said. “The company is called Cintron Industries. All I know about them is that six years ago they were wiring money to someone I’m investigating.”

“When do you need it?” she asked.

“How about at the end of this sentence?”

She laughed and told him to hold on, then came back about five minutes later. “Sorry I took so long,” she said. “But it’s harder to find information on a company when there is no such company.”

“It’s a dummy?” Novack asked, not surprised.

“No, you’re a dummy. It doesn’t exist. I’ll do some more checking, but my guess is it never did.”

“Maybe it’s foreign?” he asked.

“Who do you think I work for, Mayberry PD? Our database includes every company on the planet, no matter what country they’re located in.”

“So how could a company that doesn’t exist wire money?”

“I can’t help you with that,” she said. “Maybe you should call a cop.”

When Novack got off the phone he was quite confused, but he was nowhere nearly as confused as he was aggravated and pissed off at himself. In one day he had uncovered a truckload of suspicious information, information he should have learned six years ago if he had taken the time.

The money Charlie Harrison had received was substantial, but not nearly life changing. He would not have quit his job had he not been expecting a huge upcoming payoff, or at least the prospect of continued payments on the level he had been getting them. Fifty grand every month or so definitely would reduce the incentive to keep saying, “What will it take to put you in this 2006 Chevy Malibu today?”

The money was real, even if it seemed to come from nowhere. Maybe it was money that provoked Sheryl Harrison enough to kill her husband, but Novack instinctively didn’t think so. Although he did consider it quite possible that the money was the reason Charlie died.

Charlie did something for that money, and the payment schedule made it likely that he kept doing it. Finding out what he did, six years earlier, was not going to be easy, and the truth was that Novack really didn’t know where to begin.

Then he remembered one of the curious things about this very curious case. In Charlie Harrison’s wallet when he died was that fake ID. Novack had no idea whether or not it had anything to do with the case, but chasing it down had one major advantage to it.

It gave him something to do.

Nolan Murray was a football fan. For a time he thought of himself as a football player, and even tried to be a walk-on for Rutgers, the year before he dropped out. A few scrimmages against the first team defense convinced him his future was not on the gridiron.

Nolan had the mind for the game; he had the mind for pretty much any game ever invented. He just didn’t have the physical skills, and he was smart enough to know it.

The first thing he had learned from his high school coach, the first thing every quarterback had to know, was that he had to see the whole field. He had to know where every player was, on both teams, and where they were likely to go. In short, he had to be completely aware.

Nolan Murray was completely aware, not on the football field anymore, but in his work. He was able to see everything, and that was important, because to stretch the football analogy a bit, he was about to compete in the criminal equivalent of the Super Bowl.

For instance, Nolan knew that Novack had reopened the case; he knew it within moments of Novack turning on his computer. He knew that he was investigating Charlie Harrison’s life, and that he had discovered the wire transfers.

With the resources of the government at Novack’s disposal, Nolan also was aware that he would discover, if he hadn’t already, that Cintron Industries didn’t exist. Unless Novack was incompetent, and Nolan knew that he wasn’t, the cop would understand that the payments Harrison received were on some level tied into his death.

But Novack would never get to the bottom of this. He wouldn’t have been able to if he had the six years, and now he had barely three weeks. After that it wouldn’t matter what he learned; the mission would have already been accomplished, and Nolan would have disappeared with an almost unimaginable amount of money.

Nolan was the type to make a decision and move on, rather than replay it over and over again in his mind. But the way he got to this place was a combination of brains and luck that would change the world.

Two years ago, almost to the day, he was out with his girlfriend in a bar. Actually, “girlfriend” might not be the word many people would use, since the relationship for Nolan was totally about sex. He had no desire to be open or emotionally available or intimate or any of the things a real relationship generally called for.

It happened that the “girlfriend” met another friend in the bar that night, who in turn had just met a guy who was clearly smitten with her. He lived outside of Philadelphia, and was in town visiting friends for the weekend. They all got to talking, and when the man, Stan Wollner, mentioned where he worked, the idea hit Nolan square between the eyes.

From there it was surprisingly easy. He hacked into the young woman’s Facebook account, and in subsequent days began to pretend to be her as “she” flirted with Wollner. She raised the prospect of them spending a weekend together, but kept it just out of reach for a while. Then “she” requested that he send a message to her at a time when Nolan knew he would be at work. What sweetened the pot was a clear inference that sex was becoming a definite possibility.

Wollner could have ignored it, or he could have left work and contacted her from somewhere outside. Had he done that, Nolan would have given up and gone back to focusing on his already very, very profitable business. Wollner was not supposed to go on the Internet from work, but as Nolan suspected, he couldn’t resist the temptation and did so.

With a few keystrokes, Nolan was therefore able to break in to the computer system of Wollner’s employer, and everything else Nolan was doing immediately paled into relative insignificance. Because Nolan Murray was now inside the cyber walls of the Limerick nuclear power plant, and no one would be aware of it until he was ready to tell them.

The planning from there had gone far more smoothly than Nolan could have predicted. Each step of the way he was prepared to abort if necessary, but that never came close to being necessary. Security was incredibly lax, well beyond Nolan’s expectations, and he had not expected great competence.

Even after the Japanese tsunami, and the focus on safety measures that the damaged nuclear plant prompted around the world, Nolan was surprised by the poor preparation at Limerick. It was as if they were daring him to proceed; if that was the case, he was quite willing to accept the challenge.

That’s not to say that everything was going as well as it could have. This stupid thing with Harrison’s daughter, while impossible to have predicted, had shined a light on the case that was extraordinarily unwelcome. It also confirmed to him that he had made a mistake in judgment those six years ago.

Sheryl Harrison should have died alongside Charlie. She was allowed to live because her confession would have given the police no reason to look into Charlie’s background and especially his finances, which was why Novack didn’t discover the wire transfers back then.

But ultimately it was a mistake, but it wouldn’t matter; by the time anyone might be able to figure out what was going on, it would simply be an academic exercise to do so.

And by then Nolan would be long dead, living happily ever after.

I couldn’t remember the last time I was this nervous. Maybe high school baseball, if I was up in a key situation against a pitcher I was afraid I couldn’t handle, which would describe just about every pitcher I ever faced. Certainly there were times I was nervous around my parents, at least back in the day when I still had the notion that I could please them.

I don’t think I had ever been nervous in my work life. In fact, I can safely say that nothing ever happened at work that I considered important a week after the fact. I did what I was assigned, and then I went home, came back the next day, and did it again.

The point was that it had been a while since something seemed crucial enough for me to be anxious about it. And nothing had ever, ever, made me as nervous as I was when I found out that the New Jersey Supreme Court was about to issue a ruling on my motion.

I heard about the impending ruling on television. My developing ego was a little miffed that the court had not itself made efforts to alert me, but the truth was I had no idea if any lawyer would have gotten that courtesy. It more likely was just not the way things were done.

But the decision was coming down at two o’clock. It could go in any of many directions; this was a complicated case and a simple “yes” or “no” was not necessarily called for, though “no” was a distinct possibility.