Nantucket Five-Spot (18 page)

I took another five minutes and then drove the rest of the way to town.

Inside the station, Liam Brady was on dispatch, sitting behind the glass panel reading one of the
Left Behind
novels. Liam was a big chunky kid still fighting off the last of his adolescent acne. He had just been promoted from summer special to full-time. It was probably a mistake but I was shorthanded. He tried to cover up the book with some schedules. But he was busted and he knew it. Reading on duty was against the rules and those books were tragically bad anyway.

I said, “Not on the job, Liam.”

“Sorry, Chief. Slow day.”

“But even slow days require your undivided attention.”

He slid the book into a drawer as I walked past him toward my new cubicle.

Charlie Boyce was waiting for me with an update. The Bulgarians had no working papers, and two of them had out-of-date passports. The one I recognized had his working visa, but it only gave him another week. All of them had criminal records and outstanding warrants in Bulgaria. And none of them had any idea who hired them. It was done over the phone.

“How did whoever it was get this Bulgarian's number?”

“I asked him that, Chief. He laughed. He said it was ‘A referral.' Very American.”

But not for long. I thanked Charlie and then took a few minutes to call the INS. I spoke briefly to a woman named Miriam. “Agents will be taking them to Barnstable detention tomorrow morning,” she assured me.

She sounded tough enough to do the job herself. I hung up, and took the stairs up to the second floor and my office. I stood in the doorway for a few seconds, checking out the big room, seeing it with a fresh perspective, as a fifteen-by-thirty-foot surveillance grid. I knew what I was looking for, which made searching easy. I checked under the desk and behind my pictures—the Los Angeles Police Academy graduation shot of Chief Bratton shaking my hand, a pair of diplomas and a some prints—a Winslow Homer watercolor of a whitewashed wall with tropical flowers, Hockney's
Mulholland Drive
, a print from a museum show.

Miranda said to me once, “You'll know you have real money when your pictures cost more than the frames.” I didn't see that happening any time in the near future.

The bug was under the desk telephone.

I found it as soon as I turned the thing upside down. It was a magnetized chip of metal about the size of a breath mint. I was furious, but it somehow struck me as funny also. I heard the old Certs ad in my head, some surreal new version of it: “It's two, two, TWO mints in one! It's a candy mint! It's a criminal conspiracy to conduct illegal surveillance mint!”

I pulled it off the phone. It was wireless. There was probably some sort of transmission booster attached to the building. I'd find it later. Now I had to figure out who put it there. I booted my computer, logged on the NPD site, and scrolled through the visitor logs, every notation since early May.

An hour later, I found him.

Chapter Sixteen

Procedural

The lists were tedious: names, dates and topic references, meetings on everything from town wetlands override warrants to circus permits to fire alarm infractions and police charity donations. Dan Taylor's was marked “Various complaints.”

I smiled at that. Everyone knew Dan too well to itemize his grudges. The list went on and on, page after page. I remembered most of the meetings. Nothing struck me as significant. None of the various aggrieved private citizens, realtors and town officials seemed promising candidates for position of mad bomber or criminal mastermind.

I had just reached the morning of June 27th, when I saw this notation:

“9:50, Tyler Gibson, re: parking permits.”

I recalled the meeting. Dan Taylor had barged into my office without an appointment, causing a fair amount of confusion before Gibson finally left. I had turned my back on Gibson. If he had been quick-witted and cool under pressure, he could have stuck some little electronic component under my phone. Not many circumstances, among all the meetings in my cramped little office, presented such an opportunity. I thought back, assembling the choreography of it in my mind. Had he been standing at my desk when I turned around? I seemed to remember that.

Tyler Gibson. I pulled my computer toward me. I didn't have Franny's CARGO program, but the over-the-counter generic substitute would do just fine this morning.

I Googled the guy.

First I tried Google Images. No luck.

But the regular search turned up his investment newsletter,
Pigs Get Nothing.
There was a quotation at the top of the home page: “Bulls get rich and Bears get rich. Pigs get nothing.”

The most recent entry was dated May 27th. Before that he had been posting two or three times a week. The May 27th entry promised a rundown of the telecom stocks and the legal ramifications of the proposed new regulations. But it was a month later, and the site hadn't been updated. No explanation, only a lot of annoyed readers in the comment trail.

At the Fourth of July AIDS benefit, Gibson had freaked out over the fireworks. It looked like classic delayed stress, which made sense. He had the harrowed, suspicious look I had seen on so many veterans' faces. He had practically hit the floor when the fireworks started. I'd seen Haden Krakauer jump the same way when a car backfired.

The NPD was hooked into the Department of Defense computer archives. We couldn't access classified material, but we could pull anyone's military record and get rank, serial number, promotions, infractions, type of discharge, all that stuff. I logged on and entered Gibson's name.

No record of service.

I spelled it every way I could—with an “i” and an “e” instead of an “o” in the last name; with an ‘i' instead of a ‘y' in the first name. I went back in time to the eighties; tried all branches of the service, including the National Guard and the Coasties.

Nothing.

I was stumped. I needed a photograph of this guy. I accessed the Los Angeles DMV. I got Gibson's driver's license picture. Same guy. I wasn't quite convinced, though. After all, this was a techie who could hack into Billy Delavane's e-mail and leave a trail back to Haden Krakauer—if my theory was right. So getting into the DMV database and changing a picture would be no problem. It sounded far-fetched, but that didn't affect procedure. I still needed another picture to corroborate Gibson's ID.

The license gave Gibson's address in the 10700 block of Wilshire, in Westwood, near the 405. I thought of the rental client Elaine Bailey had mentioned at the envelope house. I needed to know that guy's name. I called her and left a message on her voice mail.

Then I tried the building management office in L.A. Soon I was chatting with an affable southerner named Bo Tanner. He ‘ran the outfit' at the building, with a crew of six. He sounded like another veteran, and indeed he had been in the 2nd Battalion of the 1st Air Cavalry Division in Viet Nam. He laughed at the idea of Gibson serving in the military.

“No way in the world, Chief. That old boy couldn't shoot a BB gun.”

Their security cameras were still hooked up to a creaky VHS system—the building management was too cheap to upgrade. The tapes were erased every seventy-two hours, but the police had taken one of the cassettes as evidence in a burglary a few months before. There might be something on there, if I could get a hold of it.

I thanked him and hung up.

My first thought was Chuck Obremski. He still owed me a favor. He always would, no matter what happened, no matter how many favors he did for me.

Years ago, he had stolen some money from a major drug bust stash to pay his son's gambling debts. We argued about it, at one point getting into an actual shoving match. But I covered for him during the Internal Affairs investigation. My own son had just been born. Maybe that had something to do with it. Anyway, Chuck walked away clean—not even a departmental reprimand.

Now he was five years from retirement and his son was going to law school. He'd be glad to help. I figured he was still working out of the Sawtelle station in West L.A. I called and left a message. Ten minutes later he called me back.

“Henry the K. How are ya?”

“I'm good Chuck. How about you?”

“Breaking in a new partner, three weeks into the South Beach diet, quitting smoking while we take care of my mother-in-law in a two bedroom house I still haven't paid for. Couldn't be better. How ‘bout you, K? Ever hear from that Franny whatshername? Tater?”

“Tate. We're actually working a case together now.”

“Working a case! I've heard it called a lot of things, K. But never that.”

“No, seriously—”

“I know, I know. You're in the news, K. Someone's blowing the crap out of your retirement village down there. Oh yeah—I keep track of you, buddy.”

“Listen, Chuck, I need a favor.”

“Damn! I took a crazy shot and guessed that. What dya know? I must carry that gold badge for a reason.”

I didn't rise to it. Chuck had always used insults as terms of endearment.

I gave him the address and the date of the burglary. I needed him to work with the doorman and send me a decent grab off the surveillance video. I gave him the doorman's phone number. He grunted his assent as he scribbled the information.

“I'm on it.”

“Thanks, buddy.”

“Fuck you. Kids okay?”

“Great.”

“Mine graduates from Boalt in June. Just what I need. Another lawyer in the family.”

“At least you get free advice.”

“Are you kidding? That punk charges me to read my insurance claims.”

We hung up without saying good-bye, as always.

Getting the screen-grab would take a day or two. I could use the time to pursue other lines of inquiry. Iraq, for instance. Whatever triggered this baroque assault on Haden Krakauer must have started there. His life had been uneventful before and after the war. He grew up on Nantucket. I did some checking—stable family life, no tangles with the law, no problems at school.

He went on to West Point—his Dad had been a general, commuting to Otis Air Force base all through Haden's childhood—and Officer Candidate School after that. He had a bunch of unpaid parking tickets that had cost him about six hundred bucks when he tried to renew his registration last year, that was all.

It had to be Iraq.

Billy Delavane's brother had served with Haden in the war. Actually Haden had pulled some serious strings to get Ed transferred to the Camp Doha motor pool. The MPs were closing in on Ed in Jeddah, where he was screwing Muslim girls and getting them drunk on grain alcohol from his still. At least he wasn't making s'mores over a burning Koran.

Haden got him out of there, put him to work on the base and kept a close eye on him. They never became friends. Ed didn't appreciate the favor. He resented losing his business and his harem. He never understood how close he had come to a court-martial, a dishonorable discharge, and a term in the stockade. Or maybe he didn't care. From what I had seen of him, Ed was a textbook sociopath. He had almost killed me last winter, and I had solved the case that sent him to jail. I wasn't his favorite person. But if anyone could tell me what happened to Haden in Iraq, it was Ed Delavane.

He was currently being held at FMC Devens, pending his transfer to Cedar Junction, the old Walpole Maximum Security facility, where he'd serve out his life sentence. I called the SIA at the prison and set up an appointment for the next day.

I caught the early boat the next morning.

As always, driving through Hyannis I felt a quiet shudder of relief. The town had the same flattened commercial sprawl as Los Angeles—but without the palm trees or the prosperity. The mall had turned Main Street into a dreary ghost town, though I suspect the average ghost probably had better things to do than hang out in junky furniture stores and dingy bars. Who needs another ‘going out of business' sale or bad ‘Polynesian' diner? They have actual houses to haunt.

Devens was even worse—a dying husk of rust belt squalor and cheesy commerce: six places to buy pizza and no bookstore. The Army base at Devens had closed more than a decade ago, leaving the usual crumbling buildings and poisoned groundwater behind. Supposedly the town was having a commercial resurgence. The jury was out on that one. The gray drizzle didn't help.

The prison wasn't much worse than the rest of the town. I parked in the lot, went inside and signed the paperwork. A guard led me to the interview room. It was crowded and the waiting area was full of crying women, noisy kids, and harried lawyers.

The door at the far side of the room opened and Ed sauntered out, eyes narrowed under his Army flat-top buzz cut, handcuffed in his prison jumpsuit, escorted by two guards. The outfit didn't humble him the way it was supposed to. He wore it like a boy psychopath's Halloween costume. He grinned when he saw me, a wide gap-toothed, Jack O'Lantern warning, with one lunatic candle lighting it up from inside.

“Howdy, Chief.”

I pulled up a chair and sat down. “Ed.”

“How's the stomach?”

“Turned out I had an abdominal hernia. Lepore closed it up for me. So you did me a favor.”

“That little prick Rafferty hadn't showed up. I would have done you a permanent favor.”

“And the staties would have gunned you down where you stood.”

“If they could hit what they were shooting at.”

I shrugged. “One of them would have winged you eventually.”

“Maybe.”

We watched each other for a while. The guards were glad to step away. Even seated, his compact body had a kind of compressed tension, ready to explode if he took the pressure off.

“So, Mr. New Police Chief. I had my eye on you for quite a while.”

“And nothing came of it. I had my eye on you for three weeks. And you're in here.”

He nodded. “You nailed Parrish, too. That was good.”

“He wanted to make a deal.”

Ed laughed. “Wheeler-dealer.”

“He's doing his deals in MCI Shirley right now.”

“Minimum Security section?”

I nodded.

“Well, fuck him.”

Another silence. Ed sat forward “Well, you're good, but you're no Ted McGrady.”

“I hear that a lot.”

“When he arrested me, he didn't have a gun. No deputies with him. No handcuffs. He just knocked on my door and said, ‘It's time.' I went with him. I could have knocked him out with one punch. But I went with him.”

“I wish I'd gotten that kind of respect.”

He let out a raucous cawing laugh, like a seagull. He had the black, empty eyes of a bird, the comfortable slouch of a lifetime predator. “Good one. But you were just another cop to me.” He flashed that grin again. I wondered what had happened to his teeth.

“I want to ask you a few questions.”

“What do I get for answering?”

“The satisfaction of being a good citizen.”

“I prefer cash.”

“Can't do it, Ed. Not on my salary.”

He shook his head. “Who else but a cop would brag about being a loser?”

“A priest?”

That laugh again. “Good one. I'm starting to like you, Kennis.”

An assessing silence settled between us. The two guards shifted from foot to foot. One checked his watch. I had been given all the time I needed today, and they weren't happy about that.

“So, Billy's been to see you a lot lately.”

“He's a good kid. He set me up with some work when I got back to the island. Car repair stuff. He talked to Chris Witte about me. I liked working on those foreign cars.”

“You should have stuck with it.”

“The pay sucked.”

“What do they pay you in here?”

He shook his head. “It's a little late for that, Chief.”

“Sorry.”

“I got nothing to spend it on anyway. I quit smoking.”

“Homeland Security thought you were helping Billy buy military grade explosives.”

He crossed his arms. “And they never even apologized.”

“So they're not just stupid, they're also rude.”

He hacked out another laugh. “You're three for three today, Chief.”

I let a few seconds go by. “How are you at taking orders, Ed?”

A level stare. “You've seen my records. You tell me.”

“And yet you left the service with an honorable discharge. How do you explain that one?”

“Friends in high places?”

“One friend in particular.”

“One was enough.”

“Well, your friend's in trouble, Ed.”

“Tell me about it. We watch the news in here, Chief.”

I sat forward. “He's being set up. I'm trying to prove it. And I need your help.”

“As a character witness?”

I ignored the joke. “This whole thing started in Kuwait. It's somebody he knew from the service. Someone who's holding a grudge from back then. You're the only one I know who was there. I can't track down everyone Haden served with. I'm running out of time. Think back. Did he have any enemies? Did anything happen that might have triggered this craziness? Did he hurt anyone? Cross anyone? Fuck anyone up? Something bad went down over there. I know it.”