Private Sector (21 page)

I shook my head. “Maybe you’d like to join me for lunch.”

“Oh my God.” She slapped her perfect hand on her perfect forehead. “I forgot to warn you to eat fast, didn’t I?”

“Forget it. I never stood a chance.”

“Nobody ever does.” She laughed. Then she said, “Jason asked me to give you a tour. He said you might be joining us, and I should make sure you know what you’re getting into.”

I pinched myself. I mean, the almost surreal Miss Tiffany Allison shows up wiggling her extraordinary fanny, I speed-eat with a billionaire, get thrown an astounding offer, and now a guided tour by this wind-up Barbie doll. Days like this are why Sean Drummond gets out of bed in the morning.

As we headed back to the elevator bank, I asked her, “So Tiffany, what’s with all those computer screens on his desk?”

“You know what we do, right?”

“Basically.”

“Three of those screens are from the Bloomberg service. Jason is intensely concerned with what’s happening on Wall Street. Our mergers are done with stock, and our employees are heavily vested, so Jason keeps a careful eye on the price.”

“And would most of Jason’s money be in company stock also?”

“Yes, there’s that.”

“Of course there’s that. What’s with the other screens?”

“Five of them track the traffic flow across our networks. Two are for Internet traffic, and the other three monitor special networks, like the Defense Department contract we got last year.”

“Why would he care about that?”

“We’re like road managers. We need to know where the traffic is coming from and where it’s going. Watching those monitors we can divert buildups to other fiber-optic lines to prevent traffic jams.”

“What is he, the Wizard of Oz?”

“Oh God, Jason doesn’t do it.” She laughed. “It’s all done through routers and switches. He just likes to see that they’re functioning efficiently. The last two screens are for video-teleconferencing. That’s our big bread-earner and the future of our corporation, so he uses it for all internal business.”

We had proceeded down ten floors and the elevator opened into a huge, darkened room. The temperature dropped about twenty degrees and about a hundred people were seated attentively behind consoles. Three large screens were on walls with lines of data blinking across them. Another wall was nothing but big gray metal boxes with wires coiling out the backs. Any second I expected Darth Vader to come waltzing out, ordering them all to destroy the universe.

“Operations room six,” Tiffany explained, “where we handle our aviation contracts. Nine of the top airlines use us as their Internet and data backbone.” She pointed at the machines against the wall. “Throw a bomb in this room and the entire U. S. air industry would stop running.” I suddenly wished I’d brought a bomb.

She approached a console. “Mark here is a customer service rep. If American Airlines wants to know why a message they sent to a parts vendor was never answered, Mark traces the problem.”

“You can read everybody’s traffic?”

“Of course. Every customer and every message is coded, so Mark recalls it from the server. Usually, the message was sent to the wrong address, or the airline operator coded it incoherently.”

I said, “How much business do you do?”

“Three billion last quarter. The same quarter last year we did two point six billion. Not bad considering the rotten economy. We have the best technology on the planet, and the most motivated people.”

“Why are your people the most motivated?”

“Because we believe in Jason.”

“I see.” I asked her, “Why do
you
believe in Jason?”

“Well . . . he’s just . . . extraordinary. For the past four years the entire telecommunications industry has been crashing. Dozens of companies have folded into bankruptcy. It’s survival of the fittest, and we’re not only the fittest, we’ve actually stayed profitable and growing. Jason’s a genius.” She studied my expression and said, “But you’re skeptical, aren’t you?”

“Reserving judgment.”

“I have no problem with that. I’ll have a packet delivered that contains our annual statement and a few articles about the company. Read them. If you’re still ‘reserving judgment, ’ or have questions, call me. We’ll talk about it . . . perhaps over lunch tomorrow?”

It would be discourteous to not at least come up with a few questions to discuss with Miss Tiffany.

But we continued our tour, waltzing through more operations rooms and offices, and ended up at a product display that Tiffany explained was a revolutionary video compression and decompression system. This was a way of crushing billions of bits of information, like voices, or pictures, or whatever, a sort of digital trash compactor, converting it all into light and zapping it down a fiber-optic line, and then yanking all those crushed bits out of the compactor and restoring them all to their former, wrinkleless glory.

This was how I understood the lecture, anyway, but I ordinarily am bored to tears by these sorts of discussions. This whole digital age schmiel—I mean, it’s a wonderful thing, right? Without it, I wouldn’t get all those football games piped into my TV on Sunday afternoons. But spare me the frigging details, you know? But that offer of three-quarters of a million a year in salary and bonus did stiffen my interest in matters technological. Tiffany’s presence sort of stiffened something else.

But all good things must come to an end, and she next deposited me back in the conference room. The packet she promised

arrived shortly afterward and gave me something to amuse myself with as the accountants chattered and babbled.

At four o’clock the door opened again and I looked up, hoping to see my new friend. But it wasn’t Tiffany, it was a receptionist from downstairs, escorting a nasty little runt who looked amazingly like Daniel Spinelli in a very bad mood.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A
MAJOR POLICE CONVENTION WAS BEING HELD AROUND A LONG, SHINY black limo. A platoon of Virginia state troopers, and scads of uniformed and nonuniformed locals, were being bullied around by short-haired, clean-cut guys in gray and blue suits who might as well have “FBI” stamped on their foreheads. Fifteen news vans and an army of reporters, cameramen, and photographers stood in a raucous pack being briefed by a good-looking Fed in a natty suit. Several news helicopters circled overhead.

Only two things draw reporters in such numbers—free booze and a particularly raunchy death.

I stood beside Spinelli in the small parking lot abutting the Iwo Jima monument, and it struck me that the statue hadn’t attracted such a crowd since the day it was unveiled. Five minutes after we arrived, a taxi stopped on the road above us and Janet Morrow stepped out. I had followed Spinelli over in my leased Jag, which was really convenient because it meant I had an escape.

Anyway, I watched Janet walk down the hill, and I sensed from her expression that we shared the same deduction—someone profoundly newsworthy was experiencing rigor mortis inside that limo. Flies, after all, will flock to any corpse. Reporters are slightly more discriminating.

Spinelli stared gloomily at his own feet, jaw muscles bunching and unbunching, and I was left with the impression that he was annoyed with me, very annoyed with her, and his balls were really on fire about that limo. But I didn’t press him. When one is standing beside a man who looks pissed and has a gun, patience tends to be a particularly worthy virtue.

Janet nodded politely at me and said to Spinelli, “Who died, Danny?”

He ignored her question and stiffly instructed both of us, “Follow me.”

He led us directly to the limo, flashing his badge and cursing at a pair of naive state troopers who foolishly tried to stop him at the yellow crime scene tape. The front and rear doors of the limo hung open on the hinges. We went first to the driver’s door, where I noted a heavy Hispanic man in a dark suit curled up on the floor. A small dribble of dark, dried blood ran down his forehead, and there appeared to be a swath of black electrical tape over the wound.

Next we peered inside the rear doors, where a young woman’s upright, naked body was sprawled across the backseat. Her position, like Julia Cuthburt’s, appeared to me to have been posed, her arms and legs spread wide apart—a bizarre display of complete vulnerability, and possibly another message to the police. Her ankles and wrists were chafed and raw, and a lipstick tube and hand mirror lay on the floor. As I mentioned, she was naked, and clothing articles were also on the rear floor, but were folded and stacked neatly, by her killer, the circumstances suggested. She had apparently been tied up and had struggled fiercely, yet no rope or other restraints were present that I could see. The killer, as before, was tidying up the loose ends and leaving no clues. In fact, I suspected the reason he had parked the car on the tarmac was to ensure there’d be no footprints for forensics to pick up.

I bent forward and examined the female victim more closely. Numerous bruises were evident on her torso, arms, and legs. Also, I observed some scorch marks on her arms and torso, made by something small and red-hot; possibly a lit cigarette, possibly a lighter. Her skin was waxy, and the inside of the car smelled awful, understandably, as her body had begun to bloat with gas. From these indications, she and the driver had been dead at least twelve hours. The female victim was brunette, quite pretty, and vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t place her. Ending the description, and apparently her life, her head was twisted to the right at a wildly unnatural angle. Her death mask, if you will, was a snarl.

“Know her?” Spinelli asked Janet.

She failed to reply.

In fact, her head was still inside the car, inspecting the murder scene. It struck me that Spinelli had brought us here and arranged this viewing to elicit shock or astonishment. His expression indicated that he was now both angry and frustrated.

“I asked, did you know her?” he repeated.

Janet peered over her shoulder and replied, coolly, “Everybody knows her, Danny. Carolyn Fiorio.”

Sounding quite annoyed, he repeated, “Do
you
know her?”

“I’ve seen her on TV and read about her in magazines. That’s all.”

“You, Major?”

“I’ve heard of her. The talk-show chick, right?”

Back to Janet, he asked, “Did your sister know her?”

“If she did, I wasn’t aware of it.”

He chewed on something, possibly his tongue. “Come with me,” he ordered. So we did, following him to a clump of oak trees about fifty yards away from the corpses in the car. He looked around to make sure he wasn’t overheard.

He picked at something on the tip of his nose and stared menacingly at Janet. “Fiorio was supposed to be at some big shindig last night at 7:15. The limo was ordered by her network staff and picked her up at the studio, about five after. The dead guy on the floor, that’s Miguel Martinez . . . wife, three little kids, the regular driver. When she never showed at her gig, her studio was contacted, the studio called the limo service, and the limo service tried to contact Martinez on the car radio. About midnight, the studio called the D. C. cops and reported her and the limo AWOL. Three hours ago, the NBC and CBS D. C. affiliates got an anonymous call saying the car was here.”

His tone as he described this hinted that we were high up on his shit list, or low on his popularity list, though in his case there might be no distinction.

Janet started to say, “I—”

His finger shot up to her face. “You listen to me, lady.”

“I’m listening.”

“You know things—I smell it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“My ass is on the line here. As the investigating officer of the first murder, I’m part of this task force, and I’m catching a world of shit. So quit fuckin’ me around.”

Janet calmly replied, “What is it you think I know, Danny?”

“Don’t play that game with me.”

“Game?”

“You
know
what I’m talking about.”

“No, enlighten me.”

He kicked a clod of dirt with his foot. We actually get instruction on this at law schools; how to piss people off. Miss Morrow, I suspected, got very good grades.

He was frustrated and said, “Don’t you get it? There’s been two more murders since your sister. We don’t get this asshole off the street, there’s gonna be more.” He gave her a probing look and added, “Come on. You know somethin’, don’t ya? Tell me.”

“Like what?”

“Ah, fuck.”

So we stood like this, Spinelli, Janet, and I for thirty more seconds with nobody saying a word. An acorn fell from a tree and

landed at our feet. A plane left a long contrail in the sky.

Janet finally said, “The same guy, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, same friggin’guy.” He added, “We timed her death at around nine last night. Like your sister and Cuthburt.”

I said, “And you think the killer was the one who called NBC and CBS?”

“That’s what we think.”

Janet said, “So he’s deliberately turning up the heat on you. He chose Fiorio because she’s a celebrity. He’s drawing his own publicity to force you to publicly acknowledge that there’s a monster on the streets.”

He did not need to answer this, and he didn’t.

“But why?” Janet wondered. She stared at the black limo and answered her own question. “Because he
wants
to sow panic.”

Spinelli pointed a finger at the gaggle of reporters. “It’s coming.”

“What else?” Janet asked as I stared at her in astonishment. She now had Spinelli answering the questions. She said, “Come on, Danny, what have you not told us about?”

“The prick disclosed all kinds of shit to the press, so you’ll hear about it anyway. Numbers were inked in on the victim’s palms. Your sister was one slash ten, Cuthburt was two slash ten, and Fiorio is three slash ten.”

She crossed her arms and asked, “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

He shrugged, but to be clear on this point, I asked, “He’s numbering them?”

“Yeah. Also, he’s whackin’ the donkey on them.”

Janet gave Spinelli a stern look and asked, “On Lisa, too?”

“On yer sister’s trouser leg, we found sperm. But we got a big problem . . . and you won’t be hearin’ this one on the news.”