Red Man Down (23 page)

‘They all complained bitterly about losing Frank’s helping hand, for a while. But then a funny thing happened – they noticed that their take went up and stayed up. After a while they compared notes. Then they started talking to some of the members who were accountants and lawyers, and pretty soon they went and talked to the president of the credit union, and we had that simmering scandal about missing money that went on for months.

‘They had no way of knowing how much was missing, but they got together and worked out an estimate of somewhere between seventy and eighty thousand dollars, depending on how long they thought he’d been skimming.’

‘While you and I and Will,’ Sarah said, ‘were busy chasing the Snakes and the Worms.’

‘Right. Ridding Tucson of the terrible plague of illegal drugs. Wasn’t that a whooping success?’

‘Well, it was what we were tasked with doing. Because, you said it yourself, the credit union scandal wasn’t our case until Frank Martin offed himself.’

‘With a stolen gun,’ Jason said. ‘That turns out to be part of a haul in a home invasion burglary almost certainly done by Joey García.’

‘Whose car was being maintained by his employer?’ Sarah looked at her teammates. ‘I’m sick of this circle. I’m going to go see how Tracy’s doing.’

‘A
h, here comes my favorite lady sleuth,’ Tracy crowed, snapping his braces. ‘I was just coming to fetch you, dear lady.’ He was back in first-rate fettle, bowing from the waist, beaming with all his zits aglow.

‘You look as if you … did you? Oh, fan-freaking-tastic – you found it, didn’t you?’

‘Of course I found it. I thought you said you were going to give me something interesting and fun to work on. This was just routine.’

‘Oh, stop. You found it in Angela’s email? I don’t under
stand
that! Ollie said he searched through her inbox and trash, and—’

‘It wasn’t in Angela’s email – it was in Ed’s.’

‘What?’

‘Well, isn’t that where you wanted me to look? It was his message.’

‘But Ollie said Ed didn’t have an email account on this machine.’

‘Ollie just looked at the file system. He didn’t find a folder for Ed in Documents and Settings. He didn’t know to look at the user accounts. When I saw there was a user account for Ed but no files, I looked in the recycle bin. I found Ed’s user folder and restored it and after that it was child’s play. I just logged in as Ed – he had no password either. Sheesh, cavemen on computers!’

Sarah scratched her head. ‘Recycle bin?’

‘Yeah. Angela must have deleted the whole folder.’

‘But if it was deleted how come it was recycled?’

Tracy looked skyward and said, ‘Oy. Where did I leave my handy brain-brightener? Let’s see if you can wrap your mind around this not-very-difficult concept: it’s true that in the sordid realm of solid waste you must decide to trash or recycle; either/or, as Kierkegaard was so fond of saying.’

‘Dear me.’

‘Yes. But in Geek World, the system gods decided it was safer to make the button that says it’s Delete but doesn’t really delete anything at all. Thus saving your hard work from your poor ignorant and fallible self, you see? So until you also empty your recycle bin, each of those bits you delete from your hard drive waits around to see if maybe, after you start running around the room shouting obscenities and kicking the wall, you might come to your senses and reach down and grab it back. Isn’t that compassionate?’

‘Gosh, yes. It would be even kinder if they’d explained it to me, just once, ever.’

‘Oh, it’s in there, in the instructions all you wooden-heads can’t be persuaded to read. Can we quit talking about how I did it so I can tell you what you really need to know?’

‘Oh, yes. Please.’

‘The email says it’s from Frank Martin but I’m sure it was sent by somebody else.’

‘You are? How?’

‘The display name was the same, in the inbox, as for all the other emails that came from Frank. But when I opened the message, I noticed a difference. Frank’s email address was “frank.r.martin.” But this one message was sent from “frank.r.r.martin.”’

‘Oh, flaming hot spit.’

‘Eee, please, dear lady. No need to get gross.’

‘Sorry. But I see how this could work. The eye just slides right over the extra r, doesn’t it? Ed wouldn’t have noticed the difference.’

‘Yes. And no one ever looks at the return address – you know who sent it when you open it. Anyone can make a new email address. And this shrewd person, whoever he is, realized that Ed Lacey was not going to spend a lot of time scrutinizing the email address, particularly on a message as devastating as this one.’

‘And he knew that we see what we expect to see.’ She gazed at the shoddy old ceiling of the support staff room and mused, ‘I was right. He may be very foolish but he’s not stupid.’

‘Who?’

‘Hmm? Oh, I better not say yet. Tracy, you just moved the ball a long way down the field.’

He made a face. ‘Disgusting epithets are not enough for you? You have to use sports metaphors too?’

‘I was trying to give you a compliment – but let it go. Can you print me up a copy?’

‘Well, I wanted to ask you about that. I try not to change a machine while I’m working on it for you. But it doesn’t look like there’s ever been a printer driver installed on this machine. So what I thought I might do is take a screenshot of the open email, save it on a thumb drive, and print the jpeg on my own machine. Would that be good enough?’

He had lost her at ‘printer driver.’ Sarah took a deep breath and said, slowly, ‘I really don’t care how you do it. I need a paper copy of that email that shows the “wrong” address visible, and a copy of another of his emails that shows the “right” address. Can you do that for me?’

‘Give me ten minutes and I’ll have them on your desk.’

Walking back to Delaney’s office, she chuckled contentedly, thinking about what he’d found for her. But by the time she’d reached the door of Delaney’s office, she’d started to think about the questions that still remained.

She told the detectives what Tracy had found, and then asked them all, ‘Why would anybody do that? What would anybody have to gain by tormenting Ed Lacey that way, pretending to be his uncle?’

‘I can’t even imagine,’ Delaney said, ‘but before we try to answer that, I wish you’d find out for me how the message got into Eisenstaat’s case file, and from there to the newspapers. I can’t believe Ed Lacey volunteered information as personal as that. That wasn’t his style at all.’

‘I’ll see if I can find the name of the information officer who handled the case,’ Sarah said. ‘He must know how the papers got it, at least.’

She caught Pam, the information officer of the day, in a rare moment of calm, checking case files at her desk. She was surrounded by bright pictures of her gleefully grinning grandchildren, playing games and crawling on their dad.

Subject entirely to the whims of fate, information officers had to take calls at all hours. Officers nearing retirement liked the assignment because they logged a lot of overtime, and retirement pay is based on their take-home in their final years. Except for that advantage, though, the job was sometimes so hectic that it was known as a marriage-breaker and younger officers generally avoided it.

‘We keep a log,’ Pam said, ‘and it’s almost all we keep on this machine, so I think it goes back … yeah, five years. Give me the name again?’

She found the entries for Frank Martin’s death – the report of his discovery in the car, and a couple of follow-up reports, the first of which featured the ‘farewell message.’ Each report was signed by the information officer who had transmitted the information to the media. The report that included Frank’s message was signed, in a clear, firm hand, ‘Mary Leary.’

‘Huh,’ Pam said, puzzled. ‘When did Mary have that job? Must not have lasted long. I sure never worked with her.’

‘She doesn’t have it now?’

‘No, Mary’s got a morning shift on patrol at West Side. You want her phone number?’

Mary Leary answered from her squad car and agreed to meet at a Wendy’s on Campbell.

‘You bet I remember the Frank Martin case,’ she said, sipping her coffee. ‘I was subbing for Kelley Pease that week. Two information officers got sick at once and when my sergeant asked me to take it for a few days I jumped at the chance to try the job. Shee, I handed it back to Kelley when she got back and said, “You can have my share of this, Baby.”’

‘It was too hard?’

‘It was all pretty stressful, but it was that Frank Martin case that convinced me never to put in for the job. Suicides always seem like the saddest cases to me. And then when I looked at the next of kin and saw it was Ed Lacey’s uncle – he was at the academy when I was in training. He was one of the Red Men, the guys you have to fight! And remember how you start out hating the Red Man’s guts—’

‘That’s mostly fear.’

‘Well, rightly so – they can reduce you to just jelly if they want to, and then you’re history, out of there. But then those trainers, if they see you’re willing to try, can help you so much – and nobody was ever kinder or more considerate than Ed Lacey was about helping. He was a wonderful teacher. So when I saw that it was his uncle we found dead in front of the Sears store, I thought, as a courtesy, I should call him and ask if he wanted to comment for the story I was about to release to the media. He answered at home, and the poor guy had just opened that email message from his uncle. He was simply, you know, devastated.’

‘It’s so hard to try to comfort,’ Sarah said. ‘You don’t know what to say.’

‘Yeah, but this was … different, somehow. At first he couldn’t seem to talk, he kept choking. But then he kind of sucked it up and said, “Mary, I want you to be sure you report his final message exactly the way I give it to you.” And he read out that first sentence, something about “I didn’t take the money.” I did my best to copy it exactly, but he was kind of sobbing at the same time, and then he dropped the phone. I heard some coughing and groaning, and then his wife picked up the phone and said, “Who is this?” I gave her my name and told her, “Ed was trying to give me the message he just got from his uncle, but I guess he broke down.”

‘I told her he seemed anxious to get it quoted right, and asked her if she could just forward the message to me. And she did, and I gave it to all the reporters.’

Mary’s face was a mask of regret. ‘I have never seen anybody so close to apoplectic as Ed was when he found me here the next day. He kept yelling, “I told you to report it just as I read it to you!”

‘Do you know what it’s like to have a Red Man mad at you? I mean, I didn’t
think
he’d actually beat me up, but I wasn’t sure. I kept remembering the first time I saw him in that big red helmet, beating on me just enough to make me look like a turkey. And the thought does cross your mind that if he wants to, this man is just an awesome fighter; he could put a hurt on you you’d never forget. I couldn’t understand why he was so angry; after all, he’d told me to give it to the press. It wasn’t till later that I realized he had just read me the first sentence and it was Angela who gave me the whole text.’

‘Why do you think he was so upset about the second sentence?’

‘I suppose he thought the first sentence proved his uncle wasn’t guilty, and then the second sentence seemed to imply that he was. He was probably going to change it slightly.’

‘So you got the message only from Ed’s email? Not from Harry Eisenstaat?’

‘Who?’

‘Our investigating officer, the one who attended the autopsy.’

‘Oh, him. I never could get him on the phone. After I got the case assigned I called him and left messages, but he never called me back. So I just called around and picked up the info from the first responders and the coroner, and pieced the story together myself. You can’t wait, you know – you have deadlines.’

Sarah went back to Delaney and said, not meeting his eyes, ‘Looks like we had it backwards, boss. The information officer didn’t get that message from Harry. Harry must have copied it out of the paper.’

On Wednesday the weather brightened and so did Delaney. He had slipped his chain at the city council and was back, he said, to doing what he knew best. So he marshaled the crew and told them, ‘No more Mr Nice Guy. I want that money found now. Leo, why can’t we turn it over to the bank examiners? They’ve got all the clout they need to look at accounts.’

‘They’ve already swept records in the five-state area for accounts belonging to every permutation of Frank Martin,’ Leo said, ‘and every possible version of Ed or Angela Lacey. And so far, we haven’t come up with another suspect to offer them. We’ve no leads on who Joey’s “employer” might be.’

‘I’ve got an idea,’ Ollie said. ‘Ask them to try that other name Angela had for a while – her first husband’s name. It’s in the case notes.’

‘Oh, and why don’t we try searching on her Polish name?’ Sarah said.

‘That won’t work,’ Leo said. ‘You need a social security number to open an account.’

‘That’s right,’ Delaney said. ‘Is it possible Frank gave the money straight to Joey? He’d take it, wouldn’t he, if he could get it?’

‘Oh, in a heartbeat, the way I hear it,’ Sarah said. ‘But why would Frank risk his career to steal it and then give it to Joey? There’s no way that makes sense, is there?’

‘I can’t think of one,’ Leo said.

‘Let’s get Joey in here in the box and make him tell us who’s paying for those long rides. Unless everything he said is a lie, if we find his employer, we ought to find the money.’

‘Fine, I agree with that. Soon as we’re done here, Sarah, you get on the horn with Pima County and arrange to have him transported.’

‘The message,’ Oscar said. ‘Why would anyone do such an evil thing as to send Ed Lacey a fake message when his uncle just died?’

Jason said, ‘Isn’t there some way to hack on that email address, to see if it made any purchases, or—’

‘I like that,’ Delaney said. ‘Ask Tracy. And Ray, you stick around here, will you, so you’re available to go in the box with Sarah when she gets Joey up here? I’ve got about a million messages to catch up on now, but let me know when you’ve got him set up, Sarah. I’ll monitor outside.’