The Intern: Chasing Murderers, Hookers, and Senators Across DC Wasn't In The Job Description (17 page)

The guard was bent over, examining the engine with a small
flashlight, and Tabitha was turned so she could see me. She slipped the doo-hickey
out of her pocket and was trying to replace it just as I came up behind the guy
and pistol-whipped him as hard as I could right between the shoulder blades,
just knowing that would knock him out.

“Hey!” he said, half-turning in my direction. Oh shit. It
didn’t work! But it always worked. I tried again. I hit him at the base of the
skull, and he started moving for his gun, still not knocked out. I quickly gave
up that idea and turned the gun around and pointed it three inches from his
temple. Tabitha had replaced the engine part and was going back around to the
driver’s side, and I couldn’t let this guy radio for help. Since he wasn’t
smart enough to just get knocked out and get it over with, he would to have to
come with us. “Get in,” I yelled. He stared at the gun.

I shoved him in the back seat and got right in beside him,
throwing his partner’s gun and my papers into the front seat as Tabitha lit out
down the street. “What happened?” she asked.

“Another security guard,” I said. The guard, by now, had
recognized me. I nodded, as I pointed the gun right at his nose and told him to
take off his gun belt slowly. My reputation obviously preceded me, and he did
so very carefully. I threw it in the front seat as well.

“Claudette,” I said, trying to think of a name that was far
away from Tabitha, “I don’t know what we’re going to do with our little
unexpected guest.”

“Please don’t kill me,” the man said softly, his eyes as big
as golf balls. “I’ll …”

At this point, I realized the chances were good that this
guy might pee all over himself and really smell up Tabitha’s car. I needed to
calm him down.

“You’re safe,” I assured him. “You’re in the presence of …”
I needed something exotic-sounding to further throw investigators off the track
for when he would turn up with his wild story linked to me. “You’re in the
presence of
Le Renard
.” That’s French for “The Fox.” I probably didn’t
pronounce it right. I had seen it on Remington Steele.

Where could we stash this guy long enough for us to get back
to the Watergate? Anywhere we put him he was going to blab to the first person
that he saw, and I really didn’t want another person to worry about sneaking
into the hotel. Besides, this guy didn’t look like he would last that long. He
truly believed we were going to rub him out, and he might do something stupid
and drastic that we would all regret in the very near future.

I told Tabitha to drive into Virginia. I told both of them
what I intended to do, although only Tabitha believed me. She drove about ten
more minutes—it seemed like fifty—until we were far enough from the city for me
to do what I wanted. We took an exit, and I ordered the guard out of the car,
while I grabbed the pair of handcuffs from his holster. I asked Tabitha if I
could use the old blanket on the floor. She nodded.

The guard’s knees buckled as I moved him forward. Cars
whizzed by and I wondered what he was thinking. I’m sure when he heard me ask
about the blanket, he was quite certain it was to keep the blood from
splattering all over me. I kept talking to him calmly, but he was whimpering
like a three-year-old. “Please don’t kill me,” he said again, and I kept him
marching. I got far enough away that he wouldn’t be spotted overnight and found
a maple tree thick enough that I knew he couldn’t possibly get away. I thought
for a second about what the most comfortable position might be and finally
positioned him on his butt with his hands behind him around the tree. I cuffed
him, grabbed the blanket, and covered him up. “So you won’t get cold,” I told
him, and, for the first time, he believed me.

“Thank you,” he said. “What made you spare me?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t killed anyone. I’m just trying
to clear my name. You can tell them what you want when they find you, but just
treat me the way I treated you.” I thought about the two smacks across the back
of the head and almost regretted saying it. “And remember,” I said as I started
back to the car, “tell them
Le Renard
says hello.”

We made it back to the hotel fine, and, although we had to
wait in the hall for a few minutes until a middle-aged drunk couple decided to
quit making out in the hall and take it inside, it wasn’t very
stressful—comparatively, anyway. I was dead-tired and thought more than once
about calling the police to tell them where the security guard was, afraid he
would die of exposure. But I checked The Weather Channel, and it was only going
to be in the mid-50s for a low, and I figured he could tough that out; I wanted
as much lead time as I could possibly get.

I climbed into bed next to Tabitha. “Because you were so
busy making fun of me,” I chided her, “I never got to ask you what you thought
about seeing Stephanie on TV.”

“She didn’t tell me she was going to talk to the press.”

“Does that bother you?”

“No. It’s her life. But I could tell she regretted doing
it.”

“How?”

“She kept her head down. Stephanie always looks right at you
when she talks. I didn’t see her look at the camera once.”

“What does that mean?”

“It just reminds me of how sad all of this is.” Tabitha
shook her head and turned out the light. She squeezed my hand for a second,
then rolled away, and went to sleep. I was so tired that I did the same almost
instantly.

Friday

Twenty-Two

T
abitha called her computer hacker
client the first thing the next morning. She asked if he could come and give
her a hand, and it didn’t take much convincing. He said he’d be there in an
hour, but knowing hacker-time, I knew it might be a little longer.

I turned on the TV, wondering what I had done now. I was
just in time to catch the press conference of Dan Morris, the security guard I
had left in the woods the night before. It didn’t take him long to make it
back. A police spokesman started the conference by saying Morris had yelled at
two early-morning bike riders passing on the side of the road, and they had
contacted the Virginia State Police. A spokeswoman from the FBI pointed out
that since I had transported Morris into a different state, I had opened up a
shit-load of other crimes.

After all the formalities were taken care of, Morris got up,
flanked by two FBI guys. He was wearing the same uniform he had worn the night
before, now wrinkled and dirty. His eyes drooped and his hands shook as he read
from a piece of paper.

“A man who I believe to be Trent Norris broke into the Reavis-Kline
Office Building last night. He and a female helper, who he called Claudette,
tried to knock me out and when they couldn’t”—he puffed out his chest—“they
took me into the woods and left me. I was afraid that he might kill me. But he
seemed very nice and said he just wanted to get away. I thanked him, and he
told me he was innocent. He called himself Leonard.”

Leonard, I thought. I said
Le Renard
—the fox—and he
had heard Leonard. I needed a press agent in the worst way. Morris fielded some
questions from reporters who must not have been listening to his spiel very
well. He repeated what he had said and refused to paint me as the clear-cut bad
guy they wanted. I smiled and forgave him for “Leonard.” This, after all, was
the first quasi-positive press I had received.

I turned off the TV and started checking about Daedalus
Travel. I pulled out the sheets I had printed at the McHolland and found the
Daedalus address—a post office box in Arlington, Virginia, no physical
address—was listed on every payment line. I knew their number by heart, because
I called in all of our department’s ticket requests. You never spoke to a real
person at Daedalus, just an automated answering service, which had never before
struck me as unusual. About three days after calling it in, we’d receive
confirmation, and that was all I really cared about.

Now, as I listened to the various options on the message, it
began to sound fishy. If you were a foundation or government entity, you
pressed one. If you wanted an address to send your payments, you pressed two.
And if you wanted to speak to an operator, you pressed zero. I pressed zero and
waited. And waited. And listened to modern little messages of hope—“Your call
is important to us” and “Please stay on the line. An operator will be with you
shortly.” But I knew no operator was coming. This was part of the set-up. There
was no operator, I was willing to bet. There was probably nothing but a post
office box and a lot of profits. I told Tabitha all about it, had her listen to
the message, and she agreed. We had another lead.

It was almost noon when Dennis the computer guy came.
Tabitha met him at the door and half-explained things, and he greeted me like I
was a movie star. He was … misshapen, probably five or six years older than me
but well on his way to developing his own set of breasts. He wore a too-tight
green polo and a pair of jeans, belted very high, which accentuated his
hourglass figure. The only flat part on his entire body was his butt, which
looked like it had been surgically removed. He had short, black hair, a
constant tight smile, which looked as if it probably hurt, and extremely bright
eyes. “I’ll do my best,” he said, putting emphasis on each word like someone
who doesn’t know the meaning of the word doubt.

Tabitha showed Dennis what she had been doing, and he
produced a disk and put it in the computer.

“This is a password program I’ve been working on, and I
think it may be very helpful,” Dennis said, typing as he spoke, his voice alive
with that supreme cockiness which can only belong to computer geeks, guitar
salesmen, and rare book dealers. But within ten minutes he was in the bank’s
computer, and I wasn’t going to argue with results.

He called Tabitha over, and the two of them stared gravely
at the screen. Tabitha told him what she needed. She waited at the computer,
and Dennis used the keyboard and mouse like they were a part of his own body.

With Tabitha standing so close to him, I couldn’t help but
think of the physical relationship that obviously existed between them. A hint
for the general public: If you’re trusting your life to someone, don’t try to
picture them committing vile sex acts with a computer geek whose body resembles
Miss Piggy’s; it can turn a relationship cold. I couldn’t decide whether I was
more repulsed or sympathetic, but, even after considering it, I was still
willing to trust her, so I guess I had my answer.

And besides, I was very glad at that moment that Dennis was
on the planet. As he worked, he told me how much he hated all of the FBI and
CIA-types, probably to allay my fears that he would turn me in. He hated big
computer companies and often broke into their systems and did nasty things
while he was there. He had done it enough, he said, to discover he was very
good at it, and he now got paid large sums of money to break in and steal
things and not get caught. But he genuinely hated the people he worked for
because they were almost always other big companies that wanted to become
bigger than the ones from which he was stealing.

He hated both political parties and didn’t seem too fond of
the media or organized religion. I imagined that he liked Star Trek, video
games, any food that was fried, and little else. But as long as he liked
Tabitha and was at least lukewarm about me, he was fine. He printed out several
documents, and Tabitha examined them. I was basically twiddling my thumbs and
thinking about what else I could do to clear myself.

“This is an irrevocable trust,” Tabitha said, thumping the
paper.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means that whoever puts money into it can’t get it back
out.” She saw I still wasn’t getting it. “If you set up a revocable trust and
just say you can put in and take out anything you want, you’re still taxed for
it, because, if push came to shove, you could get that money and use it. But if
you set up an account and say whatever money you put in there stays in there
forever and goes to someone else and you can’t ever get it out, then they tax
the account and not you, because you’re not going to be benefiting from it.”

I motioned for her to keep going. “And Helper is not only
the trust beneficiary—the guy who gets the money—but he’s the trustee as well,
which means he writes the checks. This explains why the amounts aren’t always
the same.”

“And this got Timmons killed how?”

“All it means is the money could’ve come from anywhere, and
it’s very unlikely the government would’ve ever looked hard enough to determine
the source.”

“The IRS wouldn’t catch it,” I said, proud I had at least
caught on before Dennis, “because they’d be getting their tax money, so they
wouldn’t care.”

“Exactly.” She told Dennis to search the account number
where the money was coming from. It was an offshore account, registered to a
Kat Spellman. Dennis logged off the banking software and onto the Internet. He
spent the next quarter of an hour tracking down Katherine Spellmans until we
found one who might have been Helper’s aunt.

Problem was she died in 1967 at the age of twenty-one, and
the trust hadn’t appeared until two years ago. Dennis printed this info, and I
began a file, putting the information right next to the accounting sheets
dealing with Daedalus Travel. I asked him to run a quick Internet search on my
favorite travel agency; it turned up nothing.

This wasn’t as sexy as Dennis had imagined, and I honestly
didn’t want him to be around forever. I figured it was time to show him the
door—politely, of course. “Dennis,” I said, “Thanks a lot for your help.” I
moved to shake his hand. “We really appreciate it and …”

Tabitha leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, which stopped
me cold and embarrassed Dennis too. He probably didn’t like the idea of Tabitha
staying in the Watergate with me anymore than I liked the mental pictures I had
been forming. For a second, he looked as if he were trying to develop an excuse
for staying, but he couldn’t think of one, so he tightened up his smile even
more and shook my hand.