A Spill of Blood Ch. 05

I gave her the answer that I believed in, and it had nothing to do with payback for cracked ribs. "Yeah, I think we do, Jess." Again, I almost left it at that. Maybe she'd have accepted it just because I was the boss. Knowing Jess, that was a slim maybe. But the newfound desire to let her in on things nudged me a different direction.

"If Gibson is stupid enough to tell Bertram what he told me, not only is he going to meet a toothbrush-shiv in the prison yard, but I'll be in the crosshairs ... and anyone I logically might have told."

She got who might be on that list, and her tension ratcheted up a notch closer to where mine was.

"You need to get someone else to do this, Morgan."

I would have taken Detective Murray's complaint more seriously if he wasn't doing exactly what I asked him to do, namely stripping enough of the police tape that I could slide into Larry Beck's apartment. He was just bitching because we weren't exactly going by the book.

"Look," I had said to him over good coffee and even-better Danish. He was pretty demanding when it came to me buying him breakfast ... second breakfast for me. "Homicide has their guys. They don't have the link between Gibson and that guy who went after me, but—"

"Carmine Derano. Prints came back. His name was Carmine Derano. Formerly of Queens, recently living in Baltimore."

"Okay, they don't have that link unless they can crack Gibson, but you and I both know they're not going to start hunting someone higher up the food chain until Gibson tries for a plea deal and they get some intel that justifies spending those resources. IA's on it too, but we also both know those wheels are going to grind very slowly. They're going to dot every i and cross every t. And anything that can be kept quiet is going to go into a file nobody sees."

Murray hadn't looked happy at that assessment. He also hadn't protested it.

"So, the guy behind it all is going to do a runner, and nobody's going to pay attention until it's too late. I would think that would interest a man in your profession." I'd debated, then tossed in my chips. "Plus, there's something bigger because of the story Beck fed Gibson. You got daughters?"

"Two and a son. Why?"

"Okay, well, as a sideline to that something bigger, somebody's trafficking girls." I told him everything Gibson had given me. Those weary, brown eyes stared at me for a long moment. It wasn't a happy face: at the story, at me, at the world.

"Fuck you, asshole, if you think it takes me having daughters to care about shit like that."

I had taken that as, "I'm in."

So, here we were, entering Larry Beck's apartment. The one next door to Nikki's. I didn't knock on hers first. I wondered if she heard the elevator and was peering out the peephole. While I wasn't sure of the protocol of a New York detective entering a crime scene that wasn't his, we weren't breaking in. We had keys, courtesy of Murray flashing his badge at William, the doorman.

Sydney and Jess were downstairs, playing out the fiction that Jess was taking over the apartment because Sydney "just couldn't bear to stay there after what happened." The usual dodge of an envelope to the staff made sure the building's owner never heard about the contra-lease sublet. Murray and I were doing some good old-fashioned gumshoeing.

Beck had left in a hurry. Either that or he cared nothing about his old life and was going to start completely fresh in whatever backwater he ended up in. We found files related to his Long Island place and the Manhattan apartment.

"Both are on the market. He's not there," I told Murray. "And I doubt he's at a friend's place. He's trying to vanish. Someone might say something in front of the wrong ears and word get back. Chances are, he's gone to ground in a hotel."

Murray sighed. "Yeah, the thought crossed my mind. The thing is, hotels usually require a credit card. Think he's cagey enough to know the kind of people he's pissed off can probably buy someone to check usage?"

"Maybe."

I found some of those brown document holders that look like accordions with string ties filled with financial papers. They seemed to deal with locations farther south, the Carolinas, Georgia, and were business-related. I dumped them into a shopping bag, getting only an eyebrow from Murray. In the central drawer of the desk, I came across some stapled pages.

"Jackpot!" I said, holding them up. "Itinerary for two people flying to Rome in the name of Lucas Branard. But it's for three days from now. Think he's holed up in some no-tell motel, paying cash, and waiting for his flight? Or maybe he's changed the reservations to earlier and these are old."

"Maybe. I guess we're— Whoa, absolutely not," Murray said after a second. He was rooting through one of those portable fire-safe boxes he found in the closet.

He wasn't the only one with eyebrows. Mine had gotten a workout when he'd tugged on the lid ... locked ... pulled out a keyring and selected something decidedly not made by Schlage or Yale. Ten seconds and the lid had popped.

He'd seen my expression and grinned the first real humor I'd seen. "Misspent youth and that's a cheap-ass model. Probably got it at a box store."

Now, "He's not on his way to Rome because, voilà!" He held up a packet of blue documents with gold writing on the covers, rubber-banded together. "Passports in the name of ... of Lawrence Beck, Lucas Branard, and Lawson Barnes. I think it's safe to say he's not on an international flight."

"He must have been in an ungodly rush. The laptop"—a monitor and keyboard with wires dangling hinted at that—"but not enough time to get to those. Seconds. He's probably figuring he'll go back to whoever made those and get another. That or Nikki will make a play for them."

"So, where is he?" Murray asked. He dropped into a chair at the table where we had a collection of a dozen different things. We'd grabbed anything that vaguely mentioned a place and wasn't filed with business receipts: from a receipt from a sporting-goods store across the river in Bergen County to a shot glass from a bar in upstate New York to a membership card at a hunting club in Idaho.

"I think we can rule out Idaho. Too far to get back easily."

"I guess we canvass a few of those airport motels." I could see the prospect didn't thrill him. "Which one's he out of? Please tell me it's not LaGuardia. The construction makes that a friggin' nightmare."

I dug the itinerary out of the shopping bag, checked it. Reread it in surprise. "Albany," I said quietly.

"The shot glass," he answered. He ducked back inside to retrieve it. In the hallway, I looked at Nikki's door.

"She isn't going to talk with you standing there," I said.

"Yeah. I can probably check property records faster than you can." With that, he was gone.

I had no intention of talking to Nikki. I waited until the elevator closed, then grabbed a chair and stuck a miniature camera on the ceiling fixture, aiming it so that it caught both Nikki and Beck's doors. Then I delivered the shopping bag of paperwork to Jess downstairs.

"In case you get bored."

My phone rang.

"Clock's ticking, Morgan." Regan's voice was stern, probably the way they taught you to speak when dressing down the help. When he'd told me I wasn't done, he'd reminded me of his deadline. Now he was nudging. "Tomorrow is two weeks."

"You know what, Regan? I don't give a damn if Richard Bertram finds out the money's missing." That met dead silence. Regan kept thinking nobody was smart enough to figure out what was going on. "But since he's probably going to hear about Gibson about an hour after his plane lands on Monday, and since Gibson is probably going to tell him about Beck, that whole plan is moot. So stop jiggling my fucking elbow!"

I hung up. I blocked his number on the second call so that the inevitable tirade went to a voicemail I wouldn't even see. Bertram or no, Regan wasn't going to do anything while the money was in the wind. He'd want every single eye looking.

Murray was checking property records. Jess was looking through financial stuff. I took the afternoon off. Everything was catching up with me. I couldn't do much about hurt, but I could do something about sleep-deprived.

That didn't happen right away. Sydney had an idea for how to make sure I slept soundly. It involved some warm oil and firm hands on tired and sore muscles until I was limp. Then it involved some warm mouth and firm hands elsewhere until I really was. I barely felt her curl against me as I dropped off.

Sunday is supposed to be the day of rest. I distinctly remember my Sunday School teacher telling me that. The phone started ringing at seven twenty in the morning. Normally, that would be okay, but I was in the middle of a dream about ... well ... it was a good dream.

With one bleary eye squinched against the morning sun just beginning to burn through the window, I fumbled for my phone.

"I think he's broke, Harry," Jess said.

"It's seven twenty."

"Yeah, but I thought you ought to—"

"It's now seven twenty-one."

"You're usually grumpy over coffee by this time."

"I've had a rough two weeks if you haven't noticed." I guess she hadn't because I wasn't noticing any sympathy as she ignored me.

"I think he's broke ... Beck, I mean."

"He's spent the thirty-two million already?"

"Jesus! Wake up! No. I think he was broke and that's why he stole the money."

Brain cells were finally firing about Beck and not boobs. "Those financial papers?"

"Yeah, and a lot of digging on government public-info sites. You want the details or in a nutshell?"

"Nutshell."

"His papers show they sold off several sites they own and shut down one processing plant. The announcements in the town papers were blah-blah-blah about corporate restructuring and efficiencies. Basically, what every company says when they don't want to admit business is bad.

"Beck Resources used to win a good number of contracts with the various states, cement and gravel for road work, and that kind of thing. For the last two years, it's been steadily declining. When I cross-reference those periods back to his financial records, it looks like they sorta made do with supplying some commercial building contractors. But when you're used to producing twenty thousand cubic yards of concrete per mile of highway, even office buildings aren't going to use your capacity and you start to die.

"And Beck's lifestyle didn't help. Not only did he pay himself a ridiculous salary, he's got a lot of expenses charged to the company for flights in private aircraft, five-star hotels, food, et cetera. But get this, they're to Alaska, Idaho, Montana, West Virginia ... I could go on. But except for West Virginia, he doesn't have operations in them. You know what they do have in common, don't you?"

"Hunting," I answered.

"Yeah. He probably couldn't get an accountant to agree to let him charge trips to Tanzania and India or wherever the hell he killed that other stuff, but he was using his company as a bankroll for domestic stuff even while it was tanking."

"This must have taken you all night."

"Well, I ... yeah ... I mean, once I started to see things, I thought it might be important. Motive, you know."

"You're a good partner, Jess."

The silence was deafening. Then, snarky-because-embarrassed, "Well, partners maybe get a raise once in a while."

"Yeah, they do. Two seconds after people stop trying to shoot us over this, it happens."

"That would be—"

"Shoot who?" That came from beside me.

"Who's there?" That came from the phone. "Oh, never mind. I can guess." The tone had shifted to starchy. "Talk to you later." She disconnected. For a moment, those eyes that had listened to me, and laughed at me, and yelled at me, now glared at me in my imagination. I felt guilt ... I guess because something I did killed her pleased mood.

Come on, Jess. Sydney's not going to be like Lexie was. And nobody's like Amber was.

Something felt off about that thought, but the subject distracted me by poking me.

"Shoot who?"

I turned to Sydney. "Not you. You're not a threat anymore."

"I never was. Cara didn't tell me anything!" she protested.

"Yeah. Well, not you. But they probably still see me as a problem."

I let the scalding hot water of the shower pour down over my head as I fixed the threat tables in my mind. Beck headed the list. Not only was he the one who was—or at least, had been—trying to kill me, but he was in possession of the loot. That loot would placate the second on the list, Regan, and by extension, the third, Bertram.

Then I thought about whether I had number two and number three in the wrong order. I was a pawn to Regan, one whom his personality twist enjoyed shoving around the board until some more powerful piece finally decided to take it out. Bertram, however, might or might not learn that I knew the secret of Eroticos and he might be a lot more proactive. I starred those two names as coequals: solutions needed ASAP after Beck.

But that didn't complete the table. Fourth was Lindqvist. He was tied up in this and my flailing around to find an entry point, any entry point, to the mess had made him aware of me. But he'd distanced himself. "Don't let me see him again," he'd told Regan.

You've got nothing on him but patronizing prostitutes, Harry, and he's sharp enough to know that. But maybe don't stand with your back to him in deserted places.

Do you need to give Mitchell his own entry? No, he's on a leash for now. Lump him with Regan.

What about more cops like those three?

That was a puzzler. In some ways, they could be the most dangerous. If they existed, they were anonymous, blending in among tens of thousands of other faces. I lived among them; they could wait for the right moment.

No, I decided. Gibson is a threat to them, but not me. Their anonymity makes me safe. Well, safer. With IA poking around, they're gonna lie low unless direct orders come down ... and that makes them part of line item two or three.

"Harry, you've got a phone call." Sydney's face poked around the corner of the shower curtain. She let me see her eyes drop and winked before she held up my phone. The ringing stopped as I turned the water off. I hit the button to call Murray back.

"I started with the shot glass from that bar. It wasn't hard from there. He's got a cabin outside Icaria, upstate in the Adirondacks. I talked to the local chief. I fed him some bullshit about making sure someone was clear before moving on something down here, nothing on his turf. He had a car cruise by yesterday evening on a do-not-approach. There was a light and smoke was coming out of the chimney."

"Let's go."

"Tomorrow."

"There are bad guys, Murray."

"I know. But I got a shift today, and the only way I can justify three hours up there and three hours back is to make this official. Do you want this official?"

No, I didn't. Gibson had figured out Beck was a liar. But if there were other rotten apples on the force, and if Gibson hadn't had time to clue them into the change in the story, and they got word we were going after Beck ... that was a lot of ifs, but stakes were too high to gamble. And hell, even if they did know Beck had lied, telling them exactly where I'd be wasn't a good plan. They'd figure like Gibson and take us all out at once.

"Okay, tomorrow."

In addition to being days of rest, Sundays in October were supposed to be days when you could sit in front of the tube wearing a ridiculously overpriced jersey and talk smack with someone who favored the opposing team. Sydney was a Giants fan; I was solid Steeler Nation. My team wasn't being shown due to the stupid NFL broadcast arrangements, but I would have been content to root for Philadelphia just to give her some good-natured shit.

Instead, I got another phone call about ten minutes after kickoff.

"The motion alert on my computer beeped. I got to it in time to see her go into Beck's apartment."

Leaving an armful of Sydney that included a handful of Sydney's chest when she wasn't berating me for yelling, "Fly, Eagles, fly!" did count as a downside, but the thrill of things starting pushed that out of my mind. I headed for the parking garage where I kept my car at a cost equal to what I paid for renting my apartment.

The unmistakable sensation of a cold gun barrel against the back of my head froze me with my car key in the lock.

"Where ya off to, Harry boy?" Mitchell's voice oozed smooth satisfaction. I hadn't seen even a flicker of motion nor heard a scrape of footsteps.

"Your mother's. She called and wanted me to come over."

I could feel the menace grow like a huge black shape behind me. I waited for the noise and impact that would cut off suddenly and forever. The shape's wings gradually furled.

"Regan didn't like you hanging up on him."

"Bertram's gonna know the money was stolen no matter what."

"I told him the same thing, but he's the boss."

"Yeah, well, he hired me to do a job, so both of you stop jiggling my elbow."

"Oh, there might come a time when I do more than jiggle your elbow. Buuut"—his tone said he was granting me a huge favor—"unlike you, I do what the boss tells me. Right now, he wants to know if you've got a line on Beck or whoever has the money now, and he wants an answer without some shithead cutting him off."

"It's possible I do, but every second you jaw at me is another second it might be slipping away."

I felt the hard shape leave my skull. I turned to look at him.

"Then don't let me keep you, Harry boy. But just remember, I'll be around. Don't get any ideas about that money ... you or your new piece of ass."

I got in and sat for about ten long seconds, letting the adrenaline leak away, then I headed downtown. My phone rang again.

"She took something out of Beck's and went back to her place. I couldn't quite see what it was because the picture isn't great, maybe like a purse or something? It had a handle."

"Was it like a foot long and maybe ten inches deep? Could it be a fire-safe box?"

"Hang on, let me scroll back. Yeah, it could be."

"His passports are in there."

"Why did you leave them?"

"I didn't want to spook her in case he sent her for them. I'm hoping he didn't ask her to get the folders I gave—"

"She's coming back out! She's got a suitcase. Are you close?"

"Not close enough." I didn't explain why.

"I'm gonna crack the door and listen for the elevator. I'll go for a walk after she gets out."

"Jess!"

"Don't worry, I know I don't know how to follow someone. There's a Starbucks in both directions. I'll head toward whichever one is the way she goes and see if she gets a cab or whatever. It'll give you something, at least."

I navigated my way over to the East Side, upset inside. I'd expected the visit to Beck's, but her leaving was coming on its heels more quickly than I predicted. Was he panicking or was she? Someone was.

Maybe it wasn't critical to follow Nikki because of what Murray had found, but I was worried that she wasn't going to Beck's cabin, that he was meeting her somewhere else.

"Fuck!" I hadn't gotten used to the occasional potty mouth out of a woman normally so well-mannered. "She didn't take a taxi. She stopped to speak to William, and I had to walk past or look suspicious." Sounds of movement from the phone's speaker changed to street noise.

"Turn left," I said. "There's a deli on the corner and you can see the building entrance from there." I scooted through Central Park and made for Second.

"Not a cab. William was having a car brought out. It's a silver Mercedes with a burgundy roof. I don't know model names, but it's that small two-seater convertible with ... umm, wait until I run out. It's blocked by parked cars.