Courage Stolen
Page 19
“What did he say to that?”
“He said he could get all the information to us next week as long as we were willing to buy. That made me laugh. He obviously didn’t know much about SMUD. We can’t move that fast. We’re a public agency. Everything we do needs to be competitively bid. Something on the order of what he was describing would take months, if not a year or more, to set up. We had to create an RFP with specifications and selection criteria and then set up a review committee.”
“But if it was one-of-a-kind technology, couldn’t you sole source it?”
“Not really. I told him if he brought me the specs then we could write the request for proposals in a way to make it easier for him to win the proposal.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was unlikely anyone had technology like what he was talking about. I go to conferences all the time and stay current with what’s out there. I’ve never heard anything like what he had. So I told him we could write the specs to fit his technology.”
“Was he interested?”
“He got excited. But then I told him even it would take a few months. He said he needed to sell it by next week or the week after at the latest. He got a little ticked off at me when I laughed. I said I couldn’t buy much more than a box of pencils in a week or two. Not with SMUD’s bureaucracy and rules.”
“If you don’t mind telling me, how much was he asking for the technology and everything?”
“That’s where he got squirrelly.” Farrell looked at me and shook his head.
Squirrelly. That’s what he had told Roger.
“He started off asking five million dollars. When I kept telling him how long it would take SMUD to do a deal like that, he must have thought I was negotiating because he kept dropping the price. By the time he walked out, the deal on the table was a half-million dollars. That’s what made me doubt what he had. If he had what he described, it would’ve been worth hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe more. For him to try selling it for a half-million didn’t make sense.”
thirty-four
The wind and rain battered Sacramento well into the afternoon. KFBK radio warned of flood conditions in several parts of town and power outages caused by falling trees and toppled power lines. I parked my car in the former cannery’s parking lot and sat for a moment as the rain hammered my car. I picked up my gym bag and jogged towards the door of Alhambra Athletic Club as the rain soaked my clothes.
It had been weeks since Rubia and I had played a game of HORSE, a basketball shooting tradition we’d been doing for at least five years. We tried to play once a week, but our work schedules and other obligations had gotten in the way.
Today, our usual spot, an outdoor court in Reichmuth Park, was out of the question in the storm, so she insisted I meet her at her hoity-toity gym east of downtown. I agreed after she said she would pay the fifteen-dollar guest fee.
“I’m not up for this right now,” I said. We had just walked onto the half-court basketball surface that also served as space for aerobics, yoga, and tae kwon do classes.
“Man up,” Rubia said.
As usual, we shot around for ten or fifteen minutes before starting our game of HORSE, the object of which was to make a shot your opponent cannot. If you made it and he missed, then he got a letter in the word horse. Once the entire word was spelled out, because the person had missed more shots than his opponent, then he lost the game. I hadn’t beaten Rubia in four years, meaning she’d received four years of breakfasts on me.
My mind wasn’t on the game when I lined up the opening shot, a fifteen-foot jumper from the baseline. Benzer had knowledge of Monarch. Not only that, he believed he had enough access to it to get ahold of it and sell it to SMUD. It’s unlikely he’d have approached Leo Farrell with his proposition if he’d been the extortionist, twenty million dollars in hand. Unless he was double dipping, having pocketed the twenty million and now adding on by selling a copy of Monarch to SMUD. In any case, Chan had to be the link to the project, either from his girlfriend Candace, Wiggin, or Jack Cassidy. Chan and Benzer were linked, both with knowledge about Monarch.
My shot from the baseline drew nothing but air, falling a good two feet short of the basket.
“That’s sad, Ray. At least try to give me a game.”
Rubia prepared for her favorite opening shot, a cross over dribble and a reverse layup. I thought back about the drop night. Corti Brothers, where I found the note directing me to Effie Yeaw Nature Center. There, another note directed me to Sand Cove. I’d left the keys underneath the van and walked to the Virgin Sturgeon. The bartender got a call telling me it was okay to go back to my car.
Rubia, as usual, made her shot. For an ex-gangbanger with no formal coaching, she was a natural athlete with amazing basketball skills. Had her life traveled a different path, she might have been a Division-I college athlete, maybe even a WNBA player.
She sent me a crisp chest pass after rebounding her own shot. I had to repeat her shot and make it to avoid getting an H, something for which I held low expectations.
I received two calls that night, one from Wiggin and one from Candace. They wanted to know how things were going and if I was safe. At the time, I’d not thought much of it. Now I wondered if they’d been wondering whether I was on track to make the drop off on time at Sand Cove, where one or more of them would take the money.
I missed my attempt to replicate Rubia’s shot.
Something about my last conversation with Trujillo came to mind. What did he say? Think. Cell phone records had put Wu and Bo in Eldorado County. Cell companies could tell where you made your phone calls based on which cell phone tower picked up your signal and directed the call.
“Hey,” I said. “You still have the friend who works at AT&T?”
Rubia nodded. I gave her the names and dates for the cell records I wanted checked, and she promised to do it, “as soon as I’m done kicking your ass in HORSE.”
I wanted the information and was tempted to throw the game, but my competitiveness kicked in. Twenty minutes later, both of us were sitting on HORS.
“I’m calling swish,” she said standing at the three-point arc. Swish meant she would make the shot hitting nothing on the basket but the net. As called, she hit the shot, barely rustling the net, putting the pressure on me to make the same perfect shot.
I took the ball and set for the shot.
“Hey,” she said. “You got to be behind the line.”
I took two steps back, dribbled three times and took the jumper. The ball rattled around the rim and dropped through. I’d made the shot, but lost the game.
“Swish,” I said. “You really want to win that way?”
“Heh, heh. Pancake Circus tomorrow at seven. I’m going to be big-time hungry.”
“What’s new?”
We headed to our respective locker rooms to shower and change back into our street clothes. When I exited the men’s locker room, Rubia was sitting at a table in the lobby talking on her cell phone. I sat down next to her, and she held up a finger before ending the call a few seconds later.
“No records for Candace Symington or Jack Cassidy. They must have different cell providers. I only have a contact at AT&T. But I did find what you were looking for on Wiggin.”
“Are you going to tell me or continue to gloat over your basketball victory?”
“Touchy, touchy.” She gave me a too-cute smile. “Okay, here’s what’s up. Wiggin’s in Germany on the dates you mentioned. Made lotsa calls and got dinged for international charges.”
“What about the other night, when I was making the drop?”
“You gonna let me finish?”
I rolled my eyes and slumped down in my seat.
“At six forty-seven the night he called your cell. The call went less than a minute and routed through cell tower 8114 on Garden Highway, the thirty-three hundred block to be exact.”
“Did he make any other calls around that time?”
“No.”
“You’re welcome, Ray.”
I turned and looked back over my shoulder. “Hey, I’m buying you breakfast tomorrow. Isn’t that thanks enough?”
She flipped me off as I turned and headed out of the club.
Banned or not, nothing was going to keep me from venturing onto the Granderson University campus. I parked in the visitor lot and hustled to Sieboldt. Wiggin sat alone at his desk working his laptop. It was a quarter to five in the afternoon.
“Making another run at the Minesweeper record?” I asked, sitting down uninvited in one of the chairs across from him.
“Oh, hey,” he said. “Check it out, dude.” He turned his laptop around so I could see the screen. The header on the webpage read “Minesweeper Game World Rankings.” Beneath this was a numbered list of names, the flag of the person’s country of origin, a time and a date. Number one on the list: Kenneth Wiggin, USA, 35.58. According to the date listed, he had set the record earlier in the day.
“Congratulations. You must be proud.”
“Bet your ass. I’ve been shooting for the record for years. I’m pumped.”
“Better celebrate.”
He turned the laptop back around and looked at the screen, beaming at what he saw.
“You called me the other night,” I said.
He looked at me, puzzled. “Oh, yeah, you mean when you were delivering the money.”
I nodded.
“You were great, man. Thank you again for all you did. I would’ve been too nervous to drive all over town like they had you do. It was cool, the way you handled things.”
“Getting back to your call, turns out it came from an area about a half-mile from Sand Cove Beach, where I dropped off the money.”
He didn’t react one way or the other to my statement.
“Kind of a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“I guess it is. I was at my sister’s, housesitting while she and her husband and kids were in Washington D.C. on vacation. I was looking after their Golden Retriever.”
“And your sister lives over by the river?”
“On Delta Queen Avenue. Wouldn’t get me to live that close to the river. It would scare the shit out of me on days like today. I checked the news website and the Sacramento River is close to overflowing. My sister’s putting out sandbags as we speak. She even—”
I raised my palm to stop him. “So, wait, you say you were housesitting when I was driving around with all the money and your project’s future was on the line?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Again, kind of a coincidence you were near where I dropped off the money.”
He finally seemed to see where I was going. “What? You think I ransomed my own project? Why the hell would I want to do that?”
“Twenty million bucks.”
He laughed. “I should be insulted. But I think it’s kind of funny. Kenneth Wiggin, Master Criminal.” He posed like he was holding a machine gun and moved it from one side of the room to the other.
“You were so nonchalant about the whole thing. You didn’t seem worried at all the project had gone missing. I thought that was strange.”
“You’re serious.” His smile evaporated. “You think I took my own project?”
“What I’m still not sure about is why you looped in Chan and Benzer. Was the whole thing their idea? Did they approach you, and you thought ‘Cool, dudes, let’s get us some righteous bones’?”
“I don’t like what you’re saying,” Wiggin said, all traces of the surfer dude gone from his voice and demeanor.
“It makes perfect sense. I feel like an idiot for not thinking of it sooner. I’m not sure how you were able to erase all traces of the project from Jack’s and Candace’s computers. Maybe they’re in on it, too. Stealing the server had to involve somebody on campus. Again, either Jack or Candace. Or maybe Benzer and Chan. Which of them was it? Or were all of you in on it?”
He looked away, his jaw flexing, arms held tight across his chest.
“Who else was in on it?”
He now stared at me with steel in his eyes. I thought he might throw the laptop at me, and I prepared to duck.
“Get the fuck out of here!” he yelled. “Right now! And if I hear you tell your theory to anyone else, I will sue your ass so fast it will make your head spin. Did you hear me?”
He didn’t throw the laptop, but he did throw a box of tissues, hitting me square in the chest. I’d pushed him to his limit, and he’d not admitted a thing. I picked up the box from the floor, stood up, and slammed it onto his desk. I backed towards the door, pausing as I reached it.
“I’m not done yet,” I said. “Not by a long shot.” I left his office, Sieboldt Hall, and Granderson University with the storm still raging in the February night.
thirty-five
Returning home after my encounter on the Granderson campus, I couldn’t sit down as I bustled about the house, fuming at myself, at Wiggin, at the whole sordid mess surrounding Monarch. Some of what happened began to take shape. It was an inside job all the way. Kenneth Wiggin had to be involved. Maybe even Candace Symington and Jack Cassidy. Somewhere, somehow, Thomas Chan and Adam Benzer came into the mix. Then there was Riley Forrester and the SCS, and Seth Seeger and S-SOP. It was an alphabet soup of names and acronyms. And everybody seemed to have been lying.
I needed a play to make all the parts come together, so I could see it more clearly. I spent a good two hours pacing from room to room, trying to recall the details of every interaction I’d had with everyone involved with the Monarch mess. I stopped in my tracks between the kitchen and the living room. From my office, I retrieved my laptop and toted it to the dining room and set it on the table. Five minutes later, I found a website called Marinetitle.com and bought a thirty-day membership for thirty bucks. I tried several different search criteria before scoring a hit. I wrote down the information on a notepad and folded down the laptop screen.
The view from my kitchen window confirmed what my ears had told me before—the wind and rain had stopped for now. It was after ten o’clock, but I knew I couldn’t sleep, so I put on a thick jacket, grabbed a Mag light and camera bag, and headed for my car parked in the driveway.
My first stop was Sand Cove, where I was disappointed to find the gate to the drive leading to the parking lot locked. I parked in the narrow space between Garden Highway and the gate. The road to the parking lot sloped downhill. I walked carefully down the road, the flashlight guiding me. At the end of the road it became clear why the gate had been closed—the parking lot was flooded in several inches of water. I didn’t care as I slogged along, arriving at the midpoint of the cement patch, my running shoes saturated as I stood in water above my ankles. In my previous visit I hadn’t given much significance to how close I was to the river. In front of where I stood, a dirt path curved down to a narrow beach.
When I sat at the bar at the Virgin Sturgeon that night, I kept picturing a van or truck pulling into this parking lot, the occupants hoisting the bags from the van into their vehicle. The possibility they might have used a boat didn’t enter my mind. Access to the parking lot from the water was ideal for transferring the money from the van onto a boat. I thought about walking down the path towards the river, then thought better of it. Any footprints or other signs of activity down at the beach would have been washed away by the storm.
I returned to my car and started it up. The next destination was about a half-mile away. Riverview Marina had a covered parking structure cast in a dull blue-gray light. At this time of night no one else was present. I walked from the structure down the gangway to see four covered docking areas and two uncovered ones. They were all dimly lit with pole-top mounted florescent lights. Naively, I thought I could just walk down to the docking areas and
inspect the names and vessel numbers of each boat until I found the one I was looking for.
“Damn!” I said when I reached the metal door preventing entry into the docks.
I went back to my car and retrieved my camera, the AstroScope lens still attached. I moved carefully on the sodden bank of the river paralleling the marina. None of the boats at the uncovered docks looked big enough. The boat I was looking for was thirty-four feet long.
I moved up the bank, the camera over my shoulder, spraying the flashlight from boat to boat as they bobbed in the dark water. My inspection of the first two covered docks took a few minutes. Steadying my progress with my uphill hand on the sloping bank, I reached a point where I could see most of the boats at the last two docks. The flashlight revealed at least five boats that could be thirty-four feet. When I turned off the light and raised the camera to examine the boats, I slipped and slid down the bank, my feet hitting the cold water. I reached up with my left hand and grabbed a handful of thick grass. Some of the grass pulled out from the saturated soil, but enough of it held to stop me going into the water beyond my knees.
I cursed and crawled partway up the bank until the footing felt firm enough to use the camera. I was looking for a boat named Cardinal Rules. I eliminated all but two of the boats based on their names. The bows of the two remaining boats faced me so I couldn’t see any names painted on their sides or back. I cursed again. Why hadn’t I brought a picture of what the boat looked like? That gave me an idea.
I dialed Rubia. She picked up on about the tenth ring.
“Hey, can you do me a favor?” I asked.
“Damn, Ray. What time is it? Woke me up.”
“It’s not even midnight. You shouldn’t be asleep already. Not at your age.”
“Whatcha want?”
“Can you find a photo of a boat and send it to me?”
“A photo of a boat? What, you forget what a boat looks like?”
“Not any boat, a particular boat. Write it down.”
“Don’t know why I put up with you.”