Trapped!

by James Ponti

  “How did the sting work?” asked Margaret.

  “I told the bookseller that I knew someone very interested in purchasing antique Russian books and asked if he could put me in touch with the collector to see if he had any others to sell.”

  “And the collector turned out to be Alexander Petrov?” I asked.

  “Yes. But when I spoke to him on the phone, he used a fake name and claimed to be a Russian literature professor,” answered Marcus. “He said he didn’t have any books at the moment but expected to get some soon. Five days later he called and said he’d acquired two more books. We agreed to meet at a café in Georgetown so I could authenticate them and negotiate a price.”

  “And these books were also from the Russian Imperial Collection?” asked Margaret.

  “Yes, they were,” he said. “The moment I verified that, I signaled the surveillance team that was watching us, and we arrested him on the spot.” He smiled at the memory of it all. “That’s when things got interesting.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Margaret.

  “Do you know what diplomatic immunity is?”

  “Not exactly,” she said.

  “Basically, it means if you’re in one country representing the government of another country you can’t be arrested.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” said Margaret.

  “It’s supposed to protect people from being arrested for make-believe charges,” he said. “As soon as the handcuffs went on, Petrov told us that he was not a professor but rather a cultural attaché. He claimed diplomatic immunity and alerted his embassy. They sent a pair of security officers to come get him.”

  “Did he deny he stole the books?”

  “He didn’t say a single word after he’d called for the officers. But the next day the embassy released a statement saying that he took full responsibility for what happened. As punishment he was forced to leave the country and return to Russia. It was a big deal on the news for a little while, and it ruined his career as a diplomat.”

  “So you never got to question him?”

  “No. And we weren’t allowed to search his apartment or his car. We were blocked from all our standard investigative techniques.”

  “Then what’s in there?” I asked, pointing at the white evidence box that Marcus had placed on the table.

  “His one mistake,” said Marcus.

  19.

  Mrs. Hoover Speaks Mandarin and Other Fun Facts about the First Ladies

  ALEXANDER PETROV’S MISTAKE HAD BEEN a simple one. When he came to meet Marcus at the café, he’d brought the two rare books in a briefcase. But in the chaos of being arrested and then waiting for the embassy’s security officers to arrive, he’d forgotten about it and left it behind.

  “I just saw it sitting there, and before he had a chance to send someone back to get it, I drove it down to the Hoover Building and entered it as evidence,” said Marcus.

  “Did he ever realize his mistake?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah. The embassy threw a fit and said the FBI was withholding property of the Russian government. But the director wouldn’t budge an inch. He told them that if he wanted his briefcase back, Petrov had to come into the office and answer questions.”

  “So what’s in the box?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Margaret. “We want to run it through the Toaster.”

  There were eight items listed on the evidence inventory:

  A brown leather briefcase.

  Eleven business cards identifying Alexander Petrov as a cultural attaché with the embassy.

  A letter to Petrov from an artist in Birmingham, Alabama, named Jarrett Underhill.

  Two unopened Russian candies in purple wrappers.

  A ticket stub from the Baltimore Museum of Art.

  Four unpaid parking tickets.

  A receipt for an ATM withdrawal of two hundred dollars.

  A kid’s library book called Mrs. Hoover Speaks Mandarin and Other Fun Facts about the First Ladies.

  We went through them one by one, and Margaret made sure to take pictures of each so we’d have them for reference in the Underground.

  We quickly dismissed the briefcase, business cards, and candy. None of them seemed important to the case, although we briefly debated how the candy might taste after nine years in storage and decided it would probably be something like an old tennis shoe.

  “What about the ticket stub to the museum?” asked Margaret. “According to Natalia, Baltimore has a large Russian immigrant community.”

  “Who’s Natalia?” asked Marcus.

  “She runs Gorky’s.”

  “And didn’t you say that you thought Rose Brock was from Baltimore?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “But so are a million other people. There’s nothing suspicious about a cultural attaché going to an art museum. That’s part of his job.”

  “And is reading picture books about the first ladies part of his job too?” asked Margaret as she held up the evidence bag with the book. “It doesn’t really seem like normal reading material for a spy.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” said Marcus. “It’s a library book. That didn’t seem significant nine years ago, but now with what we know about the recent case, it might have been used to pass a message or hide a post office box key.”

  “So you’re thinking this library/post office dead drop has been going on for the whole time?” I asked.

  “It’s a definite possibility.”

  “Then answer this,” said Margaret. “Of all the books in the library, why use this one?”

  “That’s an excellent question,” said Marcus. “First thing tomorrow morning I’m going to have it run for fingerprints.”

  “You think the prints are still good?” she asked.

  “The book hasn’t been touched in nine years,” he said. “They should be perfect.”

  “Except a library book gets handled by lots of people,” I said. “How will you know which prints are the right ones?”

  “Think about it,” he said.

  It took me a moment to get it. “You’re looking for one that matches prints on the new book. That’s perfect.”

  “He sure does have a lot of parking tickets,” Margaret said.

  “That’s because he didn’t have to pay them,” said Marcus. “Parking tickets are also covered by diplomatic immunity. These were just the four he was carrying. I checked with the Metropolitan Police, and he’d had more than twenty during the previous year.”

  “Is it just me, or does this guy sound like a jerk?” asked Margaret.

  “It’s not just you,” Marcus said with a laugh. “I remember checking them to see if he ever got ticketed near the Library of Congress. That was the hole in my case. I could never make a connection of any kind between him and the library.”

  I started reading off the locations of the tickets. “He’s got them for Massachusetts Avenue, Alabama Avenue, U Street, and Dupont Circle.”

  “All over town but nowhere near the library,” said Margaret.

  “What was the date of the arrest?” I asked.

  Marcus checked in a spiral notebook. “November twentieth.”

  I looked at the dates on the tickets. “He got these on November third, eighth, seventeenth, and nineteenth.” I picked up the ATM receipt and checked the date on it. “This was the nineteenth too.”

  “Why’s that important?”

  “I don’t know that it is,” I said. “I just know that the day before he was arrested he got a parking ticket and withdrew two hundred dollars from the bank.”

  “You said you could never place him in the Library of Congress?” asked Margaret.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Isn’t that odd?” she asked. “I’m not exactly sure what a cultural attaché does, but it sounds like the kind of job that takes you to the Library of Congress at least every now and then.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” said Marcus. “But I went through the guest lists of e
very official event. I checked phone records. I did everything I could to place him in that building and came up empty each time.”

  “Which is why you knew he had to have help from someone on the inside.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How’d you narrow the list of suspects down to four?” I asked.

  “Originally, I identified nine people who had access to the books in the collection,” he said. “But then I thought about the first call to Petrov. When we talked, he said he didn’t have any books he could sell.”

  “But five days later he had two,” I said.

  “Exactly. That meant whomever it was had access during that week. That narrowed it down to the four. By the way, there’s more new evidence as of today.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I had the financials pulled on our four suspects,” he said, taking out a folder with a dozen or so pages in it. “After all, each of these books should sell for thousands of dollars, so I was wondering who had large sums of money pop into their accounts at unusual times.”

  “What’d you find?”

  “Not much, unfortunately. A couple years ago Lucia started depositing money in larger amounts, but it was right as she was buying a new house. I dug a little deeper and found out that she cashed out some investments and received some money from her parents. Likewise, Brooke King had a lot of money flowing through her account three years ago.”

  “Which is when she was buying her bookstore,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he replied. “I looked into it and saw that money went to purchase things for the store like”—he picked up an invoice and read—“ ‘fourteen wooden library shelf units, a barcoding inventory machine, and a Worldwide Super Fortress Safe.’ ”

  “What about Alistair Toombs and Rose Brock?”

  “Not surprisingly Alistair has the most boring financial records in the history of the world. There are no spikes or aberrations. Rose Brock, however, occasionally deposits large sums, which she typically spends on trips to Europe.”

  “Any of those to Russia?”

  “At least three trips to Saint Petersburg.”

  None of us liked thinking that Rose was guilty, so this was not particularly good news.

  The last piece of evidence in the cold case file was the letter. Technically, it was two pieces of evidence. The letter itself was in one baggie while the envelope was in another. Margaret looked at the envelope and asked, “Do we know who Jarrett Underhill is and why he was writing Petrov?”

  “Actually, at the time, I thought that was the most interesting clue of all,” said Marcus. “Underhill is a sculptor who lived in Birmingham, Alabama. He wrote Petrov hoping to arrange some kind of cultural exchange between artists in the United States and Russia.”

  “What’s interesting about that?” I asked.

  “Underhill claims he never heard of Petrov and insists he never sent the letter.”

  Margaret and I shared a look.

  “Did he know that you had the actual letter?” I asked.

  “I went down to Alabama and interviewed him myself,” he said. “I showed him the letter, and he denied that it was his.”

  “Maybe he was lying,” said Margaret.

  “If so, he was really good at it,” said Marcus. “I believed him.”

  I picked up the bag with the letter and read it. Underhill, or at least the person claiming to be Underhill, wanted to start a program where artists from Russia and the United States could work together on projects in each other’s studios. He thought it would strengthen the cultural relationship between the countries.

  “This is actually a cool idea,” I said. “There’s certainly nothing scandalous or spy-worthy about it. More importantly, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to lie about it.”

  “Here’s something,” Margaret said, looking at the envelope. “The stamp’s upside down.”

  “I remember that,” said Marcus. “I spent an entire afternoon trying to figure out how that might be important.”

  “And what’d you get?”

  “A headache,” he said. “I finally decided that it was a simple mistake.”

  I took the envelope from her and studied it. The upside-down stamp had a picture of the Statue of Liberty. It seemed pretty obvious, but I didn’t know how that might be important. Then I noticed something that was much less obvious.

  “I don’t think Jarrett Underhill was lying,” I said.

  “Why do you say that?” asked Marcus.

  “The return address on this envelope says it was mailed from Birmingham, Alabama,” I told him.

  “Right. That’s where Underhill lived.”

  I held the envelope up for them to see.

  “Then why does the postmark say Harrisonburg, Virginia?”

  20.

  Self-Defense

  MARCUS STARED AT THE POSTMARK and shook his head. “How could I have missed that?”

  “It’s easy to overlook,” I said. “You assume the postmark matches the return address. Besides, you were probably focused on the letter and not the envelope. Anyone would have missed it.”

  He looked up at me and said, “Anyone but you.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything at all.

  “What could the explanation be?” asked Margaret.

  “Either Jarrett Underhill drove six hundred miles to mail a letter he claims he never wrote,” said Marcus, “or someone went to a lot of trouble to involve him in this.”

  “I don’t know why anyone would do that,” I said. “But the second explanation seems more likely.”

  “Where’s Harrisonburg?” asked Margaret.

  “About two hours southwest of here in the Shenandoah Valley,” said Marcus. “It’s home to James Madison University.”

  “Maybe Underhill has a connection to the school?” she asked.

  “We can check that,” said Marcus. “But I doubt it.”

  “And he had no connection to Russia or the embassy?” I asked.

  “None,” said Marcus. “But this part’s odd. He did have one to the Library of Congress.”

  “Really?”

  “He sculpted a bust of Mark Twain that’s on display in the John Adams Building.”

  “Did any of our suspects have anything to do with that sculpture?” asked Margaret.

  “Not a one,” he said. “I spent a lot of time investigating that and couldn’t find any place where they overlapped.”

  Soon after that, it was time for dinner, and we went upstairs. Rather than discuss the case, we mostly talked about the soccer game. The food was delicious, and when we were done, Marcus left for the Hoover Building, and Margaret went home. I spent about an hour doing homework, and then I went back into the Underground to study the caseboard.

  I added some new details from the day, including a map of Harrisonburg and a picture of Mrs. Hoover Speaks Mandarin and Other Fun Facts about the First Ladies. I went online to a website devoted to the artwork of Jarrett Underhill. I even got a map of the city and marked the locations of Alexander Petrov’s parking tickets.

  I kept thinking I was on the verge of figuring something out, but the clues never snapped together. The idea behind TOAST is that you add up the small things in order to find the big ones. But these small things didn’t seem like they were part of the same equation.

  The next day after school Kayla picked us up for self-defense class.

  “Have you heard anything from Marcus today?” I asked when we got into her car.

  “Just a text canceling our lunch date,” she said. “He said he was busy with the case and needed to keep working.”

  “Hopefully that means he’s on the verge of a breakthrough,” said Margaret. “Maybe he’s been able to match the fingerprints.”

  “Are you guys ready for your lesson?” she asked us.

  The first time I had a training session with Kayla was the day we met, and I mistakenly assumed that since she was petite and had a perpetual smile, she was more ki
ndergarten teacher than martial artist. After fifty minutes of her tossing me around the gym, I swore I’d never underestimate someone again.

  “Where’re we going?” asked Margaret.

  “Julie’s Gym,” she said. “You’re going to love it.”

  When I heard the name Julie’s Gym, I imagined it was one of those fitness clubs with rows of treadmills and a juice bar. Or maybe a yoga studio with a lot of moms doing crazy pretzel stretches.

  The first hint I was wrong was when we drove down a street with abandoned warehouses and boarded-up windows. Then Kayla parked in a small lot surrounded by a rusted fence topped with razor wire.

  “Get your gym bags,” she said as she turned off the car. “We’re here.”

  Margaret and I shared a look. “We are?”

  Julie’s turned out to be a hard-core gymnasium for boxers and mixed martial arts fighters. There was no air-conditioning or carpeting, and the closest thing to a juice bar was a water fountain that looked like it hadn’t worked in years. For some reason, opera blared over the speakers.

  Everything reeked of dirt and sweat, and when Margaret took a whiff, she recoiled. “That smell!”

  “I know,” said Kayla. “Isn’t it great?”

  I scanned the assortment of tough guys who populated the gym and asked, “Which one of them is Julie?”

  “This one,” she said, nodding toward an African-American man in his sixties who’d started walking toward us. He was massive, at least six foot four, with a pudgy face and gray hair. “Hey, Julie.”

  “Miss Kayla,” he replied with a friendly baritone. “Always a pleasure. I see you’ve brought friends.”

  “Teaching a little self-defense class,” she told him.

  “Your name’s Julie?” I asked, confused but trying not to sound rude.