Corridor Man 6: Exit Strategy
Page 21
Miguel dropped Bobby off at the office just before eight the following morning. They drove around the block looking for the burgundy-colored Santa Fe, but never saw the thing. Miguel stopped in front of the door to the building and Bobby hurried inside. He cautiously stepped off the elevator on the twelfth floor, checking to make sure no one, especially Jeremy Leeks, was lingering. Mercifully, the hallway was empty and he hurried into the office, then checked the screen for the hall monitors for any movement once he closed the door behind him. There was none.
Erin rang the intercom almost an hour later.
“How was your night?” Bobby asked as she stepped in the door. He kept his eyes focused on the monitor screen, checking for Leeks in the outside hallway as he spoke. Again it remained empty.
“My night? It was nice. I bought, or should I say, you bought dinner last night.” She smiled and handed him a receipt. “My friend with benefits from the DMV, we had a very lovely evening.”
“Glad to be of service.”
“Oh, believe me, it was worth it.” She grinned.
“I left two names on your desk here. Gretchen Sommers is the woman who owned the car you checked on yesterday. The guy, Jeremy Leeks, is someone I’m expecting to cause a problem down the road. I’d like to be prepared if and when it happens. I’m interested in anything you can find on either one of them. Anything you come across that would place the two of them together would be very interesting.”
“How intense do you want…”
“Everything. Employment, taxes, properties, crime reports. As thorough a background investigation as you can do.”
“Okay, I can have that for you today. Are you thinking we might be in some kind of danger here?”
“Not yet, and I’d like to keep it that way. We’ve got a pretty low profile. This guy, Leeks, just coincidently happened to run into me twice over the past few days. I’m not a big fan of coincidences, especially with someone I haven’t seen in years and never liked to begin with.”
“I’ll get right on it. Soon as I grab a coffee.”
“Tell you what, you start your research and I’ll get you a coffee. You take it black, right?”
“Always,” she said and smiled.
He was back a couple of minutes later with a steaming mug of coffee. He set the mug on the counter and noticed a pistol lying on the desktop next to the monitor screen. “I really don’t think it’s going to be that kind of serious,” he said, indicating the pistol with a nod of his chin.
“Don’t think, or you know for sure? I’ve got a conceal and carry permit so it’s perfectly legal if that’s your worry. You know, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have Miguel around, just in case this Leeks guy or the Sommers woman decide to try something.”
“We’ll see. That’s why I want that information, I’d like to head them off at the pass before we get to the stage of them trying something stupid. Hey, I might be making this all sound larger than it really is. Let’s see what you can dig up.”
Ninety minutes later Erin was in his office with a file. “This is what I’ve been able to come up with on Gretchen Sommers. In a nutshell, she seems to have been more or less normal until maybe ten years ago. Then she got a divorce, along with a DUI. She’s been nailed for driving without insurance. She lost her job, then lost another job. She picked up two more DUIs, and spent six months locked up after the third one. Basically, she seems to be making an awful lot of bad decisions. Bottom line, it looks like she might gradually be going down the drain. She doesn’t appear to have hit bottom yet, if such a thing even exists in her case.”
“And Leeks?”
“Jesus,” she scoffed. “A lot more information. Just to start, he graduated from Princeton, Yale Law school, went into banking, eventually got caught living the good life and scamming the bank. He ended up doing eight years on a bank fraud charge. He was originally looking at something like twenty years, but he cooperated with the authorities and it appears his sentence was reduced to eight years. Served the last half of that sentence up in Duluth, there’s a Federal Prison Camp up there. The Fed’s nailed him with some pretty hefty fines. I should have most if not all of his info later this afternoon.”
Bobby nodded and didn’t react to Erin’s comment regarding the Duluth facility. He began paging through the information she’d found on Gretchen Sommers.
Sommers had been a fitness instructor for a national chain, then moved to a local organization with five locations across the Twin Cities. She was there for four years and appeared to be making a decent wage. She divorced in 2011, reverting back to her maiden name. She purchased the home Bobby and Miguel had driven past in that same year.
Everything suggested a somewhat amicable divorce arrangement, if there was such a thing, although it appeared that she started to tank at about the same time. She got her first DUI in 2011, another in 2013, a third in 2015 along with a charge of driving without insurance. With three DUI offenses, her car insurance, if she could even get coverage, would have to be prohibitive.
She owned a lake place in northern Minnesota, a cabin on ten acres. Her home in the city was valued at $375,000 and she was currently in arrears on the taxes for both properties. Bobby rechecked the information, but couldn’t find anything that suggested current employment. Erin’s assessment of gradually going down the drain appeared to be accurate.
Erin brought a report in on Jeremy Leeks about half past one that afternoon. The report was about five times the size of the one on Gretchen Sommers.
“Here you go,” she said, dropping the Leeks report on Bobby’s desk. “Looks to have been the golden boy up until he got nailed on those federal charges. Private high school, Princeton,Yale Law school, a Masters from Boston College. Did some international stuff, two years in Toronto, a year in Singapore, and another in Tokyo. Then back here with a regional bank. He was a vice president and on the fast track, at least until he got nailed hiding loans that were in arrears. Things get a bit sketchy once he’s released from Duluth. No current available address for him anywhere in the country. I checked three different ways. It’s like he just fell off the face of the Earth, or he’s really under the radar.”
“I wonder if he’s taken up a new identity?” Bobby said, thinking out loud and remembering Leeks had said he was just up visiting from Chicago.
“I guess that’s certainly an option. I mean, for a guy with his background and suddenly there’s no address, no financial institution, no driver’s license listed in any state, it doesn’t make any sense, at least to me. I mean, it’s not like he’s the first banker to ever do time. That in itself should be a red flag. Anyway, here’s some light reading. I’m going to go get some lunch. You want me to pick up anything for you?”
“Get me whatever you’re having as long as it’s not some vegan, crazed health-nut meal.”
“Thai okay?”
“More than okay, it’s perfect. Thanks,” he said, then reached into his wallet and handed her some cash.
“Back in about fifteen minutes. See you shortly,” she said, and started to head out of the office.
“Say, Erin,” Bobby called. He copied something down on a sheet of paper, then handed it to her. “While you’re out there, take a casual look around for that burgundy-colored Santa Fe. The car is sort of a smaller version of an SUV. See…”
“I know what a Santa Fe looks like, my girlfriend drives one. This is the Santa Fe that Gretchen Sommers owns, right?”
“Quite possibly.” Bobby looked at the report on Leeks. It was a good fifteen pages thick. “Other than they both seem to have made some bad decisions, did you see anything in either report that linked the two of them together?”
“No, not a thing. Then again, with her background maybe they just met in a bar. He bought her drinks and she decides he’s the one,” she said with a shrug, then headed down the hall.
Bobby started at the beginning. Leeks was a high school athlete in a pricey parochial school. He lettered three out of four years in football and basketball.
He was also an honors student, and attended Princeton on an academic scholarship. A Law degree from Yale. He earned a Masters degree in Banking and Financial Services Management from Boston University in 2002. He spent two years working in Toronto, followed by a year in both Singapore and Tokyo. He suddenly quit the international scene and took a vice president position in a local bank.
Bobby wondered if he was asked to leave, or maybe he was fleeing some crime he got away with? In 2008 he was one of a number of individuals charged with bank fraud. He was convicted and sentenced to twenty years. He had his twenty-year sentence cut to eight years after cooperating with authorities on a number of prosecutions.
He had testified in four separate prosecutions and was listed in a newspaper article from back in 2010 as a major reason four defendants were convicted. Bobby wondered if the people he helped put behind bars knew where he was now, and might that not account for the low profile?
Chapter Six
Erin returned with the lunches, two white Styrofoam trays smelling of wonderful Thai food.
“Here,” she said, setting the brown paper bag on Bobby’s desk and handing him one of the Styrofoam trays. “Mind if I join you?”
“Please do,” he said, then pulled a stack of files closer to make room for her tray. She sat down in one of the client chairs in front of his desk and opened her tray. His office was immediately filled with a delicious aroma, and his stomach growled in response.
“Mmm-mmm, sounds like you’re wasting away. Better dig in before you die of starvation.” She smiled.
He opened the Styrofoam tray and inhaled deeply.
“You know that burgundy-colored Santa Fe you mentioned? The one registered to Gretchen Sommers?”
“Yeah,” Bobby said, stopping a forkful of food in midair and looking up at her, his stomach growled in protest.
“Would this Jeremy Leeks be kind of a big guy, with dark curly hair that’s sort of cropped pretty close on the sides?”
“I believe you’re describing my close personal friend, the convicted banker,” Bobby said.
“He’s parked down the block. Didn’t even bother to look at me when I walked past. I did see a McDonalds bag sitting on the dashboard with an empty coffee cup, and he was sucking on a large orange drink or something. Looks like he’s been there for a while. You think he’s out there waiting for you?”
“Damn it,” he said, and shoveled a forkful of food into his mouth. “I’d say right now it’s a pretty safe bet he knows I office in this building. Probably doesn’t know the firm’s name, at least not yet. But yeah, he’s probably hoping to see me. He was just sitting there in the car?”
“Yeah, looked like he was finishing up a lunch, and if I had to guess I’d say he probably had breakfast there too.”
Bobby drummed his fingers on the desk, thought about his options and made a decision.
“So?”
“So what? Let the bastard sit out there. Nothing I can do about it. Besides, maybe after a day or two he’ll get bored and move on to something else. This guy is a bigger idiot than I thought.”
“Maybe,” Erin said, but didn’t comment any further. She finished the remainder of her lunch in about four minutes, said, “It’s been a real pleasure,” not meaning a word of it, and hurried out to her desk.
Once she was gone, Bobby pulled out his cellphone and dialed Miguel. He answered on the second ring.
“Yes.”
“Miguel I want you to pick me up tonight about six. I’m going to take the skyway over to my old firm’s building. Pull in front of the building and I’ll walk out.”
“Everything all right?”
“That house we went past last night. The guy is sitting in that car just down the street from the office. Erin was out grabbing lunch and saw the bastard. She said it looked like he’d been there for a while.”
“Maybe I should just deal with that.”
“No, too risky, someone is bound to see you and neither one of us needs that hassle. I’ve got a better idea. Just pick me up at six. Okay?”
“You’re the boss,” Miguel said.
To be continued…
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