by Allen Eskens
He fired up his rental car, and twenty minutes later he was sitting at the desk in his hotel room. He used his laptop to log in to the secure website that would allow him to track Ianna Markova's Cadillac. He watched as the red dot appeared on the screen, showing that Ianna Markova's car hadn't left the parking garage at the condo. Then he closed the computer and began planning his trip to Wisconsin, where the next moves would play out.
Not every assassination involved a target at the center of the intrigue. Sometimes the target is a mere pawn that must be removed from the board so that a more important chess piece can be exposed. The pawns were often people like Magda Markova, a woman whose death would hopefully draw his opponent's queen out into the open.
Magda lived in a mobile home she rented on the outskirts of a small town in central Wisconsin. What little information Drago had, Facebook chatter and the like, suggested that Magda and her daughter, Ianna, kept in touch and were close enough that Ianna would run to her mother's side if the right circumstance presented itself. Around noon that Sunday, Drago drove past Magda's Markova's home in rural Wisconsin, preparing to create the right circumstance.
Drago could see remnants of Ianna's childhood scattered around the place, the tire swing waiting in vain for grandchildren, the rotting treehouse in the windbreak, the frilly curtains with the angels on them gathering dust in the back bedroom. Garland's research showed Ianna's father had died of natural causes a decade earlier, and there was no second husband or companion. Magda would be alone.
Drago glanced around as he knocked on the door of the trailer—no neighbor within yelling distance. That was good. A woman came to the door, her arms and legs showing no sign of the farm-girl muscle that she surely had once possessed.
“Hello,” she said in a soft, even voice.
“Mrs. Markova?” Drago flattened his words into his best American accent, which rarely passed muster. He wouldn't have long before she would begin to see past his charade.
“Yes?”
“I'm an investigator with the Department of Justice, Division of Criminal Investigation.” Drago held out his hand to shake hers. “I'm assisting Minnesota on an investigation that involves your daughter, Ianna. Can I come in?” Magda swayed slightly as the confusing words tipped the bubble of her level. She stepped back, her eyes remaining fixed on this man with the accent. But she let him into her home.
“Is your husband home?”
“I don't have a husband.”
Drago looked around for any sign of another presence in the house and saw no hint of anyone, not even a dog.
“What's this about my daughter? Is she in trouble?”
“Is there someone in the bedroom? I thought I heard a noise.” He hadn't heard a noise. He had her off balance and needed to make sure that they were alone before she came to her senses.
“No, there's no one. What about my daughter?”
Drago glanced around the room and saw a dish towel on the oven handle. He would need that soon.
“Who did you say you were again? I didn't see your ID.”
Drago reached into his suit jacket, a cheap rag he bought at a thrift store the afternoon before. He slid his hand past the wallet where he stored the false identification of Walter Trigg and wrapped his fingers around the grip of his Glock, pulling the gun out in a single, sweeping motion, the arc of the muzzle coming to a stop directly in front of Magda's forehead. She gulped air deep into her lungs. Her eyes bulged, and the blood drained from her face.
“Please sit,” Drago said, politely pointing to a chair next to the kitchen table. Magda felt around for a chair behind her, touching her way to a seat the way a blind person might do, never taking her eyes off the shiny, black gun, its impressive contour enhanced by a suppressor that extended the barrel length by an extra seven inches.
“You will sit still,” he said. “You will not move or make a sound. If you disobey me, I will put a bullet in your head. Do you understand?”
She nodded slowly.
He kept the gun pointed at her head as he backed a few feet to the oven and lifted the dish towel off the handle. He shook the towel open and, using his teeth and his spare hand, tore it in half, then walked back to where she sat.
“What do you want?” she whispered in a voice so meek he barely heard her.
Drago lifted a single finger to his lips and said “Shhh.” Then he tied her arms behind her back using one of the strips of towel, keeping the cloth of the towel as wide as possible so as to leave no mark. When the time came, the medical examiner would not be able to find evidence of the ligature.
She began to cry now and beg for her life, repeatedly asking him why he was doing this. Drago said nothing as he tied the second piece of towel around her eyes. She couldn't see him now, and she began to shake with fear, a scream cutting loose from somewhere deep. He faced her and sat down on her lap, his legs straddling her thighs, his chest pressing against her chest, a single finger touching her lips.
“Shhh,” he whispered again. “I'm not going to hurt you. I just need you to be quiet for a little while. All will become clear to you soon. If you do not struggle, I promise I will not harm you.”
Magda stopped screaming, but her chest continued to heave with fear. It fascinated Drago the way that people could believe the unbelievable. He had entered her house, pointed a gun at her face, tied her up in a chair, and now straddled her lap. Yet she had stopped screaming because she believed him when he said he wouldn't hurt her. Drago smiled and reached into his jacket pocket, lifted a small case, opened it, and picked up the syringe and the bottle of potassium chloride. He appraised her and guessed her weight to be around one hundred and thirty pounds. He pressed the needle into the bottle and pulled the plunger back until he had filled the syringe with enough potassium chloride to stop her heart.
He put the bottle back into his pocket and gave a look around the kitchen. Behind him, on the edge of the kitchen island, he saw a knife and a cutting board. The cutting board, a heavy, wooden butcher's block, had corners sharp enough to tear skin. Drago played out his staged scene in his head. He watched the woman clutch her left shoulder and grip the island for support as the heart attack punched her chest. He watched her grab for the cordless phone on the island, only to fall to the floor, catching the corner of the cutting board and gashing her neck in the process. With her last ounce of life, she would dial 911.
Satisfied with his plan, he lightly lifted her chin and slid the needle into Magda's neck, injecting the potassium chloride into her jugular vein. Within seconds, the chemical reached her heart and her body started to jerk and shutter. He stood and untied the towels from around her face and arms. Her heart still pumped as she fought against the chemicals. He laid her on the floor in the spot where she landed in his imagination. Then he took the knife from the island and, with the tip turned sideways, scraped a rough gouge into the side of her neck where he had injected the potassium chloride. The scrape obliterated any trace of the injection site. She shuddered on the floor until her heart stopped beating.
Once he was sure that Magda was dead, Drago positioned the cutting board on the edge of the island where her neck would have clipped it in the fall. Then he transferred enough skin cells and blood from the knife to the cutting board to make it look like the cutting board caused the injury to her throat. Then he washed the knife clean, running enough water through the sink to push the remaining blood and tissue evidence past the trap in the drain and down the pipe.
If any investigation came from this, they would find nothing more than a sixty-two-year-old woman lying on her floor, dead of a heart attack. If there were an autopsy, they wouldn't look for potassium chloride levels, and if they did, raised potassium-chloride levels are common in heart-attack victims. The investigators would find traces of her blood and neck tissue on the butcher's block and assume she hit her throat in the fall. A standard examination would find no bruises and no evidence of foul play.
With a final walk around the room, Drago wip
ed down any surface that he may have touched, although he had been careful to not touch anything. He would discard the towels in a gas-station trash can on the way back to Minnesota. Comfortable that everything had been put back in its place, he took the cordless phone from the countertop—without leaving any prints—and, using Magda's finger, dialed 911. He laid the phone next to Magda and walked out the door. In a minute, a squad car would be dispatched to Magda's address. By the time the squad arrived, Drago would be well on his way back to Minneapolis to execute the next part of his plan.
Alexander spent his weekend finding ways to avoid Desi, which turned out to be easier than he expected. She didn't mind that he toiled away at his computer for hours on end, digging through Jericho Pope's hard drive and searching the Internet for signs of Pope, Putnam, Garland, or Prather. He even researched the Domuscuta and Captain Rodgers. In the end, he found nothing that brought him any closer to an answer.
At night, Desi slept in the guest bedroom, and now that he knew why, her absence from their bed fed him full of bad dreams. In some, he floated like a ghost, watching Desi and her lover embrace each other—sometimes oblivious to his presence and other times taunting him. In other dreams, he sat dumbstruck before a grand jury, trying to speak but unable to get the words past his swollen tongue. He awoke on Monday morning badly in need of a couple hours’ more sleep.
His Monday brightened, however, when he arrived at his cubicle and found his next two stepping-stones in the Putnam case lying on his desk. The first was a copy of the administrative subpoena allowing him to have a conversation with Wells Fargo about all of James Putnam's bank accounts. The second was a stack of James Putnam's phone records, dating back ten years. Alexander started with the bank records. He picked up the phone and placed a call to Calvin Johnson, a VP in Accounts. Two minutes later, Johnson had James Putnam's account information displayed on his computer.
Alexander said, “I am interested in a flurry of deposits the account receives every December first.” He waited while Johnson navigated to the December statement.
“Wow. Five hundred thousand,” Johnson said. “Fifty deposits in ten-thousand-dollar increments.”
“What can you tell me about those deposits?”
“Give me a second.” Alexander could hear the clack of computer keys as Johnson moved through old statements to confirm the deposits. “Yes, here it is. I have the routing numbers. It looks like the money came to us electronically from banks all over the Midwest, including different branches of Wells Fargo.”
“Fifty different bank accounts?” Alexander said. “What was this guy doing?”
“I suspect…let me check something.” More clicking of a keyboard and then a pause. “Yep, just as I thought. The deposits that I tracked through two of our branch locations show that the deposits came to those banks from a single bank in Singapore.”
“Singapore?”
“It's a good location for hiding money. It's kind of the new Switzerland.”
“Did that Singapore bank generate all fifty transfers?”
“My guess is yes, but I can't tell for sure without tracking each deposit. I suspect that the customer was trying to avoid a Suspicious Activity Report.”
“What's that?”
“When someone transfers more than ten thousand dollars into the country from overseas, the receiving bank is supposed to do an SAR to notify the government of the transfer. Your guy here was trying to keep below the radar by breaking it up into ten-grand increments.”
“It apparently worked,” Alexander said.
“Seems so, but he probably didn't need to go through all that trouble. Regulators rarely look at those reports unless there's an active investigation going on.”
“Is there any way of getting the name of the account holder who sent the transfer?”
Johnson chuckled. “Not a chance. Even if you were able to pierce the veil, all you'd come up with is a number. I'd bet that the money passed through at least one or two other banks—probably Switzerland and maybe Panama or the Cayman Islands—before it showed up in Singapore. If you have the account numbers, you can move money all over the world in a matter of minutes.”
It was what Alexander had expected to find, but he still felt a sting of disappointment. “Wisdom of Solomon,” he muttered to himself.
“Excuse me?”
“I'm sorry,” Alexander said. “I'm just talking to myself. I have one more question. You see on the statement, after the half mil shows up, there's a fifty-thousand-dollar withdrawal?”
“Yes. A cash withdrawal.”
“Any chance of your computer telling me why he pulled it out?”
“Sorry,” Johnson said in a voice that sounded as if he was truly sorry. “All we have is the record that he took the money out.”
“I thought so, but I had to ask.” Alexander thanked Mr. Johnson for his time, then he eased his way out of the conversation, his thoughts having already moved on to his next task—the phone records.
Pope made a trip every year after the big payday. If he needed to make any arrangements for his December trip, those might appear in the phone records for late November. Alexander whispered his thoughts, “What did Ianna say…James left at noon, and was back at eight. He grabbed a map from his desk drawer. Alexander had found no flight confirmation or other evidence on Pope's hard drive to suggest that he flew on his December trips, so he concluded that they must have been road trips. “If it's a four-hour drive there and back…” He drew a circle around the Twin Cities that swallowed most of Minnesota, and a large swath of Iowa, Wisconsin, and parts of the Dakotas. He then made a list of every area code in the circle.
With the list of area codes in hand, he laid the November phone records for the past ten years side by side on his desk. He ignored phone numbers with a Twin Cities area code, on the hunch that Pope used much of his eight hours for driving. Alexander's fingers moved from number to number, finding a few that repeated but nothing consistent. Then he touched a telephone number beginning with the area code 515—Iowa. He went back in time and found the same phone number in all ten years, a single phone call that Jericho Pope placed every year to someone in Iowa.
“I knew it!” He settled back in his chair, letting his arms and legs sprawl over the sides as a strange sense of relief washed over him. This was the first time since they assigned him that cubicle in the Frauds Unit that he felt like a cop. He woke up his computer and logged on to a restricted database available to law enforcement. The database could identify the owners of unlisted and cell-phone numbers. It was a database to be used for official investigations only.
Alexander started to type in the number he found in Putnam's phone records, but then stopped and deleted it. He glanced around the room, just to see if anyone paid him any mind, and found that he was as invisible as always. He slipped a piece of paper from his pocket and looked at the phone number that he pulled from Desi's cell-phone bill, the one she deleted from her call log. He typed in the phone number and, in a second, had an answer. The phone number belonged to a man named Martin Edwards. Alexander committed the man's name and address to his memory and deleted the entry.
He took a couple seconds to collect himself before typing in a Google search for Martin Edwards, quickly finding a LinkedIn page complete with a smiling picture of the man who had embraced Desi in the lobby of the IDS Center. Edwards was a commodities broker living on Lake Minnetonka, some of the most expensive real estate in the Minnesota. Whether for good or bad, Alexander now had the name and address and face of the man whom his wife had been seeing. He tucked the information away for now. When the time came, he would have the advantage.
He then turned his attention back to the phone number from Iowa. He typed the number into the database, and the screen lit up with the name Michelle Holla of Des Moines. Another click, and he had her address.
“Who are you, Michelle?” Alexander asked the screen. “Why is it that Jericho Pope calls you every year right about the time he makes his bi
g score?”
He did a Google search for her name and got over a million results. He put quotation marks around the name and reduced the results to just over five thousand. With another hunch, he added the words “New York” to the search, and cut it down to under three hundred. On the eighth page of results, he came upon an obituary of a Mr. Ernest Holla who died in 1999 and was survived by—among others—a daughter named Michelle Holla.
Michelle Holla grew up in Brooklyn—the same patch of real estate that raised Jericho Pope and James Putnam. This was no coincidence. She had to be the connection to Pope's past. “Whatever happened back in New York,” Alexander said to himself, “caused you to run away to Iowa. It brought Pope to Minnesota.” He wrote down her address. “So, Ms. Holla, I think you and I should meet.”
Alexander had spent six hours electronically stalking Michelle Holla before leaving his cubicle for the day. A few years younger than both Putnam and Pope, she had lived in Brooklyn at the same time as them, and her New York trail disappeared with theirs. Alexander could find no mention of a Michelle Holla living in Des Moines before October 2001, when she applied for a driver's license at the age of eighteen. Every instinct in his body told him that Michelle Holla held the key to Jericho Pope's past.
Alexander decided not to ask for permission to go to Iowa, like he did when he went to New York. This time, he simply put in for a personal day off. He told Commander Tiller that he planned to use the time off to prepare for his grand-jury testimony, which loomed a mere two days away. He could feel the crucible of that event coming at him with the unstoppable force of a falling boulder. He felt the presence of the grand-jury investigation every time he let his mind relax. It seemed that the only way to ignore the rumble of that landslide was to focus all of his attention on the Putnam case.
He called the Des Moines Police Department and asked if someone there could send a car past the address of Michelle Holla to see if the place looked lived-in. The report came back that there was a female, who fit the driver's license description of Michelle Holla, doing yard work at the residence. The trip would not be wasted.
