Brady hit the gas and the car pulled out of the slide and shot across the right lane, narrowly avoiding an SUV full of screaming teenage girls. We were past the exit ramp, but Brady kept going. We hit the curb and the front end flew up into the air. The seat belt threatened to cut me in two. The rear wheels found traction and we slalomed down the grassy slope, while the GPS lady kept repeating the word “NO!” as though reprimanding a particularly stupid golden retriever. We left behind a screen of flying grass and dirt and two long divots. Then we bounced back onto the roadway, heading the right way down the exit ramp.
There was no one in front of us. Hochstadt had already made the turn at the bottom of the ramp. We had lost him.
—
“GODDAMNIT, BRADY. Where is he? How in hell did you lose him?” Maloney had another victim.
“Shut up!” I yelled. “It’s not his fault. Hochstadt set us up—he knew he was being followed.”
Maloney looked as though he was about to start in on me. I didn’t give him the chance.
“He put on that lousy-driver act and cut out as soon as he saw we were easing up on him. I didn’t think he had it in him—and neither did you, so leave off!”
The engine hummed. The traffic light changed to yellow, then red. Nobody said anything. The road stretched into darkness in either direction.
Maloney spoke first. “You’re right. He made us. So, where would he go? Thoughts?” It was an open question. No one ventured an opinion.
“Where’s the rest of the team?” I said.
Maloney nodded and spoke to Brady. “Call them. Have them circle back around. Wake up local law enforcement as well. Where the fuck are we anyway?”
Outside it was dark and we were surrounded by trees. It was a long way from Seventy-second Street.
“New York,” Brady answered. “Somewhere between Rye and New Rochelle.”
“Left or right?” Maloney said. “We’re not going to find him sitting here.”
“Hold up,” I said. “Let me call his wife.” I pulled out my own phone and dialed.
“What are you thinking?” Maloney said.
I held up one finger as the phone rang.
She answered in a low, tired voice. “Yes?”
“Diane? It’s Jason again. Things are swinging out of control. I need your help—and I think Geoffrey does as well.” Whatever he was up to, I knew he was frightened.
“I want nothing to do with this. I thought I made that clear.”
“I’m happy to keep you out of it. But I’m worried.”
She must have heard something in my voice. “What do you want?”
“Tell me. Did he buy himself another boat?”
Maloney’s eyes bulged.
“Why?” Now she sounded frightened.
“I thought you wanted to stay out of this.”
She paused. “Yes. It’s another big sailboat. A racing boat. He keeps it in a slip at Mamaroneck.”
“Mamaroneck?” I asked, giving Brady a look.
He nodded and gave a thumbs-up.
“Yes. Is he all right?” The concern in her voice surprised me. Maybe it surprised her.
“I hope so.”
I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t tell whether she was afraid for herself, or him, or merely sick of all of us. Little shits, big shits, crooks, pretenders, and me. She hung up before I thought of the words.
Brady was already tapping away at the GPS.
“Left turn,” the computer lady ordered.
—
MAIN STREET MAMARONECK gave way to an open park facing the harbor and Long Island Sound. Aluminum masts stood out brightly against the black water. A stiff breeze had the lines rattling in a clack-clack arrhythmic staccato. A cold mist wisped by in patches that left the windshield bedewed with tiny raindrops that sparkled golden in the overhead lights.
A wide concrete walkway led down to the floating docks. Save for the single yellow HMV in the parking lot, the place seemed to be deserted.
“A great place to have a conversation you didn’t want anyone else to hear,” Maloney said as we made our way out along the dock.
The two agents didn’t make a fuss about creeping along, but they managed to make very little noise. The slap of the lines on the masts drowned out footsteps.
Toward the end of the dock, one boat emitted a glow from the cabin lights.
“You think that’s his boat?” Brady said.
I had no clue. “Sailboats have the big stick on top, right?”
We crept closer. Serenity II was written in an italic kind of font along the back end of the hull.
“That’s it,” I said.
“So we wait to see who comes down to join him?” Brady said.
Maloney shook his head. “We go in now. We’ll wait on board.” He pulled himself over the rail and the boom creaked as the boat swayed under his weight, announcing our arrival as effectively as a siren.
“Mr. Hochstadt?” Maloney called out. There was no answer.
We must all have caught the same wave of apprehension simultaneously. Maloney took out a gun. Brady pulled himself on board and moved around to the far side of the open hatchway.
“Geoffrey Hochstadt? We are FBI agents. We’re here to talk to you.”
The lines kept slapping against the mast. The wind hummed through the rigging.
Brady ducked his head and went down the cabin steps. Maloney followed.
I stood alone on the deck, feeling the cold mist work its way through my clothes. Maybe I shivered.
“We’re too late,” Maloney called up.
I looked down the short stairway. The space below held two long, built-in couches, a small desk surrounded by navigation equipment, and a miniature kitchen. Splatters of blood covered most of it.
Geoffrey Hochstadt was sitting upright, leaning back slightly on the couch. His mouth hung open and his eyes bulged. He looked like he was doing a bad Jim Carrey impersonation. I had to crane my head to the side to see the blackened hole in his temple. The exit wound was in shadow, but the arc of blood and other matter across the walls and ceiling was easy to read.
The sight of death—violent death—affected me much less than I would have expected. I felt no revulsion at the blood and brains spewed across the cabin, just a cold stab of loneliness. I wanted my son. I wanted to be home in my apartment, tucking my child into bed, and reading to him from The History of the Muscle Car: When Detroit Ruled the World.
“That him?” Brady spoke softly.
I nodded.
“Bet he looked better before.” Cop humor can be as inane and infantile as Wall Street humor—and as dark.
“Can you close his eyes?” I said.
There was a handgun of some kind lying on the cushion next to his open hand. I had seen enough cop shows to know it was an automatic, not a revolver. I decided that two experienced FBI agents would not need me to point this out. Though he couldn’t have been dead for more than ten minutes, there was already a faint smell of decay mixed with the odors of mildew, gunpowder, and fresh urine.
“I guess he kept the gun here,” I said. They both looked at me quizzically. “On board. He came here to get the gun.”
“So you think this is suicide?” Maloney asked.
“Don’t you?” I said.
“Not likely,” Brady said. “The guy’s left-handed. Nobody shoots himself with his off hand. It is the one time where you really don’t want to have to take a second shot.”
I stared at the body. “How do you know he’s left-handed?” I finally said.
“The watch.”
Maloney nodded. The dead man was wearing a gold Rolex—on his right wrist. “They teach you to look for things like that on the Discovery Channel.”
Brady snorted a laugh as he rifled through the drawers and cabinets.
“I thought you’re not supposed to touch anything. At a crime scene, I mean.”
Brady ignored me.
“Maybe you should wait outside,” Maloney said.
I thought about waiting in the dark, wet chill where a murderer might still be hanging around.
“How about I stay here and keep my mouth shut,” I said.
“That works, too.”
It took them just minutes to discover that there was nothing to find. The drawers held some charts, an engine manual, and a booklet of the most recent sailboat racing rules. Otherwise, the boat was bare.
“He came here to meet someone,” Maloney said. “Someone who killed him almost as soon as he arrived. And then immediately cut out.”
“So what do we do now?”
Maloney looked around. “Get our guys in here to coordinate the locals. Meantime, we go after records.” He turned to me. “And the first place you should look is back at Hochstadt’s apartment. Did you see a computer there? An office?”
“No. But I never looked in the bedrooms. I suppose . . .”
“Then go. I’ll move on the offices downtown.”
I reached for a rail to pull myself up the stairway.
“And don’t touch anything,” Maloney said.
MALONEY HAD local law enforcement dancing in two states. New York and Mamaroneck shared the murder scene, while NYPD joined the FBI at the Arrowhead offices back in the city. Brady and I went back to Connecticut, where the most polite police officers I had ever encountered met us and opened up Hochstadt’s apartment. It paid to be polite in a town where a major crime consisted of a maid stealing the silverware. White-collar crimes, perpetuated daily by the hedge fund kings, mortgage bankers, and derivatives traders who populate the town, are never investigated by the town police. They are its lifeblood.
Hochstadt’s home office was a corner of the master bedroom. A flat-screen monitor and keyboard were the only items on the small desk. A pair of plastic file drawers and a wheeled, ergonomic knee chair completed the ensemble.
“What is this?” Brady asked. “It looks like one of those walking trainers for toddlers.”
“It’s a chair,” I said. “You kneel on it. It’s good for a bad back, they say.”
“It would give me a bad back,” Brady said. “If I didn’t already have one.” He dragged the desk over and sat on the edge of the bed.
I tackled the file drawers. Tax returns, a file from an attorney in Hartford about the terms of the divorce, and a folder full of hard copies of e-mails from his daughter. No secrets. However, there was a cigar box full of four-gigabyte flash drives.
“Having any luck?” I asked.
Brady made a face. “Nada. Nothing’s password-protected—but so what? Every file folder is empty.”
“How about the trash folder?”
“Checked it.”
“Try one of these,” I said. I pulled the chair around and knelt next to him as he plugged in the first flash drive and opened the folder.
A spreadsheet blossomed before us. Dates. Trades. Securities. Amounts. Prices in various currencies. And counterparties. Brady scrolled down. The data flew by. The flash held trades for a six-month period back in 2004. There were dozens, scores, sometimes hundreds of trades each day. Even when he was in London, Geoffrey Hochstadt had been a very busy man.
“I’ve got to call Maloney,” Brady said.
“Go ahead. I’ll keep going through these.” He stood up and I wrestled the monitor around. I plugged in another flash. The last four months in 2007. Another. And another. The only incriminating pieces of information not on file were the names of the traders at the various firms. Every major bank was involved at one time or another. I saw that over a two-year period the bulk of the trading had migrated from London to New York, though there were regular players involved in Singapore, Chicago, Zurich, Los Angeles, Frankfurt, and Hong Kong. I searched for patterns. There was too much data—it was overwhelming.
“There’s months of work here,” I said. “Somebody has to go through and check every trade.”
And then they would have to identify every trader, many of whom would have changed jobs, changed firms, or changed what they traded over the years.
“There could be a couple of hundred traders involved in this thing,” I continued. “You guys will be chasing this down for the next decade.”
“And we’re very good at doing just that,” Brady said. “Job secu-rity.”
I searched through until I had all the flash drives in chronological order. The earliest was almost a decade old, the most recent included trades for the previous week. There was one that I did not understand. It was wrapped in a piece of well-worn silver duct tape. The files held nothing but columns of numbers and letters. I set it aside.
Patterns. They emerged slowly at first, but then they began to cascade down into place. Trades with one counterparty were often offset with the same bank later in the day or week. Or trades with two different counterparties were revealed to be mirror offsets. It was not coincidence, it was collusion. Every time Hochstadt had executed a trade with the high-grade corporate bond desk at Rothkamp in Amsterdam, he made a profit of $1,000 per million. Every time. Without fail. Over three years. Impossible. But the more I stared, the more it became apparent—Hochstadt had not lied to his wife. Two hundred million dollars a year was a very conservative estimate. The total would top two billion.
Who had been the beneficiaries? I would need to find the money trail. That kind of money hadn’t been paid in casino chips.
I went back to the most recent files. There were the Sanders trades. Increasing in size and profitability over time, but still Lilliputian in comparison with others. I found Sudhir’s trades—sporadic, almost tentative. And Carmine’s—a consistent flow of three or four a week, though all small in size. And Lowell Barrington’s. Four trades. That was it. The young man’s ambivalence and guilt were glaring. Arrowhead had barely cleared two grand combined on the four small trades. Lowell had stepped in front of a train for less money than his broker might spend at Sparks on a typical Thursday night.
It was depressing. I wanted to sleep.
“Brady? Did you get hold of your boss yet? Tell him this thing is huge. A hundred traders in the States, that many again around the world. Tell him when he takes this down, he’ll be famous. They’ll put him on the Discovery Channel. What am I saying? They’ll give him his own show!”
I looked around. I was alone.
I walked out to the top of the stairs. The two Greenwich cops were sitting at the card table watching a Law & Order rerun on the big television.
“Hey. What happened to my FBI guy? Agent Brady?”
“He went out, sir.”
“Weird. Did he say where?”
“No, sir. He asked that we stay with you.”
“Did he say he was coming back?”
They looked like a matched pair of purebred guard dogs.
“Not to us, sir.”
I walked back and sat on the bed. I checked my watch. It was well past midnight. I couldn’t remember the last time I had slept. In the past thirty hours I had been assaulted, had my child kidnapped, and seen my first murdered corpse. I had been dragged from one crazy scene to another by the FBI, who had now, seemingly, abandoned me. And all I wanted was to hear my little robot-voiced boy tell me, “Good night, Jason.”
I lay back and tried to stop the flow of flickering images of death. Sleep approached cautiously. Just as the curtains began to close another memory floated to the surface. Skeli.
“Shit!” I sat up. I flipped open my phone and found her number. Then I stopped. What did I have to say? Sorry. Unavoidable. I should have called. Could I have explained all that had happened? Not in my conditio
n. I closed the phone and lay back down again. Caution or cowardice? Tomorrow would be soon enough.
—
I AWOKE FRIDAY morning with the sickening feeling of having spent the night in a dead man’s bed. It was coming up on nine o’clock. I did a quick survey of my aches and pains. A night’s sleep had helped. I felt better.
There was a quiet bustle from downstairs and the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee snuck up the stairs and found me. I splashed water on my face and went out to face the world.
The two Greenwich cops were sitting at the card table, drinking coffee and sharing a bag of donuts. They looked as clean-shaven, ironed, and polite as they had the night before.
“Good morning,” I called. “Is there another cup?”
“Yes, sir,” they answered together.
They shared the donuts, too. I had a blueberry. For the antioxidants.
“Have you heard anything? Any instructions?” I asked.
“Just to stay with you until further notice, sir.”
“You’ve been here all night?” Up close, I could see the hint of beard, the tired eyes.
“We don’t get much chance for overtime.”
“Or to work on a murder case,” the other added.
“What’s it like so far?” I was almost embarrassed for them. They wanted to be action heroes, not babysitters. “I’ll make some calls and try to find out where I’m supposed to be.”
I went back upstairs and called Maloney’s office. He was “unavailable.”
“Let me talk to his partner. Give me Brady. Tell him it’s Stafford.”
I didn’t have much of a hand to play. Outrage wasn’t going to get me very far.
“Agent Brady is unavailable,” said the voice of Don Corleone’s consigliere.
“What! That . . .” I discarded a number of names that came to mind. “I’m sorry. Would you just deliver a message for me?”
“Certainly.”
“Tell Agent Brady that I am making a pile of all the evidence we found up here in Greenwich and if he doesn’t come to the phone in the next thirty seconds, I am setting a match to it and walking out the door.”
Black Fridays Page 26
