by Gene Riehl
“Might not be important at all, but there’s no way to know without looking at it.” I stared out the window at the rain. “What about long-distance carriers? Sprint or IDT … one of the others.”
She checked the folder again. “Sprint mostly, but a couple others, too. Looks like she uses whatever’s handy at the time. She gets the bills separately from the regular phone bill.” Lisa paused to flip through a dozen or more pages, then shook her head. “Nope. No current bills from either of them.” She looked at me. “We can get the same subpoena for their records.”
“We could if we had the luxury of unlimited time, but we don’t, so we’ve got to go to plan B.”
To Quantico rules, in other words, although this wasn’t the time or place to go into the details of those rules with my newest partner. I pointed at her purse on the desk.
“Got your cell phone in there?”
She did, and a moment later it was in my hands. I punched numbers.
“Go through the latest of the bills,” I told Lisa, while I waited for Gerard Ziff to answer. “You know the number we’re looking for.”
When Gerard answered, I dispensed with our usual pleasantries. “Telserve,” I told him. “I need a quick favor.”
“From me? You people have the same contacts I do … or perhaps your typing fingers are broken. If that’s the case, I’m dreadfully sorry.”
“I don’t want to use the bureau computers for this,” I said. “It’s a long story. Can you or can’t you, I need to know right now.”
“I can do it, you know I can. But we try not to, unless there’s no other choice.”
“There’s no other choice.”
“Give me the phone number.”
“I’ve got three of them. Four, actually, now that I think about it.”
“You’re pushing it, my friend.”
“Just think how grateful I’ll be. What you can twist out of me next time we play tennis.”
“I can’t wait.” He paused and I heard sounds of papers rustling. “Give me the numbers.”
I picked up one of the old phone bills, read Jabalah Abahd’s home number to him, then grabbed a cell phone bill and gave him that number, too. I had to pull my notebook from my briefcase, check the notes of my interview with Judge Thompson to get the third and fourth ones, the judge’s home number, along with the number of the phone in her chambers.
“The last two,” Gerard said. “Double-check them, will you?”
I read them again, slowly.
“Give me a minute,” he said. “You want to hold the line?”
“E-mail them to my bureau laptop,” I told him. “You have the address.”
“Can’t do that, not to that address. Got your Palm Pilot with you? The one with your personal e-mail account? I’ve got that address as well.”
“Yeah, I do, but—”
“We’ll use that one instead.”
“The screen’s too small. I’ll go blind look—”
I stared at the phone in my hand. He’d hung up. Spies, I thought, nothing was ever simple with a spy. I saw Lisa looking at me, and it was easy to anticipate her question.
“Telserve,” I said. “Ever run across them when you were a D.A.?”
“Telserve … One word?” I nodded. “If I did,” she said, “I don’t remember.”
I wasn’t surprised. I’d been an agent a long time before I knew about them either.
“It’s a high-tech company in the Middle East. Business to business. A service company for the telecommunications industry.”
“Middle East? You’re going to get American phone records from the Middle East?”
“American, European, Asian … anywhere there’s a telephone.”
She frowned. “I feel like I’m in a television commercial, but I have to ask anyway. How can they possibly do that?”
“Pretty simple, really. If you have seven or eight thousand high-tech pros involved, and contracts with most of the world’s telephone and Internet service providers.”
“They work for the phone companies?”
“Customer care, order management, but most of all billing. Every time you make a call, a computer sends the data—not the voices, of course, but the phone numbers involved and the duration of the call—to Telserve’s mainframe. The supercomputer does the rest. Makes sure each call is billed properly, each of their client companies gets the correct amount of money.”
“You mean there’s a record of every call I make? Every call everybody makes? All in one place?”
“There are exceptions. Top-level government phones in this country are excluded, same in the rest of the world.” I looked at her. “But it sounds worse than it is. With or without Telserve, every call is computerized anyway. You can see that just by looking at your bill. It’s the fact that almost all of them are in one database that makes some people queasy.”
“I can see how it would. Especially when it’s so easy to access.”
“It’s almost impossible to access, that’s the only reason it’s allowed to exist.”
“But I just heard you do it. Heard you tell your friend that you didn’t want to use a bureau computer to do it. I gather he has his own computer, and doesn’t mind at all.”
“Oh, he minds, but we go back a long ways. Besides, no one’s harmed. We could get subpoenas—duces tecum subpoenas from the U.S. Attorney’s office—but there’re two problems. Kevin Finnerty would find out about it, and we don’t want to bother him with details. Secondly, we don’t know exactly which service providers are involved, especially for Brenda Thompson.”
“This Gerard. Who is he?”
“A friend, I told you. I shouldn’t have let you hear his name.”
“I’ve forgotten it already.”
“Be sure you tell the inspectors that. Or the Senate subcommittee.” Her eyes widened before I grinned. “A joke, Lisa, an old bureau joke.” I stopped grinning. “I’m not about to do anything to get you into trouble. Trust me, I’m neurotic about that. You might not know all the details, but as long as I’m in charge you’re going to be protected.”
She cocked one eyebrow at me, but my cell phone rang to break the moment. Gerard Ziff on the other end.
“I’m forwarding your information now,” he said. “See you Friday?”
“Friday, yeah, at the club. And bring the two-hundred bucks you’re holding for me.”
He laughed and hung up. Hadn’t even asked what my request was all about. Must be awfully busy, I thought. Nosy bastard never forgot to ask.
I pulled my Palm Pilot from my briefcase, opened my e-mail, then downloaded the attachment Gerard had forwarded. I shook my head as I scrolled through the pages of tiny numbers. I knew what I was looking for, but nothing jumped out at me to indicate contact between Jabalah Abahd and the judge who claimed to have lost track of her. Which meant nothing, of course. Not until each of the numbers was analyzed far more closely than we were prepared to do here in Abahd’s office.
I closed up the Palm Pilot and put it away. When we got back to the office I’d give the data from Gerard to our computer analysts, let the whiz kids see what they could come up with.
I told Lisa as much.
“Isn’t that a lot of work,” she said, “when we could just go to Thompson and ask her?”
“Bad idea. Never ask a question that important until you already know the answer.”
She stared at me for a moment. “But … but how …?” She shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense, Puller. With the roommate dead, how can we possibly know the answer?”
“We can’t. Not if we keep looking in the wrong place for it. Not if we keep looking here in Washington.”
TEN
I drove us back to WMFO, told Lisa to go home and pack for a two-day trip to Virginia, down to Brookston. I let Karen Kilbride know where we’d be, that we expected to be back sometime Friday, then returned a few phone calls and ran through a pile of fresh mail on my desk while I waited for Lisa. I considered calling
Kevin Finnerty to let him know where we were going and why, but decided to wait until we got back, until we’d done what we could to tie up the loose ends and present him with a done deal.
An hour later Lisa was in my office with a small blue overnight case in her hand and a purse slung over one shoulder, ready to go.
“One second,” I told her, then scribbled a note for Ted Blassingame, my principal relief supervisor, reminding Ted to run the ticklers tomorrow, to double-check the progress of several cases with short deadlines. I grabbed my raincoat.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We walked together through the deserted bullpen. There was a mandatory legal-training seminar down the hall and the agents on my squad wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. We were almost out the door at the other end before Karen called out to me.
“Puller,” she said, “wait a second.” She held up the phone in her hand. “You better take this. Says her name’s Annie. Sounds like she might need some help.”
I laid my raincoat over the edge of the nearest desk. “Give me a minute, Lisa.” I walked back to my office and grabbed the phone. I didn’t bother to use my chair.
“What is it, Annie? I’m just on my way out the door.”
“I need a man,” she said, then giggled. “I need a man real bad.” Another giggle, this one louder and longer. “You know where I can find one?” Laughter this time, a slightly manic sound that I recognized and could hardly stand to hear.
“Annie,” I said over her laughter. “Annie!” She stopped, then giggled again, then did nothing. “Where are you?” I asked her. “Damn it, Annie, where are you?”
“Your house, silly.” Giggle. “Where else would I come when I need to get laid?” Same semihysterical laughter. “How shoon—soon, how soon—can you get here?”
Shit. I looked around, saw Lisa through my glass wall, watching me. I sighed, then spoke into the phone again. “Half an hour. Promise me you won’t leave.”
She was giggling again as I hung up. I turned toward the door again just as Lisa came back through.
“Sorry,” I told her, “but I’ve got a problem. We’ll have to leave tomorrow morning.”
Lisa’s dark eyes flickered. “Annie? Nothing serious, I hope.”
I shook my head, but I was lying. To someone like Ann Fisher booze was as deadly as a loaded shotgun, but I was right to lie about it. Annie’s problem was hers, hers and mine. Lisa had no need to know about it.
“I have to help her with something is all,” I said. “Enjoy your evening. My house is on the way to Brookston. Pick me up at seven in the morning.”
She looked at me. “If there’s anything I can do …”
“Nothing. You really want to help, go home and figure out a way to find the truth in Brookston.” I smiled. “And bring some doughnuts and coffee when you come.”
I set a land-speed record getting to my dome in Fredericksburg, one eye on the traffic, the other in the rearview mirror for flashing red lights, but it was still thirty-five minutes before I walked through my front door. Too long, I saw when I got to the semicircular kitchen.
Annie was sitting at the table, her head in her hands, my bottle of Glenfiddich on the table next to her, a nearly empty glass next to it.
She turned as I approached, then lifted her head. Shit. Her watery eyes were dull and red, her blond hair spiking in all directions. She’d been giddy on the phone but now she’d gone past happy, past horny, straight on to outrage. A whole day in less than one hour.
“God damn you, Puller,” she muttered. “You and the fucking white horse you rode in on.”
I touched her shoulder but she jerked away.
“I’m sick of you,” she said. “Just because you show up when I call doesn’t make you better than me … not a goddamned bit better. Only difference is you won’t admit it.”
I glanced at the bottle, couldn’t remember how much had been in it last time I’d seen it. “What’s the damage?” I asked. “How much have you had?”
She shrugged. “Here, at your place?” She glanced at the bottle. “Don’t worry, I didn’t drink all your fucking Scotch.”
“Where did you start?”
“My house … my office … how the hell do I know?”
“Did you call your sponsor?”
“Fuck my sponsor. She’s just like you. Powerless, she keeps telling me … We’re all powerless. I’ll help you, she says, we’ll all help you. Bullshit. I don’t need her … I don’t need you. Go find somebody else to take care of your guilt.” She dropped her head into her hands again, her shoulders quivering as she wept.
My guilt. I shook my head. That’s the problem with sleeping with drunks. So charming most of the time, so eager to hear the story of your life, so quick to use it against you later. Used to make me mad, Annie’s claim that I wouldn’t have anything to do with her if I didn’t feel so guilty about ignoring her twelve-step ideas, but I knew better now. Knew she was right, mostly. That regardless which of us was right, it was a waste of time to talk about it.
I picked up the Glenfiddich and her glass from the table, took them to the counter, put the glass in the sink, the bottle in a cupboard to my left. Then I moved a step to my right to start a pot of coffee. Not for her, for me. It was going to be a long night.
Drowned out by the pounding water of my morning shower, the insistent sound of Lisa’s car horn on Thursday morning took a few moment to penetrate. I turned off the shower and toweled off before tiptoeing past the still-sleeping Annie Fisher, barefooting my way down the spiral staircase and cracking open the front door to peek past it. There sat Lisa, behind the wheel of her bucar, a two-year-old Pontiac something or other.
“One second!” I shouted, sticking my wet head past the door jamb, but careful not to let her see the rest of me. “Just got to slip on my shoes!”
I could see her frowning at my breach of protocol. Under the rules of bureau carpooling, “one second” means the agent being picked up is at least half dressed and reasonably ready to go, while a wet head and hidden body indicates no such thing. She beeped twice more, stiletto-sharp blasts, but grinned as she did so, to let me know she was kidding, that she realized despite my churlish behavior I was still her supervisor. I couldn’t help grinning back. I was beginning to like the woman.
Eight minutes later I was in the passenger seat next to her, ready for the hour-long drive south to Brookston. She nodded toward the two styrofoam cups in the holder behind the shift lever. “One of those is yours,” she said, “and there are doughnuts in the sack.”
I sipped coffee as Lisa eased through the winding streets of my neighborhood, then headed east through downtown Fredericksburg and out into the countryside toward the little town in Cobb County that Judge Thompson had identified as the place where her aunt Sarah Kendall had died.
Lisa turned to me. “Anything I should know before we get there?”
“Enjoy the drive. You know what we’re looking for. No point wearing ourselves out on it before we get there.”
Through the Virginia pines, their branches sagging with rainwater from last night’s storm, we passed the villages of Sealston and King George, then hooked up to a meandering two-lane state highway east toward Westmoreland County.
“Gorgeous out here, isn’t it?” Lisa said. “The trees, I mean, and the pastureland. Hard to imagine it filled with soldiers killing each other.”
I’d been thinking the same thing. It’s part of living in the middle of all this history, but especially vivid in the open spaces, the few remaining acres that continue to resist the advancing real estate developers. The Confederates had held at Fredericksburg—despite the thousands of blue hats who died trying to clamber up Marye’s Hill to get at them—but a hundred and fifty years later not a shot is fired at the builders who seem determined to cover the battleground with “affordable housing.” Life is for the living, I know, but still. There’s plenty of room for everyone in this magnificent countryside. Why build tract houses on ground so rece
ntly bloodied?
“You haven’t been here in spring yet,” I said, “or for the change, the leaves turning just before they drop in the fall. Every shade of crimson and scarlet, twenty kinds of yellow, traffic on the Interstate stopping dead to watch.” I was quiet for a moment just thinking about it. “Almost makes the mud season tolerable.”
“Didn’t see much of that in El Paso, either mud or leaves changing. Two seasons is all we had. Colder than hell, hotter than hell.”
“Southern California for me, a little town outside San Diego. We didn’t even have two seasons. What we had ranged from ‘real nice’ to ‘totally awesome, dude,’ depending how close you got to the beach.”
I opened the doughnut sack, took a full breath of deep-fried lard, then plucked one out and held the bag out to Lisa. She made a face and I bit into the doughy sweetness and moaned with satisfaction. Lisa grunted, reached to turn up the windshield wipers, indicated her disapproval of my nutritional ignorance by stepping a little harder on the gas. A mile or so later she turned to me and ignored my suggestion we avoid guessing about the Thompson case until we got to Brookston.
“The judge told me,” she began, “that she left Cal before the commencement ceremony. That seems strange to me, considering her background, to miss such a significant day in her young life.”
“It does to me, too, but I don’t want to develop a theory before we even get to Brookston. It’s an easy way to shut off your mind to other possibilities. A bad way to do business, our kind of business anyway.”
“What’s the fun if you can’t take a wild guess?”
“It’s not supposed to be fun.” But it is, I didn’t tell her, if you do it right.
“I vote for pregnancy,” she said, ignoring me completely. “The old standby, I know, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still valid.”
“Nothing at the University of California showed her as pregnant, and she wasn’t when she got to Yale. The case agent in New Haven would have seen some evidence of it in the university medical-center records, or heard about it from former classmates.”
