Bada-BOOM!

by Wally Duff

  We went through the door behind the desk. There were two offices. We went into the one on the right.

  The room was beautifully appointed in an avant-garde chrome and glass style. The modern paintings on the walls looked original, including a large Joan Miró on the far wall. The glass-top desk was empty except for a computer terminal and a picture of William Warren, Jr. and his family. There were no drawers in the desk or any filing cabinets. A Bloomberg terminal was against the wall behind the desk. The terminal was shut off.

  The computer was also locked, and there didn’t appear to be any site where we could look for the hidden password.

  “Is it always like this?” Linda asked.

  “Like what?”

  “This boring. When you do break in somewhere, you make it sound terribly exciting. I mean to tell you, this is a great big zero.”

  It was, until we walked into the other office.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” Linda asked.

  The décor here was almost the same as Peter Warren’s office with the exception of the desk, which was not as expensive as Peter’s. There were the pair of distressed brown leather Queen Anne chairs, the large Dale Chihuly pink and blue seaform, and the Steuben crystal coffee table.

  When I saw that the oil paintings included the Renoir, I knew.

  “This is Peter’s office,” I said.

  “You mean it looks like Peter’s office.”

  “No, except for the desk, it is Peter’s office. His father and brother must have moved all this stuff over here.”

  “That’s creepy.”

  “I would suggest it was a father making a shrine to his son, but I think not.”

  “I agree. It’s more likely a cheap father saving money on decorating.”

  “And he didn’t have to spend much on moving expenses since the buildings are next to each other.”

  “But why do any of it when their billings are huge?”

  120

  Warren, Sr., didn’t have a computer in his office. The desk had four drawers on each side and one long one in the middle. Against the left wall were three filing cabinets, each with four drawers. I walked over and pulled on one drawer. It was locked, as were the other two.

  “Linda, you check the desk. I’ll begin on the filing cabinets.”

  “I think not,” she said.

  “No, we should do it this way.”

  “I am obviously more qualified to look through his files than you are.”

  “I wouldn’t disagree, but how are you going to do it? The cabinets are locked.” I held up my lock pick gun.

  She turned her head. “I’ll begin with the desk.”

  The locks on the cabinets weren’t much of a challenge, and I had them open in less than twelve seconds. There was a large file on MidAmerica Hospital in the middle filing cabinet.

  “Linda, come here.”

  I found the past five years of corporate tax returns for the law firm, the hospital, and the MidAmerica Hospital Foundation. There were also files on Bear Investments and the Bear Corporation. Linda sat down at the desk and quickly sifted through them.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “It looks like it’s what we need, but I can’t be sure until I go through it in greater detail.”

  “One thing I’ve learned about breaking into places is to hurry. We don’t have time to go through this stuff.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Make copies.” I handed her a camera that I used before to make copies of documents that I wasn’t supposed to see. “Point and shoot. And we need to speed it up.”

  Linda quickly photographed what she needed. When she finished, I made sure we had the papers in the same order in which we’d found them. Linda slipped the papers into the cabinet. I locked it.

  The front door opened in the outer office.

  Uh-oh!

  Linda’s face turned white, and she put her hands to her chest. “Tina!” she whispered. “Someone’s here. They’re going to kill us.”

  “They are not going to kill us.”

  “Yes, they are. I’ll never see Bruce again.”

  “Bruce? Who the heck is that?”

  She began sobbing. “Save me.”

  “For God’s sake, relax. We’re the cleaning crew. We’re supposed to be here. Let me handle this.”

  That my heart played hopscotch in my chest didn’t matter. I was as frightened as she was, but if I lost it, we would go to jail.

  “Who’s in here?” a male voice asked.

  “Us,” I said. “The new cleaning girls. We’re in the back finishing up.”

  “Hurry it up. We have a plugged toilet in the eleventh floor, and it needs to be cleaned up.”

  “But we have to finish up here.”

  “You can do that later. The mess downstairs has to be mopped up pronto before it causes any damage. And clean the toilet while you’re there. Apparently someone was sick when this happened.”

  “Sick?” I said.

  “Diarrhea or something. Filled the toilet with crap and then must have plugged it up with toilet paper. A real mess. Get down there.”

  “Yes, sir, right away.”

  The door slammed shut.

  “I don’t ‘do’ bathrooms,” Linda hissed as she tugged at my arm. “My cleaning girls do it for me.”

  “Unless they can get here in the next two minutes, you’re going to have to.”

  121

  “See, now that wasn’t bad,” I said, as we exited the elevator into the employee’s underground parking garage. The cleanup of the bathroom had taken two hours.

  “Wasn’t bad?” Linda asked. “It was absolutely disgusting.”

  “But we didn’t get caught.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “And now you know how exciting breaking and entering can be,” I continued.

  “I don’t need excitement like this in my life. I’m better at research. Give me my computers any day.”

  When we reached my van, a man appeared behind us.

  Uh-oh!

  It was the guy who had confronted me in the Costco parking lot. He held a big gun in his right hand.

  “I told you to drop this story,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” Linda whimpered.

  “Give me your gun,” he said. “I know you have it with you.”

  I didn’t move. Linda began sobbing.

  “Give me your fucking gun!”

  Stall!

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said. “They’ll see this on the security cameras.”

  “The cameras are turned off.”

  Uh-oh.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I work for the company that owns the building.” He nudged his gun at me. “Hand it over.”

  I stuck my hand into my backpack and grabbed my Glock. Before he could react, I fired it through the material. The bullet hit his hand, knocking the gun over his shoulder and onto the cement floor. He fell on his knees and grabbed his right hand with his left. He screamed as blood spurted from the wound.

  Pulling the Glock out of my backpack, I pointed it at his chest. “Who hired you?”

  The smell of gunpowder filled the air around us. The explosion from the gun being fired made my ears ring.

  “Fuck you, bitch!” he said, as the blood from his right hand oozed through the fingers of his left hand. “I’m not telling you anything.” He shook his hands at me. “You blew my finger off!”

  “Fortunes of war, and you aren’t exactly in a position to make me mad. I’ll ask you again. Who hired you?”

  He began to get up. I fired my Glock again, this time into the cement floor of the garage, about three inches in front of his crotch.

  Immediately, he slid back and put both his bloody hands on his private parts.

  “Okay, okay, enough already,” he said. “It was someone from the hospital.”

  Linda tugged on my arm. “Tina, let’s get out of here.”

&
nbsp; “Not yet,” I said.

  I turned to the man. “How did you know we would be here?”

  “Tina,” Linda whispered. “Please, let’s get out of here.”

  I raised my gun and pointed it at his chest. “Talk.”

  “I put a GPS transponder on your car,” he said. “When I saw that you were at one of the target buildings I’d been told to watch out for, I came here stop you.”

  “Where did you put it?” I asked.

  “Under the right rear fender.”

  “Linda, check that, please.”

  “What’s it look like?” she asked.

  “Gray box,” he said. “About the size of a deck of cards.”

  She looked under the fender and pulled out the box. She held it up.

  “Why are they doing this?” I asked.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “They tell me what they want me to do. They don’t tell me why.”

  “I’m getting in the van,” Linda said.

  “Good idea,” I said. I turned to the man. “I don’t expect to see you again.”

  “Oh, you’re gonna see me again. Once my finger heals you better be looking over your shoulder when you step outside with your kid.”

  “You don’t seem to be in a very good position to threaten me.”

  “Ain’t a threat.” He laughed. “It’s a freaking promise.”

  “I hate to be laughed at.”

  “Let’s see how you like this, bitch.”

  He spit at me and then rolled to his right, picking up his gun in his left hand. He raised the gun to fire, but I did first and blew away part of his left hand.

  122

  We jumped into the mommy van and roared away from the hit man. As soon as we turned onto the main street, I called Janet.

  “We finally caught a break,” I said. “I shot one of the bad guys.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No way. I hit him in the hand. Both hands, actually.”

  “Tell me.”

  I did.

  “I doubt he can use his cell phone with his hands being shot up,” Janet said. “He can’t call anyone to help him.”

  “And he probably can’t drive a car for the same reason,” I said.

  “He needs to go to an ER,” she said. “Pronto.”

  “My thought exactly. The closest one is at MidAmerica Hospital, a block from the building’s garage we were in.”

  “I’ll call a black and white forthwith and have the patrolmen see if the suspect is still in the garage. Tony and I will head to the ER. If we’re lucky, we’ll bust him before they even have time to put any stitches in him.”

  I hung up and drove toward Linda’s home. She didn’t say anything.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, after I drove a few blocks.

  She took in a deep breath and stared straight ahead. Her hands shook. “No, I am not okay. I don’t need this. I’m a mom with two little kids. You might think this is fun, but I don’t. I quit.”

  “Quit?”

  “I don’t want to ever do this again. I’m not getting paid to take risks like this.”

  “I’m not either.”

  “But I’m doing this to help you write some stupid story. This is all about you, and I won’t do it anymore.”

  I didn’t think this was the time to mention her plan to steal clients for her husband.

  We drove the rest of the way home in silence.

  Part 5

  123

  Monday morning, I put Kerry down for her morning nap and looked out the front window. I saw Tony drive up in his white BMW. I opened the front door for him.

  “Come in,” I said. “Coffee?”

  “Got donuts?” Tony asked.

  “Always.”

  He sat in the same chair in the kitchen that he always does. I put his black coffee and a sack from Dinkel’s in front of him.

  “Went to the ER at MidAmerica right after you called Janet,” he said. “Cops in the black and white went to the garage. Found blood spatter, but the guy was gone.”

  “What about the gun?”

  “Patrolmen couldn’t find it. Dude probably took it with him.”

  “That would be hard to do with his hands shot up.”

  “Agree, but he was probably a pro. Would never leave his weapon behind.”

  Things aren’t looking good.

  “Will you do DNA on his blood to ID him?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Too expensive, right?”

  “You got it.”

  “What happened in the ER?”

  “Uniforms followed the blood trail to the ER front door. Got there the same time we did.”

  “Please tell me you arrested him.”

  “Didn’t, because the doc in charge of the ER told us they didn’t have a patient that had been shot in the hands.”

  “What about the blood?”

  “Said it was from a guy who accidently cut himself with a knife.”

  “How can they lie like that?”

  “Janet said the perp told you someone from the hospital hired him. Thinkin’ they decided it wasn’t in their best interest to have a guy like that available for us to question.”

  “We’re out of luck.”

  “Not sure. Janet’s there right now leanin’ on ‘em. Don’t hold out any hope, but got good news. Lab guys found hair at the Gary scene.”

  Yes!

  “Matches the hair found at Demarco’s.”

  “What about the hair Alexis found in Fertig’s locker?”

  “Problem with that.”

  “It doesn’t match?”

  “No, matches, but inadmissible because of how it was obtained.”

  “But we’ve got Fertig.”

  “What we got is hair from a Chinese female, probably twenty-five-years old who seems to be on a killing spree.”

  What?!

  “I don’t understand. The killer is Chinese? Did Fertig hire a hit woman?”

  “Has enough money to do that. All the hairs match, and they’re from a young Chinese female.”

  “How did they get in Fertig’s locker?”

  “Unless the chick is living in there, it coulda’ come from passive transfer. You know, he’s doin’ her, she’s doin’ him kinda thing. Hair gets transferred like that all the time.”

  A fact Tony would know all too well.

  124

  Tony left. Kerry was still asleep. I turned on the Nanit app and went down to my computer. I opened the file containing the pictures of the documents Linda took in Warren’s office. I’d downloaded them to my hard drive last night.

  This was the first time I’d had time to review them, but as I did, I realized I had a new problem. Because of the encounter we had yesterday, Linda would no longer help me analyze the files. I couldn’t ask Carter to help, because he would want to know where I got the material.

  I don’t know what to do!

  I called Cas, but her phone went to voice mail. She was probably teaching a Monday morning class at XSport. I called Molly and told her about the debacle yesterday with Linda.

  “I don’t know what Linda’s problem is,” Molly said. “I thought she was tougher than that.”

  “Whatever, but I’m left without anyone to analyze the documents.”

  “What kind of expert do you need?”

  “One with law and accounting skills, and it wouldn’t hurt if he or she had a medical background.”

  “I think I have the guys for you. I’ll text you an address. Meet me there in an hour.”

  “Kids or no kid?”

  “N.K. Call Alicia. Maybe she can watch all of them.”

  An hour later, Molly and I walked into the Creative Hair Salon. The interior looked like someone on hallucinogenic drugs had decorated the space. Few people would attempt to marry colors like bright orange and dark brown with canary yellow and glistening purple, but they had here. And it seemed to work.