by Steven Gore
The tension in the room ratcheted up.
Rose shifted into cross-examination mode. “What’s your evidence?”
“It’s less evidence than a pattern. Shortly after I introduce the case to the grand jury, Burch and Fitzhugh get hit. Then we tell them that Granger is about to cooperate and he gets taken out.”
“What about Matson?”
“Nobody’s bothered him and he says he’s not afraid.”
Rose peered over at Peterson as if the solution was obvious. “Doesn’t that tell you that he’s somehow in on it?”
Peterson shook his head. “I’ve spent a lot of time with him. He doesn’t have the balls.”
“Then what?”
“My guess is that there’s something we don’t know that connects Burch, Fitzhugh, and Granger that’s separate from Matson, and somebody doesn’t want it to come out.”
“Who were the stockbrokers?” asked Lily Willison, the leader of the Organized Crime Division, known as Mainframe because of her computerlike memory.
“Northstead Securities in San Diego. Kovalenko. Yuri.”
Willison looked toward the ceiling, searching her mental database, then back at Peterson. “He’s as gangedup as they come. Just like his dead brother. Maybe he’s the one trying to contain this thing.”
“I considered that,” Peterson said. “But as far as we can tell, Kovalenko’s only connection to SatTek was pump and dump. And he isn’t afraid of doing a couple of years. He won’t get involved in murder just to save himself a short vacation in minimum security. And even if it is him, the information about who to target had to come from somewhere.”
“Why not just ask the court to impanel another grand jury…” Willison hesitated, her face flushing. She swallowed, then finished the question, voice rising to a squeak. “And start over?”
The question hung in the air like a raised sledgehammer. Everyone knew, Willison most of all, that she was about to get thumped.
“Let’s back up,” Rose said, setting up the blow. “How many indictments has that grand jury issued?”
“Fifty, sixty, something like that,” Peterson said.
Willison’s interlaced fingers began to dig into the backs of her hands.
“How many defendants altogether?”
“Two hundred or so. Maybe more. They did two racketeering indictments with about thirty defendants each.”
Rose looked at Willison, then swung down. “Are you ready to disclose grand jury misconduct to two hundred defense lawyers? Ready to answer two hundred motions to dismiss? Maybe a hundred speedy trial motions? Maybe even a bunch of grand jury abuse motions? When we don’t even know for sure what happened?”
Willison shook her head, but held his gaze.
Rose reached for his pen, then began drumming it on the conference table, looking from face to face, lowered eyes ducking guilt by association.
“I see there aren’t any volunteers for a little motion exercise.”
Rose exhaled. It was moments like these that reminded him how much easier life was on the bench. He took the U.S. Attorney appointment only to get his name in the media to set up a run for governor, and planned to kick it off with Burch’s indictment and a no-one-is-above-the-law-time-to-get-the-big-time-lawyers press conference. But grand jury problems were messy. The public wouldn’t understand and the mess would slop back onto him.
Rose glanced at Peterson. “You and I need to visit the chief judge. Anybody have anything else?” Rose paused, then looked around the table. “No? Then we’re done.”
The chief judge cleared his calendar for the meeting, and later that day Peterson called Zink into his office.
“The chief judge authorized an investigation. I told Rose you’ve done great work on the case and you’re in the best position to connect the dots. He agrees.”
Zink settled into a chair across from Peterson. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, but this could spin out of control. You think any of the grand jurors will go to the press if they get wind of what we’re doing?”
“Only one I can think of.”
“Number Six?”
“Yeah, Number Six,” Peterson said. “And just wait until we have one grand jury investigating another. They’ll be giving me funny looks, wondering if we’re going after them, too.”
“Where do you want to start?”
“The attendance records and notebooks. They’re required to store their notes at the clerk’s office when they’re not in session. Let’s see who was present at each hearing and what they wrote. But let’s be careful we don’t focus too much on Number Six. Being a runaway doesn’t mean he’s the one. It’s a huge jump from being a little hyperactive to fingering people for hits.”
Zink glanced up in the direction of the grand jury room. “How will I get the notebooks?”
“The chief judge is sending an order to the clerk. He authorized you to make copies each evening after they’ve been collected. But you have to give the copies back to the clerk when your investigation is done. Same with the attendance records.”
Peterson paused, leaned back, and looked up toward the ceiling.
“I wonder if it’s just SatTek or if this guy, if it is a guy, is also doing this in other cases.” He glanced at Zink. “How about you get me the other indictments? I’ll find out if anything hinky happened in those cases. Maybe not murders, but witnesses knowing they’re about to be subpoenaed or targets getting advance warning of their indictments and making a last-second run. Maybe this guy shops his wares around to everybody.”
“Will Rose back you if this blows up?”
“Not if he wants to get elected governor. He’d never get past the primary.”
By the time Peterson arrived at Zink’s office the following morning, Zink had profiled each of the twenty-three grand jurors and posted leads from the jurors’ notebooks on a cork board tacked to the wall.
“I’ve got it reduced down to the three most likely,” Zink began after Peterson sat down next to his desk. “Number Six, Number Thirteen, and Number Twenty-two.”
Zink stepped to his chart, using a Bic pen as a pointer. “Number Six. Not only does he summarize everything, but he makes margin notes of his opinions. His favorite word is ‘asshole’…” Zink paused for a moment. “And he most often applies it to you.”
Peterson shrugged.
“He never liked you as a football player and is thrilled you never made it into the hall of fame. And he doesn’t like Matson, thinks he’s a scumbag. He wrote that he wishes this was a capital case and that he’d like to blow the brains out of anybody who was part of the scheme.”
“So he’s in the postal worker category.”
“Exactly. Number Thirteen maybe is just unlucky. He got caught talking about a case in the hallway. They all do it one time or another. The grand jury clerk told me she overheard the chief judge reading him the riot act. The guy was real upset. He begged to stay on. Maybe he became resentful enough to want to sabotage the whole thing.”
Peterson shook his head as if to say that this investigation would be going nowhere. “Another weak candidate.”
Zink nodded, then tapped Number Twenty-two. “But here’s a contender. What got my attention is that he wrote down Kovalenko’s patronymic not as ‘B-o-r-i-s-o-v-i-c-h,’ but as ‘B-o-r- y — s-o-v-i-c-h,’ old style. I figured he’s got a Russian background. And bingo. His family name was Toshenko. When his grandparents got to Ellis Island in the early 1920s, the immigration people anglicized it to Thomas.”
“That’s not unusual. It happened all the time.”
Zink raised his eyebrows. “Guess who his cousin is?”
“I couldn’t guess.” Peterson frowned, not in the mood for game playing.
“Scuzzy Thomas.”
Peterson sat up. “No fucking way!”
Peterson slammed his fist on Zink’s desk. Pens and notebooks jumped. The computer monitor shook. “Are you telling me that we’ve got a relative of a mobster who’s in the joint for jury
tampering sitting on a federal grand jury? Rose is gonna go nuts…Did you look at his juror questionnaire?”
“No, they’re under seal. We’ll need a court order.”
Peterson stood up. “I’ll get an order for all of them. This is a fucking can of worms.” He looked at the chart, shaking his head. “I’m starting to wish I never opened it.”
He started toward the door, then hesitated and looked back at Zink. “Did it cross your mind that whoever wants all these other guys dead also wants to keep Matson alive?” He then turned away and marched down the hallway.
CHAPTER 46
W hy is somebody keeping Matson alive?” Gage wondered aloud when Alex Z walked into the office kitchen where he was making a pot of coffee.
“Keeping or leaving?”
“Leaving means he’s harmless, keeping means he’s got something somebody wants.”
Alex Z reached into the cabinet and pulled out two cups. “If I was him, I’d get a bodyguard.”
“He must have a krysha, a roof.” Gage held his hand above his head, palm down. “Somebody is protecting him.” Gage lowered his arm. “Slava thought that Gravilov would squeeze Matson for money and it was Alla Tarasova’s job to keep an eye on him.”
“Protecting him so they can squeeze him?”
“That’s what a protection racket is all about. They protect you from other crooks so you can keep paying.”
“Why not just put a gun to his head?” Alex Z formed his hand into the shape of a revolver. “You know, ‘Gimme all you got.’”
“What would you do if somebody did that to you?”
“I’d need to run out and sell my guitars and stuff.”
“So would Matson. We need to figure out where his money is.” Gage flicked his thumb toward Alex Z’s office. “Why don’t you go over Matson’s phone records and the ones I got out of Fitzhugh’s house? See if you can tell who they were calling. Maybe we can find a pattern.”
Alex Z brought a computer printout with him into Gage’s office a few hours later.
“It’s pretty clear Matson only used his office phone for SatTek business calls,” Alex Z reported. “In fact, all the overseas calls were to companies on the sales leads or customer lists or to suppliers of manufacturing equipment. Germany and France. I checked a bunch of the numbers. Almost all were listed. But his cell phone records show calls to a bunch of unlisted and disconnected numbers in places that haven’t even been on the horizon. Like Singapore. Why would he be calling Singapore? Or Taiwan? Switzerland I can understand. Liechtenstein, yeah. UK, sure. But Singapore?”
“Any pattern?”
“Pattern? Yes. Explanation? No-but whatever it was, Fitzhugh was in the middle of it. Calls to him kept crisscrossing all the others. Switzerland, Fitzhugh. Singapore, Fitzhugh. Taiwan, Fitzhugh. He’d get a call from Matson, then right away call a bank or a law office in Lugano, or Guernsey, or London. Bang, bang. Just like that.”
Gage turned his head and squinted toward the light coming into his office window, then back at Alex Z with the barest hint of a smile.
“There’s something we haven’t thought much about,” Gage said. “Matson’s exit strategy. How does he think this’ll end? He knows the government will make him forfeit all the money. Peterson isn’t a fool. A jury asked to convict Burch wouldn’t be too pleased if he let Matson keep any. But Matson’s not a fool, either. He’s got to have a stash. He doesn’t want to come out of this thing broke. And the best place to hide money is where nobody would think to look.”
“You think maybe Alla is part of his exit strategy? Dump the wife and disappear?”
“If Slava is reading this correctly, he’ll disappear, all right.”
“I don’t know, boss, her name is just too pretty for a crook. Alla Tarasova. It’s musical, even lyrical. It sort of floats in the air.”
Gage remembered someone else who’d talked about her in almost the same way, as a butterfly with a beautiful name.
“That’s what Mickey thought, too.”
CHAPTER 47
M ickey took it. He just lay there and took it. He didn’t scream. He didn’t yell for help. He knew if they’d intended to kill him, he’d already be dead.
The giant kicked him one last time in the ribs as he lay sprawled in the shadows of Azenby Road in Southeast London, then lumbered into a waiting Mercedes and sped away.
Mickey didn’t remember passing out. He just remembered the message and the pain when a constable passing by just after sunrise mistook him for a vagrant and shook him back into consciousness.
The Metropolitan Police officer who followed the ambulance down Peckham Road and up Denmark Hill to the King’s College Hospital recognized Mickey as soon as the blood was washed off his face. Superintendent Michael Ransford was a legend whose retirement picture hung in the station to which the officer was assigned.
The officer winced as he inspected the superintendent’s shattered face, for a moment imagining it was his own infirm grandfather lying there. But then he caught himself. Ransford was a pro. The best. He’d remember the details that civilian victims forget. He felt lucky to be the officer assigned to do the interview.
“Superintendent?”
Mickey opened his eyes.
“What did he look like, Superintendent?”
Mickey squeezed his answer out through his fractured jaw. “Never saw him.”
“Would you recognize his voice?”
“No.”
The officer hesitated, almost bewildered. Of course he should recognize a voice…unless he was senile.
“What did he say to you?”
“Don’t remember.”
“What about his accent?”
“Cockney.”
Finally. At least the superintendent remembered something they could build on later. He pushed ahead.
“What were you doing on Azenby Road, sir?”
“Walking. Just walking.”
The officer watched Mickey’s eyes close, then shook his head while gazing down at the battered man, wondering why one of the top detectives in Metropolitan Police history had deteriorated so quickly in retirement. He thought again of his grandfather, and an answer appeared: Alzheimer’s. Perhaps he should call the superintendent’s wife, offer to help keep an eye on him; maybe even gather up some other officers and take turns. Clearly the old man shouldn’t be permitted to wander the streets alone.
The Russian was smart, Mickey thought as he listened to the officer’s footsteps fade toward the door. If they’d killed me, Peckham would’ve been swarming with police. No one gets away with murdering a retired superintendent. An assault case with no leads? Well, that’s an altogether different thing.
“Uncle Mickey’s hurt.”
The grim voice of Hixon Two followed a ringing that startled Gage and Faith as they sat on the couch near midnight watching the last embers in the fireplace turn dark.
“What is it?” Faith asked. “Jack? Did they take Jack back to the
ICU?”
Gage shook his head, then placed a hand on her arm.
“Will he be okay?” Gage asked Hixon Two.
Hixon Two took in a short breath, trying to maintain her soldier’s composure. “He’ll live. But they beat the bloody hell out of him.”
Gage covered the mouthpiece and turned to Faith. “Mickey’s been hurt.”
“Gravilov’s thugs,” Hixon Two continued. “Hammer and Britva. Ribs, right arm, right eye socket, jaw, a gash on his forehead.”
Gage winced at the image. “How did it-”
“He enjoyed the taste of work again, so he went out on his own.”
“I never should’ve-”
“Don’t blame yourself. He said you’d do that.”
“What was he thinking? These are dangerous people.”
“He was thinking that maybe he’d learn something that would help you. He started following Gravilov, but they led him into a trap. Azenby Road is a tiny street that dead ends at Warwick Gardens. He was trapped.
”
“Can I talk to him?”
“He’s still under. They went in to find the source of internal bleeding and they’ll wire his jaw. I could tell he learned something, but they raced him into surgery before he could finish.”
Gage disconnected the call and remained sitting on the edge of the couch.
“Mickey thought he was invisible,” he told Faith, “like lost keys.” He felt himself well up. “I never should’ve gotten him into this.”
“It’s not your fault. The little jobs you gave him made him feel important, still useful in the world.”
Gage turned toward her. “But I always made sure somebody younger and stronger was with him.”
“He never realized it, did he?”
Gage shook his head. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings…For something like this, he should’ve called me to come do it, not tried it himself.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to look stupid if he was wrong.”
“Sometimes it’s not worth being right.”
CHAPTER 48
H ixon Two called back early the next morning, catching Gage on the drive down the hill toward the flatlands and the Bay Bridge.
“He’s got a sparkle in his eye and is quite proud of himself.” The worry was gone from her voice.
“Wait till the painkillers wear off.”
“I don’t think it’ll make a difference.”
“Can he talk?”
“Yes, but he sounds like he has a lisping Chinese accent from a 1940s film. He kept saying he ‘crowsht a shirkle.’”
“Closed a circle? What’d he mean?”
“Get this.” She paused as she’d been instructed by Mickey to set Gage up for the surprise. “He spotted Gravilov coming out of Alla’s building three days ago.”
“Now that’s what I would call closing a circle.” The black hole left by Fitzhugh had been filled with Alla Tarasova. He paused, trying to visualize the possible orbits, then thought out loud. “Either she’s now Matson’s proxy or she’s got a separate deal with Gravilov. Maybe Slava is right, she and her father are working with Gravilov.”
