The Marlboro Man: A Moira McElvaney Mystery

by Derek Fee

  ‘I’m in,’ Ricky shouted from Gardiner’s office.

  Moira left the papers on Carmichael’s desk and went to join Ricky. It had taken him less than ten minutes to break the codes. She wondered what kind of data was safe from these young hackers. She already knew the answer, none.

  Ricky handed her a sheet of paper. ‘I’ve written the username and password on here. I can change it if you like.’

  ‘No.’ She took the paper from him. ‘It’s best if we leave it. Do you have any more USBs?’

  Ricky fished in his jeans pocket and took out a handful. ‘Never go anywhere without them. What do you want them for?’

  ‘I want to download the contents of the computer.’

  ‘You’d need too many USBs.’ Ricky’s fingers flew over the keyboard. ‘I’m opening an account with my cloud server for you. Now I’ll back-up the computer into that cloud and you can access it at any time. I’ll do the same for the secretary’s computer. I’m printing out a set of instructions for accessing your cloud account.’

  Shea smiled. ‘Uncle Mak would be proud.’

  Ricky stood up and motioned for Moira to take his place. ‘The secretary’s computer and the filing cabinet locks, so I gotta hurry, the restaurant opens at noon.’

  ‘You really work there?’ Moira asked.

  Ricky was already moving towards Carmichael’s office. ‘I need to have a life the police and the IRS can look into. Otherwise I’m a potential drug dealer. I gotta have some way to explain the Harley.’

  ‘Open their e-mail accounts before you go. You can do that, I suppose.’

  Ricky smiled, then he was gone.

  Moira sat down at the desk and looked at the home screen. Gardiner had used a picture of the family on vacation as his screen saver. The backdrop was a restaurant and the Gardiner family looked tanned and happy. It was the kind of screen saver that would brighten up a winter’s day with the snow piled up on the Concord streets. There were more than forty folders lined up neatly on the screen. From their names, Moira deduced that most were associated with clients. Each folder would have to be examined. Her attention was drawn to a folder named ‘Personal’. She double-clicked the icon and found sub-folders relating to the family members, photos and correspondence. She started with the folder marked ‘Gregory’.

  It took Ricky less than five minutes to hack Jamie Carmichael’s username and password. He wrote them on a Post-it note that he stuck on the computer screen. He had called his Uncle Mak at dawn and learned that Shea was kosher. The guy was the real deal and loaded with money. His uncle suggested that he not try to swindle Shea. He didn’t say why.

  Ricky moved on to the keypads. He retrieved his bag and removed a small faceplate connected to a keypad readout that he had purchased from another hacker on the darknet for the princely sum of one hundred and fifty dollars. There were four filing cabinets in the main office and each one took less than three minutes to open. Moira and Shea watched as Ricky clipped the faceplate to the keypad and switched the second part of the apparatus on. Numbers danced across the display in Ricky’s right hand until eventually they stopped and the code was displayed.

  ‘How the hell does that thing work?’ Shea asked.

  ‘No idea.’ Ricky quickly moved to the next filing cabinet and repeated the process.

  Moira looked at Shea. ‘OK, Frank, this is where you earn your keep. Dig out the files from those cabinets and find the one that led to Gardiner’s disappearance.’

  Ricky opened the last filing cabinet. ‘I’m outta here. I’ll be in touch.’ He disappeared like a whiff of smoke.

  Moira watched the way Shea was looking at the open filing cabinets. ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘There have got to be hundreds, maybe even a thousand hanging files here. I have to go through every one of them?’

  ‘Welcome to the wonderful world of investigation. My old boss in Belfast had a motto for police work – plod, plod, plod. You’re about to find out that Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character. Crimes are more often solved by hard work and sweat than by inspiration. That means you use that fantastic financial brain of yours to sift through all those files and pinpoint the one or ones that we need to follow up. I don’t care if it takes you one hour or one week to examine them and find our focus. Gardiner was involved in something that got him disappeared, or maybe even killed. We need to find out what that something was.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  M oira flopped down into an easy chair in the apartment she shared with Brendan. It was a cut above what she had been used to in Belfast. The open-plan living/dining room was ultra-modern with stained wood flooring and a fireplace that would have looked at home in an English country house. The kitchen was state of the art and an open wooden staircase led from the living room to the two bedrooms and bathrooms above. The city of Cambridge, which was in reality a suburb of Boston, was at one time the reserve of professors, lecturers and employees of the two great universities located there. That was then. Times had changed and the choicest properties had already been bought up by people in the financial investment sectors or by technology entrepreneurs. The upshot of the increase in house prices was that young professors could no longer afford to live in Cambridge. Brendan’s family had suggested that they extend him a loan to buy a property but at that time a Harvard-controlled apartment became available and Brendan jumped on it.

  Moira had made herself a gin and tonic. She felt she deserved it. She had spent the day ploughing through files on both Gardiner’s and Carmichael’s computers. Her eyes were red-rimmed and sore. Before she left Shea at Gardiner’s office reading the paper files, she had insisted that everything be put back exactly as they had found it. There was probably still an open police investigation in Miami and she was aware that she and Shea could be accused of tampering with evidence. She doubted that the investigation was currently active, but she knew that if they turned up new evidence they would be obliged to inform Miami PD and get the hell out of their way.

  It was six-thirty. Brendan was at a lecture being given by a visiting academic and wouldn’t be home for another hour or so. She realised that she hadn’t thought of him all day. In fact, she hadn’t noticed the time flying by while she scoured the computer for the smallest detail that could lead to finding out what happened to Gregory Gardiner. More than two thousand people go missing every day in the US, which meant that more than thirty thousand people had gone missing since Gardiner had vanished. It would be of some comfort to Jean Gardiner and her children that most of the missing turn up at some point. But a relatively large number of missing people stay just that – missing. Moira hadn’t come across any leads from her examination of the two computers at the office. There were no suspicious emails from either a client or a lover. In fact, both Gardiner and his secretary appeared to be squeaky clean. The search for a clue to explain Gardiner’s disappearance was beginning to feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. The office computers were awash with information but none of it seemed to lead anywhere.

  And then there was Jamie Carmichael. There was not one piece of personal information on her computer, no personal emails, no photos, no music, nothing. Moira had called Jean to enquire whether she had a photo of Carmichael. She hadn’t. She had gone online to search for a phone number for Carmichael but hadn’t found one. Then she emailed Ricky Sin and added Jamie Carmichael to his list.

  They had been on the case for almost two days and had come up with zilch. She lay back and closed her eyes. She wondered what her old boss back in Belfast would do. She smiled when she thought of the answer – plod, plod, plod. There were a couple of hundred sheets of paper in the bag that Ricky had given her that needed to be examined. She was thinking about the impact on her tired eyes when she drifted off to sleep.

  Brendan looked at the sleeping figure on the couch. He brought the bag of goodies he had picked up at the House of Chang into the kitchen. The dim sum would have to wait. He loved Frank Shea like a brother, but he wished he hadn’t dra
gged Moira into helping him search for Gardiner. The most logical step for Frank would have been to hire the top detective agency in Boston, but the little boy in Frank had surfaced and wanted to try his hand at investigating. A bored Frank Shea was a very dangerous creature. When Frank was incarcerated, Brendan wondered how he was going to survive the monotony of prison. The answer was by turning into a different man. Frank had gone on a fitness kick and his weight dropped spectacularly. He earned a black belt in judo and learned to play the piano. There were probably other accomplishments that Brendan wasn’t aware of. Now he wanted to be a fucking detective. That didn’t bother Brendan, but involving Moira did. Brendan had consulted on a number of disappearance cases and they generally ended badly. It seemed there was nothing in Gardiner’s personal life that indicated a desire to disappear. But in his experience people are by far the most complex creatures on the planet and their motivations vary from minute to minute. Brendan used a case study in his lectures on a pastor who murdered one of his parishioners, dressed the man like himself and burned down his church with the man inside. Like Gardiner, the pastor was a model citizen until he decided to kill ‘himself’ and start a new life. Moira stirred and Brendan held her hand as she slowly came awake.

  ‘Tough day?’ Brendan kissed her lightly on the lips.

  She smiled and sat up. ‘You could say that.’

  He saw the empty glass on the coffee table beside her. ‘Making any progress?’

  She gave him a quick rundown on her day.

  ‘If you were back in Belfast, what would you think?’

  ‘It’s not comparable. In Belfast I was a member of a team, which was part of an organisation with significant resources. Here, it’s me and Shea tricking around with our new friend Ricky. Gardiner’s been missing for almost three weeks now and a major police department is already looking at a cold case, probably waiting on serendipity to deposit a clue in their laps.’

  He held her hand. ‘So why don’t you drop it?’

  She looked into his dark eyes. There was pleading there. It would be so easy to say, OK, I’ll drop it. All she had to do was pick up the phone and tell Shea that he’d have to find another idiot to play detective with. She would have liked to have time to make up a score sheet with the pros and cons. ‘I can’t drop it. There’s a family out there that goes to bed each night praying that the next morning their husband or father will be sitting at the breakfast table drinking his coffee as usual. They need an answer. Maybe Shea and I won’t be able to give them one, but at least we can try.’ She held his hand tight. ‘I know this is difficult for you. We could have sat here and played happy families, but it would have been false. This is what I do. And I am bloody good at it. You love teaching. Think about waking up one day and there’s no more teaching. How would you feel?’ The answer was in his face. ‘This isn’t about female identity or assertiveness. It’s about who I am. And I’m not someone sitting at the back of a lecture theatre trying to be someone I’m not.’

  ‘I love you so bloody much, but I hate your ability to go straight to the point. It makes me feel like a shit, primarily for taking you away from the job you loved at home and secondly for trying to stop you from doing something you care about here.’ He held her. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. I love you, but there’s a part of me that I can’t deny. It’s as simple and as complicated as that. You’re this high powered psychologist, you should be able to understand.’

  ‘OK, from now on it’s you, Frank, Ricky and me. I want to be part of the investigation.’

  She smiled. ‘So we’ve gone from the Three Stooges to the Four Musketeers.’ They stood up and faced each other. ‘I hope that smell coming from the kitchen is Chinese food. I’m ravenous. Let’s open a bottle of wine and eat. Then I think we’re due an early night.’

  He kissed her hard on the lips and made for the kitchen.

  She watched his back disappear through the door. He was too good for her. Sometimes she wished she hadn’t gone to the bar that night in Belfast when they first met. But it was what it was.

  Meanwhile there was a tall black woman out there who was their only hope of a lead. The problem was Moira wouldn’t recognise Carmichael if she stood in front of her. She picked up her mobile phone and texted Ricky.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A s Moira tucked in to the dim sum in Cambridge, Jamie Carmichael sat in a motel just south of Charlotte, South Carolina. She had spent the day lying on her bed intermittently crying and sleeping. How had she ended up in a shithole like this? She’d been on the run for two weeks without knowing why the fuck she was on the run in the first place. Something inside the amygdala, the oldest part of the brain which governs the fight or flight response, told her that it was a good time to get her black ass out of Boston. She’d packed up her shit from the office, closed up her accounts on Facebook and Instagram, and got herself out of town. If she’d had a passport, she would have headed for Israel to seek asylum as a Beta Jew. The fact that she wasn’t even Ethiopian or Jewish might have been an impediment to her plan, but she was looking for some kind of safe sanctuary and the Israelis never allowed a Jew to be fucked over. Her boss had disappeared, and where she came from people who disappeared did so for a reason. She’d held the fort for a few days awaiting his return, but the Skype call with two detectives from Miami PD had thrown a scare into her. You didn’t need to be a genius to read between the lines of the conversation. They didn’t think that her boss was coming back. Gregory Gardiner was a big boy who looked like he could take care of himself. But when he didn’t show up after two weeks, she had the distinct feeling he wasn’t going to show up at all. She had no idea what the stupid fucker had got himself mixed up in but she sure as hell wasn’t going to be collateral damage. She had been zigzagging south, staying in fleapits for the past ten days. She’d been trying to work on a plan that might keep her alive but since she had no idea who her boss had pissed off, she didn’t have a clear definition of a safe haven.

  Her eyes fell on the tiny USB on the gold chain round her neck. Greg had given her the USB in case anything happened to him. She knew she should have given it to the Miami cops, but she didn’t like the look of the guy on the screen. The questions he asked were crafty. Like he was only interested in what she knew about what Greg might have been up to. Maybe she was just being paranoid. She held up the USB and looked at it. This little mother is either goin’ to get me killed or is goin’ to save my life, she thought. She had no idea what was on it, but if Greg had been disappeared because of the contents then the same could happen to her.

  She was hungrier than a bear waking up after six months’ hibernation. But the sun had gone down and there was no way she was leaving her room after dark. The previous night she’d been kept awake by the constant conversation connected with drug deals taking place directly outside her window. A cursory search of the room had turned up both used and unused condoms under the mattress. The cleaning staff must have been dragged in off the street. She’d blow this dump tomorrow and head for the coast. She needed to check the Internet to see whether Greg had turned up. All this flying around trying to avoid ‘the man’ might be just something inside her head. Why should she be so scared? She knew nothing. At least, she knew nothing that would be of any use to the police. But would the people who had disappeared her boss believe that she knew nothing? She’d been brought up in the projects and she knew that those kinds of people shot first and asked question afterwards.

  She checked her pocketbook. There was five hundred left of the two thousand dollars she’d taken from the bank in Boston. Sooner or later she was going to have to hit an ATM and that would leave a trace. The other option was to go back to Boston and give the finger to whoever might be after her. She laughed out loud at the prospect. To think she had taken the job as Greg Gardiner’s secretary because it was such a non-descript little office. The pay was good and there was little or no work. Greg never hit on her, although some of his clients often invited her out.
But hell, what had looked like the safest job in Boston had sure turned to bite her. The noise of the drug dealers outside her window was already drowning the buzzing of the fly trying to escape the heat of her room. Tomorrow she would head for the coast, maybe Fort Myers. She could lose herself among the tourists. But sooner or later she was going to have to stick that card in an ATM and when she did a red light was going to blink somewhere.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  T he text from Ricky was short and sweet: an address on Queensberry Street and an apartment number. Shea picked up Moira at Brendan’s apartment in Cambridge.

  ‘You look like I feel,’ she said as she took the passenger seat in Shea’s car.

  He slipped the car into gear and drove away. ‘Do you have any idea how many files I had to go through? Jesus, I had no idea that being a small business accountant could be so goddamned boring. The entrepreneurial spirit sure isn’t dead in America. Every mom and pop has a stupid idea that they think they can turn into a business.’

  ‘And you found?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing. I finished at two this morning and I hadn’t made a single note to follow up on.’