Patrolman Steel returned in less then an hour. “Well, boss, bad news, we can’t possibly restore the erased area because it wasn’t erased. The tape was spliced. It was a neat job but there’s no way one can splice a tape without it being noticed.”
“That’s what I suspected; and what about the stills?”
“Here they are, Lieutenant. You can see that the cement wall at the edge of the parking lot shown in the earlier frames is intact. On the 5:45 frames, the wall has been damaged and fragments have been scattered on the parking lot.”
“Yes, that would be consistent with the damage from the bullet that was fired at Miss Lang. So that seems to support her story that she was fired at just after she left work. It also appears,” Fred went on, “that whoever did the shooting was employed by AU, because they had knowledge of the details of the company’s security operations. The tape was obviously altered so as not to disclose the person’s identity.”
Steel said, “I don’t understand; why didn’t they just get rid of the tape?”
“No, they couldn’t do that,” said Fred. “That would have created an obvious gap in the filed tapes. Of course, a blank tape could have been inserted in its place but then the handwriting on the outside of the tape would be different from that of the security head. I suspect the person responsible hoped that no one would examine the contents of the tape; and in a short time the tape would have been copied over, obliterating forever the missing information regarding the shooting. Larry, please check this tape for fingerprints, although I’m not sure it will be worth your time. I will bet you my week’s paycheck that the prints you will find will be mine, the security head’s and no one else’s.”
*
The next morning Fred awoke to the irritating ringing of his nightstand phone. He looked over to Maureen who, with her ear plugs in, continued to sleep peacefully. He glanced at the nightstand clock; hell, it was only 6 a.m.
It was the chief. “Fred, we have an appointment at the CIA field office in Room 201 at 8:30 a.m.. Be there early. Miss Black will be there, as well as her attorney. By the way, did you enjoy your day off?”
“Ah,—yes, thanks, boss, it was great!”
“Good, I guess you had fun in your office, right?” Without waiting for an answer, the chief said, “See you around 8:15,” and hung up.
Shit, Fred thought, he finds out everything.
Chapter 69
Fred entered the CIA field office promptly at 8:15. The agent on duty checked the appointment book, and after verifying Fred’s identification, said, “Take the elevator up to the second floor. Room 201 will be to your left.”
Fred had hoped that the interview with Miss Black would have been on neutral grounds. The CIA field office was far from neutral; but at least the chief was willing to stick his neck out to continue the investigation in spite of the DA.
When Fred arrived at the second floor, he saw a black plastic arrow indicating that rooms 200 thru 210 were to his left. As he walked to his destination he passed several young, very fit males all well dressed in black business suits. I guess they must go incognito on assignment, he thought. They sure would stand out in a crowd if they wore that attire in a foreign country.
The door to room 201 was open. Sitting at a conference table was the chief, Miss Black, and a man whom he had never seen before. A thin man with a ruddy complexion sat to the chief’s left. An ear piercing voice yelled, “Close the door and sit down, you’re late!”
Fred started to protest that he wasn’t late, but decided to let well enough alone. He knew this was obviously an attempt by the CIA to gain early control of the meeting.
When Fred took his seat, the thin man to his left continued to speak.
“We want you to know we are here for the single purpose of insuring that you will not harass Miss Black any further. She is on assignment and your interference may have already compromised our mission.”
The chief spoke up. “We’re sorry about that, but murder takes precedence over whatever your mission might be. At this stage, Miss Black is still a suspect in a murder investigation.”
The man to Fred’s left started to protest, “Wait a minute, Miss Black is not a suspect—”
“—Excuse me,” the Chief broke in, “I am speaking; and as the person in charge of this investigation, I am telling you that she is a suspect. I would like to believe that someone may have planted evidence to direct suspicion in her direction. And I would hope we can clear her during this meeting, which we might be able to do if you cooperate …”
The thin man said, “Let’s stop this charade. The DA told you to desist from treating Miss Black as a suspect. Did he not?”
Much to the surprise of Fred, the chief responded firmly and unequivocally. “Look, the DA and I usually agree on most matters.” That was a lie, Fred thought. The chief continued, “But in this case we do not. If you don’t cooperate, I will pull Miss Black down to headquarters; and in the front page of tomorrow’s paper, the entire city of Sarasota will know she is a suspect.”
The thin man had a look of disbelief all over his face. “You do that, and you will be fired.”
The chief smiled smugly. “Look, I’m a civil servant, I’m far overdue for retirement; and much worse things have happened in my life than the possibility of being removed from a job with the prospect of enjoying a full pension. In fact, I can’t wait to take that trip around the world that I have been looking forward to, and take in some much needed deep sea fishing. The good news is that even upon my departure, Miss Black would continue to be investigated. You cannot shut our system down, and beyond that you have no leverage over me, sir, none whatsoever.
“Now if you want to cooperate, and I strongly suggest that you do, I would like my very competent lieutenant to ask Miss Black a few questions. If she is innocent, believe me, he will find out quickly. And by the way I am not an aficionado of espionage tales. That, sir, is entirely your business, ours is murder. Frankly, I don’t even understand why there are still spies in what we now consider friendly nations. Hell, according to the papers, Russia started recruiting post cold war spies after we had supposedly become friends. Red China owns a hefty percentage of our treasury notes and is helping finance our national deficit. They and Russia have become active trading partners with us. Will the games you guys play in your black worlds never end? At any rate, Lieutenant Harris, please take over.”
Fred was not ready for this. He was still amazed at the effectiveness and precision in which the chief had gained the high ground. He was also surprised at the chief’s tirade, but he wondered if it was simply an attempt to take control of the setting. He looked to his left, the thin man was reeling with anger and biting his lips; however, he remained silent. Miss Black’s anger was even more apparent, it was displayed all over her beet-red face. Her knuckles had turned pale white, where her fingers were tightly bent into hardened fists.
Trying to buy time while he tired to determine how best to proceed, Fred said, “Look, as the chief has indicated, Miss Black, we want to believe that you’re innocent.”
“Get on with it,” the thin man blurted out.
Fred knew that this interrogation would not be a cake walk. “Okay, very simply, Miss Black, as we have indicated previously, an attempt was made on Mr. Schultz’s secretary’s life, not once but twice. In the first instance it was an attempt to shoot her in the parking lot of AU. We located the spent cartridges from that attempt. The second attempt on her life was executed by turning on the gas on her kitchen stove while she slept. Now, as you know, we had an authorized search carried out in your house and in the process located a .32 caliber weapon hidden beneath the hall closet floor.
“We fired the weapon that we recovered from your home, using one of the bullets still contained in that gun. Our experts conducted a comparison of the markings on that bullet with the one found in the parking lot. Our tests showed that the barrel marking from your weapon was the same signature as the spent bullet found in the parking lot.
We also were able to lift fingerprints from Miss Lang’s kitchen stove. The fingerprints on file for you at AU were an exact match to the prints on her range.
“And by the way,” Fred continued, “the surveillance camera of the parking lot in Analysis Unlimited revealed only two cars in the parking lot just prior to the period in which an attempt was made on Miss Lang’s life. We checked the plates on both cars. One was registered to Miss Lang and the other to you. Now, can you explain any of these situations?”
Miss Black spoke coldly, “First of all, Lieutenant, I do not keep a gun in my house. My authorized weapon is kept in a safe in my office in this building unless I am on assignment.”
“Ah,” Fred replied, “but that doesn’t mean you didn’t have a second weapon that you kept at home.”
“Did you trace the ownership of the weapon?” asked Miss Black.
“We tried but we hit a dead end,” Fred admitted.
“If you looked at the video from the surveillance camera, couldn’t you see the person that shot at Miss Lang?”
“Unfortunately, that part of the tape had been cut out.”
“I see. But if I were the shooter, wouldn’t I also have cut out the frames showing my car in the parking lot?”
“I suspect you didn’t think of that.”
“Lieutenant, I always think of everything – just ask my associates. It’s obvious the real murderer wanted his or her identity removed from the tape but also wanted the evidence of my car to remain. Can’t Miss Lang identify who it was that shot at her?”
“She said she was so scared that she ran to her car and she didn’t have an opportunity to look for the shooter.”
Fred jumped to the more incriminating part of his investigation. “What about the presence of your fingerprints on Miss Lang’s stove? Were you ever in her house?”
“No, but it’s not difficult to lift fingerprints from an object and then have them preserved on a latex base for use later. That is hardly a technical impossibility. If you watched any Bond movies, you would have seen the technique used back in the 60’s. And I can certify to you that it can be done and accomplished quite easily.”
The thin man nodded his head as if he had shared some personal experience in that area.
The chief interrupted. “Miss Black, you have been planted in the AU Company for some reason. Is it possible that the person you are after has attempted to falsely plant this evidence on you?”
Miss Black replied, “I would like to say yes, but to the best of my knowledge, until this incident, only Mr. Schultz knew that I entered the company as a plant. Unfortunately, up to this stage I haven’t been able to uncover the identity of the person we are after. Look, I know you are investigating a murder, which very likely has nothing to do with what the CIA is interested in. The murderer, I am sure, had no idea that I am an agent, or he would have selected another person to try to pin this on—a person who would have been a much easier target to convict.”
Fred asked, “Miss Black, please help us prove that you are not guilty. Where were you Tuesday night?”
“For your information, I was home that entire evening and night.”
“Do you have a witness to support your alibi?”
“Unfortunately, no, I don’t. But this person, who is trying so hard to pin a crime on me, seems to be very clever; don’t you think that person insured that I had no witnesses to defend my alibi that night?”
Fred decided to shift direction in his interrogation. “This person you are looking for, can you tell us without revealing confidentiality, what state secrets he leaked?”
Miss Black looked at the thin man for a response.
“Look, none of what I am about to say can ever leave this office. Do you both agree?”
Both Fred and the chief nodded their agreement.
“We think, actually we are sure, he sold highly classified secrets to the red Chinese.”
“How do you know that?” Fred asked.
“We think that, because one of our foreign agents identified an exact code that we had previously purchased from AU. We located that secret code in communist China.”
Fred said, “You mean a code that was encoded in a computer chip?” He was mining, but that seemed like a logical jump.
“Yes, well, something like that,” said Miss Black.
Fred then made a more extended jump based on combining the information Schultz had disclosed with the new information that had just come to light. He said, “I would have to assume this chip is capable of being planted into a human being to provide them with an extraordinary psychic capability.”
Neither the thin man nor Miss Black verbally responded, but the expression on their faces told him everything. He had accidentally stepped on the truth. “My God,” he muttered, “We’re creating mental supermen.”
The thin man broke in. “Look, you are assuming that, and your assumption is incorrect. We never said anything about that.”
Fred ignored the thin man and directed his question to Miss Black. “Do you think it is possible that the murderer killed the division heads because he feared that they knew something about his espionage activities?”
Miss Black said, “It’s possible, but frankly we never felt the division heads were killed for a purpose. We have always accepted the fact they were the unfortunate accidental victims of mass murder, and that the suicide was exactly that.”
The chief entered the fray. “Now I will have to ask you to be silent about what we’re telling you. Based on all that has been divulged to the public, two of the division heads were killed as a result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, that is still our station’s prevailing theory. We are looking at other possibilities; but at this stage they remain only possibilities.”
Miss Black broke in, “Do you mean it is possible that all those people were deliberately killed just to disguise a hit on two people?”
Fred tried to read her body language. As best as he could determine, her question seemed totally sincere.
“We don’t know that, Miss Black,” the chief responded, “But it is entirely possible.”
“My God!” she cried out.
The chief said, “Thanks for your time, I am sure we have some mutual areas of interest and will need to meet again.” His tone made it clear that the meeting was over.
After perfunctory handshakes all around, Fred and the chief left the building and strolled across the street to a coffee shop.
“Well, what’s your take on this?” were the first words out of the chief’s mouth.
“I no longer think that she is involved in any killings,” Fred replied. “I can’t for the life of me think of a motive; and she just doesn’t look like a murderer to me.”
The chief laughed. “Fred, if someone could give me a profile of a murderer before that person committed the crime, I would be very happy. It just doesn’t happen. Murderers often look and act like normal people, you know that. However, I know what you mean and I came to your same conclusion as well, that Miss Black is not guilty. So if we are both correct, that means someone is still trying very hard to throw us off the trail.”
“Yes,” Fred replied, “First, the mass murderer camouflage and now the decoy of a planted gun and false fingerprints. All of this points to a very intelligent, extraordinary and dedicated individual. It is also possible that the murderer is the same person who is selling secrets to the Chinese. If three of the division heads had suspicions of what was going on, then that may have been just enough reason to eliminate them.”
“But why did the murderer attempt to kill Schultz’s secretary?” the chief wondered out loud.
“All I can think of is that she, in her capacity, has exposure to the entire building and is very much trusted by Schultz. Perhaps she came across something incriminating without knowing what it was.”
The chief pondered Fred’s analysis. “That could be very well true, especially when that person tried to eliminate the secretary twice.
“Well,” said Fred, “If you don’t disagree, I want to extend the 24 hour watch we have on Donna until the threat is over.”
“Fred, I have no problem with the 24 hour watch. But unless we catch the murderer, the threat on her life may continue for an indefinite period.”
“I know boss, I know!”
*
Fred had two urgent visits to make. In the case of two of his planned visits, he could be taking steps that could, in the eyes of others, be career ending, but it no longer mattered to him. One additional visit was to be made by Jim Hebert in Fred’s behalf.
Fred told the chief that he needed to speak to Slivers and Shepard one more time.
“As I told you, Fred, it’s your case; but with the first trial date just two weeks away, I doubt that their attorneys would permit it. However, keep me informed.”
“I will.”
Fred contacted Sliver’s attorney, Jason Roberts directly. The attorney had been practicing law in Sarasota and Manatee County for over ten years, he knew the lay of the land well. Criminal cases were his specialty and one of his guiding principles was: Under no circumstances allow the police to interrogate your client if it can be avoided. Allow the prosecution to speak to him only if a plea bargain is on the table or is a distinct possibility.
“Roberts said, “No way will you speak to my client. You were the arresting officer, what on earth could you do to help my case? And remember my job is not to help you prove my client is guilty.”
Fred said, “Look, I believe your client is innocent and I will agree to provide you with a tape stating that; and furthermore I will be willing to testify on your client’s behalf.”
Mind Switch Page 33
