Buzz Killer

by Tom Straw

  “This is going to be a short meeting,” the man said. “Is this how you want to spend it?” His voice followed a flat line, as indifferent as his face. This was the focused temperament of a master burglar. And, reflected Macie, of a potential killer.

  “How did you find us?” she asked.

  “Let’s talk instead about why.” He laced his fingers together on the tablecloth in front of him. When he did, his eyes followed Wild’s gaze to his ink, but he made no effort to conceal the tattoo, which led her to believe he wanted them to see it. “I’m here to do you a favor. I’m going to save you the trouble of spinning your wheels on me when you could be looking for Rúben Pinto’s real killer.”

  “Oh, say no more.” Gunnar bowed his head in mock gratitude. “If only OJ had been this forthright. Oh, wait, that is what he said.” He leaned forward to direct his laugh to Macie and slid his chair back a few inches. The move wasn’t lost on the visitor.

  “If you’re thinking of dealing a play, I’ll be gone before you clear your seat.”

  Wild intervened. “Does this mean you know who actually killed Mr. Pinto?”

  Not so much relaxed—call it tranquil—he slid his gaze off Gunnar to her. “Not my concern. Except to make clear that it’s not I.”

  “And your concern about our wheel spinning wouldn’t have anything to do with the inconvenience of us digging into your life?” Then she added, “For whatever we might find?”

  “Let’s not be cute.” His thin lips twitched a minor smile. “You know what I do. And, damn straight, I don’t like you routing around, potentially hindering my ability to do it.”

  “Do you have a name?” Gunnar came in bluntly, tired of playing this dude’s game. “Mr. Clean?” He turned to Macie. “What was the name of the genie in Aladdin? Oh, right, Genie.” Then, back to the crew chief. “What do we call you?”

  A pause. “You don’t.”

  “You seem smart,” she said. “Enough to see we aren’t being unreasonable. I have a client—Jackson Hall from your own crew—facing a murder one for a homicide he didn’t commit. You factor into the equation perfectly, yet you expect us to take your denial at face value.”

  “Want to talk factoring in?” Gunnar waited for him to float his eyes back to him. “I hear there was trouble in paradise. Your boyee Rú was doing some skimming out of your haul. I call that a motive.”

  “Call it what you want.”

  “We know he secretly lifted a Grammy. What else did he steal from your take? Something bigger? More valuable? Or did you teach Pinto a lesson on principle? Some honor-among-thieves kind of thing?”

  Rather than buckle under the taunts and questions, the man answered one that hadn’t been asked yet. “I was nowhere near Pinto’s apartment when it came down. In fact, I’ve never even been there.”

  Gunnar bent forward. “You have an alibi?”

  “In fact, I do.”

  “What is it?”

  “Air tight.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The crew chief rocked his head side to side, dismissing it as a stupid question. Then he decided to dignify it. “Here’s a big word for you. It means ‘unassailable.’”

  “How so?”

  There was a clatter of wheels as the restaurant host delivered an aluminum walker up to a nearby table and helped an old woman up to her Rollator. As soon as they shuffled into the aisle, hemming in Gunnar and Macie, the crew chief glided to the exit without casting a look back. They both stood to follow, but there was no way to get to him without bowling over the senior and her party. The only sign of him was the glass door near the reception podium slowly closing in his wake.

  Gunnar sat back down. “You’re not going to chase him?” she asked, also taking a seat.

  “And put Nana in the ER on her night out?” He slipped his phone out of his pocket. “Not that I didn’t think about it. But he’s vapor by now, trust me.”

  The aisle finally cleared. “You sure you don’t want to . . .”

  “Chase him? I would, if I didn’t have a better idea.” He held his screen up, said, “Give me a sec,” and replied to a text message. When he finished, he asked, “You want to order an espresso or a tea or something? That brownie sundae looked pretty good.”

  “I’m not understanding how you can just sit there.”

  “You wanted finesse?” He gestured to himself. “This is what it looks like.”

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  After a double espresso for him and an Earl Grey for her, they strolled two blocks to Amsterdam where Gunnar had parked his van in front of a Chirping Chicken. A pudgy young guy in his late twenties who had his long black hair tied up in a bandana was leaning against the E-350’s curbside fender, forking some arroz con pollo from a takeout container. Even at a distance, they could see that about 20 percent of the transfer never made his mouth and had come to rest on the ledge created by the bulge of his stomach. “Remember how I said everybody needs ‘a guy?’ Well,” said Gunnar, “this is my guy. Say hello to CyberGauchito. CyberG, this is Macie Wild.”

  “Yeah, so I got from your Facebook pic,” he said, lightly accented in Spanish. “Oh. My bad.” He transferred his plastic fork to the food container and shook. His hand was moist and kind of squishy. Wild managed to smile, and fought the urge to wipe her palm on her clothes. She thought about Purell and how it was this guy already knew about her.

  Gunnar had given her a one-block briefing on the hacker she was about to meet, a Black Hat from Buenos Aires, self-nicknamed after an Argentine folk hero with magical powers, Gauchito Gil. “A lot of hacktivists come from down there,” explained Gunnar. “Apparently where he grew up there are so many have-nots, that legions of young people like the CyberGauchito had no money for gaming, software, or even Wi-Fi, so they learned to hack it. Now it’s grown to a gutsy subculture born out of necessity. Some of the exploit coders—hackers who expose software vulnerability to companies so they can patch it—make up to a million for writing one exploit. A lot of them have put their millions into start-ups and spawned a legit tech industry in Buenos Aires.” The tubby guy with the see-through beard and granny glasses looked like anything but a budding millionaire, but magical powers can work wonders, she thought. Didn’t the FBI pay someone that much to break into the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone?

  “Hey, man, you picked the right parking spot.” CyberG gestured with his fork to the storefront, spilling more rice onto the sidewalk. “The food here is insane.” He shoveled two more helpings into his mouth and, still munching, shit-canned the remainder in the basket on the corner. “Wanna get to it?”

  His guy’s girth made space too tight for all three of them to fit comfortably inside the cargo hold, so Gunnar winged open the rear doors, and they stood in a cluster while the Gauchito unloaded a black box and a printout from his backpack onto the carpeted floor. “This afternoon,” Gunnar explained, “I gave CyberG Spatone’s phone number, figuring, as a freelance fitness trainer, his business number was also his cell.”

  “It was,” said CyberG.

  “The idea was to monitor Spatone to see if he called anyone after we rattled his cage.”

  “He did.” Again from the Gauchito.

  Macie whipped her head to Gunnar. “You had him hacked?”

  “Uh,” said Gunnar’s guy, speaking his mission statement, “kinda what we do.”

  As Wild tossed ramifications, she asked, “And you can just do that?”

  CyberG cackled at the naïveté of the question. Gunnar asked what he had learned. “Well, I didn’t do a voice tap. That’s a bit more involved for short notice. But I did get into his carrier for outgoing calls. Ninety-three minutes ago . . . that’s about right, right?”

  “Right,” said Gunnar.

  “Ninety-three minutes ago, your man placed two calls to the same number. Don’t get too excited. It’s a burner.” He turned to Macie. “Single-use cell phone.”

  “I know burners,” she said.

  “Then you know the bad
news. Not registered to a name or an address. Minutes probably paid for by an untraceable or stolen card. But the good news—CyberGauchito always has good news, es verdad?”

  Gunnar played their little game. “Es muy verdad.”

  “Absolutamente.” He spread a printout of a Lower Manhattan street map on the brown shag. “I have a ping off a cell tower where both calls were received.”

  “How far apart?”

  “The calls? First call was like a minute. Second call was longer. Three minutes, and it came sixteen minutes after the first call.”

  Gunnar ran some calculations, but Macie beat him to it. “Spatone called the crew chief right after we left. The crew chief probably told him to follow us. When he saw us go into Isabella’s, he called back to report. That’s how he found us.”

  “Macie Wild, you may have a future in detection,” said Gunnar. He bent to study the map. His hacker had drawn a circle around the location of the cell tower that received Spatone’s calls. “Same tower for both calls, so that means he probably wasn’t in his car or on the move. Not a for-certain, but somewhere in this circle could be either his home or his office, or whatever.” He angled himself to let Macie have a better look.

  “Hate to be the wet blanket,” she said, “but that’s a two-block radius, downtown. We’re talking high-rise offices, apartments. . . . What do we do, go down there and yell, ‘Marco!’ and wait for, ‘Polo’?”

  CyberG smiled. “Actually that’s sort of exactly what you’re going to do.” He set the black box in front of Gunnar. “Signal-strength meter. Programmed with your crew chief’s burner cell number. It’s still a needle in a haystack, but if you drive or walk the zone I indicated on the map—and assuming he hasn’t run the battery down or turned it off or pulled the SIM from his phone—you might pick up his signal. Then it’s a matter of following the strength of its output on the meter to home in on him.”

  Gunnar looked at his watch. Wild said, “Tonight? You mean now?”

  “Would you rather wait until he runs down the battery or shitcans the phone?”

  Wild looked up at the darkening sky and said, “Know what I’m learning? Never have a meal with you without bringing an overnight bag.”

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  Once again Wild found herself behind the wheel of the custom cargo van, this time driving a grid pattern of the Financial District while Gunnar rode shotgun with his nose to the black box cradled on his lap. Although cheaper rents near Wall Street had coaxed droves of millennials downtown, mostly as craigslist roommates, the streets rolled up at night after the stock markets closed and happy hour ended, which made traffic perfectly accommodating for Macie’s low-speed circuit. “OK, I’m getting something,” said Gunnar, but without excitement. She noted the ex-cop had slipped into his dispassionate tone again. Surveillance mode, she thought. “Can you slow it down?”

  Wild took it to eight miles per hour. As they passed Hanover Square she glanced to the passenger seat and saw the blue LED numbers on the signal-strength meter getting busy. She couldn’t tell whether they were going up or down, though, and Gunnar’s expression gave nothing away. At the stop sign in the perplexing five-point intersection where William and South William met Beaver Street, he twirled a forefinger to say keep rolling, and she did. “Losing it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, that’s a good thing.” He directed her to circle back around until they found a parking place. It took some hunting but she snagged one half a block from South William Street. They got out and walked the neighborhood. After some trial and error, the black box led them to a Gilded Age brownstone near the five-point merge. They walked both sides of the building from end to end and got the strongest reading on the Beaver Street side. “So it’s one of those,” said Cody as they stood across the street taking in the facing apartments.

  “Now that we know the building. What do we tell the police?” He gave her the look she had first seen outside the crime scene when he passkeyed Rúben Pinto’s door. It said, “Get real.” “Gunnar, he might be a material witness to a homicide. Why did we go to all this trouble if we’re not going to let the police take him?”

  “Because we actually want to learn something. And they might just send him underground.”

  “Learn something how?”

  But he already was crossing the street with the black box. Macie almost followed until she saw him climb the scaffolding in front of the optician’s next door to the old building. When he reached the second floor, he made a Tarzan swing off the pipe over to the fire escape of the apartments and started reading the blue glow as he ascended.

  “Top floor, corner,” he said, back on the sidewalk. Macie traced six floors upward to the only illuminated windows. “I see this as a two-camera job.” Gunnar clamped his free hand lightly on her arm. “You up for being my best boy?” She lingered in thought, unable to ignore how much she welcomed the familiarity of his contact.

  “Gee,” she replied, “how can a boy refuse?”

  In a single trip from the van they carried two robotic video cameras, a pair of telescoping tripods, and a duffel containing small sandbags, Wi-Fi receivers, and a couple of unidirectional shotgun mics. “Careful not to drop those cams,” said Gunnar. “You’re basically carrying my NYPD severance.” Using his fireman’s passkey, they entered the apartment lobby across the street from the crew chief’s place and climbed the internal stairs to the rooftop.

  At the ledge facing across the street to the target apartment, Gunnar took out his mini binocs to survey the windows where he had gotten the strongest signal. “No movement, no crew chief,” he said. The drapes were open but, from Macie’s vantage, all she could make out was a living room in one window and the bedroom in the other. Finished with his initial survey, the ex-TARU detective methodically went about unpacking the cams from their cases, mounting them to their tripod heads, and aiming each at a window. “Wanna sandbag those so we don’t get any drift?” It only took her a beat to process what he meant, then she placed one of the small canvas saddle bags on the foot of each tripod leg. He tested both setups with a jiggle, gave her a satisfied nod, and added, “Two more for the microphones.” While he knelt to train one directional mic on each room, Wild draped sandbags to fix them in place too. “For someone with a bug up her ass about bugs, you’re pretty good at this,” he remarked as he snapped in his Wi-Fi connections and powered up the battery.

  “I also hate cleaning my bathroom, but I do it.”

  “You’re so fancy.” He tossed the last sandbag on top of the empty duffel so it wouldn’t blow away and strode across the roof to the access door. “Let’s invade some privacy, shall we?”

  C H A P T E R • 21

  * * *

  Back inside the cargo hold of the van, Gunnar Cody exercised his rituals of turning to a fresh page in his spiral notebook and logging the date and time of the surveillance start from the codes on the monitor. Next he tested the joystick governing each camera, putting them through their robotic pans and tilts, adjusting the LoLux mode for the light, then pushing in and pulling back with their 30x optical zooms. “Still no sign of life?” asked Wild, also following custom by squeezing into her familiar-ish place on the folding chair beside him.

  “He’s in the shower, listen.” Gunnar raised the gain on the directional mic trained on the bedroom window. Even through the glass, the muted sound of water in a stall was unmistakable.

  “Amazing.” Then she added, “And scary.”

  “Here at RunAndGunn-dot-com, we do both.”

  Accustomed to the glacial pace of a stakeout, Wild busied herself dimming the screen of her smartphone and relaxed. She knew better than to ask what they hoped to learn, but did anyway, just to have some conversation. Patiently he reiterated that the nature of this work was to catch what you could, and that you didn’t always know what it would be until it happened or got said—if it ever did. The life lesson he’d learned as a scuba diver was that the best way to meet the fish isn’t to chase them b
ut to sit on a rock and let them come to you.

  A squeak, probably the shower faucet turning off, brought his hand to his phone. “I do have a plan to stimulate the action though.”

  “Isn’t that chasing the fish?”

  “Let’s call it throwing out chum.” He held up a pause finger and spoke to his phone. “Amador, mi idiota, how the fuck dumb do you think I am?” He listened, nodding, then said, “Nah-ah-ah, don’t hang up, not if you know what’s good for you. Do you really think I couldn’t figure out that you tailed us to Isabella’s so you could sic that dickless cue ball on us?” He held the phone away and Macie could hear Spatone’s shrill protests through the earpiece. “Listen, dipshit, do not—Amador, do not insult my intelligence with your lame denials. Save them for the probation officer I’m sending your way. We know your pal Uncle Fester did Pinto. He denies it but his excuses are as puny as your dick. We know Pinto skimmed the Grammy from Woody Nash’s. We also know all about the paintings from The Barksdale job. I’ll bet that’s what got him killed. I’m also betting you helped, so get your affairs in order, buddy. There’s a room waiting for you upstate as accessory to murder one.” Gunnar pressed end and checked his watch. “Please stand by.”

  He pressed a speed dial. Whoever answered did so on the first ring. “We cool?” He smiled, said, “You’re the best,” hung up, and turned to Macie. “My CyberGauchito was conferenced in on that call to Spatone, and when Amador picked up, CyberG ran a malware code that gave him a voice tap on his line. One of the directional mics picked up the ringer of a mobile in the apartment. As soon as the man answered, “This is Jeff,” Gunnar flipped a switch on the console. Spatone’s voice spilled over the van’s speakers, “Hey, man we’ve got some bad shit happening.”