Buzz Killer
Page 26
“Are you sure you aren’t trying to make me pay for something that’s none of your concern?”
“I’m trying to make it so we can work together. Again.”
“All right . . .” He rocked his full-body nod again and stood. “We aren’t getting anything done sitting here.”
♢ ♢ ♢
Unfortunately it didn’t take long for Macie to brief Gunnar on her progress since they split. A short walk back and an elevator ride sufficed to cover what little headway she had made. As Gunnar pulled open the accordion gate at his floor, she ended with the spike Jonathan Monheit had found in Rúben Pinto’s bank account that would have coincided with his shakedown of the NFL star. “Definitely quacks like a duck,” he said.
An intense funk of fast food and unshowered maleness greeted Macie’s nose when she stepped into Gunnar’s place. “Honey, I’m ho-ome,” sang out Gunnar, prompting his Argentinian hacker to gopher his bandana and eyeballs over the partition that separated the edit bay from the great room. “Hide the NSFWs,” Gunnar teased. “We’re comin’ in.” CyberGauchito paused his work only long enough to give Wild a shy head dip followed by a tug of his chin whiskers. Without a word, he returned to his multiple monitors and keyboard. From the archipelago of takeout garbage and coffee cups around the overflowing trash can, she surmised whatever was going on, it had been a long undertaking.
“I see you’ve been busy too,” she said. “This about the case? Or your VICE video? Both?” Two things gnawed at her: one, the pang from her obvious exclusion, albeit self-inflicted; two, the certainty that going to the park for a chat had been a litmus test for her return to the action. She let go of both. Some things were not fruitful to spend emotional capital on.
“Like you, breaking a sweat. Wouldn’t call it progress yet,” he called from the kitchen, returning with pale ales for them and a cane sugar Coca-Cola for El Gauchito. Gunnar dragged in one of the kitchen chairs for her, clinked bottlenecks, and paced while he filled her in.
“Back when we got that burglary list from Jackson Hall, I gave it to an ex-TARU bro who owes me from now to when Justin Bieber is in a walker. I had him run it against any other nearby neighborhood crimes, misdemeanors, and complaints that preceded or followed each break-in. This would be a routine search any detective does when trying to be comprehensive in an investigation. The dicey part is, as I am not strictly NYPD, I needed the favor and didn’t want some gatekeeper icing me again. My bro bearded for me, scored the data from RTCC, and, we shoot, we score! Foot-patrol unis from Midtown North issued a Pink Summons—that’s a Quality of Life ticket—to one Rúben Pinto who was found trespassing in shrubbery on private property at 3:18 in the morning. Significantly, the planter Mr. Pinto was cited for violating is the landscaping of The Ajax luxury condos. With me? This Pink was issued in the early hours after Hall said they burglarized the place.”
“The take,” said Macie. “Pipe Wrench, that guy you . . .” Mindful of CyberG, she didn’t finish. “When he tortured me, he wanted to know about the take. A pouch.”
Gunnar toasted her. “So we both agree it’s possible that Rúben Pinto skimmed from whatever the take was at The Ajax, secretly tossed it in the planter on the crew’s getaway, and came back to look for it later.”
“Did the summons say he had anything on him?”
“No. They just wrote him up and let him go. Why would they think to search the bushes in the dark without cause? But I think Pinto boosted something he came back for later and got. And somebody is hell-bent on recovering whatever it was.”
“I’m the last one you need to convince of that,” she said.
“The obvious question is still, who got ripped off in The Ajax?” she said.
He added, “And who had the clout to deny that there was a burglary?”
“We’re back to that LLC.”
“That’s right. Whoever, or whatever, Exurb Partners LLC is, this shell corporation that bought The Ajax condo is the hot lead.”
“But you were there at our defense team meeting. Exurb is a mail drop in Queens. And the way it’s set up, the owner is legally masked by the LLC,” she said. “With no mortgage, it’s even harder to put a name to it. And the condo management probably doesn’t even know. Or care. Like my dad told me, when you have a cash buyer for a $40 million place like that, the incentive to create red tape is minimal.”
“Understatement of the decade.”
“Thank you,” she said and took a swig of her beer.
“All of which is why I have called upon my Buenos Aires black hat to help me try to identify the mystery tenant through some unorthodox means.”
“It’s a fucking pain in the ass,” said CyberG without turning from his monitors.
“No pain, no pain, correcto, mi amigo?” He turned back to Wild. “What we’ve done is create our own facility to review security cameras in and around The Ajax to try to capture the owner of the condo in question on camera so we can ID him or her.”
While CyberGauchito scrubbed through video, Gunnar gave her the quick and dirty of his footage acquisitions. “Since The Ajax’s spy cams record to hard drives hooked up to off-site servers, that data flows over a secure internet connection.”
“Secure,” chuckled the hacker. “Riiiight.”
“With limited time and resources, we narrowed our focus down to key locations at and near The Ajax.” He bent beside Macie and showed her on his iPad an architectural plan with red dots indicating the cameras from which he had slurped video: “Ajax main lobby; Ajax underground parking spaces reserved for the penthouse; and the private express elevator to the penthouse tucked away between the Coach and Joseph Abboud stores in the mall under The Ajax.”
“I’ve walked by there a hundred times,” she said. “I never knew it was there.”
“Kind of the whole idea of a private elevator.” He set the iPad on the counter. “We’ve been screening pretty much nonstop since yesterday. Scooch on up.” Gunnar rolled his task chair over to the other keyboard and monitor setup, leaving space for Macie to place her chair beside his. Soon his fingers flew across the keys and trackpad, rolling grainy video that she immediately recognized as from the lobby of The Ajax. He was searching at four-x speed, the only way to get through all the footage from three cameras in his lifetime, he said, only part jokingly. Whenever people appeared he would toggle down to regular speed, click a screenshot, which went into a holding file, and then move on again at quad rate. The tediousness of the work matched the dead hours she had experienced in his van, and she found herself rooting for more unpopulated stretches, just to be able to clear more video without slowing down to log one more tenant whose elevator ride ended on one of the middle floors, according to the illuminated display above each car.
After a few hours, she offered to go get some pizzas, as much to quell her hunger as to break away from the monotony. On her return, Gunnar taught her just enough of the bare basics of the editing program to spell him at the controls while he ate a slice. “Ho, check it out,” said CyberG. The black hat had been scouring the underground garage where four spaces reserved for the penthouse had sat empty throughout his screening. Until then.
Gunnar paused Macie’s video and both turned their attention to the other monitor where an HVAC repair van had pulled in and stopped. The hacker pointed to the embedded time code. “Night of the burglary.” All eyes stared, all hoping for a glimpse of a familiar face—Hall, Pinto, or Stamitz. Instead the van rocked slightly from the motion of someone unseen getting out the far side. Seconds later, a gloved hand holding a can of spray paint shot up into view and sprayed the lens until it was covered.
C H A P T E R • 29
* * *
“Well, that’s no fun,” said Cody. “Gauch, do a blitz and see if this is all she wrote.” Some double-clicks on the trackpad, and time code sped to a blur as the video scanned at the fastest speed available without disengaging content. The monitor suddenly went bright again and CyberG slowed it to real time. The embedded digits established i
t as 08:12:24 the next morning. A cloth was being swabbed over the lens, and a maintenance worker they recognized from their past screening gave the camera one more spritz of solvent and a cursory wipe that left half of the lens still obscured by black enamel. Satisfied enough, he hopped down from whatever he’d been standing on and left. They ignored their other material and huddled around CyberGauchito’s monitor, four-xing through a video that might as well have been a still: a static shot of empty parking spaces and an alcove leading to the penthouse elevator. Just before eleven a.m.—10:44:10, by the time code—activity.
The hood of a black town car nosed into the bottom of the frame and stopped. Gauch shuttled down the speed to normal view. A man got out of the back seat on the far side, which put his back to the camera. Without turning, he strode to the alcove, swiped a key card, the elevator immediately opened, and he disappeared inside, face unseen.
CyberG bumped the speed up again, and a half hour whizzed by in thirty seconds until he slowed it all down again when the light blinked on above the elevator. The same man stepped out and walked back to his waiting car, talking on his cell phone. Between holding the phone up to one side of his face and the blackout of half the lens, they never made him out. When the car backed out, Gunnar said, “Balls. This close. Not even a shot of the plate on the car. Very inconsiderate.”
He and his hacker spent the next hour replaying the footage frame by frame and attempting every video enhancement the software offered. When it was clear no doctoring was going to yield an identifiable image of the man’s face they sat quietly, just thinking. Macie’s eyes burned, and she wasn’t even the one doing the heavy lifting. “OK, new thought,” said Gunnar, sounding like a man trying to bolster himself. “Play it down from his exit of the car, back-to-back with his return from the elevator.” After watching that sequence twice, he said, “Export that to a file.” He smiled and gave Macie an eyebrow flick. “Gonna skin this cat yet.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Two things: first, endure a slew of fucks and shits from my ol’ pal from TARU. Because, second, I’m going to ask him to submit this clip to the Real Time Crime Center as if it’s official police business.”
“Do they have more sophisticated enhancement capability?”
“Yes, but enhancement won’t help. Our raw material is too corrupted to clean up digitally. What they do have is something called Gait Analysis.”
“Help me out here.”
“Gait Analysis. Gait, as in how we walk. Everybody’s stride is unique—as individual as fingerprints. RTCC has built a database of gaits, same as they have with scars, tatts, and facial recog. It’s a bit of a Hail Mary, but I’ve used it before, back when I was on the job, with crazy-amazing results. We got lucky here catching him on video, assuming he is the condo owner. Let’s push it.”
♢ ♢ ♢
At midnight Wild sat in the stillness of her apartment in the company of a lone candle, a glass of the Sancerre that she never opened after impulsively christening her sink with the bottle of Jameson, and her own sullen thoughts about the direction of the Buzz Killer case, which had gone flat, to be charitable. Oh, yes, potential leads had surfaced. So had new victims to interview, crime scenes of promise, and no shortage of other players—of lethal capability—who were in a footrace with her. But to where? Nothing had knitted together. Her funk rose out of a dark recess within Macie that she was all too acquainted with. It incubated the plague of the apt pupil who feared she wasn’t studying enough. Or, more to the point, that something was sitting right there under her nose that she was overlooking. Macie’s phone made her jump when it rang. The caller ID was Gunnar’s. “Hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Hardly. I’m just catching up on some office e-mails.” She took another sip of wine.
“Live it up. Just wanted to let you know my man at the precinct did give me a ration of shit, but he ultimately submitted the video clip to RTCC.”
“Oh, good. Fingers crossed. I guess pretty soon they’ll have a database for fingers too.”
“Wouldn’t be hard. Cops see a lot of them. Middle fingers mostly.” After a pause he continued, “Listen. The real reason I called? I’m glad we’re back. We are back, right?”
She chuckled. “Seems so. And I’m glad too.”
“Good, good. Any interest in breakfast or a coffee in the morning before you go in? I can come your way.”
“I’d like that but I’m meeting my dad up at his office. Probable TMI for you, but he said he needed to have a talk with me about my mother. I’m bracing myself for divorce or separation news.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Hey, at least it’s not more danger admonishments. If my father had his way, I’d be sequestered inside a Park Avenue law office, litigating intellectual property rights.”
“Instead of consorting with reprobates like me.” If he only knew, thought Wild. “Can I pick you up for lunch then? I’m kind of a bony shoulder to lean on, but I can distract you with whack theories and moral indignations.”
Wild laughed and said, “Thanks, I’ll just Uber it. I’ll need to get right to the office.” The candle wick sputtered, throwing a spark. “But I’ll call you after. We could have dinner, if you like.”
♢ ♢ ♢
The next morning, she sat on the on-deck sofa outside the door of her father’s law office. Taking in the familiar scent of incinerated Winstons coming off his secretary’s clothing always transported Macie back to her preschool visits when Bunny Liuizzi would play big-girl work with her, guiding Macie’s little hands to three-hole punch the printer paper and let her use pastel highlighters to sign make-believe dockets. Play became passion, and the public defender submersed herself in the memory as she watched the seventy-two-year-old bend to swap her commuter cross-trainers for her office cross-trainers—the only difference being the degree of patina on the outsoles. “This morning New York-One had some gal on who claims she spotted your runaway Buzz Killer in Herald Square. At a Tad’s Steaks, can you believe it?” She sat up with a huff, pained by the curvature of her spine, then finger combed her practical hair behind each ear. “You hear about that?”
“I got some texts. Nothing confirmed.”
“Looked to me like she was hoping to grab her fifteen minutes of fame.” Casting an appraising look through the internal window, the woman who had worked loyally with her father from his early practice, then up to Albany, and back to private practice, said, “Looks like he’s about to wrap his call.” Bunny returned to her opinions about the questionable eyewitness, using it as a bridge to her evergreen topics: selfie mania, piercings, and what’s with the body ink? Macie found it hard to feign attention. She was too busy stressing whether the family cloth was about to tear.
To her relief, Jansen Wild had not asked her there for yet another blow to the family unit. Although Macie’s comfort was dampened by indications that the shoe only had been given a temporary reprieve before dropping. His agenda still bore the thorns of marital discord. “I’m worried about your mother,” he said as they settled into his conversation grouping. One plus to a morning meeting was that Wild caught him before the serious drinking began. Trying not to be obvious, she studied him for the signs of maintenance tippling. But his color was good, his eyes were clear, and his movements were controlled instead of the Frankenstein monster grabs he made at pens and mugs when he was secretly sauced.
A sudden concern flicked inside Macie. “Did something happen to her over there?”
“Not directly, no. She gave me fits when she was in Syria with those barrel bombs aimed at hospitals. Christ, what is our world?” He took a sip of water, and with a steady hand. “She did just have a near miss though. Some teenage girl her colleagues were operating on had a suicide bomb sewn inside her stomach that killed everyone in the tent. Your mother was off-shift but they evacuated the unit, and she’s going to Germany for a week of R and R. I e-mailed her, asking her to come home.”
“Let me guess.”
“Dad, I’m sorry. Have you told her?”
He snapped at her. “What, in a goddamned e-mail?” Then, calming, he continued, “That was shitty of me. See what’s happening? The e-mails are unsatisfying at best, brittle at worst. And our phone calls are always on the run, like she’s avoiding me.” He took some more water and came to his point. “I need your help. I need an intermediary.”
Macie felt herself sink an inch deeper into the sofa cushion under the weight of all this. The words left her mouth kicking and screaming. “I suppose I could call her.”
“No, I want you to see her. I want her to have some face time with you so I have a fighting chance at a next step. Maybe some counseling, I don’t know. She’s going to be in Munich for the next eight days.”
“You mean now?”
“I’ll cover your ticket, your hotel, everything.”
“Look, Dad, any other time—”
“I was afraid so.” He closed his eyes and wagged his head in resignation, then held up a palm. “I get it. I understand.”
“Do you?” He stood and managed a brave smile. Macie hugged him and said, “I will call her though. Promise.”
♢ ♢ ♢
How had John Lennon put it? That life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans? With enough on her plate to solve world hunger, Macie Wild stood on the corner of Lexington and Fifty-Fourth, wandering a circle while she talked to her mother, who was just finishing lunch in Germany. The six-hour time difference wasn’t the only separation she felt. That toxicity in the groundwater had seeped across the Atlantic, and the relay of her father’s overture was met with stony deflection. After a sigh, Dr. Wild assured her daughter that there was nothing wrong. “At least no more than there was before,” she added, contradicting herself. Her next dig told Macie she was wasting her time with the call, and would have wasted a week with a trip. “How’s his drinking?” asked her mother.