by Tim Stevens
Clune got to the part about his contact in LA putting him in touch with Oscar Flowers, and Venn slowed him down.
“What’s the name of this contact?”
Clune screwed up his face. “Gary somebody. I don’t think he ever told me his surname.”
“And he was, what, some rock fanboy like you?”
“Kind of. I met him in a bar. We started talking, discovered we had mutual interests in music. I crashed out at his place a few nights.”
“Where was his place?”
“No idea.” Clune looked sheepish, but a little proud at the same time. “We smoked some grass. I was too drunk or stoned to remember exactly where he lived.” He brightened. “His apartment had a blue door, if that helps.”
“Don’t get smart, boy,” said Harmony.
“Okay,” said Venn. “So you go to Texas to meet this Flowers guy.”
“Yeah.”
“Describe him.”
“Older. Though not as old as you.” He glanced at Venn. “Sorry. About thirty-four, thirty-five, I’d say. Medium height. Thin, but not wasted like a junkie, you know? Toned. A shaved head, though he mostly wore one of those hats. The Texan ones.”
“A Stetson,” said Walter.
“Yeah. It looked ridiculous on him, though I wasn’t stupid enough to laugh. Didn’t smile much.”
“Race?”
Clune tilted his head. “Difficult to say. He was deeply tanned. But I think probably Hispanic.” He looked worried. “Is that a politically correct term?”
Venn said, “And you genuinely had no idea what kind of a business he ran?”
“Well...” Clune looked uncomfortable. “I never found anything to confirm it. But I had an idea, of course.” He looked at the three detectives in turn. When it became clear they weren’t going to help him out, he said: “Drugs.”
“How long did you work for him?”
“About six weeks. He tested me, in the beginning. Put me in a room with two other computer guys. Real freaks, with no social skills and a dress sense that was from another planet.” Venn saw Clune glance across at Walter and then quickly away. “Flowers brought us some access problems to solve. The other two guys were good, but I found the answers before they did. Next thing, they’ve been fired and I’ve got the job.”
“Which involved what, exactly?” said Harmony.
“Financial transfers. Exclusively. Money got deposited into one account, and it was my job to hide it creatively. I found online banks, tax havens all over the world, you name it. I was pretty creative, if I say so myself.”
“Just how much money are we talking?” asked Venn.
Clune rocked his palm. “Over six weeks... probably around thirty.”
“Thirty thousand dollars?”
“Million. Thirty million.”
Venn and Harmony looked at one another. Walter was staring intently at the kid.
Venn said, “And all this time, you were never tempted, not even a bit, to use those computer whiz skills of yours to siphon off a little? Set up an account of your own, and skim a few bucks here and there?”
“Oh, I was tempted.” Clune was sitting up straight now, enjoying himself. “But Flowers wasn’t stupid. He sent someone in every day to audit the transfers I’d made. I had to keep records of every cent and where it ended up. This guy he sent in, he wasn’t as good as me. I could probably have hoodwinked him, but it wasn’t worth the risk. If he’d had even the faintest glimmer of a suspicion that I was fleecing Flowers, I’d have lost my job. And probably a lot more, besides.”
“Most likely your eyes and tongue,” said Walter, still staring at Clune. “Your balls, too.”
Clune swiveled a little in his chair. Crossed his legs.
“But you said you hacked Flowers’ email,” said Venn. “There must have been some mention of what kind of business he was involved in.”
“He said he was in imports and exports,” said Clune. “And that’s the kind of terminology he used in his emails. He was very careful, was Flowers. Everything he mentioned sounded entirely kosher, the kind of communication you’d see in legitimate business. I started reading his emails regularly, to pass the time. But I noticed he was having a lot of exchanges with this guy named Salazar, and they were arguing with one another. All about how the other guy had failed to live up to his end of one bargain or another. Then, one day, they arranged to meet up. And that’s when I decided to follow Flowers.”
Venn listened as Clune repeated the story about the gun battle between Flowers’ and Salazar’s men, and how he’d fled after seeing Flowers shot dead. How he’d crossed the country in a succession of rental cars, and ended up in New York a few days earlier. Then gotten mugged on Vandam, and sought out Kruger to ask him for help.
Et cetera.
“So here we are,” said Clune. He spread his hands and looked at each of the cops expectantly. “What now?”
Venn glanced at Walter, then Harmony. “Any questions?”
“Yeah,” said Walter. “But for you, not him.”
Venn raised his eyebrows, expectantly.
Walter said, “You want to start listing the lies you heard him tell, or should I?”
Clune stared at them, his face twisted in terror.
Chapter 20
Peter Franciscus liked an early start in the mornings. Not just because of the time it took him to get from his Staten Island home to Lower Manhattan, but because mornings were often his most productive time, a period when, refreshed by sleep, his thinking was at its clearest, and the conclusions he came to often the most accurate.
Usually he drove, taking the Verrazano-Narrows and Brooklyn Bridges. Today, because he didn’t anticipate leaving the city, Franciscus decided to ride the ferry instead. He stood on the deck, as he always did, feeling the early morning sun on his face, and enjoying the view of the harbor and the cityscape of Manhattan as it drew nearer, as awe-inspiring as ever. Franciscus was of Dutch ancestry, many generations back, as was the city itself, and despite his Ohio origins he’d always felt drawn to the metropolis.
He’d gone to bed with a problem unresolved in his head. Unlike many people, Franciscus hadn’t lain awake until the early hours, wrestling with it. Instead, he’d considered it briefly, decided he didn’t have a solution just then, and compartmentalized it, stowing it neatly in an imaginary box to be opened up in the morning, when his mind was sharper.
By the time the ferry reached the terminal, he believed he had an answer.
The problem was this. Stefan Kruger had been shot dead, shortly after O’Dell had been arrested. It might be coincidence. After all, people in Kruger’s line of work – drug dealers, fences, money launderers, all of which Kruger was – got shot dead all the time. It was an occupational hazard, and if you couldn’t stand the heat, et cetera. On any other day, Franciscus would have shrugged the killing off as just another medium-level criminal cashing in his chips.
But the timing was too convenient to ignore.
The problem, then: Kruger had been shot just after one of his associates - one of his clients, Franciscus supposed - had been arrested on felony charges following a police undercover operation. Who had killed him, and why?
Three broad possibilities came to mind. The first was that someone, a mutual associate of both O’Dell’s and Kruger’s, had learned of the former’s arrest and had, quite reasonably, concluded that O’Dell would shop Kruger to the police. This hypothetical individual might have decided to take out Kruger before Kruger himself could be arrested and subsequently sell out others. Franciscus didn’t think this likely. He preferred to believe that he would have been kept in the loop if something like this had occurred, and so far nobody had contacted him.
The second possibility was that the police themselves had carried out the hit on Kruger, or at least ordered it. O’Dell had inadvertently let slip his connection with the man, and the cops had decided to avoid the messiness of due process and gone for broke. This was even more unlikely, in Franciscus’ opi
nion. Black-ops cells, hit squads, did exist. But he doubted they operated within the NYPD on such an advanced operational scale.
Which left possibility number three. That there was another agency at work, someone or more than one person who knew of the connection between O’Dell and Kruger, and had eliminated Kruger for reasons as yet unknown.
It was the vaguest of all the three scenarios, but it was the one Franciscus favored, and the one he decided to pursue.
The next step was to work out how he’d begin to investigate the matter, and Franciscus believed he had the answer.
He caught the subway to the office he rented off Wall Street. His was a single-attorney practice, one he’d been running for seven years. He’d gone independent straight after passing the bar exam, rather than joining an established law firm first. His reasons for this were both personal and strategic. Personal, because he wanted to prove to himself that he could establish himself as an accomplished attorney right off the bat. Strategic, because it suited his patron’s purposes for him to do so.
In his office, he checked his schedule. No meetings that morning, no court appearances. That was good.
Franciscus had a secretary, but for the kind of nosing around he was going to do that morning, he preferred to work on his own. So he told the woman he’d be out until early afternoon, possibly later, and asked her to hold his calls. He might require her services later, if he needed certain phone calls to be made.
With a 24-hour news channel running in one window on his computer monitor, he opened a word-processing document and began to draw up a task list.
Get access to the police investigation on the Kruger killing. The precinct house was in Mott Haven in the Bronx. Franciscus had a couple of connections in the borough, though none in that particular district. It would be tricky. He’d have to claim that one of his clients was peripherally connected with Kruger and that he needed information about the killing to help the client’s defense. Which meant he’d have to use an informal, favor-seeking approach, so as not to arouse suspicions.
Cross-reference all available data on O’Dell and Kruger and look for overlap. He could leave that to a computer program he used, one he’d obtained through a now-defunct contact he’d had with an employee of the FBI.
Speak with Detective Lieutenant Venn. This was a potentially fruitful avenue to explore. Franciscus could easily justify seeking an audience with Venn, since he’d been O’Dell’s lawyer and would be legitimately looking for reasons to account for his client’s suicide.
Franciscus glanced at the window in the corner of his monitor where the news feed was running. The scene being shown was a jerky, chaotic one, amateur footage recorded on a cell phone of the multiple shooting in the market off Ninth Avenue yesterday. Franciscus had already seen it on the news the night before. The police were keeping their mouths shut about what had actually gone down, but they’d released a statement saying that three suspected gang members had been killed by officers and a fourth was in custody.
Something caught Franciscus’ eye just as he was about to look away. The person who’d taken the cell-phone footage had dropped to the ground at one point, so that the remainder of the film was taken from the level of the sidewalk. One of the gang members stood several yards away, his arm round a screaming woman’s neck, his gun jammed in her ear. It was the kind of dramatic clip the networks loved.
In the foreground, in the extreme right of the camera’s range, part of a man bobbed into view. The back of a shoulder was visible, then a shaved head. The figure disappeared, then appeared once more.
The gang member was looking directly at the obscured figure. Franciscus assumed the figure was one of the cops.
Then the black woman cop appeared out of nowhere from behind the gang guy and took him down. The picture went blurred after that, as scrambling bodies got in the way right in front of the camera.
Franciscus flipped channels until he found the same news story on another network. There was the footage again. He recorded it onto his hard drive this time.
Played it back.
Freeze-framed it, whenever the obscured man appeared.
He wasn’t certain, but he thought the man was Lieutenant Venn.
Franciscus sat back in his office chair and closed his eyes. Venn. A link between O’Dell, and Kruger, and now this street shooting, the nature of which was as yet unclear.
And the gang members, from what had emerged so far, were Hispanic. Possibly Mexican.
Franciscus deleted the task list he’d been drawing up, then hit various search engines. Venn came up within a minute.
Lieutenant Joseph Venn. Division of Special Projects.
Franciscus hadn’t heard of the Division, and there was nothing in the publicly available NYPD online data about it. The title was vague enough that it could mean anything.
He picked up his phone.
Chapter 21
Venn said, “You go first.”
Walter held up a pudgy hand, began ticking off points on the fingers. “Let’s start with the biggest one of them all. The whopper. You’re no computer hacker, kid. You didn’t get Lieutenant Venn’s home address from the NYPD’s database, because it isn’t stored there.”
Clune gripped the arms of his office chair, opened his mouth to speak, but Venn held up a hand.
“So if you’re no hacker, most of the rest of your bullshit story collapses like a house of cards.” Walter ticked off another finger. “You weren’t hired by this Flowers to hide his money, if he even exists. You didn’t read any emails between him and this Salazar, who again may be imaginary.”
“I did!” Clune gibbered. “He –”
“These emails,” cut in Venn. “Between these two men, both possibly Mexican. They were in English?”
“Um... no,” said Clune. “Spanish.”
“You speak Spanish?”
“Yes.” The kid’s voice was shaky.
“Es usted un pendejo?” Harmony asked.
“Uh... si,” said Clune.
Harmony smiled. “I just asked you if you were an asshole.”
Clune said nothing.
Venn looked at Walter. “My turn?”
“Sure.”
Venn leaned in close, staring at Clune’s lowered face. “You told me you followed Kruger from his home.”
“Yeah.”
“On foot?”
“Right.”
“Kruger’s home is in Jersey City. We checked. That’s quite some hike, Jersey to the Bronx. You must have been exhausted.”
Another silence.
Venn said: “I told you I had a lie detector.” He nodded at Walter.
Clune didn’t make eye contact. He looked utterly defeated, as though the sky had collapsed on his head.
Venn squatted down in front of him. He peered into his face.
“They’re closing in, kid. Just like you said. The Mexicans. Out there, sniffing around the streets, congregating like a pack of wolves. Whatever it is you’ve done, whyever it is they want you, they’ll get you. And soon. You’ll be beyond the protection of me, or any other cop.”
Clune began to shudder violently.
“One more chance, kid. Just one. And this time, the full truth. No lies. No clever plays on words. Walter will know if you’re playing us along.”
Clune lifted his head, his eyes closed.
He nodded.
Chapter 22
Salazar was up at six, after just four hours’ sleep. It was all he needed. He and ten of his men had holed up in a house on the Lower East Side which one of the men’s cousins had made available to them.
He made calls, checking in. No sign of the kid. No leads.
At one point, Salazar had become concerned that the kid was back in police custody, which would make access to him a lot harder. But by a stroke of luck, one of his people had been approached on the street by a pair of cops in Midtown. They’d asked him if he’d seen a missing person. The picture they’d shown him was that of the boy, Clune.
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Which meant he was still at large.
Salazar had another nagging problem. Ramon Espinoza. He’d been in police custody nearly 24 hours now. Of course, Salazar hadn’t gone anywhere near him. Espinoza was on his own. His instructions were clear, as were those of all of Salazar’s people in the event that they were arrested on a serious charge. You kept your mouth shut. Didn’t argue, didn’t plead. You asked for legal representation, but you didn’t name an attorney. Let the city, wherever you were, supply a public defender. And you didn’t tell your counsel anything.
You never, ever, did a deal with the cops. If you did, your life was over. As were those of your immediate and extended family, all of them. Salazar had had to apply this punishment just once in his career. The tortured, burnt bodies of the transgressor’s wife and kids had been displayed on the TV evening news in Mexico. After that, there had been no more disobedience.
Still. Even if Espinoza did his duty, and kept his mouth shut, even if he took like a man what was coming to him – and hostage-taking would earn him a few decades in prison, at least – he was still a loose end. Salazar felt an abiding contempt for the man. When he’d seen his situation was hopeless, he should have either turned his gun on himself, or provoked suicide-by-cop. That would have been a noble act, and Salazar would have honored his memory. Now, he was just another inconvenience, at a time when Salazar needed to focus all his efforts on the hunt for the British boy.
Loose ends needed tying, or they’d trip you up.
Once Espinoza was sentenced and behind bars, it would be a simple matter to get to him. Salazar’s reach was extensive within the US prison system, his capacity to offer bribes and inducements almost limitless. But by then it might be too late. It would be preferable to silence Espinoza now, while he might be wavering in his resolve to keep his mouth shut. The trouble was, Salazar didn’t know where he was being detained, and even if he did, access to a man in police custody was problematic.
Even so. Locating him was a first step.
Salazar called a couple of his men over and gave them their instructions. They were to begin calling every precinct house within a ten block radius of where Espinoza had been arrested, and claim anonymously that they had information about Ramon Jesus Salazar. The moment one of them received a positive response – a sense that the cop on the other end of the line was interested, which would suggest Espinoza had been taken into custody there – they were to hang up and inform Salazar.
