Diagnosis Murder: The Death Merchant

by Lee Goldberg

  275 546 5693.

  It didn't look to him like a valid phone number, but he knew he was on the right track. The numbers had to be scrambled in some way. He wasn't even sure those were the right numbers. What if Appleby had to incorporate a 1 or a 0? There were no letters associated with those numbers on a telephone keypad, so what work-around would Appleby have used?

  Mark wasn't a mathematician, but he guessed there were thousands of possible combinations for those numbers. How could he narrow down the possibilities?

  That was the question that nagged him for the rest of the short flight and on the forty minute drive from LAX to Malibu.

  As soon as he got home, Mark rushed straight to his laptop computer, turned it on, and opened his word processing program. He typed down what he knew:

  Ideal Oven = Diane Love

  Ask Jim Lowe = 275-546-5693.

  A loose, trendy cook =?

  He studied the remaining undeciphered phrase as he picked up the phone and dialed the number he'd come up with from Ask Jim Lowe. Before he finished dialing, his call was interrupted by a recorded message:

  "We're sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again."

  Mark hung up the phone and stared out at the beach. He couldn't see the surf in the darkness, but he could hear the waves breaking against the shore. It was the same way he felt about the message on the screen in front of him. He couldn't see the answer yet, but he was certain it was there.

  Steve came up the stairs from the first floor, where he had a bedroom, a bathroom, and a small kitchen. Both his bedroom and his kitchen opened directly onto the beach. The second floor, where Mark lived, had two bedrooms, two baths, a gourmet kitchen, and a large deck that faced the ocean. The beach house was, in essence, a duplex linked by a staircase in the entry hall. This allowed Mark and Steve to share the same house but have separate spaces to call their own. Even so, Mark's kitchen had become their meeting place, and Steve usually came and went through the front door, unless he brought home a date.

  "I thought I heard you come back," Steve said, then noticed the open laptop. "Couldn't wait to check your E-mail?"

  "I think I broke the code on the recipe card we found in Danny Royal's safe-deposit box," Mark said. "I mean, Stuart Appleby's safe-deposit box."

  "I know what you meant," Steve pulled up a chair beside Mark. "What have you got?"

  Mark explained what he'd deciphered and the riddles still left to unravel. Steve looked the numbers.

  "There must be ten thousand possible combinations of those numbers," Steve said. "Where do we start?"

  Mark tapped the screen below the remaining undecoded phrase. "Right here."

  A loose, trendy cook

  Mark decided to play a hunch. "If the first line is a name and the second line is a phone number, maybe the third line is a place. A city separated from the state by a comma."

  "It's worth a shot." Steve took a pencil and wrote the phrase across the top of a legal pad with plenty of space between each letter. Then, below it, he made a list of the fifty states.

  Together, Mark and Steve tried to match the letters of the phrase with the name of a state. Twenty minutes later, they succeeded.

  Colorado.

  "It fits with something I learned while I was in Las Vegas," Mark said. "Diane liked to ski. It makes sense she'd settle in Colorado."

  Mark went to his bookshelf, pulled out an atlas, and looked up the state of Colorado.

  "What letters do we have left?" Mark asked.

  "O, T, E, N, K, Y, and S," Steve said.

  Mark compared the list of cities and towns in Colorado with the remaining letters he had left. He found a match al most immediately.

  "She's in Keystone, Colorado," Mark said.

  Steve moved the laptop to face him, called up an Internet search engine, and typed in Keystone, Colorado. A moment later, he had hundreds of Web sites that mentioned the town. He clicked on one of them and smiled.

  "Keystone is a ski resort community," Steve said, "about an hour and a half outside Denver."

  "What's the area code?"

  Steve scrolled through the pages on the screen until he found a phone number.

  "9-7-0," he replied.

  Mark returned to his seat and looked at the numbers he'd deciphered from Ask Jim Lowe on the napkin.

  "I can find the 9 and 7, but not the zero," Mark said.

  "It has to be there," Steve said. "I know we've got the right place."

  "So do I," Mark said. "But there are no letters represented by a zero on a telephone keypad."

  "He must have gotten around it somehow," Steve said.

  Mark mulled the problem for a few minutes, staring at the keypad of his telephone, and came up with a possible work-around.

  "What if Appleby used the letter 0 as a place holder for zero?" Mark said. "In that case, Appleby would have used the number 6, which corresponds with 0 on the telephone keypad."

  Steve looked at the numbers they'd decoded. There were two sixes. If they allocated one for the zero, that left them with the numbers 5, 2,5,4, 5, 6, and 3.

  "That's still too many numbers and possibilities," Steve said. "It would take months to track them all down."

  "I think we can whittle the list down a bit more." Mark picked up the phone, called Information, and asked the operator for a list of telephone number prefixes for Keystone, Colorado.

  Armed with that, Mark and Steve were able to unscramble the remaining numbers into two dozen possible phone numbers. They looked at their short list.

  "One of these numbers belongs to Diane Love," Mark said, "who is somewhere in Keystone, Colorado, hiding behind a new face and a new identity."

  "So what are you going to do now?"

  "Book a flight to Denver for first thing tomorrow morning," Mark said, rising from his seat. "And then I'm going to drive up to Keystone and find her."

  "All by yourself?"

  Mark smiled. "You're welcome to join me if you'd like."

  "I wasn't thinking about me," Steve said. "I was thinking about Terry Riordan."

  Mark's smile faltered. "You want me to call the FBI?"

  "Dad, it's their case," Steve said. "They have the resources and manpower to take it from here."

  "It hasn't helped them so far."

  Steve leaned back in his chair. "So now this is a competition between you and the FBI? A race to see who can solve the case first?"

  "Of course not."

  "Then what's stopping you from calling the FBI?" Steve said. "You have information that could lead them to a fugitive wanted for kidnapping and murder."

  "I don't want to be cut out of this investigation," Mark said.

  "So you leverage your information. If they want it, they have to keep you involved. Terry Riordan is a politician first, an FBI agent second. He'll make the deal because this is his chance to grab credit for closing a case the FBI has been working for five years. But you already knew all that. What's really holding you back?"

  "I don't know." Mark shrugged and looked out the window. All he saw was his own reflection in the glass. He didn't like what he saw.

  Steve got up, walked over to the window, and stood beside his father. "Yes, you do."

  "I wanted to do this myself," Mark said quietly. "I wanted to beat the hit man on my own."

  "Man to man," Steve said.

  Mark nodded.

  "But it's not about you and the hit man," Steve said. "It's about Connie Standiford and getting justice for what happened to her. You have to take your ego out of it. Calling in the FBI isn't a sign a weakness. It's the right thing to do."

  Mark sighed wearily. "When did you get so smart?"

  "I had a good teacher." Steve put his arm around his father's shoulder and they stood there in silence, trying to see past their own reflections into the darkness beyond.

  The early morning was Stella Greene's favorite time of day. She was alone on the mountain, skiing swiftly down the steep, narrow ri
bbon of virgin powder between the trees.

  Stella was trim and deeply tanned, with short black hair, strong hands, and not an ounce of extra body fat, despite having given birth to two children. Her formfitting ski suit flattered her near-perfect physique, and that was intentional.

  She was acutely aware of how others saw her. When they looked at her, they saw a strong woman, physically and emotionally, seemingly born in the outdoors, totally at ease with herself and her environment.

  Stella Greene was exactly the woman she always wanted to be, that she always knew she could be, long before she was.

  Her morning ski run reinforced that self-image, reassuring her that everything she knew about herself was true, strong, and abiding. The mountain was her church, and skiing was her form of worship. She became one with the mountain, the snow, and the earth. The rhythm of skiing became fluid and instinctive. She fell into something like a trance, her body perfectly tuned to the changing terrain beneath her skis. Freed from having to concentrate on skiing, she reveled in the invigorating speed, the cold air whipping off her bare cheeks.

  The double-black-diamond run was full of sudden drops that guaranteed big air, the giddy sensation of flying into the sharp blue sky, before landing again on the snow and rocketing down the glade. To Stella, catching the air was pure freedom, like nothing else on earth. She nearly shrieked with joy every time it happened.

  It was those moments that she craved during the rest of the day as she taught the basics of skiing to the tourists. It was those moments that she dreamed about late at night, lying in bed beside her husband, her kids asleep in their rooms. It was those moments that she lived for, that she killed for, and that, very soon, she would die for.

  Because while she was lost in her personal reverie, at one with the mountain, she was totally unaware of the figure in black traversing the glade behind her, coming up fast. She didn't know he was there until he intentionally clipped her, breaking her cherished rhythm, destroying her perfect balance, hurtling her out of control and screaming into the line of trees.

  Her body smacked against a tall pine with a sharp crack. She wasn't sure if the sound was the snap of wood or bone or both. All she was truly aware of was her body sliding and spinning through the snow. It was if she was riding her body instead of inhabiting it, disconnected from pain or feeling of any kind until she finally came to rest against the base of another tree.

  Stella wasn't sure which came first, the overwhelming pain or the horrifying sight of her legs twisted beneath her at unnatural angles, jagged bone sticking out through her torn clothing. Blood dripped from her wounds like oil leaking from a car.

  He approached her now, his eyes obscured by frosty goggles, his face covered with a ski mask.

  Wyatt studied her for a moment. She was still alive, simpering in the snow. Finding her hadn't been too hard once he had the dozen phone numbers. He just took a drive on the in formation superhighway. Wyatt pulled the phone records for each household and checked to see if anyone had ever called the Royal Hawaiian restaurant in Kauai. Only one house hold had. The Greenes. Then he checked the Greenes' credit card statements and found a cluster of charges in New York around the time the $5,000 was mailed from the city to Diane Love's mother. Game, set, and match.

  "Help me," she whimpered.

  He shook his head no. He didn't feel any pity. He didn't feel anything at all.

  "Who are you?" she said, her slight voice cracking with fear.

  "No one you know."

  "Then why?" she asked pleadingly.

  Wyatt looked around for something to finish the job. He found a heavy branch. He picked it up and hefted it in his hand. It would do.

  "There are four and a half million reasons, Diane," he said.

  Wyatt saw the realization flicker across her eyes, the instant of horrified understanding, just before he clubbed her with the branch. Roger Standiford would have appreciated that.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Mark called Agent Terry Riordan at a little past eight in the morning. Three hours later, they were both sitting side-by-side in cramped economy seats on an overbooked commercial flight to Denver.

  There was a time when they would have taken an FBI jet, but that was before a faltering economy and huge budget deficits forced the Bureau to cut back and impose harsh restrictions on resources. The Bureau jet, much to Terry's chagrin, was reserved only for high-priority, ticking-clock situations, and, with the FBI focusing on homeland security, a long-dormant kidnapping case just didn't qualify.

  "Special Agents Sandra Flannery and Tim Witten will fly in from Kauai today," Terry said, sipping from his plastic cup of Diet Coke. "They'll meet us in Keystone sometime tomorrow."

  "That's good," Mark said, "because I don't know what we'd do without them."

  The tone of his own voice surprised Mark. He didn't realize just how much he'd resented the way he'd been treated by Agent Flannery.

  "Officially, it's their case. They've been on it since day one," Terry said "It's a shame they were in Hawaii when this broke."

  Mark glanced at Terry. "Which means you've been given responsibility for the case."

  "Yeah," Terry said. "But I'm glad to pitch in."

  "I'm sure you are," Mark said. If Terry caught the sarcasm in his voice, he didn't show it. The agent was concentrating on opening his tricky bag of peanuts. "Have Flannery and Witten discovered anything in Kauai?"

  "They've been able to backtrack some of the money to offshore accounts," Terry replied, tugging on the bag, unable to get it open. "They're trying to determine if Gregson, Brennan, or Love might have used the same banks to hide their shares of the ransom."

  "Does it look promising?"

  "Not yet," Terry said. The bag suddenly ripped apart, spraying his tray table, Mark's lap, and the aisle with nuts. The agent cursed.

  "Think they'll make it back in time for the arrest?" Mark asked and dropped a few spilled nuts on Terry's tray table.

  "I doubt it," Terry said, carefully picking a nut out of his Diet Coke and tossing it in the aisle. "We're moving very fast on this. With luck, they'll be able to sit in on the interrogation."

  Mark was sure Terry Riordan's urgency was motivated less by a desire to arrest the fugitive than to do it before he had to share the spotlight with Sandra Flannery and Tim Witten. Even though it was Mark who'd generated the leads, Terry Riordan would reap the career benefits within the Bureau. Terry would be seen as the aggressive agent who finally closed the case after Flannery and Witten toiled fruitlessly out for five years. He'd move up the ladder, and they'd fall down a few rungs. The only way things could possibly go better for Terry politically was if Mark wasn't along for the ride. Terry had, of course, tried to talk Mark out of coming, but to no avail.

  "The Denver office has pulled the names and addresses that go with the phone numbers," Terry gathered the salvaged nuts on his tray table together into a tiny pile. "About half are businesses, the others are residences. We're putting them all under immediate twenty-four-hour surveillance. We're doing background checks on as many of the individuals as we can, but we're dealing with a lot of potential suspects. It's especially hard without a face or fingerprints to work with."

  "I'd concentrate your efforts on the residences first," Mark said. "You might want to pull their phone records, see if any of them have ever called Danny Royal or his restaurant."

  "We're already on it. The answers should be waiting for us on arrival in Denver." Terry ate a few nuts, then asked, as casually as he could: "So you got any ideas where William Gregson and Jason Brennan might be?"

  "I'm thinking about it," Mark said.

  What Mark was thinking was that he was completely out of clues. The souvenir recipe card with the note written on it had been Mark's only tangible lead, and the only fugitive it pointed to was Diane Love. And unless she had something to share, or they found some leads at her house, Mark had nothing left to go on.

  He settled in for the remainder of the flight, excited by the
prospect of apprehending one of the fugitives and worried that they might not find the others until they showed up on morgue slabs.

  There was a time when a chopper would have been waiting for them, blades whirring in anticipation, on the tarmac at the Denver International Airport, instead of a mud-caked Ford Explorer idling outside baggage claim.

  Terry cursed the economy that robbed him of enjoying the exciting perks that FBI agents before him once enjoyed, symbols of strength and authority that reinforced the importance of your duties, that proved you represented the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world.

  Now the Bureau had been downsized and economized and bureaucratized into mediocrity. There wasn't all that much left in terms of status, power, or really nice toys to separate them from their law enforcement brethren in the DEA, ATF, or the even the local police. It was downright dispiriting.

  On the long drive up to Keystone, the lead Denver agent, Barton Feldman, briefed them on the information that had been gathered so far. Feldman was in his late fifties, graying and paunchy, and was what Terry Riordan considered a backwater agent, a nonplayer waiting out retirement and pushing paperwork. Terry didn't tell Mark his feelings about Feldman, but they came out anyway in the dismissive tone of voice he used when talking to the elder agent.

  Feldman and the driver were up front; Mark and Terry sat in the backseat. Two other agents sat in the cramped pop up seats in the cargo area and talked constantly on their cell phones, making it difficult at times for Mark to clearly hear what Feldman was saying.

  Of the half dozen residential listings among the phone numbers, two looked especially promising. Both were women in their early thirties who had moved to Keystone within the last five years. One was Stella Greene, who worked as a ski instructor and whose phone bill showed two calls to the Royal Hawaiian in the last two years. The other was Adele Urich, an interior decorator, who was vacationing in Hawaii and had been there for several weeks.

  Terry immediately called Hawaii and was able to catch agents Flannery and Witten before they boarded their main land flight. The two agents would remain in Hawaii and chase down Adele Urich.