Eye of a Needle

by Lee Perry

  Catherine had finished copying the hard drives on the twelfth floor apartment before heading down to the ninth and Jordan had remained behind, surreptitiously watching Gary Tauscher while Mary Fielding’s forensic investigation unit methodically examined each room for evidence of murder. Privately, Jordan admitted the man’s polite, calm cool demeanor was impressive; If he’s guilty he must have the mental constitution of a sociopath. It was now ten o’clock and she stood quietly to one side, watching him watch Mary, the unit’s supervisor, prepare for a test that would detect the presence of blood in Helga’s gallery of mannequins.

  “Okay,” Mary turned to them, “next we’ll be closing the drapes so we can get started.”

  Jordan turned to Gary, “That’s our cue to wait in the hall.”

  She motioned for him to precede her and he turned to look over his shoulder, “You’re sure the costumes won’t be damaged?”

  “Yes,” she assured him, “the black lights they use are harmless.” She followed him into the hallway and did a double take when she saw Catherine by the front door, giving her a slight wave. “If you’ll just wait here for a few minutes…” She told him and joined Catherine in the foyer.

  “I finished copying all the hard drives on the ninth floor…” She peeked around Jordan’s taller frame at Helga’s personal assistant and added, her voice low, “He looks like he’s more worried about her mannequins than whatever I might find on his hard drives.”

  “I noticed that too, ready to go?”

  “Yeah, Mary’s tech’s will grab any portable devices they find hidden away in both apartments and bring them in. Bea says she’ll get her team on the data as soon as it appears in her non-networked servers.”

  Jordan gave her a look, “But you’ll check them out too?”

  She grinned, “Of course.”

  “I guess that’s a good reason to miss a few appointments,” Lianna grinned, “It sounds like everything is working well at home?”

  “Oh yes,” Catherine’s eyes crinkled happily, “I would categorize our home life as exceptional.”

  “And work?”

  “This case is very different.” She added hurriedly, “And that’s a good thing. At first, I was sort of privately moaning about missing the challenge of deciphering code, but on retrospect I’d gladly trade that in exchange for this case, although it does now involve a murder.” Lianna was silent and she added, “I must admit there are aspects about this assignment that are quite fascinating.”

  The bureau psychiatrist inclined her head, “The world of the very rich seems quite alien, doesn’t it?”

  “I had no idea, during the Jeffers’s case the victims were all nouveau rich, they had nice things, but that was nothing really, compared to how people with old money live. The things they consider perfectly normal strike me as completely bizarre; rooms just for cigars or furs or…” She shrugged, “It just seems so wasteful… and shallow.”

  “So how about we end this today with a guided meditation?”

  “Great.” Catherine smiled, “Can I lie down for it?”

  “Of course.”

  She left the chair she’d been sitting on and lay on the sofa, closing her eyes.

  “It looks like you’re ready for this.” Lianna laughed and followed with her chair.

  She smiled, her eyes still closed, “I am.”

  “Alright then, you know the drill; let your breaths come, easy and deep… long slow inhalations, and when you exhale, feel yourself relax… deeper… more relaxed… each time you exhale….”

  Catherine did as she was told, and even though the smile faded from her lips as she sank further into a deeply relaxed state, she was aware, if increasingly distantly, that she felt blissful, happy and at complete ease. Lianna’s soft voice continued to guide her, and although her subconscious could hear and follow the quiet instructions, Catherine’s conscious mind floated and she blinked when she looked down at her feet and found herself on a wooded path, Where is this? She thought and when she looked up, she squinted at the figure that appeared at the far end, just where the path began to bend and trees and shrubbery pressed inward.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Her eyes flew open and she sputtered awake, “Huh?”

  Lianna smiled, “I said, you can open your eyes whenever you’re ready.”

  Catherine exhaled noisily, “That only felt like a minute.”

  “Actually that was fifteen minutes.”

  She sat up, “It’s so weird when that happens.” She scrubbed briefly at her face and smoothed her hair, “I think I saw that woman, Helga.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know, I was suddenly on this pretty wooded path and I heard someone say, ‘Beautiful isn’t it?’” She shrugged, “Probably because Jordan told us about that empty mansion of hers in Connecticut.”

  “From what you told me about the property,” Lianna agreed, “that did sound like a wild and beautiful place.”

  “Well,” she heaved a huge sigh and stood, “thanks for the session, I’d better get back.”

  Jordan waved to the receptionist and headed into the first conference room, nodding to the technician to begin recording. “Miss Hale?”

  An older woman stood and shook Jordan’s hand, “Yes.”

  “Thank you for coming in, please have a seat.” They sat opposite one another at the table and Jordan’s eyes flicked to the clock on the wall. She stated the date and time, adding, “I am Special Agent Jordan Hawkins and I’m speaking to Susan Hale about her employment as night nurse to Helga Lynch.” Susan sat quietly and she continued, “When did you start working for Miss Lynch?”

  “As soon as she checked into Dominican, I was working for an agency the hospital contracted to provide personal, round the clock care for its patients and I was simply assigned to her.”

  “And you stayed her night nurse for twenty-four years until her death?”

  “Yes.”

  “According to her financials, it wasn’t long before Miss Lynch gave you a check for ten thousand dollars as a gift?”

  “That’s true,” Susan Hale leaned back in the chair, appearing to relax, “I freely admit I prayed for an assignment to Dominican; the talk at the agency was their patients, if they were the generous type, would tip you like you were a maid at a five star hotel.” She shook her head and snorted, “I had no idea what her tips could amount to… I also had no idea she’d never leave. I thought, as we all did in the beginning, that she’d leave as soon as her face healed from the surgeries she had.” She shrugged, “But she never did.”

  “Why do you suppose she stayed?”

  “She’d never say; she’d always just wave off her doctor, saying she was fine where she was and change the subject. Her first dayshift nurse pestered her so much about going home she fired her.” She grinned, wagging her eyebrows, “That had to be the best thing that ever happened to Hannah,” she snorted, “it was her luck to be next on the list.”

  “So you both worked twelve hour shifts, seven days a week…”

  “Yes,” Susan nodded, “I saw what happened to the first day nurse, and Hannah and I both knew if we took time off and she liked the sub better…” Her head tilted to one side, “Look, I’m not too proud to say I was hoping she’d be grateful for my loyalty and service and toss lots of checks my way, and she did. All told, Miss Lynch gave me almost three million dollars over the years. I invested that money very carefully, and now I’m retired and own my own small home, outright, no mortgage. Getting assigned to Helga Lunch was like winning the lottery.”

  “Well, not really,” Jordan folded her arms across her chest, “winning the lottery only involves buying a ticket, you had to work twelve-hour graveyard shifts for two and a half decades.”

  “True,” she agreed, “but she was in her eighties when we started working for her. None of us thought she’d live so long. Plus, it was easier for me; she went to sleep at eight and only woke up once during the night to use the bathroom…�
�� She shook her head in what Jordan guessed was fondness. “She preferred to sleep in ‘til eight in the morning when Hannah came in to work so she would be the one to get her up for the day.”

  “Which is why Hannah got so much more than you did?”

  “Yes, but she had to put up with a whole lot more than me.” Jordan only looked at her and she chuckled, “They had their fallouts, trust me. After a number of years went by there were times when Hannah would storm off and I was called in to my shift early.”

  Jordan’s brows arched in surprise, “Really?”

  “Oh sure, but it never lasted long. They always made up and Hannah always came back. Why wouldn’t she?” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table, “And miss out on more money?”

  Milburn, NJ

  Jordan propped pillows behind her head and flopped against them, lying limp on the mattress. When Catherine entered she asked, “Cam asleep?”

  “Like a little log.” She said as she closed their bedroom door, “You look tired. Too tired to make out a little?”

  “Well…” she craned her neck and shoulders from side to side, “I think I can manage for a while.”

  Catherine climbed onto the bed, straddling her, “This week was kind of a bust, huh?”

  “All I know for sure at this point is Hannah Babcock wasn’t murdered by either her caretaker at Chateau Donjon or her night nurse… As for everyone else…” She raised her hands briefly before dropping them onto Catherine’s thighs.

  “Too bad Mary’s team found no blood evidence in either of Helga’s apartments.” She sighed audibly, “And all that security footage has missing bits going back for six months… which is how long the video is archived for, then it’s purged.”

  “Dammit.” Jordan sighed, sounding dejected.

  “Yeah, some of it falls in with the coroner’s time of death for Hannah Babcock, so we can guess she may have been murdered there.”

  “And that’s not enough to let me get a warrant to search Gary’s car.” Catherine gave her a blank look. “It was easy enough to get warrants for Helga’s apartments since Hannah worked for her. If Mary’s team had been able to find anything at all I could’ve gotten a warrant to search his car but I can’t go on a fishing expedition for evidence.” She shrugged, frustrated.

  “We can also only guess at this point that a lot of her art was being stolen during all the other chunks of deleted video, but I don’t think you can build a case against Gary Tauscher there either because that data indicates, irrefutably, that the system was hacked remotely.” She waited a long beat then added, “As were all of Gary’s hard drives.”

  “So, all a defense lawyer would have to do is point out that the building’s security cameras and Gary’s hard drives were hacked remotely and the DA would drop the case against him. It would have been so much simpler if we could have found the murder scene in Helga’s apartment… now I’ll have to coordinate simultaneous searches of all Hannah’s properties.”

  “Simultaneous so her kids won’t have time to destroy evidence?”

  “Exactly, Doctor Bernard.”

  Catherine dropped her hands over Jordan’s, “You know I traced that three hundred and twenty thousand dollar check that was mysteriously cashed to an online bank.”

  Jordan looked hopeful, “And?”

  “That was all I got.”

  “What’s an online bank?”

  “I mean literally the bank only exists online, there are no branches to go to. An account holder can either call or go online to talk or chat with a customer service representative, but there’s no bank building. That check was deposited into an account owned by Alton Matthews, then the funds were moved from there to an offshore account.”

  Jordan emitted a derisive snort, “Of course they were.”

  “It gets worse,” She felt Jordan sag beneath her, “but I promise, after I tell you I’ll make crazy passionate love to you to make up for it…”

  A smile tugged fleetingly at her lips, “Okay…”

  “To open an online account all you need is a name, contact information, and social security number.”

  Jordan began unbuttoning the pajama top Catherine wore, “Uh huh…”

  “I was looking at Helga’s long list of gift checks again and I found forty-seven electronic checks, supposedly issued by her, totaling three hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars.”

  “I thought she only handwrote her checks.”

  “I know.”

  “And these electronic checks were also deposited by Alton Matthews?”

  “No, these checks were deposited at a different online bank to an account owned by Hannah Babcock.”

  Jordan’s hands stopped and dropped back onto her thighs, “I’m sure the worse part is still coming.”

  “Now that we have Hannah’s financials, it doesn’t appear that Hannah Babcock actually owned this account.”

  “So we have no idea who stole that money...”

  “Well, no idea so far. I’ll likely only be able to absolutely indentify the account owner by finding and linking him or her to either a paper or digital trail after you catch them.”

  “Like with Jeffers.”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “Goddammit.”

  “Want to make love now?”

  Jordan gave her a long look, “Yes, yes I do.”

  PART 3

  “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

  - William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  New York City, NY

  Jordan subpoenaed Helga’s bank to send a full accounting of the mysterious disappearance of her jewelry from their vault and Catherine clicked open the file. The list of documents was short and her brows arched high, Ten million dollars worth of jewelry inexplicably disappears and this is all they have to show for it? Indeed, the initial letter sent to Helga by her bank was brief and to the point,

  “We regret to inform you that your vault, number 86, is now empty.”

  And how did they discover it was cleaned out? She read on; according to the letter, Helga had sent her assistant Gary Tauscher to fetch a jade bracelet she intended to give as a gift when it was discovered the multi-shelf safety deposit box in the bank’s vault was completely empty. Jordan’ll want to talk to him about that… Who was getting the bracelet? She wondered, Hannah Babcock? I wonder if Mattie can find a reference somewhere in Helga’s correspondence.

  Included was the record of visitors to Helga’s vault, but the bank formally declared they only kept security video on file for one year, And look who signed in for access to that vault thirteen months before Gary Tauscher showed up for the bracelet? She stared at the name and snorted in disgust:

  Carroll Campbell.

  Jordan will say it’s not proof he walked off with all her jewelry. The bank only notes their investigator talked to him and that Campbell reported he was only there to perform an inventory of the items. She shook her head, And that was enough… they believed him and wrote it off. Unbelievable. I guess Helga’s bank thought whittling her down to three million was worth it to keep her and her lawyer quiet and avoid bad publicity. She sighed, Just like Helga.

  “So what if everybody found out?” She grumped aloud, “Why did it matter?”

  Mary Fielding had organized her team’s simultaneous forensic raids on the murder victim’s multiple residences down to the minute. She and Jordan coordinated their efforts with the FBI bureaus in Florida and California to conduct searches of Hannah’s two homes in those states and she recruited additional forensic investigators from the Newark and New Haven bureaus to assist her teams. At precisely nine o’clock, Eastern Standard Time, all nine teams knocked and entered Hannah Babcock’s nine residences; warrants in hand. They carefully processed her two empty apartments in Cambridge, Massachusetts, her house in Long Island, a vacant house and her children’s three apartments in New York.

  She stood with one hand on her hip while the other held her phone to her ear, pleased with herself f
or successfully pulling off such an enormous project in spite of the small annoyance in front of her.

  “Hawkins.”

  “Hey, it’s Mary, got a minute?”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “Well, I’m here at Henry Babcock’s apartment,” she smiled down at the red-faced young man in front of her, “And he insists that we stop…”

  Standing on tiptoe, he shouted into her phone, “Cease and desist!”

  “Is he interfering with your investigation?” Jordan asked.

  Mary wrinkled her nose thoughtfully, “Not really… as soon as he crosses that line I’ll arrest him for obstruction…”

  “And I’ll sue!” The young man jabbed a finger at her.

  “Why don’t I come down?” She could hear Jordan sigh, “I’m at his brother’s apartment, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Jordan stretched as she exited the bureau car, Nine residences… she moaned silently, Please someone find the murder scene and give me a break in the case! When she got to Henry’s apartment on the fourth floor she waved to Mary Fielding, who waited in the hallway, her arms crossed over her chest.

  “Hello,” she grinned drolly, “having fun?”

  “I…”

  “I will not stand for this!” Henry suddenly burst through the open apartment doorway, “You have no right and if you don’t stop this right now I will sue every individual here as well as the FBI as the corrupt agency it is!”

  Jordan turned to Mary, “Thank you, I’ll take it from here.”

  “Thank you, Agent Hawkins.” Mary gave her a nod and walked back into the apartment.

  “I understand you’re being quite disruptive.” She scolded softly, her hands folded in front of her, “Your brother Claude didn’t mind us searching his place, he’s just sitting quietly, playing a video game.”

  “My brother is an idiot!” He hissed, “I have a lawyer…”