No—that obviously couldn’t be it. This was something illegal, for sure. This was trading tied to some information source, an inside flow of data, probably from the trading desk of a large investment bank, which would know what time the bank would be buying or selling large blocks.
Masolino let out a slow, relieved breath. So it was typical insider stuff after all—and, hotel manager or not, Ellerby was playing it like some back-office IT drone…except he was too stupid to hide his dirty trades amid a lot of financial noise. Masolino had been worried for a moment there, but this was going to be easy. All he had to do was identify which investment bank happened to be trading large blocks at the time these trades were made, and go from there.
The activity he was currently examining came from a few years back, so Masolino moved his focus closer to the present. He quickly noticed that the trading pattern had changed a few weeks ago. At that point, this Ellerby started making bigger trades, for bigger profits, and held on to the trades for longer—sometimes as long as an hour.
Masolino had a number of programs that he’d coded himself, and now he ran one that compared block trading of equities by large investment banks to Ellerby’s trading, looking for the match.
There was no match.
This was odd. Another thing that was odd was that the stocks were always Dow Jones Industrials listed stocks.
Now he began comparing the time stamp of each trade with stock price movements in general. Ellerby’s trades usually came during periods of high volatility and took advantage of small fluctuations that occurred sometimes within seconds after the trade. How was this possible? The trades always came right before an uptick in the stock. Not huge upticks, but decent enough to make money—although the money made in the last three weeks had increased dramatically.
He couldn’t get around it: this was the classic pattern of someone getting tips from an insider with access to private information, probably an influential stock picker or newsletter. Masolino had a database that aggregated the stock picks of thousands of such sources, and now he ran it against Ellerby’s trades.
Nothing. No match.
Now, that was damned strange.
Perhaps the trades were based on acquiring advance news about companies, like earnings reports or drug approvals, that hadn’t yet been released but that some insider was privy to. He had a program that handled that, too, comparing the trades to news reports involving the same stock.
That came up empty as well.
Masolino ran Ellerby’s trades against every program in his digital toolbox that matched trades with outside events: merger announcements, lawsuit filings, earnings reports, commodity movements, political news, and a host of other things that move stocks abruptly—and still couldn’t find a pattern.
Next he looked at who was buying and selling these stocks just before or after Ellerby’s trades. If Ellerby knew someone who bought and sold large blocks of stock, and he acted before that person did, he could make a profit from the movement of the later, larger trades.
Again, nothing came up. No big blocks of stock were dumped or purchased, no insider selling or buying from company executives. Ellerby simply seemed to have anticipated ahead of time an uptick in the stock price and bought into it, then sold at a profit. He could have made much larger profits by buying and holding some of these stocks. But he never did. The trades were quick, simple, and unremarkable—and every single damn one made money.
As Masolino went forward in time, he again saw the break that took place three weeks before the end. He saw it in every trading account. In recent weeks, the trades got bigger, more profitable, and longer.
Four hours later, Masolino, bathed in sweat, a pile of damp paper towels on the floor behind him, hands trembling, finally shut down his system. It was only two o’clock in the afternoon, but he was going home early to have a stiff martini.
Ellerby’s trading went back years and years, via every imaginable financial instrument, all over the map: those same quick little trades making modest profits. Every trade was legal, or so it seemed. Masolino could think of only one answer: Ellerby was a stock-trading genius the likes of which the world had never seen. Given the short time frames on so many of the trades, he must have developed some incredibly powerful mathematical quantitative trading algorithms that monitored markets and traded accordingly. An algorithm like that—that never made a mistake and always made a profit—would be the holy grail of Wall Street. But such programs, no matter how powerful or ingenious, could never be 100 percent accurate. It was impossible, given the random fluctuations of the market, to ever be perfectly accurate. But the hard drive held only records of transactions—no indication of how the trades were identified and executed and no algorithmic trading program.
And by the end of it all, Ellerby had amassed a paper fortune of close to $300 million. A hotel manager. Three hundred million. And $200 million of that had been made in just the last three weeks.
Christ, Masolino needed that martini.
27
FRANCIS WELLSTONE JR., HAVING donned a new suit and tie, sat in the same parlor, in the same venerable wing chair, with the same view of West Oglethorpe Avenue, that he recalled from his first visit. There were, however, a few differences of note. It was not morning, but past six in the evening; he’d been served sweet tea instead of lemonade; and his hostess, Mrs. Daisy Fayette, was in a less agreeable mood than the first time they’d met.
“Do you mean to say that he actually interrupted your segment?” Wellstone asked, injecting surprise and sympathy into his voice.
Daisy nodded, her lavender-tinged hair shaking in displeasure. A tiny cloud of powder rose from it before settling again. “I was just beginning to explain why the Montgomerie House was haunted—an eddy in the spiritual ether, caused by the murder-suicide—when he cut me off. In midsentence…and in front of everybody, with the cameras still filming!”
“I’ve heard that Betts has a reputation of being an unpleasant person to work with. But to needlessly humiliate someone who’s helping him…!” Wellstone shook his head, at the same time finding a secret pleasure in the fact that he wasn’t the only one to be recently humiliated by that bloviating dotard producer.
By now, Wellstone had taken the measure of Savannah—its history, legends, and secrets. In Daisy’s circle of southern gentility and decorum, Betts’s oafish behavior would have been dealt with in a different way, and old Mr. Fayette, if he hadn’t been moldering in the grave, might have called Betts out, fought a duel with him, over the insult. Perhaps the old ways weren’t so barbaric after all.
On the other hand, Daisy’s outrage was exactly what he’d been hoping for. After his fury over his treatment at Lafitte’s had cooled, his mind had begun working strategically again. Daisy was almost certainly ready to become a useful informant on Betts, his inside source, so to speak.
“I visited the Montgomerie House myself just yesterday,” Wellstone said, taking a sip of iced tea. “I thought it to be one of the most fascinating spots I’ve ever visited. And spiritually disturbing,” he hastily added. “Especially after reading your most informative, ah, book about it.”
“Thank you,” Daisy said.
Pamphlet, Wellstone had almost said; fortunately he had corrected himself in time. He’d tut-tut a little more, then get down to business. “I’m surprised, actually, to hear that Betts had so little interest in the Montgomerie ghosts. I would have thought it precisely the kind of thing he could work into his documentary.”
“Oh, he was interested,” Daisy said. “It was that other man who said there were no ghosts.”
“That other man?” Wellstone repeated, although he knew exactly which man that was.
Daisy nodded. “Moller. The one with all the equipment.”
“Moller wasn’t interested?” he asked.
Daisy hesitated. “No…not exactly that. He said his instruments weren’t picking up any traces of ghostly activity.”
Wellstone shook his head. “That
doesn’t make any sense. As we both know, the house is profoundly haunted. My guess is…”
He hesitated for drama.
“What?”
“That this Moller is a quack. You must have run into them, Daisy. Someone who claims to know about the science of the paranormal but is nothing more than a showman, a fake.”
“I certainly have! You run into them all the time while doing supernatural research.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole documentary is a ridiculous charade.”
Daisy took a demure sip of her tea. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all.”
“But…what happened when Moller couldn’t find any ghosts?”
“Betts actually told Moller to make his instruments ‘work better.’” She smiled slightly—the prickly smile Wellstone recalled from his first visit. “Moller told him that finding nothing there would make it all the more believable when they did find something.”
Wellstone shook his head sympathetically. She was going to be a gold mine of information on Betts and Moller.
At that moment, Daisy perked up. “Which reminds me!”
“What is it?”
“How foolish of me to forget! Heavens, my memory isn’t what it used to be.” Daisy stood up and walked out of the parlor. A moment later, with a swish of pantyhose, she returned.
“I was there, in the Montgomerie House…‘on the set,’ as you say,” she told him as she sat down again. “I had just been interrupted by Mr. Betts. I was standing in the background—rather stunned, I might say—when I recalled what you said about getting a look behind the scenes.”
“That’s right,” Wellstone replied.
“I was able to get some pictures.”
“What?” Wellstone asked. This was far better than he’d expected. He had almost asked her to take a few clandestine photos, but figured it was too risky. As it turned out, she’d taken the initiative herself.
“My phone has a camera, of course.” She pulled out a late-model cell phone and showed it to him. She tried to turn it on for several seconds before realizing she was holding it upside down. Rotating it, she pressed the screen here and there, until at last she gave a little chirp of triumph.
“You said you wanted information, so I took some pictures while pretending to send emails. There!” she said, handing him the phone.
Wellstone took the phone. It showed a black screen. He swiped his finger across it, revealing a blurred, dark image. And another.
“I’m not really all that good with it yet,” Daisy said apologetically.
Wellstone swiped his way through a dozen more photos blurred by movement and out of focus. Then he came to a set where the phone, apparently, had self-adjusted for the environment. He saw a darkened corridor, two cameramen, that charlatan Betts…and some kind of cloth on the floor, covered with a bizarre array of tools and other objects. Beside it was something he was very familiar with, given his years in and out of television studios: a hard case with foam cutouts of the kind photographers and sound engineers used to protect their gear. When he zoomed in on it, he could see more items still inside the foam cradles: a jagged, lightning-shaped piece of silver; a metering device of some kind; a large box camera; a battered cross; an oscilloscope; and a piece of smoked glass.
These were Moller’s phony “tools.”
“I took pictures of his black suitcase with his equipment,” Daisy said. “Moller wouldn’t let them film inside of the case—only the equipment itself, only when it was being used.”
Wellstone suddenly realized he was gripping the phone so hard it hurt. “Daisy,” he said, “I believe you’ve struck gold.”
The elderly matron looked at him as if he’d just given her a pearl necklace. “Really?”
“Really. Twenty-four-karat gold. These photos of the equipment will be very useful.” He paused.
The memory of his lunchtime humiliation was still all too fresh—and, he realized, it had provided him with the incentive he required to investigate and write those chapters about Betts and his phony setup after all. No way was he returning to Boston until he had the goods on that mountebank Betts.
He was going to blow up those photos and study every little thing in that case, because he was sure that in there somewhere must be the key to exposing the quack. That large camera nestled in the suitcase, for example—he’d seen pictures of Moller wielding it in the past. “Would you be willing to go back to the set again?”
Her grateful look became a little worried. “But…why would I say I’m there?”
“Offer your services again, but not on camera—just to be a help, you know, with the research. You know so much. And of course you have an in with the local people that they don’t have. I’m sure you can make a good argument why you should continue helping them. Now that they’ve finished with the Montgomerie House, did they talk about what they were going to do next?”
“They mentioned shooting scenes involving the Savannah Vampire.”
“Perfect! Once I’ve made the preparations, I’ll call.” He paused. “You know, if you’re any more helpful to me, I may just have to name you coauthor.”
She blushed.
He waved the phone at her. “Would you mind if I sent these photos over to my phone?”
“Not at all,” she said, standing. “And might I perhaps warm up your tea?”
For a moment, Wellstone didn’t understand. Then he saw Daisy had walked over to a sideboard and was cradling a bottle of Woodford Reserve.
“Why, thank you, Daisy,” he said, taking his own phone out of his pocket and sitting back in his armchair. “I’d like that. I’d like that very much.”
28
TOBY MANNING SHIMMIED UP the wrought iron fence and tried to swing his leg over the spikes, but his pants got hung up and he fell to the ground on the far side with a loud ripping sound. He lay there, a little shaken but otherwise unharmed, as his pal Brock Custis looked on, laughing uproariously.
“You bust ass like that again,” Brock said, “and half of the dead here are going to rise up and give you the finger.”
“Help me up, fagmeat,” Toby said.
Still laughing, Brock extended a hand and Toby grasped it and was hauled to his feet. He checked his jeans and found a two-inch tear along the side. “Shit.”
Annoyed, he slapped away the dirt and leaves and looked around. “Creepy place.” A full moon hung in the night sky. Strings of low-lying mist drifted through the twisted oaks and ghostly shapes of tombstones stretching in front of them.
Brock managed to stifle his laughter long enough to pull a pint of Southern Comfort from his pocket. “Here, take a shot of this.”
Toby grabbed the pint and sucked down a couple of mouthfuls before handing it back. He could feel the heat of the liquor spreading through his gullet, and it restored his mood. “The grave is supposed to be at the far end, by the river,” he said.
“Lead the way, asswipe.”
Toby pulled out his cell phone—relieved to find it intact—and turned on its light. It cast a feeble glow over the white gravel path that led off into the misty darkness of Bonaventure Cemetery. He had a momentary shiver. “Gimme another hit.”
Brock handed him the bottle. Toby drained it and gave it back. Brock stared at it, frowning. “You bogarted all the Sudden Discomfort!” he said, flinging the bottle over his shoulder. Toby heard it shatter against a tomb and winced.
“Three points.” With a grin, Brock slipped out another pint. “Go easy on this one.” He cracked the cap and they each had another swig.
Now they walked down the path, lined on either side by massive trees hanging with moss, the gravel crunching under their feet. Toby had never seen tombs as elaborate as these: miniature Greek temples, life-size marble angels, huge obelisks and crosses and urns and slabs of marble. They passed a statue of a little girl with the saddest imaginable look on her face, seated next to an ivy-covered tree stump, all pale, glowing marble. Her name, Gracie, was carved on the base.
Brock lurched to a stop. “Will you look at that,” he said. “You know why she’s so sad?”
“No,” said Toby.
“Because she’s fucking dead!” And he howled with laughter as he continued staggering down the path.
“Jesus,” Toby murmured, shaking his head as he followed. He wondered if this was such a good idea after all.
Soon they were deep in the cemetery. Toby silently went over the directions he’d been given: Go to the far end, where the river is; turn right; count three alleyways and take another right. The tomb he was looking for would be on that path, just a ways down.
Or was it four alleyways?
“What’s the name of that statue we’re looking for again?” Brock asked.
“Bird Girl.”
“Bird Girl? What the hell does that mean?”
“Because she’s holding two bird baths, one in each hand. It was on the cover of that famous book.”
“What’s so special about it?”
“It’s interesting, that’s all.” He paused. “We don’t have to find it. We can just wander around.”
The path they were on came to a T, with a mass of trees beyond. The mists were thicker here, and Toby thought he could smell mud. They must be close to the river.
“Here’s where we go right,” he said.
They were moving into a more out-of-the-way section of the cemetery, where the tombstones were smaller and plots unkempt, with weeds and cheap vases of plastic flowers, some toppled over, spilling their sad contents. That was all right with Toby: less chance of coming across a caretaker or, worse, a cop.
“Sure you know where we’re going?” Brock asked.
“Yeah.”
They passed the bottle back and forth again. Clouds had covered the moon. Now the flashlight of the cell phone barely penetrated the murk.
Bloodless Page 13
