“But you slept with her,” said Lorraine. “Right?”
Shaw was increasingly glad he hadn’t tried to bluff his way past the detectives.
“I did,” he said. “Or maybe she slept with me.”
“Is this a revenge thing? She jilted you?”
Shaw’s amused laugh seemed to surprise them. “Nobody’s heart is broken. The conference happened last week. Karla and I had breakfast the day after, and we went out that Thursday night. We talked about the conference and its sudden end. She dropped hints that if anyone had the missing chemical sample, they would be smart to sell it back. When I left her hotel the next morning, that was the first time I was attacked.”
“You saying she had sex with you to set you up?” Ronald asked.
“Maybe not. Maybe she was just on a date and saw an opportunity to mix business and pleasure. If I had stolen the item, I might be more inclined to work with her than anyone else.”
“Since you two had done the deed.”
“Or because selling the stuff through her would be safer than the alternative. The hit team coming after me the next morning could have been coincidence. A different group, watching Karla’s movements and finding me instead.”
“Is Shaw your real name?” said Lorraine.
“Yes. Donovan is my full first name.”
The detectives looked at one another again. Communicating the way lifelong partners could.
“We’re gonna need to talk this over,” Ronald said. “Go grab a coffee, come back in half an hour, okay?”
Shaw nodded and stood. Lorraine looked at him curiously.
“What’s wrong with your side?” she said, pointing with her pen.
Shaw pulled up his shirt, revealing the bandage over his rib. “Their second try at me. Shooting to wound while I ran like hell.”
“Let’s see it,” said Ronald.
Shaw peeled the bandage away, pleased to note that the scab hadn’t reopened during his morning commute from Brooklyn.
Lorraine hissed through her teeth at the sight of the healing gash. “That should be stitched.”
“I’ve been on the move.”
Ronald picked up the Karla Lokosh card from the desk and handed it back to Shaw. “Gotta tell you, if this is manure, you brought a whole field’s worth.”
Shaw left the Abramses to their deliberations.
He didn’t go for coffee. One block down Perry Street from the redbrick building with the A&A office was a similar four-story edifice, this one covered in scaffolding and painted plywood as it underwent renovations. Whatever crew had been working on the reno either wasn’t working on Friday or hadn’t arrived yet. Shaw stood three steps up the enclosed stoop and watched the street.
If they decided in his favor, great. On the flip side, they might call Karla or even Flynn to warn them. In that case Shaw would have to change tack. Getting out of New York clean was the priority.
The Abramses also had the option of doing nothing, simply refusing to answer his questions and sending him on his way. He figured that was the least likely outcome. The former cops and married PIs didn’t seem the type to be passive. They would pick a side and throw their weight behind it.
They would be running his name through their online sources right now. Looking for biography, credit scores, rap sheet. He doubted that whatever BOLO the Seattle police had broadcast would have reached past the Washington border. That was a gamble he’d have to take. Lorraine and Ronald Abrams had been cops, probably still thought like cops. If they found out he was a fugitive from custody, Shaw had little doubt they’d call it in.
The Abramses had chosen a sedate, mostly residential part of the Village. What few businesses there were had grouped around the intersections, and their awnings and stonework meshed well with the environs. No neon, no big SALE signs in the windows. A nervous potential client of A&A Investigations could feel comforted by the dignified surroundings.
Shaw felt reassured as well. A quiet street made it easy for him to note any new arrivals. He watched each car as it passed the Abramses’ building, looking for groups of men, or a car that made more than one pass, or anything that might be an unmarked. After fifteen minutes he walked away from the intersection, around the block, to watch the building from the cross street. None of the cars parked in the handful of available spaces had people sitting in them. No one hanging around the street and possibly watching the A&A office through its second-floor windows.
He’d learned as much as he was going to. If the two private eyes had given him up, the NYPD was smart enough not to show themselves. They might close the net once he was back inside. Another roll of the dice.
He knew what Dono would have said. That Shaw was stupid for getting himself into this situation but a true fool if he compounded it by trusting anyone to help. His grandfather had never been one to rely on the kindness of strangers. Or anyone else.
The primary entrance to the Abramses’ building provided access to the shop on the first floor, which sold linens and posh housewares, and to the staircase to the second-story offices and apartments on the two floors above that. Shaw had seen earlier that the hallway on the second floor had a back entry. Assuming it connected to another stairwell, those stairs would descend to meet a steel utility door he’d spotted on the cross street.
Exit Only. Shaw let himself in with his lockpicks and walked up the back stairs to the second floor. He checked the hallway. It was empty.
He rapped on the door of A&A Investigations, and Ronald shouted for Shaw to come in. The couple were still seated in the same places as before. Ronald had eaten the bagel.
“What’s the verdict?” Shaw said.
“We’ll give you some history,” said Lorraine, “and our intuitions. I’m not sure if those will answer your chief question about whether to trust Karla.”
Shaw nodded.
“Lorraine and I met Karla when she was still with Boston,” Ronald said. “A cop conference, maybe the last one before we left the force, right, Lorrie? She made an impression on us. Smart and very focused. And she wasn’t much more than a rookie then.”
Lorraine continued. “She stayed in touch. Karla was—and still is, I assume—good at that aspect of her career, the networking. Building relationships.” Lorraine paused, and Shaw guessed she might be making a reference to Shaw’s own encounter with Karla. “She wasn’t happy with BPD. Police promotions and lateral transfers to gain experience happen slowly if they happen at all. Especially for women. It’s not a growth field, not with budget cuts happening almost every year. She asked how we liked working for ourselves.”
“We were having a bit of a boom,” Ronald said. “Picking up clients on referral from friends at the Sixth Precinct. A lot of cold larceny cases and insurance work. We told Karla that if she really wanted a change, we’d bring her on part-time and she could earn her license.”
“Was she good at it?” said Shaw.
“Very. She didn’t mind the tedious parts of the job, and there are plenty of those. She had a particular skill for questioning people without them being aware, melding with business types and earning their confidence. She didn’t give off a cop vibe.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“We couldn’t give her a regular salary,” Lorraine said. “Our client list comes and goes like the tide. So with our recommendations, Karla picked up side jobs from other investigation firms. Including the one she left us for. Paragon Consulting, here in New York.
“I advised Karla against Paragon.” Lorraine’s mouth tightened. “We’d heard rumors about their methods. And about James Hargreaves, their CEO.”
“Rumors of what?” said Shaw.
“Sometimes clients ask you to do things you can’t do,” Ronald said, “like tapping a phone or stealing mail. All that shit you see PIs do on television. Paragon’s nominally an intelligence firm, but what they really are, are fixers. You didn’t hear that from us.”
“Paragon was linked to a high-profile divorce case,” said Lorr
aine. “The wife said men had approached her friends, intimidating them from providing evidence. It wasn’t proven that these men were working for Hargreaves, but word got around anyway.”
Ronald nodded. “And there were other bad smells. A fellow PI had a client who wanted him to steal computers holding key data from a competitor. He turned it down. Later on he learned that the client had signed with Paragon. Again, we don’t know if Paragon was willing to go that far.”
“But you think so.”
“Yep. We’ve met Hargreaves briefly. He’s very slick. The product of some covert federal job, NSA or CIA or some group that doesn’t even have an abbreviation. Some of the guys he hires are from the same mold. Ex-spooks and ex-military. No offense.”
“None here. Is Hargreaves a lean guy, six-one, pale blue eyes, dark brown hair like stiff bristles on a brush?” said Shaw.
“That’s him.”
“He went by the alias Bill Flynn at the conference. He and Karla and a chemist named Morton were all pretending to work for Bridgetrust. Why would Karla leave you to work for him?”
“Paragon is a bigger operation. Bigger clients, by far. Bigger money. And Karla, well . . .” Ronald looked to his wife for help.
“Karla is very smart and very dogged,” said Lorraine. “She grew up poor and wanting to break loose from that. Perhaps enough that she would be open to bending her integrity.”
Shaw was no stranger to tangled ethics. “How far?”
Ronald shrugged. “She was pretty straight with us. She might argue for planting a tracker on someone, for example, but she’d accept that it wasn’t possible. Grudgingly.”
“With Paragon the leash may be off. Or nonexistent,” said Lorraine. “That was one of the reasons I advised Karla against working for them. It’s easy to lose your compass in an environment like that.”
“Bad influences,” Ronald agreed.
“But I can’t imagine Karla being part of what you say happened to you,” Lorraine said. “She loathes violence. That was part of her reason for leaving the police. Seeing the human cost of cruelty and rage every day and unable to do much about it.”
“I get wanting to take action,” said Shaw, “and being willing to ignore rules that stand in the way.”
“She’s a decent woman,” Ronald said, “but even decent people have to fight sometimes to stay that way. I’m not sure Karla’s gonna win that fight. My opinion, but there it is.”
“Hiring Karla was about bench strength for Hargreaves, I think,” Lorraine continued. “A young woman can go undercover where men can’t.”
“Any of this what you needed?” Ronald asked.
Shaw nodded. “For Paragon, yeah. I think Hargreaves smells a big payday. He sounds like the type to break whatever laws he has to. Plus, he has the connections to assemble a team of goons like the crew that’s been after me.”
“And Karla?” said Lorraine.
Shaw mimed flipping a coin.
“Guess I’ll find out soon enough,” he said. “Maybe she’s just as trapped as I am.”
“Good luck,” Ronald said.
Shaw thanked them and got up to leave, only to turn back at the door.
“How’d you guess that Karla slept with me?” he said.
Lorraine looked at him. “She and I talked plenty during her time with us. I know Karla’s type. Tall, dark, and prone to trouble.” She pointed at Shaw. “If she’s truly in deep water, don’t become the millstone around her neck.”
FORTY-FIVE
It was still early enough that the heat hadn’t gotten a firm grip on the day. Shaw decided to walk uptown. The terrain was perfect for shaking the last kinks out of his legs from three days of driving. Flat and usually a simple two-part equation to get wherever you were going: X long blocks east or west, Y short blocks north or south.
He had been to New York a few times, always as a tourist on leave from the Army. Never for longer than three or four days. He’d rarely had more than that much leave away from Fort Benning in Georgia, and a soldier’s salary didn’t go far in Manhattan. He liked the energy of the city, could see the appeal of not needing a car and being able to discover almost anything made or sold or experienced in the world within a few square miles, from Argentine tangos to Zairian stew.
But after the first couple of visits, he knew he could never live in the heart of it. The relentlessly rushed pace of the place made him edgy. He’d found himself checking his surroundings more than was rational, even for a Spec Ops guy just off deployment. Hurrying toward an objective was one thing. Hurrying because everyone around you was hurrying was something close to herd mentality. Maybe the vibe was different in the other boroughs.
The offices of Paragon Consulting were in midtown on East Forty-fifth Street, not far off Madison Avenue. Those were the coordinates at street level, at any rate. The company’s public listing hadn’t specified the floor. A plaque outside the sleek tower read the jansson building in uncompromising raised steel letters. Its flat mirror-finish exterior stretched from the discount men’s clothier and the luxe steak house on its ground floor to the roof twenty stories above. Looking up, all Shaw could see was a bluish reflection of the older, more ornamented buildings on his side of the street.
He bought a coffee from an organic shop three doors down and drank it while watching a steady stream of people walking through the lobby. It was closing in on noon, and the numbers of people going in and coming out of the building were about even.
After an hour he estimated he’d seen four hundred people walk through the Jansson doors. Ninety percent of them wore business attire. Delivery people came out between fifteen and twenty minutes of entering. Shaw surmised deliveries were allowed to take the elevators up to their target floors rather than leaving items at the front desk. That might be a weak point.
The lobby was simple but attractive, with a short colonnade of ridged marble columns leading to the reception desk. Two guards stood behind the desk, one signing in visitors and taking their photos with a webcam to print passes, the other working the phone. Employees flashed their company IDs to the guards, who nodded and smiled slightly in recognition. Then each employee swiped a card at an interior glass door to access the elevator lobby.
Shaw watched as a delivery boy approached, carrying two stacked cardboard trays of coffee and more complicated mixtures. Guard One began making him a pass while Guard Two called up to make sure the kid was expected.
Tight, Shaw thought. Not impossible. He could figure a way to mimic a call from inside the building, ring the guards and tell them to expect a package delivery, then stroll in five minutes later. But they would notice if he didn’t return promptly. Tricking his way inside like that and hiding until nightfall was out.
He walked the street, checking out the IDs draped around the necks of people exiting the building. He could steal one of those and hope the guards didn’t look hard at the name or the photo, or that the employee didn’t backtrack to see if he’d dropped his card. Too many variables.
Shaw would need time inside the Paragon offices. As much as he could get. He wasn’t certain what he was looking for.
Seeking another way in, he walked around the block. The Jansson Building abutted its stone neighbor without even an alley between them. Shaw supposed he could get into the older building next door, but then what? Punch a hole through its walls?
There was no exposed area of the Jansson Building other than the side facing the street. Bluffing his way past the guards was dicey. Scaling the building would be ridiculous.
There had to be a service entrance somewhere. Large enough to receive items like furniture—a building this size must have tenants moving or redecorating their offices constantly—and to remove a small mountain of trash every day. He looked for a utility door or a freight elevator that might open upward out of the sidewalk and didn’t find either.
Staring at the building any longer wouldn’t help. Shaw went to find food. Three days of drive-thru fare had him craving anything not se
rved in a paper wrapper.
Grand Central was a few blocks south. He had strolled through the terminal on previous visits. Once he’d spent half an hour shooting the shit with a pair of Army National Guardsmen on deterrent duty in full ACUs and carrying carbines. Both of them happy to be away from regular training at Fort Hamilton. Shaw himself enjoyed the station’s soaring architecture and the rush of commuters who probably never looked at it, just as he never gave a glance to the Space Needle at home.
Thinking of the Needle made him think of Karla. Did she have an office in the Jansson Building along with the rest of Paragon’s New York branch? Would the name on its door say Haiden or Lokosh?
At a bistro across from the station, tucked under the Park Avenue viaduct, Shaw sat and watched the crowds flowing down Forty-second while he ate a lunch of hard-poached eggs benedict with extra toast and drank many cups of black coffee.
Around the third cup, a notion struck him. When you want to know something, just ask.
He paid the check and retraced his steps across Madison and over to Fifth. Patrons at the main branch of the public library lounged on the steps. Tourists waited for their turn to take photos with the lion statues. Shaw found a corner sheltered from the traffic noise and made a call.
“Jansson Building, front desk.” Shaw wondered whether it was Guard Two, still working the phones.
“Hey, how are ya?” he said. “I’m with Fields Lighting Design. We got an installation comin’ up for one of your companies there—Par-gon Consulting, it says?”
“Paragon. Sure.”
“Got it. We’ll be delivering the materials early next week, and I wanted to confirm the address and see where we should load in.”
“Okay, yeah. This place is a little strange,” said the guard. “When it was built, only half of the structure next to it was torn down, for some reason only God and the Zoning Commission know. So now both buildings share a basement and maintenance floor. You’ll have to take the ramp in the building one door over, number 28. The door looks like it’s connected to the shoe shop on the corner—forget that. Ring the buzzer and the guy inside will point you toward the freight elevator for Jansson.”
Island of Thieves Page 27
