“You’re sure?”
“Positive. It’s a very sophisticated device; you’re dealing with professionals.”
“How professional?”
“Let’s put it this way: there are governments that don’t have access to this kind of stuff.”
“Was somebody in the house?”
“Not for this; the device is off premises.”
“So why are we talking out here?”
“Tony hasn’t checked the house for bugs or cameras yet,” Laurie says, “so I figured it’s best we talk out here, just in case.”
“Did you leave the tap on the phone?”
He nods. “I did. There’s no way they would know that you know about it.”
“Unless there are cameras in the house, and they saw you checking it out.”
“Right.”
Tony goes back in to finish his work, and Laurie and I go in as well. He is incredibly thorough and takes three more hours to completely check out everything in the house.
“You’re clean,” he says and heads down to the office to find out if the phone there has been similarly compromised. I call Hike on my cell phone and ask him to be there to let Tony in.
When he leaves, Laurie and I discuss the latest developments. These conversations are important to me; talking about things out loud helps crystallize my thoughts.
They apparently have crystallized Laurie’s as well. “Barry was obviously into something very deep and very dangerous. And now you are in the middle of it.”
“No question about it.”
“Which means Denise Price is innocent.”
I nod. “All I have to do is prove it.”
The office phone is also compromised. Tony Vazquez called Laurie on her cell phone to tell her. It presents us with an opportunity. The fact that we know somebody is listening means that we can control what he hears.
This situation causes me to have a number of conflicting emotions. The invasion of privacy is infuriating, and even though I have no idea who is doing it, I make a silent vow to get revenge when I find out.
It’s also revealing, in what it says about Denise’s situation. Because she is my only client, there’s no doubt that whoever is listening is related to Denise’s case. Although I really don’t need any further confirmation after the murders in Augusta, this provides it.
Dangerous people are watching.
All of the events are more than a little scary. If Susser and the others were killed just to prevent them from talking first to Barry Price and then to me, I have to be at least a little concerned about my own safety. Since I was born without a courage gene, I’m not feeling too good about this.
Pretty much the only positive to be found in all this is that if the bad guys have been listening in on the office phone, they’ve had to suffer through Edna’s conversations. For instance, the other day she spent an hour and a half talking to her cousin Cecelia about the upcoming crossword tournament.
I heard only a portion of Edna’s side of the call, and I wanted to scream. If someone had to listen to both sides of the entire conversation, my guess is he would have preferred to be waterboarded.
I give it careful thought and make the decision to have the taps removed. Tony Vazquez had said he could do so easily, though of course whoever is listening in will be aware we discovered the taps and got rid of them.
I don’t want to worry about what we say on our phones, and I can’t control what callers say to us. I’m giving up the chance to set a trap by saying what we want the bad guys to hear, but there’s a good chance we might never spring that trap anyway.
Sam comes in with his initial report on the investors in Barry Price’s fund. I had asked him to find out who they are, in as much detail as he could. He’s not happy with the results.
“About sixty percent of the money is easy to trace,” he says. “They’re big-time investors, pension funds, that kind of thing. The other forty percent is not so easy.”
“Why not?”
“It’s all foreign companies; Cayman Islands, Belize, Barbados, Switzerland…”
“Tax shelter stuff?”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. We’re not talking about big-time companies; I haven’t even heard of any of them. I’m checking them out, but I think this money has been hiding under a rock.”
“Laundering?”
He shrugs. “Could be.”
“So let’s think this through and assume it’s laundering,” I say. “Foreign entities were laundering money through Barry’s company, and he found out about it. He wanted to understand it better, so he needed a financial guy outside his company he could trust.”
Sam nods. “So he called me.”
“Right. And he was afraid he might have legal jeopardy if he revealed it, so he was interested in a criminal attorney.”
“Makes perfect sense.”
“So why was he going to see Susser?”
“Maybe Susser was going to be on the receiving end of some of the money, as payment for the murder he was going to commit.”
“How would Barry know that?”
“Barry was smart.”
“Too bad he’s not around. He could help us solve his own murder.”
“I think we got something here, Andy. Hilda said it and she was right: those foreign companies are going to lead us to the answer.”
“Maybe. Or maybe those companies will just turn out to be rich people hiding their money so they can stay rich.”
Some people believe Homeland Security is an uncoordinated mess. They think that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. This is as a result of anecdotal mistakes, sometimes comical, that are then publicized. Two-year-olds are stopped from flying because they’re on the terrorist watch list, wrong houses are raided … the list goes on.
The truth is the communication among departments is good approaching excellent, and getting better all the time. It’s a vast bureaucracy but not nearly as unwieldy as commonly assumed and capable of swift and coordinated action.
Thus it was that within hours after Luther Ketchell reported to Homeland Security that Susser and his pals had talked to Andy Carpenter about a possible assassination, the information was funneled to the FBI.
Eight hours later, that same information found its way to the office of Special Agent Ricardo Muñoz, at that time on temporary assignment in Concord, New Hampshire. Muñoz had been assigned to investigate the murder of undercover police officer Drew Keller, because the specter of assassination had come up in that case as well.
Muñoz did not consider it likely that the two cases were related. The Augusta, Maine, case was limited to an accounting by a lawyer that the victim mentioned the word “assassination.” It was most likely a botched case of murder for hire.
But there were two possible connections that made it worth following up on. One was that both cases were in small northeastern cities that happened to be state capitals, and the other was that the suspected assassins were themselves murdered.
One of the negative aspects of good communication among government agencies is the overwhelming amount of that communication. Agents are often flooded with information that could conceivably relate to the cases they are working on, and full attention cannot be paid to each situation.
So the information bit that related to the murders in Augusta was relegated to near the bottom of the investigative totem pole. One of Muñoz’s assistants would at some point analyze it and decide if it was actually worth following up on.
But that would not be any time soon.
A trial date is like a car in a passenger door mirror … it’s always closer than you think. Denise’s insistence on a speedy trial complicates matters, but really not that much. The trial could start three years from Wednesday, and I wouldn’t think it was enough time.
The case against her is strong but primarily circumstantial. The Prices were known to have a troubled marriage, one that she wanted out of. Her previous job as a pharmaceutical assistant likely gave her the ability to make the poison, and her being in the house with Barry certainly gave her the opportunity to administer it.
I’m operating on two tracks. One is to prepare Denise’s defense against the testimony that the prosecution’s witnesses will offer. That is an area that I am comfortable with; it’s what I do. I certainly wish I had more ammunition with which to do it, but I can be fairly resourceful in compensating for that.
The other area is at least as important but much less in my control. Barry Price’s business dealings with his foreign investors are proving difficult for Sam and his team to penetrate. That difficulty is frustrating but at the same time tends to confirm my view that there is something to be found. It is something that I believe relates directly to Barry’s murder.
Tonight is like every other night in trial preparation. I’ve spent hours going over the discovery documents and witness reports. It’s at least the fifth time I’ve read each piece of material, which probably represents only half the times I will eventually do so.
I need to know everything cold, so that when something comes up at trial my mind will be like a file cabinet from which I can retrieve all relevant information. I have to avoid what often happened when I would call a girl in high school, which means that I can’t reflect back on a cross-examination and say, “Damn, I wish I had thought to say that.”
Before I go to sleep I decide to go on the computer and do my own research on some of the issues at trial. I’ll have an expert witness on botulism, but my own sources of knowledge can’t hurt.
After I do that unproductively for a while, I check my e-mails and discover something simultaneously shocking yet pleasing. I obviously underestimate my fame and, to be brutally honest, my sex appeal, and this is a perfect example of that.
I’ve received a number of e-mails from women I don’t know but who obviously know me. What they all have in common is a desire to either know me better or, in some cases, marry me. Some even send me pictures. One of Natasha, who describes herself as a Russian farm girl, is particularly fetching.
It’s hard to understand. Natasha is obviously sensitive and caring; she tells me that she is lonely and her only goal is to please a man, in this case, me. You would think a woman like that wouldn’t have to search for love on the Internet. It’s flattering, but also sad, in a way.
“What are you doing?” Laurie asks, having come into the den behind me without my realizing it.
“Reading my fan mail. I’ve got quite the following in Russia.”
“Natasha?” she asks.
“How did you know?”
“I got the same e-mail.”
I give her my most lascivious grin. “Well, that Natasha is really something.”
“You should call her,” she says. “I’m going to bed.”
“Me, too,” I say. It’s an instinctive reaction; I would respond the same way if Laurie said that to me in court, during my closing argument.
“Aren’t you researching the case?”
I nod. “Yes, but not getting anywhere. I’m just gathering information on how to acquire and administer botulinum toxin.”
“I hope you never get charged with a crime,” she says.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they always go into the accused person’s computer and find out he looked up stuff like ‘how to strangle’ and ‘how to make a homemade hand grenade.’ They’d find that you look up some very incriminating stuff.”
“Fortunately they didn’t find anything like that on Denise’s computer,” I say, and then a thought hits me. It’s a rare feeling; these days I get hit by thoughts about as often as Muhammad Ali throws left hooks. I get up to look through the files.
“What are you looking for?” Laurie asks.
Before I answer, I quickly scan the table of contents to confirm that I’m right. “They looked through Denise’s computer because they were trying to find evidence of guilt.”
She nods. “Which they didn’t find.”
“Right, but they never did the same kind of examination of Barry’s computer. They searched his e-mails, probably to see if there were threats from Denise, something like that. But they never searched the history.”
“History of what?”
“Where he went online the last couple of weeks. I’m pretty sure you can do that. Sam once told me that every time you move around online, you leave a footprint.”
“You do.”
“So maybe if we get Barry’s computer, we can find out what led him to Susser in the first place.”
“Where is that computer now?”
“I’m sure the prosecutor has it. We didn’t request it; I just never thought to use it to follow his cyber trail.”
I call Hike and ask him to request the computer; then I call Sam to tell him to then get the computer from Hike and get to work on tracing Barry’s steps.
Sam answers on the first ring, as he always does. I think he keeps his phone Krazy Glued to his ear. But this time he’s whispering, and when I ask why, he says, “Crash is asleep.”
“Sam, he sleeps all day.”
“He’s been through a lot, Andy. I hit him with my car.”
“I remember,” I say and then tell Sam about the computer and what I want him to do. I think he says it’s a great idea, but it’s really hard to hear him.
I hang up and ask Laurie if she thinks I should e-mail Natasha back and let her down gently.
“You do that,” she says. “I’m still going to bed.”
I close my computer. “The hell with Natasha,” I say. “Commie bitch.”
Everyone was in place, well ahead of schedule. In fact, had Carter realized it was going to go so smoothly and quickly, he might likely have delayed the beginning of the process.
The longer the men were in the field, the more chance there was for detection, for something to go wrong. They were well trained and had performed flawlessly to that point, but anything was possible.
Certainly Carter knew that his superior would never change the operation date. It was chosen for maximum psychological effectiveness, and Carter considered it a brilliant stroke. If 9/11 proved anything, and Carter believed it proved a great deal, it was that the American psyche was fragile.
Carter was a micromanager, and it had served him well to this point. He was earning a stunning amount of money for his role in this undertaking, but money was not what it was about for him. This was his chance to change the world for the better, and he was not about to see it achieve less than total success.