Heart of a Killer (13 page)

“How do you figure?”

“You’re going to need access to Sheryl; she’s the only one that can answer questions about Charlie. She won’t talk to you without me there; she trusts me and knows I’m on her side. She doesn’t see you as her best buddy; you put her where she is.”

“She put herself there,” Novack said.

“True. But I’m crucial to you and her getting along. And there’s a more important factor.”

“Keep talking.”

“The only way to do this in time, at least from her point of view, is to use whatever we can come up with in her parole hearing. I’ve got to prepare for that hearing, so I must know what’s going on as soon as you do. You not including me is a deal breaker.”

I was pushing it, but I had nothing to lose. If I didn’t have immediate access to everything he came up with, he did me no good.

He laughed. “Why would I care if you break the deal? You think I have nothing else to do?”

“I think this thing has been bugging you for six years, and you want to get to the bottom of it. So I think you’ve got plenty to do, but this is at the top of your list, and you want to cross it off.”

He thought about it for a few seconds, and then said, “When can I talk to her?”

“When you tell me why you want to.”

He took me through his trying to find William Beverly by going to what was supposed to be his home in King of Prussia, and his listed place of employment. He had done some further checking, and still could not find anyone who had been in physical contact with Beverly, or had any recollection of him. Yet his life was chronicled in cyberspace in fairly significant detail; there was far more evidence of him than just an ID in Charlie Harrison’s wallet.

“Weird,” I said.

“Wow … that could be just the insight we need,” he said. Then, “And it gets weirder. I’ve been checking into Beverly’s brother, James. He died two weeks before Charlie Harrison.”

“Murdered?” I asked.

Novack shrugged. “Depends on your definition. He was admitted into a hospital in Camden for blood clots. They put him on some medication, and within ten minutes he was dead.”

“Did the drugs cause the death?” I asked.

“Doesn’t seem like it,” he said.

“So what did he die of?”

“Nothing. As far as I can tell he didn’t die at all, because he was never in that hospital. At least nobody there remembers him, and they swear that’s the kind of event that they would never forget. But he’s in their computer; he’s in a bunch of computers, just like his brother William. But nobody remembers either of them. Nobody.”

“Any theories?” I asked.

“Not yet. How about you, counselor?”

“James Beverly supposedly died at about the time Charlie quit his job, and he quit his job because he believed he was coming into a bunch of money. It seems logical to infer that the two things are connected.”

“Unless they’re not,” he said.

“Look, I’ve never done this kind of stuff, and I’m certainly not going to tell you your business. But the timing here is such that we’re not going to be able to cross the ‘t’s you usually cross, or dot the ‘i’s you usually dot. We’re going to have to trust our gut instincts.”

He seemed amused. “You have a gut instinct?”

“A few more of these pancakes and I’ll have a gut. The instinct will follow.”

Novack asked me what I had found out about Charlie Harrison’s personal papers, and I related what Sheryl had told me. He already had learned about the robbery, and was as suspicious about it as I was.

“What about the safe-deposit box?”

“They had one together,” I said. “But Sheryl never used it; she doesn’t even think she had a key. I could use my power of attorney to get into it.”

He nodded his satisfaction with that. “Good. Let’s do that tomorrow.”

We talked some more, and Novack said that if he could gather more information, he could go off vacation mode and officially open the case, which would bring the resources of the department to bear on it. Then we discussed the public relations side of things.

“Your publicity campaign took a hit,” he said.

He was referring to the fact that we were no longer page-one news. An airline had crashed near Charlotte, North Carolina, killing fifty-nine people. The authorities were claiming to have no idea what caused the crash, but conspiracy theorists were already calling it an act of terrorism, and no one was denying it with any vehemence.

People are always interested in plane crashes, and when there is even a hint that it might not have been an accident, it crowds everything else out of the news until that possibility is credibly discounted.

“You think it was terrorism?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Beats the shit out of me. We’ll know soon enough what the government thinks.”

“You think they’ll tell the truth?”

“It’s not what they say, lawyer, it’s what they do. And what’s really important is who does it.”

“What do you mean?”

“If the FBI takes the lead, it means they think it was terrorism. And then your story goes to page forty.”

He was right, of course. Sheryl’s was a fascinating human interest story, but humans are far more interested in something that could threaten them personally, and since most people get on airplanes at least once in a while, the plane in Charlotte was a huge news event.

We made plans for Novack to talk to Sheryl at the prison the next morning, and were out of Paula’s by three-thirty. We both had a lot to do, and if I sat there and waited until I could digest the pancakes, it would be way too late.

The NTSB was already taking an uncustomary backseat on Flight 3278. Whenever there was an aviation accident, or near accident, the National Transportation Safety Board completely and immediately took over the investigation. They were famously and sometimes annoyingly painstaking and thorough.

The drill was replayed over and over. After a serious incident with multiple fatalities, with the public clamoring for an explanation, an NTSB official would hold a press conference and make it crystal clear that the answer was a very long ways off, and that no speculation would be forthcoming.

But this case was different. While it was unclear exactly how the ability to control the aircraft was taken away from Captain Whitaker, nobody in a position to know was under the illusion that it was an accident. The plane was intentionally taken down, which meant the FBI would be the preeminent agency.

Within twenty minutes of Flight 3278 hitting the ground, Special Agent Mike Janssen was in the air, heading for Charlotte. Working out of the Chicago office, Janssen had a number of attributes to make him the logical choice to head up the investigation, besides being tough, smart, and relentless.

Janssen had successfully investigated the crash two years earlier of a Brazilian jet near São Paulo. The FBI traditionally offers its superior resources to allies in particularly difficult cases, especially in situations like that one, where two Americans were among the dead.

Terrorism was suspected in the Brazilian crash, and Janssen had brought the investigation to a successful conclusion, determining that lax security measures had allowed a passenger to bring an explosive on board. The deranged individual, not representing any terrorist organization or cause, but merely wanting to commit a spectacular suicide, had detonated the device and brought the plane down.

Another key quality that Janssen possessed was an antipathy for the press, coupled with an ability to effectively control it. Actually, he pretty much had a disdain for all people, including those he worked for. Every time there were politically motivated executive changes at the Bureau, he likened it to the daily event at Buckingham Palace, but referring to the personnel shuffles as the “changing of the assholes.”

Janssen had handled quite a few high-profile cases in his career, and his unwillingness to share things with the media enabled him to be successful in maintaining a wall of secrecy when the situation required it.

And this situation certainly required it.

Janssen had the ability, or the curse depending on one’s perspective, to singularly focus on an issue, to the exclusion of everything else. It was why his colleagues nicknamed him “Laser,” and why he did not have to call his wife and tell her he was heading for Charlotte. Janssen wasn’t married; he had tried it once and his wife simply could not deal with his devotion to his job.

It was not that he worked twenty-four hours a day on a case, though he came close. It was more that the case of the moment was all he thought about, ever. Which left very little time to think of his wife, or friends, or anything else.

By the time he reached the scene, he had digested all available information, such as there was. The phone call from “Tammy” was traced to a home in Dubuque, Iowa, in which Kyle and Stacy Danforth lived with their five-year-old daughter, Tammy. Federal agents descended on the house, at which point they were told by the petrified Stacy that little Tammy was at preschool.

A trip to the preschool confirmed that Tammy Danforth had been finger-painting at the time the plane went down. It was an embarrassing moment for the agents and Bureau, though less so since it had not been made public.

Though it could not be proved at that point, there was no doubt in Janssen’s mind that the voice of Tammy was filtered through a voice synthesizer. It was determined to be the voice quality of a child less than five years old, and no person of that age would be capable of conducting such a conversation, even when prompted.

The reason that the perpetrator would have felt it necessary to use that voice was, like everything else at that point, completely unclear. Perhaps it was felt that it would seem even more bewildering and terrifying, and strike more panic into people that heard it. Or perhaps it was simply an amusement for the killer, or a sign of some personality defect or derangement that would become more clear later, and might even lead to the killer’s downfall.

Certainly, the voice synthesizer could have been programmed to sound like any kind of voice, and it would have masked the real voice just as completely.

The more important questions, of course, were how the plane was taken down and why. The NTSB investigators were working on the first part of that, and it was obvious to them from the transcript of the incident itself, especially Captain Whitaker’s description of what he was facing on board, that it was a computer issue.

The onboard computers had taken over from Whitaker, and simply did not let him regain control. It’s as if he had put it on automatic pilot, and that automatic pilot subsequently refused to relinquish command. Of course, in this case the automatic pilot had decided to become a mass murderer. It would be up to the scientists to discover how Tammy had managed the hacking feat, and they were counting on the recovered black boxes to help them.

The “why” was even more bewildering. Tammy had demanded money, which was the only thing about the case that could be considered standard procedure. But the truth was that she had set up the incident so that there could never have been enough time for money to be paid, even in the unlikely event that an immediate decision was made to do so.

To Janssen it was as if the perpetrator conducted the whole operation as a way to demonstrate his or her power. Since money was the expressed purpose, it seemed logical that money was the ultimate goal. But if a planeload of people was not considered enough of a prize to be selling, something bigger was coming down the road.

Which was why each of the many times Janssen listened to the recording, a chill ran through him at Tammy’s last line of warning:

“Next time you better listen to me.”

Novack should not have had the pancakes. Not just because it felt like he had eaten two manhole covers, but more because Cindy was making an anniversary dinner for them that night. She was making chicken parmigiana, his absolute all-time favorite, and he was going to be called upon to eat a prodigious amount.

They celebrated the date of their divorce, rather than that of their marriage, since it was because of the divorce that they seemed able to live happily ever after. Novack always spent the entire anniversary night at her house, unless he started driving Cindy crazy, in which case she had the right to throw him out, as per the rules they had long been following.

Of course, the amendment to that anniversary rule was that before she could throw him out, they would make love. That was a rule they were both inclined to enforce.

Another rule that was in place on anniversary nights was that Novack not talk business. Cindy just wanted a break from hearing about graphic crime scenes, or families decimated by drugs. The problem was that on some nights, she could tell that Novack couldn’t take his mind off those things, even if he obediently prevented the thoughts from working their way into the conversations.

This was one of those nights.

“You thinking about Sheryl Harrison?” she asked.

“During our anniversary dinner? Are you nuts? No chance. Sheryl who?”

“You’re full of shit, Novack.”

He shrugged. “What else is new?”

“Tell me what’s going on,” she said. “This is one that I’m interested in.”

“Why?”

“I want her to be able to save her daughter’s life. And it’s a weight I want lifted off your shoulders.”

“My shoulders are fine. It’s a case, Cind. That’s all.”

“Did I mention that you were full of shit?” she asked. “When cases bother you, you get sarcastic and annoying. I can tell how much they bother you by how sarcastic and annoying you get, and by how long you get that way. I have a ten-point scale I rank it on.”

He smiled despite himself. “And when I arrested Sheryl Harrison?”

“Ten point five,” she said. “Off the charts.”

So he told her the story, and she came to the same conclusion as Jamie Wagner, that it had to be about money. “Money that Charlie didn’t get because he was killed.”

“Or maybe he got it and they took it from him,” he said.

“I doubt it,” she said. “You probably would have found some record of it somewhere. And you said his boss told you the party was the night before, and he referred to it as money Charlie was going to get. Right?”