The First Billion (29 page)

36

Howell Dodson was not happy to be in Florida at six o’clock on a Friday evening. His daughter Renee’s softball game had begun a half hour ago, and at this very moment he’d hoped to be seated in the bleachers next to his wife, chomping on popcorn, swilling a Coke, and yelling his lungs out for his little girl to belt one over the left field fence. He’d promised her he wouldn’t miss the game, and each day this week before he went to work, she’d reminded him of his obligation.
Friday night at seven-thirty, Daddy. It’s the league playoffs. You have to come.
In fact, he hadn’t just promised to come—he’d sworn it. Cross his heart and hope to die. This was one game the Bureau would not interfere with. And goddamn it, until ten o’clock that morning, he’d had every intention of attending. Until a cold-blooded killer had stormed into Cornerstone Trading in Delray Beach, Florida, and massacred ten innocent people, Howell Dodson would have broken legs to see the game.

“It’s all right, Dad,” Renee had said when he’d called earlier to tell her he would not be able to make the game. “I know you wanted to come. That’s what’s important.”

“Hit a homer for me, will ya, slugger?”

“Sure thing. I’ll try for two even.”

Hanging up the phone, Dodson struggled to come to grips with her newfound maturity. When had his little girl grown up on him? When had she become possessed of such poise and understanding? When had she stopped needing him to cheer for her?

Dodson’s temporary office was located in a small room in the basement of the Miami-Dade Federal Building. There was a metal desk, a clerk’s rolling chair, and a sagging love seat done in transparent plastic slipcovers. The sole artwork came from the U.S. Government Printing Office: a copy of the most recent “Ten Most Wanted” circular.

Standing, Dodson moved to the door, smoothing his blue and white seersucker suit, appraising the knot of his yellow paisley necktie, as if checking that his uniform was presentable for inspection. He looked onto a large, open linoleum floor that might have welcomed the smaller, less prestigious variety of convention. Chiropractors, roofers, or morticians. Desks and chairs were being set up on the double. A man passed carrying a chalkboard. Another labored beneath a half-dozen cases of Coke. Behind him followed a woman with grocery bags full of juice, cookies, and tissues. In an hour or two, the first of the victims’ relatives would arrive for questioning. Pinching the bridge of his nose, Dodson sighed. It would be a long and painful night.

From afar, he spotted Roy DiGenovese storming across the floor, dodging a pushcart loaded with potted plants. His eyes were bright, his olive cheeks flushed with excitement. Since Dodson’s appointment as director of the Cornerstone investigation, DiGenovese had been more gung ho than usual, almost dangerously so.

“What is it, Roy?” called Dodson. “You look about ready to burst.”

“We got Gavallan’s prints from the Pentagon. There’s a ninety percent probability they match the partials we took from the golf club in Luca’s bedroom, as well as the smudges on the closet door. The lab’s still comparing them against the prints found at Cornerstone. Nothing yet.”

“Lucky for us he’s a vet. Always handy to have a suspect’s prints on file. Has the Air Force sent us over a copy of his records yet?”

“Due in twenty-four hours.”

“Good news.” Dodson motioned the younger agent into his office and shut the door behind them. “What about the blood in the house?”

DiGenovese pulled a spiral notepad from his jacket pocket, flipping back a couple of pages. “Gavallan’s O-positive. The stuff on the floor is AB-negative.”

“How recent?”

“Very. The samples were hardly dry when they collected it. Three hours tops.”

“And Luca’s blood type?”

“O-positive, too.”

“Got sex?”

“Still checking. Preliminary DNA’s due by nine.”

“What about the acetate test on the murder weapon?”

As Lieutenant Amoro of the Delray Beach P.D. had been so kind to point out, it was nearly impossible to completely erase a weapon’s serial number. While the numbers could be filed down so that the human eye could not see them, an overnight’s bath in a sodium acetate wash often brought out the latent stamping sufficiently to be identified by an infrared scan.

“Started an hour ago,” said DiGenovese. “But I got something better.” He was bouncing on his toes, the muscles in his jaw flexing. Yes sir, young Roy was worked up over something.

“Better? Working your magic again, Agent DiGenovese?”

“J45198890,” said DiGenovese, reading from his notebook.

“What’s that? My tax ID number? The IRS looking for me again?”

“No sir. It’s the serial number of Gavallan’s Glock.”

“The wh—” The words plummeted from Dodson’s mouth, a sudden and debilitating disorientation coming over him. “Mr. Gavallan owns a Glock?”

“A Glock 17; a nine millimeter with an extrawide stock to hold seventeen rounds.”

Circling the desk, Dodson collapsed in his clerk’s chair. “Would I be correct in guessing that’s the same model and type of weapon we’ve got in the lab right now?”

“You would be correct indeed, sir.”

Dodson smiled weakly. He knew he was being made fun of, but he didn’t feel like sharing in the humor. DiGenovese’s revelation didn’t just startle him, it forced him to see the case in an entirely new light, to reblock his compass and find a new true north.

Cornerstone had all the hallmarks of a professional job: the marksmanship, the blind entry and exit (meaning no witnesses saw anyone enter or leave the building at the time of the shooting), the speed with which the job was done. The whole thing was too neat. The powder tests on Luca’s hand had come back inconclusive. There was residue on his fingers, but not enough for him to have fired the weapon ten times. No one was taking it for a suicide rampage, a day trader run amok. It was bigger than that, a premeditated homicide to be sure.

But Gavallan?

Simply put, the man did not fit the profile of a professional killer. The very idea that he possessed the training, the sangfroid, to enter a building and methodically shoot ten innocent people was absurd. A panorama of the bloodshed inside Cornerstone played out in Dodson’s mind, and he shuddered. Only a monster could commit that kind of atrocity.

Yet there was Gavallan at the scene of the crime not forty-eight hours after he’d proclaimed himself interested in shutting up the Private Eye-PO forever. And there he was again at Ray Luca’s house, leaving behind another man or woman’s blood. And now, it turned out he owned a gun identical to that used in the crime.

“Sir, I don’t make it my business to try to piece together everything that happened,” said DiGenovese, sliding forward on his seat, eyes narrowing. “All I know is that everywhere we look we find Gavallan hiding. He’s working in close association with an oligarch, a guy he’s gotta know is a gangster. It’s a matter of professional life or death if the Mercury deal goes through. I mean, come on, do you think he paid Jason Vann a hundred grand to track down the Private Eye-PO just to talk to him? No sir. Gavallan shelled out that kind of dough because he wanted Luca’s mouth closed. And pronto. He wanted the Private Eye-PO dead. Even if he didn’t pull the trigger himself, he made it happen. And now he’s running.”

At some point in his short speech, DiGenovese’s tone had shifted from exposition to accusation . . . and it was Howell Dodson he was accusing.

“That he is, Roy. Full points on that one. And don’t you worry, we’re going to find him. The question remains whether he’s running because he’s innocent or because he’s guilty.”

Dodson had known plenty of innocent men and women who’d refused to cooperate with the authorities for one reason or another. Weak nerves, ingrained distrust of authority, fear of the police, the advice of their friends . . . the list went on and on. Of course, there was a difference between merely being tight-lipped and going on the lam. The former was not a reliable indicator of guilt. The latter was.

“Roy, I want you on a plane to San Francisco tonight. First thing in the morning, I want you inside Gavallan’s house looking for that gun. Don’t you worry about breaking and entering—I’ll get you a warrant in plenty of time. If you can’t get a commercial flight, we’ll fire up one of the Bureau’s Lears for you. This is key, Roy. You search that house from top to bottom, ya hear? If that gun is there, you find it. Now, shoo! Get on out of here.”

After DiGenovese had left, Dodson slid the phone nearer and stared at the Post-it bearing two ten-digit phone numbers that lay next to it. Plucking free the paper, he dialed first one, then the other number. Each time a recorded message informed him the desired subscriber could not be reached. Typical, thought Dodson, for a banker to carry two numbers and answer neither.

Fishing a rubber band out of a side drawer, Dodson began twirling it around his fingers. Forward and back. Forward and back. He asked himself where he would run if he were Gavallan. Home to San Francisco? New York? Overseas? The man had offices in Chicago, London, and Hong Kong, or had he gone to ground in Florida instead? Dodson had the firm impression Gavallan was on the move, that he had an agenda of his own that called for more than eluding the authorities. Whatever it was, Dodson had to give Gavallan one thing: He was a slippery fish.

As of five that afternoon, Dodson and his men had the state of Florida sewn up tight. Partnering with the Florida State Bureau of Investigation, the Coast Guard, municipal police departments, and county sheriffs, Dodson had contacted every airport, harbor, marina, bus station, and train terminal in the state. Faxes were sent to hotels up and down the coast. When agents could not visit a site themselves, a description of the suspect was faxed and a phone call made to get across the urgency of the request.

The phone rang and Dodson answered. “Well, well, Mr. Chupik,” he said, recognizing the cocksure voice. Lyle Chupik was the three-hundred-pound, ponytailed, Yoo-Hoo–swilling techie who ran the FBI’s computer surveillance lab. “What a surprise.”

“I got a track on one of those phone numbers you gave me this afternoon,” said Chupik. “A call was placed at two-thirty to a Coastal Aviation in Fort Lauderdale.”

“I see you’re atoning for your sins.”

“If that’s atoning, what I’m about to give you ought to send me straight to heaven, and I mean directly to St. Peter. The front of the line.”

“Do tell.”

“The number we got a nibble on didn’t belong to Gavallan.”

“It didn’t?” Dodson examined the phone numbers. Both had a 415 area code, and the prefixes that followed them were similar. He’d assumed they belonged to Gavallan. “Go on.”

“The number belongs to another one of our Daisy taps. A Ms. Catherine Elizabeth Magnus. Ring a bell?”

“I confess I hear a wee tinkling,” said Dodson, as a deadly voice inside intoned,
Enter the third murderer
.

“Anyway, that number’s connected to a pretty decent phone,” Chupik continued. “Kind of a hot rod. It’s a WAP device—a wireless assisted protocol. Third-generation equipment. It can send and receive E-mail, as well as download pages from the web. I had the NSA send over the latest Daisy downloads attributed to that phone number. Usually, they sift it for the keywords we give them before sending it over, but I got it raw. This is what I found. At two thirty-two Eastern Standard Time, the number logged onto a cash transfer site on the Net.
Quickpay.com
. At two thirty-five, the user ordered sixty-five thousand dollars transferred from an account at the Bank of America in San Francisco to an account at Florida Commerce Bank. The beneficiary was Coastal Aviation.”

“And the sender?”

“Drumroll, please. . . . Mr. John J. Gavallan.”

Dodson’s stomach tumbled. “Bless your soul, Mr. Chupik. I’ll mention your name to St. Peter tonight in my prayers.”

“Actually, I’d prefer if you’d mention it to my supervisor. I’m kind of sick of being a GS-15. Time I moved up a notch. You wouldn’t want to lose me to the private sector.”

“Rather to Satan himself.”

It took another hour for Dodson to put the rest of the pieces together.

While his assistants confirmed that Catherine Magnus had indeed arrived in West Palm Beach that morning—via an American Airlines red-eye, making stops in Las Vegas and Chicago—Dodson contacted Coastal Aviation. They were quick to report that they had, in fact, set up a private charter that afternoon, but neither the names Gavallan nor Magnus appeared on their manifest. The plane in question, a Gulfstream III, was chartered by an elderly man and his nurse. The flight plan called for a leg to Teterboro, New Jersey, then a transcontinental leg to Los Angeles.

“I’m sorry if my knowledge of business jets isn’t as up to date as it should be,” Dodson had said politely to the desk man at Coastal Aviation. “What is the range of a Gulfstream III?”

“About four thousand miles. But this one’s got an extra fuel tank. It can go six thousand easy.”

“Pray tell, did the elderly gentleman in question—”

“His name’s Dodson, just like you.”

Dodson bit back an expletive. He did not abide smart alecks. “Did
Mr. Dodson
request that the plane be fully fueled?”

“Sure did. Said he was picking up his son in Jersey and didn’t want to hang around very long. Funny thing is, he’s already half an hour overdue.”

“He is?”

“Plane took off at three-fifteen sharp, should have landed at seven latest. This Dodson fella’s not a relative of yours, is he?”

“No,” said the real Mr. Dodson. “You can rest assured he is not.”

The map was ancient, circa 1989, a moth-riven relic five feet wide and four feet tall dug up from a closet in the research library on the third floor. Politically, it was obsolete. Myanmar was called Burma. Germany was still two countries. And the Soviet Union was a single rose-colored mass spanning eleven time zones. But Howell Dodson couldn’t care less about what belonged to whom, whether Ingushetia was shown as independent or if the Panama Canal was denoted as American territory. All that mattered to his fevered brain was that the map be geographically accurate, and it was.