Authors: James Patterson
This place was no ordinary savings and loan, starting with the fact that we had to be buzzed in from the street. The lobby had a do-not-touch kind of feel to it — not a pamphlet or a deposit slip in sight. From the reception desk, we were directed up to a row of glass-walled offices on the mezzanine. A woman inside one of them put down her phone and turned to look at us as we started up the stairs. page 59
Sampson smiled and waved at her. "Feels like a damn James Bond movie," he said through his teeth. "Come in, Dr. Cross. We've been expecting you."
The branch manager, Christine Currie, was indeed expecting us. Her brief smile and handshake were about as warm as yesterday's oatmeal.
"This is all a bit irregular for us," she said. Her accent was stuffy and British, and more upper-crust than Nicholson's. "I do hope it can be done quietly? Can it be, Detectives?"
"Of course," I told her. I think we both wanted the same thing — for Sampson and me to be back on the street as soon as possible.
Once Ms. Currie had satisfied herself with our paperwork and compared Nicholson's signature in half a dozen places, she led us out to an elevator at the back of the mezzanine. We got on and started down, a very rapid descent.
"You guys do free checking?" Sampson asked. I just stared straight ahead, didn't say a word. Stuffy environments sometimes set John off. Stuffy people too. But most of all, bad people, criminals, and anybody who aids and abets.
We came out into a small anteroom. There was an armed guard by the only other door, and a suit-and-tie employee at an oversize desk. Ms. Currie logged us in herself, then took us straight through to the safe-deposit room.
Nicholson's box, number 1665, was one of the larger ones at the back.
After we'd both keyed the flap door, Ms. Currie pulled out a long rectangular drawer, then carried it to one of the viewing rooms off an adjacent hallway.
"I'll just be outside, whenever you're ready," she said in a way that sounded a lot like
Don't take too long with
this
.
We didn't. Inside the box, we found three dozen disks, each one in its own plastic sleeve and dated by hand in black marker. There were also two leather binders filled with handwritten pages of notes, lists, addresses, and ledgers.
A few minutes later, we left with all of it in our briefcases.
"God bless Tony Nicholson," I said to the unflappable Ms. Currie.
I had to keep reminding myself that every one of these people was — at least technically — a murder suspect. We set up a log, using the date stamps embedded on each recording. For every clip, we wrote down the name of the clients we recognized and flagged the ones we didn't. I also made a note of where each "scene" took place at the club.
My primary interest was the apartment over the carriage barn, which I'd come to think of as a kind of ground zero for this whole nasty murder puzzle.
And that's where we started to pick up some legitimate momentum. Right around the time I thought my eyes were going to burn out of my head, I started to notice an interesting pattern in the tapes.
"John, let me see what you've got so far. I want to check something." All of our notes were handwritten at this point, so I laid the pages out side by side and started scanning.
"Here . . . here . . . here . . ."
Every time I saw someone had used the apartment, I circled the date in red pen, ticking off entries as I went. Then I went back over everything I'd circled.
"See this? They were using the studio in the back pretty regularly for a while, and then, about six months ago, it just stops cold. No more parties back there."
"So what happened six months ago?" Sampson asked. The question was more rhetorical than anything, since page 60
we both knew the answer.
That's when the killing started.
In which case — where were the rest of Nicholson's disks?
It looked like she had a whole mobile-office thing going on, with her laptop and a little printer and files spread out on the counter in the back. The laptop was open to Web MD, and she was busily taking notes when I came in.
"Who ordered the panang curry and pad thai?" I called from the doorway.
"That would be me," Bree said.
She picked her way past all the equipment and gave me a kiss hello.
"How's our girl been doing?" I asked.
"Still fighting. She's amazing; she really is."
Nana looked a little more peaceful, maybe, but otherwise seemed about the same. Dr. Englefield had already warned us not to get too invested in the minutiae. You could drive yourself crazy scrutinizing every little tic and twitch, when the important thing was to keep showing up and never lose hope. While I unpacked the food, Bree caught me up on the day. Englefield wanted to keep Nana on beta blockers for the time being. Her heart was still weak, but it was steady, for what that was worth. And they were going to take the dialysis down to three times a day.
"There's a new resident, Dr. Abingdon, you should talk to about that," Bree said. "I've got her number right here."
I traded a plate of food and a bottle of water for it. "You're doing too much," I told Bree.
"This is the closest thing I've ever had to a real family," she said. "You know that, don't you?" I did. Bree's mother died when she was five, and her father never expressed much interest in his children after that. She'd been raised by a series of cousins more than anything, and when she left home at seventeen, she never looked back.
"All the same," I told her, "you can't take off from work indefinitely."
"Sweetie, listen to me. I hate that this is happening. There's nothing good about it. But as long as this is the deal, then I am right where I want to be. End of story, okay? I'm fine with it." She twirled up a forkful of rice noodles and popped them into her mouth, with a grin I hadn't seen in a while.
"Besides, what are they going to do at work, replace me? I'm too good for that." I couldn't argue there.
Honestly, I'm not sure I could have done everything Bree was doing. Maybe I'm not that generous. But I do know that she made me feel lucky, and incredibly grateful. There was never going to be enough I could do to thank her for this, but Bree didn't seem to want any payback.
We spent the rest of the evening with Nana, reading out loud from
Another Country,
an old favorite of hers. Then, around ten o'clock, we kissed her good night, and for the first time since this had happened, I went home to sleep in my own bed. Right next to Bree, where I belonged.
Apparently, the Bureau had already secured an administrative subpoena to get a look at Tony Nicholson's overseas bank records. They'd gotten a whole list of deposits, originating accounts, and names attached to those accounts, through something called the Swift program.
Swift stood for the Society of Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. It's a global cooperative based in Belgium that tracks something on the order of six trillion transactions every day. The database doesn't include routine banking — they don't necessarily know when I go to the ATM — but just about everything else is in there. The program was under all kinds of legal scrutiny, since it had come out that the US government was using it to track terror cells, post 9/11. Whatever the obstacles, though, someone at the Bureau had gotten around them.
"If this were my case, which it isn't, I'd follow the numbers," Mahoney said, still peppering me with information. "I would start with the biggest depositors into Nicholson's account and work my way down from there. I don't know how much time you'll have, though, Alex. This thing is unbelievably hot. Something is not right here, in a big way."
"Isn't the Bureau already on it? They have to be, right?"
It was the first question I'd asked in five minutes of nonstop talk. Ned was as manic as I'd ever seen him, which is saying a lot, since he's usually a buzz saw on Red Bull.
"Honestly, I don't know," he said with a shrug. He shoved his hands into his pockets, and we started another lap around the sunken garden.
"Something's sure up, Alex. Here's an example. I don't understand it, but the whole case has been moved out to the Charlottesville Resident Agency, which is a satellite. They'll work with Richmond, I guess."
"Moved? That doesn't make any sense. Why would they do that?"
I knew from past experience that the Bureau didn't swap cases around midstream on a whim. It almost never happened. They might cobble a task force between offices to cover a wider area, but nothing like this.
"Word came down from the deputy director's office yesterday — and they transferred the files
overnight
. I don't know who the new SAC is, or if there even is one. Nobody'll talk to me about this case. As far as they're all concerned, I'm just a guy running a lot of field agents. I shouldn't even be on this anymore. I definitely shouldn't be
here
."
"Maybe they're trying to tell you something," I said, but he ignored the joke. It was pretty lame, anyway. I just wanted to calm Ned down a little if I could. I wanted him to speak slowly enough that I could follow. He stopped by the big Rodin in the garden, took my hand, and shook it in an oddly formal way. "I've got to go," he said.
"Mahoney, you're freaking me out a little here —"
"See what you can get done. I'll find out what I can, but don't depend on the Bureau in the meantime.
For
anything.
Do you understand?"
"No, Ned, I don't. What about this bank list you were just talking about?" He was already walking away, up the stone stairs toward Jefferson Drive.
"Don't know what you mean," he said over his shoulder, but he was patting his coat pocket when he said it. I waited for him to leave, then checked my pocket. There, along with my keys, was a black-and-silver thumb drive.
though he had plenty of that too.
Yarrow was a billionaire before he was fifty, riding the dot-com wave in the nineties and then getting out. He'd turned part of his fortune into a Bill Gates–style foundation, run by his wife, focused on children's health initiatives in the United States, Africa, and East Asia. Then he leveraged all that good will, and another big pile of money, into a Senate campaign that no one took too seriously — until he won. Now Yarrow was in his second term, and it was an open secret in Washington that he'd already formed an off-the-books exploratory committee, page 62
with his eye on the next presidential election.
So yes, plenty to lose — but he wouldn't be the first Washington politician to blow it all on hubris, would he? With a little calling around, I found out that Yarrow had a working lunch in his office that day, followed by a one thirty TVA caucus meeting, both in the Russell Senate Office Building. That would put him in the southwest lobby just before one thirty.
And that's when and where I went after him.
At one twenty-five, he came off the elevator with a retinue of power-suited aides, all of them talking at once. Yarrow himself was on the phone.
I stepped into his line of sight with my badge out. "Excuse me, Senator. I was hoping for a minute of your time."
The one woman in the group of aides, strikingly blond, attractive, late twenties, stepped between us. "Can I help you, Officer?"
"It's Detective," I told her, but kept my eyes on Yarrow, who had at least put a hand over his cell. "Just a few questions for Senator Yarrow. I'm investigating a large credit card fraud case in Virginia. Someone may have been using one of the senator's cards — at a social club out in Culpeper?" Yarrow was very good. He didn't even flinch when I referred to the club at Blacksmith Farms.
"Well, as long as it's quick," he said, just reluctantly enough. "Grace, tell Senator Morehouse not to start without me. You all can go ahead. I'm fine with the detective. I'll be right along. It's okay, Grace." A few seconds later, the senator and I were alone, as much as you could be in a place like this. For all I knew, the three-story coffered dome over our heads carried sound everywhere and anywhere.
"So, which credit card are we talking about?" he asked, with a perfectly straight face. I kept my voice low. "Senator, I'd like to ask you about the half-million-dollar transfers you've made to a certain overseas account in the past six months. Would you rather talk about this somewhere else?"
"You know what?" he said, as brightly as if he were being interviewed by Matt Lauer on the
Today
show. "I just remembered a file I need for this meeting, and I already sent my aides on. Would you mind walking with me?"