Faces of the Gone: A Mystery (28 page)

of his belt.
“So, heck of a week, huh?” he said casually.
“Sure was.”
“Your articles have been excellent. You’re really some writer.” “Thank you.”
“You put certain things together faster than my detectives.

I smiled but didn’t laugh. I usually reserve laughing for things that are, you know, funny. I recognized this as the portion of the conversation where he was trying to establish friendly relations with me. But I wanted to get on to the productive part of the conversation. We each possessed information of indeterminate value to the other. Neither of us would give it up willingly without getting something in return. There would be some bluffing, some casual-sounding questions that weren’t actually so casual, some false leads tossed out there just for fun. I was curious who was going to mention the name Irving Wallace first.

“So, I’ve always wondered this,” Meyers continued. “When you work on a story like that, do you work alone or are you part of a team?”

“If it’s an important story, we usually have several reporters on it.”
“But the person whose name is at the top. They’re the one who knows the most? Or no.”
“The person with the lead byline is the one who has contributed the most reporting. But that can change from day to day, article to article.”
“I see,” Meyers said. “But when you have new ideas, you share them with your fellow reporters?”
“It depends whether you need another reporter’s help in fleshing it out. Sometimes you share, sometimes you don’t.”
“Which was it this time?”
“A bit of both,” I said.
“I see,” he said, again. And I was, quite frankly, a little perplexed by his questions. Had he really brought me here to talk about newspaper politics?
Meyers’s hand was resting on his shoulder holster, his fingers absentmindedly tracing the butt of his gun. Really, why was the gun even necessary? This had to be the most secure building in Newark. Was he worried the janitors were plotting against him?
For that matter, when was the last time he’d used the thing? It made me almost sad for him: the paperwork warrior, still hauling around his piece like he was on the front lines.
“So where has your investigation led you with the Ludlow Street murders?” he asked.
I stared at him, unable to hide my incredulity any longer. “I thought that’s why I was here.”
“Oh?” he said, putting down his legs and sitting up suddenly, like I’d said something to unsettle him.
“Yeah, you called this meeting, right? Or I should say Pete, or Monty, or whatever his name is—he called this meeting. He said you guys had a great story to give me?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, nodding unconvincingly, purposely not looking at me.
“So . . .” I began, dragging out the word to indicate it was his turn to talk.
“Well, yes. Your articles have certainly caught our attention,” he said. “And I said to Agent Sampson that you seemed like the kind of person we could trust. I mean, a good reporter is someone you can trust, right?”
“Absolutely,” I said, then pointed to his gun. “You carry that thing. The only thing I come armed with is my credibility.”
“Absolutely, absolutely,” Meyers said. “Tell me, and you can trust me, how did you deduce that this brand of heroin—what is it called, ‘The Stuff’?—how did you figure out that was the connection between all the dealers? It always fascinates me to understand the thought processes a good investigator goes through.”
“Well, Randy, it wasn’t really much of a deduction,” I said, with what I hoped was a patronizing tone. “I’m not an investigator, of course. I’m a newspaper reporter. Which means I’m always trying to tell a story. And to tell a story, you have to keep asking questions until things make sense to you.”
“Of course, of course,” he said. “And then today’s story, that was quite something, you bumping into this young man just hours before he was killed.”
“Yeah, it was something, all right,” I said.
“And he told you how he got recruited in prison?”
“He did,” I said, feeling my annoyance level rise.
“And he had that packet with those photos?”
I nodded.
“Remarkable,” he said.
“Sure was.”
“Did he tell you anything else before he died?”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Any theories about who he was working for? Any ideas about who this ‘Director’ guy is?”
“He had theories and I had theories, yeah.”
“Really? What were they?”
Finally, exasperated, I threw my arms in the air.
“Look, Randy, what game are we playing here? Twenty questions for the
Eagle-Examiner
reporter? Because where I come from, information goes both ways. You show me yours, I show you mine. That kind of thing. If you just hauled me in here to quiz me because your own investigation has stalled, I got better things to do than talk to you.”
“Hold on there, soldier,” Meyers said, holding his hands out like he was a crossing guard.
“I’m not a soldier, and I’m certainly not
your
soldier,” I shot back. “We can play games with the sourcing and that crap later. Right now, I’m leaving if you don’t answer a very simple question for me: do you know who the Director is or not?”
I stood up to let him know I was serious, putting my fists on his desk.
And that’s when I saw it.
It was just sitting there in plain sight, mixed in with some knickknacks. It was a stamp perched atop an ink pad. You couldn’t see the bottom of it, which would have appeared backward anyway. But on the side of the stamp was a sample of its impression.
It was that unmistakable eagle-clutching-syringe design with the scripted lettering underneath.
It was The Stuff’s logo.
And there was only one person who could be in possession of that one-of-a-kind stamp—the man who had it imprinted on dime bags by the thousand, the man who stamped it at the top of those memos, the man who killed to protect its reputation for unmatched purity.
The Director.

looked across the desk with new eyes. It was the man from Red’s sketch, all right, with his thick neck, fleshy cheeks, and receding hairline. How had I not seen it when I first entered the room?

Because I had fallen into the mistake of believing Irving Wallace, and only Irving Wallace, was my bad guy. Tina had tried to tell me all the ways Wallace didn’t fit, but I wouldn’t listen. Hell, Tommy was telling me Wallace was driving a tancolored vehicle, and I convinced myself it was really white.

Because I
knew
it was a fed.
I just had the wrong fed.
Now that I had the right fed—the one sitting in front of

me—I realized I had to keep my face straight and talk my way out of the room as gently as I could. I couldn’t let on I knew who he really was.

“Let’s slow down a bit here,” the Director said. “We can keep things cordial.”
“Absolutely,” I said, trying to keep my voice from quavering. “And I’m sorry. Like you said, it’s been a hectic week. You may have heard I lost my home.”
“I did hear that. I’m very sorry about that.”
“I lost my cat, too,” I said. “I loved that cat. His name was Deadline.”
The cat card. I was really playing the cat card again. Anything to cover my retreat.
“Awful, just awful,” the Director said. “I’d like to assure you this agency is doing everything it possibly can to bring the person or persons responsible to justice.”
“Then let’s start at the beginning,” I said. “You know where I’ve been coming from. I’ve put most of what I know in the newspaper. Why don’t you walk me through your investigation a little bit? What led you to the conclusion José de Jesús Encarcerón is behind all this?”
The Director started talking but I was beyond listening. My brain was trained to seek narratives. And now that the Director’s once-scattered story was falling into place, it was hard to slow the thoughts streaking through my head. All those questions suddenly had found answers.
Where did 100 percent pure heroin come from? Newark airport. Who was responsible for making seizures at Newark airport? The National Drug Bureau. Who would have unfettered access to the impounded seizures without worrying about chain of custody or being accountable to a higher authority? Field Director Randall N. Meyers.
Who could have more easily skated under, over, and around the detection of all levels of law enforcement? It wouldn’t be some lab guy. It would be someone deeply embedded in the agency that was . . . what was the speech Monty/Pete had given me? I couldn’t quite summon the language. But it had something to do with being the guys in charge.
Just look at the way the Director had hopped on the Ludlow Street investigations, claiming jurisdiction before the bodies were even stiff. The overburdened Newark cops were all too happy to give it to him, of course. From that point, the Director could spin the investigation any way he wanted, falsifying evidence, pinning it on someone else, or just forgetting to assign any detectives to the case. Talk about guaranteeing the perfect crime: the guy responsible for bringing the perp to justice was the perp himself.
And sure, someone in Washington might notice the Newark office hadn’t solved that pesky quadruple homi cide. But what would they care? The Director could please his bosses with other successes. He certainly didn’t lack for motivation: every time his agents made another successful seizure at Newark airport, it was just more supply for his operation.
The only people who might hold him accountable for the Ludlow Street investigation were the families of the victims— who didn’t have much pull or, in some cases, didn’t even exist—and the press, i.e., me. And when I came inquiring, all the Director had to do was make up a plausible story. In this case, he had made up some ridiculous, impossible-to-confirmor-deny fairy tale about José de Jesús Encarcerón—the equivalent of pinning it on the bogeyman. And he had Monty Pete to parrot it for him to the media.
Was L. Pete in on it? Of course he was. He was Wanda’s “boss,” the little guy with the suit and the badge that Tynesha sucked off. Or at least that was a reasonable guess. After all, he’d offered to take her to a game at Giants Stadium. He had offered to take me to see the Jets—who, of course, play in Giants Stadium. Nice to know L. Pete held me in the same high esteem as his favorite hooker.
Suddenly I became aware the Director was standing, rearing to his full six feet five. He was every ounce of three hundred pounds, but his weight was much more solid than I had first surmised. Lift a Honda? Hell, he could lift a Cadillac.
He was done talking. And he was looking at me like I was supposed to say something.
“That’s all very interesting,” I said, feeling like the kid in math class who had been caught daydreaming. “What was it that gave it away?”
“That gave what away?”
“You know, what you just said,” I said.
“I’m sorry?”
“The thing.”
“What thing?”
The Director was staring me down like he was on one of his hunting vacations and I was an antelope at the end of his rifle sight. And—I don’t know why this took me so long to figure out—it suddenly dawned on me that’s exactly what I was. He hadn’t brought me here for a story. And he wasn’t tickling that gun on his shoulder because he liked how it felt.
He had lured me into his office to kill me. Right here. Right now.
“Is something the matter?” the Director asked.
My fight-or- flight response was kicking in, and I could feel those ancient juices that had been saving mankind’s ass for thousands of years surging through me. I’m not sure what prehistoric generations of the Ross family did a hundred millennia ago when faced with a predator on the plains of Africa. But I knew what I was going to do. There was no fighting this guy, who was big, mean, and, oh yeah, armed.
So I flung myself away from the chair and ran.

n three long strides, I covered that great tract of carpet and made it to his door. I didn’t know if he was pulling his weapon, if I was about to feel a bullet in the back of my head, or if my sudden move had caught him by surprise. But I wasn’t turning around to check.

I slammed the door behind me, like that would do some good. I knew L. Pete’s office was to the left so I cut hard to the right, down the hallway in the opposite direction. I heard the Director’s voice from behind the closed door shouting for Monty.

The fifteenth floor of the National Drug Bureau’s Newark Field Office was one big rectangle, designed completely without imagination. On the exterior side of the hallway, there were offices. On the interior side, there was a mix of offices and what appeared to be secretaries’ stations filled with cubicles.

Maybe there were hiding places, but damn if I could slow down to find a decent one. I raced past the elevators, knowing they weren’t going to do me any good: I didn’t have time to wait for a car to arrive and, in any event, I didn’t have the swipe card to operate one.

The stairs were my only shot. But where were the stairs? I looked around for an exit sign.
“Go that way,” I heard the Director shout at Monty. “Guard the stairs.”
So much for that.
I disappeared around the next corner just as the Director had rounded the first one. That gave me about a hundred-foot lead on him but I didn’t dare round another corner. Eventually, I was going to run into Monty coming from the other direction. No time. I had no time.
I started grabbing at door handles, hoping to find an open office, but none of the doors budged. Goddamn paranoid flatfoot pensioners, locking their offices when they went home at night. Didn’t they ever think about the possibility that a desperate newspaper reporter might need to slip under their desks to escape their homicidal boss?
I was on my seventh door when, finally, I found the one that had been left slightly ajar. I slipped in and closed it as softly as I could. I had bought myself time, but how much?
The office was sparse: a desk with a chair, a filing cabinet, a potted plant, and absolutely no place to hide. I reached into my pocket for my cell phone but, of course, it wasn’t there. So I tiptoed to the desk phone and picked up.
Hello, 911? I’m trapped in a federal office building where I’m about to be killed by a high- ranking government official. Hello?
But, no, I couldn’t get that far. I couldn’t even get a normal dial tone— just this monotone buzz. I looked at the phone in frustration. The screen said: “Enter passkey.”
Of course. Uncle Sam wasn’t going to stand for anyone making free phone calls. The phone wasn’t going to save me.
I looked at the window, but I was fifteen stories up. There was no surviving that kind of fall. So I studied the phone again. Maybe it
might
save me. If I got lucky. I punched in 813. My birthday. What the hell. But the line stayed monotone.
“You have to admit, Carter, my business plan is brilliant, isn’t it?” the Director called out. “I mean, have you ever heard of a better brand name for heroin than ‘The Stuff.’ It’s elegant, don’t you think? It’s going to become the first national heroin brand, you know. It will be like Kleenex, perfectly synonymous with the product it represents.”
I kept my ear to the phone and soon the line changed to a fast busy signal, like it had grown tired of waiting for me to push additional buttons. Okay, so maybe it was a four-digit passcode. I tried 8137. Pause. Pause. Fast busy signal.
“You know I’m making more money than I know what to do with?” the Director said, still panting slightly from his sprint. “I’m not sure I could print money as fast as I’m making it. It’s all I can do just to get it laundered and shipped offshore.”
I keyed in 81378. Pause. Pause. Fast busy signal. Then 081378. This time it went immediately to a fast busy signal. So it was a six-digit code. But even assuming there were a couple hundred employees with passcodes, that made my odds at guessing less than 1 in 1,000.
“You should come join my operation, Carter,” the Director went on. “You’ve been the only one smart enough to catch on to what’s happening here. No one else has even come close. Not the FBI. Not those supposed geniuses at the CIA. Not the ATF. The most powerful government in the world and I fooled the whole damn thing. But not you. I could use a man like you. Why don’t you come out so we can talk about it? I can make you rich, you know.”
I rolled my eyes. If I was smarter than the CIA, what the hell made him think I was dumb enough to step outside the office door and greatly hasten my own demise?
The Director’s voice was getting louder—and closer.
“You can’t hide forever,” he bellowed. “There’s not another employee due on this floor until Monday at eight
A.M.
I’ve got all the time I need to find you. Come on out and we’ll talk this through.”
I could hear him opening doors one by one. Obviously, he had some kind of master key and was going office to office looking for me.
“Don’t even think of escaping,” he called out. “We’ve got holding cells on every floor. The place is designed so you can’t escape. We’ve hired
experts
to expose flaws in our security system by escaping, and even they couldn’t do it.”
I was sure I couldn’t, either. But I could do a little better job concealing myself. As softly as I could, being mindful that even the slightest squeak could be deadly, I stood up on the desk and slid open one of the ceiling panels. That was always how they did it in the movies, right? Climb up in the ceiling, replace the panel, and you were as good as invisible.
Except, of course, when you were on the top floor and it was just a drop ceiling with nothing above it but a concrete wall. I couldn’t even climb around in the space between the real ceiling and the drop ceiling—there was nothing that would come close to supporting my weight.
So, in short, I had no communications, no place to hide, and absolutely no way out.
Sorry, Mrs. Ross. Your boy is flat-out hosed.
There was going to be a showdown, and it was going to come soon. I looked around the room for some kind of weapon, pulling on desk and cabinet drawers to see if there was something sharp inside. A letter opener? A fountain pen? Something?
But even the fed who had been sloppy enough to leave his door slightly ajar had been careful enough to lock everything else tight. So I grabbed the only thing in the room that looked like it could do a little damage: the plant. The pot was made out of terra-cotta, which wasn’t exactly known as the world’s hardest substance. But maybe if I swung fast enough and connected with something soft and vital, the Director would be the first human being to experience Death by Ficus. Then I could take my chances with Monty.
I hid by the side of the door, hoping the Director might lead with a particularly vulnerable part of his head. I listened as the sound of the Director trying locks inched ever closer. He was perhaps three or four rooms away and closing in fast.