Deception (A Miranda Murphy Thriller) (4 page)

“Is it Jeff?” the man asked.

Miranda mouthed ‘yes’ and nodded energetically.

“Yes, it’s me,” Eddie said.

Why not? They might score a clue or two.

“Jeff Hackett?”

“Yes, Jeff Hackett. Who is it?”

“It doesn’t matter. Is your father Marshall Dillon?”

“Yes, Marshall Dillon’s my father.”

“We need to talk. It’s a very important matter. Very important. What’s your cellphone number?”

“Why do you need my cellphone number?”

“Your landline could be tapped. Give me your cellphone number, please.”

This guy had seen too many spy movies, that was for sure.

After a short pause, Miranda pressed the mute button and said, “Give him your personal cell number, Ed.”

 “Okay.” Eddie dictated his personal cellphone number. The number was not listed in any publicly available database, so this guy would never find out who its actual owner was.

“I’ll call your cell in a second,” the man said.

“Okay.” Eddie hung up and took out his cellphone.

“Does your voicemail greeting have your name?” Miranda asked.

“Yes, it does.”

“You’ll have to get rid of it after you talk to this guy. Temporarily.”

“Sure.” As soon as Eddie uttered this word, his cellphone rang. It was Mister Paranoid.

“We need to meet,” the man said. “Come to the bakery cafe on Appleton and Dartmouth tomorrow at one in the afternoon. Be careful, they could be watching you. Leave your car at home and take a cab.”

Eddie said he would follow his advice.

2.

Another stroke of luck. Hopefully, this lead was going to prove productive.  

It looked like the case was more complicated than she had thought. Hackett must be in one hell of a pickle if people who wanted to talk to him had to change their voices and stay away from landlines. Who did that guy think could be tapping Hackett’s phone? Police? FBI? Enemies? Mafia? If you were a private citizen, you had to either have a lot of spare cash or be an electronics guru in order to be able to tap somebody’s landline. At any rate, people wouldn’t go as far as eavesdropping on phone conversations unless the stakes were high. Murphy doubted that jealousy had anything do with it: why in the world would Mister Paranoid be scared of a cuckolded husband?     

Well, things were getting curiouser and curiouser. 

By the way, there was a little problem. That man wanted to speak to Hackett. Where were they going to get Jeff Hackett?

He would have to think about it.

So, they needed Jeff Hackett. Under the circumstances, the best practical solution to the problem was to use a double. They would find a guy who looked like Hackett and pray that Mister Paranoid didn’t figure out their little secret. And you know what? Chances that they would pull this trick off were good. You see, Mister Paranoid didn’t know Jeff Hackett very well. Why did Miranda think so? When Mister Paranoid was talking to Eddie Carr, he believed he was talking to Jeff Hackett, which meant he had never spoken to Hackett before. He might have seen Hackett’s pictures, but oftentimes the difference between the photograph and reality was enormous. The bottom line was this stunt could work.

Even if their "Hackett" was discovered as a fake, they would still win. Mister Paranoid would have to come really close to the double in order to notice he’d been duped, which would allow them to identify and detain him for questioning.

3.

It was forty minutes since they had assumed their position one hundred feet from Appleton Bakery Café, which Mister Paranoid had designated as the meeting place. They had arrived in a Chevrolet Impala, whose tinted windows did a great job of hiding Miranda and the high definition digital camcorder in her hand from prying eyes. The camcorder offered a super powerful 50x optical zoom, which would allow her to see individual teeth in Mister Paranoid’s mouth when he smiled. Right now, the camcorder was aimed at Ted Winslow, the cop who had been made up to look like Jeff Hackett; he was passable as Hackett, but no more than that. Winslow was sitting on the bench next to the café entrance door with an alert expression on his face, holding Eddie Carr’s cellphone. He was wearing a wire—even though a possibility existed that Mister Paranoid would check him for listening devices, they had opted to take a chance.

Miranda glanced at her watch. Five past one.  Mister Paranoid must have a penchant for being fashionably late.

“He’s late,” said Officer Frank Shanahan, who was behind the steering wheel.

“Yes, he is, Captain Obvious.”

Shanahan laughed.

Mister Paranoid showed up at 1:08 pm. It was a dark haired man of average height, with a fairly long beard and a thick moustache. His age was hard to tell. He had sunglasses on and was dressed in a brown hoodie and blue washed jeans. Not surprisingly, the hood was on his head. Miranda put on the headphones and focused the camcorder on the man. Mister Paranoid sat next to Winslow, crossed his legs, and leisurely looked around. Miranda scanned the street, searching for the man’s car. She gave up when Mister Paranoid started talking; it was not that urgent anyway. 

“Hello, are you Jeff?” the man asked.

“Yes.” Winslow nodded. “Did you call me yesterday?”

“Your father is Marshall Dillon, the president of American Discount Tires?”

“Yes, Marshall Dillon is my father. What do you want to talk to me about?”

The good news was that Mister Paranoid was not alarmed by the fact that the voice he was hearing now differed from the voice he had heard on the phone. He must have realized there was nothing unusual about it.

“When was the last time you spoke to your father?” The man took off his sunglasses and wiped the lenses with his hoodie sleeve.

“About three months ago.”

The man put the sunglasses back on. “When was the last time you saw him?”

“Three months ago. Why are you asking this? What’s your name?”

A pause. Mister Paranoid looked around. Was he suspecting something? It didn’t seem so.

“Be very careful, Jeff,” the man said. “I think someone wants you dead. If I were you, I’d leave Boston today and hide. I’ll contact you again later.”

Then he stood up and headed south down Dartmouth Street.

4.

“Follow him,” Miranda told Shanahan.

Mister Paranoid walked in a nonchalant manner, without looking around, his hands in his hoodie pockets. He didn’t seem nervous or agitated. When Miranda opened her mouth to say ‘Where is he going?’, the man stopped by the taxicab parked by the curb on Dartmouth Street and Warren Avenue—just two hundred feet from his starting point—opened the right rear door, and whisked inside.

He must have paid the cab driver to wait for him here, Miranda thought.

“Should we detain him now?” Shanahan asked.

“And let him go an hour later?” Miranda shook her head. No, they gained nothing from detaining Mister Paranoid at this point in time. She would rather wait for the man to show more of his cards.

“Follow the cab,” Miranda said. “Let’s see where he’s going.”

Risking their cover, Shanahan made a sharp U-turn in the middle of the street and went after the cab.

Mister Paranoid’s taxi ride turned out to be much shorter than Miranda had anticipated. After traveling less than a quarter of a mile, the man got out of the cab at the Back Bay Station. As he headed for the subway entrance, Miranda exited the car and followed him. When the man passed the turnstile, it became clear he didn’t come here to buy a newspaper or a donut. Unfortunately, Miranda didn’t get a chance to find out Mister Paranoid’s end destination. He hopped onto a train while she was still on the stairs. As bad luck would have it, the doors shut in front of Miranda just as she was about to board the train.

It was an Oak Grove bound train, but Miranda had a hunch that Mister Paranoid had gotten on it only because it was the earliest. He was probably going to alight at the next station and take a cab or a different train.  

5.

Miranda asked their computer gurus to remove the beard and the moustache from Mister Paranoid’s photos, having assumed that they were part of a disguise. If the man’s objective was to conceal his identity from Jeff Hackett—which was undeniable, considering that he had used a voice changer during the phone call—fake facial hair was the least he could do. Besides, what man in his right mind would wear such an ugly moustache?

The resulting image was underwhelming. The guy had a bland face, which was symmetrical and didn’t look like it belonged to a criminal or an evil genius. Miranda thought he had smart eyes. She estimated his age at forty to forty-five.        

Now they had to find him.

Unfortunately, Mister Paranoid had worn gloves when he’d met Winslow, so they didn’t have his fingerprints. Could they show his photo on TV and ask for tips from the public? He would probably hide and might never call again. 

Well, all they could now was wait and see. Hopefully, Mister Paranoid would contact Jeff Hackett soon.

6.

When her cellphone rang, Miranda was sitting on the couch in the living room, in front of the TV set, watching a rerun of Pawn Stars, with a ham sandwich in one hand and a bottle of iced tea in the other. According to conventional wisdom, it was bad for your weight to eat late at night, but she knew from experience that her strong metabolism wouldn’t let her down. She glanced at the clock. One in the morning. Phone calls after midnight were rare, but she did receive them from time to time.

Let’s hope they’re calling to congratulate her on inheriting ten million bucks from an uncle she never knew.

Miranda picked up the cell.

It was Gabi Mornell.

“He just called me,” she said.

“Jeff?”

“Yes, Jeff. I told him everything you asked me to tell.”

“And?”

“He agreed to meet you.”

“When and where?”

“Right now, if possible. He’ll wait for you in the parking lot of a bank on Boston and Southampton in Dorchester. It’s near the South Bay Center mall. Is it close to you? He’s going to call me in half an hour. What do I tell him? Are you coming?”

“Okay, I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Tell Jeff to look for a grey four-door Audi. And give him my cell number, please.” 

7.

Miranda arrived at the spot specified by Hackett at 1:36 am. At 1:39, Hackett got in the front passenger seat.  

“Are you Miranda Murphy?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Start the car.”

“Why are you hiding?” Miranda asked, pulling away from the curb.

“What makes you think I’m hiding?”

“Did your girlfriend tell you about the dead body we had found in your house?”

“The body?  Yes, she did.”

“Can you explain how it got there?”

“No, I can’t. But I swear I have nothing to do with it. And I wasn’t hiding. I almost got killed myself. You told Gabi someone is after me, right?”  

Miranda nodded.

“You’re right, someone is trying to kill me,” Hackett continued. “Let me tell you what happened. Two weeks ago, on a Friday night, I went to Callisto. It’s a club in downtown Boston, a great place to relax. When I was taking a leak in the restroom, someone hit me on the head and knocked me out. I woke up ten hours later in an alley in Milton, ten miles from the club. My wallet and watch were gone. It took me an hour to find someone who would let me use his cellphone. I called my buddy, asked him to pick me up, and an hour later I was on my way to his place.”

Congratulations, Detective Murphy. Your guess proved correct. Patrick Flynn had followed Hackett into the restroom, bludgeoned him, and then took him out of the club ("Is everything all right, Sir?”—“Oh yeah, everything’s fine. My friend just had a little too much to drink.”). After dumping Jeff in Milton, Flynn had headed to his house to score more stuff. Flynn thought he’d hit a gold mine, instead he’d gotten a bullet in his chest.

“Why didn't you go home?”

“Have you heard about Jake Hester?”

“The mobster? Is he extorting money from you?”

“He tried. Twenty grand a month. But we refused to pay. They said we were going to regret it.”

“So you concluded it was his guys who attacked you?”

“What else was I supposed to think? Has anyone ever extorted money from you? It’s not a pleasant experience. You get really paranoid, you know.”

“Did you see the face of the person who hit you on the head?”

“No, I didn’t. He approached me from behind.”

“You believe it was a man?”

“It was either a man or a very strong woman.”

Murphy opened his notepad and began writing down Jeff’s story. “Did you go to the doctor?”

“No. My head was okay. Nothing got broken.”

“Did they beat you up?”

“No. I found no bruises or anything like that.”

“Why do you think Hester did it? To scare you?”

“Yes. And I have to tell you—it worked.”

Miranda pulled Patrick Flynn’s photo out of her jacket pocket and showed it to Hackett.  “Do you know this man?”

“No, I’ve never seen him before,” Hackett said after examining the picture.

“It was his body that we found in your house.”

“As I said, I’ve never seen this guy.”

“Well... I have bad news and bad news for you. First, I believe someone is trying to kill you. And I don’t think it’s Hester. Second, we are out of clues. Our investigation’s hit the dead end.”

“Why not Hester?”

“He wants your money not your life. For now, at least.”

“Then who is it?”

“I hope to find that out sooner if you help me. What are you planning to do next?”

“Am I supposed to do something?”

“You can’t stay in your house, Jeff. You have to move to another location. I could arrange police protection for you if you’d like.”

Hackett shook his head. “I can handle it on my own. I guess I’ll leave Massachusetts for a while.”

“Let’s keep in touch, okay?”

“I’m going to call you every day. I hope you catch this scumbag.”

“I’d like to show you something. Can we meet tomorrow?”

“Sure. Give me the time and place, and I’ll be there.”