Greed: A Detective John Lynch Thriller (2 page)

Hardin knew there was more to it. The whole Hollywood PR machine was cranked up around Dollars for Darfur. It was their chance to prove what a big heart the industry had, take everyone’s mind off the brainless crap they put out – the no-panty starlets and the revolving doors at the rehab clinics. And now, instead of Darfur leading the news, they had video of a drunk actor acting like, well, a drunk actor.

 

That was five years ago now.

Hardin had tried to get back into the network gigs, but suddenly no one returned his calls. After a couple months, he ran into a producer he went back with a ways, and the guy told him he’d been blackballed. Word had gone out from the agents and PR flacks – any news team working with Hardin gets zero play with their people. And the same media conglomerates who owned the movie studios owned the news networks. The movie studios made way more money.

So five years of scrambling, taking riskier gigs for less money, working with some of the European outlets, Al Jazeera, even. Burning through his savings.

And maybe a few other things… not-quite-legal things. Hardin hadn’t always been a glorified gofer. He’d spent eight years in the Marines, Scout/Sniper back in Gulf War I. When a beef back home meant he needed a get-out-of-jail-free card, he spent half a decade in the French Foreign Legion, 1st Co, 2nd Para regiment, the baddest asses in a bad-ass crowd, pretty much his whole time in the Legion spent in Africa. It was no continent for pussies. Not just journalists who needed a little security.

Then Hardin heard some interesting noises about a new twist in the old West African blood-diamond business. That had cooled off after Charles Taylor and his RUF animals finally got run to ground, but there’d always been a Lebanese connection to the diamond trade in West Africa. Now Hardin was hearing that Hezbollah had muscled in on that, and then Bin Laden and the boys had muscled in on Hezbollah, and now Al Qaeda was using diamonds as a way to move capital
sub rosa
since the US was putting the freeze on any above-ground cash flow. Not to mention, if you got Hezbollah in the mix, then you got Tehran holding their leash.

Story felt a little canned, though; had a little Mossad scent around the edges, Hardin getting the feeling maybe the Israelis were trying to play him, get some storyline they liked to come out through Al Jazeera so it would fly on the Arab street, give them some way to muddy up Iran a little in case this was the week they decided to bomb something. So Hardin did a little recon. Far as he could tell, the story checked out.

A couple things, though. First thing was this. Even if he got Al Jazeera to bite, this was going to come to maybe ten grand on his end – ten grand after probably a month with a higher-than-usual chance of getting his ass shot. Second thing? These blood diamond guys, sometimes their security wasn’t what it ought to be.

Hardin figured he’d had a good run in Africa. But he was pushing fifty, and after almost twenty years schlepping around the Sahel, fifty was pushing back. It was time for an exit strategy. A few million dollars in untraceable stones looked like a good one.

That was how Hardin ended up on an Air France flight, headed to Chicago, with eighteen ounces of uncut stones hidden in his bag.

Problem was that was about fifteen ounces too much of a good thing.

A couple ounces were what he had planned on. Al Qaeda moved the stones when they had to finance an operation – usually two or three ounces, $10 to $20 million retail value, out of which they’d get maybe half. So Hardin figured he’d bounce a shipment, get a couple ounces of stones, come out with a million or two on his end, still be pretty much under the radar. From what he’d heard, it wouldn’t be the first time they’d had a shipment go missing.

Now he was halfway across the Atlantic with a pound and a half of hot rocks – ten times the size of a usual shipment. Eighteen ounces would cut out to better than $150 million retail. That raised a few questions. Like how was he going to move that kind of weight? And what was Al Qaeda up to that took that kind of financing?

Most importantly, how was he going to get back under the radar now?

Time to talk to Stein.  

CHAPTER 2

 

 

Detective John Lynch climbed out of the unmarked Crown Vic in the parking lot outside the United Center and hunched his shoulders, pushing the collar of his overcoat up around his ears. United Center… almost had that down now. Lynch could go a month sometimes without calling it the Stadium.

Temperature was near zero and heading down, wind coming out of the northwest like sandpaper. Beginning of March. Even in Chicago, they should be past this shit by now. But the storm had blown in overnight, dumped better than a foot of snow, cold front behind that. Lynch looked across Madison at the chimneys on top of the three flats. The wind flattened the heat from the furnace stacks sideways against the sky in ribbons of vapor and mirage. Powder blew across the snowpack around the edges of the parking lot in braided ropes, the half moon and stars showing in a night sky frozen so clear and hard that you’d swear it would shatter like a plate if you fired a round into it.

Been pretty warm the last week so the shelters had emptied out, a lot of the emergency options closed down for the spring. The uniforms would find the bodies in the morning – the homeless along Lower Wacker –curled up in the basement delivery doorways of the office towers; more of them frozen into fetus shapes under cardboard and old blankets beneath the underpasses out on the west side, the south side; probably a family somewhere, all of them dressed in everything they owned, choked out from carbon monoxide, huddled on the floor next to a smoldering charcoal grill in some shit-ass tenement where the heat was out because some slumlord hadn’t made repairs or paid his gas bill.

The uniforms would call out the wagons, haul all the bodies in so the ME could thaw them out, try to make sure that each death was really an act of God and not the result of some nefarious human agency. Then everybody’d go home and have a drink or six try to figure out why God had to act like that.

“Pretty sky,” Bernstein said. “Only time it looks like this.”

“Yeah, when standing outside to look at it will kill you,” said Lynch. “Let’s go see our stiff.”

 

 

“That Stein?” asked Lynch.

“Hard to tell, just looking at his ass,” said the uniform. “Girl outside found the body, says it’s him – right size, right suit – nobody seen him leave, it’s his box, so I’m thinking yes.”

Stein’s body was wedged between the toilet and the wall in the bathroom of the luxury box at the United Center, on his knees, face on the floor, ass in the air. Aside from a little mess next to the three holes at the base of his skull, no blood at all.

“Two thousand dollar suit, luxury box, and you still end up kissing the floor next to the john while you take three in the back of the head,” said Lynch.

“Are all thy conquests shrunk to this little measure?” said Shlomo Bernstein, Lynch’s partner.

“What’s that shit?” asked the uniform.

“Shakespeare probably,” said Lynch. “He does that.”

From the floor of the stadium, the expansive post-game echoey sounds rattled around – the crew breaking down chairs and tables, starting to pull up the floor so they could set up the rink for the Hawks game the next night.

“Got a timeline?” Lynch asked.

“Girl said she’d been in with five to go in the game,” said the uniform. “Stein’s last guest had just left, so she wanted to see did Stein need anything. Stein said he was good. After the game, she came back in, didn’t see him, which she says was weird, cause he’s a pretty gregarious guy – saying hello to everybody coming and going. Anyway, she started cleaning up, bathroom door was open, she looked in, saw the stiff, ran out, called security, they called us. We got the call at 9.53. Five to go in the game is like 9.30 – got a twenty-minute window there.”

“OK, thanks. We got everybody rounded up that had access up here?”

“Everybody that wasn’t gone already, yeah. Got them in the next couple suites up the hall.”

“OK, let ’em know we’ll get to them when we can. Thanks.”

The uniform left the suite.

“So what can you tell me about this Stein, Slo-mo?”

Shlomo Bernstein was an anomaly. North shore, Jewish, big family money, but he always wanted to be a cop. When he tried to go to the academy right after finishing a double major in Economics and Philosophy at Brown, his parents made him a deal – get the MBA just in case you change your mind and want to take over Daddy’s brokerage business someday. So Bernstein blew through Wharton in two years, top of his class, and then became a cop, made detective in record time. Smart as hell, but a physical anomaly, too – five foot seven, maybe 140 pounds. Good looking guy, though, like some junior-sized male model. Sharp dresser.

“Abraham Stein. Huge in commodities – one of the lords of the universe down at the Board of Trade. And one of the real big shots in the Jewish community here – Jewish United Fund chair, Spertus Institute named a building after him. Word is he’s tight with Tel Aviv. His father was Palmach. Family goes way back in the diamond business – that’s where he started.”

“What’s this Palmach?”

“The elite of the Haganah, which was a sort of unofficial Jewish army in Palestine under British rule. These were the guys who won the War of Independence back in 1948.”

Bernstein handed Lynch his iPhone, Wikipedia article on the Palmach up on the screen.

Lynch scanned it, handed it back. “Jesus, Slo-mo, you sleep with that fucking thing?”

“If you want to stick with your talk-only dinosaur, that’s your problem. You want to be one of the cool kids, get yourself an iPhone.”

Lynch just shook his head. “OK, you and your electronic friend might as well get back to the station, start digging at the business and Jewish stuff. This had to come out of somewhere.”

 

Ashley Urra was in her early twenties with the kind of face that Lynch bet meant she never had to buy her own drinks. Blonde, a short cut with bangs Lynch was seeing a lot of these days. Shiny white teeth. Thin, decent figure, not real tall. Perky. Lynch bet she got called perky, and she probably liked it.

“You were working Mr Stein’s box tonight?”

“I was Abe’s regular hostess. It was a great assignment. He was very generous, and he wasn’t one of these guys who gets off on pushing the help around. He didn’t hit on me either.”

“Bet you get a lot of that.”

She just smiled.

“Nice spread,” Lynch said. Table at the back of the box had a chafing dish full of ribs, some kind of pasta, salad, bar set up on the other side of the room. “All this, he’s up here alone?”

She was looking across the suite to the bathroom, where the evidence techs and McCord, the ME guy, were working on the body. “What?” she said.

“Lots of food. Seems like too much for him to be up here alone.”

“Oh. Abe did a lot of business during the games. People would come and go. He always over-ordered. He’d let us have what was left, after the games. The staff loved him.”

“I bet. Security pretty good up here? I mean you can’t just walk in, right?”

The girl was looking over at the body again. The interview would go quicker if Lynch did it in one of the other suites, but most people didn’t see a lot of dead bodies and it kept them off balance, kept them from working on their answers too hard. If it didn’t, then that told him something, too. So Lynch liked to do interviews with a stiff around.

“I’m sorry, what?” she said.

“Security,” Lynch repeated.

“Oh, yeah. This level has its own elevators and ramps – you have to have a special ticket just to get up here.”

“You need to show any ID?”

“Not if you have a ticket. I mean unless you need to pick it up at Will Call or something.”

“Did Mr Stein leave any Will Calls tonight?”

“I don’t know. They’d know downstairs, I guess.”

Lynch waved a uniform over, sent him down to check; also told him to run down any records on Stein’s box, his contract, that sort of thing. The girl was looking at the body again. Lynch waited until she turned back.

“Sorry,” she said.

“It’s OK. That’s not normal for most people. What can you tell me about tonight? Who’d he have up here?”

“People from his firm mostly, I think. Mendy Axelman – he worked with Mr Stein, he’s here all the time. He was here early with a lot of younger guys. I think they were traders who work with Abe and Mendy. I recognized a couple of them. They bring them up to the box as a reward or something. Bulls went up by like twenty-five points midway through the last period, and they all took off. The younger guys were all heading for a party somewhere – one of them slipped me his card on the way out, told me I should stop by after the game, that it was going to go late.”

“You got the card?”

She handed it to Lynch. Mike Schwartz, Stein & Co. Business contact info on the front, address for a townhouse in Streeterville handwritten on the back along with another phone number – probably the guy’s cell. Lynch called another uniform over, told him to get a unit over to that address, make sure everybody stayed put until he could get there. Turned back to the girl.

“Were you going to go?”

“What?”

“To the party. Nice neighborhood.”

A weak smile; she shrugged. “Yeah, probably. I mean, not now.”

Lynch nodded, straightened his leg, his right knee barking at him some the way it did when it got cold like this. Green Bay had taken him in the third round back in 1985: strong safety out of Boston College. Blew out his knee in his second preseason game, and they couldn’t do shit with knees back then like they could now. Came back from rehab half a step slower. Wasn’t a half-step he had to give.