The Informant (24 page)
The sheriff looked up from his clipboard, showing his first sign of interest. “Where’d you see it before?”
“We had a similar situation out in San Francisco—
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the Timothy Copeland murder. The killer drugged the victim’s roommate and put him in the closet. Unfortunately, Copeland’s roommate didn’t remember a thing.”
The sheriff tucked the clipboard under his arm. “Well, this may be a little different situation.”
“How’s that?”
“The boy seems to remember something.”
Her heart thumped. “What does he say?”
“At this point he’s basically incoherent. Which is under-standable—he’s pretty traumatized. But I think he knows a lot more than he’s able to tell. A lot more than he probably wants to remember. The question is how to draw him out of his shell.”
She thought for a moment, then her eyes lit with an idea. “I know just the right person to help you with that.
One of the polygraph agents in Washington is a friend of mine. We went through the Academy together. She’s trained in hypnosis, and she’s excellent with children.
We’ve used her in some of our abduction cases.”
“Hypnosis? I don’t want no hocus-pocus. I’d rather just wait and see if the kid remembers something.”
“This isn’t the kind of case where you can wait around for anything. We have a killer who we
know
is going to kill again.”
“Maybe,” he grumbled. “But that doesn’t mean we should hold a séance.”
“It’s not a séance. We don’t conjure up spirits or pump him full of drugs or anything like that. It’s just a psychological tool to help the boy relax, remove his anxieties.
If nothing else, do it for the boy. Let’s find 234
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out what he knows right now, before the nightmares, so the counselors can help him deal with it.”
He sighed, but her last point had seemed to make an impression. “I’m still not too keen on this.”
“Let’s leave it up to his father,” said Victoria. “The boy’s a minor. We’ll need parental consent. If the father will go along—will you?”
He paused, mulling it over. “I suppose. But we’ve been working with this boy all day. Let’s at least give him and his dad a night to grieve. We can meet in the station tomorrow morning.”
“What time?” said Victoria.
“Say ten o’clock?”
“I’ll call my friend. We’ll be there.”
The sheriff nodded. Victoria was gone in an instant, headed for her car phone before the sheriff could change his mind.
At dusk the mountain air had dropped below forty degrees. The cabin was cold enough to steam Rollins’s breath, yet little beads of sweat had gathered on his upper lip. A trace of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
He was still seated on the floor, braced against the post, hands tied behind his back. Hannon sat in the chair facing him, tapping the flat side of the blade into his gloved hand as he spoke.
“This is your last chance, Curt. How’d you hide the money?”
Rollins licked his dry lips, then swallowed hard. “It’s like I said. I’ve seen lots of money laundering as a cop, so I knew how to do it.”
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Hannon dragged the blade like a razor over the whiskers on Curt’s chin. “I want details.”
Rollins’s lips quivered. “I didn’t think Posten would call in the cops, but just in case he did, I couldn’t take cash from him in a suitcase. They might mark it. So I had him deposit it in Citibank. The first fifty thousand was cash, but the bigger deposits I had wire-transferred, so Posten wouldn’t look like a drug smurf toting all that money. I withdrew some of it with my ATM card, just to get my hands on some cash. But for the bulk of it I wanted to do it right.”
“What does that mean—doing it right?”
“Doing as many wire transfers as I could without eating up my funds, to throw any tracers off the trail. Three thousand to a bank in Wyoming, seven thousand to a bank in New York, and so on, every day. When I got to a quarter million, I wired it all offshore to Antigua. If anyone
was
tracing it, they sure couldn’t get through Antigua’s bank secrecy.”
“How do you get it back?”
Rollins swallowed, felt his terror rise. He knew that if he gave Hannon the means to secure the money, he’d be issuing his own death sentence.
“I asked you a question, Curt,” Hannon repeated, bearing down on each word. The tip of his knife pricked Rollins’s skin.
“Antigua,” Rollins said desperately, “I go to Antigua, withdraw the cash, buy a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar boat for cash money, and sail it back to Miami.”
He was hyperventilating now. “The IRS doesn’t track big cash purchases outside the United States. If the bank secrecy laws don’t
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throw the stiffs off my trail, turning the cash into a yacht sure will. Then I either keep the boat, sell it, use it as collateral for another loan. Whatever I want.”
“Where are all the account records?”
Rollins’s eyes lit with faint hope. “My apartment in Brooklyn. Hey,” he said, trying to smile, “I’ll take you there, man. Come on, you and me. Like old times. Buddies. Partners.”
Hannon looked at him coldly, then rose from the chair.
His six-and-a-half-foot frame towered over the prisoner.
He bent down and slowly lowered the knife. With a quick flick of the wrist he cut the ropes from Rollins’s hands.
Rollins was shaking with fear and giddy relief. He rubbed his raw wrists and looked up gratefully.
“Let’s go,” said Hannon. “I want the records.”
“I know you do,” said Rollins as he wobbled to his feet.
The apparent reprieve was allowing him to think more clearly, and he found himself improvising. “Of course, you know that without me the records won’t do you any good. This isn’t a normal bank with a checking account and ATM card. I went there personally to open up the account, and I set it up with special restrictions so that
I
have to go there
personally
to close it out. You can’t wire it out or ask for a check in the mail. You
need
me. I’m the only guy who can walk into the bank and withdraw the funds.”
Hannon’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a pretty good bluffer, considering the circumstances.”
“It’s no bluff. There are too many feds who want that money back. I couldn’t take the risk that one of 237
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them would just walk in and withdraw it.” He looked for signs that Hannon was buying his explanation, then continued. “Come on, old buddy. This will be a beautiful partnership. Let me show you the records, and then we’ll talk about how to keep the gravy train running.”
Hannon stared coldly, then his mouth curled with a semblance of a smile. “All right. You’ve bought yourself some time.”
“Good.
Now
can I use the bathroom?”
“’Fraid not,” he said, shaking his head. “Back in the trunk.”
Rollins grimaced. “All the way to Brooklyn? Come on, man. It smells like those rats you threw in there.”
Hannon was deadpan. “Like you, Curt. You smell exactly like a rat.”
238
h
annon reached Brooklyn before 10:00 P.M. and parked the Volvo on the street outside the old brownstone flat. It was a mild night for February, much warmer than the Virginia mountains. The streets were wet, but the scattering of white that at first looked like snow was actually trash that had collected in the gutters.
Several streetlamps were burned out, and the row of parallel-parked cars across the street looked as if they hadn’t moved since Reagan was president. Fifty years ago it had probably been a quaint neighborhood, but times had changed.
Hannon saw no one walking the sidewalks, but he didn’t want to risk opening the trunk. The Swedish car had a small hatch that opened in the middle of the backseat so that snow skis could lay flat, partly in the trunk and partly in the backseat. He popped the latch, then winced immediately at the pungent odor.
“Where’s the key, Curt?” he said as he waved off the stench.
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“Untie me, okay? I can’t stand it in here.”
“Shut up or I’ll gag you again. Where’s the key?”
Seconds passed as Rollins shifted around in the darkness.
The odor was getting worse. “Curt!”
“There’s no key. Combination padlock. Twenty-eleven-seventeen.”
Hannon closed the latch, crawled out of the car and headed up the cracked sidewalk. Rollins had the basement apartment, down the cement steps behind the black iron gate. It reminded Hannon of those stairs in Atlanta where he’d cut off that woman’s finger for her diamond ring.
The front door was padlocked, like Rollins had said.
There was a hole where the old key lock had been. It looked like somebody had taken a crowbar to it.
He popped the lock and the door opened to an efficiency apartment that smelled nearly as bad as the trunk of his Volvo. It was garbage. Strange, he thought, the way everyone’s garbage seemed to smell the same. He switched on the light and went straight to the kitchen, the source of the odor. He picked up the trash basket and dumped the mess in the middle of the floor. Old coffee grounds, milk cartons, tin cans and a big glob of something that looked like a year’s supply of creamed corn spilled onto the linoleum. He shook everything out, then looked inside the can. As Rollins had promised, fastened securely to the bottom of the garbage can was a watertight pouch with something inside.
Hannon took the pouch to the counter and opened it carefully. Inside were three big manila envelopes. The first contained bank records. A
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detailed log showed a series of wire transfers through FedWire, CHIPS, and SWIFT, all funneled to a secret numbered account at Charter Bank in Antigua. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It wasn’t exactly like winning the lotto, but it gave him the option to ditch Valerie if she got too nosy. In truth, the amount wasn’t the issue. It was simply
his
money; he’d earned it by giving old Curt something to snitch about.
The second envelope contained a birth certificate, Florida driver’s license and Social Security card for a man named Ernest Gill. The picture, however, was Rollins with big eyeglasses, a heavy mustache, and added gray to his hair that made him look older.
The Citibank account.
The third contained similar ID for “Eric Venters,” including a U.S. passport, voter’s registration and New York driver’s license. Again, the picture was Rollins wearing a convincing disguise.
The Antigua account.
Hannon smiled as he stuffed the envelopes back in the pouch. Decision time. He could let Rollins be Venters and withdraw the funds, or
he
could become Venters and do it himself. The birth certificate and Social Security card were reusable—no photo, and they looked legitimate. All he needed was a passport, which in New York was as easy as finding pastrami on rye. He could become Venters before the sun came up.
The open issue, of course, was the height. Rollins was five feet ten inches tall, and as he was being put back into the trunk back at the lodge he’d mentioned that the bank had some record on file with the customer’s—Rollins’s—height on it. That could be true. But from what Hannon knew about offshore
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banks, they’d be unlikely to focus on height—and even if they checked, what were the chances they’d challenge him?
That left just one question: What to
do
with Curt.
Hannon sealed up the pouch and started toward the door, smirking at the possibilities.
Just after 11:00 P.M. Valerie St. Pierre returned home. An afternoon of shopping at the mall had turned into dinner and a movie with her girlfriends. Her face was flushed red from a little too much wine, and she was humming a tune from
Phantom
when she dropped the bags from Lord & Taylor on the kitchen table.
“Charlie?” she called out.
The house was quiet. She checked the den, then flipped on the hall light and started upstairs to the bedroom.
“Honey, come look what I bought you.”
The bedroom was dark, and so was the bathroom. A puzzled look came over her face, then she noticed the message light blinking on the answering machine. She sat on the edge of the bed and hit the play button.
“Hi, babe, it’s Charlie.” She perked up immediately at the sound of Hannon’s voice. “I’m really sorry, but I got an emergency call from that accounting firm I did the network for. Some weird computer virus has the whole system running slower than shit. Anyway, I had to drive to Pittsburgh this afternoon. Not sure when I’ll be back.
But I’ll make it up to you. Promise.”
She switched off the machine and fell back against the pillows, sighing with disappointment. She reached 242
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across the comforter for the television remote on the nightstand, then stopped as she noticed his leather flight bag resting in the corner. It was still lying where he’d tossed it this morning, beside the skimpy white tennis dress he’d ripped right off her. He’d always taken the bag with him on his other trips. She wondered why he hadn’t this time.
She slid across the bed, then knelt on the floor beside the bag. She felt a little like a snoop and hesitated, but her excitement grew as she ran her finger lightly over the leather straps. Slowly, she unzipped it and peeked inside.
There was a razor and toothbrush and other uninteresting stuff. She smiled to herself as she sniffed his cologne.
The extra pair of baggy boxer shorts triggered a smirk.
He was too embarrassed to wear the bikini briefs she’d given him. Not much of a bulge for such a big man. That didn’t bother her, however. He knew what she really liked, and whenever he buried his face between her thighs he was her golden boy with the magic tongue.
Magic, and tireless. Lustful thoughts of him putting her flat on her back brought tingles inside. His muscular body would glide over her breasts and stomach and slowly disappear below the vaginal mound. She imagined him sliding the pillow gently beneath her ass, then grabbing both cheeks with his huge hands and pulling her toward him as her body arched to receive his kiss. On impulse, she touched herself through tight designer jeans. Lightly at first, then gradually harder, rubbing back and forth in the way he liked to tease her. Her heart pounded at the first sign of
