The Informant (36 page)
The young agent looked at her curiously. “Of course it’s him.”
She stared at the computer image, not really listening.
Her mind was racing, and the pieces were 357
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finally fitting together. “Now I’m certain of it,” she said, still staring at his image. “I’ve seen him before.”
She looked up. Marc was about to speak when she sprang out of the chair and bolted out the door, face-aged photograph in hand.
“Where you going!” he shouted, chasing after her.
She was streaming down the hall at full speed, her two-inch heels clicking on the hard tile floor. She hit the stairwell without slowing down, never responding, never once looking back.
It was just one flight up to the auxiliary surveillance center. She slid her access card through the electronic security checkpoint and rushed through the doorway. The technician behind the counter knew her by sight. He was a skinny old black man wearing a short-sleeve dress shirt and incredibly wide tie. His warm smiled faded as she rushed toward him. She slid to a halt and leaned across the counter, speaking right into his face.
“I want the transcripts,” she said, still trying to catch her breath, “from the phone tap I put on Valerie St.
Pierre.”
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a
three-foot tail of perforated computer paper flapped behind her as Victoria ran back downstairs and down the long corridor. It had only taken a few minutes for the surveillance department to print out a verbatim transcript of Valerie’s telephone conversations, and in just a few seconds Victoria realized she had exactly what she needed. Her hair was falling and her face flushed with excitement as she landed at the door to David Shapiro’s office on a dead run. She gave one quick knock, then rushed inside.
“I’ve got him!” she blurted.
Shapiro flashed a startled look from behind his desk.
Steve Caldwell was seated on the couch beside his boss’s potted prickly cactus plant. His mouth was hanging open as if Victoria had caught him in midsentence.
“He’s on the MS
Fantasy
—a cruise ship out of San Juan.”
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The two men exchanged glances. “How do you know?”
asked Shapiro.
“Long story.”
“Make it short,” he said with urgency.
She stepped farther inside and closed the door, then spoke quickly. “Last month, I met a guy in the airport bar in San Francisco. We got to talking, and I gave him my phone number, thinking he was a nice guy. I never heard from him, but a week ago I got an angry call from some woman claiming to be his girlfriend—very jealous type.
She scared me a little, so I retrieved her name and phone number from my caller ID service and wrote it down, just in case she kept harassing me.”
“What does this have to do with Hannon?”
“At the time, I didn’t think it had anything to do with him. But then, fast-forward: Two days ago, I saw Hannon’s mug shot and prison photo. It didn’t hit me at first, because the beard and mustache made it hard to make a comparison, but the longer I stared at the photographs, the more I saw a resemblance between Hannon and the guy at the airport. That’s when I really started to think about it. He was the right height, the right age. We were both flying out of San Francisco, right after the Copeland murder. And what really got me thinking was…” She stopped for a moment, measuring her words. “Well, we talked about his penis.”
Shapiro looked at her strangely.
“In an innocent way,” she said defensively. “He was just saying things like how his ex-wife didn’t seem to notice he had one. It’s not like he came out 360
James Grippando
and said he had Marfan’s syndrome, for crying out loud.”
Caldwell smirked. “Gee, Victoria. You never asked
me
about my penis.”
“You see, dammit?” she said angrily, shaking her head.
“That’s
precisely
the reason I didn’t want to say anything about this. I didn’t want it to turn into the next big Victoria joke, and then for the next ten years have to put up with the bullshit from every penis in the Bureau. So I pursued it on my own. Once we focused on Hannon, I had a reasonable suspicion that he was the guy I’d met at the airport, but I wasn’t sure. So I just had surveillance tap the girlfriend’s phone in Maryland, figuring that if something panned out, then I’d bring it to your attention.
Well, it
did
pan out. Frank Hannon is on the cruise ship.
And here’s the transcripts that prove it.”
“Transcripts of what?”
“Just this morning, a guy using the name ‘Charlie’ called his girlfriend from the cruise ship. Charlie is the guy who I met at the airport.”
“I still don’t see how you make the leap to Hannon.”
“It’s his old high school yearbook photo and the face-aged computer image,” she said, spilling them onto his desk. “I just saw them this morning. Now that I’ve seen Hannon with no beard and mustache, I’m convinced that he was the guy I talked to at the San Francisco airport.
That means ‘Charlie’ is Hannon. And Charlie’s on the ship.”
Shapiro gave her an assessing look. “Are you a hundred percent on this?”
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“I don’t know. The high school shot is almost sixteen years old. The computer image has Hannon blond and blue-eyed, and the guy in the airport had brown hair, brown eyes. But that’s an easy disguise. I’m ninety-five percent sure, I’d say.”
He nodded pensively, seeming to mull it over. It took just a few seconds until he looked her in the eye. “Get your sunscreen, Victoria. We’re going on a little Caribbean cruise.”
At Karen’s invitation, Mike spent the rest of the morning at the house. He borrowed one of her disposable razors and showered in the guest bathroom. The
guest
bathroom—a tantalizing reminder that he wasn’t quite home yet.
He still had some clothes buried deep in the walk-in closet, just things he’d left behind to make their separation seem temporary. Most of them had been mothballed for years, like the pastel linen jackets with colored T-shirts and rolled-up sleeves from the heyday of
Miami Vice.
He wasn’t sure which was harder to believe, the fact that he’d once worn them or that Karen had actually allowed them into her closet. Fortunately, he found some khakis that still fit and a timeless old tennis shirt.
Since Victoria’s phone call this morning, Mike had been bursting inside. He sensed something was afoot, and it wasn’t his style to sit around waiting for the telephone to ring. But he could see in Karen’s eyes that she didn’t want to be left alone. For once, he was determined to put her first without telling her he was doing it.
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They made a team effort at lunch. Karen cooked the fusilli pasta and created the dressing while Mike chopped up the tomatoes, carrots and broccoli. He pretended she was out of cauliflower; the broccoli was compromise enough. They ate at the blond knotty-pine table in the breakfast nook. Karen kept the room like a miniature greenhouse, with plants draping down from the skylight like ever-growing tentacles.
“I was thinking about my grandfather last night,” said Mike, going heavy on the grated Parmesan.
Karen sipped her iced tea. “What about?”
“Remember toward the end there, the way his mind was kind of slipping?”
She raised an eyebrow. “You mean before or after he asked me to marry him?”
Mike smiled. “He was like a schoolboy, with those crushes he developed. I was thinking about how nuts he was for Diane Sawyer. He thought she was the total woman. A beautiful, smart journalist. Personable. And to top it all off, an incredible cook.”
“Diane Sawyer can cook?”
“I doubt it,” he said with a shrug. “But who had the heart to tell poor old Grandpa that the woman on television with all those great recipes was actually Martha Stewart?”
She laughed to herself. “A perfectly honest mistake for a ninety-seven-year-old man.”
“Hey—he was in love, he was happy. I could have set him straight, if I’d wanted to. But you have to make a judgment call on these things.” He paused to catch her eye. “Telling the truth isn’t always better. The important thing is that your intentions are good.”
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Her smile faded. She lowered her eyes toward her pasta salad. “Nice try, Mike. But what I did to you isn’t even in the same cookbook.”
He looked at her with concern, until finally she looked up. A soulful expression filled her eyes.
“I was twenty years old,” she said, “a punky little sophomore on spring break from Cornell. When I got off the ship I saw your article in the
Tribune
about the rape, saying the police had no suspects. That’s when I decided to call you. How could I know that five years later I’d actually lay eyes on you, when I almost literally ran into you at that fund-raiser for the Miami Ballet? My first reaction was to get the hell out of there.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. It was a strange feeling. Your being a stranger, really, and yet knowing my deepest secret. I guess I felt like I had the right to know something about you. At least talk to you a little, find out what kind of person you were.”
“It must have been a shock when I asked you out.”
Her eyes widened. “Boy, was it.”
“Well, at least now I know why you turned me down.”
“But then when I ran into you at happy hour the next week, I started to think it was fate or something. It wasn’t until after I finally said I’d go out with you that my friend Terri told me you’d called her to find out where I went after work on Fridays.”
“Reporters,” he said. “Can’t trust ’em.”
“That was sweet, really. And for the first few dates I was able to put the history aside, even though in my heart I really wanted to tell you the truth.”
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“Why didn’t you?”
“I was afraid. I was never publicly connected to the rape or the shooting. The newspaper in New York had a policy against printing the names of rape victims, and…well, he was technically a juvenile, so his name wasn’t printed either. I left Cornell and moved closer to home. The only people who really knew anything were my parents, and even they didn’t know that what I had done was as much revenge as it was self-defense.”
“Call it whatever you want. It doesn’t change the way I feel about you.”
“Back then it might have. What if we’d broken up? I didn’t want you—a
reporter
—knowing who I was and what I’d done. So I kept putting off telling you the truth about how we met. I said to myself, I’ll tell him if we date six months, if we date nine months, if we get engaged.
By the time we got married, I’d kept it secret for so long that I
couldn’t
tell you—not after having concealed it for so long. Keeping the secret became as bad as the secret itself.”
“You’re too hard on yourself.”
“Really? The truth is, if Frank Hannon hadn’t gotten out of prison and murdered ten people, I don’t know if I ever would have told you.”
He paused for a moment, then reached across the table and touched her hand. “If you had believed our marriage was strong enough to survive it, you would have told me.
Keeping the secret isn’t what made our marriage weak. I had a little something to do with that.”
They exchanged a long, warm look. “Thank you,” she said.
He nodded, then smiled wryly. “That’s quite a 365
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trick—when a guy can get a ‘thank-you’ for screwing up his marriage. I also do lifelong friendships and extended families, if there are any of those you’d like busted up.”
She threw her wadded napkin at him, smiling as she shook her head. “That’s the problem with you, Posten.
You take life too seriously.”
They talked well past the lunch hour. The phone rang at two-forty-five, just as Mike was loading the dishwasher.
He answered in the kitchen.
“Victoria,” he said, loud enough to let Karen know who it was. She was sponging off the table and stopped in midswipe. “Are you actually making good on your promise to call
me
before CNN?”
Her tone was strictly business. “I just wanted to reiterate what I said this morning. Please don’t print anything about Hannon, the serial killings or your informant. It’s extremely important.”
“You already told me that.”
“But now it’s more important than ever. We’re in an extremely delicate situation. Anything you write could set Hannon off, jeopardizing the lives of agents and civilians.”
“If you’re asking me to put public safety over the public right to know, I think I have a right to know what I’m balancing.”
She sighed, struggling. “I’m sorry, I can’t give specifics.
All I can tell you is that Hannon doesn’t know it yet, but we’ve got him cornered. Anything you put in print could tip him off or provoke him.”
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Just then, Mike heard a long, low-pitched background noise over the line, like a bassoon in the distance. He winced with confusion.
Where the heck is she calling from?
Her voice was suddenly nervous. “I have to go. I hope I can count on you.”
His mind raced as he hung up the phone. Karen stepped quietly into the kitchen. From the look on her face, he could tell she’d overheard the conversation.
“Something big is going down, isn’t it,” she said.
He nodded. “They’ve got Hannon cornered.”
“Where?”
“She wouldn’t say. But—” He stopped himself in midsentence. His expression changed, as if something had just hit him. “It was a ship’s whistle.”
Her faced scrunched with confusion. “What?”
“I heard a noise in the background while we were talking. It was faint, in the distance, but it was definitely one of those obnoxious horns from a ship. I think she was calling from a seaport.”
“So?”
“So, where do you think they have Mr. Hannon cornered? We know he was in Antigua, because that’s where he killed the guards. He’s eager to get back to the United States, so he can continue his search for the informant. Victoria says they have him cornered, and I just heard a ship’s whistle in the background. Right now, I’ll bet he’s on a ship heading for the States.”
