The Pandora Key (6 page)

“Heh. Sly, Miss Shanahan. Get someone else to do the legwork. I like it.”

“Leverage, Felix. It’s all about leverage. Call me when you have something on that license plate.”

“You got it.”

6

BACK IN MY APARTMENT, I CHECKED MY PHONE MESSAGES on the home machine. Nothing but a recorded voice from the Red Cross saying it was time to give blood again. I called Harvey’s house and didn’t get him. Then I went through the same routine on his cell phone. I thought about calling my friend Bo but dismissed the idea, at least until I had a better sense of what was going on. I didn’t want to bring in the big guns until I knew for sure Harvey wasn’t at the Coolidge Corner theater catching a matinee with Rachel. I knew that wasn’t the case. I could feel in every part of me that Harvey had not left that house on his own. But my Bosnian enforcer friend and colleague was not a resource to be used lightly.

The speed of my DSL connection was liberating after Harvey’s poky dial-up service. I started punching the keys, doing searches and cross-references on names and phrases, looking for connections, and trying to find anything that would help me locate Rachel.

The first thing that came up was a piece in one of the smaller trade publications announcing that Rachel Ruffielo had joined a midsize local accounting firm as a partner. This was four, almost five, years ago, so it must have been shortly after she’d left Harvey.

There was a second, splashier announcement three years after that, when Rachel was named managing partner of the firm. The announcement listed several of the larger accounts she had managed during her tenure. Sure enough, one of them was Betelco. The final articles were all about the dissolution of Rachel’s firm in the wake of the Betelco scandal. When Betelco went down, it took its accountants with it.

I did a search for
Betelco
and got so many hits I cross-referenced with the name
Fratello
and words like
indictment, embezzlement
, and
fraud.
It seemed that Roger Fratello had inherited the controlling interest of a company founded by his father in 1944. The Lightway Company manufactured parts used to make lightbulbs. Roger found lightbulbs boring, so he used a good portion of the company’s substantial pile of cash to go on a spending spree. One of the companies he bought made semiconductors, and that put Roger right in the middle of the tech boom. He took on new investors to shore up his cash position and, when the technology sector went bust, took off with their money. In his wake, he left faked financial reports, fabricated customer lists, and a lot of very unhappy investors.

I searched hard for any reports on the Betelco fiasco that mentioned Rachel. Her company took a few direct hits in articles toward the end, but she was never mentioned by name. Inquiring minds wanted to know where the auditors had been throughout this ongoing fraud. Another good question to ask when I found her.

I hit the enter button several times, stacking up the Betelco articles for printing, then I went into Google Images to see what pictures I could find. Roger and his wife, Susan, had apparently been quite the presence on the Boston social scene, back before he had slithered out of town with other people’s money. The two of them had been regulars at fund-raisers, charity balls, and other excuses to wear black ties and gowns. Roger looked the same in all his pictures. More interesting were the pictures of his wife. I put the name
Susan Fratello
in and found several more recent photos of her. The difference in the images pre- and post-disgrace were startling. You could look into her eyes and see that she had suffered greatly for the sins of her husband. What better source of information could I hope to find?

I went back to the private databases to see if she was still in the area. She was not only still in the area, but she was in the same house in Newton she’d shared with her husband. I printed out the address. She would be my next stop.

When I could think of nothing else to search for, I checked my notebook. Ling had also mentioned the name
Stephen Hoffmeyer
as a possible alias for Roger. I put that into the Google box and got about a zillion hits. When I tried to cross-reference it with
Fratello
, I got nothing. I tried a few more combinations. Just when I was about to give up, I tried
Stephen Hoffmeyer
and
Brussels
, the city where Ling had found the cash. What I got in return might have been interesting to anyone, but for a former airline person, it was fascinating. A man named Stephen Gerald Hoffmeyer had been one of the passengers taken hostage in the Salanna 809 hijacking. Salanna Airlines was a small Belgian carrier that had gone out of business, driven there primarily by the bloody terrorist hijacking of Flight 809.

I started skimming the articles, refreshing my memory of the details. Seventy-nine passengers and crew had boarded their scheduled flight from Brussels to Johannesburg. One hour in, five members of the radical Armed Islamic Martyrs Brigade pulled out ice picks and took over the plane. Unfortunately for everyone, things began to go wrong almost immediately. The plane took a mechanical and ended up making an emergency landing in Sudan. The Belgians immediately ticked off the Sudanese by dispatching an elite military team to take charge. The Sudanese immediately invited in several high-profile terrorist groups, including Hamas, to help with the negotiations. This ticked off the Belgians.

Ten excruciating days later, with only the Western hostages still onboard, the Belgians stormed the plane without permission from the Sudanese government. In the conflagration that followed, seventeen people died—nine passengers and eight hijackers, the original gang of five, plus three that boarded later. The plane was destroyed.

I found a photo array of the storming and the aftermath. It had happened at night, so the pictures of the initial bombing and the fireball that followed were particularly vivid. The pictures shot in the cold and dreary light of dawn were quite a contrast. The grotesquely twisted hulk of what had once been an airplane was prominent. The debris field that surrounded it was blackened.

It was hard to believe anyone had walked away from that, but eight hostages had made it out. I searched several articles for the list of survivors. Once I found it, I checked the dates, then I sat back and tried to figure out what it all meant.

Salanna 809 had happened four years ago. If this was the same Stephen Hoffmeyer whom Ling had asked me about, and if it was an alias for Roger Fratello, then the embezzler had himself become the victim of a terrible crime. He had been caught on a hijacked aircraft, held hostage for ten days, and then killed in the fiery inferno that had resulted from a failed rescue attempt. He had not been one of the survivors.

Talk about karmic retribution.

7

ROGER FRATELLO’S OLD ADDRESS WAS A LARGE WHITE Victorian down a shady street in the affluent suburb of West Newton. It had a vast front lawn and a wraparound covered patio with a wooden porch swing. Susan Fratello answered the door. It was the same woman I had seen in those tuxedo-and-gown photos with her once-respectable husband, plus twenty years and a blue velour housecoat zipped up the front.

“Mrs. Fratello?”

A small terrier with wisps of brown hair in its eyes yapped from behind her leg as she scanned the street. “Have they found him?”

“Excuse me?”

“Aren’t you a reporter?” Her voice conveyed nothing but calm curiosity, a direct contrast to her nearly hysterical pooch.

“I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for information about your husband.”

“Read the papers.”

She started to close the door, but I put my hand on it, a gesture that made the tiny canine go nuts. He was a smart dog. He could spring and yap at the same time. Mrs. Fratello stared at me until I took my hand off her door.

“I’m sorry, but I have read the papers. I’ve done lots of research.” I held up my backpack. “It’s all in here. But it doesn’t give me what I need to solve my case.”

“What kind of case?”

“Someone I’m close to was abducted. My partner. I’m trying to find him.”

“What does my husband have to do with it?”

“That’s why I’m here. I need to figure that out.”

She pushed her head out again and looked up and down the quiet street. “Have you seen the FBI? They’ve been here. And they watch. They’re always watching. Did you see them out there?”

“I was questioned by the FBI a few hours ago.”

“About what?”

“About your husband. They have some new information about him.”

“Down, Trudy. Quiet.” The dog went silent. It was miraculous. “What did they say?”

“Perhaps if I came in, I could answer some questions for you as well.”

Susan Fratello lived what appeared to be a modest existence in a large house. While she went to change, I perused the photos lined up across the mantel. Her children were handsome and healthy, tan in the summer, red-cheeked in the winter, and always affectionate and close in their poses. It looked as if it had been a comfortable life, easy to be in, and without ever a thought in the world that it could all go away. There were no pictures of Roger.

Susan came in with a tall glass of water. Trudy, the tiny terrier, was right on her heels, and I wondered if she ever got stepped on or lost in Susan’s longer gowns and robes.

I took the glass from her. “Thank you.”

She had put on a pair of white slacks, a dark blue, long-sleeved, scoop-necked top, and a string of white beads with matching earrings. She was also wearing lipstick. I sensed that she didn’t get many visitors. She sat on her couch and patted her thighs. The springy dog had no problem leaping up there. Then the two of them sat and looked at me. Susan’s smile gave her the appearance of one of her photos—posed and two-dimensional.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “to bring all this up for you—”

“It never really went away. Besides, you’re not the only one. That awful Agent Southern was here. He brought a new one this time. He was completely bald.”

“Special Agent Ling,” I said. “That’s the team that interviewed me this morning.”

“That Southern is a sour man. I wonder what makes him so sour. Do you know?”

“I don’t.” But I had to agree with her. “Why did they come to see you?”

“Apparently, my husband has popped up somewhere in Europe.”

“He has?” If true, that put a big dent in the Fratelloas-Hoffmeyer theory. Hoffmeyer was dead.

“They have no proof. They only told me they had found something of his.”

“I think I know what that is,” I said. “They told me about all this cash in a safety deposit box in Brussels. Stacks of it with your husband’s and my partner’s fingerprints.”

That got her complete attention. “How much money?”

“They didn’t say.”

“Was it my husband’s?”

“We didn’t really talk about the money.”

Just as quickly, she turned a little glassy-eyed. “How strange this all is,” she said, “after so much time has passed. They showed me his wallet. Don’t you find that odd? From four years ago. They think he might contact me. That’s why they were here.”

“Would he?”

“Heavens, no. I would be the last person he contacted. I would turn him in, and he knows that.” She offered that same fixed expression. It was strange. At times, she seemed to be completely present behind it. At other moments, she was just gone.

“Who is your partner?”

“His name is Harvey Baltimore.”

“How unusual. Is that his real name?”

I nodded, thinking of how Harvey always had to explain his name. “His people came over from Poland. The agents who processed them couldn’t say the family name, and they were going to Baltimore, so—”

“They were rechristened at America’s doorstep. Yes, I understand.” This time, her smile was not forced. Her maiden name was probably something like Kasprzycki. “I don’t know a Mr. Baltimore,” she said. “I would remember. Is he also an investigator?”

“A forensic accountant.”

She sighed. “Unfortunately, I know what that is. After Roger left, I was interviewed by investigators of every stripe. Agents from the Treasury, the IRS, the state’s attorney’s office, the attorney general’s people—”

“But not Harvey?”

“No.”

I hadn’t considered that Harvey might have been part of a team investigating the fraud. Ling hadn’t mentioned it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t so. I pulled out a picture of Harvey and showed it to her. “Maybe you know his face.”

She looked at it. “He has a nice face. He looks kind.” She offered it back to me. “Did you say he’s also missing?”

“He’s…I’m not sure where he is. I’m looking for him.”

I put the picture back and came out with the one I had slipped from the frame on Harvey’s desk. “His ex-wife showed up this morning. I think she might have something to do with it. Maybe you know her. She worked with your husband.” I offered her the picture of Rachel.

Susan looked as if I had just offered her a plate of botulism. Her neck bowed. Trudy, holding otherwise perfectly still, turned her head and looked back at Susan’s face. “Of course I know her. She was the ruin of this family. She deserves the hottest corner of hell for what she did to us.” Trudy whined. Susan lifted her up to her face and nuzzled her. “Isn’t that right, pookie?”

“I’m sorry.” I pulled the picture back. “I didn’t realize…were she and Roger—”

“Sleeping together?” She shrugged it off. “Who didn’t he sleep with? It wasn’t that.” She leaned forward and pointed with a long fingernail at the image of Rachel in my lap. “She brought the Russians.”

“Excuse me?”

“Russian
investors
.” She did the air quotes. “The Russian mob, the Russian
mafiya
, the red menace. Whatever you want to call them, just don’t call them people, because they’re not human, they’re animals. Those
animals
made our lives a living hell, and she’s the bitch responsible for bringing them in.”

“Into Betelco?”

“I’m sure you know all about my husband’s company.” She still puffed up a little when she described it that way. “Actually, my husband’s father’s business—and the source of our income—that my husband ran straight into the ground. We didn’t know what we were going to do. We couldn’t find any more investors. We couldn’t get a loan. We were desperate when, out of the blue, we found a buyer for the business.”