A Spill of Blood Ch. 07

That was one side of the equation. The other had long, dark hair.

Sydney was used to a better style of living. She hadn't commented about the spartan bachelor quarters that were my place, but I remembered the polished interior of hers with its laden wine rack and a kitchen that looked like it was stocked by someone from Food Network despite relatively little signs of use. I recalled the closet full of classy looks, gear for the profession she'd abandoned.

And regardless of her tastes, she was right about one thing. Unless we could kill the entire hydra—and that was the longest of shots—she should change who she was. She needed to accomplish what Nikki had been trying: running. Probably we both should, but I was stubborn. Left on my own, if Richard Bertram and Anders Lindqvist wanted to come at me, my attitude was that it brought them into reach.

But she wasn't like that. No normal person was. She needed a new name and a new place. And she wanted a new man as part of the package. Moi.

I was content with a simple life. I didn't need that Porsche or a villa on some Greek island. I could be perfectly content sipping my ordinary rye while looking across the table in some local bar at a beautiful woman who made me feel good. I didn't need anything more. But if her tastes wanted that drink to be in some café in Mallorca or the Algarve, then who was I to judge? I could get used to it.

And anyway, Harry, don't get all holier than thou. You accepted it when Regan paid your bill out of that red bag. The money's dirty, but you can start to wash it by helping someone.

That memory of those packets of money Regan triggered another. There was a moment of confusion as the image of dark hair split into two. One crowned full curves and a face that lit up every time I came into the room.

The other belonged with a slender frame and an expression that held "What the fuck, Harry?" more often than I cared to mention.

The other side of the equation didn't include only Sydney.

I paid Jess what I could. It was pretty close to par for what an administrative assistant took home in the Big Apple ... which meant it was pretty close to par for sharing a New York apartment with one-too-many-other girls and keeping an eye on the Con Ed bill. But Jess was too private to share an apartment. It was why I saw her in a predictable, short rotation of clothes and why that apartment, for all the '50s-retro comfort it held, was filled with pieces made over from flea market finds.

And sometimes, that face didn't hold "What the fuck?" Sometimes it got pink with a genuine, dumbfounded pleasure at only a fraction of Larry Beck's runaway fund. That expression, quickly hidden away as she deflected the conversation in embarrassment, had been a shining bright spot in weeks of darkness.

That woman was loyal as hell. She'd proved it more than once and I owed her.

Two dark-haired women who were important to me. Two women whose lives would get better if Harry Morgan laid his hands on Larry Beck's go-fund rather than turning it over to the law where it would be wasted in bureaucratic bullshit or vanished into some unknown's bank account.

What are the chances Beck would have memorized sixty-four random characters? The answer, Harry, is that there are two chances: "slim" and "fat."

I thought back to those few minutes I'd had with Larry Beck, when we'd made the deal of information for a chance to run. He'd made me step away so I couldn't see what he was doing on the computer, so I didn't know what the clicking and typing had been about. Some of it had moved most of the money to a new account, the one I'd turned over to Regan, but maybe some of it was looking up a password. It was worth a try. I wasn't doing anything useful otherwise.

Murray had forged some kind of relationship with Police Chief Denunzio up there. He'd convinced him that the man responsible for the killings up there was a dead body down here. That wasn't a lie. Even though we couldn't prove it, we knew Mitchell had been the one, and he was certainly occupying a slab in the morgue right now. I listened in on the phone call.

"You need to come up quick," Denunzio said. "We've got the request for his stuff from you guys, but we just got a similar request from the feds. I gotta give into the feds." I could hear some fellow-cop-versus-them in his tone.

"We" going up there had turned into "me" when Murray got a call from his captain. Evidently, Special Agent Dutter had been on the horn, and Murray's boss wanted to talk about it.

"Go. Now. Before they realize," Murray said.

Beck's computer was a waste of time. Yeah, Chief Denunzio had it. Yeah, he let me see it. Yeah, they'd even broken the Windows password to get into it. The trouble came then.

"What do I do now?" I asked a guy I had on the phone. He was one of my dad's friends and knew a lot about computers.

"Press the Windows key and R. Then type 'recent' into the window that pops up and hit Enter. That will show you all the files recently accessed."

I read the listing to him.

"Stop. That's the vault file for a password program. It's ..."

My mind fuzzed over the gush of terms like "256-bit AES" and "initialization vectors and nonces." Finally, I interrupted.

"So, I'm fucked, you're saying."

"Unless you have a ton of time and some NSA-level decryption stuff, yeah, you're fucked."

I sat back and stared at the useless bit of plastic and circuitry. Maybe it was for the best. Who needs two million dollars in bitcoin? I picked it up and shoved it into the box it had come out of. I put the box back with the other two that held the worldly possessions of Larry Beck and Nichelle Hill that would be on their way to Special Agent Dutter and his minions come morning.

I was an hour into the drive back when I thought about the two of them, about Nikki and Larry and their relationship.

"Sydney, you weren't really close with Cara, but what about Nikki?" I said when she answered.

"Why?"

"Because from what you've told me, she was a serious dominatrix."

"She wasn't really like that, Harry. She only did it with Larry because—"

"It doesn't matter whether she was or wasn't," I interrupted. "Say you're a woman looking to land a whale, to use your term. And say that what keeps that man obsessed with you is that he gets off on you being in control. Now say you're running off together with thirty-two million dollars ..." I left it hanging. She got it.

"You make sure you've got the keys," she said excitedly.

I laughed when she told me the password to Nikki's phone. "Nikkigoddess with dollar signs instead of the esses."

I laughed even more an hour and a half later when I finally found a file in Notes that had seeming gibberish in it. It wasn't gibberish to me. Those numbers and letters were the entry point to the two million in crypto I had been willing to let Beck run with while I took twenty-nine plus the cash back to Regan. I copied them down on a scrap of paper. Then I checked twice before I was satisfied I hadn't screwed it up. I dropped her phone back in the box and gave it to the property clerk who had been watching me with a semi-attentive eye.

"Thanks, Chief," I said on the way out. "I guess it was a bust. Might as well ship it off to the feds and let them see if they can make anything of it."

Be careful about assumptions. They are "knock on wood" moments. Like assumptions that we were on a hiatus.

The thought of four hours—make that five or so during rush hour—back to New York when I'd already spent six in the car that day didn't appeal. I crashed in a hotel for the night. Two ryes became three because there was nothing going on. Sometime around ten o'clock, it started.

"I feel stupid," Jess said as an intro to her first call.

"Hmm?"

"I feel stupid because it took a days for something to sink in."

"Hmm?"

"Those letters in Bertram's mail? One of them was from Sand Dune Management Group. At first I thought it was some charity appeal. But I checked now. It's not. It's a property management group. They handle stuff down on the north end of Long Beach Island. Harvey Cedars, Loveladies, Barnegat. It's where the money is, Harry. I'm looking at public property records now." I heard the clatter of her keyboard.

"Bingo!" she yelled into my ear. "One of the houses in Loveladies was purchased by a corporation years ago. Guess which corporation."

"Excelus Imports."

"Right in one, Harry. And I've gone through that place when we went down the shore." Jess grew up in Jersey and hadn't lost all her Jerseyisms during her years in the city. "Those houses are set back and have a lot of empty land around them."

I let out a long breath, one I hadn't realized I'd been holding. "It's gotta be there," I said.

"Yeah. What now?"

"I'm in no shape to drive. Call Murray. Jess! You do not go down there yourself. Understand?"

"Yes, boss."

"Call Murray. He'll know what to do with the New Jersey State Police and the locals. If Bertram's there, that's the best bet."

I extracted an explicit promise from her that "Yes, boss" wasn't just humoring me. Then I went back to sleep in a better mood. Two breaks in one day.

And then, an hour later, I got the second call.

"Harry, Rachel Bertram's been shot!"

They wouldn't let me see her. I wasn't family. I did manage to worm out of the nurse that it wasn't serious. Well, any more serious than a gunshot needs to be.

"She'll be released tomorrow. I suggest you contact the family at their home sometime in the afternoon and see if visitation is okay."

I hadn't planned to travel to New Canaan. I had planned to make my way down to Loveladies, New Jersey and get in on what was going on down there. If nothing was going on, I was planning to start something. But Rachel getting shot raised a possibility in my mind.

Had Richard Bertram caught his wife snooping?

It seemed likely. I'd have a hard time forgiving myself if I'd been the cause. I didn't know if her attitude toward keeping her husband out of the mess was undying love or concern over a meal ticket, but it didn't matter. She didn't deserve a bullet for doing something I'd asked her to do.

I gnawed my lip in frustration at Murray's terse, "Can't talk right now. There's people here. Call you later." Since nobody in the New Jersey State Police would be likely to elicit that tone, I had a feeling "people" was somehow "Dutter." Well, it was to be expected they'd have the resources to track down all known addresses quickly.

I paced the room over my conversation with the same smooth-talking voice that had told me Rachel Bertram didn't take unscheduled visitors.

"Mrs. Bertram has made it clear she does not want any visitors today." When I asked that he mention that it was me, his voice grew in satisfaction. "She said that explicitly included you, Mr. Morgan. She will send a message about Friday, whatever that means." I could tell he didn't like the idea that the hoi polloi might have found yet another way around him.

"Can you at least tell me what happened to her?"

No.

It took three hours of phone calls to friends, who knew people, who knew hospital personnel to wheedle out the story. Rachel had been walking to her car from a local shopping center and had been shot by an unknown assailant in the parking lot. That person had fled in a silver Accord. The wound was to the upper arm. "She pulled back at the last minute. Good she did. Maybe ten inches to the left and it'd have been a different story" was the assessment.

When I wasn't gnawing and pacing and wheedling, I was ignoring the phone messages that requested I appear in Special Agent Dutter's presence. They turned from requests to demands to veiled threats. Then I thought about his resources and turned my phone off. If you think they can't locate you from it, well, you obviously haven't been watching movies. They got that part right.

"Where the hell have you been? I've been trying to call you," Jess complained when I called from the road.

"Rachel won't see me today, so there's no point in hanging around. I got one minute on the phone with Murray. He says locals have seen Bertram in the area. And somebody fitting Coco's description has been seen recently. They haven't moved on the place yet, but there are signs someone is there. I'm betting it's Bertram, Coco, or both. I'm going down to join the stakeout."

He'd also told me that I better answer Dutter's messages because I was about one minute away from a warrant as a material witness. "He's figured out you held something back. I don't know how or what 'cause he isn't talking to me. But he's out for your blood. You're standing in the way of a major win for him, and he's one ambitious son of a bitch."

A warrant for my detainment would be license-threatening. I'd turned my phone back on and called Dutter. "Don't get your panties in a twist. I'll be down there in a few hours." I'd hung up on his recitation of what would happen if I failed to show.

"And if Bertram makes another try for his wife?" Jess went on. She'd heard my fears.

"I made sure that gatekeeper asshole on the phone knew that Richard Bertram was not above suspicion, and that the police should be called if he showed. While I pretty much got stonewalled, he did tell me in his supercilious way that the gate code had been changed and deadbolts were on. I doubt she's coming out of the house while this is going on. I'll run back up Friday and hope that—"

"Yeah, well about that," she broke in. "The reason I've been trying to call you is that Rachel Bertram has decided that Friday doesn't work. Instea—"

"Fuck!" I yelled into the phone. "Sorry."

"Instead," she said patiently, "she's heading somewhere she wouldn't tell me, but my impression is abroad. She said if you want those papers, she'll have someone bring them to you at the gate. You're not coming in and she's not coming out. Today or never; those were her words."

I thought about the consequences of stiffing Dutter. I didn't like them. He was the kind of officious jerk who'd make trouble just because I didn't hop to his whistle. I explained that to Jess.

"Can you go up to New Canaan and get them?"

"Well, Harry, I'm in your office to take this call. I'm in here and not at my desk because caller ID told me who it was, and my office has an agent sitting in it to see if you appear. If I go booking out the door, don't you think they'll follow and then they'll know you did hold out on them. At a minimum, they'll confiscate whatever I get from Mrs. Bertram."

"Shit."

"Exactly. Look, it's easy. Send your girlfriend for the papers. If she goes in broad daylight when there are other people on the street, nothing will happen. Even she'll see that." I didn't miss the waspish tone. I simply ignored it. "You meet Dutter and get him off your back. I'll get in the car and drive down to Loveladies. It'll drag all the attention that way. Plus, I can help watch for Coco. Oh! That was the other thing I wanted to tell you before you went incommunicado." Her tone left no doubt what she thought of being unable to reach me.

"We got the password from Cara's sister. We think we know which picture she wanted to show you. It's good we didn't see it right away."

"What's that mean?"

"It would have muddied the waters. It doesn't show Beck or Nikki sneaking off to Regan's office."

"What's in it?"

"It's a picture of some partying in the game room." The slightly prim tone told me the partying was somewhere between heavy R-rated and XXX. "But those big, glass patio doors are in the background. You can see two people outside putting someone into a car.

"Sydney says the two people are Bertram and Coco. The person they're supporting has her back to the camera, but Sydney says that, from the long black hair, she thinks it's Kimi. And Harry, she looks kinda floppy, like maybe she's drugged or something."

"I think it's confirmation that Kimi didn't do a runner on her own."

"Yeah." Her voice was sad.

"Send it to me. I know it's probably not that good, but it's better than nothing. I'll start showing it around."

My conversation with Sydney went better than expected. "It's broad daylight, Harry. There'll be people around," she said, echoing Jess, "and I'm going crazy cooped up in this room. But I don't want to bring it down to New Jersey. It sounds like Richard and Coco are there and I'm afraid."

"Syd, I don't know what Dutter has found out, and I don't know if he's going to let me out of his sight. At best, I need to see that information. At worst, I may need some leverage to buy myself out of a situation. Don't come too close and they'll never know you're there."

She was reluctant. "I don't have a car."

"Take the train up to New Canaan. You don't want to fight rush hour anyway. Then get a car service to and from the station. There are plenty in that area, I'm sure. Train back, another car service. Trust me, we can afford it."

"What does that mean?"

"It's a surprise. When you get to LBI, find a hotel and let me know where you are. I'll meet you."

"Does that mean—"

I cut her off. "It's a surprise. Bye." I was smiling as I hung up.

Yeah, you don't want to fight rush hour. The Merritt is a beautiful road, surrounded by lush landscaping and beautifully architected bridges. It's also two lanes, no shoulder, non-existent merge lanes full of maniac drivers who alternate between stomping on the accelerator and pounding the brakes. The George Washington Bridge can be a nightmare to cross even in non-rush-hour times.

But the Garden State Parkway takes the cake. Look, I've been to western New Jersey. It's beautiful horse country that belies every stereotype of the state. But the eastern part confirms every bit of it. I swore at the five-lane logjam, especially as my GPS showed an accident down the road. It was a common occurrence in bumper-to-bumper, eighty-miles-an-hour traffic.

I cut off onto Rt. 35. An hour passed. Then the better part of another. I'd made the right choice, though. The picture off to my right on the GPS screen was still a solid line of red. Must have been a doozy of a pileup.

My phone dinged. I glanced down. Dutter confirming I was on my way. I ignored him.

A little while later it dinged again. A text from Jess. I thumbed it up, keeping my eyes on the ass end of the car in front of me.

You could see some pixelation, telling you that this image had been blown up substantially from a larger picture. But Cara's phone was the newest model, and the camera on it was good.

I never took an advanced driving course. I knew those one-eighties while staying on the road at forty miles an hour involved the hand brake and a lot of practice. I had a hand brake. That was moot, though, because I had zero practice, and killing myself with some hero maneuver wasn't going to help.

Instead, I swerved through a break in oncoming traffic, ignoring the blare of angry horns. I couldn't blame them. The gap I'd cut through had been about fifty feet longer than pure suicide. I stood up on the brake pedal in the strip mall's parking lot, trusting my antilocks to keep me out of a skid. Less than ten seconds later I was headed in the opposite direction ... again, accompanied by the blare of angry horns and fingers pointed skyward.

I knew that face.

Coco was Rachel Bertram.

Sydney didn't answer her phone. Not the first time I called, nor the second. Just in case someone else had it and used her face to unlock it, I left a message the second time, pretending innocence.

"I guess you're busy with Rachel Bertram. I'll see you in a couple of hours. I'm on my way to the city from Icaria and reception sucks, but call me when you get this."