Murder Games Page 15

  “You’re hardly a queen, at least as far as gay slang goes,” said Tracy. “But taken with your last name…yeah, Dylan Reinhart could definitely be the queen of hearts.”

  “Only I’m not,” I repeated.

  “Why am I even debating this with you?” said Elizabeth. “I already arranged protection for you starting this afternoon. It’s done.”

  There was no point in arguing with her. I may have lapped Elizabeth when it came to arrogance, but we were neck and neck in terms of stubbornness. Sometimes you fight. Sometimes you retreat.

  Sometimes you strike a deal.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Postpone the start of that protection until tomorrow, and I won’t say another word about it.”

  “Why tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Because there’s something you and I need to do today,” I said. “Just the two of us.”

  “Gee, thanks,” said Tracy.

  “I didn’t mean it like—”

  “I’m kidding,” he said. “Besides, I’ve got my own plans, beginning with buying a new phone. That’s still freaking me out, by the way—the fact that this psychopath was in the Starbucks with me.”

  “Yeah, but that was the break we were waiting for,” I was about to say.

  I didn’t, though. Truth was, as much as I thought the Dealer had finally made a mistake, I couldn’t know for certain yet. He still could’ve been playing me. Or at least trying to.

  One way or the other, I was going to find out for sure. It’s true what they say.

  A man can never fully leave his past behind…

  Chapter 70

  IT WASN’T so much a blind spot as it was our laying down the shovel too early. In other words, we didn’t dig deep enough.

  Now we needed a little more than a shovel. More like a backhoe, really.

  I knew just the guy.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Elizabeth. We had walked from the diner to the parking garage near my and Tracy’s apartment.

  “I’m hardly kidding,” I answered, handing her a blindfold, which was really just the sleep mask I wear when flying. “In fact, what I am is absolutely crazy to think I can bring you along.”

  That softened her stance a bit, the mere possibility that I could change my mind. “I’ll look ridiculous,” she said.

  I pointed at the spare helmet under my arm with the heavily tinted visor. “No one will even know.”

  She was out of arguments, so on went the blindfold, on went the helmet, and on jumped Elizabeth to the back of my motorcycle. It didn’t get any more Bruce Wayne than this.

  Twelve miles and twenty minutes longer than it should’ve taken, courtesy of a closed lane on the George Washington Bridge—which Chris Christie, I hoped, had nothing to do with—the two of us were standing inside a steel door that was ten feet behind another steel door that was past the security gate to a warehouse for a medical supply company in Fort Lee, New Jersey, that nobody had ever heard of, primarily because it didn’t actually exist.

  “Who the bloody hell is that?” asked Julian with his British accent, pointing at Elizabeth with a finger on the hand that wasn’t gripping his customary highball of whiskey. Back in the day, he was always a no-brainer for a birthday gift—just as long as it was single malt.

  Elizabeth extended her hand. “I’m Detective Elizabeth Need—”

  “Christ, darling, don’t tell me your name!” said Julian. “I don’t want to know who you are, and you definitely shouldn’t know who I am.”

  “It’s okay,” I assured Julian. “She doesn’t even know your zip code.”

  Julian Byrd, who single-handedly was keeping the word curmudgeon alive and well in the English language, managed a shrug. He wasn’t actually mad that I had a plus one. If he had been, we never would’ve made it past the security gate.

  “What is it with you and protocol, Reinhart?” asked Julian as he turned and led us back to his office.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “The thing is—”

  “Yeah, I get it. This Dealer guy could stand trial, and your detective friend needs to cover her tracks and have her own version of events for when she testifies,” said Julian, always seeing a few moves ahead. The world was Boris Spassky, and he would forever be Bobby Fischer. He glanced back over his shoulder at Elizabeth. “She’s rather good-looking, isn’t she?”

  “You know that I’m actually here, right?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Yeah, he knows,” I said.

  That was Julian, thoroughly British but still like the original Marlboro cigarette. No filter.

  Throw in his crazy hair and even crazier beard, and he was either one of two things: Charles Manson’s doppelgänger or what he actually was, the greatest hacker ever to work for MI6.

  As well as for the CIA.

  Chapter 71

  “WHOA,” SAID Elizabeth.

  “Yeah, I get that a lot,” said Julian as we entered his office. “Or at least from the few people who have actually been inside here.”

  It wasn’t the massive terminals or the fact that Julian’s giant “desk” was made from the wing of an old Fokker Eindecker, the first German fighter plane. No, what had Elizabeth’s jaw nearly scraping the floor was the view. In an otherwise windowless room in a windowless warehouse, the four walls in Julian’s office, as well as the ceiling, were one seamless projection screen capable of carrying a live feed from any Internet, satellite, or LAN-based camera that Julian chose to hack into. At the moment we were floating in space above the earth. It was insanely cool.

  “Russian satellite?” I asked.

  “Chinese, actually,” he said. “A stealth beta launch of their Tiangong space station. It’s comical: their firewalls are like rice paper.”

  Julian sat down behind a double row of screens and a single keyboard. His chair was the only one in the room. Again, he almost never had company.

  “Thanks for doing this,” I said. “Especially on such short notice.”

  “It wasn’t as short as you think,” he said. “The Eagle gave me the heads-up that you might be calling. He now thinks this is related to one of your past assignments.”

  “It’s not,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” Julian asked. “He’s convinced.”

  “The Eagle still thinks we faked the moon landing,” I said.

  “Well, if there was ever a guy who would know,” said Julian before making a few taps on his keyboard. Poof, we were no longer floating in space. Now the entire room was the rotunda of the National Archives Building, in DC. It was a live feed from one of the security cameras aimed at the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. “So whose civil liberties will we be violating today?” he asked.

  Julian plus whiskey always equaled a wicked sense of humor.

  I glanced over at Elizabeth, who still seemed undecided as to how surprised she was supposed to act after Julian referenced my “past assignments.”

  “Relax,” I told her. “I know you know.”

  “You do?” she asked. “Wait, what exactly do you think I know?”

  “Nice try,” I said. She was a born detective, seeing if she could get something more out of me.

  “How would she know?” asked Julian. “You sure as hell didn’t tell her.”

  “Apparently you’re not the only hacker in the world,” I said.

  “No,” said Julian. “Just the best.” He meant it, too.

  Then he proved it.

  Chapter 72

  “HERE—THESE are all the victims so far,” I said, handing Julian a list. Or so I tried to. He waved me off.

  “I already created files on each and every one,” he said. “The only thing missing is some brilliant insight as to what we’re looking for.”

  That was my cue.

  “The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law,” I began. “The AP Stylebook, for short.”

  Julian immediately raised a sarcastic finger. “One second,” he said. He poured himself some more whiskey. “Oka
y, Columbo, now I’m ready.”

  I raised a finger, too. My middle one. That got a rare smile out of Julian. He loved busting my American chops.

  I continued. “The AP Stylebook was first created in the mid-1950s as a language guide for newspapers, a way to establish uniformity of grammar, punctuation, and usage. It’s been revised annually, but it’s always been the bible for the news industry. Like any bible, it has its quirks, one of them being the use of the term innocent versus not guilty.”

  “I always wondered about that,” said Elizabeth. “Papers always used to get it wrong.”

  “You’re right, and they knew it, too,” I said. “For decades, newspapers would always write ‘innocent’ instead of ‘not guilty,’ not because they didn’t know the difference in the legal sense but because they were afraid of a disastrous typo.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Elizabeth.

  “If a writer or an editor or a typesetter left off the word not, suddenly the paper would be declaring someone guilty instead of not guilty,” I said.

  “For real?” asked Julian. “This AP book says to use the word innocent simply to avoid that possibility?”

  “For close to a half century, that’s exactly what it said,” I replied.

  Julian took another swig. “Okay, but I’m going to run out of whiskey, Dylan.” Translation: What’s the point?

  “The AP has since changed the rule. However, long before they did, there was a young reporter who refused to follow it. In fact, he made a big stink about it in the wake of the O. J. Simpson trial.”

  “You’re kidding me,” said Elizabeth. “Grimes?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Back when he was just Allen Grimes, before Grimes on Crimes.”

  “How did you know that?” she asked.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “The Dealer said something on the phone with me, though. He said, This isn’t about the innocent.”

  Julian nearly dropped his whiskey glass he was in such a hurry to return to his keyboard.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I believe it is.”

  Chapter 73

  I’D KNOWN Julian for ten years, approximately nine longer than necessary to understand exactly what he was doing at that very moment. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was still out in space. The dark side of the moon, in fact.

  “What the hell is going on?” she asked.

  “You and I looked at the criminal records of all the victims,” I said. “Some had been arrested, but not all of them. One or two had been convicted of petty crimes, but again, not all of them. We didn’t see a pattern, and we moved on.”

  “There is one?” she asked. “A pattern?”

  “I’m almost sure of it,” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Almost?”

  “SARA will tell us,” said Julian without looking up from his keyboard.

  Poof, we were back on earth again. Julian’s walls were now displaying direct feeds from the multiple screens on his desk, his entire office engaging in a game of This Is Your Life with each and every victim. Only this version of the game was unlike any other.

  Elizabeth leaned over to me. “Who’s Sara?” she whispered.

  I thought it was an acronym the first time Julian mentioned the name. Short for “search all restricted accounts” or something like that. Instead SARA—the program—was named for Julian’s older sister. “She was always such a bloody know-it-all when we were growing up,” he had told me.

  That was the program, all right. The ultimate know-it-all.

  In fact there was a rumor when I first met Julian that Steve Jobs had somehow heard about it and named Siri as a tip of the hat to him. Of course, neither Julian nor Jobs ever had a word to say about that.

  I turned to Elizabeth. “Just watch.”

  Julian’s walls were churning through an endless stream of pages, so fast that Elizabeth didn’t notice at first that this was more than simply a Google search on steroids. This was sealed court documents—city, county, state, and federal. This was unfiled depositions. This was the ultimate digital crowbar into the legal troubles of all the victims: Jared Louden, Bryce VonMiller, Rick Thorsen, Cynthia Chadd, Colton Lange, and Jackie Palmer.

  Was it legal?

  That depends on how you feel about Machiavelli. Or, for that matter, about serial killers. To paraphrase an old Chinese proverb, the enemy of evil must sometimes borrow from his foe.

  “How does it feel to be back, Dyl?” asked Julian, finally looking up from his keyboard. By then, he was simply waiting for SARA to do her thing. We all were.

  “Back?” I asked. “You mean in this office?”

  Julian knew I was playing dumb. He also knew how to do a few impressions, although Al Pacino from The Godfather: Part III wasn’t necessarily one of them. Not that that was about to stop him.

  “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” he shouted.

  “Always longing for the past,” I said. “What is it with the British? I told you, whatever this is…it isn’t that.”

  “But you miss that, don’t you?” he asked. “I know you do.”

  “Ah…who’s analyzing whom now?” I said.

  “And that’s a nondenial denial,” he retorted.

  I looked over at Elizabeth, sizing me up. Whatever she did or didn’t know about my past, it was as if she were seeing me for the first time. “What are you looking at?” I asked, doing my worst Jack Nicholson imitation.

  “You tell me,” she said.

  Suddenly the sound of Julian clapping filled the room. SARA had found something.

  Or, rather, someone.

  “Well, what do you know?” said Julian, staring at one of his monitors. “I do believe we have our answer.”

  Chapter 74

  I WAITED until we were back over the George Washington Bridge, well into Manhattan, before telling Elizabeth she could lower the mask covering her eyes. It was in keeping with the general theme developing for the day. John 9:25: Whereas I was blind, now I see.

  “Can’t this damn thing go any faster?” she was soon yelling into my helmet.

  Two things. First, complaining about the speed of a beautifully and painstakingly restored 1961 Triumph TR6 Trophy was—in my very biased opinion—like standing in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and wondering why Leonardo didn’t use a bigger canvas.

  Second, we were already pushing seventy.

  Make that eighty as we got onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. Next stop, the Bronx and Riverdale, the neighborhood that contains the northernmost point in New York City. We were headed for the Hudson Hill section, to be exact.

  If Riverdale is the diamond of the Bronx, then Hudson Hill is the diamond you get at Tiffany’s. About a mile past the Wave Hill House, where Mark Twain once lived, I pulled into the driveway of a sprawling Tudor home half covered in ivy.

  “Do you mind taking your shoes off?” asked Arthur Kingsman, greeting us at the front door. “Its not a dirt thing—I just hate the sound of heels against my floors.”

  Elizabeth and I promptly removed our shoes.

  If Kingsman’s reputation for eccentricity preceded him, what he was wearing above his yellow wool socks all but confirmed it. Technically a red robe, it looked like the silken love child of a smoking jacket and a kimono. “I have tea. You want tea?” he offered.

  “No thanks; we’re good,” said Elizabeth.

  The words were polite. Her tone, though, was impatient. I couldn’t blame her; I was feeling the same way. It was as if our minds were still back on my bike, hovering near the redline. This was happening fast, yet there was no shaking the feeling. Was it fast enough? The Dealer’s game—did we finally catch up?

  “Excuse the clutter,” said Kingsman, leading us into his study. “You know, I can still hear my wife’s voice telling me to tidy things up.”

  Fact: Kingsman’s wife had died of breast cancer five years ago.

  Somewhere underneath
the stacks of files and books was the desk he took a seat behind while pointing us to a couch, the leather so worn and cracked it looked as if it were shedding. Not that Elizabeth noticed. We had barely sat down before she was rattling off the Dealer’s victims.

  “Do you recognize any of those names?” she asked.

  Kingsman, a lean sixty-two with a shaggy head of gray hair, rolled his eyes behind his thick black glasses.

  “This will go a lot quicker, Detective Needham, if you simply tell me why I should,” he said. “For the record, you’re not the only one capable of impatience.”

  And like that, he was no longer sitting at his desk. He was at the bench, and his study was now his courtroom.

  The Honorable Arthur Kingsman. The rarest of breeds. A strict constitutionalist liberal judge. But that inherent contradiction—and his apolitical reputation, derived from it—had helped propel him from the New York State Supreme Court up to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. At one point, he was even rumored to be on the short list for the highest court in the land. The fact that he was a former air force pilot with combat history only helped his cause.

  The reason he ultimately was never nominated to the US Supreme Court, however, was no mystery. Kingsman was a self-professed atheist. Legal scholars would point to that as being an advantage for a judge, a marker of his objectivity, but try telling that to a red-state senator up for reelection. Or, for that matter, to a blue-state senator.

  “All those names I mentioned? They’re all dead, Your Honor,” said Elizabeth. “And at one time or another, they’ve all been in your courtroom.”

  Chapter 75

  “I KNOW,” said Kingsman.

  “Wait—what?” said Elizabeth. “How could you—”

  “I mean, I recognize the names,” he said. “All of them except the woman’s, that is. Can you say her name again?”

  “Cynthia Chadd,” said Elizabeth.

  Kingsman shook his head. “I know the name of every person who has ever stood trial in one of my courtrooms,” he said. “There’s never been a Cynthia Chadd.”