Steal, page 9
The game had clearly started already. “Are you sure he really needs to talk to me?” I asked.
“Gee, maybe you’re right. You’re only asking him to save your life, so it’s crazy to think he might actually want to speak to you first and see just how bad you screwed things up.”
“Grigoryev was going to kill the girl,” I said. “I told you that.”
Elizabeth nodded, her voice softening. “I know you did.”
We were standing near center ice by the team benches. New York City has tons of almost everything you can imagine except public hockey rinks. Ice time is at a major premium. The only thing crazier than the start times for many of the rec league games, especially at the Sky Rink at Chelsea Piers, are the players themselves. But that’s hockey. You don’t play it; you live it. The puck drops at midnight? No problem.
“Which one is he, by the way?” I asked.
Elizabeth pointed. “Number sixteen.”
Right on cue, I watched as number sixteen perfectly threaded the needle on a pass to a teammate crossing the blue line. “He’s good,” I said.
“He played in college. Would’ve been drafted if he hadn’t blown out his knee,” she said.
The way she said it, though. I shot her a look. “Is there something I should know about you two?”
“Don’t even try it. Danny and I work together. That’s all we do together.”
“Danny, huh?”
“On second thought, maybe you don’t need to talk to him. Best of luck with that Russian mafia psychopath. I’m sure it will all work itself out on its own.”
I cooled it with the romance talk and resumed watching some hockey. I figured I’d have to wait until the end of the first period to talk to Danny, but as soon as he skated off the ice for a shift change he came over.
“Danny, this is Dylan,” said Elizabeth, in what was easily a candidate for the world’s most redundant introduction.
“On a scale of one to ten, Danny, how bad did I screw up?” I asked, not wasting any time.
He needed even less time to answer. “You a fan of Spinal Tap? Because this one goes to eleven.”
“I’m truly sorry for getting you involved,” I said. “Do you think you can smooth things over with Grigoryev?”
“You stole his car, one of his girls, and you held him at gunpoint. Smooth things over?”
“Well, when you put it like that…”
“What I can tell him is this,” he said. “He’ll feel good about killing you for a day—maybe even a few days—right up until some operative, who he’ll never see coming, puts a bullet through the back of his brain. If he understands that, he might back off.”
“Might?”
“He’s a pakhan, Dylan. Mne nasrat’, chto ty dumaesh’.”
That was definitely outside my grasp of Russian. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“It’s the polite version of what Grigoryev might tell me in return,” he said. “That he doesn’t give a rat’s ass.”
Danny was watching me intently as we talked. The more he stared, the more I began to realize what he was doing. Why I was there. Why he wanted to meet me in person.
Ask seasoned hostage negotiators what their biggest fear is on the job, and you won’t be told it’s the person or group who takes the hostages. Negotiators are trained for that. As long as they have a dialogue going, the odds are in their favor that innocent people won’t get hurt. No, their biggest fear is what they can’t control—that a hostage decides to take matters into their own hands. A preemptive strike. A hero play.
In my case, that I would kill Grigoryev before he could kill me.
That’s what agent Danny Sullivan was trying to gauge. He didn’t want me making his job any harder than it already was.
I wasn’t ruling anything out. Never limit your options if you don’t have to. But it wasn’t my plan at the moment, and he needed to know that.
“Danny, is there anything I can do to help you?” I asked. “Anything at all?” Only now I was staring back at him as hard as he’d been staring at me.
“No,” he said, reading between the lines. “But thanks for asking.”
“I’m the one who should be thanking you. You’ll let me know once you’ve spoken to Grigoryev?”
“Elizabeth will. You and I never talked.” He glanced at Elizabeth and then over at his team bench. There was a game to get back to. “That’s my shift up next,” he said. “But one last thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Grigoryev’s girl. Is she safe?”
“She is.”
“Good,” he said. “No matter what, you did the right thing.”
CHAPTER 33
Before I left the rink, Elizabeth asked where I’d be spending the night. With a target on my back, it certainly wouldn’t be at my apartment, so she offered up hers. She also asked when Tracy was due back with Annabelle.
“Not until the end of the week,” I said. “And thanks for the offer, but I’ve already booked a hotel.”
Not just any hotel.
I had Jade make one call before I removed the SIM card from her phone. It was to the client who’d hired her to set up Carter von Oehson. Ironically, her freelance gig for the guy was the only reason she knew his cell number. “Every date I had with him was arranged through Mother Hen,” she’d explained. That’s what she called the booker, the woman who oversaw all the escorts. What about the guy’s name, her client? “He told me to call him Vincent,” she said.
Maybe his name really was Vincent. Maybe it wasn’t. Without a last name it didn’t really matter.
What mattered was getting him alone, face to face.
Dialing *67 before his number ensured that Jade’s identity would appear as “No Caller ID.” This had to be a message, not a conversation. She couldn’t give him the opportunity to ask questions. No one answers a “No Caller ID” call. “Straight to Voicemail,” it might as well read.
Sure enough. After the beep Jade quickly explained what had happened. “He needs to hear the panic in your voice,” I’d told her.
She’d been found out. Her boss—“the man who runs everything”—knew about her involvement with the rich kid’s disappearance. That made her a liability. She feared for her life. She was skipping town while she still had the chance. Her flight was the next day at noon, but before leaving there was more she had to tell him. Important details.
The devil is always in the details.
She couldn’t cover everything in a message, but the upshot was simple. The best way for Vincent to protect himself was by coming to see her. She’d left a room key for him with the concierge at their usual hotel. It wasn’t safe for her to remain at her apartment.
Be here at noon, was how she ended the message. After that she was leaving straight for the airport. “Don’t call me back. Just come.” And then came the kicker, the two words I told her that she absolutely had to say before hanging up. The real secret of making someone believe you? It’s not plausibility. It’s vulnerability. “I’m scared,” she added.
At a few minutes before noon the next day, I stood waiting in the bathroom of room 2106 of the Stafford Marshall hotel a few blocks south of the United Nations headquarters on the East Side. The door to the room—only about six feet away from the door to the bathroom—was propped open against the security latch. I’d left the key and room number in an envelope with the concierge, as Jade had told Vincent she would do. He would need the key to access the elevator. Not the room, though.
Okay, Vincent, or whatever your name really is. Don’t let me down. All you’ve got to do now is show up…
The soft knock came at noon on the dot. It sounded almost as hesitant as the whispered voice that I heard through the crack in the door. “Jade, it’s me. Are you in there?”
I waited as he waited. He knocked softly again. Whispered again. When he got no response a second time, I heard the hinges creak. He was coming in.
CHAPTER 34
There are exactly forty-two muscles in the human face, and every one of his was shocked to see me.
As soon as he’d walked past the bathroom I came out behind him, loudly closing the door to the room. He spun around. I had him cornered.
“Jade couldn’t make it,” I said.
In a fight-or-flight world most people choose to run. This guy couldn’t. That was my plan. I had to hand it to him, though. His instincts said fight.
Of course, after handing it to him, I then had to punch his lights out. Only temporarily, though. One quick jab to the solar plexus as he charged me, followed immediately by a right hook to his jaw. The bare-knuckle training at Langley will almost always leave you standing over your opponent.
“Just breathe,” I told the guy as he lay flat on his back while sucking wind for dear life. He sounded like a busted accordion. “Just keep breathing. That’s it. You’ll be fine.”
The only purchase I’d made in advance of this meeting was a roll of duct tape for $4.49, plus tax. I looped it around his ankles a half dozen times and then dragged him toward the bed, propping him up against it.
Taking a seat in an armchair opposite him, I gave him another half minute of recovery time while going through his wallet, which I lifted from the inside breast pocket of his slick Brioni suit. The bright-red stitching on the label was hard to miss.
Vincent Franchella, read his New Jersey driver’s license. Turned out, he used his real first name with Jade. Who says romance is dead?
He was finally catching his breath. “Sorry about the takedown, Vincent, but you sort of left me no choice.”
“Who…who are you?” he asked.
“You can call me Dylan,” I said, since we were being honest about our first names. “I’m a friend of Mathias von Oehson.”
Vincent had a lousy poker face. Those same forty-two muscles screamed Oh, shit all at once. “Are you a cop?” he asked.
“You should be so lucky. That would mean I wasn’t allowed to kill you,” I answered. I was bluffing, of course, but my poker face was a little better than his.
I watched as Vincent’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. The proverbial gulp. “Where’s Jade?” he asked.
“Like I said, she couldn’t make it. She’s fine, for now, but you really got her mixed up in something bad. That’s what you and I are going to talk about. Actually, you’re going to do most of the talking.”
“I don’t know anything,” he said.
“You know plenty. Is Carter von Oehson alive?”
Vincent stared at me, unblinking. “I don’t know.”
Damn. He and his face were telling the truth. I was almost sure of it. “How do you not know? You’re the one who hired Jade to set him up.”
“I arranged for her to do what she did, but it wasn’t my money paying her,” he said.
Now we were getting somewhere. Vincent Franchella of Westfield, New Jersey—five foot nine, brown eyes, and an organ donor—was beginning to talk. All I had to do was keep asking him the right questions and listen. C’mon, Vincent. You’ve got this. Walk me through every—
Shit!
By the time I heard the double beep of the key swipe they were already bursting through the door. There were two of them, both in ski masks. The lead man was wielding a SIG pistol with a suppressor while his tail was pushing a laundry cart like an Olympic bobsledder. They knew exactly what they were doing, and who they were doing it to. Everything was happening so fast. Too fast. My only move was to raise my palms slowly in the air.
I sat staring at the barrel of the SIG while the second man pulled a long steel rod from inside the laundry cart. Before I could even figure out what it was, he jammed the electric cattle prod against Vincent, jolting him unconscious.
Out came an armful of bunched-up linens from the cart, and in went Vincent after being slung over the guy’s shoulder as if he were a sack of potatoes. Then, in went the linens again to cover Vincent. It was all choreographed. Nothing was improvised.
Including my death.
Maybe they wanted Vincent alive, or maybe they wanted to kill him in a place where there’d be no blood sample from a hotel rug to identify him. Either way, they for sure wouldn’t give a damn about my blood being splattered everywhere.
After watching Vincent get wheeled out of the room, my eyes swung back to the SIG aimed at my forehead. The eyes staring at me behind it were as black as the ski mask. Soulless. He edged closer to me, the barrel of the SIG only inches away. His arm was locked, his hand perfectly still. He’d done this before. Plenty of times. Snuffed out life with the simple squeeze of a trigger. Everyone else made widgets for a living. This guy killed people. I was merely one more.
Only not today.
“Bang,” he said.
Then he walked out of the room.
CHAPTER 35
I’d dodged my own funeral. Actually, it was more like I’d been spared.
A minute passed. I hadn’t moved from the chair in that hotel room—my heart still thumping wildly against my ribs—when the text arrived from Elizabeth. Talk about ironic timing.
Heard from D. Something going
down. Not sure but u should be
good. Wasn’t easy
Something had gone down, all right, but Danny had indeed come through. I owed him. I was alive. The only regret was that I was no closer to knowing whether Carter von Oehson was, too. I needed to update his father, or so I was told repeatedly via a flurry of texts that lit up my phone later that afternoon from the man himself.
There was no dodging Mathias von Oehson, nor the surreal location of where he wanted to meet.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said to Bethany von Oehson, Carter’s mother, in the crowded vestibule of St. Sebastian’s church in Darien the following morning. She was the front end of a two-person receiving line, with Mathias hearing another couple’s condolences a few feet away.
I’d seen pictures of Bethany, smiling and posing at various charity benefits, but she was even prettier in person. High cheekbones, flawless skin. A trophy first wife, as dubbed by New York magazine. Or was it the Post? I couldn’t remember.
I’d already introduced myself, and was about to explain my connection to Carter, when she leaned forward, her voice dropping to a near whisper. “I know who you are,” she said.
“You do?”
For a brief second I thought maybe Mathias had told her about hiring me, along with all the reasons why. But that was impossible. If she truly knew everything her husband was hiding, we wouldn’t be gathered at Carter’s funeral. You don’t bury your son when there’s hope he’s still alive.
Of course, Mathias was doing just that. I understood. Sort of. This was about keeping up appearances, especially in a town—and among a distinct social set—all but programmed to do “the right thing.” Still, it was crazy, and I knew it. By playing along I couldn’t escape feeling like an accomplice. An accomplice to crazy is never a good look.
“Yes, you’re Carter’s professor,” said Bethany von Oehson. “I’ve read your book, the one about serial killers. I’m the one who actually suggested that Carter take your class.”
“He was a wonderful student,” I said.
“He was a wonderful boy.”
The way she said boy, the sweet way only a mother could say it, echoed in my head as if I were back in Woolsey Rotunda on the Yale campus with my class. Some primal screams aren’t a scream at all.
“Again, I’m so sorry,” I said.
Those were the only other words I could think of to say. I glanced behind me at the slew of people waiting to greet Bethany. No one likes a Chatty Cathy on a receiving line. There was just one problem, and it suddenly dawned on me as the couple talking to Mathias moved on from him and headed into the chapel.
Do I know you, Mathias von Oehson? Or are we meeting each other for the first time?
CHAPTER 36
I was about to play it safe and introduce myself when Bethany thankfully did it for me.
“Honey,” she said, reaching over to tap her husband on the arm. “This is Dylan Reinhart, one of Carter’s professors at Yale.”
Mathias didn’t flinch. He looked at me with a fixed smile, the kind you give someone you’ve never met before. The financial markets guru who could famously see around corners had already anticipated this moment. Of course.
“It’s nice to meet you, professor. Reinhart, is it? Thank you so much for coming,” he said, shaking my hand. In doing so he pulled me closer to him—and more important—away from his wife, who immediately turned back to greet the next people in line.
Mathias had me all to himself for a few moments. To anyone looking on I was extending my condolences, and we were engaging in pleasantries.
He leaned in, pushing his words through a clenched jaw that was doubling as his smile. “What the fuck am I paying you for?”
So much for pleasantries. “I’m getting close,” I said. “Very close.”
“Horseshoes and hand grenades.”
“A few more days.”
“Days my son may not have, if he has any at all,” he said.
“Believe me. I’m doing everything I can.”
“Are you?”
“Yes. Now do something for me,” I said. “I want you to look over my shoulder, just casually gaze around for a few seconds. Is there anyone here you don’t recognize?”
“I’m a billionaire, Dylan. I’ve got family here I don’t even recognize.”
Decent point. Money is the world’s most powerful magnet.
As it stood, the odds that someone involved with Carter’s disappearance would actually risk showing up at his funeral were pretty slim. Still, slim was better than none.
“Just scan the damn room, will you?”
“Fine. I’m scanning,” he said.
