Turnabout shallow secret.., p.4
Turnabout / Shallow Secrets, page 4
“I didn’t know people fished in that part of the bay,” O’Neil said.
“Yeah, we’re checking out that part of their story. They may just be a couple of morons in a boat, like half the dickheads in Florida on a weekend. They said they didn’t see anybody else out there, maybe a few boats passing by, so maybe it was a good place full of fish nobody knew about.” Hill scratched his forehead with dirty fingernails. “Or maybe it didn’t occur to them that they never saw anybody fish there because there wasn’t anything worth catching. Probably they just don’t know what they’re doing. Anyway, it looks like they’ll probably check out okay. The boat was full of tackle and fishing gear and they haven’t been in any trouble before except for matching sets of DWIs. Those they take turns renewing every year like library cards.”
That’s cute, thought O’Neil.
“They pulled in their lines and pointed the boat in the direction of the noise. About fifty or sixty yards away they saw something floating in the water. Evidently your buddy was wearing a windbreaker that had filled with air and was keeping him afloat.” An ugly expression formed briefly on his face, then passed. “Weren’t for that, he would’ve sunk like a stone, been down there a few days at least. Anyway they got to him and pulled him into the boat but he was already dead. The legs were torn from the body but still attached. The other unusual thing were some pieces of fried egg in his hair but we think one of the brothers probably puked on him and didn’t want to cop to it in front of the other one. I haven’t seen the autopsy report yet, but cause of death appears to be consistent with a fall from a substantial height into the water. Or I guess at the speed he would have been going, it would have been ‘onto’ the water.”
Good one, Hill. “What about this airplane they heard?”
“Well, they’re not sure they heard one, but hey, the body had to come from somewhere, right? That’s our assumption at this point although any plane would have had to fly relatively low to stay out of the TARSA.” He looked at O’Neil who did his best to not show a reaction. “That’s the restricted airspace controlled by the tower at an airport. If they did fly into the TARSA, or if they had their transponder on, somebody may have picked up an ID on them.”
O’Neil stood and walked in a circle, turning his back to the table so he could relax the expression on his face without showing Hill his distaste. Listening to him talk and looking at that smirk brought back a taste of all the stress and ill feelings O’Neil had walked away from years before.
“But why did all this happen? Why would somebody want to take Tim Clayton for a ride in an airplane over Tampa Bay and throw him out? I appreciate what you’re telling me, but do you guys have any idea what kind of motive there might have been?”
Hill detached himself from the bench and stood up, stretching. He never liked talking to someone who was standing while he wasn’t. For that matter, he generally disliked people who were taller than him. “Well Frankie, we may, but then again we may not.”
“And that’s supposed to mean what?”
“You see, we came out here yesterday morning to have a friendly talk, like we’re having now actually, but you were a bit rude. More than a little, and you didn’t even know why we wanted to see you. Now I could tell you some things that you probably want to know but they are of a somewhat confidential nature. Details of a pending investigation, you know. But I need a little help in return, Frankie. We didn’t come out here yesterday or even today just to give you a show and tell session.”
And I yelled at you in public and in front of your partner and now you need to show me who’s boss. Games, games, games. “All right. I apologize for yesterday. Okay? I didn’t mean to make things hard on you guys. I’m asking you now, please just tell me, do you have any idea who killed Tim or why?”
“Geez, O’Neil, slow down a little, will you? He just got himself killed yesterday. This isn’t the only issue on the agenda here. There are other factors at play you don’t even know about.” Hill looked back at Fetterman who seemed oblivious to the conversation. His work on the table had continued to grow in scope and was now swallowing some of the older carvings on the table. O’Neil still couldn’t make out what it was.
“Okay. What did you want yesterday? When you came out here?”
“Well, that’s a whole other thing, Frankie.” Back to his first name. “And it does have something to do with Clayton, although possibly not his murder.”
“But it could, whatever it is?”
“Who can tell? But I don’t know, Frankie. Your best friend’s been killed, you look like you haven’t slept all night, you got to feel like shit warmed over. With your grieving and all, maybe we should wait to talk about it until you get some rest, feel a little better. It can keep for a few days, can’t it, Fetterman?” Fetterman gave a slow nod, hardly acknowledging the question and not breaking his rhythm with the knife.
O’Neil was too worn out to play any more. He sat down at the table again and said, “Look, Hill. You can keep filling my card but I’m not going to dance with you. If you’ve got something to talk to me about, do it now. Especially if it might shed some light on what happened to Tim. Just knock off the crap, okay? You’re right, I feel like hell and I’m really not in the mood.”
“Well Hell’s Bells, Frankie, you really do have some balls tucked away in those panties, don’t you? Okay, let’s not draw this out any more. Here’s the skinny. But I need your word, before I tell you anything more, that you repeat this to no one.”
“Repeat what, Hill?”
“No shit, O’Neil. I’m working an investigation and your buddy was helping me out. He’s gone so now I’ve got to find some way to get out of the hole he left me in. That’s what we came out here yesterday to talk to you about. But I can’t let you, ex-cop or no, screw this up with any side investigations of your own. No loose talking with anything I might tell you about our little project.”
“And this investigation of yours that Tim was helping you with, you think that might have something to do with why he was killed?”
“I need your word, O’Neil.”
“All right, Hill, you’ve got it. I’ll play by your rules.” Now tell me what the fuck you got my friend involved with.
Hill nodded and motioned for him to have a seat while he remained standing so he could look down at O’Neil as he spoke. “Have you ever heard of a business called the Walter Lankford Company?”
“Off West Shore Boulevard on Cypress?”
Hill nodded. “That’s the place.”
“All I know about them is that Tim put in a network over there a few months back.” O’Neil thought about it for a moment. “I believe they had around a hundred or so computers they needed to connect as well as some wide area routers and internet connectivity.”
“Very good, Mr. O’Neil. How come you’re able to remember it so well?”
“Nothing spectacular, Hill. Tim stayed with my wife and I whenever he did a job in Tampa. It didn’t happen that often so it’s not terribly difficult.”
“Okay, I can buy that. Anyway, you’ve got it right. It turns out these guys are big into their computer system, their networks. In fact, their whole business, from what we can tell, couldn’t be run without it.”
“That’s not so unusual these days.”
“Well, it depends on the type of business that they’re actually in, though.”
“What does that mean?”
“Money laundering. They take in dirty money, invest it legitimately in hard to trace places, and return net worth to the original ‘investor.’ Keeping a little something off the top, of course.”
“Hill, that’s about as unsurprising as their dependence on their networks. Uncovering drug money in Florida is like finding sunscreen on the beach.”
“But there is something unusual about this case, O’Neil. It’s all mine.”
“What about the feds?”
“There are no feds, not at this point. The problem is, I’ve got information but I don’t have hard proof. If I give up what I’ve got now, I’m pulled out of the whole thing and this enchilada gets served up nice and warm to the FBI.” He held up his hand before O’Neil could say anything. “Before you give me the rules and regs crap, I’m well within protocol to investigate my source, see if he’s yanking my chain or what. Officially speaking, there’s no evidence that the Lankford Company is anything other than what they say they are, a financial services and investment company.”
O’Neil thought this out for a minute. “So you don’t really have any proof they’re doing anything criminal?”
Hill said, “That’s right.”
“So what the hell are you doing using a civilian to help you investigate a possible felony? Your investigation may have gotten him killed and you don’t even know if they’re breaking the fucking law?”
“Jesus Christ, O’Neil,” Hill shouted back. “If somebody farts on an elevator, you can tell something’s wrong by the way everybody scrambles out of the fricking box when the doors open. You don’t have to be plugging your nostrils with your necktie to believe it. You think I’m jerking you off or something? What the fuck do you think I’m doing here talking to you, you son of a bitch?”
O’Neil didn’t know what to think at this point. He was feeling angry at everything and everybody. “Settle down, Hill. I’m just trying to see how this all fits in with Tim.” He took a deep breath to calm himself down. He didn’t want to completely alienate Hill just when he had gotten him talking. “How did he actually get involved?”
“I’ll get to that if you just shut up and listen. I’m trying to paint a picture for you here, before we get to the details. May I continue?”
“Please.”
“Thank you very much. Anyway, it seems that the Walter A. Lankford Company may be involved with laundering money for a group of South American businessmen, possibly out of Venezuela, we’re not sure yet. If the information we have is true, we can’t just search their offices, tap their phones, and read through their garbage. We can’t do all the normal crap we do. Care to guess why?”
“You tell me,” O’Neil said.
“Because they don’t talk on the phone, they don’t throw shit in the garbage, and the only thing they do by mail is order fancy underwear for their girlfriends through Victoria’s Secret catalogues.”
Fetterman spoke for the first time, as if Hill had set him up and it was time to deliver the punch line. “They do it all by computer,” he said, then bent back to his work.
“That’s right,” agreed Hill. “So now you see what keeps this whole party going. But if they were just storing illegal data on their computers, that’s no big deal. We could grab them and get that shit off, decode it or do whatever the hell our guys would do, and we’d be good to go.”
“And the problem with that is...” O’Neil prompted.
“The problem, Mr. Ex-cop computer nerd, is that what if there isn’t anything stored on their computers or floppy disks? What if there’s absolutely nothing on the premises physically linking them to any crimes?”
O’Neil began to see what Hill was getting at. “What you’re trying to tell me is that they run everything through their computer networks.”
“Everything. That’s how they communicate with each other, how they move the money, how they track it, the whole deal. And none of it exists until Lankford links their computers to someone else’s. They can start it up or shut it down as easy as turning on and off a light switch.”
“Can’t you go after the individual employees? Look at who’s making more money than they should and focus on them?”
“They’ve got over two hundred people working there and most of them are normal working stiffs. They do a legitimate business. And even if there were some way I could get approval to go after each one of them, if one wrong person finds out, the whole case is blown.”
“What about wire taps?”
“I don’t know what the hell to tap. But you’re the expert, you tell me. How would you track it down?”
O’Neil thought about ways to hide your real business on a computer network. The Internet is named for the word ‘internetwork,’ which is exactly what it is. An enormous number of government, university, medical, and private computers all electronically linked together to form a single, easily accessible network. A user in Baltimore can log on and swap electronic mail or files with a user in Switzerland as easily as he can with somebody two doors down in the same office building. There would be countless ways to arrange something like this using the internet, O’Neil thought.
Someone could access a remote database somewhere that was programmed to access another one somewhere else, and so on and so on, and that data could be sent to your network just like any other data. There would be no limit to how deep you could take an arrangement like that. Performance could be an issue, how long it would take to actually see a particular piece of information on your screen, but clever programmers could minimize that. The data could also be encrypted so that an electronic eavesdropper wouldn’t be able to understand what he was looking at.
A computer could also be connected to the Internet wirelessly using radio or a microwave dish making it extremely difficult to trace.
“I see the problem,” O’Neil said.
“I thought you might.”
“What about the person who tipped you off to the whole thing? Can you get at it by going through the inside? That may be the only way you’re going to find out what’s going on with those computers.”
Fetterman spoke again, this time without looking up from the table. His design had stopped growing and instead was taking on more detail. “Can’t do that. Informant’s not talking anymore.”
“Lean on him, then. I know you, Hill. At least I used to. There’s not a lot you won’t do to get a make a break for yourself.”
Hill looked back at O’Neil and didn’t move. “Problem is,” Fetterman went on. “The informant is not talking to anyone at all. At least not since yesterday.”
What they were trying to tell O’Neil exploded across his brain. “You sons of bitches!” he said, rising to his feet. “You motherfucking sons of bitches!”
“Hey, calm down, O’Neil,” said Hill. “What exactly do you want us to do, huh? We didn’t get his ass killed, he got that done by himself. We’re trying to find out how it happened.”
“How it happened is he was working for you and you fucked up and left him hanging. Tim wasn’t a hero, he wouldn’t have done anything like this on his own.” At least not without talking to me first. God damn it, Tim, why didn’t you come to me with any of this?
“Like it or not, O’Neil, we didn’t leave him anywhere. He left us. Isn’t that right, Fetterman?”
“Yup. Yesterday was the second time.”
O’Neil found it hard to believe what they were saying. “So why the hell didn’t he come to me with any of this? That would have been more like Tim than to go to you guys, people he didn’t even know.”
“Christ, O’Neil, figure it out. You guys were like best friends, right? Two peas in a pod. He was best man or something at your wedding, wasn’t he?”
O’Neil nodded.
“By the way, I never got my invitation. Anyway, you’re his best pal who used to be a cop but you went a little nutso and walked away from the job.”
O’Neil looked at him sharply.
“Or whatever, but you lost your wife for a while, didn’t you? Took a little trip to La La Land, someone said.” Hill had a ‘don’t blame me’ expression on his face. “So here’s your buddy, he knows about a crime, he isn’t sure how you’d react and he doesn’t want to cause you any stress or heartache, so he takes it right to the cops. Which is what he should do anyway, according to the law. So tell me, Frankie, just where exactly did he go wrong?”
At the point somebody decided to kill him, you asshole. Was that how it happened, Tim? Did you really think you were saving me from something by not coming to me first? Was it my fault this happened to you?
“So now what?”
Hill put his foot on the bench across from O’Neil and leaned his elbows forward on his knee. “Well, now it gets interesting, I hope. Really interesting.”
As Hill spoke, O’Neil’s eyes focused on the surface of the table where Fetterman was doing his carving. Without taking his eyes off it, he stood up and turned around so he could see it from the right side up. Under the scrapings and gouging of Fetterman’s Swiss army pocket knife, the envy of any Boy Scout, was the image of a large morning sun appearing over a horizon made up of the sea. A small airplane was flying between two clouds and below it the surface of the water was disturbed by an incredibly detailed splash pattern that blossomed high above the waves. In the lower right corner were the initials ‘FB.’
You are one sick son of a bitch, thought O’Neil.
Chapter Five
Katy’s sister answered the phone on the second ring. “Hello,” she said.
“Rachel, it’s Frankie. I need to speak to my wife.”
“Your wife, Frankie?” She didn’t bother to hide her disapproval. She waited a beat, then said, “Hold on, I’ll get her.”
When Katy spoke into the phone, O’Neil felt a banging start in his chest. “How are you doing?” he asked her.
“I’m doing fine, honey. I’m thinking about you a lot.”
He was afraid to ask, but he did anyway. “Good or bad?”
“Oh, Frankie, you know I love you so much. It’s just that I can’t go through that again. You know.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Really, honey? You get that puppy with a bone thing and you keep gnawing away, all in some parallel universe where nobody else exists. Even me. You don’t drop that bone until it’s gone. It’s bad for you and it’s bad for me.”
