Suspect, p.27
Suspect, page 27
“Wouldn’t that have embarrassed the shit out of you, too?” I ask.
“Well, first, it was a threat—I doubted he’d ever want to find out if I meant it. But I can promise you, if I ever arranged for somebody to see those photos, my face would be blotted or cut out entirely. No one would be able to say it was me.
“And it worked. Until now. With DeGrassi and Cornish and Blanco, I knew it had to be Ritz getting even, because he’d figured out a way to make sure I wouldn’t dare drag out that picture, not when these guys are saying they got forced. The Ritz, he’s smart, I always knew that. But I never saw him as a techie. I had the pictures in a password-protected file. I was pretty shocked when Blanco was passing around that photocopy in the hearing. Any idea how he did it?” the Chief asks me.
“Ritz paid someone to take a stroll through your computer,” I answer.
“How long ago? Recent?”
“Recent.”
She reaches out then to touch my hand.
“You know, when I saw Blanco with the photo, I hate to say it, Pinky, but my first thought was you.”
“Me?” I’m angry at once and in a primal way. It’s always me, it’s always my fault, especially when it’s not.
“You were back in my study for a week, right next to the computer. But it was just for the first second I had that notion. Then I couldn’t make sense of it.”
“I hope not.”
“I was thinking scared, Pinky.”
“Okay.” Some of the poison is still circulating through me. The Chief looks back to Rik. “So what do I tell the Feds or Tonya in our little sit-down? This story, it wouldn’t have sounded so good twelve years ago, but these days? They’ll fire me in a heartbeat, right?”
Rik doesn’t take long to think. “They kind of have to. And you have no real criminal exposure. It was extortion, maybe sexual assault, but it’s way past the statute of limitations. So no Fifth Amendment. And yeah, there’s no way in today’s world anybody’s going to give you a gold star for this one, Lucy.”
She nods with a sad weight. “Well, okay, at least I’d be getting fired for something I actually did. And I gotta tell you: Stupid or not, it felt good. It was like the story with the lion when he got that thorn out of his paw. Almost worth anything. But I guess I’ll be finding out now whether that’s true.”
After a moment in which all of us are taking in the scope of her current dilemma, I ask a question.
“What if we could show what a complete piece of dirt Ritz is, why the Chief had to get rid of him? Does that help?”
Rik floats his hand like a drifting leaf—mezza mezza.
“And how would I even do that, Pinky?” the Chief asks. “I’ve had an eye on the guy for a dozen years.”
“My CI had this hunch that the Ritz is up to something over in the Tech Park. Does that make sense to you, Chief?”
“Vojczek was one of the initial developers. And everybody says he bought a lot of land waiting for Phase Two. But it would all be through offshore trusts and middlemen.”
“But does it make sense, that he’s got something dirty going on there?” I ask.
“Anywhere and everywhere.”
“Any guesses what he’d be doing?”
“With Ritz I always think drugs first, but in the Tech Park?”
Rik has heard enough.
“It’s late,” he says. He’s got that hearing tomorrow and we could all do with time to think.
The Chief walks us to the door. She gives me a hug.
“Sorry,” she says. We both know she’s talking about doubting me. “It was just a stupid thought I had for one second. There was no point in saying it now,” she says, “but I wanted you guys to understand. It’s why I felt at first that I couldn’t play straight with you. Then, you know, once I was on that road…” She moves a shoulder.
“It was a logical thought,” I say. “But I’m all for you, Chief.”
“I know that. That was what I told myself.”
Rik and I walk back to our cars, both parked in the Chief’s driveway.
“Clients?” I ask as we’re parting.
“Clients,” he says.
29. After I Leave the Chief’s
After I leave the Chief’s, I head home, but not to sleep, just to grab a few items from the PIBOT: first off, my night-vision binoculars, bought from army surplus; second, a cheesy fake mustache that I purchased years ago in a toy store; and finally, a set of old license plates that I took out of the garbage when one of Pops’s neighbors on the West Bank got a Tesla. (The grifters in the State Capitol require more expensive tags for electric vehicles, supposedly to get even for the lost gas tax.) I have the plates on magnetic holders like auto dealers use when you take a new car for a test drive. I slap them on the Cadillac, and then cover my hair in a baseball cap and stick on the mustache and drive over to Harrison, the street opposite the Tech Park. Remembering what Koob told me, I’ve put my phone in airplane mode. The point of the mustache and the phony plates is so that even with the high-powered cameras outside Northern Direct, nobody will be able to figure out who was watching when they look at the CCTV feed in the a.m. But I can only do this for a few nights before they keep someone on duty to come out and question me.
Everybody says the Ritz is a clever guy, and this is a pretty good example. Assuming he’s up to no good here, he’s basically got Northern Direct playing the part of guard dog, with all their fancy anti-surveillance systems thwarting anybody who might want to keep an eye on him. Being a former cop, and undoubtedly understanding some things about the way federal law enforcement works, he realizes that agencies like DEA would keep a wide berth around the Tech Park, rather than tangle with the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, who generally squelch other investigations on their turf in the name of national security. But Ritz still wanted Koob on the lookout. Either Vojczek is paranoid or he’s into something so big and outrageous that DCSA would let the crime-fighting agencies operate here.
While I’m sitting on the place, I look over my texts that arrived before I went on radio silence. There’s a message from earlier in the night from a woman I’ve hooked up with now and then, who’s inviting me over tomorrow night. She lives out in the suburbs with a guy who’s made zillions in home electronics, and she says he’ll be traveling on business. I’ve been there a couple times. There are a lot of photos of him and NBA and NFL players on the shelves, and he’s got a real lounge-lizard look, clothes too tight for the body he has now and dye that makes his hair laughably black. He’s got to be at least twenty years older than her. I don’t think my visits are secret, because she’s asked a couple times if I’d consider coming over when he’s there, but he leaves me cold, and I’ve made excuses. But with just China alone—maybe a made-up name—I decide, yeah, I’ll be there.
A lot of people, when a relationship, or an attachment, whatever you want to call it, ends, they need a breather. But I’ve always preferred to jump right back in. Having a fun time with somebody else always makes me realize I haven’t lost as much as I think. China says she has ‘two beans,’ meaning two capsules of Molly, which kind of guarantees it will be crazy monkey sex for a few hours, and that’s a good thing right now.
I’m listening to some Dua Lipa to keep myself awake, since I didn’t get a solid night in that parking lot in Pittsburgh, but I drift off anyway, for maybe an hour, leaving me uncertain as to whether I missed the whole show. But I get lucky. About 2:45 a.m. a panel van approaches the front entrance of the Tech Park, which is wide open at this hour. Northern Direct, about fifty yards to the left, has mechanized iron gates and a guard visible in a little hut, but the truck doesn’t head that way. Instead, it goes right and circles all the way around Direct’s huge installation. While the van is moving, I drive about two hundred yards north down Harrison to keep the truck in view. It finally parks beside another building, a low structure of formed concrete. A long-haired dude in a T-shirt, cargo shorts and flip-flops jumps out, opens the rear doors of the vehicle and picks up a wooden fruit crate—full, from the way he maneuvers it. Moving slowly under the load, he carries the box toward the back door of the company, whatever it is, on the north side of the building. He appears to hand over the crate to somebody—I can’t really see through the open steel door—and waits there, while the person inside apparently empties the crate. Then the driver returns with the box to the truck. It all looks so matter-of-fact, he might be dropping off groceries, except for the hour. The delivery guy closes up his van and zooms off. Koob proved to me yet again that a one-person tail rarely works, so I kill any thought of following him.
Instead, I stay put until the first light begins coloring the horizon, then head home to sleep. I consider calling Koob to find out if he was actually getting paid big bucks to be sure nothing went wrong with a two-minute delivery out of a panel truck, but I check that notion, too. I know that Koob and I are done-done, for all purposes.
Tonya comes over as soon as she gets off duty Tuesday night about six p.m. I’ve just finished a little online research about the Tech Park. As near as I can figure, the plant behind Northern Direct is called Vox VetMeds, which is in the business of making specialty medications for animals. It turns out, not too surprisingly, that most veterinary pharmaceuticals are manufactured by divisions of the same companies that serve humans. Vox, according to its website, focuses on niche products that big pharma doesn’t want to deal with, like antibiotics that happen to work only on horses, or products for zoo animals whose size makes the usual human meds ineffective, creatures like giraffes and rhinos and elephants. About the only tie to the Ritz is that Vojczek led the phase of development in the Tech Park that brought VVM in, but he didn’t even show up for the press conference when Vox’s new location was announced. There’s video online of the mayor speaking. She clearly expected to be treated like the second coming of Dr. Dolittle, best friends with the animals, and instead ended up defending herself on environmental concerns the reporters raised about the disposal of any dangerous chemicals that Vox might use. At the end of the video, Amity looks like she’d be perfectly happy if they just tore the First Amendment out of the Constitution.
I give Tonya a beer. She’s in her plainclothes detective stuff, including an unstructured jacket that makes her look a little boxy, which is probably what she wants for work. As soon as she’s seated, she says she has big news.
“Your stuff about a secret section on Frito’s phone was a great lead,” she says. “The Bureau guys had already said that Frito’s work computer was like the apartment computer. Frequent insertion of external media.”
“Memory stick, thumb drive?”
“That was the Bureau guy’s guess. We turned Frito’s office upside down again. Then I asked Marisel if I could come back to take another look at that locked drawer Blanco had at home for police stuff. I was searching for like a secret compartment. But with a flashlight, I saw on the steel slides—you know, the mechanism that holds the drawer and lets it open and close—in the back, there was like a magnetic hide-a-key thing. Inside there were two USB drives.”
“And?”
“I had to wait for the Bureau computer guys at the Center City office to bust through the password protection, but they did.”
“And?”
Tonya edges forward on the sofa so she has my eye.
“Kiddie porn.”
That’s a load. “Frito? Kiddie porn?”
“Kiddie porn,” she repeats. “It fits together with what your source told you about the Ritz referring to a five-year mandatory minimum and Blanco talking about his private life and keeping it private. And the Ritz calling him a pervert. That’s why Frito didn’t want to turn over his phone, I guess. Because those were the dark web sites he’d been visiting.”
“Kiddie porn?” Frito sure fooled a lot of people with all his crap about clean living, but I guess that’s who he desperately wished he could be.
“That’s on the deep deep DL. Nobody wants Marisel or the kids to have to hear about that.”
“So that’s what he was doing in the apartment? You think he was messing with children there?” The one emotion that dominated my childhood was this intense feeling of powerlessness. Because of that, I’ve always thought that anybody who touches a kid for the wrong reasons belongs in a running sewer underneath the basement in the lowest level of hell.
“Well, you can’t tell for sure,” says Tonya, “but there’s no evidence of that, nothing the child abuse unit has picked up. From what Frito was saying to the Ritz, and what they found on the face of that chair, my guess is what he did there was watch that stuff and pull his crank.”
“And that’s what the Ritz had on Frito, that he was watching kiddie porn?”
“Best guess. I don’t know how they figured it out, but Frito would have been their bitch if they had. Even for simple possession of that shit, you usually catch a lot more time than five years—closer to eight.”
Years ago, Pops defended a seventy-year-old corporate executive who got caught visiting a kiddie porn site that was an FBI front. He was a solid-seeming guy, head of the board for the Kindle County food bank. Given the weird array of sexual fantasies that have inhabited my brain most of my life, and since all Pops’s client did was look, I was ready at first to stick up for this guy’s right to his unfulfilled desires. Then I saw some of that stuff, which, honest and truly, brought up my lunch. You pay for that shit, then you’re making it happen, and any time it happens, there’s a kid who will probably never recover. So make room in the sewer.
But it’s a really sad crime. Pops’s client went off to prison—seven years, in his case—still swearing to his wife and kids he had no idea how that crap got on his computer. He probably felt they would find him less repulsive if he could have told them instead that he tortured animals. And from what I saw of Frito, I can imagine the wheel of torment he was riding. Every time Blanco got off in the apartment, he told himself he would never do it again and begged God for forgiveness. But sooner or later he was back, trying to banish the images from his brain that he knew were going to send him straight to hell, while his dick was like an iron bar. They say most often the people who are hung up on those fantasies were preyed upon themselves by some sick bum when they were kids. So there’s that, too. Sad all around.
I finally ask Tonya if there have been other, less dramatic developments. A fingerprint examiner compared Walter’s cards in the municipal files with the fragmentary prints found in Blanco’s apartment. “She says,” Toy tells me, “we have about a quarter-inch of what is probably from Walter’s palm on the outside of the back window, about a foot up from the bottom. But there aren’t enough points of comparison for her to testify to a positive ID. Just ‘might be.’ And Walt will say it happened when he opened the window the night we found Blanco.”
“How do you touch the outside of the window a foot from the bottom, when you open it from inside?” I ask. “Walt left that when he was coming in.”
Tonya agrees, but the main point is that without a solid, positive ID on the palm print, we still don’t have a good angle to work Walter.
“How we doing on my mosquito?” I ask.
“Better. Walter’s A positive. But like I told you, so is about one in three humans. We need DNA before we have any chance of scaring him.”
“If you ask him to provide it, what’s he do?”
“He probably hires a lawyer and tries to fight it. The worst part is we’ve got diddly chance to roll him if we go down that road. Vojczek will probably be paying for Walter’s lawyer and tuning in on every development.”
“Okay. So do you have a plan? Without burning my guy,” I remind her.
“Right,” she says, “max respect for your boyfriend.”
“You know this boyfriend joke stopped being funny a while ago. You’re like picking at a scab.”
“Sorry,” says Tonya. “I didn’t know he’d drawn blood.”
“He didn’t. But you might. So give me your plan with Walter.”
There’s a brief silence while Toy and I retreat to our corners. I guess we’re always going to bicker like exes now and then, aiming for the tender spots.
“Well,” she says, “I think I’ll invite him to the station for a cup of coffee. Tell him I need his advice.”
“From Walter? Advice?”
“Yeah, I’ll drop the mosquito thing on him, just slide in the A-positive part, and how the tiger mosquito doesn’t go very far and can bite a bunch of people, and tell him we’re trying to figure out if we can actually get DNA from everybody in the building. Like can he think of a way to get a cheek swab from each tenant? The great part is he’ll really really want to help, because he’s gonna be hoping the mosquito bit somebody else. He’ll put on his thinking cap real tight.”
“Okay, but I don’t understand what you get out of this?”
“Oh,” says Tonya. She smiles full-on, which you don’t get a lot of from Toy, who’s self-conscious about her crooked yellow teeth. “What I get is the DNA off the rim of the coffee cup.”
On Friday, I am hoping to sleep in, when Tonya calls to ask me to come to the station for an 8:30 meeting, half an hour from now. I had spent another night sitting on the Tech Park, just to be sure I didn’t z my way through the arrival of like a huge tanker truck or something else more conspicuous than a little panel van. But no: same time, same station. Fruit crate through the back door. Then I saw what I’d missed the first time. From the way he held the crate on his hip as he reopened the truck, I realized it wasn’t empty. He doesn’t just make a delivery—it’s also a pickup. That was part of what the Ritz wasn’t telling Koob. Maybe the surveillance Ritz was most concerned about would start when the truck left the Tech Park and the driver headed for his next stop.
“Tsup,” I croak into the phone, while I try to return to the here and now.
“Walter’s coming in for another meetup,” she says. “I just told him we’ve made a little progress on the mosquito thing, and I need to talk to him about our next moves.”
