Suspect, p.32
Suspect, page 32
Because it’s all need-to-know around the Ritz, Walter can’t say what Sid DeGrassi is up to. Even Primo is in the dark. Sid is totally close-mouthed about what he does at the plant. Walter’s guess is that Sid’s main job is to act dumb and see nothing, responsibilities for which he possesses great natural aptitude.
Tonya, however, has gotten more insight about what’s happening when Sid is on duty. After a week of rotating in and out of FBI surveillances, she has seen Sid let an after-hours cleaning crew into the VVM building every night about eight p.m. The company, Vojczek Sanitary, is another subsidiary that does the end-of-lease or storm cleanups in the Vojczek buildings around Highland Isle and Kindle County. Yet there is also a regular janitorial crew that works during the days at VVM. The cleaners who show up at Vox VetMeds put in a full shift there and, according to the agents who have tailed them, never clean any other building. When the Bureau finally ID’d one of the guys, he turned out, no surprise, to have a master’s in chemistry.
Aside from Sid DeGrassi and the cleaners, there is no other visible connection between Vox VetMeds and the Ritz, with one further exception. In VVM’s annual report in Delaware, they list the names of their three board members. One, Yolanda Green—also VVM’s general counsel—is a lawyer in her thirties who practices in a small firm in Kindle County. Based on photos on her Facebook feed and info from Ancestry.com, both of which the Bureau keeps an eye on, she is believed to be related to Jewell, Ritz’s ex, on her father’s side and is probably Jewell’s niece. When I share this with Rik, he laughs in a snorty disbelieving way.
“The Ritz seems as clever as they say. He’s got privilege insulating everything. Yolanda can’t be forced to disclose her communications with Jewell—or Vojczek—because of the attorney-client privilege, and Jewell will never have to testify about the Ritz, because she can still claim marital privilege. Our friends in the US Attorney’s Office have got their work cut out for them.”
Moses and Feld, however, seem to have a plan, although they don’t share much of it when Rik and I bring the Chief to meet with them and Ingram. Pops has always described Moses as methodical, and from the bits and pieces I hear, Moses’s attitude seems to be that Vojczek is into so much bad shit that they will eventually get him for something. Feld at one point remarked that the Ritz is the guy they dreamed up the RICO statute for—a one-person crime wave.
Toy has also been in touch with DEA about Vox VetMeds. Carfentanil is legally available in the US these days only as a compounding drug, meaning a made-to-order prescription for a single customer. About eight months ago, Vox was granted a registration as a controlled substance manufacturer in order to compound a generic form of carfentanil for the Kindle County Zoo. The zoo has made two compounding requests, both of which VVM reported to DEA. What is important is that the registration gives VVM a reason to acquire the chemicals needed to formulate the stuff and to keep them on hand.
From the start, all the Feds seriously love my idea of running the Chief in on the Ritz. Even if it doesn’t work, it won’t blow Walter, and Lucy is, of course, the last person in the world Vojczek expects to hear from. By now, with a non-subject letter Rik got her from Moses, which protects the Chief if she tells everything, the Feds have learned the whole story about her and the Ritz and the picture. And Feld, who has the kind of conniving imagination that makes you glad he chose law enforcement instead of crime, has come up with a scenario that everyone thinks has a good chance to get the Ritz talking.
To lay the groundwork, at Feld’s instruction, Rik asks Marc Hess to inform the press that the commission has required testimony from the Chief. Marc took the request as part of our press strategy to get ahead of the story. After the articles go up saying she will testify next week, the Chief phones Ritz’s cell—a number she got from Walter—when surveillance puts him in his office in downtown Highland Isle. She makes the call from the Greenwood field office, with six of us listening.
“It’s Lucy, Ritz.”
Long silence, before Vojczek says, “Where the fuck did you get this number?”
“I’m the police, remember? The phone companies bark and sit when we call. You and I have to talk.”
“Fuck we do,” he answers.
“We need to have a word, Ritz. And I don’t want to do it on the phone.” That was Ingram’s idea, to come on as if the Chief is wary of surveillance.
“We have zero to talk about, you and me.”
“I have to testify next week, Ritz.”
“So it goes.”
“Well, you’re going to be hearing your name now and then. I want to give you a little preview. For both our sakes. You just tell me where and when we get together.”
He hangs up with no goodbye.
There is silence over the weekend, and then on Monday, midday, Ritz tells Walter that he needs him in his car Tuesday morning. He doesn’t say why, but when Walter asks around the office, he hears that Ritz is getting ready for some kind of meeting tomorrow. It’s just a guess that the Ritz is about to set up something with the Chief, but the Bureau calls a late-night conference on Monday at an off-site to get the Chief ready, just in case. Naturally, both Rik and I are invited to attend.
35. As Soon as I Enter My Apartment
As soon as I enter my apartment, I sense something. It’s about six p.m. Monday, and I’ve returned to walk Gomer the Turd and to eat before we meet with the Bureau technicians. But I know I’m not alone. Gomer is in the far corner of the living area with his little eyes racing. He usually retreats there when I have visitors, as if he needs space to plan his future actions. And even if it’s below the threshold of actual hearing, I sense somebody else’s breath.
“Toy?” I ask.
“Don’t shoot,” I hear him say. Strangely, I haven’t yet reached under my arm for my gun. Koob steps out of my bedroom. He is thinking about smiling but isn’t positive how that will be received.
“Wow,” I say, absorbing the total-body shock.
“Sorry,” he says. “I tried to call you.”
“‘No Caller ID’?”
“That’s my name,” he says with the same suggestion of a smile.
I was with Rik and a client and couldn’t answer when my phone lit up about 3:30 p.m. I assumed it was the FBI with details about tonight’s meeting, which I then received from Tonya by text.
“I was kinda thinking I’d never see you again,” I say. “What’s going on?”
Life is not a rom-com, at least not mine. I suppose there’s a chunk of me that would get a thrill if he said he’d left his wife and was here because he needs to hang with me every day and thinks I’m great and is all in for me. And there’s another, maybe bigger part of me that would never believe that or would be totally freaked about any commitment. But there’s nothing in me that really expects him to say that.
“I understand there’s a meeting tomorrow,” he says. “Involving your client.”
I’m alarmed at first, then realize who he’s been talking to. Neither Walter or Lucy is sure yet about a meeting. I take a beat to remind myself Koob and I are back to being on opposite sides.
“Then you know something I don’t,” I say. “Where did you hear that?”
“The Ritz called me.”
“Okay.”
“He wants me to provide counter-surveillance. He thinks it may be a setup.”
“Really?” I hitch a shoulder, noncommittal. “Then why would he go?”
“Well, he has faith that his comms guy will outwit law enforcement, I guess.” He comes closer to a smile than usual, as he compliments himself. “And I think he’s concerned about what your client will say about him on the witness stand.”
“Last time I saw you, you were afraid Ritz might kill you.”
“I have not completely disregarded that thought. But it turned out when Darnell called the payment intermediary that Ritz had fallen way behind in what he owed us, which helped explain why I just took off. And the Ritz does appear to accept that cooperating with law enforcement would be lethal for our business. Not to mention our freedom. It’s also been weeks and nothing bad has happened to Ritz or the matters that concern him. So I think he feels reassured.”
“Still. Why not tell him, ‘Nice knowing you’? Why take the chance?”
“As I said. Ritz owes us a great deal of money. He’s been playing some excuse about a sharp rise in the price of bitcoins. But the transaction will supposedly take place the instant he sees me tomorrow. It’s the kind of power play you would expect from Ritz: You quit when I say you quit. And obviously, showing up again will probably lessen any suspicion he has that I turned on him.”
“Is this the money he owes you for spying on me?”
Koob knots up his lips to keep from smiling again.
“For many services. It is a lot of money, but if this is an undercover operation, probably run by the FBI, given their earlier involvement, then I would rather not be there—at least not without some preconditions. Obviously, I have no interest in being held for questioning.”
“We don’t talk about our clients. Remember?”
“I understand.”
“So what I know or don’t know, I have nothing to say.”
“Understood. But I have spent some time thinking this through. If I show up tomorrow and it is a sting of some kind, then I like to think I will figure that out. Whatever means the FBI employs to intercept the communications, radio or recorder or even a laser tap—do you know what that is?”
I nod. It’s a dream addition to the PIBOT. The mechanism uses a laser to turn the vibrations of speech against a hard surface, usually a window, into sound, applying the same principles involved in a microphone.
“Well, whatever devices are in use,” he says, “I suspect I will detect them. Certainly, if I were the FBI, I would not like to take that chance. So I want to propose a win-win. For me. And your client. And the FBI.”
I tumble my hand forward, indicating he should explain.
“If I recognize something, I will keep it to myself,” he says. “I will go through the motions, searching, using the appropriate machinery, but if I uncover anything—” He extends a thin finger over his lips. “And all I get in exchange is a day pass. I come and I go. No one detains me. No one comes looking for me afterwards.”
“And if I say I can’t help?”
“I head home now.”
“Explaining what to the Ritz?”
“Too risky, I suppose.”
Which would be like posting a ‘STOP’ sign. If the surveillance guru has decided meeting Lucy is too perilous for him to show up, Ritz won’t proceed either.
Koob has reasoned this through carefully. Bottom line, the Bureau needs to accept his terms. It’s the only way the Ritz will see Lucy.
“And just say it turns out to be law enforcement?” I ask. “Won’t Ritz think you were part of it, if he gets rolled up?”
“He may. But my name will never appear on any government witness list. And I can say the feds must have developed some advanced technology that fooled my machinery. The federal agencies go to great lengths not to disclose their newest surveillance techniques, even at trials, and the courts usually permit them to keep their secrets. I’ll have some deniability. And frankly, if Ritz is under arrest, he will have less time to bother with me. Darnell and I both think this is the best course for us.” Koob looks at me in that unflinching way he employs when he’s getting to some uncomfortable truth. It’s a cool deal for him. They get their money. They never turn on Ritz visibly. And they silently assist in apprehending somebody they now know to be a true sinister shit and a killer.
I tell him I need to make a call or two.
“Go walk for an hour,” I say. “And hey, do you mind taking Gomer with you?”
I phone Rik first. Then Tonya. She calls back in about forty-five minutes.
“The FBI hates being dictated to,” she says. “Some of them just wanted to say, ‘Fuck him,’ but the cooler heads realize they have no choice. Still, Joe, or whatever his name really is, has to understand that he can’t play games. If they think he’s tipped off Ritz, this deal evaporates and your guy ends up in cuffs. So he better be super convincing when he tells Ritz it’s cool to go ahead. And they were emphatic that you can’t confirm to Joe that it’s a law-enforcement operation. They don’t want to take the chance that he’ll let something slip to Ritz beforehand, even by accident.”
When Koob returns, he’s brought carnitas from Ruben’s. I laugh and we sit down at my table.
“Just play it out tomorrow,” I tell him. “One way or the other, you’ll be able to go on your way.”
“Thank you,” he says.
He talks to me about his daughter while we’re eating. He sees no signs she’s growing up. It’s sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. And shopping.
“That’s not a good feeling,” he says, “to look at your own child and think, You’re shallow.”
“And young,” I say. “She’s young. People change. Right?”
“Sometimes.”
“The way you describe your wife, your daughter’s got a lot she’s getting over. So maybe that’s why she needs to stay on the surface.”
He looks up like he’s never considered that.
At ten to nine, I fold the food wrapper and get ready to go. I have told him only that I have a meeting with Rik.
“Where you staying?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Ritz would pay for a hotel.”
“You can stay here. But,” I say, having considered it, “no hooking up. It wouldn’t be fun for me. I mean, it would be fun. But not afterwards.”
He nods several times. “I have been thinking the same thing.”
I think he means it. He looks kind of relieved.
“So, you know, help yourself to the sofa,” I tell him.
“Okay,” he says. “If I’m not here, I will talk to you before I go.”
We hang there by the door.
“Oh, just, fuck,” I say and hug him quickly before I leave.
36. The Session with the Bureau Techs
The session with the Bureau techs takes place at the off-site in the North End where Ingram has been seeing Walter—a down-on-its-heels office building where the door to the Bureau’s second-floor space identifies the enterprise inside as ‘National Industries.’ It’s been a little creepy finding out that the federal government has all these random little hideouts around town. Inside the small office, it’s the same inexpensive stuff, a conference room with portable metal walls and an oval table with a shiny plastic surface.
Don Ingram and Tonya are here, along with Rik and Lucy and me. The star of the show is a thick-set woman named Mulligan, who has big hands and a short do that looks like permanent hat hair. She has arrived from DC to brief the Chief on the equipment the Bureau will be using tomorrow. According to what Tonya told me, Mulligan had wanted the deal with Koob to include specifying the counter-surveillance equipment he’d employ. But that was scotched by higher-ups who said it would confirm this was a law-enforcement operation. I was pretty sure Koob wouldn’t have been willing to go that far anyway.
Mulligan has that annoying habit of identifying everyone only by the role they play in the operation, as if they have no consequential human existence beyond that. The Ritz is ‘the target.’
“Our understanding,” Mulligan says to Lucy, “is that the target has employed a well-trained surveillance expert, so we have to assume the target’s defenses will involve the latest and the greatest—devices to detect anything we might use to watch or hear: cameras, laser taps, radio transmissions, bugs in the room, GPS transponders. And whatever the target actually says out loud is going to be covered by an ambient noise machine that produces blank sound in the same frequency ranges as human speech. The goal of that is to make sure that even if you have a recording device—and you will, two in fact,” Mulligan says, lifting a finger toward Lucy, “or a radio, ditto, what is captured will be completely unintelligible. We have a few tricks of our own to counteract that.”
“Our source”—that is how she refers to Walter—“says that he’s bodyguarded two of the target’s meetings with an outsider in the past. Each time the target had personnel on hand to do the initial search of that person. We assume tomorrow that will be the CS guy.” Counter-surveillance. Aka Koob.
“After that,” Mulligan continues, “in the past, the target used his own vehicle for the conversation. That gives him a controlled setting that he can sweep in advance for bugs or GPS devices. Expect the same tomorrow. The target will drive, so no one else hears what he’s saying. By moving, with his own people on all sides of the vehicle and watching for any tail, he thinks he can defeat most surveillance. After he’s confident he’s not being followed, he has previously parked under a viaduct, a road underpass—the source says both times it was the same site in the North End in Kindle County, not far from here—to defeat any aerial surveillance, drones, et cetera, and to block the radio signal from any broadcasting device he’s missed.
“We think he’s very likely to park there again. Whoever has advised the target about the site is right—that’s a tough location to surveil. But we have ways around that.
“The main problem for us is the noise machine. As I said, you will be equipped with two digital recorders.” Mulligan reaches in an envelope and places both on the conference table. Each device is amazing. One is a physical car key, a perfect match for what the Chief uses to start her ten-year-old Toyota, and the second appears to be a magnetized entry card, the kind that opens the electronic lock on a door. She’ll carry the card, along with a couple similar pieces of plastic—ATM and credit card—in a stick-on envelope attached to the back of her phone.
“We used the phone recording of you and the target last week to develop a signal envelope for each of your voices. The microphones in each recording device are directional—and noise canceling. They will enhance everything within the signal envelope and add a digital marker. If you keep one of these recorders close to you, we’ll have no trouble extracting your voice afterwards by computer.
