Collateral Damage (32 page)

“Yes,” she said. “Tonight. He's supposed to be here before midnight.”

Jock pulled back on the knife. “That's better. Where's J. D. Duncan?”

“I don't know.”

Jock waved the knife in the air near her face.

“Really,” she said. “I don't know.” Her voice carried a pleading tone.

“Do you know J.D.?” I asked.

“I know she's a cop down on Longboat Key. That's all.”

“Does she somehow work with you and Stanley?” I asked.

“I don't know, but I think so.”

“What's her job?” I asked.

“I don't know anything about that, either.”

“Do you know how your name ended up with her Social Security number at a bank in Sarasota?” I asked.

“I don't know anything about that.”

“Nigella,” said Jock, “we're going to be here with you until Stanley shows up. If I find out tonight or later that you've lied to us, I'm going to carve you into little pieces and feed you to the fish out there in the bay. It won't matter where you go. I will find you. Just like I did today.”

“I'm not lying. I just don't know.”

“Tell us about the Otto Foundation,” I said.

“What about it?”

“Are they in the drug business?”

“Yes. Of course. That's where the money comes from.”

“Where do the drugs come from?”

“I don't know. My job is simply to launder their money.”

Fear of Jock had loosened her tongue. She was talking rapidly, taking shallow breaths, glancing at him every few seconds. He was sitting quietly in a chair he'd pulled up to the sofa, his knees almost touching hers, the knife still in his hand, a scowl on his face.

“Do you know how the drugs get into the country?” I asked.

“No.”

“Are you familiar with the name Souphanouvong Phomvihana?”

“Sounds Laotian, but I've never heard that name.”

“What is your ethnic background?”

“Irish dad and Vietnamese mother.”

“Where are your parents?”

“I have no idea about my father. His name was Nigel Morrissey, but he disappeared when I was an infant. He left me his name, nothing else. My mom lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.”

We talked for another hour, sporadically asking her questions, getting no answers. I thought she was too frightened of Jock to lie to us. Maybe we'd gotten all we were going to get out of her. She didn't seem to have a lot of knowledge about the drug business, insisting only that she was used for laundry and was paid very well to do so.

Shortly after dark, I heard footsteps coming up the walkway that led to the front door. I pulled my pistol from my pocket and stood by the door. A key was inserted into the lock from outside. Before the key turned, I swung the door open, my gun pointing right into the very surprised face of Bud Stanley.

“Do come in, Mr. Stanley,” I said, opening the door wider.

He stood there, stunned, not sure what to do.

“If you run,” I said, my voice hard, “I'll shoot you in the back. Get your ass in here. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

He walked in, his hands in front, palms turned outward. He saw Nigella. “Are you okay?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

“What's going on?”

“You left in a hurry up in Macon,” I said. “We weren't finished with our visit. Sit down.”

He sat at one end of the sofa, Nigella at the other. Jock had a nine-millimeter pistol trained on him. “Where's J. D. Duncan?” asked Jock.

“I don't know. I didn't know she was missing.”

“Look, dickhead,” said Jock, “I don't have time to fool around. If you don't tell me what I need to know, I'm going to shoot you. First in the foot, then the other foot, then the knee and so on until you decide to talk to me.”

Stanley blanched. “Look,” he said, “if I knew where she was, I'd tell you.”

“You know who she is,” Jock said, a statement, not a question.

“Yes. She's the Longboat Key cop who was investigating the Desmond killing.”

“Tell me about the money going into her account,” I said.

“What money?”

“Shoot him, Jock,” I said.

“No. Wait. I don't know what you're talking about.”

I stared at him for a moment. “You sent three payments of ten grand each to a bank account in Sarasota in the name of Nigella Morrissey but with J.D.'s Social Security number. It shows up in your records as payroll.”

“That's not possible.”

“Believe me, asshole, it's in the records.”

“I swear to you, I had nothing to do with that.”

“Who besides you had access to the Otto Foundation bank accounts?” I asked.

“Nobody other than Maude Lane.”

“Tell me about your connection to Souphanouvong Phomvihana.”

“I told you in the office that day. I don't have a connection with him.”

“You and your dad worked with Soupy's dad.”

“Yes, but I gave that up when I got out of prison.”

“You're still dealing drugs,” I said.

He was quiet for a beat, then exhaled, and said, “Yes.”

“Where do they come from?”

“From the same area of Laos. But not from Soupy.”

“Look,” I said, “I'm not really interested in the drugs. I'll let the Drug Enforcement Administration deal with that. Right now I want to find J. D. Duncan. That's my only interest.”

“I don't know anything about that. I'd tell you if I did.”

In the end, we didn't get any more information. I tended to believe Stanley when he said he didn't know anything about J.D.'s disappearance. He and Nigella were too scared not to tell us the truth.

I called the DEA office in Tampa. It was late now, after ten, so I got a duty officer. “This is Matt Royal,” I said. “I need to talk to Special Agent Dan Delgado.”

“He's gone for the day, sir.”

“Can you reach him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell him to call me on an urgent matter. He knows who I am.” I gave him my cell number.

“I'll call him, sir.”

Dan Delgado had worked with Jock and me on another problem we'd run into a few months back. He was the special agent in charge of the Tampa office of the DEA.

My cell phone rang. “Matt, you running drugs or something?”

“Not exactly, Dan. Jock Algren and I are holding some people at gun-point who I think you'd love to talk to.”

“If Jock's there, we probably have a huge mess. Where are you?”

I gave him the address.

Twenty minutes later Delgado showed up with two other agents. They were wearing windbreakers with police printed across the back in block yellow letters. Below that was the agency name. Dan shook hands with Jock and me and we explained who we had and what kind of evidence we'd accumulated. We asked him to hold them separately and incommunicado until we were able to dig further into J.D.'s disappearance. Dan knew J.D. and was most willing to help out. Nigella and Stanley were carted off in handcuffs.

“What now?” asked Jock as we got back into the car.

“I don't think there's anything else we can do tonight. I need sleep. We'll start fresh in the morning.”

I woke feeling like a regiment of infantry had walked across my head during the night. Tired as I was, I hadn't slept well. Images of J.D. flashed through my sleep, vivid dreams of her in a dark place from which she could not escape. Still, I'd stayed in bed long past my usual time. It was almost nine when I rolled out.

I showered, shaved, and stumbled into the kitchen. Jock was there drinking coffee and reading the morning paper. He looked as if he'd slept through the night without any worries. I thought it must be a habit he'd learned during all those years of clandestine operations.

“Got a question,” I said. “Were you really going to strip the clothes off Nigella last night if she hadn't started talking?”

“You're a pervert.”

“I'm just asking.”

“No. I wouldn't have touched her. I just wanted to scare the hell out of her. I think I succeeded. Why?”

I grinned at him. “Just wondering.”

“Right. You were thinking about her naked.”

The man had a point. He went back to his paper. I grabbed a couple of packaged pastries and popped them into the microwave. Such was breakfast when I didn't have time for the Blue Dolphin. I got a cup of coffee and joined Jock at the table.

“The director got a lot done on Thanatos,” he said. “It was waiting for me this morning when I opened my e-mail.”

“What've you got?”

He went to the living room and returned with a sheaf of printouts. “The most interesting part of this is the makeup of the teams. There were
twelve men in each and there were only three teams. They were dubbed, Team Alpha, Team Beta, and Team Charlie. Desmond was part of Team Charlie. Look at the roster.”

“Damn,” I said. “Desmond, Brewster, and Fleming were all part of the same team. This isn't a coincidence. But there are only seven names here. What about the others?”

“Five of them are dead.”

“Any information on the living members?”

Jock handed me another sheet of paper. “Names and current addresses.”

I looked at the list. “Are you sure the other five are dead?”

“Yeah. I checked. Two were killed in Vietnam before the end of the war, one died in a car wreck a year after he came home, and two died of cancer.”

“Why are the team members kids being killed?”

“Don't know, but I'd like to find out if any of the others have had deaths in their families.”

“I'll get Bill Lester onto this. He can query the police departments in the towns where they live. Maybe something will turn up.”

“We need to warn these guys. Somebody is targeting them.”

I called Bill Lester and gave him the names and addresses of the men who'd served on Charlie Team in Operation Thanatos. “It can't be a coincidence that the children of three men who served on the same team are now dead,” I said.

“I'll get right on this and get back to you,” said the chief. “And before you ask, the answer is no. We haven't made any progress in finding J.D.”

I hung up and my phone rang again. Debbie.

“Good morning, sunshine,” I said. “You're up early.”

“I spent most of the night on Marsh LLC. I thought you'd want it first thing this morning.”

“What'd you find?”

“It's a tangled mess. Marsh LLC is owned by a company incorporated in Ohio called BriteSun, Inc. That corporation has only one officer, the president whose name is Victor Chaffin. The office address is a post office box in Columbus.”

I interrupted. “What about the registered agent for service of process?”

“Both Marsh and BriteSun use one of those companies that serve as registered agents for lots of corporations all over the country.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“BriteSun does not seem to have any business operations, and other than the listing on the Ohio Secretary of State's website, there's nothing on it anywhere.”

“Then why the hell was somebody trying to get me to look into Marsh?”

“There is one thing I found that may have some bearing on this mess.”

“What?”

“Marsh LLC is shown as the owner of a piece of property in the Bahamas.”

“How did you ferret that out?”

“BriteSun was incorporated in Ohio about twenty years ago. The check that was written for this year's annual corporate fee was drawn on a bank in Columbus. The signature on the check was illegible and there was no printed name on it. I hacked into the bank's computers and found the account. It was set up by the same person who is shown as the president of BriteSun, Victor Chaffin.”

“That's interesting.”

“There's more. That checking account is only used once a year to keep BriteSun active. That is until recently when somebody put a million dollars into the account. It's listed as ‘capital infusion.' Marsh was formed a couple of days later, the million dollars was transferred by check to Marsh. I got the routing numbers off the endorsements on the back of the check and traced that to a bank in Atlanta.”

“And you hacked their computer.”

“Damn right. Marsh wrote a check to the trust account of a law firm in West Palm Beach for guess how much.”

“One million dollars.”

“Bingo.”

“And you found out what it was for.”

“Law firm computers have notoriously bad security. This one closed on the Bahamian property for Marsh LLC.”

“Where is the property?”

“It's a house in Marsh Harbour. In the Abacos.” She gave me the street address.

“Damn, you're good,” I said.

“That's not all I got. Victor Chaffin died five years ago. He's listed in the Social Security death index, and I found his obituary in the Columbus
Dispatch
. He was the founder of Chaffin Consultants, an engineering firm that was one of the first bought by Desmond Engineering Consultants when it started expanding.”

“I'll be damned.”

“Bye.” She hung up, and I related the conversation to Jock.

“If she's able to hack into bank computers, she's better than I thought,” he said. “The agency's hackers are the best in the world and they have trouble with bank computer security. Does she have any particular training in this stuff ?”

“No. It's just something she got into and developed a real talent. She's usually too wired to sleep when she gets home from work, so she stays up and trolls the Internet. I think she's made some friends who spend their entire lives breaking into other people's computers. It's like a big game. Get in and get out. As long as they do no damage, they figure it's all in fun.”