Delta Ghost (12 page)

“Feel free to make yourself at home,” Venn muttered sourly as he went over to the coffee machine. He found it cold and empty.

He turned, incredulous. “No coffee?”

“I brewed some tea.” Clune nodded at a pot Venn couldn’t recall ever seeing before. “Help yourself.”

“This is America,” said Venn. “We drink
coffee
to kickstart our hearts in the morning. Jesus.” He opened a package of Colombian beans and dumped them in the grinder.

“Well, we survived the night,” said Clune, carrying two heaped plates to the counter. He appeared genuinely light-hearted.

“Don’t get too damn comfortable,” said Venn. “After breakfast you’re out of here.” He peered at the plate Clune shoved under his nose. Eggs, sunny-side up, bled their broken yolks into a sea of grease that coated bacon rashers, mushrooms, a mess of eviscerated tomato, and something that looked like toast but wasn’t quite.

“What the hell’s that?”

“Fried bread,” said Clune. “The food of champions.” He stuffed a forkful of egg into his mouth.

Venn made to push the plate away. He’d moved toward muesli and oats for breakfast since living with Beth, and in any case he didn’t care for the idea of this snot-nosed intruder taking over his kitchen and cooking for him.

But the food smelt good. He had to admit it.

In a show of compromise which Venn knew was half-assed, he grabbed two slices of bread from the depleted loaf on the counter and spread low-fat margarine on them and forked the bacon from his plate onto one slice and bit into the sandwich.

“So,” said Clune, his mouth full. “What’s on the agenda for today?”

“I’m taking you down to my office, where we were yesterday,” Venn said. “You’ll tell us everything you know, everything that might be of use. With no bullshit, this time. Then I’ll figure out a plan.”

“You’re not turning me over to the local cops? Or the Feds?”

“Not for now,” said Venn.

Clune’s shoulders slumped in relief. “How many people have you got working with you in your office?” he said. “I mean, I’ve met your sidekick, Harmony. But I didn’t see anyone else there yesterday.”

“One other,” said Venn.

“One?”

“Well, two. Including Shawna, our receptionist.”

“Just three of you?” Clune looked agitated again. “Against Salazar? Bloody hell, Lieutenant. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. The guy is
dangerous
. He has about a million men, and automatic weapons. He –”

“Make up your mind,” snapped Venn. “First you want me to keep this low-key. Then you whine about how I don’t have an army at my disposal. I told you. I’ll figure something out. But you’re going to have to co-operate, son. And I mean, seriously.”

“I will. Promise. I said –”

“Because I’m going to be using a lie detector on you,” Venn cut in.

“A lie detector? You mean one of those things –”

“Not a
thing
,” said Venn. “It’s a person.”

*

V
enn found a hooded fleece jacket in his closet that he hadn’t worn for six months or more. He told Clune to put it on, and almost laughed. It was many sizes too big, and the kid looked like a child dressing up in its parent’s clothes.

“It’s bloody hot,” grumbled Clune.

“That’s too bad,” said Venn. “We want to hide your face as much as possible.”

“I’ll look conspicuous, dressed like this in this weather,” Clune objected.

“Nah. City’s full of weirdoes.” Venn grabbed a leather jacket for himself. “You’ll fit right in. Just another oddball.”

Venn stepped out the front door. Already, at just after nine in the morning, the heat was descending on the streets like an alien invasion. He surveyed the street. Mothers pushing strollers, people in suits hurrying along, late for work. A normal scene. If there were enemies about, they were well hidden.

“Wait here,” he said to Clune, who cowered inside the doorway. “I’ll bring the car round.”

He kept the Mustang’s engine running and beckoned to the kid from the curb. Clune hung back, his face almost invisible beneath the hood. Sighing, Venn got out and went to the door and hustled him into the passenger seat.

“There’s a fine line between cautious and paranoid,” said Venn.

He’d called ahead to the office. Harmony and Walter were both there, and Venn told them to stay put. He didn’t say why.

At reception, Venn pulled the hood back from Clune’s head. Shawna’s drawn-on eyebrows shot even higher.

“Ah, yes. The young man from yesterday.”

Before Venn could make it through the door, Shawna said, “Main office has been calling. You need to schedule a time for your interview.”

Venn groaned inwardly. The post-shootout interview, yes. He’d forgotten all about it. “Tell them I’ll call back.”

“Well, well,” said Harmony, as they entered. “The prodigal son.”

Walter rolled his chair over. Today he was sporting a dogshit-brown suit and turquoise shirt. He stared at Clune, a toothpick protruding from a gap between his teeth.

Venn dumped Clune in a chair.

“Danny Clune, Detective Sergeant Walter M. Sickert,” he said.

“Walter Sickert,” said the kid. “Like the artist?”

“Huh?” said Harmony.

“He was a German-born artist of the late 19
^th
and early 20
^th
centuries,” said Clune. “Worked in London. A big name in the avant-garde movement.”

“And possibly Jack the Ripper, too,” said Walter. He looked bored, as if smartasses had commented on his name a hundred times before.

“What?” said Harmony, looking form Walter to Clune.

“That’s right,” said Clune, getting excited. “Sickert was fascinated with Jack the Ripper. A theory’s been developed that Sickert himself was the Ripper, or was at least his accomplice.”

“Really?” Harmony shuffled her chair nearer. “Tell me –”

Venn had had enough. “All right, people. Can it. We’ve got work to do.”

He got Shawna to send out for coffee, lots of it. It was going to be a long morning.

T
hey carried out the questioning informally, the four of them sitting around the floorspace on office chairs, the three cops forming a vague semicircle and facing Clune. But before long Clune began to fidget and sweat, just as if he was in an interrogation room under flickering fluorescent lights.

He described his arrival in the US two months earlier. Venn would check it out, but he assumed the date given was correct. It was too easy to verify to be worth lying about. The details of Clune’s early weeks in the country were of little interest: his road trip to Seattle and down the West Coast, the locations he’d visited. When he started to digress yet again about some piece of rock history, Venn cut him off with a swiping motion across his throat.

Clune got to the part about his contact in LA putting him in touch with Oscar Flowers, and Venn slowed him down.

“What’s the name of this contact?”

Clune screwed up his face. “Gary somebody. I don’t think he ever told me his surname.”

“And he was, what, some rock fanboy like you?”

“Kind of. I met him in a bar. We started talking, discovered we had mutual interests in music. I crashed out at his place a few nights.”

“Where was his place?”

“No idea.” Clune looked sheepish, but a little proud at the same time. “We smoked some grass. I was too drunk or stoned to remember exactly where he lived.” He brightened. “His apartment had a blue door, if that helps.”

“Don’t get smart, boy,” said Harmony.

“Okay,” said Venn. “So you go to Texas to meet this Flowers guy.”

“Yeah.”

“Describe him.”

“Older. Though not as old as you.” He glanced at Venn. “Sorry. About thirty-four, thirty-five, I’d say. Medium height. Thin, but not wasted like a junkie, you know? Toned. A shaved head, though he mostly wore one of those hats. The Texan ones.”

“A Stetson,” said Walter.

“Yeah. It looked ridiculous on him, though I wasn’t stupid enough to laugh. Didn’t smile much.”

“Race?”

Clune tilted his head. “Difficult to say. He was deeply tanned. But I think probably Hispanic.” He looked worried. “Is that a politically correct term?”

Venn said, “And you genuinely had no idea what kind of a business he ran?”

“Well...” Clune looked uncomfortable. “I never found anything to confirm it. But I had an
idea
, of course.” He looked at the three detectives in turn. When it became clear they weren’t going to help him out, he said: “Drugs.”

“How long did you work for him?”

“About six weeks. He tested me, in the beginning. Put me in a room with two other computer guys. Real freaks, with no social skills and a dress sense that was from another planet.” Venn saw Clune glance across at Walter and then quickly away. “Flowers brought us some access problems to solve. The other two guys were good, but I found the answers before they did. Next thing, they’ve been fired and I’ve got the job.”

“Which involved what, exactly?” said Harmony.

“Financial transfers. Exclusively. Money got deposited into one account, and it was my job to hide it creatively. I found online banks, tax havens all over the world, you name it. I was pretty creative, if I say so myself.”

“Just how much money are we talking?” asked Venn.

Clune rocked his palm. “Over six weeks... probably around thirty.”

“Thirty thousand dollars?”

“
Million.
Thirty million.”

Venn and Harmony looked at one another. Walter was staring intently at the kid.

Venn said, “And all this time, you were never tempted, not even a bit, to use those computer whiz skills of yours to siphon off a little? Set up an account of your own, and skim a few bucks here and there?”

“Oh, I was
tempted
.” Clune was sitting up straight now, enjoying himself. “But Flowers wasn’t stupid. He sent someone in every day to audit the transfers I’d made. I had to keep records of every cent and where it ended up. This guy he sent in, he wasn’t as good as me. I could probably have hoodwinked him, but it wasn’t worth the risk. If he’d had even the faintest glimmer of a suspicion that I was fleecing Flowers, I’d have lost my job. And probably a lot more, besides.”

“Most likely your eyes and tongue,” said Walter, still staring at Clune. “Your balls, too.”

Clune swiveled a little in his chair. Crossed his legs.

“But you said you hacked Flowers’ email,” said Venn. “There must have been some mention of what kind of business he was involved in.”

“He
said
he was in imports and exports,” said Clune. “And that’s the kind of terminology he used in his emails. He was very careful, was Flowers. Everything he mentioned sounded entirely kosher, the kind of communication you’d see in legitimate business. I started reading his emails regularly, to pass the time. But I noticed he was having a lot of exchanges with this guy named Salazar, and they were arguing with one another. All about how the other guy had failed to live up to his end of one bargain or another. Then, one day, they arranged to meet up. And that’s when I decided to follow Flowers.”

Venn listened as Clune repeated the story about the gun battle between Flowers’ and Salazar’s men, and how he’d fled after seeing Flowers shot dead. How he’d crossed the country in a succession of rental cars, and ended up in New York a few days earlier. Then gotten mugged on Vandam, and sought out Kruger to ask him for help.

Et cetera.

“So here we are,” said Clune. He spread his hands and looked at each of the cops expectantly. “What now?”

Venn glanced at Walter, then Harmony. “Any questions?”

“Yeah,” said Walter. “But for
you
, not him.”

Venn raised his eyebrows, expectantly.

Walter said, “You want to start listing the lies you heard him tell, or should I?”

Clune stared at them, his face twisted in terror.

P
eter Franciscus liked an early start in the mornings. Not just because of the time it took him to get from his Staten Island home to Lower Manhattan, but because mornings were often his most productive time, a period when, refreshed by sleep, his thinking was at its clearest, and the conclusions he came to often the most accurate.

Usually he drove, taking the Verrazano-Narrows and Brooklyn Bridges. Today, because he didn’t anticipate leaving the city, Franciscus decided to ride the ferry instead. He stood on the deck, as he always did, feeling the early morning sun on his face, and enjoying the view of the harbor and the cityscape of Manhattan as it drew nearer, as awe-inspiring as ever. Franciscus was of Dutch ancestry, many generations back, as was the city itself, and despite his Ohio origins he’d always felt drawn to the metropolis.

He’d gone to bed with a problem unresolved in his head. Unlike many people, Franciscus hadn’t lain awake until the early hours, wrestling with it. Instead, he’d considered it briefly, decided he didn’t have a solution just then, and compartmentalized it, stowing it neatly in an imaginary box to be opened up in the morning, when his mind was sharper.

By the time the ferry reached the terminal, he believed he had an answer.

The problem was this. Stefan Kruger had been shot dead, shortly after O’Dell had been arrested. It
might
be coincidence. After all, people in Kruger’s line of work – drug dealers, fences, money launderers, all of which Kruger was – got shot dead all the time. It was an occupational hazard, and if you couldn’t stand the heat, et cetera. On any other day, Franciscus would have shrugged the killing off as just another medium-level criminal cashing in his chips.

But the timing was too convenient to ignore.

The problem, then: Kruger had been shot just after one of his associates - one of his
clients
, Franciscus supposed - had been arrested on felony charges following a police undercover operation. Who had killed him, and why?

Three broad possibilities came to mind. The first was that someone, a mutual associate of both O’Dell’s and Kruger’s, had learned of the former’s arrest and had, quite reasonably, concluded that O’Dell would shop Kruger to the police. This hypothetical individual might have decided to take out Kruger before Kruger himself could be arrested and subsequently sell out others. Franciscus didn’t think this likely. He preferred to believe that he would have been kept in the loop if something like this had occurred, and so far nobody had contacted him.