JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home (38 page)

“People we do business with: industry contacts, fund managers, people from the companies we cover— the same people who called before he went away.”

“You told me last time that Danes wasn’t always adept at dealing with big investors,” I said. “That there were fund managers who got the better of him.”

“Indeed,” Frye said.

“Were there any who did it on a consistent basis— any who Danes might have had a gripe with?”

Frye was quiet for a while. “I suppose there were,” he said. “I don’t know how Greg felt about them, but certainly whenever it would happen— whenever he would find that one of these people had blown smoke up his ass— he’d be angry and as near to embarrassment as he ever got.”

“Why did he keep dealing with them?”

“Well, it was a part of his job, after all,” Frye said. “Beyond that, I couldn’t say.”

“No psychological theories?”

Frye chuckled. “Greg fancied himself a player— someone who could move markets and reshape industries and that sort of thing. Perhaps dealing with those fellows on a regular basis was a part of that fancy; perhaps it helped him to believe his own PR.”

“The people you’re thinking of are all fund managers?”

“The three I have in mind ran hedge funds. Three of the biggest, in their day.”

“But not anymore?”

“Two of them are out of the markets. Julian Ressler cashed out nearly three years ago, and Vincent Pryor was called to that big investor conference in the sky about eighteen months back.”

“And the third?”

“The third is Marcus Hauck. He’s still around and making a bloody fortune again.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“Not many have outside the industry.”

“You know him?”

“Only slightly, and only over the phone; Greg dealt with him mainly. Hauck runs the Kubera Group— as in the Hindu god— and he’s got over five billion under management, all told. He’s smart and aggressive and very private, both professionally and personally. His funds hit a few bumps in the road at the end of the bubble— late into tech and late out— but over the past year or so he seems to have gotten the old magic back.”

“And Danes still talks to him?”

“He did while I was at Pace, though not very frequently— perhaps every few months. You think he might know something about Greg?”

“I have no idea,” I said honestly. “Is he based in town?”

“In Connecticut. Kubera’s offices are in Stamford, and Hauck himself has some massive place in Greenwich. Why, are you off to see the wizard?”

“Maybe he can fix me up with a brain,” I said.

Frye laughed. “From what I know of Hauck, he’s more likely to set the flying monkeys on you.”

Frye rang off. I poured myself another cup of coffee and opened my laptop, and after about an hour I found that Frye’s description of Marcus Hauck as very private was an understatement. There was next to nothing about him online: a one-paragraph biography, a brief four-year-old article from a trade rag, and a more recent piece from a business weekly that added little. I learned that Hauck was forty-six, Swiss by birth, and the only child of a banker from Basel. He was educated in the States— at MIT and the Kellogg School— and from there he went to the investment bank of Melton-Peck, where he spent the next five years as the star of its proprietary trading desk. And then he started Kubera.

His first investors were former Melton colleagues, who’d liked the way Hauck had traded the firm’s money and thought he could do as well with theirs. As it turned out, he did even better. In his first year out he posted returns over 15 percent, and for the next several he matched or bettered that— until the bump in the road that Frye had mentioned. Up to that point, his assets under management had grown steadily, as had his fees and his reputation.

The Hauck legend revolved mostly around his remarkable intelligence, his voracious appetite for market information, and an obsession with privacy that some said bordered on the pathological. He granted no interviews and refused all speaking engagements, and all of his employees— current and past— were bound by strict nondisclosure agreements, as were his two ex-wives. And that was it. There wasn’t even a picture.

I read the articles over again, but repetition didn’t make them more informative. I paced around my apartment, in the close gray air, and thought about Marcus Hauck and Jeremy Pflug. And I wondered some more about Irene Pratt and why she’d stopped taking my calls.

I picked up the phone a few times, to call Neary, and each time I put it down again. Asking him how things were going wouldn’t make them go any faster. I thought about calling Jane at the office, and didn’t. What would I say after I wanted to hear your voice? I pulled on my running shorts and shoes and got the hell out.

I ran for forty-five minutes through a fine mist that did nothing to cool me down but instead basted me in a sauce of bus fumes and soot. My shirt was soaked through when I turned onto 16th Street, and I slowed to a trot as I came to my building. There was a car double-parked out front, its hazard lights blinking. It was a Volvo sedan. Neary ran the window down.

“Good run?” he asked.

“Better than banging my head against the wall upstairs. You have something?”

Neary shook his head. “Barely. I talked to my guys in DC about tracking down one of Pflug’s freelancers and using their local shitbags to do it. They had some ideas— came up with four or five guys in the Marty Czerka mold— but consensus was that it was going to take some time, a few days at least.” I groaned and Neary held up a hand and continued. “So I switched to Plan B.”

“Which was … ?”

Neary smiled a little. “I called up George L. Gerber again and begged.”

I laughed. “And that worked for you?”

“I was just pathetic enough. Gerber gave me one name, a guy called Santos who used to work for Pflug. I got off the phone with him a little while ago.”

“And?”

“And that’s where my good news ends. Santos didn’t know much, not much more than what Gerber told us: that his subjects— his targets— were Wall Street people and that Pflug was very private about his clients. Or client, I should say.”

“Client, singular?”

“That’s what Santos said. He didn’t have a name, but he was under the impression there was only one of them. And he thought it was some sort of big-deal financial guy.”

Neary took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. I told him about my conversation with Frye and he listened and thought about it.

“So Danes might have had some sand in his shorts about this guy Hauck— okay— but how do you get from there to Hauck hiring Pflug?”

“Maybe I don’t,” I admitted. “But Hauck is the name I’ve got to work with, and he qualifies as a big-deal financial guy. I want to try him out on Irene Pratt— assuming I can get her to talk to me.”

Neary’s eyes narrowed. “Why Pratt? Last night you didn’t think she had anything to do with Pflug; you said the breakin had freaked her out.”

“That was last night— now I’m not so sure. She wasn’t particularly happy to hear from me when I called her on Tuesday morning. Mostly she told me she had work to do and she’d been overly paranoid about people following her, and she just wanted to forget the whole thing. She hasn’t taken my calls since, and I’d like to know why.”

Neary smirked. “You have that effect on people sometimes,” he said.

“This is different. I got what might have been a weird vibe off her when I asked about people interested in Danes’s whereabouts. At the time I wrote it off to nerves, but now I wonder if she had someone in mind.”

“Maybe Hauck?”

“I’m hoping she’ll tell me.”

Neary nodded. “If you can get her to cop to that, there’s something else you can ask.” I looked at him. “I checked in with my guys on the way over here. Nothing’s changed at Nina Sachs’s place or at Danes’s or yours; Marty’s geniuses are still doing their thing. But not at Pratt’s place. At her place, they’ve packed up and left. Maybe you can ask her why.”

27

“This is it for me, Irene,” I said into my cell phone. “This is all that’s on my agenda today— just sitting here, waiting for you.” It was Saturday morning, and I was outside the bar at the end of Irene Pratt’s street, watching the door of her building. I had come there on a fishing trip, but there’d be nothing patient or quiet about it; I was wading in with big boots and a club.

Pratt’s voice was tiny and mad and scared. “I knew it. I knew I should never have talked to you. I knew it was a stupid thing to do. What is wrong with you, anyway? Why are you harassing me?”

“We haven’t gotten to the harassing part yet, Irene. Right now I just want to talk.”

“Is that supposed to convince me? Because all it makes me think of is calling the police.”

I laughed. “Sure, Irene, give them a call. And while you’re doing that, I’ll ring Turpin. We can all meet at your place and have a little party.”

She drew a sharp breath. “You bastard,” she said.

“Whatever. Can we talk now?”

She huffed for a while and then went quiet. “Come up, dammit,” she said finally.

Pratt was waiting at the door when I got off the elevator. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and an anxious, angry look. Her hair was caught in an unwilling ponytail, and her face was paler than usual. She said nothing as I walked in.

There was a kitchen straight ahead of me, with white cabinets and stone counters, and a long hallway to the left. To the right was the dining room and, beyond that, the living room. The walls were white and the floors were gleaming wood. The apartment was sparsely furnished, with bland rustic pieces that seemed to have come from the same catalog. Except for the dining table, which held a massive PC and stacks of paper, it was tidy.

I followed Pratt into the living room. It was long and narrow, with windows at the far end and a treetop view. There was a brick fireplace on one wall, with a striped sofa nearby. Pratt crossed the room and perched on a bench beneath the windows. She looked at me warily, and her eyes flicked from the bruise on my face to the envelope under my arm.

“So … talk,” she said.

I leaned against the sofa and looked down at her. “I didn’t sleep well last night, Irene. In fact, I haven’t slept well for a few nights now.”

“This is what you came here to say?”

I smiled. “On the one hand, lack of sleep has made me a little slow on the uptake; on the other, it’s given me time to think about things. Things like why you were so hesitant, back at the Warwick, when I asked you who had been calling about Danes. And what happened between Monday, when you were happy to hear my voice, and Tuesday, when you weren’t. Things like who it is that you’ve been talking to, Irene— who it is that got to you.”

Pratt’s brows came together behind her wire glasses and she turned her head a little, as if she had a crick in her neck. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said evenly.

I smiled at her some more. “I think the breakin really shook you up. I think you were genuinely scared. But not so scared that you stopped thinking, right? Not so scared that those gears stopped turning.”

Pratt sighed and rubbed her hands on her knees. “Am I supposed to understand some part of this?”

I kept smiling. “I think something occurred to you, when I asked who had taken an interest in Danes’s absence. I think a lightbulb went on, Irene. You had someone in mind.”

Pratt shook her head but said nothing.

“I don’t know exactly what happened on Monday, though. Did you just wait for him to call the office again, or did you take the initiative and phone him— and offer up a little something?”

Pratt shook her head some more.

“I’m thinking it was the latter, and that you maybe started off talking about the breakin. That strikes me as an attention-getter.”

“This is … I don’t know what the hell to call this.”

“And once you got his attention, then I imagine you got into the meat of things— your conversation with me maybe, the fact that I knew someone had been tailing me, and that I intended to find out who it was. The fact that I’d called in some people to help me do it.”

“This is nuts—”

“I expect you probably got through to him right away, and you liked that. And why not? He’s an important guy, right? And a good friend to have in the industry, too: someone who could really help a career. A person wants a friend like that at any time, but especially when things are a little … uncertain … at work. When her boss has up and left— maybe for good— and left her without a career path. I can understand wanting to ingratiate yourself with someone with his kind of clout.”

Pratt chewed her lower lip. Color was rising on her white cheeks. “Are you almost done with … whatever this is?” Her voice was quieter and less steady.

“It’s understandable, I guess, but if you’re going to sign on for this sort of thing, you should make sure you know who you’re working for.”

“I work for Pace-Loyette. No one else.”

I shrugged. “Have a look at those,” I said. I tossed the envelope into her lap. She flinched as if it were a dead fish.

“What’s in it?” she said after a while.

“Open it up.”

“I don’t—”

“Open it.” My voice was sharp.

Pratt’s shoulders twitched and she looked up at me. The corners of her mouth were tight and there was fear in her eyes. She unfastened the little metal clasp and slid the photos out.

“It’s nothing gory, Irene, nothing messy. Just two little boys and a young woman, going to school, going to work, going about their business. Nothing scary.” Her fingers were clumsy as she leafed through the pages, and her hands were trembling.

“Who are they?” she asked.

I ignored her. “Nothing scary, right? But look at how close some of those shots are. Whoever took them must have been very near, don’t you think?”

“Who are they?” Her voice was quiet now.

“That shot there— they had to be right alongside her for that. But she had no idea that anyone was watching her. And there— they couldn’t have been more than a few paces away from the boys for that one.”

“Who are they, for God’s sake?” She was staring down and her face was hidden from me, but her voice was a harsh whisper. I kept my tone conversational.