The Partner (19 page)

“Did you determine where the signals were being relayed to?” Underhill asked. It was a fair question because the FBI certainly didn’t know.

“No. It has a range of three miles, in all directions, so it would be impossible to tell.”

“Any ideas?”

“Yes, a very good one. I doubt Lanigan was foolish enough to set up a receiving dish anywhere within three miles of downtown Biloxi. He would have to rent space, hide the dish, spend lots of time there monitoring hours of conversations. He has proven to be quite methodical. I’ve always suspected he used a boat. It would be much simpler and safer. The office is only six hundred yards from the beach. There are a lot of boats in the Gulf. A man could drop anchor two miles out and never speak to another soul.”

“Did he own a boat?”

“We couldn’t find one.”

“Any evidence he used a boat?”

“Maybe.” Stephano paused here because he was now entering territory unknown to the FBI.

The pause quickly irritated Underhill. “This is not a cross-examination, Mr. Stephano.”

“I know. We talked to every charter outfit along the Coast, from Destin to New Orleans, and found only one possible suspect. A small company in Orange Beach, Alabama, leased a thirty-two-foot sailboat to a man on February 11, 1992, the day Lanigan was buried. Their rate was a thousand dollars a month. This guy offered twice that if the transaction could be done in cash with nothing in writing. They figured he was a doper, and said no way. The guy then offered a five-thousand-dollar deposit, plus two thousand a month for two months. Business was slow. The boat was insured against theft. They took a chance.”

Underhill listened without blinking. He took no notes. “Did you show them a picture?”

“Yeah. Said it could’ve been Patrick. But the beard
was gone, the hair was dark, baseball cap, eyeglasses, overweight. This was before he discovered Ultra Slim-Fast. Anyway, the guy couldn’t make a positive ID.”

“What name did he use?”

“Randy Austin. Had a Georgia driver’s license. And he refused to provide more identification. He was offering cash, remember, five thousand. The guy would’ve sold it to him for twenty.”

“What happened to the boat?”

“They got it back, eventually. The guy said he got real suspicious because Randy didn’t seem to know much about sailboats. He asked questions, fished around. Randy said he was in the process of drifting south after a bad marriage in Atlanta, tired of the rat race, lots of money, that routine. Used to sail a lot, and now wanted to float down to the Keys and practice his skills along the way. Said he’d always keep the shore in sight. It was a nice story, and the guy felt somewhat better, but he was still suspicious. Next day, Randy appeared from nowhere, no car, no cab, as if he had walked or hitchhiked somehow to the dock, and, after a lot of preliminaries, he left with the boat. It had a big diesel engine of some sort and it would cruise at eight knots, regardless of the wind. He disappeared, going east, and the owner had nothing else to do, so he eased down the Coast, stopped at a couple of favorite bars along the way, and managed to keep an eye on Randy, who was a quarter of a mile out and doing a decent job of handling the boat. He docked it at a marina at Perdido Bay, and left in a rented Taurus with Alabama registration. This went on for a couple of days. Our guy kept an eye on the boat. Randy
played with it, a mile out at first, then he ventured farther. On the third or fourth day, Randy took it west, toward Mobile and Biloxi, and was gone for three days.

“He came back, then left, going west again. Never east or south, in the direction of the Keys. The guy stopped worrying about his boat because Randy stayed close to home. He would leave for a week at a time, but he always came back.”

“And you think it was Patrick?”

“I do. I’m convinced of it. Makes perfect sense to me. He was isolated on the boat. He could go for days without speaking to another person. He could gather his intelligence from a hundred different spots along the Biloxi-Gulfport shore. Plus, the boat was a perfect place to starve himself.”

“What happened to it?”

“Randy left it at the dock, and simply vanished without a word. The owner got his boat back, plus the five grand.”

“Did you examine the boat?”

“With a microscope. Nothing. The guy said the boat had never been so clean.”

“When did he disappear?”

“The guy wasn’t certain because he stopped checking on the boat every day. He found it at the dock on March 30, four days after the money was stolen. We talked to a kid who was on duty at the dock, and, to the best of his recollection, Randy docked on either March 24 or March 25, and was never seen again. So the dates match up perfect.”

“What happened to the rental car?”

“We tracked it down later. It was rented from the
Avis desk at the Mobile Regional Airport on Monday morning, February 10, about ten hours after the fire was put out. Rented by a man with no beard, cleanshaven, short dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a coat and tie and claiming he just stepped off a commuter flight from Atlanta. We showed pictures to the clerk on duty, and she made a very tentative ID of Patrick Lanigan. Evidently, he used the same Georgia driver’s license. He used a phony Visa Card, one with the name of Randy Austin and a number he stole from a legitimate account in Decatur, Georgia. Said he was a self-employed real estate developer in town to look at land for a casino. So he had no company name to put on the form. He wanted the car for a week. Avis never saw him again. Didn’t see the car for fourteen months.”

“Why wouldn’t he return the car?” Underhill asked, musing.

“Simple. When he rented it, his death had just happened, and had not been reported. But the next day, his face was on the front page of both the Biloxi and Mobile papers. He probably figured it was too risky to take the car back. They found it later in Montgomery, wrecked and stolen.”

“Where did Patrick go?”

“My guess is that he left the Orange Beach area on March 24 or 25. He assumed the identity of Doug Vitrano, his former partner. We learned that on the twenty-fifth he flew from Montgomery to Atlanta, then first class to Miami, then first class to Nassau. All tickets were in the name of Doug Vitrano, and he used the passport when he left Miami and again when he entered the Bahamas. The flight arrived in Nassau at
eight-thirty on the morning of the twenty-sixth, and he was at the bank when it opened at nine. He presented the passport and other papers to Graham Dunlap. He diverted the money, said good-bye, caught a flight to New York, and landed at La Guardia at 2:30 P.M. At that point, he ditched the Vitrano papers and found some others. We lost him.”

When the bidding got to fifty thousand dollars, Trudy said yes. The show was “Inside Journal,” a slash-and-burn tabloid with solid ratings and, apparently, lots of cash. They set up lights and covered windows and ran wires throughout the den. The “journalist” was Nancy de Angelo, flown straight in from L.A. with her own band of hairdressers and makeup artists.

Not to be outdone, Trudy spent two hours in front of the mirror, and looked absolutely glorious when she appeared. Nancy said she looked too good. She was supposed to be wounded, hurt, broke, besieged, handcuffed by the court, angry at what her husband had done to her and her daughter. She retreated in tears and Lance had to console her for half an hour. She looked almost as good when she returned in jeans and a cotton pullover.

Ashley Nicole was used as a prop. She sat close to her mother on the sofa. “Look real sad now,” Nancy told her as the technicians checked the lights. “We need tears from you,” she said to Trudy. “Genuine tears.”

They chatted for an hour about all the horrible things Patrick was doing to them. Trudy cried when
she recalled the funeral. They had a picture of the shoe found at the site. She suffered through the months and years afterward. No, she had not remarried. No, she had not heard from her husband since he had returned. Wasn’t sure if she wanted to. No, he had made no effort to see his daughter, and she broke down again.

She hated the thought of divorce, but what was she to do? And the lawsuit, how horrible! This nasty insurance company hounding her like she was a dead-beat.

Patrick was such a horrible person. If they found the money, did she expect to get any of it? Of course not! She was shocked by the suggestion.

It was edited to twenty minutes, and Patrick watched it in his dark hospital room. It made him smile.

Nineteen

Sandy’s secretary was clipping his photo and the story of yesterday’s brief court appearance from the New Orleans paper when the call came. She immediately found him, extracted him from a crowded deposition, and put him on the phone.

Leah Pires was back. She said hello and immediately asked if he’d had his office checked for bugs. Sandy said yes, just yesterday. She was in a hotel suite on Canal, a few blocks over, and she suggested the meeting take place there. A suggestion from her carried more weight than a directive from a federal judge. Whatever she wanted. He was excited just to hear her voice.

She was in no hurry, so Sandy strolled leisurely down Poydras, then to Magazine, then to Canal. He refused to watch his back. Patrick’s paranoia was understandable—poor guy had lived on the run until the ghosts finally caught him. But no one could ever convince
Sandy that the same people would shadow him. He was a lawyer in a high-profile case. The bad guys would be crazy to tap his phones and stalk him. One bungled move, and serious damage could be done to the case against Patrick.

But he had contacted a local security firm and made an appointment to have his offices swept for bugs. This was his client’s wish, not his.

Leah greeted him with a firm handshake and a quick smile, but he could tell instantly that she had many things on her mind. She was barefoot, in jeans and a white cotton tee shirt, very casual, the way most Brazilians probably are, he thought. He’d never been down there. The closet door was open; there weren’t many clothes hanging. She was moving around quickly, living out of a suitcase, probably on the run just as Patrick had been until last week. She poured coffee for both of them, and asked him to sit at the table.

“How is he?” she asked.

“He’s healing. The doctor says he’ll be fine.”

“How bad was it?” she asked quietly. He loved her accent, slight as it was.

“Pretty rough.” He reached into his briefcase, removed a folder, and slid it to her. “Here.”

She frowned at the sight of the first photo, then mumbled something in Portuguese. Her eyes watered as she looked at the second one. “Poor Patrick,” she said to herself. “Poor baby.”

She took her time with the photos, gently wiping tears with the back of her hand until Sandy found the presence of mind to get her a tissue. She wasn’t ashamed to cry over the pictures, and when she was
finished with them she placed them in a neat stack and put them back in the folder.

“I’m sorry,” Sandy said. He could think of nothing else to offer. “Here’s a letter from Patrick,” he finally said.

She finished her crying and poured more coffee. “Are any of the injuries permanent?” she asked.

“The doctor thinks probably not. There will be scarring, but with time everything should heal.”

“Mentally, how is he?”

“He’s okay. He’s sleeping even less. He has nightmares constantly, both day and night. But with medication, he’s getting better. I honestly can’t imagine what he’s going through.” He took a sip of coffee and said, “I guess he’s lucky to be alive.”

“He always said they wouldn’t kill him.”

There was so much to ask her. The lawyer in Sandy almost screamed out an endless barrage: Did Patrick know they were close behind him? Did he know the chase was about to end? Where was she when they were closing in? Did she live with him? How did they hide the money? Where is the money now? Is it safe? Please, tell me something. I’m the lawyer. I can be trusted.

“Let’s talk about his divorce,” she said, abruptly changing the subject. She could sense his curiosity. She stood and walked to a drawer where she removed a thick file and placed it before him. “Did you see Trudy on TV last night?” she asked.

“Yes. Pathetic, wasn’t it?”

“She’s very pretty,” Leah said.

“Yes, she is. I’m afraid Patrick made the mistake of marrying her for her looks.”

“He wouldn’t be the first.”

“No, he wouldn’t.”

“Patrick despises her. She is a bad person, and she was unfaithful to him throughout their marriage.”

“Unfaithful?”

“Yes. It’s all in the file there. The last year they were together, Patrick hired an investigator to watch her. Her lover was a man named Lance Maxa, and they were seeing each other all the time. There are even some photographs of Lance coming and going from Patrick’s house when he was away. There are pictures of Lance and Trudy sunbathing by Patrick’s pool, naked of course.”

Sandy took the file and flipped quickly until he found the photographs. Naked as newborns. He smiled wickedly. “This will add something to the divorce.”

“Patrick wants the divorce, you understand. He will not contest it. But she needs to be silenced. She’s having a nice time saying all those bad things about Patrick.”

“This should shut her up. What about the child?”

Leah took her seat and looked him squarely in the eyes. “Patrick loves Ashley Nicole, but there is one problem. He is not the father.”

He shrugged as if he heard this every day. “Who is?”

“Patrick doesn’t know. Probably Lance. It seems as if Lance and Trudy have been together for some time. It goes back to high school even.”

“How does he know he’s not the father?”

“When the child was fourteen months old, Patrick obtained a small blood sample by pricking her finger.
He sent it, along with a sample of his, to a lab where DNA tests were run. His suspicions were correct. He is definitely not the father of the child. The report is in the file.”

Sandy had to walk around a bit to sort things out. He stood in the window and watched the traffic on Canal. Another clue in the Patrick puzzle had just fallen into place. The question of the moment was this: How long had Patrick planned his departure from his old life? Bad wife, bastard child, horrible accident, no corpse, elaborate theft, take the money and run. The planning was astonishing. Everything had worked perfectly, until now of course.