The Strategist (14 page)

CHAPTER 23

T
he Leeds job had been executed to absolute perfection.

It was a bold declaration, but one that the man hired to carry out the job was fully prepared to make. Even by his own exceedingly high standards, perfection was rare. In this case however, he struggled to find another word to adequately describe the outcome.

The growing number of media outlets reporting on the story had already come to the collective conclusion that Julia Leeds was the victim of a home invasion gone horribly wrong. Based on the information these news outlets, and thus the rest of the public, were privy to, the conclusion was a sound one.

But as was usually the case, there was a great deal of the story that the media wasn’t privy to. And as hard as they may eventually try, Joseph Solomon went to great lengths to ensure that neither they, nor anyone else
, would ever be privy to more.

From the time he began his surveillance of Julia Leeds nearly three weeks ago, Solomon knew the operation would be fairly straightforward. Julia was a creature of habit, never once deviating from the daily routine
of taking her dogs out for a six a.m. run, leaving for work at eight and arriving back home some twelve hours later. There were no dinner dates, no visitors, no late night telephone conversations. This predictability made her the easiest target imaginable. And aside from the minor hassle of disarming her security system and dealing with her two behemoth guard dogs, everything went exactly as he had drawn it up.

Staging a burglary scene to look authentic, particularly when the motive is something else entirely, is a process that requir
es more meticulous planning than one realizes.

‘
The devil is in the details
,’ a man Solomon would loosely consider a mentor once told him. ‘
A cop’s natural inclination is to dig. Never give them a reason to dig any further than the surface
.’

Home invasions were usually poorly planned and even more poorly executed. Robbers kicked down doors, left fingerprints,
and ransacked the house until they found what they wanted, and if they were of the ruthless, drug-crazed variety, they killed anyone they saw without a moment’s hesitation.

When a first responder entered a scene and saw any one of these things, he knew exactly what he was dealing with. The suspects would be profiled by the time the incident was called in to detectives, and those suspects usually resembled the meth freak or crack addict who routinely occupied the backseat of the cop’s patrol car.

Solomon, however, was no out of control meth freak. He was focused, highly organized, and very skilled. But the scene he left behind could not reflect any of that. The scene he left had to look chaotic, violent, and rushed, all without a single trace of himself left behind. It was a tall order to be sure. Fortunately, he had an abundance of experience to draw from.

He was particularly proud of the Leeds scene. It took him nearly two hours to make his way through each room, but by the time he was finished, every drawer in the house had been emptied, every closet had been rummaged through, the mattresses in the two spare bedrooms had been flipped, and most importantly, every item that a burglar would even consider taking had been removed from the house.

He ended up leaving all of it in the same alley where Julia’s Range Rover was ultimately found. He had chosen that alley specifically. The lowlifes who occupied it could smell stolen merch a thousand miles away, even at 3:30 in the morning, so Solomon felt confident that nothing would be left behind.

But there was another reason why he chose that alley. It was in direct proximity to the home of one Stephen Clemmons, the man whose car was seen near the crime scene a short time before Julia’s death. Solomon knew it had been seen becaus
e he was behind the wheel when he spotted Julia’s neighbor staring out his window at it.

Clemmons came gift-
wrapped to Solomon, courtesy of the man who had hired him for the job. As part of the lengthy dossier he provided on Julia, he included a list of every employee at Brown, Wallace, and Epstein, along with their position within the firm, their home addresses and telephone numbers. The sheer amount of detail in the document was staggering; something only a high-level insider within the firm would have access to. But Solomon thought it would ultimately be useless, until he saw Clemmons’ highlighted address with the word ‘
Diversion
’ written next to it. He knew exactly what that word meant.

Even though the diversion had been executed as smoothly as the rest of the operation, Solomon realized, with the benefit of hindsight, that stealing Clemmons
’ car, driving it back to Julia’s, and doing everything he could to call attention to it while he was there was a really bad idea. He had never taken a chance like that before. And with good reason. There were a million reasons why the plan could have gone wrong. He could have been pulled over, Clemmons could have seen him steal the car or realized it was gone before it could be brought back, one of Julia’s neighbors could have immediately called the police, or worse yet the car could have gone unnoticed altogether.

There was also the matter of involving a second person in the operation. Solomon preferred to work alone, but the logistics of stealing Clemmons’ car and Julia’s
car and driving them both to the same location would have been impossible to navigate by himself. The man he entrusted with the task of driving the Range Rover had as large a stake in the outcome as anyone else. But Solomon had serious concerns about his ability to improvise should any aspect of the operation break down.

Fortunately none of the worst case scenarios
that he envisioned actually came to fruition. Solomon took the Impala without incident and brought it back three hours later. With the car parked safely in front of Clemmons’ house, he saw no need to conceal the hotwire job.

The neighbor two houses down from Julia’s, no doubt roused by the music Solomon made sure was loud enough for the entire block to hear, saw the car first from his living room win
dow then from the front porch. And best of all, when Solomon drove through the Gilpin neighborhood a few hours later to make sure that Julia’s Range Rover was where it was supposed to be, he saw a patrol car parked directly in front of Clemmons’ house.

Tough luck for the lowly mail clerk that he made such a sensible scapegoat.

If investigators had done even fraction of their due diligence, they would have discovered early on that Clemmons and Julia worked for the same law firm. It didn’t matter that they most likely never knew each other. Once the police began feeling the heat that this case was sure to generate, they would start making things up; connecting dots that were never meant to be connected. He knew all too well how the game operated. In this case, he even had a hand in writing the playbook.

“Perfection,” he uttered to himself with a smile that only accentuated the sharpness of his chiseled jaw line. “I should
charge those assholes double.”

But before he started demanding more money, Solomon knew he first had to complete the job he was originally paid to do. The logistical phase of the operation was over. Now it was time to recover the information that made the operation necessary in the first place.

Before he proceeded to destroy Julia’s house, Solomon removed two computers from her home office: a clunky Gateway desktop and a Sony VAIO notebook. He also scoured the house for all of the portable computer disks he could find. He came upon box of CD-ROMs, several flash drives, even three floppy disks. He also looked around for homemade video tapes; even though he was assured that she would never have such a thing lying around. She didn’t.

Solomon had strict instructions to recover her computer and every piece of data associated with it. But he was not told what information would be on that computer or the associated files. There was mention of a possible SD video disk or Windows movie file, which provided one obvious clue. But aside from that, his employer was intentionally vague. Compartme
ntalization at its finest.

Ultimately it didn’t matter what Solomon knew and what he didn’t. The directive was simple. It also seemed silly in a way. All of this effort for a couple of compute
rs and a handful of flash disks. But Solomon learned long ago that the ‘whys’ never mattered.

Still, he couldn’t help but be curious.

Sitting in his apartment bedroom with the five p.m. newscast turned down, Solomon set up the desktop computer on his bed and powered it on. A green indicator light blinked, then something inside the CPU tower made a sharp grinding sound. Finally, after five agonizing minutes, the monitor displayed a Windows XP symbol and the computer came to life. But that life seemed to be hanging on by the thinnest of threads.

The lone file on the desktop was a Microsoft Word document titled ‘
Copper Mountain info 11-29-09
’. Solomon clicked on the file but it took at least forty-five seconds to open. During that time the sharp grinding noise inside the CPU returned, convincing Solomon that it was preparing to explode at any moment. Instead, it moved mind-numbingly slow through every other document that Solomon tried to open. Fortunately there weren’t many. An Excel spreadsheet titled ‘
Julia’s Budget Dec ‘08
’, a picture folder with seven photos of Julia’s dogs, the same ones he shot and killed before proceeding to Julia’s bedroom, and a PDF file that simply refused to open were all that he found. After a thorough check of the hard drive, including hidden and temporary folders, he determined there was nothing else of value on the computer.

Next he inserted each of the floppy disks. This was probably the only computer in existence that still had the drive to support them, but it ultimately didn’t matter. Every one of the disks was empty.
When he inserted one of the CD-ROMs, he immediately received a DRIVE NOT SUPPORTED message. He received the same message when he inserted one of the flash disks. After another forty seconds of grinding and barking, Solomon officially declared the computer worthless and wondered why Julia ever wasted her time with it.

The second computer seemed more her style. The Sony VAIO looked brand new, and probably cost way more money than any computer should. He eagerly hit the laptop’s power button and sat back in anticipation of the flurry of files he was sure would be there.

But there were no files. There wasn’t even a start up message. He saw nothing more than a blue screen with a blinking gray cursor in the top left corner. When Solomon pressed the enter button, the screen went black and the computer shut off. When he hit the power button again, the computer failed to respond altogether.

Solomon pounded his fist against the keyboard and tossed the computer aside. The VAIO was one of the most expensive laptops on the market. It shouldn’t have just stop working, not unless it was hit with a Trojan
horse or something equally fatal. But why would Julia allow herself to have two inoperable computers? She undoubtedly brought work home almost every night and it would be impossible to do that work without a computer. Something wasn’t adding up.

Eager to get at least some idea of the information on the disks, Solomon pulled out his own Apple MacBook. He turned it on and breathed a sigh of relief when the desktop immediately came up.

He started with the CD-ROMs. There were fifty-two in all. Every one of them was blank. Same with the eight flash disks. 

Solomon bit down hard on his lip. There was not a single piece of data on either of the computers or any of the disks. A million thoughts simultaneou
sly ran through his head. All of them led to bad outcomes. Foremost in his mind was the idea that he had somehow misunderstood his directive. ‘
Get her computer and any disks that you can find
.’ There wasn’t much ambiguity there.

That only left the possibility that Julia either never had the information to begin with, or she got rid of it before he or anyone else could get to it. Either possibility presented a major problem.

The final exchange between Solomon and his employer was scheduled to take place in two days. Solomon was to deliver the computer data in exchange for the rest of his fee. But that exchange would now have to be put on hold. There would be no way to gauge his employer’s reaction to this delay. But Solomon knew how he personally felt about it - pissed off.

More than anything else in the world, he hated loose ends. It was particularly bad when the failure
was through no fault of his, as had been the case now. 

Solomon was not a private investigator, which meant that he had no intention of digging any deeper for those files than he already had. But that still didn’t change the fact that the job was now unfinished, and unless Julia was killed over two worthless computers and a bunch of empty data disks, his employer would expect more.

Solomon had survived this long in the worlds he operated in because of two things: skill and instincts. Neither one had ever failed him. Solomon’s instincts were talking to him loud and clear right now. They were telling him that this simple little job was far from over. If someone other than his employer had the disks, Solomon knew it would be his job to find them. And once he did, that someone would most certainly have to die. It wasn’t a scenario he was particularly fond of, but one that his vast experience told him was inevitable.