Need You Now (10 page)

16

A
ndie was alone in her office when the text arrived. She didn’t recognize the incoming number, but the message was clearly from Patrick.

Position Three. ASAP.

It was his third message in less than twenty-four hours, his second selection of Position Three. She sensed that something was wrong. She rose from her desk, closed the door, and hit Call Back. Speaking on the telephone was a total break in protocol, and Patrick sounded surprised, but he answered in Spanish—
Hola
—which was their previously agreed-upon code for
I’m OK, no gun to my head.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” asked Andie.

“Yeah, other than the fact that I got mugged in the park after you left and spent the night in the ER.”

Andie wanted to follow up, but Patrick was on a cell she didn’t recognize. “I’m on my way.”

She grabbed her coat, then on second thought went back to her computer. The Parks system was part of the automated incident report database, and in less than a minute she had the full report of last night’s incident. She printed a copy, skim-reading as she hurried to the elevator.

. . .
white male found unconscious. . .

She stopped, relieved that Patrick had reported that he was okay, but anger was coursing through her veins. She blew right past the elevators, hung a quick left at the end of the hall, and found her supervisor alone in his office.

“Got a minute?” she asked.

Wayne Teese was the assistant special agent in charge of the Manhattan field office. Andie was his direct report on the FBI’s money-laundering investigation at BOS. He didn’t micromanage, but Teese had the final word on the broad parameters of Andie’s relationship with the principal informant in the operation—Patrick Lloyd.

Teese grimaced at the sight of Andie standing in his open doorway, as if he knew what was on her mind. With some reluctance, he waved her inside. It wasn’t that he disliked Andie. An overload of administrative responsibilities simply made any intrusion unwelcome. Andie closed the door and took a seat, his gunmetal, government-issued desk between them.

“I’m on my way to meet with Patrick Lloyd right now,” she said. “I’m asking you to reconsider your position on protection for him.”

“Denied,” he said.

“But—”

He raised a hand, stopping her. “You’ve already stated your case.”

She had indeed. Rather convincingly. The bureau’s intransigence was baffling.

“He’s been attacked twice,” said Andie, holding up a copy of the police report. “This last one landed him in the emergency room. I don’t see how we can expect him to continue in this role if we don’t guarantee his protection.”

“We have at-risk informants all over the world. It’s cost prohibitive to protect every last one of them.”

“Patrick Lloyd is different. This is not a situation where a target cooperated in the investigation to avoid prosecution. Patrick is not suspected of any criminal conduct, much less the kind that would justify putting him in this much personal danger.”

Teese folded his hands atop his desk. He had just a few years of seniority on Andie, but the worry lines aged him. With so much of the FBI’s funding earmarked for homeland security, the shoestring budgets for more traditional operations had stretched the office and his supervisory capacity to the limit.

“We agreed to provide medical treatment for his father from one of the most prestigious cancer centers in the world. I don’t have resources to essentially provide him with a personal bodyguard. We kept our side of the deal. He needs to keep his.”

Andie knew exactly what he meant. “I realize that he has not delivered much.”

“It’s been the better part of six months, and he’s delivered
nothing
.”

“Patrick never agreed to be the FBI’s all-purpose eyes and ears and give us carte blanche access to confidential banking information. He promised only to befriend Lilly Scanlon and tell us if she admitted to criminal conduct that fits our theory of the case.”

“He certainly befriended her,” Teese said, scoffing. “So either he’s holding out, or he doesn’t understand our theory.”

“Or maybe there’s something wrong with our theory.”

Andie braced herself. The theory was one that Teese himself had developed. He was known for defending his brainstorms the way he defended his beliefs: with the vigor of a combat-tested Marine.

“It’s been three years since Cushman’s scheme blew up,” he said. “Banks, lawyers, private security firms, and just about every law enforcement agency in the world have searched under every rock for the supposed sixty billion dollars that was lost. Only a fraction of that amount has been recovered. There’s a good reason for that: most of the funds on Cushman’s books never actually existed, except as a bogus entry in Cushman’s records.”

“I’m not saying the theory is implausible,” said Andie. “There’s no end to the creative ways to launder money.”

“It’s beyond plausible,” said Teese. “If I’m a drug dealer with ten million dollars in dirty money from cocaine sales, a Wall Street crook like Cushman is my best friend. I give him my ten million. He records an ‘investment’ of a hundred million dollars. In a few months, maybe a year, he pays me a return of ten percent on my bogus hundred million dollars. Presto, change-o: my ten million, less a cut for Cushman, comes back nice and squeaky clean as investment proceeds. But the bottom line for Cushman’s Ponzi scheme is that the fraud is overstated tenfold—sixty billion is more like six billion.”

“I’m not debating the theory in the abstract. I’m just saying: maybe the reason we’re getting nothing from Patrick Lloyd is that it wasn’t drug money that flowed through BOS/Singapore to Cushman Investment. Or if it was, maybe Lilly Scanlon had no idea it was dirty.”

“You’re being naïve. The reason we’ve gotten nothing out of Patrick Lloyd is that he hasn’t been given the proper incentive to talk.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the element of added danger may be the added incentive that Mr. Lloyd needs to give us the information we’re seeking.”

“That incentive means putting an innocent person in danger.”

“I hate to sound like a broken record, but I keep coming back to the deal.”

“I understand the technical terms of our agreement. But by cooperating, he may have blown his witness protection coverage. The bank is digging deep into his background. We have at least a moral obligation to protect him . . . and his sister.”

He was suddenly six inches taller in his chair, literally getting his back up. “Moral obligation? You’re overlooking the fact that it was Patrick Lloyd’s father who killed Gerry Collins and, in the process, eliminated the best source of information about the Cushman scheme.”

“So, pox on the entire family? Is that it?”

“I’m saying it’s a morally ambiguous situation.”

“It’s not ambiguous to Patrick. He firmly believes his father didn’t kill Collins. He thinks his father was coerced into a confession.”

Andie braced herself again, this time for a forceful denial, or at least a hearty guffaw. She got neither.

“I have to get back to work,” said Teese. “Deliver this message to Mr. Lloyd: it’s time he kept his end of the bargain. Deliver something. If he does, we’ll take another look at protection.”

Andie felt like she was back where she’d started. There was definitely no point in going around the same circle. “It would be helpful if I could tell him that we are continuing to keep our end of the deal.”

“You mean tell him that his father is still alive and receiving treatment?”

“Yes.”

Teese pondered it. “I don’t see a problem with that.”

“He’ll also want assurance that the new treatment facility is comparable to the Duke center.”

“You can tell him that in general terms. But you can’t disclose the new location.”

“That’s going to be awkward,” said Andie. “It’s only natural for him to ask why his father was moved, what his new name is, why I can’t tell him where he’s gone—all of that.”

“We can’t tell him.”

“Okay. But it would be easier for me to accept that decision if
I
knew the answers to those questions.”

“That’s on a strictly need-to-know basis.”

“I find it interesting that there’s enough money allocated to this operation to create a new identity for Patrick’s father, move him to another facility, and arrange for medical treatment from a new facility. But there’s not a dime in the budget to protect Patrick, who happens to be the only person helping us in the BOS investigation.”

“Sorry,” said Teese. “Strict need-to-know basis.”

“Got it,” said Andie.

Teese turned in his chair and faced his computer screen. Andie rose and started for the door, then stopped.

“You know, Patrick is very emphatic that his father is innocent. I can’t overstate how strong his feelings are on that.”

Teese was typing and staring at his computer screen, never looking up. “Strictly need to know,” he said.

Andie nodded, not in agreement, but merely acknowledging his words as the FBI’s final position. She left the office, her thoughts awhirl as she walked down the hall toward the elevator. No doubt about it: Andie
needed
to know.

17

S
now started to gather on the giant mushroom. I watched the first few flakes fall from a gray sky and rest on the bronze heads of Alice and her friends. Connie was beside me on the park bench. We had hot coffee and one of the smelly zoo blankets to keep us warm on a day that was turning colder by the minute.

“My snow monkeys are absolutely loving this,” said Connie.

I smiled. Huddled beneath that blanket in the middle of Central Park, we must have looked like a couple of lost little monkeys.

“Do you remember that summer we came here with Mom and Dad?” she asked.

“I think of it often,” I said.

“Remember when Dad walked over and read the poem out loud?”

“Mmmm, no. Dad read a poem?”

“You don’t
remember
the time—”

“Connie, I’m kidding. How could I forget? It was the only time in my life that I heard Dad recite something more literary than a menu, and he managed to punctuate it with the f-bomb.”

We laughed, then it faded. I wrapped my hands more tightly around my extra-tall cup of coffee, trying to draw the last bit of warmth through the paper sleeve. Connie sniffled back what sounded like the beginnings of a cold. I hoped it wasn’t snow monkey flu, or some such thing.

“Patrick?” she said, her tone more serious. “Why are you so sure Dad didn’t kill Gerry Collins?”

“Do you think he did it?”

“I asked you first.”

Sibling talk. Connie could shift from stand-in mother to big sister in a heartbeat, when it suited her.

I glanced again at the sculpture. The snow was falling harder, making the bronze a blur. Strangely, it seemed to make the past clearer. “About six months before Mom died, we had a talk.”

“What about?”

“At first it was about me, the kind of talk any single mother might have with her son about gangs. Madison High changed a lot after you graduated. One of the gangs there had ties all the way up to the Crips. I was getting pressure to join one of the rivals. Mom wanted to make sure I stayed clear of it.”

“Were you actually thinking of being a gangbanger?”

“Not really. But she was afraid that I might, because of the things Dad did when he was young.”

“She didn’t want you to make the same mistakes.”

“That was a big part of it. But she wasn’t preaching. As the talk went on, I think she just wanted me to know Dad’s story. The truth.”

“The truth about what?”

I put down my coffee—it was ice cold—and folded my arms to fight off the chill. “Do you know why Dad turned against the Santucci family?”

Connie paused. Her expression told me that she had never thought of it in terms of a trigger event, that she’d simply accepted Mom’s mantra over the years that our father had searched his soul and finally found the courage to do the right thing.

“I’m not sure I do,” she said.

“An underboss ordered him to whack a guy.”

“You mean a genuine mob-style hit?”

“Yup. It was like an initiation rite. The natural progression of things on his way to a made man.”

“I assume he didn’t do it.”

“No. But the family wasn’t going to take no for an answer. They kept up the pressure for him to prove his loyalty, and he found himself in a kill-or-be-killed situation. He didn’t see a way out. That’s when he went to the FBI.”

“So, ‘doing the right thing’ was just an exit strategy?”

“Not exactly. It was a matter of principle. It’s how I know Dad didn’t kill Gerry Collins.”

“I’m not seeing the connection.”

“Dad gave up everything—his wife, his kids, his
existence
—because he refused to whack some two-bit thug who probably deserved to die. Yet we’re supposed to believe that he killed Gerry Collins for losing his money?”

She considered it. Connie was a bright woman, but she thought things through before rendering a verdict. “It doesn’t compute,” she said.

“It sure doesn’t for me,” I said.

Connie sighed, her breath steaming in front of me. “I wish Mom had packed us up and we had all disappeared with him.”

I shook my head. “Mom was right. The marriage wasn’t strong enough to survive that kind of trauma. Why would any woman take her kids into witness protection, away from extended family and friends, only to go through a divorce?”

“It would have been safer.”

“That’s easy to say in hindsight. She had good reason to believe that no one would touch a woman whose maiden name was Santucci.”

“What has the world come to? Not even the Mafia plays by the old code of conduct.” It was an unusual bit of sarcasm from Connie, who normally had the optimism of an Eagle Scout.

I checked my BlackBerry for the time. Almost forty minutes since I’d texted Andie. She was taking her sweet time about getting here.

Connie said, “I don’t want you going anywhere near the Santucci family.”

“I’m not going to join them, if that’s what you mean.” Sarcasm came more naturally to me.

“No, smart ass. I understand what you were saying earlier in the van. I agree it would be nice if you could convince them that Dad is dead. That might put an end to all this. But it’s too dangerous to make any contact with them for any reason.”

“Connie, you must not have been listening. Let me say it again: the Santucci family is the bogeyman. Operation Clean House reduced them to almost nothing.”

“Never underestimate a convicted mobster who wants revenge and finally gets paroled.”

“I just don’t believe it’s the Santucci family who roughed me up in the park last night.”

“How can you say that? Lilly called me this morning and said you might be dead before breakfast if we didn’t get you out of the ER.”

“That’s the whole point: Lilly is mixed up with something else entirely. Something big enough to get her fired from the bank. I think it’s tied to a guy named Manu Robledo, who heads up a phony-sounding church downtown that has to be a front for something. It could be a cult. I’m not sure.”

“How much does Lilly know about the Santucci family?”

“I don’t know. When you told her my real name is Peter Mandretti, did you talk about the Santucci family?”

Connie’s expression was one of complete incredulity. “When
I
told her? Patrick, I didn’t tell her anything.”

“Then how did she find out my real name?”

“Cut the crap. For now I’ll accept the fact that if she hadn’t given me a heads-up to get you out of the ER, something really bad could have happened. But at some point you and I are going to have a talk about how ticked off I am that you told her.”

It took a moment before I could speak, but finally my response came. “I
never
told Lilly anything about us. From beginning to end I’ve led her to believe that I’m Patrick Lloyd, and that I’ve always been Patrick Lloyd.”

“Oh, come on,” she said.

“I didn’t tell her. I swear.”

We sat in silence, and finally Connie seemed to believe me, but her expression turned to one of grave concern.

“We got a problem, brother. I’m telling it to you straight: Lilly knows. Based on what we talked about on the phone this morning, I’d say she knows the whole story.”

“I don’t understand how she could.”

Connie reached over and put her arm around my shoulder. “I hate to bust your chops, dipshit, but who the heck is this woman?”

I shook my head slowly, focused on nothing in particular in the falling snow. All was a blur.

“Apparently, I have no clue.”