False Convictions

18

JAKE RACED OUT of the parking lot and took a left, away from the airport. He checked his rearview mirror before taking a sharp right into the shopping center across the street and circling through the parking lot until he sat up on a rise facing Graham’s office building from across the street. He jumped out and retrieved the audio pack from the trunk. Back in the front seat, he positioned the headphones on his ears and flicked on the power button that would let him hear the broadcast of the little microphone he’d left in Graham’s office.

“-because people don’t talk to me like that, that’s why!”

Jake’s eyes lost their focus as he concentrated hard on Robert Graham’s voice. Its tone was indignant but also tainted by a dash of fear.

“I understand the position we’re all in,” Graham said, quieting to almost a whine. “I’m in it, too, and I’m working on it as we speak.”

There was a pause.

“You think I don’t know that?” Graham said. “I’m more exposed than anyone, you know that.”

Jake heard what sounded like papers being stuffed into a briefcase.

“What?” Graham said. “It has nothing to do with that. Listen, Massimo, if they’d taken care of her when I asked, the way I asked, we wouldn’t be ‘fucking around with this charade,’ as you call it, but I was told to fix it and if anyone has a better idea how, you just let me know.”

Another pause.

“No, Massimo. I’m not talking to you like that,” Graham said, “but do I really have to? I mean, can’t he just pick up the phone? We’re in the twenty-first century.

“I’m just saying,” Graham said, his voice lowering so that Jake could barely hear it. “Yes, I’ll be there. Let me finish this first and I’ll leave right away. No, I don’t have an attitude, Massimo. I’m sorry. Yes. Good-bye.”

Jake waited and watched the building, expecting Graham any second. Nothing happened. Finally, to ease the tension by sharing the excitement, he dialed Casey’s cell phone.

“Everything okay?” he asked her, wriggling out of his suit coat.

She told him how it went with the judge, sounding pleased.

“Good,” Jake said, his eyes still glued to the front door of Graham’s offices. “Sounds like you put the judge’s cojones in a vise.”

“That’s not what you meant, is it? When you asked if everything was okay,” Casey said. “You meant something else.”

Jake told her about the conversation he overheard Graham having on the phone without telling her how he heard it, then said, “When he talked about a charade I was thinking maybe this whole thing with your killer and the Freedom Project-I don’t know. It was as much the tone of Graham’s voice as the things he said. The man sounded scared, and when he said ‘if they’d taken care of her when I asked, the way I asked,’ I could only think of you.”

“It could be anyone, though,” Casey said thoughtfully.

“Right, me just being paranoid,” Jake said, nodding to himself. “I hope that’s true, but I like to play things safe, so in the meantime, I want you to watch your back.”

“And you?”

“I’m going to see if I can follow him,” Jake said. “Obviously, he’s being summoned by someone who makes him pee down his leg, and I’m going to find out who.”

“Be careful,” Casey said.

“Touching,” Jake said, allowing himself a smile. “I didn’t know you cared.”

“I care,” Casey said. “Don’t act like an idiot.”

“It’s tough,” Jake said, “but I’ll try.”

Jake hung up and waited. It was almost three when the billionaire came out of the offices and got into a silver Range Rover. Jake started his engine and followed. As they headed west on the Thruway, Jake figured Graham was heading for the airport. He called a contact at the FAA in Washington and used a favor to track down the location and flight plan of Graham’s private jet.

“Victor Tango seven-seven-nine,” his man said, “owned by Robert Graham. Landed in Rochester at oh-six oh-seven this morning. Let’s see… scheduled to depart from Rochester to PLS at fifteen hundred.”

“That’s-”

“In three minutes,” his man said.

“He can’t make it,” Jake said.

“Maybe he’s not going.”

“Maybe they’ll take off late?”

“Could be.”

“What’s PLS, anyway?” Jake asked.

“Ah, I think one of those islands in the Caribbean, you want me to tell you which one?”

“Just call me if it takes off, will you?”

“Sure.”

Jake hung up and gripped the wheel, knowing the track would go cold if he couldn’t follow Graham and wondering how he could get permission from his executive producer to do it, anyway. His next call went to Don Wall, an old friend in the FBI, who answered his cell phone in a whisper.

“Bad time?” Jake asked.

“Stakeout,” Wall said. “Bored out of my mind, but there’s an old lady upstairs who’s got nothing better to do than listen at the air vent, so I got to keep it down. What’s up?”

“How up are you on your organized crime trading cards?” Jake asked, wrinkling his brow as Graham’s Range Rover kept going west on the Thruway, past the exit he should have taken north to the airport.

“Colombian, Russian, Vietnamese, Albanian, or Italian?” Wall asked, the sound of some kind of shell cracking in the background before he began to crunch into the phone.

“Italian, for sure,” Jake said. “Guy named Massimo.”

“To the max,” Wall said. “That’s what it means.”

“Heard of anyone?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean so much,” Wall said. “I’ve been on this fucking Al Qaeda thing for the last nine months and all I’ve seen is some douche bag from Iowa growing a beard. Let me make a call. My old partner is in Philly working some heroin angle and I swear the only reason he’s on it is because the shit is coming in from Afghanistan. I got to tell you, it’s got to be good to be an American criminal these days. You ought to do a story on that.”

“Maybe I am,” Jake said, weaving in and out of the traffic to avoid being boxed in by a tractor trailer as Graham picked up his speed. “Meantime, would you see if you can get anything on an Italian gangster from Buffalo whose name is Massimo?”

“I’ll get back to you.”

Jake thanked him and clicked over to another incoming call.

“It’s up,” his FAA man said.

“Thanks,” Jake said. “You don’t know when it’s coming back, do you?”

“No return flight plan filed yet.”

Jake thanked him again, hung up, and settled in, pleased that whoever Graham was going to meet, he wasn’t flying to get there.

“Buffalo,” Jake said to himself as they passed the only exit Graham would have taken if he was going south to Pennsylvania. “Lots of Italians there. No sense in flying.”

He wondered briefly who was inside Graham’s jet, but it could be anyone for a million different reasons. When the Range Rover slowed down and got off the Thruway at the exit for the express to downtown Buffalo, Jake nodded to himself. But before reaching the center of the city, Graham got off the expressway and headed through a run-down industrial area toward the river. Empty weed-ridden lots and crumbling brick buildings surrounded a towering yellow brick cereal factory still belching smoke. The rich smell of yeast and baking wheat filled Jake’s nostrils as he followed Graham over a steel trestle that lay like a sleeping giant across the river’s span. Grain bins ten stories high lined the river’s bank as the road turned to follow its course down a finger of land that split the river.

Chain-link fences surrounded the different warehouses and abandoned mills, and Graham turned his Range Rover into the parking lot of one. Jake drove past the entrance and just caught sight of Graham pulling his SUV right into the big open bay of an abandoned mill before disappearing into its dark bowels. Half a block down, an old ball-bearing factory had a broken parking lot nearly a quarter full with rusty pickup trucks and late model cars. Several cars had been parked along the street and Jake found a spot among them, scanning the area before he got out and walked quickly back toward the warehouse.

As the open bay of the hulking concrete building came into view through the fence, Jake searched for signs of life, seeing none. Down where the road took a turn in front of the cereal factory, a dusty cement mixer pulled out and rumbled away. Past the warehouse, late afternoon sunlight glittered on the broken mud-brown surface of the river. A deep strumming sound of heavy diesel preceded a vast tanker that surged into view like a skyscraper laid on its side, pushing a four-foot wake from its bow as it surged upriver.

When Jake reached the open gates, he took one final look and sprinted across the open ground without stopping until he reached the shadow of the warehouse and felt the crumbling face of its wall. Outside the bay, he paused to listen before peeking around the corner.

The cool smell of rot and spilled oil seeped from the opening. Through the vast empty space, a second open bay allowed a square of light to illuminate the Range Rover resting beside a black Suburban. At the sound of another vehicle approaching from the direction of the cereal factory, Jake ducked into the shadows of the warehouse. He heard the vehicle turn in at the gate and he backed deeper into the gloom. Just outside the bay door, the vehicle came to a stop. Someone got out and a door slammed shut before a silver Mercedes G55 SUV rolled into the warehouse and headed for the far door.

Jake heard the distinct metallic click of a Zippo lighter and smelled cigarette smoke as it drifted from the man outside the door into the warehouse and toward the river. The taillights of the Mercedes glowed as it came to rest next to the other vehicles by the far bay door. The front doors of the Mercedes swung open and two thick-chested men popped out, one of them hurrying to the hatch and removing a wheelchair while the other opened the back passenger-side door and began to help a bent old man into the waiting chair.

His eyes now adjusted to the dark, Jake made his way carefully through the maze of metal drums, deserted machinery, and empty wooden pallets, stepping silently across the damp, gritty floor. Soon a faded picnic table came into view in front of the vehicles. Robert Graham sat across from a muscular man in a suit. Standing over them in the shadows was an enormous fat man in a short-sleeved silk shirt with his tattooed arms folded and resting atop the shelf of his gut. The old man in the wheelchair had been placed at the end of the table, and Jake saw now that he wore a cranberry cardigan sweater and his eyes stayed hidden behind the kind of monstrous black glasses reserved for the blind. Behind him stood one of the big men from the Mercedes while the other paced slowly in the open bay, scanning both the bank and the river beyond.

Jake could tell the men around the table were talking, but he couldn’t hear a thing. He studied the sedan and the truck, memorizing their license plates, then, keeping to the deepest shadows and crouching low, he began to work in a roundabout way toward the open bay and into earshot. His heart thumped a fast steady beat and he tried unsuccessfully to quiet his ragged breathing. When the men’s voices rose, Jake doubled his pace, thinking that if he took much longer anything of interest would already be said.

When he peeked up to get his bearings, his hand found what he thought was the metal rim of an oil drum, but when his foot slipped and he instinctively gripped it for balance the hubcap he held flipped through the air and clanged into the side of another metal drum before clattering to the concrete floor.

“What the fuck!” one of the men shouted.

Footsteps slapped across the concrete, heading right for him. Jake scrambled off his backside and felt blindly for the obstacles in front of him as he dove even deeper into the maze of junk.