Six Years

Chapter 31

When I reached the highway, I flipped on my iPhone. I didn’t think anyone was tracking me but if they were, they’d find me on Route 287 near the Palisades Mall. I didn’t think that would help them very much. I pulled over to the right. There were two more e-mails and three calls from Shanta, each more urgent than the last. That added up to five. In the first two e-mails, she politely asked me to contact her. In the next two, her request was more urgent. In the final, she threw out the big net:

To: Jacob Fisher

From: Shanta Newlin

Jake,

Stop ignoring me. I found an important connection between Natalie Avery and Todd Sanderson.

Shanta

Whoa. I took the Tappan Zee Bridge and pulled over at the first exit. I turned off the iPhone and picked up one of the disposables. I dialed Shanta’s number and waited. She answered on the second ring.

“I get it,” she said. “You’re mad at me.”

“You gave the NYPD that disposable number. You helped them track me down.”

“Guilty, but it was for your own good. You could have gotten shot or picked up for resisting arrest.”

“Except I didn’t resist arrest. I ran away from some nut jobs who were trying to kill me.”

“I know Mulholland. He’s a good guy. I didn’t want some hothead taking a shot at you.”

“For what? I was barely a suspect.”

“It doesn’t matter, Jake. You don’t have to trust me. That’s fine. But we need to talk.”

I put the car in park and turned off the engine. “You said you found a connection between Natalie Avery and Todd Sanderson.”

“Yep.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll tell you when we talk. In person.”

I thought about that.

“Look, Jake, the FBI wanted to bring you in for a full-fledged interrogation. I told them I could better handle it for them.”

“The FBI?”

“Yep.”

“What do they want with me?”

“Just come in, Jake. It’s fine, trust me.”

“Right.”

“You can talk to me or the FBI.” Shanta sighed. “Look, if I tell you what it’s about, do you promise you’ll come in and talk to me?”

I thought about it. “Yes.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart. Now what’s this about?”

“It’s about bank robberies, Jake.”

The new rule-breaking, live-on-the-edge me broke plenty of speed laws on the way back to Lanford, Massachusetts. I tried sorting out some of what I learned, putting it in order, testing out various theories and suppositions, rejecting them, trying again. In some ways, it was all coming together; in others, there were pieces that felt too forced for a natural fit.

I was still missing a lot, including the biggie: Where was Natalie?

Twenty-five years ago, Professor Aaron Kleiner had gone to his department chairman, Professor Malcolm Hume, because he caught a student plagiarizing (really, just outright buying) a term paper. My old mentor asked him, in so many words, to let it go-just as he had asked me to do with Professor Eban Trainor.

I wondered whether it was Archer Minor himself who threatened Aaron Kleiner’s family or had it been hired hands of MM? It didn’t matter. They intimidated Kleiner to the point where he knew that he had to make himself disappear. I tried to put myself in his place. Kleiner probably felt scared, cornered, trapped.

Who would he go to for help?

First thought again: Malcolm Hume.

And years later, when Kleiner’s daughter was in the same situation, scared, cornered, trapped…

My old mentor’s fingerprints were all over this. I really had to talk to him. I dialed Malcolm’s number in Florida and again got no answer.

Shanta Newlin lived in a brick town house that my mother would have described as “cutesy.” There were overflowing flower boxes and arched windows. Everything was perfectly symmetrical. I walked up the stone walk and rang the doorbell. I was surprised to see a little girl come to the door.

“Who are you?” the little girl said.

“I’m Jake. Who are you?”

The kid was five, maybe six years old. She was about to answer when Shanta came rushing over with a harried look on her face. Shanta had her hair tied back, but strands were falling in her eyes. Sweat dotted her brow.

“I have it, Mackenzie,” Shanta told the little girl. “What did I tell you about answering the door without an adult around?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, yes, I guess that’s true.” She cleared her throat. “You should never open a door unless an adult is around.”

She pointed at me. “He’s around. He’s an adult.”

Shanta gave me an exasperated look. I shrugged. The kid had a point. Shanta invited me in and told Mackenzie to play in the den.

“Can I go outside?” Mackenzie asked. “I want to go on the swing.”

Shanta glanced at me. I shrugged again. I was getting good with the shrugs. “Sure, we can all go out back,” Shanta said with a smile so forced I worried it required staples.

I still had no idea who Mackenzie was or what she was doing there, but I had bigger concerns. We headed into the yard. There was a brand-new cedar-wood swing set complete with rocking horse, sliding board, covered fort, and sandbox. As far as I knew, Shanta lived by herself, making this something of a curiosity. Mackenzie jumped on the rocking horse.

“My fiancé’s daughter,” Shanta said in a way of explanation.

“Oh.”

“We’re getting married in the fall. He’s moving in here.”

“Sounds nice.”

We watched Mackenzie rock the horse with gusto. She gave Shanta the stink eye.

“That kid hates me,” Shanta said.

“Didn’t you read fairy tales when you were a kid? You’re the evil stepmother.”

“Thanks, that helps.” Shanta turned her eyes up toward me. “Wow, you look awful.”

“Is this the part where I say, ‘You should see the other guy’?”

“What are you doing to yourself, Jake?”

“I’m looking for someone I love.”

“Does she even want to be found?”

“The heart doesn’t ask questions.”

“The penis doesn’t ask questions,” she said. “The heart usually has a little more intelligence.”

True enough, I thought. “What is this about a bank robbery?”

She shaded her eyes from the sun. “Impatient, are we?”

“Not in the mood for games, that’s for sure.”

“Fair enough. Do you remember when you first asked me to check on Natalie Avery?”

“Yes.”

“When I put her name through the systems it got two hits. One involved the NYPD. That was the big one. She was a person of great importance to them. I was sworn to secrecy about it. You are my friend. I want you to trust me. But I’m also a law enforcement officer. I’m not allowed to tell friends about ongoing investigations. You get that, right?”

I gave the smallest nod I could muster, more so she’d move on than to signal agreement.

“At the time, I barely noticed the other one,” Shanta said. “They weren’t interested in finding her or even talking to her. It was the most casual of mentions.”

“What was it?”

“I’ll get to that in a second. Just let me play it out, okay?”

I gave another small nod. First the shrugs, now the nods.

“I’m going to offer up a show of good faith here,” she said. “I don’t have to, but I spoke to the NYPD, and they gave me permission. You have to understand. I’m not breaking any legal confidences here.”

“Just friends’ confidences,” I said.

“Low blow.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And unfair. I was trying to help you.”

“Okay, I’m sorry. What’s up with the NYPD?”

She gave me a second or two to stew. “The NYPD believe that Natalie Avery witnessed a murder-that she, in fact, saw the killer and can positively identify him. The NYPD further believe that the perp is a major figure in organized crime. In short, your Natalie has the ability to put away one of the leading mob figures in New York City.”

I waited for her to say more. She didn’t.

“What else?” I asked.

“That’s all I can tell you.”

I shook my head. “You must think I’m an idiot.”

“What?”

“The NYPD questioned me. They showed me a surveillance video and said that they needed to talk to her. I knew all that already. More to the point, you knew that I knew that already. A show of good faith. Come off it. You’re hoping to gain my confidence by telling me what I already knew.”

“That’s not true.”

“Who’s the murder victim?”

“I’m not at liberty-”

“Archer Minor, son of Maxwell Minor. The police believe that Maxwell put out the hit on his own kid.”

She looked stunned. “How did you know that?”

“It wasn’t hard to figure out. Tell me one thing.”

Shanta shook her head. “I can’t.”

“You still owe me the show of good faith, right? Does the NYPD know why Natalie was there that night? Just tell me that.”

Her eyes moved back to the swing set. Mackenzie was off the rocking horse and heading up toward the slide. “They don’t know.”

“No idea?”

“The NYPD went through the Lock-Horne Building’s security footage. It is pretty state-of-the-art. The first video they got was of your girlfriend running down the corridor on the twenty-second floor. There was also footage of her on the elevator, but the clearest shot-the one they showed you-was when she was exiting out the lobby on the ground floor.”

“Any video of the killer?”

“I can’t tell you more.”

“I would say, ‘can’t or won’t,’ but that’s such a hoary cliché.”

She frowned. I thought that she was frowning at what I said, but I could see that wasn’t it. Mackenzie was standing on top of the sliding board. “Mackenzie, that’s dangerous.”

“I do it all the time,” the girl retorted.

“I don’t care what you do all the time. Please sit down and slide.”

She sat down. She didn’t slide.

“The bank robbery?” I asked.

Shanta shook her head-again this action was not directed at what I had said, but at the stubborn girl at the top of the sliding board. “Have you heard anything about the rash of bank robberies in the New York area?”

I recalled a few articles I’d read. “The banks get hit at night when they’re closed. The media calls the robbers the Invisibles or something.”

“Right.”

“What does Natalie have to do with them?”

“Her name came up in connection with one of the robberies-specifically the one on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan two weeks ago. It had been considered to be safer than Fort Knox. The thieves got twelve thousand in cash and busted open four hundred safety-deposit boxes.”

“Twelve thousand doesn’t sound like a ton.”

“It’s not. Despite what you see in the movies, banks don’t store millions of dollars in vaults. But those safety-deposit boxes could be worth a fortune. That’s where these guys are cleaning up. When my grandmother died, my mother put her four-carat diamond ring in a safety-deposit box to give me one day. That ring is probably worth forty grand alone. Who knows how much stuff is there? The insurance claim for one of their earlier robberies was three-point-seven million. Of course people lie. All of a sudden some expensive family heirloom happened to be in the box. But you see my point.”

I saw her point. I didn’t much care about it. “And Natalie’s name came up with respect to this Canal Street robbery.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“In a very, very small way.” Shanta put her index finger and thumb half an inch apart to indicate how small. “Almost meaningless, really. It wouldn’t be anything to care about on its own.”

“But you do care.”

“Now I do, yes.”

“Why?”

“Because so much of what’s surrounding your true love makes no sense anymore.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“So what do you make of that?” she asked.

“Make of what? I don’t know what to say here. I don’t even know where Natalie is, much less how she might be connected in a very, very small way to a bank robbery.”

“That’s my point. I didn’t think it mattered either, until I started looking up the other name you mentioned. Todd Sanderson.”

“I didn’t ask you to look him up.”

“Yeah, but I did anyway. Got two hits on him too. Naturally the big hit surrounded the fact that he was murdered a week ago.”

“Wait, Todd is also linked to this same bank robbery?”

“Yes. Did you ever read Oscar Wilde?”

I made a face. “Yes.”

“He has a wonderful quote: ‘To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’”

“From The Importance of Being Earnest,” I said because I am an academic and can’t help myself.

“Right. One of the people you asked about comes up in a bank robbery? That’s nothing to get excited about. But two? That’s not a coincidence.”

And, I thought, a week or so after the bank robbery, Todd Sanderson was murdered.

“So was Todd’s connection to the bank robbery also very, very small?” I asked.

“No. It was just small, I’d say.”

“What was it?”

“Mackenzie!”

I turned toward the scream and saw a woman who looked a bit too much like Shanta Newlin for my taste. Same height, same relative weight, same hairstyle. The woman had her eyes wide open as though a plane had suddenly crashed in the backyard. I followed her gaze. Mackenzie was back standing on the slide.

Shanta was mortified. “I’m so sorry, Candace. I told her to sit down.”

“You told her?” Candace repeated incredulously.

“I’m sorry. I was watching her. I was just talking to a friend.”

“And that’s an excuse?”

Mackenzie, with a smile that said, My work is done here, sat, slid down the slide, and ran toward Candace. “Hi, Mommy.”

Mommy. No surprise there.

“Let me show you out,” Shanta tried.

“We’re already out,” Candace said. “We can just go around the front.”

“Wait, Mackenzie drew the nicest picture. It’s inside. I bet she’ll want to take it home.”

Candace and Mackenzie were already heading toward the front of the house. “I have hundreds of my daughter’s drawings,” Candace called back. “Keep it.”

Shanta watched them both disappear into the front yard. Her normal military posture was gone. “What the hell am I doing, Jake?”

“Trying,” I said. “Living.”

She shook her head. “This will never work.”

“Do you love him?”

“Yes.”

“It’ll work. It’ll just be messy.”

“How did you get to be so wise?”

“I was educated at Lanford College,” I said, “and I watch a lot of daytime talk shows.”

Shanta turned and looked back toward the swing set. “Todd Sanderson had a safety-deposit box at the Canal Street bank,” she said. “He was one of the victims of the robbery. That’s all. On the surface of it, he’s pretty meaningless too.”

“But a week later, he gets murdered,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Wait, does the FBI think he has something to do with the robberies?”

“I’m not privy to the full investigation.”

“But?”

“I didn’t see how it could be connected-the bank robbery in Manhattan and his murder down in Palmetto Bluff.”

“But now?”

“Well, your Natalie’s name came up too.”

“In a very, very small way.”

“Yes.”

“How small?”

“After a robbery like this, the FBI does an inventory of everything. I mean, everything. So when the safety-deposit boxes are blown up, most people have all kinds of important papers in them. Stocks and bonds, powers of attorney, deeds to homes, all that. A lot of that ended up on the floor, of course. Why would a thief want any paperwork? So the FBI goes through all that and catalogs it. So, for example, one guy was holding his brother’s car deed. The brother’s name goes on the list.”

I was trying to keep up with what she was saying. “So let me see if I follow. Natalie’s name was on one of those documents from the safety-deposit box?”

“Yes.”

“But she didn’t have a box of her own there?”

“No. It was found in a box belonging to Todd Sanderson.”

“So what was it? What’s the document?”

Shanta turned and met my eye. “Her last will and testament.”