“None of this fits,” the man called “Mr. X” said when Munroe reported Farber’s demand. “Less than a week after they find Farber’s address he claims to know who I am and insists on a meeting? What if he didn’t get away at all? What if they caught him and covered it up and this is all a scheme to lead us into a trap?”
“He used the safe word,” Munroe answered.
“He could be cooperating with them. We’re in the dark here. We need information.”
Munroe wanted to ask about Farber’s cryptic reference to “The Professor” but he knew that it would be a bad idea. If it had been nonsense Mr. X would have laughed it off and told Munroe to sever all contact with the former deputy. If the reference meant something, as Munroe suspected it did, Mr. X wasn’t going to let him in on the secret. That led to a further question: How would Farber know more about Mr. X than I do?
Farber’s claim that he got the information by using his law enforcement skills didn’t wash. Farber had been a deputy sheriff who spent most of his time transporting prisoners and serving eviction orders. He sure as hell wasn’t some Sherlock Holmes. So, where had he gotten this “Professor” crap?
Mr. X was worried. That was pretty clear. Mr. X distrusted phones and they usually communicated through an intermediary but now they had been forced into in almost daily telephone contact. It was pretty clear that Mr. X or The Professor or whomever was worried and that worried Munroe as well. Mr. X had promised to cut him in on a multi-million dollar drug empire and now all of that seemed as if it might be at risk.
“What do you want me to do?” Munroe asked.
“Stall him. Tell Farber that you won’t be able to meet him until late tomorrow night. Say that you’ll call him an hour in advance with the location. That should give us enough time to get some answers.”
Munroe didn’t ask where those answers were going to come from. He knew his employer had a source who was feeding him info. How else would he have learned about the raid on Farber’s house?
“I want you to grab that agent, Kane,” Mr. X said.
“What?”
“If this meeting with Farber is a setup Kane will know all the details. Tie him up and take him somewhere safe and question him.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Surprise him inside his home. Incapacitate him before he knows what hit him. I’ll get you his address.”
“It’s not that simple,” Munroe complained.
“I’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars. Be creative. Do it tonight.”
* * *
Kane lived on the fourth floor of a six story apartment building halfway between Trinidad and Brentwood Park. The lobby door was locked but Munroe figured that he could get past it pretty easily. The main questions were, first, if he could get into Kane’s apartment; second, how he was going to quietly disable a trained agent and, third, how he was going to get Kane out of the building without being seen. He started with the last question first. How did people remove a body in the movies? In a rolled-up rug. It was as good a way as any.
Munroe checked Google for D.C. carpet cleaners and then sign makers. Using an ID that wasn’t linked to his real address he rented a white panel van and then visited a sign shop on the way back from the rental lot. It took them about fifteen minutes to create an eighteen by thirty plastic stick-on that read “Montpelier Carpet Care – Cleaning & Restoration.” A final stop at Walmart got him a hand-truck and a six by eight foot Arabian-style carpet. A few minutes with Photoshop produced two invoice forms with the heading “Montpelier Carpet Care” and the company’s real address and phone number. The first document was a work order for the delivery of a newly cleaned carpet to Gregory Kane in apartment 4C. The second was instructions to pick up a stained carpet from Gregory Kane at the same address.
It was almost three-thirty when Munroe arrived at Kane’s building. He set the rolled-up carpet vertically on the hand truck and pressed the buzzers for all of the apartments on the third floor. If anyone asked who he was or what he wanted he had a clipboard with a work order bearing the notation “Deliver with customer-supplied house key.” No one asked any questions. One of the third-floor occupants just buzzed him in. Dressed in a khaki shirt, brown pants and a brown baseball cap Munroe wheeled the rug into the elevator and pressed the button for the fourth floor.
Now came the tricky part. Given a minute or two a skilled burglar could pick a garden-variety residential lock but most thieves just jimmied the door or used a bump key. A set of twenty bump key blanks that would fit a wide variety of residential locks could be purchased over the Internet for fifty dollars. High-end bump-proof locks were available but most apartment houses didn’t want to spend the money to retrofit an entire building. Kane could have done that himself, of course, but most single guys, especially cops who figured that they could take care of themselves, weren’t that worried about their personal security.
The lock on Kane’s door was an old Yale. Munroe pulled the Yale bump key off the ring, slipped it in, then simultaneously gave it a firm tap and a twist. Nothing. The timing between the rap, or bump, and the twist had to be just right. Munroe did it again. On the third try the pins bounced above the cylinder just as Munroe applied the torque and the lock turned. Munroe took a look down the deserted hallway then wheeled the rug inside. A quick check confirmed that the apartment was empty. He stuffed the rolled-up carpet in the back of the closet then entered the bathroom. The floor was some kind of vinyl but Kane had placed a towel in front of the toilet, apparently to insulate his feet from the cold floor while he peed.
Munroe ran a fine wire from the back of the toilet down into the water at the bottom of the bowl and secured it with a dab of super glue. He equally spaced six more fine, bare wires under the towel then joined them near the edge of the porcelain and ran that single wire to the rear of the tank. He attached the wire from the bowl to one terminal of a stun gun and the wires from under the towel to the other. He taped the stun gun to the backside of the tank then locked down the switch. Lastly he dropped a handful of salt into the water. Now he just needed to test it.
The stun gun was rated at eight million volts. Munroe dropped an insulated wire into the bowl and set another one on top of the towel. Then he moved the two free ends toward each other. When they were about an inch apart a surge arced through the towel and electricity sparked across the one-inch gap. Munroe was not surprised. The manufacturer had promised that the jolt would penetrate several layers of clothing with enough voltage to incapacitate a man. Munroe quickly pulled the ends apart then filled the sink with water to which he added another handful of salt. Once the towel was dampened with the salt water he laid it back across the bare wires.
The final step was making sure that he would know if and when his trap had been sprung. Munroe scanned the bathroom and spotted a Kleenex box on the shelf next to the medicine cabinet. He cut a flap in the back and inserted a wireless camera. The pinhole lens fit neatly behind the hollowed out center of one of the “e”s. The battery wouldn’t last more than twelve hours and the broadcast range was only five-hundred feet but that was enough. Munroe took one more look around then grabbed his clipboard and hand-truck and returned to the van.
He drove around the block then pulled into a new space across from the entrance to the building’s underground garage. Along with his address Mr. X had provided him with Kane’s DMV picture and the make and model of his car. Munroe settled in to wait. Around a quarter after six he spotted Kane’s black Mustang and he scrunched down in his seat. As soon as the car disappeared into the garage Munroe got out the hand-truck and headed for the building. This time he punched the buttons for the fifth-floor units and, again, a helpful tenant buzzed him in.
He dithered a minute in the lobby pretending to be checking his iPad then rode the elevator to the fourth floor. Once there he slipped into the stairway and called up the view from the spy camera. The bathroom was dark. Now he just had to wait and hope that the building wasn’t full of health nuts who enjoyed climbing the stairs. He had a scare around a quarter to seven when he heard footsteps descending. Luckily there was no one in the fourth-floor corridor and Munroe returned to the landing as soon as the tenant had passed by.
Inside the home Kane pushed the half-empty pizza box aside and chugged down the last of his beer. So, he thought, looking around his empty apartment, now what? It had been a disaster of a day. Franks had sent him a text telling him that they hadn’t gone live on Bellingham’s phone surveillance until four that afternoon. Some problem with the warrant application.
For about one second he thought about trying to fix things with Allison then snorted. Yeah, that’ll work. Kane eyed the empty bottle and decided that one more beer wouldn’t hurt him. He found a basketball game on ESPN, put his feet up on the coffee table and half watched the screen. Around ten after seven he felt the beer demanding to be set free. As he settled in front of the toilet and started to unzip, Kane noticed that the towel was damp. Jesus, was the plumbing leaking? After the day he’d had that’s all he needed. How much is it going to cost to get a plumber up here at night? Would the landlord pay for that? Ten to one the manager would try to blame it on him. Fuck. Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe it was just a washer. The beer became more insistent. Well, pee first, check the pipes second.
Kane aimed slightly toward the side of the bowl, closed his eyes and let go. A fraction of a second later he felt as if he had been dipped waist deep into molten lava. Because of the minerals and other waste products it contained human urine was highly conductive. The stun gun’s eight million volts were only slightly diminished during their trip through the salt water in the bowl and then up the stream of urine and into Kane’s penis. The charge roared through his groin and then down his legs and out through his heels. One second Greg was standing in front of the toilet and the next he was lying half conscious on the floor, fighting to draw a breath.
As soon as the monitor showed Kane entering the bathroom Munroe hurried down the hall and slipped the bump key into the lock. He paused for a couple of seconds until Kane toppled off the edge of the iPad’s screen then he rapped the key and managed to turn the tumbler on the first try. Munroe abandoned the hand-truck just inside the door and raced into the bathroom where he found Kane shuddering on the floor in a puddle of his own urine.
Munroe pulled out another stun gun and gave Kane a three-second jolt in the side of his neck then dragged him out of the bathroom. A few seconds later he had Kane’s ankles, wrists and mouth wrapped in duct tape. Munroe searched Kane’s pockets and removed his cell, wallet and creds. A few seconds more and Kane’s knees were taped together and his arms were secured tightly to his chest. Jesus, this guy stinks! Munroe thought. He removed the carpet from the closet, rolled Kane up inside it, then wrapped bands of tape around the rug’s top, bottom and center.
It took all of Munroe’s strength to stand the rug up against the wall and then get the hand-truck’s blade under the bottom. Another two lengths of tape secured it to the hand-truck’s steel frame. Had he forgotten anything? The camera! Munroe pulled the stun gun from behind the toilet tank and then grabbed the Kleenex box. He stuffed them into a paper bag from the kitchen along with the roll of tape. Carrying it wouldn’t look right but he couldn’t leave them behind. He briefly considered dropping the bag down the garbage chute but that was the first place the cops would search once Kane went missing.
Munroe did a final check of the apartment, carefully wiping down anything that he might have touched. Getting Kane and the rug out the door was a pain and a half but he did it, wiping his prints from the knob as he left. Everything went smoothly until he reached the lobby and realized that he couldn’t simultaneously open the front door and push the hand truck through it. He was looking around for something to wedge under the jam when one of the tenants showed up.
“That looks like a two-man job,” the man half joked.
“It’s heavier than it looks.”
“Here, let me hold it for you,” the guy volunteered.
Munroe spun the hand-truck around, pulled it through the opening and then across the street to the van. After half a minute’s more pushing and straining he manhandled Kane into the back and then he was gone.