Back at the North Patrol Division he found The Gecko at work in his cubicle, with Stone’s laptop hooked up to other computer equipment on his desk. Gabriel lowered himself into a chair and said, “What’s so important, my friend, that I have to come in and look at your ugly face.”
The Gecko continued staring at the large monitor in front of him. “I got curious, lieutenant. I had a feeling that this Stone character was screwing with me—or with someone. Or maybe just showing off. He was smart enough to hide the cloud account in a way that non-geeks would never find it. But there was still a clear trail to it that wasn’t that hard for me to follow—a trail that he could have covered better if he knew what I think he knows and if he knew people might be looking for him. Or maybe he was just amusing himself. Or maybe he was leading me by the nose—away from something he really didn’t want me or anybody to find. Which pissed me off.”
“Go on.”
“So I spent the weekend digging back into his files. And, lo and behold, I came upon this, buried in the Cloud IX account: coded info referring to a file called ‘The Eddy.’ Took me a while to understand what he meant, but I finally figured it out: Like an undertow in the river, the thing around which everything else is turning and getting sucked in. In other words, another cloud account with pivotal information but at another provider. It took me awhile to crack the code, but I finally did and traced his trail to the second cloud.”
Gabriel let out a breath. “Not sure it makes much difference now, Geck. Looks like he may be the swimmer at the morgue.”
The Gecko turned to him, eyes searching Gabriel’s face. “Then, Carlo, it could make all the difference in the world.”
“What you mean?”
The Gecko stood, looked over the top of his cubicle walls to see if anyone was in earshot, and bent toward Gabriel. He whispered, “Maybe he knew too much.”
Gabriel laughed and slapped The Gecko’s biceps with the back of his hand. “You’re watching too many old movies, my man. I got this baby wrapped up. I’m on way back downtown.”
The Gecko gave him a curious look. “All right, Mr. Ace Detective. You’ll understand it when you read it. And for the official record, I did not read it. I have no idea what’s in it.”
Gabriel took the flash drive offered him and stood. “I’ll go look at it.”
The Gecko grabbed his arm. “Maybe better to study it at home, lieutenant. And just leave it on the flash drive. Don’t save it to your hard drive.”
“Do tell me why not.”
“For your own good.”
Gabriel smiled. The Gecko wrote a phone number on a notepad resting on his desktop, tore off the sheet, and handed it to Gabriel.
“What’s this?”
“A safe cell-phone number,” he whispered. “And don’t use yours if you need to talk to me about this. Go to a public phone or something.”
Again Gabriel laughed. “What’s with all the cloak-and-dagger, Gecko? If you’re afraid, call 911.”
It was seven o’clock by the time Gabriel got home that evening thanks to a case he got called in on because of his homicide chops. Leslie Hardaway, a seventeen-year-old honor student at the college-prep magnet school, had been found strangled when her mother got home from work. A lovely girl, he saw when he went to the Penrose Street crime scene, who reminded him of his wife at that age.
A jealous ex-boyfriend, nineteen, a dropout, finally copped to it after Gabriel kept hammering at him—figuratively. “She was the only beautiful thing I ever had,” he said.
Of course the confession did little to console the girl’s mother. A fucking waste all around—two lives at least. And who knows what Leslie might have done with hers.…
He got a light beer from the fridge and called downstairs to the Town Hall Tavern to find out what the special was: meatloaf. They’d send a tray up. “Hold the mashed.”
Gabriel sat at the table in the dining alcove and turned on his laptop. He inserted the new flash drive The Gecko had given him and saw a list of alphanumeric files and, last, a file titled, “The Eddy.” He opened it and read.
I have no one to talk to, no one in whom I might confide all the sordid details, so I talk to myself here. Maybe I’ll write a novel about it someday. It has all the dramatic elements: love, betrayal, mystery, and, perhaps, vengeance. But I can’t think of her without making myself sick. I see her as I’m taking her from behind. And there, faint in the glow of moonlight coming through our bedroom window, I spy a fine line, the merest scratch, running across her buttock. And a second. Fingernail marks.
Epiphany came a bit early this Christmas season. Cognitive dissonance earlier in play, with my subconscious covering all the evidence so my conscious mind didn’t have to face a painful truth. Late nights, the sudden trips out of town. The attitude, the coolness in bed, the sniping—all new. Nagging me about my dissertation, my job, my perceived lack of ambition.
I took my marriage vows seriously, made before God and man at St. Francis Xavier. Just as I took my professional duty seriously—which also cost me. Now I wonder what my civic duty is and if I have the balls to send her and Angelo Cira to prison—and whether duty trumps the loyalty a man should have toward his wife. And whether I can pull it off. And if those who play hardball downtown could stop me …
The doorbell rang and Gabriel rose from the table. Alice stood in the carpeted hall with a tray holding silverware and two dishes covered by metal lids.
“Bachelor-cop special,” she announced.
He had her set it on the dining room table, signed the tab, and handed her a five. “Thanks, babe. What time the Billikens on?”
“Starts in a half hour.”
“I may be down later.”
He sat before his dinner tray, sliding his laptop off to the side. He read while eating.
Which is why I took care to put all this in cloud storage, where it would not be found. Including this confessional Eddy file, which is largely irrelevant anyway. I’ve made my confession.
I am not proud of spying on Ellen. Putting a tracking device in her car. Installing a keystroke monitor on her laptop and surveillance software on her cell phone. I did it in a fit of rage and sorrow. I went looking solely for confirmation of her infidelity, not expecting to find incriminating emails and leads concerning kickbacks and money laundering. But I felt so vengeful—which caused me to dig further. Put horns on a man’s head and you put murder in his heart, it’s said. Funny how killing her seems less objectionable morally than divorcing her (my formerly dormant Catholicism rising)—and more gratifying.
Gabriel scanned the page, scrolled down a few more, and saw the narrative continuing chronologically. Their college days together. Her first TV appearance on the Mizzou station in Columbia. Graduation. Her getting the TV job in St. Louis. The Eddy ran some two hundred pages.
Gabriel went back to the list of files. He opened the first, titled “0001 – Ghosts.” Like Stone’s document on “Corruption in the public schools,” this too began with an epigraph from Mark Twain: “The government of my country snubs honest simplicity, but fondles artistic villainy.”
He read on:
At least five “ghosts” work in the offices of elected St. Louis City Treasurer Maurice Townsend, who has held the post for some 30 years. That is, employees who appear on the payroll but never appear in the treasurer’s office. They include Theresa Cira Genovese, sister of Mayor Angelo Cira. The combined annual salaries of these ghosts total nearly $500,000. For three years Genovese’s salary—$137,000 annually—came from funds earmarked for the Inspire Charter Schools, which are slated to close at the end of the school year due to financial difficulties.…
Union organizer Thomas Welch has “worked” for the treasurer for more than 20 years, heading an “external mobile squad” charged with overseeing parking-meter operations. Welch, however, maintains his primary residence in Boca Raton, Florida, where there are no City of St. Louis parking meters. Another ghost worker, Democratic Party operative Joseph Saleem, purportedly runs the Treasurer’s Office information-technology security unit, despite having no training in the field and remaining unknown to workers in the office. IT security remains lax, as I have documented here via departmental personnel files of the ghost workers, 0001.1 through 0001.5…
Gabriel found those files and peeked in: as advertised, with names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and salaries. Yet nothing too surprising. Political spoils in St. Louis? Featherbedding? Shocking!
He moved on to file “0002 – Laundry.”
This and associated files document an ongoing money-laundering scheme that has worked to illegally finance local and state political campaigns. Among those implicated are former Missouri Governor Alfred “Skip” Woolrich, St. Louis Mayor Angelo Cira, Central Insurance CEO Thomas Pelletier, and Katherine Hinds, managing partner of the law firm Katz Mellon Shenk, where Cira, a former cop, practiced law after his stint as prosecutor and prior to his election as mayor.
One example of the scheme, Gabriel read, involved payments from Central Insurance Company, the insurance carrier for numerous city operations, to Katz Mellon Shenk for non-existent legal services. The law firm would then funnel the money into party campaign-coffers. This simple reimbursement ploy was repeated time and again, with money coming from various businesses seeking city and state contracts paid to various law firms.
In other words, business as usual. Though the details were interesting. Something that the FBI might find thought-provoking. He moved on to file 0003, titled “Undertow.”
St. Louis Chief of Police Arthur Donnewald has participated in an ongoing scheme with Mound City Towing, which owns a monopoly on towing and impounding vehicles for the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, by which he has profited hundreds of thousands of dollars over seven years.
The company falsified titles, which enabled it to sell impounded cars at inflated prices. From its sales revenue it kicked back thousands to Donnewald monthly. Further, it sold impounded vehicles to Donnewald family members at prices far below market value.…
Some of this was not news to Gabriel. The previous year Donnewald’s nephew had been arrested after leaving the scene of an accident when drunk. The car he had been driving, news media reported, had been purchased by his father—Donnewald’s brother-in-law—from Mound City for half its street value. The police chief denied any knowledge, and the incident soon moved off the front page. But the kickback scheme, if true, was something that could bring the chief down.
The last set of files, “0004 – Play Ball,” told Gabriel something of even greater interest—and of greater potential political damage.
The developer of the $850 million Stadium Towne project adjacent to the new baseball park has made payments in excess of $1 million to St. Louis Mayor Angelo Cira through Cayman Island bank accounts. Below you will find written and audio confirmation culled from emails, phone calls, and live conversations with Cira’s press secretary Ellen Cantrell, who also stands to profit from the scheme. For over a year, she has maintained a secret bank account, previously unknown to her husband, which holds a balance, as of December 7, of $457 but has seen a flow-through of more than $800,000 in the past six months. If reelected this spring and able to see Stadium Towne become a reality in his next term, Cira hopes to earn some $10 million in kickbacks from the project, it has been rumored, though that is unconfirmed at this point.
“Holy mother!” Gabriel leaned back and let out a long breath. His half-eaten meatloaf had grown cold. He went to the kitchen for a bourbon muttering, “Fucking Gecko.”
Gabriel stood at the windows and gazed out over the park. The moon hung nearly full, laying long shadows from the naked trees across the white snow below. On the east side of the park Ellen Cantrell, newly widowed, likely slept. Miles beyond he spied the spotlighted Gateway Arch looming over the Mississippi River, from which a mutilated Jonathan Stone had recently been taken.
Had Stone’s scraped fingers and chopped face come by a chance encounter with a river tug after his apparent—and possibly instantly regretted—suicide plunge? Or was there a more sinister explanation? Whichever, Gabriel wanted no part of it. All he wanted was his old job back. That and, more immediately, a decent night’s sleep. Now both seemed in doubt.