The next morning, Tuesday, George Rankin walked across stained gray carpet to Lou Billingham’s office, florescent lights humming in the ceiling overhead, the low drone of work chatter all around. He knocked on the thick wooden door. Billingham, deputy chief of intelligence, worked directly under Horace Ellison. Ellison’s office windows were dark, which meant he wasn’t in yet, otherwise George would talk to him. But the man didn’t show up until seven fifty every morning, and that was still twelve minutes off.
“Come in.”
He pushed open the door to find Lou Billingham behind his desk eating a bagel with cream cheese and lox. He had gray hair and a pockmarked, though clean-shaven, face. Brown eyes that always looked tired. A sag in his neck like a turkey wattle. He took a sip from a coffee mug with WORLD’S BEST GRANDDAD written across it. It was hard to imagine Billingham being any kind of granddad, much less the world’s best; he struck George as the kind of guy who’d push kids away with a broomstick.
“Rankin.”
“Sir.”
“Cup of home-brewed coffee? Got a thermos full and you can bet your ass it’s better than that slop in the break room.”
“No, thank you, sir.”
“Then how can I help you?”
“Ellison isn’t in yet or I’d have asked him, but have we got anything back on that bank account information Gael got us? Or the phone records?”
“We got a name but we haven’t been able to connect it to a birth certificate, or anything other than an Illinois driver’s license and a Citibank Visa card with a two thousand dollar limit, and of course, the bank account itself.”
“Wouldn’t he need a social security number for the bank account and the credit card?”
“Yeah, we’re still waiting on the SSA to get back to us.”
“What about the phone records?”
“People are going through the numbers, seeing what they can pin down.”
“What’s the name?”
“First name Mulligan. I can’t remember the last name offhand, but I’ll get you Xeroxes of everything that came in.”
“Mulligan like in golf?”
“Just like.”
“Think it’s a real person’s name?”
Billingham shrugged. “Look at the dumb shit some of these actors name their kids and it doesn’t seem impossible.”
“Did we get an address from the driver’s license?”
“We did. It’s a bar in Chicago. Nobody lives there, and best as we can tell, nobody there knows anybody named Mulligan—and it’s not exactly a forgettable name.”
“Will you keep me updated on anything new?”
“It’s your case.”
“Thank you.” George paused, opened his mouth to speak again, but hesitated.
Billingham let him dangle a moment before he said, “What is it?”
“We have a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
George told Billingham about Francis Waters asking after the Rocha case; told him about yesterday’s meeting with Diego Blanco; told him what he thought these things added up to: “The son of a bitch is crooked, sir.”
Billingham sipped his coffee. “Do we have anything solid?”
“Just the recording and the pictures.”
“We’ll need more than that.”
“The recording is pretty incriminating.”
“You’ve never said anything that might seem incriminating if taken out of context? We can’t have agents afraid to do their job, Rankin, and sometimes doing your job means talking to bad guys about bad things. You know that.”
“It’s not his case.”
Billingham shrugged. “Maybe he’s taken an interest.”
“He could be putting Gael’s life in danger, sir.”
“We can’t go after a DEA agent with a single recorded conversation, Rankin, especially if we don’t know the motives behind that conversation.”
“Best scenario, he’s working a case he’s not authorized to work and endangering the whole operation. I don’t want to sit on this and—”
“You’re not sitting on anything. You’ve told me. If you really think he’s crooked, stay on him, try to get something we can use. That’s the end of our conversation on that matter. Do you have anything else?”
“No, sir.”
* * *
George flipped through the paperwork they’d gathered so far. The phone records looked like a dead end unless they happened to arrest people with corresponding cells in their pockets. They’d managed to connect several numbers to local businesses, but George would bet green money that those calls were legitimate. Otherwise Rocha talked to people using burners or to people with cell phones he paid for. The bank account information was a different story. The wire transfers were going from accounts in Alejandro Rocha’s name into an account belonging to a man named Mulligan Shoibli. The one record they had was for a transfer in the amount of five hundred thousand dollars. The DEA had subpoenaed records from both banks, but they were in the Cayman Islands, which meant they’d never get them.
For two hours, George sat at his desk and with both his computer and telephone, tried to build a man out of fog. But Mulligan Shoibli never solidified, never took on shape or form. No fingerprints in any database. No address other than that bar in Chicago where no one knew him. No pictures on file. No Facebook page. No LinkedIn account. Not even an abandoned Myspace page or a comment on a three-year-old New York Times article. The man was a ghost.
There was something about Chicago floating just under the surface of his consciousness, but George didn’t know what it was, and didn’t know if it would be useful when it finally breached the surface of his mind. Such unconscious connections were useless almost as often as they were useful. You looked for patterns and sometimes saw them where they either didn’t exist or weren’t relevant.
But still: Chicago. He let it lay there below the surface and hoped it floated up at some point, like a bloated corpse.
George moved on to James Murphy and his sister Layla, working under the assumption that they shared a last name. Layla Murphy didn’t have an arrest record, but her death had been page-nine news in Austin, Texas, two days after her body was discovered.
EL PASO—Layla Murphy, daughter of well-known local car dealer Brian Murphy and sister of Marine Corps Sergeant James Murphy, recipient of the Silver Star Medal for distinguished service in Afghanistan, was found dead Friday morning of an apparent drug overdose. Two boys, whose names have been withheld by police due to their status as minors, found her body while walking to school in northeast El Paso.
An autopsy revealed that Ms. Murphy had died of “fatal respiratory depression” due to heroin use. El Paso Police Department spokesperson Michael Samonek said in a statement yesterday that there was “no reason to suspect foul play.” Ms. Murphy’s family were aware that she had a drug problem and had attempted to convince her to enter a recovery program.
Barbara Allan-Murphy, the decedent’s mother, asks that those considering cards or flowers instead send a small donation to the Austin Recovery Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center.
There was more on James Murphy, who’d been an offensive guard for the Aggies up until six years ago. He’d declined to enter the draft when he became eligible and instead joined the Marine Corps as a private after graduation. There was a big write-up about this decision, as many thought he might be a third- or fourth-round pick. Local man turns his back on millions in order to serve his country. Even though a middling offensive guard with fourth-round prospects probably wasn’t turning his back on millions, there was something admirable about walking away from what might have been a four hundred thousand dollar salary in order to pick up a weapon and maybe get yourself killed in a desert country for fourteen hundred bucks a month. George also found a piece from two years ago about Murphy being awarded the Silver Star Medal. What exactly he’d done was kept vague, but Silver Stars weren’t Chiclets; they didn’t hand them out to just anybody.
Finally, an item about James Murphy being arrested in La Paz, Mexico, last Wednesday. A young man with NFL prospects who chose duty over cash wasn’t the kind of person to end up arrested with five kilograms of cocaine, a pistol, and a sniper rifle in his car. Especially not when he’d only been back in the states for a month. He wasn’t the kind of person to end up arrested for anything, except maybe an on-leave DUI, a charge that would probably never be filed.
The arrest stunk.
Not that he hadn’t been up to something. According to the news item, a rifle of the type found by La Paz police in James Murphy’s car had gone missing from Fort Bliss, and though they didn’t have that weapon now to match serial numbers, chances were good that when they did, it would turn out Murphy had taken the thing. Though he didn’t like to admit it, this made George admire the guy. It meant James Murphy had gone to Mexico to find justice for his sister. He had either known Layla was murdered—as yesterday’s conversation between Diego Blanco and Francis Waters had made clear—or he’d blamed Alejandro Rocha for her overdose. Either way, he’d been acting out of love.
If La Paz police had nailed James Murphy for the guns alone, George might have bought the arrest as legitimate. Might have thought Murphy was the victim of nothing more than bad luck. Wrong place, wrong time. That kind of deal. But he didn’t believe the drugs. His guess was that Rocha’s men had seen James Murphy watching his estate and Rocha decided to have him locked up until he knew what his motives were. He owned the police force. It would have taken nothing more than a phone call to make it happen.
What George needed to know now was how involved Layla had been in Rocha’s operation, how much James Murphy knew about it, and if he knew a significant amount, whether he’d be willing to testify. About the last question he had some doubt. James Murphy, based on the evidence at hand, wanted Rocha buried, and he’d be hard to bury if he was locked away in prison. He might refuse to testify to keep Rocha out of jail and therefore accessible by bullet. George could understand this, part of him would even approve of the murder, but he was a man of the law, which meant he couldn’t allow it.
While George worked, while he thought about the situation, he also listened to Francis Waters through their shared cubicle wall. Mostly he was quiet. There were a few telephone conversations early on, two business calls and one personal, the latter being an argument with his third wife, Lydia. For an hour after that, George heard only the tapping of fingers on a keyboard.
George had stopped paying attention, concentrating on his work, when Francis Waters got a call on his cell phone.
“Yeah,” he said, answering the call. This one word was followed by a long silence. When Francis Waters finally spoke again, he said, “I’m on my way.” He got to his feet, grabbed his suit coat from the back of his chair, shrugged into it, and strode across the gray carpet to the door.
George hesitated only a moment, locked his computer, and pushed away from the desk. He didn’t know where Francis Waters was going, but he intended to follow him there.