Eighty
AS we waited for word on Matt’s condition, I channeled my worries into an online investigation of the “Critter Crawl” fitness guru . . .
Two hours after Joy’s arrival, I was still searching while my daughter (thank goodness) was sleeping. Cocooned in Franco’s big coat, her head on his warm thigh, she needed the rest, emotionally and physically, after the draining week she’d had.
Meanwhile, I was using the search engines like slot machines, and I thought I came up a winner—until I showed Franco the results.
He was less than impressed.
“I don’t see anything incriminating in that handshake,” Franco said, after I showed him the key part of Matt’s camera phone video. “There could be a dozen reasons Tristan Ferrell said he didn’t know this guy when you asked him. Ferrell was looking for ‘Angels’ to invest in his business, right? They could have just met Saturday night at the Soho Lounge.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say, so I dug deeper. I got to thinking that if Robert Crenshaw used an alias, maybe Tristan Ferrell did, too.”
“Go on.”
“After Hookster, Cindy started to go by her middle name Sydney. Crenshaw falsified IDs to become Crest, then Krinkle. And I found evidence that Tommy Finkle—”
“Stop. Who is Tommy Finkle?”
“According to the Wall Street Journal, Finkle is the other cofounder of Hookster, a friend and frat brother of Robert Crenshaw.”
I showed Franco how difficult it was to find images of Tommy Finkle—the business pages mentioned him by name, but he kept out of the limelight and let the lawyers do the talking during the class action suit.
“I hit a dead end, until I remembered that Crenshaw and Finkle were in a fraternity together. I checked the archives of the fraternity’s web page, and there he was—”
I turned the laptop to show Franco a decade-old picture of Tommy Finkle, a butterball with baby-fat cheeks, but clearly recognizable.
“Tommy Finkle, cofounder of Hookster, is now Tristan Ferrell. Franco, it all fits. When I took Tristan’s Critter Crawl workout class, he went on and on about his ‘painful failure in the business jungle’ and how it sent him to a real jungle to regain his balance or some such. And from what I’ve uncovered, it’s clear he found a new identity, too.”
For a moment, Joy stirred and Franco lovingly stroked her chestnut hair. Then he burst my balloon by pointing out the obvious. The connections I’d found, while suspicious, were not proof of anything.
He shook his head. “Sorry, there’s no evidence of wrongdoing that I can see. Even if we tried to question Ferrell, he’d lawyer up fast and that would be that . . .”
As I considered that bit of bad news, a night nurse interrupted to deliver something far more positive—
“Mr. Allegro is out of danger,” she said.
I closed my eyes. Thank you, God . . .
“The doctor will give you an update when she’s finished her rounds. One of you can see the patient after that, the rest of you in the morning.”
“It should be Joy,” I rasped to Franco. “She’ll lift his spirits.”
For a long moment after that, I sat in numbed silence. Then all the fears and feelings I’d been trying to ignore overwhelmed me, and I quietly broke down, sobbing into my hands.
Franco curved his big arm around my shoulders and squeezed, a silent but sweet and deeply appreciated reminder that I wasn’t in this alone.
SHORTLY after the nurse stopped by, the doctor gave us another encouraging update. Then Joy was permitted to visit her dad.
After she left the waiting room, my mind went back to Franco’s discouraging words about Tristan Ferrell.
While I had no proof of wrongdoing, I couldn’t stop thinking about Haley Hartford. Ferrell not only denied knowing Crenshaw, he never answered my question about why he’d hired Haley—with a cash bonus and double her salary at Cinder.
Detectives Soles and Bass claimed Mr. Ferrell had an alibi the night Haley was killed. He was supposedly “at his place of business, with plenty of witnesses, until midnight . . .”
But Equator was a big, busy facility with a broken security camera on its back door. If Ferrell had wanted to slip out and meet Haley in Hudson River Park, then slip back into the club, would anyone have even noticed?
“You know,” I said to Franco, “I’ll bet all the evidence you would need to incriminate Ferrell is on Robert Crenshaw’s phone. That might explain why the killer took it after shooting him.”
“You could be right.”
“And what about Red Beard’s phone?”
“You mean Doug Farthing?” Franco rubbed his jaw. “Interesting. Soles and Bass told me his phone is missing, too.”
“And so was Haley Hartford’s. Phone snatching looks like the modus operandi for this killer— Hey . . . what if you got hold of Tristan Ferrell’s smartphone? Why not get a search warrant and crack it open?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Franco laughed. “Haven’t you ever heard Mike Quinn gripe about the phone graveyard at the DA’s office?”
I had—more than once. The Manhattan DA’s spanking new Cyber Crime Lab had hundreds of phones encrypted with advanced iOS software, which made them impossible to crack without a password.
“That’s hundreds of major crimes that can’t be cleared, and hundreds of active criminals still walking the streets,” Franco said. “So you see? Even if we got a warrant to search Ferrell’s phone, it might be encrypted. Unless he gave us a password, we’d be locked out.”
“What about the cloud?”
“Smart criminals don’t back up their data where law enforcement can access it. They keep it in their phones.”
I fell silent a minute and thought of one more option. “Mike once told me UK police found a way to get around a locked phone. They wait until the suspect is using it, then they arrest him. One officer grabs the phone while it’s open, and keeps swiping until they get the device to a computer and download its contents.”
“We could legally do that—if we secured proper warrants or had a solid reason to arrest him. With this Tristan guy, I don’t see any.”
Franco watched me silently deliberate.
“Spill it, Coffee Lady, what’s your idea? Because I know you’ve got one.”
“I’m a private citizen. If Tristan decides to freely give his unlocked phone to someone, who, in turn, hands it to me, then there’s no civil rights issue. And if I happen to come upon evidence of a crime, I would be duty bound to report it to the police, right?”
Franco’s eyebrow arched. “Okay. I’m listening . . .”