EIGHTEEN DAYS BEFORE
J. D. Spengler chose the Flint Creek Motor Court in Anaconda for its location as well as its physical attributes. He figured if he had to stay in a Podunk town like this that didn’t feature the kind of four-star properties he preferred, he’d go with what he always chose—an older motel with doors that opened up to the parking lot and no central hallway or lobby to pass through. This way, he could come and go as he pleased without anyone knowing. And, if he could indeed find a working girl while he was there, she could enter his room from the outside without attracting attention.
When he tried to check in there was no one in the small lobby. Spengler had to ring the bell on the counter to get someone’s attention. An older bald man in flannel entered via a door behind the counter while dabbing barbecue sauce from the corners of his mouth.
“The old lady made ribs tonight,” the man said while he looked Spengler over with a practiced eye.
“Ribs are great,” Spengler said. “I’d like a room on the end of the row for two nights.”
“You’re in luck. That one’s open.”
“Good.”
“You seem to know what you want,” the man said. “What brings you here?”
“Business and pleasure,” Spengler said. It was his standard line when asked by nosy locals. “Is there any action around here?”
The clerk looked at him suspiciously after he ran Spengler’s credit card. “Where are you from?”
“South Florida.”
“Well, there might be a lot of action down in South Florida, I wouldn’t know. But there isn’t much around here. Try Butte, maybe.”
“Maybe I will.”
His room was clean but unremarkable. There were cowboy prints on the walls and plastic cups in the bathroom. The television was bolted to its stand. Spengler put his bag on the bed and turned on the air conditioner. It moaned to life and vibrated as if possessed by a demon wanting out.
While it rattled, Spengler changed into all black clothing and pulled on a dark blazer. Black, he felt, made him look slimmer and it helped hide sweat stains.
He turned off the air conditioner and went back outside to the lobby.
He rang the bell and the man appeared, once again dabbing his lips with a napkin. When he saw it was Spengler again, he didn’t hide his disdain.
“What now?” he asked.
“The air conditioner works like shit. It sounds like a buzz saw in there.”
“That’s because nobody ever uses it,” the man said. “I’ll take a look at it when I can. In the meantime, just open a window. It’ll cool down tonight. This is Montana.”
Spengler contemplated asking for another room but decided to try it at least for one night.
“Can you recommend a good place for dinner?” he asked.
The man squinted as if he’d never encountered the question before. Then: “Do you like hot pastrami sandwiches?”
“I do.”
“Try Haufbrau’s down the street. It’s popular with the locals. They make a good pastrami and sauerkraut sandwich.”
“What about breakfast?”
The man’s eyes settled on Spengler’s large belly.
“Tillie’s. They’ve only got six tables and they don’t take credit cards. But they make a chicken-fried steak the size of a baseball mitt.”
“Thanks. Enjoy your ribs.”
“I’d like to,” the man said before he turned around.
Spengler sat at the counter at Haufbrau’s and ate two hot pastrami sandwiches and a double order of fries. He washed it all down with two draft beers.
The place was full of working-stiff locals who all knew one another. Large families filled booths and let their children run wild. There didn’t seem to be any prohibition about kids in bars in Montana, he thought. At least not in Anaconda.
He kept his eye on the waitress who wore denim jean shorts and a Haufbrau’s T-shirt knotted at the waist. She was blond, in her late twenties, and she had a good figure. Nice legs. Maybe an athlete in high school, he guessed. Spengler tried to engage her in conversation when she brought him his second orders and second beers, and she was pleasant but disinterested in him. He lost interest in her when a rough-dressed man who was obviously in construction came in and kissed her hello and sat down. The man was covered with sawdust and his steel-toed work boots were the size of small dogs.
Still, when she brought Spengler his third beer, he asked her, “Are you from around here?”
“I’ve lived here all my life.”
“Look, I’m trying to find an old friend of mine. Do you know Marc Daly?”
She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Marcus Daly founded this town. He died a million years ago.”
Interesting. “What about Matthew Annan? Do you know him?”
“Sure. Everybody knows Matthew. He does a lot of good in this community.”
He felt an electrical jolt shoot through him. “Do you know where I can find him?”
She looked at him askance. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
She gestured behind the restaurant somewhere and said, “Seventh Street. He just moved a big old mansion there from Butte. Believe me when I tell you that you can’t miss it.”
“Thank you.”
“What do you want with Matthew?” she asked. She seemed protective of Annan.
“Like I said, he’s an old friend.”
“I thought you said Marcus Daly was your old friend.”
“I got confused,” Spengler said while lifting up his mug. “Too many of these, I guess.”
The home on Seventh Street was magnificent, Spengler thought. The waitress was right.
He parked on the street across from it and observed. The lights were on inside and there were no window coverings. After a few minutes, he saw a figure pass in front of the huge great room window. The man stopped there as if posing and he looked out over the unfinished front lawn with his hands on his hips. He didn’t look up to see Spengler.
It was him, Spengler thought. He knew it from the poor photos he’d received from Candyce Fly and the physical descriptions he’d gotten from his other new clients. Spengler knew how Annan had been able to afford the small castle in front of him.
Spengler grunted from his full belly as he leaned to the side and popped open the center console. He grasped the handle of his .38 snub-nosed revolver and slipped it into the right pocket of his jacket. Then he grabbed his notebook from the passenger seat and got out.
He walked up to the house on large flagstones that had been placed but not yet secured into the soil. One rocked as he stepped on it and he nearly lost his balance. He felt more than saw that the man inside was watching his progress from where he stood at the front window.
The door had a heavy bronze knocker and Spengler was reaching for it as the door opened.
There he was. The man he’d been chasing for three months.
“Are you Matthew Annan?” he asked.
“Yes. Who are you?”
“J. D. Spengler. I’m a private detective from Tampa, Florida.”
“I know where Tampa is. What can I help you with?”
Annan was pleasant and seemed genuinely curious, Spengler thought. He looked at Annan’s face carefully when he said, “I’m here on behalf of Candyce Fly of Boca Grande as well as three other clients. Their names are Monica Weatherby, RuthAnne Sommers, and Brooke Alexander. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”
Annan didn’t flinch. There was no tell at all. Either Annan was genuinely clueless or he was an accomplished actor. Or a sociopath.
“Okay,” Annan said. “What do those women have to do with me?”
“You really don’t know?”
“I really don’t know.”
Annan closed the door a few inches. “As you can see here, we just moved this house to this location. It’s not yet finished and I’m running behind. I’ve got a lot to do to get it up to snuff. So if you don’t mind…”
The door closed farther. Spengler stepped up on the threshold so that Annan would have to hit him in the belly with the door if he closed it all the way.
“Look, I’ve come a long way,” Spengler said. The alcohol in his system gave him courage. “I really only need a few minutes of your time. I’m not on any kind of schedule now that I’ve found you. If you don’t let me in now I’ll just keep coming back, day after day. And I’ll ask plenty of people in town about you. I’ll ask them what it is you did to be able to afford this place. I look forward to hearing their answers. So, like I said, I need just a few minutes of your time.”
Annan glared at him without moving. Then, with a sigh, he said, “A few minutes and that’s it. But I warn you, the inside is a wreck.”
Annan stepped aside and Spengler went in. As he passed Annan the man said, “I’d offer you a beer but it smells like you’ve had plenty.”
He gestured toward a huge dining room table that was covered with blueprints and building plans.
“This is the best I can do,” Annan said.
He gracefully slid into a chair on one side of the table and Spengler brushed the sawdust off a chair and sat on the other. There was at least ten feet between them.
Annan dug his phone out of his back pocket and placed it facedown within reach.
Spengler said, “You’re a hard guy to find.”
Annan shrugged. “I don’t know why you say that. I’ve lived here all my life.”
“But you do get around. Boca Grande, Chicago, Santa Monica, New York City. And those are just the places I know about.”
“Business travel,” Annan said. Then he looked at his watch to indicate that time was racing by and Spengler didn’t have long.
“Oh, what business are you in?” Spengler asked.
“Finance.”
The PI swept his hand to take in the interior of the house. “Business must be good, judging by this place.”
“I’ve been fortunate.”
Spengler leaned forward and clasped his hands together on the top of the table. He stared hard at Annan. “You’re probably curious how I found you since you’re pretty good at covering your tracks.”
Annan shrugged and said, “I’m just curious about how much more of my time you plan to waste.”
“What kind of business took you to the Gasparilla Inn in Boca Grande?”
Annan frowned but didn’t reply. A tell, Spengler thought.
“My client told me all about it,” he said. “So I was able to get a look at the guest list from February fifth through February twenty-seventh this year. It cost me a couple of hundred to a night clerk but it was worth it. That’s the time line from when Candyce Fly did a meet-cute with a man claiming to be Marc Daly on the Lemon Bay golf course until he vanished like the wind with a ton of her money. I was disappointed at first to find out that ‘Marc Daly’ wasn’t on the guest list for any of those days. But who was, I asked myself?
“So I dug further into the guest list,” Spengler said. “Most of the guests during that period were couples who stayed only a night or two. After all, the hotel is pretty expensive and it’s more of a vacation destination than a long-term stay kind of place. Snowbirds might rent a cottage for the winter, but likely not a hotel room for three weeks.
“It turns out there were only two guests who stayed that entire length. One of them was a ninety-year-old geezer. The other one was named Matthew Annan, and he checked in using his American Express gold card. Lucky for me and unlucky for you, the inn won’t take cash for an extended stay.”
“There’s nothing wrong with staying in a hotel for three weeks,” Annan said.
“I’m not finished,” Spengler said, cutting him off. “So I employed a hacker. It’s absolutely amazing what a good hacker can find about a person—especially if they know their name and their credit card number.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” Annan asked.
“Yes. But so is fraud. Anyway, please allow me to finish.”
Annan reached up and tugged at his chin. Spengler surmised it was a tic Annan had when he got nervous.
“So my hacker did a nationwide search,” he continued. “We found where Matthew Annan booked rooms all over the United States. We were especially interested in long stays, and we found them in the cities I mentioned earlier.
“Now, someone might think that a private investigator works alone, and I usually do,” Spengler said. “But in this instance—knowing what I knew from my client Candyce Fly—I engaged the services of the top PIs located in Chicago, Santa Monica, and New York. Those cities all had long-term hotel stays under your name. I told each of those local PIs to identify prominent local women who fit a profile: extremely wealthy, of a certain age, lonely, and between relationships. Frankly, there were hundreds of names.”
“I would think so,” Annan said with a smirk.
“Anyway, I took those lists and gave them to my hacker. Which of these ladies, I asked him, experienced big unexplained hits to their assets over the last two years? Not depletions in the hundreds of thousands, Matthew, but hits in the millions. That narrowed down the list considerably. It didn’t take long for my researcher in my firm to identify eight women who fit the criteria. So I contacted them all. Five of the women had other reasons why they lost a lot of their money suddenly. I won’t burden you with the reasons.
“But three of the women told me stories very similar to the MO you used on Candyce Fly. You showed up at the right time, you charmed their pants off—literally—and they ‘invested’ in your made-up business or scheme. Then you vanished like the wind. The four women I mentioned to you earlier are now my clients. In all, you bilked them for $18.5 million. No wonder you’ve been so ‘fortunate.’”
Annan said, “Assuming what you say is correct—which it isn’t—you couldn’t use that information in court. You admitted already it was obtained illegally.”
“I won’t need to use it,” Spengler said. “I envision a situation where Candyce Fly, RuthAnne Sommers, Monica Weatherby, and Brooke Alexander are in the witness stand and one by one they point at you in the docket and say, ‘That’s him, Your Honor. That’s the man who broke my heart and stole my money.’ Man, the tabloids would be all over that trial.
“And these are just the women we know of right now,” Spengler said. “Only you know how many others you defrauded. How many, Matthew? How many more are out there who would come forward if they found out you’d been caught?”
It irked Spengler that Annan didn’t seem disturbed. The man was just as cool as when he’d arrived at his house.
“Excuse me,” Annan said. He picked up his phone and tapped out a message, then put the device facedown where it had been before. A few seconds later, it chimed with an incoming message.
Annan didn’t even seem to note the return message. He said, “Assuming any of this is true, which it certainly isn’t, what is the point of you coming here today? Why haven’t you just turned over all of this information to law enforcement and let them deal with it?”
Spengler sat back in his chair and smiled. He said, “You’ve got quite the scheme going, Matthew. You do your research, you build fake websites and fake online histories for whatever character you plan to play: Marc Daly, Bill Clark, Auggie Heinze, Marcus Daly. There are probably more I don’t know about yet. Then you target these women and move in. I suppose it hasn’t worked every single time. Maybe there are a few rich women out there who don’t fall for your act. But it’s worked well enough. And no one has been able to put it all together until now. You’ve had a pretty good thing going.”
“You’re wasting my time,” Annan said. “This is all smoke and mirrors. What is it that you want from me? A confession?”
“No,” Spengler said. “I want a cut.”
Annan raised his eyebrows. “A cut?”
“Ten percent of the money you took from my clients,” Spengler said. “And twenty percent going forward for any new cons.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought,” Annan said through a grin. “Would your clients be happy with ten percent of their money? Theoretically, of course.”
“It’s not for them,” Spengler said. “I’ve had months to think it through. While I was flying around the country spending my clients’ money, I thought: I’m the one eating fast food and staying at the Flint Creek Motor Court, for Christ’s sake. Isn’t it about time I was able to cash in on my hard work?”
“Ten percent of $18.5 million is $1.85 million,” Annan said. “It sounds like extortion to me.”
“It’s not extortion. It’s my bonus for figuring it all out. Then I go away and tell my clients you just slipped through my fingers as I closed in.”
“And they continue to pay you,” Annan said. “Boy, you do have it all figured out.”
“I spend a lot of windshield time in the car,” Spengler said. “I have plenty of time to think.”
“How would you know, theoretically of course, that another woman lost a chunk of her money?” Annan asked. “How would you know to demand twenty percent?”
“I’d know,” Spengler said. “I’ve got my feelers out and I’ve got your methods down cold.”
“The credit card,” Annan said. “But credit cards can be replaced.”
“With other credit cards,” Spengler said, trying to sound bored. “We know how to track you and what to look for. You really can’t risk using a fake card. Credit card security is just too good these days. So you have to check in using your real ID and a real credit card. You can pay cash for everything else, but that initial transaction needs to be clean or you’ll be found out. If you don’t believe me, you’re playing with fire. I don’t think you want to do that. Twenty percent is a small price to pay when you think about it. You can just bilk the next woman out of ten million dollars instead of nine million. That way, you’re money ahead and everyone is happy.”
Annan laughed and pushed his chair back to stand up. He said, “Mr. Spengler, this has all been an interesting mental exercise and a nice break from putting this house back together. But I think we’re done.”
Spengler was confused. He said, “So do we have a deal or don’t we?”
“Of course not,” Annan said. “Can I offer you another beer for the road?”
He walked across the room to a cooler and opened it. “I’ve got Coors, Coors Light, and Miller. I’ve also got water.”
“What is happening here?” Spengler asked. “Are you insane enough not to make the deal? Do you really want to have your reputation destroyed and go to prison?”
Annan looked up. “Not gonna happen,” he said almost cheerfully. Then: “I hate to tell you that you’re not as smart as you think you are.”
At that moment Spengler lunged across the table for Annan’s phone.
“Put that down,” Annan commanded. But not before Spengler saw a text thread with someone named “Deputy Doug.”
Annan had typed: Need your help. My house.
Deputy Doug had replied: Rolling.
“That’s right,” Annan said to Spengler. “I called the police. They should be here any minute.”
As he said it, Spengler looked out of the huge picture window to see a police cruiser screech to a stop on the street. The side door panel read, ANACONDA–DEER LODGE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. A big man in a uniform launched himself out of the vehicle and jammed his hat on his head while he approached the front door of the house.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Spengler said. He hauled himself up. “You don’t want the cops involved in this. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking,” Annan said to Spengler while he opened a can of Coors, “that you should have stayed in Florida.”
“Look—call him off,” Spengler said in a panic. “You don’t want me telling him what I’ve learned, do you?”
“Go ahead. He knows all about it.”
Spengler felt a wave of sweat break through his scalp. He got it now.
“Call him off,” he said again. “I’ll leave. You’ll never hear from me again.”
“After all your hard work? I doubt that.”
“I’ve got a gun,” Spengler shouted.
“Are you threatening me?”
“No, Jesus. I’m not. I’m just letting you know so this cowboy doesn’t get the wrong idea and start shooting.”
“Then put it on the table,” Annan said as the front door flew open. The cop entered in a crouched shooting stance. Spengler looked straight into the gaping muzzle of his service weapon.
“Mr. Spengler here has a gun,” Annan said to the deputy.
“Good to know,” the deputy said before firing four rapid shots.