Steal, page 6
“Then we’re back to me,” I said. “I’m the one you’re following.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t recall seeing your badge,” he said.
“No, that’s right. You didn’t see it. That’s because you already know who I am and that I don’t have one. If you thought there was a chance, you’d never hit me with a cocky line like that,” I said. “Human nature, pure and simple.”
“I’m afraid he’s right,” said Elizabeth. “And trust me when I tell you how much it pains me to admit that Dr. Reinhart is right about anything. He’s one of those Ivy League professors. Total fancy pants. Then again, you probably already know that, too. Behavioral psychology. So annoying. It’s like he’s living rent-free inside your head.”
“Yeah, but I still don’t have a badge,” I said. “Agent Needham just showed you hers, though, which means you now have to show her some ID.”
“Yes, and then you have to explain why you’re following Dr. Reinhart,” said Elizabeth.
“Tell him what happens if he doesn’t,” I said.
She gave him a quick head to toe. “He looks like he knows.”
“You should tell him anyway. How long can you detain him for? Is it thirty-six hours?” I asked.
“No. It’s forty-eight hours,” she said.
“Wow. Without charging him with anything, right?”
“Yep. That’s how it works.”
“A whole two days,” I said.
“Only it’s never the days that people remember. It’s always the nights.”
“The nights are the worst. A slab for a bed. A rock for a pillow. Sheets like sandpaper.”
“Who said anything about sheets or a pillow?”
“You get the picture,” I said, smiling at the guy. “Zero stars on Tripadvisor.”
This wasn’t good cop, bad cop. This was crazy agent and the nutty professor. It was also damn effective. The guy didn’t know what else to do—except start talking.
CHAPTER 20
“Okay, okay, I get it,” he said, palms raised. “Only it’s not what it looks like. I mean, it is what it looks like. I am following you, Dr. Reinhart. But he didn’t ask me to.”
He? I should’ve known. “He, as in, Mathias von Oehson?”
“Yes. I work for his firm.”
“As a private detective?” I asked.
“No. No, it’s nothing like that,” he said. “Like I told you, Mathias doesn’t know I’m doing this.”
“So why are you doing it?” asked Elizabeth.
He reached into his pants pocket, removing a sterling silver business card holder. I’m pretty sure the last time I saw one of those was when I was watching Christian Bale in American Psycho. “Here,” he said.
Elizabeth and I were both handed a card. Raised lettering. Nice texture. It even had a watermark. Richard Landau, Chief Compliance Officer, Von Oehson Capital Management.
“I’ve known Mathias for more than twenty-five years. We were at Yale together. I’m the closest thing he’s ever had to a real friend, and I’ve never seen him so distraught.”
Landau folded his arms as if he’d somehow made everything crystal clear for us. In a way, he had. Just not in the way he intended.
“Are you protecting him or yourself?” I asked.
“Both,” answered Landau. “He’s convinced his son is still alive, and the only thing he told me was that he’s hired a college professor to find him. No offense.”
“None taken,” I said. “What more do you need to know?”
“For starters, that you actually know what the hell you’re doing.”
I nodded at his business card. “So this is about compliance, so to speak?”
“It’s more than that,” he said. “Our fund is worth more than one hundred forty billion dollars, and every penny of it rests on the reputation and good judgment of one man.”
I got it. “In other words, Mathias von Oehson can’t be seen as delusional or in denial.”
“And I shouldn’t have been seen at all,” said Landau. “You’re right, Dr. Reinhart. I’m not any good at this.”
“What would happen if Mathias were to discover that you were following me?” I asked.
“To be honest, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t want to find out.”
I glanced at Elizabeth. Your call, said her look.
Civilization as we know it would be nowhere without trust. We tend to remember betrayals most—Jesus and Judas, Caesar and Brutus, Benedict Arnold—but that’s only because they’re outliers. Suspicion isn’t innate. It’s a learned behavior. Just look into the eyes of a baby, if you have any doubt. What’s innate is the desire to believe someone. We want to trust. We need to trust. Every day. Doctors. Pilots. A crossing guard. The elevator inspector.
As well as the chief compliance officer at Von Oehson Capital Management.
What did Richard Landau possibly have to gain by lying to us? The answer seemed to be nothing. So as I shook his hand, confident that his amateur private-detective days were over, I truly couldn’t know for sure.
I’d just been played.
CHAPTER 21
How do you tell a man that his son was engaging the services of a prostitute once a week in his home?
If the man is Mathias von Oehson, you apparently don’t use an expression like engaging the services.
“Do I look like a fucking choirboy, Dylan? Carter was banging a hooker here, is that what you mean?”
“Yes, that about sums it up.”
“The point being, this woman was here the day he went missing?”
“Actually, no,” I said, standing in the massive kitchen of von Oehson’s mansion in Darien. “She apparently wasn’t here. Someone else was instead.”
“Who?”
“A tall brunette in a red Jaguar,” I said. “That’s all I know about her so far.”
Von Oehson had made the trip out to Connecticut, as I’d asked, to show me where he kept his hundred-million-dollar Monet. Now I was bringing news of a mystery woman—and the hope that maybe something in the house could lead us to her quickly. The next NSA download was still weeks away, according to Julian, which meant so was that red Jaguar’s VIN. That was too long to wait.
“When we first talked, you mentioned the alarm system here,” I said. “But I don’t see any cameras.”
“No, my wife thinks security cameras are tacky. We compromised on motion detectors along the perimeter,” he said. “Any room with a window or door to the outside has one.”
“What about your neighbors?”
“What about them?”
“Do they have a view of your property?” I asked.
“I spent about a million dollars on trees to make sure they don’t,” he said. The unintended effect of that flashed across his face. He frowned. “I suppose I’m really paying for that privacy now.”
“It was a long shot anyway,” I said. “The off chance of a witness, someone who saw the woman here. Besides Carter, that is.”
“How do you know about this woman in the first place?”
I told him about Paulina—Carter’s Betty—and how she was basically duped by the tall brunette in the red Jaguar. “At this point, I have no reason to think she’s lying.”
“I’ll give you one,” he said. “She’s a prostitute. I’ll give you another. If she’s been to the house multiple times, she probably knows the layout.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, “how about showing me around?”
When I’d first arrived, I followed von Oehson directly from the foyer into the kitchen. I’d basically seen only two rooms in the house. That left a mere two dozen more to cover, give or take, including the one where he kept the Monet.
“It was in here,” he said, leading me into his second-floor study.
I looked at the only wall in the room that wasn’t floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Practically every square inch was covered by paintings. There was no space to be had for the Monet. Unless.
“Have you already hung something in its place?” I asked.
“As if one could actually replace a painting like that,” he scoffed. But he knew what I meant. “No. It was never hanging on any wall.”
He walked across the room, opening a door. I went over and took a look.
“This is where you kept it? A closet?”
A nearly empty one, at that. There were a few file boxes stacked in one corner. Nothing more.
“I didn’t need to look at the painting to appreciate it,” he said. “All that mattered was that the damn thing was in my possession.”
I understood he couldn’t exactly hang this particular painting in his living room for all the world to see. Still, for some reason I expected him to show me a secret room behind those bookshelves or some other exquisitely hidden place within the house where he and only he could marvel at his conquest. Maybe I’ve seen too many Bond movies.
“Did Carter know about the painting?” I asked.
“Of course not,” said von Oehson.
“I don’t mean the specifics of how you got your hands on it. I can’t imagine you would’ve told him that,” I said. “But it’s not like it was under lock and key here. There’s a chance he saw it at some point.”
“I suppose.”
“It wasn’t boxed up or anything, was it?”
“No. It was wrapped in one of those blankets that moving companies use.” He paused for a moment. “I know I just said I didn’t need to look at it, but, yeah, okay, from time to time I liked to take a peek.”
One of the fascinating things about the human brain is that it often processes information without telling us. We seemingly have thoughts that come out of nowhere, but the reality is that they always come out of somewhere. They’re triggered by one thing or a collection of things that we’ve previously seen or heard, touched, tasted, or smelled.
I’m sure my eyes saw the telescope by the window when I first walked into the room. I suspect I maybe even saw that it wasn’t aimed out the window as one would normally expect. Instead, the lens was turned around. It was facing inside the room. A little strange, if you thought about it. But I hadn’t.
Not until von Oehson uttered the words “take a peek.”
That’s all it took. Like a robot on autopilot I walked over to the telescope and peered through the viewfinder.
“Holy shit,” I muttered.
Von Oehson was convinced that Carter had intentionally said peachy keen in his Instagram post as a way of signaling him. He was sure of it. I was less so. But not anymore.
Carter had sent another signal.
CHAPTER 22
“That’s one smart kid,” said Elizabeth.
That was an understatement. Carter had trained the lens of the telescope on a row of books, with one of the books pulled forward slightly from all the others. Behind it on the shelf was a lowball glass that smelled like tequila, and on the glass were the fingerprints of the tall brunette in the red Jaguar.
The book Carter had chosen? The Glass Menagerie.
The only thing Carter couldn’t know—it was safe to assume—was whether Ingrid Dombrov had a record. That was her name. The tall brunette in the red Jaguar. Then again, Ingrid was a call girl with a proclivity for kidnapping. Or even worse. As gambles go, her having a record was like Bruce Springsteen playing “Born to Run” in concert anywhere in New Jersey. It was a pretty safe bet.
“Yep. That’s definitely one smart kid,” I said.
I stared across the table at Elizabeth. We were in the back booth of a greasy spoon in the Financial District, only a few blocks from Wall Street. I didn’t know why she wanted to meet all the way downtown, but she was helping me, not the other way around, so I didn’t ask.
She’d gotten an old friend from her NYPD days to lift the fingerprint off the glass. It wasn’t as if she could run it through the JTTF lab. From there, it was a simple records check. Ingrid Dombrov had been arrested a year earlier for drug possession. And like that, we had a name and address. Or at least one of us did. Elizabeth hadn’t given me the address yet.
“Is there a reason you’re not telling me where she lives?” I asked.
“Sort of,” she said. “It’s a bit complicated.”
“No, it isn’t.” I was thinking she was still a bit conflicted about how involved she wanted to be. That was fine. I’d give her space. “You give me the address and I’m on my way. You don’t have to come along. Easy as that.”
We were interrupted by our waitress, coffeepot in hand. She didn’t ask if we wanted refills or even look at us. She just poured.
Elizabeth waited for the waitress to walk away before leaning in. “It turns out that red Jaguar isn’t owned by Ingrid Dombrov.”
Okay. So what was I missing? The arrest record had all the information needed. Name, address, even a telephone number. Still, to know Elizabeth was to know there was a reason she was telling me this.
“So who owns the Jaguar?” I asked.
“According to a speeding ticket Ingrid got a few months ago, it’s registered to an LLC called VOG Enterprises. The member information isn’t public, but I did a little digging. VOG stands for Vladimir Oleg Grigoryev.”
“Do I know him?”
“You’re about to. Because the only way you’re getting to Ingrid Dombrov is through him.”
“So he’s her pimp, for lack of a better word.”
“He’s a lot more than that. He’s a pakhan,” she said. I knew the word. A pakhan is a crime boss in the Russian mafia. Elizabeth began counting off on her fingers. “He’s also a weapons dealer, money launderer, and, yes, he oversees a very exclusive escort service.”
“How is it that you know all this about him and he’s not locked up?”
“Because there’s one other thing,” she said.
It was the way she said it. “Shit, don’t tell me.”
She told me. “He’s an FBI informant.”
“I’m guessing a valued one,” I said.
She nodded. “A very valued one. Which is saying a lot these days.”
Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If Newton were alive today, though, he probably would’ve added an asterisk to the law that read, “This does not apply to US counterintelligence, especially with the Russians.” Given their meddling with our elections, the game had changed. For every action there’s now a completely unequal and overwhelming reaction on our part when it comes to informants. We try to turn every Russian on the planet who has any link to Moscow. Because that’s the American way. Go big or go home.
As for me, I was apparently going to go meet Vladimir Grigoryev.
“His apartment is across the street,” said Elizabeth.
That explained the diner choice. “Is he expecting us?” I asked.
“He’s expecting you,” she said. “Not me.”
“So you’re waiting here?”
“I’m not waiting at all. I’m on special assignment for the mayor, remember?”
I couldn’t blame her. “Spa day?”
“I wish. Just a little Christmas shopping.”
“I’ll never tell.”
“That reminds me,” she said. “Our being here right now? You and me? We never were.”
It wasn’t hard to read between the lines. “You’re not the one who set this meeting up with Grigoryev, are you?”
“Nope.”
“Can you tell me who did?”
“Nope.”
Fair enough. I didn’t push. Someone was clearly doing her a favor, a delicate one at that. I didn’t need to know who it was.
“Thank you,” I said instead.
“Don’t thank me yet. Grigoryev is a borderline psychopath with a god complex.”
“So he’s every Hollywood agent.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “Anyone willing to betray his own country—Mother Russia, no less—is willing to betray anyone. Whatever you do, don’t drop your guard around this guy.”
CHAPTER 23
I still didn’t have Ingrid Dombrov’s address when I walked out of the diner. But I did have Grigoryev’s, and that was the only one I needed. Was he connected somehow with Carter von Oehson’s disappearance?
All I knew was what Elizabeth knew. Trying to go through “one of his girls” to find out the truth would be like putting a big fat target on my chest. That’s simply how the Russian mafia operated, especially with a pakhan. Shoot first and don’t even bother asking questions. The fact that he was also a protected FBI informant meant that he might even get away with it, too.
May you live in interesting times, goes the old saying.
The pat down didn’t happen in the lobby. After announcing myself to the young doorman—who looked at me dubiously, as if to ask, Are you sure you want to do that, dude? when I told him I was there to see Grigoryev—I was told to wait a minute for one of Grigoryev’s “associates,” which proved to be the kindest description ever in the history of recorded language for the steroid-addled bruiser in the sleeveless muscle shirt who grunted at me from the elevator when it opened. “Get on.”
We rode up in silence to the twentieth floor, the door opening to a room that clearly hadn’t been designed by the building’s original architect. It was an added layer of security, a holding area. The only furniture, a small bench. Next to it, directly opposite the elevator, was a steel door. A camera was positioned over it.
The associate grunted again. “Spread.”
He frisked me, then nodded at the camera. I was clean. A couple of dead bolts snapped, and the steel door opened to a thick, black curtain.
“Welcome, Dr. Reinhart,” said Vladimir Grigoryev, from behind the curtain. “My apologies for the security. Occupational hazard, I’m afraid.”
I’d come to see the wizard. Accordingly, when the curtain drew back, he wasn’t what I expected.
The accent was a bit rough, but everything else about him was polished, right down to the wingtips. They shined like mirrors. In fact, if it weren’t for the neck tattoos extending up from the button-down collar of the shirt he wore under his three-piece suit, Grigoryev could’ve been a fellow professor in the English department at Yale.
