Red, White and Dead Part 36

Victoria looked with a keener eye around the door and finally noticed a black k.n.o.b on the right. A buzzer? She pushed it. She couldn't hear anything inside.

But then the door clicked open-just like that. No one said anything, no one stepped outside. She pulled the door toward her a little bit and peered around it. Inside, it was dark, and with the sun behind her, she couldn't make out much of anything.

"h.e.l.lo?" she called out. "h.e.l.lo?"

Nothing. But then she heard a distinct clack...clack...clack...Footsteps. Someone's heels. .h.i.tting the floor. She wanted to draw back with anxiousness, but she didn't let herself. She pulled the door open farther and dipped her head inside.

She could make out a hallway now, bare with a gray cement floor and brick walls. A man in a suit appeared next to one of the few lights fastened to the brick. He looked like someone Victoria might see down the street from her, having a drink at the Pump Room. He had dark hair, and the suit was well-tailored. His hands clasped behind his back, he appeared, almost, as if he were a host, waiting for the first guests to arrive at a party.

"Mrs. McNeil?" he said.

She nodded.

"Do you have the money?"

She nodded again, a little tentatively, then stuck her hand in her bag and withdrew the cash.

"Who did you tell?"

"Excuse me?"

"Who did you tell that you were coming here?"

She looked at him. What answer was he looking for? She told the truth. "No one. My son asked me not to tell anyone."

She held out the cash to him. He took a few more steps forward with the clack, clack, clack of his heels on the floor. She moved forward a bit, stepping inside, her arm outstretched, and just then, the door behind her slammed shut.

65.

"W here are we going?" I asked my dad. I'd been paying no attention to where we were driving, but now I saw that we were almost to the exits for the Loop. "I know you said you wanted to ask some questions, but where?"

"WGN. The radio station. If someone saw Charlie get s.n.a.t.c.hed by those guys, we might be able to figure out more about the whole situation."

I looked once more at Charlie's picture on my phone, then stowed it in my bag.

"So, you..." my dad said. But just those two words.

I looked at him. He was simply driving, as if he hadn't said anything. "So, I...what?" I asked.

He shifted a bit in the seat. He'd taken off his jacket. The white cotton shirt he wore was wilted, and there were perspiration stains under his arms. I looked away. It was too human a thing to see.

"So, you..." he continued. "You went to the University of Iowa for college, is that right?"

I glanced at him. "Sounds like you know all about it."

He swallowed hard, kept looking at the road. "I know the facts. I don't know if you liked it."

I stared at the dashboard, then I leaned forward and drew my finger over it. I don't know why. I guess I just wanted something to do, wanted to think for a second. But there didn't seem to be any reason not to respond. "I liked it a lot. I loved it. Iowa gets a bad rap outside the state. People think pigs or corn, but it's idyllic actually. The perfect place to go to college. Great little town, nice people, good football program."

My dad coughed. It sounded like a fake cough.

"What?" I said.

"Well, my family was never into football growing up, but during my masters program and later when we lived in Detroit, I followed Michigan football."

"Oh, for Christ's sake. You mean, I not only have to deal with you being alive, but you being a Michigan fan?"

My father blinked for a second, then we both started laughing.

After a minute, we fell into silence. Then, staring out the front window, not even seeing Chicago, I started telling my dad about how I'd floated through a few majors at Iowa like Pharmacy (too much science) and Leisure Studies (it sounded more leisurely than it actually was), and eventually ended with a Communications Studies degree.

My dad nodded the whole time I was speaking, as if he was gulping up the information. "You do communicate well," he said.

I chuckled. "Thanks."

"And law school? What was that like?"

"Fairly brutal. I mean, during the first year you can barely see, there's so much work, and then it gets a tad easier the second year, and then by the third year when you've just got the hang of it, you realize that you have to find a job and get your b.u.t.t out of there."

"Did you have a hard time finding the job at Baltimore & Brown?"

I looked down at my hands, tapping my fingers together. "You know about that, too, huh?"

He cleared his throat. "Like I said, just the basics, that you worked there."

It felt weird that someone I didn't know, not really, had known all about my life all along. Yet it felt familiar, too, like a recognition inside that I'd always known but never called to the forefront.

"I lucked out by getting a summer a.s.sociate position at Baltimore & Brown," I said. "And after seven months of nail biting they finally made up their minds and gave me a permanent offer."

We kept talking. And it got easier. Even enjoyable.

I was about to ask him some questions when I realized we were on Wacker Drive, not far from WGN, and then all I could think of was Charlie, and I veered the conversation back to today, to what we were facing.

"Okay," I said, "so let's figure out what Dez Romano wants from you. Because if he's not going to be prosecuted by the Feds, then why isn't he just keeping his head down at this point?"

My dad nodded thoughtfully. "He must know that I know more about the Camorra than he does."

"So he wants information?"

"That makes the most sense."

"What kind of information?"

My father shook his head. "I'm not sure."

"We need some dirt on Dez Romano to counter with, something we can use as leverage."

My father nodded again.

The WGN producer, a young guy with prematurely gray hair and frameless gla.s.ses, had a horrified look on his face. He'd agreed to talk to us immediately, and now he walked us outside onto Michigan Avenue to show us where they'd grabbed Charlie.

"We were on the air." He pointed at a gla.s.s wall that looked into a radio studio.

Two guys were broadcasting now. They were talking into their big microphones but looking out at us with curious, somewhat fearful expressions on their faces.

"Everyone is freaking out," the producer said.

"What's the purpose of this gla.s.s around the studio?" my dad asked.

"People watch us while we're live. They walk by all day and they wave, and do silly stuff. Sometimes they hold up signs or something. But this time, these two guys started pounding on the gla.s.s and yelling. They wouldn't stop and you could hear it on air. So I told Charlie to get out there fast and get them to stop."

"Don't you have security for that?" my dad asked.

"Yeah. In the Tribune Building. But by the time I called them and explained the whole thing, I thought it would take too long. I thought these guys were just drunk out-of-towners here for a Cubs game, and I figured it would take two seconds for Charlie to get them to stop."

"But they didn't?" I asked.

The producer threw his hands up into the air. "They grabbed him. It happened so fast, I'm not even sure how it went down. I looked up and saw them hauling him that way." The producer pointed to stairs.

"Where does that lead?" I asked.

"Lower Wacker. There's a parking lot down there, and access to the river." He ran a hand over his anguished face. "I called security and the cops. I couldn't get out here myself because we were on air, and by the time security got out there, there was no sign of him. He was gone." The producer shook his head, looking as agonized as we felt. "He was just gone."

We got back in the car, and the air somehow felt bleak. We hadn't learned anything. We were no closer to figuring out this situation. I looked at my father. His eyes were narrowed as he stared out the front window, looking as if his mind were working hard but failing to find any solutions, anything that would help.

I thought back to when I hacked into Michael DeSanto's computer last year, downloading information from his hard drive. Mayburn and I knew such information wouldn't be usable in a lawsuit or federal investigation, since it was an illegal search and seizure, but Mayburn used the information to get the ball rolling, used it to direct the bank in the right direction to get enough information for a warrant. Once they did, the authorities found the same information under their warrant, information that was then used to charge DeSanto. The thing was, I was sure Mayburn still had that information from Michael's hard drive.

I looked at my dad. "Does your cell phone work here in the States?"

He nodded.

"Can I make a phone call without it being traced?" I was still a little nervous about my phone being tapped, and I didn't want anything to interfere with getting another e-mail from Charlie via Dez Romano.

My father took his phone out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me.

I called Mayburn. "Where are you?"

"Hi, to you, too."

"Where are you?" I repeated.

"Working from home. Paperwork. You still in Italy?"

"Nope. See you in fifteen minutes."

66.

C hristopher McNeil didn't keep journals. He never wrote his thoughts down. He never left any trace of himself. And that was, in some ways, reflective of what had happened to his soul over the last twenty years.

He pulled up to a single family home a few blocks south of Lincoln Square. He watched his daughter exit the car, make a 360-degree turn, looking every which way, and then head inside to meet John Mayburn.

When she was inside, Christopher scanned the area himself, noting the other shingled houses on the street, the nicely manicured lawns. He didn't close his eyes-he never did unless he knew he was safe and nearly asleep-and entered the relaxed state of mind where he could write in his mental journal: I am as flat as a penny. Although I see things outside me in color again, there is little left of me. My child recognized me physically, but no one truly knows me or sees me, because I have all but disappeared. If I give myself up to save my children it will be no sacrifice. There is nothing left to sacrifice.

He exhaled hard, then put away his mental journal.

He and Izzy had decided he would stay outside to make sure they hadn't been followed. So he spent the next thirty minutes in silence, glancing continually in the car mirrors, scanning the streets with his eyes, but it was rote work. For decades now, he had searched for someone that might be following him. It wasn't second nature. It was first.

The front door of John Mayburn's house opened, and Izzy stepped out. She was wearing a black skirt and a teal T-shirt that she had changed into on the plane. She took the stairs fast, and was in the car a second later.

"I think I might have something," she said, talking quickly. "Last year, after I got into Michael DeSanto's computer, Mayburn turned over the original copy of the hard drive to his client, the bank where Michael used to work. Mayburn told the bank and the Feds he didn't keep a copy." He glanced at her and saw her roll her eyes to the roof of the car. "But of course he did. That's so Mayburn. Anyway, most of the stuff is financial, encrypted records of transactions Michael put through for Advent Corporation. I asked Mayburn if he remembered anything in there having to do with Dez Romano, but like you said, there was nothing solid that could tie Dez to Michael or Advent Corporation. So, Mayburn and I started opening all the doc.u.ments on the hard drive and scanning them, trying to see if we noticed anything. But we didn't find anything that the Feds hadn't, but then..."

"Then?"

"Well, I started thinking. If Dez and Michael had formed Advent Corporation so they could run financial transactions through it, maybe they formed other corporations. We got on the Secretary of State Web site and searched for Michael's name and Dez's, just to check, but of course nothing came up. We thought of the name of the lawyer you mentioned, the one who was the registered agent for Advent, so we searched for his name, but you can't search by the names of the agents on the site, only the names of the corporations. So I tried to think like Michael. I kept thinking that now that I know Lucy pretty well and have heard her talk so much about Michael that maybe something would jump out. So we did all the searches I could think of, using Michael's street name or number, stuff like that. And then I remembered from the day I got on his computer that he's a huge Notre Dame fan. Huge. So we started running searches with Notre Dame words."

"Like what?"

"Irish, Fighting Irish, ND, Domer. When we found corporations that used those words we'd look at the information on file and check out the registered agents or the officers. We couldn't find anything at first. It was such a long shot."

"But then you found something?"

"Yep. When we clicked on the name of one corporation called UND, LLC, it showed a registered agent named Paul Crane. We used Google to search for him and he's like the other one you mentioned-a lawyer who incorporates for people over the Internet. But guess who the princ.i.p.al officer was?"

"It couldn't have been Michael DeSanto or Dez Romano or the Feds would have found that."

"Nope. It was Belle Joseph."

"Who's that?"

"Belle is the name of Lucy and Michael's daughter. Josephine is her middle name. I heard Lucy call her by her full name when we were at the museum."

"And by using her name, no one would be able to search for it. They wouldn't know to search for it."

"Exactly."

"Wow." He was filled with awe at his daughter's ingenuity. What would it have been like if he had been with her for her whole life, getting to witness triumphs like this?