The Dread Line Page 3

  “Damn,” he said. “Been a long time since I smoked a Cuban. Where do you get these?”

  “Sorry, Chief. I never betray a source.”

  “Good to know. What do you need from me?”

  “For starters, a peek at the incident report and witness statements.”

  He opened a drawer, extracted a file, and slid it across the desk. “Take a seat in the hall, look it over, and bring it back when you’re done.”

  So that’s what I did. The paperwork told me nothing I didn’t already know. The list of stolen items was not in the file, and the name of the victim had been redacted with a black marker.

  “Questions?” Ragsdale asked as I reentered his office.

  “Who’s the victim?”

  “A filthy-rich dude who values his privacy.”

  “I already gathered that.”

  “The bank manager wouldn’t give you the name?”

  “Nope.”

  “Neither will I,” he said.

  “The guy must have a lot of pull around here.”

  “He does.”

  “Got any leads?”

  “Nothing solid.”

  “How much is the stolen jewelry worth?”

  “Do I look like a fucking appraiser to you?”

  “I’m told you have photos. Can I get a look at them?”

  “No can do.”

  “Come on, Chief. Give me something to go on.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I’m good at what I do—and because some of the people who talk to me would never spill anything to a cop.”

  Ragsdale took a moment to think that over. Then he nodded, fished a cigar cutter from his shirt pocket, and clipped the tip from the Cuban.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’m gonna step outside and have me a smoke. It’s a big cigar, so I won’t be back for a good forty-five minutes. While I’m gone, don’t you go peeking at what I’ve got in my top right-hand desk drawer.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  He rose, tossed me a conspiratorial grin, and shut the door on his way out.

  I sat behind the desk, opened the drawer, and found an unsealed, letter-size envelope. Inside was a flash drive. I slid it into one of the laptop’s USB ports and flipped through twenty-six color photos of what appeared to be very expensive pieces of women’s jewelry. I inserted the thumb drive I carry on my key ring into the computer and copied the files. Then I rummaged through the chief’s humidor, extracted a Perdomo torpedo, and notched the tip with my cutter.

  I set fire to it, put my feet up on the desk, and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. I’d smoked the cigar down to the band by the time the chief came through the door.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Mulligan? Don’t you know there’s a state law against smoking in public buildings?”

  “Must have slipped my mind.”

  “Toss me another San Cristóbal, and maybe I’ll let it slide.”

  “Sorry, Chief. I don’t have any more on me.”

  “Then get your bony ass out of my chair.”

  As he reclaimed his seat, I plopped into the visitor’s chair across from his desk. He glared at me and raised an eyebrow.

  “Something else I can help you with?”

  “There is. What can you tell me about a dog named Crispy?”

  5

  Next morning, I scraped a headless gull from my porch, dropped it into a plastic grocery bag, and tossed it into my trash can. Then I settled into my Adirondack with the morning’s second cup of coffee and watched a tanker plow its way through the chop toward the Port of Providence.

  I was idly wondering what the tabby was doing with the all those heads when the intercom buzzed. Someone was seeking admittance at the electronic gate I’d had installed at the top of my driveway. The rich aren’t the only ones who value their privacy. Bookmakers do, too.

  Going off the grid is next to impossible in our interconnected world, but I wasn’t about to make it easy for strangers to nose around in my business. I used the detective agency as my mailing address, registered my car under the company name, made most purchases with cash, and stuck to untraceable prepaid cell phones. According to the Jamestown tax rolls, my cottage was owned by a shell corporation with no paper trail leading back to me. I’d told only a handful of people where I lived.

  I entered the kitchen, tapped the call button on the wireless intercom, ascertained the name of the visitor, and punched the remote to open the gate. I closed it a moment later when I heard tires crunch on my long crushed-stone drive. I’d just stepped back outside when a red Mazda CX-5 braked to a stop behind my Mustang, and Tracy, the woman from the animal shelter, climbed out.

  As I skipped down the porch steps to greet her, she gave me a wave, opened the rear hatch, and let Brady leap out. The big guy raised his nose and sniffed the air. Then he bounded off at full gallop, scattering a covey of quail in the meadow of saw grass and wildflowers I left unmowed in the long stretch between the street and the house.

  “Good morning, Mr. Mulligan.”

  “Drop the ‘mister,’ and just call me Mulligan.”

  “Not Liam?”

  “Never.”

  “But why? It’s a lovely name.”

  “Bad memories,” I said. “I was named after my grandfather, a Providence policeman who was shot dead on the job.”

  “Oh! I’m so sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago, Tracy.”

  As we climbed the stairs to the porch, Brady barked. He sounded joyful.

  “Let’s let him run for a while,” she said. “He didn’t have much chance to do that at the shelter.”

  “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

  “No, thank you. Do you mind if I have a look around?”

  Before I could answer, she opened the screen door and stepped into the kitchen. I sat back in the porch chair and let her prowl the house. It was a good ten minutes before she returned.

  “I noticed your gun case,” she said, a note of disapproval in her voice. “Two handguns and a shotgun. Do you hunt?”

  “Only humans.”

  “Well, then,” she said. “This is certainly a fine place for a big dog, but I do have a concern. The property is fenced on three sides, but there’s no barrier between the house and the water.”

  As if to make her point, Brady tore around the corner of the house and dashed down the steep grade to my dock, where the twenty-six-foot Sundowner I’d picked up secondhand was tied up. He stared into the water for a moment and then plunged in.

  “I doubt the big guy’s going to drown, Tracy.”

  “Of course not. But he could come out of the water half a mile from here.”

  “Brady, come!” I shouted. He paddled to shore, shook himself, climbed onto the porch, and sat on my feet, soaking my Reeboks.

  I plucked the cell phone from my pocket and placed a call. “Eddie? It’s Mulligan. Yeah, the electric gate is working fine, but I’ve got another job. Can you run about two hundred feet of chain link across the back of my property between the house and the water? And I’ll need a gate big enough to tow my boat through. Sometime next month would be great. Thanks.”

  “Okay, then,” Tracy said. “You’ve got yourself a dog.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What about Crispy? Have you made any progress?”

  “The police chief showed me what he has on the three dog burnings, but it isn’t much,” I said. “Apparently no one saw anything.”

  “Is he going to do something about it?”

  “Not much he can do unless a witness comes forward the next time somebody torches a pooch. Chief Ragsdale is mad as hell about this, Tracy. He likes dogs. Has two Border collies of his own. But you were right. It’s not a high priority for him.”

  “Is there anything you can do?”

  “No guarantees, but I’m going to look into it.”

  “How?”

  “Creeps who torture animals are usually teenagers,” I said
. “When they get older and wiser, most of them stop because they’re afraid of getting caught.”

  “What about the ones who don’t stop?”

  “Some of them graduate to human prey.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Yeah.”

  “How does knowing that help us?”

  “Maybe I can get some of the kids around town to talk to me. One of them might have heard something.”

  “Forgive me for being blunt,” she said, “but are you really going to do this, or are you just trying to get out of paying the hundred and fifty dollars for Brady?”

  I opened my wallet and drew out three hundred in cash. “Here,” I said. “Use this to help pay Crispy’s vet bills.”

  * * *

  When she was gone, Johnny Rivers heralded a call from McCracken.

  “Morning, boss.”

  “Any progress on the bank heist?”

  “A little,” I said, and filled him in. “The gunman knew how to avoid the security cameras, so he must have spent some time casing the place.”

  “Or had an accomplice do it for him,” he said. “Be good if you could wrap this one up quick, because we just landed a major client.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “The New England Patriots.”

  “Really? What do they want?”

  “Don’t know yet. A couple of front-office types are coming down for a meet early Monday afternoon. Can you make it?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  After we finished up, I sat at my desk and printed the color photos I’d downloaded from Ragsdale’s computer. Then I carried my laptop out to the porch and did an online search for society events held in Newport the weekend before the bank heist.

  I found only one, a fund-raising soiree for the Newport Preservation Society. It had been held at the Breakers, the seventy-room monument to bad taste and conspicuous consumption that New York Central Railroad chairman Cornelius Vanderbilt II erected in the 1890s.

  Attendees and the organization’s official photographer had posted a lot of photos. As I flipped through them, Brady climbed onto the porch and rested his head in my lap. It took me nearly a half hour to find what I was looking for.

  6

  “I directed that bitch not to give you my name,” Ellington Cargill said.

  “Directed? Unless you own Pell Savings and Trust, Mildred Carson doesn’t work for you.”

  “It’s not currently among my holdings,” Cargill said, “but perhaps I should arrange a hostile takeover so I can have the pleasure of discharging her.”

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “I didn’t get your name from her.”

  “From that bumbler Ragsdale, then?”

  “Not him, either.”

  He reached for the beaded pitcher of martinis on the bamboo table beside his Lake Erie–size swimming pool and refilled his stemmed glass. He didn’t offer me a drink. He hadn’t offered me a chair, either, but that hadn’t deterred me from claiming the seat across from him. I grabbed the pitcher and helped myself, even though I didn’t care for martinis.

  “Impudent bastard,” he said.

  “It’s genetic. I come from a long line of impudent bastards.”

  “So if not Carson or Ragsdale, who?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It does to me,” he said.

  “A couple of days before the robbery, your wife wore the diamond and emerald necklace to the Newport Preservation Society fund-raiser. I spotted it in a photo of the event posted on the organization’s Web site.”

  “Ah.… But wait a minute. How could you have identified the necklace as one of the stolen items?”

  “Private-eye trade secret.”

  “So you’re not going to tell me?”

  “No.”

  Neither of us was making a good first impression.

  I loathed Cargill even before I met him, my opinion colored by what I’d learned by researching him on the Internet. He’d inherited a hundred million dollars from his oil baron father and parlayed it into two billion by mastering the sort of financial manipulations that had crashed the economy at the close of the George W. Bush administration. Despite the head start he’d had in life, he imagined himself a self-made man. The Jamestown house was one of five he shared with his third wife, a Brazilian-born supermodel twenty years his junior. In a recent CNBC interview, he’d ridiculed concerns about America’s growing income gap, branded the poor as lazy and not deserving of help, and proclaimed that calls for higher taxes on the rich were the moral equivalent of the Holocaust.

  In a just world, Cargill would have looked like Charles Montgomery Burns, the hideous skeletal billionaire from The Simpsons. Instead, he bore a disconcerting resemblance to that tall, smug Hollywood liberal, Alec Baldwin.

  * * *

  Earlier that afternoon, I’d filled Brady’s water bowl, locked him in the house, driven to Cargill’s mansion on Highland Drive, and parked on the street near his gated driveway. I climbed out and pushed the buzzer at the gate, but there was no response. As I turned to leave, the gate rolled open, and a black Ferrari convertible with a young man behind the wheel burst out. As the gate began to close, I slipped onto the grounds, admiring the distinctive shriek of the Italian car’s monstrous engine as it sped away.

  I hiked eighty yards up the paving-stone drive, climbed the steps to a massive front door that would have looked at home on Westminster Abbey, and rang the bell. A liveried butler opened the door, informed me that Mr. Cargill was not receiving visitors, and ordered me to remove myself from the premises. Instead, I strolled around to the back and found Cargill drinking by the pool, a woman I took to be his trophy wife sunning topless on a nearby chaise in the warmth of a day that felt more like late August than early October.

  The woman spotted me, removed her sunglasses, and gave me the once-over, not bothering to cover herself. Her husband followed her gaze, startled, and pulled himself to his feet.

  “Who are you, and how the hell did you get in here?”

  “My name is Mulligan. I’m a private detective. The bank hired me to investigate the jewelry robbery.”

  “Get out.”

  “As soon as you answer a few questions.”

  “Yuri,” Cargill shouted, “please remove this intruder.”

  That’s when I noticed him, a tall, well-muscled young man in a beige Italian suit dozing in the shade of a dogwood tree. He roused himself, glided to his feet, swaggered over, and clamped his right hand on my shoulder. I stomped on his instep, grabbed his right wrist, and twisted his arm behind his back. Then I bulled him to the pool, tossed him in the deep end, and seated myself at Cargill’s table.

  “Impressive,” Cargill said.

  “Not really. My resistance took him by surprise.”

  Yuri was hauling himself from the pool now. I’d humiliated him in front of his boss, and the scowl on his face said he intended to do something about it.

  “Get out, Yuri,” Cargill said. “You’re fired.”

  Yuri squeezed pool water from his dirty-blond ponytail and took a step toward us.

  “Out,” Cargill said.

  The hired muscle hesitated, then lowered his head and trudged off.

  “A bit harsh,” I said, “don’t you think?”

  “Not at all. I don’t pay bodyguards to be taken by surprise.”

  “Bodyguards? You mean you have more than one?”

  “Of course.” He smirked and added, “Doesn’t everyone?”

  We were sitting across the table now, sipping martinis and taking measure of each other.

  “It would be in your interest to talk to me,” I said. “I’m your best chance of getting the jewelry back.”

  “I don’t much care about that.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. The items have no sentimental value, and they are fully insured. I can’t tolerate someone stealing from me, however. I want that son of a bitch behind bars.”

  “Well, then, I’m your best chanc
e for making that happen, too.”

  “I doubt that. My chief of security is on it. He’s a former treasury agent. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “Is he from Rhode Island?”

  “No.”

  “Then he doesn’t know the players here. I’ve got a huge head start on him.”

  Cargill pursed his lips, thinking it over. “His name is Ford Crowder,” he said. “Give me your card, and I’ll have him give you a call. Perhaps the two of you can put your heads together.”

  “What about the insurance company? They stand to lose a lot of money from this, so they must have their own investigator working the case.”

  “I’ll have him call you as well. Are we done?”

  I shook my head. “Who knew you’d be going to the bank that morning to access your safe deposit box?”

  “My wife, Fabiola, of course. And my son, Alexander.”

  “How old is Alexander?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Was that him behind the wheel of the Ferrari that screeched out of your driveway a few minutes ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could anyone else have known?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “What about the household staff?”

  He paused to consider that.

  “I suppose it’s possible one or two of them could have overheard Fabiola and me discussing it.”

  “How many people are we talking about?”

  “Seven.”

  “I’d like their names.”

  “Ask Crowder.”

  “What about members of your security staff?”

  “I didn’t inform them of my plans.”

  “Did you take any of them with you to the bank that morning?”

  “Yuri drove me.”

  “But he didn’t accompany you into the bank?”

  “I had him wait in the car.”

  If Belinda Veiga’s description was accurate, the bodyguard was about same height as the robber. “When you finished telling your story to the police and returned to the car,” I said, “was Yuri by any chance wearing a brown sweatshirt?”

  “Certainly not. I require my personal staff to be properly attired.”