Charlie had called in sick that day so he and Tatiana could take a sightseeing cruise. The champagne-pouring, sailor-hat-wearing tour guide was corny, but they both knew this was the closest they could come anytime soon to fulfilling Tatiana’s dream of a real luxury cruise. He thought of the glee on her face – the utter carefree abandon – as they waited among the tourists to board at Pier Eighty-three. The way she pushed her cheek into his hand when he reached for her. The one time he had touched her in public. That’s what Charlie remembered now as he stared at the water.
They had met two months earlier when Charlie drove to the precinct in Brooklyn to debrief a Russian female who had just been arrested for heroin possession and credit card fraud. His friend and supervisor Barry Mayfield liked to say that Charlie “got played” by Tatiana. It was easier for Mayfield to think of it that way – to think of Charlie as the victim instead of Tatiana. In Mayfield’s view, Tatiana had immediately spotted an easy mark.
Charlie used his federal authority to cut her loose from the state felony charges she was facing. But instead of giving cooperation, she gave Charlie fake stories and false promises that led to nothing except the violation of a number of Justice Department guidelines – enough to lose Charlie his job and his pension, if not his freedom. In Mayfield’s view, Tatiana was probably killed by some other gullible horn dog who was sucker enough to fall for her shit. As Mayfield saw it, Charlie was luckier for it, as long as no one ever found out about him and Tatiana.
Charlie understood why Mayfield liked that version of the story, but he also knew it wasn’t true. He remembered the way Tatiana cried during that first interview. He’d seen a lot of suspects – male and female – try to cry their way out of it, but these tears were real. She was in over her head, and she had no idea how to get out.
Russian heroin importers were among the most sadistic, ruthless, and organized criminals Dixon had ever encountered. They also expected loyalty among cohorts, meting out heinous reprisals against those who disappointed. Dixon had flipped a member of the Russian mob three years ago. Six hours after the plea deal was struck, the informant’s wife and three children disappeared from the family’s home. Three days later, eight hack-sawed thumbs arrived in a care package mailed to the informant at his federal holding facility. The bodies were never found, and Dixon’s informant backed out of the cooperation agreement and served his full sentence. Tatiana didn’t want to go upstate but she wasn’t about to double-cross the men who fed her drug habit.
She was in the worst position suspects could find themselves in. She was a stripper-slash-occasional hooker who wanted a television she couldn’t afford. An eager-beaver cop’s search for the flat-screen led to her pop with enough horse to trigger eight years under the state’s Rockefeller sentencing laws. She was just dangerous enough, to men who were just bad enough, that she just might find herself killed. But she didn’t have an established record of cooperation, and she couldn’t corroborate anything she had to say. She was of marginal worth as an informant and was not even close to being the kind of deep player who could earn witness protection as a quid pro quo.
But Charlie got her out of the local charges anyway. He didn’t have it in him to do anything else. Not this time. She was too vulnerable, too needy. She seemed too good, and it had been a long time since he’d used his position to help anyone. So he helped Tatiana. He listened to her. And to reconcile the help he had given her with his obligations as an FBI agent, he had even acted on the limited information she did provide. He set up a controlled buy with a dealer she gave up. He popped another guy walking out of a motel with nearly a hundred stolen credit card numbers.
But, on paper, he didn’t document one word about Tatiana – not the information she gave him, and not the consideration he’d shown her at the Brooklyn precinct. If he did, it would be obvious she got too good a deal for the information she gave. There’d be an inquiry. His motives would be questioned. And someone might figure out that he had fallen in love.
Everything might have been fine if Charlie had ignored the most intriguing piece of information Tatiana provided. This one time, she said, I heard some guys talking about some arrangement they had with a company called FirstDate. Charlie pressed her for more. What guys? What kind of arrangement? Nothing. He should have let it drop. But even with that vague description, he had a theory: Organized criminals had to have a means of washing the proceeds of their criminal enterprises, and it was often legitimate businesspeople who did the laundering.
He couldn’t extract cooperation from the members of the criminal ring themselves, but he figured a man like Mark Stern would make a deal the minute the possibility of federal criminal charges was mentioned. So, nearly three months after he first met Tatiana, with absolutely no evidence to back him up, Dixon went to Mark Stern and told him he was a target. He claimed he had an informant who could document the use of his company, FirstDate, to hide financial transactions for Russian drug dealers.
But, to his surprise, Stern feigned ignorance, and then threw Charlie out of his office. Three nights later, Tatiana was shot in the Vibrations parking lot.
Looking back on it, almost two years after her death, he realized that Tatiana knew more than she told him. Her elusive mention of “some guys” with “some arrangement” was intentionally unhelpful. Tatiana wouldn’t have hidden anything from him, though, unless she were truly terrified. What crushed Charlie the most was the possibility that she was even trying to protect him. She had loved him too, after all. And they both knew that the men she was talking about made the crooks Charlie usually dealt with look like Boy Scouts.
So because Charlie had not let the FirstDate matter go when it would have made a difference to Tatiana, he had vowed never to let it go. He was still trying to figure out how Stern knew his information came from Tatiana. He was also still trying to find a connection between Stern and the men whom Tatiana was wrapped up with. In short, he was still looking for a way to bring Stern down.
Stern had all the signs of a man up to no good. According to his tax returns, he was drawing only a modest salary – modest for a CEO, at least – and had no other documented income. Meanwhile, he and his strictly volunteer-work wife managed to cover the mortgage on their twenty-four-hundred-square-foot apartment, complete with keys to Gramercy Park. They blew thirty grand on a weeklong stay last winter at a five-star resort on Paradise Island. They had a private driver. They were not living on Mark Stern’s salary. A hundred times Charlie had been tempted to turn what he had over to the tax division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. After all, Al Capone had been taken down for tax evasion. But then Charlie would have to explain how he knew so much about Mark Stern. And Stern would remember his meeting with Charlie two years ago. And Charlie would have to identify his informant. And then Charlie’s career would be over. He might even be prosecuted himself.
So Charlie kept waiting and watching, thinking someday Stern would slip up. Charlie would catch him with the wrong person. Figure out who else was involved. He’d make it look like one of them had been cooperating with the FBI all along. It was an old lawman’s trick – find out what you need to know first, then find yourself an informant to take the credit.
He’d used laws intended for terror investigations to get access to Mark Stern’s financial information. He kept up an undocumented informant relationship with a marketing assistant at FirstDate – on federal parole for a little coke habit. He could lose everything but had gotten absolutely nowhere. Up until this week, the only dirt he’d uncovered was that Mark Stern lived above his explainable means. Then, yesterday, out of the blue, his informant called to report that Stern had sent out an office-wide memo about a police inquiry related to the company. And now two NYPD detectives were threatening his mission by asking their own questions about FirstDate.