You have to understand that, for most of us, this job is a non-stop horror show. Every day we’re working on ideas to contain some truly nasty stuff. And we do it so that someday we aren’t in biohazard suits walking through some American town watching people die and knowing there isn’t much we can do about it. But Heinz? You never got that vibe from him. You always got this feeling that, if the shit ever really hit the fan, he’d be trying to wrangle a seat on the first chopper in just so he could watch.
On the other hand, Heinz’s record was spotless. Honorable discharge once he hit his twenty years, solid career with one of the big pharma companies after, and everybody there thought the guy was just swell. Of course, he had been the brainchild behind one of those boner pills that made the joint a few hundred zillion dollars, so everybody they talked to probably owed Heinz for half the bounce in their stock options.
But Heinz had always been a lab guy, not a C-suite player. Good money, but not Bill Gates money. They’d pulled his finances apart, and if you plugged everything into a spreadsheet, then this Heinz wasn’t living beyond his means, not so that you could prove it. But he was living on the edge. The very edge. And the last couple years, when the economy had tanked and everybody else in the world had pulled their belt in a couple notches, Heinz had gone right on spending.
Nothing you could take to court, but it sure felt like he’d picked up an extra income somewhere. So that had Munroe suspicious. That and Heinz showing up dead. Dead guys always made Munroe’s nose twitch.
CHAPTER 62
The next morning, Lynch and Bernstein were out in Aurora.
“Nice place,” Lynch said. He and Bernstein were shaking hands with Perez in the lobby of the new Aurora PD headquarters. Bright, airy, lots of windows, more like some corporate HQ than a cop shop.
“Yeah,” said Perez. “Just moved in a couple months back. You don’t get the nice digs in the city?”
“Asbestos, lead paint, Seventies linoleum,” said Bernstein. “All the modern conveniences.”
Perez wound them through the building back to Jenks’ station. The IT guy. Black slacks today, expensive-looking white shirt, some kind of linen thing but without the wrinkles. Jenks walked them through what he had.
“First, you gotta understand we’re going to be pulling this apart for months,” said Jenks. “He didn’t keep much on his local drives – looks like just whatever he had cooking at the time – but he was a bitch for backups. Had a floor safe, pretty high-end piece we had to cut. Backups going back three years. Just scratched the surface on those.” Jenks pulled out a file from a drawer, set it on the desk. “Start of an inventory in there. He had the backups sorted by the name of the subject he was tracking.”
“OK,” said Lynch. “What about these shots of Hardin?”
“He had three Hardin files,” said Jenks, “and pretty much the same stuff in all of them. So he had three customers interested in the guy, and he was just reselling the intel.”
“Can you tell who the customers were?” Lynch asked.
“I can tell where he sent the stuff,” said Jenks. He clicked at his terminal for a minute. “OK, here’s customer number one. Gmail account in the name of John Smith, so that’s bullshit, right? But I looked at the IP addresses where this account pulled down the data Lee sent. You get a few outliers, but mostly you get the Starbucks downtown at Wells and Madison and you get another Starbucks up in Highland Park. So whoever it is, they’re making an effort to say off the grid, keeping it public so you can’t tie it to them.”
“Not trying hard enough,” said Bernstein. “Gerry Ringwald’s office is across the street from one of these Starbucks, and he lives in Highland Park.”
“Who’s Ringwald?” asked Jenks.
“Corsco’s lawyer,” said Lynch. “Any way we can tie it to him more directly?”
Jenks shrugged. “He’s working remote – could be a laptop, could be a cell phone, could be an iPad or something. If he still has the device he did the download with, then I might be able to tie the data to the box. Might even find the files on there.”
“OK,” said Lynch. “Who else you got?”
“Customer number two, the first few hits were in Juárez, so you have to figure that’s Hernandez. Then those start bouncing around. Picked up mail here in Aurora a couple of times, a couple spots in Chicago, all around the area. They’re moving around, sticking to public access Wi-Fi, so I can’t track this back to any base of operations.”
“Same deal?” asked Lynch. “We catch them with the right laptop, we can tie them in?”
“Yeah,” said Jenks. “Now, customer number three. This guy’s picking up his mail all over the 19th arrondissement.”
“The what?” asked Lynch.
“Paris,” said Bernstein. “The Arab quarter, actually. Where they had the riots back in 2005.”
“So that’s al Din,” Lynch said.
“Or his handler,” said Bernstein.
“Or his handler’s cutout,” said Jenks.
“Any of these guys do business with Lee before?” asked Bernstein.
Jenks nodded. “He’s sent stuff to the IP address in Juarez before, the Highland Park address, the Paris, so my guess is yeah.” Jenks spun his desk toward his chair, started clicking away on his keyboard. “Something else I wanted to show you,” he said. A slide show of pictures started on the monitor. Stein. Leaving his house, leaving his office, parking at the Stadium. “Part of a file that went to your Paris guy two weeks ago.”
Little snort from Lynch. He opened the file on Jenks’ desk, ran his finger down the list of names that identified the files Jenks had inventoried. Wide out for the Bears that just got his ass handed to him in a divorce, real estate developer everybody thought had the Block 35 deal tied up before he got low-balled by an out-of-town player, and Mike Lewis.
“Can you pull up what you got on Lewis?” Lynch asked.
“Sure,” said Jenks. “Sounds familiar.”
“County board race last year,” said Lynch. “Remember, that Kroger guy, inherited the seat when his old man keeled over after the primary? Got a little carried away on the patronage, even by Cook County standards? Lewis was the good government candidate that looked like he was going to win the primary, right up until he dropped out a week before the election.”
“Now I remember,” said Jenks, scrolling down his screen, clicking on this and that. “Real mysterious. Family issues or something.”
“That’s the guy,” said Lynch.
“OK, here we go,” said Jenks. Lee ran the file. Lewis leaving his townhouse in Printer’s Row, hailing a cab. Couple shots of the cab, tracking it through town, Lewis getting out of the cab at Belmont and Broadway, Lewis walking north and west. Lewis ducking into the Steam Room. Maybe an hour later, Lewis coming back out, another guy with him, the two of them walking a bit west before picking up another cab, the cab dropping them off at the Marriott on Michigan.
“What’s that about?” asked Jenks.
“Steam Room’s a gay bath house,” said Lynch. “Lewis is Mr Family Man, some kind of deacon at one of the black churches. Looks like he was playing on the down low. Hurley, Kroger, or probably one of their guys, they put the eyes on him, knocked him out of the race.”
Silence for a second, that sinking in.
“How many files does he have?” asked Bernstein.
“Haven’t cataloged everything yet,” said Jenks. “So far, better than three hundred.”
Lynch’s cell rang. Starshak.
“Looks like it’s your day for the burbs,” Starshak said. “When you’re done in Aurora, head for Highland Park.”
“Highland Park?” Lynch asked.
“Somebody offed Ringwald. And his family.”
CHAPTER 63