Poskanzer shrugged. “I… I didn’t agree to this.”
“Got it. So noted. Now, let’s say I get proof. Then where do I go with it?”
“You take it to the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility. Hold on.” He swiveled his chair and batted out something on his keyboard. “Okay, here’s their website, okay… it says… here we go: Jurisdiction… yada yada ya… investigate allegations of misconduct by law enforcement personnel. Yep, these are the folks you want.”
“And they’d really go after a couple of DEA agents? Not just cover it up?”
Poskanzer exhaled a long sigh of what sounded like frustration. “Here’s the deal. This is what they do, investigating official misconduct. But they won’t open an investigation unless they think they can win it. Which brings us back to proof. You don’t have any.”
“Not yet,” Danny said, and he stood up. “But I will.”
He’d gotten three secure texts from the DEA agents demanding to meet. They wanted the photos, the ones he’d failed to get in Aspen. He’d avoided their texts.
But he was ready to see them now.
61
In front of the Hancock Tower, Danny grabbed a cab to Government Center.
He still hadn’t answered the DEA agents’ text messages. He wanted to surprise them. Catch them off guard. Provoke them into making threats again, if need be. Anything.
The afternoon sun was melting the snowdrifts. Water seemed to be dripping everywhere. A truck plowed through an immense gray puddle on Cambridge Street in front of One Center Plaza, splashing everything within ten feet, including Danny’s shoes and socks. He cursed aloud.
Standing outside the ugly façade, he took out his iPhone and selected one of the recording apps. He recorded a sample and played it back. It seemed to work fine.
Then he started it again and began the recording: “My name is Daniel Goodman,” he said. “I live at 305 Marlborough Street in Boston, Massachusetts.” He gave the date and the time. Keeping the recorder on, he slipped the phone into a front pocket. For evidentiary purposes, Poskanzer had told him, he had to make one continuous uninterrupted recording.
He took the elevator to the second floor. His cell phone rang. He saw BATTEN SCHECHTER on the caller ID. Jay Poskanzer.
He debated taking the call. Then decided against it. He’d already begun the recording by stating his name and the date and time. The iPhone was recording. He could talk to Poskanzer when he was finished with the DEA.
He found room 322 and recognized the stain on the carpet. This was definitely the place.
He turned the knob and pulled the door open and looked to the left. The receptionist, strangely, wasn’t at her desk. The L-shaped mahogany-laminate desk was still there, but that was the only piece of furniture in the reception area. The row of chairs was gone. There was an empty cardboard box on the floor. The DEA seal, which had occupied a place of prominence on the wall, was gone. So were all the Most Wanted posters.
No.
“Hello?” he called.
He advanced farther into the room, pulled open the door to the inner corridor where he’d met with the DEA men.
It was empty, too.
A snowdrift of Styrofoam peanuts across the hallway. Another empty cardboard box. The wrapper from a ream of Staples copy paper.
Nothing here. No one.
The quietly bustling office was no more. It had been disbanded, broken down like a stage set at the end of a run.
He stood there, dazed, looking around. His cell phone rang. Batten Schechter again. He picked it up.
He knew what Jay Poskanzer was going to say before he said it.
“Hey, what’s the deal?” he said. He sounded angry. “I talked to my pal at the US Attorney’s office. There’s no special agents named Slocum or Yeager on the DEA payroll. They used to work for DEA, couple of years ago. But no longer.”
62
Danny felt a coldness settle over him, icy tendrils reaching inside, freezing and palpating his guts.
If they weren’t DEA, then who were they?
Maybe they were real DEA agents using cover names. That was certainly a possibility. He’d covertly taken a picture of one of them, Slocum, and he mailed it to Jay Poskanzer and asked him to forward it to the DEA. The real DEA.
Poskanzer called back twenty minutes later. “It gets better,” he said. “These guys used to work for the DEA in Mexico, in Nuevo Laredo, and got caught up in a corruption sting. They each got fired seventeen months ago. They’re bad apples.”
“Well, they made pretty convincing DEA agents.”
“Probably because they’ve had practice. Question is, what’s their game? What are they up to? What are they doing it for?”
Danny didn’t reply. He didn’t know.
But he would find out.
His cell phone chimed: a secure text message. “Hold on,” he said. He held it away from his ear, read the message.
From AnonText007@gmail.com: 6 p.m. Home Depot parking lot, South Bay.
South Bay was a shopping center between the South End of Boston and Dorchester, just off the Southeast Expressway.
“Slocum” and “Yeager” were ready to meet.
63
Wallace Touhy’s knees hurt like hell.
When the doorbell rang, he got up from the couch and lumbered to the front door. It took him a good minute or so. He groaned. He’d planned to hold off on the knee replacement until he retired, but now he wasn’t so sure he could make it another four months. The soft knee brace didn’t do a damned thing, and the steroid injections were worthless. He gobbled Motrins like popcorn. His doc told him if he lost thirty or forty pounds, it wouldn’t hurt so bad, but he knew better. It was those four years of serious wear and tear, playing football for the Billerica Memorial High School Indians half a century ago. That was what did it. Everything else was just the cherry on the cake.
“Agent Touhy?”
The man at the door was tall and lanky and appeared to be Hispanic.
Touhy elbowed the storm door open. “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Come on in. Hernandez, right?”
“Thanks for seeing me.”
“I don’t know if it’s gonna be worth your while, but okay.” He flapped a hand toward the living room. “I’d make coffee, but believe me, I’m doing you a favor not making it. Your stomach will thank me later.”
“Oh, that’s perfectly fine,” the man said. “I suspect you’ll enjoy this more than coffee anyway.”
He handed Touhy an elegant box containing a fine bottle of whiskey.
“Pappy Van Winkle, huh?” Touhy’s mouth came open.
“I hope my intel was accurate. I’m told you love bourbon.”
“I do.”
“That’s a small-batch bourbon that’s-”
“I sure as hell know Pappy Van Winkle. Just never had it before. Can’t find it around here. Awful generous of you. This is a first for me.”
“They were out of the twenty-year, but the fifteen’s supposed to be quite smooth.”
“Much obliged, Agent Hernandez.”
“David. Please.”
“All right, David. Have a seat over there. I’ll get us a couple of glasses.”
Touhy broke the seal on the bourbon bottle and glugged a couple of fingers into two highball glasses. He hobbled over to the visitor and handed him a glass. “Neat okay?”
“The only way.”
Agent Touhy looked easily a decade older than his fifty-seven years. His white hair had a yellowish tinge to it. He had a large, jowly face. His cheeks were taut and shiny and scarlet, evidence of a bad case of rosacea, though years of heavy drinking might have broken a bunch of capillaries, too.
A large flat-screen TV was on, some sort of reality show about two men fighting to survive in the Amazonian jungle.
“So,” Touhy said, sinking with a deep sigh into his favorite chair. He reached for the cable remote and hit the MUTE button. “Any reason this couldn’t wait till tomorrow?”