The entries were brief and unrevealing. Val did not record the names of her clients, just times and places. On the night she was murdered, she’d had two appointments, one at eight o’clock at the Four Seasons, the other at eleven o’clock at the Ritz. It wasn’t out of the question that one of these two “clients” had followed her home after an assignation and murdered her. The possibility couldn’t be ruled out.
Had Valerie Santoro been murdered because someone had discovered she was an FBI informant? If so, was it one of her clients? Valerie’s information had helped Sarah make two major OC cases; quite likely she’d been the victim of an organized-crime hit.
Sarah was one of a handful of women in the Boston office, and for some reason she hadn’t become friends with any of the others. Her closest work friend was her partner and podmate, an immense grizzly bear of a man named Kenneth Alton, who was speaking on the telephone. He waved at her as he sat down. A computer junkie who’d gone to MIT, Ken had long hair, hippie wire-rimmed glasses, and a great protuberant belly. He probably weighed over three hundred pounds and was always on a diet, always sipping Ultra Slimfast milk shakes. He wasn’t exactly what the public expected to see in an FBI agent, and he’d never make management. But he was valued for his extraordinary computer skills, and so his idiosyncrasies were tolerated. J. Edgar was probably spinning in his grave.
Sarah had been with the FBI for almost ten years. Her father had been a cop who hated being a cop and had urged his only child to avoid law enforcement if it were the last job on earth. Naturally, she went into law enforcement and married a cop, in that order.
Though for the last several years she’d been working Organized Crime in Boston, her main interest was in counterterrorism, where she’d developed something of a reputation within the Bureau while working the Lockerbie case.
A Pan Am jumbo had exploded in the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, at 7:03 p.m., resulting in the death of 270 people. The FBI launched SCOTBOMB, the largest international terrorist investigation ever, conducting fourteen thousand interviews in fifty countries.
Sarah was a single mother-Peter had moved out by then-living in Heidelberg, Germany, with a sick infant. Jared, then four months old, had developed a bad case of bronchiolitis. Neither baby nor mother got any sleep. The first several weeks in Heidelberg Sarah spent in a state of complete sleep deprivation. It was a trying, exhausting time, but it was where she had made her bones within the Bureau.
She’d been assigned to interview the friends and families of U.S. soldiers who’d been stationed at the base at Heidelberg to see whether any might have been targets. The days were long; they usually weren’t done until nine at night. The Army provided a command post and a secretary for dictating reports.
Each investigator was assigned one victim. You had to follow up all connections to that victim, all friends, even casual contacts. In the process, you couldn’t help digging up dirt. One victim had been cheating on his wife, another was in financial trouble, another was using drugs. Were any of these problems connected to the bombing?
Sarah became a sponge, soaking up information, rumors, overhears. It soon became apparent that the answer was not in Heidelberg.
The important forensic work was going on elsewhere. Sarah began to hear details through Bureau channels. The bomb had consisted of a plastic explosive and a timing device concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette recorder, which had been placed in a Samsonite suitcase. The suitcase was traced to Air Malta flight KM-180, from Malta to Frankfurt, then transferred as unaccompanied luggage to Pan Am 103A from Frankfurt to Heathrow. There it was transferred to container AVE-4041 on Pan Am 103.
Then she learned that a fragment of a green circuit board, part of the timing device, had been identified.
Sarah asked and received permission to do some digging into the matter of timing devices-who used what, what had been used where. This was pure scut work, and it wasn’t her “ticket,” as they say in the Bureau, but she had gotten reluctant approval to search.
All the intelligence on timing devices was on-line at the Bureau. There was a match. The circuit board was similar to one used in an attempted coup in Togo in 1986. It was also similar to one seized at the Senegal airport in 1988.
That was her contribution, and although it turned out to be crucial, at the time she had no idea where it would lead.
But the timer was eventually traced to a Swiss company, Meister et Bollier Limited, Telecommunications. In 1985, it turned out, twenty of these timers were sold to Libyan intelligence.
And the case was cracked. Her file reflected a “contribution above and beyond.”
But when her Heidelberg tour was done, she found that there were very few Counterterrorism slots in the United States open and none in Boston, which she still considered home-and where, by the terms of her custody agreement with Peter, she had to live. So she’d requested a transfer to Organized Crime, and there she’d been ever since.
She called a few informants, worked a few leads. For almost two hours she filled out forms, wrote up a few 302s, or interview reports, did the paperwork that takes up most of an FBI agent’s work, got caught up. She called the airport and talked to a member of an FBI surveillance team on a case that was all but wrapped up.
Then a thought occurred to her, and she picked up the phone. Fortunately, Ted answered the phone; Peter was out of the squad room.
“Can you pull Val’s phone records, or should I?” she asked.
“Already did.”
“You’re kidding me. You got a subpoena that fast?”
“I’ve got a friend at New England Telephone Security.”
Sarah shook her head, half in disgust and half in admiration. “I see.”
“Oh, don’t tell me you feebees always play by the rules,” Ted replied. “Phone company’s impossible to deal with through channels anymore, you know that.”
“So what’d you find?”
“According to her local phone records, at three forty-four in the afternoon of the day she was killed, she received a three-minute call.”
“So?”
“So she wasn’t at home at the time. Between three and quarter after four, she was at a salon on Newbury Street called Diva. Take a look at her appointment book. Both her hair stylist, a guy named Gordon Lascalza, and her manicurist, Deborah something, placed her there then.”
“You’ve never heard of answering machines?” Sarah said.
“Oh, there’s messages on her answering machine, all right,” Ted replied. “Three messages. One from the owner of the Stardust Escort Service, a Nanci Wynter. Her madam. And two from creditors-Citibank Visa and Saks. Apparently she didn’t like paying her bills, or she was short of funds, or both.”
“And?”
“None of them remotely approached two minutes. Also, they were received between five o’clock and six-thirty. They also match up with her phone records.”
“So you’re saying that Val came home after her haircut and manicure,” Sarah said, “played her answering machine, and rewound, right?”
“Exactly,” Ted said.
“And whoever called her at three forty-four that afternoon and left a long message-we don’t have that message, because it was recorded over by later messages.”
“Right.”
“But you know who placed the call, right? From the phone records?”
Teddy hesitated. He was not a good liar. “According to the phone records, that three-minute phone call Valerie Santoro got on the day she was killed came from a cellular phone, a car phone. Registered to a limousine-rental agency. The limo company has twenty-some cellular phones in its name, probably all installed in the cars it rents out.”
She nodded, sensed he was holding back. “Did you already talk to the limo company, or should I?”