I retrieved the envelope from the floor and opened it. There were photographs inside. I went through them slowly while Joe looked over my shoulder. In the first picture, Dan Beckley was in a car, talking to a woman on the sidewalk who wore stiletto heels and a short red skirt with black fishnet stockings. In the next, he was passing her money, and then she was in the car, her head buried in his lap. In the final photograph, she was out of the car again, walking away, while Beckley sat in the driver’s seat.
I slipped the photographs back into the envelope. “So that’s how it went,” I said. “Hubbard sent you photographs of you with the hooker, and you made the deal?”
He shook his head. “Can’t prove it was him. All I got were the photographs and a little Post-it note with the price he’d offered me written on it. The message was pretty clear, though.” He looked down at the desk. “I got a wife and a son. I didn’t want them seeing that shit.”
“Did you call Hubbard on it,” Joe asked, “or did you just agree to the deal?”
“I didn’t call him out, but we both knew what was going on.”
I dropped the envelope back on his desk. “Thanks for your time, Dan. And don’t worry, this isn’t going to leave the room.”
He flipped me off and kept his eyes on the desk. Joe and I left. The Chinese man was still yammering at the clerk, who looked ready to strangle him. He shut up when Joe brushed against him, but he was back at it when we reached the door.
We sat in the truck, and I started the engine but didn’t shift out of park.
“So that’s what Weston was doing for him,” I said. “No wonder the guy has such good luck with business deals.”
“Explains why Weston didn’t appear to be a legitimate investigator,” Joe said. “He was just a well-paid extortionist. Hubbard probably gave him plenty of business.”
“If Weston had been doing this for a while, it would add to the list of people who’d have liked to kill him.”
“What about the Russians?” Joe said.
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. “Yes. What about the Russians?”
We sat there for a while, and then I said, “We could go back to Hubbard, confront him with it, and see what he gives us.”
Joe shook his head. “I don’t like that. Not yet, at least.”
“All right. So what now?”
“Back to the office. Let’s take another look at those faxes from Amy and see who else Hubbard might have been putting the squeeze on. Then we’ll give Agent Cody a call.”
I pulled out of the lot and started to drive, then realized Joe was looking at me.
“What?” I asked.
“Just thinking about you pushing Beckley back there,” he said. “You’ve got some kind of instincts, LP.”
“Lucky guess,” I said.
Back at the office, the telephone message indicator was blinking. Joe checked the voice mail while I browsed through the faxes from Amy, writing down all the names she’d associated with Hubbard in recent months. I had a list of seven names by the time Joe hung up the phone. His face was thoughtful.
“Who was it?”
“Cody,” he said. “He had his guys check the plate on that green Oldsmobile we saw yesterday.”
“Yeah?”
“Plate’s not registered to the car.”
“It’d be too easy if it were. Maybe I should ask the Russians for the VIN number. They’ve been eager to help me so far.”
He frowned. “I don’t think this guy is with them. Why’s he camped outside their house if they’re associates? You ask me, he’s working against them in some capacity. And he’s definitely interested in Weston.”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it.”
“Uh-huh.” He tapped a pencil on the desk and stared at the wall. “The plate was reported stolen from South Carolina, though. Two days ago, Cody said, in Myrtle Beach. That’s a hell of a drive.”
“If he drove. Could have stolen the plate beforehand, then flown up here, rented a car, and swapped the plates to cover himself.”
“Now why’s a guy from Myrtle Beach come to Cleveland with a phony badge to question Weston’s neighbors? And how the hell does he know about the Russians? Even if he flew in, according to the license plate he couldn’t have been here for more than two days. So we can assume he knew about the Russians beforehand.”
“Knew what?”
He shrugged. “Something, anyhow. He’s asking the neighbors about the night of Weston’s death. Why?”
“Another investigator?”
“Who’s he working for, then?”
I sighed and shook my head. I didn’t have any answers. A dull ache had crept into my shoulders, and I rolled them slightly, trying to relieve the tension. I needed a good workout, or maybe a massage.
“What do you think of Agent Cody?” Joe asked.
“A Bureau boy, through and through,” I said. “Smart, flashy, cocky. And probably full of shit.”
He nodded. “That’s what I think, too. I don’t know if he lied to us last night, but I’m sure he didn’t tell us everything he knew. He says the FBI took over this investigation just because Weston’s name came up on a wiretap? Bullshit. There’s got to be more than that involved.”
“Do you think we should tell him about Dan Beckley?”
“I don’t know. Our first duty is to John Weston. The FBI can make it awfully hard for us to get anywhere with this case if they don’t like where we’re going with it. I don’t want that to happen.”
“We can assume Weston was working for Hubbard, providing him blackmail material to use in his business negotiations,” I said. “Hell, he’s pretty active in city government, too. There’s no telling how many secrets Weston gave him over the years.”
“Enough to make some people mad enough to kill him.”
“Sure. But where do the Russians fit in, then? I can see dozens of people willing to whack Weston for extortion if they caught him, but not many of them would involve his family. That sounds more like a mob tactic.”
“And then we’ve got this guy in the green Olds,” Joe said. “I’m thinking maybe he’s FBI after all.”
“Cody said he wasn’t. And Swanders was pissed about it, when we told him the guy was flashing a badge and claiming to be CPD.”
“Uh-huh,” Joe said. “I believe Swanders is clueless, but I wouldn’t put it past Cody. You know how the Bureau protects their agents, especially if they’re undercover. If he didn’t want to claim the guy as one of theirs, he wouldn’t hesitate to lie about it. And it wasn’t Swanders who left the message about the license plate being lifted in Myrtle Beach. It was Cody.”
“You’re saying he lied about that, too.”
“I’m saying he could have.”
We could have continued throwing questions and complaints about the case at one another for an hour or two, but it wasn’t going to get us anywhere. Joe asked to look over the faxes from Amy again, so I passed those over, and, for lack of a better idea, I pulled out the small case file we had and began to look through it. The contents weren’t particularly awe inspiring: the notebook of recollections from John Weston, the folder of background on the Russians I’d taken from April Sortigan, and notes from my conversation with Deputy Prosecutor James Sellers. I read through it all again, searching for something I might have overlooked originally or for something that might have new meaning after our recent discoveries. I didn’t find much. Sortigan’s file wasn’t especially helpful, just basic notes from her court research. There was nothing I hadn’t already committed to memory, but I read through it anyhow.
My eye caught on a telephone number written on a yellow Post-it note and stuck to the outside of the folder. I tried to remember if it was related to the case or just a personal note she’d neglected to remove when she gave me the file. Then I remembered. Sortigan told me Weston had instructed her to fax information on the Russians to that number while he was out of town.
I turned on the computer and logged on to the Internet. There are a number of good databases for reverse lookups that take a phone number and match it with an address, or vice versa. I went to my favorite of them and typed in the number, then clicked the search button. A few seconds later the database reported there were no matches. I wasn’t surprised. The databases are effective only for listed phone numbers, and most fax numbers aren’t listed.