Travis Starnes
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Family Ties (John Taylor #5) - Chapter 11
🕑 Added 2020-07-24 15:34:52 +0000 UTC
The sun was still peaking around the edges of the thick motel curtain when Taylor woke up. Turning, he found Whitaker already awake, propped up on one elbow, staring at him.
“I missed this,” she said once he looked up at her.
“Me too.”
She rolled over, draping her body over half of his, her head nestled in the crook of Taylor’s arm.
“Have you talked to Kara since you’ve been here?”
“A couple of times.”
“She’s going to be thrilled.”
“She’s going to accept it as us coming to our senses and take it in stride.”
“Maybe. Any luck figuring out what you were missing in the video.”
“No. It’s still right out of reach.”
“Then let’s call Kara now.”
“Sure,” Taylor said.
Whitaker rolled off him, and both began to pull on clothes.
“Hello?” Kara’s said, answering with the cautious tone of someone not recognizing who was calling them.
“Hey,” Taylor said.
“What number is this?”
“A disposable Whitaker’s using for the time being.”
“You found her?” Kara said, her voice suddenly getting excited.
“Yep,” Whitaker said.
“Will you be coming home soon?”
“Not yet,” Taylor said. “We have some things to take care of first. You might not be able to get a hold of us. Things have gotten a little tricky, so I’m going to have to keep my phone shut down for a while.”
“Can I be calling you back on this number?”
“No, since we’ll also keep it off unless we have to, but we’ll call you from it or another disposable when we can.”
“So you are in trouble again, yes? Switching phones to stay hidden?”
When he didn’t answer, Whitaker looked up at Taylor.
“John?”
“Kara, sorry, we have to go. We’ll call you again in a few days.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice sounding a touched concerned at Taylor’s tone. “Be careful.”
“We will. Bye,” Taylor said.
He disconnected the cell phone and dropped it on the bed, getting up and moving the few steps to the rickety hotel desk, opening the laptop, and powering it on.
“You figured it out?”
“Yes.”
Taylor pulled up the video and brought it back to the frame he’d been looking at earlier.
“What was it?”
“One of those things you register but never think about. I was around Graf for a while, and he made a lot of calls. He used a pretty new smartphone, capable of all the crap people use it for these days. He’s a busy guy who has to stay in touch.”
“Okay,” Whitaker said, not sure where Taylor was going.
“Look at that,” he said, pointing at the image of Graf, cell phone to his ear, looking up at the camera.
“It’s a flip phone,” she said, understanding creeping into her voice.
“Yep. A crappy flip phone, and not even one of the later flip phones. Look at it. It’s a piece of crap prepaid flip phone, the kind that you couldn’t even get in a mobile store. You’d have to find that at a discount store or convince store. Hell, I bet it was one of the options you could have gotten instead of that,” he said, pointing at the disposable Whitaker held in her hand.
“So he has two phones. A lot of cops have two phones. Usually, a personal phone and one for work.”
“Yeah, but he’s an important guy. You saw his townhouse. It might not have been downtown, but it wasn’t in that bad of an area either. He wouldn’t be going to a discount store to get his personal phone. He’d want email and internet and all the bells and whistles. That thing can barely do calls and texts.”
She stared at the image, nodding slowly.
“So, where does this get us? We already know he’s dirty, so of course he has a burner.”
“True but remember he’s about to walk through that door and murder Freida. He’s not making routine calls at a moment like that. People who are about to murder in cold blood like that, they’re focused. Look at his face. Serious. Determined. He’s either making arrangements or telling the people he’s working for that he’s about to do the deed. Either way, the person on the other end of that phone is connected.”
“Damn, you’re right.”
“What’s more, we know where he was when he made the call, and the exact moment it was made, down to the second. We can use information from the nearby tower and find out what number he was calling. It’s probably another burner, especially if he’s making arrangements for the body, and not calling to report to whoever he’s working for. He didn’t know you were going to be back so soon. He might have hoped to just make the body disappear. If the family was dirty, they might never report her missing. She didn’t have a lot of friends, so they might have thought she could just disappear. You’re showing up screwed that up, forcing them to scramble. I'll bet if we look at the same area within a few minutes of you walking in the front door, we’ll find another call, probably to the same number, calling off whatever he told them.”
“I have a friend that might be able to get that information for me,” Whitaker said.
“Call them.”
Whitaker scooped up her burner phone and dialed as Taylor looked back at the screen into Graf’s eyes as he stared up at the camera, trying to get into the man's head. Taylor tried to work through how he would have done it if he was Graf. Would he have paid someone to come sneak the body out and clean the apartment? The family could have told the building she moved to a home. Being family, and the people paying her bills, they could have ordered her mail forwarded to him. The whole thing would have quietly disappeared. Everything he’d found suggested Frieda was a shut-in. There hadn’t been friends to talk to. It’s why the old woman had been so desperate for someone to help her get justice for Fredrick. He’d been her only friend.
Whitaker stopped pacing the room and dropped the phone on the bed.
“My friend said she’d check and get back with me. She said it might take some time since that’s a busy area with a lot of calls. Even knowing the exact moment, tens of thousands of people live in the area of that one tower. She’s going to weed out all the ones that belong to real people. She pointed out in a downtown area with that kind of population, even a higher-end one like that, there might be other prepaid phones in use at the same time.”
“Did you tell her to check for ones that made a second call ten minutes or so later to the same number?”
“Yes, but I told her if she didn’t find it, to just give us the information on all the prepaid phones making a call at that time.”
“Good, although I’m dead certain I’m right. It doesn’t make sense he’d call his bosses before the deed was done. No, he was making arrangements to pick up her body. Telling them, he was going in and to give him ten minutes. Five minutes later, he leaves, and a minute after that, you walked in. He had to hurry to keep his clean up guys from running into you. There was a second call.”
“We’ll see. We should call Joe.”
“Keep it short.”
She dialed Solomon’s cell phone, not wanting to go through the switchboard, which would have taken time and put them on Bureau records that could be a problem if the Germans officially asked for help. If it was just to his cell phone, it gave Solomon more options to avoid handing anything over, if he chose to cover for them.
It was a risk, of course, since he wouldn’t answer if he was in a meeting, and there wouldn’t be a secretary to tell him the call was urgent. Thankfully, Solomon did answer after a few rings.
“Joe, it’s Loretta,” she said when he picked up.
“Whitaker, what the hell’s going on out there? Is Taylor with you? We got a notice this morning that he tried to kill Lieutenant Graf and currently has an arrest warrant out for him, too.”
“I’m here,” Taylor said.
“You two need to start explaining.”
“Graf’s dirty,” Whitaker said. “We’re positive he was the one who killed Freida Wissler and are pretty sure he, or whoever he’s working for, had Fredrick Wissler killed, too.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Not enough. We have a video of him walking into Freida’s building about seven minutes before I came back and found her body. He left that out of the video he showed you.”
“That’s not enough. He could say he was visiting someone else.”
“I know. We’re working on getting proof,” Whitaker replied.
“The fact that he said she was the only person seen entering into the building within the time of death and never mentioned he was there in that window says a lot,” Taylor said.
“I agree. The German government filed a formal request for any information on the two of you two hours ago. They also included something about you shooting up a university.”
“We didn’t shoot up anything. We just... needed a diversion,” Whitaker said, looking at Taylor.
“I’ll slow everything down on our end as much as I can, but you two be careful. If you hurt someone, it doesn’t matter if Graf’s dirty, the Germans will want your scalps.”
“We know,” Whitaker said.
“I hope so. They’ll forget petty stuff to sweep him under the rug, but only if you have enough to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that he’s dirty. Do you know who he’s working for? Can you get at him that way?”
“We have some ideas,” Whitaker said, “but it’s all conjecture and wild ass guesses. If it’s who we think it is, though, they’re going to be a lot harder to get to than Graf. We have a plan to get him, which should be enough. We just need some time.”
“I’ll do what I can. I’ll also see if I can get an official request for you to be turned over to us if you're apprehended.”
“They’ll never go for it,” Whitaker said.
“Probably not, but it’s worth a shot.”
Taylor looked over at Whitaker and said, “We could use some support, though. We’ve basically just got the clothes on our backs. If we’re going to make this work, we could use transport.”
Joe was quiet for a long time, long enough that Taylor thought he might have asked for too much.
“I’m friends with the Berlin station chief. They’re used to doing some fairly shady shit. I can probably get them to part with some stuff, no questions asked. If we were to leave a car for you, where would we put it?”
Whitaker gave him an area a few miles from where they currently were.
“Call me back in an hour, and I’ll let you know if I can swing it,” Solomon said and hung up.
“He could have someone put a tracker on the car,” Taylor pointed out as Whitaker shut the power off on the phone.
“He could. Knowing Joe, he might do so, even if he doesn’t plan on handing the information over to the Germans.”
“What, to keep tabs on us?”
“Yeah. He’s a big believer in ‘just in case’ information, even on his friends.”
“A dangerous habit for a man in politics.”
“A necessary one. Joes’ a good cop, but he’s not beyond working leverage to get what he wants. Don’t worry, I know how to check a car for a tracker.”
“I hope so. So now we wait.”
“Yep, now we wait. We can’t do anything until I call my friend back in two hours. Even then, there’s no guarantee she’ll have the information we need, yet. She has to be careful. If her employer knew what she's doing, she’d be out of a job.”
“What to do in the meantime,” Taylor said, looking suggestively at Whitaker.
“I think I have some ideas,” she said, leaning into him.
Whitaker’s friend came through, when they called her two hours later, in the form of several spreadsheets showing activity to the Graf’s burner phone along with the activity of the numbers that phone had called, all uploaded to a secure cloud drive. It actually turned out better than they could have hoped. The phone that Graf was using was activated the day before Fredrick’s death, which was suggestive in, and of, itself. It had only made two calls until the day Frieda died when Graf started ramping up his usage. Once Taylor had returned with him, Graf’s usage exploded. Taylor could almost track everything they’d done just by looking at the calls that number had made.
There was a call while he was checking out Whitaker’s original hotel room after they found the invoice for the storage locker and another a few hours after they’d been jumped at the locker, probably to see if the third gunman had survived unhurt. There were calls a few hours before the shootout with Grace Sharp and another minute after it ended. There were also a flurry of calls after Whitaker rescued Taylor from Graf’s apartment.
It was all very suggestive, but still circumstantial, and not anywhere near enough to bring down a police lieutenant. Two numbers got used often. One Taylor recognized as the Wissler family trust offices. That wasn’t a surprise either, since they were the only people that made sense as the people really behind Fredrick and Frieda’s deaths. Graf had clearly only been a functionary, and there wasn’t any reason for him to want the couple dead. They were also untouchable, for all intents and purposes.
Caldwell had only managed to get him a low-level meeting, and she was almost a shoo-in to be the next President of the United States. They had connections and money, the two things that let people at that level get away with literal murder. The only thing they’re terrified of, is the spotlight.
The other number was more interesting. It always showed up in pairs. A single call never picked up, followed by a second call five minutes later lasting anywhere from a few minutes to almost an hour. Everyone followed the same pattern. A signal that a call was coming in followed by the actual call five minutes later.
These seemed paired with calls to the family trust, at least some of them. Graf would talk to someone at the Trust, and then, within twelve hours, he’d do the two call routine to the second number. Not every call made to the Trust was followed up by the two call number, but every call to the two call number, followed a call to the Trust.
“What do you think? Graf getting instructions from his bosses and then passing those on to a subordinate?” Taylor asked as they poured over the data her contact left her.
“No, the pattern’s wrong. If that was the way it went, you’d see the calls after the calls that look to be instructions to Graf. Look, there’s the call the day before Fredrick died from the Trust, but no call to the second number. The same day he killed Frieda. The calls to the second number are after calls to the Trust following an event. There’s a pattern. He calls the Trust, Fredrick dies, he calls the Trust again, and then the second number. Same with Freida. Trust call, Freida’s murdered, another Trust call, and then a call to the second number.”
“This one,” Taylor said, pointing to one of the sets of outgoing calls, “Is right after we were jumped at the storage locker. There isn’t a first call. We’re jumped, a call to the Trust, and then the second call. So it breaks the pattern.”
“I don’t think it does. I think that’s him getting paid. He gets the order to kill Fredrick, gets the job done, reports success, checks on his money. He didn’t get orders about the files I hid because the Trust didn’t know about them. He told them after he destroyed them and was paid for his service.”
“Maybe. It’s the only thing that makes sense. These other calls,” Taylor said, pointing to the numbers that were less regular, “are all over the place. I’m betting those are to his men, who are regularly changing burner phones. The Trust feels safe, they know they can’t be touched, so they don’t take any precautions.”
“This guy,” Whitaker said, pointing at the two call number, “is using a burner, but isn’t taking precautions. Always on the same towers, never changes numbers. Someone who doesn’t feel safe but isn’t used to taking the same measures as the rest. Their ancillary, involved in criminal activities, but only peripherally. They aren’t hardened criminals themselves.”
“So, a money person.”
“Maybe. Could be some other kind of support, but the pattern suggests Graf is getting paid, and probably arranging payment to his people.”
“So, what do we do with this?”
“My friend said she can narrow down the area based on the strength of the signal to the tower, but it still leaves us a four-block area. This is where things fall apart. We can’t go knocking door to door.”
Taylor stared at the numbers, thinking the problem through. Looking at the calls out to random numbers. Looking at the calls out to the Trust. Looking at the calls to the money man.
“How confident are you that this is the banker,” Taylor said, pointing at the two call number.
“I’m making guesses, but it’s what makes sense.”
“If this is the banker, then he’s going to be calling them again soon. We need to be in this area and wait for the call. You’ll have to leave the burner on, so your friend can call us when a call to it is being made.”
“It’s still a five-block area inside the city. Half the people we’ll see on the street will have cell phones. Half of those will look like money people, in suits or whatever. A cell tower won’t tell us the specific spot a burner with no GPS is specifically in that five-block area we’ll find him. We’ll be looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“I think I know where he’ll go to take the call.”
“How.”
“Another guess, but look here,” Taylor said, pointing at the columns of data. “This is a couple of months before Fredrick’s death. There’s the banker’s number, but no second call.”
“Maybe he could pick up on the first call.”
“Not quite five minutes later, there was a call to Graf’s phone from a cafe in the target area.”
“Doesn’t mean anything. The cafe call lasted less than ten seconds. Maybe it spooked him, and that’s why there wasn’t a second call.”
“I don’t think so. The next day, around the same time, there the two call pattern happened. I’ll tell you what I think happened. He called, the banker took a walk for privacy, but couldn’t make a call for whatever reason. Maybe the battery died. Maybe the cell towers crapped out. Whatever reason, he called Graf back from the café phone instead of the burner phone. Graf freaked, told him to never do that again, said he’d call him tomorrow and hung up.”
“You can’t know that. Plus, even if that’s true, it doesn’t help us.”
“Sure, it does. Numbers guys like this, like things consistent. Always the same coffee on the way in from the same place. The same pattern of places for lunch, in a rotation. I’m betting he goes to the same cafe every time to sit down and do whatever he needs to do for Graf.”
“That’s barely even a guess, but okay, say you’re right. How do you know he’ll be calling again soon?”
“Look at the patterns. Since you pulled me out of the apartment, there have been a ton of calls to all these random numbers, all marked as disposable prepaid phones. These are his guys, looking for us. A team at the ready to come take us out. He did the same thing here when he identified and got onto Sharp’s trail. All these calls, ending around the time Sharp was killed and not starting up again until hours later when you rescued me. There hasn’t been a call to the Trust for a few days, not since he got your files, and hence no corresponding call to the banker. These guys are all out working, there’s been a shootout, and I’m betting no money has gotten paid out.”
“Why would he payout now? Wouldn’t he offer some kind of bounty for the person who finds us and payout then?”
“He probably has, but he’s had to bring on more people. Look at the different phones he’s calling every few hours. The numbers almost doubled. He’s brought in more people. New people. They’re going to need some money to keep the hunt going, and the longer we’re in the wind, the more people he’s going to feel pressured to call in. I’m betting he’s worried, with all the activity. The Trust hasn’t called him yet, Graf’s a real proactive kind of guy. He’s going to want to have the answers they’re going to ask for before they call him. He can’t just keep bringing on people indefinitely with the promise of a bounty. He’s going to need money to pass around, and he’s too smart to keep that kind of cash on hand or to be the guy actually doing payoffs. It’s why he has a banker. There will be a call, and it will be soon.”
“So if the two call guy is his banker Graf might be calling him soon to arrange payments for people he might have out on the street. If he takes the call, it might be at a cafe where we could be on hand to find out who the banker is. There are so many conditionals in that you can’t even call it a plan. If even one of those guesses is wrong - which is likely considering how much of a leap you had to make, to get to them - then we’ll be right back where we are, now. You’d have to be insanely lucky for that to actually work out.”
“What else do we have? Sometimes, luck is all you have.”
“We are screwed.”
“What else do we have?”
“Fine, if we’re going with this insanity, then we should get moving. I’ll call Joe and see if our ride’s ready. Then we can find somewhere in that area to hole up until my friend calls.”
To Taylor’s surprise, Joe was ready for them when they called, saying the car and some supplies would be in place within the hour. If they left now, Taylor figured they’d be at the car within a few minutes of it getting dropped off.
“I’ll go pick it up and come back and get you,” Taylor said, walking towards the door of the room.
“The hell you will.”
“This could be a trap. If both of us go and get picked up, we’re done. If one of us is still out here, there’s a chance.”
“Joe’s not going to sell us out.”
“Are you willing to bet your life on that? That’s exactly what we’d be doing.”
“It’s no riskier than the rest of this plan. If you think the call is going to happen soon, then we don’t have time to wait, unless you’re ready to admit this plan isn’t going to work.”
They stared at each other, each refusing to back down.
Finally, Taylor said, “Fine. We both go, but one of us stays out of sight while the other checks out the car.”
“Fine. Let’s go.”
