Chapter11

 

The hall on the sixth floor looked vacant, but something in Ponci’s gut said it was not right.

But the voice in his head kept telling him: “Get out. They are out there. They will come and get you if you don’t.”

“What do you think I’m fucking trying to do?” Ponci growled, easing into the hall with Sara right behind him, carrying a black gym bag in which she had packed the computer and the external drives, as well as a number of small thumb drives,

She wasn’t sure if her brother had meant for her to take them all, so she did. Ponci wasn’t sure either, but figured the more he delivered to the man with the sunglasses, the better chance he had of collecting his money.

She and her brother didn’t want him to give anything to the man with the sunglasses.

“Believe me,” Ponci had assured her. “The only thing our friend is walking away with will be a bullet in his brain.”

But something told him this wasn’t safe, carrying these things, and so he made her carry it.

“Are you talking to my brother?” she asked in a whisper.

“Yes.”

“What does he want?”

“He’s urging us to hurry. He says we don’t have much time.”

“Then we ought to listen to him,” Sara said.

Ponci nodded, then turned in the direction of the service elevator, only for the inner voice to scream: “Not that way.”

“I’m not taking the fucking stairs,” Ponci said.

“The main elevator. Through the lobby.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind? It’ll be filled with people.”

“The more people the better,” her brother said.

“The better to see us.”

“At this point, you want to be seen. They might not make a move on you if you’re seen.”

“All right, all right, we’ll take the main elevator,” he said and turned the other way, Sara trailing behind, looking scared, and more than a little doubtful.”

 

***************

 

 

Miller pinched the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb, trying to ease the rising pain of a headache he knew was inevitable.

His eyes remained closed for a moment, but the vision of the long back hallway through the guts of the hotel with its creepy florescent lighting remained imprinted on the retinas, as did the panicked look of workers who stood at various points, waiting to answer the myriad of questions scrambling police investigators might have. The echoes filled his head like voices of ghosts, and he tried to make out the sound of the ghost he wanted, but knew that it was not there to be found, had long gone, despite its having returned not once, but thrice. Every instinct he had told Miller the ghost could not return again. Whatever it had come to collect this last time it had gotten or not found, and it would move on, carrying its treasure or seeking it somewhere else.

When he opened his eyes, Miller found himself looking down at the dead body of the hotel worker, stiff now in the closet where the killer had stashed him, the bullet hole at the center of a circle of blood that stained the shirt near the region of the heart.

“Let me get this straight,” Miller said, his voice becoming yet one more echo in a world of unending repetition. “Our suspect came down this same hall, twice and no one but this poor fool bothered to stop him?”

“No one thought the killer would come back for a third time,” Ransom said, though his slightly shrill voice sounded as surprised as Miller’s. “But whatever it is that was supposed to be in that briefcase, must be damned important.”

 

 

“It would seem so,” Miller mumbled.

“My guess,” Ransom went on, “is that whoever hired this guy wanted Billman did as well as the contents of that briefcase. Didn’t Billman’s sister say something about it being top secret?”

Miller gave a slight nod, again seeing the tiny red light that had popped up on the monitoring screen outside the brownstone in The Bronx.

His chest began to burn the acid reflex of a churning stomach. But his fingers did not move towards his jacket pocket and the package of antacid he routinely kept there. He felt weak and small again, as he had at the scene of his partner’s murder years earlier, as if things were moving around him he had no way of keeping control of.

“Maybe we should have the apartment upstairs swept,” he said.

“You mean for surveillance?”

“Yes.”

“Do you really want to know?” Ransom asked in a low voice. “If there is, then what can we do about it?”

“Better to know what we’re up against than to operate completely in the dark,” Miller said in an equally low voice. “If this is as bad as I suspect it is, then it might explain why Old Silver Top if flipping his wig.”

“The question is, why wasn’t stuff in the briefcase when our killer came back the first time?”

“You mean when he collected the brief case?”

“Yes,” Ransom said.

“My guess is because someone took it out between his first visit and the second,” Miller said. “And since our friends from the NSA were still monitoring the situation when we got uptown, I suspect they didn’t do it.”

“Then who did?”

“Billman’s sister had the key to the briefcase,” Miller said. “She even showed it to us.”

“You think she took the contents?”

“Let’s go ask her.”

“We can’t,” Ransoms said.

 

 

“Why the hell not?” Miller asked.

“She’s gone.”

“As in walked out?”

“As in taken,” Ransom said. “Apparently when our suspect came back to collect the contents of the briefcase, he also collected her.”

“Are you certain of this?”

“Some of my men reviewed the hotel security camera data. We have several showing the two of them together. We also found the officer assigned to guard her and the apartment tied up.”

“Take me to him,” Miller said.

Ransom nodded, then moved along the hall, weaving through the myriad of people covering yet another crime scene, with Miller trailing him, gaze studying each face as if anyone of them might be the ghost of the man who he had hunted years earlier, knowing none were, but caught up in that same desperate fury of thought and the need to find this man before he slipped from his grasp again – this man, who could come and go as he pleased, do what he wanted, knowing no one could stop him or even see him.

Did he walk through walls, Miller wondered. What power did this man have over other men that he could move among them, killing freely, leaving a bloody trail no one noticed?

The silence between Miller and Ransom seemed exasperated by the echoes of the hall, and Miller was grateful when he got into the service elevator and the door closed off the echoes, leaving the two men embraced only by the hum of the rising car.

 

 

When the doors opened, Miller stopped.

“Is that gunpowder, I smell?” he asked.

Ransom sniffed, and nodded.

“That’s odd, it should have dissipated hours ago,” he said.

“Unless, it’s not from the original exchange,” Miller said, drawing out his revolver, a snub-nose 38 he insisted on carrying, when the model issued was a 9 millimeter automatic. Less nostalgia, than his own comfort. The revolver had never let him down.

Ransom drew his standard issue and both men stepped into the hallway with care.

Everything looked the same as it had earlier, except without the army of police – and it felt too quiet. There should have been police in the hall – especially after what had happened.

“Where are they?” Miller asked.

“I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” Ransom said, and then spoke hurriedly into the radio receiver, which rasped back a moment later.

“It seems we’ve had trouble on the roof. And our people were called from here,” he said.

“What kind of trouble?”

 “Shooting. We’re not exactly clear what transpired. But apparently, they shot someone on the street in front.”

“Our suspect?”

“No, I think not. We haven’t recovered bodies. But there were witnesses who saw two men fall.”

“Are you telling me someone moved the bodies?”

“It would seem so.”

Miller glanced down the hall again.

“The question is, what transpired here?” he said. “Are those bullet holes in the wall?”

“Yes,” Ransom said.

“Careful then,” Miller said as he advanced, while Ransom watched behind.

The first shape appeared near the service elevator behind them, followed by a second coming out of the stairway door at the other end of the hall. The man behind shot first, a puff of smoke with almost no noise, followed by a tearing along the wall near Miller’s head. Ransom’s reply thundered in the hall, but did not better at hitting the mark. The figure vanished back in the service elevator, and the figure near the stairs vanished without firing.

“What the fuck?” Miller mumbled. “Get some help up here. Then come help me check out the apartment.”

Miller moved quickly towards the apartment door as Ransom called for backup on the radio. The door was open slightly. Miller pushed it the rest of the way with the tips of the fingers of his left hand, while keeping his pistol pointed towards a possible intruder inside.

 

But it was a police officer with a drawn gun that greeted him, startled no doubt by Ransom’s return fire, lowering his weapon when he recognized Miller.

“What’s going on, Sarge?” the officer asked.

Miller eased into the room, followed by Ransom who backed in with his weapon still pointed at the hall.

“I’m not quite sure,” Miller said, glancing around. “Has anybody tried to come in here?”

“Anybody? Like who?”

“Like men with silenced weapons,” Ransom said over his shoulder, but keeping his attention on the hall.

“No,” the police officer said. “You’re the first. I got told to stay put when the call came about the shooting up top.”

“Where’s the officer that was on guard here earlier?” Miller asked.

“In there,” the cop said, pointing to the bedroom.

“Cover the door,” he told the cop. “Stop anyone who approaches until they make it clear who they are. Steve, come with me.”

Ransom gave up his position to the cop and passed through the door to the bedroom behind Miller.

 

The police officer, a tall man with black hair and a small scar on his right cheek, glanced up when Ransom and Miller arrived.

Seated in the chair beside the bed, he looked humiliated, and cringed a little when Miller asked how he felt.

“Like shit,” the cop said. “What the hell is going on out there, anyway?”

“Don’t know exactly,” Miller said, moving around the bed. The small window looked out onto the back yards of older tenements and for a moment, he felt swept back into another era when this part of the city was still a living breathing neighborhood rather than the extended campus for two greedy colleges.

When he turned, he looked carefully at the cop, trying to see what that man saw, trying to get some feeling about the man who had made a victim of him.

“What was he like?” Miller asked.

“You mean the man with the gun?”

“Yes.”

“Cold, maybe crazy,” the cop said. “He kept talking to himself, and about voices in his head.”

“The woman was with him?”

“Yes, she kept begging him not to kill me.”

“This was after you let the killer into the apartment?”

The cop looked at Miller, guilt again filling his gaze. “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I thought he was the porter and with the woman inside, I thought someone had sent him.”

 

“And you didn’t check?” Ransom asked sharply.

The cop shook his head.

“Speak up,” Ransom snapped.

“No, sir, I didn’t check.”

“And then what happened?” Miller asked, more softly, feeling as if they were playing good cop/bad cop on a man who didn’t deserve it.

“A few moments later, the woman asked me to step inside.”

“And you did it?”

“Not at first,” the cop said. “I know my job. But I thought she had a problem. The next thing I know, he’s going a gun in my face.”

“He?” Miller said. “The killer?”

“I guess so,” the cop said. “She begged him not to kill me. So he made her tie me up.”

“You got a good look at him?” Miller asked.

“Sure.”

“What did he look like?”

“And older gentleman, graying hair around the temples, stocky, but clearly in shape, except he held his side with one hand.”

“You said gentleman?”

“He was that – even dressed like he was as a bell hop, he looked – well, like he came from class. I saw that he was wounded when he changed clothing.”

“Into what?”

“Some of the soldier’s stuff from the closet.”

“The woman helped him?” Ransom asked.

“Yes, I don’t think she wanted to. There was something else going on between them.”

“You mean that crazy talk about her brother?”

“Yeah, she seemed to believe it.”

“What happened after he got changed?” Miller asked.

“They said something about going downstairs?”

“Out of the building?”

“No, sir, she said she had a suite and he seemed to want to get something out of it before they left.”

 

Miller gave a hard look at Ransom, who immediately stepped out of the room and called someone on the radio.

“Am I in trouble?’ the cop asked Miller.

“No,” Miller mumbled. “If anybody’s in trouble, it’s me. But I’m going to ask you to get back to the station where we can build a composite on this guy. The security cameras were very vague, almost as vague as what we got from the hotel staff. I want to know what this guy looks like.”

Miller existed the room and grabbed Ransom’s elbow.

“Do we know what room she was in?” he asked.

“Not yet, I have our people checking,” Ransom said. “There is a lot of confusion down in the office.”

“No, doubt,” Miller said, pulling out his revolver. “I’m worried about what we might find when we get there. Do we have back up?”

“I’m told there are people on the way, but I wouldn’t pin my hopes on it,” Ransom said. “Our people are on every floor searching for the shooters from the roof.”

“My bet is that they got air lifted out,” Miller said. “But I also think we’re going to have someone to worry about near her apartment. Grab the officer, we may need him.”

 

The three men eased into the hall way, weapons drawn, the still lingering scent of the earlier shooting teasing them, stirring up a nagging fear in Miller, who could feel something wrong around him, something watching and waiting, but could not figure out what.

Ransom, who lead the three in the direction of the stairway, paused, knelt, and then rose holding up the casing to a bullet – but not like a casing to weapons Miller routinely saw.

“I’ll bet almost anything this is Russian made, or Chinese,” Ransom said.

“In either case, it shouldn’t be here,” Miller said as they advanced, Ransom in the lead, the uniformed officer watching behind them, and Miller stuck in the middle, his head turning this way and that until they got through the door.

The scent changed to a lingering scent of old blood. Drips showed on the staircase.

Ransom leaned down, and then reported, “Our suspect no doubt, and not older than a half hour.”

The three men eased down the stairs to the landing.

“Look,” Ransom said, pointing up at a spot where a camera had been located.

“Our friend doesn’t like his picture being taken, it would seem,” Miller mumbled, and then took the lead down the next flight to door to the fifth floor.

 

The hall was a riot of activity, a mingling of police and hotel uniforms caught up in a panicked dance Miller could fully appreciate, since much the same went on inside his head as he tried to sort through the madness that was taking place inside and outside the hotel. And as the Red Sea did for Moses, the people in the crowded hall parted to make way for Miller as he approached the open apartment door.

He said nothing to any of them; and they said nothing to him, until he got inside.

The suite was smaller than the one upstairs, but laid out largely in the same matter with largely the same type of furniture, illuminated by one large overall light in the main room, and several lamps in the slightly elevate wings.

Light glistened on pieces of metal on one of the end tables a few steps down from the door in the main part of the suite.

Miller paused here and looked down. The metal pieces, the table, and the area around showed the white residue of recent dusting. Even in the midst of hell, the tech guys did their bit, he thought.

“What are these?” Miller asked.

“The rest of the pieces from the briefcase locks. We found some in the cab. Our suspect must have had some in his pocket. There a broken knife blade there as well. Most likely what he used to break open the lock.”

“Does this mean that our suspect finally got his hands on the contents of the briefcase?” Miller asked.

“Possibly,” Ransom said. “He didn’t stay here long, and he apparently took the woman with him.”

Miller’s eyebrows rose as he looked at the shorter man.

“Why the hell would he do that?”
”No way to tell until we catch up with them,” Ransom said. “Maybe he was afraid to leave her behind.”

“It can’t be because he doesn’t want any witnesses. He left the patrol officer alive upstairs.”

“Only because the woman begged him not to kill him,” Ransom said. “He apparently needs her for some reason on his own, otherwise, he would have killed the cop and her when he had the chance.”

“He still might intend that,” Miller said.

“I don’t think so. Why take her some place else to do what he could do here much more easily. Especially with all the confusion?”

“Maybe he got interrupted? Any sign of the others coming in here?”

“Not that we can figure. There were no surveillance devices in here. And those in the hall seem not to be functioning at the moment. Even the hotel security cameras went in operative at some point.”

Miller pondered this for a moment, then sighed.

“Okay, he needs her,” he concluded. “Perhaps there’s some confusion over the contents of the brief case. Still it seems a little sloppy, him dragging her along – especially, if he intended another meeting like the one he had in The Bronx.”

“That’s not all,” Ransom said. “We found this in the trash?”

He held up a broken cell phone contained in a plastic evidence bag.

“Hers?” Miller asked.

“Apparently. But broken.”

“Anyway to get anything off it?”

“Not lightly. She removed the card and tried to burn the phone itself.”

“So much for leads,” Miller mumbled.

“We have another,” Ransom said. “Someone made a call from the hotel phone about the time our suspect and the woman were in here.”

Miller felt a rush of hope, the old feeling that he’d had years earlier, like a hound dog finally coming across a scent fresh enough to follow.

“Did you track the call?”

“Yes.”

“Who did he call?”

“A cellular phone,” Ransom said, “registered to someone in the Pentagon. Beyond that, we can’t get anything. Apparently the owner of that number is considered highly classified.”

 

 

“And you can’t get any more information anyway?”

“Not so far.”

Miller stared into space for along time, feeling something slipping away from him, like it had last time.

“Okay, then we need to figure out how the hell he got out of here,” he said finally. “Do you think he flagged down another cab?”

“Not any near this place,” Ransom said. “Everything is locked down, if not by us, then by Homeland Security. They’re all over this place. It seems we’re in the middle of some kind of international confrontation.”

“That might explain why old Silver Top is in such a fit,” Miller said. “Do you think our suspect stole another car?”

“Or left with the one he already stole,” Ransom said.

“Get on that. Put out a bulletin to find out if anyone saw it,” Miller said, and as Ransom started to speak into his radio, Miller grabbed his arm. “Keep it to our people. Don’t use names. Just run the plate.”

Ransom gave him an odd, sideward glance, but nodded. “I’ll have someone call the plate number in from one of the squad cars, and try not to connect it to this. But I wouldn’t hold your breath about keeping it secret long. These guys are not stupid.”

“No, they’re not,” Miller admitted. “But they don’t know the turf, and we might be able to use that to our advantage.”

“To do what?”

“Get to our suspect first. I want him, Steve. I don’t want him shot down by the feds or worse taken away by some national security agency spooks.”