blue binder. “Do Not Remove. Property of Smith Barney.” He flipped it open. Names. Telephone numbers. Pages and pages and pages of leads. Smuggled out and sold to Northstead for cash that had been stolen from previous victims. Tacked above on the cubicle wall were scripts for pushing new stocks. One was for a company promising renewable energy using a process the brokers weren’t allowed to disclose and, Gage suspected, didn’t exist.
Headlights swept the window, backlighting the closed blinds. Gage snapped off his flashlight and ducked down. Headlights once again. This time bearing down. Then off.
Gage reached for his cell phone. Tiptoe’s number was set for redial. “A car pulled up.” He crawled to the window and peeked out. The driver’s door opened. A man stepped out. His starched white shirt glowed in the parking lot’s halogen lights. Black hair. No more than thirty-five. Six foot two. Broad-shouldered.
Must be one of the brokers, Gage thought.
Then the passenger door opened. A woman. Blond. A walking centerfold, but hair a mess. She reached into her purse. The parking lights of the car next to his flashed.
The broker steadied himself on the hood of his Lexus as he made his way toward her. He opened her driver’s door, then reached his arms around her. His hands groping under her skirt, reaching between her legs. She giggled and pushed him away. She slid into the car and he staggered to the sidewalk, rocking side-to-side, and watched her drive away.
The broker turned toward the office entrance, keys in hand.
“Tiptoe,” Gage whispered into his cell phone. “He’s coming in.”
Gage ducked back into a cubicle just a second before the office exploded with light.
“It’s me.” The slurred voice was speaking into a phone. Words coming out as “Itch me.” “Sorry. I had to work late…Dinner meeting with a client…yeah…it was Kovalenko’s idea. Fucking slave driver.”
Kovalenko. Kovalenko. Kovalenko.
The name rocketed around in Gage’s head. Burch’s face came to him first. A bull’s-eye encircling it. Only then did an image appear: Semion Kovalenko, an East Coast gangster.
Wait. That can’t be right. Isn’t Semion Kovalenko dead? Who’s he talking about?
“Yeah,” the broker said, “at the office to get some papers…gotta take a pee, then I’ll be home.”
“He’s coming your way,” Gage whispered into his phone.
But he wasn’t.
Gage heard the thud of the man staggering against the corner of the first cubicle. “Son of a bitch.” Then a laugh and “I’m fucking wasted.” The voice was moving closer.
Gage glanced around the carpeted cubicle. The desk and chair and filing cabinet occupied half the space-and Gage filled most of the rest.
The metal joints of the cubicle walls creaked when the broker pulled on it to maintain his balance as he worked his way down the aisle.
Gage knew he couldn’t fight him. Their combined four hundred pounds crashing into walls, buckling partitions, and shattering windows would leave an irreparable battlefield-and send Kovalenko-or whoever he really was-on a hunt for the invader.
The carpeted wall bulged out as the man grabbed on to it just a yard away.
When the broker stopped again to steady himself, Gage snatched a pen off the desk and tossed it in a high arc toward the glass partition behind the receptionist’s station. Gage sprang to his feet as the man turned toward the sound of metal clicking against glass, then stepped up behind him. He locked his hand over the man’s eyes and clamped the crook of his elbow across the man’s neck. The man tried to pry away Gage’s hands and punch at Gage’s head, adrenaline rushing to overwhelm the alcohol that had deadened his brain-but not enough. The broker finally went limp. Gage lowered him to the carpet.
Tiptoe’s head peeked from the far hallway and he pointed at the light switch by the door. Gage shook his head, then met him halfway, next to the glass partition.
“The guy’s car is in front,” Gage said. “Anyone driving by will think he’s working late.”
Tiptoe glanced down the aisle toward the body. His eyes widened. “You didn’t…”
“He’ll be okay. Hopefully, tomorrow morning he’ll just think he passed out.” Gage picked up the pen, then looked back toward the hallway. “What did you find?”
Tiptoe shrugged. “Not much. The cabinet drawer in the storage room with the SatTek label is empty, except for one file. I photographed everything inside. And there were a few folders mixed in with some others in a drawer called Cambridge Investments. The only name I saw was for a guy named Verona, from Nevada. His name was also on some papers for something called Golden West Properties. It owns cars with this address on the registration.”
Gage pointed at the storage room. “Keep searching.” He then headed down the aisle toward what appeared to be the manager’s office. An image of Burch’s face in the bull’s-eye once again appeared in his mind. Then his stomach tensed. Kovalenko.
He called Alex Z. “Do a news archive search for me. Semion Kovalenko. He was involved in a Russian organized crimes stock scam in New York.”
He stepped into the boss’s office, but didn’t turn on the light. He scanned the desk with his flashlight. Stacks of correspondence.
“Alex? It’s not Semion, but Yuri.”
Gage inspected the sparse room as he listened to Alex Z’s keystrokes in the background. No pictures on the walls. No filing cabinets. No diplomas or broker’s licenses. A high-back leather chair and two smaller ones that looked like they’d been salvaged from a skid-row dentist’s office. No computer on the Office Depot desk. Just a twenty-line phone and an adding machine. Gage opened each of the drawers in turn. Nothing about SatTek.
Finally, Alex Z spoke. “I found it. A Business Week article. Three years ago. Yuri is Semion’s brother and was the muscle for the operation. Says here the broker-dealers were terrified of him. Semion was murdered just before he got indicted and Yuri did almost twenty months for refusing to testify.”
“In the fraud trial?”
“No, in the trial against the guys who gunned down his brother…looks like he got shot, too.”
“An old-school gangster. Any kind of testifying is snitching.” The almost bare office now struck Gage as a stage set. A way for Yuri Kovalenko to tell whoever sat across the desk that he had nothing to lose-so don’t cross him. “He must’ve terrified Matson, too.”
“Hold on. It looks like there’s a link to another story…Jeez…the bodies of the killers were found dismembered in Central Park two days after he was released from jail.”
CHAPTER 22
O ceanside’s Pleasant Acres wasn’t near the ocean, wasn’t pleasant, and had no acreage beyond the legally required ten-foot strip between it and Good as Gold Pawnshop on one side and Nguyen’s Nail Salon on the other. And it didn’t strike Gage as the sort of place a stockbroker would expect to spend his declining years.
“Albert will be so pleased to have another visitor,” the receptionist said to Gage. “And you are?”
She was a fleshy middle-aged black woman wearing a yellow shift. Reading glasses hung from a “What Would Jesus Do?” lanyard. Her off-kilter name tag, riding high on huge and structurally supported breasts, said “Dolores B.” She seemed thrilled to have outside company.
“I’m Mr. Ward’s nephew. This is my first chance to get to this part of the country in years. How long has he been here?”
“He came right about my birthday. So about twenty-three months.”
“Then happy birthday.”
Dolores beamed. “Thank you kindly. I hope he remembers you. Even if he doesn’t he’ll be so pleased to have a visitor.”
She turned a sign-in book toward him. Gage wrote in the name Gary Ward.
“He’s out in the patio,” she continued. “Just go down that hallway.” She pointed to her left. “There’s a sliding glass door near the end. He’s dressed. We get them dressed every day, you see.”
Gage walked down the corridor, counting six rooms and a nurses’ station, unattended. Two patients per
