“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
