“Next comes the exotic twist. A little while back, for a completely different project, we managed to download one of the databases from a very large overnight delivery company. We’re talking major data volume here, but handling it is something that Big Brain does better than any computer in the known universe. Big Brain found a package sent by Benoit Moreau-a shipment from a sex gadget company. Now Moreau is close to Chellis in the corporate structure, so she creates red flags any time Big Brain notices her. She sent the sex toy to Belle du Jour, but the contact phone didn’t match any of the numbers we had for Belle du Jour. The number turned out to match a satellite phone, and it also appeared on the phone logs of a cell phone used by one of the stalkers. It was also dialed by the Systemtechnik executive and a phone at Grace headquarters in Paris.”
“So that tells us a criminal, the Systemtechnik fellow, and this Benoit gal all called the same sat phone number.” Anna’s eyes widened, as if she could see the possible significance.
“Uh-huh. They did. Next step is to find the address associated with that sat phone number; turns out it’s registered to a company, the Freight Stop, in the Caymans. You could search for that company for years and find nothing on it… but… Big Brain had noted that someone at Belle du Jour had sent a document to the Freight Stop. And at one time the billing address for Belle du Jour was a Cayman Island address that had all mail forwarded to a certain Polynesian island address.
“Because of this, Big Brain assigned priority to the Polynesian address.
“That led Big Brain to do some handwriting-recognition analysis. Remember the cheese? In Benoit Moreau’s garbage was a card that she had sent to the Cayman address, which forwarded it to the Polynesian address. A joke was scribbled on the card by the recipient, who sent it back to Moreau-return address: Polynesia. The joke was in French and it said: ‘Keep the G spot warm.’ And it was signed G. Now do you recall the guy checking for spores in the Carter Building?”
“Yeah?”
“He signed in with the receptionist as G. Gousteaux. Big Brain matched the G on the sign-in form with the G on Benoit’s card. And when he was printing his name on the sign-in sheet it matched the print of the joke on the gift card. That makes the man at the Polynesian address the man of Belle du Jour, who is associated with the Freight Stop, which does business with Grace Technologies and Systemtechnik. This fellow is almost surely the lover of Benoit Moreau and is definitely the spore man who killed Weissman and who in all likelihood masterminded the assault on the Carter Building.”
Anna whistled, shaking her head.
“What really tortures me is that he also probably controlled the two perverts who harassed Suzanne, one of whom killed my son. The good news is that we’ve put this all together. The bad news is that this guy is very clever and very deadly and now opposes us. One more thing. When we gave all this to Interpol, they thought it might be a man who sometimes calls himself Devan Gaudet.”
“That’s incredible.”
“About like the granola,” Sam said, taking the last bite.
“So now that makes this personal for you.”
“I’m afraid it does.”
Twenty-nine
Devan Gaudet strode lazily down the sidewalk, an air of calm certainty masking what he was about to undertake. On a leash he led a fine-looking bulldog as harmless as May daisies. It amused him that the good guys were so predictable. At times like this he was practically ready to believe in God, for only the miraculous could account for his good fortune.
Naturally Grady had to tell Guy that she was going to go to school. (It was entirely predictable that the Sam man would try to ruin a perfectly good stripper by giving her a job and sending her to college.) With her background she would start either in a small state university or a junior college. Using about a dozen skip tracers he and Trotsky identified the school in three days.
That would have been impossible to accomplish in the short time frame if she hadn’t also reassured Guy that she wasn’t moving far. She had called from a phone booth on the street right after registering at school and according to her story walking some distance through the neighborhood before stopping to use a pay phone. Although she didn’t say how far she walked, they assumed no more than thirty minutes. On the tape of the call there was the sound of a harbor whistler buoy in the background. There was one junior college in the greater LA area that would be within earshot of a whistler buoy. Benoit had sent the voice recording as an e-mail attachment so that Gaudet and his men had it almost immediately.
Using an old ruse, a seasoned private eye had gotten Grady’s mailing address out of the school. Of course it was a PO box. Since the post office needed a physical address or phone number, a complex bit of bribery completed the work. Immediately he put three of his best men on the house. At least that was Trotsky’s assessment of this trio. When they saw Grady leave in a rusty-looking car driven by another young woman they called him. The bodyguard types around the house had vanished, so he concluded that she would be gone for a while. No suitcase had been in her hand, so she wasn’t on a trip. Now he was only gambling on her swift return.
There was something unusual about this job-something in his state of mind. For some time he had allowed himself to fantasize about watching this particular young woman die. He knew that she must be beautiful if she was anything like her reputation. The vision growing in his mind was becoming a compulsion, and although he knew it, he found himself drawn to the point that his will was riding on a tide of strange emotions. Nothing about the situation seemed to be blunting his analytical skills; he was not unaware of the risk involved in a face-to-face, hands-on killing. As he thought about it he concluded that his will was very much intact, that there was no element of irrationality. It was simply that the reward inherent in what he was planning merited the risk. It was nothing more than the pursuit of pleasure, the way some men risk their lives for a shot at the summit of Everest.
The house had an alarm equipped with motion detectors. The best way in was under the house through a duct that had been opened with heavy shears, but before going into the house he had some chores. He crossed the street at the end of the block, careful not to jaywalk. Wandering a little, letting the dog piss and sniff as he went, looking here and there, he made sure to give the appearance of a man out for a stroll.
When he arrived at the front gate he tied the dog and it sat. Then he walked through the gate and into the shadows, where he pulled on plastic surgeon gloves, put rubber slip-ons over his shoes, and pulled a key from under his raincoat. Next, staying in the shadows, he went to the side of the house, unlocked a padlock that fastened a three-foot-high door allowing access under the house. Chellis’s men had exchanged locks after they had cut off the original with bolt cutters. It took seconds to find the splice between the heavy lengths of duct tape; he disconnected them at the elbow. Another two minutes to find the depression in the ground that had been covered with cardboard, burlap, and dirt. It was carefully constructed so as to be invisible to the naked eye. He left it open so that he could crawl in quickly, but hoped he wouldn’t need it. Next, he moved up under the grate and slowly pushed it aside. The motion detector did not trigger the alarm.
He pulled a plastic bag from the large pocket of the overcoat. Without hesitating, he stood up with his torso above the floor and triggered the alarm. He went straight to the cupboards, found a bowl, and filled it with the contents of his bag and placed it on a table with a note. The alarm was raucous. Moving fast, he found the trapdoor to the attic in the bedroom closet. There were foot pegs up the wall for access. He tilted the overhead trapdoor on its hinges and put his head up into the attic, illuminating the musty space with a flashlight. It was a sizable storage area and had a plywood floor supporting a large number of boxes. The woman was a pack rat. When he left, he did not replace the trapdoor, but instead left it open for easy access. He then jumped back under the house, replaced the heater grate, and fit the duct back in place, applying tape. The alarm had been sounding for three minutes. Crawling out from under the house, he walked to the front, took the dog, and immediately encountered the neighbor, clearly the neighborhood busybody, just as his men had predicted. An older man with a pipe and a paper under his arm looked eager to talk.
“I am from France, as you can tell by the accent, and I saw this place and thought sure it was my friend’s, and now I see that I am turned around and in the wrong neighborhood. I feel so bad. Somehow when I knocked loudly on the window I must have set off the noise sensor.”
“Only a girl and her friend live here.”
