The Liar Read online

  No one responded.

  I felt the big man taking my phone and wallet. He placed them on the desk in front of Howell.

  “Make sure it’s turned off,” said Howell.

  For a second, the big thumbs struggled to find the power switch. Eventually he seemed satisfied and I watched the screen turn black. Howell checked the phone to make sure it was off.

  “Thank you for coming, Eddie. I’m afraid I owe you two apologies. First, I insist on security and privacy – so please forgive Marlon here. Second, I will answer all your questions in time, but I’m sorry to tell you it’s going to be a very long night.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Howell looked a lot worse than when I’d last seen him on TV. His skin held a gray tinge, with dark patches around the eyes. The eyes themselves looked strained, raw, and painful. For a guy in his late fifties he looked remarkably thin and yet you could still see the outline of a much younger, and more defined, physique through his white silk shirt. Broad shoulders and chest, well developed arms. Black hair, probably assisted by a two-hundred dollar dye job.

  His hands shook just a little, and I put it down to physical and nervous exhaustion.

  “The gentleman who escorted you here is Marlon Black. He handles security at the house,” said Howell.

  I turned in the direction he pointed and locked eyes with Marlon’s chest.

  “He’s not the best at introductions,” said Howell.

  I held out a hand. Marlon nodded at it.

  “And behind you is Mr McAuley. He’s my associate.”

  I didn’t offer a hand to McAuley. The dark-skinned man in the navy suit lit a cigarette and simply smiled at me.

  “Please, sit down,” said Howell.

  The chair facing Howell looked like an antique. Gingerly, I took a seat.

  Elbows on the table and hands beneath his chin, Howell looked me over. The gun on the desk was all for show. For whatever reason, Leonard Howell wanted me to know that he was in charge.

  “How was your ride over here? George isn’t much of a driver, or a conversationalist. But he has a good heart and I trust him. You can’t buy that in an employee,” he said.

  “The trip was fine. I like George. He seems like a good man.”

  “Good men are hard to find. When you get one like George you hold on to him and treat him right. I learned that from your father. I was sorry to hear he passed.”

  I nodded.

  “Everybody in the neighborhood knew Pat Flynn. Hell of a cannon, and ran a straight book. He worked his crew like a pro. If you were in, you were made, but give Pat one reason to doubt you and you were out. He was big on trust. I respect that. Your father was good to me when I was a kid. I know he would’ve been very proud of who you are now.”

  “He never wanted me to go into the life. Didn’t want to teach me the grift. You helped persuade him otherwise,” I said.

  I remembered a lazy Tuesday afternoon in the back of the Irish pub my father used to run his book. He was out collecting. The pool table was busted, and I was bored. Lenny passed that afternoon for me by teaching me three-card monte. My first con. My dad came back to the bar around four, and watched me work the cards. Lenny told him I was a natural, I’d already taken twenty bucks off of the regulars. So my dad agreed to teach me. He taught me the cons, the street hustles, the techniques and skills for the life of a cannon.

  Lenny smiled, but it didn’t last. I could tell the smile felt unnatural to him. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, then spun the Beretta on the table. It was an idle distraction. I got the impression that the small talk was more for Howell’s benefit than mine. It struck me that he was warming up his voice. I could hear the cracks in his throat. There was a dark pain eating away at Howell and he was doing his best not to let it show.

  “What can I do for you, Lenny?” I said.

  “I’m going to need a lawyer. I want you.”

  “I’m sure a man like you has a long-standing relationship with a law firm. Why do you need me?”

  He leaned back in his chair, let his arms fall into his lap and studied me. For a second, I saw him glance at McAuley before returning his stare to me. I could smell McAuley’s cigarette.

  “I heard you don’t drink too much any more. I can understand that, but it’s late and I could use one. Care to join me?” he said. He got up and made for a drinks cabinet behind his desk. He selected two low-ball glasses and filled one halfway. The decanter was poised over the second glass.

  “It’s twenty-year-old Scotch,” he said.

  “No, thanks. Maybe later,” I said.

  His lips turned down and he shrugged, set down the decanter and returned to his seat. He placed his glass right in front of me, inches from my seat and a good three feet from his.

  He took a sip from the glass and placed it back down.

  “Caroline didn’t like me drinking in the house. I hadn’t touched this stuff in a … well, when she didn’t come home that night …”

  Another hit from the glass emptied it. He drank like I used to: not for the taste, not for the pleasure, booze was the medicine that numbed the pain. He refilled his glass.

  I said nothing. The Scotch propped him up enough to get through another sentence.

  “As you are probably aware from the press, the NYPD and the FBI believe someone has taken my daughter.”

  From the papers and the news, I knew Caroline was in her senior year of high school, a straight-A student who already had great offers in for college. As far as her parents and her friends knew, she didn’t have a boyfriend. Her picture had been on the news for days. She was every high-school boy’s dream – blonde, captain of the school cheerleaders and apparently very kind with it. Her interests were slightly unusual; she loved comic books. Instead of hanging out in the mall with her friends, she spent most Saturday afternoons rooting through baskets of old comics in second-hand bookstores.

  Nineteen days ago she set off in her car to go pick up a comic book she’d ordered from Zero Comics, on Hudson Street. She never got there. When she didn’t arrive home that night, Leonard tried calling her. No answer. He called Caroline’s friends. No one had seen her. Howell called the cops and they checked out the bookstore and her friends. An APB went out on the 2015 VW Golf that Leonard had given to her on her birthday. The car was never found. Her cell phone didn’t register at any cell towers that day. Girls like Caroline disappear all too often. But everything was good at home. Nobody who knew Caroline ever thought she would run away. What was there to run away from? She hadn’t packed a bag, she left money in her room and her cell phone charger.

  The working theory for law enforcement was abduction. A couple of the papers announced this theory a few days after she’d been missing in their initial reports on her disappearance. No doubt Leonard Howell knew it within hours of her disappearance. The media attention proved fierce. NYPD press liaison briefed reporters every twelve hours. In the days that followed her disappearance specially trained NYPD officers questioned nearly every kid in her school. Twice.

  No suspects. No reason to believe she up and left on her own. Her debit card showed no withdrawals.

  Abduction.

  But no ransom demand. Which was a bad sign. For the last two weeks one word had been on everyone’s lips. You could tell the papers were hinting at it. The TV too. You could see it in the cops’ eyes.

  Murder.

  The press conference I saw three days ago confirmed my suspicions about Caroline Howell. Leonard was reaching out to whoever had taken his daughter. That only meant one thing: no contact from any supposed kidnapper. The longer a person was missing without a ransom demand, the more likely it was that they weren’t taken for ransom – they were simply taken for someone’s pleasure, and they won’t ever come back.

  This was a last roll of the dice for Howell. Go on TV and hope she was still alive. The fact that Howell specialized in the kidnap and ransom retrieval for some of the biggest insurance companies on the planet meant that i
t was possible someone was giving him a taste of what it’s really like when your child is taken from you.

  A thought occurred to me that if Caroline Howell had been a girl who’d come from a family that didn’t have a million dollars in the bank, a family that struggled on welfare in the projects, the media would not have given one inch of column space to her.

  “I know it looks like kidnapping. I heard your appeal on TV. I’m sorry for you, and your family,” I said.

  He took the glass from the center of the desk, swallowed in one shot and put it back down in front of me. His face was twisted. There were two emotions fighting for control of Howell – fear and hope. When you find out your kid has been taken, it feels like a knife in your stomach and with each passing second, time itself twists that blade deeper into your guts. People think that hope keeps you going; that wishing and believing, somehow, it will all turn out okay actually helps. It doesn’t. It makes the pain from that blade a thousand times worse, because it reminds you of what you’ve lost and all that there is yet to lose.

  “Thank you. The thing is, I thought she was dead. When I gave that press conference, I didn’t think anyone still had my girl. I’d hoped, you know … but I knew she hadn’t run away.”

  He put his hand inside his shirt and drew out a crucifix on a gold chain. The chain was thin and the cross looked tarnished.

  “This belonged to her late mother. It was the only thing she had belonging to her mom. She kept it in a jewelry box in her room. She never would’ve left without it.”

  Rubbing the cross between his thumb and forefinger, his gaze fell away and he stared into nothing. I knew that look. He was thinking of all the times that he’d spent with her, the good times. Holding her, playing with her, Christmas mornings and the weight of her on his lap as they watched old movies.

  I shook my head and realized I was projecting. I’d done the same when my daughter, Amy, had been taken. I was thinking about the times I’d spent with her. I wanted to see her right then, but I’d have to wait. I’d arranged to visit the next day.

  Howell let the cross fall onto his chest, and then tucked it back under his shirt.

  “I thought she was gone. We had no contact, no demands for ransom, but then everything changed.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  He was about to tell me more. I could see it brewing in his throat as his Adam’s apple bobbed.

  “The retainer,” said McAuley, behind me.

  “He’s right. Before I go on, I need to ensure confidentiality. Did you bring the retainer agreement with you?”

  I produced my retainer from my jacket but didn’t place it on the table. Instead, I held on to it.

  “I’m not entirely sure I can help you. Tell me what you want me to do, before you sign this.”

  He nodded to McAuley.

  “In short, I need a lawyer to help me deal with the ransom. We got a legit ransom demand after the TV appeal. Photos of my daughter held captive. The FBI think it’s solid. Caroline is insured, and there are a lot of hoops I have to jump through to get my insurance company to make the ransom available. The FBI is all over this too, so I need a legal mind in my corner. And not one of those Harvard pricks. I need a lawyer I can trust.”

  I took a moment to think it through. While I turned over everything I’d heard, he flipped around a framed picture on his desk.

  “That’s my daughter,” he said.

  She sat on a grass bank surrounded by her friends but the photographer only had eyes for her. The others were merely background scenery. She wore black and white striped leggings, denim shorts, ugly black boots and a pink tee sporting the name of a punk band that I vaguely recognized. Over her shoulder was a leather biker jacket, with pins on the collar. I knew the band names on the pins; The Stones, Thin Lizzie, Pearl Jam, The Black Keys. My eleven-year-old daughter once had a denim jacket just like it; covered in pins. It reminded me of the time I spent trawling flea markets with my Amy. A couple of stalls sold tee-shirts, bandanas and every kind of rock merchandise you could think of. Amy wanted a vintage Black Sabbath pin, and it took us months to find one. We had ice cream the day she found it hiding under a belt buckle on a junk stall. She stared at it, and took a long time to decide where to place it on her jacket.

  “She decorate the jacket herself?” I asked, examining the photo of Caroline.

  He nodded.

  “I think I’ll take that Scotch now,” I said, handing him the retainer agreement.

  Marlon took Howell’s glass and refilled it. Grabbed a fresh one for me too. He placed them both on the table and I took a sip while I watched Leonard scan the retainer. He patted his pockets and said, “Where the hell are my glasses?”

  Neither Marlon nor McAuley did anything to help him find his spectacles.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” he said. He took a pen off the table and signed the retainer, slid it back to me.

  “This means you’re my lawyer now, right? Client confidentiality?” he said.

  “Right. Anything you say to me is treated in the strictest confidence. Attorney client privilege, it’s completely confidential,” I said.

  “Good. I’m glad,” he said, picking the Beretta off the center of the table and slotting the magazine into the receiver. “Because, I’m about to commit a major felony.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Scotch may have been well aged, but it tasted bitter.

  “I should tell you, Lenny, that if I’m given information that leads me to believe that someone is in danger then I have a duty, as a lawyer and officer of the court, to report that to law enforcement. If I didn’t I’d be breaking my oath, and I’d become an accessory. So be careful what you tell me. But you’d better tell me why you really want me here or I’m going to tear up this agreement, call a cab and send you a bill for my time this evening.”

  “Fair enough, I’ll choose my words carefully,” he said.

  From the chair behind me, I heard McAuley say, “I told you.”

  I didn’t turn around, and I watched Howell shake his head and put the Beretta in the back of his pants.

  “Without wasting your time or mine, I know who you are. I know what happened in the Chambers Street courthouse; somebody kidnapped your daughter and you got her back. That’s why you’re here. You can handle the pressure, you’re a father, you’ve been in my situation and you come highly recommended. We’ve had contact from the man holding my daughter. I want to pay the ransom. Technically, that’s illegal.”

  “But wait a minute, won’t the feds turn a blind eye to the ransom payment? Isn’t that normally how things work?”

  “It is. The kidnap and ransom game is based on the economics of human life. It’s the same all over the world. If the kidnapper is paid, and the hostage returned safely, the kidnapper will go straight out and do it again. Paying the ransom facilitates that crime, it gives it a business model. Official US policy is that we do not negotiate with kidnappers. Unofficially it happens every damn day. I make my living dealing with kidnappers.”

  “So why do you need a lawyer this time?” I said.

  Howell leaned forward and placed both hands on the table.

  “In most domestic kidnappings the FBI deliver the ransom. They can justify the ransom being paid because they get their chance to follow the kidnappers and make an arrest. It’s like baiting a hook. This time, the feds are fishing in the wrong pond. After the press conference we got a ransom demand with proof of life photographs. They wanted two million. You may have noticed the SWAT guys and the feds getting organized for the drop. It goes down in two hours at the Rochelle train station. Three a.m. sharp. While the drop is going down I need you to cover my back.”

  I felt a prickle of heat on my neck and said, “What do you mean, cover your back?”

  “It’s a con. One hour after the kidnapper sent the pictures of Caroline to the FBI, he also contacted me on a secure email system and told me the train station is a decoy. He sent me the same photos of Caroline and a demand for ten mi
llion. It’s good proof of life. The photos are definitely Caroline and they are recent. The exchange goes down tonight – same time as the FBI are chasing their tails in the train station, I’ll be dropping the money off at the real location. The kidnapper doesn’t want to get arrested – he wants the feds and the cops miles away from the real drop. He’s smart. The feds want to capture the kidnapper and take Caroline alive – in that order. My daughter is not their priority, they want their arrest. I want my daughter back – I’m not interested in anything else.”

  His voice had just about held together, but the more he talked the heavier it sounded, like there was a tidal wave of desperation and fear that he was holding in check.

  “You have any idea who might have taken her?”

  “No. I’ve dealt with kidnappers all over the world, it could be any of them or none of them. There’s no clear MO here. But it doesn’t matter who took her, you’re going to help me con the feds and the NYPD so I can get my daughter back alive. I’ve played this game many times, all over the world. I know how to retrieve a hostage – alive. The only way it works is with one man, no police and a bag full of cash. She’s my daughter and I’m calling the shots. Thing is, I don’t have ten million. I’ve only got two,” he said.

  “So where are you going to get the ransom?” I said, and instantly felt that was a question I shouldn’t have asked.

  “My insurers are sending the ten million. I contacted them privately. The feds think the insurance company are bringing two million. When the insurance bondsman arrives, I’m going to bring him in here, alone, stick my gun in his face and take him hostage. I’ll tie him up and keep him here. I know the man, so I don’t want to hurt him if I don’t have to. I’ll give the feds my two million and wave them goodbye – then I’ll go get Caroline. I will get her back. And when I do, I’ll be arrested for kidnapping and perverting the course of justice. The FBI have an unwritten rule not to prosecute families who pay ransom. But I’m doing a lot more than that. I’m committing a felony kidnap and colluding with the people who have my daughter to help them evade capture. There’s no other way to put it. They will prosecute me for this – you’re going to defend me. Also, I’m breaking my contract with my insurers. There’s a clause that the ransom becomes repayable, in full, immediately, if I refuse to co-operate with law enforcement.”