Part 12:
” And she sat down on the linoleum and unlaced them with her small, serious hands and put them on. She walked around this kitchen in her new boots for about 10 minutes, not saying anything, just walking. And Ryan stood at the sink and pretended to wash a dish that was already clean. That was the first week. The second week was when he started to notice that he was being watched.
It was not a dramatic noticing. It was not a man following him in a trench coat down an alley. It was smaller than that. It was the same car behind him in the rearview mirror two mornings in a row, a gray Toyota Camry with a small dent in the front bumper. He had seen the same car parked across from the apartment the night before, both nights.
He told himself he was being paranoid. On the Thursday of that second week, he told Delia about it anyway. Delia did not laugh. Delia did not say you’re being paranoid. Delia picked up her phone, dialed an extension, said, “Get me the plate of a gray Camry that followed Hale in this morning.” and hung up.
She looked at Ryan and said, “You should have told me on Monday.” “I thought I was being paranoid.” Ryan. “Yeah. You are not a paranoid man. Your problem is the opposite. Your problem is that you give people the benefit of the doubt longer than is wise for you. When you notice something, tell me about it.
Even when you think it’s nothing, especially when you think it’s nothing. Okay?” “Okay.” Her phone rang 90 seconds later. She picked it up, listened, nodded once, and hung up. “The Camry is registered to a leasing company in Burlington. The leasing company rents to small businesses. One of the small businesses is a private investigator named Dale Rochford.
He is not a very good private investigator. He is the kind you hire when you are not very sophisticated and you want to know if your wife is cheating. Someone paid him to put eyes on you.” “Someone like Carl?” “I did not say Carl.” “Is it Carl?” Delia smiled very slightly. “It is Carl. So, Carl thinks I’m a threat.
” “Carl thinks you are a loose end.” “What do we do? We let him watch. We let him see you take your daughter to school. We let him see you come home. We let him see a man who is trying to pull himself together after losing his job. That is what he wants to see. That is what you are going to show him. And in the meantime, I am going to have someone put eyes on Dale Rochford and on everyone Dale Rochford reports to, and we are going to follow the money from the other end.
Okay?” “Ryan?” “Yeah.” “You look a little pale.” “I’m fine.” “Are you armed?” “I’m sorry?” “Do you own a firearm?” “No.” “Do you want one?” “No.” “Good.” “I was going to say no anyway. Okay then. Do you have anyone who stays with your daughter at night? Her grandmother’s on the block, three buildings down. Good. Keep it that way.
We will put a man on your street at night for a while. You won’t see him. He won’t knock on your door. He will be there. Is that all right with you? Ryan thought about it. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s all right with me.” He went back into the windowless room. He sat down in the bad chair. He looked at the whiteboard which had grown a lot of new things on it in 10 days.
There were photographs now. Carl Voss in a grainy security still walking to his car in the parking lot. A man named Everett Sharp, the regional operations director above Carl, who Ryan had met exactly twice in two years, and who had both times struck him as the kind of man who shook your hand with one hand while checking his watch with the other.
And a third photograph, a woman mid-40s whose name was Linda Marrow and who worked in the corporate accounts department at the headquarters in Burlington. Ryan had never met her. Until that morning, he had not known she existed. Linda Marrow was the one who signed off on the paperwork that moved the missing crates onto a ghost shipping manifest, routed through a shell company in Montreal that did not exist, which then routed through another shell company in the Netherlands that technically existed but had never done
any other business, and which terminated in a private warehouse outside of Worcester, Massachusetts, where the crates were broken down and the contents sold through three different black market medical supply channels. The whole ring had generated in the 14 months Delia’s team had been tracking it, something in the neighborhood of 11 million dollars.
Linda Marrow, as best anyone could tell, had received a little under 400,000 of it. Carl Voss had received about 800,000. The man who had received the rest was Everett Sharp. Everett Sharp, Ryan learned that second week, had recently bought a vacation home on Lake Champlain. He had also quietly paid off his ex-wife’s lawyers in a settlement that had otherwise been about to go very badly for him.
He had a son at a private college in Rhode Island. The son did not know his tuition had been paid for the last two semesters with money that had been stolen one insulin pump at a time from the company his father worked for. Ryan stared at the whiteboard for a long time that Thursday afternoon. Delia came in around 3:00.
You look upset. I’m fine. You don’t look fine. I’m thinking about the kid. What kid? Sharp’s son. At the college. What about him? He’s going to find out. Yes. That’s not going to be a good day for him. No, it is not. He didn’t do anything wrong. No. And he’s going to lose his dad, and he’s going to lose his tuition, and he’s going to find out his whole life for the last 2 years was a lie.
