Chapter Nine --
“That’s not nice. You shouldn’t talk about my boss that way, Gabby.” I could see Little Miss Sunshine was disappointed in my cynical mindset, as far as her boss was concerned. “He was very good to me when Paul was ill. He let me take a lot of time off with pay.”
“Did he? And never expected anything in return?”
“No. As long as I kept up with the filings, the permits, and the rest of the paperwork, he didn’t care if I worked from home, from the construction site, or from the office.”
“Listen, Nettie. I’ve got to go see Rufus and get this mess straightened out. Just tell me one thing. Did Joe know I was a deputy sheriff?”
“Sure. We often talked about you. I told him all about you and Sam, how you saved the Klarsfeld family from those terrorists.”
“What about your boss? Does Kevin Frist know about me?”
“Oh, heavens no! I don’t discuss that sort of thing with Mr. Frist. He doesn’t have time for that. He’s a very busy man.”
“Okay. I’ll be back later. You can reach me on my cell if you need me.”
“The old one or the new one?”
“The old. By the way,” I said as I got up, “you missed your calling. You’re a genius with gingerbread.”
“Thanks. You should see the architectural models I made for Mr. Frist. They’re even more amazing in cardboard.”
“You make his models?” I was surprised by that bit of news.
“Sure. I used to do all the models for Harvey Construction when I worked there. When Mr. Frist found out, he asked me to do the same for his company.”
That explained why Annette was such an attractive target. No wonder the FBI was all over this.
Rufus was in his office when I got to the Latimer Falls Sheriff’s Department. After Marge buzzed him, she told me to go right in.
“Brief me,” he demanded, sitting behind his massive desk. He waved me into a chair opposite and waited. I obliged, filling him in on all the information I had developed on the case. We talked over a couple of possible scenarios and kicked around a few ideas on how to proceed. We came to a consensus half an hour later, after I outlined a scheme I thought might yield dividends. Rufus agreed.
“Do it, Gabby. Put his feet in the fire, don’t take any crap, and don’t worry about me. I can handle the FBI.”
“Think it will work?” I wondered.
“It’s worth a shot. At the moment, we don’t really have much, do we?”
I had to agree about that. Between the duplicate gingerbread house, the likelihood that I was being tailed by the feds, and the fact that Joe Fortuna was a possible undercover FBI agent who set up my cousin, there was too much confusion clouding our view. We couldn’t afford to sit around waiting for the dust to settle. Better to stir it up and see what surfaced.
I left him as he sat at his desk, making phone calls and cashing in old favors for current information. I stopped at the winery for a quick conversation with Gerhard. And then I called Mike Alves and got his voicemail.
“Joe,” I said breathlessly, in my sexiest voice. “This is Harriet. I have those bids on the concrete you wanted. Can you meet me?”
Twenty minutes later, my cell phone buzzed and an unfamiliar number with a New Jersey area code popped up on the screen. I counted to ten before answering.
“Talk to me, Mike, or I’ll nail your ass to the wall a hundred different ways for messing with my cousin.” That’s the thing about me. When I get my dander up, it’s tough to smooth those feathers into submission. Nobody messes with my cousin, just to make a case.
“Don’t you know better than to threaten a federal agent, Deputy Grimm?” There was some serious venom in the hiss of that snake. I wasn’t about to let the reptile bite me.
“Don’t you know the Office of Professional Responsibility will hang you out to dry for compromising an investigation by sexually taking advantage of a vulnerable woman to get information on a criminal enterprise when the woman has no direct connection to the criminal activities? You think I can’t find a good lawyer to represent Annette and expose your shady dealings? Film at eleven, pal.”
“Look,” the voice on the other end suddenly dropped the hostile tone and became conciliatory, “it’s not like that.”
“Oh?” I gave him a good dose of Ice Queen, letting the frosty word put a chill on his attempt to sweet talk me.
“Gabby..., er, Deputy Grimm,” he replied. “I really like Annette. She’s a good, decent woman. Why do you think I stole that gingerbread house?”
“Because you’re the Grinch and you wanted to spoil Christmas for a woman who’s still grieving for her late husband?”
“No. She’s too smart for her own good. Why do you think I disappeared? I needed her to get out of town. I knew that she’d go running to you the second there was any trouble. That’s what she did when that jerk, Pete, used her.”
“You’re telling me that you wanted her to come to me for help?”
“Off the record?”
“Sure,” I replied nicely. Good cop, bad cop works for me. I don’t mind being nice, but if you screw around with me, I’ll turn bad cop in the blink of an eye and take you down, even if you’re a federal agent.
“My bosses wanted me to turn her into an informant. She would be the star witness in the federal trial. I...I wasn’t willing to do that.”
“Meaning you have feelings for her?” I demanded.
“I...um, it’s complicated.”
“Give me the uncomplicated version.”
“We went into the investigation assuming that Annette was apprised of her boss’s criminal background and his mob connections. Once I got to know her, I realized that she was too distracted by Paul’s cancer to have absorbed any real information until after she returned to work. But my bosses didn’t care. They figured we had spent all that time and money trying to get inside Frist and Company, she was still going to be our source.”
“Which means you reported my call to you, and your boss called my boss, because you wanted us to interfere with the FBI’s investigation?”
“I know I crossed the line with Annette. I shouldn’t have...”
“Slept with her?”
“It wasn’t like that. She’s a nice woman. I didn’t want her to be forced into becoming an informant.”
“You compromised her by sleeping with her. Your bosses wanted to keep using her as an informant because she was suspected of being a willing participant in Frist’s criminal activities. What part of all this makes you a hero, pal?”
“When I realized she was innocent, I tried to get her out of it. What more can I do? I’m between a rock and a hard place!”
“Oh, I think you’ve got a ways to go before that happens. You obviously still have room to wiggle your sorry ass. You’re about to find out how much tighter that squeeze can get, pal, if you don’t start telling me the whole truth!”
“Deputy, give me a break here. You owe me.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Albany. The Mobil station.”
“You fired those shots?”
“I had to,” he insisted. “I couldn’t let those punks kill Annette over small change. They were a couple of crack heads bent on robbing the convenience store for cash to buy drugs.”
“Why did you steal the gingerbread house?” I wanted to know.
“My bosses heard that it was an exact replica of the 1423 model. The Assistant United States Attorney thought it would make a great courtroom display. Annette would be known as the gingerbread lady who brought down the condo king with her baking.”
“So you arranged not only for a replacement, but for that sergeant to call me and let me know it had been found?”
“I had to, Gabby. If I just stole it, you’d waste time looking for it and people would pay too much attention to it. Annette would just be in even deeper. As we speak, Assistant US Attorney Rita Maloney is asking a judge for a warrant to seize it.”
“And yo
u want them to have the duplicate gingerbread house, not the original?”
“I do. I want them to think Annette doesn’t bring anything to the table.”
“How are you going to clean up this big mess on Aisle Four?” I demanded. “How do you repair the damage to Nettie’s reputation and still make the case?”
“Ah, that’s the problem,” he admitted. “I still need to make the case. Frist is a bad guy.”
“No kidding. You know that the building isn’t structurally sound, right?”
“Talk to me.” As soon as he said that, I knew he was in. I went over the conversation I had had with my cousin.
“If I had to guess, Whatever-Your-Name-Really-Is,” I started to say. He cut me off.
“Jondahl. Will Jondahl.”
“Okay, Jondahl. If I had to guess, I’d say that Frist is onto you. He told Nettie he doesn’t want her to see the showcase unit until the decorator is finished with the place. He’s trying to buy time. Maybe he suspects she will recognize the differences in what the blueprints called for and what construction was actually done. And to my mind, that can only mean one thing. He’s got to destroy the condos before Nettie can see them.”
“An explosion would do it, right?” Even as he said that, I could see the potential. What were the pitfalls?
“Sure. But he’s risking public safety. If he blows up the building, it’s likely to result in a massive loss of life.”
“Not really,” said the now enthusiastic FBI agent. “The 1423 location is in an area of vacant old factories that are in disrepair. Phase One, which is just being completed, is in the center of the complex. The buildings of Phases Two and Three surround it. That means they could safely blow up the first building, collect the insurance money, and keep their investors happy by rebuilding Phase One. Frist keeps the money he stole from Phase One of the project and uses the insurance money to start again, and no one is supposed to be the wiser.”
“Your job is to catch him in the act before he can destroy the evidence?”
“That’s it in a nutshell. The trouble is I haven’t figured out how to do that without putting Annette at greater risk. Frist has some serious organized crime connections. I have a couple of informants inside and they tell me that when the renovations were going on, they deliberately bollixed up the gas pipes, vents, and furnaces they installed. Phase One is rigged to blow the day they turn on certain sections of the gas lines. The condos will slowly fill with gas overnight. There are lights operated by timers throughout the complex. One of those will create the spark that will ignite a blaze, blowing the place to Kingdom Come. Frist was afraid Annette would figure it out, so he hired me to wine and dine her.”
“You worked for Frist? You walked down both sides of the street? You bastard!” I was ready to report his lying fanny to the powers that be. To think I was starting to trust him. The man was unbelievable! How could he do that to Nettie?
“It wasn’t like that, Gabby. I was working undercover. The FBI sent me to flip Annette and others at Frist and Company. I was in the process of that when Frist hired me to break her heart. I thought if she believed I was a rat who set her up, she’d go to you for help, and you’d do what you did, which was to check me out. I also knew that when you checked me out, I’d have an excuse to tell my boss you were interfering, and my boss would threaten your boss. That would get Annette out of the way until things got sorted out. Once the FBI serves that warrant and takes custody of the gingerbread house, Annette will no longer be of any value to the case. I think we can both agree she doesn’t really have any information of value.”
“Not exactly true,” I corrected him. “She actually does have some. She knows more about building construction than you might think. Annette understands those blueprints. She can tell you what’s missing and what’s not missing in Phase One.”
“I can get a structural engineer to do that,” he replied.
“But it will take time, won’t it? And it won’t save Nettie’s reputation. I don’t want her spending the rest of her life hiding from the world.”
“It’s a risk.”
“What if we could let her contact the FBI on her own, to share her concerns? What if we could put it all out there as a complete package from Santa, wrapped up with a big red bow? I could drive her to the Albany FBI field office.”
“She can’t just show up with that gingerbread house, not with the US attorney’s office grabbing up a warrant,” Jondahl insisted. “How do we explain the duplicate?”
“Simple. It was a diversion to protect the real one until it could be delivered to the FBI. I have photos of the missing documents on a cell phone I bought in Manhattan when we took possession of it. We could turn that over as evidence that we intended to provide the material to the FBI. I can fill Nettie in on the drive.”
“Only one problem. The gingerbread house is down here in New Jersey.”
“Then I guess you’d better get moving, Jondahl, if you’re going to get to the Albany rendezvous in time.”