American Outrage Read online

  The guard shrugged and yawned.

  “Look, I get pretty focused,” Jake said. “I’m sorry if you thought I was rude yesterday. Can you help me out?”

  “What do you need?”

  “What can you tell me about the travel agency and the girl that works there?”

  “I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “The travel agency,” Jake said, raising three fingers along with his voice, “on the third floor.”

  The guard made a show of examining the front of his little lectern.

  “Do you see something that says information desk?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”

  Jake clamped his mouth shut and blew out through his nose. He took the scrap of paper from his pocket that Zamira had given to him and showed it to the guard.

  “Is this the company that owns this building?”

  The guard took the paper and gazed at it for a minute, then handed it back.

  “Tell you what. You give me a phone number. I’ll think about it and get back to you. That’s what they say in TV land, right? ‘I’ll get back to you.’”

  He rattled his newspaper and brought it back up in front of his face.

  “Asshole,” Jake said under his breath.

  Outside, he stared up at the building. Painted brick. Tall old windows. Five stories. Not unlike the rest of the buildings up and down the block. He remembered the words of the secretary in the law office and jogged down the sidewalk, into the lobbies of the buildings on either side. One was 200, the other 240. They were similar, but not the same, and neither had the security guard. When he went back into 220, he stared at the guard until he looked up from his paper.

  “Do you ever sit in the other buildings?” Jake asked.

  The guard just snorted and shook his head.

  “That too tough a question for you?” Jake asked.

  “Hey, asshole.”

  “Do you sit in the other buildings or not? Just answer the fucking question or I can call your boss and tell him I’m doing a story on belligerent rent-a-cops who mistake themselves for the real thing.”

  The guard puckered his mouth and shook his head. “No. This is where I sit.”

  “And this is the company who owns this building?” Jake asked, producing the paper.

  “Yeah,” the guard said, then raised his paper so Jake couldn’t see his face.

  Jake had an hour before he had to be at the jail, so he took a cab to the real estate company.

  On the way, he called Muldoon and told him to have the PA drop a car off at his hotel. He’d drive himself out to the jail. He tried Cambareri again, but with no luck. When he arrived at the real estate company, the receptionist thought the best person to answer his question would be Peter Finn, the owner. Jake showed his press credential and asked her to please tell Peter that American Outrage would like to quote him for a story. Two minutes later, a secretary appeared and led him into the owner’s office.

  “I’ve got to admit that I don’t watch your show,” Finn said, rising from his desk to shake Jake’s hand, “but my wife does and she’d kill me if I sent you packing. Sit down. How can I help?”

  Jake took a chair and told him about the travel agency and asked him to check all three buildings.

  “There isn’t a travel agency on the third floor of any of them,” Finn said after several minutes on his computer.

  “Who’s on the third floor of 220?”

  “Two companies,” Finn said. “The tax lawyer and some Tarum Jakul International.”

  “What’s that? Is that Albanian?”

  “No idea,” Finn said.

  Finn picked up the phone and asked his secretary to have someone bring him the leasing file on 220 Warren Street for Tarum Jakul International. While they waited, Finn asked if it would be too much for Jake to get a photo of Nancy Riordin, the show’s host, signed for his wife. Jake took one of Finn’s cards and said he’d be happy to do it.

  The file came in a thick standing binder.

  “Whoever they are,” Finn said, examining the papers, “they’ve been there for the past fourteen years and they pay their rent every month.”

  “It said AA European Travel on the door,” Jake said.

  “I don’t know. This is the only other tenant on three besides the lawyer. This is their third five-year lease they’re in now,” Finn said, flipping through the pages.

  “Who signed the lease?” Jake asked.

  “It just says President of Tarum Jakul International under the signature and I can’t read it,” Finn said, holding the paper up to the light, then showing it to Jake.

  “I have no idea,” Jake said, squinting. “The first name looks like it starts with an M, but that’s about all I can tell. Do you have any more information on whoever this is, or the company?”

  “Uh, Ivan Lindgren did that lease,” Finn said. “He’s not with us anymore. Went to Arizona, I think.”

  “Forward address for him?”

  Finn shook his head. “It wasn’t a happy breakup.”

  Jake wrote down the company name anyway. He looked at his watch and thanked Finn for the help, assured him that he wouldn’t forget to send Nancy’s picture for the wife, and stepped out.

  Jake got to the bunker-man interview at 1:58, three minutes from being late. He ran his fingers through his hair, straightened his tie, and slid into the chair. The room was crowded with cameras, lights, and cables. The audio man clipped a microphone to his lapel and the bunker man, dressed in a blaze orange jumpsuit, blinked at Jake from behind the glass with flaps of skin drooping from the tendons in his neck, thinning gray hair, and sad saggy eyes. He looked like a harmless old man, not someone who could have abducted, raped, tortured, and in some cases killed more than a dozen women in the past twenty years.

  “Couldn’t do anything about the glass. Sorry,” the lawyer said, stepping up to shake Jake’s hand. He wore an olive-green suit and his hair was slicked back. His next sentence was to ask when he’d get the check for the interview.

  “I’ve got it right here,” Muldoon said, patting the envelope that poked up out of his front shirt pocket. “Soon as we’re done, it’s all yours.”

  The lawyer smiled and flicked his eyes from Muldoon to Jake. The interview turned out to be mostly a rehearsal for the bunker man’s defense at trial, his story about how the women in his underground vault were there consensually. The responses were canned, with the lawyer giving embarrassing verbal cues to the old man. The questions Jake asked didn’t matter. The old man would look right at him and regurgitate his trumped-up story.

  Around and around they went, with Jake pressing, the old man sidestepping him, and Muldoon signaling Jake to keep going. Muldoon finally stopped the tape. The guards led the bunker man away and Muldoon handed the envelope to the lawyer without looking at him.

  In a voice the whole room could hear, he said to Jake, “I want to do some stand-ups by the bunker and a walk-through of his house tomorrow at nine. We’ve got the blonde at eleven. I’ll e-mail you an itinerary. They also lined up the husband of one of the dead women when he gets out of work. The guy’s got tattoos all over his neck and he’s ballistic. It’ll help to spice up the counterpoint to the crap we just got.”

  The lawyer gave Muldoon an offended look and walked out of the room examining the check. Jake told Muldoon to e-mail him the itinerary with the addresses and directions, that he’d keep the PA’s car and drive himself.

  “Where you headed now?” Muldoon asked.

  Jake unclipped the microphone from his lapel, handed it to the audio man, and said, “Working some leads.”

  “For this story?” Muldoon asked. “Because I could use you for some voice-overs. I’ve got some studio time up at the university.”

  “It’s for a story,” Jake said. “Something I’m working on.”

  When that didn’t seem to be enough, Jake lied and said, “Katz knows all about it.”

  Muldoon closed his mouth and nodded, then turned away.r />
  Jake headed for Otisco, a small hamlet of homes—some barely more than shacks overgrown with weeds—clustered on the north end of Otisco Lake. The road ran in and out of steep valleys, sometimes cutting through rolling farms with milking parlors that kicked their ferocious stink out onto the highway, anointing passersby with real-life country living. As he drove, Jake rolled up the windows and called in to the office to ask one of the researchers at the news desk to have them find everything they could on Tarum Jakul International.

  “What project do I assign this to?” the young woman asked.

  “What do you mean ‘assign to’?” Jake asked.

  “We’re not supposed to research anything that’s not assigned to a specific approved project.”

  “Since when?”

  “Well, they cut our staff in half to save money. The businesspeople in LA thought we were wasting too much time doing research that wasn’t vital to the show.”

  “Put it to the bunker-man story in Syracuse,” Jake said.

  “You’re sure, right? Because I have to get approval from the producer, too. That’s Muldoon, right?”

  “Forget it,” Jake said. “Thanks anyway.”

  He called the house and got Sam.

  “Want a job?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tarum Jakul International,” Jake said, spelling out the names so Sam would get it right. “Find out as much about it as you can. Also, the name, Tarum or Jakul. See if either one is Albanian.”

  “Is that my mom’s name?” Sam asked, his voice pumping energy through the phone.

  “I doubt it. It’s a clue. Maybe. It might have nothing to do with your mom. When you do a job like this, man, most of it’s pretty boring and most of it is dead ends, so cool your jets.”

  “You got it,” Sam said, but his voice was still charged. “Call you back. Wait.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about LexisNexis? You got an account? That’ll help.”

  “How do you know about LexisNexis?”

  “All the big libraries have it.”

  Jake gave Sam his account number and password and told him to go easy on it because they charged by the minute.

  On the last leg of the drive, Jake got behind a slow-moving blue compact. He fought the urge to lean on his horn and was glad he hadn’t when the car turned in at Dorothy Cakebread’s address. The driveway went down toward the water to a small red camp wedged into a row of similar places, all nestled up snug to the shore. When the compact stopped, an overweight fiftysomething woman with frosted hair got out and glared at Jake as she sidestepped toward the front door, fumbling with her keys.

  Jake hopped out and called to her. “Mrs. Cakebread? My name is Jake Carlson. I knew your husband.”

  Before he could say another word, the woman slipped inside the house and slammed the door. Her pale drawn face appeared in the picture window before the windmill of her arms yanked the curtains closed. When Jake knocked softly on the door, she began to scream.

  “Go away! Leave me alone!”

  “Mrs. Cakebread,” Jake said, shouting through the door. “I knew your husband. He helped me adopt my son, Sam. I’m looking for his records.”

  “I’m calling my lawyer,” she shouted.

  “Mrs. Cakebread, please. I need your help.”

  “Leave me alone!”

  Jake heard a noise. Two doors down an older man with a full gray beard stood staring at Jake from his front step.

  “You heard her,” he said. “Should I call the police?”

  “I’m not hurting anything,” Jake said.

  The old man frowned and shook his head. His small dark eyes bored into Jake and he stood there, with his arms crossed, muttering to himself, until Jake went away.

  13

  JAKE HEADED BACK INTO SYRACUSE. He hadn’t eaten all day so he parked his car and walked up the block for fish and chips and a beer at Kitty Hoynes, the corner pub. He sat at the bar and while he waited for his food, a promo for that night’s American Outrage came on the wide-screen TV suspended from the ceiling. He watched Nancy’s face go from somber to jovial as she teased the lineup for the show. A doctor who had massacred his wife and two daughters, an exclusive interview with the owner of Russell Crowe’s latest canine victim, and a flotilla of drunks in Lake Michigan. Around the bar, half the people were focused on one another or their drinks, but the other half stared vacantly at the screen.

  Jake told the bartender that he’d changed his mind and moved so he could eat at a small cocktail table by the window. He took his pint and had sat down with his back to the TV when his phone rang.

  “Nothing,” Sam said, sounding glum. “It’s not a corporation for sure, unless it’s in Delaware. They aren’t on line, but I’ve got a number I can call tomorrow. I’m gonna call the county clerk there tomorrow, too. You’re in Onondaga, right? And see if it’s a DBA. The name isn’t Albanian as far as I can tell. This doesn’t do any good, does it?”

  “It takes time, Sam. It takes time. What are you reading?”

  “Return of the King. Why?”

  “It’s good, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Go read that and don’t worry.”

  “Yeah, right,” Sam said, “you’re not going to call me if I can’t find things.”

  “I’ll call you,” Jake said. “There’ll be more.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure, man.”

  “I’ll go look again. The Department of State has a Web site, but I know it’s not there.”

  “Read your book. Then get to bed.”

  When he finished eating, Jake strolled back toward the hotel. The night was clear and balmy, and a breeze whispered through the new leaves on the trees. The block of refurbished brick buildings held a dozen bars and restaurants. They called it Armory Square after the fortress that loomed on the south edge of the block. Jake peered through the windows at the people talking and laughing together. He cut through an alley that led to his hotel, but instead of going inside, he put his hands in his pockets and kept going toward the office building where the agency had been. He hoped to prove to himself that he hadn’t lost his mind completely. Once he got out of the Armory area, the sidewalks were empty except for an occasional bum foraging in the shadows. The business area was a ghost town after six.

  Jake walked past 220, craning his neck for a look inside. The security guard’s lectern stood empty. He let himself in and pushed the elevator button. Nothing happened. Jake looked around the narrow lobby and found the stairwell door. Its handle wouldn’t move. He looked around and listened, then took the driver’s license out of his wallet. He slipped the license into the space between the frame and the door, sliding it up and down, fishing it in and out and turning on the knob. After five minutes, he returned the rumpled and twisted license to his wallet. He thought about kicking the door in, but ran his hand over the metal frame and decided against it.

  He peered through the glass front door, scanning the street before he walked out onto the sidewalk and headed for the hotel. His steps were quick and with every few, he’d check the empty street behind him.

  Inside the hotel, he hunkered into the back corner of the bar and ordered a drink from the kid with the stutter. He was the only patron. After his third drink, he took a deep breath and let his shoulders relax. He pulled out his BlackBerry and opened an e-mail from Muldoon with an attachment, the itinerary for tomorrow. When Jake had finished going through his mail, he opened his cell phone and began to scroll through the stored numbers, looking for someone he could call.

  A couple times he actually hit the send button, but ended the call after the first ring. He fished the wedding ring from his pocket and looked through it up at the TV. A pretty brunette read the news. He put the ring up to his lips, holding it with both hands and running the smooth round surface over his skin.

  During a commercial for a blood pressure drug, two men walked in wearing three-quarter-length coats, sneakers, and jeans and sat down at
a small table in the far corner. Jake put his ring back on and presented them with his back. He examined the men as best he could in the bottle-lined mirror. They didn’t talk or signal to the bartender, who finally walked out to them to take an order.

  Jake watched the bartender load up two pint glasses with ice, then pick up the soda hose and fill them with Coke. He brought the sodas out to the men and said something Jake couldn’t hear. If they answered, Jake didn’t hear that either. Jake ordered another drink and finished the one he had while he watched the kid make it. The bar seemed suddenly warm. He reached inside his shirt and scratched his chest. When the drink came, he knocked it right down and paid the bill. When he turned, the men stared in his general direction without eye contact or expression. Neither of them had taken off his jacket.

  Jake stood and turned, slowly tucking away his wallet while he assessed them directly. Both wore their hair short with blunt cuts that looked homemade. One was thin with a sharp nose. The other was stouter and taller with darker skin and jet-black hair. He smiled at the men on his way out but they let him pass without even looking up. There was a light on in the office beyond the front desk, but no sign of anyone. Jake glanced over his shoulder. The sharp-nosed man looked out at him. Jake stepped around the corner and backed into the elevator.

  When he got to his room, he turned the lock and fastened the chain, then went to the window, thinking he could watch them leave. When he pulled back the curtain, he saw a glass door that led out onto a tiny concrete balcony. A small metal chair barely fit in the space.

  The room didn’t face the street. Three stories below, a small brick courtyard with a pool had been wedged into the space between the adjacent buildings and their alleys. A dark green pool cover stretched across it, outdoor furniture stacked off to one side. Jake tugged the glass door shut and turned the deadbolt.

  The message light on the phone next to the bed was blinking. There were three messages. All of them were just silence for a minute before the call ended with a click. Jake laughed quietly, shaking his head. He took off his suit, brushed his teeth, put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and got into the bed. It was early, but he was tired, mentally as well as physically. He turned off the light and blinked at the white beam shooting in through the curtains. When he got up to draw them tight, he heard a tiny beep and a click and turned toward the door. He stared at the handle and the sound he had just heard registered as a card key opening the lock.