“I’m guessing Creed didn’t take the news too well,” said Leopold. “Maybe we should go find out how he’s doing.”
“We can’t. It would be ex parte,” said Mary. “We can’t speak to him without his lawyer.”
“Bullshit. We can speak to whomever we like. You need to loosen up a little. Come on, you said you needed more evidence—let’s go get some.”
The guard looking after the cells signed them in and led them through to the holding area. “You guys know his lawyer just left, right?” he said, fiddling with a giant set of keys.
“Yeah, we got it Jimmy,” said Mary. “Anyone else been down?”
“Just the guy bringing chow. The boys should have finished by now. Go on through.” He swung the heavy iron gate open and ushered them over the threshold. He followed, locking it behind him. “Just a couple more.”
After a few minutes, they reached the holding cells. The harsh neon lighting bounced off the white walls and floors, making Leopold squint. With no windows and the air conditioning shut off, the air in the room was thick with the smell of food. There were eight cells in total, each with solid metal doors. Jimmy the guard walked up to the farthest right and rapped a knuckle on the steel.
“Hey, yo. You got visitors,” he said.
No reply.
“Open it up, Jimmy,” said Mary, stepping forward. “You can wait for us outside, it’s not a problem.”
“Ma’am.” He nodded and slipped a key into the door lock. “Here you go.” He swung the door open.
“Good evening, Mr. Creed,” said Mary, stepping toward the empty cell. “You enjoying your stay at—” She stopped mid-sentence.
“Holy shit,” said Jimmy.
Leopold ran forward and peered past the others. Vincent Creed was slumped against the wall, his skin as white as porcelain, with one half of a prison fork protruding from his throat—his own hand still wrapped around the handle. Both carotid arteries appeared to have been punctured from several jabs to the soft flesh. There were dark bruises around the wounds, though there was very little blood on the body. Most of it had sprayed across the room and was dripping down the opposite wall.
“Holy shit,” Jimmy repeated. “What the hell happened?”
“You tell me,” said Mary. “You were supposed to be watching.”
Leopold pushed through and knelt by the body.
Jimmy held up his hands. “I can’t watch everyone at once, can I? I got other work to do, I can’t be expected—”
“Keep quiet, both of you,” said Leopold. “Who has had access to this cell today?”
“Just the guy’s lawyer. And the other guy bringing food. Damn, how the hell he do that with a spork?”
Leopold noticed something on the floor and bent down for a closer look. “Plastic shards. The cutlery was snapped in two, with one end filed down into a point against the wall.”
“Jesus.”
“And who said anything about him doing this to himself?”
“What, you think someone else broke in and killed him with a spork?” Mary said. “I don’t see any signs of a struggle here. No defensive wounds. The guy knew we were on to him; maybe prison was too much for him to face. It’s not unheard-of.”
Leopold sniffed the air. “What’s that smell?”
“What smell?”
He turned to Jimmy. “You let people smoke in here?”
“Not since Bloomberg’s witch hunt. Why?”
“There’s the stink of tobacco smoke in here. You not getting it?”
“My sense of smell ain’t what it used to be. Two decades of industrial cleaning products will do that to you.”
Mary tipped her head and sniffed. “Yeah, I can smell it too. Kinda sweet. Not like cigarettes. Something else.”
Leopold froze. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. He turned to Mary, his eyes wide.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I recognize the scent from before,” he said. “We’ve come across it twice already, and I never made the connection. The smell isn’t from cigarette smoke,” he pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number. “It’s from pipe tobacco.”
Leopold paced the office. Mary sat at her desk watching, nursing a mug of coffee.
“Want to run that by me again?” she said.
“Think, think, think,” he tapped his forehead with an index finger. “Tobacco smoke. The employee at the hotel reeked of it. At Biggs’ house, there was an old pipe spilling ash all over the place. Then again in the cells. All three times, the same smell.”
“Plenty of people smoke pipes.”
“You ever run into three different guys smoking the same flavored tobacco, all in the same day? Smelled like cherry to me.”
Mary blinked. “Okay, maybe not. Still, it’s not exactly groundbreaking evidence.”
“Not by itself. But sometimes the smaller things lead us to the bigger things. You checked Biggs’ file?”
“Yeah. Nothing much there we didn’t already know.”
“You got a photo?”
“The guy’s got no record. No photo, no prints, no DNA. Why?”
“Call it a hunch.” Leopold turned his cell phone’s speaker on and lay the handset down on the desk. It was playing a Muzak rendition of “Uptown Girl.” He pulled Mary’s keyboard toward him and leaned in to get a view of the computer monitor.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Just bear with me.” He loaded up the internet browser and punched Biggs’ name and address into the search bar. A few dozen relevant results bounced back, the top ones belonging to various social media sites.
“This isn’t exactly the police database,” said Mary.
Leopold ignored her and clicked on the top result. “Look. Recognize this guy?” He pointed at an image of a gaunt, aging man with black skin and gray hair.
“No, should I?”
“What about these photos?” He opened up the other search results, all pictures of the same man.
“You’re kidding me,” she said.
“Afraid not.”
“The guy we spoke to in Brooklyn...”
“Wasn’t Biggs.”
“Shit.”
“Well put.”
“Then who the hell were we talking to?”
Leopold grinned. “My guess: if the pipe smoker was the inside man at the hotel, our fake Biggs was probably the one with the connections. You know, the middleman. He dispatched the real Biggs and waits at the apartment for the cops to show. That just leaves the brains.”
“Don’t get all Wizard of Oz on me,” said Mary. “You’re just guessing here. We’re going to need more than that.”
“You really think the fake Biggs, whatever his name is, had the mental capacity to pull something like this off?”
Mary folded her arms. “I’m no psychologist. How would I know.”
“You should learn to rely on your instincts. We both know there must have been someone else involved, someone who had working knowledge of the bank. Now that Creed is dead, our pool of suspects just got a little smaller.”
“Not small enough. We need more to work with.”
“I’m working on it.” He picked up his cell phone just as the Muzak stopped and a man’s voice came on the line. Leopold walked away from Mary’s desk, just out of earshot.
“Blake?” The voice was strongly accented, maybe Puerto Rican.
“Yes. You have the information I need?”
“Your contact had to work fast. He had to drop a lot of important clients.”
“He’ll be well compensated. I trust you’ll see to that. What have you got for me?”
“The wire transfer came from an account in the Cayman Islands. The corporation was a shell, as you might expect. We followed the trail through Geneva and then back west to the Caribbean.
“You got a company name for me?”
“Yeah. Umbrella corporation calls itself ‘Plutus Inc.’ I got a list of the directors and shareholders, though it’s pretty short.”
Leopold felt his pulse quicken. “Let me guess. Just two people? Share a surname?”