A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,69

to it. What the hell did you mean by Catch-22?”

She had already ordered me pancakes, and they came while I started sorting through the columns of dates and rows of figures. The smell caused me to start absentmindedly cutting them with a fork and eating.

“Old Joseph Heller book,” I said. “It’s where they got the phrase. This bomber crewman is trying to prove he’s crazy by flying these dangerous missions in WWII. But the fact that he keeps going up proves he’s not crazy because he can still do his job. But if he refuses to go up, it proves that he realizes how crazy it is, so again he’s not crazy.”

“Never read it,” Richards said. “And what’s it got to do with Milo?”

I washed another mouthful down with coffee.

“Milo was a character in the book. A G.I. who was making a killing swapping out government supplies for illicit civilian goods. Billy tracked down McCane’s work history and found out he worked in a Georgia prison and lost his job for running scams inside on the population.”

“Yeah,” Richards said. “Keep going.”

“McCane and Dr. Marshack worked in the same prison at the same time. A prosecutor friend of Billy’s said McCane was like the operator inside. You needed it, McCane was the bull to get it through. I took a chance on a guy I knew who’d been sent to the place and he used McCane’s nickname, Milo. Said McCane was proud of it.”

I let her digest the information while I was matching up the dates that Marshack had recorded apparent payouts with the time of death dates for Billy’s women. They were close.

“If you fill in the blanks, Marshack was paying somebody three hundred dollars a few days before each death and two hundred dollars afterwards,” I said, pointing out the figures. “Then within two weeks, he was getting eight thousand dollars from Milo.”

“Tight little business,” she said. “But if McCane is Milo, how much was he getting? And from where?”

“The investment group,” I said. “With at least three people between them and the killer. And each of them set apart on a need-to- know basis. If McCane set this up, he wouldn’t know who the hit man was, and Marshack wouldn’t know who the investors were.”

I reached for my coffee but Richards was just finishing the last of it.

“So you’re figuring the psychotic patient, Baines, for the killer,” she said. “But the last one didn’t work the way they wanted it to, and your friend Billy had already stirred up the nest by looking into the other deaths.”

I stood up and snapped the cell phone off my belt.

“I’ve got to let Billy know,” I said. “We’re supposed to meet with McCane this afternoon.”

I got Billy at his office and ran through the ledger file and the Milo connection and told him to stall McCane if he called.

“Not a problem,” Billy said and then went silent. I knew my friend, knew those silences meant he was trying to collect a thought, pare it down before putting it into words.

“What? All this doesn’t surprise you, counselor?”

“I’ve been trying to track Marshack’s stolen hard drive,” he said, finally letting it go.

“Yeah. So’s every cop with a pawn shop connection.”

“Might not be in a pawn shop. If the killer needed to find out what was inside, he’d take it to a hacker who could get into it. A hacker who wouldn’t tell what he found or who he found it for.”

“Ideas?” I said.

“I’ve been thinking maybe someone who was very good with computers who’d stretched themselves in an insurance fraud and might have come into contact with an insurance investigator.”

“Jesus, Billy. You found someone who McCane’s company nailed for hacking?”

“Not yet. I’m working on it, but Sherry might be able to help us if they’ve got a computer crime investigator with a good memory.”

I handed the phone to Richards and sat staring out into the sunlight flashing off the chrome and glass in the parking lot, letting them talk, my head gone to another place.

Richards closed the phone and slid out of her side of the booth.

“So what did he say?”

“He thinks if he can track our dead doctors computer to McCane, then it’s a lock that McCane took out Marshack to cover any link to your women,” she said. “He’s got access to the insurance company files and we’ve got access downtown to all the known hackers who’ve been snagged in the past few years. It’ll be faster if we work together.”

I