Ghost of a Chance

19 The Connection

Alex woke the next morning to his phone ringing. He knew that sound meant something important, but he couldn’t seem to wrap his head around it. Finally he managed to work up the energy to roll over and pick it up.

“Lo?” he slurred.

“Alex?” Danny Pak’s voice came out of the receiver at what seemed like an excessive volume level.

Alarms started going off in Alex’s head, but try as he might he couldn’t put together why he thought hearing Danny’s voice was important.

“You called me,” Danny reminded him. “About a missing Barton Electric truck?”

Synapses started firing and Alex sat up.

“I need a minute,” Alex said, then set the receiver down and poured himself four fingers of bourbon from the bottle on his nightstand. Downing it in one go, he felt the liquor burn its way down to his stomach.

Normally that would do the trick, but his head still felt like it was stuffed with wool. Whatever Dr. Kellin had done to the nerve tonic, it was making him sleep a little too soundly.

Alex forced himself to stand and staggered to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. He tried not to look in the mirror at the dark circles under his eyes and the unkempt mop of white hair hanging down into his face.

You’re a train wreck, he thought.

Train!

Alex jumped as if he’d been jolted by a bolt of lightning. Tearing back into his bedroom, he scooped up the receiver and pressed it to his ear.

“Danny?” he said, trying not to yell.

“I’m still here,” his friend’s voice announced. “Were you asleep when I called?”

“Yeah,” Alex admitted, picking up his alarm clock and pressing it to his ear. The time read eight o’clock, but he couldn’t believe that was possible. The ticking of the clock told him it was.

“Rough night?”

“Rough week,” Alex said. “Did you find out about that truck? I expected you to call last night.”

“I got your message last night,” Danny said, “but I had to wait till this morning to contact the sergeant in charge of evidence at the abandoned factory. I just got off the phone with him and he said that there is a truck in there from Barton Electric.”

“Is it empty?” Alex asked.

“Yeah,” Danny said.

Alex let out a pent-up breath. So far, everything was lining up perfectly. If he was right, he might just have a chance to save Leroy, help Danny solve his case, and get paid double his fee. Not a bad day’s work.

“I didn’t have a Barton Electric truck on my list of stolen property,” Danny said. “How did you know about it?”

Alex started pacing, fully awake now.

“Andrew Barton asked me to find a stolen electric motor for him,” Alex said.

“But why did you think my thieves took it?”

“I’ll explain it all to you at the Central Office,” he said. “You’ve got to run this by Callahan as soon as possible. Can you meet me there in an hour?”

“Do you have a death wish?” Danny said with no trace of humor in his voice. “After that tabloid article yesterday, Detweiler has you on his shoot-on-sight list, and Callahan’s not far behind.”

Alex groaned. He’d forgotten about Billy Tasker of The Midnight Sun. Something would have to be done about that guy, but now wasn’t the time.

“That’s why I need you,” Alex said, thinking quickly. He had intended to let Danny bring his solution to Callahan and take the credit. Tasker burned that plan and now Danny might be risking his own career by helping. Alex hesitated for only a moment before continuing. “I need you to sell this to Callahan. Someone’s life is at stake, I can’t afford for the Lieutenant to give me the brush off.”

“Whose life is at stake?” Danny asked. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Leroy Cunningham,” Alex said. “I promise I’ll tell you the whole story at the Central office. Meet me in the lobby at a quarter to nine.”

To his credit, Danny didn’t ask if Alex was putting him on. He just sighed and agreed to the meeting. Alex hung up with only a little trepidation. If his hunch proved out, Danny would get a very big notch in his belt. If he was wrong, though, he might lose his badge.

It was a tough spot in which he was putting his friend.

“Can’t be helped,” he said out loud, more to convince himself than anything. He peeled off his nightshirt and headed for the shower.

“I wonder if Danny would like to be a partner in a private detective agency?” he asked his reflection as he waited for the hot water.

He didn’t need his reflection to answer, he already knew. Danny would hate it.

Alex decided he would have to work extra hard not to get his best friend fired.

Fifteen minutes later, Alex was showered, shaved, and dressed. Iggy had gone out again, leaving him a note saying he’d gone back to the museum to talk to Dr. Hargrave, the linguist, about the glyph runes. Since Iggy usually made breakfast, and coffee, it was irritating to have him gone two days in a row, but there was no helping it. If Danny couldn’t make the police listen, the glyphs were the only lead Alex had left.

He was about to head out the door and try to grab a cup of coffee from a dog wagon somewhere near the Central Office when the house phone rang.

“Glad I caught you,” Leslie’s voice chided him when he picked up. “You all right?” she prodded when Alex mumbled a barely intelligible greeting at her.

“Tell you later,” he said. He didn’t want to go into it and he really didn’t have the time. “I’m on my way over to the Central Office. I think I know how to find Leroy, but I’m going to need the cops’ help to do it.”

There was a long pause.

“Okay,” she said finally.

Alex knew that meant she was worried. She would make jokes and try to bully him if she thought everything was okay.

“Don’t worry,” Alex said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. “Danny’s with me on this one.”

“Do not get that nice boy in trouble,” she said.

Alex smiled at her bullying remarks. He’d said the right thing to calm her fears.

“What did you need?” he pressed. “I need to get going.”

“One thing,” she said. “Randall looked up Martha Gibbons like you wanted. She owned that land for years, but she fell behind in the taxes.”

“What happened?”

“She died and the land was passed to a relative named Duane King.”

“Okay,” Alex said, taking out his notebook and writing King’s name down. “I’ll try to look him up at the Hall of Records after I’m done with the cops.”

It wasn’t much, but he felt like he was one step closer to figuring out why David Watson was killed.

“There’s more,” Leslie said with a sly grin Alex could hear. “When Randall looked into it, he found that the land was sold at a tax sale.”

Alex had no idea what that meant.

“What’s a tax sale?”

“Apparently, if you don’t pay the taxes on your land for five years, the state will sell your land at auction to cover them.”

“Didn’t Mr. King have the money to pay the taxes?” he asked.

“Randall didn’t know. All he could find out from the report was that the land value had gone down in the year before it sold.”

“That doesn’t sound right. I thought land on the North Shore was valuable.”

“That was before the big push for millionaires to build houses in the Hamptons,” Leslie said. “Randall said that land does lose value sometimes. He figures King didn’t want to pay the taxes on land that wasn’t worth that much to begin with.”

“Well if this is all so normal, why did Randall bother telling it to you?” Alex was starting to get irritated. He knew very well why Randall would want to keep Leslie on the phone but why would she pass useless information on to him?

“There might have been a detail he found interesting,” Leslie said. Alex could tell from the teasing shift in her voice that she was annoyed that he’d gotten short with her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “What did Mr. Wonderful find so interesting?”

“The tax sale for that land was moved to a new location on the day of the sale,” she said. “Randall said that tax sales are announced to the public in advance. Moving it would make it hard for people to find.”

Alex nodded, starting to see where this was going.

“Do you know who won that auction?” he asked.

“North Shore Development.”

“Well that’s not suspicious at all,” Alex said, making quick notes in his book. If Seth Kowalski or someone in his office changed the auction’s location to make sure North Shore got the land, then maybe one of the losers was the ghost.

That’s a long time to wait to take revenge for a bad land deal, his logical brain reminded him.

It wasn’t a concrete motive, but it wasn’t nothing. Alex needed to find Duane King.

“Thanks, doll,” he said, tucking his notebook back in his pocket. “Call your beau back and see if he’s got an address for Mr. King. I’ll run the rest of this down as soon as I’m done with the police.”

“If I haven’t heard from you by dinner, I’ll come by with bail money,” she promised, then wished him luck and hung up.

Thanks to his call with Leslie, it was nine-fifty when Alex got off at the crawler station across from the Central Office. At the corner of the block there was a vendor selling hot dogs and sandwiches. Alex noticed the bullet shape of a coffee percolator and he headed that way instead of crossing the street.

He wasn’t sure that he could get the police to help him recover Leroy, even with Danny’s assistance. He needed to get his head clear. The way things were going, this might be his only chance to find Hannah’s missing husband.

He decided that in addition to clearing his head, he needed something for his nerves. He took out one of his two remaining cigarettes and lit it.

“I thought I might find you here,” Danny’s said when Alex stepped up to the dog wagon.

Alex must have needed the coffee more than he thought. Danny stood back from the street, leaning against the corner of the building. He wasn’t hidden at all and yet Alex had missed him.

“Coffee,” he told the man working the dog wagon.

“Are you going to tell me what this is about now?” Danny asked as Alex paid for his drink.

“Remember my theory from the other day,” he said, sipping the scalding liquid as fast as he dared.

Danny nodded.

“You thought my thieves were actually bank robbers trying to tunnel into an underground vault.”

“I was right.”

Danny raised an eyebrow at that.

“As I remember it,” Danny said, pulling out his notebook and flipping it open, “you called an expert on mining who told you that my thieves would need a special mining engine to make that work. One that would make far too much noise and probably asphyxiate the people using it.”

Alex nodded. He hoped it didn’t sound that impossible when Danny told Callahan.

“That’s where the Barton Electric truck comes in,” he said. “That truck was carrying an experimental electric motor that Barton developed to pull trains.”

Danny didn’t seem sure what to make of that.

“So,” he said after a long silence. “You think the thieves are using the Lightning Lord’s motor to turn the boring bits to dig a tunnel.”

“Think about it,” Alex said. “Electric motors are quiet and they don’t have exhaust. Whoever stole all that stuff has everything they need to tunnel from the basement of one building into a bank vault. Even one across a street.”

Danny hesitated, flipping to his notes on the things that had been stolen.

“It’s crazy,” he said after a moment. “But you’re right, whoever stole the trucks has everything they’d need to dig a tunnel. Callahan is not going to like this.”

Alex knew Danny was right, but he pressed on anyway.

“He’s going to like a Manhattan bank getting robbed a whole lot less,” he pointed out.

“True,” Danny said, flipping his notebook closed.

“So, are you with me on this?” Alex asked with a smile.

Danny rolled his eyes and shook his head.

“I must be out of my mind.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Callahan roared at Alex. The usual look of casual disdain he wore when Alex was around had been replaced by something perilously close to naked hatred. “It’s bad enough you’re sneaking around behind Detweiler’s back and feeding information to the tabloids, but now you drag my detective in here to sell me some cock and bull story about a bunch of penny-ante gangsters tunneling into a bank? Get out of my office.”

“Lieutenant,” Danny began but Callahan silenced him with a look.

“If you keep listening to this guy, he’s going to drag you down with him. I’m not going to let that happen to me.”

Alex forced himself not to blush under Callahan’s tirade. Truth be told, he did worry that sooner or later he’d steer Danny wrong and cost his friend his job. Or worse, his life.

“Lieutenant!” Danny interrupted. “I know how this sounds, but you should know by now, I wouldn’t have brought this to you if I didn’t think there was something to it.”

Callahan swelled up with fury and Alex wondered if he’d pop his collar button. After a long, pregnant moment, however, he sat back in his chair and folded his hands in front of him.

“Do you have any idea what bank these guys are planning to hit?” he asked, his voice calm and even.

“No,” Danny admitted.

Alex just shook his head when Callahan looked at him.

“Do you know how many banks there are in Manhattan?”

“No,” Danny was forced to admit.

“Do you know?” Alex asked, speaking before he thought better of it.

Callahan glared at him.

“I know it’s more than fifty,” he said. “And since you don’t know which bank is the target of this master plan, you’re asking me to send out officers to look in the basement of every adjacent building for some lowlifes digging a tunnel.”

Alex had to admit, it sounded crazy when put like that.

“Forget the fact that the Captain will never go for this,” Callahan said. “Just tell me how, in your little scenario, these bank robbers are going to power that electric train motor?”

“Most of the banks worth all this trouble are in the Inner and Mid-rings,” Danny said. “Power shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Except when you dig a tunnel, you do it underground,” Callahan said. “Radiated power doesn’t do well underground, that’s why magelights have to be wired to the building in most basements.”

“Very good, Lieutenant,” Alex said. “The field generated by Empire Tower is based on magic and magic doesn’t penetrate the ground well.”

“I don’t care how big Barton’s missing motor is,” Callahan said. “It’s not going to drill anything without power.”

Alex turned to Danny.

“Can I borrow your notebook?” he asked. “I think I can narrow down the search for your boss.”

Callahan ground his teeth loud enough for Alex to hear as Danny passed over the notebook. Alex flipped to the page where Danny had catalogued all the stolen items that were missing from the recovered trucks.

“See here, Lieutenant,” he said, putting the notebook down on Callahan’s desk. “Three one-hundred-foot spools of heavy copper wire were stolen.”

“So?”

“So,” Danny said, picking up on Alex’s train of thought. “All the robbers have to do is patch the wire into the building’s etherium receiver and run it to the motor.”

Callahan looked like he wanted to object but couldn’t find a flaw in that argument.

“And,” Alex jumped in, eager to maintain what little momentum he’d garnered. “The only buildings you need to search are ones adjacent to banks with underground vaults.”

Callahan jumped up out of his chair and got right in Alex’s face.

“It doesn’t matter how many banks have underground vaults,” he growled. “What matters is that if I manage to convince the Captain that there’s something to this and it turns out to be a bust, I’m going to be jackass of the century around here. And that’s if they let me stay on as janitor or something.”

“What happens if it’s not a bust but you don’t look?” Alex pointed out, locking eyes with Callahan. “These guys have spent too much time planning and digging to waste that effort on some little, no-name bank. They’re going to hit the biggest, fattest target they can find, and what happens when they do?” Alex picked up a newspaper from the Lieutenant’s desk with an article about the ghost killer. The headline declared that the city was in panic.

“You think people are panicking now,” he said. “Wait until there’s a run on a major bank because all their money’s gone.”

“He’s right, Lieutenant,” Danny said. “One run is likely to cause others. They’ll be rioting in the streets before it’s done.”

Callahan swore and flopped down in his chair. Alex could tell that the Lieutenant was facing the reality that he really didn’t have any choice. Alex’s evidence was circumstantial, but it fit, and Callahan couldn’t afford to let a major bank get cleaned out. Alex resisted the urge to smile out of sheer relief.

“You told me you became a cop to protect people,” Alex reminded him. “Now’s your chance.”

Callahan chuckled and shook his head.

“If this blows back on me, Lockerby, then you’re done,” he said in a cold, even voice. “You’d better leave the state, because if I catch you, I’ll make sure you get twenty years breaking rocks, you got me?”

Alex nodded.

“That’s fair,” he said. “One more thing, though. When you have your boys search for our tunnel diggers, tell them that one of them is a hostage. A guy named Leroy Cunningham.”

“Hostage?”

“Yeah, they grabbed him because he used to work in a mine and they think he knows how to shore up a tunnel.”

“Does he?” Callahan asked.

Alex shrugged.

“Maybe,” he said. “In any case, tell your men it’s probably best if they stay out of any tunnels they might find.”

“That’s just great,” Callahan sighed. He stood up and put on his suit coat.

“You’re with me, Pak,” he said to Danny. “You,” he said, waving his finger in Alex’s face. “Get lost, and don’t come back till this is over, got me?”

“Loud and clear, Lieutenant.”