The Zero Hour

But when her Heidelberg tour was done, she found that there were very few Counterterrorism slots in the United States open and none in Boston, which she still considered home-and where, by the terms of her custody agreement with Peter, she had to live. So she’d requested a transfer to Organized Crime, and there she’d been ever since.

***

She called a few informants, worked a few leads. For almost two hours she filled out forms, wrote up a few 302s, or interview reports, did the paperwork that takes up most of an FBI agent’s work, got caught up. She called the airport and talked to a member of an FBI surveillance team on a case that was all but wrapped up.

Then a thought occurred to her, and she picked up the phone. Fortunately, Ted answered the phone; Peter was out of the squad room.

“Can you pull Val’s phone records, or should I?” she asked.

“Already did.”

“You’re kidding me. You got a subpoena that fast?”

“I’ve got a friend at New England Telephone Security.”

Sarah shook her head, half in disgust and half in admiration. “I see.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you feebees always play by the rules,” Ted replied. “Phone company’s impossible to deal with through channels anymore, you know that.”

“So what’d you find?”

“According to her local phone records, at three forty-four in the afternoon of the day she was killed, she received a three-minute call.”

“So?”

“So she wasn’t at home at the time. Between three and quarter after four, she was at a salon on Newbury Street called Diva. Take a look at her appointment book. Both her hair stylist, a guy named Gordon Lascalza, and her manicurist, Deborah something, placed her there then.”

“You’ve never heard of answering machines?” Sarah said.

“Oh, there’s messages on her answering machine, all right,” Ted replied. “Three messages. One from the owner of the Stardust Escort Service, a Nanci Wynter. Her madam. And two from creditors-Citibank Visa and Saks. Apparently she didn’t like paying her bills, or she was short of funds, or both.”

“And?”

“None of them remotely approached two minutes. Also, they were received between five o’clock and six-thirty. They also match up with her phone records.”

“So you’re saying that Val came home after her haircut and manicure,” Sarah said, “played her answering machine, and rewound, right?”

“Exactly,” Ted said.

“And whoever called her at three forty-four that afternoon and left a long message-we don’t have that message, because it was recorded over by later messages.”

“Right.”

“But you know who placed the call, right? From the phone records?”

Teddy hesitated. He was not a good liar. “According to the phone records, that three-minute phone call Valerie Santoro got on the day she was killed came from a cellular phone, a car phone. Registered to a limousine-rental agency. The limo company has twenty-some cellular phones in its name, probably all installed in the cars it rents out.”

She nodded, sensed he was holding back. “Did you already talk to the limo company, or should I?”

An even longer pause. “Uh, I did already.”

“And?”

“All right, the phone call came from a limo rented for two days by a guy named Warren Elkind, from New York City.”

She hesitated. “Know anything about the guy?”

“Nothing.”

“Do me a favor. Forget to mention to Peter you told me about this guy, huh?” There was a long silence. “Hello?”

“Yeah, I’m here. All right. Understood,” Teddy said reluctantly.

“Thanks, Teddy. I owe you. Oh, and one more thing.”

“Now what?”

“Can I have the tape?”

“The what?”

“The tape from Valerie’s answering machine.”

“You asking me to get it transcribed? Or copied?

“I want the original.”

“Shit, Sarah, why are you doing this? It’s in the evidence locker already-”

“Because we have jurisdiction. She’s one of our informants.”

“It’s not going to do you any good, Sarah-I already told you what’s on it.”

“Can I borrow it for a little while anyway?”

He sighed. “I’m hanging up before you ask me for anything else.”

“Ms. Cahill? Excuse me.” Hector, the database trainee, approached her awkwardly. He was holding a long sheet of computer paper and smiling bashfully. His face looked like that of a child who’d accomplished something for which he knew he’d be praised.

“We got six hits,” the trainee said.

Sarah perused the computer printout. The six names had little in common. One was a United States senator whose name had come up in a bribery investigation. Another was a professor at Harvard Law School who specialized in defending celebrities; he was probably being watched for no other reason than that someone high in the Bureau disliked him. A third was a well-known construction executive tied to the Mob; then there were two lowlifes who’d done time for drug trafficking.

And there was Warren Elkind: a prominent New York banker, the chairman of the Manhattan Bank, the second-largest bank in the country. The accompanying biographical information indicated that he was a leading fund-raiser for Israel and had been the target of numerous threats from Palestinian and Arab groups.

***