Peter Spiegelman - Death's little helpers

I closed the car door and went around back. There was a flash of blue light through the high barn windows, and a sizzling sound, and an almost simultaneous crack of thunder. The building shook and I felt the pressure wave in my shoulders and I was sure that the windows had shattered. The weak lights failed and found themselves again. I looked up at the windows and saw they were intact. I lifted the trunk lid.

The first thing I saw was the missing curtain rod from the farmhouse dining room, and the missing green curtain. The rod was bent and the curtain was stiff with dried blood. Beneath it was another insane pile. Rather than linen closets and wardrobes, it looked as if someone had whirled a refrigerator together with a desktop. The food was on top- a carton of milk, eggs, butter, a foil bag of coffee, bread, a box of Swiss breakfast cereal, a bottle of red wine- all curdled and rotten and gone to mold. The smell wafted up at me, competing with- and momentarily defeating- the dead smell. It was a small reprieve. Below the food was hardware.

I saw the cell phone that was never answered, an electronic organizer the size of a deck of cards, and the laptop that was missing from the docking station in Danes’s apartment. I saw a wineglass, cracked and dark with dregs and mold, and a snarled skein of black power cables wrapped around it all. The papers were underneath.

Some of them were newspapers-New York Times, Journal, FT- and some were magazines, and some of them were glossy pamphlets and catalogs. But the milk carton and wine bottle had drained on the pile, and left the electronics sticky and spotted with odd pink scabs and the papers mostly illegible. I picked carefully through the mess and stopped when I got to the briefcase. It was a black leather satchel, and it was empty except for an accordion file. The file was red, with a long flap and an elastic band, and it was mostly unscathed. I slid it out and opened it up.

There was a thick sheaf of papers inside. I thumbed through them and my heart started to pound. There was a bench behind me, near the Dutch door, and I sat on it and read.

Mostly, they were stock research reports, with titles like “Fly Me to the Moon: A Survey of Online Travel Agents,” and “Going, Going, Gone: Valuation of Internet Auction Houses,” and I recognized the names of the authors- Irene Pratt, Anthony Frye, others- as members of the Pace-Loyette equity research department. The reports were in chronological order on the pile- oldest to latest- and every page of every report was marked CONFIDENTIAL in dark capitals in the upper left-hand corner and DRAFT in the upper right.

The report at the top of the pile had been written by Irene Pratt, and it was fifteen months old. It was eight pages long and surveyed stocks of video-game software companies, and it ended with a recommendation to buy the shares of three different firms. Stapled to the bottom of its last page was a rectangular strip of paper. It was from a fax machine, and it confirmed the transmission, some fifteen months back, of an eight-page fax from a number with a 212 area codea New York City number- to a number with a 203 area code- a number in Connecticut.

The last report on the stack was barely three months old. It had been written by Anthony Frye and another man from Pace, and it concluded with sell recommendations on the shares of four companies. It was six pages long, and it too had a fax confirmation stapled to its last page- six pages sent to a number in Connecticut. In fact, each of the twelve reports in the stack had a fax confirmation fastened to it. The sending phone numbers were different in each case, but the receiving numbers were all the same. They suggested that someone had been faxing drafts of Pace-Loyette’s confidential research reports to someone else in Connecticut, and that whoever it was had been doing it for well over a year.

It was the pages I found tucked between the research reports that told me why. There were twelve of them, one following each of the research reports, and they were typed- not printed- on the simple yet elegant letterhead of the Kubera Group. They were investor statements.

The dates corresponded roughly to the dates on the research papers, lagging them in each case by a week or so, and they reported the performance of only one investment: a 15 percent share in a fund that had the innocent-sounding name of Kubera Venture Twelve. It was an investment, apparently, that had done quite well. On the first statement, dated fifteen months back, the investor’s stake in Kubera Venture Twelve was worth just under five million dollars; on the last, its value had more than doubled. I guessed that the investor must have been quite pleased with that performance, but as he was currently wrapped in plastic and dissolving in the back seat of a car, I’d never know for sure. But maybe Marcus Hauck could tell me- it was, after all, his signature on each of the statements.

I let out a long, slow breath. The way I read it, they were in business together, Danes and Hauck. In violation of about a zillion securities laws and NASD rules, and who knew how many of Pace-Loyette’s company policies, they were in business together. Danes’s end of the deal, apparently, was to provide Hauck with advance copies of Pace-Loyette’s research reports. Hauck’s part, I assumed, was to use that information to place bets for his funds. Pace-Loyette’s reports might not have the same oomph in the markets these days as they once had, but with the size of the positions that funds like Kubera took, even small moves up or down could mean serious money. And Danes, in return for his faxing services, had apparently cut himself in for a piece of that action- and never mind conflicts of interest or little things like insider trading. I remembered what Anthony Frye had told me about Hauck- about the bumps in the road that his funds had hit, and about the magic he’d somehow reacquired over the past year- and I was pretty sure I knew where he’d found his sorcerer’s stone.

I looked through the sheaf of papers again. The file was damning to Hauck and Danes both, and while it might not be the whole of their paper trail, it was enough to set even the most sluggish investigator on the right track. It was a smoking gun, and I wondered why Danes had compiled it. And then I recalled what I’d heard about Danes- from Irene Pratt and Anthony Frye and even from Neary- about his reflexive mistrust of people, his tendency to see conspiracy everywhere, and his habit of keeping a firm grip on his management’s balls. Whatever else Danes had intended the file to be, it was also an insurance policy. If he’d ever gone down for any of this, he wouldn’t have gone alone.

I wondered if Marcus Hauck knew the file existed. He couldn’t have been sleeping well if he did, and it could explain why he’d mobilized Pflug and his army of contractors when Danes dropped out of sight. Having something this explosive in the hands of a co-conspirator as difficult and volatile as Danes was bad enough. Having the co-conspirator go missing was infinitely worse.

There was a long rumble of thunder and a gust of wind, and the Dutch door blew open. I jumped. I looked at my watch; it was closing in on six o’clock. I took a last look at the papers and put them in the file folder, and another burst of light and shattering noise exploded overhead. The rafters rattled and glass chattered in the windows. The lights flickered- off and on and off again- and stayed off. I switched on my flashlight.

Shit. I wasn’t going to get much more searching done in the dark, and in truth I thought I’d found what I’d come for. It was time to call the cops. It was time to go.

I went to the car and slid the file folder back into the briefcase and closed the trunk. I pulled out my cell phone and tried to find a signal, but the ether was empty no matter where in the barn I stood. I put the phone away and headed for the door.