“We’re all team players,” she said, and lightly patted Weiss’s arm. She was good. “Thanks for being open to the suggestion.”
Macdougall came back to the table and he seemed calmer. He even apologized to Weiss. “I’m sorry. Nerves are a little frayed, you know.”
I waited a couple of seconds for his apology to be accepted by Weiss, but the IAD man never said a word. I finally began. “Detective Macdougall, why don’t you tell us what you have that’s important. You know what you have to tell. You also know what we want to hear.”
Macdougall looked at both of his lawyers. He finally smiled.
Chapter 95
“ALL RIGHT, LET’S TRY THAT APPROACH,” said Macdougall. “Simple questions and simple answers. I met with the so-called Mastermind three times. Always down in Washington. Each time I saw him, he gave us what he called ‘traveling expenses.’ That was fifty grand a trip, which made it well worth our while, and also caught our attention, piqued our interest.
“He was very, very buttoned-up. Thought everything through. Knew all the angles. Knew what he was talking about. And — he told us right off that our cut of the action would be fifteen million dollars. He was very credible when he talked about MetroHartford. He had a concept and a plan that was extremely detailed. We felt it was workable, and it was.”
“How did he know about you?” I asked. “How did he contact you?”
Macdougall liked the questions, or made it seem as if he did. “There’s a lawyer we use sometimes.” He looked at the lawyers on either side of him. “Not these two gentlemen. He contacted our other lawyer. We don’t know exactly how he knew about us, but he knew what we did, how we worked. That’s useful information, Detective Weiss. Make yourself a note. Who would know about us? Somebody in law enforcement? A cop? One of ours, Detective Weiss? An agent with the FBI? A cop from D.C.? Maybe somebody in this room? It could be anybody.”
Weiss couldn’t control himself. His face was red. The collar of his button-down white shirt looked a couple of sizes too small. “But you already know who it is, Macdougall? Isn’t that right?”
Macdougall looked at Betsey and me. He shook his head. He couldn’t believe Weiss, either. “I’m coming to that, to what I know, and what I don’t know. Don’t underestimate the information that he knew about us. He knew about Detective Cross. And about Agent Cavalierre. He knew everything. That’s important.”
“I agree with you,” I said. “Go on, please.”
“All right. Before we agreed to the second meeting, we were doing our best to find out who the hell this so-called Mastermind was. We even talked to the FBI about him. We made whatever contacts we could make. We found out nothing. He left no trail.
“So we get to meeting number two and he still doesn’t commit. Bobby Shaw tries to follow him after he leaves the hotel. Shaw loses him.”
“Which makes you think he might be some kind of cop?” I asked.
Macdougall shrugged. “It definitely crosses our minds. Meeting number three is about whether we were in or out. Half of thirty million dollars — we already know we’re in. He knows we’re in. We try to negotiate a better cut. He laughs, says absolutely not. We agree to his terms. It’s his way or we’re out.
“He leaves the hotel after the meet. We’ve got two men following him this time. He’s tall, heavy, dark beard — but we think it’s probably a disguise. Our two guys almost lose him again.
“But they don’t lose him. They’re very lucky. They see him go into the Hazelwood Veterans Hospital in D.C. He doesn’t come out again. We don’t know what he looks like, but the Mastermind went in there and he stayed. He didn’t come out.”
Macdougall stopped talking. He let his eyes go slowly down the line from Weiss to Betsey to me.
“He’s a mental patient, guys and girl. He’s at Hazelwood Veterans Hospital in Washington. He’s on the mental health ward. You just have to find him in there.”
Chapter 96
FBI AGENTS were immediately dispatched to Hazelwood Veterans Hospital. Files on every current patient, and also the staff, were being pulled and would be evaluated. The Veterans Administration was blocking access to the patients themselves, but that wouldn’t last very long.
I spent the rest of a very long day cross-checking copies of files on employees and customers of MetroHartford against patient records as they became available from Hazelwood. Thank God for computers. Even if the Mastermind was at the hospital, no one knew exactly what he looked like. His half of the thirty million dollars was still missing. But we were closer to him than we’d ever been. We had recovered nearly all the money from the New York detectives. Only a couple hundred thousand was still missing. All the detectives were trying to play “let’s make a deal.”
That night around nine-thirty, Betsey and I had dinner in New York at a restaurant called Ecco. She wore a yellow smock, gold earrings and bracelets. It looked good in contrast with her black hair and the tan she still had. I think she knew that she looked good, too. Very, very feminine.
“Is this, like, a date?” she asked once we were seated at a table in the cozy but noisy Manhattan restaurant.
I smiled. “I would say this might qualify as a date, especially if we don’t talk about work too much.”
“You have my word on it. Not even if the Mastermind walks in here and sits down at our table.”
“I’m sorry about Jim Walsh,” I told her. We hadn’t gotten a chance to talk about it much.
“I know you are, Alex. Me too. He was a really good guy.”
“Did it surprise you? That he killed himself?”