Silent Assassin(44)

“It’s very, very important that you tell me everything you can about the delivery of this envelope.” Morgan pulled out of his jacket the envelope that Stuart had given him.

He looked at it, then looked around at the street, careful to keep his eyes averted from Morgan’s. “Look, we don’t look at the documents we send, and we don’t look too hard at the person sending it either. A little thing called privacy? Customers tend to value that. And they put that stuff on the Internet these days, you know? If they’re not satisfied, they’ll write us up. If it gets out that we’re not treating their stuff the way we say they do . . .”

“Come on, I’m sure you can tell me something about the man who sent it.”

“Are you with the police or something?” he asked, getting more nervous by the second.

“No. Not police. Just someone who’s really interested in finding the man who sent this.”

“Look, man,” he said, “all we need is a name and a signature, and those you’ve got on that envelope there.” That he did. The name on the package was James Helfer. Shepard had halfheartedly looked it up in the database and found only two in the city—one who was eighty-four years old, and another who was seven.

“You took the package from him, didn’t you? Is there a rule against describing him for me?”

“Technically, no,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t cost me my job if someone finds out.”

“Nobody’s going to find out,” said Morgan. “What harm could it be? Look,” he went on, lowering his voice, “the thing is, I’m a PI. This guy’s been blackmailing my client. It’s a thing from his past, nothing major, just a minor indiscretion, but it could cost him his job and his relationship. If you come through for me here, it could make a big difference in this guy’s life.”

“Look, man, I don’t want any trouble. I’m not supposed to be giving out customer information like this. It could cost me my job.”

“What if I sweetened it a little more?” Morgan offered him another fifty. The man hesitated nervously. “Hey, this guy’s a blackmailer. Do you really want to go out of your way to protect him? Scout’s honor, nobody ever finds out about this.” He took out another fifty and offered it to the man. “Come on. Take it. All I want is a description.”

The courier looked around again, then took the money without looking down and stuffed it into his shorts. “He was a small guy. He was wearing a Yankees hat and big sunglasses, but I could tell he looked Chinese or something. Young, I think. Like under thirty. Black hair, looked like it was cut short, like a couple inches.”

“Anything else?” said Morgan.

“That’s all—no, wait. I just remembered. He had this bandage on his forehead, just peeking out under his hat. I swear I saw a little bit of red, like there was blood seeping through.”





“What do we make of this?” said Bloch, standing at the head of the conference table in the war room at Zeta headquarters. Morgan was sitting at the table, along with Shepard, O’Neal, and Bishop. Shepard, wearing the same plaid shirt over a grey graphic tee he’d had on the day before, had his face buried in a laptop, as usual. Bishop had pushed his chair a few feet away from the table, and sat with crossed arms and extended legs. Together, they were trying to figure out what their next step would be.

The note that Stuart had passed Morgan had been scanned, and the image was now up on the big monitor. Like the previous one, it contained a date, a time, a location written on it—this time, a restaurant downtown—and a dollar amount. It was much the same as the previous note, except that it demanded fifty thousand in cash, and that it was handwritten.

“I had the computer analyze the handwriting,” said Shepard. “But it won’t help very much unless we have something to compare it to, which means it will not help us find our guy.”

“Did you gather anything at the address he provided for the handoff?” Bloch asked Bishop, who’d been down to scout the place.

“It’s an Asian cuisine place,” he said. “It’s nothing fancy, and there doesn’t seem to be anything shady about the people who run it.”

“Their finances are clean,” said O’Neal, resting her chin on her hand with a sigh. “Nothing fishy in their income taxes, at least, and the cash flow seems pretty standard for a business that size.”

“So there’s nothing special about this location,” said Bloch, walking pensively along the length of the table, her heels clicking on the dark stone floor. “What do we make of the fact that the note was handwritten?”