The Partner (5 page)

She was Leah Pires now, same age but different birthday. Danilo didn’t know these details; he couldn’t know.

She certainly felt like someone else.

There were many scenarios. He could’ve been shot by bandits making a routine heist along a rural road. Happened occasionally along the Frontier. He could’ve been grabbed by the shadows from his past, tortured, killed, buried in the jungle. Maybe he talked,
and if he did maybe her name got mentioned. She could spend the rest of her life on the run. At least he had warned her of this in the beginning. Maybe he didn’t talk, and she could remain Eva.

Perhaps Danilo was still alive somewhere. He had promised her they wouldn’t kill him. They might make him beg for death, but they couldn’t afford to kill him. If the American authorities found him first, it would be a matter of extradition. He’d picked Latin America because of its historical reluctance to extradite.

If the shadows found him first, they would beat him until he told them where the money was. That’s what he feared most—the coercion.

She tried to nap in the Buenos Aires airport, but sleep was impossible. She called his home again in Ponta Porã, then the cell phone and the apartment in Curitiba.

In Buenos Aires, she boarded a flight to New York, where she waited three hours then caught another one to Zurich on SwissAir.

They laid him across the rear seat of the Volkswagen van, and wrapped a seat belt around his waist so he wouldn’t bounce off. The roads ahead were rough. He was dressed in his running shorts only. The doctor checked the heavy gauze bandages—eight of them in all. He had covered the burns with ointments and shot antibiotics into Patrick’s blood. The doctor took the seat in front of his patient, and tucked his little black bag between his feet. Patrick had suffered enough. He would protect him now.

A day or two of rest and more painkillers, and Patrick would be on his way to recovery. The burns would leave small scars, which would probably fade with time.

The doctor turned around and patted him on the shoulder. He was so pleased they hadn’t killed him. “He’s ready,” he said to Guy in the front seat. A Brazilian driver started the van and backed away from the cabin.

They stopped every hour, precisely every sixty minutes, so the antenna could be raised and the cell phone could work around the mountains. Guy called Stephano, who was in his D.C. office with Hamilton Jaynes and a top official with the State Department. The Pentagon was being consulted.

What the hell was going on, Guy wanted to ask. Where did the feds come from?

In the first six hours they traveled a hundred miles. At times, the roads were almost impassable. They often fought with the phone trying to get Washington. At two in the afternoon, the roads improved as they left the mountains.

The extradition issue was sticky, and Hamilton Jaynes wanted no part of it. Important diplomatic strings were pulled. The Director of the FBI called the President’s Chief of Staff. The American Ambassador to Paraguay got involved. Promises and threats were made.

A suspect with cash and resolve can stifle extradition from Paraguay for years, if not forever. This suspect
had no money on him, and didn’t even know what country he was in.

The Paraguayans reluctantly agreed to ignore extradition.

At four, Stephano instructed Guy to find the airport at Concepción, a small city three hours by car from Asunción. The Brazilian driver cursed, in Portuguese, when told to turn around and head north.

It was dusk when they entered Concepción, and it was dark when they finally found the airport, a small brick building next to a narrow asphalt strip. Guy called Stephano, who instructed him to leave Patrick in the van, with the keys in the ignition, and walk away from it. Guy, the doctor, the driver, and another American eased away slowly while looking over their shoulders at the van. They found a spot a hundred yards away, under a large tree where they couldn’t be seen. An hour passed.

Finally, a King Air with American registration landed and taxied to the small terminal. Two pilots emerged and went inside the terminal. A moment later, they walked to the van, opened the doors, got inside, and drove it to a spot near their airplane.

Patrick was gently removed from the back of the van and loaded onto the turboprop. An Air Force medic was on board, and he immediately took possession of the prisoner. The two pilots returned the van to its original spot in the parking lot. Minutes later, the plane took off.

The King Air refueled in Asunción, and while it was on the ground there Patrick began to move. He was
too weak and sore and groggy to sit up. The medic gave him cold water and crackers.

They refueled again in La Paz and Lima. In Bogotá, they transferred him to a small Lear, which flew at twice the speed of the King Air. It refueled on Aruba, off the coast of Venezuela, then flew nonstop to a U.S. Navy base outside San Juan, Puerto Rico. An ambulance took him to the base hospital.

After almost four and a half years, Patrick was back on American soil.

Five

The law firm Patrick worked for before he died filed for bankruptcy protection a year after his funeral. After his death, the firm’s letterhead properly included him: Patrick S. Lanigan, 1954–1992. He was listed up in the right-hand corner, just above the paralegals. Then the rumors got started and wouldn’t stop. Before long, everyone believed he had taken the money and disappeared. After three months, no one on the Gulf Coast believed he was dead. His name came off the letterhead as the debts piled up.

The four remaining partners were still together, attached unwillingly at the hip by the bondage of bankruptcy. Their names had been joined on the mortgages and the bank notes, back when they were rolling and on the verge of serious wealth. They had been joint defendants in several unwinnable lawsuits; thus the bankruptcy. Since Patrick’s departure, they had tried every possible way to divorce one another,
but nothing would work. Two were raging alcoholics who drank at the office behind locked doors, but never together. The other two were in recovery, still teetering on the brink of sobriety.

He took their money. Their millions. Money they had already spent long before it arrived, as only lawyers can do. Money for their richly renovated office building in downtown Biloxi. Money for new homes, yachts, condos in the Caribbean. The money was on the way, approved, the papers signed, orders entered; they could see it, smell it, almost touch it when their dead partner snatched it at the last possible second.

He was dead. They buried him on February 11, 1992. They had consoled the widow and put his rotten name on their handsome letterhead. Yet six weeks later, he somehow stole their money.

They had brawled over who was to blame. Charles Bogan, the firm’s senior partner and its iron hand, had insisted the money be wired from its source into a new account offshore, and this made sense after some discussion. It was ninety million bucks, a third of which the firm would keep, and it would be impossible to hide that kind of money in Biloxi, population fifty thousand. Someone at the bank would talk. Soon everyone would know. All four vowed secrecy, even as they made plans to display as much of their new wealth as possible. There had even been talk of a firm jet, a six-seater.

So Bogan took his share of the blame. At forty-nine, he was the oldest of the four, and, at the moment, the most stable. He was also responsible for hiring Patrick nine years earlier, and for this he had received no small amount of grief.

Doug Vitrano, the litigator, had made the fateful decision to recommend Patrick as the fifth partner. The other three had agreed, and when Lanigan was added to the firm name, he had access to virtually every file in the office. Bogan, Rapley, Vitrano, Havarac, and Lanigan, Attorneys and Counselors-at-Law. A large ad in the yellow pages claimed “Specialists in Offshore Injuries.” Specialists or not, like most firms they would take almost anything if the fees were lucrative. Lots of secretaries and paralegals. Big overhead, and the strongest political connections on the Coast.

They were all in their mid- to late forties. Havarac had been raised by his father on a shrimp boat. His hands were still proudly calloused, and he dreamed of choking Patrick until his neck snapped. Rapley was severely depressed and seldom left his home, where he wrote briefs in a dark office in the attic.

Bogan and Vitrano were at their desks just after nine when Agent Cutter entered the building on Vieux Marche, in the old section of Biloxi. He smiled at the receptionist and asked if any of the lawyers were in. It was a fair question. They were known as a bunch of drunks who occasionally showed up for work.

She led him to a small conference room and gave him coffee. Vitrano came first, looking remarkably starched and clear-eyed. Bogan was just seconds behind. They mixed sugar in the coffee and talked about the weather.

In the months immediately following the disappearance of both Patrick and the money, Cutter would
drop in periodically and deliver the latest update on the FBI’s investigation. They became pleasant acquaintances, though the meetings were always disheartening. As the months became years, the updates grew further apart. And the updates had the same endings: no trace of Patrick. It had been almost a year since Cutter had spoken to any of them.

And so they figured he was simply being nice, happened to be downtown for something, probably wanted a cup of coffee, and this would be routine and quick.

Cutter said, “We have Patrick in custody.”

Charlie Bogan closed his eyes and displayed every one of his teeth. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed, then buried his face in his palms. “Oh my God.”

Vitrano’s head fell back, his mouth too fell open. He gazed in utter disbelief at the ceiling. “Where?” he managed to ask.

“He’s at a military base in Puerto Rico. He was captured in Brazil.”

Bogan stood and walked to a corner, next to some bookcases, where he hid his face and tried to hold back the tears. “Oh my God,” he kept repeating.

“Are you sure it’s him?” Vitrano asked in disbelief.

“Positive.”

“Tell me more,” Vitrano said.

“Like what?”

“Like how did you find him? And where? And what was he doing? What does he look like?”

“We didn’t find him. He was given to us.”

Bogan sat down at the table, a handkerchief over his nose. “I’m sorry,” he said, embarrassed.

“Do you know a man named Jack Stephano?” Cutter asked.

They both nodded with some reluctance.

“Are you part of his little consortium?”

They both shook their heads in the negative.

“You’re lucky. Stephano found him, tortured him, damned near killed him, then gave him to us.”

“I like the part about the torture,” Vitrano said. “Tell us about that.”

“Skip it. We picked him up last night in Paraguay, flew him to Puerto Rico. He’s in the hospital there. He’ll be released and sent here in a few days.”

“What about the money?” Bogan managed to ask, his voice scratchy and dry.

“No sign of it. But then, we don’t know what Stephano knows.”

Vitrano stared at the table, his eyes dancing. Patrick had stolen ninety million dollars when he disappeared four years earlier. It would be impossible to spend all of it. He could have bought mansions and helicopters and lots of women and still have tens of millions left. Surely they could find it. The firm’s fee was a third.

Maybe, just maybe.

Bogan worked on his moist eyes and thought of his ex-wife, a congenial woman who’d turned vicious when the sky fell. She had felt disgraced after the bankruptcy, and so she took their youngest child and moved to Pensacola where she filed for divorce and made ugly accusations. Bogan was drinking and using coke. She knew it and beat him over the head with it. He couldn’t offer much resistance. He eventually cleaned himself up, but was still denied access to the child.

Oddly enough, he still loved his ex-wife; still dreamed of getting her back. Maybe the money would get her attention. Maybe there was hope. Surely they could find it.

Cutter broke the silence. “Stephano’s in all sorts of trouble. There were burns all over Patrick’s body where they tortured him.”

“Good,” Vitrano said with a smile.

“You expect sympathy from us?” Bogan asked.

“Anyway, Stephano is a side issue. We’ll watch him, maybe he’ll lead us to the money.”

“The money will be easy to find,” Vitrano said. “There was a dead body. Somebody got killed by our boy Patrick. It’s a death penalty case, open and shut. Murder for the sake of money. Patrick will sing when the pressure is applied.”

“Better yet, give him to us,” Bogan said, without a smile. “Ten minutes, and we’ll know everything.”

Cutter glanced at his watch. “I gotta go. I have to go to Point Clear and break the news to Trudy.”

Bogan and Vitrano snorted in perfect unison, then laughed. “Oh, she doesn’t know?” Bogan said.

“Not yet.”

“Please video it,” Vitrano said, still laughing quietly. “I’d love to see her face.”

“I’m actually looking forward to it,” Cutter said.

“The bitch,” Bogan said.

Cutter stood and said, “Tell the other partners, but sit on it until noon. We’ve scheduled a press conference then. I’ll be in touch.”

They didn’t say a word for a long time after he left. There were so many questions, so much to say. The room spun with possibilities and scenarios.