“I still want to go back to the room with you. Then we can go through all the dusty, musty files on the banks.”
I laughed. “That sounds like a very wise plan. Especially the first part.”
Chapter 109
WE WERE BACK at the FBI field office by three that afternoon. Betsey had called ahead, and the First Union files were waiting in her office. We dug into the files. And dug, and dug. We ordered sandwiches and iced tea from the deli on the corner.
Twice.
“Why are the two of us so driven to do this?” Betsey finally looked over and asked me.
“He probably killed Walsh, and maybe Mike Doud. He’s a really sick puppy and he’s out there somewhere and that’s scary as hell.”
She nodded solemnly. “We’re sick puppies, and look where it got us. Pass me that stack, will you? God, it was so nice and restful and sunny at the Four Seasons.”
Around eleven o’clock I held up a small black-and-white photo. I was deep into the personnel files from First Union.
“Betsey?” I called out.
“Mmmm?” She was deep into her own stack of files.
“This guy was a security executive at the bank. Betsey, he’s a patient on Five at Hazelwood. I know who he is. I’ve talked to him this week. There’s no record at the hospital that he ever worked at First Union. This is our guy. He has to be.” passed her the picture.
We quickly agreed that Sampson and I would return to Hazelwood in the morning. In the meantime, she tried to gather all the information she could on a patient named Frederic Szabo. Goddamn nerdy Frederic Szabo!
It was possible that Szabo wasn’t connected, but it didn’t seem likely. Szabo had been the head of security at First Union Bank. He was a tall, bearded patient at Hazelwood. He fit Brian Macdougall’s description. His psychiatric profile included recurring paranoid fantasies against many prominent authority figures, including several Fortune 500 companies. He’d just seemed too withdrawn and helpless to be the Mastermind.
The most telling evidence was that the hospital’s records didn’t show that he had worked at First Union. Supposedly, Szabo had been an out-of-work drifter since Vietnam. Of course, we now knew that he’d been lying about those years.
According to his psychiatric profile, Szabo had a paranoid personality disorder. He had a severe distrust of people, especially businesspeople, and believed that they were exploiting and trying to deceive him. He was sure that if he confided in someone, the information would be used against him. During a two-year marriage, from ’70 through ’71, Szabo had been pathologically hypersensitive and jealous of his wife. When the marriage broke up, he supposedly hit the road. He eventually showed up at Hazelwood, seeking help three years before the robberies and a year after he’d been let go at First Union. During his frequent stays at Hazelwood he was always cold and aloof. He cut himself off from everyone at the hospital, both patients and staff. He never made a friend, but he basically seemed harmless to others; and he had grounds and town privileges most of the time.
After I read the profile again, it struck me that Szabo’s job at the bank had been a perfect fit for his disorder. Like a lot of functioning paranoids, Szabo had sought out work in which he could operate in a punitive and moralistic style that would be socially acceptable. As head of security at the bank, he could focus on his need to prevent attacks from anyone at any time. By protecting the perimeters of the banks, he was unconsciously protecting himself.
It was ironic that by setting up a series of successful bank robberies he had proven, at least symbolically, that there was no way to protect himself from attack by others. Maybe that was his point.
His mistrustfulness made treatment at the hospital difficult, if not impossible. He had been in and out of Hazelwood four times in the past eighteen months. Had the veterans hospital been a front for his other activities? Had he chosen Hazelwood as his hideout?
And, most puzzling of all, why was he still there?
Chapter 110
ON MONDAY MORNING I went to work at Hazelwood again. I was outfitted in an overhanging white shirt and corduroy pants that were loose enough to hide the holster strapped onto my leg. An FBI agent named Jack Waterhouse had been added to the staff as an aide. Sampson continued as a porter, but he was working only on Five now.
Frederic Szabo proceeded to do nothing to attract suspicion or reveal himself in any way. For three days straight, he never left the ward. He slept a lot in his room. He occasionally worked on an old Apple laptop.
What the hell was he doing? Did he know we were watching him?
Late on Wednesday, after the work shift, I met up with Betsey in the hospital’s administration building. She had on a navy blue suit and blue slingback heels, and she was all business again. She almost seemed like another person at times, preoccupied and distant.
She was clearly as frustrated as I was. “He worked on his master plan for at least four years, right? Presumably, he has fifteen million dollars stashed somewhere. He’s killed a lot of people to get it. Now he’s sitting on his ass at Hazelwood? Give me a break!”
I told her what I thought about Szabo. “He’s extremely paranoid. He’s psychopathic. He may even know we’re here. Maybe we should pull back from the hospital. Do surveillance from the outside. He has his full grounds and town privileges back from Dr. Cioffi. Szabo can come and go as he likes.”
While I talked, Betsey kept pulling at the lapels of her blazer. I was afraid she might start pulling out her hair next.
“But he doesn’t go anywhere! He’s a fifty-year-old slacker! He’s a total loser!”
“Betsey, I know. I’ve been watching Szabo sleep and play games on the Internet for three days.”
She snorted out a laugh. “So he’s pulled off five perfect crimes — that we know of. And now he’s retiring to the farm.”
“Yeah. The funny farm,” I said.
“Want to hear about my day?” she finally asked.
I nodded.
“Well, I visited First Union and I talked with everyone I could find who was there when Szabo was at the bank. He was considered very ‘dedicated,’ actually. But he was wound tight about efficiency and doing the right thing in exactly the right way. Some of the others used it to mock him.”
“Mock him in what way?” I asked.
“Szabo had a nickname, Alex. Get this — it was the Mastermind! The name was a joke. It was supposed to be a joke on Szabo.”
“Well, I guess he’s turned the joke around. Now the joke is on us.”
Chapter 111
THE STRANGEST THING happened the following morning. As Szabo was passing me in the hall, he rubbed against me. He managed to look flustered and he apologized for supposedly “losing his balance,” but I was almost certain he had done it on purpose. Why? What the hell was that all about?
About an hour later, I saw him leaving the ward. I was pretty sure he knew I was watching him go. As soon as he was out, I hurried to the door.
“Where’s Szabo going?” I asked the aide who’d just let him out.
“PT. He signed out. Szabo has full grounds and town. He can go wherever he likes.”
He had been vegetating on the ward for so long that he’d caught me off guard. “Tell the head nurse that I had to leave,” I said.
“Tell her yourself.” The aide frowned and tried to blow me off.
I pushed past him. “Tell her. It’s important.”
I let myself off the unit and took the rickety and temperamental elevator down to the lobby floor. PT was physical therapy, and Frederic Szabo hated the gym. I remembered reading it in his nursing notes. Where was he really going?
I hurried outside and saw Szabo skulking across the courtyard between hospital buildings. Tall and bearded — like the physical description we’d gotten from Brian Macdougall.
When Szabo walked right past the gym, I wasn’t surprised.
He was on the move!
He kept on going and I followed. He seemed kind of nervous and skitt
ish. He finally turned his head in my direction, and I ducked off the path. I didn’t think he’d seen me. Had he?
Szabo continued on and walked through the hospital gates. The street outside was filled with traffic. He walked due south. Not a care in the world. Was this the Mastermind?
He hopped into a cab a couple of blocks from the hospital. There were three of them parked in front of a Holiday Inn.
I hurried to one of the other cabs, got in, told the driver to follow.
The driver was Indian. “Where are we going, mister?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. I showed him my detective’s badge.
The driver shook his head, then he moaned into his hands. “Oh, brother. Just my bad luck. Like the movies — follow that cab.”
Chapter 112
SZABO GOT OUT OF HIS CAB on Rhode Island Avenue in Northwest. So did I. He walked for a while — window-shopped. At least that’s what it looked like. He seemed more relaxed now. His nervous tics had lessened once he was off the hospital grounds. Probably because he had been faking them.
He finally turned into a squat, dilapidated brownstone building, still on Rhode Island Avenue. The basement floor was a Chinese laundry — A. LEE.
What was he doing in there? Was he skipping out a back door? But then I saw a light flash in a second-floor window. Szabo crossed past it a few times. It was him. Tall and bearded.
My brain was starting to overload with possibilities. No one at Hazelwood knew about Szabo’s apartment in D.C. There wasn’t any mention of it in the nursing notes.
Szabo was supposed to be a drifter. Hopeless, harmless, homeless. That was the illusion he’d created. I’d finally learned a secret of his. What did it mean?
I waited down on Rhode Island Avenue. I didn’t feel in any particular danger. Not yet, anyway.
I waited out on the street for quite a while. He was inside the building for nearly two hours. I didn’t see him appear at the windows again. What was he doing in there? Time flies when you’re hanging by your fingernails.
Then the light in the apartment blinked out.
I watched the building with mounting apprehension. Szabo didn’t come outside. I was concerned. Where was he?
A good five minutes after the light went out upstairs, Szabo appeared on the front doorstep again. His nervous tics seemed to have returned. Maybe they were for real.
He rubbed his eyes repeatedly, and then his lower chin. He twitched and continually pulled his shirt away from his chest. He finger-combed his thick black hair three or four times.
Was this the Mastermind that I was watching? It almost didn’t seem possible. But if he wasn’t, where did that leave us?
Szabo kept nervously looking around the street, but I was hidden in the dark shadows of another building. I was sure he couldn’t see me. What was he afraid of?
He started to walk. I watched him retrace his steps up Rhode Island Avenue. Then he waved down a cab.
I didn’t follow Szabo. I wanted to — but I had an even stronger urge. A hunch I needed to play. I hurried across the street and entered the brownstone where he’d spent most of the afternoon.
I had to find out what Szabo had been doing in there. I finally had to admit — he was driving me crazy. He was giving me nervous tics.
Chapter 113
I USED A SMALL, very useful lock pick and got into Szabo’s apartment in less time than it takes to say “illegal entry.” No one was ever going to know I’d been in there.
I was planning to take a quick look around the apartment, then get right out again. I doubted he’d left evidence linking him to the MetroHartford kidnapping, or any of the bank jobs. I needed to see his place, though. I had to know more about Szabo than the doctors and nurses at Hazelwood had written in their reports. I needed to understand the Mastermind.
He had a collection of sharpened hunting knives, and he also collected old guns: Civil War rifles, German Lugers, American Colts. There were souvenirs from Vietnam: a ceremonial sword and a battalion flag of the K10 NVA Battalion, North Vietnamese. Mostly, he had books and magazines in the apartment. The Evil That Men Do. Crime and Punishment. The Shooting Gazette. Scientific American.
So far, no big surprises. Other than that he had the apartment in the first place.
“Szabo, are you him?” I finally asked out loud. “Are you the Mastermind? What the hell is your game, man?”
I quickly searched the living room, a small bedroom, then a claustrophobic den that obviously served as an office.
Szabo, is this where you plotted everything out?
An unfinished handwritten letter was lying on the desk in his den. It seemed he’d been working on it recently. I began to read.
Mr. Arthur Lee
A. Lee Laundry
This is a warning, and if I were you, I’d take it very seriously.
Three weeks ago, I dropped off some dry cleaning to you. Before I send out my cleaning, I always enclose a list of all articles in the dry cleaning bag, and a brief description of each article.
I keep a copy for myself!
The list is orderly and efficient.
The letter went on to say that some clothes of Szabo’s were missing. He’d spoken to someone at the laundry and been promised the clothing would be sent right over. It wasn’t.
I march right down to your cleaners. I meet with YOU. I am enraged that YOU too can stand there and tell me you don’t have my clothes. Then for the final insult. You tell me my doorman probably stole them.
I don’t have a fucking doorman! I live in the same building you do!
Consider yourself warned.
Frederic Szabo
What the hell was this? I wondered as I finished reading the odd, crazy, and seemingly inconsequential letter.
I shook my head back and forth. Was the A. Lee Laundry his next target? Was he planning something against Lee? The Mastermind?
I opened the drawers in a small credenza and found more letters, written to other companies: Citibank, Chase, First Union Bank, Exxon, Kodak, Bell Atlantic, scores of others.
I sat down and skimmed through the letters. All of it was hate mail. Crazy stuff. This was Frederic Szabo as he’d been described in his hospital workups. Paranoid, angry at the world, a curmudgeonly fifty-one-year-old who had been fired from every job he’d had.
I was getting more confused rather than clearer about Szabo. I ran my fingers along the top of a tall filing cabinet. There were papers up there. I pulled them down and took a look.
There were blueprints of the banks that had been robbed!
And a layout of the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel!
“Christ, it is him,” I muttered out loud. What were the blueprints doing here, though?
I don’t remember exactly what happened next. Maybe it was shifting light or motion in the room that I caught out of the corner of my eye.
I turned away from Szabo’s work desk. My eyes went wide with surprise, then total shock. My heart skipped.
A man was coming at me with a hunting knife clasped in his hand. He was wearing a President Clinton mask. He was screaming my name!
Chapter 114
“CROSS!”
I reached out both hands to try and stop the arm chopping down toward me. It held a hunting knife much like the ones on display in the other room. My hands wrapped around the powerful arm. If this was Szabo, he was stronger and a lot more agile than he’d looked at the hospital.
“What are you doing?” he screamed. “How dare you? How dare you touch my personal property?” He sounded completely crazy. “These letters are private!”
I pivoted off my right leg and yanked the hand holding the knife. The blade stuck several inches into the wooden desk. The masked man grunted and cursed.
Now what? I couldn’t chance bending down to get my gun from my ankle holster. The masked man easily wriggled the knife free. He swung it in a small, lethal arc. He missed the thrust by a few inches. The blade whistled past my temple.
“You
’re going to die, Cross,” he screamed.
I spotted a cut-glass baseball on his desk. It was the only thing resembling a weapon that I saw anywhere. I grabbed it. Sidearmed it at him.
I heard a crunching sound as the paperweight struck a glancing blow off the side of his skull. He roared loudly, angrily, like an injured animal. Then he wobbled backward. He didn’t go down.
I bent quickly and pulled at my Glock. It hitched once, then came free in my hand.
He flailed at me again with the large knife.
“Stop!” I yelled. “I will shoot you.”
He kept coming. He roared out words that were unintelligible. He took another swipe with the knife. This time, he cut me on the right wrist. It burned, hurt like hell.
I fired the Glock. The bullet hit him in the upper chest. It didn’t stop him! He spun sideways, righted himself, and he was on me, screaming, “Fuck you, Cross. You’re nothing!”
He was too close for me to swing, and I didn’t want to shoot again and kill him if I didn’t have to. I drove my head hard into his chest. I aimed for the general area where he’d been wounded.
He screamed, a horrifying, high-pitched moan. Then he dropped the knife.
I wrapped both arms as tight as I could around him. My legs churned hard. I kept driving him across the room until we hit a wall. The whole building shuddered.
Somebody in the next apartment banged on a wall and complained about the noise.
“Call the police!” I yelled. “Call nine one one.”
I had him pinned to the floor, and he was moaning loudly that I’d hurt him. He continued to struggle and fight. I hit him squarely on the jaw, and he finally stopped. Then I pulled off the rubber mask.
It was Szabo.
“You’re the Mastermind,” I gasped. “It is you.”
“I didn’t do anything,” he snarled back. He started to struggle again. He cursed loudly. “You broke in to my house. You fool! You’re all goddamn fools. Listen to me, asshole. Listen! You got the wrong man!”