Chapter 115
IT WAS A MADHOUSE, and that certainly seemed appropriate for the dramatic capture. A team of FBI technicians arrived at Frederic Szabo’s apartment in less than an hour. I recognized two of them, Greg Wojcik and Jack Heeney, from past jobs. They were the FBI’s best, and they began to expertly take the place apart.
I stayed on and watched the painstaking search. The techies were looking for false walls, loose floorboards, anywhere Szabo might have concealed evidence, or possibly hidden fifteen million dollars.
Betsey Cavalierre got to the apartment just after the technical crew. I was glad to see her. Once Szabo’s bullet wound was treated and bandaged, Betsey and I tried to question him. He wouldn’t talk to us. Not a word. He seemed crazier than ever; manic one moment, then quiet and unresponsive the next. He did what he was known for at Hazelwood — he spit at me, several times. Szabo spit until his mouth was dry, then wrapped his arms around himself and was silent.
He shut his eyes tight. He wouldn’t look at either of us, wouldn’t respond in any way. Finally, he was taken away in a straitjacket.
“Where’s the money?” Betsey asked as we watched Szabo leave the building.
“He’s the only one who knows, and he sure as hell isn’t talking. I have never, ever felt more out of it on a case.”
The next day was a rainy, miserable, godawful Friday. Betsey and I went to the Metropolitan Detention Center, where Frederic Szabo was being held.
The press was gathered in large numbers everywhere outside the building. Neither of us said a word as we passed through them. We hid under and behind a big black umbrella and the streaking rain as we hurried inside.
“Pitiful goddamn vultures,” Betsey whispered to me. “Three things are certain in this life: death, taxes, and that the press will get it wrong. They will, you know.”
“Once somebody writes it wrong, it stays wrong,” I said.
We met with Szabo in a small, anonymous-looking room attached to the cell block. He was no longer confined in a straitjacket, but he looked out of it. His court-appointed lawyer was present. Her name was Lynda Cole, and she didn’t seem to like Szabo much more than we did.
I was surprised that Szabo hadn’t gone after a bigger-name attorney, but just about everything he did surprised me. He didn’t think like other people. That was his strength, wasn’t it? It was what he loved about himself, and maybe it was what had brought him down.
Once again, Szabo wouldn’t look at us for several minutes. Betsey and I tried a steady battery of questions, but he was completely, stubbornly unresponsive. His dosage of Haldol had been increased, and I wondered if that had anything to do with his listlessness. Somehow I doubted it. I felt he might be playacting again.
“This is hopeless,” Betsey finally said after we’d been there for over an hour. She was right. It was futile to spend any more time with Szabo that day.
She and I got up to leave, and so did Lynda Cole, who was small like Betsey and very attractive. She hadn’t said more than a dozen words during the hour. There wasn’t any need for her to talk if her client didn’t. Szabo suddenly looked up from a spot on the table. He’d been staring at it for at least twenty minutes.
He looked straight at me and he finally spoke. “You got the wrong man.”
Then Frederic Szabo grinned like the craziest person I had ever met in my life. And I’ve met some very crazy people.
Chapter 116
BETSEY CAVALIERRE and I returned to Hazelwood and the mountains of grunt work that still had to be done there. Sampson met us. By ten-thirty that night, we’d gone through everything we could find at the hospital. We had managed to identify nineteen staff members who’d spent time with Szabo. The shortlist included six therapists who’d seen him.
Betsey and I tacked their pictures up on one wall. Then I walked back and forth staring at them, hoping for a blinding insight. Where the hell was the money? How had Szabo actually controlled the robbery-murders?
I sat down again. Betsey was sipping her sixth or seventh Diet Coke. I’d matched her coffee for Coke. Intermittently, we had revisited the mystery of James Walsh’s supposed suicide and the sudden disappearance of Michael Doud. Szabo had refused to answer any questions about the two agents. Why would he murder the two of them? What was his real plan? Goddamn him!
“Could Szabo really be behind all this, Alex? Is he that clever? That goddamn evil? That nuts?”
I pushed myself up from the desk I was working at. “I don’t know anymore. It’s late again. I’m fried, Betsey. I’m out of here. Tomorrow’s another day.”
The overhead lights were blinding and hurtful. Betsey’s eyes were red rimmed and vacant as they stared up at me. I wanted to hug her some but half a dozen agents were still working in the office. I ached to hold her in my arms, to talk to her about anything but the case.
“Good night,” I finally said. “Get some sleep.”
“Night, Alex.” I miss you, she mouthed.
“Be careful,” I said. “Be careful going home.”
“I always am. You be careful.”
I got home somehow and climbed upstairs to bed. I’d been working too hard for too long. Maybe I did need to quit the Job. I hit the pillow hard. At about twenty past two I woke up. I’d been having a conversation with Frederic Szabo in my sleep. Then I’d talked to someone else from the investigation. Oh, brother.
It was a bad, bad time to be awake. I usually don’t remember my dreams — which probably means I’m repressing them — but I woke with a clear and very disturbing image of the last couple of minutes.
The bank robber Tony Brophy had been describing his meeting with the Mastermind; how he’d been sitting behind bright lights and could only see a silhouette of the man. The silhouette he described didn’t match the shape of Frederic Szabo’s head. Not even close. He had talked about a big hooked nose and large ears. He’d mentioned the ears a couple of times. Big ears, like a car with both doors open. Szabo actually had small ears and a regular nose.
But there was someone else who came to mind! Jesus! I jumped out of bed. I stared out my window until my mind was more focused and clear. Then I called Betsey.
She picked up after the second ring. Her voice was a soft, muffled moan.
“It’s Alex. Sorry to call you, to wake you. I think I know who the Mastermind is.”
“Is this a bad dream?” she muttered.
“Oh, definitely,” I told her. “This is our worst nightmare.”
Chapter 117
THERE WERE TWO MASTERMINDS. It sounded crazy to me at first, but then I was almost sure it had to be the answer to so many things about the investigation that didn’t make sense.
Szabo was one Mastermind, but he’d been given the name as a joke because he was too efficient, too perfect. There was someone else. A second Mastermind. This person wasn’t a joke to his peers — he had no peers; he didn’t write hate mail from his room at a veterans hospital.
It took me a few minutes to convince Betsey that I might be right. Then we called Kyle Craig. We went two-on-one until Kyle was convinced enough to let us move forward — in a whole new and mind-boggling direction.
At eleven that morning, Betsey and I boarded a plane at Bolling field. Up until a few weeks earlier I’d never been to Bolling, but lately I seemed to be flying out of there more often than out of National, or Ronald Reagan, as it’s now called.
Just past one o’clock we landed at Palm Beach International Airport in south Florida. It was ninety-five degrees outside, humid as hell. I didn’t care about the heat. I was excited, pumped up about possibly solving the puzzle. We were met by FBI agents, but Betsey was in charge, even in Florida. The local agents deferred to her.
We got on I-95 North once we left the small, very well run airport. We proceeded about ten miles, then headed east toward the ocean and Singer Island. The sun looked like a lemon drop melting in bright blue skies.
I’d had time on the flight to think about my theory of two Masterminds.
The more I thought it through, the surer I became that we were on the right track, finally. A vivid image kept flashing through my mind.
It was a photograph of a therapist named Dr. Bernard Francis. The photo had been stapled to Francis’s personnel file at Hazelwood. Two other photos had been hanging on the walls of Dr. Cioffi’s office. I’d seen them there when I interviewed him. Bernard Francis was tall and balding, with a broad forehead and a hooked nose. He also had large ears, floppy ones. Like a car with both doors open.
Francis had been Frederic Szabo’s therapist for nine weeks in ’96, and then for five months last year. At the end of the year he had transferred to Florida, supposedly to work at the veterans hospital in north West Palm. Once I’d established a link to Francis, several other connections followed. According to the nursing notes, Dr. Francis had accompanied Szabo off the grounds on at least three occasions last year. The trips weren’t unusual in themselves, but under the circumstances they were very interesting to me.
During the plane ride to Florida, I also reread the actual notes Dr. Francis had made about Szabo in ’96 and then last year.
One of the very insightful early notes posed the question: Did pt. actually spend the past twentysome years wandering the country performing odd jobs? Somehow, this doesn’t ring true. Suspect pt. has a very active fantasy life and may be withholding from us. What really precipitated pt.’s. stay at Hazelwood this year?
Betsey and I knew the answer to that question, and we suspected Francis had found out, too. In February of ’96, Frederic Szabo had been fired from his job as head of security at First Union. There had been a series of unsolved robberies at First Unions in Virginia and Maryland. Szabo had blamed himself for the lapse in security, and then so had the bank. They finally fired him.
Soon after that he had a nervous breakdown and checked himself into Hazelwood, which was where the fun and mind games began.
Chapter 118
WE SET UP a round-the-clock surveillance post outside Dr. Francis’s condominium on Singer Island. The place was a sprawling four-bedroom penthouse with a roof deck; it was right on the water. It seemed beyond the means of the average therapist at a veterans hospital. Of course, Dr. Francis didn’t consider himself an average therapist.
Francis was spending the evening entertaining a blond woman who looked to be about half his age. To give him his due, he was a slender man of forty-five and appeared to be in good shape. She was a stunning beauty, though; she wore a black string bikini with high-heeled black pumps. She was constantly rearranging her cleavage and pushing her long blond hair out of her eyes.
“Very fetching,” Betsey said, and frowned. “Looks like she’s caught herself a real killer date.”
Betsey, two other agents, and I camped out in a Dodge van in a parking lot behind the condos. The lot was nearly full, and the van blended in. It had a periscope that allowed us to watch Francis and his guest as they barbecued steaks on his deck. The FBI had already identified the blond woman as a dancer at an “upscale topless steak house” in West Palm. She had previous arrests for soliciting and prostitution in Fort Lauderdale. Her name was Bianca Massie and she was twenty-three years old.
We watched the good doctor as he frequently hugged and fondled the blond woman while cooking dinner. Then the two of them disappeared inside for about ten minutes. They came out again, and during the meal they played footsie and stroked one another. They finished a second bottle of Stag’s Leap cabernet, then disappeared inside again.
“What can we see in there?” Betsey asked one of the agents. “I need a picture.”
“Our man on the other roof can see inside the condo through several of the southern-exposure windows,” one of the agents reported.
“It’s an easy-sleazy bachelor pad. Expensive furniture, lots of etchings. Bose sound system, free weights. The doc has a black Lab he probably uses to pick up more ladies on the beach.”
“I don’t think he picked her up,” I said. “More likely, he leased her for the night.”
“He and the young lady are intimately involved at the moment. The black Lab seems to have taught the doc a few things. He knows some doggy tricks. Our lookout says that his ears and nose are much larger than a certain other part of his anatomy.”
That got a laugh from the group. It also eased the tension. We were a little fearful for the girl, but we were close enough to get inside in a hurry.
The lookout continued to report on what he saw. “Oops, the doc would appear to be a premature ejaculator. The young lady doesn’t seem to mind. Awhh, she kissed him on top of his head, poor baby.”
“You get what you pay for,” Betsey said.
Finally, the blond woman left and the steamy movie was over for the night. Dr. Francis stayed out on the deck, sipping a snifter of brandy, watching the moon ride high over the Atlantic.
“Ahh, the good life,” Betsey said. “Moon over Miami and all that neat stuff.”
“He only had to kill about a dozen people to get his place in the sun,” I said.
Francis’s cell phone rang around midnight. We listened to the call from the surveillance van. The call definitely got our attention. Betsey and I exchanged glances.
The caller sounded nervous. “Bernie, they’re all over this place again. They’re looking at staff now. They —”
Francis cut in. “It’s late. I’ll call you in the morning. I’ll call you. Don’t call me here. I’ve told you that. Please, don’t do it again.”
Dr. Francis hung up angrily. He drained the rest of his brandy.
Betsey elbowed me. She was smiling for the first time since we’d been watching Francis. “Alex, you recognize the voice on the other end?” she asked.
I sure did. “The lovely and talented Kathleen McGuigan. Nurse McGuigan is part of this. It’s all starting to come together, isn’t it?”
Chapter 119
IT WAS REALLY EASY to loathe Dr. Bernard Francis. He was human scum, the worst of the worst, a killer who liked to make his victims suffer. It made the late-night-surveillance job easier, almost bearable. So did the idea that Francis was the Mastermind, and that we were close to nailing him to the walls of his pink stucco, Mediterranean-style condo.
Kathleen McGuigan didn’t try to call Francis back that night. And he didn’t call her. Around one o’clock, he went inside to bed and turned on his alarm system.
“Sweet dreams, you bastard,” Betsey said as the house lights went off.
“We know where he lives. We know he did it — if not exactly how. But we can’t bring him down?” one of the agents complained once Francis had turned in for the night.
“Patience, patience,” I said. “We just got here. We’ll get Dr. Francis. We just want to watch him a little longer. We need to be absolutely sure this time. And, we want the money he stole.”
Betsey and I finally left the surveillance van around two in the morning. We took one of the Bureau’s sedans. She drove off Singer Island. Everyone else was staying at a Holiday Inn in West Palm. We headed north on I-95.
“Is this okay?” she asked once we were on the interstate. She looked more vulnerable than I was used to seeing her. “There’s a Hyatt Regency a few exits north.”
“I like being with you, Betsey. Right from the first time we met,” I told her.
“Yeah. I can tell, Alex. But not enough, huh?”
I looked over at her. I liked Betsey even more when she was a little unsure of herself. “You want candor and honesty at two-fifteen in the morning?” I joked.
“Absolutely, relentlessly.”
“I know this is a little crazy, but —”
She finally smiled. “I can handle crazy.”
“I don’t know exactly what’s going on in my life right now. I’m floating with the tide a little bit. This isn’t like me. Maybe that’s a good thing.”
“You’re also still trying to get over Christine,” she said. “I think you’re doing it the right way. You’re being brave.”
“Or very fool
ish,” I said, and smiled.
“Probably a little of both. But proactive. You’re untroubled and simple on the surface — in a good way. But you’re complex — in a good way. You’re probably thinking ‘I could say the same about you.’”
“Not really. Actually, I was thinking that I’m lucky to have met you.”
“This doesn’t have to go anywhere special, Alex. It’s already special to me,” she said. Her eyes were so beautiful, incandescent. “Anyway, will you come home with me tonight? Home away from home. My humble room at the Hyatt?”
“I’d love to, more than anything.”
When we parked outside the hotel entrance, Betsey leaned in close and kissed me. I pulled her against my chest and held her tight. We stayed like that for a couple of minutes.
“I’m going to miss you so much,” she whispered.
Chapter 120
THE REST OF THE NIGHT flew by, and I think both of us hated to see it go. I kept thinking about what Betsey had said — that she was going to miss me. She and I were back inside the FBI surveillance van by nine the following morning. The van already smelled bad. Dry ice sat in twin buckets in the corner, throwing off a vapor and making the cramped space almost livable.
“What’s happening, gentlemen?” Betsey asked the agents crowded into the van. “Did I miss any fun? Is the Master-prick up yet?”
We were told that Francis was up, and that he hadn’t called Kathleen McGuigan yet. I had an idea and made a suggestion. Betsey liked it a lot. We called Kyle Craig and got him at home. Kyle liked the idea, too.
Agents in Arlington, Virginia, arrested Nurse McGuigan at a little past ten that morning. She was questioned, and denied knowing anything about a relationship between Dr. Bernard Francis and Frederic Szabo. She also denied any involvement in the scheme. She said that the allegations against her were ridiculous. She hadn’t called Francis the night before, and we were welcome to check her phone records.