Cleaning the Gold Read online

  None of the guards looked old enough to legally buy alcohol. One of them still had peach fuzz on his chin. Another could’ve passed for Groot going through puberty. They all had the same bored look in their eyes that could easily lead to a trigger being pulled, a baton being slung, and Will being airlifted to the hospital or driven to the morgue.

  His heart jackknifed against his ribs when the teenager with the laptop stepped back into Will’s personal space. The kid had Jack Wolfe’s driver’s license, VA health insurance card, social security card and, for some reason, his Costco card.

  “Look into this.” Another guard was holding up a pair of heavy, black goggles. A springy cord ran from the top and plugged into a tablet.

  Will pressed his face into the goggles. He saw nothing but black, then a line crossed his vision that gave him the sensation of eyeballing a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica.

  The sun blinded him when the goggles were pulled away.

  “Retina scan,” Baldani offered. The half-smoked cigarette dangled from his lips. He looked like he was enjoying Will’s discomfort which, fair enough, was exactly what Will would’ve been doing in his place.

  “Sir?” The kid with the laptop was back up in Will’s business. He was looking at Will’s IDs, then looking at Will, then looking at the IDs. His laptop made a beeping sound, but he kept his eyes on Will. Will stared back. He watched sweat roll down the side of the kid’s shaved head. The soldier was eighteen if he was a day, his body cut the way you were cut if every second of your free time was spent either working out or trying to get laid.

  The laptop beeped again, but the kid did not look at the screen.

  Will broke first. He looked down at the screen. He looked back at the kid. He looked down at the screen.

  The kid yelled, “Alpha! Mike! Foxtrot!”

  Will waited to get shot in the face or shoved face-down onto the asphalt.

  Baldani smirked as he flicked away his cigarette. “Adios. Mother. Fucker.”

  The bollards dropped. The spikes were drawn back. The ten guards peeled away. Will took the deepest, most cleansing breath of his life.

  Baldani smugly flashed a row of nicotine-stained Chiclet teeth as he drove up to the building. Will let him have the win, pushing the humiliation aside and turning his mind toward the job at hand. He wasn’t here to beat the shit out of Dave Baldani or to clean gold bars. He was here to find a cop killer.

  The initial crime had been committed on April 16, 1997, in a city one hundred miles south of Atlanta called Margrave, Georgia.

  These were the facts:

  A stranger was reported loitering in and around the library. Margrave was a small town. They didn’t get strange people, at least not ones they didn’t recognize. The loiterer was a white male with blond hair and blue eyes, well over six feet tall, built like a linebacker and dressed in dirty jeans and an Army camo jacket. Last seen pacing back and forth outside the library doors. He’d been inside once to use the bathroom and page through a copy of A Guide to Birds of the Southeastern United States. The librarian had called the sheriff’s office when she’d heard the stranger mumbling to himself. Within five minutes, a deputy had rolled up to the scene. According to an eyewitness, the stranger had pulled out a revolver and shot the deputy in the head.

  The deputy’s name was Phillip Michael Deacon. Thirty-nine years old, twenty-one years on the force, a wife and teenage boy at home, a married daughter with his first grandchild on the way.

  The stranger had given Deacon no warning. There were no words between the two men. Just a double-tap on the trigger, then the stranger had darted into the woods, never to be seen again.

  Deacon had survived the gunshots, but it was hard to argue that he had lived. He never woke from surgery. He’d spent the next twenty-two years in a coma. Two months ago, he had finally succumbed to pneumonia, which converted the arrest warrant from attempted murder of a peace officer to murder in the first degree with aggravating circumstances, which carried the maximum penalty of death.

  That was when Will’s boss had dropped the file on his desk.

  Will was not a fan of killers, but cop killers belonged in the Devil’s favorite part of hell. He had spent every waking hour since the file had landed on his desk tracking back through the original case, even driving up to the GBI’s secure warehouse in Dry Branch to search in deep storage for the only pieces of physical evidence that remained in the case, fragments from the two slugs taken out of Phillip Deacon’s brain and a sealed plastic bag containing the Margrave library’s copy of A Guide to Birds of the Southeastern United States.

  There was no gun to match the fragments to.

  The only identifiable fingerprints found on the book belonged to the librarian who, the morning of the shooting, had taken it brand-spanking-new out of the shipping box and placed it on the shelf.

  The general public always thought of cold cases as impossible to solve. They weren’t completely wrong, but oftentimes, Will found that the passage of time gave witnesses more perspective. Mostly, it came down to the simple fact that they weren’t scared anymore. The bullies and thugs who’d intimidated them had either died young or ended up in prison. Marriages dissolved. Love ran out. Reputations were damaged or rebuilt. In short, a long stretch of time could lend more focus to past events.

  Will had driven to the Florida panhandle and talked to the now-retired librarian who’d made the 9–1–1 call. He had tracked down the widow of the eyewitness to the shooting. He had talked to some of Deacon’s fellow deputies and various patrons of the library. He had sat in countless living rooms sipping countless glasses of iced tea and listened to countless old ladies doling out the tiny pieces of information that would eventually help Will put together the puzzle.

  First piece: One month after the attempted murder of Deputy Deacon outside of the library, a second stranger had shown up in Margrave.

  Second piece: Stranger 2 was reportedly a white male. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Mid-thirties. Around six-foot-five and two hundred fifty pounds. Built like a linebacker, some said.

  Third piece: Stranger 2 was immediately arrested for murder—not the library attempted-murder, but murder in the first of an unidentified male—by the Margrave sheriff, who also provided the only eyewitness testimony to the alleged murder. The alleged was thrown in there because Will could find no report or file that contained any mention of a murder during that time period.

  Fourth piece: There was a prison transport record showing Stranger 2 en route to the Warburton penitentiary, but there was no record of him remaining there longer than two days.

  Fifth piece: Instead of the sheriff calling in the Marshals Service and conducting a full-on manhunt for the presumed fugitive, the alleged murder charge was dropped, and Stranger 2 was allowed to disappear.

  Until now.

  “Last stop, ladies’ lingerie.” Baldani angled the car across two spaces like he was parking a Lamborghini instead of a government-issued Chevy.

  Will heard the click of a cigarette lighter as he got out of the car. He looked up at the imposing building. He saw guard towers, security cameras, slitted windows with rifles poking out, vast light arrays that could probably be seen from the surface of the moon.

  The place was guarded like Fort Knox.

  Baldani walked toward a side door, smoke trailing behind him. Will tried to keep downwind, wondering which would get Baldani first—lung cancer or skin cancer.

  Not his problem.

  Will ran his hand along the cool granite side of the building. He focused his mind on the heart of the case. Phillip Michael Deacon had never held his first grandchild. He had never watched his son play ball. He had never kissed his wife again or driven his car to the store or taken out the trash or scratched his own ass when it was itching because he’d rolled up on a loitering call and lost every meaningful part of his life.

  Here was what Will knew about the Margrave sheriff: he was a corrupt son of a bitch.

  And also very dead.

&n
bsp; The sheriff’s widow hadn’t kept any of his files. His kids couldn’t bear to say their father’s name. The sheriff’s initial eyewitness report to the alleged first-degree murder no longer existed. None of his former deputies would give up their boss, even as the man rotted in the ground. There had been no computers in the sheriff’s office back in 1997. The only reason Will had any details on Stranger 1 was because the GBI had been called in immediately after the shooting. By order of the state legislature, the agency was in charge of investigating all officer-involved shootings.

  The scant information Will had on Stranger 2 had been knotted together with strings of gossip that had eventually led him to a dusty old filing cabinet in the basement of Warburton penitentiary. The triplicate prisoner transport request on Stranger 2 had provided the requisite bullet points: The inmate’s name, birthdate, physical details and mug shot. The charges filed. The sheriff’s signature on the summary report that listed himself as an eyewitness.

  It was some kind of crazy bad luck that Stranger 2 had arrived in Margrave, and within an hour managed to allegedly murder a guy in cold blood in front of only one witness, who happened to be a seasoned county sheriff.

  Puzzle piece number six was a corner piece: During the period of time between Phillip Michael Deacon getting shot and Stranger 2’s arrest, Will had found no proof of any murders in the tri-county area. No newspaper reports. No local gossip. No funeral home records. No death certificate registered with Georgia’s Division of Public Health and Vital Records.

  The only thing that made sense to Will was that the crooked sheriff had framed Stranger 2 for a murder that did not happen.

  Which—why?

  The most likely answer to this question helped Will see the picture that the individual pieces had started to form: Stranger 1 had to be Stranger 2, because—

  Seven: The two strangers’ physical descriptions were identical.

  Eight: Both strangers had coincidentally shown up in a Podunk town that never saw strangers.

  Nine, another corner: Will had emailed the now-retired librarian in Florida a scan of the mug shot from Stranger 2’s prison transport file. She had written back immediately, stating with absolute certainty that Stranger 2 was Stranger 1, the man she had reported for loitering back in 1997. The man that an eyewitness had identified as the man who had shot Phillip Michael Deacon twice in the head.

  Ergo, Will had his man.

  “Thissaway, Wolfe.” Baldani took one last hit on his cigarette before he opened the door.

  The air inside the building was at least ten degrees cooler. Will followed Baldani down a steep flight of stairs. They hit the landing at a locked steel door, then walked up another flight of stairs. Then down again. Will was thinking this was another one of Baldani’s pranks, but then they entered a large hall with polished white marble gleaming from every surface.

  All of the sweat on Will’s body turned to ice.

  The room felt like money. Not tech money or hedge fund money, but real-deal J. D. Rockefeller “Puttin’ on the Ritz” money. The ceiling was decorated in gold leaf. The mahogany benches had intricate designs hand-carved into the backs. Museum-level artwork hung on the walls. Will walked up to one of the glass display cases.

  “Some kind of old book,” Baldani provided.

  “Gutenberg Bible.” Will had never been to church, but he felt like he should whisper the words.

  “Yeah,” Baldani said. “They kept a copy of the Magna Carta here during WWII. The original US Constitution. The Declaration of Independence. I heard they even stockpiled morphine during the Cold War.”

  “We didn’t have the raw resources to make it ourselves.”

  “Whatever.” Baldani led him down the hall.

  Two more guards stood outside a pair of large, wooden doors. The hinges were polished brass, as long and wide as an outstretched Corgi. Will looked up, carefully studying the individual block letters carved into the arch. Each one was at least three inches deep into the stone, a chisel and hammer digging out the meat of the marble to form the words—

  UNITED STATES DEPOSITORY

  Baldani asked, “You gonna eye-fuck that sign all day or you wanna go inside?”

  The two men muscled apart the wooden doors, and just like that, Will found himself standing at the open vault door. Four armed guards blocked a long, white hallway. The Mint Police. They wore Kevlar vests with the seal of the US Department of Treasury on their chests. Will counted three weapons on each of them, which meant there were probably more he wasn’t seeing.

  Will had to touch the vault door. The stainless steel was cold under his palm. It was massive, as thick as three grown men and twice his height.

  Baldani said, “Takes four people to open that bad bitch. They have to memorize their own combinations, given to them verbally by the Secretary of the Treasury. Nobody can watch them spin it in. Then the wheel gets turned fourteen times to pull back the bolts.”

  Baldani walked inside, so Will walked inside.

  The opulence stopped at the door. Will was reminded of every single government building he’d ever been through. Low ceilings. Exposed air conditioning ducts. White paint that had turned yellow two days after it was slathered onto the concrete blocks. Cracked tile floors. Dirty grout. Multicolored wires leading to nowhere.

  The temperature dropped another ten degrees. They were going down a steep slope. The walls were lined with smaller versions of the main vault door. Blue signs were posted beside each one. Ribbons hung like police tape from one side of the jamb to the other. Clear plastic envelopes dangled from the ribbons. Will squinted at the lines of type on the papers, but all he saw was row after row of numbers. He assumed they corresponded to serial numbers on the gold bars. He longed to stop and examine each one, to open the stainless-clad doors and peer inside. There were no windows. Each door had two sets of combination dials and a keyed lock straight out of a supermax.

  Baldani turned down another hallway. Will looked up. The lights were Xenon, bright enough to pull the intricate details out of the grout between the tiles. He could hear music playing. The sound echoed off the hard surfaces. He took another turn. More vault doors. More signs. More ribbons. Every thirty feet, there was a red phone mounted on the wall, the rotary dial gleaming in the unnatural light.

  Up ahead, Baldani turned another corner. The music was louder. Hoobastank, which was some kind of crime. There were no guards this far into the vault. Will guessed there was only one way out and hiding an almost thirty-pound bar of gold on your person would take a special kind of asshole.

  “Holy shit.” The words slipped out of Will’s mouth before he could stop them.

  They had reached their first open door. Three men wearing white cotton gloves and face masks were removing bars of gold bullion and stacking them onto a pallet.

  “The Reason” stopped mid-whine. Or maybe Will lost his sense of hearing. He had never seen anything like this in his life. This whole time he had been picturing Scrooge McDuck doing his daily money swim when he should’ve been thinking Minecraft building an entire freaking city.

  Baldani said, “Meet the FNG, turdblossoms.”

  Everyone ignored the douchy introduction. Will stuck his head inside the open vault. The room was around the size of a commercial freezer. No overhead light, but the gold reflected a metallic light that was brighter than any bulb. The bars were stacked on their edges from floor to ceiling in a horseshoe around the periphery. There was enough space for one guy to stand inside and pass the bricks to the guy standing outside. The second guy handed off to the third guy, who gently placed the bars onto a steel pallet.

  Will realized he was gawking. He squinted down the hallway as he waited for his pupils to return to a normal size. There was another open door just past the first one. The second team was one man down, but they seemed to be farther along in the process. The guy outside was kneeling down to wipe the bars with a cotton cloth before grabbing two bars in both hands, standing, swiveling around, and handing the bar
s to the guy inside.

  Back-breaking work.

  “The read-out for the scale.” Baldani tapped the LED display sticking up behind the pallet. “We don’t actually count each bar. We weigh the contents of the room, give them a wipe-down, then stack them back inside nice and neat for the next time.”

  Will nodded, but he wasn’t sure that made sense. The vaults were sealed shut, deprived of oxygen. Surely putting the bars outside in the open somehow affected their weight. There had to be moisture in the air, maybe fuzz from the cotton gloves, a stray strand of hair from one of the cleaners. When you were talking millions of ounces, that kind of thing added up.

  “Here’s where we check the math.” Baldani pointed at one of the blue signs. Someone with very neat handwriting had used a white marker to fill in the information. “36,236 bars of gold. Almost twelve billion troy ounces. Gold’s going for around thirteen hundred bucks an ounce right now, so that’s—well, shit, that’s a boatload of fucking benjamins.”

  A deep voice came from inside the second vault. “$472,238,000.”

  Will looked past the top of Baldani’s stubby head.

  The guy inside the vault was hidden from view. Will saw a pair of humongous hands reach out, the seams busted on a pair of cotton gloves. The man’s arms were chain-linked with muscle. The faded tan indicated he was more accustomed to working outdoors. He one-handed two bars of gold like they were Lego blocks. Then he took another two bars in the other hand.

  “Switch it up, big guy.” Baldani snapped his fingers, indicating he meant now. “Lukather doesn’t want her new boy breaking a nail.”

  The man ducked his head as he exited the vault. He pulled down his face mask. White male. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Mid-fifties. Around six-foot-five and two hundred fifty pounds. Built like a linebacker, some might say, but given the visual reference, Will would describe him as approximately the size of a sealed vault inside of Fort Knox.

  The last pieces of the puzzle: Former MP. Currently homeless. Mercenary. Ass kicker. Gold cleaner. Cop Killer.