CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
“Damn,” said Jock. “That’s obviously Nigella’s dad. What are we missing?”
“We’re only missing one piece of the puzzle,” said Logan.
“How do you see that?” I asked.
Logan held up his index finger. “If we drop the one missing piece into the puzzle, we’ll see the whole picture. There has to be something that connects Nigella, Nitzler, and Stanley. Soupy and the Laotians are not a part of this. They were just part of the misdirection.”
“I think we can connect Nitzler and Morrissey,” I said. “They were both CIA and worked on Operation Thanatos. They were probably buddies, and now Nitzler is taking his revenge for the killing of his pal.”
“How does that connect Stanley and Morrissey’s daughter?” asked Jock. “And how are Nigella and Stanley connected to Nitzler?”
Logan was quiet for a moment. “I would guess that Nitzler has some relationship with Nigella. She’s the daughter of his buddy. I just don’t see how Stanley and his drug operation work into the picture.”
“Maybe DEA has something,” said Jock. “Delgado had all day yesterday to work on Stanley and Nigella.”
“It’s worth the call,” I said.
Jock phoned the DEA office in Tampa and asked to speak to Delgado. The conversation was short and mostly one-sided. Delgado did all the talking. Jock hung up. “He wants to see us as soon as possible. Says there’s a lot we need to know and he can’t talk about it over the phone. He’s also sending one of his guys to the bank in Sarasota to pick up that check with the thumbprint. It’ll be interesting to see who was cashing those checks.”
I looked at my watch. Not quite nine in the morning. “If Doc’s plane’s still in Marsh Harbour, can you square it so that he can bring it here to Opa Locka without worrying about customs and a lot of bureaucracy?”
“I’ll talk to some people,” said Jock. “You call Fred Cassidy. See if he’s left the Bahamas yet.”
“What about Nitzler?” I asked. “We’ve got to get to him.”
“Nitzler’s in a safe place. My agency guys picked him up on his way to the office this morning. He’s in one of our safe houses in Virginia. My director called the CIA director and told him that Nitzler was a security risk and that my agency would take care of it. Nitzler won’t even be missed at the office this morning.
I reached Cassidy at the airport in Marsh Harbour. He was about to leave for Atlanta. He agreed to fly directly to Opa Locka and pick us up. Jock handled the bureaucrats and by eleven o’clock we were in a taxi in Tampa on our way to the DEA offices.
Dan Delgado, the special agent in charge, met us in the reception area and led us back to a small conference room. He offered coffee and Jock and I accepted. Logan asked for a bottle of water. A middle-aged woman brought the coffee and water and closed the door on her way out.
Delgado drew a deep breath and said, “Gentlemen, we have a big problem here. You’ve stepped all over one of our investigations.”
“What do you mean?” Jock asked.
“The Otto Foundation has been bringing drugs into the country and sending money out. The DEA office in Macon was on top of it and was about to bust the entire operation when you guys showed up.”
Jock said, “This goes deeper than the drug running, Dan. There’s a tie-in to some murders and probably some rogue CIA types. We don’t have the whole picture yet, but we’re zeroing in on it.”
“You think the CIA was involved in the drugs?”
“I don’t have any idea,” said Jock. “At least one very senior guy in the CIA is involved in the murders. I don’t know anything about the drugs, except that we stumbled over Stanley’s operation. Have you sweated anything out of Stanley?”
“No. He’s our guy.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s a confidential informant for us.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “He’s the guy in charge of the operation.”
Delgado shook his head. “Stanley runs the foundation charitable operations. Maude Lane runs the drug side of the operation.”
I sat back in my chair. Stunned. “Maude Lane? The grandmotherly type who works at the foundation?”
Delgado laughed. “Some story, huh?”
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Logan.
“She’s worked there for ten years,” I said. “Has the drug running been going on all that time?”
“No,” said Delgado. “Stanley approached the Macon police at the end of last year. Said he’d noticed some funny things going on with the bank statements. Apparently Maude Lane ran the bookkeeping side of the operation. Stanley had done an audit of sorts at the end of the year and couldn’t account for money coming in and going out to people and corporations he’d never heard of. The police smelled drugs, because the Southeast Asian connections the foundation had, and called us in.”
“Did you know that Stanley had a prior conviction for dealing drugs?” asked Jock.
“Yes. He came clean at the first meeting. He really is a guy who turned his life around. He does a lot of good with that foundation and he’s very proud of it.”
Jock said, “We ran a background check on him. He had some very professional help in setting up his new history. Do you know anything about that?”
“Yeah. I looked into it. Our agency set that up for him after he got out of prison. He gave us lots of leads that ended up with us disrupting a number of drug-importation operations on the West Coast.”
“What did your people find when you looked into the Otto Foundation?” I asked.
“It appears that somebody with a lot of computer savvy went into the foundation’s computers and made some changes in the accounts going back a couple of years. They also hacked into the bank computers and brought them into compliance with the foundation records.”
“Why would they do that?”
“We think it’s a smoke screen, set up so that if anybody started looking closely at the records they’d see that the funny money had been going in and out for several years. Actually, it started last fall.”
“When Jock and I confronted Stanley in his house in Macon, an Asian man speaking Vietnamese pulled a shotgun on us.”
“That was Jack Minh. He’s one of our agents. His job was to protect
Stanley if any of the drug people decided to take him out.”
“Where does Nigella Morrissey fit into this?” Logan asked.
“Nigella,” said Delgado, “is Maude Lane’s niece. Maude’s brother, Nigel Morrissey, was killed in Vietnam, but he left a Vietnamese wife and infant daughter. They were evacuated from Saigon before the fall.”
“Maude’s your missing puzzle piece, Logan,” I said.
“I think you’re right,” Logan said. “Dan, how did a nice old lady like Maude Lane get involved in drug smuggling?”
“We’ve never quite figured that out. We know that Nigella was the one who talked Maude into using her ties to the Otto Foundation to turn it into a drug operation, but we don’t know why. Nigella isn’t talking. She’s invoked her right to remain silent. There’s nothing we can do.”
“What if,” asked Jock, “I told you this was a national security issue and that Nigella is a target of a national security investigation?”
“I know who you are, Jock,” said Delgado. “If you tell me that you need her for a national security investigation, I’ll turn her over to your custody.”
“I may want to do that,” said Jock. “Let me think about it. Where is she now?”
“She’s in the county lockup, held in a secure area under our jurisdiction. No visitors, but I’m afraid she’ll be seeing her lawyer this afternoon. I can’t hold that off any longer.”
“Can you have her brought here so that I can talk to her?”
“Sure. I can have her here within the hour.”
“Dan,” I said, “do you want to speculate, based on everything you know about the drug operation, as to how Maude got roped into this by her niece?”
Dan was quiet for a moment, stroking his chin. “I think there is some body way up the food chain who is in charge of this thing. These ladies didn’t come up with this sophisticated an operation on their own. We were trying to work our way up the chain when you guys showed up.”
“I’ve got an idea about who was in charge,” said Jock. “But I’m going to have to do a little digging. I don’t have some of the legal constraints that you guys do.”
The phone on the table buzzed. Delgado picked it up, spoke into it, and then listened. He hung up. “I do have a little package for you. Mary Jennings.”
“Who’s Mary Jennings?” I asked.
Delgado smiled. A big happy, gotcha kind of smile. “A young lady who works for Hillsborough County and managed to leave her thumbprint on that check at the Sarasota bank. She’s a part-time actress. Does commercials and amateur plays and looks uncannily like a certain Longboat Key detective we all know.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Is she here?”
“Yep. Scared shitless and in the interrogation room. You want to talk to her?”
“Bet your ass,” I said.
“Be my guest, Counselor.”