The Spike (A Marty Singer Mystery Book 4) Read online

  “Thanks. I’ll take anything you can find. I don’t think Pat, here, is a major player, but you never know. He might give me sideways access to something.”

  “Will do.”

  “One more question. He mentioned to me that this woman Tonya Jackson was ‘as good as a spike.’ ”

  “Yeah?”

  “I played along and guessed that a spike was a holdout, someone who wouldn’t sell. Is there any more to it than that?”

  He waved his hand, an idle gesture. “Not much more. A spike usually refers to someone who’s done it on purpose, though, not someone who just refuses to budge. Competing developers who lose a bid might sneak in and buy a spike after a bid’s been won, but before development starts. They hold out, stalling the project, until the competitor pays them ten times what it’s worth.”

  “Why don’t they hold out for a hundred times?” I asked.

  “Bid winners usually have friends in high places, remember?” he said. “If you’re being a real pain in the ass and not just playing the game, the place gets condemned and eminent domain is invoked.”

  “Do individuals get in on the action? Try to extort the developer by buying their own spike after they know the developer is committed?”

  “Maybe, if they’re ballsy enough.” He wagged my picture of Zimmerman. “Brokers, in fact. They’re the ones that know about these places to begin with, right? If they don’t think they’re getting their fair cut, they buy one condo in the middle of the block and stop the project in its tracks. But they also know better than most when to cut a deal. I can’t see one of them hanging on until people start getting killed. Or did you mean someone else?”

  I was quiet.

  The surprise was plain on Faraday’s face. “Unless you’re talking about…who, Wendy buying the spike? To hold up Atlantic Union for the money?”

  “Montero, too,” I said.

  He rubbed his jaw. “God, I don’t know. It would be tempting, I guess. The kind of money Atlantic Union thinks of as a rounding error could make one or two individuals very rich. But Wendy? I can’t see it. It would be a one-way trip. She’d never work again, that’s for sure. Not in this town, probably not anywhere.”

  “She wouldn’t have to. The spike is worth millions, maybe tens of millions. And it supplies a good motive for some powerful people to see her removed from the game, as well as Montero.” I took a deep breath. “Anyway, it’s as much a guess as anything else I’ve come up with, so don’t take it to the bank. If you could find anything out on this Pat Zimmerman, I’d appreciate it.”

  We both jumped as one of the workers dropped his toolbox on the floor. Faraday said, “Hey, careful with that. That’s real parquet, damn it.” I slipped out as Faraday marched over and started bitching at the guy.

  One down, one to go. On my way back to my car, I pulled out my phone and called Michael Denton. The number was to the main office and I had to weasel my way through his phalanx of volunteers, but eventually the man himself came on the line.

  “Singer?”

  “Denton,” I said as I unlocked my door and got in the car. “I was wondering if I’d made a strong enough impression on you yet.”

  “You should be worried what kind of impression you’re making,” he said.

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Not really. Like I told you, I know a few people at City Hall and the odd law enforcement officer. The City Hall folks who knew you thought you were a bullheaded prick. The law enforcement types loved your style.”

  “Can’t please all the people all of the time.”

  A voice intruded in the background and Denton said, “Hold on.” There was that funny sound when someone puts their hand over the phone, followed by a muffled conversation. I started the car and pointed the nose towards H Street and the PoP office. I think I knew where this was going.

  Denton came back on the line. “Singer? Sorry about that. Tell you what. I’ve got some time. Why don’t you swing by and pull up a chair. Put your feet up awhile. I’ll pour some hot cocoa and tell you the story of how big, bad Atlantic Union gobbled up the city council, sank their claws into Washington, DC, and never let go.”

  “Is there a happy ending?”

  “That’s up to you,” Denton said and hung up.

  “What’s this?” I asked. I’d barely sat down in Denton’s office when he handed me an inch-thick manila folder. I opened it and leafed through the papers, skimming charts and text-heavy reports rife with dates and dollar amounts.

  “That is a copy,” Denton said, leaning back in his chair, “of a report we put together charting every intersection of Atlantic Union and District government for the last ten years. The ones that involved money, at least.”

  “That’s a hell of a report,” I said, looking up. “Want to give me the sound bite?”

  He steepled his fingers together. A favorite gesture, apparently. “Without fail, on the same day a District development bid was won by the company, a check was cashed by a sitting city councilman’s campaign finance officer. Sometimes more than one councilman, almost always more than one check.”

  “Different donors, thanks to the LLC loophole?”

  “I see you know your campaign finance swindles, Mr. Singer. Yes.”

  “And they’ve done this every year for ten years?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure it goes back longer, but DC records aren’t digitized that far back. We’re working on the paper records now, but it will take us a year or more to research.”

  “What kind of money are we talking about?”

  “You’re going to have to be more specific. Just Atlantic Union or the other players, too? Or do you mean the other side, like how much in tax credits and incentive money to the developers?”

  I hesitated. Money was flying around everywhere. “Let’s start with the big picture. What have the developers been getting?”

  “Over ten years, the total campaign contribution outlay by developers we tracked was about two million dollars.”

  “And what did the developers get?”

  He smiled. “About one-point-five billion.”

  I was quiet as I let that sink in. “That’s everything, right? Tax breaks, incentives, waivers.”

  “Don’t forget undervalued property,” Denton said. He smiled when I looked quizzical. “Like that Columbia Heights thing I was kicking Waites’s ass over the other day? The value of the property—which we believe was lowballed to begin with—is about one-point-eight million.”

  “How much did AU pay?”

  “One dollar.”

  I blinked, but tried to play Devil’s advocate. “They’re on the hook for the development, though, right? They buy it, they got to build it.”

  “Of course. That’s their argument. And they’re also contractually obligated to the city to put in affordable housing and use local labor for the job and throw in a community computer center or a school or a playground.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Want to know how often that happens? And in any kind of time frame that actually matters to the people that live there?”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “I can guess.”

  “You understand, this is just the stuff that’s public. We can’t even talk about gifts, trips, dinners, and business hookups because, of course, none of that’s public record. But it does make you wonder how Toby Waites paid for three vacations to Vegas last year on a councilman’s salary. Though, to be fair, I’m sure he had the means to pay for them himself. DC city council members have the second-highest average salaries in the country.”

  “This is big money,” I said, holding up the folder.

  “It surely is. And while I know no one hired you to take down dirty developers or a city council on the take, you might want to take a hard look at what you’re getting into and what it means for your case.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He leaned forward. “There
are players in this, Singer, that will kill for a lot less money than we’re talking. A lot less.”

  “And?”

  “And Wendy Gerson was mixed up in the middle of them.”

  I left PoP’s office with Denton’s report tucked under one arm, though I really wanted a lead-lined case to put it in. And an armed guard wouldn’t be unwelcome, either. Denton was a crusader and I wouldn’t put it past him or his earnest followers to inflate some numbers, mix in stray facts, and generally paint developers and the city council in an unfavorable light, but if even a fraction of what he said was true, Wendy and her boss and probably anyone at their firm were part of one of the dirtiest systems I’d encountered in a long time.

  I wasn’t entirely surprised. Politically agnostic though I was, thirty years at MPDC had put me awfully close to council infighting and city gamesmanship. Money and power flowed outward from the politics and, as an arm of the council, the police force felt the ripples. But this deal for developers was beyond anything I’d caught a whiff of before.

  What to do with the information, though? Denton was right. I’d been hired to find Wendy Gerson’s killer, not beat a drum and wave a sign. But the kind of money Denton was talking about was enough to get anyone killed if they blabbed, rocked the boat, or made a big enough mistake.

  An idle glance in the mirror told me that, apparently, there was also enough money to hire halfway decent help, too. Most of my brain had been chewing over what Denton had said and what to do with it, so I hadn’t been paying nearly enough attention to my surroundings. It was only after the tail had been on me for five or ten minutes that I noticed the silver Avalon hanging back, taking the same turns I was, slowing down to keep its distance, speeding up to make it through red lights. I’d seen it earlier, but my forebrain had told my subconscious ringing the alarm bell to go away.

  Good thing it finally listened. To be sure I wasn’t just being paranoid, I hooked a left on 8th Street, which I hoped would drive the guy nuts with its illogical mix of stop signs and stoplights at every intersection. I drove erratically, slowing down, cruising, then completely blowing through one stop sign altogether—not so different than any other driver in DC. I came to almost a complete stop around Eastern Market to look at the backside of the flea market stalls, then hit the gas again.

  The Avalon kept pace, and at one point, even hung a right and got off my tail, but we were nearing the Marine Barracks and close enough to the wall cordoning off the Southeast Freeway again that I knew he was faking—in this part of town, there were only two places that went under the highway, so my tail knew that all he had to do was speed up, get to the wall, and follow it left again to find me at the next traffic light.

  So he knew the area. I slowed down as we got to the bottleneck at 8th, giving him a chance to catch up. There he was, two deep, stopped at the light. We all waited for the cycle until it was my turn to go. I eased through the light and continued towards M Street, watching for my tail in the mirror. To my surprise, the Avalon went straight through the intersection, giving up on me.

  I chewed that over. Either I was excessively paranoid or…I glanced in the mirror again. A green Land Rover, a powder-blue VW Bug, and a boxy-looking sedan I couldn’t figure the make and model of were behind me. I slowed to a crawl, working a hunch. The SUV gave me twenty seconds before it whipped around me and passed in the oncoming lane. It slowed down long enough for the driver, a young brunette, to yell, “Learn how to drive, asshole!” out the passenger window before it sped past. The VW’s driver seemed to be made of more tolerant stuff and gave me to the next block before they politely turned down a side street to get away.

  The sedan—okay, now I could see it was a black Lexus—was next. I kept the speed pegged at fifteen for another block, then suddenly whipped into a parking spot and put the brake on. The Lexus had no choice but to keep on rolling past. Unfortunately, it had tinted windows, but so far they hadn’t invented tinted license plates.

  I pulled back on the road and showed my disrespect for modern driving etiquette by taking out my phone and calling Dods. He picked up on the second ring.

  “Hey, Junior. Want to run a plate for me?”

  “Shoot.”

  I rattled off the plate number, he told me to drive in circles for a while, then hung up. I headed home at a leisurely pace. I could’ve caught up with the Lexus, and tailed them in return, but they knew I’d made them…and they really would drive around in circles, trying to lose me, for as long as it took to make me want to kill myself. I’d be more productive heading home while Dods did the legwork.

  He called back as I was crossing the Memorial Bridge out of the District. I fumbled with the phone as I zipped over the Potomac and into the state of Virginia. “Got anything?”

  “Sorry, Marty. It’s registered to a driving service. I could get a name, if you give me a couple of hours, but there’s nothing like Harry comma Oil Can attached to the record.”

  “Okay. Chase it down, you got the time.”

  “Will do.”

  I ended the call and headed home. There wasn’t anything else I could do if I didn’t want to drive around aimlessly, trying to pick the tail’s backup on purpose. I kept half an eye out for trouble and gave myself permission to go on autopilot. The drive to my house from DC had been routine for decades now, changing only when the roads themselves were altered. I’d surprised myself before by remembering taking a seat in the car and showing up at home, with nothing in between.

  Letting memory and instinct take over, however, gave me time to get back to the thought process I’d been following before I caught the tail. To wit, that Wendy Gerson was involved in the fairly normal business of corporate development, but seemed to have deep connections to one of the dirtier players in the game. And her particular role was attached to a failing development potentially worth millions or even tens of millions of dollars—if there hadn’t been, and continued to be, a spike standing in the way of the development and those millions.

  I kept bumping into the same question, though. Namely, why kill Wendy Gerson and Alex Montero? Even if they were preparing to go public with what they knew…there was nothing to go public with. The city council buyoffs were disgusting, but the situation was legal, so there was nothing to hide or fear having exposed. Making public just how unethical Atlantic Union and the council were behaving would simply cause a temporary stink that would settle in a few weeks like a dust cloud kicked up by a passing car. So there was something else, some knowledge or experience the two of them shared that was dangerous to another interest involved in the development of the Quarters.

  It all came back to the place. And the single thing that had stalled development was the land that Tonya Jackson had refused to sell. The spike. That was the key. Find out who owned the property now and I’d have a good idea of what was really going on.

  I wondered if Jackson had known what kind of trouble she might be drawing to herself by fighting the good fight. Maybe she had, and had the foresight to set up a trust to keep her home out of the hands of bottom-feeders like Atlantic Union. Or had simply sold the house to someone beyond their reach in a bid to keep it safe. I shook my head. Unlikely. But holding out as long as she had had taken some guts. The spike, like a fortress, standing against the surge, the lone holdout against a corrupt system instead of being pulled into it, compromised and compliant.

  I shook my head and looked around. Autopilot had done its job. I’d pulled up to the curb in front of my house and was shutting off the engine, all without much conscious thought. I got out and groaned as I stretched my legs—I’d been in the car a lot in the past week. Twirling my keys around my index finger, I let my mind relax and think about dinner, feeding the cat, and watching some TV.

  As I climbed the steps to my house I heard a scuffing noise behind me. I turned, reaching for my gun, but froze as I saw Harmon and Martinez—Laurel and Hardy—coming from around the corner of the house. Martinez covered me with a big, chrome-pl
ated gun that would’ve been more at home mounted on the back of a Humvee. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten I wasn’t the only one with the connections to run a license plate and get an address.

  Harmon smiled at me as they approached. “Hello, asshole. Take any good pictures lately?”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Open the door and go inside,” Martinez said. “Do it.”

  I turned slowly in place and put the key in the lock. The two came up on the porch, close, making sure I didn’t jump inside and slam the door. Martinez had lowered the elephant gun, but it was still out and pointed in my general direction. Given the size of the hole at the end of the barrel, that’s all the aiming he needed to do. Harmon held the screen door open, but with his head turned to watch the street.

  “Anyone else at home?” Harmon asked, his voice a rasp on wood.

  “No.”

  “Coming home later?”

  “No.”

  “You sure, now? It’ll be better for them if we’re not surprised.”

  “One cat. That’s it.”

  “All right. Inside.”

  I opened the door and Harmon shoved me in the back. Pierre was in the living room, attracted by the sound of my keys in the door and driven by the desire for dinner. When I stumbled in, he backed up suspiciously, but the cat likes his food and was willing to tolerate just about any strange behavior to assuage his hunger. Harmon and Martinez, however, were not part of the normal arrangement and when he saw their ugly mugs walk in behind me, his ears flattened to his head like they’d been glued there and he hissed with the sound of a radiator letting loose.

  “Cats, man,” Martinez said, looking down at Pierre with disdain. “I fucking hate cats.”

  “Have a seat,” Harmon said to me. “And put your hands on your knees. I don’t want to shoot you. Yet.”

  I sat on the couch and carefully placed my hands over my kneecaps. They hadn’t frisked me yet, which was a positive sign. We were going to talk. Maybe.