Bill Walton 

When I returned to the office, I had a message on my voice mail to call Buddy. A year ago, I shuddered every time Buddy Olsen called me on the telephone, but now his calls were money in the bank. Buddy Olsen and his Canadian Security and Intelligence Service friends needed the help of Pilger and Associates more and more and I was happy to oblige them. The budget cutbacks in Ottawa had reduced the field staff of CSIS to the point where they now contracted out much of their forensic investigations to companies like ours. We did not get the jobs that involved National Defence or International conspiracies, but often an investigation into a routine monetary swindle turned over stones that hid characters that were into spying and espionage. Buddy knew our company well and I believe he gave us the jobs that might turn out to be a little sensitive, knowing that we would report to him if we suspected we were onto something bigger than it first appeared.

"Buddy, this is Frank, returning your call. I’m in the office for the next hour - call me," I said to his voice mail. Voice mail tag can last for several rounds but it was only a matter of minutes before Buddy replied. He was probably monitoring calls with his voice mail, a practice in the civil service of which the public has good and valid reasons to complain.

"Frank, I have a really good job for you, if you can get on it right away," Buddy began.

"I’m well, thanks, Buddy, and Nancy and the kids are fine. How are Bertha and Jenny?" I replied.

"Oh. Yeah, fine, thanks. Sorry, Frank, things area little hectic here this morning. The Minister of Finance is crawling all over me, looking for answers that I can’t give him."

"What's up?"

"You heard about the collapse of that Mutual Fund - Wardwell?"

"As a matter of fact, I just did - about an hour ago. My dentist had some money in it and he was calling his broker. How is CSIS involved in that?"

"Normally we wouldn’t be involved, but the Ontario Security Commission has asked for our help. They are quite certain that there is an international flavour to this whole thing and want us to investigate. This is all on the QT, Frank, but the OSC had been watching Wardwell for some time and were about to open an investigation when the major players just disappeared."

"With a lot of money, I presume?" I asked.

"Yeah, a lot of money. Upwards of two billion dollars."

"Two BILLION?"

"The papers are going to say several hundred million, but they will eventually come up with the right math. The amount of money involved should automatically call for us to do the work in-house, but I simply don’t have the resources right now. Can Pilger and Associates look after this one?" Doing some quick math with a figure like two billion dollars was easy.

"Yes, I can work it into my schedule. I’ll take this one myself, at least in the initial stages. How soon can you get me the background material?"

"I already have my person waiting for you at Wardwell's office. The two main players are Jerry Sewell, a Canadian and Hogarth Attward, an American. Robbie Quick will meet you as soon as you can get down to Bay Street. Quick will fill you in on the details and be your contact with CSIS. Quick has been assigned to work with you all the way on this one, Frank."

"Quick. I don= t know that name, Buddy. A new employee, I assume?@

"Yes, fairly new to us."

"So you want one of your new people dogging my tracks?" I was hurt to think that Buddy would not trust me with over two billion dollars. A Does this mean I have to share any commission I might earn?@

"Oh, yeah, the commission. Due to the large amount involved Frank, we will have to cut that back by half. If you ever do recover any money, that will still make it worth your while,"

"I see. You don= t sound hopeful of catching these guys."

"No, I don= t. Our experience with stock scams has been that the money is gone long before we can get to it. Your usual hourly fee should still make it worth your while."

"And as a bonus I get to train your new employee. Sounds great!"

"Think of it as an apprenticeship, Frank. Quick is a good operative but needs some field experience. I thought you might be a good teacher." Buddy saying > needs some field experience= was like me buying a handyman= s house - something I would never contemplate. A pig in a poke came to mind.

"Needs field experience - that sounds like a greenhorn to me. How long has Quick been with you?"

"Just over a year, but don’t let that fool you. This one is sharp and shows a lot of promise. Do it as a favour to me, Frank."

"Okay, okay. How will I know this Quick person?"

"Don’t worry, Robbie has your photo," he laughed. I did not get the joke. "The FBI is getting a team together and I’ll get their contact name to you sometime today." Damn Buddy was as confident as ever. One of these days I would surprise him and turn down a job. But not one that involved billions of dollars.

I checked in with Nancy at her desk, telling her that I had one filling and no freezing. She patted my hand saying how brave I was and reminded me to pick up my summer-weight suit at the dry cleaners. Saturday we were flying to San Diego for a holiday. Nancy had arranged our complete itinerary and I was satisfied just to get away for a week, no matter where she took me. I told Nancy of Buddy= s call and said I was on my way downtown to meet his new operative.

The Wardwell offices were in an office tower just at the edge of the financial district on Bay Street. The building, 27 stories according to the elevator, was not clad in the reflecting gold of the Royal Bank Tower, but in plain old-fashioned clear glass that neither mirrored the opulence of the neighbouring buildings nor kept the heat of the sun out of the building. The lobby was typical of most business offices, a reception desk where a security person sat before some video consoles that displayed hallways and entrances from nearly-hidden cameras. I read the directory and found Wardwell listed on the seventh floor, nodded to the security person and walked across the fake marble floor to the bank of elevators. I shared the ride up with three young executive types - all dressed in slacks and blazers displaying some complex company logo on the breast pocket. They were discussing some stock or other that was moving well and would go to at least sixty-five cents before the week was out. For a moment, I thought of phoning the name of the penny stock to Dr. Bauer, but I was in a good mood and decided against it.

The office door to 707 was open. Standing behind the receptionist's desk, I saw a very beautiful young blonde woman reading through a pile of papers. She had her hair caught back in what Nancy calls a French roll. Her complexion was bright and clear, with just enough makeup to be almost natural shadowing around the eyes. She was wearing a dark blue two-piece outfit with a narrow red and white stripe crossing diagonally from the shoulder to the waist. I guessed her at about five-eight and around 135 pounds. I still cannot convert people sizes to metric. She had not heard my approach so I took a business card from my gold CGA clip and cleared my throat. "Good morning," I said, sub-consciously dropping my voice a note or two to sound manlier. "I’m Frank Pilger and I am supposed to meet a Mr. Quick."

She laughed, her laughter as pleasant as her appearance, "Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Pilger, but I am Robbie Quick."

"Oh," I stammered, knowing now why Buddy had chuckled at my expense. "No apology required - I just expected some stodgy little accountant-type - that’s what Buddy usually gives me to work with." I remembered my training then and asked for some identification. Robbie handed me her CSIS photo and it matched the smiling face before me.

"The office has been closed for over a week and the report from the Securities Commission says that Jerry Sewell left on the 5th of the month to places unknown. The staff were paid, complete with a severance package, to the end of the month. When the receptionist and two employees arrived at work on the Monday all of their computer files had been erased, the backup tapes magnetically destroyed and a number of paper files shredded. Most of the information was kept on the computers - one of these offices that were trying to go paperless. I've been looking through what paper there is for the past two days but I’m afraid there is nothing that leads anywhere."

"All right," I said. "Sewell obviously planned this for some time. He would have covered his tracks very carefully, knowing what we were looking for. Let’s look for the not-so obvious clues that everyone leaves. Show me around, Robbie."

"You mean like finger prints, hair samples, things like that, Mr. Pilger? We . . ."

"No, Robbie - I assume we have everything we need to identify the physical Mr. Sewell. And please, it’s Frank - I’m not that old!" although I was thinking about the differences in our ages. I was not old enough to be her father but I was afraid that was what she might be thinking. Why I was even concerned, I do not know. Maybe young beautiful women do that to all men - even happily married men like me. "What I want to do is get a picture of the way this man thinks and acts. I noticed that the carpeting in this office is very good quality. Find out if these offices come furnished or does the lessee supply the carpeting, etc."

"The lessee supplies it. I looked at the lease to see what terms Sewell had signed. His lease expired in six months."

I was encouraged to see that she remembered a detail like that from reading a lease. "So either he planned this whole thing to end within a time frame or he was going to renew. Is there anything else that might indicate that he was planning to leave?"

"Not that I know of."

"Check to see if these office plants were rented or purchased. If they were purchased, see who bought them. If Sewell did it himself, we have a person who likes and cares for plants. You don’t often see a Clivia in an office - too sensitive to heat and light. The same goes for that orchid over there. If Sewell selected this carpet, I would say he has good taste and knows his furnishings. Let’s look at his office."

"I never thought about it, but his apartment has lots of plants - I have no idea what kind they are. All I know is African Violets and geraniums."

"So we have access to his apartment?"

"Yes. He lived alone. He had a girl friend, Judy O’Hare, and we’ve applied for a warrant to search her place, but there has been no one at her apartment for about a week before Sewell disappeared. She is named on the international warrant along with Sewell."

Sewell’s office was typical executive suite - very nice mahogany desk and credenza, an expensive, comfortable, leather chair, gold-plated pen set on the desk. I powered up his computer, a current model Compaq but all I got was a password query that I did not even try to guess at. The art on the wall was poster art - one of a surfing scene, another was one of those > inspirational= themes of waves breaking on a rocky shore that said to be all you can be. A screen saver of tropical fish began swimming across the computer screen. "Did he have an aquarium in the apartment?" I asked.

"Yes, but there were no fish in it - just some plants."

"Let’s check the local fish shops and see if he sold his fish recently. Maybe the guy had a hobby . . ." Hobbies are good things to use when tracking someone who has gone to earth. Sooner or later they try to get back to their normal routines and hobbies are one of the things that people take up again. And aquariums say something else to me. People who keep fish in glass cages can be control freaks. They keep these little creatures in a glass prison, a place with no privacy or hidey holes, where only the master feeds at his leisure, controls the temperature and light - a person who must be the master of all situations. Or else just someone who likes coloured fish. Maybe Sewell was the later since he had fish on his screen saver. For my sake, I preferred to go after the control freaks. They are predictable and vulnerable. People who like and keep coloured fish probably think they are doing the fish a favour by keeping them from becoming fodder in the violent under-water food chain. The control freak would have flushed the fish so there would be no record of him at any tropical fish shop. I hoped the fish were still alive and registered at some pleasant aquarium in the area where we could make a connection with Jerry Sewell.

The meeting room was typical but a large painting caught my eye. It looked like a Remington - wild horses running on a western plain, an Apache on a galloping paint trying to lasso one on them. I had always liked Remington's depictions of the Wild West and walked over to take a closer look even though I knew it would only be a print. It was not a Remington. It was a limited edition print, signed by the artist, one M. Morcos. I stood back and examined the print more closely. This person could use a paint brush; there no doubt about the skills of the artist here. The colours were good although there was a little more yellow in the grasses than I would have liked. The sky had a unique blueness to it that was almost a chromatic. The horse, trying to dodge the thrown lasso, had a certain wildness in his eye that was revealed by the amount of white showing. The mountains in the background had a redness in them that you did not see at first glance, but on closer inspection added a depth of field that I would not expect from such a colour. Not that I am so knowledgeable about painting, it is just an interest that I picked up from my first wife and her vocation.

"I assume you have applied for a copy of his telephone records?" I asked as we left the empty board room.

"Yes, both for the office and his home. We should have them in a couple of days," Robbie replied.

"That includes his cell phone?"

"Uh, I’m not sure." She checked through her note pad. "His secretary said Sewell had a cell but did not use it for business. He never gave out the number. The secretary did not know the number. He had a car phone and we are checking that number as well."

"A big time operator like this guy that doesn't list his cell phone number on his business card? That’s unusual. Let’s ask for all phone records under his name." On a hunch I added, "Get the girl friend's records too. If he had a cell and didn’t use it for business calls, who did he call on the cell?" Perhaps, I was thinking, he might be calling his partner in the States. Or some other co-conspirator. He might also have registered the cell under a different name. And different billing address. "Are you picking up the mail from both of their apartments?"

"Yes. Nothing of interest yet. No telephone bills, no charge cards so far," she added, reading my thoughts. This girl might be new to CSIS, but she did know what she was doing when it came to an investigation. It might not be as hard to work with Buddy= s greenhorn as I had feared.

I followed Robbie's rental car across town to the Scarborough area and parked in the visitor's space outside a small, five-story apartment block. The building was new, about ten years old, and looked out over a ravine filled with maples and oaks, now bare except for a few clinging brown oak leaves that were waiting for the first warm days of spring when they would be blown onto someone's pristine lawn. Jerry Sewell rented the penthouse suite on the top floor, a spacious and tastefully decorated apartment of over 2400 square feet of floor space. This guy had a taste for the finer things in life and treated himself to only the best. The furniture was all top quality, the electronic sound system was Sony and Bose with a 40-inch Hitachi television set, the dining room set was rosewood, well oiled and rubbed to a fine gloss.

"We checked his study and found it cleaned out, the same as the office,@ Robbie continued. "Nothing on his personal computer that we could find, the drive shows no files, there are no backup diskettes or tapes in the place. He has a paper shredder here and we think he shredded everything before he left. The building superintendent says he remembers a couple of large green bags of shredded paper in the dumpster but that was picked up before we got here. Are you listening?"

"Oh, yeah. Right. Sewell obviously planned his departure very well. I doubt if we’ll find anything here. Notice this painting?" I asked.

"So, what about it? It looks like any one of a thousand of those seascapes you see in every art store. It looks like something you'd find at a starving artist sale in a park or mall," she laughed.

"No, I don’t think so. Come and take a closer look. This is an original oil painting, not a copy like we saw at the office. And it is by the same artist - Morcos. I’m only guessing, but a painting of this size - 48" by 60" has to be worth - oh, say $10,000."

"You think so?" Robbie was now looking at the painting with a different perspective. "Yes, I can see that it’s better than I first thought. The painter did a nice job of catching the light on the waves, didn’t he?"

"Yes, it is quite effective, almost a luminescence. And we don’t know whether the artist is a man or a woman, do we?" I liked correcting women on the gender thing.

"Oh, I think it’s a man," Robbie replied.

"Why do you say that?"

"Just the lines - the curves of the palm trees - the waves. The lines are too soft - women try to hide that side of themselves and try to make their art more male-like. Sells better," she said.

"Are you a student of the Arts," I asked. It would be too much of a coincidence to find this attractive young woman shared the same love of painting as my first wife, Karen.

"No, just human nature - police thinking. It is probably not right in this case. Maybe this painter is just a good artist - I wouldn’t know."

I checked out the bathroom, looking for old prescription drugs or patent drug containers. The only thing unusual about the bathroom was a surfing poster. Same bronzed guy from the office, riding a different green-water wave. We went back out to the living room and I poked around, trying to find something that I may have missed on the first pass through the room. I had a vague feeling that something was not right but I could not pinpoint it. "Robbie, do you feel anything wrong about this room? Something is bothering me and I can’t figure out what it is," I said.

She stood and looked around the room and then said, "Got it! It’s the paintings. Don’t you see what's wrong?"

There were four paintings on the walls, none of them by this Morcos person - two landscapes, a tiger in the jungle and a science-fiction interpretation of some faraway galaxy. "What do you see that I don’t?"

"That’s it precisely, Frank. Would you place those paintings on the walls in those locations?"

Interior decorating is not one of my strong suits but now I looked at the room as a whole unit. It was out of balance. "Something is missing!" I moved closer to the wall that was out of sync with the rest of the room. There were small nail holes, almost invisible with the white plaster spackling that had been hurriedly applied. The other wall had the same marks. Two paintings had been removed. They must have been small paintings, probably about 12 x 18 inches, allowing for frame size. "So, our Mr. Jerry Sewell took a couple of paintings with him. That’s interesting. They must have been originals, perhaps worth a little money," I mused.

A Then why didn’t he take the one you say is worth $10,000?@

A Good question. Because of its size? Maybe it was too big to pack?@

"Or maybe he just liked the smaller ones more than the big one," Robbie suggested.

"True. Good work, Robbie. I doubt if I would ever have noticed that those paintings were missing. I guess most men wouldn’t have noticed. Maybe Sewell didn’t really see the change in the room himself."

"Or maybe he never thought there would be a woman police officer on his trail!" she laughed. She may have been right.

I left Robbie with a list of little chores to follow up on. I would contact the Americans to see if they had anything to share on Sewell’s partner, Hogarth Attward. I told her that Nancy and I would be away for 10 days in San Diego and we would get back on the case when I returned. Jerry Sewell had a well-planned three-week lead on us anyway - a few more days would not make much difference. Until we had an idea of where the money had gone, we could not do much. It would take the banks another week to get the big money transactions to us and then some time to analyze the legitimate money movements. Always follow the money, was my credo.

We had a spare interview room at the office so I installed Robbie there rather than have her working out of a hotel room. This case was going to take some time and resources so I wanted her nearby. I watched Nancy for any signs of jealousy when I introduced the two women but saw nothing. Not that there should be any reason, for I had no thoughts about this very pretty young woman. No inappropriate thoughts.

By Friday, we had tracked Jerry Sewell’s girl friend, Judy O’Hare, to the Pearson International airport in Toronto. Her car had been tagged since March 3 because the parking ticket was not displayed. Robbie would get a search warrant for the car as well as for O’Hare's apartment. I asked Robbie to check every airline for an O’Hare and Sewell between March 1 and March 8. I doubted they would be using their own names, so I asked her to verify all female single passengers between March 1 and 3. I was guessing that Ms O’Hare had departed before Sewell and was meeting him somewhere. It would take Robbie a week to track every single airline and all passenger lists, and follow up all women traveling alone during our search period. I gave her the telephone number of the Cove Suites in La Jolla where Nancy and I would be vacationing for the next week in case she came up with something important.