Страница 9 из 69
6
BACK IN MY APARTMENT, I CHECKED MY PHONE MESSAGES on the home machine. Nothing but a recorded voice from the Red Cross saying it was time to give blood again. I called Harvey’s house and didn’t get him. Then I went through the same routine on his cell phone. I thought about calling my friend Bo but dismissed the idea, at least until I had a better sense of what was going on. I didn’t want to bring in the big guns until I knew for sure Harvey wasn’t at the Coolidge Corner theater catching a matinee with Rachel. I knew that wasn’t the case. I could feel in every part of me that Harvey had not left that house on his own. But my Bosnian enforcer friend and colleague was not a resource to be used lightly.
The speed of my DSL co
The first thing that came up was a piece in one of the smaller trade publications a
There was a second, splashier a
I did a search for Betelco and got so many hits I cross-referenced with the name Fratello and words like indictment, embezzlement, and fraud. It seemed that Roger Fratello had inherited the controlling interest of a company founded by his father in 1944. The Lightway Company manufactured parts used to make lightbulbs. Roger found lightbulbs boring, so he used a good portion of the company’s substantial pile of cash to go on a spending spree. One of the companies he bought made semiconductors, and that put Roger right in the middle of the tech boom. He took on new investors to shore up his cash position and, when the technology sector went bust, took off with their money. In his wake, he left faked financial reports, fabricated customer lists, and a lot of very unhappy investors.
I searched hard for any reports on the Betelco fiasco that mentioned Rachel. Her company took a few direct hits in articles toward the end, but she was never mentioned by name. Inquiring minds wanted to know where the auditors had been throughout this ongoing fraud. Another good question to ask when I found her.
I hit the enter button several times, stacking up the Betelco articles for printing, then I went into Google Images to see what pictures I could find. Roger and his wife, Susan, had apparently been quite the presence on the Boston social scene, back before he had slithered out of town with other people’s money. The two of them had been regulars at fund-raisers, charity balls, and other excuses to wear black ties and gowns. Roger looked the same in all his pictures. More interesting were the pictures of his wife. I put the name Susan Fratello in and found several more recent photos of her. The difference in the images pre- and post-disgrace were startling. You could look into her eyes and see that she had suffered greatly for the sins of her husband. What better source of information could I hope to find?
I went back to the private databases to see if she was still in the area. She was not only still in the area, but she was in the same house in Newton she’d shared with her husband. I printed out the address. She would be my next stop.
When I could think of nothing else to search for, I checked my notebook. Ling had also mentioned the name Stephen Hoffmeyer as a possible alias for Roger. I put that into the Google box and got about a zillion hits. When I tried to cross-reference it with Fratello, I got nothing. I tried a few more combinations. Just when I was about to give up, I tried Stephen Hoffmeyer and Brussels, the city where Ling had found the cash. What I got in return might have been interesting to anyone, but for a former airline person, it was fascinating. A man named Stephen Gerald Hoffmeyer had been one of the passengers taken hostage in the Sala
I started skimming the articles, refreshing my memory of the details. Seventy-nine passengers and crew had boarded their scheduled flight from Brussels to Joha
Ten excruciating days later, with only the Western hostages still onboard, the Belgians stormed the plane without permission from the Sudanese government. In the conflagration that followed, seventeen people died-nine passengers and eight hijackers, the original gang of five, plus three that boarded later. The plane was destroyed.
I found a photo array of the storming and the aftermath. It had happened at night, so the pictures of the initial bombing and the fireball that followed were particularly vivid. The pictures shot in the cold and dreary light of dawn were quite a contrast. The grotesquely twisted hulk of what had once been an airplane was prominent. The debris field that surrounded it was blackened.
It was hard to believe anyone had walked away from that, but eight hostages had made it out. I searched several articles for the list of survivors. Once I found it, I checked the dates, then I sat back and tried to figure out what it all meant.
Sala
Talk about karmic retribution.
7
ROGER FRATELLO’S OLD ADDRESS WAS A LARGE WHITE Victorian down a shady street in the affluent suburb of West Newton. It had a vast front lawn and a wraparound covered patio with a wooden porch swing. Susan Fratello answered the door. It was the same woman I had seen in those tuxedo-and-gown photos with her once-respectable husband, plus twenty years and a blue velour housecoat zipped up the front.
“Mrs. Fratello?”
A small terrier with wisps of brown hair in its eyes yapped from behind her leg as she sca
“Excuse me?”
“Aren’t you a reporter?” Her voice conveyed nothing but calm curiosity, a direct contrast to her nearly hysterical pooch.
“I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for information about your husband.”
“Read the papers.”
She started to close the door, but I put my hand on it, a gesture that made the tiny canine go nuts. He was a smart dog. He could spring and yap at the same time. Mrs. Fratello stared at me until I took my hand off her door.
“I’m sorry, but I have read the papers. I’ve done lots of research.” I held up my backpack. “It’s all in here. But it doesn’t give me what I need to solve my case.”