Cut and Run (7 page)

“I need anything you've got on her,” Larson said.

He felt Sunderland resist.

“Why do you suppose there hasn't been a bloodbath?” Larson asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“If Markowitz has cracked
Laena
and decrypted each of the protected identities, if the Romeros have all those names and locations, then why hasn't there been a bloodbath?” With Sunderland behind the desk, Larson stepped forward and took a seat in a comfortable red leather chair facing him. “They could sell the names off that list. No shortage of buyers. Every crime family in the country has someone on that list they'd like to see dead—most have hit lists they're just itching to get to. So why no bloodshed?”

“I'm sure Scott told you about the encryption. One identity at a time. That's a lot of work. Takes a lot of time.”

“Why else?”

“They want to cherry-pick the list, I suppose. We're way ahead of you on this, Larson. Believe me, we have crews out there right now recalling dozens of witnesses.”

“But not the ones who have opted out,” Larson said.

“Actually, we're posting a prearranged general warning for
all
witnesses. It's a red flag meant to send them and their dependents to ground. They'll stay there until they get the all clear.”

“And Hope will obey that?”

“If she's smart she will.”

“If she's not smart,” Larson said, “we miss a golden opportunity to catch a killer and find Marko.”

“Are you always this confident?”

“Fugitive apprehension isn't like anything else. You have to learn to see around corners. That's all I'm trying to do here.”

Sunderland stood and moved to his study door, trying to draw Larson out of his chair. “Come on,” he said.

Larson didn't budge. “You've got to help me.”

“Not here,” Sunderland said. “Not in my home. I'm not discussing a protected witness—even one that opted out—in my home. We have a room downtown. It's clean. Both of us will have to be swept as well. I'm not doing this without taking that precaution.”

Larson practically sprang out of his chair. Sunderland had agreed to give him Hope Stevens.

Larson was made to empty his pockets—billfold, credentials, loose change, handkerchief, pen—and to leave his BlackBerry and his belt, anything metal, with the deputy in charge. Sunderland did the same, but was carrying a lot less. Wands were waved over every limb and up and down their torsos, like an airport security check, before either man was cleared. They entered a plain-looking conference room.

Housed in the center of the offices, this room was without windows or decoration, and only the one door, a thick door that locked with a significant
click
. The pale green walls looked different to Larson, perhaps a special metallic paint had been used, or even a composite material that reflected radio waves. He'd heard of such rooms, but had never been in one. No phone, no computer. No electrical wall outlets. The recessed lights in the ceiling shone through some kind of thick glass or similar material, and Larson thought this material was probably also designed to ground out any random radio waves.

It had been a thirty-minute drive downtown, Larson in the rental following Sunderland's Buick. All this effort, he thought, an exercise in secrecy for a woman no longer in the program. He would never fully understand the government of which he was a part.

At his request, Larson was provided a simple wood pencil and a blank piece of paper.

“Hope Stevens was relocated under the protected name Alice Frizen,” Sunderland began without ceremony. A man in a hurry. “Bakersfield, California. We set her up, as I recall, with employment in health care. Information technology skills, wasn't it?”

“Computers, yes.”

“Yes. I.T. at a hospital, I'm pretty sure it was. No matter, because just short of a year after assuming her new identity, right at the time she was applying for a dependent, there was another of our witnesses, a man known to Hope Stevens, who was murdered while in a parking lot outside a Wal-Mart in Des Moines. His picture—it was a gruesome kill—went national before we could stop it. The Stevens woman went off our radar, just as the AUSA was putting a second case, the murder-for-hire case, together against Donny Romero and the others. Needless to say, those conspiracy and attempted murder charges were never brought.”

Larson sat there, as if slapped across the face. Hope's application for a dependent's paperwork suggested the existence of a husband or a child or both. A new life, indeed.

“A dependent, singular or plural? Anything more on that?”

“There might be in her record. You're right about her information being filed separately. We
do
pull it once they opt out. But it's kept in
Laena
as well, because seventy-some percent of those who opt out eventually rejoin the program. By Monday I'll be in a better position to clarify this sort of request.”

“And that's all? Alice Frizen voluntarily left the program.” Larson scratched out notes for himself.

“Forfeiting a sizable stipend and medical insurance coverage, I might add.”

“That's a lot to give up.”

“It is indeed.”

“No explanation of this dependent? Child? Lover? Relative?”

“None that I'm aware of.”

“And that's that?” Larson had spent a career reading the faces of notorious liars, and he put Sunderland up there with the best of them—but a liar just the same. It wasn't all, and Larson knew it.

“The possibility of Mr. Romero's parole lit a fire under the U.S. Attorney's office. With it came a renewed interest in locating Ms. Stevens, a.k.a. Ms. Frizen.”

“And?”

“And I don't report rumor or innuendo.”

Larson studied the man carefully, awaiting another lie.

“It's one of those things you hear, is all,” Sunderland said.

“Would you make the call for me?”

“On a Saturday?”

Larson answered, “You want to wait until Monday? I was told that if Markowitz doesn't have the entire list decrypted by now, he will
any day
. I doubt either of us has slept much in the last thirty hours, and I can tell you I for one won't be doing my best work by the time Monday rolls around.”

“You'll have to wait here.”

“I'm good at waiting,” Larson answered, containing his excitement. “Government work, you know?”

Sunderland didn't appreciate the sarcasm. He left the room, Larson catching a glimpse of the deputy marshal standing guard by the door. After a minute Larson put his head down onto his arms and rested on the table. He sat bolt upright upon Sunderland's return.

Sunderland sat down beneath a great emotional weight, reminding Larson of some judges as they returned to the bench following jury deliberations.

Sunderland said, “An Alice Dunbar appears on a three-year-old health insurance group coverage for St. Luke's Hospital, Minneapolis. The social she provided is the same one we gave her for Frizen. She probably had no choice. It makes sense: Post 9/11, it's this side of impossible to get a counterfeit social. The name change to Dunbar was legit—done legally in California. There's also a social assigned by Treasury to one Penelope Dunbar, born in California, currently a five-year-old Caucasian female. The kid's social was mailed to a box number in Minneapolis. The investigator's report lists some calls made to the hospital there before passing this up the command. His report suggests the lead was promising at that time.”

“And?” Sunderland now seemed to be dragging this out for dramatic effect and the change bothered Larson.

“No follow-up.” Sunderland's face reflected Larson's exasperation. “You're the one who brought up government work: It looks as though he sent it over to us, to Justice, but not directed to the U.S. Attorney's office—and this is a little over three months ago. Apparently it never found its way to the U.S. Attorney's office. This deputy had not only the post office box number where the social had been sent, but a residential address he thought was good. It was very good work this guy did. There's been a lot of turnover at Justice since Ridge and Homeland Security—I probably don't have to tell
you
that. But as far as I can tell—and it's the same for the guy I talked to—it looks as if it died there.”

“Right,” Larson said, then, under his breath, “Or else she did.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Minneapolis, Minnesota, streamed past outside the bus window
as the passenger took a final opportunity to commit the face of his next victim to memory. He had to allow for added age, a change in hair color or style, weight loss or gain, so he focused on the green eyes, the soft curve of her chin and the placement of her ears, finding a tiny, hooked scar in the hairs of the eyebrow above her left eye. He put no currency in the name—Alice Frizen, Alice Dunbar—he thought instead of carving lines into her, shallow at first, deeper when necessary, the beauty of the rich, sanguine red against pale skin.

A hole in the knee of his worn blue jeans revealed the dark skin of his Latin heritage. His knee bounced with the vibrations of the city bus. The fabric moved, including the forest green sweatshirt he wore, but not the body within—every muscle flexed and taut, a cat ready to pounce. With the hood of the sweatshirt pulled up, the man's face remained like a monk's, in dark shadow, so that the curious little girl who studied him so intently from the row in front of him could make out no distinguishing features. Just two eyes peering out, impossibly dark brown to the point of appearing black at the center. Those eyes looked down and returned to the crossword puzzle in his lap.

3 across:

A knot, not to be undone.

The five-year-old girl smiled at him and waved with the tips of her fingers so her mother wouldn't see. She clearly hoped for a smile, but she got nothing out of him.

Paolo ignored the girl, his attention on the puzzle and occasionally out the bus window, on the street numbers above or alongside the door of a passing building. He awaited a particular address. For all the rigidity of his muscles, he felt an internal calm. He followed instruction; he did as he was told. He felt eternally grateful for the opportunity he'd been given: a sense of family, a sense of
belonging
. Nothing, no one, would come close to stopping him.

Paolo had Philippe to thank for his training; he served him as a lieutenant serves his captain. It had crossed his mind more than once that his orders should have come directly from Ricardo, Philippe's half brother, who now ran the Romero compound in his father's “retirement.” Philippe did not sit on the council as Ricardo did, and was unlikely to have the authority to order this woman's execution, but this was the woman responsible for putting Donny away, and so Paolo followed the orders. Philippe was tangled up in a family dispute, a power struggle to keep the family business in health care and insurance, while his worthless half brother was more of a street thug who favored cutting in on the Native American casinos and gaming. Paolo would follow Philippe to the grave, if asked. Ricardo was an arrogant, spoiled snot. If the bastard son, Philippe, was making a move for control of the Romero family, as it appeared, then Paolo would gladly assist the transition. Philippe carried a hard-on for his half brother's wife, an extremely fine-looking Italian woman named Katrina. Paolo grew heady with the thought of his own increased importance following the success of this job.

He felt the twinges of an erection and knew he must be close.

He looked up and caught a street number off a delicatessen's window. Yes. Nearly there.

. . . he wrote into the small boxes.

He reached for the button to signal the driver:
next stop.

Paolo scouted the back of the apartment building intent on finding an alternate point of entry. The crossword puzzle was now folded and tucked into a back pocket. He pulled down the sweatshirt's hood, aware that he exposed his face by doing so, but wanting his ears in open air, his hearing in top form. He pursed his lips and inhaled through his nose, collecting the various odors of the back alley—
cats, stale beer, human urine, decomposing trash, motor oil
—wiggled the fingers of both hands like a butterfly drying its wings, and briefly closed his eyes, containing himself in darkness before opening them again and seeing everything around him as new.

He saw it. The adjacent office building held a fire escape on the alley side that led to the building's roof. This office building physically connected to the apartment building, which had a similar fire escape, but one that used a weighted drop mechanism and was therefore impossible for Paolo to reach. It was an indirect route, but one that would serve his purpose.

Broad daylight
, he thought.
Who expects to die in the morning?
Hollywood had conditioned the public into believing murder only happened at night. He had them to thank for the ease with which he could surprise his victims.

He climbed strongly, his light frame moved effortlessly by a taut, lean musculature. He made no hurry of it, counting again on the public's conditioning. He climbed with confidence, a maintenance man perhaps, or a roofer making an inspection.

He crossed to the four-story apartment building, descended an exterior steel ladder, and worked his way down one level to the catwalk that fronted a string of eight large windows. Studying the top floor as he climbed down, he made it out to be two apartments, four windows each: kitchen, living room, and probably a pair of bedrooms.

From a distance no one would see the Tru-Feel surgical gloves. With his back turned to the alley it would be difficult, if not impossible, to make out the reflective sunglasses he now donned. They served the same purpose as the black box strung across eyes in photographs, effecting anonymity.