Forty Thieves (27 page)

“Or us,” said Ed.

22

When morning came, Sid and Ronnie came down from their room and had breakfast in a booth at the back corner of the hotel restaurant where they weren’t as likely to be noticed, and then took the elevator to the parking garage.

As they walked to their car, Sid stopped. Ronnie said, “What’s wrong? Why are you stopping?”

Sid muttered, “Oh, there it is. I forgot for a minute that we had another new rented car. It’s the gray one.” He clicked the key fob, and the car gave a little yip in response.

As they got into the car, he said, “I guess this case is starting to get to me.”

“Me too,” she said. “The company says they’re interested just because they can’t bear to give up on James Ballantine, but they hardly knew him. The ex-wife, who’s probably had to deal with racists from time to time, thinks it’s obvious he was killed by racists. As soon as the first girlfriend learns he had other girlfriends, she tries to plant the idea one of them must have killed him. The married girlfriend says he was blackmailing her to keep having sex, and that raises the likelihood that somebody killed him because he asked for
it. And the girlfriend who says she knew him best, knew nothing about him after two years.”

“And everything we got from the background checks on the next girlfriend is garbage. Mira Cepic might as well have arrived from the planet Neptune the day before yesterday. Jobs? Education? Marriages? Last address? Not found not found not found.”

“There’s still the criminal background check you requested, and then we’ll get the immigration status from the government,” Ronnie said. “She’s got to have grown up in another country. We’ll get it eventually.”

“If we’re forced to wait long enough, maybe the people trying to kill us will.”

“Yes,” she said. “Somehow those people never seem to slip my mind. Especially when I look forward to going home to sleep in our own bed, and remember that we don’t have a home or our own bed.”

“I guess we should check with Miguel Fuentes in North Hollywood, and see if he’s gotten any new information since we sent him the pictures of Mira Cepic and the background stuff.”

“Or the lack of background. We should call him first instead of dropping in,” said Ronnie. “Maybe it’ll give him time to look for her in the system.”

“I’ll do it,” said Sid. He took out his phone and hit the number for the North Hollywood station. “Can you please connect me with Detective Miguel Fuentes? This is Sid Abel.”

Fuentes’s voice came on. “Sid?”

“Hi, Miguel. We’re getting ready to go talk to Mira Cepic, and we were wondering if—”

“Great timing,” said Fuentes. “I was just going to call you. Can you both meet me at First Street in an hour?”

“The police headquarters building?”

“Yes. Those pictures you sent me caught my eye, and I sent them to Major Crimes. One of the detectives there thought he recognized the face, and sent the pictures to Interpol. Their guy will be here in an hour.”

“We’ll be there,” said Sid.

“And Sid?”

“Yes?”

“I probably don’t have to say this, but stay away from Wintergarden Way,” said Fuentes. “When Interpol in Washington got the pictures, it took them about two minutes to call back.”

Captain Albright was a woman about fifty-five years old with blond hair that she wore in the police on-duty bun. Her suit jacket was unbuttoned, and the others could see she had a .45 in a shoulder holster. She raised an arm to indicate the man in a gray suit who had come into the conference room with her. “This is agent John Roche. He’s from the US National Central Bureau of Interpol.”

She surveyed the big conference table. “This is Detective Miguel Fuentes of North Hollywood Homicide. Lieutenant Dennis Cole, Major Crimes. Sergeant Daniel Trevolino, Major Crimes. And joining us today are Sidney and Veronica Abel. They’re the private investigators who took the photographs. They’re both retired Los Angeles police detectives, and you can talk freely in front of them.” She looked around as though the room contained hiding places. “I don’t see Detective Hebert. Anybody hear from him?”

Lieutenant Cole said, “He’s in traffic.”

“We’ll fill him in later,” she said. Her expression betrayed a slight irritation. “Agent Roche is here to brief us about those photographs.” She nodded to Roche. “Agent Roche?”

“Thank you, Captain,” said Roche. He said, “Sergeant Trevolino forwarded the photographs to our office in Washington last night, and immediately two of our agents recognized this lady.” He paused and watched the people in the room. “Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve got a panther infestation.”

He seemed pleased with his choice of words, and even more pleased that they meant nothing to the others, who merely looked at him expectantly. “It’s what the police in Europe call them—pink panthers, after the old movie. They’re diamond thieves. The London police caught a couple of them once with diamonds hidden in a lotion jar, which was a trick used in the movie, and the press picked it up. It’s an unfortunate name, because it keeps people from taking them seriously.”

“They’re from London?” Lieutenant Cole said.

“No,” said Roche. “They were mostly from parts of the former Yugoslavia. Over the years, various European police agencies have arrested a hundred and eighty-nine of them. They were Serbian, Montenegrin, Bosnian. A few were from other places in Eastern Europe.”

“That’s a huge number of men for a jewel theft ring,” said Cole.

“That’s another thing,” said Roche. “They’re never all men. There are always women too. Let me run you through the way the thefts work.”

He reached into the briefcase he’d brought and took out a file. Ronnie and Sid could see it contained printed
photographs. He said, “The first step is that a woman comes to the door of the jewelry store. She’s vaguely foreign. She wears all designer clothes. She’s attractive. Sometimes she wears a little bit of high-quality jewelry. It’s not garish, but the jeweler who sees her will recognize that it’s very expensive. Usually she’s alone. If she’s with a man, he dresses and acts like he’s capable of buying her whatever she wants.”

Roche opened the folder and took out a print of one of the photographs Sid had taken. He handed it to Captain Albright to his left, and she looked and passed it on. Roche said, “The lady in the picture is Mira Cepic, and she’s one of these women. She’s originally from Romania, a child of Serbian parents who we believe disappeared shortly after she was born. She was apparently raised in an orphanage in Bucharest. This is significant because the Ceausescu government used to take some of these children and train them to be members of the Securitate, the secret police. We don’t know much about her history in Romania—education, foster parents, and so on are absent from the record, and this would be typical of the children that the government took. At some point after the Ceausescus fell in 1989 we think she lived in Serbia. She was arrested with a Serbian passport in Bern, Switzerland, in 2008 after a diamond theft, and then again in London in 2012, carrying a Serbian passport and a Canadian one. Both times she was charged as one of the thieves, but later released.”

“Why did they let her go?” asked Lieutenant Cole.

“It was hard to prove she wasn’t a bystander or victim, because her job is ambiguous. The woman cases the store on the first visit and then gets the door opened for her on the second. The first day, the woman comes to check display
cases, window displays, guards, alarms, automatic locks, and so on. At the same time she’s appraising the diamonds that she can see. When she can, she photographs everything with a cell phone or small camera. Then she’s gone. The next day, or a week later, the woman shows up again. Because she’s been there before, the clerks know her. They remember she’s rich and interested in buying something. They can hardly get the door open fast enough. As she enters, a man comes in right behind her. He’s armed. He takes care of the guard and opens the door. Three more men come in quickly. Instantly they’re smashing glass cases and pouring diamonds into pouches as fast as they can. It’s usually over within sixty seconds. Their record is under thirty seconds. Then they’re all gone.”

“Where have they done this before besides Bern and London?” asked Lieutenant Cole.

“They’ve done about two hundred robberies so far. Paris, Saint-Tropez, Tokyo, Dubai, Biarritz, Monte Carlo. Anyplace where high-quality diamonds are in the biggest numbers, which is usually high-end stores. They hit the places where they can walk out with at least three to five million in diamonds.”

“Diamonds only?” Fuentes asked. “Nothing else?”

“So far, yes,” said Agent Roche. “I think we’re talking about two generations of thieves here. The original group appeared around 1993. They were all veterans of the Bosnian wars, mostly from the Serbian special forces. We believe the reason they took diamonds was that they had a connection with a man who could market them. There was one particular diamond wholesaler in Antwerp who took the stolen stones, recut them, and sold them along with forged papers saying
they were found in Sierra Leone within the past year or two. They got dispersed among other dealers quickly. It’s an old-fashioned crime that went out of style.”

“Why is it back now?” asked Fuentes.

“It came back because governments and police agencies got much better at tracking electronic transfers of money, particularly the kind that goes across borders. That’s great. But it means we’re back to dealing with diamond thieves.”

Captain Albright said, “How many people are we talking about? How many are there in the whole gang?”

“So far, using DNA, fingerprints, and photographs, Interpol has identified eight hundred individuals, if you include all of the robberies back to the nineties.”

“We’re dealing with eight
hundred
people?”

“No. The structure isn’t the sort of hierarchical pyramid that mafias and drug cartels have. There’s no command and control setup. They seem to be autonomous crews that pop in and out of existence. So at any given time there might be two hundred panthers or zero panthers. They all seem to use the same methods—in Dubai they got into the store by driving two Audi S8 cars through the front of it, and in Geneva they escaped in a speedboat, but otherwise it was the same general plan—and the same conduits for moving the diamonds. They’re all from Eastern Europe, and they all still seem to have military backgrounds.”

Lieutenant Cole said, “So what should we be preparing for?”

Roche said, “If Mira Cepic is here, I think we have to assume there’s a crew. I would expect that the group here in Los Angeles will try to do what they do. They steal diamonds.”

“But what does a crew look like?”

“Each team will include one woman and three or four men. That’s the number who can sit comfortably in the average sedan. They will have the whole robbery planned impeccably, including the getaway. As soon as they’re out of sight they’ll split up immediately. The diamonds will be smuggled out of the country, probably into the regular channels the panthers have been using for over twenty years.”

Sergeant Trevolino said, “What do you know about the route they’ll use to enter the country or leave it?”

“We know nothing yet,” said Roche. “Because they’ve never struck anywhere in the United States or Canada before. We’re checking now on how Mira Cepic got here.”

Miguel Fuentes said, “How dangerous are they?”

“That’s an important question,” said Roche. “Are the panthers capable of homicide? They’re all trained for war, and the oldest ones almost certainly have done some killing. They were soldiers during an ugly war. But the record since then is much less clear. None of these robberies has included murder. What we’re most worried about right now isn’t a few jewel thieves. It’s their customers. The people who want diamonds so they can move large amounts of money from country to country right now are a very scary bunch, and they’re up to much worse things than robberies.”

There was a brief silence as the officers around the table contemplated the possibilities.

“Are there any more questions for Mr. Roche?” asked Captain Albright. She looked around from one face to the next. “No? Then we’ll meet again at four.” She heard a noise behind her and turned. “Detective Hebert,” she said. “It’s a shame you missed the briefing. Sergeant Trevolino will fill you in when we’re through here.”

She turned to the others. “What we’ll want to do is develop a plan to find out which other members of the group are here and what they’re up to.”

As an afterthought she added, “Mr. and Mrs. Abel, thank you very much for your assistance to the police department. We’ll let you know in a few days how this works out.”

23

For over an hour, Ed and Nicole Hoyt had been in the overgrown, weedy yard of an old house, sitting at the back of the garage, where a boat on a trailer gave them cover to watch the second address they’d found on the Russians’ cell phones. From there they could see the houses on the 5900 block of Glenview Terrace. It was Ed’s turn with the binoculars. He said, “The car is leaving the garage at 5-9-6-0.”

Nicole said. “How many in the car?”

“Two,” he said. “One man, one woman.”

“That’s seven houses empty so far. Everybody seems to go to work at about the same time around here.”

“That should help a lot.”

“You’re not thinking of doing it right now, are you?”

“I’m thinking we’re going to have to do it in daylight, when all the neighbors are at work. And this is the right place. All three cell phones called the landline number of this house, and got calls from it.”

“Before we try anything, we’ve got to plan this really carefully,” she said. “We have to strike fast—in, out, and away before any of them gets a clue. We should know where each
one of them is, and check ahead of time to be sure there aren’t any traffic jams on the freeway to keep us from getting off clean. And we should choose a route that won’t lead them back to us.”

“Of course,” said Ed. “We’ll do all that.” He moved his binoculars to study the house they had come to watch. His voice came out as a quiet, tense whisper. “There’s another car pulling out at the house.”