Off the Grid (10 page)

18

J
uan Flores sat in the dark, hot living room of his Culver City, California rental, listening to the violent smacks of palm fronds against the side of the bungalow, as if they were clamoring for indoor shelter from the ferocious Santa Ana winds that were shredding them.

The storied winds had blown in earlier in the day, engulfing Los Angeles in bone-dry, superheated desert air, along with the potential for disaster. It was late in the year, and wildfires were already starting to pop up in the canyons and along the backbones of the Santa Monica and San Bernadino Mountains, feeding on the summer-scorched scrub, fueled by the wind. Malibu was already bracing for an onslaught, because they were always in the danger zone—the posh western terminus for eager fires racing from inland to sea as if they wanted to extinguish themselves, and do it in a good zip code while they were at it.

Most Angelenos shuttered themselves up when the hot winds came, waiting out the fierce temperatures, dusty air, and sometimes even ash blown in from a seared hillside somewhere upwind. Those who had the luxury of doing such a thing in the comfort of their air-conditioned offices, homes, and apartments prayed that the city’s fragile, overtaxed power grid could meet the energy demands that were keeping them cool. If they had extra prayers to spread around, they’d use them on additionally imploring God to stop the fires. But not before He made damn sure Pacific Gas and Electric had their shit together so a brownout wouldn’t interrupt their climate control.

Big pussies, Juan thought, entertaining a brief fantasy of seeing all those Italian-suit-wearing, German-car-driving whiners hoofing it through the Iraqi desert with sixty-pound packs on their backs like he’d done for the past two years of his life. They didn’t know shit about what real heat was. And they didn’t know shit about what real sacrifice was, which was a hell of a lot more than living without central air for an hour.

The lights flickered for the sixth time in the past fifteen minutes, a sure precursor to an inevitable brownout. But he was prepared, with a gun, a beer, and a flashlight. A man didn’t need much more than that to survive. Now all he had to do was wait.

It was half past midnight when the cell phone on the end table next to him finally started buzzing, an unfamiliar area code lighting up the display in the twilight of the room. The number would be fake, he knew. These days, if you knew what you were doing, you could program any phone to display as an incoming call from the McDonald’s in Pushkin Square if you wanted to.

This particular phone had been silent for a while, but he’d been notified yesterday to expect this call tonight, a call to duty, and he was ready for it. “Been waiting to hear from you, man,” he answered.

“Should I take that as an affirmative?”

Juan looked up as the single light overhead in the kitchen flickered, then finally died. “You should take that as a ‘Hell, yes.’” He crooked the phone between his ear and shoulder, clicked on the flashlight, and followed its faint photon trail to the front window to peer through the slats in the dusty vinyl shade. The neighborhood was dark, and the view he had of the city farther out looked black, too. L.A., or at least a big part of it, was off the grid. PG&E had finally given up the ghost. “You have a location for me?”

The man rattled off an address about two miles east of his Culver City bungalow, and Juan burned it into his memory, then recited it back. He didn’t want to write anything down, but he didn’t want to make a mistake either. “Perfect timing. We just went into brownout here, and it looks like the target is in the zone. I’ve got everything going for me tonight.”

There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line. “You need to know something. Our source tracked three different computers and three different cell phone signals coming out of the house. Multiple user names and ISPs, set up with separate dummy accounts.”

“So there’s three of them.”

“Or more.”

“No problem. I’ve got this covered. Check the L.A. police report bulletin tomorrow morning, and that’ll be your mission complete from me.”

The faceless, nameless caller he’d been speaking with for a couple months was silent for a long time, and Juan thought he heard the clatter of a keyboard in the background. “Godspeed,” he finally said. “Be safe.”

“Semper fi.”

“Semper fi.”

Juan hung up and pulled a duffel bag out from underneath his sofa. He didn’t need the flashlight to find it; he knew where it was at all times, down to the millimeter. It looked like a workout bag, and nobody in L.A. ever questioned a fit man carrying a workout bag late at night, especially if they were wearing gym clothes, which he was. It was the perfect cover. Nobody would ever guess what was really inside his bag. It was go time.

It took less than an hour for Juan to jog to his site with his duffel, get in position under the cover of an untended oleander hedge, and recon his targets. The shades on the east side of the house weren’t drawn, which gave him a clean line of sight into the kitchen. Through his night vision goggles he saw the glowing green figures of five men, all sitting around a table. Perfect. This was going to be easier than target practice.

When the first bullet hit its mark, the remaining four men froze at the table, startled by the shot, but unaware of the hole in their companion’s forehead. Damn, Juan was loving this power outage.

Two, three, four . . . dropping like flies . . . oh Jesus. Shit. Where was the fifth one?

19

B
y Tuesday morning, the Little Mogadishu shootings had become the most searched news story on the Web—the video of the screaming ladies running from the cop was media crack and network and cable were running it nonstop. To make matters worse, someone had leaked a little too much about the contents of the weapons cache and the IDs of the victims. Great fodder for conspiracy theorists, who had apparently decided overnight that Minneapolis was home to an unknown supercell of global terrorists who were regrouping in the naive heartland.

The city was taking center stage on the terrorist front. Again. Made the city look bad; made law enforcement in the city look worse.

Gino and Magozzi had ranted about it over the phone last night after they’d both watched Chief Malcherson and Special Agent in Charge Paul Shafer deliver their nonanswers to a few questions from reporters still mobbing the crime scene.

No, we can’t confirm the types of weapons found in the house, nor can we confirm that there were bomb-making materials and schematics on-site. No, the shooting victims have not been positively identified as Somali students. The investigation is ongoing. There will be no comment on those issues at this time.

Well, Christ. How stupid was that? Photos and biographies of the two victims were all over the Internet, although God knew how anyone had gotten hold of them, and there was MPD and the FBI both saying that they couldn’t confirm that the emperor had no clothes. Pissed Magozzi off.

And what pissed him off more was that the explosives house had pushed the murder of a fifteen-year-old Native girl and the rescue of the other four girls that had been kidnapped with her right off the media radar. The story had been top of the news, right where it should have been, until two dirtbags sitting on a buttload of explosives met their maker early. The bad guys were dead and the Native American girls were a media ghost of breaking news past.

He turned off the TV in disgust, rinsed out his cereal bowl, and left the house. The air was crisp this morning, and dew had shellacked everything with a layer of wet, from the grass to the cars parked out on his street. There was the slightest hint of burning wood in the air, mingling with the vegetal smell of wet leaves, and something mysteriously fruity behind it all, which brought Magozzi right back to his first day of kindergarten.

Their neighbor Earl had let him pick a fragrant, ripe apple from his front yard tree to bring to his teacher, and his father had walked with him the two blocks to the school, carrying his lunch box for him. The apple had scored him big-time points with the teacher, and she’d eaten it during snack time. Nowadays, a teacher wouldn’t dare eat anything a student brought in for fear it would be laced with rat poison. He was officially old.

• • •

Johnny McLaren
was the only one in the office when Magozzi and Gino arrived, his elbows propped on his desk, his fingers raking upward through his red hair, making him look like Bozo the Clown. He’d caught the domestic shooting that had left five dead.

“You have your case sewn up, Johnny?” Magozzi asked.

Johnny raised his head and showed bloodshot eyes and a two-day stubble. “It’ll be in the courts for months. Normally, the asshole who kills his ex-girlfriend and half her family has the decency to shoot himself in the head afterward. Not this guy. He just stands there over the mess he made, holding the gun until the cops arrived. Now he’ll get a nice long trial, thirty or forty appeals, and then probably do a few years until some sappy parole board decides he’s been rehabilitated and deserves a second chance outside. Christ.” He made a futile effort to smooth down his hair. “And just think, I’m the lucky one. You guys really walked into a shit storm in Little Mogadishu yesterday. I caught some of the coverage. Rolseth, your ass ate up the screen.”

“Screw you, McLaren.”

“It was good stuff, especially the cop carrying that kid.”

“The guys on scene did a good job,” Magozzi said.

“Yeah, well that’s not what al-Jazeera is saying.”

“You watch al-Jazeera?” Magozzi asked.

“Yeah. My Arabic needs work. Anyhow, they’re running a loop of those four women running and screaming while the cop tried to turn them around.
INFIDEL AMERICAN POLICE HUNT DOWN AND KILL OUR WOMEN
was the caption.”

“Super,” Gino muttered, sorting through the pile of incoming mail on his desk that had accumulated since yesterday. He took his time with the report from Ballistics and said, “Crap. The rifling on the slugs the ME pulled out of the kidnappers doesn’t match any gun on the registry. No suspects, no gun. We’re going to have to wait for that particular shooter to pop someone else, or this is going into Unsolveds.”

“But,” Magozzi said, holding aloft a piece of paper from his own desk, “the knife in the sink had Aimee Sergeant’s blood on it, and the prints match one of the dead Somalis’.”

• • •

Chief Malcherson
had a tendency to fill up the room when he walked in, not just because he was tall, but because the man had a presence. As always, he looked like a well-dressed mistake who had been errantly dropped into an alien environment that was defined by worn acoustical panels, no-frills office furniture, and the off-the-rack suits and ties of his underlings.

All three detectives said good morning to the Chief at the same time.

Malcherson nodded a greeting to all of them, then focused on Magozzi and Gino. “I hear you gentlemen think there may be a connection between the two men who kidnapped the girls and the homicides at the explosives house.”

“Where did you hear that, sir?” Gino asked.

“Special Agent in Charge Shafer said his man at the evacuation yesterday told him about the calendars you saw in both houses. That was nice attention to detail, Detectives.”

“It may not mean anything. Let’s hope it doesn’t,” Magozzi said.

“Agent Shafer also asked me to let you know that agents questioned the girls at the hospital. Each one of them positively identified the murdered Somali men who were holding them as the men who also took them from the reservation. He said to thank you for helping them solve their kidnapping case.”

Gino smiled with one side of his mouth. “And I’m sure Shafer will give MPD full credit in his next press conference.”

Malcherson looked at Gino like he was an obnoxious relative who showed up once a year on Thanksgiving and told off-color jokes at the dinner table. “Keep me apprised of your progress on the four homicides.”

McLaren waited until the door closed behind Malcherson before getting out of his chair and slipping on a sad-sack sports coat. “I hate to leave you guys all alone, but I’ve got a hearing over at the courthouse.”

“DUI?” Gino asked pleasantly.

“Nah, that puke bag who killed five members of the same family filed a police brutality charge against me because his cuffs were too tight.”

“Did his hands fall off?”

“No.”

“You’re golden, then. See you later.”

Gino dropped into his chair like a rock, then started shuffling papers.

Magozzi followed suit, fiddling with the settings on his new office chair, which he hadn’t quite figured out yet. Amazing how chairs could be more complicated than computer operating systems.

20

T
en minutes after McLaren left, the direct Homicide line lit up, and Magozzi stared down at the clunky old phone that probably dated back a decade. Technology moved faster now, and ten years by today’s standards was more like a century. But it still worked, and budgets were too tight to squander money on unnecessary new phone systems. The added bonus of the department’s frugality was that he knew how to run it and he could actually see the buttons, unlike the microscopic ones on his new smartphone. By his prediction, it wouldn’t be long before the entire world got streamlined down to the size of a peanut and humans wouldn’t fit in it anymore.

“Great,” Gino opined from his adjoining desk. “Another murder.”

Magozzi read the caller ID tag on the display console. “It’s not Dispatch, and it’s not a transfer from the switchboard. Direct dial, outside line.” He picked up and answered. “Minneapolis Homicide, Detective Magozzi speaking.”

“Detective Steve Kramer here, Detroit Homicide. I know you have your hands full this morning, but do you have a couple minutes?” The man’s voice was stressed, terse, and crunchy, like he was getting over a case of laryngitis, or maybe a late night out.

Magozzi paused for a moment. Detroit Homicide? That was weird, and he wondered if a crank call had slipped through somehow. It happened sometimes, especially after a splashy case that went national—but then he heard what sounded like a million phones ringing in the background and a lot of competing voices, shouting out things only cops would. The call was legit, and business was obviously booming in Detroit. “You’ve got all the time you need, Detective Kramer. Let me conference in my partner, Gino Rolseth.” He gestured for Gino to pick up the phone, then quickly scrawled a brief, explanatory note so he’d know who he was about to talk to.

Gino’s pale eyebrows rose and punctuated his forehead with little question marks as he joined in on the conversation. “Good morning, Detective Kramer. Gino Rolseth here.”

“Great, glad I caught you both. I’ll keep this short, but I wanted to touch base with you on your terror case that’s burning up the news right now. This might be a desperate homicide cop’s last stab at solving his own cold case, but I think I might have some kind of a weird dovetail here in Detroit.”

Magozzi and Gino shared a hopeful glance. “What kind of dovetail?” Magozzi asked.

Kramer blew out a breath. “Basically, a murdered terrorist—an Egyptian national with a lot of bomb-making crap stashed in his kitchen cupboards, along with some al-Qaeda cheerleading manuals, that according to the Feds. No suspects. Obviously, I don’t know all the details of your case, just what I heard on the news this morning, but does that pretty much sum up your situation there?”

“Yeah,” Magozzi said, his brain quickly firing out of early a.m. sludge mode. “Except we have
two
murdered terrorists, which we are not allowed to call terrorists yet, they were Somali, not Egyptian, and they were sitting on a pile of guns and explosives.”

“Terror’s an equal-opportunity job,” Kramer said, his voice laced with cynicism. “You can be from anywhere and want to blow up shit.”

“Good point. When did your case go down?”

“About a month and a half ago. I know it’s early in the game for you two, but any viable suspects straight out of the gate?”

“No. And the Feds have all the evidence now. All we have are the bodies and the guns, and we’ve only got them because they were in the front yard. If there were any tells in the house, we’re not going to see them until the Feds decide to read us in.”

“Yeah, I know about that, trust me, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The computers they confiscated at our scene here in Detroit churned up a whole mess of stuff, and it led to some more arrests in Detroit and Dearborn. And Massachusetts. Listen, I’m pretty close to retirement and I’d love to go out with the perfect closing record I’m sitting on now, but in this one case, I don’t care if I go out with an unsolved. In my mind, the only good terrorist is a dead one, and somebody took care of it. But I sure as hell would like to find out what kind of perp uses a garrote to kill people.”

“He was
garroted
?” Gino asked incredulously. “You mean, like piano wire stuff?”

“Yeah, I probably forgot to mention that. But the ME confirmed cause of death. See what I mean about a weird dovetail? Similar scenes, but different MOs. Nothing to hang our hats on. If something pops on your end, give me a call, will you?”

“Sure thing, Detective . . .” Gino started to say, but Magozzi interrupted.

“I know this is kind of a weird question, Detective Kramer, but we found a calendar at our scene with Halloween circled. You see anything like that at yours?”

Kramer was silent for a few moments. “Yeah, I did. Another weird dovetail. Is it going anywhere?”

“The Feds on our end are looking into it. You might want to give a heads-up to your field office.”

Magozzi signed off and glanced up at Gino. “So what do you think?”

Gino looked down at his desk calendar. October twenty-fifth. “I think I’ll call Agent Dahl.”

While Gino was talking to Dahl, Magozzi played with the lumbar-support button on his chair, and immediately felt the stitch in his back disappear. Amazing.

Gino hung up. “Dahl says hi and to give you a big, fat kiss for sharing info. He also said to turn on the television.”

“Why?”

Gino shrugged and walked over to turn on the tiny television on the file cabinet and the sound and a female news anchor’s voice filled up the room.

“. . . five men gathered around a kitchen table were targeted and assassinated by a single gunman in the Culver City neighborhood of Los Angeles last night, who was himself the victim of return fire. But the story doesn’t end there. Within an hour of the reported shootings, Hazmat crews were on-site and a neighborhood evacuation was under way, implying that there was something brewing in that house besides coffee.” The screen cut to a night shot of police cars, Hazmat trucks, and fleeing neighbors that looked a lot like the scene in Minneapolis yesterday.

Magozzi pulled out his national police directory and punched in a number. “I’m going to call Culver City. I figure our only shot at information is from the local first responders. Every other agency is going to be shut down tight.”

“Good thought.”

Magozzi went through the song and dance of getting connected to the right department and the right man, then hooked the receiver in his shoulder as he scribbled notes. When the conversation ended abruptly, he threw his notepad on his desk.

“That was a short call.”

“They are seriously freaked out there. The first responder I talked to was scared to death someone was going to walk in on him. The Feds are crawling all over his office.”

“So what’d you get?”

Magozzi said, “Basically, their scene was pretty much a duplicate of ours—and Detroit’s for that matter. A houseful of explosives, and a whole lot of radical Islamist crap lying around. The guys inside were Arab types, the cop said, but by his own admission he can’t tell a Somali from a Samurai. The shooter bought it, so they got an immediate ID on him. One Juan Flores, ex-Marine, did a couple tours in Iraq, came home and landed a job as a diesel mechanic with some big trucking outfit. No criminal record.”

Gino leaned forward, pressing his belly on the edge of his desk. “What did he say when you asked him about a calendar?”

“They’ve got one, too.”