Private: #1 Suspect (21 page)

PART FOUR

DEAD END

CHAPTER
98

IT WAS EIGHT P.M.

I was standing just inside Private’s front entrance, saying good night to my friend and attorney Eric Caine. He hadn’t said so directly, but he had let me know that without new evidence, my defense in the case of
California v. Jack Morgan
was looking bad.

As I closed the door, a storm came up out of the blue. Rain slashed against the floor-to-ceiling windows of the building and haloed the headlights of the traffic streaming along Figueroa.

Caine ran to his car, and I headed up the winding staircase to my office, where I planned to put in another four or five hours of work on my own behalf.

As I climbed the quarter-turn span between the third and fourth floors, I saw Justine coming down.

She was still wearing the black dress she had worn to Piper Winnick’s memorial service, and seeing her sent a jolt to my heart, as it did every time.

I said, “Hey.”

Justine returned the hey and kept going down the stairs. I stopped and said, “Justine, did you eat? Let’s go out and celebrate your Koulos bust—”

“No, thanks anyway, Jack. I’m wiped out. I can’t wait to get home.”

“Are you sure linguini marinara and some good wine wouldn’t beat being home alone? I need to talk to you.”

“Not tonight, Jack. Ask Cody to fit me into your schedule tomorrow.”

She started to pass me on the stairs, and I didn’t like it. She wasn’t tired so much as she didn’t want to deal with me. As though I were a guy standing behind her in line at Starbucks, breathing down her neck and yakking into his phone at the same time.

I said, “Then spare me a couple of minutes now. Are you going to take that job offer? I have to know.”

Justine sighed, shifted her weight, adjusted the strap on her shoulder bag.

“They’re matching my compensation plus fifteen percent.”

“So you’ve made your decision?”

“I like Private. I like my job.”

“Stay, Justine. I’ll match their offer and more.”

“Thanks. Let me think about it overnight.”

“You’re mad at me, Justine. I understand. But will you please talk to me? I want to talk about…us.”

Justine gave me the subzero look that I remembered well from fights we’d had when we lived together.

“There is no ‘us,’” Jack,” she snapped, “and I’m not sure there ever was. But I still give a damn. So as your friend, I want to say don’t ever take your eyes off Tommy.”

After the memorial service, I’d tailed Tommy’s car from his office to his house, watched him tinker with a sprinkler and then go inside for his home-cooked meal.

His phone was tapped, his car was bugged, and right now, Mo-bot was monitoring the live feed from the “spy eyes” I’d personally trained on his home.

I said, “Short of implanting a device in his skull, there’s not much more I can do.”

“Tommy hit on me again, Jack. I don’t take him seriously, but you should.”

Again?

Tommy had hit on Justine
again?

I felt a knife slide into my gut. Not just because Tommy was still trying to beat me at girls, but because Justine had filed the edge of this news so that it would really cut deep.

I said, “Did you go out with him?”

“When you were in prison. Strictly business. At least it was for me.”

“Nice one, Justine. Thanks for keeping me in the loop.”

Justine said, “See you tomorrow,” then she took the outside rail and walked past me.

I stood on the staircase until I could no longer hear the sound of her heels striking metal treads.

Point taken, Justine.

Parting shot duly noted.

CHAPTER
99

I DRANK DOWN a Red Bull in the break room while I waited for coffee to brew. I thought of a few comebacks for Justine—mostly why she should forgive my completely unpremeditated good-bye tryst with Colleen.

I’m human. I’m sorry. I couldn’t possibly be more sorry.

Why couldn’t she forgive me?

I went to my office, booted up my laptop, opened files in the “Colleen” folder, and revisited facts that Colleen had never told me.

Item: Right out of high school, Colleen had married a man named Kevin Molloy. The marriage was annulled six months later, but Colleen had kept her married name. In the year that Colleen and I had dated, she’d never mentioned an ex-husband, not once.

Had Molloy followed her to LA?

Did he still love her?

Item: A businessman named Sean McGough had paid Colleen’s way to the USA in 2009. McGough was still in Dublin, had not left Ireland in three years. Who was McGough to Colleen? And why had she also failed to mention him?

Item: Mike Donahue. Colleen had said he was like an uncle to her. As with Molloy and McGough, I had put Donahue’s life through an electronic sieve. Donahue had gotten his American citizenship in 2002. He’d gotten two DUIs in LA and another in Seattle, where he was supporting a boy of seven. He hadn’t married the child’s mother.

If Donahue had wanted to kill Colleen, it would have been easy. She’d trusted him. Still, I had never gotten any sense that he’d had a romance with her, that he’d been jealous of her feelings for me, that he was anything other than an avuncular man with an Irish pub that Colleen had frequented when she’d lived in Los Feliz. A dead end.

Another folder.

I had collected all of the personal e-mails between Colleen and me going back to the day I first kissed her. I went time-traveling for a while, got lost reading her words and mine, remembering the growing romance at the office, all the love we had made in her rose-covered cottage.

And I remembered Donahue calling me. “Come to the hospital, quickly.” Seeing Colleen with bloody gauze around her wrists. Knowing what she’d done to herself after I’d told her it was over.

I got up, paced the hallway, made more coffee, stared out onto Figueroa. The rain had moved on. I went back to my desk and clicked on the video folder.

I’d seen all of the videos stored there, except for the one Mo-bot had shot while Tandy and Ziegler were perp-walking me out to the car at the curb.

Now I forced myself to play the video and look at myself from Mo-bot’s second-story point of view.

There I was, just ripped from the Private Worldwide meeting, stumbling between Tandy and Ziegler in the blinding sunshine. The media had been shouting questions and I’d kept my eyes down.

I watched every frame—and I saw something I hadn’t seen that day. Correction. I saw some
one
. Clay Harris.

Clay Harris was a Morgan family hand-me-down, not exactly harmless, almost a Morgan family curse.

It couldn’t be happenstance.

Harris lived in Santa Clarita, twenty miles out of town, yet there he was, standing behind the media surge with a very good view of me.

Why was Harris lurking in front of Private the moment I was taken in for Colleen’s murder? He was smiling, and I thought I knew why.

CHAPTER
100

EMILIO CRUZ DIDN’T like it.

This was what was called a “bad job.” Like if a middleweight found himself mixing it up on the street with a heavyweight. The best the smaller guy could hope for was not to get killed.

Cruz understood that Jack had to do this job for Noccia. The guy was lethal. He was vindictive. He killed people. And he got away with murder.

Not only was Cruz doing this for Jack, he was doing it for his partner.

Rick was over forty. He was stiff. He was slow. He was going to have to scale walls. In the dark.

Scotty picked up some of the slack for Del Rio. He could do one-armed cartwheels and run like a cheetah. But Scotty was a former motorcycle cop. He’d never gone outside the law like this, and doing a job for a mobster was against everything that had made Scotty a good cop.

Right now, while Rick cruised around looking for a parking spot, Scotty was sitting behind Cruz, jouncing his knee, sending shocks through the front seat.

Cruz said again, “Rick, we should go in through the back wall. I don’t like the roof. At all.”

Del Rio said patiently, “We know what Scotty scoped out. If we go through the wall, we don’t know what we’re going to find. Could be heavy crap stored against it. We could hit pipes.”

Now Del Rio was swearing because Boyd Street, where they’d parked before, was locked in. Not an empty space on either side of the block.

Cruz said, “Ricky, I’m telling you. I don’t like this.”

Del Rio said, “There.”

And he parked in a “No Parking Anytime” driveway that maybe wouldn’t attract the attention of a random drive-by cop at this time of night. Maybe.

Before the car had come to a stop, Scotty was out the back door. He crossed the street in his black duds, his ski mask in hand. When he crossed Artemus, he ducked into the shadow of the pottery’s outside staircase and, as he’d done before, rattled a window until he set off the alarm.

The alarm screamed out over a couple of square blocks, and Cruz knew that it also alerted the techs at Bosco Security Systems’ control center through the phone line.

The same people who had manned the phones twenty-four hours ago were very likely on duty now. They’d received three false alarms from this address, and team Del Rio was counting on Bosco to tell the building’s owner and the cops that the alarm indicated a system failure, not a break-in.

The Private investigators waited for a police response that didn’t come.

Fifteen minutes later, under the pale light of a new moon, Cruz, Scotty, and Del Rio crossed Anderson and proceeded into the narrow gap between the Red Cat Pottery and the auto parts building next door.

Employing a rock-climbing maneuver called “bridging,” they inched up the brick crevasse between the buildings.

Two cars hissed past on slick pavement as the Private guys slowly ascended to the Red Cat Pottery’s roof.

CHAPTER
101

SCOTTY GOT A leg across the low wall at the edge of the roof, pulled himself up and over, gave Cruz a hand up, and did the same for Del Rio, who rolled onto the tar paper, saying, “Everybody down.”

The three men hunched behind the wall, got their wind and their bearings.

Del Rio counted off a couple of minutes in his mind, then stood up, located the skein of electric lines running from the pole on Anderson to the roof, and severed them with his wire cutters, causing a blackout inside the warehouse.

The alarm was cut off, as were the motion detectors, the telephone backup, everything—but, shockingly, the alarm sounded again almost immediately.

Startled, Del Rio ducked from pure reflex, then said to the others, “They have a battery backup. To the alarm. It’s gotta be wireless.”

Cruz said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Then the alarm halted midshriek.

Del Rio said, “That’s Bosco shutting it down, thinking that’s enough of this noise tonight. Emilio, we’re okay. We stay put. Make good and sure no one is coming.”

A long ten minutes went by, then Del Rio got up, paced off twenty feet in from the Anderson side of the building, eyeballed approximately the same distance from Artemus, took his eighteen-volt battery-operated Sawzall out of his bag, and flipped it on.

It made a little bit of a racket, but not the kind of thing that would wake up any watchdogs in the neighborhood or even cause anyone driving by to notice.

Scotty and Cruz stood by as Del Rio sawed through the tar paper, the old layers of asphalt roofing, and the plywood below that, cutting through sheetrock that had little resistance to the blade.

Roofing fell through the opening and clattered down. They listened to the ensuing silence, and then Scotty opened his bag of tricks.

He put on his miner’s lamp and took out a thirty-five-foot length of marine-grade one-inch poly line. He tied one end to a brick chimney, put some knots into the rest of it, and approached the hole.

Del Rio said, “Take it
slow,
” and Scotty grinned, jazzed up with nervous energy.

He pulled the knotted rope taut, then lowered himself down from the roof to the kiln room, where the clay pots were fired. Del Rio followed and Cruz was last to come down the line.

As soon as his feet touched the floor, Cruz went to the office and found the wireless alarm backup system next to the circuit box. He took out the batteries and set up the cell phone signal jammer in case the wireless signal went active again.

Del Rio, meanwhile, left the kiln room and went to the back-right-hand corner of the warehouse proper, where Scotty had seen the van. But Del Rio didn’t see a van. He saw racks and racks of flowerpots.

He didn’t want to believe this.

Private investigators had watched the damned warehouse, three shifts a day every day, for the past week. Had the van been dismantled, taken out in parts, or driven intact into a big rig?

Del Rio was ready to call Jack, when Scotty walked past him, catlike on rubber soles, and showed him where the van was hidden behind the racks, pretty much barricaded in.

Scotty said, “What do you think, Rick?”

Relieved that Jack wasn’t going to have to tell Noccia that the van had disappeared, Del Rio said, “We’re good.”

CHAPTER
102

THE VAN WAS a late-model Ford transport, white with vegetables painted on it, two doors and a slider on each side, cargo doors at the back, tinted glass all the way around.

It was parked fifty feet away from and facing the roll-up doors at the far end of the warehouse. Whoever had parked the thing had meant to hide it. The driver’s side and rear were against the corner walls of the warehouse. The other two sides were hemmed in by metal racks of flowerpots two deep and seven feet high.

Del Rio squeezed around to the driver’s-side door and tried the handle, but the door was locked. So were all of the others.

Fucking A.

He had a short crowbar in his bag. He took it out, staved in the passenger-side window, reached in, and pulled up the handle. He brushed the glass off the seat with his gloved hand, threw his bag into the passenger-side foot well, and slid behind the wheel.

After flipping on the dome light, Del Rio looked at the ignition. He wanted to see a key dangling there. That would have been nice, but no, the only thing on the ignition was blood spatter. It was on the wheel too, sprayed all inside the windshield, and there were some bits of bone and brain matter too.

Noccia’s wheelman’s remains.

Del Rio looked for the keys under the mats and up under the visors. No luck. He called out to Scotty to check the tops of the tires, just in case, and when Scotty said, “Nope. Nothing,” Del Rio opened all the doors with the lock release.

He got out of the van and squeezed past the racks of flowerpots, hitting one of them with his shoulder. The rack shimmied as if it weren’t sure if it was going to fall, giving him a shot of adrenaline he didn’t need.

He imagined Cruz calling Jack: “Jack. Ricky had a heart attack, man. What should I do?”

Cruz called out, “You okay, Rick?”

“Fine. Fine. Emilio, let’s see how quick you can start this engine.”

Cruz squeezed along the racks, got into the van, and used the screwdriver attachment on his knife to remove the guard plate from the ignition tumbler. While he stripped the wires, Del Rio groped his way to the rear of the van and checked the cargo.

He counted the stacks of cartons, did the math, came up with four hundred cartons, all but one of them still sealed. Each carton was marked with the number of bottles per carton, so many pills per bottle, so many milligrams per pill. He took out one of the bottles, shook it, put it back.

This was a ton of Oxy. If there wasn’t thirty million in this van, it wasn’t his fault.

Scotty called to him, “Houston. We’ve got ignition.”

Del Rio closed the cargo doors, came out from behind the van, and got in the passenger side. Scotty wedged himself between the seats.

Cruz put the transmission into drive and turned on the headlights. At that moment, there was the loud, brassy roar of a motor coming from outside the building. The lights in the warehouse flickered and then they came on. It was like daylight inside the Red Cat Pottery.

Fucking A, for sure.