Shadows of Deceit (A Series of Shadows) (35 page)

Lou rolled her eyes. “Of course it has.”

“A moving van could have come in from the broken side and loaded up without anyone questioning anything.” Dillon continued. “The turnover rate at that complex is pretty quick so no one really gets to know anyone or pays much attention to people moving in or out.”

“None of her neighbors knew her at all. One guy on the ground floor remembers seeing her a few times but I think he just remembered her implants.” Vinny scoffed. “He thinks he remembers seeing her on Valentine’s Day because she was dressed for a hot date, wearing a really low cut red dress and matching stilettos.”

Dillon grabbed another pile of papers and started flipping through them. “Inventory of the beach house closet has a red dress and red stilettos. Had to be her.”

“So she had a hot date on Valentine’s Day.” Vinny waggled his eyebrows.

“Yeah but with who?” Lou wondered. “You think it was Casius?”

“Let me look at his calendar.” Dillon said as he pulled up the file on his laptop. “He has a notation for dinner with Luna here, nothing else.”

“The dog.” Lou spun around in her chair again.

“I can call Taylor and ask him if he remembers anything about Valentine’s Day.” Dillon suggested. “Casius may not have told anyone, but Taylor may have some recollection of his behavior that day or the day after?”

“It was on a Tuesday, right?” Lou asked them. “I was in a coma so I missed it.” She tried to make a joke of it.

“That’s kind of morbid, Lou.” Vinny said with a scowl while Dillon just looked dumbstruck.

Lou laughed. “I was joking! Sheesh! Yeah, call Taylor and see if he remembers anything.” Dillon picked up the phone and dialed.

Their list of players had gone off the grid at various points in their timeline. Those that had resurfaced had done so dead. Ernesto Vargas and Manuel Rojas, along with the blood born boy, were all still missing unless Niko and the rest of the Council could find them in Cuba. Lou looked at the time and knew that even thought it was just past 3:00 p.m. for her, it was three hours ahead for the guys. She wouldn’t learn anything more from that end until much later. It was all up to the agent at Homeland Security now. If he could find a time and location for Esterhuizen or Manuel Rojas entering the country then they would have a place to work from. As it stood, they only had speculation and hunches about Carlos Vargas, none of which the District Attorney would buy for a warrant. Even if Dillon got a solid read from Peter Taylor on the possibility of a Valentine’s Day reunion between Casius and Adrianna Vargas a.k.a Angela Boone, it really only added something else to the timeline. Given Taylor’s detailed description of how devastated Casius had been upon his return from Costa Rica, it really seemed unlikely to Lou that he would ever meet with the woman again. At least not willingly. Their bodies had been bound together before they had been set on fire, forcing them into that embrace. Perhaps whoever sent Adrianna Vargas to seduce Casius in the first place was sending some sort of message. If they had just stayed together, would either of them have been burned to death? Was it the suspect’s way of getting what he had wanted from the beginning in his nefarious plan, in some sick and grotesque manner? The thought of this rang inside Lou’s head as plausible. It made sense. Another sadist exacting control, one way or another. Even with this new thought it didn’t get them any closer to the who. It could have been Adrianna’s father, Ernesto Vargas, or her uncle Carlos for that matter. There was clearly something going on with her uncle, Manuel Rojas and they knew now that Adrianna was aware he was her uncle and he clearly knew she was his niece. Not like that mattered. Lou felt her skin crawl when she thought about the uncle and niece having an affair together. They were obviously tweaked and depraved to be sleeping with each other. How tweaked and depraved was a question Lou was not in any rush to have answered.

It was nearly
4:30 p.m. when Lou got the email from Agent Callahan at Homeland Security. The information he obtained put Manuel Rojas, Johan Esterhuizen and the Salazar brothers all on the same freighter leaving Panama and coming in to the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro. Once again, San Pedro was in the mix and that was definitely no coincidence. Earlier an informant listed in the MI5 report mentioned a shipment of guns scheduled to come out of San Pedro. Lou knew immediately that was a breadcrumb trail they had to follow.

Terminal Island is situated between Long Beach Harbor and the Port of Los Angeles, the busiest container port in the United States. Major parts of the Port are located on the island as well as a low-security federal prison for men. Agent Callahan was particularly annoyed since he was based right down the street and a boat load of bad guys had walked right past his building without him knowing until now. One, if not all the men could have been smuggled in on a cargo container, loaded up on a train and hauled out to just about anywhere if the right palms had been greased. Lou was once again not feeling very warm and fuzzy about the Nation’s security given three known international criminals just sailed in to her back yard with such ease.

“We now know which ship they came in on. The problem is that there were more than seven-thousand containers on it.” Callahan explained.

“But there is an inventory of what those containers carry and a list of who they belong to, right? Lou asked.

Callahan blew out a breath before responding. “Yes, theoretically.”

“Excuse me?” Lou didn’t like the word theoretically being used.

“A third of all U.S. imports come through Los Angeles and Long Beach.” Callahan paused a moment. “The truth is that only nine percent of cargo containers are inspected. Documentation is sometimes glossed over when there is a crunch to get cargo loaded and out of port. We are doing our best but so far we have found a few containers that had bogus paperwork and we are not even a quarter of the way through the manifest.”

Lou felt her stomach churn. “Can I get a copy so that we can try to narrow things down? Anything?” Lou’s voice squeaked she was so frustrated.

“I’m faxing copies to you right now.” Callahan told her. “You find something and we will back you up one-thousand percent. I wrote my home and mobile numbers on the cover sheet but I’m not going anywhere for a while.”

“I appreciate that.” Lou really did. “Let me get my team on that manifest. Talk to you soon.”

Lou hung up the phone and recounted her disturbing conversation with Agent Callahan to Vinny and Dillon as she retrieved the manifest from the fax. There were so many pages that Lou had to stop to refill the paper reservoir so it could continue spitting out pages. Callahan had noted on the cover that there were one-hundred, forty-four pages coming, excluding the cover, but that Lou and her people should start on page seventy-two since he and his team were working on the first half already.

The freighter carried exactly seven-thousand, two-hundred and fifty containers on that trip. Each container had it’s own spot on the list rather than lumping the sum into a total for each shipper. It seemed like a horrible waste of paper to Lou.

“Of course this is all done by container number, not alphabetically according to shipper.” Vinny grumbled behind his glasses.

“We need to go through this list for anything that even remotely looks like it could be linked.” Lou instructed them.

“Yeah like Onus Global.” Dillon added.

“What about it? Because it was bogus? We couldn’t have known that just from the name.” Vinny glared at Dillon from over the rim of his reading glasses.

“I think I’ll have to disagree with you on that.” Dillon looked at him apologetically. “Onus means a few different things and the more I think about it, the more I think it’s relevant.”

Lou stopped what she was doing and stared at Dillon. “You planning on sharing any time this century?”

“It means Burden, responsibility, I mean literally the burden of proof. We’ve all have heard the phrase ‘
The onus is on you
’ right?” Dillon laid it out.

“Yeah.” Vinny recalled the word. “I knew it sounded familiar but I didn’t get it until you said it.”

Lou clicked the keys of her laptop. “the weight, responsibility. A difficult responsibility or burden.” She read the definitions off her screen then pondered it as she spun around in her chair. “Onus Global can translate quite literally to world burden or world responsibility.”

“It’s more a negative word though, isn’t it?” Vinny was falling in line with the train of thought. “I mean, its kinda like saying ‘
It’s on you buddy!
’ Like in a bad way, right?”

Dillon nodded then started typing away on his laptop. “Yeah, I agree with you there.” Once he stopped typing, Dillon started scanning the manifest pages, going down each line with his finger tracing the words.

Lou could see Dillon was on to something. “What are you thinking, Evelyn Wood?” She teased over his apparent speed reading abilities, making Vinny chuckle.

As soon as Dillon spotted it he slammed his fist down on the desk, startling both Lou and Vinny. “Odium Elite International!”

“What the hell is that?” Vinny frowned.

“Check the thesaurus!” Dillon shot up out of his chair and brought the page over for Lou to inspect. “Look!”

Vinny tapped at his keyboard, squinted then looked a bit surprised. “Huh. How about that.”

“Read out loud please!” Lou demanded as she looked at the manifest entries Dillon was pointing to.

“Odium means intense hatred and dislike. Comes from Latin for hatred.” Vinny told her as he scratched his head

“Alright,!” Lou contemplated Dillon’s theory. “Check the business address for this Odium Elite.”

“On it.” Dillon scrambled back to his desk and started typing away again.

“Fifty bucks says it’s the same address that was listed for Onus.” Lou winked at Vinny when he eyeballed her. “The donut shop.”

“You’re on.” Vinny pulled out his wallet and flicked the money on her desk. “No way in hell they are connected and even if they are, no way they would be that cocky, using that address twice.”

“Don’t bother grabbing your wallet, Lou.” Dillon spun around in his chair. “You were right. It’s the same business address.”

“No shit?” Vinny was the one gawking now as Lou scooped up the bills and stuffed them in her pocket with a smirk.

“Give me a few minutes, I need to see which trucking company hauled the containers out, if they ever did.” Dillon told them as his fingers continued typing away. “This is where we may get a break. I got the company name but how are we going to get them to tell us where they hauled the containers to?”

“That is a very good question.” Lou responded but had no real answer. Instead she called Callahan back and asked him if there was a way he could find out.

It took a minute or two for Callahan to register that they already had a lead. “Give me a little bit to find that out.” He requested. “God bless the Patriot Act.”

Lou grinned. “Thanks again, Callahan.”

“You bet!” He chuckled then hung up.

“Lou, if the DEA or ATF gets wind of this, you know they are going to swarm all over this case.” Vinny was back at abusing his stress ball.

“Well, then we better find out where the hell those containers went quickly and quietly before the wind shifts.” Lou smiled sweetly. “Wherever they are, I’ll bet you another fifty that Manuel and Ernesto are there too.”

“Uh...” Dillon stammered as he looked at more of the manifest pages. “Uh guys...”

“Spit it out!” Vinny barked at him.

“You think it’s a coincidence that Odium and Arcano had four cargo containers on the same freighter?” Dillon asked.

Lou’s eyes lit up and she couldn’t dial the phone fast enough. “Quick, what was the name of the freighter?”

Dillon scurried to find the first page, making papers fly all over the place. “The DSC Freya!”

Lou nodded. “Hello? Joe?” She was yelling in the phone. “I can barely hear you. I need a huge favor...”

As Lou suspected, her step-father knew the shipping company that owned the freighter in question and he agreed to try and see if he could use his considerable influence to find out where the containers were offloaded. It was a long shot but Lou needed to try every angle possible to find the missing Sanguinostri blood born, Manuel Rojas and Ernesto Vargas before someone else turned up dead. When she hung up with Joe she realized Dillon was on the phone rattling off in Spanish again.

“Who’s he talking to?” She asked Vinny.

“Maria Arcano.” Vinny told her as he looked at his cell phone, squinting to read the display. “He had an idea about seeing if he could get a list of Arcano shipments scheduled to land here. He thought four containers was small for a coffee shipment and I agree with him. Did you know that last month alone the U.S. imported almost two-million 60 kilo bags of coffee?”

Lou snorted. “Of which you and I will drink most of this month.”

Vinny chuckled. “I’m putting a serious dent in that figure today.”

“Those 60 kilo bags are how the beans are packed, then they are put into containers for shipment.” Dillon broke into the conversation as he hung up the phone. “I confirmed that with Maria just now. Some companies use plastic lined cargo containers but the jute or sisal sacks are how Arcano’s beans are packed and transported. As far as Maria was able to check, Arcano didn’t have a shipment on the DSC Freya scheduled at all. She is going to double check though.”

“We have eight containers, four listed as Odium and four as Arcano.” Lou was thinking out loud. “Were the Arcano containers picked up from the same trucking company?”

Dillon checked the manifest “It sure was.”

Lou called Callahan back but got his voicemail. She figured he was busy working his magic to try and get the information on the Odium containers so she left a voice message then followed up with a text asking him to add the Arcano containers to his search. Even thought it was after 6 p.m. Lou knew there was no way Callahan would have clocked out with what they had going on. It was going to be a long night and she knew it. Lou heard Vinny’s phone beep for the tenth time in so many minutes and could see he was growing more and more agitated.