the Prostitutes' Ball (2010) (23 page)

"I wonder why they didn't take those," I said. "Be easier to carry."

"Because you'd need a forklift to move fifteen million in gold bullion. The killer probably took it out in individual bricks," Hitch replied. "What would that much gold weigh anyway?" He reached down with a gloved hand and opened the top of the nearest box.

That's when we got the first big surprise.

Resting inside the strongbox were at least twenty-five gold bricks. They glittered brilliantly in the fluorescent light.

"Get the fuck outta here," Hitch whispered.

We opened the second box and, like the first, it was also filled to the top with bullion. So were the last two.

"Let's back out of here and think this over," 1 said.

We jumped down and told Jeb, Alexa, and Dahlia what we had just found. After they had all looked at the gold, everyone stood behind the truck talking at once.

The question was, why steal an armored car, kill at least two of the guards, and then leave fifteen million in bullion behind, parked with two skeletons in a concrete well house for over twenty-five years?

"Unless this gold is bogus," I offered. "Maybe somebody switched it out with painted lead or something."

"I'll get a metallurgist out here right away and find out," Alexa said. "The Jewelry Mart should have somebody who can assay this. I'll get someone who's bonded and sworn to secrecy."

While she was working on that, the rest of us tried to come to grips with this new find. It changed all my theories.

"What is going on here?" Dahlia said. It was the second time in two days I'd seen her off balance. "Was this a gold bullion heist or not?"

"We'll know more once these bars are tested," Jeb told her.

Ten minutes later I saw Hitch getting some coffee from a portable urn one of the CSIs had brought in. He carried an extra cup over to me behind the armored car. We stood, blowing steam across the cup rims, considering the new developments.

"I think you're wrong," I finally told him, pointing at the gold. "That's our Act Two complication."

He smiled widely at me. "You're absolutely right, dawg, and since we have Act One in place and this kick-ass complication in Act Two, now it's all about. . ."

*

Chapter
39.

An hour later, Alexa had returned to her office and Dahlia to her trial in progress at the downtown courthouse. There were now fifteen men and women from the MEs office and CSI assembled inside the deserted hospital building. Some wore CSI jumpsuits and carried satchels full of equipment, others were from the lab or the ME s office and wore white coats. None of them had been told why they were here. They stood listening as Captain Calloway filled them in on the old armored car case.

Hitch and I stood behind Jeb and listened. He finished with the briefing and then launched into a rant on security precautions.

"It s extremely important that you protect the confidentiality of this investigation," he said to the roomful of earnest-looking geeks. "You cannot tell anyone about this. Not your wife, not your brother nobody.

Because, while you may think you can impress upon them the severity of the situation, my experience has been once you tell anything to anyone outside the immediate scope of the investigation, it always leaks."

The tech team looked solemn, but who knew how seriously any of them were actually taking this warning.

Ray Tsu, as a supervising coroner, had agreed to personally wrangle the ME staff for us. He stood off to one side, looking like a wispy anime character: thin build, limp black hair pulled behind both ears, a hollow chest that was a concavity of bones. He may have looked frail, but he was well respected and one of the top MEs in the department.

"The perpetrators of this crime may still be around," Jeb warned. "We have to take every precaution to keep what were doing here absolutely quiet so they don't cut and run."

He paused for effect and looked at each face of his handpicked team. "Okay," he finally said. "You guys know what to do. Get at it."

Everyone broke ranks and the work began. The truck was already open. After a quick round of crime-scene photographs, the MEs went in and carefully removed the skeletons from the front seat, placing them on plastic sheets before moving them onto gurneys and wheeling them off.

The power inside the old, deserted hospital was still connected for the movie companies who shot there, enabling the coroner's crew to transport the bodies by elevator to the OR theaters on four.

After everything got going, there wasn't much for Hitch and me to do. I was out by the loading dock making notes when my new partner drifted outside to talk on his cell. I overheard a little of his conversation.

"You gotta slow it down, Jerry. This is better than even I thought, but I'm under a police department cone of silence. I can't tell you or anybody else what's going on. But when it breaks, you're gonna kiss me. Keep our auction warm, but don't bring it to a head quite yet. This is definitely going to be bigger than Mosquito."

He listened, then said, "Back attcha," and hung up. He noticed me sitting nearby and shot a wide grin in my direction. "Working on your second mil, dawg."

"Hitch, we need to stop trying to make money off all these dead people and just work the case."

"It's been my experience that the dead are extremely forgiving." This philosophy supplied by a man who seemed unreasonably terrified of them.

"Jeb is pulling the old Brinks case record. Like Vulcuna, it was in the hard-copy room at the warehouse. A runner is bringing the stuff over right now."

"You don't even care what UTA just told me?" He had a little grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. "Not even a teensy-weensy bit interested?"

"Uh . . . well, I'm trying real hard not to think too much about all that money."

"It will make you happy," he teased.

"Not now. Can we just stay focused on the case, please?"

Twenty minutes later Jeb had a makeshift office set up in the ambulance dispatcher's old space. He had decided to watch over this part of the investigation personally, which was great by me. We were taking a big chance not telling Chase Beal what we were up to, and it's always good strategy to have a boss between you and any angry politician who's running for office.

The old hospital was basically without furniture. Hitch explained that on each production the set decoration department took care of that. Somebody had found a discarded desk and had moved it down to the ambulance bay along with an old scavenged sprung-back swivel chair. By the time the case file boxes arrived from the records warehouse, our captain was ready to go.

We started thumbing through two surprisingly thin case binders from '83 on the missing Brinks truck. The cops who had worked this heist were a couple of Metro Division bank squad dicks named Robert Carter and Jeremy Briggs. Hitch made a call downtown and found out both had retired in the late eighties and had subsequently gone EOW, which stood for End of Watch. Department-speak for dead.

"The Brinks truck was transporting this gold bullion to the airport, where it was scheduled to go to Switzerland," Jeb said, reading a page from Detective Carters case binder. "An L
. A
. outfit called Latimer Commodities Exchange was in charge of the transport. We need to find out if Latimer is still in business. According to Carters notes, they brokered gold, silver, and platinum contracts."

He licked his fingertips, taking more pages of case notes out of the binder. After reading, he handed each off to us one at a time. "Says here that the standard gold bar used for bank-to-bank trade is something called a London Good Delivery Bar."

Hitch and I had nowhere to sit, so we stood in front of the desk reading the pages after Jeb was finished.

"There were three guards assigned to this truck," Jeb said. "Driver was Alan Parks, age thirty-four. Married, two kids."

Jeb looked up at Hitch, who was in the midst of transferring this info into his snazzy red leather journal.

"Get another crime book, will ya, Hitchens? That fancy writers journal is really starting to piss me off."

"Sorry, Skipper. I'll lose it as soon as I can." Hitch looked up from his writing. "We should probably see if Mrs. Parks and those two kids are still around."

"Wife was named Patty," Jeb said, as he found that on another page. "Carter and Briggs really shorthanded these write-ups. Didn't even put down the names of the children. Both were boys, ages six and eight, is all it says here. That makes them in their thirties today."

"Okay," Hitch said, and jotted that down as well. "We'll find out where Mrs. Parks and her two sons are. If they're available, we'll go talk to them."

"Damien Deseau, African-American, age twenty-nine, was the Brinks truck swamper," I said, reading a page in the late Detective Carter's binder. "That's probably the guy we just pulled out of the passenger seat. Unmarried. The GIB was Sergio Maroni, also unmarried, age thirty." GIB was patrol division slang for Guy in Back.

"We need to get these two skeletons sorted out," Jeb said. "Find out who's who. Fey Ray will do the bone scans and dental matches. He's got a forensic orthodontist on the way over here, but we gotta figure it's gonna take a while to find their X-rays 'cause we gotta run down their original dentists from over twenty-five years ago if they're even still around."

The forensics team found two old thermoses in the front seat of the truck. There was dried coffee residue in the bottoms. Both containers were quickly sent to the CSI techs, who were busily assembling a makeshift lab in the old ER and getting what equipment they needed sent over from the new Forensic Center at Cal State.

An evidence tech found the first bullet. It was buried in the passenger-side door panel of the Brinks truck's front seat. A .38 caliber standard-size round.

"We need to find out what kind of sidearm each of those Brinks guys carried," I told Hitch, who wrote down that note.

We were in a holding pattern until the crime techs got through with the truck and the assayer arrived, so we went outside again for some fresh air, sat on the loading dock, and worked on to-do lists. Ten minutes later a blue Lincoln Town Car pulled up and honked the horn. I walked over to the car.

"I'm from the Jewelry Mart," the driver called to me as I approached.

I directed the Lincoln to pull into the drive and park. When the driver got out, I could see he was a middle-aged dark-haired Hispanic man with a sagging beltline and a patch of male pattern baldness on the crown of his head about the size of a coffee saucer. He pulled a large rolling suitcase from the trunk, then turned to greet us.

"Hi," he said. "I'm Jose Del Cristo."

"Assayer?" I asked.

"You don't need to call me names," he quipped.

Great, I thought. All we needs is another goofy character.

Chapter
40.

Jeb didn't want the assayer to know that we had two dead guards and a Brinks truck from an '83 bullion heist stashed in the deserted ambulance bay. He instructed us to escort Jose Del Cristo up to the fourth floor and tell him as little as possible.

Jeb had set up a work area for the assayer in the old hospital administrator's office.

The three of us waited on the ground floor for the elevator. When it arrived we stepped inside.

"I was told you guys wanted me to do a gold assay and that it's very hush-hush, but nobody will tell me what it's about," Del Cristo said as he dragged his rolling suitcase onto the elevator.

"That's right and that's how it's gonna stay," I replied.

" 'Zat why you're hanging out in this old deserted hospital?" he pressed.

"No comment."

I pushed the fourth-floor button on the elevator panel and we rode up in silence.

The doors opened and we stepped out into a long corridor with green walls and linoleum floors, with Jose pulling his rolling suitcase behind him. Jeb was at the end of the corridor waiting for us. I introduced him to Jose and we entered the office.

Jeb had chosen this room because it was spacious with a built-in desk and two badly functioning chairs. He had randomly selected a gold bar out of one of the strongboxes and had personally carried it up here. The brick was approximately the size of a paperback novel and was now sitting in the center of the large wooden desk, glittering in the flickering ceiling light.

Jose walked over and peered down at it. "London Good Delivery Bar," he said. "First test is the easiest. Just gotta lift it."

He picked up the bar. I could tell by the way he handled it that the brick was extremely heavy.

"So far so good. 'Bout the right weight," he said, setting it back down.

As he unpacked his equipment, he started a running monologue. Aside from being a character, Jose was also a nonstop talker.

"London Good Delivery Bars weigh exactly four hundred troy ounces, which, if anybody's interested, is about twenty-seven pounds."

"When I picked it up to bring it here, I wasn't prepared for how heavy it was," Jeb commented.

"Very few metals are as dense as gold," Jose rambled on. "For instance, gold is twice as dense as lead and two and a half times as dense as steel. That's why it's hard to counterfeit a gold bar. Even if there's a lead core, it's still way too light. One metal that's heavy enough to substitute is platinum, but its actually more expensive than gold, so what's the point?