The Rabbit Factory (52 page)

Collins shrugged. "What crime?"

"Suicide."

I

When we got back to L.A., Terry called Kilcullen, and I asked Church how to reach Ike Rose. "I think we should give him the good news."

He frowned. "Bad idea." Then he shook his head. "Fuck it, the guy's been through enough. Call him, but if it leaks that we nailed the people behind it, the rest of the network will scatter like roaches when the lights go on."

He gave me a number with a 573 area code. Curry answered. "We got them," I said. "You can't come out of your spider hole yet, but we got them."

"Hallelujah," he said. "Who are they?"

"Kennedy, Barber, Lebrecht, and believe it or not, Dean Lamaar."

"Elvis isn't in on it, too, is he?"

V

"I know it sounds like movie magic, but I just spent two hours talking to Dean Lamaar."

"He's alive?"

"Not exactly." I took Brian through the events of the past two days, ending with Lamaar's on-camera suicide. His only

response was a loud exhale.

"Can you tell me where you are?" I asked.

"I guess I can now. We're guests of the President of the United States at the Fort Leonard Wood army base in Missouri."

"How'd you swing that?"

"Ike called the President and said he needed to get his people the hell out of Dodge. Ten minutes later The Secretary of the Army called back and gave us a choice of four military bases. This one came with the continental breakfast, a Jacuzzi, and a strict no-tipping policy. Plus it's in the middle of fucking nowhere, which helps us sleep better at night. When can we come back to LA.?"

"Lamaar still has some wet workers in the field," I said. "Give us some time to sweep them clean."

"The stock market opens in the morning," Brian said. "The sooner Ike can announce that these guys have been caught..."ŚŚ:.Ś,;V,

"Brian, Garet was nervous that I could be jumping the gun by telling Ike. The people who are out there doing the killing are still out there. If Ike goes public, Garet Church will do a lot more than cut off his rabbit ears."

"Understood. I'll keep him in check," he said. "Congratulations, bro. You just solved the biggest case of your career."

"I didn't solve it on my own. There were hundreds of people involved, including my girlfriend, who figured out that there was something fishy about the Deanie's Farewell tape."

"Mike, I got a flash for you. The TV news shows don't want to interview hundreds of people who were involved. They want heroes. And you're the guy who crackedthe code.

The Rabbit Factory

When this story breaks, it's going to be front page from here to Oshkosh. And you, Detective Lomax, are about to become a media star."

Brian was close. I didn't exactly become a media star, but I definitely got my fifteen minutes.

i'fViij

Mitch Barber sat in The Box, one ankle shackled to the leg of a gray metal table. It was a sterile room with gray industrial flooring and four white walls, one of which had a four-by-six-foot mirror built in. Barber stared at the mirror. Church, Terry, and I sat on the other side of it, staring back.

H The door behind Barber opened and Agent Mai Strang, known to one and all as Patch, entered the room. He was tall and lanky, with parchment skin and wispy red hair. He was pushing retirement, the oldest agent I'd seen so far. He wore a black eye patch over his left eye.

"What happened to his eye?" I asked.

"Nothing," Church said. "He only wears it to put people off." "Good evening, Mr. Barber," Patch said. "I want a lawyer," Barber answered. "They read me my rights. I told them I want a lawyer."

"If I had murdered as many people as you, I'd want one, too," Patch said. "How old are you?" "Eighty-one."

"Enlighten me, sir," Patch said. "At your advanced age, does the death penalty scare you?"

"Of course it scares me."

"It's not that bad, sir," Patch said. "They strap you to a gurney, put the needle in your arm, turn the spigot. It's not a bad way to die. In fact, in your case, it would be a fantastic way to die."

Barber looked at him like he was nuts.

"And, sir, if you tell me what I want to know, I can personally guarantee you that you will die by lethal injection."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Barber said. "What happens if I don't tell you what you want to know?"

"That would be ugly, sir," Patch said. "You'd still get the death sentence, but we'd lock you up with a prison population of lifers, murderers, and sickos. No solitary. No isolation. No protection. It's amazing how many convicted killers have a warped sense of justice. They see this rich old white guy and they think, Hey man, somebody's gotta pay for them poor fucking souls who got murdered at Burger King. But they don't kill you right away. You'll wish they did, but they never do. Now that's a terrible way to die. Would you like to avoid that?"

Barber started to whimper. He nodded his head.

"That's where I come in, sir," Patch said. "You and your partners have a bunch of hired assassins out there. I will give you thirty seconds to tell me who and where they are. When the thirty seconds are up, I'll leave the room, and make the same offer to one of your partners. The first one of you to accept will live to see the needle. The other two get fucked." He laughed. "Often and hard. Your thirty seconds starts now." >

Barber panicked. "It's a good offer," he said. "I'll talkit over

with my lawyer when he gets here."

"I hope he doesn't get stuck in traffic, sir," Patch said, looking at his watch. "This offer will be retracted in sixteen seconds. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen."

"I have a good defense," Barber said. "I was brainwashed by the others. They said they'd kill me if I backed out."

"Ah, the famous Third Reich defense," Strang said. '"I was only following orders.' Six, five, four."

"This isn't fair. This is blackmail," Barber said.

"See what I mean by a warped sense of justice?" Patch said. "Here you are, a mass murderer, and you're angry at me, a humble blackmailer. Your time is up, Mr. Barber. I guess I pegged you wrong, but I have the feeling that Mr. Kennedy is more the kind of man who will tell us anything to avoid being gang raped. Goodbye."

He turned and headed for the door.

Barber screamed. "Stop, please, stop!"

Patch kept walking. He opened the door, stepped out, let the door close most of the way, then stuck his head back in the room. "Yes, sir?" he said.

"I accept," Barber whimpered. "I'll talk."

He talked. Names, specialties, how they were recruited, how they were paid. "We had a cast of ten," he said. A cast. Three of them were still active.

Church took over for Patch. "What are they planning to do next?"

"Lebrecht told them to sit tight and wait for instructions."

"And they're willing to do that?" Church asked.

"They get paid by the day whether they work or not."

"Well, let's put them to work," Church said. "That's the only way we're going to flush them out. How do you contact them?"

"Klaus contacts them by e-mail."

An hour later Lebrecht's PC was in the FBI computer lab. He had trashed his e-mail program, but it took the techies about a nanosecond to restore it.

We already knew the man behind the Burger King bombing. Declan Brady, code name Yeats. The guy in L.A. was a Basque, code name Cervantes. And the one in New York was Greek, code name Sophocles. "I hope you catch that fuck," Barber said. "He was more trouble than he was worth."

Barber created scenarios for their next targets. It was almost midnight when we emailed each one and told him to catch an early morning flight. We sent Yeats to Chicago, Sophocles to San Francisco, and Cervantes to Miami. Then we faxed Brady's photo and sketches of the other two to every office in the net.

"Now we wait till morning," Church said.

"It's my day off," Terry said. "I think I'll go home."

I didn't want to go home. I went to Diana's apartment. "Sorry to wake you," I said, when she let me in.

"Shut up," she said, and kissed me.

She led me to the bedroom. I peeled off my clothes and crawled into bed with her. Human contact never felt so good.

"I have good news," she said. "Hugo's counts are up. The docs tell me this is the sign of remission we've been waiting for."

"I thought you weren't going to the hospital today," I said.

"I didn't, but I still called in."

"That's fantastic," I said. "Tell Hugo as soon as he's ready, he's invited for the grand tour of our squad room."

She kissed me. "Have I told you lately that you're a very nice man?"

"I don't believe you have," I said. "Ever."

"Oversight. So, how'd it go at the office for you today?"

"Excellent, but I'd rather give you the details in the morning."

"Well, I'm wide awake now," she said. "I hope you're not going to just roll over and go to sleep."

I held her close. "Have no fear."

Sophocles was the first to be caught. He pulled up in a taxi at the American Airlines terminal in JFK at 7 a.m. At least a dozen agents were waiting for him, posing as skycaps, gate agents, and fellow travelers. He entered the terminal and was looking up at the departure screen when two of the agents grabbed his arms and a third one cuffed him.

Cervantes met the same fate at LAX. Henry Collins headed up the team who made the capture. Both arrests were clean and simple, almost routine. There was a lot more drama in Dallas.

The FBI agents at DFW had staked out every airline that had direct or connecting flights to Chicago. But Yeats took a cab to the international terminal, then hopped on the monorail that circles the airport. He arrived unnoticed at his departure terminal and actually got as far as the gate, when the FBI agent behind the counter recognized him.

I She was nervous and must have given herself away, because Yeats knew he'd been spotted and he bolted. Three agents chased him down the corridor.

There's a lot of pent-up energy in airports since 9/11.

People eye their fellow travelers suspiciously. Who's carrying a bomb? Who smuggled a deadly pair of tweezers past airport security and plans to storm the cockpit? So when the three agents ran down the corridor, one of them yelled out something that caused all that pent-up energy to explode. "Stop that man, he's a terrorist!"

Weary travelers heard the call and rose to the occasion. At least half a dozen men lunged at the fleeing criminal, but the one who nailed him was, appropriately enough, a 330-pound football tackle from North Dallas High School, a seventeen-year old kid named Darryl Jenks.

The photo on Page One of almost every newspaper the next day showed young Darryl with his knee dug into the back of an Irish citizen named Declan Brady. The headline in The LA. Times said Teen Tackles Burger King Bomber.

As soon as the last assassin was accounted for, Ike Rose was ready to hold a press conference. He and Brian had flown in the night before, leaving his senior management in Missouri to figure out how they could downplay the involvement of their much-beloved founder.

Ike's first proposal was that we sweep Deanie under the rug. "Just say you captured a gang of terrorists and skip the details."Ś

"Yeah, that should fly in twenty-first-century America," Church said. "Especially with this Freedom of Information Act we've got going for us."

Ike didn't press the point. "I knew you wouldn't buy it," he said, "but I had to take a shot." I hoped that Amy Cheever was looking down from on high and laughing at the sheer audacity of it all.

We agreed to a more believable and almost accurate story. We would let the world know that Dean Lamaar had faked his death and embarked on a mission to destroy the company he had birthed. But we would also emphasize that he was suffering from severe mental illness and that at this time, the extent of his involvement was not clear.

"I think that'll hold the press for now," Ike said. "I've got four of our best screenwriters working on a story that will make Dean Lamaar sound more like a confused victim than an evil perpetrator. It won't be the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth, but we have to preserve our image. If we give the public full disclosure, it could wind up destroying the company, and Dean and his partners in crime will have succeeded."

"I appreciate the need for a corporate cover-up," Church said, "but you're going to have to talk to someone higher up the food chain than me."

"I understand," Ike said. So he called the highest person up the chain he knew--the President of the United States. He in turn called the Director of the FBI, who agreed that it was in the country's best interest not to go public with details of the crime, lest it hurt one of America's premier corporations and damage the nation's economy. It took less than an hour for the Director to pass down the official FBI position to Garet Church.

"Pretty fucking amazing," Terry said to me, "when you consider it took me five months to clear up a two-hundred-dollar overcharge on my Visa bill."

The press conference was at 2 p.m., which guaranteed it would be the lead on the six o'clock news in the East. By order of the Los Angeles Chief of Police, Terry and I were both on the platform with Garet Church and Ike Rose.

Church read an opening statement. When he got to the part about Dean Lamaar being alive, the reporters went nuts. When he followed up by saying that Dean had been part of the conspiracy, they went ballistic. Forget that he was in the middle of a prepared script; they started screaming like a bunch of adolescent groupies at a Justin Timberlake sighting. Church didn't give the details of how the case was solved, but he did give me a lot of the credit..Ś..Ś.,'Ś>Ś

Ike read a statement that promised the American people that Lamaar Enterprises would return bigger and better than ever. He thanked the law enforcement agencies for their tireless efforts in bringing an end to the crime spree, the public for their support and understanding, and the President for making this an issue of national concern. He went on and on and on. At one point Terry leaned over and whispered in my ear, "If this were the Academy Awards, they would have cut to a commercial five minutes ago."