Three shirt deal ss-7 Page 19

  Sometimes I'm a complete jackass.

  Chapter 37

  Thenext morning when we returned to the hospital the doctors agreed to let me spend some time in Secada's room. I met with her father and mother for a moment before going inside.

  "My daughter, we work for her college education," Hector said in halting English, his dark eyes burrowing holes in my self-esteem while her mother looked down at her Bible. "Many hours in fields, many nights in restaurants. She is the first in our family for degree."

  "I know."

  "Cal State University in Los Angeles," Hector said, still searching my face for a response. "She study criminology, graduated in top ten percent."

  "Yes. She's very smart."

  "In the police, she has many partners. Many jobs. This is first time for her to be hurt."

  Facts issued as a challenge. What he was really saying was, "After all this, look what you let happen." I didn't have much of an argument because Secada was my partner and she'd gone down. I'd been unable to protect her.

  Hector couldn't seem to find anything more he wanted to say to me.

  I finally said, "I'm sorry I let this happen."

  Hector gave no sign that he accepted my apology.

  I was allowed into the room and sat in a chair beside the bed looking into Secada's eyes. She wore no makeup and her hair was tangled, but she was still beautiful. She had been watching my exchange with her father through the glass.

  "I see you had a talk with Popi," she said, trying to smile. "He's a very basic man."

  "I can see how much he and your mother care for you."

  "Yes," she said, softly. "Sonrisas de me alma-the smiles of my soul. But you shouldn't feel bad if they don't understand. Popi sees things with ancient eyes. He has loyalties and values steeped in the traditions of the past." I waited, wondering what she was trying to tell me. "In our old hill town near Cuernavaca, we had a family of close friends who all looked after one another. I had many 'tios,' 'uncles' who treated me almost as a daughter. These families would give us things they couldn't afford if they thought we were in need. In good times, my father always did the same for them. The people in the mountain towns all had very deep loyalties to one another."

  That triggered something in me, some idea. But it was gone before I could grab it.

  As we talked, Secada was strangely distant, as if by her attitude, she could send me a message. She seemed determined that we would not repeat the personal mistakes of the last week.

  "Alexa came to see me," she said, deliberately bringing my wife into the conversation. "The chief, too. Alexa has been back to talk to me three times. She seems very interested in the Hickman case. She's asking a lot of good questions. She's a little different than I thought. Nothing like I imagined."

  I didn't respond to that, but said instead, "Alexa agrees with us that the case against Tru was bad due process," I said. "She and I are going to keep working it together."

  "She can take over for me," Secada said. "This is good."

  "It was your idea."

  A small smile appeared, but was quickly gone. "She's intelligent and very beautiful, your Alexa. But she is impulsive. Don't get yourself in more trouble."

  The remark had the flavor of a warning as well as a farewell. We looked at each other and I could see that whatever we had once felt, it would never be discussed again. Somehow that was a huge relief.

  "I'm leaving here today," I said. "Alexa and I are going back to L. A to pick up the loose ends."

  "I will pray for only good things to happen," she said.

  The nurse entered the room and beckoned for me to leave. I leaned down and brushed my lips on Secada's forehead. As I stood up, I saw tears glistening in her eyes.

  Chapter 38

  Alexa was taking luther's medication for her convulsions, and I was not yet one hundred percent, so she drove as we headed back to Los Angeles. Along the way, I thought again about what Secada told me about the mountain people in the towns of Mexico. Suddenly, the idea that had escaped me in her hospital room fell right in my lap.

  We stopped for gas about forty miles out of L. A. and while Alexa was in the bathroom, I called Walter Finn. He was a source I'd been saving inside the Records Division who owed me a favor. I asked him for two deep backgrounders.

  "Sure," he said. "Gimme your case number." That started a short discussion and negotiation because, of course, I didn't have one. The LAPD had new strict policies forbidding unauthorized record checks. Before Alexa was shot, she had actually been the one who'd instituted these new rules in the wake of a recent scandal where it was alleged in the L. A. Times that cops were selling files from the Records Division to a Hollywood private detective, which he was then using to extort huge divorce settlements for his rich and famous clients.

  Finn reminded me of Alexa's involvement in these new policy guidelines. He was trying to shrug me off. I asked him how his sister was doing. I'd taken care of a stalker problem for her. It was a low blow professionally to bring it up, but I needed the favor. He got quiet after that, so I begged. I promised never to ask him for another favor again. In the end, he came through. I was just putting my cell away when Alexa came out of the ladies room and got behind the wheel. We pulled back onto the 101 Freeway.

  Twenty minutes later we crested the hills west of Thousand Oaks and dropped into the Valley. She glanced over and said, "That courtesy check I did on Ron Torgason came back this morning. Treasury faxed his topsheet over. You might want to check it out. It's in the folder."

  I picked up our now well-used manila file. The fax bore the seal of Homeland Security. Torgason had retired from the U. S. Customs Service in 2003 as a GS-15 assigned to Special Ops out of D. C. I scanned down through the list of cases he'd worked on and found that he had been part of the very controversial, but effective, Operation Casablanca, back in the nineties.

  I knew all about that case because it had been run by Bill Gately, a friend and a now-retired U. S. Customs ASAC. Gately had figured out that several large Mexican banks were laundering Colombian narco-dollars from their U. S. drug operations by using bank-to-bank wire transfers. He proceeded to organize a covert sting inside Mexico, using Spanish-speaking Customs agents who pretended to be Columbian drug dealers. Operation Casablanca had finally netted over thirty corrupt Mexican bankers and set off a screaming match over territorial integrity on the floor of the United Nations between then U. S. President Clinton and President Zedeho of Mexico.

  "You see he worked Operation Casablanca?" Alexa said and I nodded. "He had to have been cool before he went to Promo Safe, or Gately wouldn't have used him."

  "Kinda makes you wonder how Church and Wyatt managed to turn him," I said, still reading the report. "Says here his last address in on Valley Spring Drive, Thousand Oaks. That's only a few miles from where we are right now. Want to swing by and ask him?"

  "Thought you'd never ask," she said, a mischievous smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

  Alexa exited the freeway at Westlake Boulevard, and ten minutes later we were on a street lined on both sides with middle-income homes. A lot of retired cops lived out in the far West Valley because the houses were nice and priced in a range that allowed law enforcement officers on twenty-year pensions to afford them. The houses in this development looked to be no more than ten years old. We turned onto Torgason's block, which was in a white-picket-fence neighborhood, nestled up against the low hills. After a short search, we pulled to the curb in front of his address, and found a neatly cared for, yellow-and-white, two-story faux Georgian house with shutters and a wide front porch. The lawn looked freshly mown and there was a big Century 21 real estate sign hanging from a white post driven into the center of the yard.

  "For sale," I said. The house had a vacant look.

  We got out of the car and were met by a gust of warm desert air that was blowing across the Valley, bringing a low level of hazy, brown pollution with it. We walked up to the front door and rang the bell. Nobody answered
. Alexa stayed on the front porch while I walked around back.

  A wrought-iron fence protected a nicely landscaped backyard and kidney shaped pool. As I looked around, something fluttered at the corner of my vision. I turned and spotted a little, two-inch-long piece of faded yellow ribbon snapping in the brisk wind. It was tied to the fence near the garage. I didn't have to look twice to know it was a remnant of police crime scene tape. I'd strung miles of this stuff over the years.

  "Alexa, around back!" I called out.

  A few seconds later Alexa rounded the corner. She immediately saw the tape and stopped. "What the hell happened back here?" she said, crossing to the fluttering yellow ribbon, and pulling it off the fence.

  We needed answers, so Alexa took the neighbor's house on the left, while I took the one on the right.

  After showing my identification to a fish-eye peephole, the front door of my house was opened by a pale, middle-aged woman in a brown-beige Polo shirt dress. She studied my badge carefully before telling me her name was Judy Parker. I said that we were trying to get in touch with her neighbor, Ron Torgason, and asked if she knew where he was.

  She stood for a moment, drying her hands on a dish towel, gazing at me through the screen door with a puzzled look on her face, then said, "Well, he drowned in his pool. I'm surprised you don't know. The police investigated it for almost a week. Gosh, that was almost a year ago."

  "Drowned?"

  "The coroner called it death by misadventure or some term like that."

  "How did he drown?" I asked.

  She put the dish towel down on an entry table, warming to the gossip. "I don't think they really know exactly. Maybe he slipped and hit his head on the diving board. Apparently, he was knocked unconscious and just sank down to the bottom. One of the neighborhood boys who did yard work for him found the body down by the drain. They said by the time they got him out, he'd been underwater for almost a day."

  I looked up and saw Alexa walking up the path to the porch.

  "Drowned last August," she said, as she joined me on the front porch. I nodded and turned again to Mrs. Parker. "Was there anything you can remember about that incident that seemed strange or out of the ordinary?"

  She thought for a moment, then shook her head. "He was a good guy, Ron. A retired Customs agent. Made us all feel safe to have him as a neighbor."

  "If he died in August, how come the house is still not sold?" I asked, struggling with the year-old timeline.

  "I heard there was a fight between his heirs. The house got stuck in probate," she replied. "Just went up for sale two weeks ago."

  We exchanged numbers. Then Alexa and I returned to Torgason's front lawn and stood looking at the vacant house.

  "Those two dirtbags killed him," Alexa said flatly.

  "Yep. Last August. Puts it close to the time when Olivia Hickman was killed. So that probably makes him the second shirt. That means there's still one more murder we don't know about."

  "Shirt?"

  I never told Alexa when I was in procedural quicksand. The old Alexa always got frustrated when I stretched the rules. But who knows how she would feel now, so I decided to run my BlackBerry caper past her. "On Wade Wyatt's BlackBerry there was a text message the night they killed Olivia Hickman. It said, "This just became a three shirt deal." I think 'shirt' is shorthand for a murder. Tru's mom was the first, now Ron Torgason is two. If I'm right, somewhere in this case there's another body connected to all this. One that we don't know about yet."

  "Wade's BlackBerry?" Alexa asked arching her eyebrows. "You managed to get paper to go through Wade Wyatt's IMs? What was your probable cause? We need to stay really friendly with any judge who'd write you a warrant without a fucking shred of probable cause." Not much got past her.

  "I didn't exactly have a warrant," I admitted, wondering how she would react to that.

  "You either had one or you did an illegal search. Which was it?"

  "We accidentally switched phones," I said putting some spin on it. "I accidentally saw some of his text messages before I discovered the mistake and traded him back." Curious if my BS had any traction.

  "Since when did you get a BlackBerry?" she said, sniffing the lie.

  I dug into my pocket and showed her my new phone. She took the unit and held it for a minute. Then she turned it on. Of course, it still wasn't even set up. She flipped it over. Dumb-ass that I am, I hadn't even bothered to remove the Best Buy price sticker.

  "You're simply amazing," she said, shaking her head in disbelief. Then the mischievous smile suddenly appeared.

  "It was an honest screwup," I said.

  "More to the point, you can't inadvertently violate constitutional protections," she said. "There has to be prior knowledge and premeditation. Of course, the evidence you found is lost forever. But the information you attained was probably worth it."

  My reasoning exactly. So why did it worry me so much to have her say it?

  Chapter 39

  "The way I see it, Ron Torgason became a big problem for these guys after Olivia was murdered. They needed to switch the ownership of the rare. In order to do that they had to either buy Torgason off or bump him off. If Torgason was a Gately-vetted cop then you know he probably wasn't for sale."

  "So that leaves murder," Alexa said. We were back on the Freeway heading toward Los Angeles.

  "Right. The original plan was to let Hickman cash the rare and just take the million away from him. But after Olivia's killing, that all changed. In order to get the ownership of that six-pack transferred to someone else, they waited until after Torgason filled out his affidavit. Then once the documentation was sent to Cartco, Wade took it out of the file, changed Hickman's name to Morales. Then before Morales collected the prize, Church rolled out and knocked Torgason unconscious, pushing him into his pool, making it look like an accidental drowning. That way Torgason's not around to say that Morales isn't the real winner and his affidavit was altered."

  We rode in silence for a moment, both thinking about it. The structure and timeline seemed solid, but we still had no proof.

  "That's only two shirts," Alexa finally said. "Who's the third?"

  "Don't have a clue." I sat deep in thought, watching her drive.

  "I think maybe you have these murders in the wrong order," she said. "What if Torgason isn't the second shirt but the third? On Wyatt's BlackBerry the night they killed Olivia, Mike Church text-messages that this just became a three shirt deal, right?" She looked over at me.

  "Yeah. That's what it said."

  We were coming into the West Valley near the Chatsworth Reservoir. It was almost three o'clock, and the normally light traffic was beginning to pick up.

  "Okay, if Olivia was a mistake and after the murder Tru couldn't cash the prize, then they knew at that moment that they'd have to pass the rare to someone else. That meant they had to kill Torgason in order to keep the scam alive. Olivia is probably the second shirt and he's the third. If so, the first shirt had to predate these other two. The first shirt happened some time before August tenth."

  This was neither the angry, confused Alexa nor the wild-eyed kamikaze. This was the sharp-thinking, brilliant woman I married.

  "We should start hunting around in all of these back stories for a dead body that got murdered before August tenth," she finished.

  We rode in silence again, thinking about it. Just as we crossed the transition to the Hollywood Freeway out by the reservoir, I got an idea and said, "Go downtown to North Mission Road."

  "The coroner's office? How come?"

  "The only death I know about that happened before Olivia's, was Mike Church's father, Juan Iglesia," I said.

  Alexa looked over at me with a frown on her face. "Why would they kill him?"

  "So Mike Church can get his inheritance, the garage, and everything."

  "How does that add up? Wade Wyatt isn't part of that crummy garage. What's in it for him? Or Morales and Devine? These three murders all have to be connected to our main playe
rs, and they have to connect up to what we already have. Either that, or our whole structure is wrong."

  This was definitely the old Alexa. My heart warmed. "It all comes back to that bus company," I said, enjoying the back and forth. "He needed his father's inheritance and that included the nonprofit bus line. I don't know why, but something tells me this is all about the North Van Nuys Transit Authority."

  "But how does it work? What the hell good does it do to be a police commissioner for a nonprofit bus line?"

  "I don't know."

  "And how does the Bud Light rare that Morales won fit in? Why give the money to him?"

  "I don't know. Somehow the money needed to go to Morales. For his campaign, maybe."

  "It's not enough money to make a difference. And why would Mike Church and Wade Wyatt want to finance Tito Morales's campaign for mayor? This isn't working, Shane."

  "What if they didn't use the money to finance his campaign?" I said, grabbing at a new idea. "What if Morales found a way to get the money back to them so they could use it to buy those four new hundred-thousand-dollar buses, and all that security equipment?"

  "Why?" she said, eyeing me as she drove. "It's a nonprofit company, Shane. Nonprofit means it doesn't throw off any earnings. Morales isn't going to lend a million dollars to them for that. And the Fed won't let them pay out any cash to themselves from the operation. These guys would have to file tax returns on the bus line in order to keep its nonprofit status. None of this makes any sense." Of course, she was right.

  "It's some kind of scam," I said.

  "But what's the scam?"

  "Look, I just had a stroke. My head isn't completely functioning yet. Why don't you come up with something?"

  "Hey, I was shot in the brain eleven months ago. Don't put this on me."

  We were both grinning. This was a flash of the way it had once been between us. Back before Stacy Maluga fired that bullet and changed who Alexa was. In that moment we both felt it and it felt really good.