Inside, a young woman with close-cropped black hair, black eyeshadow, black lipstick, and black nail polish, with lots of silver rings piercing her earlobes, cheeks, and lips, looked at them and said, “If you’re not from New Jersey, you gotta be cops.”
“We’re cops,” Mallow agreed. “Where’s Loco?”
“Dead.”
“What?”
“He’s dead. Funeral was last Saturday. Obit was in the paper.”
“Then who are you?” Mallow asked.
“His daughter.”
“We’re looking for some stolen jewelry . . .”
The woman waved a hand at the store, which was heavy on leather furniture, gilt picture frames, and old but nonetheless high-end women’s clothing, and said, “No jewelry. Not that I found anyway. I been in the store only since Monday. I wanna sell this junk and cancel the lease and get back home.”
“Where’s that?” Mallow asked.
“Oakland. California.”
“How did your father die?” Lucas asked.
“In a bar. St. Arnold’s Craft Brewery. The bartender told the cops that he was sitting on a barstool, grabbed his chest, and fell off. When he didn’t get up, they went around and looked at him, and he might have already been dead. He definitely was dead when they got to the hospital.”
* * *
—
OUTSIDE, Lucas put his sunglasses back on and asked Mallow, “Who was Louise talking about?”
“The Eli brothers. I was going to ask her what she thought about them, but she brought them up herself. They’re downtown.”
Lucas followed, a ten-minute ride. When they’d parked, Mallow pointed down an alley to the back end of another low stucco building with an open garage door instead of a normal entrance. “That’s the legal front end of the Eli business. Somewhat legal—most of it fell off a truck somewhere. Walk down there and go in. Be cool. Pick up an item or two. Hang out at the back of the store, in the electronics. There’s a black steel door on the left side; it goes into the back room, where the real hot stuff is. The door’s always locked. When somebody comes out, grab the handle and yell for me. I’ll be right outside. I can’t come in, they know me.”
* * *
—
LUCAS AMBLED DOWN the alley, walked through the garage door, and found a store with piles of crap and the stink of truck exhaust and diesel. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the crap. Stacks of slightly crushed rolls of Bounty paper towels were piled next to heaps of car wax bottles, with boxes of peanut bars on top of it all; cartons of nails sat next to a hill of tattered books; bottles of Softsoap sat on top of a couple of battered-looking speakers. The store itself was the size of two double garages, and the merchandise went to the ceiling. The shoppers seemed to be more browsers than people looking for specific items.
Lucas checked through a basket of Levi’s premium blue jeans, found that they were all bootcut, let them go. An elderly woman sat by an old-fashioned cash register, chewing on a strip of beef jerky. She asked him, “You finding what you want, hon?”
“I was wondering if you ever get any accordions in here,” Lucas said.
“Aw, hell, we had two Hohners in here last week; they both went in an hour. You keep checkin’ back, though. We do get them in from time to time. There might be a concertina in the back by those ukes, if you’d be interested in that.”
“Let me take a look,” Lucas said.
He wandered toward the back, toward the black steel door. A rack of cheap-looking musical instruments sat within a few feet of it. Lucas took down an electric guitar, peered at the brand name on the headstock—ZziZZiX—plucked a string, which flopped instead of vibrating.
He peered down the fretboard, as if gauging its flatness, and heard the lock grind on the steel door. He put the guitar down, stepped to the door, and when it opened an inch he shouted, “Mallow! Now!” and yanked the it open. The man on the other side—skinny, gray-faced, with dark bags under his eyes, and startled—followed the door out into the sales area.
Mallow was coming fast for a man with a build like a bowling ball, and he jammed past the gray-faced man and yelled over his shoulder, “Shut the door!”
Lucas stepped inside and pulled the door closed and hurried after Mallow into a brightly lit room lined with built-in metal filing cabinets and with a couple of tables, a half dozen chairs, and an oversized television looming down from a wall. Four bulky men were standing around one of the tables, looking at something Lucas couldn’t see.
Mallow spread his arms, his pistol in one hand, and cried out, “Hi, guys! What do we got going here?”
One of the bulky men shouted, “Fuck!” grabbed a plastic Office Depot bag off the table, and ran at Mallow and stiff-armed him. Mallow went down, and two of the other men jumped over the supine cop, the three of them then heading for the alley door. Lucas swung at the lead man, who put the plastic bag up to take the blow, and what looked like candy exploded from it. The man hit Lucas with his shoulder and Lucas went down and smacked his head on the concrete floor. One of the men stepped on his arm and Lucas hooked him by the pant leg, but the man pulled free. And Lucas could hear Mallow shouting for them. And then . . .
And then they were gone.
Mallow was on his knees, a drip of blood running out of his nose, and he croaked, “You okay?”
“Whacked my head,” Lucas said. He got to his knees and almost toppled over, and Mallow came over and helped him get to his feet.
“You don’t look so hot,” Mallow said. He turned to check the fourth man, the one who hadn’t run but who was now edging toward the exit. “Hey now, Tommy, stay put,” he said. He pointed at a chair. “Sit.” The man sat.
Lucas knelt down again, and Mallow asked, “You want me to call the meat wagon?”
“Nah, I’m looking for . . .” Lucas was patting the floor and came up with one of the candies that had exploded from the bag. Except that it wasn’t a candy; it was a pill.
He stood up and tipped the pill into Mallow’s hand. “OxyContin. Pure Purdue Poison.”
Mallow turned to the man in the chair. “Tommy, what is this shit? Dope? What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’d already told them to take off when you busted in,” the man said. “We don’t deal no dope.”
Mallow looked at all the pills scattered on the floor. “You’re gonna have to tell it to the narcs, my friend.” To Lucas he said, “Keep an eye on him. I gotta make a couple of phone calls. Don’t fight him. If he tries to run, go ahead and shoot the motherfucker.”
The man on the chair said, “Bart, goddamnit, you know me.”
“I thought I did,” Mallow said. There was a compact bathroom with a toilet, and a sink off to one side. Mallow stepped in, pulled a handful of toilet paper off the roll, wetted it in the sink, and wiped the blood off his face. After checking himself in the mirror, he walked down the hall to the back door and started talking into his phone.
They waited some more, not talking much, watching Eli squirm.
Fifteen minutes later, two narcs walked through the black steel door. Mallow pointed out the pills. The narcs checked one, and then the older of the two said to the man in the chair, “We’re gonna need a lot of information from you, Tommy. You know, to keep you outta Ely. We wouldn’t want to send a couple of Elis to Ely.”
Ely was the state prison.
While the narcs were talking to Tommy Eli, Mallow pulled Lucas back into the hallway. “I’ve got a search warrant coming. Should be here in a few minutes,” he said quietly. He tipped his head toward the metal filing cabinets. “If they bought that Indian jewelry, it’ll be in one of those drawers.”
“Okay. I think I’ll sit down for a while,” Lucas said.
“You’re still looking shaky,” Mallow said.
Lucas shrugged. “I’m all right . . . Maybe not ready to tak
e on a couple of linebackers.”
“Knocked both of us right on our asses,” Mallow said.
“Got blood on your shirt,” Lucas said.
Mallow looked down at the front of his bright yellow guayabera shirt. “Ain’t that the way?”
* * *
—
WHILE LUCAS AND MALLOW waited for the search warrant, Bob and Rae had fought through three separate hospital bureaucracies and had come up empty. One the fourth try, at a northside medical center’s emergency room, they asked the duty nurse if she knew of a man who’d been treated for a leg injury and who’d paid for the treatment with a stack of bills.
Instead of shaking her head and referring them to somebody else, her eyes narrowed and she said, “I’m not supposed to talk about that. You’ll have to talk to one of the people in the director’s office.”
She made a phone call and pointed them at the elevators.
Bob said to Rae, “She said that like it was in italics.”
“I noticed.”
A tall carefully coiffed woman in the director’s office looked at their IDs and then said, “We’re not allowed to give out specific patient information without a subpoena. I’m sure you know that. I can confirm that we did treat a man about six weeks ago with a serious leg infection who refused to give us identification and paid us in cash. He said he didn’t have any insurance, and the bill was substantial. Substantial enough that the cash payment was . . . extremely unusual.”
“Can you tell me what kind of injury it was?” Rae asked.
“Yes. He had a large defect in his calf. The actual injury happened some time back, probably months ago, and apparently had been self-treated. A cyst developed under the wound. Our surgeon had to open the healed wound to drain the cyst. And that’s about as much as I can tell you without the subpoena.”
“Can you tell us if the patient was given any medication that required a prescription?” Bob asked.
“Yes. He was given prescriptions for pain pills and also for antibiotics.”
She wouldn’t answer any other questions until Rae asked, “Can you answer a question about non-patients?”
The woman frowned. “Like what?”
“Was he accompanied by anyone?”
“I believe he was accompanied by a woman, perhaps his wife or girlfriend. One of our security guards reported that she brought him to the emergency room in a Cadillac.”
“Do you do video of the cars at the emergency room?” Bob asked.
“Yes, we do. We archive the tapes after thirty days unless there’s an inquiry during that time.”
“So you wouldn’t have the video anymore?”
“We do not,” the woman said.
Bob said, “We’ll be back with the subpoena.”
The woman nodded. “We’re always happy to cooperate with the authorities, but according to law we have to do the correct paperwork. It can be a pain, but it’s the law.”
When Bob and Rae stood to leave, the woman asked, “Can you tell me who the man is? The injured man?”
Rae said, “You heard about the Louisiana cannibal?”
“Oh . . . no . . .”
* * *
—
WHEN THE SEARCH WARRANT arrived at the Eli brothers’ shop, delivered by two robbery cops, Mallow handed it to Tommy Eli, who frowned and said, “I gotta talk to my attorney about this.”
“Talk to him all you want,” Mallow said. “In the meantime, we’re gonna search the place.”
The cabinets along the wall, which looked like the ordinary filing type, were essentially keyed safes. Mallow asked Eli for a key, but Eli shook his head. “Bobby must have it. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
“Are those cabinets expensive?” Lucas asked.
“The best,” Eli said.
“Too bad,” Lucas said. To one of the robbery cops: “You got a pickax or a sledgehammer?”
“Yup. We also got a guy with the Jaws of Life. All we need to do is beat in the front of the drawer to bend them so we can get the jaws in the crack and then we can rip them right open, like ripping a door off a car. I’ll go call him.”
As he headed for the door, Eli called out, “Wait. I remembered. There might be a spare key.”
* * *
—
THERE WAS a lot of jewelry. Lucas was no expert, but most of it looked like junk. Much of it was older, like nineteenth-century, with semiprecious moonstones or onyx and probably eight-karat gold. There was one flat-out safe, in which they found fifty-one thousand dollars and several hundred euros. In the velvet-lined bottom drawer of the eighth cabinet, they found five pieces of Charles Loloma jewelry that matched the photos given to them by the Wrights.
Eli said that the jewelry had been brought in by two men. He’d seen one of them before, a big guy who said his name was Richard. The other guy didn’t mention a name, but was, Eli said, “An evil-looking fuck.”
They were pushing him on it when one of the cops said, “There’s another drawer.”
He’d pulled the drawer out, which was shallower than the others, and then reached back into its cavity, where he found another handle. He pulled it, and in a second compartment were nine pistols, ranging from a piece of crap .32 to a .50 caliber Desert Eagle.
Mallow went off on Eli again and was still hassling him about selling guns illegally when a cop brought Bobby Eli into the room. Eli asked, “What the fuck?”
“That’s what the marshal and I were saying,” Mallow said to him. “What the fuck? We look in one drawer and we find guns, and we look in another and we find a buttload of jewelry stolen by the Louisiana cannibal. I never would have believed you guys would have joined up with an animal like that. I thought you were the friendly neighborhood fences. And then we’ve got OxyContin all over the goddamn place . . .”
“Wait a minute,” Tommy Eli said. “The fuckin’ cannibal?”
* * *
—
THE ELIS HAD two things relevant to the Gang of Four. The first was a scrap of lined yellow paper, ripped from a legal pad, with a license number scrawled on the back. While Tommy was paying the two guys who’d brought in the Loloma, Bobby had run around the block to watch them leave. He followed them to a Dodge Challenger with Oregon license tags. Bobby had written down the number, should it ever be needed.
Mallow called the number in to his office and was told that they’d get back to him as soon as they could.
The second was that in the negotiations for the Loloma jewelry, “Richard” had mentioned he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before because of the fuckin’ planes taking off.
The Elis had written down the date that the Loloma had come in, and Mallow called somebody at the Las Vegas sheriff’s office and asked them to call somebody at the Federal Aviation Administration to find out which way the planes had been taking off the night before they’d brought in the jewelry.
The narcs eventually took the Elis off to jail, though the brothers protested that they were victims, not perpetrators. The burglary guys were working through the office space inch by inch. They’d already solved a couple of burglaries and were hoping to solve more.
“That OxyContin was the biggest break we ever had back here,” Mallow told Lucas. “We never had a way to get inside before. I’m a happy guy. Thank you.”
“I’ll be happy if you can help me get to Deese,” Lucas said. “The rest of them are all yours.”
* * *
—
LUCAS WAS STILL at the Eli brothers’ office when Bob and Rae called about what they’d found at the medical center. “We got a subpoena on the way. We ought to know about the prescriptions and where they were filled inside the hour.”
And as they were talking about that, Mallow waved at him and then called, “Got the car. It’s a Hertz and it’s already been returned. Hertz has video, and they
’ll give it to us, but they want some paper to cover their asses.”
Lucas asked to Rae, “Who’d you talk to about the subpoena?”
“An assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. You need one?”
“Yeah. We need to talk to Hertz.”
* * *
—
MALLOW DIDN’T WANT to go talk to Hertz because the Eli search was producing too much good material. Lucas talked to the assistant at the U.S. Attorney’s, stopped at the federal building and got the subpoena from a pretty young woman who said, “We know about you. You’re world-famous in the Justice Department.”
Lucas said, “Right,” but he liked pretty women and stayed to chat with her for a minute before he went on his way.
Lucas followed his iPhone GPS map to the Hertz office, which was in a car rental center south of the airport. The manager looked at the subpoena and then led the way into a back room, where he called up the video of the car rental. The renters were two men, one big and the other smaller, both wearing ball caps that obscured their faces.
At the end of the rental transaction, as the two were walking out to the car, one of the men half turned, and Lucas could see the side of his face. The manager hit a button and froze the image. “Oh, yeah,” Lucas said. “Marion Beauchamps. That’ll look good on the nightly news.”
He also looked at the paperwork on the rental. He’d never heard of the renter’s name, Harold Weeks, but it was Beauchamps for sure.
“The license is valid and so was the Visa card he used,” the manager said. He’d printed out all the rental information and gave a copy of it to Lucas.
Outside again, Lucas called Russell Forte in Washington and asked him to chase down the driver’s license number and the Visa card.
Mallow called, said somebody in his office had talked to the FBI and the FBI had called the traffic controllers at the airport tower. The night before the gang had sold the Loloma jewelry, the planes had been taking off to the west. “There’s one main east-west runway. There’s a mix of residential housing out there under the flight path—apartments, town houses, single family homes. They’ll be in there somewhere.”
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