The Gods of Guilt

by Michael Connelly

  Nobody asked any questions along the way, though Jennifer took some notes. I didn’t know if the silence was a testament to the early hour, the implied threat that surveillance meant to all of us, or my fully engaging skill as a storyteller. There was also the possibility that I had simply lost everyone on one of the turns of the convoluted tale I was spinning.

  Cisco reentered the room, looking none the worse for wear. He took his seat and nodded to me. Problem solved.

  I looked at the others.

  “Questions?”

  Jennifer raised her pen as though she were still in school.

  “I actually have a few,” she said. “First of all, you said that Sylvester Fulgoni Sr. called you from the prison in Victorville at two in the morning. How is that possible? I don’t think they give inmates access to—”

  “They don’t,” I said. “The number was blocked but I’m sure it was a cell phone. Smuggled in to him or given to him by a guard.”

  “Couldn’t that be traced?”

  “Not really. Not if it was a burner.”

  “A burner?”

  “A throwaway phone—bought with no names attached. Look, we’re getting off the subject here. Suffice it to say it was Fulgoni and he called me from prison, where someone had obviously reached out to him to inform him that I was speaking at that moment to his star witness Trina Trixxx. That’s the salient point. Not that Sly Fulgoni has a phone up there, but that he knows the moves we’re making. What’s your next question?”

  She checked her notes before asking it.

  “Well, before yesterday we had two separate things going. We had the La Cosse case and then we had this other thing with Moya that we thought was separate but might be useful to bring in as part of a possible straw man defense for La Cosse. But now, if I’m following you correctly, we’re talking about these two things being one case.”

  I nodded.

  “Yes, that’s what I’m saying. This is all one case now. What links it for us is obviously Gloria Dayton. But the key thing here is Lankford. He was following Gloria the night of the murder.”

  “So La Cosse, he was set up all along,” Earl said.

  I nodded again.

  “Right.”

  “And this isn’t just an angle we’re playing or a strategy,” Jennifer said. “We’re saying this is now our case.”

  “Right again.”

  I looked around. Three walls of the boardroom were glass. But there was one wall of old Chicago brick.

  “Lorna, we need a whiteboard for that wall. I wish we could diagram this. It would make it easier.”

  “I’ll get one,” Lorna said.

  “And get the locks changed on this place. Also I want two cameras. One on the door, one on this room. When we go to trial, this is going to be ground zero, and I want it safe and secure.”

  “I can put a guy on the place—twenty-four-seven,” Cisco said. “Might be worth it.”

  “And what money do we use to pay for all of this?” Lorna asked.

  “Hold off on the guy, Cisco,” I said. “Maybe when we get to trial. For now we’ll go with just locks and cameras.”

  I then leaned forward, elbows on the table.

  “It’s all one case now,” I said again. “And so we need to take it apart and look at all of the pieces. Eight years ago I was manipulated. I handled a case and made moves I believed were of my own design. But they weren’t, and I’m not going to let that happen again here.”

  I sat back and waited for comment but I got only silent stares. I saw Cisco look over my shoulder and through the glass door behind me. He started to get up. I turned around. Across the loft there was a man standing by the front door. He was actually bigger than Cisco.

  “One of my guys,” Cisco said as he left the boardroom.

  I turned and looked back at the others.

  “If this was a movie, that guy’s name would be Tiny.”

  The others laughed. I got up to refill my coffee and by the time I returned, Cisco was coming back to the boardroom. I stayed standing and awaited the verdict. Cisco poked his head through the door but didn’t come in.

  “The Lincoln’s been jacked,” he said. “Do you want them to take it out? We could find a place for it. Maybe a FedEx truck would be good—keep them running around.”

  By “jacked” he meant LoJacked, a reference to an anti-theft tracking system. But in this case he was telling me somebody had crawled underneath my car and attached a GPS tracker.

  “What does that mean?” Aronson asked.

  While Cisco explained what I already knew, I thought about the question of whether to remove the device or leave it in place and possibly find a way of making it work to my advantage against whoever was monitoring my movements. A FedEx truck would keep them running in circles but it would also tip our hand and let them know we were onto them.

  “Leave it in place,” I said when Cisco finished his explanation to the others. “For now, at least. It might come in handy.”

  “Keep in mind it could be just a backup,” Cisco cautioned. “You still could have a live tail. I’ll keep the Indians up on the cliffs a couple days, just to see.”

  “Sounds good.”

  He turned in the doorway and signaled to his man with a flat hand, as if running it along the surface of a table. Status quo, leave the tracker in place. The man pointed at Cisco—message understood—and walked through the door. Cisco returned to the table, pointing to the Paquin 7000 as he went.

  “Sorry. He couldn’t get a call in to me because of the blocker.”

  I nodded.

  “What’s that guy’s name?” I asked.

  “Who, Little Guy? I actually don’t know his real name. I just know him as Little Guy.”

  I snapped my fingers. I’d been close. The others muffled their laughter and Cisco looked at all of us like he knew there was some kind of joke and it was on him.

  “Are there any bikers out there who don’t have nicknames?” Jennifer asked.

  “Oh, you mean a nickname like Bullocks? No, I don’t think there are, to tell you the truth.”

  There was more laughter, and then I turned it serious again.

  “Okay, let’s look at this thing. We now know what’s on the surface. Let’s go below. First off, there’s the question why. Why the manipulation eight years ago? If we believe what we have been told, then Marco goes to Gloria and tells her to plant a gun in Moya’s hotel room so that when he gets busted he gets the firearms enhancement, making him eligible for a life sentence. Okay, we get that. But then comes the hard part.”

  “Why didn’t Marco just bust him once the gun was in place?” Cisco asked.

  I pointed at him.

  “Exactly. Instead of the easy and direct route, he sets forth a strategy in which Gloria allows herself to get busted by the locals and then comes to me. She drops enough information on me for my eyes to light up and think there is a deal to be made. I go see the DA and make that deal. Moya gets busted, the gun is found, and the rest is history. It still begs the question why go to all that trouble?”

  There was a pause while my team considered the complicated setup. Jennifer was the first to dive in.

  “Marco couldn’t be seen as attached to it,” she said. “For some reason he had to be removed from this and wait until it was brought to him. The DA makes the deal with you, the LAPD gets the bust, but then Marco jumps in with the outstanding federal warrant that trumps everything. It looks like it just fell into his lap but he orchestrated the whole thing.”

  “Which only brings us back to why,” Cisco said.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Do you think Marco knew Moya and didn’t want him to know he’d set it up?” Jennifer asked. “So he sort of hid behind Gloria and you?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But he still eventually got the case.”

  “What if it was because of Moya?” Cisco said. “He’s a cartel guy, and they’re the most violent people on the planet. They’ll wipe out a whole vi
llage just to make sure they get one informant. Maybe Marco didn’t want to draw the target on himself for bringing Moya down. This way he just sat back and the case came to him all signed, sealed, and delivered. If Moya started looking for somebody to come down on, it would stop with Gloria.”

  “That’s possible, I guess,” I said. “But then if Moya was looking for revenge, why did he wait seven years to hit Gloria?”

  Cisco shook his head, unconvinced by either argument. That was the trouble with spitballing ideas. More often than not you found yourself talked into a logic corner.

  “Maybe we’re talking about two separate things,” Jennifer said. “Two things separated by seven years. You have the bust and the unknown reason for how Marco set it up, and then you have Gloria’s murder, which may have happened for an entirely different reason.”

  “You’re back to thinking our client did it?” I said.

  “No, not at all. In fact, I’m pretty convinced he’s a patsy in this. I’m just saying seven years is a long time. Things change. You yourself just asked why Moya would wait seven years to exact vengeance. I don’t think he did. Gloria’s death is a big loss to him. His habeas suit claims the gun was planted in his hotel room. So he needed Gloria to make his case. Who’s he got now? Trina Trixxx and her secondhand account? Good luck putting her before the U.S. District Court of Appeals.”

  I stared at Jennifer for a long moment and slowly started to nod.

  “Out of the mouth of babes,” I said. “And I don’t mean that in any derogatory way. I’m saying you’re the rookie here and I think you just nailed something. Moya needed her alive for the habeas. To tell the court what she did.”

  “Well, maybe she wouldn’t tell the truth and so he had her whacked,” Cisco said, nodding afterward to help convince himself.

  I shook my head. I didn’t like it. Something was missing.

  “If we start with Moya needing her alive,” Jennifer said, “the question becomes who needed her dead.”

  I nodded now, liking this logic. I waited a moment, spreading my hands to the others for the obvious answer. None came.

  “Marco,” I said.

  I leaned back in my chair and looked from Cisco to Jennifer. They stared back blankly.

  “What, am I the only one seeing this?” I asked.

  “So you’re choosing a federal agent over a cartel thug as our straw man?” Jennifer asked. “That doesn’t sound like a good strategy.”

  “It’s no longer a straw man defense if it is a true defense,” I said. “Doesn’t matter if it’s a tough sell if it’s what really happened.”

  There was a silence as my words were considered, and then Jennifer broke it.

  “But why? Why would Marco want her dead?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  “That’s what we have to find out,” I said.

  “Lot of money in drugs,” Earl said. “It bends a lotta people.”

  I pointed at him like he was a genius.

  “Right there,” I said. “If we believe the story that Marco made Gloria plant the gun, then we’re dealing with a rogue agent already. We don’t know if he breaks the rules to get bad guys or if it’s to protect something else. Either way, is it that far a leap to think he might kill to protect himself and whatever his rogue operation is? If Gloria became a danger to him, then I think she was definitely in the crosshairs.”

  I leaned forward.

  “So this is what we need to do. We need to find out more about Marco. And this group he’s in—the ICE team. Find out what other cases they’ve made before and since Moya. See what kind of reputation they have. We look at other cases to see if anything at all looks bent.”

  “I’ll search his name through court records,” Jennifer said. “State and federal. Pull out everything I can find and start from there.”

  “I’ll ask around,” Cisco added. “I know some people who know some people.”

  “And I’ll take the Fulgoni boys,” I said. “And Mr. Moya. They might now actually be assets to our case.”

  I could feel the stirring of adrenaline in my veins. Nothing like having a sense of direction to get the blood moving.

  “Do you think this means it was the DEA who jacked your car?” Jennifer asked. “And not Moya or Fulgoni?”

  The thought of a rogue DEA agent monitoring my moves froze the adrenaline into tiny icicles in my veins.

  “If that’s the case, then Fulgoni calling Trina last night when I was there was just coincidence,” I said. “Not sure I believe that.”

  It was one of the conundrums of the case that would need to be cleared up before we had full understanding.

  Jennifer gathered up her notepad and files and started to push back her chair.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “We’re not finished.”

  She resettled and looked at me.

  “Lankford,” I said. “He was tailing Gloria the night she was murdered. If we’re looking at Marco, then we have to look for a connection between him and Lankford. We find that and we’ll be close to having everything we need.”

  I turned my attention to Cisco.

  “Everything you can find on him,” I said. “If he knows Marco, I want to know from where. I want to know how.”

  “On it,” Cisco said.

  I looked back at Jennifer.

  “Just because we’re looking at Marco doesn’t mean we take our eyes off Moya. We have to know everything there is to know about his case. It will help us understand Marco. I still want you on that.”

  “Got it.”

  Now I turned to Lorna and Earl.

  “Lorna, you keep the boat floating. And Earl, you’re with me. I think that’s it, everybody. For now, at least. Be careful out there. Remember who we’re dealing with.”

  Everybody started to get up. They were all silent as they moved. It hadn’t been the kind of meeting that drew any kind of lasting jocularity or camaraderie out of the troops. We were going off in separate directions to conduct a sub rosa investigation of a possibly dangerous federal agent. There weren’t too many things more sobering to consider than that.

  19

  On the way downtown I had to tell Earl to cool it with the single-handed effort to determine if we had a tail. He was weaving in and out of traffic, accelerating and then braking, moving into exit lanes and then jerking the wheel to pull out at the last moment and get back on the freeway.

  “Let Cisco handle that,” I said. “You just get me down to the courthouse in one piece.”

  “Sorry, boss, I got carried away. But I gotta say I like all this stuff, you know? Bein’ in the meeting and knowin’ what’s going on.”

  “Well, like I said, when things happen and I need your help—like yesterday, for example—I’ll bring you into it.”

  “That’s cool.”

  He settled down after that and we made it downtown without incident. I had Earl drop me at the Criminal Courts Building. I told him I didn’t know how long I would be. I had no business in court, but the District Attorney’s Office was up on the sixteenth floor and I was headed there. After getting out, I looked over the roof of the car and casually scanned the intersection of Temple and Spring. I didn’t see anything or anyone out of the ordinary. I did catch myself checking the rooflines for Indians, however. I didn’t see anything up there either.

  After I made it through the metal detector, I took one of the crowded elevators up to sixteen. I had no appointment and knew I might be in for a nice long wait on a hard plastic chair but I thought I needed to take a shot at getting in to see Leslie Faire. She had been a key player in the occurrences of eight years before, yet she had barely come up for discussion lately. She had been the deputy DA who made the deal that resulted in Hector Arrande Moya’s arrest and Gloria Dayton’s freedom.

  Leslie had done well for herself in the years since that deal was struck. She won a few big trials and chose correctly in throwing her support to my opponent Damon Kennedy in the election. That paid off with a major promotion
. She was now a head deputy DA and was in charge of the Major Trials Unit. This made her more of a manager of trial attorneys and court schedules, so it was rare to see her standing for the people anymore. This of course was fine by me. She was a tough prosecutor and I was glad I didn’t need to worry about crossing paths with her again in court. I counted the Gloria Dayton case as the only victory I ever scored against her. Of course, it was a hollow victory in my eyes now.

  I may have disliked facing Leslie Faire on cases but I respected her. And now I thought she should know what had happened to Gloria Dayton. Maybe the news would make her inclined to help me fill in some of the details from eight years before. I wanted to know if she had ever crossed paths with Agent Marco and, if so, when.

  I told the receptionist that I had no appointment but was willing to wait. She said to take a seat while she notified Ms. Faire’s secretary of my request for a ten-minute meeting. The fact that Faire had a secretary underscored her lofty position in the Kennedy regime. Most prosecutors I knew had no real administrative help and were lucky if they got to share a pool secretary.

  I pulled out my phone and sat down on one of the plastic chairs that had populated the waiting room since before I was a licensed lawyer. I had e-mail to check and texts to write but the first thing I did was call Cisco to see if his Indians had picked up anything on the drive downtown.

  “I was just talking to my guy,” Cisco reported. “They didn’t see anything.”

  “Okay.”

  “Doesn’t mean they’re not there. This was just one drive. We might need to send you out to get a little separation and then we’ll know for sure.”

  “Really? I don’t have time to be running all over town, Cisco. I thought you said these guys were good.”

  “Yeah, well, the Indians that were up in the cliffs didn’t have to watch the 101 Freeway. I’ll tell them to stick with it. What’s your schedule anyway?”