by B. J. Graf
It was time to bring Raymond Lee in.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Initial questioning of Raymond Lee went nowhere. We had seventy-two hours to hold him before charging or releasing him in connection with the murder of his father. Witness testimony and circumstantial evidence linked him to the nano-bot that caused the crash, but a good lawyer, like the one Raymond’s mother had hired, could poke holes in that easy. We needed Pink to pick Ray out of a line-up.
My phone pinged. I looked down to see the floating face of the desk sergeant.
“There’s a Mercedes Delblanco wants to talk to you, Detective,” the sergeant said. “Should I put her through?”
Mercedes Delblanco - the name pinged too. She was the Latina with the raven-wing hair from Sandy Beaches Gentleman’s Club and Britney Devonshire’s best friend.
“Put her through.”
“Detective Piedmont?” Her voice was a hoarse whisper. The base from some pop song pounded its way through the blue-grey walls littered with graffiti behind her head. She was speaking on her glove phone from inside a stall in the ladies’ room of the club.
Mercedes leaned in so close to the phone’s wide angle lens that the face floating before me was suddenly distorted like it had been stretched tight - over a globe. Under the fluorescents of the ladies’ room I saw her eyebrows had been plucked to oblivion and redrawn with a single arch of black ink like a butterfly’s antenna. Mercedes’ lips were painted violet, but there was a gap between the edge of the natural lip and the hard outline of deep purple. It reminded me of little girls who couldn’t color within the lines.
Mercedes scrutinized my face too. What she found satisfied her enough to continue. “You’re the cop who came to the club. The one handling Brit’s case. Britney Devonshire?”
“How can I help you?”
The image shifted vertiginously as she leaned down and peered out from under the stall. Hers were the only pair of feet in the bathroom.
“You know the Lotus Eaters in East Hollywood?” she said, jerking the camera up again as she stood up.
“The vaping lounge on Vine and 3rd? That was the boutique marijuana shop which had paid Britney Devonshire for her derma ad.
She nodded. “Meet me there in a half-hour.”
“Come downtown,” I said. “I’m in the middle of…”
She shook her head violently. “If Sandy knew I talked to you…” She glanced at me then turned her eyes away. “I could be next.”
“Make it an hour,” I said. “See you there.”
Forty minutes later I strode into The Lotus Eaters, a vaping lounge with clouds of steam twirling in pirouettes overhead and Wi-Fi at every table.
It took me a second to recognize the woman sitting in the back was Mercedes. She wore a grey hoodie over black yoga pants. The garish make-up was gone, the blue-black hair pulled straight back from her face tied into a knot at the nape of her neck. Makeup-free Mercedes looked ten years younger. She spotted me right away and gestured to the seat opposite with a sidelong glance.
I took the seat and ordered a cup of expresso from the auto-server on the table. “You want anything?”
Mercedes shook her head and took a hit from the dragon-headed hookah planted at her feet. When she pursed her lips and exhaled a cloud of cherry-vanilla-scented steam, she looked like a cute baby dragon herself.
“What is it Sandy doesn’t want you to tell me?”
Mercedes took another quick hit and wrapped the edges of the hoodie around her a little bit tighter. “That Brit didn’t O.D. on green ice like they said. She was murdered.”
I waited until the human server suddenly at my elbow set my expresso down on the table and left. The coffee’s aroma did battle with the sweet cherry-vanilla. “I know,” I said, tasting the dark rich liquid. “But I need proof.”
“I’m telling you,” Mercedes said, her face flushed. “No way she O.D’d. No way. Brit didn’t use. Not for a long time.” Mercedes crossed her short, but shapely legs, the knee bobbing up and down in counterpoint to the rhythm of the trance music playing in the lounge.
“Proof,” I said again. “How can you know for sure she didn’t inject the ice herself?”
“Cuz Sandy got us both drug tested every month. Brit was clean. She wouldn’t have been cleared to sell if she failed the test.”
“Sell?” I leaned forward, cupping my hand tight round the expresso’s white ceramic. I wasn’t surprised that Sandy Rose had lied to Shin and me about the club’s drug tests being random, but this was something else again. “Was Brit hooking for Sandy?”
Mercedes opened her mouth to say something then closed it. Her knee started to bob faster. She looked round the lounge like she expected her employer to pop out at any moment. “Not hooking, just selling. Eggs.”
“Eggs?” The trance music in the lounge wasn’t that loud, but I thought I must have heard her wrong.
“Yeah,” she said. “There’s good money in the fertility biz. It’s legal, mostly, but Sandy’s not down with us doing side deals.” She paused and shivered, turning her head back towards me.”
“Britney was an egg donor.” I sat back in my chair. “The tracks,” I said, remembering Britney Devonshire’s dead body draped in her bathtub. “The tracks on Britney’s hips. Fertility drugs?”
Mercedes’s knee stopped bobbing. “Yeah,” she said. “Brit showed me how to shoot up the hormones so the marks don’t show when we dance.”
There had been three sets of tracks on Britney’s corpse - the red dot on her forearm that marked the latest, lethal shot, the recent tracks on the dead girl’s hips versus the older ones between her toes or under her toe nails. Finally they made sense.
“So you girls were the egg donors,” I said. “Sandy made the arrangements. Who’s the buyer?” At Frank’s funeral Raymond Lee had said something about not knowing any of those women. His cryptic line started to make another kind of sense.
“That fertility clinic,” Mercedes replied. “Baby Mine.”
The company’s inane smiling baby logo flashed to mind. Baby Mine sat next to Genesys Pharma in Sun Valley. Genesys – Dr. Lee’s employer. Lee was a genetic researcher, a guy who needed eggs for his work. One stop shopping.
“How much does it pay?”
“Depends,” she said. “Smart pretty Asians get the most. Blonde college girls after that.” Mercedes snorted in derision. “Everybody who isn’t Asian wants that Ivy League prom queen look.”
“Ballpark, how much money are we talking?”
“Depends on how many good eggs you make that month with the drugs,” she said. “Girls eighteen to twenty-four get sixty to one hundred K each cycle. Less for older girls. You can’t donate more than twice a year though.”
If ten or twenty girls from the club were paid sixty to one hundred thousand for two cycles, how much did Sandy clear? I started the rough calculation. “You mentioned a side deal.”
She nodded. “There was this guy, the scientist.”
“Dr. Lee?” I pulled up a picture on my phone and held it out for her.
Her chin jerked up and she nodded. “Yeah, that’s him. He approached me and Brit about doing this deal on the side. Said he’d pay cash up-front and our boss would never be the wiser. I told Brit not to cross Sandy. That she’s in bed with some bad people, gangs, but Brit didn’t listen. She needed money, and she said she had insurance.”
“Insurance?” Britney had blackmailed Lee. With what exactly? Had she threatened to tell his employer about the off-book deal?
Mercedes shrugged. “She wouldn’t explain. Just smiled like that cat in “Alice In Wonderland.” Brit agreed to do the deal. The next thing I know she’s dead and you show up at the club asking questions.” She took another long deep pull on the hookah and exhaled a plume of steam long and full as a mare’s tail. “Sandy can’t know I told you.”
I reached over, took her phone hand and bumped my direct line into her contact list. “Call me anytime, day or night. Do you have someplace y
ou could go? If you need to move fast? Family or friends out of town?”
She nodded.
“Now would be a good time to visit them.” I paid the bill and started to leave.
Mercedes remained sitting for a second longer. Her eyes had gone steely. “I hope you get them,” she said. “Those murdering bastards. Britney was my friend. I don’t have many friends.”
I nodded. At the door, I paused and looked back. Mercedes had already disappeared out the rear exit. The door closed behind her with a soft click.
What had Britney and Lee gotten themselves into? And how did Harvey Pink, Raymond Lee and his mother fit into this mess? Another rabbit hole had just opened up.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I headed out of the Lotus Eaters parking lot with more than cherry-vanilla steam clouding my thoughts. I’d driven around for several minutes without really tracking where I was going, my foot as heavy on the accelerator as a steel diving boot.
My conversation with Lee’s employer came back to me as I turned onto Vine. Maclaren had told me how difficult it was for scientists to get viable embryos for genomic research. Dr. Lee had been an ambitious man and he was under enough pressure to produce results that he needed a sabbatical for nerves.
My own research showed he’d also cut some ethical corners in the past. Say Mercedes was on the level and Sandy Rose had provided Lee with a way to cut through that bureaucratic red tape. She’d furnished him a hassle-free and virtually endless stream of viable blackmarket eggs he could use in his Alzheimers X research. Sandy would charge a hefty fee on top of the other expenses, and Lee was a man with a gambling addiction and money problems. Enter Britney undercutting her employer with a discount side deal.
If Sandy, or the people she ran with, had found out that one of her girls and a client had cut her out? Some people would kill for a lot less than that.
Then Britney had taken that step too far, blackmailing Lee. More pieces started to fall into place.
I pulled onto the 101 South and headed back towards Nokia PD.
The green and white off-ramp sign for Benton Way had just flashed by when my call to Shin went through.
“Bad news,” Shin said before I could update him. “We’ve gotta cut Raymond Lee loose.”
My foot came off the pedal. The car hiccoughed until I eased my foot back down on the accelerator. “Pink recanted in the line-up?”
“Suddenly all Asians look alike,” Shin said, pulling a face and nodding. “We can sweat him, but the D.A. doesn’t think any jury would convict Raymond on Pink’s word at this point. Even with the nano-bot info and the green ice we found in his room.”
“Let Raymond go for now,” I said. “We’ve got a new scenario to consider.”
Shin stared at me, head cocked, eyebrows raised so high they almost brushed his hairline. “I’m all ears.”
“Maybe the reason it’s so hard to make the pieces fit is that we’ve been looking at the picture from the wrong angle. What if Britney wasn’t blackmailing Lee about an affair at all?” I filled Shin in on what had gone down in my interview with Mercedes Delblanco.
He sat there cracking his knuckles as he took it all in. “So Britney goes against Sandy to make this side deal with Lee,” Shin said when I’d finished. “Then she turns around and uses the deal to blackmail him. So he kills her.”
“Or he turned around and came clean to Sandy Rose,” I said, “and she took care of the problem.” I remembered the gang tats on Sandy’s security personnel. “Mercedes said Sandy ran with a rough crew. Once Britney was dead, Sandy figured everything would go back to normal; Lee has learned his lesson, and she holds the whip.”
“Only the scientist is so shaken up,” Shin said, “he panics and runs.”
“Or makes a bigger mistake,” I said. “Tells Sandy he’s gonna come clean to his employer and the police.”
“O-kay,” Shin said. “But how does that tie in with Harvey Pink, Raymond Lee and the nano-bot detonator?”
“Somebody had to take the fall. Harvey’s tailor-made for the job. And she can use him to implicate Lee’s son Raymond. That gives her even more leverage over the Lees. You’ve got to hand it to Sandy. She’s a strategic thinker.”
“So, tell me,” Shin said. “Is all this just a hunch or do you have actual proof?”
“When you put it that way, it sounds mildly insulting.”
He sighed. “Looks like another long night researching Sandy Rose and the Baby Mine clinic. Let’s make sure this Delblanco girl isn’t pulling our chain.”
“I trust you to handle it in your usual excellent fashion,” I said, turning off the freeway.
“Me? Where are you going?”
“To see a girl about a file.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Given Mercedes’ new information on Lee’s true connection to Britney Devonshire, access to his research files had inched up even higher on my list of priorities. So twenty minutes later I eased the nose of my Porsche into a spot opposite the café two doors down from the Bradley Building on Broadway and West Third.
The Scratching Post was one of those downtown pet cafés where people who live in animal-free zones come to get their fix. People like Denver Lakshmi. From the door I saw felines sitting on the shoulders of the red leather booths and winding their way through the forest of human legs under tables.
Denver was seated in a booth on the right. Her black hair had cobalt blue streaks today. They matched her iridescent nails and the fitted dress that looked like something from a digital ad for some new flavored vodka. Somehow the look suited her.
“It’s a good thing I’m not allergic,” I said, gesturing to the fat orange tomcat sprawled on her lap.
“You’re the one wanted to meet on my therapy night,” she replied. “Besides, they’re mostly animatronic. Or bred allergen free like Tomaso here. So stop your bitching. We have to make this quick. Diamond Dog is meeting my parents at Vegan Heaven tonight at eight.” She petted the cat. He purred on cue.
“Your show.” I pulled out a chair from the neighboring table and straddled it. “Just give me the update on Lee’s files. You able to salvage anything?”
“Most is damaged and almost all is encrypted.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. Did you break the encryption?”
“Don’t tell them, but I networked our computers in with UCLA’s for a brute force assault. It should have been enough to break through.”
“But it didn’t?” I didn’t hide my disappointment.
“I don’t think Lee used any typical encryption program,” she replied, pushing the cat off her lap and straightening her dress. Then her hair. “He may have gone old school, used a key.”
“One of those words I gave you before?” I thought back to the cryptic names and numbers Lee had blurted out before death: Father, Fuentes, 333-1110.
She pulled a long face and shook her head.
“You said almost all is encrypted,” I said. “What’s not?
“His vid-diary.” She grinned. “Something he did for rehab – one of his twelve steps. I tried to watch, but it’s boring as hell. Depressing too. Lee was such a lonely old guy.”
“I’ll watch it later. Did anything connect with –-“
“-- 3331110?” Denver’s broad smile lit her face. “Watch this. File menu,” she said, loading the memory dot. A list of files popped up, floating in the air before us. “This encrypted stuff over here,” she pointed to a column of symbols and numbers, pulling them over with her fingers so the electric green digits swam closer, “has been damaged.” She touched one of the encrypted files with her right index finger. “But take a look at the file save option.” As I followed the dance of her fingers in air, the name of the file to be saved came up, clearly legible.
3331110 wasn’t a phone or serial number, but part of the name on Lee’s encrypted file - AI3331110.doc.
“Awesome,” I said as we knuckle-bumped. “What’s the AI for, artificial intelligence?”
&n
bsp; “Like I know. That’s your department.”
Grinning at Denver, I didn’t stop her going on about the vocal command software connection being damaged and defaulting to the original keystrokes. All I cared about was that the name of the file we were staring at matched the number Lee had muttered at his death.
“Great. Now all we have to do is break the encryption on the file itself to find out what’s in there.”
“We?” Denver said in a tone dripping derision.
“I provide the pertinent questions, necessary incentive and moral support. Copy me on the vidlog.”
“You’re too predictable,” she said, holding out a flash-dot, the fingernail sized memory stick with the vidlog already loaded. “Don’t ever try to hack. You’d be toast.”
“Reliable,” I countered, pulling her into my arms for a quick hug. “Not predictable.”
“Hottie that you are, you’re too late, Piedmont.” She waved her left hand, engagement ring flashing at me. “I’m already taken. Remember?”
“Diamond Dog’s a lucky guy.” I winked and released her. “Let me know as soon as you break that encryption.” I started to head out.
“Yeah,” she said, yelling at my retreating back. “I got a life now you know, Piedmont. You should get one yourself.”
I smiled all the way to the car and headed home, eager to pop Lee’s vlog into the computer and see what answers it held in its digital keep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Jo’s car wasn’t in the driveway when I arrived home forty-five minutes later. But my phone pinged before I’d turned off the engine.
The caller wasn’t Jo. I stared at my mother’s face without picking up, listening as she left me a message. My junkie father was in the hospital again. No surprise there. They don’t parole a prisoner on compassionate leave unless he’s pretty much circling the drain. He wanted to see me. I deleted the message and went inside the house.