Cutting Edge (2002)

by Clancy, Tom - Power Plays 06

  Peripherally aware of the dogs in their circular sprint around the court, Thibodeau nodded, gave him their names, told him how sorry they were for his loss, and explained that what they wanted to ask wouldn’t take long.

  “We know you been through everything with the police, ain’t about to put you on that go ’round again,” he said.

  Howell cast his sunken eyes down at the ground a moment. Then he raised them to Thibodeau’s face and shrugged. “It’s all right. If it can help you find Julia, I don’t mind.”

  Ricci looked at him. “Julia,” he said, “and the people who took what they did from you.”

  Howell turned his way.

  “My daughter was only six months old,” he said.

  Ricci remained tunneled on his eyes, noticing their glazed appearance. Tranquilizers. A CNS depressant. Probably lorazepam.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I got a call from him this morning, you know. The detective in charge. He didn’t want me to talk to anybody about what happened, mentioned you two in particular. In case you showed up at Merry’s.”

  “He say why?”

  “I guess just what you’d expect,” Howell said. “Something about how they don’t want their investigation compromised by outside parties.”

  “You’re allowed to talk to whomever you want. Nothing legal they can do to stop you.”

  “I figured that,” Howell said. “And if he’s right and we’re wrong, I can always claim not to remember his words.”

  Ricci nodded a little.

  “The medication,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Besides,” Ricci said. “We aren’t at Merry’s.”

  A faint, desolate smile touched Howell’s lips, revealing little white flecks of dried saliva at their corners. He checked on the dogs with a glance over his shoulder, thrust his hands back into his pockets, and quietly bowed his head toward the synthetic grass again, his thoughts slipping into their own nebulous, faraway space.

  “We were at the center before,” Ricci said. “The cops gave us a look around. Probably decided to phone you because I got on their nerves asking questions they didn’t want to answer.”

  Howell brought up his head, slowly, working against the heavy resistance of the tranqs.

  “What sort of questions?”

  “There was blood on the floor of the shop,” Ricci said. “Near the door. The detective was ready to tell me it wasn’t Julia’s, but he wasn’t so ready to tell me the blood came from a dog that’d been shot.”

  Howell nodded.

  “Vivian,” he said.

  “That be one of the rescues?” Thibodeau said.

  Another nod.

  “Julia favors her. The first day she came to work for me, I remember lecturing her about how our policy’s not to become too attached.” Howell gestured toward the whirling dogs behind him with a slight roll of his shoulder. “Being firm’s how I wound up with five of my own.”

  Ricci looked at him. “With all the things the police shared with us, we have to wonder how come they kept quiet about the dog. Vivian.”

  Howell’s mouth worked.

  “Evidence,” he said after several moments. “She’s just evidence to them. It’s why they won’t let me anywhere near her. They call it a safeguard.”

  Ricci let his eyes rest on him. “It’s important for us to know what’s happened to her body.”

  Howell’s expression was odd.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.

  Ricci paused a beat.

  “When a pet’s remains have to be examined during an investigation, the police bring them to a lab for tests,” he said. “Depends on the case, but they’ll usually give them back to the owner after they’re through—”

  Howell was shaking his head.

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  Ricci looked at him.

  “Don’t understand what?”

  “Viv’s alive,” Howell said.

  Aware Gordian would want to see it with his own eyes, Pete Nimec had hardcopied the e-mail aboard the chopper, printing it out on a single sheet of paper he’d folded into his wallet. Behind the closed sliding doors of Sheffield’s visitor parlor now, he sat on the couch with him and heard that paper rattle in his trembling hand.

  “There’s nothing else?” Gordian said. His face was chalky. “This message is it?”

  “So far,” Nimec said. “Yeah.”

  Gordian shook his head. “Ashley . . .”

  “She doesn’t know yet. Meg’s been leaving messages for her to get in touch.”

  “I’ll contact her myself.”

  Nimec looked at him and nodded. He heard the paper rattle.

  “You’re sure it’s the truth . . . about the tattoo?” Gordian said. “Because if Julia had gotten something like that put on her body, she’d tell me just to see my face turn red. You know her, Pete. How she is. She acts like it’s amusing when my dander’s up. She’d tell me—”

  “She told Megan. Some kind of secret thing between them. I think she was going to make a presentation of it the next time you saw her.”

  “My God,” Gordian said through a harsh exhalation. “If not for that poor woman . . . her baby . . . killed, shot dead . . . I’d think it was all some kind of hoax. That maybe someone who knows Julia found out she’d gone out of town, sent this poison over the Internet for a sick thrill . . .”

  He let the sentence trail, recognizing the uselessness of trying to bind it in logic and reality. Nimec heard his agitated snatches of breath, the paper rattling again between his fingers in the silence of the room.

  “Who’s on it?” Gordian said.

  “Ricci and Thibodeau. If there are any leads, any paths they need to follow, every man, every resource, everything we’ve got is available in a heartbeat. You know that.”

  Gordian nodded.

  “I need to tie things up, get back home right away—”

  “Boss,” Nimec interrupted. “You can’t leave Africa.”

  Gordian looked at him. “No,” he said.

  “Gord—”

  “I know what you’re thinking. It doesn’t matter. Somebody has to be with Ashley.”

  “Meg plans to stay with her, look after her for as long as she has to—”

  “No, Pete. Forget it. I won’t let you decide this for me. That demand in the message . . . the announcement I’m supposed to make . . . we can’t jump to the conclusion it has anything remotely to do with the actual motive or motives for what’s happened. It could be a red herring. Meant to throw us off.”

  “Or not,” Nimec said. “You really feel we’re in a position to take chances right now?”

  Silence clapped down over them again. But now Gordian became very still, staring at the wall opposite him, the printout no longer rattling in his hand. The thick doors and walls of the room blocked out any sounds from elsewhere in the old French mansion.

  After a long length of time, he turned to Nimec.

  “The path you need to follow starts here,” he said, and put a hand to his chest. “Whatever the reason for what’s happened to Julia . . . those other innocents . . . they’ve fallen into the middle.”

  Nimec said nothing for a while, and then nodded pensively.

  “Find who’s at the other end,” Gordian said.

  UpLink SanJo. Mid-afternoon. Their secure conference room’s sound-baffled, audio-secure walls once again enclosing them in an electronically fortified cocoon of silence. On one of those walls, a flat plasma screen jacked into a digital viewer showed an enlarged image of the e-mail Megan had received hours earlier. It struck the eye like the Mark of the Beast, a reminder that nothing in this technological age can make us impervious to its stain.

  “We need to find out what evidence they’re pulling from that greyhound,” Ricci said. “We can’t wait.”

  Megan looked at him. “You’re positive it’s that important.”

  “I’m positive the cops think it is,” he
said. “We cruised past that veterinary clinic a bunch of times. Saw a team of uniforms cooping outside in a patrol car. And I guarantee they weren’t going anywhere.”

  “What makes it a sure thing is that they ain’t letting Howell in to see the dog,” Thibodeau said. “He tells us the vet be a good friend of his. Know him for years, care for every one of his hounds. Most’re more dead than alive when he bring them from the track. Some of ’em need surgery. Howell say you have to treat runners different from other breeds. They ain’t able to tolerate certain kinds of medicine or anaesthesia, need lower doses, you know.”

  “One reason the cops brought the dog there is that Howell insisted on it when he found her alive,” Ricci said. “The clinic is only a few miles from his rescue center out in the boonies. Good break for him, trying to save that dog. Not too convenient for the badges.”

  Megan was looking at him. “Why not?”

  Ricci’s expression seemed to say the answer should have been obvious. “If they’re under orders to keep watch over it, they’d prefer bringing it someplace near an all-night diner, where they can tank up on free coffee and muffins the whole time. If it bleeds out on the way, so much the better. The dog becomes meat. They don’t have to worry about its carcass disappearing from a locked refrigerator drawer in a police lab, but a live animal in a country vet’s infirmary makes them insecure.” He paused a second. “Howell had some strong persuasion, though. The vet’s no bumpkin. Used to be with the San Francisco Zoo. Has a diploma in veterinary forensic pathology. The cops would have to call on somebody like him for the necropsy anyway . . . probably couldn’t find a better qualified man for the job.”

  Megan was thoughtful. “And yet Howell doesn’t know why the police are so interested in the dog, am I right?”

  “Right.”

  “No idea despite his long-standing relationship with the veterinarian.”

  “Right.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand that.”

  There was a crackle of impatience in Ricci’s stillness.

  “Once the vet becomes a fact finder in a criminal investigation it obliges him to clam up,” he said after a moment. “He leaks anything and it’s a violation of professional ethics.”

  “I still think he’d be entitled to a general explanation,” Megan said. “Terrible as it sounds, we’re so focused on Julia, we risk losing sight of what Rob Howell’s suffered. He’s lost his entire family.”

  Ricci turned toward her.

  “You know how tight the cops can be with eyewitnesses in protective custody,” he said. “Maybe the dog had a clear look at the perps and they want her status kept secret till she’s well enough to make them in a lineup.”

  Megan was silent. The sarcasm had caught her off guard.

  “Wasn’t any call for that remark,” Thibodeau said from his opposite side. His large body shifted in his chair. “This ain’t no joke—”

  “Stay out of this.” Ricci cut a hand in his direction, held his gaze on Megan. “You’re the one who might as well be joking. You don’t have the right to speak for me. You don’t know where I’m focused. You don’t know, or act like you don’t know, that the cops are putting an extra-heavy lid on things to keep us out. You sit here throwing words around a table when that e-mail on the wall says everything. We need to get busy.”

  Megan remained quiet, staring back into his eyes. “What’s your recommendation?”

  “We have to get Erickson to share that evidence from the dog. Whether he likes it or not.”

  “I’m convinced,” she said. “But I also prefer we don’t alienate him. He has legal authority over the investigation and—as you’ve implied—can withhold anything he wants from us. We, on the other hand, have no license to meddle. If we plan to get somewhere we need his voluntary permission. Or maybe cooperation’s a better word. And I think the best way to obtain it would be to exert pressure on Erickson through behind-the-scenes channels.”

  “Those channels have names attached to them?”

  Megan nodded. She drew in a breath.

  “Until now I’ve kept any knowledge about the e-mail within our organization to give us elbow room, but that changes tomorrow,” she said. “Since it’s safe to assume Erickson’s department would have put the FBI on alert for possible involvement, I can’t see a reason not to contact our old friend Bob Lang at Quantico in the meantime and ask him off the record to make a request of the local field office. That would be the San Francisco division. It won’t be long before the case winds up under its bailiwick anyway. And at that point they can share evidence with whomever they wish.”

  Thibodeau was nodding as he mulled her words over.

  “Sounds reasonable enough to me,” he said. “Beats going to war with Erickson.”

  Ricci ignored him, continuing to look at Megan as if it were just the two of them in the room.

  “Lang’s your old friend, not mine,” he said. “You want to visit wonderland with him, it’s your choice.”

  A taut silence between them again. Megan’s eyes became narrow.

  “What are you suggesting?” she said.

  Ricci sat a moment, then slowly shrugged and rose from his chair.

  “Nothing,” he said. “You’re the boss, you make the calls. I just want to get back to work.”

  When the phone rang in Derek Glenn’s office, he was at his window admiring the new 120-foot-tall naval ship-yard cranes that soared prominently in his view of the waterfront. They had appeared there about a month earlier, and he hoped it was a permanent spot. Keeping a vigilant and appreciative eye on the cranes had come to occupy a large part of his day, and Glenn supposed that if he ever looked out to discover them farther up or down the harbor—or, worse, altogether gone—it might be a sign he’d have to find something else about the commercial harbor that might be of interest, which had been tough before their arrival. Or something other than standing by the window to keep him occupied. Either way, it would be a development worthy of consideration at UpLink’s San Diego overflow warehouse.

  His lookout interrupted, Glenn went over and lifted the receiver.

  “Yup, I’m here.”

  “Glenn. It’s Tom Ricci.”

  Glenn was surprised. Not a word from the guy for over a year. Then a phone call, a visit, and a second call in the space of a week.

  “Lo and behold,” he said. “Knew I should have explained my picking up the tab the other night was a one-time deal—”

  “I need help.”

  Glenn’s face suddenly became serious.

  “What is it?”

  “Something you maybe don’t want to take on,” Ricci said. “Might not even want to know about, because just knowing puts you in it to where you have advance knowledge.”

  “As in the sort of knowledge that might not be any good for my job status?”

  “Could be,” Ricci said. “Could be that won’t be the worst of it. You say good-bye right now, it’s fine. You decide to take a pass, I’m okay with that, too.”

  “How long do I have to think about this?”

  “Till I hang up the phone,” Ricci said. “If you’re in with me, you have to be up here tonight. Early as possible.”

  Glenn thought it over a few seconds, the receiver cradled against his shoulder, his eyes wandering toward the high, reliable cranes framed by his window.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Let me hear it.”

  A country route near Portola State Park, half past eleven at night, a ground mist spreading over the roots of the oaks and madrones. Under a low roof of clouds the sky was moonless and starless.

  The shingle outside the square, flat, single-story brick building read PARKVILLE VETERINARY CLINIC, KENNETH W. MOORE, D.V.M., PH.D., but there was scarcely enough light seeping from the windows on the clinic’s north side—and from the dashboard of the police cruiser parked out front—for someone even a yard or two away to see the sign with his unaided eye. Discerning the doctor’s name and credentials would be almost imp
ossible.

  In the thick woods that belted the clinic’s parking lot, Ricci would have known what the lettering said without having to use his portable night-vision binoculars—the vet’s name being one among many details he’d marked while driving past the clinic with Rollie Thibodeau almost twelve hours earlier, doing a canvass for reasons he’d kept to himself. Still, he found the definition with which it appeared in the high-mag, IR-boosted illuminator tubes exceptional. A clear, close, fully stereoscopic image. It was not so many years ago that night vision optics gave you green ghosts moving among ghost-objects and a poor sense of their spacial relationships. The ability to read a sign in pitch darkness at fifty yards and judge its distance was an asset he would have coveted as a SEAL, and later as a Beantown homicide cop. He did not take it for granted.

  But now Ricci’s gaze held on the sign for only a moment before shifting elsewhere. A single prowl car did not automatically mean that two cops inside made up the entire watch. There could be others on foot patrol, though he’d have bet against it.

  Beside him, Glenn’s thoughts were running to the contrary as he scanned the wide pool of shadows around the clinic through his own NV binocs. A hidden frown creased his brow under a black nylon balaclava.

  “This just doesn’t wash,” he said in a hushed voice. He lowered the glasses and normal darkness poured into his eyes. “The police have a murder on their hands. The daughter of a famous businessman kidnapped. A war hero. And you tell me there might be important evidence in that animal hospital. But they’ve got one cruiser guarding it. No backup I can see.”

  Ricci looked over at him.

  “As of this minute, it isn’t an official kidnapping,” he whispered. “Tomorrow there’ll be feds all over the place.”

  “Still . . .”

  “Don’t think UpLink. Or U.S. Army,” Ricci said. “Think small-town police force. They haven’t got many resources. Don’t have a clue anybody besides Howell knows the dog’s alive, being kept here in the middle of nowhere.”

  A grunt. Glenn raised his lenses again. Both cops were slouched against their headrests, relaxed, chatter from their police radio faintly reaching the trees. They had their windows open—the driver’s window lowered about a third of the way, his partner’s almost completely down on the other side.