Until Judgment Day

by Christine McGuire

Years before, the friend had tracked credit-card charges to find escaped murderer Robert Simmons. When Mackay had asked how she got such prompt results, Escalante had said, “I made him a promise I won’t mind keeping.”

  “I’ll ask him to find out where R-O-L does its banking,” Escalante volunteered now. “Maybe we can track them down that way.”

  “Do I know this wannabe-cop VISA investigator?” Miller asked.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Then I’ll go along as backup.”

  “Not necessary, I can handle it.”

  “That’s what bothers me, Chiquita.” Miller crushed the mutilated Camel and stuffed it back in the pack.

  Granz leaned forward in his chair, rested his elbows and forearms on the desk, and squeezed his shaky hands together. “Jazzbo, run an NCIC computer search for similars, and check the Secretary of State’s corporate database for R-O-L.”

  “Will do. Other states, too, in case Escalante’s hotshot doesn’t come through. If it’s a U.S. corporation, it’s chartered someplace.”

  Escalante ignored the pointed comment. “A lot of them are in the Caribbean, like OnLineCasino-dotcom. Not only that, but anybody can operate a web casino out of any place with electricity and a phone line—they can be anything from a one-man scam in a bedroom or garage to a legitimate, tax-paying international consortium at Monte Carlo or Las Vegas.”

  “Check FBI and Interpol organized crime units,” Granz told her.

  Mackay was shaking her head. “Casino fraud or not, I still don’t buy it’s a paid hitter.”

  “Why not?” Granz challenged.

  “MOs are too different.”

  “Pros adapt.”

  “Maybe, but why torture Benedetti and Duvoir instead of executing them quick and making a clean getaway?”

  “The casino’s sending a message—don’t welch on bets or you’ll get the same. And if they think someone besides Thompson, Benedetti, and Duvoir stiffed them, and if they did contract out a hit, there’s going to be more dead priests if we don’t ID the shooter damn fast.”

  Escalante agreed. “I’ll contact the IFCC.”

  “The what?” Mackay wanted to know.

  “Internet Fraud Complaint Center—the FBI and National White Collar Crime Center—set up a cyber-crime clearinghouse. Victims log on, submit complaint information, IFCC evaluates it and disseminates cases to the proper jurisdiction for investigation and prosecution.”

  “Why don’t the Feds prosecute?”

  “Cyber-crooks are several steps ahead of Congress—most Internet offenses aren’t federal crimes yet.”

  “How do they decide whose jurisdiction a crime occurred in?” Mackay asked.

  “It isn’t easy. The game’s web server can be in one state or country, but controlled by a perp at a second location, even from a laptop or cell phone, while the victim’s in a third jurisdiction.”

  “Jesus! I just figured out how to e-mail my kid and wire-transfer child support payments to my ex,” Miller complained.

  Then he added, “I oughta retire while I’m smart as the bad guys.”

  “You’re too young to retire.” The corners of Escalante’s mouth lifted a little. “An Internet perp can run the con, pull down the web site in seconds, and vanish without a trace. With IFCC, victims can report crime the same way it occurred—on-line, at the speed of light.”

  “What good’s that do us?”

  “IFCC keeps cyber-crime stats and patterns in a central repository available to law enforcement. If similar Internet scams or e-mail threats have been reported, they’re most likely in IFCC, not NCIC or Interpol. I’ll check it out before you waste time chasing dead ends.”

  “Anything else?” Mackay asked.

  No one spoke up.

  “I’ll call Menendez, see what DOJ came up with on evidence recovered at the crime scenes. You free to run out to the lab with me tomorrow morning, Dave?”

  Granz’ vacant, glazed eyes stared out the window. He was chewing furiously on nothing, as if someone had slipped him a piece of old shoe leather instead of a T-bone.

  “Dave?” she repeated.

  He continued to stare.

  She stood and touched him on the shoulder. He jerked, blinked his eyes, and ran the back of a hand over his lips. “Did you say something?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “What—sure. I was thinking.”

  “One more thing,” Miller said. “In an orange jail jumpsuit Davidson looks like all the other scum-bags. Some fudge packer claims him as a punk and he beefs, you’ll have a dead Bishop in your jail.”

  “The Bishop won’t fight back.” Granz leaned back in his desk chair and pressed the heels of his hands into both temples. “Have him put in Q before lockdown,” he ordered Miller.

  “You got it.”

  When Miller and Escalante left, Mackay stood behind her husband’s chair, massaged his shoulders, and felt his forehead with her fingers. “No fever. What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t feel well, must’ve been what I had for lunch.”

  “What did you eat?”

  “Miller, Fields and I went to Sophia’s for burritos, beans, rice and chips.”

  “That’d do it to me.”

  “I think I’ll lie down for a few minutes.”

  “Good idea, Babe. As soon as I get done with Keefe, I’ll stop by.”

  Chapter 21

  MILLER POKEDESCALANTE’S shoulder playfully as they headed down the elevator. “I’ll drive you to San Jose to see that VISA investigator.”

  “I told you I can handle it.”

  “And I told you that bothers me.”

  “You sound jealous.”

  His ruddy face reddened. “I’m playin’ a gig tonight at Bo’s Alley Jazz Club, maybe you’d like to stop by and listen.”

  “Are you asking me for a date, Lieutenant Miller?”

  “You ain’t heard a trombone till you hear mine.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “We work together.”

  “I asked you to listen to me play trombone, not to bump uglies.”

  “You’ve got a real way with words.” She thought about it. “What time?”

  Chapter 22

  GRANZ WAS ASLEEP when Mackay returned. She sat on the sofa beside him and stroked his head.

  His eyes fluttered open and he flashed one of the lopsided smiles she’d fallen in love with years before. “What time is it?”

  She checked her watch. “Four-thirty.”

  “I’ve been asleep two hours?”

  “You needed it.”

  “Did Keefe sign warrants to grab the computers?”

  “Yeah, but I had to listen to his new tough-on-crime speech. Fields and one of your detectives are serving them as we speak.”

  “What took you so long?”

  “I needed to discuss something with Escalante, then I stopped at my office and called a travel agent. How would you like to wake up New Year’s Day in a tropical paradise, eat some great food, lie on the beach every day, and make love every night?”

  “Sounds great. I could use a few days off.”

  “I’ll say.”

  He sat up and swung his legs over onto the floor. “But we’ve gotta go to DOJ tomorrow.”

  “I asked Miller and Escalante to handle it. By the way, have you noticed they’ve got a thing going?”

  “Yeah. Makes the Odd Couple seem like Ozzie and Harriet by comparison.”

  “For sure.” She dug in her handbag and handed him a Pacific Harbor Travel envelope. “Wendy arranged it—we leave tomorrow.”

  “Where and for how long?”

  “Five nights in Manzanillo, Mexico, at the Las Hadas Beach Resort. It’s where the movie 10 was filmed. Remember that?”

  “No man could forget Bo Derek in a bikini.”

  She smiled at his attempt at levity, but told him seriously, “I’m worried about you, Dave. Really worried.”

  “No n
eed.” He sat up. “A few days alone with you is exactly what I need. I feel better already.”

  Chapter 23

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1:00 P.M.

  SANTA RITA

  “YOU PLAYED GREAT LAST NIGHT. Dinner was good, too. ¡Muchas gracias!” Escalante told Miller.

  “De nada, Chiquita.” He piloted his VW Passat south on Highway One through light New Year’s Eve traffic.

  “Please don’t call me Chiquita.”

  “What should I call you?”

  “‘Inspector’ when we’re around others.”

  “What if we’re alone?”

  “Me llama Doña Luisa.”

  “I thought it was Donna.”

  “My mother Anglicized it when our family immigrated to the U.S.”

  “Doña then, if you call me James.”

  “Me gusta. Diego Es un nombre fuerto.”

  She touched a bandage on his arm with a slim brown finger. “¿Qué es?”

  “Nicoderm patch—I quit smoking.”

  “¡Excelente! ¿Por que?”

  “Why!” He sneaked a peek at her out of the corner of his eye. “Because beautiful women don’t go for guys who smell like ashtrays.”

  “Es verdad.”

  They rode in self-conscious silence to 46A Research Drive, where the unblinking eyes of fence-top cameras stood silent watch over the DOJ complex that cops called Building 46A.

  The lab commanded a breathtaking view to the west, where the collapsing winter sun stretched horizontal orange and purple bands across the afternoon horizon.

  They punched an intercom button at the top of a five-step concrete landing. A uniformed Barney Fife look-alike checked their IDs, logged them in, and buzzed Criminalist Roselba Menendez’ workstation.

  Menendez was a little pudgy with brown skin, white teeth, and a Spanish accent. She wore white Reeboks, blue jeans, and a black Hollister Harley-Davidson T-shirt with a stylized iron horse spitting out smoke in puffy letters that read, RIDE ME HARD, I CAN TAKE IT.

  “Nice to see you again, Lieutenant,” she told Miller, then acknowledged Escalante. “Inspector.”

  “Have you scientific whiz kids tied those church murders together for us good guys yet?” Miller asked her.

  “We just analyze the evidence,” she retorted. “It’s you good guys’ job to figure out what it means.”

  “I was hopin’ you’d solved ’em by now.”

  “If I did, what would they pay you for?” She led them through a vast, open-floor-plan office jammed with desks, filing cabinets, and computers, past a swinging half-gate into a hallway lined with doors, a few of which stood ajar exposing an array of mysterious scientific equipment.

  She stopped at a sign that read FIREARMS AND BALLISTICS, punched her ID code into a keypad, swung the door open, escorted them inside, and stopped at a metal workbench with swiveling stools. “Let’s review the evidence chronologically,” Menendez suggested. “First, the shooter got in and out of Reverend Thompson’s rectory clean as a whistle—the Woods Lamp picked up no transfers, and the vacuum bags didn’t contain any forensically significant trace evidence.”

  She picked up a highly magnified black-and-white photograph of a bullet, with a plastic evidence bag containing the bullet stapled to the corner.

  “This is the slug Doctor Nelson removed from Thompson’s head at autopsy. Rifling twist, lands and grooves confirm it was fired from a .25-caliber Beretta automatic.”

  Menendez indicated several spots on the picture, surrounded by circles of black ink. “Microscopic manufacturing imperfections gouged these marks into the bullet as it transited the barrel. All gun barrels have unique flaws. I can match this slug to the weapon it was fired from if you can find it.”

  “Not much help,” Miller complained. “Most cops I know, including me, carry Beretta .25s off-duty.”

  “That’s what I carry,” Escalante confirmed. “So do half the criminals on the street. They’re cheap and easy to conceal.”

  Menendez picked up a pistol. “This is the Colt Python from Holy Cross.” She made a logbook entry to maintain the chain of custody and loaded a cartridge.

  “Let’s test-fire it.”

  She stuck the barrel into a rubber sleeve that opened into a tank of water and fired a bullet. Then she laid the pistol aside and fished the slug from the tank. Finally she mounted the slug on a glass slide alongside the bullet from the gymnasium floor.

  Sliding them side by side under an optical comparison microscope as she peered into the twin lenses, she twisted the scope’s knurled knobs to align the bullets and adjust the focus.

  “They match,” she declared, looking up and squinting to recapture her distance vision. “You’ve got the weapon that killed Benedetti but I already examined it—no fingerprints and the serial numbers have been obliterated.”

  “Raise ’em with acid,” Miller suggested.

  “I tried, but whoever did it removed too much metal.”

  “Send it to the FBI.” Miller tempered his advice: “No offense intended.”

  “None taken, but if I can’t raise them, they can’t be raised. The weapon’s untraceable. There is some good news.”

  “We could use it,” Escalante commented.

  Menendez motioned for them to follow her to a metal rolling cart where a high-tech slide projector was hooked up to a laptop computer through a USB cable.

  She flipped on the projector’s power switch. Its fan whirred, its lamp flared, and a blurry shoe print, with a twelve-inch ruler laid beside it on the hardwood floor, slowly sharpened into focus on the pull-down wall screen.

  “Yamamoto’s a pit bull,” she said with unabashed admiration. “He photographed every wet shoe print at the Benedetti crime scene with his camera perfectly perpendicular to the gym floor, at exactly the same height.”

  She scrolled through a series of slides, each of a shoe print with the same twelve-inch ruler alongside to establish size and perspective.

  “None of ’em are good enough to ID,” Miller said.

  “No one print is, that’s true. Yamamoto suggested I piece them together, using legible slices from each print. When my software constructed the entire right-shoe print using his technique, I got this.”

  Menendez punched a computer key. From a single blurry print, the computer program started sliding out indistinguishable sections and replacing them with legible slices from the same locations on other prints. The program sent an “operation completed” message and the screen displayed a perfect right-shoe print.

  “I ran the composite through the Idaho State Police shoe outsole tread pattern database. Bingo. Nike Airliners, size ten.”

  “Pretty impressive for a techie lab rat,” Miller told her. “But there must be thousands of Nike Airliners in Santa Rita.”

  “Not exactly like this one. As shoes wear, rocks, metal, glass, and other surface imperfections erode the tread and change the original design with random cuts, scratches, nicks, and dings—we call them ‘individual identifying characteristics.’

  “A person’s gait also impacts the pattern,” she went on. “By the time a shoe’s got a few miles on it, the tread pattern’s unique. If you find me the shoe soon enough, I’ll positively ID it.”

  “That’s a start,” Miller said. “Now, all us good guys gotta do is find the one guy in the entire world, wherever he is, who owns that Beretta and those Nikes before he wears ’em much more, borrow ’em for comparison, and our job’s wrapped up. No big deal.”

  “Maybe if the ‘good guys’ turned the investigation over to the ‘good gals’ you’d get better results.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  She handed each of them a closeup shot of the disassembled dead-bolt lock off the gym’s side door, which highlighted a number of tiny scratches and gouges.

  “Sheriff Granz had good instincts. These are fresh tool marks on the pins and tumblers,” Menendez explained. “This lock was picked recently by someone who knew what he was doing, probably usin
g a professional pick gun.”

  “Any two-bit burglar can buy one on the Internet usin’ a hot credit card,” Miller told her, then asked, “If you had the tool, could you ID it?”

  “I doubt it, they normally don’t leave distinctive tool marks. Pick gun needles and tension tools are interchangeable and disposable.”

  “Anything helpful come out of the Duvoir crime scene?”

  “CSI recovered three slugs—two embedded in the pavement beneath Duvoir’s knees. They were badly deformed, although the rifling and lands and grooves are identical to the third—it passed through his chest and lodged in a wooden post, and was in good condition. A high-velocity M-118 full metal jacket fired from a Remington .308 rifle.”

  “Most police TAC and sniper units use Remington 700s and metal-jacketed ammo. You think our perp’s a cop or ex-cop?”

  Menendez contemplated, chewing the inside of her cheek. “It’s not impossible. The same rifle and ammunition in military configuration are used by Army and Marine Corps snipers. European military forces, too, but they call the rifle the NATO 7.62 millimeter. Add the civilian hunting version, and millions of those rifles are out there. Half the ex-military Rambo sharpshooters probably have one in their closets at home.”

  “God bless the Second Amendment,” Miller said.

  “Anything else?” Escalante asked.

  “I’m afraid that’s it,” Menendez said.

  “Then we ain’t got diddly squat.” Miller reached for his shirt pocket, then glanced sheepishly at Escalante and touched the Nicoderm patch. “I forgot I quit the Humps.”

  “The what?”

  “The Humps—Camels.”

  On the way back to Miller’s car, Escalante said, “Sheriff Granz was right.”

  “’Bout what?”

  “He said the shooter’s too smart to leave a calling card.”

  “Looks like. Speaking of—where’d Granz and Mackay go?”

  “Manzanillo, on Mexico’s Pacific coast—the Las Hadas Beach Resort.”

  “We oughta go there someday,” he said, staring at her.

  She smiled and her face flushed. “Are you leering at me, Lieutenant?”

  “Moi?” he said innocently, touching his chest with a forefinger. “So, should we consider it?”