The Pain Scale

by Tyler Dilts

  “Tropov,” he said, “is my cousin. He promised much work for us. Good work on the docks. Longshoreman. Legitimate.” There was a heavy sadness in his voice, and his regret seemed to thicken the air in the small room. “That’s what it seemed like at first. Loading trucks. Driving van. Delivery. Things like that.”

  “But...” Kincaid let the single word sit there.

  “Yes, there is ‘but’ always.” Turchenko looked at the three of us. Whether he realized that winning our sympathies was not only impossible but pointless as well, or whether he just got tired of speaking, I don’t know. He gave up on the story of his tragic fall from grace at the hands of the dark side of the American Dream and got right to the point.

  “Tropov hired us to kill the wife.”

  “Which Tropov?” I asked.

  “Anton.”

  “Just Anton? What about his cousin, Yevgeny?” At the mention of the other Tropov’s name, Turchenko’s eyes widened. I couldn’t be sure it was fear, but it might have been. He was certainly surprised by the fact that someone might think him associated with Yevgeny.

  “No, no. Anton only.”

  Kincaid asked, “You were hired to kill only Sara Benton?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why kill the children?”

  “They saw Taras,” Turchenko said, staring down at the dull metal surface of the table. “His face.” He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness, as if we were sure to understand that they just had to kill Bailey and Jacob after the children had seen their faces. They just had to. I mean, what else could anyone do in that situation? We’d all do the same, right?

  I had to hand it to Kincaid. He played the moment perfectly enough that even Pfister seemed surprised. The DDA nodded so sympathetically that, for a moment, I thought he might actually be sincere. “Of course,” he said so quietly that it was almost inaudible. “What else could you do?”

  They looked at each other, Turchenko and Kincaid, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if they’d gone on to share a good cry. They didn’t, but I knew we’d just had a major break.

  Turchenko not only rolled on Tropov but pled out. He agreed to life with the possibility of parole instead of life without, and Kincaid promised him that, for his protection, he’d be segregated from the general prison population for as long as he was incarcerated.

  After the guard re-cuffed him and escorted him out of the room, Kincaid looked at Jen and said, “I hope the judge will go for that.”

  “Me too,” she replied.

  It would have to be officially approved by the DA and a judge, and the LBPD brass would have a say as well. The feds, too. It could be vetoed by any of them. The downside of the deal would be that the case was close to a slam dunk. It would be hard to imagine a situation in which he wouldn’t go down for life. The death penalty was even a strong possibility. But the big sacrifice the higher-ups would be making was a closed case. For Jen and me, and even for Kincaid, following the trail to whoever ultimately decided to kill Sara Benton was of the utmost importance. From a political standpoint, it was a better bet to stick a needle in the arm of the big scary foreigner and call it a triumph of the justice system.

  But that wouldn’t get us Tropov. And whoever pulled his strings.

  “What do you think the odds are?” I asked.

  “Hard to say.” Kincaid fastened the latches on his briefcase. “I think my boss will be happy with the plea. There are a lot of other fingers in the pie, though...”

  We stood by the door and waited for the guard to escort us out.

  “When was the last time you ate an actual vegetable?” Jen asked me after we picked up takeout from Carnitas Michoacan across the street and down the block from the station. The place was no Enrique’s, not even close. But what the food lacked in quality it made up for in convenience.

  “There’s corn in the tortillas,” I said. “And I’m gonna have at least a tablespoon of salsa.”

  “Oh,” she said, “my bad.”

  “What do you think about Tropov?” I said as we stood on the corner of Broadway and Cedar waiting for the light to change. We’d parked in the department garage and walked over before heading upstairs.

  “I can’t see him having an angle. There’s no connection between him and the Bentons at all.”

  “My thoughts exactly. I’m betting he’s just a contractor in this, piecing the work off to Shevchuk and Turchenko. What else fits?”

  “Well, Bob’s already on the warrant for Tropov, so we’ll pick him up and sort it out later.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  There must have been something unfinished in the way I spoke, because when I didn’t continue, Jen said, “What?”

  “If Tropov’s the contractor, did he have Shevchuk killed, or was it whoever he was working for?”

  “I don’t know. But we better get to figuring it out.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “That’s your job,” she said. “I’m just here to nag people about balanced diets.”

  Upstairs, we filled in Ruiz and the rest of the squad while we ate our lunch and waited on Kincaid for the arrest warrant for Tropov.

  The lieutenant shared our concerns about closing the case. “But we still have Shevchuk and the Seal Beach SUV cases. Even if they reject the plea and decide to pin the whole thing on Turchenko,” he said, the Texas creeping back into his voice, “we’ve still got irons in the fire.”

  He looked at Marty. “Anything new on the SUV?”

  “Found out more about the green footprint tattoo,” Marty said, tipping back a venti Starbucks cup.

  I wasn’t sure if he’d eaten and felt a momentary twinge of guilt at the fact that we didn’t ask anyone if they wanted us to bring any food back for them. I stifled a burp, though, and the feeling passed.

  Marty went on. He wasn’t sure how much Patrick and Dave knew about the tat, so he covered the connection with air force Pararescue and a bit of the history we’d found on the web. “Funny thing, though—if you’re a real PJ, you only ever get the footprints on your ass. But not everybody knows that. The word from my guy is that they see anybody with the footprints anyplace other than a butt cheek, they take them out in the alley and kick the shit out of them.”

  “Or maybe make them pull the getaway car over and blow their brains all over the windshield?” Dave asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Could be that the tat was only part of it. We know the driver fucked up. The shooter knew, too. He should have been able to lie down in the backseat with his rifle across his chest as they calmly pulled out of the parking lot. But the driver blew it. Even after that, he should have been able to lose us. If he’d researched the route or had any tactical driving skills, we wouldn’t have been able to stay on them. The shooter knew all this, too. And he’d already seen the footprints on the driver’s arm. That’s three strikes.”

  “Does that mean the shooter’s Pararescue?” Jen asked.

  “Either him or someone close to him,” Dave said. “He’s got the training. Don’t forget the way he disappeared into the wilds of Seal Beach even with two helicopters, three dozen uniforms, and a couple of canine units looking for him.”

  For me, that was the most compelling piece of information. Special forces evasion training helped that make sense.

  “So,” Marty asked, “how do we start working the PJ angle?”

  “With the congressman,” I said. “The bio on his webpage mentions his having served in the air force.”

  “Does it say anything about his unit?” Marty asked.

  “No. And there’s only one brief mention. Something about a period of service between college and law school.”

  Jen asked, “What kind of politician only gives their military service a passing mention in their official bio?”

  “He didn’t have an Other Than Honorable discharge, did he?” Patrick said.

  “No. If it was anything like that, it wouldn’t be there at all,” Ruiz said.

  “It’s
someone who’s proud of what he did in the service,” I said, “but isn’t allowed to talk about it.”

  While we continued to wait for the arrest warrant on Tropov, we reorganized our priorities. We wanted to talk to the congressman about air force Pararescue, but first we had to check out his actual service record and look for any other possible connections between him and any other Person of Interest on the case and the PJs. We needed to be sure we’d found all the angles before we questioned him. None of us had finished cross-referencing our location data from the green-footprinted SUV driver yet, either. And we still hadn’t explored the DVD we had recovered from the safe. We needed to find and interview everyone involved. Especially the girl Bradley had raped. And we still needed to look for more of Bradley’s victims. None of us who’d seen the deposition believed that the sexual assault being detailed was his first. And those were just the afternoon’s priorities.

  So the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk was check CalBungalow.com to see if there were any new listings Jen might be interested in. There was a terrific Spanish Revival bungalow in California Heights that was brand-new. It was a little bigger and slightly over her budget, but I couldn’t recall working a case with her anywhere too close to the neighborhood. It looked like a good possibility to me. I e-mailed the link to her. She had three or four already in her inbox that she hadn’t yet commented on.

  Marty and Dave were out of the office, and Jen had gone downstairs.

  Patrick and I were the only ones in the squad room, and he had been clacking away at his keyboard. He looked over at me and asked, “How far have you gotten with those location logs from the driver’s iPhone?”

  “Not far,” I said. “Why?”

  “Because I’ve got the database here sorting it for us. Give me a couple of hours, and I think I’ll get what we need out of the files.”

  “Sweet.” I wasn’t sure if he really had the impression that I was going to dive into the data, but I didn’t do anything to disabuse him of the notion.

  I opened my browser’s bookmarks and clicked on the congressman’s website again and found the passing reference to his USAF service. It was just as I had remembered—a brief, single mention: “After graduating from UCLA, Congressman Benton enlisted in the United States Air Force before returning to law school at Stanford.” That was it. The more I thought about it, the more I believed our theory fit and that he might indeed have been a Pararescue jumper during his enlistment. We’d find out soon enough.

  “Hey,” I said to Patrick. “Did we ever finish the background on Roger Kroll?”

  “Good question,” he said. We both started searching our notes and files. “It doesn’t look like it. Why? You have something on your mind?”

  “Did he do any military service?”

  “I don’t know.” His fingers started clacking on the keys again.

  Before he looked up again, Jen came back into the room. “Just got the call from Bob. We’re good to go on the arrest. They want to take a SWAT dangerous-warrant team.”

  “You call it in?” I asked. “They good to go?”

  She nodded. “Ruiz, too. We’re meeting them a few blocks over from Tropov’s warehouse. Going in hard.”

  “You want to come?” I said to Patrick.

  He hesitated just long enough for it to be noticeable, then stood up and said, “Yeah,” with an enthusiasm none of us bought. The ATM shooting still had him rattled.

  Jen looked at me, and I tried to indicate that I thought it was a good thing that he was ready to step back up to the plate. I don’t think she got it, though, because all I saw was a question in her eyes. Then Patrick caught us trying to figure out each other’s expressions, and I tried to break the awkwardness by tossing the keys to the unmarked cruiser we’d checked out that morning and saying, “You drive.”

  It didn’t work, and the weird uneasiness followed us all the way down in the elevator and into the garage.

  Patrick finally lightened the mood by saying, “If this one gets his head blown off, too, I’m going back to Computer Crimes.”

  “What do you mean he’s not in there?” I asked the SWAT sergeant on the scene. His name was Phillips. We knew each other but hadn’t worked together.

  “There’s someone inside.” He plopped a Panasonic Toughbook down on the hood of his Police Interceptor, flipped the screen up, and hit a button on the keyboard. “It’s just not him.” He spun the notebook computer toward us. “It’s this guy.”

  Someone had snapped a photo of a man sitting behind Anton’s desk. They must have used a telephoto lens, because it looked like a close-up. And I could easily recognize the face.

  “You know him?” Phillips asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well?”

  Jen answered for me. “That’s Anton’s cousin. Yevgeny Tropov.”

  “What do you want us to do?”

  “Can we sit on him for a while?”

  “For a couple of hours,” Phillips said. “After that, we’ll need to get a surveillance authorized. You want us to stay on him or on the warehouse?”

  I looked at Jen. “What do you suppose Anton knows?”

  “At the very least, he knows Turchenko’s got a new lawyer,” she said.

  “And if he knows that, he must know there’s a good chance he flipped.”

  “Stay on Yevgeny,” I said. “We’ll go back to the station and try to get a full surveillance authorization. You call us if he moves, and we’ll call you as soon as we get authorization for a new operation.”

  “You got it,” he said.

  “So you think Anton’s in the wind and we need to tail his cousin?” Ruiz asked.

  “Yes,” Jen said.

  “What are you asking for?”

  “Everything,” I said. “Wire and cell taps. GPS smartphone tracking. Twenty-four seven eyes-on surveillance.”

  “If I can’t get the captain to go for a full team, you think it’s important enough to sit on him yourself?”

  Jen and I had talked about that on the ride back to the station. The decision hinged on what strategy we thought was most likely to get us to Anton. Would we be better off staking out Yevgeny and hoping he’d lead us to his cousin, or would the chances be better if we pursued other strategies? As long as we were staking out a suspect, we’d be pretty much useless in any other capacity.

  “Probably not. If Anton is hiding, then he’s enough of a pro to know we’ll be looking at Yevgeny, and it’s not likely they’ll meet,” I said.

  “I think we’ll get the taps, but probably not the team,” Ruiz said. “Let me make the calls.”

  He was right. When Phillips checked in a few hours later, I told him to wrap it up. The GPS tracking had been authorized and we’d be able to monitor Yevgeny’s movements through his smartphone, assuming the Android in his name at Verizon was actually the one he was carrying. I suspected he’d be sharp enough to dump it somewhere and carry a throwaway. Or maybe even to plant it on a decoy. I thought maybe I’d try sitting on his house for a while on my way home.

  Jen and I were back at our desks. Marty and Dave were still out. Ruiz told us they were working leads on another case. No new murders had come in since the Bentons’. That was good, but the squad still had half a dozen active open cases. We couldn’t put them on the back burner for very long. No matter how high profile our current case was, the other victims were every bit as dead as Sara and the children. And they deserved every bit as much effort no matter how much wealth and influence they didn’t have.

  “Here we go,” Patrick said softly. I couldn’t tell if he was speaking to us or to himself.

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “I think we might have something,” he said.

  “What?” Jen asked.

  “I entered every address that came up anywhere in our records on the Bentons and had the database cross-reference it with every address in the location logs from the driver’s phone.”

  We waited for him to go on. He didn�
��t.

  “And?” I said.

  “And the only match was an address at Olympic and Avenue of the Stars in Century City. He was there for about three hours last week.”

  “Is that location supposed to mean something to us?” I was trying to keep the frustration out of my voice and not doing a very good job.

  He picked up on it and got right to the point. “Sternow and Byrne,” he said. “That’s their building.”

  “There was an article in the LA Times several months ago. I think it got a little TV play, too,” I said.

  Patrick, Jen, and I had managed to corner Ruiz on his way out of the office. He had been ready to go—sleeves rolled back down, suit coat on again, briefcase in hand. But when he saw the three of us, he took off his jacket, let out a barely audible sigh, and sat back down behind his desk.

  “Do you have a link to the article online?” he asked.

  “Not yet. I will, though, and I’ll get it to you ASAP,” I said.

  “Give me the gist of it.”

  “Sternow and Byrne were huge and getting even bigger. They bought one of the smaller private military firms that had been operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Said they were going to turn it into a security, investigation, and protection arm that would work with clients worldwide. The international angle was a big part of how they were justifying the whole deal.”

  “How much did they pay?”

  “Nobody knows. The PMF was privately owned, and apparently the sale actually took place out of the country. Didn’t have to report anything.”

  “Danny,” Ruiz asked, “what do you want to do with this?”

  “First, we have the driver at their headquarters. Maybe he’s ex-military and trying to impress people with the green footprints. Or maybe with something else, but he was there. Also, there have to be government connections. Is the congressman tied to them in any way other than by his personal attorney? Are there any business connections? Any congressional wheels getting greased with the PMF purchase? We need everything from their employment records on up.”