Cold Hit (2005)

by Stephen - Scully 05 Cannell

  Detective Quinn was turning red with anger, but to her credit, her expression didn’t change. She took a breath and held his gaze. “It was checked out of our motor pool to CTB.”

  “I give up.” Underwood was getting snotty now. “Counter Terrorism Bureau,” she clarified. “They’re upstairs on four.”

  Underwood started rubbing his forehead with a freckled hand. “What the hell is going on here? Did we just accidentally stumble into some multinational antiterrorism case?”

  Nobody answered.

  “Who in CTB checked the car out of your motor pool?” he asked Sally, holding up the two pictures of the Forest Lawn workers. “Was it these two? Did you get their names or did you even bother to ask?”

  “Don’t know who they are, sir. It was checked out on what they call a blind borrow.” Detective Quinn’s voice was strained. She’d had her fill.

  “I wanta know who these two people are. If they’re cops, I want their names.” Underwood was apoplectic, waving the digital pictures at us.

  After a long silence, I volunteered. “Homicide Special shares the floor with CTB. I’ve gotten to know a few people. You want, I could wander around up there and see if I can find out who these guys are.”

  “Hey … that sure sounds like a plan.” Underwood rolled his eyes in undisguised frustration.

  I glanced at my fellow task force members. They all wore deadpans that would have won poker tournaments in Vegas.

  I went upstairs and wandered around with our digital prints stashed out of sight in a manila folder. CTB was divided into two sections. The operational side was a regular squad room with partitions, which housed your basic, high-testosterone, door-kicking commando types. Across the main aisle from them was the Intelligence Section. It was a cluttered cube farm full of nerdy boys and girls with fluorescent tans, plastic belts, and intense expressions.

  The way it was explained to me, CTB Intelligence worked on background, accessing computer data banks, and looking for known associates of terrorist cell members. Once a new list of potential bomb throwers was compiled, Intelligence would turn it over to Operations. Operations would then make a determination on which targets looked promising and the lieutenant in charge would assign one of the surveillance squads for a twenty-four-hour look-see. Sometimes they’d spot the target buying drugs. Sometimes they were conspiring with other known terrorists or buying street guns. Sometimes they were just picking up prostitutes. Whatever the crime, Operations would arrest them and pull them in for questioning.

  What CTB had learned since 9/11, was that once a terrorist was arrested, most hardcore operations like Al Qaeda would never deal with him again. One minor bust, even one that didn’t stick, eliminated a cell member forever. As a result, the terrorist cells were so busy rebuilding, they didn’t get around to running plays.

  I walked slowly down the corridors looking for a friendly face; somebody that I could show my packet of photos to. Then I looked up. Coming right toward me was the handsome black detective from Forest Lawn. He was now wearing a snazzy designer suit with an open-collared blue silk shirt. Fruity cologne trailed him like expensive exhaust. After he passed, the guy flicked an F-stop glance back in my direction.

  We have ignition.

  I followed him into his small, cluttered cubicle. He was taking off his coat and settling behind his desk as I came through the doorway.

  “Something I can do for you?” he asked.

  Instead of answering, I dropped his picture on the desk in front of him.

  Chapter 22

  I settled into the chair on the opposite side of the partner’s desk in his cubicle, and gave him my best blank stare.

  There was a long moment while he tried to decide how he wanted to play it. I obviously wasn’t going to go away, so he heaved a deep sigh and said, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

  He was one of those guys who had scored big in the gene pool. Mocha skin, square jaw, white teeth, piercing black eyes. But there was also a healthy dose of arrogance.

  I reached into my back pocket, fished out my worn leather badge case and dropped it onto the desktop between us. He did the same. Then we each slid them across the three-foot polished surface at each other.

  He was Roger Broadway, Detective III. On the job since ‘87. The picture looked like it came out of a modeling portfolio. We airmailed our creds back, both plucking badge cases out of the air simultaneously.

  “You don’t have a clue what you stumbled into, Scully. Your John Doe is in good hands. Cut your losses.” I gave him more attitude so he continued. “This is a CTB special op. My best advice is, dial it way down, go back to that task force pinata party you got going, and forget this.”

  “That’s kinda shitty advice, Roger. Especially since I’m working a front-page serial murder, and I got half the deputy chiefs in this building walking around in my asshole with flashlights.” I tapped a picture of the coffin. “So in the spirit of interdivisional cooperation, why don’t you start by putting a hat on this guy for me?”

  “He ain’t Mike Eisner,” Broadway said, holding my gaze. “And he also ain’t one of your Fingertip murders. He’s an international intelligence asset. Beyond that, you don’t have to know.”

  I reached into the envelope and pulled out the rest of the pictures and dropped them onto the desk. “This was a very eclectic turnout.”

  He picked up the pictures of the lumbering Russian in the brown tweed, and the bald man in the blue blazer from the Israeli embassy. He studied them for a second before he shrugged and handed them back to me.

  “I want some answers,” I said. “Why were you there, and why did all these embassy people show up?”

  “Leave it be,” he said softly.

  Yeah, right … I thought. Pushing on then …

  “I think my John Doe victim is a foreign national, possibly Russian. Maybe even Odessa Mafia. I agree, he’s not one of the Fingertip murders, but my bosses want me to keep him in the mix. If I stumbled into a CTB covert op, I can walk softly, but this is still my one-eighty-seven, and the sixth floor wants it put down. So if you hardball me, I’ll be forced to take it to Deputy Chief Ramsey and we can do this hair-pulling thing in his office.”

  “Great White Mike can’t cover you,” he said, but there was worry flickering in his coal-black eyes.

  “Help me and I’ll help you. I have no desire to bitch up your investigation, but I’m not going away, especially after throwing this funeral and watching half the spooks in L. A. show up.”

  “I hope that ain’t no racial epithet.” A smile found the corner of his mouth. “Hate to have to one-eighty-one your Gumby white-slice ass.” Talking about an Internal Affairs complaint.

  “Your best bet of containing me is to trade with me, Roger.”

  “Right. And once that happens and you share our covert information with that buncha literary hopefuls downstairs, how long till it’s on sale at Amazon?”

  “I’ll keep what you tell me strictly between us.”

  A bald-faced lie, because I knew I probably couldn’t do that. I had to report this meeting to Underwood, and he could do anything he pleased with the information. My last line of defense was Alexa, but right now my beautiful wife wasn’t all that happy with me. However, now wasn’t the time to hesitate.

  I pulled out the picture of the attractive blonde who had been sitting in the back of the church and showed it to him. “Teammate?” I asked.

  He didn’t take the picture out of my hand, but I saw another flicker of something in his black eyes.

  Then a shadow fell over me. I looked up. Standing in the doorway was his partner—pencil-thin, bad haircut, hips like a wasp, chewing a soggy toothpick.

  “You’re in my chair, pard.” His Southern accent was thick as pork gravy. All that was missing was the banjo solo from Deliverance.

  I stood up and handed him the packet of pictures. He sorted through them quickly.

  “That puts some hair in the biscuits, don’t it, Rog?”
He glanced over at Broadway.

  “I’m Scully, Homicide Special.”

  “We know who you are, Joe Bob,” he drawled around his toothpick. “You’re the dummy running that mess down on three.”

  “Not running it anymore. We have a cool new FBI leader. Lunar calendars, party hats. Come on down and get a shit cupcake.”

  Broadway said, “This is my partner, Emdee Perry. Emdee is a name, not initials. This cracker’s from the hills a South Carolina, so he ain’t above burnin’ a cross on your lawn. But the motherfucker sure knows how to kick up a shed.”

  “This cracker-bashin’ Oreo finally got somethin’ right,” Emdee deadpanned.

  I knew they were just stalling, putting up smoke, doing the dozens.

  Broadway said, “Detective Scully’s wondering who he was getting set to bury. That’s how far off the pace the boy is.”

  Perry studied me, rolling the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “We ain’t actually getting set t’deal with this fool, are we, Snitch?”

  Then I knew who they were. They had flashy nicknames—Rowdy and Snitch. Two colorful characters who were fast becoming LAPD legends.

  “Don’t make me take this to Deputy Chief Ramsey,” I said. “He has big pressure coming down from the super chief. He won’t like me being stonewalled.”

  “Great White Mike can shit in his hat,” Broadway said. “We report to Deputy Chief Talmadge Burke in Support Services, and he doesn’t like us to stand around and yap about secure cases with people who ain’t been baptized.”

  “I can’t believe you two humps want to start a turf war over a little deal like who my dead guy is. I’m gonna find out anyway.”

  Broadway and Perry exchanged some kind of subliminal look. The trick for them was to only give me info I would eventually discover on my own, and keep the rest hidden. My job was to run a good bluff and get things they shouldn’t reveal.

  Finally, Roger Broadway leaned back in his chair. “Your stiff is named Davide Andrazack. He’s an Israeli black ops agent working for the Mossad. End of story.”

  “Except the guy had a contact lens for an eye condition called Keracotonus. According to our lab he was damn near blind. Are you two trying to tell me that a world-class black ops service like the Mossad is down to hiring blind guys?”

  Emdee Perry cleared his throat, then threw the chewed toothpick into the wastebasket. “Since his eyes went bad, Andrazack don’t work black ops no more,” he said. “These days he’s more of what you’d call an electronic plumber. Fixes computer leaks.”

  “Before he caught the big bus, he was their best guy for E-ops,” Broadway said. “A master cracker.” He glanced at Emdee. “A term of endearment.” Emdee bowed his head magnanimously.

  “Our file on him says he once penetrated Level Four Pentagon security. We think he was in the U. S. scoping the Israeli computers looking for a leak at their embassy.”

  “I’m still not buying this,” I said. “A foreign intelligence agent with a record of hacking Pentagon data gets a visa from our State Department to come over and hack embassy computers? Not in the post nine-eleven world I live in.”

  “You’re over cookin’ the grits here, Joe Bob. Just accept what we’re tellin’ ya and move along,” Emdee said.

  “You guys haven’t heard the last of me. See ya up on six.”

  I started to leave, but Emdee grabbed my arm.

  “He was over here off the books. When they can’t get a visa, the Israelis have been known to drop one a these hog callers in a rubber boat from a mother ship three or four miles offshore and run the man in. Not just the Mossad. Everybody does it. Any given day we got enough unidentified illegal spooks in this town to haunt a house. Idea is, they only stay here long enough to do one quick job, then it’s back to the beach and adios.”

  “INS never knows they were here,” Broadway said. “Only this time, looks like Davide didn’t move quite fast enough and somebody skagged him. Whoever did that piece a work knew it was gonna stir up trouble, so they dressed Davide in homeless clothes and tried to ditch him in your Fingertip case.”

  “End of story,” Emdee said firmly, and glanced at his partner. Neither of them wanted this to progress any further.

  I didn’t mention that we had held back the symbol carved on the chest and that there was no way the espionage community could have dumped Andrazack into our serial murder without knowing about that. Instead, I asked, “If Andrazack’s dead, why are you guys still involved?”

  They looked at each other, and I could see they were through with me.

  “I guess you can just take it up with Great White Mike then,” I said.

  “Tell you what,” Broadway replied. “Why don’t you leave all these pictures with us? We’ll run it past Lieutenant Cubio and if he signs off on you, we’ll give you a call.” Lt. Armando Cubio ran CTB.

  “Make it happen, guys,” I warned. “‘Cause there’s big trouble hiding behind Door Number Two.”

  “Man, I think I just shit my drawers,” Perry drawled.

  Chapter 23

  Are you with the family?” the county psychiatric evaluator asked, looking down at a clipboard with all of Zack’s pertinent information. We were standing in the lobby just outside the secure psychiatric wing of the Queen of Angels Hospital. The doctor was tall and bald, peering at me through rose-colored lenses, which seemed to me like a bad visual metaphor in the sensitive field of mental health. His name tag identified him as Leonard M. Pepper, M. D., but he was pure vanilla.

  “I’m Don Farrell. Zack’s brother,” I lied.

  He found Zack’s brother’s name on the clipboard. “Okay.” He had that kind of spacey, nonconfrontational manner usually found in westside head shops.

  “I’m just wondering how he’s doing.”

  “How he’s doing is a subjective measure of what he’s willing to accept minus what he’s willing to admit to.” Oh, brother.

  “Is he suicidal, for instance?”

  “I’m not sure. He’s very depressed.”

  I tried the direct approach. “Is it possible for me to see him?”

  After a long moment, he nodded and punched a code into the electric door we were standing next to. Once it kicked open he motioned for me to follow him down a narrow corridor that had rooms every thirty feet or so on both sides. The doors were solid metal. Each had an eight-by-ten, green tinted, wire and glass window. As we walked, he droned on.

  “Has your brother ever undergone psychiatric analysis before?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “He said he went through it once in the army.”

  I didn’t know Zack was ever in the army. He’d never mentioned it. I wondered why. But of course I couldn’t say any of that. I was supposed to be his brother. “He never mentioned undergoing analysis in the service,” I dodged.

  Dr. Pepper turned to face me, taking a gold pen out of his pocket. “Was he truant a lot when he was in lower school?”

  “Once or twice, maybe.”

  I was flying blind here. I didn’t want to contribute to an incorrect diagnosis, but a brother couldn’t be completely ignorant, either. I decided to just vague this guy out.

  “Was he often engaged in fights as a child?” “No more than anyone.”

  “What kind of answer is that?” The doctor peered over his rose lenses at me.

  “It’s my answer, Doctor.” Now he was pissing me off.

  “He indicated he had problems with bed-wetting into middle school,” Pepper said. “Do you recall when it stopped happening?”

  “What is this?”

  “Just answer me.”

  “I don’ t remember … I don’ t think so … I don’ t know. I had my own problems. I wasn’t paying attention.” The asshole actually noted that down. “Why don’t you just tell me what the hell you’re getting at?” I demanded.

  He clicked his pen closed. “This is still very preliminary. He’s only been here six or seven hours, but your brother exhibits
signs of cognitive disassociative disorder, along with what might be described as massive clinical depression. The depression is so strong I’m wondering if it might be a calendar reaction stemming from some event in his childhood. Often our subconscious stores dates and revisits them annually through bouts of depression, even though the event itself may be blocked in our memory. Do you remember something severe in his youth that might have caused that?”

  “No,” I said. “All I know is, right now he’s under a lot of stress with his upcoming divorce. He’s having money problems. He’s also afraid he’s losing his relationship with his sons.”

  “If my diagnosis is right, I would doubt any of that is responsible for the depression. Cognitive disassociates don’t treasure emotional relationships. It’s what that behavior is all about. But it’s hard to tell, because right now, he’s just trying to bullshit his way out of here.”

  “But you’re not going to let go of him, are you?” I said, getting this guy’s drift. He was bored with the endless drug overdoses and soccer moms who felt trapped by the monotony of carpools and Saturday sex. He wanted to hang some high-drama diagnosis on Zack, add some excitement to the revolving door litany of petty complaints he was forced to deal with daily.

  “Your brother also may be a narcissistic personality,” he added, really piling it on. “It’s characterized by a predominate focus on self and a lack of remorse or empathy. This is only a preliminary diagnosis, and mind you, I could be wrong, but I want to keep him here for a while to sort it out.”

  He turned and led me further down the hall, stopping in front of a locked door. “Tell your brother he needs to cooperate with me if he wants to go home.”

  Then he took out a keycard and zapped the door open, letting me pass inside alone. I heard the door close and lock behind me.

  Zack was slumped in a white plastic chair next to the window. The cell-like room was a concrete box painted dull white. In a salute to insanity, the bed and dresser were both bolted to the floor. Zack turned his swollen face to look at me. Without saying anything, he returned his gaze to the window and the distant traffic on the 101 freeway half a mile down the gentle slope from the hospital.