“There’s more,” Jessica said. “The amount is not negotiable. Once you agree to pay the money, place a notice in the Classified Section of the LA Times stating that the family of the late Buddy Longo thanks his friends and co-workers for their love and support during our time of grief. When that notice runs, you’ll get further instructions. Until it runs, the killings will continue.”
“The killings will continue,” Rose said. “This is fucking insane.”
Jessica went on. “If you don’t respond within five days, I will notify the media of everything you have tried to keep secret. Mainly, that being associated with Lamaar can be extremely hazardous to your health. After that, we won’t have to kill your people or your customers or your suppliers. They’ll desert you in droves, and that will definitely have a negative impact on your bottom line.”
Jessica set the letter down. “There’s no signature. Nothing else,” she said.
Not a single person in the room had any difficulty processing the clear-cut instructions. Yet, for a good ten seconds, no one said a word. Not even Amy.
Finally, Rose spoke. “He’s right. Thousands of our employees would quit if they thought that working for us would put their lives at risk. That would cripple our operations, but I think we could weather that. And if the public finds out that a woman was murdered in Familyland just because she decided to spend her vacation here, we will lose hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. It would rock this company to its foundations, but I think that long-term we could weather that as well.” His voice was calm. His thought process was no longer driven by emotions. Once again he was a CEO analyzing a business problem. He took another drag on his cigarette. “What we won’t be able to deal with is Wall Street. What investor in his right mind would want to put money into a company whose customers and employees are abandoning it in fear for their lives? Lamaar stock would be in the toilet. Now, wouldn’t that make Danny Eeg happy? Speaking of which, I think this would be a good time to give me an update on where you are with Mr. Eeg.”
I filled him in on Falco’s interview with Eeg. “I’ll be honest,” I said. “Even with his vendetta, Eeg never fit the profile of a serial killer. But this case is no longer just about multiple homicides. Now what we’ve got is an extortion plot.”
“Pay $266.4 million or we’ll cripple your company? I’d say that’s one hell of an extortion plot, Detective.”
“Mr. Rose, we’ve got a lot of new evidence here. LAPD will bring in the FBI and we will do whatever it takes to catch the person or persons behind this,” I said. “And we would strongly urge you not to pay the ransom.”
“I don’t intend to,” he said.
I was a little surprised he had made that decision. Amy was a lot surprised. She let out a little gasp. Rose looked at her, then turned back to me. “I’ve always admired the people who stood up to terrorists and refused to meet their demands. I just never thought I’d be forced to make that decision myself.”
“Sir, excuse me.” Amy was finally talking. “Do you plan to consult with the Board of Directors?”
“I’ll tell the Board what I’ve decided, but I’m not going to put the burden on them,” Rose said. “According to my contract, this is my call, and I repeat, I am not paying the ransom.”
We were seeing a different side of Amy. The Corporate Kiss-Ass obviously disagreed with her boss’s decision and she was letting him know it. “But, sir, the ransom note says that if you don’t pay, they’ll keep killing people connected with Lamaar.”
“Yes, I know,” Rose said. Then he turned to me and Terry. “That puts the pressure on you, gentlemen. Find out who’s behind this. And find out fast.”
He dropped his cigarette on the floor, stepped on it, and walked out of the room.
II.
BOILING THE BUNNY
CHAPTER 57
We were back in the office by 8 p.m. The chopper deposited us on the roof of the Federal Building and another pair of uniforms picked us up in a black and white. This was a male-female team. It was the first time I’d ever met them, but I’d bet anything they were teaming up after their shift was over.
Terry agreed. “Hell, yeah. Did you see his body language? He practically announced that he’s banging her.”
“And I thought it was my keen detective skills that had led me to deduce that,” I said. “But then if I were a real detective they wouldn’t be calling in the Feds to solve my case.”
“Help solve,” he said. Terry, who had been pissy on the way down to Familyland, had mellowed now that we were back on our home turf.
I, on the other hand, was tired, hungry, and cranky. “Sending for the Feebies,” I said, loud enough for half the squad room to look up, “is like making a public announcement that the crime we’re supposed to be solving has now escalated beyond our Level of Competence.”
“It’s not beyond our level of anything,” Terry said. “You and I could’ve found D.B. Cooper if we’d have caught that case. But you gotta admit this one has escalated. It’s a serial killer, plus big bucks extortion. And now that they’re threatening to kill anybody associated with Lamaar, you got your terrorism factor. Three mints in one. Sounds like a Federal case to me. That still doesn’t mean that a couple of schmucks from LAPD can’t solve it.”
“Okay, schmuck, how do we solve it?”
“Divide and conquer. We both have the same learning curve, and there’s too much work to do for the two of us to be doing it together.”
“Flip a coin,” I said. “Winner flies to New York on the corporate jet and interviews Eeg. Loser gets to stay in L.A. and tell half-truths to the FBI.”
“Hey, if you think flying back and forth across the country in one day is first prize, you take New York,” Terry said. “I’d rather suffer the FBI and still get home in time to have dinner with my girls.”
“Deal,” I said. “Let me call my travel agent.” I called Brian Curry who had been waiting to hear which one of us was going and how soon we could leave.
“I’ll have a car pick you up at 5:30 tomorrow morning,” he said. “You’ll be wheels up out of Burbank at six.”
“Don’t I have to check in an hour and a half before flight time?”
“No, and if you’re late, they’ll wait. Is there anything special you want to order for breakfast, lunch, or dinner?”
“You mean like a kosher meal?
“I mean like anything.”
“No, I’ll take pot luck. Just don’t forget that reading material you promised me.” Now that we were positive we were dealing with a crime against Lamaar, I had asked Brian to pull together as much backgrounder information on the company as he could find.
“It’s already on the airplane.” I could practically hear him grinning.
I called F.X. Falco in upstate New York. I had spoken to him earlier, filled him in on the latest murder, and told him to make sure Eeg didn’t skip town before someone from LAPD got there. Now I gave him my flight details.
“A friend of mine is an ATC at Stewart. I’ll be watching you land from the tower,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”
The next call was to Kemp Loekle. When Joanie and I first rented the house, our landlord sent Kemp over to repair the washing machine. Then Joanie hired him to build shelves in the laundry room, then in the closets, and in no time flat she adopted him. Kemp is forty-five and single, and a good part of his life revolves around women, beer, and motorcycles. Most important he loves dogs. He’s particularly nuts about Andre, and he dog-sits whenever I’m in a bind.
His machine picked up. Sunday night. Kemp probably had his beefy mitts wrapped around a babe, a bottle of Beck’s, or the handlebars of his 1980 Yamaha 1100 XS. “It’s almost an antique,” he always tells me.
“So are you,” I always answer back.
I left Kemp a message outlining his tour of duty as Andre’s caretaker. Then I dialed Big Jim. “I’m calling from the phone in the Squad Room,” I said, which was my way of letting him know we’d have to talk in code.
“So, how is that mangy dog who came crawling home the other night?”
“I got him on a short leash,” Jim said.
“Glad to hear that. I’ll be out of town on a case, but if the dog tries to run away or do anything stupid, call me.”
“Hey, if the dog tries to run away,” Jim said, chuckling, “I may just put him out of his misery myself.”
CHAPTER 58
When I stepped out of the house at 5:30, the car was already waiting. Actually it was a car and a half; a stretch Lincoln with a back seat big enough to have its own zip code.
The driver held the rear door open and said a polite good morning. I picked up a slight European accent. I sat back, and he glided the car silently up and over a dark, dewy Laurel Canyon toward Burbank Airport.
Captain Ted Sheppard was waiting for me on the tarmac. He was fortyish, tall, and had the classic square-cut jaw that always gives me added confidence in any pilot’s flying ability. His face was copper colored and smooth shaven, except for the sole patch of blond hair under his lower lip. “I’ll give you the fifty-cent tour,” he said as he escorted me up the steps of the twin-engine Gulfstream IVSP. I know enough about planes from hanging out with Big Jim to calculate that we were fifty-cent touring an aircraft that cost upwards of thirty mill.
“Seats fifteen,” he said. “You could’ve invited fourteen friends.”
In the forward cabin were two single seats upholstered in tan and gray leather, and a matching three-cushion divan. The mid cabin had a grouping of four more leather chairs, two on the left, two on the right, each pair with a polished burl cherry wood table between them.
“Captain, you’re spoiling me for coach,” I said.
“Hell, I’ll spoil you for first class. And there’s no need to call me Captain,” he said, removing his navy blue uniform jacket. Underneath was a crisp, white short-sleeved shirt with blue-and-gold epaulets on the shoulder. On his left breast pocket the words ‘Air Rambo’ were embroidered. Below that was a colorful logo—Rambunctious Rabbit flying upside down in a biplane. “As you can see, we’re a lot more informal than the other airlines. Call me Shep.”
He opened the door to the aft cabin. “This is your conference room.” The chairs in the conference grouping were green leather, which picked up the color of the dark green squares on the plush maroon carpeting.
“Food, liquid refreshment, and rest room facilities are back here,” Shep said, as we made our way aft into a compact galley. I caught the early-morning smell of fresh coffee and cinnamon buns, plus an extremely provocative scent, which turned out to belong to an equally provocative woman.
“This is Sig,” Shep said, pointing in the direction of the coffee, the buns, and the perfume. “She can feed you, hook you up to the Internet, darn your socks; you name it, she’ll do it. And if she can’t figure it out, we’ll land and pick up somebody who can.”
Sig was the flight attendant grown men dream about. Her thick, red hair had that lustrous shine you see in shampoo commercials, but never in real women standing less than an arm’s length away. She wore a starched white blouse and a navy skirt that were just tight enough and short enough to show off enough of her kickass body to make me want to see more.
“My socks are fine,” I said, “but I could use some of that coffee.”
Sig poured some into a paper cup that had the Rambo logo on it. “I can’t use the good china till after we’re airborne,” she said.
“Which will be in less than five minutes,” Shep said. “Why don’t you grab a seat? Actually, you’re our only passenger today, so feel free to grab them all.”
He headed for the cockpit, and I settled into one of the leather chairs in the front cabin. Take-off was effortless. I’ve been on corporate jets before, so unless I get invited to fly on Air Force One, I’m not that easy to impress, but I did get a kick out of the fact that the announcements from the flight deck were aimed directly at me.
“Good morning again, Mike,” Shep said ten minutes into the flight. “We’ll be cruising at 37,000 feet, smooth air all the way. Estimated time of arrival is 2:44 p.m. If there’s anything you need, just holler. Enjoy your breakfast, and thank you for choosing Air Rambo.”
Sig brought me coffee, a basket of pastries, six different jams, and three kinds of butter. She was walk-right-past-any-club-bouncer gorgeous, one-step-ahead-of-you efficient, and she left behind a light trail of perfume that wafted up into my brain and immediately started working its way south. I wondered how many times I could push the Call button before she realized all I really wanted was to get her within sniffing distance. Whatever I might still be going through over the death of my wife, my hormones were officially out of mourning.
The breakfast menu had no fewer than twenty items on it. I ordered the egg white omelet with spinach and mushrooms. Sig went back to the galley and I pulled out my notes on the man I was flying across country to interrogate. I had read the case file on Eeg a dozen times, but I had to read it again. I was like the hungry man who keeps going back to the same empty refrigerator thinking that some tasty delight will suddenly appear.
CHAPTER 59
Daniel Sven Eeg was born in L.A. in 1947. A sister, Inge, was born the year before. His father, Lars, had been in the Army with Dean Lamaar and wound up in the inner circle at Lamaar Studios. Danny was a Hollywood kid who went into the biz after college. He made good money writing for TV, mostly cop shows. Got married at thirty and divorced four years later. A few years after that, he knocked up a twenty-two-year-old actress wannabe, Barbara Schneiderman, a.k.a. Bonita Storm, and they had a son, Colby.
Eeg was fourteen when his father got squeezed out of Lamaar. They paid Lars some blood money, and he tried to make a go of it as a serious artist. He flopped and a few years later started working at a small studio doing TV cartoons. Steady work, but a big comedown from his heyday at Lamaar. Then he developed Parkinson’s. It escalated to the point where he couldn’t draw.
One night in ’85 he comes home, pulls his car into the garage, and leaves the motor running. Not only does it kill Lars, but the fumes leak through to the kitchen, catch a spark from the stove, and boom, the house gets leveled. Lars’s wife survived the blast and moved to Albany, New York, to live with her daughter. Two weeks after Lars blew himself to Kingdom Come, Danny’s girlfriend ran off. She and Eeg’s son haven’t been heard from since.
At this point Eeg was pushing forty and going through his own mid-life career meltdown, so he follows Mom to Albany. He got a job teaching high school English and found a law firm to sue Lamaar Studios on contingency, but the Lamaar lawyers have successfully tied up the lawsuit in the justice system since the get-go. When Eeg’s mother died in 1991 he decided to leave the hectic city life of Albany and move to the relative peace and quiet of Woodstock.
He got involved in the local Democratic party, was elected to Town Council and got re-elected three times. His bank accounts showed no unusual deposits or withdrawals that would indicate he was paying off a string of hired assassins to settle his legal battles with Lamaar. The deposit of $50,000 made nine months ago turned out to be an advance on a book he is writing.
I folded my notes and set them down on the seat next to me. Seconds later Sig came down the aisle with a brown leather briefcase. “Mr. Curry said you’d be reading this,” she said, “but we also have today’s newspapers, the latest magazines, and a selection of DVDs, CDs, and video game cartridges.”
“I’d better pass on the entertainment and do my homework,” I said. “Just curious. Sig—is that short for Sigourney?”
“Signilda. It’s Swedish,” she said flashing me a friendly skies smile that would make John Madden abandon his cross-country tour bus and become a Frequent Flyer. “I’ll be back in a few minutes with your breakfast.”
The briefcase weighed about ten pounds. I’m a slow reader, but I’ve learned the fine art of skimming. By the time I skimmed through the first few pounds I realized it had a pro-Lamaar slant. There was a history of the company; a
nother on Familyland; and several travel books on Lamaar’s vacation spots. Each one painted a rosier picture than the last. Even the three-inch thick binder on the ongoing court battle with Eeg about royalty rights featured newspaper articles and letters that made Lamaar look like an innocent victim.
I read, ate breakfast, flirted with Sig, took a nap, had a snack and read some more. By the time Shep announced that we were on our approach I had waded through the bulk of it, and I didn’t feel any better briefed than your average tourist who’s planning a trip to Familyland.
Lamaar was a multi-billion-dollar player in the cutthroat world of show business, yet based on the material Brian gave me, nobody had ever written an unkind word about them. Everyone except Eeg adored them, and there was no reason anybody would want to hurt them, their employees, or their fans.
I called Terry and got his voicemail. I could have tracked him down, but I just left a message that the flight was lovely and that I had wasted the better part of six hours sifting through corporate propaganda. “As far as I can tell,” I said, “this is the one of the world’s finest organizations, and you and I should do everything in our power to see that no further harm befalls them.”
I looked out the window at the longest runway I’d ever seen. It was clear and dry, but the patches of ground around it were covered with a light dusting of snow. All I had to keep me warm was a summer-weight blazer. I had forgotten that springtime wasn’t the same in upstate New York as it is in Southern California.
Shep was right on the money. We touched down at Stewart Airport in Newburgh at exactly 11:44 L.A. time. I didn’t bother setting my watch ahead.
CHAPTER 60
F. X. Falco was your basic tall, strapping, handsome Italian law enforcement officer. He had a commanding presence, a manly handshake, and the foresight to bring me some cold-weather gear.
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