Rose rubbed his hand over his chin. He hadn’t shaved yet or combed his hair. His eye sockets were dark from lack of sleep. He looked more like a desk sergeant who had pulled a double shift than a millionaire CEO.
There was a picture of Hannah on her dresser. She was wearing a green-and-white gym uniform and had her right foot on a soccer ball. Rose picked it up and stared at it. “You got kids, Detective?”
“Three daughters.”
“If their bedroom looked like this, what would you do?”
“I would do whatever it takes to keep my kids safe.”
“So would I. I’ve decided to pay the ransom.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?” Terry asked.
“My mission at Lamaar is to get out from under the shadow of the cartoon bunny rabbit image. Next month we cut the ribbon on Phase One of a multi-billion-dollar entertainment complex in Vegas. Whoever is behind this extortion plot is threatening to destroy that deal. I was willing to fight them. But they have a gun to my head, their finger is on the trigger, and the safety is off. I’m paying the money before my family or someone else gets hurt. I’m only sorry I waited. An innocent woman died because I was stupid enough to think I could go up against these bastards.”
“It’s your decision,” I said.
Mr. Lu appeared in the doorway with a telephone in his hand.
Ike waved him off. “Not now, Lu, I don’t want to…”
“It’s Brian Curry. It’s bad news.” He held out the phone and Rose wrenched it from his hand.
“Brian, it’s Ike.”
Rose listened for about twenty seconds. I watched his face and body slowly contort in anguish. “Oh, God. They didn’t have to do that,” he said. “I’m gonna pay. I swear I was ready to pay the fucking money. Oh, Jesus.”
Rose handed me the phone. “Brian, this is Mike. Terry and I are both here. There was a threat on Hannah’s life, but she’s alright. What’s going on?”
“They took down our plane,” he said. “It left Burbank early this morning on the way to Vancouver. I don’t know if it was a surface-to-air missile or if they planted a bomb on board, but it doesn’t matter. The plane was blown out of the sky. Everyone’s dead. Amy, four of our senior executives, and a crew of three.”
Amy? Dead? I could hear the sound of my own breathing. Labored little inhales followed by loud, painful exhales. “What about the crew? Was it…”
“Yes, Mike. It was the same crew you flew with on Monday.”
I looked at Ike Rose. He was still holding his daughter’s picture and was pressing it to his chest. The powerful head of one of the biggest entertainment enterprises on the planet looked at me with pleading eyes. I had seen that look too many times before. They were the eyes of a crime victim who can’t believe that what is happening is really happening to him.
He shook his head back and forth. “I was ready to pay,” he said. “They didn’t have to kill anyone else. I was ready to pay. I was ready to pay.”
CHAPTER 71
Thirty minutes later our Forensics Team was in Hannah’s room. Terry and I waited downstairs with Rose in a large room with a bar, a billiard table, a pinball machine, and several other expensive adult diversions. A maid brought in a cart with coffee and pastries.
Rose took a silver cigarette case out of his pocket. “I want to write an autobiography when I’m through with this corporate shit,” he said, tapping a cigarette on the case. “So I keep a journal. Every time I fuck up, I write it down, and I tell myself it’s all part of the overall experience. The book won’t be interesting unless you have fuckups. But this…?”
He lit the cigarette and blew a lungful of noxious chemicals into the air. I was jealous. Seven years and I still missed the poison.
Twenty minutes later Brian showed up. “I’m driving to the crash site to meet with investigators from the FAA, NTSB, and the FBI,” he said, “but I figured I’d stop by and see if there’s anything I can do here.”
“Thanks,” Rose said. “I wish I could go with you, but I’ve got our financial people coming over so we can talk about how we’re going to pull the ransom money together.”
“They still don’t know what brought the plane down,” Brian said, “but it has to be sabotage. They threatened to kill our people and they did.”
“What about all that post-9/11 security hype?” Terry asked.
“Security is a hell of a lot better on commercial flights since 9/11,” Brian said. “But corporate and private jets are pretty lax. Ask Mike. He just flew that plane on Monday.”
I looked at Terry. “The driver took me right to the tarmac,” I said. “I got on without being searched. And I was carrying a gun.”
Brian stayed for less than ten minutes, then left for the crash site. Terry and I decided to stick around to hear from Forensics. Rose smoked two more cigarettes while we waited. I always tell myself that one of these days something is going to happen to push me over the edge and I’m just going to pick up again and start inhaling where I left off. Joanie’s death didn’t do it. Maybe it was because I had time to brace myself. But the Lamaar plane going down with people I hardly knew had a much stronger effect on my addiction. I really wanted a cigarette. I settled for one of the pastries.
It didn’t take Forensics long to confirm what Terry had assumed. The blood on Hannah’s bed was a mix of corn syrup and red food coloring, the basic formula used in movie making. And the burglar alarm had been disabled by an expert. He even overrode the feature that signals the security company when someone tampers with the system.
By 11 a.m. Terry and I were back in the squad room. Kilcullen was waiting for us. “I spoke to Garet Church at the FBI. He rescheduled the Joint Task Force Meeting for 2 p.m.”
“Nice of them to wait for us,” Terry said.
“They pushed it back to give the new people time to get there.”
“What new people?” Terry said.
“Now that it looks like the plane crash is connected to the other murders, we’ve got the FAA involved. Plus the Governor’s Office wants representatives from the California Bureau of Investigation, the State Troopers, and the Office of the Attorney General.”
“What?” Terry said. “They didn’t invite the good folks from the Department of Fish and Game?”
“We’re lucky they invited LAPD. Why didn’t you guys solve this mess last week like I asked you to?”
We filled him in on what went down at Ike Rose’s house.
“I wish he wouldn’t cough up the money,” Kilcullen said. “Now the Feds will be in charge of the ransom phone calls and the payoff and whatever else goes down. They’re the lead agency. I’m not kidding. I wouldn’t be surprised if they told LAPD to go back home and write traffic tickets.”
”I know Garet Church,” I said, “and he isn’t going to pull us off this case. Terry and I have too big of a learning curve.”
“Plus we got closer to Ike Rose in a week than any fucking Federal agent could get in a fiscal fucking year,” Terry said. “They’d be crazy to ask us off.”
“Is that your ego talking?” Kilcullen said. “Or do you really think you can make a difference?”
“Both,” Terry said. “If we get pulled off now, it will always be our failure. If we hang on, we have a chance to be in on the collar.”
“And if there is no collar?”
“Then you can take us out behind the bowling alley and shoot us.”
Terry’s way of dealing with the darker side of our job is to joke his way through it. I on the other hand felt a deep sense of loss. Amy, Captain Sheppard, Sig, all dead for one reason. They were connected to Lamaar.
CHAPTER 72
The 2:00 meeting was in the FBI offices at 11000 Wilshire. At 1:50 Terry and I were on Sepulveda, squeezing from three lanes to one to get around an accident involving a Hummer and a vanload of Koreans.
Terry flashed his lights, crossed over the double yellow line, and scattered the oncoming traffic. “Sorry to take your life in my han
ds,” he said, “but I hate being late to a dick-measuring contest.”
I’ve been to enough meetings with the FBI to know that they have several conference rooms that can seat forty people around one big table. It helps promote the misguided feeling that all agencies are created equal. This time there was no such pretense. The meeting took place in a theatre. Garet Church stood in front, so that the rest of us who sat facing him would have no doubt who was in charge. It was a none-too-subtle mind fuck.
Being a homicide cop, I’ve had to break the bad news to a lot of people that someone they loved or were close to had been murdered. The most common response is “But I just saw him yesterday, but I just kissed her goodbye this morning, but I was just on the phone with him a few hours ago.”
People think that if they just saw you, you couldn’t possibly, suddenly, inexplicably, be dead. It’s a reaction I see a lot, and now I was going through it. So I didn’t feel like saying much. I let Terry do the talking. He gave the group an update on the break-in at Rose’s house and his decision to pay the ransom.
As we expected, Church assigned his people to hang twenty-four/seven with Rose, to make sure the Bureau had first crack at the bad guys when the ransom call came.
“Rose is running the ad in the Classified Section of tomorrow morning’s L.A. Times,” Church said. “We’ve got electronic surveillance teams set up to cover his home phone, his office, and his cell. When the call comes, we’ll try to get a trace, but don’t count on it. These people are smart.
“We have no idea if they’re going to ask Rose to wire the money to the Caymans, pay it out in gold bars, or leave a check under the doormat. Best guess is they’ll ask for good old American greenbacks. Our job is to follow the money. Are you listening to me, people? We’re not playing with Monopoly money here. This is going to be 266.4 million of Uncle Sam’s finest. Some packets will be rigged to send out electronic signals so we can track it with a GPS locator. And we will track it. Then we’ll nail whoever is on the receiving end.”
Church tapped a button on the podium and a large screen lowered behind him. “We’ve made some headway in the killings. I’ll start with Elkins. There are about a thousand surveillance cameras throughout the park and down underground where the employees are. We isolated only those cameras that Elkins passed through from the time he started work in the morning.
“One man, dressed like your average tourist, consistently took the same route as Elkins. He didn’t follow Elkins directly. Sometimes he’d show up in a frame a minute behind Elkins and sometimes he’d be ten seconds in front of him, because he probably did a dry run and knew Elkins’s itinerary. Here’s a video of him entering the front gate on the day of the murder.”
The lights dimmed and the screen lit up with a surveillance tape of the Lamaar main entrance. People were streaming through the gate eager to get into the park. Garet hit a button and the video froze on one happy group.
“See this bunch?” Church said. “Six people. Five of them are Belgian tourists traveling together. Two couples and one woman who is the sister of one of the husbands. We know who they are because they stayed at a hotel on the Lamaar property and we were able to cross-check. But this short guy with the sunglasses, he doesn’t belong with them. He hung close to them, because one guy alone in a place called Familyland is going to stand out to Security.”
He rolled the tape to a second scene. “Same guy again. Only now he’s walking alongside a different group. Each time he pops up he tries to blend in so he doesn’t look like a solo act, and each time he’s following the route that Rambunctious Rabbit took through the park.”
A voice from one of the seats called out. “Do we know who he is?”
“His name is Angelo Innocenti. Interpol ID’d him for us yesterday. He’s a professional killer; home base is Palermo, Sicily.”
A third video went up. “This is Signor Innocenti going through security at LAX that night. He took Lufthansa 451 to Frankfurt, and by the time Elkins’s body was discovered the next morning, he was back home eating pizza and drinking Chianti. We don’t have the manpower or the jurisdiction to smoke him out of whatever cave he’s hiding in, and frankly, I don’t give a shit about him right now, because he’s just a pair of hands for hire.”
A female voice called out. “If Innocenti went back to Sicily after the Elkins murder, then someone else killed Ronnie Lucas. Correct?”
“Correct. The Lucas killer was eight inches taller than the Elkins killer. One person who was on the breakfast line that morning swears that the tall guy who talked to Lucas sounded Albanian. Now admittedly our eyewitness has been homeless for twelve years and is not as mentally stable as some of you folks…” He paused for the laugh and he got it. “But a few other people thought the suspect sounded Eastern European. Again, the doer is not who we’re after.”
“What about the Judy Kaiser murder?” Terry asked.
“That only happened a few days ago. But something jumped out on the surveillance tapes from the restaurant. A woman came in with two kids. They bought lunch, then sat in the back out of range of the cameras. About twenty minutes later we pick up the two kids leaving. But the Mom stayed behind. Then the Kaiser family comes in and Judy goes off camera toward the bathroom. Four minutes later we pick up the Mom leaving the restaurant. We track her to the train ride where she catches up with her kids.”
“Was she in the bathroom with the vic?”
“Hard to tell,” Church said, “but she was definitely in that little alcove in the rear, so she must have seen Judy. She’s either an innocent bystander or a soccer Mom who brought her kids to Familyland, then murdered one of the other patrons to help pay for the trip.”
He put up a shot of a striking, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman and two young boys. “Fortunately she also stayed at one of the Lamaar hotels, so there were cameras everywhere. This was taken when they checked in. Her name is Penina Benjamin and the kids are her two sons. She’s an Israeli.”
There was an audible “ah-ha” murmur from the room. Sort of a collective conclusion that if a beautiful young mother with two kids is from Israel, she’s more likely to be a trained commando than an innocent bystander.
“Mrs. Benjamin and her kids flew to New York early Monday morning, spent the night, then flew El Al back to Israel yesterday. We want to talk to her, but with all the bureaucratic crap that goes on between the U.S. and Israel, that’s not going to be very high on anybody’s list. More important than picking her up for questioning is that once we get a suspect who might have hired these killers, we’ll see if his passport shows that he made a shopping trip to Israel, Italy, and Eastern Europe.”
My cell phone vibrated. I checked the Caller ID and bolted out of the room. I got to the corridor and answered on the fourth ring.
“Hi, it’s Diana.”
“I know. You think I pick up for every beautiful, blue-eyed blonde who calls me in the middle of a multiple homicide investigation?”
“Oh, gosh,” she said. “I caught you at a bad time.”
”It’s never a bad time when you call. How are you?”
“I’m fine, but Hugo has had a few rocky days. His fever is up, his blood count is down, and he’s rejecting platelets. He’s stable now, but… I’m sorry, I hate to ask you this when you’re so busy.”
“Would it help if I came over and visited him?”
“Yes.” She lowered her voice. “The sooner the better.”
“I’ll be there by 6:00.”
“Thank you,” she said, still whispering, making her sound both grateful and sexy at the same time. “You know I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it would make a big difference.”
We hung up, and I went back to the meeting. I still didn’t feel like saying much. But after thirty seconds on the phone with Diana, I felt a hell of a lot better than when I walked out.
CHAPTER 73
The meeting dragged on till 5:00. It took another two hours to go back to the office, follow up on phone calls and deal with K
ilcullen. I didn’t get to Valley General until 7:45. Diana was waiting at the sixth-floor nurses’ station.
“I did the best I could,” I said, “but you can never believe a cop who says he’ll meet you at a civilized hour. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. You’ve already gone above and beyond. I didn’t tell Hugo you were coming. He’s going to be thrilled to see you.”
She took my arm and led me down the corridor. “I should warn you. He’s lost more weight and the meds have really taken their toll.”
I nodded. I had seen Joanie in her final months. I knew what to expect.
Hugo was in bed, connected to a network of tubes and wires that snaked their way out of his body to a multi-limbed IV tree. A monitor hung from one of its metal arms and beeped efficiently. Also dangling from the pole were six plastic bags filled with high-tech potions that would either cure him or kill him.
A woman, whom I recognized as Hugo’s mother from the Christmas in Sundance T-shirt, was sitting in a chair near his bedside. She stood up and introduced herself. “I’m Nola Cordner. You must be Detective Lomax. Diana told me all about you. Hugo, look who came to visit. It’s your hero.”
Hugo looked smaller, paler, and much sicker. He contorted his face in a grimace. At first I thought he was in pain, but then I realized it was just typical teenage embarrassment. “Mom,” he said, stretching the word out into three syllables. “I never said hero. What am I, eight years old and he’s Batman?”
He looked over in my direction, but my old LAPD baseball cap was pulled down low on his face, so I couldn’t see his eyes. “I didn’t say hero,” he said.
“Well, even if you did,” I said tapping on an IV bag filled with Da-Glo yellow glop, “I’d just figure it was the drugs talking.”
“Tell my Mom about the revenge of the flowers,” he said. “It’s the best story, but if I told it, she’d probably say I was making it up.”
“Well, let’s see,” I said, turning to Nola. “I was about your son’s age, and I had no thought about going into police work.”
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