Loose Ends - California Corwin P.I. Mystery Series Book 1

by D. D. VanDyke

  Chapter 3

  I let myself out Mira Sorkin’s back gate with relief. Now I felt like going, doing. The bright afternoon sun continued its struggle to burn away the lingering coastal drizzle, reinforcing that feeling of gusty, crackling energy.

  I dialed Mickey’s desk phone before I had reached Molly, speaking as I picked my way across the wet unmowed grass and weeds of the vacant lot, avoiding muddy BMX paths. “What you got?”

  “Miranda Almone Sorkin, née Herndon, born in 1970 so she’s thirty-five. Married once to Dennis Wilson Sorkin. No criminal record for either of them. Graduated Stanford pre-med at twenty and then UOP Doctor of Pharmacy at twenty-three. Married shortly after graduating in 1993, when she went to work for North Bay Distributors, a drug wholesaler owned by Rankin Pharmaceuticals. One ten-year-old child, Talia, born in 1995. They divorced in 2003, but she kept his name.”

  “Tell me about the ex,” I said as I fobbed open my car with a beep and got in. At this point I really didn’t think Mira was being watched. In fact, given that the heist – the presumed heist – had not taken place, Mira supposedly had not heard from the kidnappers and I had found no bugs, I doubted they were watching the house at all.

  “Dennis is an MBA, a stockbroker. Liked to live big, from what I can tell. Flew high for a few years but lost a bunch of his clients’ money on some bad trades right before the divorce. Dodged criminal charges, but the trading house dumped him hard. Looks like she was paying his bills for a while. Then they split up and he moved to Seattle where he now works at a small firm. Less than two mil in client assets. That’s not bad, but not big like he used to be. He took home one hundred ten thousand last year.”

  “Decent, but not even what Mira makes.” I popped the phone into its hands-free cradle and stuck the headset on. “So he either learned from getting burned and is on the straight and level or he’s got an angle, something not obviously traceable, and is working this pedestrian gig as a cover. Was the parting amicable?”

  “Not at all. Looks like a lot of bad blood, motions and countermotions, accusing each other of bad parenting, crazy stuff. Everything but child molestation and adultery. Almost comical, really.”

  “No adultery charges? Why did they break up, then?”

  “The initial filing listed ‘irreconcilable differences.’”

  “When things start to get ugly, people begin to lie. At least, exaggerate. Seems weird that neither accused the other of sleeping around.”

  I could almost hear Mickey shrug over the phone. “Sometimes it just all goes wrong. That’s what Mom says when I ask about what happened with Dad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was wondering if maybe Dennis figured out a way to burn Mira. Maybe he sicced this heist crew on to her as payback for getting custody of the daughter?” Mickey said.

  “Maybe.” I chewed my lip. “Hard to believe he’d put his daughter at risk, though.”

  “Probably didn’t know they’d kidnap her. Things got out of hand.”

  “Mickey, you’re smarter than you look.”

  “Thanks, I think. Does that mean you want me to keep tunneling?” No surprise, Mickey sounded eager to put his skills to use and make some money doing it.

  “Yeah. Dig away on both of them. I got an advance and as long as the check doesn’t bounce you’re good for a few days of work.”

  “Sa-weet.”

  I revved the Impreza’s engine, spun the wheel and hit forty in the twenty-five zone in two seconds flat, twisting through the narrow car-lined streets. Unlike more modern suburbs, garages and driveways were small in this neighborhood, seldom holding more than one car, and curbside parking was the norm. “I need you to take a look at Sorkin’s landline records for the last week, incoming and outgoing. Flag repeat calls, and try to match all the numbers to names. Then cross-reference them with the ex’s. Also,” I kept my voice casual, “pull up Cole Sage’s records. Any numbers he has, including his office numbers at the Chronicle. See if anything lines up. Print those all out, will you?” If I was going to pay Mickey to hack, I might as well feed my favorite obsession. Okay, maybe second favorite, or third, after racing and poker.

  “Okay, boss. I’ll have all this by tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.”

  “That’s my boy.”

  “I wish.” Mickey hung up.

  “I heard a wistful undertone in Mickey’s words,” my dead father said in my ear. Okay, I knew he wasn’t really there. He wasn’t a ghost, I was pretty sure. He’d never told me anything I didn’t already know or reveal secrets of the Other Side. But ever since the bomb blast, he’d show up and talk to me, usually when I was driving alone.

  I couldn’t help but look over at the passenger seat. Sometimes I could see him, sometimes only hear his words. Today he sat there in his corduroy jacket and long 70s haircut, exactly like he appeared in my favorite photo of him, the one on my office wall.

  “Poor guy’s had a crush on me since I hired him for one of my first private cases,” I replied as if nothing weird was going on, refusing to allow tears to spring to my eyes. I’d found if I tried to make the hallucination go away, whatever part of my mind created it fought back harder. Better to simply roll with it, talk it out and let it fade along with the ache in my heart.

  “I wouldn’t worry. It’s a hopeless nerdy fanboy thing, like having the hots for Halle Berry because she plays superheroes and villains.”

  “I don’t worry.”

  “I hope you don’t flirt with Mickey to keep him working harder for you.”

  I shook my head. “That would be cheap. Besides, unrequited hope seems to flow like caffeine through the whole gamer crowd’s veins. I don’t have to encourage him.”

  “But you don’t discourage him.”

  “I don’t want to crush his ego.”

  “If you did, he might get over you and find a girlfriend.”

  “I can’t do that. I’m shocked you’d even suggest it.”

  “Sometimes you have to kill the hope-monkey,” he said.

  The hope-monkey was a metaphor Dad often used. He said people were addicted to hope like a junkie to the needle. I thought about Cole, knowing I might have more in common with Mickey than I’d admit. Maybe it was the scarring that put Cole off. I massaged the damaged area around my right ear with the heel of my hand. That part always still felt like it was asleep. My thoughts turned dark as I answered my own question.

  “Your mind is wandering,” my father said.

  “It does that.”

  “You don’t look that bad. Plenty of men show interest in you.”

  “Children don’t run screaming and people don’t flinch away, you mean.” When I see myself in the mirror or a snapshot someone has taken of me I look completely normal, but what woman doesn’t obsess over her flaws?

  “Screw Cole,” Dad said. “Get a grip, girl. Plenty of fish in the sea.”

  That was proof positive this apparition was no spirit, just a hallucination. Dad never used language even that strong. He’d been a good Catholic and a crusader for social justice, unfailingly polite even when he was being tough.

  “Easier said than done, Dad.”

  I waited, but he didn’t answer. When I looked over, he was gone, thank God.

  Breaking out of the cramped neighborhood with relief, I turned off my higher brain function and floored it onto Miller Avenue, raced through the traffic as if I was at Le Mans, reveling in the physical. My fuzzbuster showed green and lasers didn’t work very well in the drizzling rain, so unless some overzealous uniform got eyeballs on me, I should be fine. Adrenaline sang through my veins like joy, mixed with anger on Mira’s behalf.

  Whatever it takes to get Talia back, I’ll do, I vowed.

  I proceeded down Bridgeway until it met 101 again. The state highway was still lightly traveled and should remain so in the misty daytime until rush hour and ocean fog made their inevitable rendezvous on the Golden Gate Bridge before dusk.

  I was happy to live and work in the same neigh
borhood where I grew up, the Mission District, now a bit more gentrified than it used to be but still full of character, and not have to commute in to work as I used to. Beat cops, even Inspectors, the title SFPD uses instead of “Detective,” didn’t make enough to live alone in the City, but now I owned my office and cars free and clear.

  I’d also bought Mom and myself a house, and all it had cost was a damaged hand and face, one eardrum, some nerves and skin – and my career.

  I’d happily trade the money back if I could. Because I couldn’t, I worked hard, played harder, and lived life the hardest I could. “Die young, stay pretty, live fast ’cause it won’t last,” Blondie sang on the radio when I was a teenager in the 80s. Meat Loaf had an answer for her: “Two out of three ain’t bad.”

  After crossing the Golden Gate I exited onto Marina Boulevard, just by coincidence less than a mile from Cole’s place, and then pulled over. I opened up his speed-dial entry and pushed the button. When I called it went through to voice mail, so I left a message in hopes of getting a callback to clarify things. Maybe he could give me some more background on Mira. She’d said he was out of town, but it was Monday. Maybe he had returned from his trip by now. I needed a lead and I hated to return to the office and hang around waiting for Mickey to come up with something.

  After trying Cole’s office and unsuccessfully trying to get something more out of the receptionist, I decided to plug the address of the pharmaceutical warehouse into the GPS.

  The voice of the machine led me back across the Bridge and up to a discreet commercial district in San Rafael straight to a large building with a high, heavy fence that I would have taken for a corporate headquarters rather than a warehouse if not for its utter lack of windows. A tiny plate read, “North Bay Distributors.” When I pulled up to the talk-box at the barrier I had my story ready.

  “Hi, Cal Corwin of Corwin Security,” I said. I actually had several business licenses, including security consultant and bail bondsman. Telling someone up front you were an investigator wasn’t always the best move. “I need to talk with your security people.”

  “Umm…I can give you the number up at Corporate,” the young male voice said from the speaker.

  The camera feed should be showing my face, my good side thank God, so I ran my hair behind my ear and smiled winningly. “How about the number to the monitoring center? That can’t be against the rules, right?”

  “Umm…okay. But I can’t open the gate for you.”

  “That’s fine. Just the number is good.”

  I wrote it down and then backed up, waving an apology at the driver behind me as I did a five-point turn in the cramped space of the lane between the curbs. I called Mickey as I drove and interrupted him long enough to get me a reverse lookup on the number. I plugged that into my GPS.

  Back when I was on the force we didn’t have these things. The department wasn’t going to spring for expensive new gadgets, but for me it was an essential time saver.

  This time the machine led me farther northward to Novato and an office building with an open parking lot and a lot of traffic in and out. I could have just phoned, but I find a friendly face gets a lot more results than just a voice on the line when it comes to bending the rules.

  At least forty clients were listed on the directory, with Clawson Monitoring on the second floor. I breezed through the unwatched lobby. Somehow I thought it ironic that the drug warehouse was well defended while the office of the security center was not. Seemed like a point of weakness.

  At least the steel company door was locked, with a keypad and card reader to the side. Its small identifying sign seemed understated. I knocked, waited, and then knocked again harder before getting an answer.

  The man who answered the door narrowed his middle-aged eyes in suspicion. “Can I help you?” He didn’t sound like he wanted to help me at all.

  “Cal Corwin of Corwin Security.” I waved my impressive but largely meaningless badge at him. “Can I get a few minutes of your time?”

  Relaxing fractionally after looking each way down the hall, apparently ensuring I was alone, he said, “Sure. Come on in.”

  I followed him into a bare reception lounge with a couple of naked workstations in it – phones, computers, not much else. No one sat at them. In one corner squatted an old refrigerator next to a kitchenette – countertops, cabinets, a two-burner stove, microwave and sink. A restroom door and another unmarked one completed the points of interest. I presumed the second entry led to the real monitoring center.

  The man waved me to a seat and then sat down nearby. “What’s this about?” His eyes set deep in a grizzled hatchet face stayed very still, like a hunter, as did his whipcord-lean body.

  “You’ve been on the job?” I asked, recognizing the signs.

  “Like you. Bill Clawson, Lieutenant, Chicago PD, retired.” He still didn’t hold out his corded, veined hand.

  “Cal Corwin, as I said. Eight years SFPD.”

  His eyes flicked to my hip. “Still carry, I see.”

  “Good catch. Yes, I do.”

  “I don’t.” Distance surfaced in his haunted blue eyes.

  “Should I ask why?”

  “Can’t stand to touch a weapon anymore.” Bill snorted ruefully. “Pathetic, huh?”

  I shook my head. “I get it. Everyone reacts differently.” I understood. Once bitten. Ask a plane crash survivor how they feel about flying. Some could do it and some couldn’t. I felt certain Bill had killed someone on the job and a piece inside him had broken off. Maybe it still rattled in his head. Given Chicago’s reputation as the murder capital of the U.S., I wasn’t surprised.

  “So what’s this about?” Bill’s azure orbs searched my face and I felt myself getting distracted. I was always a sucker for damaged goods, especially a man with a bit of age on him. Mom says it’s daddy issues and I couldn’t really argue. My father had died young and left us both needing him.

  Forcing myself to look away, I glanced around at the room. Suddenly, I doubted that this man had anything to do with Talia’s disappearance. Sometimes I just knew. That vibe again maybe, or just old-fashioned cop sense.

  After a brief internal debate I decided to show some cards. Normally I’d go slower, be more cautious, but the clock was ticking on Talia, so I had to take a risk. Either this guy was clean and I could use his help or he was dirty and I should see it in his responses. Either way, I’d win.

  “I’ll level with you, Bill, as far as I can. I am a security consultant sometimes, but right now I’m investigating a crime. I can’t give you too many details, but I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Cop to cop?”

  “Yeah.” I met his eyes this time. They turned cool, appraising. “It’s about a young girl, if that makes you feel better.”

  Bull’s-eye. Bill’s face crumbled and I rejoiced inside at his strong reaction, hoping it meant information was about to flow.

  “How did you know?” he asked.

  That sounded like an admission. Diamond clarity seized me by the scruff of the neck. “Just following leads, Bill,” I said, casually letting my hand drift down near my holster.

  Bill’s eyes narrowed as they followed my movement. “Why would you be asking about her? It was…it was seven years ago.”

  “What was?”

  “My baby girl. My little Sandy.”

  Baffled, I tried to keep from showing it. “The girl I’m talking about is missing right now.”

  “Oh.” Bill took a deep breath, almost a sob. “I thought…but that makes no sense,” he repeated. “I’m sorry. It’s burned into my skull. May fourteenth, 1998, I…I had too much to drink. I came home, fell into bed, failed to secure my service revolver, and…”

  Oh, God. I could see it in a flash of imagination. His daughter, walking in to see Daddy. Disobeying, as kids will do. Picking the gun up.

  Pulling the trigger.

  Bill, waking to that sound and a world-shattering nightmare of guilt, remorse, despair. Must hav
e wrecked his marriage, too. Hard for a mother to forgive something like that.

  My voice cracked. “I’m sorry, Bill. I really am. I can’t imagine how that must feel. But right now there’s another child out there. She’s missing, and someone might have her. I’m looking.”

  Spreading his hands, he visibly steeled himself. “How can I help?”

  “You guys monitor for North Bay Distributors, right?” An innocuous name for the company, obviously designed to keep a low profile.

  “Sure.”

  “Tell me about the security system. Is it any good?”

  “Pretty deep, though it’s geared toward monetary loss rather than burglary prevention.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well,” he scratched at the knee of his suit trousers, “there’s just one security guard on during the day, and none at night. If I was a heist crew I could crash the gate, ram the door, be in and out in two minutes with a million bucks worth of stuff and no way the police could react in time. No, their security system is state of the art, but it’s for preventing white-collar crime. Very tight access.”

  “So it cuts their potential losses and ensures that any break-in is going to be obvious, quickly found out, and limited by the time it takes to fill a couple trash bags with expensive narcotics.”

  Bill smiled without humor. “Actually there are much pricier things in there than, say, Oxy. Some specialized drugs go for thousands a dose. They’re kept in heavy vaults. No smash-and-grab will get those.”

  “So, bottom line, it’s a lot cheaper to pay for insurance than round-the-clock guards or heavier fortifications.”

  “Yeah. But what does that have to do with a child?”

  I cleared my throat, trying to split the difference on how much I was willing to tell him. I had to keep his sympathy, but I didn’t want to spread so much information that it might get to the cops or elsewhere and endanger Talia. “Bear with me a little longer. If you wanted to make more than a quick heist…say, if you wanted to clean the place out of the good stuff, how would you do it?”

  “Inside job, of course.” He looked at me as if I had gone simple, and then realized my question had been rhetorical. “The girl. Leverage. Who is it?”

  “I –”

  Bill’s face lit up as his cop mind went visibly into overdrive. “It has to be someone that works at the warehouse. There are six people that have access. Obviously none of them are a willing part of it or nobody’d be leaning on them. So one of them has a kid and she’s been taken. Give me five minutes to look them up and I’ll tell you who.”

  “Damn, Bill. You’re wasted in this job.”

  “I was a good cop,” he said simply as he stood with a convulsive motion and looked away. “But I made my twenty for retirement and this job pays really well, so…”

  “I get it.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Bill walked over to the fridge and opened the freezer. He rooted inside and came up with a bottle of vodka, unscrewed the top and took a long pull of the subzero liquid with the motions of a professional alcoholic. He saluted me with the bottle. “But now you do.”

  I held my hand up. “I just saw your eyes light up with the old fire. You figured out what I had in five seconds flat. I bet you were hell on wheels back in the day. Look, I’m not asking you to come with me out into the field. Just work with me, help me by filling in what I don’t know.”

  “Then tell me what you already do know. I’m going to figure it out anyway. Would you rather I started poking around separately?”

  No, I really wouldn’t. An uncoordinated investigation might snarl things up badly, get someone killed.

  I stared at him. My gut told me he was on the level even while my head nagged that he might be dirty. No. Nobody could fake the reaction I had seen. No way this guy could be part of anything that threatened a child. I decided I’d rather have him inside than out.

  “Okay. The warehouse manager, Mira Sorkin, had her daughter kidnapped on Friday. They blackmailed her into revealing all the information for someone to get into the warehouse, but it doesn’t appear the heist has come off and they haven’t let her daughter go. She’s a wreck, as you might expect, and of course they told her not to go to the cops.”

  “Taken Friday and they had all weekend to pull the job – but here it is Monday.” Bill snapped his fingers. “Something delayed them. But what?”

  “No way to know, and I’m not sure it matters.” I filled him in on everything else Mira had told me.

  Bill sat forward, rubbing his hands together – either a theatrical gesture, or from the cold bottle. “We ought to set a trap.”

  “How?”

  “Now that I know, my guys and I can be looking for anyone that tries to impersonate Sorkin and get in. Once we got eyes on them…” He clapped his cupped hands together as if catching an insect.

  “Look, Bill, no offense, but we only met today. I get a good vibe off you, but one of your guys might be in on it.”

  “No way!”

  “For a cut of, oh, tens of millions? You sure? Any of them seem different lately? Anybody specifically ask to work Friday overnight, or Saturday?”

  Bill sat back, realization dawning on his face. “Lattimer. Dammit. And he switched with Cy to get on tonight.”

  “That’s our boy. With a guy on the inside they don’t have to worry as much about slip-ups or anyone noticing the oddity of anyone going in at that hour. They have cover.” I pointed at him. “Something delayed them before, but the longer they wait, the more likely something will go wrong. So they’re going to do it this evening. You mentioned a trap, but that doesn’t get us the girl back. In fact, if the cops swoop in and grab the thieves, whoever is watching the kid might…”

  “Yeah. But look, I got a simple plan. They won’t have any reason to think we’re on to them, so we stake the place out and then follow. They’ll probably lead us right to her. We can call PD when we have something solid.” Bill began to pace and seemed suddenly filled with a zealot’s flaming heart, as if he recognized his opportunity for moral redemption.

  I nodded, checking my watch. 3:30 p.m. “Seems like our best chance. Let’s do it.”

  “Pick me up at the diner across the street from here at about eight, all right?”

  “No problem.” We exchanged cell numbers, I waved off a handshake, and then I headed back to my office for a meal and a nap on my sofa. Stakeouts often turned into long, boring nights and I needed to be fresh, because if Bill was right, this was our big chance to follow the perps back to Talia.

  You might think I’d have had a hard time going to sleep, but as a cop I’d long ago learned to compartmentalize, to ignore what I couldn’t control and shut down my impatience. In this case, I dropped off instantly.

  I woke to find a fax from Mira in my machine. Skimming it quickly, I didn’t see anything new, merely more detail. I handed it off to Mickey on the way out. He hummed and waved over his shoulder, eyes glued to the screens as I shut the door.