Against the Dark

by Carolyn Crane

  “Understood.” Cole kept his eyes on the floor, the walls. It didn’t do to look at Borgola while he was stung, and obviously the man was stung by this robbery. He’d been boasting about having the diamonds. They were something special, those stones.

  “I’ll run down known fences,” Mapes said.

  Cole knew Mapes wanted to beat him out and catch the guys first, but it was sloppy to skip the crime scene and go right to the fences. Mapes was banking on the fact that the kind of pros who pulled this job wouldn’t leave evidence behind. He could be right, but Cole preferred to do things methodically. He tried to look morose. “I’ll take the scene of the crime.”

  “I have Hensen and Smits on it,” Borgola said. “You’ll both share any information gleaned by them. I want you two beating the bushes.”

  It was dangerous to counter a Borgola request, but Cole had to see the scene—this robbery had suddenly gotten very interesting. And Hensen and Smits were far from forensics pros. “I do like to start at the scene,” Cole said. “Just the way I run.”

  “That works, because I’ll have the pawnshops and fences,” Mapes said. “I’ll ask around and see who’s moving rocks. They may have put out advance word. This sounds planned.”

  “Fine. Cole, work the inside heading the crime scene investigation,” Borgola said.

  Cole eyed Borgola. “If it comes down to a choice between getting the hands or the stones, you got a preference?”

  He knew what the old man would say before he said it. But part of the trick of undercover work was making the subject look and feel good. A puffed-up man noticed less.

  Borgola smiled his oily smile. “All of the above. Stones and hands. Got it?” Borgola left him and Mapes standing there.

  “This thing is mine,” Mapes said. “Don’t get in my way.”

  Mapes left then, too.

  Cole tried hard not to wince at Borgola’s lavish bedroom, full of mirrors and heavy curtains and his freak-show style of art.

  “No prints,” Smits said. “And they really screwed up the electric. Tech guys are mad.

  Cole inspected the safe. Not blown. Cracked. He looked at the interior alarm. Whoever got in hadn’t counted on Borgola’s techie modifying the safe further. Interesting.

  “Was anything else in here beside the diamonds?” Cole asked.

  “Nope.”

  As they traced the robbers’ footsteps backwards, something like hope swelled inside Cole’s heart. The electric around the bedroom safe was ruined, and the safe itself had been compromised. So what would Borgola do if the diamonds were returned?

  There’d only be one place to put them: the secret safe.

  A plan formed in his mind.

  The plan was entirely based on finding the guys who did the job. He’d make them turn over the diamonds, which he’d promptly bring back to Borgola, but with something extra: a tracking string or two sewn into the bags. The trackers would lead him to the secret safe. And he’d force whoever cracked the safe to crack the secret safe, and he’d get the shell corporation documents. If he got the gems fast enough, it could all happen in the space of a day or two.

  They’d find the boat. And more—if they could get into the secret safe without tipping off Borgola, they could start taking apart Borgola’s operation right under his nose. It would be a worldwide tidal wave of drug, kiddie porn, and snuff film arrests.

  He just needed to find the guys before Mapes did.

  Somebody had fed them detailed plans of the home. The thieves were good, but the experience of countless operations told Cole that there was always something off, something missed. He had to find that something fast.

  They eventually traced the path to the ISI in the lower level security closet. The thieves had disabled just the right mansion cameras. A few minutes later, one of the guys brought in a maid.

  “You need to come up to the fourth floor,” the guy said. “Their escape route wasn’t the roof.”

  The maid told him about broken glass and a jammed elevator with a rope hanging off the bottom.

  They went up to inspect.

  The fourth floor tended to be a business floor; it was full of meeting rooms that weren’t used a whole lot. They stopped in the hallway where the glass from the broken window spread across the patterned carpet, catching the light of the moon. It had been walked over a lot, unfortunately. The elevator had been jammed between floors. A vase smashed in the corner—an angry, thuggish move that was unusual for a catburglar. What the hell kind of guys had pulled this job?

  But it was the cut-up carpet that really interested him.

  One of the perps had injured himself. He didn’t want to leave blood behind, which meant he was probably in the federal database.

  Cole cordoned off the area. Smits and Hensen had a decent processing kit, complete with Luminol. Cole took over and proceeded to Luminol the hell out of the carpet. Nothing. He played out the movements of the thieves. Guys on the ground thought there had been three of them. One would’ve been monkeying with the elevator—not the one cut. That one and the other would’ve been looking for blood. The cut would’ve happened coming through the window. He traced their steps, turned. His gaze fell onto an unassuming patch of wallpaper which he promptly Luminoled. And there it was. The spatter.

  He cut the square and dropped it into a baggie. Then he cut a couple of other squares of wallpaper—blank ones. He took two patches of carpet, too.

  He ordered Smits and Hensen to scour the shaft down to the basement for more blood, but he knew they wouldn’t find any. The thief would have stopped the bleeding on the fourth floor.

  While they were busy, Cole ducked out onto the roof and pulled his tiny earpiece from his pocket. He activated it and stuck it in his ear. It was after two a.m., though it could be morning for Dax.

  “A break, Dax. I need DNA run. Fast. And I also need the hands of a fresh white male adult corpse along with the blood from that corpse. I need the blood in three hours, but the hands I won’t need for twelve.” He’d put the blood on the carpet patches to give to Borgola’s guy to run. Then when he produced the hands, they would match the blood. All nice and tidy. Meanwhile, he’d have the real culprit.

  “I’m guessing not elderly,” Dax said.

  “Under fifty years of age. And it can’t be in any database.”

  “Would you like the location of the Lindbergh baby, too, Mr. Hawkins?”

  “This gets me the boat, Dax.” Cole knew Dax was concerned about the boat. Dax had even activated a sleeper operative in Hawaii on it. There was some thinking the boat had picked up crewmembers on the big island. They discussed trackers. Borgola had said the diamonds were in bags; Dax said he’d arrange for tech to put together fiber trackers—stiff enough to be forced into the hem of a small bag.

  Cole ended the call and went back in. He climbed down the rope to join the guys. The elevator shaft was clean. The thieves had their bases covered. He wouldn’t have expected anything less.

  The doors at the very bottom had been jimmied open. He stepped out. Tunnels stretched every which way. He stood there where they’d stood. The trio had an inside informant and a lot of strong planning. They’d brought smoke bombs, for crissake. Unusual and a bit theatrical, but effective.

  He called the elevator car and used his key to send it a few feet back up and untied the rope from the bottom of it. Yellow. Coated. Not very distinctive. Probably from a big chain store.

  He stood in the tunnel, listening to the echo of Hensen’s voice, feeling a strange kinship with the thieves. He and the thieves were both up to something very dangerous—screwing Borgola. And things were about to turn south for the thief who’d cracked the safe. He wouldn’t want to be dragged back the mansion but Cole wouldn’t give him a choice. He’d let him live if he could. The boat was his first priority.

  Cole needed to work fast. A lot of the jewel gangs traveled. Many of them were Europeans. He asked Smits to run down the source of the rope, and then he and Hensen followed the route the
thieves had taken, walking the tunnel, whihc stretched a good 300 meters south, almost to the gate. This tunnel had been made for escape—he’d been in it before, though he pretended he hadn’t. He looked around, inspecting it thoroughly. They climbed out the hatch and followed the trail beyond, all the way to the wall. Cole was stalling at this point, trying to kill the three hours he’d given Dax to get him the replacement blood so he could hand it over to Borgola’s guy to test.

  A little before five in the morning he found himself again in Borgola’s office. He showed Borgola the wallpaper spatter. That wasn’t even the best sample, he assured him.

  Borgola went to his massive desk and extracted a card from a wooden box. “Bring the sample to this fellow. He’s a PI who owes me a favor, and he knows guys who can run it. Keep me in the loop on every step.”

  Cole nodded and left. Mapes was going to be pissed. Some things couldn’t be helped.

  Cole arrived at the drop-off, a Starbucks in a strip mall east of Yorkwood. The Association had found Starbucks to be a convenient place for quick meets and pick-ups, points that worked even when one was being followed. If you couldn’t do a handoff in person, you could leave things in gaps they’d created behind the baseboards in the men’s bathrooms. The fact that they opened at 5:30 a.m. was also convenient.

  He bought a coffee and went to the condiment station, loaded in the cream. “Nice day for a coffee,” he said to the striking blond man in a rumpled tweed coat and glasses who wandered up next to him. This was the standard Association greeting, though sometimes it was a nice night for a beer, or a nice afternoon for a walk, or whatever suited the occasion.

  “Clears the mind,” Macmillan said, the standard Association reply. Significant deviation from the Association exchange signaled trouble.

  “I thought you were in Morocco,” Cole said.

  “Scuttled.” Macmillan was a linguist and one of the Association’s most brilliant and dangerous operatives, a man who could pose as anything. Macmillan’s hair was longish and swept back; he looked every inch the academic.

  Cole smiled. “Professor Maxwell, I presume.”

  Macmillan gave him a dark look. Professor Maxwell was one of Macmillan’s covers. “And I went through a great deal of trouble to get you a little prize from the medical school lab,” Macmillan said in his clipped Euro accent. “Two prizes, to be precise.”

  The hands. “Are they on ice?”

  “Of course, old man.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Cole said. It reminded him of Borgola. Anyway, he and Macmillan were both thirty—hardly old.

  “Small cooler in the back of that black Navigator. Right back door’s unlocked. And I’m to courier your sample.”

  “Did you saw them off yourself?”

  “No, I had one of my fawning grad students do it,” he said caustically. “Cut these off at the wrists, love. Bone saw if you please. Daddy needs extra hands.”

  Cole tried not to smile.

  “Thaw at room temperature overnight for best results, my friend.”

  Cole and Macmillan had come up together and Cole enjoyed seeing him, even for these short bits. It could get lonely being undercover. “Do my hands have a name?”

  “Hans Newland. German national. Dax is putting together the records and he’ll shove them down a few levels in the federal database. It’ll take a bit to populate. What’s the plan?”

  Cole related the specifics—returning the diamonds as a Trojan horse. Following them to the secret safe. Forcing the safecracker to break in.

  “Your safecracker’s not going to go back easy,” Macmillan said.

  “No,” Cole said. “But I feel confident he will. I’ve been studying my copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

  Macmillan smiled. “How rocky have things gotten?”

  Cole knew what he meant. How much trouble are you in? How precarious has your cover become? “Beyond rocky.”

  “Beyond the rocky shoals and into the Maelstrom,” Macmillan said. “What does Dax say?”

  Cole gave him an icy stare. Don’t tell, that was the message.

  “It’s not all on you,” Macmillan said. “Hawaii’s on it, too.”

  “I’m the only Associate with any chance of getting that boat in time and you know it,” Cole said.

  Macmillan said nothing. He knew it was true. He knew about hiding trouble from the Association, too.

  “Inside that mansion you’re in do-not-extract territory. But Cole, call me all the same—”

  “I won’t,” Cole said.

  “The offer stands. Even if you just need them distracted.”

  “It’s my risk.”

  Macmillan raised an eyebrow. “And the risk of a certain safecracker. It’s a bad day indeed for clever safecrackers. By the way, you owe me a white oxford. Good luck and all that.” He shoved a copy of The Nation under his arm and settled into a window table.

  Cole fitted the cover over his cup and headed for the door.

  The sun was just coming up, and the parking lot was relatively vacant. The Navigator was in the center of a loose group of cars. He opened the right back door, pulled out the ice chest, and set the baggie containing the blood-spattered wallpaper under the driver’s seat. Then he got back in his Borgola-issued SUV.

  He started up the engine and peeked into the cooler. Two hands. Cut clean. A forensics lab would be able to tell Borgola that the hands had been chopped off long after death, but Borgola didn’t have easy access to a lab, and Cole had to take the chance he wouldn’t think of it. Cole replaced the lid. A padded envelope was taped to the side of the chest. He pulled it off and opened it, extracting a small tube full of blood. Perfect. He pulled the blank wallpaper and rug cuttings out of his case and tipped a blood drop on each, then blew on them to dry them. He’d drop them with Borgola’s man in a bit.

  Then he’d wait for results of the real sample. He could have a name in as soon as two hours—everything was a rush. Then the full firepower of the Association would be turned on helping him find the thieves.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Angel pulled out three fabric swatches and slid them across the table, pushing them up next to the cabinet door facsimile—water glass framed in dark walnut. She set the piece of translucent green tile next to that. The tile showed what would be on the backsplash.

  Lisa was a good client—she trusted Angel to guide her and narrow down her choices, and she tended to like the type of warm, eclectic, pattern-rich interiors Angel had become known for around Santa Monica.

  Angel pointed to a flower on her favorite of the choices. “This one is slightly vintagey, and the yellow picks up the abstract art we’ve got going in the great room. This other is more subtle. This blue pattern will show lavishly alongside the greens, but still look clean.” She talked about the different samples, the effect that they’d have as curtains, which she liked to think of as jewelry for windows.

  “It’s amazing how you can see this,” Lisa said. “You can look at a place and imagine possibilities and then make them come true.”

  Angel smiled. Her ability to visualize grand things was handy now that she was a designer, but for a kid growing up in Parker Gables, home of impoverished workers who gutted poultry for a living, it had been a double-edged sword.

  That was where she’d first met Macy and White Jenny—they’d both lived on her hall in their apartment complex. The trio became instant friends, mostly because other kids didn’t want anything to do with them. Macy was smelly and her crazy-scary mom would speak in tongues half the time, White Jenny was fat and the only white girl in the whole place, and Angel was fat, too, and also shy.

  As pre-teens, she and Macy and White Jenny would spend hours on the apartment complex roof, spinning tales of themselves driving red convertibles and wearing pretty dresses, dining at restaurants where they could order anything on the menu, learning they were lost royalty, finding treasure, flying their own jets. They would make books about their future lives from pictures they cut
out from magazines. Here’s my car, here’s my house. Elegant men would fall at their feet. There would be many romantic dramas.

  They got lots of praise from teachers for their imaginations, and their families were happy they seemed to be doing constructive, smart-girl things instead of playing video games or smoking behind the rec center.

  Angel couldn’t remember when the imaginary stories slowly became plans, but she was pretty sure it was about the time they turned fourteen. The three of them were over their ugly duckling phases, so boys and drinking got blended with their life plans, and the three of them fell into stealing cars. They ran away, got arrested repeatedly, and wound up in juvenile detention. That was where the jewel thief dreams began.

  Lisa smoothed a hand over the pattern with grasses.

  “Nice and fresh with this palette,” Angel said. “It’s a beautiful choice with the rich wood of the floors. And look at these colors you surround yourself with—” Angel swept a hand across the woman’s counter, which was lined with jars of pasta and legumes of every kind, and bowls of red onions and garlic bulbs. “These things are beautiful. And the way you put them together. The dishes you create, this is beauty you create in your life, and it needs to be part of our design.”

  Lisa’s eyes brightened. “You’re right, I love cooking, but I never thought of it as visual. As art.”

  “Well, it is. Your ingredients are like sculptures that live and evolve in your kitchen. It’s a manifestation of your inner beauty. And the herb garden in the living room? And the dishes display? This is from your own beauty and your love of your family, and your Italian mother, too.”

  Angel watched Lisa run her hand over the green. This was a good moment, when a client recognized that she contained beauty that was reflected in her own environment. Something intrinsic, something of hers. Lisa ran a finger over the pattern. People wanted beauty in their lives. They would shop for it and buy it, but what they really wanted was for it to come from within.