Cruel Vintage

by Huston Michaels

  “Baruch told me he and Avi were like brothers.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. I checked, and it turns out Avi changed his will about six months ago.”

  “Any idea why”

  Ziva shook her head.

  “So, what’s Baruch going to do?” Kaye asked. “Stay on and teach your son the ropes?”

  “No, he decided to retire. He moved out of Los Angeles.”

  “To?”

  Ziva stopped again and turned to Kaye.

  “His condo,” she said, then paused before adding, “In Santa Barbara.”

  “Got an address?” Kaye asked instantly.

  She said nothing, but resumed walking to the parking lot. Then she looked back over her shoulder and said, “That would be another favor, Detective. You already owe me one.”

  Kaye sat on the Road King, thinking about how the information he’d gleaned over the last hour fit in with what he already had.

  That Les Baruch had a place in Santa Barbara could be significant, but might mean nothing.

  Lots of people had condos in Santa Barbara. Les Baruch also just happened to work for a major motion picture production company.

  Visiting Baruch had just moved up his priority list.

  He was about to start the bike when his phone buzzed. He recognized Thompson’s number.

  “What’s up, Captain?”

  “Kaye, where the hell are you?”

  “Outside Ziva Geller’s lawyer’s office. Why?”

  “I just got off the phone with Kai Iwamura over at the FBI,” Thompson said. “He’s been trying to call you since this morning. Wants to talk to you ASAP.”

  “Really?” Kaye said. “My phone…”

  He stopped short, realizing Iwamura had the wrong number.

  “Okay,” he told Thompson. “I’ll call him. Thanks, Captain.”

  He ended the call and called Iwamura.

  “Ben, where the hell have you been?”

  “In Stupidville,” Kaye said. “I got a new phone and didn’t give you the number. Sorry.”

  “But you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine. What do you need?”

  “I went ahead and called my contact in Europe over the weekend,” Iwamura said. “She didn’t even have to dig. I’ve got information for you on Valle delle Viti. I’ll tell you all about when you get here.”

  “You want me to come there?”

  “I don’t want to do this over the phone,” Iwamura said. “Hope that’s okay.”

  “Give me thirty minutes.”

  ***

  A little less than a half-hour later Kaye was riding the elevator to the FBI’s main floor in the federal building at Wilshire and Veteran. When he stepped out, Kai Iwamura, in the typical FBI gray suit, was waiting.

  “Wow,” Kaye said. “This must be important.”

  “It is. Follow me.”

  After sitting down Iwamura grabbed a file folder packed with pages and put it on his desk.

  “Okay,” he said. “I talked to my contact about Valle delle Viti, and you’re not going to believe what I found out.”

  “Try me.”

  “It’s strongly tied to organized crime.”

  “You were right,” Kaye said, smiling. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Then listen to this,” Iwamura said. He pulled several stapled pages from the folder and started running it down for Kaye.

  “In Italy, SRL means the same thing LLC does here. There are two individuals listed as the owners of Valle delle Viti, SRL, and the company address is in Reggio, Calabria. The Italian version of Valle delle Viti was formed about six years ago, one year before registering as an approved foreign entity in California. The declared nature of the business in Italy is real estate development and construction, but since being formed Valle delle Viti, SRL, has not acquired any property or applied to any Italian jurisdiction to build so much as a dog house.”

  “Sounds like a front to me,” Kaye observed.

  “You have no idea,” Iwamura said. “Ever heard of Lorenzo Maisano?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Maisano runs a company that translates into English as Cargo Expediters Unlimited, headquartered at the Port of Gioia Tauro, just north of Reggio. Gioia Tauro is Italy’s largest port and Maisano’s company handles ninety-five percent of cargo in and out, mostly containers.”

  “I assume you’re telling me this because Maisano is who formed Valle delle Viti here.”

  “Correct,” Iwamura said. “But what’s most interesting is that Interpol, Europol and the Italian Guardia di Finanza all believe Maisano heads an organized crime syndicate based in Calabria. They reputedly control nearly all the illegal drug traffic into and out of the European Union. What better way to do that than control the port?”

  “You think the Italian mob is investing ill-gotten gains in Santa Barbara County?” Kaye asked. “I don’t know. I’ve been up to Valle delle Viti, and it’s a pretty impressive place.”

  “I think Valle delle Viti resort might be legit,” Iwamura said. “But building a place like that is also the perfect way to launder money. Cost overruns, change orders, import duties, legal fees, service contractors, all kinds of things come to mind if there’s an international border involved. Hell, you could hide a fortune just in currency exchange rate fluctuations.”

  “Does anybody know if Maisano is in the U.S.?”

  “They know where Maisano is every single minute of every single day, and, no, the guy hardly ever leaves home except to go to his office.”

  “Is the Bureau going to open a case on this?” Kaye asked.

  “That’s not up to me,” Iwamura replied. “I’ll need more before I can take this to the boss.”

  “What do you need to know?”

  “I guess mostly why you asked me to look into Valle delle Viti.”

  Kaye spent the next twenty minutes filling Iwamura in on, and answering questions about, the Geller case, from the crime scene to Avi Geller’s possible investment in Valle delle Viti to Megan Sullivan all the way to that morning’s meeting with Howard Feinmann and Ziva Geller. He trusted Iwamura implicitly and held nothing back.

  “So,” Kaye said in closing, “I’m starting to put the connections together, but I’m no closer to tagging the actual shooter than I was on the day of the murder. I do have one question.”

  “Sure.”

  “Who’s the other principal in Valle delle Viti, SRL?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Iwamura said, grabbing the folder and shuffling through it momentarily before coming up with a single sheet.

  “His name…is…Adrian Gagnon. No other information given. I ran him and got nothing.”

  “Adrian Gagnon? Are you sure?”

  “That’s what it says.” Iwamura turned the form around so Kaye could see it. “Why? You know this guy?”

  “Remember we talked about the guy in the exploding Ferrari?”

  “Yeah, and that it might have been a revenge terror attack.”

  “I think we can forget that angle.,” Kaye said.

  “I’m not following,” Iwamura said.

  “Howell, the guy who died in the Ferrari, ran Black Scimitar.”

  “Yeah, I remember you telling me that.”

  “The guy who now runs the company,” Kaye said, “Howell’s right hand man for the last two years, is named Adrian Gagnon, and he went to school in Europe.”

  “Shit,” Iwamura said. “If it’s the same guy, that means Black Scimitar, which does a lot of work for defense contractors, could be tied to organized crime. We need to track that IPO.”

  The odd-shaped patch on Officer Reid’s uniform suddenly made sense to Kaye.

  “Gagnon is not a common name,” he said.

  “No, it’s not,” Iwamura said.

  Kaye pondered what Iwamura was telling him. If the people behind Valle delle Viti resort were either directly involved or fronted by organized crime, it helped explain some of the hardball legal tactics Alicia Valdez had
described.

  Kaye nodded, then said, “He’s connected to Valle delle Viti. What better way to keep a tight hold on things than build your own town, all nice and legal, then hire your own people to control it?”

  “They built their own town?” Iwamura asked. “You mean like employee housing and stuff?”

  “No, I mean they literally built their own town and incorporated it. The Village of Chumash Oaks,” Kaye said. “They got Santa Barbara County to use eminent domain to condemn some of the property they wanted so they could get their hands on it. I didn’t know they could do that.”

  “They can,” Iwamura said. “Back, oh, almost fifteen years ago the Supreme Court ruled that government entities’ use of eminent domain to transfer property from one private owner to another for economic development was constitutional. They just have to convince the local courts and pay the owner fair market value.”

  “Sounds shaky to me,” Kaye said. “I know of at least one instance where a guy’s vineyard was taken from him, and it’s still a vineyard, but now it’s owned by Valle delle Viti.”

  “I’d have to see all the paperwork, Ben, and read the decisions.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Kaye said. “I’m just saying that we both know that money influences both processes and opinions.”

  “That is true,” Iwamura said. “The irony of the particular eminent domain case that set the precedent is that the developer’s financing fell through after the original owners all lost their homes, and the pharmaceutical company that built a production facility and hired a bunch of people laid everybody off and left town as soon as their tax breaks ran out. The entire site is now a landfill.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a higher use to me,” Kaye said. “Oh, and I also hear that the local cops are making a lot of civil asset seizures.”

  “Maybe so,” Iwamura said. “But it’s not that easy in California anymore. The State changed their rules recently.”

  “But it still goes on, right?” Kaye asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Iwamura said. “I’m not saying it’s right or foolproof, but it is legal.”

  “Seems like there should be a connection there somewhere.”

  Iwamura laughed and said, “Geez, Ben, did you just get off the bus?”

  ***

  When Kaye got back to the Squad he headed directly for his Captain’s office. The door was closed, but the blinds were open, and two guys Kaye didn’t recognize, both wearing suits, occupied the chairs across the desk from Thompson.

  He went to his desk instead and found the message light on his desk phone on.

  The first message was from the DA’s office.

  “Kaye, this is Kayla Okafor. I just checked with Judge Gardner’s office and thought you should know there’s been no activity on the restraining order front. No further requests or allegations of any kind, nothing like that. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it, and keep your Captain in the loop.”

  No news is good news, he thought, then punched the delete button.

  The next message made him sit up and listen.

  “Kaye, this is Stephenson, Santa Barbara County. Just had a report cross my desk that I thought you’d find interesting. It came to me from San Luis Obispo PD. Several weeks ago they were contacted by the Vancouver, Washington PD about a missing person. It was a young woman, reported by her parents. She was on her way back to L.A. for school, last known whereabouts a Best Western just off the one-oh-one, from where she called her parents. She let them know she was okay and would call them when she got to school. She hasn’t been seen or heard from since. She was driving a blue Honda with Washington plates, which has not been located. Sounds familiar, right? Call me if you want more information. Thanks.”

  Kaye kept that message.

  He leaned back and thought about it.

  Could there be a serial kidnapper working the Central Coast region? If so, it was not his problem, right? Out of his jurisdiction, right?

  Right.

  But…

  He searched his desk drawers and finally found the contact information for law enforcement support at NamUs, the national database for missing and unidentified persons.

  Five minutes later he was talking to Farida, giving her the gist of the similarities between Nicole Ingram’s disappearance and the case he’d just heard about.

  “Is there a way to search the database for a particular geographic area where people went missing?” he asked. “Not where they lived, but where they disappeared from?”

  “I follow,” Farida said. “You want to know if there have been more possible abductions in that area?”

  “Correct.”

  “I’m sure there must be,” she said. “Can I put you on hold for a moment?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  He waited almost five minutes.

  “Sorry for taking so long, Detective Kaye,” Farida said. “Here’s what we can do. The bad news is that the standard search algorithm doesn’t do that. The good news is that our database administrator says she can write a custom query that will get you what you’re after.”

  “That’s great,” Kaye said. “What do you need from me?”

  “She asked for some basic parameters, like last known whereabouts, place of residence, race, sex, age range, stuff like that. The more specific you can be the better. It’ll refine the search results and you won’t get flooded with returns.”

  Kaye had to think about that for a moment.

  “Okay,” he said at last, “let’s narrow it down. Got a pencil?”

  “Ready when you are.”

  He gave her his list: Females between eighteen and thirty, no race or ethnic restrictions. Last known whereabouts the coastal counties from Ventura to Monterey and the contiguous inland counties. Vehicle descriptions and the State of registration. Time frame of the last twenty-four months.

  “Can you do that?” he asked.

  “She’s very good. She’ll figure it out.”

  “How long will this take?”

  “That I can’t tell you,” Farida said. “If you give me your e-mail we’ll send you the results as soon as we have them.”

  Kaye gave it to her. “Thanks, Farida, you’ve been a big help.”

  “That’s what we’re here for, Detective.”

  Kaye checked the Captain’s office and saw that Thompson was still in conference. He decided to wait a while.

  He found his notes from his conversation with Officer Devon, logged in, and pulled up the vandalism photos tagged to Megan Sullivan’s report.

  Devon had taken a lot of pictures, getting each spray paint tag from multiple angles and carefully documenting the few broken items.

  Kaye’s first thought was that Devon was doing a good job of making sure the department’s ass was covered in case there was a damages dispute with the insurance company.

  His second was that, in his opinion, anyway, the damages were almost superficial. The pictures clearly showed a target-rich environment if the perpetrators were interested in wreaking major havoc. Yet the vandals had passed over many easily accessible items, almost as if they were afraid to break anything of real value. Which he knew could mean kids.

  Though he’d never been in the house, several pictures of the living room tickled his memory. He had the feeling he’d seen the fireplace, the elaborate ormolu clock on the mantel and the painting hanging above that somewhere before. Even some of the furniture, which was mostly upended, looked enticingly familiar.

  While he dredged his memory, his desk phone buzzed.

  “Kaye.”

  “Detective, this is Bates at the front desk. Just got a call from some guy named Hernan who says he needs to talk to you, but hasn’t been able to reach you.”

  “Thanks, Bates. I’ll call him.”

  Kaye used his desk phone to make the call.

  “Hernan, Detective Kaye. Just heard you were looking for me.”

  “Yes, I tried to call.”

  “It’s a long story. What do you ne
ed?”

  “Rigo told me you talked to him this morning.”

  “I did,” Kaye said. “He’s not in trouble and he was very cooperative. Tell him I appreciate it.”

  “Good to know,” Hernan said. “But he also told me something he thinks you should know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He said he asked around if anybody else saw anything at the house on the day you asked him about, and one of the guys who used to be on his crew did see something.”

  “Go on,” Kaye said.

  “The guy, Miguel, told Rigo he saw the man who came to the house with La Jefa that day. He said the man got out of the car after La Jefa went inside, and he was carrying a large black bag. He also told Rigo that the man didn’t leave when La Jefa did.”

  “Did Rigo give you a description?” Kaye asked.

  “All his guy told him was that the man had dark hair, was wearing sunglasses, and was tall,” Hernan said. “In fact, Rigo said his guy said the man was ‘really tall’.”

  “Where can I find Miguel?”

  “That’s the thing,” Hernan said. “He won’t talk to you.”

  “Why not?”

  Hernan laughed. “Because you’re la policia. Plus, Miguel quit after he talked to Rigo.”

  “Hernan, I don’t care about Miguel’s status. But if he can help me solve two murders, I really need to talk to him.”

  “I understand,” Hernan said. “I’ll tell Rigo and have him put the word out. We’ll see if we can find him.”

  “Thanks, Hernan,” Kaye said. “Hey, how’s your boy doing? Staying safe?”

  “He’s doing good. Loves his job. I’m very proud of him.”

  “You should be. Thanks again.”

  When he hung up, Captain Thompson’s office was dark and empty.

  DAY 17

  Wednesday Week 3

  By 6:00 a.m., again driving the pickup to try and stay under the radar, Kaye was parked in the Venice canal neighborhood in a spot that gave him a view of Dennis Bettencourt’s garage doors.

  Because the houses fronted the canals, finding a vantage point hadn’t been easy, and because the houses were so close together it was difficult to park the pickup without blocking someone’s driveway.