by John Dalmas
Savola pointed out that interstate kidnaping was a federal offense, and as such an FBI responsibility. Which of course was why I'd talked in terms of the assault. It was the junior of the two felonies, but it came under the sheriff's jurisdiction. I told him I'd run onto the evidence while carrying out two other investigations, one private, the other for the City of Los Angeles. If the feebs, the FBI, started an investigation of the Christman disappearance, they'd pull the rug out from under me and the firm on both of them. But if we could present major evidence that certain persons had abducted Christman, the government would have to pay us our costs and a reasonable fee, which could be substantial.
I watched Savola while he thought it over. Not every county sheriff feels friendly to contract investigation firms, but most of them feel even less friendly to the feebs, who can be really arrogant and overbearing toward local agencies when their interests overlap. Besides, Joe Keneely has carefully nurtured Prudential's good name, and this wouldn't need to cost Lane County much if any money.
"Seppanen, eh? I've read about you." It had to be the twice-killed astronomer again. As Joe likes to say: "The best promotion is outstanding work properly publicized." Savola ended up saying okay, if our terms were suitable. Carlos transferred the call to Joe, and twenty minutes later we had another contract we could use, registered in the National Law Enforcement Network. It didn't mention kidnaping.
As Joe put it: "Ah, the marvels of electronics, the Network, and a good reputation."
* * *
While we waited, I got a bright idea for my next action. My office was still bugged, and I needed to use the National Law Enforcement Network, which meant I couldn't do it from home. So I sat down, called up the army's CID headquarters in the Pentagon, and instead of telling them orally what I wanted, I wrote it. Including: "My office is bugged, and I need to pretend I don't know it. So I'm writing this." I figured a little drama might help get me what I wanted. Then, still writing, I identified my firm, myself, and the contract, and indicated that at least two of our suspects were ex-Rangers. What I needed, I told the guy, was a printout, with photos and certain other particulars, of all Rangers who'd served in the same company as Captain Aquilo Reyes, and who'd resigned or failed to reenlist between 2007:1:1 and 2008:12:31.
He checked me out on the Network first, then agreed. It turned out there were sixteen of them, including Steinhorn. Eight had been unmarried, and three had Hispanic names. Two of the sixteen photos matched faces in Carlos' videotapes from Ensenada. A third matched a face in Charles' photos. Of those three, all had been single at the time of discharge.
Then I went home. I decided to start with the eight who'd been single. I'd gotten their addresses at the time of enlistment; now I called up local directories and got the phone numbers for those addresses. At six of the eight, someone answered, none of them the subject. Only two knew, or admitted knowing, the person I was calling about. I pitched myself as an old army buddy trying to get in touch, and got addresses for the two; neither was in Ensenada.
Then I called up the Ensenada directory; two of the others were listed there. That left me with four to go. I called up the directories for their pre-enlistment home towns, then called the listed numbers. I put on a mild Finnish accent, in case people were suspicious that I was police. People don't usually associate foreign accents with police, except in some places Hispanic or Oriental accents.
One number got me an L.A. family. My man, Robert Myers, was their son. Until recently he'd lived in Ensenada, Mexico, they said, where he'd done security work and traveled a lot. But three weeks previous they'd called him and gotten a recording in Spanish. Their college-student daughter told them it meant the number was out of service. So they'd written to him. The letter had been returned: he was no longer at that address, and had left no forwarding address.
I promised them I'd let them know if I learned where he was, and the daughter gave me the names of three L.A. friends of his. The directory gave me numbers for two of them. The third was a Jesse Johnson. There were eight Jesse Johnsons listed, along with maybe thirty J. Johnsons, so I skipped him. At one of the two numbers, for an Osazi Gorman, a woman answered. She was suspicious and hostile, and said her husband didn't know any Robert Myers.
At the other number, a man answered. He told me he'd heard, a week or so earlier, that Robert was in town, but he hadn't seen him. And if his parents hadn't seen him, then . . . After a long hesitation, he suggested I call Osazi Gorman. There was also an Arnette Jones who was more likely than anyone else to have seen him, but Jones had no regular address. He hung out around Lafayette-MacArthur Park a lot, and was easy to recognize. An ex-Colorado State basketball player, he was seven feet tall and usually wore a feathered headdress.
You work at UCLA, so you probably live in Westwood, and might not be familiar with those midtown parks. They've pretty much been taken over by street people and assorted characters, many of them doing drugs. Was Myers in trouble? Maybe on drugs and gotten fired? Or run away? If SVI was smartly run, and it probably was, they wouldn't keep someone on the payroll who used drugs. He might blab; even sell information. Or had Myers gotten crosswise of them for some other reason? In either case they might not want him running loose.
Had Leo McCarver been another runaway from VSI?
It was conceivable that Myers was still with them, had gone underground for them on some job, though my gut reaction to that was rejection.
But the real question was, could Robert Myers give me any information regarding Christman.
30
MacARTHUR PARK
I'd planned to eat breakfast at home the next morning. I got up more than early enough, showered, shaved, and being alone in the apartment, turned on the radio. The first thing I heard was a news item about a newly reported development by a Brit research project. They'd built what they called a spatial transposer, and tried to move a rock from one side of their lab to another with it. Somehow it was supposed to relocate without moving through the intervening space! They transposed it, all right, but it arrived as a little pile of molecular dust.
Back to the drawing board. Yeah. But when they perfected it, and they probably would . . . What a terrorist could do with something like that! Or a dictator, or anyone else who was ruthless. What price peace then? Or privacy? What would happen to wilderness areas? Wildlife refuges? Homes? Convents for chrissake! Let alone what it would do to people's sense of what kind of universe they lived in. This report by itself would stimulate a new spike of craziness for the newscasts to tell about.
With that on my mind, I finished dressing without noticing. The next thing I knew, I'd put on my shoulder holster and was shrugging into my jacket without fixing breakfast. To hell with it, I decided, I could eat at Morey's. Tuuli'd be flying home later that day, and maybe the world would seem right again.
I left for work. Twenty minutes later I was driving south on Fairfax, still thinking about the spatial transposer and half listening to music on the radio. Then KMET interrupted with a special news bulletin. According to the station's traffic floater, a huge explosion in Van Nuys, a couple of minutes earlier, had done massive damage to an apartment building in the vicinity of Woodman Avenue, south of Ventura Boulevard.
My stomach spasmed and I jerked over toward the side of the street, braking, almost hitting a parked car and damned near getting rear-ended. Horns blared. For a minute I just sat there, till someone got out of a car and came over to see if I was all right. He thought I'd had a seizure of some kind, which I guess in a way I had. I thanked the guy, and told him I'd be all right; that I'd just heard on the radio my apartment house had been blown up. Because I had no doubt at all what building it was. A day later, Tuuli would have been there asleep when the place blew. If I'd eaten at home as planned, I'd have been there. Meanwhile, the building security guys were ours. Had been ours. I realized then that I'd heard the explosion and ignored it, dismissed it. As if it might be some demolition contractor bringing down an old high rise.
I drove on to work but didn't go to Morey's. Breakfast didn't interest me then. Instead I went into the lobby, pressed the up button, and waited for an elevator. When one arrived, who should step out but Rossi and Steinhorn, getting an early start on their day. I took myself totally by surprise. I slammed Steinhorn right between the eyes, driving him back into the elevator cab, stunning him and breaking his nose. Grabbing his feet, I dragged him back out in the lobby, got in the cab, and started upstairs, leaving poor Rossi staring, his lower jaw hanging down on his chest. Steinhorn was bleeding all over himself.
When I got upstairs, I didn't know what the hell to do, so I just sat down in reception. A minute later Joe came out of his office looking terrible. He saw me there, and asked if Tuuli was still out of town. He'd just gotten a call from one of the night guards who'd gotten off duty at 6:05; at the apartment. He'd stopped for breakfast at a Clancy's a few blocks from there—had finished eating and was drinking his coffee—when a huge explosion broke all the tempered glass windows in the restaurant.
He'd had a feeling it might have been "his" building, and had driven back, bleeding from glass cuts. It had been a car bomb, apparently on the entrance ramp to the underground garage. The whole front half of the building was rubble; there was even major damage to the building across the street. No way the entrance or garage guards could have survived. The hall man might have, possibly, if he'd been in the back of the building.
When he'd finished telling me, Joe went back into his office. Meanwhile Rossi had come up, and heard most of it. "Your partner," I told him, which made no sense to him at all. Made no sense, period. I started down the corridor, thinking how many people must have been killed. Most wouldn't have started for work yet. Kids wouldn't have left for school.
Rossi followed me into my own office. I knew what I had to do. First I removed the bug from the thermostat control; no use playing that game anymore. Then I called Tuuli. I told her what had happened, and to stay where she was a while longer. All after telling the computer to charge the call to my home phone, so the call and destination wouldn't be registered in the office computer.
When I disconnected, I told Rossi his partner was a plant, then asked myself aloud: "Why in hell have I been screwing around trying to get a line on Robert Myers, when one of the murderous assholes was sitting right here in our offices? And I knew it!" And I'd left him downstairs! I should have put him under citizen's arrest! Rossi said he'd told Steinhorn to go to the building infirmary, which was on the ground floor, so I called there. They hadn't seen him. I wasn't surprised. He'd realized his cover must be blown, and taken off. All the satisfaction I got from it was what Rossi told me: Steinhorn had been bleeding badly from the nose, and his eyes had started to swell.
Meanwhile I still had the lead I'd dug up the day before: Robert Myers. Carlos wasn't in—he was flying to Fresno that morning—or I'd have told him what I had in mind. So I clipped a gadget pouch on my belt, with some stuff I'd need, then told Fidela where I was headed, and left.
* * *
I took Sixth Street east toward downtown, and parked in the shade in the big lot at the First Congregational Church between Commonwealth and Occidental. Then I crossed the street to Lafayette-MacArthur Park, and started circulating. It's an open-access park south of Sixth Street, a mile long and half as wide. That's a lot of city blocks, and it always has a lot of people. Even finding someone seven feet tall and wearing a feathered headdress could take awhile.
The eastern section north of the lake is sort of a bivouac for street people—a lot of Plastosil bubble tents that the city set up, with interspersed latrines and showers, and stand-up mess tents with rice, beans, bread and cheese, and whatever produce is a glut on the current market.
There aren't as many street people as there used to be, and they're different from the street people of the eighties and nineties. A good job is still a problem for the functionally illiterate, but they're a lot less common than they were years ago. For a lot of today's street people, it's the rate of change that's gotten to them, and they've opted for days in the sun, with music or drugs or both, till they get bored with it or maybe die. When the weather's nice, there's a sense of fun and laughter. When it rains or a Santa Ana blows in, those who stay tend to get gloomy and suicidal, or surly and mean. Sort of a manic-depressive subculture. But this day was beautiful—sunny, temperature about 75, and a light breeze.
I'd been walking around for the better part of an hour, when I saw a small crowd on the west shore of the lake, gathered around some drumming and chanting. I drifted over. In the center of them, some guys, mostly blacks, were bounding up and down in a Watusi-looking dance. One of them was going so high, he looked like he was on a pogo stick. He wore a feathered headdress that added an extra foot to what was already way more height than anyone else there. Arnette Jones, I decided, and moved in closer. Maybe Robert Myers was one of the other dancers.
He wasn't. He was sitting cross-legged, slapping the bongos. I recognized the face from his picture. He was a caramel-colored, average sized, athletic-looking black. The dance was nearly over by the time I moved in. A tallish, lean-looking guy was doing a sort of rap counterpoint to the chant in some African-sounding language. He changed tempo, speeding up and raising his pitch; the drums crescendoed; then everything stopped, the dancers streaming sweat.
I'd already gone over and squatted down beside Myers. He looked at me, not very alert, under the influence of some chemical, hopefully New Orleans Sugar. It's supposed to be big with musickers, and they can shake it off if they need to. "Robert," I said quietly, "I'm trying to bust Kelly. For the abduction of Ray Christman. And for Christman's murder, if that's what he did to him."
He turned to me, coming back into the world a bit.
"Steinhorn's in L.A.," I went on. "Steinhorn and others. They've already killed McCarver. Maybe you knew that."
He shook his head.
"They don't wish you well, either. Kelly's gone kill-crazy, and if I could find you, his guys can. This morning he car-bombed the apartment house I live in. Lived in. It killed a lot of people; it's not known how many yet. If my wife had been in town and I hadn't gone out for breakfast, she and I would be dead now. That's what they had in mind."
I held his eyes. "If you're willing to give me your deposition regarding SVI and Christman, I can hide you where you can't be found. Not in the time Kelly will have. Because with your statement we can nail the sonofabitch. And as far as I'm concerned, you won't have to name any other names than Kelly Masters."
He was looking at me, apathetically but taking it all in. With the music and dancing over, the crowd was dispersing. Arnette Jones and another dancer were standing by though, to find out what was going on between me and their buddy.
"Robert, you want us to run this shark?" Jones asked. In street argot, a shark's a detective.
Myers shook himself, physically. "No," he said, looking up at Jones. "I told you I was in deep shit. Maybe the shark's got a ladder for me to climb out with."
I took the minicam out of my pouch and found his face in the viewfinder. I was going to get his statement now, before anything happened, before anything ran him off. I deliberately didn't read him his rights. It might spook him. Of course it would make him hard to prosecute, but if he netted Masters and company for us, that was fine with me. Joe and Carlos would understand, even if they weren't overjoyed. And if the prosecutor's office bitched, their heart wouldn't be in it. They're not what you'd call naive, and they've negotiated more than a few plea bargains.
"All right," I said, "if you'll speak slowly and clearly, starting with your name . . ."
He took a deep breath. "My name is Robert Fielding Myers. I was copilot of the skyvan that forcibly removed Ray Christman from Church of the New Gnosis property in Oregon about 7 October, 2011." He sounded like someone trained on being debriefed. I wondered if that was his Ranger training, or something the SVI taught its people. "Mr. Christman and a female companion were abducted by personnel acting fo
r my employer, Servicio Viajero Internacional, of Ensenada, State of Baja California del Norte, Mexico. I'd been briefed as an alternate to the abductors, but I wasn't used in that role. I was the copilot.
"The managing partner of SVI, Kelly Masters, was the pilot. Masters is an ex-OSS officer. Christman was flown to Mexico alive and in constraints, to a place about twelve kilometers from Ensenada, arriving there at approximately 0230 hours, Pacific Time.
"After we arrived, I went home to bed. The next day I was told that Christman and the woman had been taken to a shut-down pottery works across the road, where they were killed, then cremated in a large pottery kiln. Their ashes, I was told, were dumped in a manure pit on an adjacent dairy farm, and covered with manure."
Myers hadn't changed expression during his recital. "How did they kill him?" I asked.
"The plan had been to resedate him, then suffocate him. But because Christman was a large man—this part is hearsay, from, uh, one of the guys there—because Christman was a large man and it was uphill to the pottery works, they decided to have him walk there before they resedated him. They didn't want to carry him. They told him they planned to hold him for ransom. Inside the plant though, he started to fight and kick, as if he realized what they had in mind. Maybe the kiln was on and he could hear the gas flames, I don't know. Then Mr. Masters shot him and they cremated him. While he was in the kiln, they suffocated the woman, and when they finished cremating Christman, they cremated her. And that's it."
"Thanks, Robert." I popped another microcube into the minicam and started making a copy. "That seems to cover it. We got samples of the dried blood from a mop, and from pores in the concrete. Your statement should clinch it. Now let's get you out of here."
I got to my feet and helped him up. Jones and the other dancer had heard the whole thing. I wasn't very comfortable with that, but I couldn't see what harm could come of it. There hadn't been anything I could do about it anyway, not and get Meyers' statement.