“Let’s go,” Shane muttered.
What the hell could Laura be thinking? Shane thought furiously as he charged down the hallway, Mavis jogging to keep up with him. Hadn’t he specifically asked her to stay in his condominium where it was safe? And instead she’d traipsed off to the MCF and requested a meeting with an accused federal felon?
Worse, if she said anything that implicated her on that tape, there wasn’t a damn thing Shane could do to help her.
Yeah, this day just kept getting better and better.
Shane squinted while he watched the black-and-white video recording, not so much because the quality of the tape was poor, but because it pained him to see Laura’s beautiful face—a face he considered precious and special and his—transmitted on a video screen for not only himself, but Mavis Bertram, John McNamara, Andre Lorenzo, and the man who handled the surveillance tapes at the MCF.
The camera angle was above and to the right of her. Although he observed her only in profile at a distance of about five feet, he sensed her anxiety as she spoke through the telephone to Vince Lazar and watched him through a pane of bulletproof glass.
“Can you replay the whole thing from the beginning?” Mac asked the technician in charge of the surveillance. “I didn’t catch any of that. Were they talking in code or something?”
“They both knew they were being taped,” Mavis murmured. “It’s federal policy to tell visitors about surveillance. I got the impression she didn’t understand what Lazar was trying to tell her, though. And what was all that stuff about ‘checking with the other Cubans?’ Does Laura Mays have other family members that might be involved in the theft ring? Dom?” she prompted when Shane didn’t immediately answer the question she’d clearly intended for him.
Shane was busy grinding the enamel off his back teeth. God damn Laura for backing him into this position. He’d seen something on the tape all right—something only he, who knew Laura so well, might notice. If he said anything, though, he might get Laura into some kind of trouble. Although that would imply Laura was guilty of something . . . which he didn’t believe.
Did he?
He wouldn’t have initially guessed Joey Vasquez, his childhood friend and companion, could have knowingly agreed to take part in these crimes, either, even though his belief in his guilt had grown commensurately with the evidence that piled up against him.
He was furious at Laura for exposing herself this way. He stewed in a kettle of helplessness and rage. What the hell did she think she was doing by meeting with scum like Vince Lazar? And why had she gone behind his back, just when they seemed to have finally shattered the long-standing barriers that stood between them?
He stared at the snow on the video screen for a moment before he realized all the people in the room were looking at him expectantly.
“Are you okay, Dom?” Mavis asked, concern wrinkling her smooth brow. “Your shoulder bothering you?”
He didn’t have any choice. He believed Laura wasn’t involved, but he resented her for backing him into a corner where he might reveal something that put her in the FBI’s crosshairs.
“Actually, we just need to look at the last minute of their conversation,” Shane told the technician, ignoring Mavis’s question. He thought of that subtle shift that had occurred on Laura’s face there at the end of the recording. Understanding had hit her in that moment. She’d “gotten” whatever it was Lazar was trying to co vertly tell her.
Shane’s mouth twisted in anger as he watched the last part of the tape again. Vince Lazar ate up the vision of Laura like a perv at a peep show as he leaned as close to the window as possible.
“I never liked the way they treated you, Laura,” Lazar muttered unctuously into the phone. “If it’d been me, I would have been sweet with you. Now I’m locked up in here with no one on the outside who gives a rat’s ass. You and me are alike that way . . . our families betrayed us. So I’m gonna tell you a little secret, one that I acquired from a family member who did care about me, but who’s no longer alive. You know I’ve always liked you, so I kept it there . . . close to you. Just in case the shit flew, which I knew it would. Check with the other Cubans. With that and what else you received, you’ll have all the evidence you need.”
The first two times Lazar had mentioned the Cubans Laura had stared at him like he was mad. Shane knew Laura’s facial expressions too well not to recognize the precise moment when comprehension had struck her. She’d stiffly thanked him. Lazar had leered at her ass as she walked away, the phone dangling uselessly in his hand.
Their conversation had actually taken place less than a half hour ago.
“The details about what Vince Lazar was trying to tell her don’t matter,” Shane said softly when Laura and Lazar’s interview came to an end once again on the video. “The important thing is that Laura understood what Lazar said. First, she’ll go to her house and retrieve something. I don’t know where she’ll go next, but all we have to do is follow her to know what Lazar wanted her to find.”
Mavis pulled out her cell phone and called the agent tailing Laura. Shane felt Mavis’s gaze on him once she’d uttered a few terse sentences into the phone and hung up.
“You were right, Dom. Laura went to her house, was inside it for less than a minute or two, came out, and got in her car again. She’s headed north on Ashland as we speak. I’ve given Patterson instructions to call us as soon as she reaches her destination.”
“We’ll be in the car,” Mac told Mavis as he and Lorenzo left the room. “Give us a call when you find out her location.”
“Dom? Are you coming?”
He stood and walked out of the room behind Mavis, Lorenzo, and Mac. Mavis gave him a wary look and let the others get ahead of them a bit. She spoke in a soft voice. “Are you worried that if Laura finds anything the courts will say it’s inadmissible evidence because of your relationship to her?”
“The thought crossed my mind. Among other things.”
“We have the tape of her and Lazar talking. He’s the one who tipped her off. You had nothing to do with it. If there’s evidence, it’ll be admissible. So don’t beat yourself up about that.”
Shane didn’t say anything as they got on the elevator, but he’d already come to the same conclusion about the admissibility of any evidence that might be uncovered. That wasn’t what had him so preoccupied.
Laura had put him in the untenable position of choosing her safety and well-being over his integrity and mission as a law enforcement officer. He couldn’t lie to his staff about what he’d seen on that tape. Who knew what kind of trouble she was getting herself into? They’d just found their way back to each other after nearly fourteen years. Now she’d gone and done this.
He’d stand by her, no matter what. But he was going to turn her over his knee the first chance he got for willfully making herself a target not only for the investigators in this case, but the guilty men who had nothing to lose at this point by harming her.
Or worse.
The frightening thought galvanized him, punching through exhaustion wrought by stress and his injury.
“Call Patterson back and tell him to make sure he never loses sight of her,” Shane told Mavis as they got on the elevators that led to the parking garage. “Tell him there’s a possibility someone else could be following her to see where she goes after her visit with Vince Lazar.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
You were right about Lazar holding out to tell someone what he knew. He wanted to tell Laura Mays for some weird reason. What did you see on the tape, Dom?” Mavis asked as Shane pulled out of the parking garage and headed toward Ashland Avenue. “How did you know Laura would go to her house before she went wherever Lazar suggested?”
“Laura doesn’t have any family left except for Joey in the United States who qualify as ‘Cubans’—even though Laura and Joey are only half Cuban. So unless Lazar wanted her to check with every Cuban émigré in Chicago, he wasn’t talking about people.”
�
��Yeah . . . so?”
“Lazar said he put whatever she needed close to her in case the shit flew. Lazar was down in that basement with Mays on any number of occasions. It was their party central. I’m hazarding a guess he referred to a humidor Huey Mays kept at his bar in the basement,” Shane murmured, thinking of how he’d seen the electronically regulated storage box for cigars years back when he’d broken into Laura’s home. He’d seen the same humidor recently at Huey’s bar when he’d checked Laura’s house following Huey’s suicide.
“Cubans. He was talking about cigars?” Mavis asked. “What do you think Lazar put in the humidor?”
Shane shrugged as he turned north on Ashland and slammed his foot on the accelerator. Laura had quite a head start on them. “I’m guessing he hid a key of some sort. Whatever it is will give her access to something along with the information on the piece of paper Telly Ardos gave her earlier at her gallery.”
“You didn’t tell me about any piece of paper.” Mavis shot him an accusing glare.
“I didn’t get its significance until now,” Shane said truthfully. “Lazar must have passed on half the information to Ardos and kept the other half to give to Laura himself. It ensured he wouldn’t give away too much in the surveillance tapes.”
“I don’t get why he wanted to tell Laura and not us, aside from the fact that the guy was slobbering all over that pane of glass between him and Laura. Lazar obviously leches after her, but that’s not a good enough reason for him to do what he did,” Mavis mused.
“It’s just like he said. He felt a commonality with her because they’d both been betrayed by their families. Laura told me earlier this afternoon that her uncle, Derrick Vasquez, was a leader in the cop theft ring.”
“He was? So you think Lazar was talking about his cousin, Eddie Mercado? But he’s dead.”
“Alvie Castaneda isn’t. Randall Moody isn’t. Neither crime boss has stepped forward to help Vince. Both of them must think Lazar will either stay quiet or are betting his criminal background will make him an untrustworthy witness against them. Neither think he’s got anything worthwhile on them. The Chicago mob and the men in the theft ring are the family Lazar referred to, and if I don’t miss my guess, Eddie Mercado—Alvie Castaneda’s one-time first lieutenant and Lazar’s cousin—is who Lazar meant when he said he had a family member who did care, but was dead.”
Shane stared out the front window grimly. “I’m thinking it was Eddie Mercado who gave his cousin Lazar something worthwhile on this case—something either Castaneda or Moody or both didn’t know about.”
“And that something is what Laura Mays is going after at this moment,” Mavis said with dawning understanding. “But what does she plan to do with whatever it is? She thinks it’ll vindicate her brother. She hinted that much at the emergency room. But Joey Vasquez is guilty by his own admission—”
“We just need to get there and fast,” Shane interrupted. “I’m more worried about Moody or one of his boys tailing her like we are after her visit with Lazar. Moody knows everything that happens in this city.”
Mavis flipped open her cell phone when it rang a second later. She pulled out a pad of paper and pen from the breast pocket of her overcoat. “Okay, go ahead. Got it. We should be there in ten minutes, tops.”
“Tell Patterson to stay fixed unless he sees someone go in after Laura or she leaves before we get there,” Shane said.
Mavis relayed his instructions to Agent Patterson and hung up before she called Mac to tell him their destination.
“Mac and Lorenzo are a few blocks behind us. It looks like you were right again, Dom. Laura pulled up at one of those warehouses where you can rent spaces for storage. It’s located on Ra cine and Loomis. Patterson said she had a card key to get into the building.”
Shane cursed when the light turned red and the cars in front of him slowed. “Shit. We’re still seven or eight minutes away.”
The ceiling was twenty feet high inside the warehouse although the newly built storage rooms only went up eight feet. All that open space above her head combined with the narrow hallway made Laura feel jittery, like something was looming above her, waiting for the right moment to swoop down and strike.
It was so eerily quiet she had the strangest urge to tiptoe down the vast hallway lined with doors. She resisted the stupid temptation, however, and located locker number fifty-eight accompanied by the sound of her pumps clicking briskly on the tile floor.
She used the keypad to the left of the door to enter the seven digit code Telly Ardos had given her earlier today along with Vince Lazar’s name. The light on the keypad turned green. Her breath burned in her lungs as she once again utilized the card key she’d found inserted beneath the felt lining at the bottom of Huey’s humidor.
The lock on the door clicked, the noise sounding unnaturally loud in the empty, silent facility. Laura reached for the knob, her heart hammering in her chest. She flipped the switch on the wall and the room was bathed in harsh fluorescent light.
She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but the ten-by-ten-foot room stacked with boxes seemed a little anticlimactic. A quick inspection of one of the top boxes told her it was filled with what appeared to be reels of audiotape, each one labeled with a date and names. The one she picked up read: SUNNY DAYS—SEPTEMBER 28, 1992, PENSACOLA, FLORIDA.
Her heartbeat pounded even louder in her ears. Sunny Days had been Derrick’s restaurant, the place where Laura first overheard the cops planning for a jewelry heist. For as long as she could remember Sunny Days had been a cop hangout. For a select few, however, those meetings took place late at night in the back room.
She opened several other boxes in quick succession and saw that most of the tapes were labeled with the restaurant name.
After a few more minutes of investigation Laura realized that the tapes were arranged by year. She couldn’t get back to the tapes in the far right-hand corner without clearing out the entire room to make way for herself, but a cursory count told her there must be at least fifty boxes there and they weren’t all filled with audiotape. One contained electronic equipment and another bulletproof vests.
In another she found notebooks filled with writing, most of it in a single hand. Laura couldn’t be sure, but it appeared the names and drawings represented some sort of plans or worksheets for multiple-member crimes like the jewelry heists. A memory flashed into her mind’s eye, a recollection that anxiety and fear had made fragmented and blurry, of Derrick dragging her before a group of eight men sitting around a table. She saw flashing images: Huey’s hungry, furious gaze; Vince Lazar’s lascivious expression, so unchanged from the one she’d seen today through the bulletproof glass; Randall Moody inspecting her coldly with those chilling light blue eyes as he held a pen in his hand, a notebook on the table before him.
Well, well, what’s this? A sneak? Didn’t your uncle ever teach you it is rude to listen in at doors, Laura? Randall Moody had asked, a small, cold smile curving his thin lips.
A shiver leapt down her spine at the memory. She forced her attention back to the notebooks. She thought she recognized some of the locations written both on the tapes and on the notebooks: Pensacola, Florida; Andersonville, Indiana; Green Bay, Wisconsin. They were the locations for some of the jewelry and rare coin exhibitions that Huey and the other cops had been accused of hitting.
Were the tapes of them planning for their heists? And if so, why in the world would the members of the theft ring purposefully make and save such incriminating evidence against themselves?
Unless somebody else besides Moody and his gang was secretly recording the meetings. But who? It couldn’t have been the federal or state government or it would have been mentioned in Joey’s preliminary hearing. Besides, the evidence was all locked away in private storage, not in a government facility.
Excitement fluttered in her belly. This could be it—her ticket to freedom after all these years; a guarantee of safety for Joey, his family, and Shane.
Sh
ane needed to know about these tapes. All she could do was pray that whatever was on them was a stake to Randall Moody’s heart.
She randomly grabbed two of the reels and shoved them into her bag before she shut out the light and made sure the door was locked behind her. The hallway seemed dim in comparison with the superbright lights in the storage room. It was chilly, too. Apparently the owners of the facility didn’t waste money on heat. She rushed down the gloomy corridor, eager to be out of the vast, silent warehouse so she could call Shane. He’d be irritated with her for leaving his condo when she’d promised she wouldn’t, but what was inside that storage facility would go a long way toward getting him over his anger.
The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees with night-fall, Laura realized when she stepped into the parking lot. The chirping sound her car made when she hit the unlock button on her key chain echoed off the surrounding warehouses and abandoned-looking brick buildings. Just as she reached for the handle of her driver’s-side door, someone wrapped his forearm around her throat and jerked her head back painfully. Her scream froze in her throat when she felt the sharp edge of a knife biting into her skin.
“You’ve been a bad girl, Laura. Maybe Huey was right when he said we should have gotten rid of you from the first. You always were a nosy little sneak,” Randall Moody murmured into her ear.
Shane parked his car a quarter of a block down the street from the storage warehouse.
“Patterson says she’s still inside,” Mavis said after she’d flipped closed her cell phone.
“He hasn’t seen anyone else near the storage facility?”
Mavis shook her head. “Laura’s car is the only one in the parking lot. All he’s seen is an occasional car passing.”
“You, Patterson, Mac, and Lorenzo stay put for now. I’m going to meet with her when she comes out, see if I can just talk her into showing us point-blank what Lazar wanted her to see,” Shane said as he unbuckled his belt.
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