Signature Wounds

by Kirk Russell

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m an idiot.”

  “Just bring me in. If I’m wrong about Jeremy, I need to know what I’ve missed seeing.”

  I pulled the memory stick Beatty gave me and slid it across to her.

  “That’s video Beatty took of you with a small drone he owns. He didn’t know the surveillance was DOD until last night when OSI told him he was being investigated over drones he flew in Taiwan. Until they knocked on his door, he thought you were CIA.”

  She looked at the memory stick and then at me with kindness in her eyes. Her voice softened and slowed.

  “We have wiretaps of an angry Jeremy Beatty talking about the US Air Force. Read the transcripts we’ll send you tonight and come to your own conclusions. He harbors extreme anger over his discharge. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was turn over a year’s worth of investigation, but I didn’t see how we could ignore it. He knew the victims. He knew the party location. He was invited and declined to attend. He has knowledge of explosives.”

  “Jeremy doesn’t know anything about explosives.”

  “He was trained in the air force.”

  “Only about the ordnance the drones delivered, so you’re really stretching it.” I paused, took her in again, then said, “Are you saying you were worried about his state of mind before there was a bombing?”

  “That’s right, and we’re turning everything over tonight.” She did something I didn’t see coming. She reached across the table and touched my fingers, then pulled her hand back. “I’m so sorry, so truly sorry for your loss.”

  “Is there any hard evidence on Beatty?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Is there any hard evidence?”

  “Not yet.”

  Desperation mixed with grief crept into my voice. “You should have told my supervisor that you had questions about me. I should be out there.”

  “I see that now.” She glanced at Griswold, who was cleaning his glasses again and wouldn’t look at me. “Any questions about you are my doing, not my team’s,” she said.

  I didn’t care if it was her or her team or whatever. I needed to be at the Alagara right now and wasn’t. She was still talking, and I wasn’t hearing her.

  “But not about Beatty,” she said. “He needs to be questioned. Everything we have, transcripts, everything—the Joint Terrorism Task Force will have it all before dawn. I should tell you that he canceled his phone tonight.”

  I pulled out my cell, called Beatty, and got a recording saying the phone number was no longer in service.

  “When you saw him earlier, did he tell you that he was cutting his phone off?”

  “No.”

  “Yet you were kind enough to drive out and check on him after you had left several messages for him. Don’t you think it would be basic human decency to tell you the number you’ve been calling all these years will stop working in a couple of hours?”

  I nodded at her. I agreed. I was surprised.

  “That’s all I have, all we have. We’ve been working a stolen blueprint investigation with OSI, and we’re swamped with cybertheft. That’s been my whole life the past six months. Beatty’s not implicated in our Taiwan problem, but his job broker could be. That broker, Edward Bahn, is a scuzzbag, and the man who paid Bahn is a black-market heavyweight. I hate to turn everything over before we’ve moved on our investigation, but there seemed to be too much to ignore.”

  “Maybe he disconnected his phone due to your surveillance and after OSI officers questioned him last night.”

  “Maybe he did, and it just happened to coincide with the hour of a terrorist attack.”

  I registered that and stared as my phone rang.

  “That’s my supervisor. We’ll go through everything you turn over as soon as we get it. For what it’s worth, Beatty misses the air force and thinks of those days as the best in his life. Check out his haircut.”

  “You don’t have an answer for him canceling his phone, do you?”

  “Only that he’s trying to shake your surveillance.”

  “Ahead of an attack.”

  I didn’t touch that, walked out, and talked to Venuti only long enough to tell him I was on my way upstairs to his office.

  6

  “Send me back to the bomb scene.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “Not yet, headquarters is . . .”

  “Screw headquarters, Dan. I belong out there and you know it. I just dealt with the DOD farce. Send me back now.”

  My anger was intense, and I interrupted as soon as I understood what he was planning.

  “You’re going to shuffle me off to look at a van two detectives have already looked at that’s about to get hauled to our yard. You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Grale, listen to me. I’m sorry. I’m very sorry for you. I don’t know how you’re doing it right now, but I can’t send you back yet. Headquarters doesn’t want you at the Alagara.”

  “Headquarters doesn’t want me there? Why would that be? Did someone here say what the DOD brought in needs to be looked at closely? You’re the only one they’ve talked to, right? So what did you say? That you’d backwater me somewhere while I get looked at for some asinine reason?”

  “The Hullabaloo driver has been identified as a twenty-seven-year-old Hispanic named Juan Menderes. Presumably fled. I’ll text you the address for the van. The Las Vegas PD detectives there will wait for you. Go there. That’s an order. You’re on Menderes until we get this sorted out.”

  “It’s already sorted out.”

  “There’s no other way, Grale. You need to go.”

  “I don’t get it, Dan. I don’t get any of this. I’m needed at Alagara, not tracking this guy down.”

  “This is not a debate.”

  “What this is, is wrong.” I pointed a finger at him. “I never belonged at a crime scene more than this one.”

  “I’m trying to get you back there.”

  Twenty minutes later I said hello to the Las Vegas Metro detectives, then I circled the lime, orange, and red Hullabaloo van while they watched. I had a hard time concentrating, but they had already done their search of the van. They had other information after talking with Hullabaloo. The driver, Juan Menderes, had texted the Hullabaloo bakery office after making the cake delivery to Bar Alagara. That was confirmed. That was Hullabaloo’s protocol. You deliver then communicate the delivery was made.

  Menderes had made two more deliveries after Alagara yet in the van was a lone red, white, and blue Fourth of July cake with the address of one of the last scheduled deliveries taped to it. Las Vegas detectives and FBI agents were at the Hullabaloo bakery building and had verified that the recipients of the final two deliveries had received their cakes. One was at home and the other out watching fireworks but could be reached on her cell phone. So either the cake still there was an extra that got mistakenly made or something else was going on.

  I called the woman whose name was on the tag and identified myself. She confirmed her cake had been delivered and asked what anyone would ask: Why was the FBI interested in her Fourth of July cake? I heard nervousness in her voice and leaned through the van door and looked at the address on the cake in the van again. It was her address. So there was that to figure out. I thanked her and said good-bye.

  The LVPD detectives also had witnesses who could put the Hullabaloo van in the neighborhoods of the final two delivery locations, one on Bonanza and the other a mile and a half from Bar Alagara on North Torrey Pines. It was the North Torrey Pines cake that was still in the van. I could read the address on that one but didn’t climb in to avoid contaminating evidence should there be any. The van would go from here to the FBI yard, and a bomb dog would get in first. I looked at the Metro detectives, and one asked me, “What do you think?”

  “I think somebody has a side business.”

  “That’s what we’re guessing too.”

  Menderes’s girlfriend lived on the
third floor of the apartment building over a parking garage and was home when the detectives and Metro officers had knocked on her fourth floor door. She was in a Metro detective’s car on her way to a station to be interviewed, but so far she was claiming she’d had no contact with Menderes tonight.

  After the van was loaded onto a tow truck, I followed the detectives to where Menderes lived. As I drove, the office texted me a photo of Menderes’s driver’s license. Looking at it, I confirmed that Menderes was the Hullabaloo driver I had seen talking on his phone at the stoplight just before the bomb exploded. Who was he talking to then? I wanted that answer tonight.

  7

  Menderes lived with two roommates in a drab three-bedroom house with tan paint and a concrete tile roof, same as all the houses on the block. Four Metro patrol cars and an unmarked sat nose-to-tail on the street in front of the house. I skirted those but paused at a Ford Taurus with bald tires and flecked paint dying in the driveway.

  Inside, Menderes’s two roommates, Enrique Vasco and Jaime Cordova, worked hard to separate themselves from Juan. Yes, he was their roommate. No, they didn’t know him well. Cordova hadn’t met him until after he’d moved in. Vasco had once worked at the same casino as Menderes but barely knew him then. When they were looking for a roommate, his name had come up and now they lived with him, but everybody had different schedules so nobody ever talked or hung out together. I had heard it all before.

  “It’s not that big of a deal we don’t know him that well,” Vasco said.

  “Maybe not,” I answered. “Which of you heard he needed a room?”

  Vasco looked puzzled. Hadn’t he just explained this? He tapped his chest.

  “I did.”

  “Where did you hear it?”

  “From this chica. I don’t know how she knew.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Rosamar something.”

  “Rosamar what?”

  “Don’t know, dude.”

  “My name is Paul Grale.”

  I got out my FBI cards and gave one to each of them. I expected Venuti to redirect me to the bomb scene, but I’d follow this until Menderes was found.

  “None of this is going away until we find Juan.”

  Vasco shrugged and said, “Juan is a quiet dude and always wearing headphones. He’s into soccer and music.”

  “You know his hobbies, but you don’t know him.”

  “I didn’t say I don’t know him. Just when he’s here he’s got his headphones on.”

  Neither roommate knew anything about his family. Vasco thought Juan might have a relative living in Vegas, but he wasn’t sure. We did this some more, then I asked to see Juan’s bedroom and the Vegas detectives who’d arrived before me stepped outside. They’d already seen the bedroom.

  Clothes were lying around, but there was little else. Menderes slept in there, little more. One window was shut tight, the other unlocked and opened an inch, enough to bleed air conditioning into the hot night. The window frame was warped and Vasco volunteered that you need someone on the outside pushing to get it locked.

  “Is it usually locked?” I asked.

  “I’m never in here.”

  “Why is it open now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Make a guess.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does Juan ever come by the bar where you work?”

  “No. Where I work is a big deal. They wouldn’t let Juan in. It’s like a club bar. Why are you coming down so hard, man? We’re freaked out and trying to help you guys. We were watching it on TV when you got here.”

  “Three roommates living together usually know something about each other. I’m trying to get my head around you knowing next to nothing.”

  “Why do you need him so badly? Juan didn’t blow anybody up. The dude is not political.”

  “Why would he run?”

  “Probably got scared.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “Police.”

  “Why?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Why run? What does that get him, other than us looking for him?”

  “I’m not saying I know what he did, but he comes from a place in Mexico where if the police are looking for you, it’s always bad.”

  “Where in Mexico?”

  “Some village. I don’t remember. He said it was bad, and he was never going back there.”

  “Could he have come home and you didn’t see him?”

  I pulled on the window handle again.

  “You’re really on that window.”

  “Does your landlord pay for your air conditioning?”

  “Yeah, and he buys all our food and beer too. The landlord is an old asshole. We asked him to fix the window. He told me to fix it myself.”

  I looked around at the room again. The carpet hadn’t been changed in thirty years. The paint might have been older.

  “If later it turns out you covered up for him, that could pull you into a terrorist investigation. You don’t want a jury at a terrorism trial thinking you withheld evidence. You really don’t want that.”

  “Sounds scary.”

  Sarcasm, and early for it after what had happened tonight. I took that in, along with Vasco’s features: high forehead, jet-black hair razor-cut with clean lines, a handsome face, sensitive mouth and eyes. Everything about his look was a look, but maybe that just came with a high-end bartending job in Vegas.

  I returned to the warped window and pictured Juan coming home for what he needed, then climbing out the window. Twenty steps from the rear of the house was a six-foot-high fence bordering the backyard.

  “What did he do?” I asked. “Come home, get money, a different ID, an unused burner phone, and then hop out the window and climb over the fence. Let’s walk around back.”

  We looked over the back fence in the moonlight together, Vasco and me—Vasco tired of repeated questions and going dark like the other roommate, Cordova. His answers got shorter and shorter. Waiting me out and not overly affected by the bombing. He was in a far different space than I was.

  I looked at moonlight reflecting off a gravel road running through pale desert. Beyond the road and across an open area of scrub were the lights of another subdivision. I knew this road. It led to six abandoned concrete slab foundations that teenagers used for parties. Neighbors had complained about the noise and the drinking. Six years ago there had been a murder out here later linked to two other unsolved killings in Tucson and Kansas City. I shined a flashlight beam on dry, crumbly soil at the base of the fence and held the beam on a heel print.

  “You know we’ll find him, right?”

  “I’m not covering for him.”

  “You’re not being straight either.”

  “Why would I lie?”

  Juan Menderes had a green card. He was documented. He had a job that sounded better than his previous stints as dishwasher, bellhop, busboy, casino worker. I stared hard at Vasco, and he finally gave me something. He also convinced me he was still holding back.

  “Juan did stonework in Mexico and now he gets to drive, listen to music, deliver cakes, and makes good tip money. Maybe he doesn’t want to lose that. Maybe he thinks if he goes away for a while everything will be okay.”

  “Hides while we catch the bad guys, then pops back up.”

  “I guess that’s stupid, but that’s my only idea.”

  I moved the flashlight beam to the next footstep; the one where whoever jumped had regained his balance after landing.

  “Let’s go back inside,” I said.

  I talked to the Metro detectives, then drove the gravel road alone out to the abandoned foundation slabs and walked back along the road with a flashlight looking for footprints intersecting the road. I’d have to call about getting a dog out here in the dawn. I got back in my car, grief coming in waves as I crossed town to the Summerlin address of the owner of Hullabaloo and the Alagara, Omar Smith aka “The Turk.”

  A dozen Bureau and LV
Metro PD cars were in the driveway of Smith’s house and on the street when I arrived. If you lived in Vegas and listened to AM radio, you’d heard Smith’s ads. He called himself The Turk, but legally his last name was Smith, a change he made after becoming a US citizen in 2003. In his ads, he said Omar was his Turkish name and Smith his American. He had comic timing and made both names sound funny.

  Tonight, he was anything but funny. He looked stunned, anxious, and deeply worried. He looked shocked. He’d granted us full access to his business records and computers as soon as he was contacted following the bombing, said he wanted to help in any way. He didn’t know of any enemies, hadn’t had any threats personally and didn’t know of any disgruntled employees. He had debts, sure, but didn’t every true entrepreneur? He was current with his debts.

  He gave a large discount to the drone pilots for their party and said he very much liked Melissa Kern, the woman he’d negotiated with. He volunteered that he loved America and that he was Muslim, and the drone pilots fighting against radical Islam was a very good thing.

  “Of course, many hate the drones,” he added. “Many want the pilots dead. You must know this.”

  This brought more questions about his views, and he clarified, saying, “I am a Muslim but I am never at the mosque. This does not mean I don’t have faith. But I am not an active religious man. The Muslims who kill are like the Christians and Jews who kill. They are not really of any faith.”

  At the FBI we never turn down free information. He talked more about himself, speaking as he sat on a white leather couch in a large, comfortable room with tile floors, rugs, high white-painted walls, and art. A housekeeper offered tea and coffee. No one accepted. I saw a big man emotional over the bombing, answering questions without a lawyer present. Offhand, I liked him, but doubted he ever did anything without a reason.

  For five hours he answered questions about how the party-rental business worked and his other businesses, and how the drone pilots ended up renting the Alagara. He talked with his hands as he explained the constant breaking down and moving of party equipment and the running of his bakery, which made signature bread and cakes. None of that work happened with his long elegant fingers. His hands were far too smooth.