Guardian of Lies

by Steve Martini

  “If we want to live, we have to move,” she told Katia. They crawled on their knees back between the seats, dragging the clinking ankle chains with them. “Whatever you do, stay down,” said Daniela, “as close to the floor as you can.”

  “You’re bleeding,” said Katia.

  “I know.” Daniela’s right arm hung limp. The right shoulder and chest area of her jail jumpsuit were already soaked with blood.

  The sirens were now closer than before. From the direction of the sound, they might be approaching on the freeway.

  “We’ll be okay,” said Katia. “I know we will.”

  They could hear the muted voices of the men as they talked just outside the door to the bus. They were frenzied, in a hurry. They had to know they were running out of time. Katia and Daniela could hear shooting in the distance, somewhere behind the bus.

  “If they come again they will come very quickly,” said Daniela. “There may be explosions in the bus. It’s very important to stay down low, as close to the floor as you can get. In the confusion and smoke they may not see you. If you can survive for the next five minutes, you’ll be okay.”

  Katia looked at her. Her friend’s eyes had a distant, glazed look to them. The blood from her shoulder had soaked much of the top of her blue jail jumpsuit. Katia reached down to the bottom of her own pants leg and pulled hard at the stitching on the inseam until the threads holding it together ripped. She quickly opened eight inches of the seam and then was tearing the fabric from around the bottom of her leg until the cloth came free. She folded it into a compress.

  “Daniela, we have to stop the bleeding.”

  “Katia, you need to know. My name is not Daniela. It’s Carla Mederios…”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Katia. “What I know is that you are my friend. The only friend I have.”

  THIRTY

  I don’t want excuses,” said Liquida. He and the explosives man conversed over the walkie-talkies. “Take the bus and do it now.”

  Liquida could see the highway patrol units as they closed in along the freeway. They had blocked off the highway in both directions, so the roadway was now empty. Two of the highway patrol cars were already parked under the bridge overpass. The cops were out of their cars, carrying shotguns and rifles, looking for cover and advantageous angles from which to fire.

  Sheriff’s units from the jail had taken over the intersection of Magnolia and Prospect. They were exchanging gunfire with two of the button boys near the top of the ramp.

  Liquida wasn’t bothering to inform his people of all the negative details. It would only sap their morale. If they waited much longer, the SWAT unit would arrive.

  “How did your men get shot inside the bus?” he asked. “There was only the driver and one guard. You told me you killed them both.”

  He listened for a second.

  “Well, then, who shot your men? What do you mean you don’t know? Are your people afraid of a busload of women? Get your ass on board that bus, finish what you came for, and get the hell out of there. Get to the safe house. Otherwise nobody’s getting paid. Do you understand?” Liquida threw down the walkie-talkie and looked up at the sky.

  They were beginning to breed like mosquitoes. Ten minutes ago there were two, now there were four local news choppers all circling over the action on the ramp.

  How the hell did Demo Man think they were going to get to the safe house without being followed from the sky? If Liquida wasn’t careful, he would show up on TV. The arrival of the choppers had forced him back from the edge of the roof. He huddled in the shadows between two large air-conditioning units and continued to observe the activity on the ramp through the field glasses.

  He watched as the demolition man fired up his soldiers, at least the two of them who were assembled near the bus door. Two others were up near the top of the ramp holding off the cops. The flaming cars were now just smoking rubble with an occasional flicker as fumes from the gas tanks floated past a hot spot.

  The last lone soldier from Liquida’s army was positioned on this side of the bus, lying prone on the ground and taking occasional shots at the police who were trying to move in from the freeway side of the ramp.

  The explosives man finished his pep talk. He reached into his bag of tricks, then walked toward the bus door with something in his hand. A second later he disappeared inside. There were two muted shots, what sounded to Liquida like a small handgun, and a second later the demolition man came off the bus holding his right shoulder. As Liquida watched him, a massive explosion ripped through the bus, blowing out the windshield and ripping a jagged hole in the roof. Smoke billowed from the front of the bus. The soldiers, armed with their AKs, stormed on board while the shock and impact of the blast was still having its effect. Automatic gunfire erupted inside. Liquida tried to zero in with the binoculars.

  Suddenly a gun battle broke out at the top of the ramp. A large black SUV raced out from under the bridge on the freeway and drove past the bus, exchanging fire through the windows with the button boy lying on his belly on this side of the bus. Whoever was firing from the car must have hit him, because a second later the button boy dropped his rifle as his head slumped to the ground.

  The black vehicle made a beeline for the bottom of the ramp, pulled a U-turn, and drove up the ramp in the wrong direction. It stopped on the other side of the box truck. The doors flew open and six men, all wearing black body armor and carrying short carbines and MP-5s, spilled out of the car. They raced around the truck and moved up the ramp.

  Liquida could still hear shots coming from inside the bus.

  One of his men at the top of the ramp began to retreat down toward the gully on the other side. Liquida lost sight of him for a moment. When he picked him up again, the button boy had joined up with the explosives expert and both of them were making their way up the embankment toward Magnolia Avenue and the van.

  There was another flurry of gunfire at the top of the ramp. Liquida watched as police flanked the remaining lone button boy. Three shots rang out and he went down. Police started to flood down the ramp on foot, just as the six men from the black SUV reached the door to the bus.

  Liquida picked up the walkie-talkie. “Hello. Hello.”

  A voice crackled back on the other end.

  “Are you in contact with them?” He was talking to the explosives man, who was in contact with the button boys on the bus. Through a separate radio. “Is it done?”

  “Yes,” said the man. “She is dead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” came the crackling response.

  “Excellent,” said Liquida.

  He could see the demolition man talking on the handheld unit as he slipped through the hole in the fence, followed closely by the button boy who had left his rifle in the ravine and ditched his dark glasses and face scarf while climbing up the other side.

  Liquida watched as three of the armed men from the SUV boarded the bus. A few seconds later gunfire erupted again from inside the bus. This time it didn’t last long. He heard several short bursts of pistol rounds from the MP-5s and then silence.

  He focused the field glasses back across the ravine. The explosives expert and his young helper had made it to the van. They pulled away from the curb and did a U-turn to avoid all the excitement at the intersection on Prospect. Before they’d gone fifty feet, another shiny black SUV pulled out of a side street and cut them off. The occupants, all dressed like their comrades on the bus, opened the SUV’s doors, using them for cover, and trained their assault rifles and pistols on the stopped van through the SUV’s open windows.

  As he was reaching into his pocket, Liquida had to wonder what the federal government was doing here so heavily armed. No one else used black SUVs like the United States government.

  He took out a small metal box from his pocket, flipped the toggle switch on the top, and pressed the small black button. There was a large brilliant flash of light on the other side of the freeway. It was followed a second
later by the sound of the blast and the shock wave as it rippled across the rooftop and rattled the metal panels of the air-conditioning unit where Liquida was sitting. Avis would miss one of their rental vans. He would have to remember the next time to use a little less C-4.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Gil Howser was the lead homicide detective in the Solaz case. This morning he’d buttonholed Templeton while the prosecutor was busy packing his briefcase and getting ready to head to the courthouse.

  “Make it quick,” said Templeton. “You and I have a meeting with Quinn on Solaz in ten minutes.”

  “I know, to talk about the deal with her. But there are some problems with the evidence. We have to talk,” said Howser.

  “Do we need to do it right now?”

  “No, but it might be good to have a handle on them in case the judge asks us what kind of an evidentiary basis he has for accepting a plea.”

  “What kind of problems?” said Templeton.

  “The dagger, for example,” said Howser. “How do we explain the fact that Solaz’s prints are all over it but there’s no blood on the handle? If she stabbed him with the other knife first, and according to the postmortem that’s how it went down, she’d have blood on her hands. It would have been transferred to the handle of the dagger. But the handle was clean except for her prints.”

  “What else?” said Templeton.

  “Forensics found tool marks on the coin drawers in Pike’s study. Whoever pried them open used a sharp implement of some kind. They think it was a knife. The problem is, the tool marks on the wooden drawers around the locks as well as the scratches on the brass locks themselves don’t match either the chef’s knife that was used to kill Pike or the point on the dagger that was left in his body. Forensics checked the points on all the other blades in the kitchen. According to their report there would have been some damage to the knife point used to pry open the drawers. There was no evident damage to any of the other knives, and none of them matched the tool marks. So there must have been another knife.”

  “All right. What else?”

  “You do recall that the police in Arizona didn’t find a knife on Solaz when they arrested her?”

  “I’m aware of that,” said Templeton. “What else?”

  “The blood around the lock on the front door,” said Howser. “The bloody prints, that is, if there ever were any, weren’t smeared, they were rubbed, using a cloth, according to forensics. They found patterns in the blood on the door consistent with the fibers on one of the cleaning cloths on the maid’s body. And to make it a little more contrived, all the blood was hers, none of it was from Pike.”

  “There was blood transfer from Pike to the maid’s clothing,” said Templeton.

  “Yes, but it ended there. There was nothing on the front door,” said Howser. “If you have blood all over your hands from killing two people and you panic and run out the front door, even if you collect yourself before you go two steps so you can come back and smear the prints on the door, how is it that only the maid’s blood shows up there? How do you explain Solaz smearing her prints on the door and taking the time to wash the blood and her prints off the chef’s knife and then forgetting her prints on the dagger in Pike’s body?”

  “Maybe she didn’t forget,” said Templeton. “Maybe someone else told her he’d take care of it for her. Someone who knew a lot more about crime scene evidence than she did.”

  “Madriani,” said Howser.

  “That would explain why the Arizona Highway Patrol didn’t find the knife used to jimmy the drawers when they arrested her, or Pike’s computer, or the other missing coins, why she went down the front driveway straight into the security camera when whoever helped her went out through the side yard, through the hole in security and over the fence. It would explain a lot of things, wouldn’t it? And by the way, I wouldn’t put too much faith in the theory that Solaz plunged the dagger into Pike’s chest.”

  “That’s the linchpin of your case,” said Howser.

  “She may have handled the letter opener, but you missed something,” said Templeton.

  “What’s that?”

  “A little twist on one of the details that came in late, courtesy of the people in the crime lab. Have you ever read the book entitled A California Gold Rush History, by David Bowers?”

  “No.”

  “Neither have I,” said Templeton. “I’m told it’s a tome, what you would call a substantial read, one thousand and fifty-five pages in hardcover. Single volume weighs in at more than eleven pounds. It’s a big sucker. And according to forensics, whoever left the dagger in Pike used that particular book to pound it into his chest. Now can you see a petite little thing like Katia Solaz holding the dagger in one hand while she swings a big book like that in the other?”

  “Now that you mention it,” said Howser, “no. When did you find this out?”

  “Yesterday morning. Forensics found a strange indentation in the book’s cover when they were processing the crime scene. It seems the dimple in the cover matches precisely the shape and contour on the end of the dagger’s handle. Just the way you might want to hit it if you wanted to preserve somebody else’s prints on the handle.”

  “So you haven’t turned this over to the defense yet?”

  “Not yet. Of course I will—sooner or later,” said Templeton.

  “I have to say, that puts a major focus on the other player,” said Howser. He meant the unidentified codefendant. “And you can bet the second we turn it over, Madriani will jump on it and claim that this is solid evidence that some other dude did it.”

  “And he’ll be right,” said Templeton. “He did it. He set her up nine ways from Sunday. She may have invited him in on the party, told him what was in the house, but he took over when he came. Do you have any idea what the value of the gold is that’s missing?”

  “No,” said Howser.

  “Just under 146 pounds, it would be a shade under 1.8 million dollars, and that’s just by weight. If you could sell the coins at collector’s value, who knows, you could probably multiply that by a factor of three or four. That’s what they tell me, anyway.”

  “I’d say that’s a pretty good motive for murder,” said Howser.

  “It could certainly beef up a private pension plan. Anything on that end yet?” said Templeton.

  “No. We’re not going to know that until we get a subpoena for Madriani’s bank records. And we’re not going to be able to do that until we go public with the court and open an active investigation on him. Maybe you can get the feds to go online and take a peek at his bank records.”

  “He’s not going to sell the gold and put the cash in a bank account,” said Templeton. “Too much money and too many records. He’d have to pay taxes and explain where he got all his sudden wealth on a return. If he melts it down, and I have to assume he probably already has, he’s going to put it somewhere safe, where it can’t be found or traced, and sit on it until things cool off.”

  “Still, it’s hard to believe that a seasoned lawyer who has seen forensics play out in court a thousand times would miss as many details as we have here,” said Howser.

  “It’s one thing to study it in a courtroom in the cold light of day. It’s another to live it,” said Templeton. “Can you imagine the frenzied thoughts that crowd the mind after killing someone, in this case two people? And then there’s all the glitter from that gold to get in your eyes. That’s how he managed to leave the pen behind. A thirty-cent ballpoint pen you can buy by the bushel with your firm name and address printed on them. Madriani wrestles with Pike and the pen ends up on the floor, kicked under the desk. Go figure.”

  “I still think you should have allowed us to ask him about that,” said Howser.

  “Why, so he could lie to us again? Make up another story? When you first questioned him, you asked him whether he’d ever been to Pike’s house. He said no. You asked him if Solaz had ever been to his office and he said no. You asked him if their meeting at the groc
ery store was the only time they ever met or talked before she was arrested, and what did he say? He said yes. Now we know they talked by phone at least one other time and had drinks at the restaurant out in front of his office in Coronado on that same day. He had plenty of opportunities to tell us the truth, but he didn’t,” said Templeton. “Would you like to take bets on what a jury’s going to say about how that pen found its way under Pike’s desk? I could use the money.”

  “No, that’s all right,” said Howser. “They’re already taking enough out of my paycheck as it is.”

  Suddenly Templeton’s office door shot open. One of the other prosecutors stuck his head in.

  “What is this, no-knock day?” said Templeton.

  “Have you guys heard the news?”

  “No, but I’m sure you’re gonna tell us,” Templeton said, glaring at him.

  “Somebody just hit the sheriff’s bus on its way in from the women’s jail out at Santee. Word is, the driver and the guard are dead, smoke and explosions everywhere.”

  Templeton dropped his briefcase on the floor.

  “It’s on Fox News and CNN right now, aerial shots.”

  “What are they saying?” said Templeton.

  “Reporters are speculating that it may have been a botched attempt to spring one of the inmates from the bus. The area around the freeway looks like a war zone.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Much of the inside of the bus was charred. Most of the officers, the sheriff’s tactical squad as well as the agents from the FBI’s violent crimes task force, had only seen training photographs and films of buses that had been hammered by terrorists in the Middle East.

  None of them had ever seen anything like this on American soil. And while they had trained for it, the presumed targets were always soft, inner-city commuter buses and trains, not a locked-down sheriff’s transport bus. In a way this was worse. Once the door had been blown, none of the passengers on board had a chance of escape. They were chained to their seats.