Make Them Sorry

by Sam Hawken

  Ignacio looked at Pope, whose face was unreadable. He looked at Mansfield. “You’re talking about ancient history. Miami’s not Little Colombia anymore. It’s not Scarface out there.”

  “No, it’s not, but that doesn’t mean the problem has gone away. The last time we worked together, things got a little messy. Lots of corpses and a lot of questions. I’m hoping that won’t happen this time. I’d like to get on top of it before it has a chance to really get out of hand. As for this case, let’s stick to the general outlines. Let’s talk about money laundering happening right here, right now, in Miami.”

  “Is that an FBI thing?”

  “Oh, sure. We have hundreds of accountants working for the Bureau. Financial crime is what we were born to do. For a while there, if you didn’t have a degree in accounting, you wouldn’t get very far in our line of work.”

  “Are you an accountant?”

  “Me? Hell, no. I have trouble balancing my checkbook. No, that’s not my area. I come at problems from a completely different angle, but it’s money that got us into this. You see, about a year ago we received an anonymous tip. It was a fragmentary piece of data, basically part of an accounting record showing a substantial cash deposit into an account we have an interest in. Now, there’s nothing particularly shady about the account at first glance, but it has a history, and when we see big money going into it…”

  “Drug money,” Ignacio said. “That’s why Special Agent Pope is here.”

  “Special Agent Mansfield…” Pope said.

  “Right, right. Detective, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Like I said, there are things I’m not sure I’m cleared to tell you. I have temporary permission to bring you in on this because of the situation with your dead man. Whether I can bring you in all the way, I don’t know. But I do know you can be trusted to keep your mouth shut.”

  “Thank you?” Ignacio said.

  “It’s a compliment,” Pope said.

  “Okay, then. So some money goes somewhere it shouldn’t. And you can’t tell me where the money came from because it’s classified. What does all of this have to do with my dead body? Is he a money launderer when he’s not attacking women in their homes?”

  “I understand you confiscated a notebook on the scene.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Is there a notebook?” Pope asked.

  “Yeah. But it’s all in Armenian. The guy’s got Armenian tattoos on him, too. Seriously, how do you know what I have? How did you even know I was working this? Do you have access to our system?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Detective,” Pope said. “The important thing is we’re here.”

  “Exactly,” Mansfield agreed. “It’ll make more sense once I’ve told you the rest. You see, we’ve been watching that account because it’s attached to a construction company that doesn’t build anything. Sure, there are a lot of construction companies in Miami and only so much work to go around, but this company has never built anything. Anything ever. It exists solely to process cash from dirty sources.”

  “I follow you,” Ignacio said.

  “Good, because this is where it gets interesting. The ownership of this company is part of what I can’t tell you right now, but it’s an essential piece of the whole investigation. I can tell you it’s a bank, and like Agent Pope said, there are a lot of banks in Miami with, uh, questionable pasts. Some are worse than others, but all of them have a little bit they don’t talk about at board meetings.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “We thought the tipster would stay silent, but we got more information later on. Additional cash moving into this construction company’s account, and some indication the money was moving out fully laundered. This is information we might have gotten through a subpoena, but there are ways to cover up this kind of transaction. So what we got was hot stuff, straight from the source.”

  “Someone inside the company?”

  “The company has no employees. It’s controlled entirely from the outside. You have to understand: this company is only a thing. It’s a machine that makes clean money. That’s literally all it does, and it does it by playing with numbers inside the system, making hard currency into ones and zeros in an electronic account somewhere.”

  “I need to sit down,” Ignacio said.

  He took one of the office’s seats for visitors. He rubbed his forehead. “So you’re telling me this person, your informant, he’s in the bank, or he’s working for some accounting firm, or what?”

  “You’re getting warmer,” Pope said.

  “We got information for about six months,” Mansfield said. “And then the source shut down. So we started digging, because we hoped we could find out who the informant was based on the information we had. What we got was compelling, but it was only pieces. We couldn’t act on it, not without stirring up the situation and maybe blowing the case altogether. It took about three months to isolate a half-dozen people who might have the information we received. It took another month to narrow it down from there. And finally we had one name.”

  “Faith,” Ignacio said.

  “Yes. Faith Glazer was the informant.”

  Chapter Thirty

  CAMARO STEPPED INSIDE the apartment. It smelled of old cooking, and the interior was stuffy and hot. She kicked aside pieces of the door frame and nudged the door itself shut with the toe of her boot. With the blinds down and the light from the open door cut off, the apartment was reduced to a dim cave.

  In her back pocket, Camaro had a pair of light leather gloves. She put them on. She moved to the window air conditioner and pressed the power button. It started to blow on the highest setting. Camaro notched it down to soften the noise of the fan.

  She did not know what she expected to find. The apartment was neat and kept clean, the area rug in the middle of the room vacuumed and the hardwood of the floors swept. A few framed pictures hung on the wall, including one of the Carlyle, a hotel in the Art Deco District that millions had seen in movies and on TV shows about Miami over the decades. Camaro remembered seeing it on TV as a kid, and when she came to Miami she saw it in person. It was less impressive in the daytime, but at night, as in the photograph, it glowed with light.

  Camaro moved closer to the pictures. There was a thin film of dust on the glass of one, barely visible. On the picture of the Carlyle, there was none.

  From the front room she wandered into the small dining alcove. A simple table topped with Formica sat with two old-fashioned chairs. In the kitchen she found a refrigerator with almost no food inside, but a full complement of pots and pans in the tight cabinets, all of which looked as though they’d been used frequently.

  One half of the duplex was given over to these communal spaces, but the second half was private. Serafian’s bedroom was surprisingly large. He had a bed with a cast-iron frame painted flat black. On the wall over the headboard was another cross, this one featuring a crucified Jesus writhing in agony. On the opposite wall, a framed painting of the Virgin Mary, expression intense. Being trapped between both made Camaro feel cold despite the mugginess of the room.

  The bed was made. Besides the religious items there were no other decorations. Camaro looked for photographs of Faith under the bed and in the drawer of the nightstand, but there was nothing. She moved to the closet and shoved aside the accordion door. Serafian’s clothing was sorted into little wire baskets, or hung in an orderly fashion. He owned casual clothing and suits. He had six pairs of shoes of varying fanciness. He had expensive socks, but also socks that looked as though they’d been purchased at a dollar store. Some of his shirts included touristy logos. Some were very much of the yuppie variety.

  Camaro pulled one of the basket racks away from the wall to look behind it. No hidden evidence of Faith. She didn’t exist here at all.

  Serafian’s bathroom was the last stop. She found it in the same condition as the rest. Shaving kit with fresh blades and a brush for mixing and applying lather. The tub was thoroughly scrubbed, and the pla
stic shower curtain had no mildew or buildup on it at all. The tile under Camaro’s boots looked as though it had been scoured with a toothbrush.

  She looked up. Overhead, a square screen was embedded in the ceiling, large enough for a person to fit through. Screws held it in place. At one corner was a semicircular scrape in the paint.

  Camaro glanced around. In the corner was a tiny footstool made of wood and carved with a heart. It served no purpose. She put it directly under the screen and stood on it. With her hands extended, she gripped the screen’s mesh.

  The multi-tool was still on her belt. Camaro studied the screws on the screen. She selected a flathead screwdriver. She went to work on one corner until the screw dropped into her cupped hand. She repeated this three times before gently tugging the screen out of its place.

  A black space opened up beyond the hole. Camaro saw nothing. She stepped down from the footstool and went into the kitchen. A minute’s rummaging turned up a flashlight. She brought it back to the bathroom, along with one of the chairs from the dining area. Standing on the chair, her head was even with the ceiling. She shone the flashlight around.

  The equipment stowed in the space was wrapped in resealable plastic bags. Camaro removed them piece by piece. Eduard Serafian had a tripod, a high-resolution digital camera with a variety of lenses, a parabolic microphone, and a small case filled with things that looked like microchips with wires attached. Camaro didn’t know what they were, but she could guess.

  The last things to come out were a pair of gun cases. Serafian owned a rifle and a handgun. Both were well maintained and smelled strongly of oil. He preferred hollow points for his pistol and full metal jacket for his rifle. Both of the weapons were of Eastern European make.

  She crouched on the bathroom floor with the things all around her. After a while she went into the space again and found another resealable plastic bag farther back from where everything else had been, barely reachable. This one contained a cell phone and three different passports. All the passports showed the face of Eduard Serafian, but his name and his style in the pictures were different in each one.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  BRANDON ROCHE HAD just turned onto Eduard Serafian’s street when he saw the woman, Camaro Espinoza. He did not know her by sight, but he knew her regardless. She moved away from a parked Harley-Davidson motorcycle and crossed to stand in front of Serafian’s house. Roche applied the brakes and slipped up to the curb. He cracked the windows of his Audi and killed the engine. The air conditioner’s blast whispered away to nothing. Instantly the heat of the sun soaked into the black body of the car. Roche felt it reaching through the windshield to cling to his suit jacket.

  Espinoza stood for a long time watching the house before climbing the fence. When she disappeared from sight, Roche keyed the Audi back to life, but didn’t start the engine. He voice-dialed his phone through the car’s Bluetooth and waited for the other end to pick up. “It’s Roche,” he said when the call was answered.

  A woman responded. She had the clipped, low tone of an emergency dispatcher. “Mr. Roche, what can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to make arrangements for a passive surveillance.”

  “Yes, sir. What do we need?”

  “I’m looking at a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. I’m not sure of the model. It’s one of the bigger ones. Let me give you the license plate number. I want someone to put a marker on it. Nothing fancy. Something we can use to keep tabs when we need to.”

  “I’ll have someone on it right away. Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Roche?”

  “Yes. I want a complete workup on a woman named Camaro Espinoza. I have a little information already, but I want the whole story. Deep background. Everywhere she’s ever been and everything she’s ever done. Also give me a list of known associates and anything else that might be useful.”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  “And I need it on my desk by this time tomorrow.”

  “No problem, sir.”

  “That’s all for now.”

  He hung up without letting the woman reply. He waited a few minutes for Espinoza to reappear, but she didn’t. Roche tried not to grit his teeth. Instead he scratched at his knee with his thumbnail, the contact making tiny rasping sounds. It grew increasingly more unpleasant inside the car. Sweat gathered at the center of Roche’s back and under his arms. He turned over the engine and let the air-conditioning run. Within a few minutes, the temperature plummeted to a chilly sixty degrees.

  Espinoza came out. Roche watched her stand still on the curb, lean and tightly bound. She turned her head and Roche thought she was looking directly at him, but he knew he was invisible behind the tint of his windshield. The angle of the sun also helped, though in a few hours looking down the street from his direction would be impossible.

  She unwound and crossed. Roche observed her movements. She was careful, balanced. He recognized her body language in himself, and in the men who trained him. “Who are you really, Ms. Espinoza?” he asked aloud.

  She leaned against her motorcycle. She glanced his way, but now he was certain she had no idea he was there. Her eyes were hidden by black Wayfarers. He saw her gather the hair off her neck to cool the perspiration there. He felt no desire for her, but he knew not every man would feel the same way. She wasn’t beautiful. Roche decided that “striking” was a better word.

  His phone rang. He said, “Answer phone.”

  “Brandon?”

  “Mr. Kaur.”

  “Don’t ‘Mr. Kaur’ me, Brandon! Where are you?”

  “I won’t tell you, and you don’t want to know. This conversation isn’t happening and you have nothing to do with it. In fact, you ought to hang up right now.”

  “I’m looking over the accounts.”

  “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  Roche sighed. “Every time you open a file, that file leaves a trace. That trace can be followed directly back to you, especially if you’re using the computer in your office or in your home. Everything has to be anonymized. If you want to have a look at the accounts, it can be arranged.”

  “I don’t arrange things with you. This is my bank. Mine. I decide what I look at and when.”

  “Then I suppose there’s no argument to be made. If you want to go to prison, that’s your concern.”

  “It’s not like that. I only want to be informed.”

  “You are informed. Everything you need to know, I will tell you. Beyond that, your best course of action is to go on as if nothing has happened. Go play golf, or racquetball at the club. Take the boat out. But don’t look at those accounts again.”

  Espinoza was on the phone. Roche wished he could hear her.

  “I’m closing the files now,” Kaur said.

  “Good. I’ll be in touch.”

  “When will you—”

  Roche killed the connection and settled into his seat. He watched Camaro Espinoza. She didn’t go anywhere. The cop came.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  CAMARO CHECKED HER watch when Ignacio’s car made the turn onto Serafian’s street. Ignacio waved.

  She waited until he parked, and met him in the middle of the street. He surveyed the house. “So this is the place,” he said.

  “Looks like it.”

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t go in there. I’ve got probable cause to search, and if you did anything you shouldn’t, we might run into trouble down the line.”

  “Yeah, all right,” Camaro said.

  He glanced at her. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  Camaro was quiet.

  “Okay, I really don’t like the sound of that.”

  “I may have taken a look around.”

  Ignacio took his hat off and covered his face with his forearm. “Tell me you didn’t leave your fingerprints all over the place.”

  “No, I was careful.”

  “She was careful,” Ignacio said to himself. He put his hat on. “You thin
k you can go without breaking the law for thirty minutes?”

  “Gee, I’ll try, Detective, but you know how it is.”

  Ignacio shook his head. “What did you find? Not that you told me, because I’d be an accessory after the fact.”

  “You should see for yourself, anyway.”

  They went up together. Camaro let him take the steps first. He entered through the broken door, tsking at the damage. He took a sealed package of latex gloves from his pocket, stripped it open, and put on the gloves. He turned a full circle in the middle of the front room. “Looks normal,” he said. “If I didn’t know the guy was a pervert, I’d never guess. But that’s the way it goes.”

  “The bathroom has what you want.”

  She led him in. Serafian’s gear was laid out on the floor of the bathroom, the guns unloaded and set aside in the bathtub. Ignacio made a low whistle. “Now what does a guy need with all this stuff?” he asked.

  “I don’t think he was some peeping Tom.”

  “You got that right. Creeping on Faith Glazer was only his sideline. I’m thinking he was some kind of a spook, but we won’t know until we can get a handle on him. It’s like he doesn’t exist in the United States, outside of a couple of driver’s licenses and a lot of speculation.”

  Ignacio knelt and traced his hands in the air above Serafian’s surveillance gear. Camaro went to the bedroom window. She opened the blinds and looked into the yard of the next house over. It was cramped, too, but the owners let some grass grow. There was a worn track outside a battered old doghouse. No sign of a dog.

  “I’m not an expert at this kind of thing,” Ignacio said. “But you don’t have to be an expert to know what most of this is. These little wire things, I think they’re probably bugs. I’ve seen something like it when the tech guys go to work. Little doodads. You can put ’em inside a phone. If anybody used landlines anymore. Nowadays we usually hide them in the electric sockets. Every room has one of those.”