Faye Kellerman_Decker & Lazarus 13

by The Forgotten

  Webster stared at her. “Uh, a girl—”

  “Oh, how wonderful! She got her girl. She really wanted a daughter, but didn’t say anything to you because she didn’t want to upset you in case she had another boy. Tell her congratulations.”

  Webster was struck silent. The elevator doors opened and they all stepped inside. As soon as they closed, the woman smiled, showing white teeth. “Did I say my name? Kate Mandelbaum. What was your wife’s name? Karen?”

  “Carrie.”

  “That’s right. And don’t look so concerned about not remembering me. I make it a practice to memorize people. It comes in handy in my line of work.”

  They got out on the third floor. Kate took them down a long corridor, her buttocks swaying because she was marching in ultra-high heels. As soon as she got into her office, she pressed the blinking message-machine button and listened while sorting through a stack of written phone numbers.

  “Hi, Kate—”

  She disposed of that message.

  “Hey, Katie—”

  Fast-forwarded through that one.

  “Kate, it’s Neil. I was wondering if you could take on the Farkas file—”

  “No, I cannot!” She erased that one.

  “Hi, Grandma. It’s me…Reuven. I was wondering if you could come to my school for Grandparents’ Day. I’m gonna be in the choir, too. But I don’t have a solo. Call me back at—”

  She fast-forwarded the message. “Like I don’t know the number.” She punched it in via speed dial. “Hello, darling. I got your message and of course I’ll come to the school. Tell me when and where. I love you, darling. Bye.” She fell down on the chair and fanned herself with a flyer. She spoke to Rina. “You want me to tell him about hate groups? By now, you must know as much as I do.”

  “That’s quite a compliment,” Rina answered.

  Webster took out a notebook. “I b’lieve you’ve talked to one of my colleagues in the past…Wanda Bontemps.”

  “Sure, I know Wanda,” Kate answered. “So, you work with her?”

  “Same geographical area, different detail. I’m in Homicide.”

  “Then you must think white supremacists had something to do with the murder of those two psychologists. Wouldn’t surprise me. Racists hate shrinks almost as much as they hate Jews.”

  “Most of the shrinks are Jewish,” Rina said.

  “Yeah, that just adds to their sense of paranoia that the Jews are out to get them. Turn their brain into mush…like there was something there to begin with.” Kate turned to Webster. “Actually, I heard it was a gay thing. The wife caught her husband and the boy in a compromising position.”

  “It’s an ongoing investigation,” Webster said.

  “That means he can’t talk about it,” Rina said.

  Kate said, “Ernesto Golding—the boy who was murdered along with Mervin Baldwin—he vandalized your synagogue, right?”

  Rina nodded.

  “So you think there’s some kind of connection?”

  “Beats me,” Rina said. “I’m just here to help Detective Webster.”

  “C’mon, your husband must tell you things.”

  “No, he really doesn’t.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “America’s the land of free thought,” Rina answered.

  “Very funny. Anyway, Detective, what do you want to know that Wanda couldn’t tell you?”

  Webster said, “Wanda’s great at investigating hate crimes like Ernesto Golding—vandalism by bored, white, rich kids. Triple murders are another ballgame. Right now, we’re looking into everything, including local white supremacy organizations.”

  “How local?”

  “Southern Calif—”

  “So-Cal is teeming with the critters. Starting in San Diego environs is Tom Metzger territory. You know about Tom Metzger?”

  “Yes, ma’am. American Nazi Party—”

  “No, the ANP was started by George Lincoln Rockwell, and that’s based in Chicago. Not to be confused with the home of the NSDAP which is based in Lincoln, Nebraska. Metzger’s party is the White Aryan Resistance—WAR.”

  “What’s the difference?” Webster asked.

  “Nomenclature. They’re all hatemongers.”

  “How many groups are there in Southern California?”

  “Twenty…twenty-five. That doesn’t mean So-Cal is being overrun with these clowns, only that it’s hard to tell you specific numbers because the groups are constantly shifting.”

  “How about some names?”

  “I know there’s a chapter of the World Church of the Creator—”

  “Who are they?” Webster asked.

  “An offshoot of the American White Party…Matthew Hale,” Rina answered.

  Kate said, “Hale took over in 1995, maybe ’96. They’re white supremacists based on social Darwinism—survival of the fittest. They don’t care who you are as long as you’re white. They’re atheists as opposed to the Christian racist sects who obviously use Christianity to rationalize their racism. Each ethnic group more or less has its own racist counterpart—the Latinos have Aztlan, African-Americans have the Nation of Islam. Whites have lots to choose from—branches of the Klan, the neo-Nazis, the Straight Edges, the Skinheads, the Peckerwoods—”

  “Peckerwoods?” Webster laughed. “Why would anyone in their right mind call themselves a Peckerwood?”

  “It was a derogatory term for blacks,” Kate said. “Peckerwoods use drug money to finance their neo-Nazi activities, as opposed to groups like the Hammerskins, who supposedly disavow the drug trade. Now, that’s the overt party line. The differences are teeny-tiny and becoming more teeny-tiny every day.”

  Rina said, “I think Detective Webster is specifically interested in the Preservers of Ethnic Integrity, because its home base is in the North Valley.”

  “The Preservers of Ethnic Integrity.” Kate nodded. “They were originally a splinter from the World Church of the Creator. Over the last four years, they’ve worked really hard to sanitize their act. For instance, they don’t talk about white supremacy or even the white race. Instead, they use terms like the integrity of the European-American, to put it in the same category as African-American or Hispanic-American.” She sat down at her desk, moving the computer mouse until her flying-object screen saver disappeared. “I’m sure that PEI has a Web site.”

  “They do.” Webster gave her the URL page number. “I was just hoping that you could tell me more than the stuff I picked up off the Internet.”

  “Well, first let’s look at what they’re preaching. Often the buzzwords will tell me something about who they associate with.” As soon as Kate brought up the Web site, she flinched. The screen was alight in vivid color and was three-dimensional. It showed a detailed, three-dimensional Uncle Sam standing guard over a topographical map of the United States. “Well, the graphics are new…very high quality. A pro job. They must have gotten an infusion of money somewhere.”

  “Where would the money come from?” Webster asked.

  “I don’t know, and that’s a problem. Recently, two white supremacists up in Silicon Valley sold their business to a major computer company for over a hundred million dollars. They financed this massive mail-out of hate literature up in the tri-state area—Washington, Oregon, Idaho. Right now, their dot-com money is paying for Garvey McKenna’s defense.”

  “I don’t know him,” Webster said.

  “He’s a violent racist,” Rina said. “Sacramento area. He was involved in the arson of two synagogues and one black Baptist church. He’s currently being tried on robbery and assault charges of a Jewish jeweler in that area.” Rina frowned. “Wasn’t he convicted?”

  “It’s on appeal,” Kate answered. “It’s really depressing. One of the ways we hit these bastards is with lawsuits—sue ’em until they’re broke. With an influx of techno-money, it makes it harder for us to do our job.”

  “What about the Preservers of Ethnic Identity?” Webster asked.

  �
��I don’t know who’s funding them.”

  Rina asked, “How many people log on to this kind of Web site?”

  “This one in particular…” Kate punched up some keys. “It’s got about seventy hits a day. Some of the users have cookies—identifiable pixels—that act as a computer trail. We can find out where they go from here, what other sites they have visited. A lot of them have traceable pixels, so we can tell the point of origin for their messages.”

  “The exact residence?” Webster asked.

  “No, but the city oftentimes. The Internet is a sneaky thing. It professes privacy, but in reality it leaves a large electronic trail. You just have to know where to look for it.”

  “So you keep tabs on the people who’ve hit these Web sites?”

  “We can’t possibly keep tabs on all of them, but if a name pops up a certain number of times on different sites, we’ll start a file on him or on her. I can’t get over the sophistication of these graphics.”

  “Ever hear of a guy named Ricky Moke?” Webster asked.

  “Ricky Moke,” Kate said. “No. Who is he?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Webster said. “His name showed up on the FBI list for computer hacking. When the synagogue was vandalized six months ago, I interviewed Darrell Holt at PEI. His assistant, a kid named Erin Kershan, mentioned him to us. But no one seems to know who he is.”

  “I’ll look him up.”

  “What about Darrell Holt?”

  “He’s been around for a while,” Kate said.

  “Somebody told me he’s been with PEI for about four years. Does that sound right?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “So Darrell came right when PEI started to clean its image,” Rina commented. “Maybe he was behind the sanitation effort.”

  “That sounds logical,” Kate said. “Darrell comes down with a college education—UC Santa Cruz—”

  “I thought it was Berkeley,” Webster said.

  “Maybe it was Berkeley. He was a radical turned conservative—which isn’t at all unusual for these guys. Tom Metzger was a communist before he became a Nazi. I’ll plug Holt into the computer later. Right now, let’s see what PEI is up to. Okay, okay, here’s their pitch. They’re now railing against the New World Order—”

  “Which is?” Webster asked.

  “Anything that espouses cooperation and peace between countries,” Kate said. “When Bush senior was president, he often made mention of a New World Order. That fed these crackpots’ paranoia of government conspiracies. They began to profess anarchy like blowing up government buildings. Willis Carto, who lives in So-Cal, out in Escondido, publishes a newspaper called The Spotlight—one of the oldest anti-Semitic machines. Now it’s almost exclusively anti-NWO. Maybe PEI is some sort of outcropping from Escondido. Maybe that’s where they’re getting their funding for the fancy graphics.”

  “If Ricky Moke exists,” Rina said, “and if he’s a computer person who’s also aligned with PEI—maybe he’s doing the graphics gratis.”

  Webster liked that idea and told her so. He looked over Kate’s shoulder as she scrolled down the site. She said, “No, PEI can’t be aligned with TWCOC. They’re anti–Third Position.”

  Rina said, “The Third Position states that nationality is irrelevant as long as you’re white.”

  “You’re white,” Webster told Rina. “Could you join?”

  Kate broke in. “Actually, she could because The Third Position doesn’t believe that white Jews are really Jewish. So if she dropped her identity as a Jew and preached white supremacy, they’d probably take her in.”

  Webster said, “You know that Darrell Holt is kinda black.”

  Kate raised her head from the screen and thought a moment. “How can you be kinda black? That’s like being kinda pregnant.”

  “He looks biracial or multi-racial,” Webster said. “You’ve never seen him?”

  “Just pictures. He’s claims he’s Cajun. To me, he looks typical Na’leans.”

  “Actually, he claims he’s Acadian from Canada—Nova Scotia. Which I’m thinking might be true, because Nova Scotia Acadians have black descendants.”

  “Then it would make sense that he’d been anti–Third Position,” Rina said.

  “So now we got a guy who’s a segregationist and a racist, but not a white supremacist because he’s got black blood in him,” Webster said. “So why didn’t he align himself with a group like Nation of Islam?”

  “Maybe he tried to do that up at Berkeley, and he wasn’t black enough,” Rina said.

  Webster smiled. “Wouldn’t that be a hoot? Someone wanting to be a racist, but too much of a mix to fit in with any of the groups.”

  “So he starts his own group,” Rina said.

  “No, PEI was started longer than four years ago,” Kate said.

  “But it changed images four years ago,” Webster reminded her.

  “You said it yourself, Kate,” Rina said. “Holt made several transformations.”

  “Why don’t you look Holt up?” Webster suggested.

  “First let me shut this down…” She exited the official PEI site and plugged in Darrell Holt as a keyword. “He has his own Web site…linked to PEI.”

  Webster said, “Who started PEI?”

  “I believe that it was originally a splinter group from the Methods of Mad White Boys—one of Garvey McKenna’s survivalist militia groups up in the Idaho area.”

  “Survivalist militia group,” Webster repeated. “Is the man from military stock?”

  “I believe so. Marines if I’m recalling correctly.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Webster said. “Does the name Hank Tarpin ring a bell?”

  “Not until thirty seconds ago,” Kate answered. “Holt’s Web site is linked to Tarpin.”

  25

  Decker said, “If Tarpin murdered the Baldwins because of his racist beliefs, why did he wait so long?”

  “He needed help,” Oliver answered. “The Baldwins had a variety of psychos going through their nature camp. Tarpin had to find the right one.”

  “So you’re saying it took him, what…eight years to find the right psycho?” Wanda Bontemps was skeptical.

  “Tarpin is a patient man,” Oliver answered.

  Wanda didn’t dispute him. Scott had seniority, and she didn’t want to piss him off by arguing with his conjectures that nobody else was buying, either. It was almost two in the afternoon, and Decker’s office was as stuffy as a gym sock. The desk fan had been turned up to the max, but it wasn’t cooling much. It was blowing papers all over the place. Decker had run out of coffee mugs to use as weights for his paper piles. The group was fanning itself with flyers of the police Fourth of July picnic at Rodgers Park. Have a safe and sane Fourth and enjoy the city fireworks. The loo was waiting for the pathology reports, waiting for the ballistic reports. Maybe Forensics would point to a killer.

  Marge said, “Pardon my ignorance, but aren’t the Baldwins, being therapists, supposed to be savvy when it comes to reading people? You’re saying that they didn’t have an inkling that Tarpin was out to get them?”

  “They were arrogant,” Oliver persisted. “You know, kind of like that Greek thing…pride before the fall.”

  “Hubris,” Marge answered.

  “How’d you know that?”

  Marge stiffened. “First of all, Scott, I’m not a moron. Secondly, Vega’s studying Oedipus Rex in school.”

  “Tarpin was the first one to find the bodies,” Oliver said. “He was the only one capable enough to pull it off. The kid that Webster talked about…Riley Barns. He thought he saw a couple of shadows.”

  Decker said, “Barns was vague. He might have seen shadows; he might have been dreaming.”

  “He wasn’t dreaming,” Oliver insisted. “He saw two shadows—Holt and Tarpin. They’re both survivalists; they’re both militia based. They wait until everyone’s asleep, they slip into camouflages, do Baldwin and Ernesto, then slip back into the
woods. Tarpin goes back to the boys, Holt does Dee—”

  Martinez said, “Scott, it’s just as likely that Dee Baldwin whacked herself in remorse for whacking her husband in a fit of rage after she found him with Ernesto.”

  Marge made a face. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  “Well, you didn’t see her positioning. Consistent with suicide.”

  Webster said, “Tarpin associated with bad news, Bert. Y’all should’ve seen the literature on Garvey McKenna and his militia—the Methods of Mad White Boys.”

  “They’re crackpots,” Martinez said.

  “That don’t mean they aren’t evil,” Webster retorted.

  “So maybe that’s why Tarpin broke away from them,” Martinez suggested.

  “Why are you defending a jerk like Tarpin?” Oliver asked Bert.

  “I’m not defending him,” Martinez said, bristling. “I think it’s odd that Tarpin and Holt—even with their racist views—would twiddle their thumbs for years before murdering the Baldwins. Especially since he and Holt may have known each other for years.”

  “Maybe a money motive was introduced,” Wanda said.

  “There’s a thought,” Oliver said. “Someone in PEI paid Tarpin to murder the Baldwins because the Baldwins were liberals, asshole shrinks, and PEI knew that Tarpin could get them easier than anyone else.”

  Decker made a face. “I don’t remember hearing that the Baldwins were crusading against PEI or any hate group. They seem like an odd target.”

  “Isn’t Ernesto’s father very liberal in his politics?” Wanda asked.

  “Aha!” Oliver said triumphantly. “Tarpin got three in one day.”

  “Ernesto was murdered, not his dad,” Marge said.

  “You want to cripple someone, you attack their children,” Oliver said.

  “That’s true.” Decker formulated his thoughts. “But if Tarpin did it, he certainly cast himself in the limelight. There are safer ways to murder someone.”

  Martinez said, “Exactly. Why would Tarpin set himself up?”

  “Cause he’s a dumb-shit racist,” Oliver said.