Splintered

by Jamie Schultz

  “Again, that’s no more than the LAPD has explained to me.” Sobell rolled his eyes heavenward and put on his most long-suffering, martyred grimace. “Good help—tremendously difficult to find in these decadent latter days.”

  “Let’s be real about this. Every street rat and no-account son of a bitch from Burbank to Anaheim knows Gresser wouldn’t so much as unzip to piss except on your orders.”

  The sudden vulgarity surprised him, but he thought he knew what Elliot was about now. Taking his measure—poking at him from a few different angles to see how he jumped. He answered her avid grin with a bland smile of his own. “Oh, I highly doubt that. You see, I’ll have nothing to do with no-account sons of bitches. Won’t be seen on the same street as them, as it happens. Anything they claim to know about me is, what’s the legal term? Hearsay, I believe. Utterly inadmissible as evidence.”

  Her laughter came warm and throaty, and Sobell thought it genuine. She was having fun, he realized.

  “I don’t need that kind of evidence,” she said.

  Sobell nodded. “Hence the warrant. Very well. Have at the premises. You’ll find no more than the police have.”

  “The police,” she said, very deliberately enunciating each syllable, “were looking for a different kind of evidence.”

  This time, her gaze stayed fixed on his face. He wondered what she hoped to find there.

  She presented a sheaf of papers—the warrant, no doubt. He took it from her and set it on the bar without a glance.

  “What is it you want, Agent Elliot? I’m as anxious to get this over with as you are, so if you can jump to the point, I can hopefully clear this up. I can go back to my work, and you can ransack the premises, satisfy yourself that the police missed nothing, and get back to your work.”

  “I’m not looking for bloodstains,” Elliot said. “I’m here for documents.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “I need you to provide company financials, documents of incorporation, minutes from board meetings, org charts, and anything else that shows company structure or income.”

  “I see.”

  “For every company in which you own a controlling interest.”

  “That’s several companies.”

  “Then it will probably be a lot of documents. I also need real estate records and the location of any property you own personally or any of your companies own.”

  There could be no doubt now—she was enjoying this. There wouldn’t be much of anything to find in the documents, Sobell thought—he was very careful about that—but the scope and the nature of the demand were alarming.

  “That doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you might need for a murder investigation, even if there is a surplus of victims by normal standards.”

  “Nevertheless,” Elliot said.

  Now he glanced toward the paperwork on the bar. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to have my attorney look at this before you proceed.”

  “I don’t think you understand, Mr. Sobell,” Elliot said, her eyes positively sparkling. “This is a search warrant, bearing the signature of a federal judge. This is not a negotiation. I don’t need your permission, or your attorney’s permission. My people are already hauling documents and computers out of the building by the cartload.”

  “Already? How industrious.” He started taking a mental inventory. This was the center of a legitimate business, and he was, for the most part, scrupulous about treating it as such. There shouldn’t be anything for them to find, and yet he worried. “I think you’re mistaken about at least one thing, though. If this isn’t a negotiation, why are you talking to me? You don’t need me to let you in the building, obviously, and you don’t need my imprimatur of approval of your actions.”

  “I want your passwords. I want encryption keys. I want every last bit of knowledge you have stored away here opened up for me.”

  “It’s been quite some time since I worked in tech support.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Just subpoena them,” he said, knowing no such thing was possible. The Fifth Amendment right to refrain from incriminating yourself apparently covered giving up your passwords, a fact that he’d had more than one occasion to be grateful for. Goddamn digital world and its endless trails of ones and zeroes.

  She opted, wisely, he thought, to dodge the legal argument. “If you cooperate willingly, it’s possible we can make this a little easier on you.”

  Sobell gave her as parental a frown as he could muster. “Is it possible to cooperate unwillingly? By which I mean, is that actually cooperation, or is it something else entirely? Isn’t ‘cooperate willingly’ a wholly redundant construction?”

  Elliot said nothing, but Sobell saw her fist clench on the counter.

  “You’re going down, Enoch,” she said. “The only question is how hard.”

  “I want a vodka and cranberry juice. Anything for you?” He got up, turning his back to the FBI agent, and made his way around to the end of the bar. Elliot hadn’t rattled him, exactly, but it wouldn’t hurt to take a moment to compose himself, either. Elliot was casting a very wide net here, and he was mildly surprised she’d managed to get a judge to sign off on it. There wasn’t much to find, and the obvious legal connections could largely have been traced through public records, if with a great deal of labor. The other connections, either unobvious or illegal or both, were more concerning. Was everything clean? Had somebody, somewhere, made an injudicious note in some forgotten file? What could be traced to whom?

  Perhaps the mayor knew what he was doing after all.

  “Yeah,” Elliot said, surprising him. “What the hell? Seven and seven.”

  Sobell busied himself with the glasses. Once he finished pouring the drinks, he slid Elliot’s glass across the bar to her. “Cheers,” he said.

  His hand shook as he brought his glass to his lips. A slight tremor ran up through his elbow and through his wrist, and the surface of the liquid rippled. It worsened, and vodka slopped out, a cool kiss on the back of his hand. A wave of dizziness followed. He dropped the glass. It bounced off the edge of the sink and cracked, then fell into the metal basin and broke into four pieces. He leaned against the bar.

  The FBI agent just watched.

  The dizziness abated. Sobell pushed himself upright. “My apologies. Ever since I got shot in the head, I’ve been prone to dizzy spells.” The words were calm enough, but he felt a sudden rage at his frailty. He wanted to smash something, to pick up the broken glass and grind it into somebody’s face, to kick and break. His shakes had been getting worse, along with bouts of weakness, fatigue, and dizziness, and it had nothing to do with getting shot in the head. It had everything to do with the fact that he was slowly dying. He was slowly dying, his body giving out and his magic unable to stop it, and he needed to find Van Horn, and instead he was wasting his time on the ambitious pipe dreams of an FBI agent with a typically banal agenda. Stupid. He didn’t have time for this.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” Sobell said. “This conversation has taxed me as much as I care to be taxed today. I’ll leave you to your business. Best of luck.”

  “The passwords?”

  “Oh, those.” The rage swelled again, roaring with fury at being hounded, hassled with trivial stings and tiny, meaningless arrows, while Sobell’s personal Rome burned. Nonetheless, he summoned up one more smile. “Kindly go fuck yourself.”

  * * *

  After walking out on Elliot, Sobell had gone back up to his office, the damn office, and waited for his hand to stop shaking. He wasn’t sure what had happened after that. He thought he’d stared at his hand until it steadied, but it was steady now, and he didn’t remember when it stopped shaking. The phone was ringing now. How long had that been going on?

  He picked it up. “Yes?”

  “Ms. Tran is here.”

  Sobell looked around the room, got oriented, and checked the clock. He’d been out of it, but not for more than ten minutes or so, he thought.

&nbs
p; “Send her in,” he said.

  Erica Tran, to Sobell’s shock, looked tired. She’d done legal work for him in some way or another for over fifteen years, since she was barely out of law school, and he’d never seen her so much as yawn, that he could remember. She worked her fellow associates into the ground. Now, though, she looked bone-weary, at that stage where all but the tiny part of the world that has your complete focus becomes blurry and the highest-octane coffee might as well be water for all the good it does.

  “Please, sit,” Sobell said.

  She shook her head. “If I sit, I won’t get back up until tomorrow.”

  Another time, he might have insisted, but not today. There was too much happening now. If Erica thought she needed to keep at it, he wouldn’t dissuade her.

  “What have you found out?” Sobell asked.

  “This is bad, Enoch.”

  “Everything is dire these days. A product of the terrible times in which we live.”

  “Did you read the search warrant?”

  No, he realized abruptly, though he should have, and normally would have done so straightaway. Instead, he’d left it on the bar. He didn’t like that one bit. He shook his head.

  “The good news is that it’s a fishing expedition. Pieces of allegations from dozens of sources tied together in a document that barely surpasses the minimum standard for a warrant, and probably wouldn’t have if they’d had a less friendly judge.”

  “So nothing to worry about, then.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. The warrant isn’t actually related to the violence here. Not directly, anyway.” She made a disgusted face and swallowed. “They’re putting together a RICO case.”

  Sobell understood the expression on her face. He was more than a little familiar with RICO, and it was no laughing matter. It stood for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and the neat trick it performed was essentially that of making everybody in an organization culpable for criminal activities performed on behalf of the organization, particularly the leaders. You didn’t have to perform a single illegal activity yourself. If it could be shown that your organization had established a pattern of engaging in illegal activity, you were on the hook for all of it. The Mafia had been more or less wiped out by RICO.

  “That’s why they’re following the paper trail,” he said.

  “Tracing connections,” Erica said, nodding agreement. “Anybody they can get on the hook as working for you could become a weapon.”

  “It’s flimsy, though,” Sobell said.

  “The warrant? Yes. They don’t have enough for an indictment, but they put every excuse into the warrant they could think of. There are affidavits from witnesses who claim to have seen you, and still more affidavits from people who claim to have worked for you or Gresser, but they’re drug addicts and felons, and many of them have some pretty outrageous claims about what else they saw, so we’re probably safe there. The D.A.’s complaints about the missing camera footage from the night of the massacre made it in there, so they’re using that and some other items as an excuse to take any electronic media they can. There’s a lot more, mostly small stuff.”

  “And Gresser’s records? Anything salvaged?”

  She yawned. “I don’t think so. They’re trying, but according to my contacts, the fire got most of it and they’re trying to piece the documents together from fragments of ash.”

  “This doesn’t sound that bad so far,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, what?” She rubbed her eyes with thumb and forefinger, rather viciously, Sobell thought. No wonder they were so red.

  “It appears to be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

  “I don’t see it that way.”

  “We’ve been careful,” Sobell said, with some degree more confidence than he felt. “As far as I know, there shouldn’t be much for them to find. They’re mostly trying to annoy me, I think.”

  Erica lifted her head slightly. “Any of the side projects would have been handled by Gresser, right? Not you directly?”

  He grinned. “On advice from counsel, yes.”

  “And since he’s dead, it will be a lot harder to link you to any of the criminal enterprises. That helps.”

  “And yet you’re frowning. I confess that doesn’t fill me with confidence.”

  She bit the inside of her cheek, a sure sign she was thinking furiously. “If this adds up to an indictment, they can seize your assets. Bank accounts, real estate, the groceries in your refrigerator. Everything.”

  He knew. The purpose of asset seizure was, in part, to prevent the target from hiding incriminating money, but also in part to weaken his or her defense—draining funds to the point where a person couldn’t even pay a decent lawyer. “I trust you’ll work on credit, if worse comes to worst?”

  “The RICO thing needs to be taken seriously, but it looks weak right now. Even supposing nothing new turns up, the major concern here is that the FBI has taken an interest in you.”

  He waved it away. “That had to be regarded as inevitable.”

  “No, it didn’t.”

  “I regarded it as such.”

  “Enoch, this isn’t a joke. As of right now, you’re on lockdown. The FBI will have surveillance capabilities—and likely permissions—that go well beyond the LAPD. Assume any phone you talk on is tapped, any vehicle you ride in is bugged, and that they’re reading every e-mail you send or receive.”

  “I’ve assumed all that for years. It’s why they don’t have a case. That, and good counsel.”

  “Okay. Well, now is not the time to change any of that.”

  “That will hamper some of the side projects. My trusty lieutenant is in no condition to manage them.”

  Erica walked to the wall and leaned against it. Sobell was amazed she was still on her feet. It looked as if she might fall asleep where she stood. “Good. Leave them alone for a while. Stay clear of all that, and you should be fine.”

  Her advice was sound. He knew that. He’d made a long habit of trying to avoid any exposure to the seedier sides of his business, and it would be effortless to let them run unsupervised until things calmed down. But the thing with Van Horn . . . oh no. Somebody had to handle that.

  “That’s not exactly an option. Not entirely, at any rate.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I need to meet someone,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Anna Ruiz.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “She hasn’t been implicated in this latest debacle. I believe the risk is acceptable.”

  Erica closed her eyes, a pained expression wrinkling her brow. A few moments passed, just long enough for Sobell to wonder if she’d zoned out and forgotten about him. When she spoke again, she didn’t open her eyes. “I don’t think it is. She’s street trash, Enoch. With a rap sheet longer than the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

  “No convictions, though.”

  She opened her eyes again, squinting as though the light in the room had become intolerable. “No, not as an adult, but she’s high on the list of the last people you should be seen with right now. As far as RICO goes, they just need to establish a pattern of illegal activities. ‘Pattern’ for the purposes of RICO means two events in a ten-year period. If they can tie anything she does back to you, that takes care of half of the case right there.” She paused. “What do you need with her?”

  “I need to inquire on the status of a project. Perhaps offer some additional incentive, if motivation is flagging.”

  Erica’s voice was heavy with suspicion. “What kind of project?”

  “Personal project. Nothing to do with either the legitimate businesses or the other side projects.”

  “What is the nature of this project?”

  “Kidnapping, if you absolutely must know.”

  That pained expression was back, and this time she rubbed her temple, too. Her lips moved slightly, probably in some kind of prayer for forbearance, or maybe just cursing him under her breath. �
�This is not a good idea, Enoch. I swear. In fifteen years, how many times have I told you ‘No, under no circumstances should you do this’?”

  “Four.” He didn’t even have to think to total them up. Each one had been an extremely irritating roadblock for him—but she had been proven right by subsequent events three of those times, and he’d give her the benefit of the doubt on the fourth.

  “Make it five.”

  He looked down at his hand. It was steady now, but when would the next fit come along? And how much worse would it be? He didn’t know how much time he had left, but it was surely measured in months, not years. He turned his attention back to Erica. She’d given him so much good counsel over the years, and she was almost surely right about the risks this time, too.

  “Very well,” he said. “You meet her.”

  Chapter 3

  Karyn couldn’t tell if she was dreaming or not. Maybe later, looking back, she’d know. Dreams had a way of relieving some of her fatigue, whereas the visions—daily life, in other words—were generally just exhausting. The other clue was that, if the events and people made some kind of sense, she was almost certainly dreaming. No such luck today.

  She didn’t recognize the room she was in. That was new. Before, her room had presented itself in various stages of decay or construction, various styles of decor. It had once been a hole in the earth, once a hillside, sometimes a blasted, burned ruin. Other times it changed to one of two different, other rooms, larger rooms with strange furniture and baffling appliances, and she wondered if that meant she was seeing something from the far future or simply pure nonsense.

  The room was different from all that now. A little larger than it had been, smaller than the two from the future. She was sitting, though she couldn’t tell on what. Earlier she had opened her eyes to see nine or ten blue-upholstered recliners jammed into the room, most of them overlapping in an extremely unsettling way, not at all like multiple photo exposures, but more like holograms: tilt your head one way, you see all of chair number one. Tilt it the other, you see all of chair number two. There wasn’t enough space for all nine simultaneously, yet there they were. Her best guess was that she was seeing all of the chair’s locations at the same time. It gave her a splitting headache.