Duel to the Death

by J. A. Jance

  “What about my office?” she asked. “Is that under surveillance, too?”

  “St. Thomas Aquinas,” Stu answered. “Volume one is in your office, and volume two is in B.’s. I didn’t think you’d miss them.”

  When Ali had first signed on to work with B. at High Noon, her first assignment had been to spruce up the premises and get rid of the motley collection of mismatched furniture that made the place look like the leavings from an abandoned consignment store. She’d repainted walls, had new carpeting installed, and replaced worn-out desks and chairs with first-rate office furniture. Then, hoping to give their offices a bit of class and some additional gravitas, she’d added one final detail.

  After the death of Ali’s second husband, Paul Grayson, all his worldly goods, including his extensive wine collection and the contents of his showy library, had come to her. She and B. had started making inroads on the wine collection almost immediately, but at the time she had embarked on decorating the offices at High Noon, the books had still been languishing in boxes in a storage unit uptown. Ali had donated most of them to a friends-of-the-library sale, but she had been unable to force herself to let go of some of them—the upscale leather-bound editions of the Great Books that had once been included in the purchase price of some long since discarded set of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

  Ali had brought the books out of forced retirement, freed them from their boxes, and then used them as the finishing touches for her office space makeover. She had divided the books into two sets and lined them up on spanking-new shelving units, half in B.’s office and half in hers. Only now did she discover that two of the books had been cannibalized to hold the surveillance video cameras.

  “I think you’re right.” That time Ali really did laugh aloud. “I don’t think I’ll be reading either of those tomes anytime soon.”

  “You still haven’t told me why you’re in the office on Saturday morning,” Stu said again.

  Ali may not have known about the interior surveillance system prior to this, but she was relieved to know about it now. Whoever Mr. Barris was, Stuart would most likely have him on camera, doing whatever it was he’d been doing.

  “I was actually going to call you about that. B. wanted me to ask you to run a security scan.”

  “How come? Have we had an intrusion?”

  “Maybe,” Ali said. “A county building inspector who was supposed to show up sometime late next week dropped by late yesterday afternoon instead just as Shirley was getting ready to leave. The whole thing seemed off to me, but as long as you’ve got him on video, I’ll stop worrying. Maybe you can take a look at what you’ve got and see if he was doing anything out of line.”

  “I’m a little busy right now,” Stu told her. “Lance and his guys just showed up. I can start the scans right away, but checking the video feeds takes time. I’ll take a look at them when I have a chance and get back to you. Do you know about what time he was there?”

  “Between four and five,” Ali told him.

  “Okay,” Stu said. “I’ll check it out. I’ve gotta go.”

  23

  On Saturday morning, Graciella cut through the crime scene tape, stepped into what had been her mother’s room, surveyed the mine field awaiting her there, and immediately called down to the manager’s office, asking for help. Half an hour later a motley group of four young men arrived at her door. They came armed with a rolling grocery cart and plastic trash bins along with an assortment of cardboard boxes.

  The guys were willing workers. With Graciella doing the sorting through the clutter, they carted away load after load of accumulated junk. When they finally cleared away the debris surrounding the bed, Graciella had them drag that away next, watching with what she realized was a curious lack of emotion as her mother’s actual deathbed was dismantled and lugged out of the room. One of the workers asked would she mind if he took the headboard and frame, and Graciella told him it was fine. As for the bedding, mattress, and box springs? Those were all destined for the Dumpster at the back of the building, although she had a sneaking suspicion that her work crew would cart some of those away as well, turning those along with her mother’s many other dubious treasures into someone else’s.

  As the clutter disappeared, some of the original furnishings emerged—a chest of drawers, a dressing table, a love seat—along with the door to a closet that had been invisible for years. Hanging in the closet Graciella found some of the glamorous clothing that had come into the house from the storage unit all those years ago. Some of them—slinky cocktail dresses and floor-length evening gowns—were things she dimly remembered seeing her mother wearing. Christina had been so beautiful back then. In Graciella’s eyes her mother could have been a movie star or a princess.

  Just because Graciella remembered some of the outfits, didn’t mean she kept them. The dresses went into the discard boxes, as did the shoes. She sorted through the drawers, emptying them all and consigning the contents to the trash bins before sending the dresser and chest of drawers away as well. There was nothing of her mother’s that was worth saving. If Graciella’s helpers happened to notice her lack of sentimentality concerning such things, they were too happy making off with Christina’s usable furniture—including the flat screen TV from the living room—to make any mention of Graciella’s state of mind.

  As the day drew to a close and with her mother’s room completely empty, Graciella made one last check of the closet. At the very back of an overhead shelf, she discovered a thin box. Her first thought as she brought it down was that it might contain a strand of long-forgotten pearls. When she opened it, however, she discovered inside a series of articles and/or obituaries, written in English and printed on pieces of brittle, age-yellowed newsprint, all of them concerning Christina’s assault.

  Graciella shuffled through the stack, glancing at the stories. One of the six perpetrators had committed suicide. Two had died of drug overdoses, one in L.A. and the other in Dallas, Texas. One of them had been the victim of a hit-and-run in Fresno, California. Two had been shot to death in what was believed to be gang-related violence, one in Chicago and the other in Detroit. Those two homicides remained unsolved. The last article in the stack was one written in Spanish and taken from a local paper called Panamá Hoy (Panama Today), detailing the court-martial convictions of the six airmen involved in the savage rape of Christina Miramar. All had been found guilty and dishonorably discharged. The local prosecutor, who could have charged them with rape as civilians as well, had declined to do so. They all went home to the States with what was widely regarded by locals as nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

  Going back to the obituaries and matching the names with the ones charged in the attack on Christina, Graciella immediately suspected she was seeing El Pescado’s handiwork. The six men who had attacked Christina had gotten away with it as far as any real justice was concerned, so her father had followed them home to the States, systematically tracked them down, and exacted his own style of revenge.

  Late in the afternoon, Graciella retreated to the living room with the damning box of articles, unsure what she should keep or toss. If those papers ever surfaced in the wrong hands, they would irretrievably link her to El Pescado. Still, curious about the details, she sat in the living room and, using her laptop and secure dark Web-based server, she tracked down all available information on the men involved. The six deaths had taken place over a three-year period of time in the early nineties in far-flung towns from one end of the US to the other. Some of her searches led her back to those original obituaries. An article about one of the unsolved homicides actually referred to the court-martial proceedings resulting from the attack on Christina Miramar several years earlier.

  Did learning about her father’s mission of revenge give Graciella any comfort? Hardly. Just because he had punished the attackers didn’t give him a free pass, nor did the fact that he had looked after both Christina and Graciella during all those intervening years. His actions after the fact did
n’t absolve him of his original crime—the unforgivable betrayal—of abandoning them in the first place.

  There were no strands labeled forgiveness located anywhere in the Duarte family’s DNA, and in that regard, Graciella truly was her father’s daughter.

  When Graciella had satisfied herself that she had learned all there was to learn about the deaths of the six men who had attacked her mother, she took the stack of yellowed articles into the kitchen. She placed them in the sink, lit a match, reduced them to ash, and washed that down the drain.

  When she was done, she showered the grime off her body, then left the apartment, and hurried down the street to the little family restaurant on the corner of Vía Brasil.

  “¿Los de siempre?” The woman behind the counter greeted her with a smile. “The usual?”

  The usual was sancocho, the thick, stew-like chicken soup that is Panama’s traditional cure for a hangover. Since Christina had been drunk on a daily basis, she had practically lived on the stuff, and Graciella had always ordered carryout containers of it from here rather than going to the trouble of making it herself.

  She nodded. “Si, por favor.”

  The woman frowned. “But I thought your mother . . .” She bit her lip and fell silent.

  “Yes,” Graciella said with a sad smile, graciously acknowledging the expression of sympathy from this near stranger, just as a properly grieving daughter ought to do. “You’re right. My mother is gone now, and the sancocho was her favorite, but I have been thinking about her today, and it seems only right to order it tonight.”

  “Of course,” the woman agreed, “it’s important to keep our lost loved ones with us—by remembering the foods they liked. Will there be anything else?”

  “No, gracias,” Graciella told her. “Sólo el sancocho.”

  24

  There was no way Stu could have anticipated how easily the complex job of packing up Owen Hansen’s handiwork could be accomplished. Every piece of the network had been laid out with exacting attention to detail. Stu and Lance began the project by numbering each of the racks so that, when it was time to put them back together, they could mirror the original arrangement in every detail. Each cord and each connection was numbered and labeled to allow for easy reassembly once the equipment arrived in Arizona.

  Lance was as impressed by the elegance of Owen Hansen’s setup as Stu was, and the two tech guys talked as they worked. Lance was excited about the idea of adding Frigg to High Noon’s cyber arsenal. Stu was far more wary. He was still on what he called “the one and done page”—turn Frigg on, get the passwords, turn her off, and get the hell out.

  “From the way Owen Hansen was able to penetrate other people’s devices with impunity,” Stu said, “Frigg must be loaded with all kinds of electronic eavesdropping crap that shouldn’t be there. No doubt a lot of it is absolutely illegal. If Hansen had been caught using it, he might have ended up in jail. You can bet that if we’re caught using any of it, we really will go to jail. We’ll also be out of business.”

  “Maybe we can get Frigg to do a self-scan and give us a directory of the programs that cross the line so we can delete them.”

  “From what I’ve read, some of those deep-learning algorithms are machine-readable only and are indecipherable for humans. What’s to stop Frigg from disbursing that collection of illicit files out into the ether again so she can retrieve them whenever she wants, just like she did last time?” Stu asked.

  “You’d better figure out how to keep that from happening,” Lance said, “and you need to do it now—before you let Frigg back online.”

  “Tell me about it,” Stu said miserably. “I can’t get the passwords without putting her online first.”

  “Sounds like you’re screwed, then,” Lance told him with a grin, “but at least you’ll have the money.”

  A mere six hours after they started the project, it was done. While Stu and Lance had been deconstructing all the connections, Lance’s crew of musclemen, directed by Cami, had removed all the monitors from their brackets, wrapped them in protective film, and loaded them into the truck. Once the racks had been disconnected from their wall mounts, they, too, were wrapped in packing film, hauled outside, and strapped securely into the truck.

  At last the only piece of equipment remaining in the space was the antique Macintosh sitting in solitary splendor on the library table. Stu punched the power switch and the screen came to life. It was password-protected, so Stu couldn’t run it, but that didn’t stop him from taking the top off to look inside. With the lid off, the machine wasn’t at all what it appeared. It may have looked old, decrepit, and out-of-date, but under the hood Owen Hansen had installed a powerful collection of some of the very latest computer wizardry.

  Cami came back inside through the sliding door just as Stu was replacing the outside cover panel. “You’re not taking that piece of junk along with us, are you?” she asked.

  “I don’t think it’s junk,” he told her. “I suspect this old goat of a computer functioned as Owen Hansen’s base of operations.”

  “That was my husband’s,” Irene Hansen said nodding toward Stu and the Mac. Once again, and despite still wearing those stiletto heels, she had turned up behind them as silently as a ghost. “They gave it to Harold for free because it was one of the first computers off the assembly line. They used Harold’s chip, you see. He was a very smart man, and so was his son. Owen barely knew his father and yet they were very much alike.”

  Stu took a deep breath. He hadn’t told Irene Hansen everything he needed to tell her earlier. Now he cleared his throat to do so.

  “Your son left me some money,” he said. That wasn’t exactly the truth, but he didn’t want to bring Frigg’s machinations into the discussion. “More than just some,” he added. “The money is on deposit in some offshore accounts. Once I get the passwords and pay whatever taxes are due, I’ll turn anything that’s left over to you.”

  “Oh, don’t do that, sweetie,” Irene said. “I already have all the money I’ll ever need. If Owen gave it to you, he must have meant for you to have it.”

  Stuart Ramey was stunned. It wasn’t just that Irene had passed on his giving her any of Owen’s money. That in itself was almost incomprehensible. She had just called him sweetie, however, and that was something that had never happened to him before in his whole life!

  25

  Walking back home with her take-out soup in hand, Graciella examined the neighborhood. The apartment building on Calle 61 Este was called El Sueño, The Dream. The whole time Graciella had lived there with her mother, she had dreamed of living elsewhere. She had watched longingly as sparkling new high-rises had sprouted throughout the city. Those were the kinds of places where several of her very important clients maintained penthouse suites. She had always imagined that once her mother was no longer in the picture, she’d move into one of those—preferably in one of the top floor units—and take her rightful place in the universe.

  But the last few days had caused her to rethink her place in the universe. As her father’s primary money launderer, she knew exactly how much money was floating around inside El Pescado’s illegal world. She knew which numbered accounts belonged to him and which ones belonged to each of her half brothers. While sorting out the trash in her mother’s room, it had occurred to her that maybe there already was enough money. Maybe she didn’t need any more. What she should probably do was to consolidate what already existed by collapsing the cartel and walking away with the remaining spoils.

  She wasn’t yet sure how she’d go about accomplishing that goal, but she intended to bring El Pescado’s cartel down in the time-honored Duarte fashion, by turning brother against brother and father against son. Graciella, an unassuming and unmarried spinster in her mid-thirties, wasn’t anyone’s idea of a drug lord. She wasn’t the least bit glamorous or even especially good-looking. She lived a quiet and ostensibly sober life. No one looking at someone who had selflessly cared for her mother for years would consider
her capable of turning on her family and destroying them from within. Her father and her brothers would be wary of attacks coming from outside—from rival cartels or from the cops—but not from her.

  Her challenge was to point the authorities in the direction of El Pescado and his sons without being drawn into the fray herself. There would be plenty of time later on for her to live a flashy life. Right now, she needed the protection of the same kind of invisibility that had served her so well as a vagrant child, wandering on her own and begging for money in the slums of Panama City. Now she would be an invisible drug cartel kingpin, hiding in plain sight in a run-down, somewhat seedy condo complex. She doubted anyone other than her father would know to come to El Sueño looking for her, and by the time he did, it would be too late.

  Back in the apartment, Graciella was about to dish up her soup when the phone rang. The name in the caller ID belonged to one of Graciella’s coworkers. Isobel Flores’s cubicle was next to Graciella’s. She was also the assistant office manager. “Have you heard?” Isobel asked breathlessly.

  “Heard what?” Graciella asked, feigning innocence although she was quite sure she already knew the answer.

  “It’s about Arturo,” Isobel said. “He never made it home last night.”

  “Really?” Graciella replied. “What happened?”

  “You knew he left the office with Bianca yesterday, right?”

  “I was pretty busy yesterday,” Graciella said. “I guess I didn’t notice. Why?”

  “The cops came by here a little while ago. They got my name from Arturo’s wife. They told me that they found Arturo’s car early this morning. It was stuck in a ditch outside of town. The car was shot full of holes and covered in blood, but there was no sign of Arturo.”