by Alec Peche
"We have hit a jackpot of evidence as to how Lott’s corrupt empire was constructed. As the Attorney General was originally involved in the case, we have invited her into the discussion. While the San Francisco DA will take the lead on the Graeme St. Louis homicide, the state will handle the charges regarding the financial fraud against the city. The San Juan police will pursue charges for the Gonzales and Perez homicides. Finally, the FBI will direct the investigation for the attempted homicides of Jill Quint, Agent Brown, and Agent O’Sullivan, as well as for overall coordination between all law enforcement agencies.
"Judge Kamiguchi has issued a warrant for Lott’s arrest that the San Juan police are executing as we speak. As soon as he is in custody, a press release will be issued jointly by all agencies discussing the arrest. Each of our public relations people is working on the draft.
“Jill, you and your team have found the evidence to crack this case. It all started with your accuracy and curiosity related to an autopsy. Today, you saved 2 agents’ lives. You are a hero within our agencies, and keeping you alive is more than a job. It’s an opportunity to show a small amount of appreciation for all that you have done on this case. It is our promise and our mission. We need to keep you safe in this apartment until we can be assured that the person hired by Lott is captured,” said Agent Ortiz.
Mostly, Jill was embarrassed by this speech. She hadn’t set out to be hero and felt that she had just done what any decent human being would have done. In a very private place inside she felt like her card had been punched for a free ticket to heaven, if such a thing existed. That was all the satisfaction and recognition she needed.
She also wanted to give credit to her group. They had each brought different skills to an inquiry, and they had unearthed critical information on the case. Her life had been at risk, and the separation from Nathan and Trixie had been hard. Otherwise, she had enjoyed the challenge of discovering what had led to Graeme’s death. As a medical examiner, the dead had always talked to her. Not literally, but by the clues that they left.
“Thanks, Agent Ortiz, but really I just used my skills while reacting to the situation. I would rather give thanks to the members of my team, who helped decipher Lott’s financial, political, and personal connections. I would also like to thank members of law enforcement, as they have certainly saved me over the past weeks. Can we end the mutual admiration? I’m uncomfortable with that kind of thing.”
The speakerphone buzzed in a new caller. It was Captain Rivera of the San Juan police department. Introductions were made so he would know who was in the room.
“As requested by the San Francisco Police Department, we arrived at Señor Lott’s house in Humacao to enforce the warrant for his arrest. It is outside of our jurisdiction in San Juan, but the municipal police force was happy for us to coordinate his arrest. We knocked on his door, and a housekeeper answered. She led us to Señora Lott, who indicated that Señor Lott was not on the premises. We conducted a full search of the property and did not locate him. The maid indicated outside of the hearing of Señora Lott that he had packed a bag and left 3 days ago. We have no record of his exit through the San Juan International Airport. We contacted the Humacao airstrip, which flies charter jets, and he traveled under the name of Mark Lucas to Hermosillo, Mexico, and perhaps crossed into the United States at Nogales, Arizona. We lost track of him after he left our airspace.
“We are on our way back to his house to question Señora Lott, and we have frozen his bank accounts in Puerto Rico. We will see if Señora Lott has knowledge of Señors Gonzales or Perez. What can you tell us regarding the case there in San Francisco?,” questioned Captain Rivera.
Agent Ortiz replied with an update. While they spoke, Agent Brown ran a customs search on Lott and Lucas. It seemed that Lott had stolen not only Lucas’s life but his identity too. The SFPD and FBI would have to look in other places, such as the bank accounts, for the name Mark Lucas, as it seemed to be a current stolen identity favorite of Lott’s. A moment later Agent Brown’s search results came back.
“This is Agent Brown of the FBI. U.S. Customs shows him crossing the border at Nogales, Arizona, 3 days ago by car. I am running a search on rental cars assuming that he ditched the car he took from Mexico. No record of him anywhere in Arizona. I’ll check Amtrak and major airlines. Please wait a minute while the computer searches.”
“Here it is. He boarded a train in Tucson and reached Los Angeles the next day. I’m checking car rental companies, planes, and trains. Riding a bus doesn’t require an ID. It’s about a 6 hour drive from Los Angeles to the Bay Area. We lost him after LA. LAPD has facial recognition software embedded in its streetlight cameras, as does the SFPD. The problem is that it doesn’t collect 100 percent of images. It usually only collects pictures when there has been a violation, and it is only at busy or high security sections of the city.”
“This is Lieutenant Chau of the SFPD. We will program our cameras to search for his image throughout the city. It will take 10 minutes for our system to start searching for his image. Please keep us informed of any relevant information from Mrs. Lott, and let us know what evidence you collect on the Gonzales/Perez homicides. With so many serious crimes in so many jurisdictions, we will need the courts to sort out where we try him once we locate him.”
The call continued, and elsewhere in the city. . . .
Chapter 25
Jeffrey Lott was a misunderstood guy. He had loved each of his wives. They had each stopped loving him. He would still have been married to Susan, his first wife, if she hadn’t freaked out so completely when he had provided inaccurate income data and then forged her name on a loan application. The money had been for a good cause. He had used it as a down payment for their first house.
She had said that she loved him enough not to want him to go to jail, but she couldn’t trust him anymore. He still did not understand what she was so upset about. Everyone lied on their loan applications, and furthermore, the loan officers knew this and expected some false information on an application, after all. Oh well, it was a shame that she had died so long ago. He bet she would have been impressed with what he had now and the house in San Juan.
He supposed he could try finding his second wife, Rebecca. He had searched briefly for her 2 months after their divorce, but it was as if she had vanished. The job, the apartment, and even her name had vanished when he had tried to find her all those years ago. That was before the Internet. Maybe with some effort, he could find her now. He would make a note on his iPhone to Google her once he finished his business in San Francisco. He was a lucky guy. He wasn’t paying alimony to any of his previous 4 wives, as 2 were dead and the other 2 he had been unable to find since shortly after they divorced him.
So far he had contracted with a bunch of incompetents. He couldn’t believe how many times they had missed at trying to kill that bitch, Dr. Jill Quint. Even Aleksandra had let him down. He had hired her a few times over the years since they had met and had a brief liaison back in his college years. She had gotten rid of his third wife, Stacey, while on a safari in Africa a few months after she had divorced him. Aleksandra was a brilliant shot and had evaded Interpol for 2 decades. He was fond of her, and she mostly viewed the world the way he did. He was annoyed that she had been increasing her rates with each job. After all, he was a friend and former lover.
She had had the nerve to say that she was going to have a face-lift with the fee from this last job and retire from the business. He liked her face, but she was tired of evading Interpol. Every city was getting so wired with cameras that it would only get harder to stay free. She had more money than she thought she could spend in a lifetime. So she was going to take up a new hobby, like running a pheasant hunting camp. She had plenty of guns and thought she would enjoy instructing everyday hunters on how to be a better shot.
The guy that he had hired initially in San Francisco to get rid of Graeme had lost his nerve after 2 failed attempts. Lott included him with Aleksandra's contract to kil
l Jill. He had been so easy to dispose of off the end of the ferry traveling from San Francisco to Sausalito using the silencer. Really, how hard could it be to kill one attorney?
Aleksandra had been unwilling to come to Puerto Rico, so he had had to hire locals, and they were incompetent also. He should have known better. Gonzales was all talk and no action, and Perez’s elevator didn’t go to the top floor. Gonzales uttered lots of big words but had no idea what the big words meant. Lott hated to spend much time with such stupid people, but he had thought he needed them for the job. They screwed that up, and he had had to fly to San Francisco to finish off Graeme. He had met each of them separately to pay for their services and had instead slit their throats. He hadn’t even felt bad leaving Gonzales to be eaten in the rain forest, while Perez had been shoved into the harbor water to choke on the water and his own blood. Gonzales was a man with a small brain who had gotten eaten by a bunch of insects with smaller brains. Lott chuckled at that thought.
He was in San Francisco for the second time in a month. It was so easy to take a private charter plane to Mexico where a sufficient bribe to Mexican officials kept his travels off the radar of those in the United States. He knew the well-traveled route from Hermosillo to Nogales and enjoyed the nostalgic train ride on a sleeper car into Los Angeles. He always brought lots of cash with him, and he had kept an open account in his first wife’s name all these years so he would have always have cash in the U.S. He liked to use the cash to buy guns and cars. When he was finished with both, he wiped the items clean and left the guns in the cars with the keys in a very poor neighborhood so they would be easily stolen. It was his version of recycling.
It was also helpful that he had kept some of Mark Lucas’s identity before he had that accidental fall off the cliff in Pacifica. He had kept his identity alive all these years and had even filed tax returns under Mark’s name. He often spent up to an hour laughing each year before he mailed the tax return. The joke was on the IRS.
Just as soon as he took care of this problem in San Francisco, he thought he might never again return to the United States, and then he could safely end Mark’s life for a second time. He had thought of going so far as to try and obtain social security disability payments under Mark’s name but had decided that the payback was too small on that one. So he just had left Mark unemployed with no income year after year. He even had a laugh about that.
His college friend had thought himself so successful having joined the firm upon graduation when Lott couldn’t find a job with a law firm. He had gone on dozens of interviews, but no one had had any openings. His friend had been reported as an unemployed bum for 10 years on Mark’s fake tax returns.
Lott knew himself to be a very smart man. He wouldn’t even break a sweat evading police. It was child’s play. In addition to his law degree, he had been smart enough to tell a few small lies and amass a fortune over the years. He had designed the perfect way to kill Graeme. His experience as a student running a lab at the university had come in handy. He knew how to kill with bacteria and had actually used it on Stacey in the bush of Africa. She had been too far away from a major city hospital to be saved in time from the overwhelming infection. Aleksandra had booked the safari that Stacey reserved and had followed Lott’s instructions and put the bacteria in her water, her food, and on a cut just like he had Gonzales try with Graeme. It had been her only non-gun assassination.
He had also taken a chemistry class in at the university as an undergraduate. He had never forgotten the thrill of the chemical reaction that resulted when making Molotov cocktails. He had used that knowledge while serving in the Peace Corps to be a worker by day and a terrorist at night, blowing people up for the sheer fun of it.
He had continued to use that knowledge over the years. When he had served on that stupid city council and the other members had all wanted to come clean on the error in the contract for protective services, he had had to bomb one of councilmen’s properties to demonstrate that he meant business when he needed the councilmen to stay quiet about what they knew. After the demonstration, no one broke ranks to give evidence to that idiot Attorney General. Maybe when he was done in San Francisco, he would drive north to Sacramento and see if he could arrange a convenient accident for the Attorney General.
He had used that same knowledge to bomb Graeme’s house. He had seen a man and a woman in the study and assumed that the woman was Jill Quint. He had learned on the news that he had injured Agent O’Sullivan rather than the good doctor. Furthermore, Jill was being portrayed as a local hero, and he really hated that. How dare she be honored for saving the lives of the agents? She had just been lucky to be there when he decided to bomb Graeme’s home office to make sure that Graeme hadn’t left any evidence behind on his computer. The news said the office was destroyed so he was sure it had done the job. He couldn’t stick around to confirm that the job was complete.
He was sure that every rich person had a few skeletons in the closet. Literally. Didn’t everyone have to kill a few people who were in their way to get ahead? He had asked himself this question on many an occasion.
Jill Quint wasn’t smarter than he was. She had been to medical school and he hadn’t. She just had luck. He was still smarter than she was, and he would get her in the end. Without her test results and testimony the police had no case against him. He would return to the high life with Cecilia in San Juan. They had plenty of money, a beautiful house, friends at the local resort and country club, and if the sex ever got boring, he could find a new wife.
Lott had spoken with Aleksandra before she died, and he knew where Jill was staying. He surveyed the building now. She had returned about 2 hours ago. He wanted to watch the building awhile longer, study the traffic. He watched for another hour and then he figured he how he would go through the security screening to reach the upper floors.
He had never shot someone, so he didn’t carry a gun. He had a ceramic knife that he planned to use. It was sharp enough to cause her to bleed to death, but it contained no metal in it, the metal detector stayed silent when Lott passed through with the weapon on his person. He also carried an empty pizza box that he had dug out of a dumpster, although he exceeded the age of the average pizza delivery boy. He assumed that Jill was in the same apartment as she had been for Aleksandra’s visit with 2 new agents. The agents who had been guarding her were staying in the hospital at least over night according to the news.
What he didn’t know was that while he had been sitting in the front of the building, his face had been recognized by the facial recognition software in a camera across the street. Police had been watching him for nearly 3 hours. SFPD and FBI officers in plain clothes had gradually replaced nearly all of the pedestrians in the area as well as the guards at the metal detector. They had an operation going in and around Lott. They wanted him to make another attempt on Jill’s life to make sure that they had enough to hold him for a very long time while unraveling his actions over the past 20 years.
While he went through the metal detector without setting off the alarm, he didn’t seem to realize that his ceramic knife could be seen quite well by the CT scanner, which had been put in 2 years ago after someone had tried to get this same type of knife into the IRS to hurt someone.
He took the elevator up to Jill’s floor. Law enforcement personnel were in all 3 apartments posing as occupants. The officers had a much-rehearsed plan to welcome him in and give him enough rope to hang himself.
He approached the people in the first 2 apartments in exactly the same manner. He stated he was meeting a friend who lived on that floor, and that they were going to have pizza. He said that he knew the floor but not the apartment number.
Each apartment door was opened by a disguised SFPD officer, the first a Goth woman in full make-up and clothing. Her aggressive stance and conversation put him off his stride. So he moved on to the second apartment, which was opened by a 35-year-old detective posing as an 80-year-old gentleman who was hard of hearing and who yelled
in a loud voice, making Lott repeat his question. It wasn’t easy to seem to be stooped when you wore a bullet proof vest. Both officers had perfected their characters over 5 years of running ops and were generally considered hits at Halloween parties as well.
If Lott had stopped to wonder what these 2 people were doing in an IRS building he might have been more suspicious. They were likely not the profile of someone renting or owning an apartment in a government building. It was the best that law enforcement could do on short notice. Lieutenant Chau knew his officers well and didn’t hesitate to pull them in to the Op on extremely short notice. They had just had time to run home and retrieve their costumes.
Lott didn’t stop to think of the unusual characters that had opened the first 2 doors, as he was so intent on finding Jill Quint. Instead, he had prided himself on how soon he had identified that the first 2 apartments were not occupied by Jill.
He moved on to the third apartment. The lobby law enforcement personnel had provided a description of the knife that Lott carried. Based on his history, it would seem that he would try to slit Jill’s throat, as he was unable to kill her by infection or pushing her to fall off a cliff, 2 of his favorite methods of killing someone.
A makeup artist from the San Francisco Opera occasionally provided services for the SFPD, and an example of her best work was found in the final apartment. She had used all of her stage props to make a detective from the narcotics look like Jill. The alterations to Detective Branson had Jill herself taking a second glance. Better still, Detective Branson taught hand-to-hand combat at the academy and was one of the detectives best suited to evading a knife.
Due to the lack of time, Jill was still in the apartment but locked within the safe room with Agent Brown for protection. Detective Branson was in the living room with Agent Somerset. Two more Agents and 2 other SFPD officers were in the second bedroom. Cameras and microphones recorded all angles of the apartment and hallway. Detective Branson, imitating Jill, sat on the sofa with a laptop.