by Glenn Rogers
“No.”
“Well, let's see if she's in the system.”
Alex entered her information. Her data came up.
“Hmm,” Alex mused. “Rachel Pipestone, previously known as Rachel Perez, is the daughter of Carlos Perez, the number two guy in the Ramos Cartel.”
I thought about that for a moment. “Be interesting,” I said, “if we could find a connection between Rachel Pipestone and Benito Esposito.”
“That would be interesting,” Alex said. “I'll get some people on that while we pay her a visit.”
Alex dialed an extension and asked an agent named Diane to see if she could find a connection between Rachel Pipestone and Esposito, either senior or junior.”
He hung up and we were out the door.
Chapter 20
Thursday Morning and Afternoon
The hot wind of the day before had subsided and it was just hot. The drive to North Hills took thirty-five minutes. It was not yet noon when we arrived. The Pipestone house was a ranch style that looked like it might be three thousand square feet—not all that big, actually, for a wealthy drug dealer. Pipestone must have been trying to keep a low profile. A circular drive cut through the manicured lawn. A multicolored rose garden that ran the length of the front of the house added color and texture to the otherwise bland sand-colored California stucco. We pulled into the circular drive and stopped in front of the front door.
Alex knocked and a chunky middle-aged Latina in a maid's uniform answered the door. Alex held up his ID. “Mrs. Pipestone, please.”
She shook her head and said, “I'm sorry, but Mrs. Pipestone is not here. She is still mourning the death of Mr. Pipestone and has gone to Mexico to visit with her family.” Her English was flawless.
“Mexico,” Alex said.
“Yes.”
“When is she expected back?”
“I do not believe her return has been scheduled.”
“Where in Mexico did she go?”
“Puebla. She is flying into Mexico City and then driving to Puebla. I made the travel arrangements for her myself. She left this morning.”
“And she has family in Puebla?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you,” Alex said. “You've been very helpful.”
She waited until we had stepped away from the door before closing it. Very polite.
“You buying any of that?” Alex asked as we pulled out of the driveway.
“She may be in Mexico,” I said. “But I doubt she's in mourning. Branch interviewed her yesterday. Kind of a sudden departure.”
It was lunchtime, so we stopped at a Burger King and ate. After I downed my Whopper, I called Frank.
“Frank, Jake.”
“Had time to follow-up on Rachel Pipestone?” he asked.
“Alex and I were just there. Apparently, after Branch talked with her yesterday, she decided that she needed to visit relatives in Mexico so she could mourn her dead husband. Left this morning. She's in Puebla. Or at least, that's where she's supposed to be. Can you have Branch check the flight manifests and see if she actually traveled?”
“Sure thing,” he said. “What are you thinking?”
“Her husband worked for Esposito, Senior. Her father's the number-two guy in the Ramos cartel. Between husband and daddy, what are the odds she's not up to her eyeballs in the drug business?”
“And if she is,” Frank said, “she probably didn't appreciate you and Monica disrupting the flow of income.”
“And right after the LAPD questions her about Jorge Betancourt and the assassination attempt, she decides to go to Mexico.”
“We need to dig deeper into Esposito, Junior, too, don't we?” Frank said.
“I think so.”
“I'll have Branch focus on that end of it.”
I clicked off and Alex said, “So Frank and his people are going to see whether or not Rachel Pipestone did, in fact, travel to Mexico, and if there is an ongoing connection between Pipestone and Esposito.”
“Frees us up to focus on other things,” I said.
Before Alex could reply, my phone rang. It was Mildred.
“Another note came in the mail,” she said.
“What does it say?”
“I haven't opened it.”
“Go ahead, and tell me what it says?”
I could hear her opening the envelope and taking the note out. “It's hand written in block letters. All capitals. It's a question. It says,
HER SINS OR YOURS?”
“Her sins or yours?”
“That's it.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said. “We'll be by in a little while to get it.”
Alex said, “Another note?”
“A question,” I said, “Her sins or yours?”
“As in, did I take her because of her sins or because of yours?”
“That'd be my first interpretation of it.”
“So maybe instead of looking into Monica's past for who might be looking for payback, we should be looking into your past.”
“Apparently,” I said, disgusted with myself for not thinking of it sooner. Brilliant, Mr. High IQ.
Alex must have seen what I was thinking. “Jake,” he said, “you couldn't have known. Don't beat yourself up over it.”
“I should have at least considered it.”
“Well, we can consider it now. Shall we start digging through your files?”
“Sure,” I said.
As we got into Alex's car, I noticed a dark blue Tahoe with three guys in it sitting across the street. As Alex pulled out of the Burger King lot, the Tahoe fell in behind us, five cars back.
“Make a couple of turns,” I said.
Alex glanced in his mirror. “We pick up a tail?”
“May have. Dark blue Tahoe five cars back.”
“Got it.”
Alex turned right. So did the Tahoe. He turned left. The Tahoe kept its distance, but it also turned left. Alex drove straight for a while. So did the Tahoe. He turned left again and the Tahoe followed.
“Yeah,” I said. “We got a tail.”
“Casual or aggressive?” Alex said.
I thought about it. “Aggressive. Maybe we can catch them off guard.”
“You got it,” Alex said, as he spun the wheel and hit the gas, making a quick, tight U-turn, heading back toward the Tahoe. Before they knew what was happening, Alex nosed his car up very close to theirs. They were boxed in with nowhere to go. We came out of Alex’s car with guns drawn. Three Asian men in their twenties raised their hands and sat very still. Traffic stopped. No one honked.
“Hands on your head,” Alex shouted. “All of you.”
They complied.
“Now, you in the backseat, get out. Slowly.”
He did.
Alex pointed his gun at him. “Take two steps toward me.”
The young man obeyed.
I watched the two in the car. They kept their eyes on me.
“On the ground,” Alex said to his man.
Once the young man was on the ground, Alex cuffed him. The guy had a Glock 21 stuck in the waistband of his slacks.
“Now, very slowly, get up and walk to the rear door of my car.”
The young man complied, having an easier time of it than most would have, and Alex put him in the back seat and closed and locked the door.
“Your turn,” Alex called to me.
I ran the same routine on the other two while Alex called the local cops. By the time I had the third guy cuffed and in the back seat, a squad car had arrived. My guys were also armed. Alex's vehicle was not set up for prisoner transport, so he had the local police transport the three men to the FBI offices where they were fingerprinted and questioned. Oddly enough, they had nothing to say.
“We can hold them on a weapon’s charge,” Alex said. “They’ll deny they were following us and we can’t prove they were. Not going to get much out of this.”
“I know. But let’s keep them out of circulation as long as we
can.”
I called Norman Hanson.
“Jake Badger,” Norman said. “How can I help you?”
“Just wondering if you've had time to ask around about who might have sent the shooters.”
“I have. And no one seems to know anything.”
“What does that mean?”
“Probably that they were in-house people. They worked for whoever sent them.”
“Is it likely that whoever had three Latinos would also have three Asians guys on their payroll?”
“It would be very uncommon for one organization to have a multicultural staff.”
“Three Asian guys followed us this afternoon.”
“Us being ...?”
“FBI Agent Watson and myself,” I said. “They were armed, but we surprised them. They didn't have an opportunity to resist.”
“I'm glad Alex was with you.”
“You know Alex?”
“We met at the hospital after your surgery.”
“Ah.”
“I don't know who's sending the assassins, Jake. But if both teams were sent by the same person, two teams within a couple of days, his intent is serious. You need to be careful.”
“I agree. Thanks, Norman.”
“You're welcome. Jake, if you need some extra firepower, people who won't be as concerned about legal procedures as your law enforcement friends, I've got a couple of guys you can borrow. They’re quite good.”
As odd as it seemed, even to me, his suggestion was not entirely without merit. Depending on what developed, a couple of shooters who would not be concerned with trivia such as legality might come in handy.
“I'll keep that in mind, Norman.”
Chapter 21
Thursday Afternoon
Alex and I got to my office a little before three. Mildred was just getting ready to leave and wanted to know if she should go ahead and take Wilson with her. I told her Wilson could stay with me. She gave Alex the note that she'd put it in a small plastic bag. We opened it and read it.
HER SINS OR YOURS?
The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that it was not really a question but a message ... She was taken because of your sins. Someone who had a grudge against me had taken Monica. But who?
Alex put the note back in the plastic bag and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket.
“So,” he said, “how do you want to attack this thing?”
“I've got all my case histories in the computer. I've got them filed chronologically. I'll run down the list and print off the ones I think are possibles. Once we get a stack, we can look through them in more detail.”
“Sounds good,” Alex said.
While I started on my files, Alex brewed himself some coffee and me a mug of tea. He took Wilson for a walk and called Papa's Pizza and ordered an extra large twenty-inch pizza to be delivered at five thirty.
The cases I selected for review were those where I had sent someone to jail or prison or made someone very angry. When I finished, I had twenty-four files to print. Before making the list, I hadn't really been aware of how many people I'd pissed off in the past three and a half years.
“Long list,” Alex said. “You’ve pissed off a lot of people.”
“It’s one of the few things I’m good at.”
“Shall we get started?”
“Actually, I have something I have to take care of first?”
I explained about Heather’s dilemma.
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “If brute force doesn’t work, I’ll put the fear of the FBI into the kid.”
We were going to have to go over my case list together anyway.
I called Heather on the way. She told me where to meet her. She didn’t want her mom to know what we were doing so she wanted me to pick her up at the library. She had it all worked out. She and her friend Ashley would walk to the library. Ashley would stay at the library and Heather would direct me to where Ryan worked.
Turns out Ryan was an athlete, a wrestler, Heather explained. He worked at a place called, The Big Sports Store, a stand alone sporting goods store in an older section of Santa Monica that at one time might have been referred to as downtown. We parked on the street. Heather went in with us to point him out.
“That’s him,” she said, pointing.
“Okay,” I said, “you go back to the car.”
Ryan was a big guy for a seventeen-year-old. Six foot, two hundred pounds. Most of it muscle. Alex and I headed in his direction.
“I’ll get him outside,” Alex said. “Then you can put the fear of God into him.”
Sounded like a good plan to me. We needed to get him somewhere private, somewhere where there were no security cameras.
Alex approached him and flashed his badge long enough for Ryan to get a good look at it.
“Ryan Anderson?” Alex asked.
“Yeah.”
“We need to talk,” Alex said. “Let’s go outside.”
“Well, I can’t right now. It’s not my break time.”
Alex gave him a cold, hard stare. “When the FBI says step outside, you step outside.”
“Uh, well, um, okay. Sure. I guess so.”
“You go out the back way,” Alex said. “Wait in the back for us. We’ll be around in a minute.”
Ryan nodded. “Yeah, sure.”
Ryan headed off toward the back of the store. Alex and I went back out the front entrance. As we went around to the back of the store, I looked for security cameras. There were none down the side of the building, but there was one monitoring the back entrance. We stopped at the back corner of the building and called Ryan over.
“What this all about?” he said, as he stepped around the corner of the building, out of camera range.
I grabbed him by the front of his shirt, swung him around and slammed him up against the side of the building. His eyes went wide and his respiration jumped way up.
“So you like to scare little girls, huh?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
I slapped him across his face. A slap is good to get someone’s attention. No blood, no broken bones. But it stings a lot and it’s humiliating.
“I’m talking about Heather Edgewater. Your sister Linda told you about her and you said some very ugly things to her.”
Ryan’s respiration was up even higher. His eyes were the eyes of a frightened young man.
“Takes a big tough guy,” I said, “to scare a twelve-year-old girl, doesn’t it?”
“I … I di … didn’t hurt her. I was just trying to scare her so she’d leave my sister alone. I didn’t hurt her. I swear. I wouldn’t hurt a little girl.”
“Yeah? Well, aren’t you a fine upstanding young man. Wouldn’t hurt a little girl. But you would call her names and tell her about all the sexual things you were going to do to her, wouldn’t you?”
He started to cry.
“Oh, shut up, you stupid little crybaby.” I pulled him away from the wall and slammed him up against it again. “If you ever speak to Heather again,” I said, “or even go near her, I’ll find you and make you regret it. You understand me?”
He nodded vigorously.
“Say it.”
“I understand. I won’t speak to her again.”
I held him a moment longer, my face in his so he could see the anger in my eyes. When I was sure he was sufficiently frightened, I let go of his shirt. Then I said, “The FBI’s watching you, Ryan. But if you go near Heather again, when they find you, there won’t be enough of you left for them to prosecute.”
Alex and I left him standing there and went back to the car. I don’t know how long he waited before going back into the store. Heather was waiting impatiently in the car.
“He won’t bother you again,” I said, after getting into the car.
“I wanted to watch,” Heather said.
“That wouldn’t have been appropriate,” I said. “You wanted me to scare him. He’s scared. Be satisfied with that.”
“Absolutely not,” I said, turning around in the seat to look at her. “No one can know this happened. There will be all kinds of problems if anyone knows this happened. You have to be satisfied knowing that I just scared the crap out of him and that he will not bother you again. Is that clear?”
“You mean you could get in trouble?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Okay. I don’t want you to get in trouble. I won’t say anything.”
We dropped Heather off at the library and got back to my office by five. We sat down and went to work. The pizza came at five thirty. We kept working while we ate. After two hours, we had come up with five people who might have been holding a serious grudge against me. Four of the five had gone to prison. I did not know whether they were still in prison or had been released. I called Frank, apologized for calling him after hours, and asked him to check for me. He said he would, and would get back to me. I gave him four of the five names.
“So what about this other guy?” Alex asked, “this Cole Randolph. What's his story?”
“Cole Randolph,” I said, “had been a B list TV actor as a young guy in the nineteen sixties. What he lacked in talent, he made up for in luck. He'd married a beautiful, talented actress and they’d had a beautiful daughter, Julie Randolph, who inherited not only her mother's looks, but her talent as well. The mother had died tragically in an automobile accident when Julie was only seven. Cole had raised Julie and she had been a much sought after child star in TV and movies.”
“Cole was her manager. Julie was a multi-millionaire by aged twelve. However, her agent, Linda Hampton, happened to see some financial statements and there weren’t as many millions as there should have been. Lots of Julie's money was unaccounted for. Her agent called me to look into the matter.”
Alex did not interrupt as he listened to the story. He knew there was more and waited for me to give it.
“Turns out,” I said, “that Cole had not only a hefty coke habit, but also a serious gambling addiction. He bet on everything. He was actually a good gambler with a good winning percentage. But he tended to reinvest his winnings in bigger bets. You do that long enough, you lose some big ones. In the end, it can be expensive. For Cole Randolph, the temptation to tap into his daughter's millions was too big. He stole from his daughter. I caught him at it. He lost everything, including his daughter. At fourteen, she sued for emancipation and won. The court appointed a temporary guardian to supervise her activity and financial concerns until she reached age eighteen. Her father went to jail, two years and probation and pay back what he stole. He claimed that he never stole anything. As the business manager with authority to sign on the account, he argued that he had merely borrowed the funds. Given how he spent the borrowed funds, the court disagreed with his interpretation of the events. He blamed me. He made threats. Cole fancies himself a tough guy. He's big: six two, two twenty-five. He'd had some martial arts training.”