Web of Evil

by J. A. Jance

  Dave’s exasperated sigh wasn’t lost on her. He didn’t say, “Women!” but he could just as well have. Turning her back on him, Ali inched forward far enough so she could see the front of the restaurant. The remaining waitstaff had disappeared into the kitchen except for Carrie, who had taken shelter behind the hostess desk.

  In the end, all of Easy Washington’s advance preparations for a flawless takedown still weren’t enough—at least not for the one in Valencia’s Claim Jumper parking lot. Before Easy and the last of his officers could move into position, something must have alerted Tracy McLaughlin to their presence. Ali didn’t see the suspect slam his Element in gear and shoot forward across the parking lot, but she did hear the squeal of tires and brakes as the vehicle screeched to a stop just outside the restaurant’s front door.

  Seconds later, Tracy McLaughlin charged into the entryway lobby. Stifling a scream, Carrie tried to retreat farther into the restaurant, but he was too fast for her. As she attempted to dart away from the hostess stand, McLaughlin got one arm around the terrified woman’s neck. With his other hand, he held a gun to her head.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Ali saw Detective Taylor rise to his feet, weapon in hand. “Drop it,” he ordered.

  “You drop it,” Tracy returned. “If you don’t, this woman dies.”

  “Don’t hurt me,” Carrie wailed. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  For a long moment, the three of them remained in a frozen tableau. Then, moving slowly and deliberately, Detective Taylor grasped the handle of his .38 with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and carefully deposited the weapon on a nearby table.

  “That’s better,” Tracy said. “Move away from the table.”

  Detective Taylor complied.

  “Now,” Tracy went on. “Do you have any way of communicating with those bozos outside? If so, I want you to tell them to stay put so nobody gets hurt.”

  Lying there, waiting for what she thought was an inevitable volley of shots, all Ali could think about was a pair of cold-blooded armed killers silently roaming the hallways and classrooms of Columbine High School, stalking their innocent victims. Determined to fight back, she unholstered her Glock.

  “Stay here!” Dave whispered urgently in her direction, then he moved away from the spot under the table that had sheltered them both. Staying under the cover of intervening tables, he slithered across the floor of the darkened restaurant in a surprisingly rapid commando crawl.

  “Not really,” Detective Taylor replied. “They’re Feds. I’m local. Our radios aren’t compatible.”

  “Isn’t that just great,” Tracy muttered.

  Anxious to provide a diversion from whatever action Dave was about to take, Ali surprised herself by finding her own voice.

  “Let Carrie go, Tracy,” she urged. “Haven’t enough people been hurt already?”

  “Who are you?” he demanded, glancing around the room, trying to fix her position. “Are you a cop?”

  “You know me, Tracy,” she answered. “I’m Ali Reynolds. I’m the woman you followed here, remember? And the whole place is surrounded by cops. You can’t get away. Give it up. It’s your only chance.”

  “No matter what, I’m not going back to the slammer,” he declared. “So come out from wherever it is you’re hiding. Show me your hands.”

  Attempting to estimate the distance Dave would have to cover to circumnavigate the dining room and how much time it would take for him to be within striking distance of the armed man, Ali tried to stall a little longer.

  “Why should I?” she asked. “So you can shoot me, too?”

  “Because if you don’t come out where I can see you, I’m going to shoot her,” Tracy returned ominously. “If that happens, this woman’s blood will be on your hands as much as it is on mine.”

  Carrie moaned in protest. Somewhere in the restaurant, Roseanne Maxwell began to sob as well.

  Hoping Detective Taylor saw her do it, Ali tucked the Glock into the back of the waistband of her jeans. Then, aware Tracy would have to peer through the gloom in order to observe her every move, Ali raised her hands and slowly rose to her feet. Once upright, Ali stepped forward until she was standing a foot or so in front of Montgomery Taylor and slightly to one side. The move left her Glock’s exposed handle well within the detective’s reach.

  “What do you want?” Ali asked, willing Tracy to keep his attention focused on her. “What are you hoping to accomplish?”

  At that instant, Dave materialized to the right of the front door. Without being observed, he had managed to work his way all around the restaurant. Now, coming from just outside Tracy’s line of vision, Dave smashed into the two people locked in their life-and-death embrace. The unexpected blow propelled the couple apart, sending Carrie in one direction and Tracy and his weapon in the other.

  Carrie screamed. A burst of gunfire pierced the air, but only for a moment, then it was over. In the sudden silence that followed, Detective Taylor grabbed Ali’s Glock and charged forward to help Dave subdue Tracy. Seconds later the room was filled to capacity as more officers raced in from outside.

  “Is he dead?” Roseanne Maxwell’s plaintive question came from two tables away. “Please tell me the son of a bitch is dead.”

  Ali walked over and helped Roseanne emerge from her hiding place beneath the table.

  “I’m afraid not,” Ali returned. “It looks to me as though he came through just fine.”

  “Damn,” Roseanne muttered.

  Easy Washington appeared. He seemed shaken. His dark skin had taken on a peculiarly ashen hue. “Is everyone all right?” he asked.

  “I think so,” Ali said. “I believe everyone’s fine.”

  “Too bad,” Roseanne added. “I was really hoping.”

  Dave showed up just then with concern written all over his face. He grasped Ali by the shoulders. “What in the world were you thinking, standing up like that?”

  “I was trying to get him to look at me instead of you.”

  “Are you nuts? You don’t even have on a Kevlar vest.”

  “Do you?” Ali returned.

  Dave ignored her question. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Perfectly fine.”

  And for some strange reason, right that minute, she wasn’t even mad at him anymore. In fact, she felt lighter than air.

  { CHAPTER 19 }

  In the aftermath of the Claim Jumper incident, Ali found herself once again on the wrong side of the thin blue line. While Dave went off to confer with the other officers, Ali was interviewed in a cursory fashion by a pair of young uniformed cops who took her statement and then left. They made it clear that most of the team was focused on what had happened to Carrie and on the pivotal roles Dave Holman and Detective Taylor had played in effecting Carrie’s rescue.

  Ali was tempted to point out to one of the young cops, “Hey, I helped, too.” Instead, she let it go. In the grand scheme of things the fact that Carrie was safe was all that mattered.

  Because shots had been fired in the course of the incident, all weapons on the scene—including Ali’s Glock—were collected by crime scene investigators, bagged, cataloged, and taken away for forensic examination. Ali’s objections about losing possession of her Glock were duly noted and duly ignored. Nobody but Ali seemed to care much that her weapon was going away nor were they willing to say when, if ever, she’d be able to have it back.

  The better part of an hour passed before Tracy McLaughlin and Roseanne Maxwell were loaded into separate patrol cars and carted off. For a long time after that, Ali sat drinking free Claim Jumper coffee and being pretty much ignored by all concerned while a small army of people hustled around the restaurant processing the scene. It was frustrating to be right there in what was supposedly the middle of the action and still have so little information about what was going on.

  Finally, Ali reached for her computer case and her computer. Minutes later she was logged on to a wire-service news site.
What she found wasn’t much but it was a lot more than anyone had bothered telling her.

  A joint task force made up of local and federal officers staged a series of coordinated raids at several locations late today targeting what is thought to be a major drug-distribution operation centered in the Los Angeles area. Several arrests were made, including a number of people—both customers and employees—at an exclusive area topless bar called the Pink Swan.

  Mason Louder, the Drug Enforcement Agency’s local public affairs officer, has announced that a press conference dealing with today’s operations is scheduled for 10 A.M. tomorrow morning at the Federal Building.

  Two of those arrested at the Pink Swan location are thought to be Mario and Reynaldo Joaquin, sons of local real estate magnate Lucia Joaquin. According to sources close to the investigation, Ms. Joaquin, now in ill health and living in semi-retirement in Palm Springs, has long been suspected of maintaining close ties with Colombian drug cartels, in which her deceased husband, Anselmo, was once considered to be a major player.

  For years, Ms. Joaquin maintained a high-profile lifestyle and counted among her circle of acquaintances many of Southern California’s media elite, including television network executive Paul Grayson, whose grisly murder late last week as well as the subsequent deaths of both his fiancée and her mother are all thought to be connected to the case and may well be what sparked tonight’s coordinated law enforcement action.

  Mr. Grayson’s widow, former L.A. news anchor Alison Reynolds, was originally suspected of having some involvement with his death. Ms. Reynolds’s mother, Edie Larson, who is visiting from Arizona and was interviewed at her hotel late this evening, told reporters that she hoped that the cloud of suspicion lingering over her daughter’s head would soon be lifted.

  Ali reread that sentence. “Interviewed at her hotel…”

  What hotel? Ali wondered. It sounded as though at least one reporter and probably more had managed to track Edie to her new location at the Motel 6. And yes, Paul’s death was definitely related to the Joaquin organization, but Monique Ragsdale’s death and April Gaddis’s had nothing at all to do with it—at least not as far as Ali knew. That meant the so-called sources close to the investigation didn’t have all their facts straight.

  Unable to find any more information elsewhere, Ali turned to her cutlooseblog.com mailbox, where the “new mail” symbol told her she had forty-seven new messages. Daunted by the very thought of starting to mow through all of those, Ali turned instead to her personal mailbox, one she had set up in order to keep her blog life separate from everything else. There she had only three new messages.

  The first one was from her father:

  Dear Ali,

  Back home but from what I hear—and don’t hear—from your mother, obviously I shouldn’t be. I should have stayed there instead. What in the world is going on? Call me.

  DAD

  Ali didn’t answer the message right then, and she didn’t call, either. Her father was her mother’s problem more than he was Ali’s, and Edie was going to have to handle him on her own.

  The second message was from her wrongful dismissal attorney, Marcella Johnson. Like Victor Angeleri and Helga Myerhoff, Marcella, too, worked for the firm Weldon, Davis, and Reed. Although sharing a sky-high hourly rate, the three attorneys had totally different areas of expertise. Despite their inarguable effectiveness, Ali had sometimes found herself wishing she’d hooked herself up with more of a general practitioner attorney rather than three separate and amazingly expensive specialists.

  Dear Ali,

  My God woman, what are you thinking? Your name has been everywhere this weekend—in the news, in the papers, on the radio. With our case coming up next week, now would have been a good time for you to keep a low profile, but since you didn’t ask my advice on that score, I guess I won’t give it.

  When is your husband’s funeral? We’re due in court on Tuesday afternoon, but I’m wondering if I should ask for a continuance. Also, I’m getting a few hints here and there that opposing counsel may be ready to come forward with a deal. Don’t leave town without letting me know and keep your cell phone handy in case I need to reach you.

  MARCELLA

  Does Valencia count as out of town? Ali wondered.

  Dave turned up then, looking agitated. “I just talked to your mother,” he said. “I thought we’d managed to ditch the reporters back at the other hotel, but now it seems they’ve tracked her to the new one, too.”

  “I know,” Ali said.

  “You talked to Edie?” Dave asked.

  “Not exactly,” Ali replied. “I read it online.”

  “Online?” Dave asked. “Somebody put your mother’s whereabouts up on the Internet?”

  She brought the article back up and pushed the computer over so he could read it for himself.

  “Geez!” he said, when he finished. “They’re everywhere.”

  “So I guess Motel 6 is out?” Ali asked.

  “Easy’s already working the problem, and it’s a good thing, too. When I left him he was on the phone with LAPD, trying to clear it with them so you can go back to your own house tonight.”

  “On Robert Lane?” Ali asked.

  Dave nodded. “We’re thinking that’s the last place anyone would expect you to be along about now.”

  Me included, Ali thought. But if Dave and Easy were still concerned about Ali’s safety, did that mean some member of the Joaquin group had escaped law enforcement’s coordinated dragnet?

  “Who’s still on the loose?” Ali asked.

  “Jake Maxwell,” Dave answered. “We’re not sure how or where we missed him. Amber and Lucia are still unaccounted for as well. Easy thinks I should pick up your mother and then go to the house and keep an eye on both of you there until we know Jake and the others are in custody.”

  As if on cue, Easy sauntered into the room. “Done,” he said to Dave. “LAPD Homicide has cleared the house on Robert Lane. You’ll stay with them and keep an eye out?”

  “Absolutely,” Dave said.

  Easy came over to where Ali was sitting. “Hold out your hand and close your eyes,” he said.

  Ali did as she was told. A moment later, something metallic and shaped like a silver dollar dropped into the palm of her hand. It was smooth on one side while the other side was tacky with the residue of some adhesive that could have been rubber cement.

  “What’s this?” she asked, staring down at the shiny disk.

  Easy grinned. “A memento,” he said, “just for you. Compliments of the DEA.”

  “But what is it?”

  “A GPS tracking device Dave removed from the inside of your rear bumper.”

  “Don’t you need it for evidence?” she asked.

  Easy shook his head. “We have enough evidence, and I think you earned this. It turns out we’ve got several of them from several different vehicles. The warehouse complex out behind the Pink Swan is a veritable jungle of electronic tracking and wiretapping equipment complete with an armload of these. Not only have the Joaquins been keeping tabs on what we’ve been doing, they’ve also been running electronic surveillance on their competition. Our IT guys tell us that the place is an absolute gold mine of drug-dealing intelligence if we’re able to move on it fast enough and before anyone else knows what we have.”

  Ali examined the device for a moment or so longer before stuffing it in the front pocket of her jeans. “Are you sure you should be saying all of this in front of a ‘loose-cannon’ blogger?” she asked.

  “Sorry about that,” Easy said apologetically. “I was out of line earlier. I think we can trust you. Dave told me what you did to help out in there, and I’m very grateful. He and Monty might not have managed without you. Clearly we were lucky to have you on the team tonight. Still, now that you mention it, it might be better if you didn’t bring up any of the details of this operation in your blog until after tomorrow morning’s news conference.”

  “Maybe you should take a look at wh
at’s out there on the Net right now,” Dave said, nodding in the direction of Ali’s computer screen. “Some of it’s already showing up, and she didn’t put it there, either.”

  Without a word, Ali turned the screen so Easy Washington could read it. “They don’t have a lot of it straight,” he observed when he finished reading. “Just enough to cause trouble.” He turned back to Ali.

  “Have Dave give you my numbers. Once the press conference is over, I may be able to give you an exclusive about all this.”

  He was offering Ali an exclusive story about a major drug bust that would appear first on cutlooseblog.com? Ali knew that would be a scoop that would drive her former cohorts in the media—friend and foe alike—utterly nuts. It would be especially galling to the people who were spending tonight doggedly tracking her mother’s every move.

  “Thank you,” she said. “So in the meantime you and Dave think I should go back to the house?”

  “Only if you want to,” Easy said. “There’s not much sense in your hanging around here. Going to the house makes sense because it’s presumably a spot where no one would think to look for you. For one thing, it’s still officially off-limits due to being a crime scene. But if you’d be more comfortable somewhere else, or if you’d like me to send some officers along to look out for you—”

  “No,” Ali said. “The house is fine, and sending extra officers along is unnecessary. The less fuss there is about it, the more likely it is that no one will notice we’ve gone anywhere. For another, Dave will be there. He’s just going by the hotel long enough to pick up my mother. I’m sure you can make better use of your people here. We’ll be fine on our own. Oh,” she added. “Is it all right to use my phone now?”

  Easy waggled his hands. “We believe so,” he said. “We’re hopeful that the Joaquins’ entire electronics setup was centered in that one location. At this time, however, there’s always a chance that they have backup equipment somewhere else that’s still in operation.”

  “So it’s possible someone else might still be listening in on whatever I say.”