Slipknot: A Private Investigator Crime and Suspense Mystery Thriller (California Corwin P. I. Mystery Series Book 3)

by D. D. VanDyke

  Her absence made fixing breakfast with Thomas less awkward. The dogs seemed to accept him with barely a sniff and a wuff. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  “What good are you two, anyway, if you can be bought off by some chicken?” I murmured as I ruffled their manes. They gazed gravely at me and didn’t answer.

  “What’s your next move?” Thomas asked me as we shared coffee, toast and a pan of soft-scrambled eggs.

  “I presume you don’t want to bodyguard me, so I thought I’d hire me some muscle.”

  “A wise beginning. And then?”

  “Between Homicide and Mickey, I’ll try to find a thread to pull. See what unravels. What will you be doing?”

  “Making a few discreet calls. Maybe I can find out who’s been hired in my place.”

  “What if you do?”

  Thomas gave me a little headshake. “Do you really want to know?”

  I shrugged. “Guess not.” I didn’t find myself disturbed by the idea of Thomas putting two in the back of another hit man’s head. Maybe I was getting used to the idea, which struck me as a slippery slope. I could justify it as a form of preemptive self-defense. The hidden assassin had already tried once and missed. Maybe twice, if you count the shot taken at me up in Granger’s Ford. Why give him a second – or third – chance?

  My lover finished his coffee, stood up and planted a kiss on my upturned lips. “See you later. I’ll be about.” He slipped out the back, dressed again in jeans and hoodie, just another nondescript young man on the street.

  What must it be like to be Thomas? Living off the books and outside the law, paying everything with cash, always looking over his shoulder. Yet he seemed relaxed most of the time. You’d think the cops, with all the power and backing of the establishment, would be the ones without stress, but that wasn’t how it worked.

  And then there’s me, sometimes with the worst of both worlds, sometimes with the best. I picked up my phone and speed-dialed.

  “Meat,” said the deep voice on the other end.

  “Meat, it’s Cal. You and Manson available?”

  “Yeah, sure. Things are kinda slow right now.”

  “Then you’re in luck. How does two hundred a day each plus expenses sound for some bodyguard work?”

  “A little cheap, but mejor que nada. Whose ass we watching?”

  “Mine.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? We’d watch your ass for a lot less.”

  “I’m not sure how to take that, Meat.”

  “Any way you like, mamacita.”

  “Orale, you been hanging out with the vatos again?”

  “Si, hermana.”

  “Well, at least you’re brushing up on your street Spanish. How soon can you get to my office? You can park your truck in my space.”

  “Give us an hour, homes.”

  “Esta bien. Adios.” I hung up, and then texted Thomas that I was walking to my office.

  I went out the back like Thomas had, hopping a neighbor’s fence and cutting through their yard to the street on the other side of the block. I stayed alert for the short jog, but saw nothing. If someone had been waiting for me, they’d been thrown off by my exit.

  “Okay, Mickey, hit me,” I said as I opened the basement walkout.

  “You’re kidding, right? What time is it?” he replied from his reclining position on the overstuffed sofa, rubbing his eyes.

  “Eight o’clock. Rise and shine.”

  “Your evil knows no bounds.” He sat up, wearing nothing but boxers, not a pretty sight. In the dim light, he resembled a greasy-haired, bearded Sumo wrestler wearing a bear’s pelt.

  “Get cleaned up and put some clothes on. I’ll make coffee and send out for some food. You have until it arrives.” I clapped my hands. “Chop chop!”

  “I hate you.” He stumbled to the bathroom as I climbed the stairs to my office proper.

  From my landline I called Brody. “Tanner, it’s Cal. What’s the latest?”

  “Your dead twin was a small-time poker pro out of Seattle.”

  “I was just about to tell you the same thing. What else?”

  “Seattle PD went by yesterday and interviewed her cohabitant.”

  “Cohabitant as in, what, roommate? Lover?”

  “Looks like lover. She was pretty upset to hear of the death. Said Hade got a call last Friday. Told her it was about a poker tournament in the City the next Tuesday…only poker’s not legal in San Fran proper, so that was probably a cover story. This chick didn’t seem too bright, I’m told.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m not sure I should say any more than that.”

  I sighed. “Tanner, if you were Jay, I’d tell you I got some very interesting intel for you and we’d do the dicker dance, swapping tip for tip. But since I like you, I’m just gonna give you what I know for free. But that means I need info from you too. Want me to come by the station?”

  Brody paused. “No, better I ditch Jay and drop by there. Ten minutes?”

  “Perfect.”

  He made it there in nine, just after I’d poured coffee and phoned in a breakfast order. I buzzed him in as one hand reached for the door. His other clutched a thick envelope. Once he’d entered, he pulled several files from it.

  “I’m bending the rules showing you this stuff,” Brody said, “but since it was your car, I figure you deserve to know.” He tossed it on my desk and sat down.

  I pulled out the case file and eagerly thumbed through it. “Thanks a lot, Tanner. I owe you.”

  “How about you pay me back by buying me dinner sometime.”

  I lifted my eyes from the file. “You asking me out?”

  He shifted the toothpick in his mouth to the side and grinned. “Absolutely.”

  “Then I have to say no. I’m seeing somebody.”

  His face fell a bit, but he kept smiling through it. “Bummer.”

  “But if it were a working dinner, you know, as colleagues…I might say yes. After we finish with this case, anyway.”

  The grin returned. “I’ll take it.”

  I went back to perusing the file. “Hade’s partner says she wanted to go along, but she turned her down, which was unusual. What if Hade came to town just for me?”

  “Hired by someone who doesn’t like you? Then why kill her?”

  “We’re thinking two different people.”

  “We who?”

  I’d slipped a bit there, but I covered. “Me and Mickey.”

  “Oh, yeah. So someone hires Hade to screw with you, and someone else entirely tried to kill you?”

  “Yes. You heard of Houdini, right?”

  “Sure. He’s a phantom, though. Nobody knows who he is.”

  “I have a tip he wants me dead for getting in his way with that big drug heist.”

  Brody took the toothpick from his mouth and tossed it into my wastebasket. “That’s bad news, Cal. You think whoever killed Hade thought it was you in the car?”

  “Seems logical.”

  “So the intersection of these two cases is just…a lucky coincidence?”

  “Lucky for me. Not for Hade. I see from your case notes the Coit Tower footage shows she met someone in the parking lot?”

  “Two someones, actually. Sorry I couldn’t bring the tape. It’s all in the AV lab, and it’s large-format Beta anyway. But I watched it. First, a tall woman in a track suit jogs into the picture. She circles the lot and then stops at Hade’s car.”

  “My car.”

  Brody winced. “Okay, your car. She leans down to speak with Hade for a moment, and something changes hands. Payment, maybe. Even with the enhancement, it’s very hard to see. Then she jogs off.”

  “Face?”

  “Barely. Enough to see she’s probably Caucasian.”

  “Hair color?”

  “Light, maybe blonde. It’s black-and-white footage, though. Their system’s so old we’re lucky to have anything at all. And it could have been a wig.”

  “Or even a man in drag
?” Not that I thought it was Thomas, but his methods had gotten me wondering.

  Brody shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “Older woman, we think, by the way she moves. Middling height, maybe five-four, five-five.”

  “You sure she wasn’t taller?” If not, it couldn’t have been Thomas.

  “Sure. We matched her against the measured height of the car roof. So she walks up wearing a trench coat, leans over to the driver’s side window as if to speak with Hade for a moment, just like the first one. She takes something small out of her purse, and then puts it back in. Then she opens the door, leans far in, comes back out, rolls up the window on the driver’s side door, and then hurries around the car to get in the passenger side. Three minutes and forty seconds later, she gets back out, locks the door and leaves.”

  “Hair?”

  “Short or pinned up, with a scarf over it against the weather, like in old movies. Covering the lower face too.”

  “Not much to go on…but obviously the second person killed Hade.” I flipped to the medical examiner’s report. “No wounds, offensive or defensive…no punctures, no blunt force trauma, no ligature marks. Cause of death…suffocation?”

  “That’s what the ME said.”

  “How do you suffocate someone with no marks whatsoever?”

  “Normally I’d say holding a pillow over the face. Look at the tox screen, though.”

  I flipped the page. “Rohypnol? Roofies, the date rape drug. Hade seemed married to that water bottle, but how does someone just walk up and get her to drink roofies?”

  Brody leaned forward, eyes intense. “That’s the cool part, actually. The ME thinks it was administered in a spray. He found traces of it all over the vic’s face, and once they knew what to look for, CSU found it on the seat.”

  “Like some spy gadget? Knockout spray? That’s unreal.”

  “Fits with the MO, though. When someone is murdered by poison or drugs, the perp’s usually a woman.”

  “The drug was just an enabler to suffocation, though in this case I’d agree with you because of the footage.” I leaned back from the folder. “So Houdini hires a woman to kill me?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Tanner, it’s obvious Hade was meeting whoever hired her to set me up at the table, but did you wonder how the killer knew she was there?”

  “Not until now. Good point.” He took out another toothpick and I could smell the mint oil as he slowly unwrapped it from its paper, thinking. “She must have followed Hade in the car, believing she was you.”

  “I handed over my car at the Vitale hotel, in the parking garage. I took a taxi back. The killer must have tailed me from my house, and then she missed the switch.”

  Chapter 7

  “Tanner, can you check hotel CCTV footage?” Maybe we could get something more on the woman who had killed Hade by mistake, if she’d been lurking around the Vitale.

  “On it.” Brody took the case file from my desk, slipping it into the envelope again. “Stay in touch.”

  “For sure.”

  As he left, the breakfast sandwiches arrived. More alert than usual, I made sure I recognized the delivery girl and even asked her if she’d made any stops before she arrived. She hadn’t.

  Mickey was happy to dig into his food. Around a mouthful of triple meat, egg and cheese he said, “I heard what you said to Brody, so I hacked into the Vitale hotel. Unlike Coit Tower, they have a modern DVR-based security system, but their firewall is crap.”

  “Maybe you should offer to tighten that up for them. In fact, I bet you could pick up good money doing security upgrades. Like you keep telling me, everything’s going on the internet nowadays.”

  “I hate working for security people. They think it’s all about the corporate image, and they don’t like mine. Computers don’t care about image, thank God.”

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Nothing yet. Staring at multiple camera feeds is a lot more time-consuming than cracking into a system.”

  “Keep at it. Call me if you get anything. A license plate would be ideal.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  Half an hour later the M&Ms arrived. Mickey let them in the basement. Since I hadn’t told them to try to look respectable, today they’d outfitted themselves to resemble Latin O.G.s – plaid long-sleeved shirts buttoned to the neck, baggy jeans and bandanas.

  “What the hell’s that all about,” I said, eyeing their getup.

  “Just getting in touch with our roots, hermana,” said Meat, the larger, older of the two, sounding like he was straight out of a gang movie.

  “You have Hispanic roots?”

  “Just like you, mamacita.”

  My gutter Spanish, learned from the neighborhood kids when I would visit my Mexican grandmother in East L.A., came flooding back. “Chinga tu madre, cabron, could you cut that out? Orale, you gonna make me pick up that cheesy accent again. When I was thirteen, I got grounded for two weeks when I came home talking like that and wouldn’t stop.”

  Meat smirked and altered his voice to sound ultra-white and nerdy. “Sure, ma’am. Sorry ma’am. Pardon me, ma’am.”

  “At least you’ll keep the hit-woman guessing.”

  “Hit-woman?”

  I filled them in on the basics.

  “I dunno if I can tackle no little old lady,” Manson said, reverting to his usual Oakland urban. “’Specially if she look like my moms.”

  “You can if she comes at you with a gun – or a spray can, for that matter,” I snapped. “Whoever it is, she’s a killer, and she wants to kill me. I doubt she’d flinch at taking you out. Remember that.”

  “So what’s our next move, boss? We gonna fort up here?”

  “Park it for now. One of you go upstairs, one of you stay in the basement with Mickey.”

  “Aw, man. That guy smells like B.O.”

  “I told him to shower, so hold your nose and bodyguard, capisce?”

  “I didn’t know you was Italian, boss.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Get to work, boys.” Reaching for my phone, I called Cole Sage’s office, but he was out. I flipped my rolodex to his entry and stared at it for a moment, and then shrugged and dialed his private cell number.

  “Sage. Who’s this?”

  My voice hitched slightly. I’d carried a torch for him long enough that old feelings still echoed. “It’s Cal.”

  “Don’t make me change my cell number again, Cal.” I wasn’t supposed to have this one, but Mickey had “researched” it for me.

  I affected a businesslike manner. “Don’t worry. That’s all done. I’m with someone now.”

  “Glad to hear it. What’s going on?”

  “I think you know already.”

  “I know a lot of things, Cal.”

  “I need to talk with you about what happened yesterday. Off the record.”

  “I thought you might. I’m up in Sacramento now, but I’ll be coming back this evening. You up late?”

  “You have to ask?”

  “Okay. You know the Horseshoe Tavern on Chestnut?”

  “I’ll find it.”

  “Eleven sharp.”

  “See you then.” I hung up. Then I took a deep breath and dialed my brother Ron on the landline.

  “Agent Corwin,” he answered.

  Agent. God, I was so proud of him, despite our differences. I wish he were as proud of me, but after the whole lawsuit thing, I’d gotten the strong feeling he was on the side of those who thought I was a turncoat. But it had been three years and family is family. I hoped he’d gotten over it. Last time I talked with him, things had seemed almost normal.

  “Hi Ron, it’s me.”

  “Cal! Good to hear from you.”

  “Yeah, me too. Hey, do you have a phone that can use secure VOIP?” Mickey had briefed me on how to use the fancy phone-computer monstrosity that sat on my desk to make encrypted calls, as long as the other side had the right software – PGP or s
omething like that. Supposed to be uncrackable by anyone but the NSA.

  “I think so.”

  “Call me back from it, will you?”

  “Oh…kay…. It might take a minute.”

  It took ten, but eventually my phone rang. I punched buttons and the lights turned the right colors.

  “What’s this all about, Cal?” Ron’s voice sounded tinny, an effect of the encryption, I supposed.

  “Someone tried to kill me last night, but she missed. Got someone else instead.”

  “She?”

  I told him all about it. It took a while. “Ron, I need a big favor. If it really is Houdini, a couple tough guys won’t keep me safe forever, even if I could afford them. I could use federal help to take Houdini down, or at least put so much pressure on him that he’ll back off. Maybe leak something to an informant that I’m family to an FBI agent, and killing me will rain hellfire on them.”

  “Cal, it’s not that easy. I’m just a junior agent. I don’t have the clout and connections I’d need, especially inter-agency.”

  “I know, but whatever you can do…”

  “Oh, I will. Can’t have my favorite sister getting killed. Who’d take care of Mom?”

  “You would, and you’d hate it. By the way, any word on those undercovers I asked you about a while back? Maybe biker nomads?”

  His tone suddenly became guarded. “It’s worth my career to give you specifics, but I got some intel that says yes. Not Bureau, though. DEA. Something funny about it, though.”

  “Funny?”

  “Yeah…it’s bad protocol to ask about undercovers unless we’re directly involved, especially from another agency. Even then, it’s normally so close-hold only the top brass know everything. This time, though…it almost seemed like someone wanted me to know. Just a feeling, but…”

  I thought about that, and about misdirection, and layers of deception. There was complexity here and a whiff of corruption, and I had an idea this might be the one crack in an otherwise airtight criminal enterprise.

  Or it might be a sticky trap.

  At least it was a thread I could pull. Maybe I could get something to unravel if I tugged at it gently and skillfully enough. If that didn’t work, maybe give it a good hard yank, which was more my style anyway.