Velocity

by Alan Jacobson

  They walked briskly down the hall to the task force conference room. Sitting on the table was a black DVD case with a Post-it note stuck on the front: “From Ray.”

  “I didn’t say anything because it was a long shot and I didn’t want to get your hopes up, but I made one last attempt with Merilynn. I took her on a little field trip to visit Mayfield in the hospital. He didn’t look so threatening with all the tubes and beeping machines. I told her we’d submitted her WITSEC request and that we needed her to do something for us. Seemed like I was getting through, but I didn’t want to push her. So I gave her a little time to think about it. Her place was on the way back from Herndon, so I stopped by.”

  “And she gave you a DVD?”

  Brix scooped it up and handed it to Vail.

  Vail pried open the lid and stared at the disc, which bore Ray Lugo’s slanted handwriting. Did it hold some secret information that would give her clues as to what happened to Robby? Would it answer the question of what John Mayfield had meant when he taunted them with, “There’s more to this than you know?”

  “Karen,” Dixon said softly, “We need to watch this.”

  Vail woke from her stupor. “Right.” She plucked the disc from the plastic spindle, then placed the DVD in the laptop tray and watched as Windows Media Player loaded.

  Brix, Dixon, Mann, and Vail stood around the computer. Vail felt Dixon shudder when the image of Lugo’s living room filled the screen. Lugo then appeared and sat down on the couch. The angle of the camera and Lugo’s proximity to the lens gave the impression it was filmed on a webcam.

  He leaned in close, looked up at something off to his right, then turned back to the camera. “If you’re watching this, something must’ve happened to me.” He lowered his voice and his eyes danced from left to right, suddenly avoiding the lens.

  “I . . . this is Sergeant Raymond Lugo of the St. Helena Police Department. Everything I’m about to tell you is the truth. If you’re watching this . . . I have to assume you’re law enforcement. I need you to . . . I need you to look after my wife and son. Please promise me that.” He glanced up at the camera and then canted his eyes downward again.

  He took a deep breath, covered his face with both hands, then dropped them to his lap and extended his neck. Staring at the ceiling.

  “C’mon, Ray,” Dixon said under her breath. “Get to it.”

  “In October, my wife, Merilynn, and my son, Mario, were kidnapped. I got a call. This guy said he had them, and he’d kill them unless I did what he wanted. He proved he had them. I—I had no choice.”

  Lugo looked away, licked his lips, kept his head down as he talked.

  “He told me. If I tell anyone at work, he’d kill them. If I call in the FBI, he’d kill them. If I told the media . . . he’d kill them. And he said he had a way of finding out if I told anyone at work. He knew I was a cop. I couldn’t . . . ” He looked up at the camera. “I couldn’t take a chance he was telling the truth.”

  His bottom lip quivered, and he bit down to arrest its twitch.

  “He had them,” Lugo finally said. “For two days. He called back and I, I made a deal with him. And he let them go. Left them by the side of the road in front of the fire station, near the Sheriff’s Department.

  “I looked at video, tried to figure out who this guy was. I spoke with Merilynn. And my son. Tried to get any information I could to find this fucker.” He wiped at his face with both hands, sighed deeply, and sat back into the couch. He was far from the camera now, but his voice was still audible. “He told me not to look for him, that I’d never find him. And . . . and that no place was safe. If I did anything wrong—tried finding him, reporting it, he’d find Merilynn and Mario again. Only this time they wouldn’t be coming home. He’d kill them. And it wouldn’t be pleasant.” His eyes narrowed in anger, then he sat forward, leaning closer to the lens in a way that distorted his facial features.

  “I couldn’t find anything, I got nowhere. But the deal I cut with him. I thought it might give me some clues as to who he was. I thought maybe there was some way I could track him based on the info he wanted me to get for him. Finally I found something. But he knew and he called me, warned me. The only warning I’d get, he said. Stop immediately or he’d kill them. And me.”

  Vail put her hands on her hips. “What the fuck were you doing for him, Ray?” she shouted, as if it would do some good. No one seemed to mind. They all wanted the same question answered.

  “I thought that if I got that kind of a rise out of him, I must’ve been on to something. It had to do with a guy I knew, César Guevara.”

  Vail and Dixon eyed each other.

  “The guy wanted info on César,” Lugo continued, “from the police database. Not just ours, but the Sheriff’s Department’s, too. So I ran the stuff he wanted. Then I started looking into César’s business. He runs a mobile bottling company out of American Canyon. I know César from when we were kids, working the vineyards. But the kidnapper is somehow tied in with him because he called me right after I went to see César and started asking questions. He said he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, that he didn’t know a big white guy who drives a van. But that’s all I had on the kidnapper. That’s all Merilynn and my son could tell me. He spoke English like a native, no accent. And that was it.

  “An hour after visiting César, the kidnapper called me. I knew I was on to something. What it was—I didn’t know. But . . . ” He turned away and said, “I was too afraid to look into it. He said he’d find us. Another state, another country, didn’t matter. He’d track us down.”

  A noise behind him. Lugo twisted his torso. What looked like Merilynn in the background, entering the room. Lugo reached out his hand, splayed fingers covering the webcam, the screen darkening. Fumbling. Raised voices. Lugo’s body leaned left, then the video cut off.

  They waited a few seconds before Dixon blurted, “That’s it? Please, tell me there’s more.”

  They continued to stare at the screen, but the progress bar at the bottom struck the endpoint and then the video started from the beginning. Brix stuck out his index finger and clicked the mouse. Windows Media Player closed.

  Vail looked up. Her eyes searched the conference room and came to rest on the clock. It was now almost 5:00 PM. Damn it. She grabbed her temples, took a deep breath, and coughed. Then she sat down heavily on a nearby chair.

  Burt Gordon walked into the conference room. His eyes scanned the others in attendance and seemed to have no difficulty reading their body language. “Bad?”

  “I’m not sure how to characterize it,” Brix said.

  “Bad sounds about right to me,” Austin Mann said. He filled Gordon in on what he’d missed. “There’s no good way to look at it. Question is, what did Ray know, and when?”

  Dixon swung a chair from beneath the table and sat down. “You mean, did he know Mayfield was the guy who took his wife and son?”

  “I think the question is when he knew it,” Vail said. She slid forward in the chair and leaned back, letting her arms fall free over the chair’s sides. “At some point he figured out that Mayfield was the kidnapper. And if I had to guess, I’d say it was before Roxx, Lugo, and I went to see Guevara.”

  Brix walked over to the white board and examined the timeline he had drawn for the prior week, which documented the major breaks in the Crush Killer case. “Maybe, maybe not. I mean, I wasn’t there so I didn’t see the looks Ray and Guevara were giving each other, but Guevara simply might’ve been pissed at Ray for bringing five-o onto his premises. May have nothing to do with Mayfield and the murders. Maybe he’s cheating on his taxes. Whatever it is, good bet it’s illegal—but it’s not the answer to our problems.”

  “No,” Vail said. “Hold up a minute. Ray thinks Guevara’s involved in some way with the kidnapper—who turns out to be Mayfield—because right after Ray goes to Guevara and starts asking questions, the kidnapper flips out and goes off on Ray for not leaving ‘it’ alone. That’s a pretty irref
utable connection.”

  “But we don’t know what Ray asked Guevara. I guess we might assume it’s got to do with him, with Mayfield.” Dixon nodded at the laptop. “But Ray didn’t say. Seems to me we’ve got lots of holes and only a few facts, and we’re trying to fill in the holes with assumptions. That’s a recipe for a failed investigation. At best.”

  “I agree,” Mann said.

  Vail held up her hands in surrender. “Fine. I’ll give you that. But we can’t ignore the connection. There’s no obvious reason for Guevara to even know the kidnapper unless they were affiliated somehow. Guevara’s involved in this. On some level.”

  “I got Guevara’s LUDs and cell logs earlier this afternoon,” Gordon said, moving to a stack of papers at the far end of the conference table. “Haven’t had a chance to go through them yet.” He licked his index finger and thumbed through the pile. He stopped, glanced around the room, then snuck a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket. “Here.” He yanked a sheaf of pages free and tossed the first aside.

  “Just so you all know,” Vail said. “I’m on a flight out of here in a few hours. I leave for SFO at 4:00 AM.”

  Brix ground his molars. As he looked at Vail, his stress and frustration were evident for all to see.

  “My boss is gonna have agents from the San Francisco field office pick up the investigation.”

  Dixon shook her head in disapproval.

  “Any chance I can get him to reconsider?” Brix asked.

  “Beyond our control,” Vail said. “I tried. But the unit’s shorthanded and they caught a big case.”

  “Got something,” Gordon said, his stubby finger poking at a spot on the phone logs. “Calls from Guevara to Ray. Ray’s cell. Starting two days ago with a text message, followed by a three-minute call.”

  Vail gathered herself and rose slowly from her seat. She moved beside Gordon and looked over his shoulder. “That was after we’d met with Guevara, which makes sense. Guevara was pissed.”

  “At some point,” Mann said, “Ray knew Mayfield was the kidnapper.”

  “He could’ve suspected it all along,” Vail said, “but didn’t get positive confirmation until yesterday. Maybe it was something in the interview. ’Cause that’s when he pulled his gun and shot Mayfield.”

  Dixon shook her head. “He purposely left his backup piece in its holster when we all stowed our side arms in the lockers. So he either knew or strongly suspected.”

  “Or he needed us to find Mayfield so he could kill him. Payback,” Vail said.

  Dixon stood and began to pace. “Not payback. Security. He said he tried finding the kidnapper, but he couldn’t. And when he did try, Mayfield was all over him, with more threats. He’d already proved he could operate at will, so Ray couldn’t chance it. What if he had an accomplice? Friends on the outside who’d take care of business for him? When Ray put two and two together, and realized that his kidnapper was our serial killer, he knew the opportunity would come for him to get the guy out of his life—and keep his family safe—when we caught him.”

  “If we caught him,” Gordon said.

  “Well, we did catch him. And soon as we did, Ray shot him.”

  “We’re missing an important point,” Vail said. “We got a vital piece of information from Ray’s video.”

  Brix kicked at the chair in front of him. “Really? Might as well share it with us, because I didn’t fucking see anything that’ll help us.”

  “Mayfield’s in a coma and who knows when he’ll come to or what he’ll tell us. Ray’s dead. Cannon’s in the wind. But we’ve got someone who’s tied into this somehow right in our backyard.”

  “Guevara,” Dixon said.

  Mann nodded slowly. “Guevara.”

  Vail glanced at the clock again. Running out of time. “Seems to me, makes more sense to lean on Guevara and see what he knows.”

  “So . . . what?” Brix asked. “Bring him in, sweat him?”

  Dixon began pacing in front of the windowed wall. “A guy like that, we bring him in, I think he clams up at best and lawyers up at worst.”

  “Agreed.” Vail thought a moment. “We get a warrant, we go to his place and start going through his rigs.”

  “His rigs,” Gordon said. “Those mobile bottling trailers? What do you expect to find in there?”

  “Nothing,” Vail said. “But once we start putting our hands on his precision machinery, talk about tearing it apart to look for evidence, he’ll flip out. It’s his profit center. He may start talking just to make us stop.”

  Dixon flipped open her phone. “I’ll start the wheels moving for getting a warrant.”

  “How long do you think?” Vail asked.

  “I’ll need someone to draw up the probable cause statement.”

  “Got it,” Mann said. “Plenty of experience with that.” He pulled a chair in front of the laptop.

  “Redd,” she said to Brix. “Get NSIB over to Ray’s house. If Merilynn won’t cooperate, get a warrant. Impound his computers, every goddamn thing you can find. Ray made a video; maybe he kept an insurance policy.”

  “Insurance policy. Like copies of records, phone calls, video, stuff like that? Wouldn’t he have mentioned it in the DVD if he had?”

  “Not necessarily. Looked to me like Merilynn interrupted him and he didn’t finish it.” She pointed at the laptop. “Wait a sec. Look at the DVD Ray made. The file, when was it created?”

  Mann opened Windows Explorer, clicked, and scrolled. “The DVD was burned two months ago. As to when it was filmed . . . I don’t know.”

  “Close enough,” Dixon said. “My guess is he filmed it, then burned it to disc. No reason I can see to film it and leave it in the drawer. A lot of shit could’ve gone down in the past two months. But maybe things didn’t heat up till we found Victoria Cameron in that cave. Mayfield’s first vic.” She turned to Vail. “Is it possible Ray knew Mayfield was the killer from day one?”

  Vail played back the events of the past week in her mind. “I doubt it. But now that we know there was something going on between Ray and Guevara beginning at least two months ago, I don’t think we can rule it out, Roxx.”

  “Goddamn him.” Dixon looked at the screen, where the image of Ray Lugo had stared back at them moments ago. “Karen, with me. Let’s go pay a visit to Guevara. You tried rattling his cage before. Maybe we need to try a different approach.”

  25

  The sun’s March burn melted behind the mountains like wax over a bottle of Madeira: beginning with a smoldering deformation, then accelerating as the heat built, spreading, losing definition, and enveloping all.

  They arrived at Superior Mobile Bottling without a warrant in hand, and little time to kill. But kill it they must . . . because going in strong against a César Guevara without the ammunition to back it up had already failed. And at present, their best ammunition was not filled with gunpowder but with written words.

  Dixon pulled the Ford Crown Victoria against the curb, down the street from Superior’s facility in American Canyon, and shoved the gearshift into park.

  “How long?”

  Dixon glanced at the dashboard clock. “No way of knowing.”

  “Your judges?”

  “Not always sympathetic.”

  “At least you got a look around last time we were here.”

  “I didn’t have much time,” Dixon said. “It was a quick once-over. We really need to tear the place apart.”

  Vail turned and looked at the fading light in the distance. The sky behind her was a purplish black, like a fading bruise on an otherwise pleasing landscape. Ahead, there was still a yellow hue, dissolving to dusky charcoal as the minutes ticked by.

  “You okay?”

  Dixon’s question pulled Vail from her reverie. “I’m not going to see the sun in Napa again for . . . who knows how long.”

  “Did you ever see the sun in Napa?”

  Vail chuckled.

  Dixon’s phone vibrated. She tapped the Bluetooth receiver. �
��Dixon.”

  “Roxx.” It was Brix’s voice. “You want the good news or the bad news first?”

  “I’ll take the good.”

  “Just spoke with Timmons from NSIB. He’s taken over as point for us so we have a consistent contact, since it seems we’re going to need them long-term. Or longer-term than we originally thought.”

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  “So Timmons says he’s got a list compiled of all the potential locations where must is produced within earshot of the Napa Valley Wine Train whistle. There’s a margin of error because it’s not scientific or anything like that. But this is like a freaking needle in a haystack, anyway.”

  “How many potential sites are there?” Dixon asked.

  “Sixty-plus. NSIB’s got some guys looking into the whole list, just to see if there are any that can be eliminated based on some set of criteria Timmons and his team are developing. You want to be plugged into what they’re thinking?”

  “No, we’ve got enough to do. Let them do their jobs. Touch base with him from time to time, and if they sound like they’ve landed on the wrong planet, let me know and we’ll meet with them, set them straight. Otherwise, let’s see what they turn up.” Dixon threw Vail a sideways glance. “Redd—I said I wanted the good news first.”

  “By comparison, that is the good news.”

  “I’m not sure we want to know,” Vail said, “but what’s the bad?”

  “Search warrant was denied. Mirabelli rejected our argument. Said there was no direct connection between . . . well, between anything. Get him something that’s more than just a series of coincidences and he’ll reconsider. What we’ve got doesn’t even rise to reasonable suspicion.”

  Dixon shook her head. “Well, that’s just great.”

  “And for what it’s worth,” Brix said, “DOJ wasn’t too excited about our WITSEC request for Merilynn.”

  Vail said, “We didn’t give them anything particularly compelling, and that video Ray made didn’t help her case any.”

  “One other thing. The Hall of Justice fountain vic has an ID. Kaitlin Zago. They’re putting together a backgrounder on her but there doesn’t appear to be any obvious connection to Mayfield’s vics. And—the manual search through the handcuff database is taking longer than I’d hoped. I put a call into Peerless in case they can tell us who they sold that serial number to. But they’re back east, so we probably won’t hear from them till tomorrow. Where are you two?”