Tess stared at the outfall for a long moment. “You have a flashlight?” she asked.
“Why?”
“Do you?”
He patted his jacket pocket. “Penlight.”
“So do I. Let’s look inside.” She pointed at the outfall.
Crandall looked stricken. “In there?”
“Why not?”
“There are approximately a million reasons I can think of.”
“I need to get a feel for it. For what it’s like in there. What it was like for her—and for him.”
“I told you, we don’t even know she came out of that outfall.”
“I’m not looking for evidence. I just want to see what she saw. Walk in her shoes. One passageway is probably the same as another.”
Crandall studied her. “You’re not doing this to impress me, are you?”
“Why would I want to impress you?”
“Just asking.”
She ascended the embankment, then lowered her head and stepped into the outfall. Sunlight reached only a few feet inside. The floor was slimy with moss, thick and velvety, a green carpet squishing under her shoes.
She took out her penlight and angled its beam down the passageway. A long, grim stretch of concrete faded into blackness. The tunnel was wide enough for a person and nearly tall enough to allow her and Crandall to stand upright.
“In the mood for some spelunking?” she asked as he stepped into the passage behind her.
“I hope that’s a joke, Agent McCallum.”
“Wherever she was kept, she certainly wasn’t within sight of daylight. We need to go in deeper if we want to get a feel for her last hours.”
“I’d be happy using my imagination.”
“Neither of us has enough imagination for this. Come on.”
“We’re on a tight schedule, you know.”
“Five minutes. Just to look around.”
She pressed forward into the dark, led by the twin beams of her flashlight and his.
“If it starts raining,” Crandall said, “we could get trapped in here.”
“There’s no rain in tonight’s forecast. You ought to know that.”
“I do. I was hoping you didn’t.”
A chill had settled in the tunnel, the permanent chill of a place where light could not reach. Tess found herself thinking of the catacombs haunted by the early Christians, of mausoleums and crypts. Places of hiding, places of the dead. Where she was now was a little of both.
“What kind of person are we up against?” she asked.
“I’m not a profiler.”
“Me neither. But we can guess, can’t we?”
“He’s smart,” Crandall ventured. “And careful.”
“And very sure of himself. He wants to challenge both the municipal and federal authorities. He wants to run with the big dogs.”
“That’s our thinking, too. Delusions of grandeur, megalomania. Which narrows it down to only half the population of LA.”
Tess smiled. “I’m starting to like you, Crandall.”
“I’d like you better if you’d let us get the hell out of here, Agent McCallum.”
“Just a little farther. I want to see what happens when we come to an intersecting pipe. What else do we know about our adversary?”
“He knows how to open foreign bank accounts. Could be a world traveler.”
“Could be. But these days you don’t need to go overseas to open a foreign account. It can be done by mail.”
“One way or the other, he knows his way around the banking system.”
“He—or they. Is it one man or a team?”
Crandall hesitated. “I’m guessing one guy.”
“Easier to pull it off if you have an accomplice.”
“Yes, but there’s his megalomania. He doesn’t think he needs help. That’s my read on it, anyway. What do you think?”
“It’s not my case. I have no opinion.”
“That’s a cop-out.”
“Absolutely.”
“You must have some opinion.”
Tess acquiesced. “He’s smart, as you said. He’s got it all planned out. The way he’s worked it, he hasn’t given us even a glimpse of him. We haven’t seen his handwriting or heard his voice. He’s a ghost.”
“He could be anyone,” Crandall said.
“I’m afraid so.”
“That’s not very reassuring.”
No, it wasn’t, Tess reflected. But it was true.
She thought about the man they were after, the man who used these passages as his killing ground. He had played his game adroitly so far. No slip-ups yet.
The first note had been found on Wednesday afternoon, January 5, inside a videocassette box dropped through the return slot of a rental outlet. The note was written in felt marker on a sheet of notebook paper, a popular brand sold in thousands of stores. Paper-clipped to it were a driver’s license issued to Angela Morris and an index card bearing a laser-printed bank account number.
The note’s handwriting was large and clumsy, and there were several misspellings.
My name is Angela Morris. He is making me write this. He is kiddnaping me. He says my life is at steak. He is going to put me under ground in the storm dranes. The storm dranes will flood tonite when it rains. You must transfer $1,000,000 in city revenus to the bank account number on the card before it rains. When it rains it will be to late.
The money had never been transferred. Tess doubted that the kidnapper had expected it to be. Most likely he’d used Angela as a test case in order to familiarize the authorities with his method of operation—and to prove he was serious.
Because kidnapping was a federal crime, the Bureau had been brought in at once. The case was all over the media, of course. It had all the elements of TV drama, except a flashy moniker for the killer. For some reason the journalistic gimmick of nicknaming serial offenders had become passé. To the Bureau he was the unsub—unknown subject—in the case code-named STORMKIL.
On Sunday, January 9, a second note was found, this time inside a Ford Taurus parked in a loading zone. A patrol cop traced the Ford to Paula L. Weissman of Reseda. He was writing Ms. Weissman a ticket when he saw the sheet of paper, the driver’s license, and the index card on the dashboard. He had the presence of mind not to touch these items, but it made no difference; there were no prints on them but the victim’s.
The handwriting of this note was more polished, but the message was nearly the same.
My name is Paula Weissman. I’m being held captive by a man who says he is responsible for the abduction of Angela Morris last week. He demands that $2,000,000 in municipal revenues be deposited in the bank account indicated on the attached card. He says you made a mistake last time, but he’s sure you will cooperate now. He wants me to tell you he’s very disappointed with you, and he doesn’t want to be disappointed again. He says he doesn’t handle disappointment well. He says it’s something he’s working on. He says to remind you of the weather forecast.
That was all, except for a few scribbled, shaky words that trailed off at the end.
Please help me I don’t want to die down there
This time the money, twice the kidnapper’s initial demand, had been paid. Two million dollars was wire-transferred to a blind account in the Cayman Islands—a different account from the one specified in the first kidnapping, but equally untraceable. Authorities in the Caymans were cooperating, but by now the money had been moved elsewhere, vanishing in a maze of anonymous or pseudonymous accounts.
Fifteen minutes after the deposit, as the rain began to fall, the mayor’s phone rang. Paula’s recorded voice stated that she was handcuffed to a railing in a side passageway beneath the intersection of Wilshire and Vermont. The tunnels were flooding when the rescue team entered. They got close enough to see the victim before surging water forced them back. When the storm cleared, Paula’s body was found, still manacled to the handrail.
And today—Monday, January 10—Angela’s body had
been found as well, washed out of the drainage lines by the same downpour. Perhaps out of the very passageway through which Tess was maneuvering now.
She arrived at the junction of two pipelines and beamed her light along the wider, intersecting passageway. Faintly she heard the rumble of traffic overhead. People were commuting home from work, listening to the car radio, talking on their cells, oblivious to the labyrinth below.
“It’s a whole other world down here,” she said.
She took a step forward, intending to explore the larger passageway. Crandall grabbed her arm.
“This really is not safe,” he said.
“Afraid we’ll run into the mutant mole people?”
“Who the fuck knows what we’ll run into?”
“You’re shaking.” He didn’t answer. “Crandall, are you claustrophobic?”
“Maybe a little.”
“You should’ve said something.”
“I was too busy panicking.” He forced a nervous laugh.
“Retreat,” Tess said.
“Look, I can handle it. I mean, it’s not that bad.”
She smiled. All of a sudden he was being brave. “I’ve seen enough,” she said. “Anyway, we don’t want to be late.”
“Right. We definitely don’t.”
She was about to turn back when a prickling sense of dread stopped her. “Wait,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper.
She wasn’t sure what had signaled her attention. Then she heard a faint, solitary splash in the darkness of the intersecting tunnel.
Instinctively she cupped her flashlight. Crandall covered his, as well.
They listened. Another splash. Closer.
Someone was in there, coming this way.
Crandall unholstered his gun. It seemed like a good idea. Tess reached into her coat pocket and drew her 9mm. Before terrorism had become a chronic worry, she would have stowed it in her checked baggage. These days federal agents were encouraged to carry their weapons while flying.
Another splash, closer than before.
She tried to estimate the odds that the stranger was somebody genuinely dangerous, somebody like the man they were after. On the one hand, Crandall had been right in saying that the drainage system was huge. There was little chance of encountering the killer by accident. On the other hand, serial offenders were known to return to the scene of the crime. Hearing that Angela Morris had been recovered nearby, the killer might have come here to retrace the route her body had taken.
Or it could be just a Department of Water and Power maintenance man. But she didn’t think so. A maintenance worker would have carried a flashlight. He wouldn’t be sloshing around in the dark.
Tess raised her penlight, holding it away from herself and Crandall. If the beam drew fire, she wanted the shots to go wide.
“FBI!” she called out. “Identify yourself.”
No answer. No further splashing. Silence.
“Identify yourself!” she shouted again, the command coming back to her in a flurry of echoes.
“I’m Manny,” a voice said.
She and Crandall aimed their flashlights at the source of the voice. The two beams played like miniature searchlights over a small, lumpy figure in a shapeless black coat.
“Get your hands up. Up!”
Pale hands lifted toward the tunnel’s low ceiling.
“Cover me,” Tess told Crandall. She stepped into the larger passageway, her shoes sinking into a stream of filthy water. She approached the man, keeping her flashlight pinned on his upper body—his face, his hands. It was something they taught at the academy. The hands were critical because they could hurt you. The face was next in importance. Read his eyes and you could tell what he was thinking.
But these eyes told her nothing. They were smooth and white and pupilless, like eggshells. Cataracts, cloudy and thick.
Not the killer, then. Not anybody.
She pocketed her gun and patted him down out of habit, finding nothing inside the soiled coat except a thin, malnourished body that had gone unwashed for months or years.
“Okay,” she said, “you can lower your hands.”
He obeyed, blinking.
“What are you doing here, Manny?”
“Public property.” He was defensive. “Can’t stop me from living on public property.”
“You live down here? What about when it rains?”
“Oh, you can’t be here when it rains.”
“No, you can’t. It’s dangerous. You could be caught in a flash flood.”
He shook his head, his white eyes staring past her. “Won’t get caught. Always know when there’s rain coming. Can smell it.”
“There are shelters. Places where people can help you.”
“Not going to no shelter.” He cringed. “You won’t take Manny to no shelter, please. Don’t want to go there.”
She ought to take him. He wasn’t competent to look after himself. But a shelter couldn’t keep him against his will, and he was probably too lucid to be detained on a psychiatric hold.
“We’re not taking you anyplace.” An idea occurred to her. “Have you seen anyone else in these tunnels?”
Too late, she realized that seen was a poor choice of words. But Manny didn’t notice. “There are worker guys, sometimes,” he said.
“DWP. Anyone else?”
“No.”
“Hear anything? Voices?”
He cringed again. “Don’t hear no voices. Not no more.” Voices in his head, he must mean. He probably did still hear them, but he’d learned not to admit it.
“Not those voices,” she said. “New ones. A woman, crying or shouting for help?” The victims’ mouths had been duct-taped at some point, but they might have been able to cry out before they were gagged.
Manny gave it some thought. “You’re a woman,” he offered.
“Well, yes.”
He smiled, showing black teeth. “You got a nice voice.”
“Thank you.” She wasn’t going to make any progress here. It had been a long shot, at best. “You sure you’ll be all right alone like this?”
“Always alone. Like it that way.”
She removed some bills from her jacket pocket and thrust them into his hand. “Buy food. Hot food.”
He stood there blinking, the money captured in a small, scabby fist. She hoped he understood.
Crandall had joined her sometime during the interrogation. His gun, she noticed, was still drawn. He seemed to have forgotten his claustrophobia.
“Let’s go, Crandall,” she said. “Manny can’t be of any assistance to us at this time.”
She retreated toward the smaller tunnel, following Crandall. Once, she looked back and saw Manny, a small, lost figure in the enfolding darkness.
A whole other world down here. A world she had never suspected, and one she wished she had never found.
2
She and Crandall didn’t speak again until they had reached the daylight outside the tunnel. Crandall was obviously embarrassed by his admission of claustrophobia. Tess tried to take the edge off.
“Do I smell as bad as you do?” she asked as they climbed the embankment.
“No.” He smiled. “You smell worse.”
They walked back to Crandall’s Crown Victoria. The sedan bore no FBI markings, but its color was the traditional Hoover blue of Bureau cars. Tess slipped into the passenger seat. Crandall keyed the ignition and drove back to Santa Fe Avenue, then accelerated toward the downtown skyline, bright against the dimming sky. It was only four thirty, but dusk came early on an overcast evening in January.
“No rain till tomorrow night,” Crandall said. “Buys us a little time.”
“Very little.” Tess sighed. “Sunny California.”
“It’s a lot less sunny here than people realize.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
She stared out the window at the city blurring past in a smear of palm trees and stucco haciendas. There ought to be something exo
tic about LA’s amalgam of desert and coastline, tropical verdure and urban grit, but to her there was no glamour here. LA was a city out of control, overcrowded, underfunded, its tax base eroding, its social services disappearing, the police outnumbered and outgunned, the citizens harassed by wandering mental patients and roving packs of gangbangers, the walls and fences and even the trees befouled by graffiti, and underneath it all, the ticking clock of the next earthquake, the one that might bring the steel-and-glass towers crashing down.
There were earthquakes in Colorado, she reminded herself. In many ways LA was similar to Denver—mountains, sprawl, traffic. But Denver felt solid, stable. LA was balanced on a knife edge.
She smelled aftershave, wafted by the sedan’s air-conditioning. Rick Crandall’s scent. She took a closer look at him. His face was smooth and round, an innocent face. He did not look like a special agent of the FBI, though he was dressed for the part in his blue blazer and white, stiff-collared shirt. She studied his hands on the steering wheel and noticed cuff links. He might be the only agent under forty who wore French cuffs.
“You’re quite the natty dresser, Crandall.”
“Maybe I got a little extra dressed up.”
“For an airport pickup?”
“Not just any pickup. You’re something of a legend around here, Agent McCallum.”
She didn’t want to hear any praise. “I doubt your boss thinks of me that way.”
“I don’t know how he thinks of you.” Crandall chose his words with care.
“Sure you don’t.”
She wondered how old Crandall was. Twenty-seven, she guessed—ten years her junior. Despite that remark about her status, he didn’t appear to be intimidated, and she didn’t think he was brown-nosing. He seemed very sure of himself. She wondered where his assurance came from.
“Been in the Bureau long?” she asked.
“All my life.”
“That’s somewhat cryptic.”
“I’m a Bureau brat, you could say. My father…”
She understood. “Ralston Crandall?” she said, naming one of the top figures in the DC office.
Dangerous Games Page 2