Loose Ends: A California Corwin P. I. Mystery (California Corwin P. I. Mystery Series)

by D. D. VanDyke

  My quarry took the second exit into town, dumping onto Cutter and then turning north onto Harbour past the MLK memorial park into the midst of a bustling, mostly nonwhite neighborhood. Not a dangerous one by any means, just hardworking lower-middle-class folks relaxing after work.

  Kids played on the sidewalks under the watchful eyes of mothers, squads of teenage boys sauntered here and there, tossing basketballs to each other and launching lustful looks at groups of girls in too-tight clothing, who sent the sizzle right back. I could almost smell the hormones wafting here and there on the late afternoon breeze.

  I had to pull in closer, dodging bicycles and jaywalkers, but it appeared the Audi’s driver had slowed his frenetic pace as well. I got the impression he was searching for something. Eventually he reached Barrett and turned west toward the railroad cargo terminal, a major reason for Richmond’s existence.

  Such operations needed large swaths of commercial buildings – warehouses, transloading facilities, unpretentious offices. Good places to hide out, I thought.

  Through these demesnes I followed the Audi, turning onto Richmond Parkway, the artery carrying scores of big trucks to and from their appointments with the business of shipping. The driver meandered northward past the Richmond Country Club and its associated golf course.

  Eventually the neighborhoods changed, becoming more white-collar and, frankly, white. The Audi turned onto Hilltop and headed for the eponymous Hilltop Mall, a suburban megachurch dedicated to the worship of consumerism, built in the mid-seventies on a former Chevron petroleum handling facility. I wondered if all the ladies getting their makeovers at Macy’s or Emporium knew about the spills beneath their feet, or cared.

  On the other hand, these were people who applied toxic chemicals directly to their faces in order to conform to society’s standards of beauty.

  Then again, I had to admit I used makeup too. My feeling consisted of sour grapes, I supposed, or perhaps envy aimed at those with nothing to hide more distracting than a pimple or two.

  My mental diatribe on the ills of suburbia ended when the driver spotted me – or I assumed he did. Perhaps he just decided to test out the capabilities of his vehicle in the enormous oval mall parking lot. Most of the cars clustered inward toward the central complex, leaving the edges largely free of obstruction.

  The Audi wove between concrete planters, orphaned vehicles and lightposts, probably hitting sixty. I cruised on the ring road trying to keep him in sight. After a minute of this, he slalomed around a speed bump and shot across the street a hundred yards in front of me, ignoring all traffic signs. Behind him I could see a mall guard with flashing yellow lights, vainly trying to keep up.

  I laughed. The most that guy could do was chase him away and call the incident in. I wondered what caused the Audi driver to play that way, calling attention to himself. I sped up to follow. When I turned off the ring road I found myself back on Hilltop heading the other way. My quarry had made a circuit and reversed course.

  I triggered the supercharger and punched Molly to catch up, blazing past Mercedes, BMWs and Escalades, but found I wasn’t overtaking him fast at all. Why became clear when we crossed San Pablo. I was pushing up on ninety, my foot glued to the floor and more than three hundred horses roaring behind my dashboard when I ran the red light just as the yellow faded.

  He must have spotted me after all. If I hadn’t matched his acceleration he would have trapped me behind four lanes of traffic heavy with semis from the port. As it was, I hung onto him like a starving blue tick, all thought of stealth blown away like thistledown in a hurricane. The speed and risk vaulted me into the zone of concentration so welcome and familiar, the place I loved and lived whenever I could.

  Now it’s on, you son of a bitch, I thought. You ever see one of those animal shows where the cheetah goes after the gazelle, following every twist and leap with utter concentration? That was me, my eyes fixed on the German sport sedan and my mind running every possible scenario at lightning speed.

  I had to catch this guy. I had to beat Talia’s location out of him. That was all there was to it. Him or me is what it came down to. If I could make it happen, I’d run him down, drive him into a wall or a ditch, push him until he made a mistake. My rally skills should keep me close and my cop training should let me take his wheels out from under him.

  The standard maneuver for this is called a PIT, for Pursuit Intervention Technique. In simplest terms it meant knocking the rear of a fleeing vehicle sideways, causing it to slide to an abrupt stop in a somewhat controlled manner if everything worked as planned. Then, several pursuing squad cars would surround the perp and block him in.

  Of course, it could also cause the Audi to roll. That was okay by me, because I didn’t have the luxury of blocking vehicles. My best result would be him crashing, and then me with a boot on his broken wrist for five minutes of intensive interrogation before an ambulance showed up and I had to bug out.

  Nothing ever goes as planned, though. This mother was good. Really good. There were a dozen ways to avoid giving me a chance to PIT him and he used them all. Twice we were kissing bumpers down short straightaways, NASCAR style, but I couldn’t get a line to put Molly’s corner against his rear quarter to do it. Like a track racer, he kept me from passing.

  Though the Audi undoubtedly had more top end and its V8 pumped out more horsepower, it was heavier than Molly and not as nimble, so on these city streets he shouldn’t get away. Still, I had to watch both him and the situation in front of us, while he only had to avoid crashing and look for a place to lose me.

  That came when he got onto the freeway northeast toward Sacramento. Within ten seconds we were up over one hundred again, swerving among cars and laying on our horns. Over the next several minutes he pulled away by skillfully using his greater stability and better top-speed gearing, leaving me slamming my palm on Molly’s steering wheel and spitting epithets.

  Within a minute, I’d lost him.

  I caught sight of rollers – squad car lights – as they came on well behind me. We must have either passed a speed trap or an officer had spotted our race while he traveled in the opposite direction. I maintained my highly illegal velocity until I dove off the next off-ramp somewhere in Fairfield, following the surface streets away from the freeway before turning south. Meandering back the way I came on the country roads between towns, I eventually cruised back to the City, still spitting with frustration.

  It was one thing to screw up, but I hadn’t. Had his car been less of a monster and his skills been poorer I’d have taken him down, but that Audi came out of the factory costing a hundred thousand dollars, and money bought capability worth every penny.

  It’s a screwed-up world when the scumbags have all the best toys, I thought. Then again, I had dash-cam recordings of the Audi. Maybe Mickey could work his magic.

  With no other leads I headed to my office. On the way I dialed Cole Sage, but got nothing again. What kind of investigative reporter didn’t even answer his private line?

  I called the Chronicle main number and eventually, after being handed off several times, played the sister solidarity card to get the prim voice on the other end to admit Cole was on assignment out of state. That was all I could drag out of the woman, so I left another message to call me before giving up.

  I was on my own, again. Naturally.

  Mom says I’m a loner, and maybe she had a point. I could have kept the M&Ms around as my posse. Maybe I should have. Maybe I’d regret it later.

  What can I say? I am a rock. I am an island.

  Chapter 11

  When I opened the basement door to my office building around noon, I saw Mickey stacking Zs on the sofa, an empty plastic two-liter diet cola bottle clutched to his chest. He claimed he couldn’t sleep without it, which made no sense to me. Caffeine kept me awake, usually a good thing.

  I slammed the door and flipped on the light, watching in amusement as my assistant flailed and covered his eyes. “Get up, Mickey. I’m not paying
you to sleep. That’s why I sent you home last night, so you could keep the revs up all day. Come on, come on.” I snapped my fingers near his ear. “You did go home, right?”

  “No, sorry. My mom had some new guy over and the walls are thin. Awkward.” Mickey rolled to his feet and in one ponderous motion dropped his butt into the nearby office chair, which creaked alarmingly.

  “Just as long as you got some sleep. Here,” I said, handing him the dash camera. “Look for shots of the back of an Audi with dirty plates. If you can pull a number we might be in business.”

  “Okay, I’ll get right on it.” He plugged in a cable and started tapping at his keyboards. When I didn’t move, he spoke without turning. “Food would be really cool.”

  “Okay.” Hovering wouldn’t make him work any faster, so I got up and popped over to Mission Picnic for a couple of sandwiches.

  When I got back, Mickey triumphantly exchanged a stack of printouts for a hoagie. “On top is a DMV record.”

  “Excellent. 2003 Audi A8 Quattro owned by –”

  “Skip that for now. Look at the police report.”

  I flipped over the stapled sheet. “Crap. Stolen plate, up in Redding…but not the car?”

  “Nope. The car wasn’t touched.”

  “So look for another stolen A8 –”

  Mickey grinned, cola-stained teeth showing through his beard. “Way ahead of you, boss. Turn the page.”

  I flipped to the next sheet. “Here we go. Green A8 boosted last week in Sacramento. Sandy Henneman, 49, reported her keys were stolen from her purse at a nightclub in Old Sac, which she only noticed when she went to a nearby parking garage and found her car missing.”

  “I always wondered how you find something missing.”

  “Same way you eat jumbo shrimp, I guess.” I leafed through the paperwork to a grainy picture of a man in a trench coat opening the Audi’s door. “Great work, Mickey, but unfortunately it’s another dead end. Confirms what I already suspected: he stole a plate, a misdemeanor, to cover grand theft auto, a felony, and then further obscured the numbers.”

  “Now you know how he got here, though.”

  I raised my eyebrows, and then got it. “Oh, via Redding? So he came down from Portland, probably, but that’s too thin. He could have stolen a different car, swiped the plate, and then dumped the old one…near the site of the Sacramento theft. Mickey, you’re a genius!”

  “I know,” he said, looking down at the remnants of his bitten nails with false modesty.

  “Stay right there,” I said as I charged up the stairway to my office. At my desk, I took a deep breath and dialed Tanner Brody, Jay Allsop’s rookie partner.

  “Yeah,” he answered.

  “Tanner, this is Cal Corwin.”

  “Hey, Cal. What’s cookin’?”

  “I need a favor. Can you hit up Sacramento PD and see if there were any high-end stolen cars recovered in Old Sac in the last week or so?”

  “Just in Old Sacramento?” Old Sac was the upscale-funky historical district, a big tourist draw and therefore well policed.

  “Right. There’s an Audi stolen there I’ve run across and I’m thinking the perp dropped off his former ride to boost it, so it should be within walking distance.”

  “Does this have anything to do with Clawson’s homicide?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Does maybe mean no but you want me to help you out, or does it mean yes but you don’t want to give me more details?”

  Sharp kid. I sighed. “It means yes but everything I got is very thin.” I mentally balanced how much I should tell him against the potential for police involvement to spill over into my search for Talia. “Look, I have a live client in trouble. You have a dead body. I’ll tell you what I can as soon as I can, all right?”

  “All right. Call you back soon.”

  “Thanks, Tanner.”

  Click.

  I headed back down the steps to Mickey’s world. “Okay, tell me what you learned about Houdini.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Nothing in any of the police computers I can hack and not much on the web. In a decade or two everything will be on the internet, but not yet.”

  “Everything, huh? How are people going to get all that info on the internet? A million monkeys typing it all in?” I took a seat on the arm of the sofa again.

  “Some will be scanned in, but a lot of stuff people will just want to tell everyone and put it up themselves. There’s this new thing at Harvard and Stanford called ‘The Facebook’ where the students upload all sorts of crazy shit they’d never usually tell anyone – who’s hot or not, party pictures, sexy shots, test answers. Kinda like MySpace but better.”

  I picked my way over to perch on the arm of the sofa. “Sounds pretty stupid. What if their parents found out? Or the administration?”

  “That’s what I tried to tell Zuckerberg, but he doesn’t care.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  “So is this Houdini on The Facebook?”

  “Criminals aren’t stupid enough to put stuff online to help catch themselves.”

  I snorted. “And Stanford students are? These are supposed to be our best and brightest.”

  “Dunno about your college experience, but some of the dumbest people I know were in class with me.”

  “Yeah. Binge drinking and STDs.” I thought about the four years I spent at California State University Stanislaus, graduating in 1995 with a criminology degree to qualify for the police academy, and I had to agree. I’d have rather gone somewhere near the City, but the living was cheap in the dusty San Joaquin Valley town of Turlock and there was no waiting list, unlike closer programs. “So, Houdini?”

  “A couple of articles in the Sacramento Bee about a flood of pills back in 2003. That’s it.”

  “Print them out for me, will you?”

  Mickey scrabbled in the pile on his desk and came up with a stapled packet. “Here you go.”

  I took them. “Hey, college students like pills, right? Rich kids especially.”

  “Yeah. Ludes, Ecstasy, Oxy, stuff like that. And dope of course. Mostly they stay away from hard shit like crack and meth.”

  “What about you?”

  Mickey’s eyes widened. “Me?”

  “You use anything?”

  He hesitated, and then said, “I never buy. Can’t afford it. I’ll take a hit off a joint if someone passes it.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not a cop anymore and I’m not your mom. As long as you can do the job and don’t bring anything illegal here…”

  Mickey relaxed. “You know what? You’re the coolest boss ever.”

  “Yes, I am.” I spent the next few minutes filling Mickey in on the latest, and then said, “Monitor that Facebook thing, and MySpace too. Maybe someone will blab about Houdini or a big shipment of pills coming onto campus.”

  “Already on it.”

  “Also, there’s this guy called Luger, white supremacist. Give me a workup on him.”

  “You got it.” Mickey turned to his array of screens.

  My cell phone rang then. “Hello.”

  “Gale?”

  “Speak of the devil.” It was Luger. I climbed the steps back up to my office and paced while I talked. “Do you have something for me?”

  “And a good day to you. How have you been?”

  I gritted my teeth. “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “I’m well, thank you for asking. And in answer to your question, yes, I have a word for you. I made discreet inquiries and I was told it’s being handled.”

  “That’s it? It’s being handled?”

  Luger’s tone was careful, as if he was walking on eggshells. Like someone was listening. “This word was given from someone who knows. A source one doesn’t doubt. Am I being clear enough?”

  “Not at all. I’d really like to know more.”

  “As we all would. That’s all I have. You’ll have to trust me.”

  I sighed. “I believe what you say, but it doe
sn’t get me any closer to recovery.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s all I can say on that topic. On another, it may please you to know I’ll have some merchandise available for you. Come by on Friday evening around seven and you can choose whatever you like. We can have dinner.”

  “Let me check my calendar.”

  “You’re being coy. I like that.”

  “Look, Luger –”

  “I’ll expect you at seven. Goodbye.”

  Dammit. He assumed I was a pill popper and would want the product even if I didn’t want him. Maybe I’d go after all, play along. I didn’t want to antagonize a source.

  I sat down at my desk to listen to my messages while I waited for Brody to call back. Still nothing from Cole, which wasn’t surprising. Nothing from Mira, which was. I rubbed my face and phoned her, confirming she’d heard nothing. I told her the heist was over and done last night, but to sit tight and say nothing. The kidnappers should be contacting her soon, or maybe just dropping Talia off. Until then, I’d keep trying.

  My reassurances seemed to calm her down, another oddity, but I didn’t ask. If I was in her shoes I’d have been frantic, wondering what was keeping the crew from freeing themselves of the burden of a child prisoner and worrying that they’d do it the simple, ugly way. Now was not the time to grill her about it, though.

  Instead, I raised the blinds behind me to let in more light and read the two-year-old newspaper articles Mickey had printed out.

  They quoted unnamed sources on the street that claimed Houdini had recently become a big player in the illegal distribution of prescription drugs. He was reputed to have ties to Chicago organized crime, but none to the cartels south of the border. The articles speculated some of his product came from Canada and some was smuggled in from the Far East.

  Lab tests paid for by the newspaper’s investigation on various pills bought on the street showed them to be either genuine or high-quality fakes with the same, if generic, ingredients. No fillers, none of the substitute drugs that often made scoring from the street deadly dangerous.