Guardian of Lies: A Paul Madriani Novel

by Steve Martini

  Suddenly a gun battle broke out at the top of the ramp. A large black SUV raced out from under the bridge on the freeway and drove past the bus, exchanging fire through the windows with the button boy lying on his belly on this side of the bus. Whoever was firing from the car must have hit him, because a second later the button boy dropped his rifle as his head slumped to the ground.

  The black vehicle made a beeline for the bottom of the ramp, pulled a U-turn, and drove up the ramp in the wrong direction. It stopped on the other side of the box truck. The doors flew open and six men, all wearing black body armor and carrying short carbines and MP-5s, spilled out of the car. They raced around the truck and moved up the ramp.

  Liquida could still hear shots coming from inside the bus.

  One of his men at the top of the ramp began to retreat down toward the gully on the other side. Liquida lost sight of him for a moment. When he picked him up again, the button boy had joined up with the explosives expert and both of them were making their way up the embankment toward Magnolia Avenue and the van.

  There was another flurry of gunfire at the top of the ramp. Liquida watched as police flanked the remaining lone button boy. Three shots rang out and he went down. Police started to flood down the ramp on foot, just as the six men from the black SUV reached the door to the bus.

  Liquida picked up the walkie-talkie. “Hello. Hello.”

  A voice crackled back on the other end.

  “Are you in contact with them?” He was talking to the explosives man, who was in contact with the button boys on the bus. Through a separate radio. “Is it done?”

  “Yes,” said the man. “She is dead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” came the crackling response.

  “Excellent,” said Liquida.

  He could see the demolition man talking on the handheld unit as he slipped through the hole in the fence, followed closely by the button boy who had left his rifle in the ravine and ditched his dark glasses and face scarf while climbing up the other side.

  Liquida watched as three of the armed men from the SUV boarded the bus. A few seconds later gunfire erupted again from inside the bus. This time it didn’t last long. He heard several short bursts of pistol rounds from the MP-5s and then silence.

  He focused the field glasses back across the ravine. The explosives expert and his young helper had made it to the van. They pulled away from the curb and did a U-turn to avoid all the excitement at the intersection on Prospect. Before they’d gone fifty feet, another shiny black SUV pulled out of a side street and cut them off. The occupants, all dressed like their comrades on the bus, opened the SUV’s doors, using them for cover, and trained their assault rifles and pistols on the stopped van through the SUV’s open windows.

  As he was reaching into his pocket, Liquida had to wonder what the federal government was doing here so heavily armed. No one else used black SUVs like the United States government.

  He took out a small metal box from his pocket, flipped the toggle switch on the top, and pressed the small black button. There was a large brilliant flash of light on the other side of the freeway. It was followed a second later by the sound of the blast and the shock wave as it rippled across the rooftop and rattled the metal panels of the air-conditioning unit where Liquida was sitting. Avis would miss one of their rental vans. He would have to remember the next time to use a little less C-4.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Gil Howser was the lead homicide detective in the Solaz case. This morning he’d buttonholed Templeton while the prosecutor was busy packing his briefcase and getting ready to head to the courthouse.

  “Make it quick,” said Templeton. “You and I have a meeting with Quinn on Solaz in ten minutes.”

  “I know, to talk about the deal with her. But there are some problems with the evidence. We have to talk,” said Howser.

  “Do we need to do it right now?”

  “No, but it might be good to have a handle on them in case the judge asks us what kind of an evidentiary basis he has for accepting a plea.”

  “What kind of problems?” said Templeton.

  “The dagger, for example,” said Howser. “How do we explain the fact that Solaz’s prints are all over it but there’s no blood on the handle? If she stabbed him with the other knife first, and according to the postmortem that’s how it went down, she’d have blood on her hands. It would have been transferred to the handle of the dagger. But the handle was clean except for her prints.”

  “What else?” said Templeton.

  “Forensics found tool marks on the coin drawers in Pike’s study. Whoever pried them open used a sharp implement of some kind. They think it was a knife. The problem is, the tool marks on the wooden drawers around the locks as well as the scratches on the brass locks themselves don’t match either the chef’s knife that was used to kill Pike or the point on the dagger that was left in his body. Forensics checked the points on all the other blades in the kitchen. According to their report there would have been some damage to the knife point used to pry open the drawers. There was no evident damage to any of the other knives, and none of them matched the tool marks. So there must have been another knife.”

  “All right. What else?”

  “You do recall that the police in Arizona didn’t find a knife on Solaz when they arrested her?”

  “I’m aware of that,” said Templeton. “What else?”

  “The blood around the lock on the front door,” said Howser. “The bloody prints, that is, if there ever were any, weren’t smeared, they were rubbed, using a cloth, according to forensics. They found patterns in the blood on the door consistent with the fibers on one of the cleaning cloths on the maid’s body. And to make it a little more contrived, all the blood was hers, none of it was from Pike.”

  “There was blood transfer from Pike to the maid’s clothing,” said Templeton.

  “Yes, but it ended there. There was nothing on the front door,” said Howser. “If you have blood all over your hands from killing two people and you panic and run out the front door, even if you collect yourself before you go two steps so you can come back and smear the prints on the door, how is it that only the maid’s blood shows up there? How do you explain Solaz smearing her prints on the door and taking the time to wash the blood and her prints off the chef’s knife and then forgetting her prints on the dagger in Pike’s body?”

  “Maybe she didn’t forget,” said Templeton. “Maybe someone else told her he’d take care of it for her. Someone who knew a lot more about crime scene evidence than she did.”

  “Madriani,” said Howser.

  “That would explain why the Arizona Highway Patrol didn’t find the knife used to jimmy the drawers when they arrested her, or Pike’s computer, or the other missing coins, why she went down the front driveway straight into the security camera when whoever helped her went out through the side yard, through the hole in security and over the fence. It would explain a lot of things, wouldn’t it? And by the way, I wouldn’t put too much faith in the theory that Solaz plunged the dagger into Pike’s chest.”

  “That’s the linchpin of your case,” said Howser.

  “She may have handled the letter opener, but you missed something,” said Templeton.

  “What’s that?”

  “A little twist on one of the details that came in late, courtesy of the people in the crime lab. Have you ever read the book entitled A California Gold Rush History, by David Bowers?”

  “No.”

  “Neither have I,” said Templeton. “I’m told it’s a tome, what you would call a substantial read, one thousand and fifty-five pages in hardcover. Single volume weighs in at more than eleven pounds. It’s a big sucker. And according to forensics, whoever left the dagger in Pike used that particular book to pound it into his chest. Now can you see a petite little thing like Katia Solaz holding the dagger in one hand while she swings a big book like that in the other?”

  “Now that you mention it,” said Howser, “no. When did you find this out?”

  “Yesterday morning. Forensics found a strange ind
entation in the book’s cover when they were processing the crime scene. It seems the dimple in the cover matches precisely the shape and contour on the end of the dagger’s handle. Just the way you might want to hit it if you wanted to preserve somebody else’s prints on the handle.”

  “So you haven’t turned this over to the defense yet?”

  “Not yet. Of course I will—sooner or later,” said Templeton.

  “I have to say, that puts a major focus on the other player,” said Howser. He meant the unidentified codefendant. “And you can bet the second we turn it over, Madriani will jump on it and claim that this is solid evidence that some other dude did it.”

  “And he’ll be right,” said Templeton. “He did it. He set her up nine ways from Sunday. She may have invited him in on the party, told him what was in the house, but he took over when he came. Do you have any idea what the value of the gold is that’s missing?”

  “No,” said Howser.

  “Just under 146 pounds, it would be a shade under 1.8 million dollars, and that’s just by weight. If you could sell the coins at collector’s value, who knows, you could probably multiply that by a factor of three or four. That’s what they tell me, anyway.”

  “I’d say that’s a pretty good motive for murder,” said Howser.

  “It could certainly beef up a private pension plan. Anything on that end yet?” said Templeton.

  “No. We’re not going to know that until we get a subpoena for Madriani’s bank records. And we’re not going to be able to do that until we go public with the court and open an active investigation on him. Maybe you can get the feds to go online and take a peek at his bank records.”

  “He’s not going to sell the gold and put the cash in a bank account,” said Templeton. “Too much money and too many records. He’d have to pay taxes and explain where he got all his sudden wealth on a return. If he melts it down, and I have to assume he probably already has, he’s going to put it somewhere safe, where it can’t be found or traced, and sit on it until things cool off.”

  “Still, it’s hard to believe that a seasoned lawyer who has seen forensics play out in court a thousand times would miss as many details as we have here,” said Howser.

  “It’s one thing to study it in a courtroom in the cold light of day. It’s another to live it,” said Templeton. “Can you imagine the frenzied thoughts that crowd the mind after killing someone, in this case two people? And then there’s all the glitter from that gold to get in your eyes. That’s how he managed to leave the pen behind. A thirty-cent ballpoint pen you can buy by the bushel with your firm name and address printed on them. Madriani wrestles with Pike and the pen ends up on the floor, kicked under the desk. Go figure.”

  “I still think you should have allowed us to ask him about that,” said Howser.

  “Why, so he could lie to us again? Make up another story? When you first questioned him, you asked him whether he’d ever been to Pike’s house. He said no. You asked him if Solaz had ever been to his office and he said no. You asked him if their meeting at the grocery store was the only time they ever met or talked before she was arrested, and what did he say? He said yes. Now we know they talked by phone at least one other time and had drinks at the restaurant out in front of his office in Coronado on that same day. He had plenty of opportunities to tell us the truth, but he didn’t,” said Templeton. “Would you like to take bets on what a jury’s going to say about how that pen found its way under Pike’s desk? I could use the money.”

  “No, that’s all right,” said Howser. “They’re already taking enough out of my paycheck as it is.”

  Suddenly Templeton’s office door shot open. One of the other prosecutors stuck his head in.

  “What is this, no-knock day?” said Templeton.

  “Have you guys heard the news?”

  “No, but I’m sure you’re gonna tell us,” Templeton said, glaring at him.

  “Somebody just hit the sheriff’s bus on its way in from the women’s jail out at Santee. Word is, the driver and the guard are dead, smoke and explosions everywhere.”

  Templeton dropped his briefcase on the floor.

  “It’s on Fox News and CNN right now, aerial shots.”

  “What are they saying?” said Templeton.

  “Reporters are speculating that it may have been a botched attempt to spring one of the inmates from the bus. The area around the freeway looks like a war zone.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Much of the inside of the bus was charred. Most of the officers, the sheriff’s tactical squad as well as the agents from the FBI’s violent crimes task force, had only seen training photographs and films of buses that had been hammered by terrorists in the Middle East.

  None of them had ever seen anything like this on American soil. And while they had trained for it, the presumed targets were always soft, inner-city commuter buses and trains, not a locked-down sheriff’s transport bus. In a way this was worse. Once the door had been blown, none of the passengers on board had a chance of escape. They were chained to their seats.

  A line of ambulances long enough that no one bothered to count them lined up under the freeway overpass, waiting their turn as paramedics and police worked through the bodies on the bus.

  The bomb squad gingerly checked the box truck for explosives. Two of the FBI agents had already been badly injured in the blast from the getaway van, and authorities were taking no more chances. The box truck had to be cleared before moving it so that ambulances could pull up on the ramp.

  “I don’t, sir.” One of the FBI agents was on the phone with Thorpe, in Washington. “They’re on the bus looking for both of them now. I know. I know. There’s nothing the hostage rescue team could have done, believe me. They made no contact with any authorities, no evidence of any interest in negotiating anything. When the sheriff’s department tried to communicate with them through the speaker on one of the squad cars up at the top of the ramp, the assailants just opened on them. The minute they blew the door off the bus, they just entered and started shooting people. We had no choice, we had to move in.

  “No, from what we can see, there were eight of them. All dead, yes, sir, unfortunately. It’s hard to tell. We went through the pockets of the two we killed outside the bus on the ramp. They were carrying nothing. No identification. They were wearing jeans and street clothes. They could have bought them anywhere. But it’s pretty clear they’re not Islamic. The two outside had gang graffiti tattooed on their bodies. Somebody from the sheriff’s gang unit is trying to decipher it now. I have a feeling we’re going to find out they’re not local, probably from over the border.

  “The weapons, yes, sir, Chinese made, AKs, all original military actions, fully automatic. The explosives we don’t know yet. We think most of them went up in the van explosion, but we should be able to get residue, trace compounds and markers that should tell us where they originated. I’d say it’s pretty clear that it’s not ideological. It’s either drug related or they were after your woman on the bus.”

  “Get them out of here.” A big, beefy sergeant from the jail unit at Las Colinas had taken charge on board the bus. He was the same one who had slipped the small Walther pistol to Carla two days earlier.

  “Crime scene is gonna want them left where they lay.”

  “I don’t give a shit.” The sergeant turned on the officer, still decked out in SWAT gear. He had lost two friends, Jed the driver and the guard, and he was in no mood to debate the issue. “We’ve got wounded people here and I want this aisle clear. Get some officers to drag those bodies out of here.” He gestured toward the dead button boys piled up in the aisle.

  “See that they lay ’em outside far enough away so they don’t block access to the ambulances. Crime scene can process them there. And tell them to hurry up and get that truck out of there.”

  “They just cleared it for explosives. They’re looking for the keys.”

  “Let’s hope they didn’t go up with the van,” said the sergeant. “Check their pockets before you take them out of here. The truck keys may be there. Here.” The sergeant handed a different set of keys to on
e of the agents on the FBI assault team. He had found them outside on the ground, near the body of the guard.

  The agents and officers were busy trying to get the ankle bracelets off the wounded and remove the waist chains so they could be separated from the dead as paramedics checked the victims and conducted triage. The officers already knew that most of the women up front were dead. Those who hadn’t been shot were killed in the blast when the last satchel charge was tossed inside. It had blown a hole in the roof of the bus and ripped out four of the bench seats, bending them sideways, so that they now rested against the bulging walls of the bus.

  “What do you want to do with this?” One of the agents was holding the small Walther pistol.

  “Here, give it to me.” The sergeant took it, dropped it on the floor, and kicked it under the body of one of the dead button boys. It was clear that one of the women had managed to get the gun away from them. What wasn’t clear was how many of them she shot or from what angle or distance. The medical examiner and the forensics team would have to figure that one out, and having moved the bodies, it would be anybody’s guess.

  The agent worked with the keys, found the one that worked, turned it, and the manacle on her ankle popped open.

  “It should be the same key on her waist,” said the sergeant.

  Two seconds later the agent had it unlocked. “I know her last name, what’s her first name?” the agent asked the sergeant.

  “Katia. Katia Solaz.”

  “Katia, listen to me. We have to take you off the bus now. Is she okay to move?” asked the agent.

  Katia could see his lips move, but she couldn’t hear a word, or any sound for that matter, just a constant ringing in her ears.

  One of the paramedics glanced over. “There’s a shallow flesh wound, right thigh. I bandaged it. It doesn’t look serious. She’s got some concussive injury from the overpressure of the blast. May have blown her eardrums, I’m not sure. They’ll have to check her at emergency. Make sure they don’t give her any depressants in the meantime. But she should be okay to move, if you can get her outside and on a gurney.”