Dark Angel (Lassiter/Martinez Case Files #2)

by Joseph Badal

  “How else do the innocent find justice?”

  “That’s the purpose of our legal system.”

  The man laughed again, but there was a knife-sharp edge to it this time. “Now you truly are being naïve. The legal system did nothing to bring justice to our sweet Rosa. Nothing!” He sighed deeply. He seemed embarrassed that he’d raised his voice. “Go home, ladies. Stop wasting your time and ours.”

  Barbara was lost in her own thoughts on the way to McCarran International Airport for their 5 p.m. flight to Phoenix, when Susan said, “You know, we are wasting our time.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  After a short silence, Susan said, “You wanna hear my interpretation of our meeting with the Puccinis?”

  “Sure.”

  “Giuseppe Puccini was telling the truth. He didn’t know a thing about hiring a hit man to take out the three guys who assaulted his daughter.”

  “I agree.”

  “But Mama Francesca was involved up to her French twist die job.”

  “Yep. And what about Grandpa Salvatore?”

  “He made it happen. With Mama Francesca’s encouragement.”

  “That’s why we’re so good together. We both know when we’re being lied to.”

  Susan laughed. “As I already mentioned, we’re wasting our time. So, why don’t we just catch a flight home?”

  “Probably not a bad idea.”

  “But we’re still flying to Phoenix.”

  “Yep.”

  “Because Barbara Lassiter’s stubborn?”

  “I’d prefer to think of myself as diligent, professional, and disciplined. But I’ll accept stubborn if that’s all you’re willing to concede.”

  Susan said something under her breath.

  “What was that?”

  “I said you’re a pain in the ass.”

  “I’ll accept that as well.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Race hadn’t had much to eat all day, but it never crossed his mind to stop for a meal. He’d been holed up in a run-down motel on Central Avenue near San Pedro Boulevard. He suspected the motel had been built when Route 66 was the way through the city. He also suspected, other than a paint job and new carpeting maybe ten years ago, nothing had been done to improve the place since the early 1950s.

  But Race couldn’t have cared less about his surroundings. The information that Lieutenant Maggie Carter had given him had appeared fairly innocuous at first. But, as he went down the list of victims, he thought he recognized another name. That sent chills up his spine. The odds that he would know two of the Three Ghouls’ victims—William Brownell in Flagstaff, and now Susan Grabowski in Cincinnati, Ohio—were staggering. Race’s heart throbbed and he felt short of breath.

  He didn’t actually remember Susan Grabowski’s name. What clicked with him was that Carter’s information showed that Susan Grabowski’s maiden name was Kellerman. She’d married Ronald Grabowski five years ago. When Race met her eight years ago, she was single: Susan Kellerman.

  The fact that he’d known two of the Three Ghouls’ victims was difficult to reconcile. But what was even more astonishing was that the victims were serious coin collectors.

  Race set the folder aside and thought about his telephone conversation with Amarillo Police Department Detective Dennis Forrester. He’d asked him if William Brownell was the same person he knew from his coin collecting days. Forrester had told him there was nothing on the wire or in the NCIC system that indicated Brownell had owned a coin collection. He stood and paced. A thought had hit his brain as though a bell had rung inside his skull when he’d remembered that he’d read an article written by a coin collector named Brownell. That bell had rung louder when he read the Grabowski/Kellerman name. Three numismatist-victims of the robbers were too strange to ignore: Brownell, Kellerman . . . and himself.

  He rushed back to the table and sat down. On the back of one of the sheets of paper in Carter’s folder, he wrote down a list of things he needed to do. When he’d finished, he felt a rush of frustration. It was already 10 p.m.; too late to follow up on most of the things on his ‘to-do’ list. But then he thought there was one thing he could do now, right here in Albuquerque.

  Race found James Dunhill’s home telephone number on the Internet.

  “Jeez, do you know what time it is? Who the hell is this?”

  “Hey, Jim. Sorry to call so late. It’s Race Thornton.”

  Dunhill didn’t immediately respond. A full five seconds passed before he said, “My God, Race. Is it really you?”

  “Yeah, Jim. I know it’s been a while. But—”

  “Shit, Race, it’s been about three years. I tried to contact you after . . . you know; what happened at your home. But your number was no longer good. No one knew what had happened to you.” Another pause, then: “How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay, Jim. Listen, is there any chance we could get together?”

  “Sure. Are you in Albuquerque?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you come by the shop tomorrow?”

  “Uh. I was hoping we could meet tonight.”

  Dunhill hesitated for no more than a second this time. “You sound like it’s important.”

  “Yeah. Really important. Life and death important.”

  “Why don’t you come by the house in the morning? I’m still in the same place. In the Tanoan Country Club area. You remember how to find it?”

  “You have old Worldwide Coin Collectors’ directories at your home?”

  “No. They’re in the shop.”

  “Would you be able to meet me there tonight?”

  “I’m already in bed, Race. This can’t wait until tomorrow?”

  “I guess it could. But another coin collector could be murdered by then.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think someone’s been targeting collectors all over the country.”

  “I’ll meet you in thirty minutes.”

  Dunhill’s shop was a tiny place squeezed into the base of a horse-shoe-shaped neighborhood shopping center on Eubank Boulevard in Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights. Race beat Dunhill to the shop and waited in his truck until his old friend and coin dealer arrived. They shook hands in front of the shop, then Dunhill unlocked the front door, flipped on the lights, and shut off the alarm.

  “Looks the same,” Race said.

  Dunhill chuckled. “The only thing that changes from one day to the next is the inventory.” He went to the back of the store and slipped behind the glass display cases. “You mentioned the Worldwide Coin Collectors’ directories.”

  Race bellied up to one of the cases and placed Carter’s folder on the glass top.

  “What’s that?” Dunhill asked.

  “Bear with me for a bit. I’ll explain as soon as we check the directories.”

  “Which directory do you want?”

  Race checked Carter’s list and looked at the name Sam Jones. Jones and his wife were murdered on July 31, two years ago.

  “Let’s look at the directory from three years ago.”

  Dunhill went to a bookshelf behind him and fingered through a row of directories. He pulled one from the middle of them, turned, and placed it on the counter.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Check for the name Sam Jones.”

  Dunhill flipped through the alphabetical listing of member names and stopped at the Sam Jones listing.

  “Here it is,” he said. “Providence, Rhode Island.”

  “Does the directory still list the WCCA conferences members attended?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Jones attend any conferences?”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “What?” Dunhill’s eyebrows arched and his eyes widened.

  “Let’s check the other names.”

  Race consulted Carter’s list and threw out a name to Dunhill. This time, the man was from Arkansas. He’d been a member of the WCCA for eighteen
years. His membership terminated four years ago, the year after he’d been murdered in his home. He, too, had never attended a conference.

  He and Dunhill went through the list of names and their listings in the WCCA directories for over an hour.

  After they’d finished, Dunhill said, “Out of the names you gave me, eleven were members of WCCA. Only one—Kellerman—ever attended a conference. Why’s that important?”

  “First, let me tell you that every person you looked up in the directories has been murdered.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Yeah, murdered. By a vicious home invasion gang that’s operated all over the country for about five years.”

  “Holy Mother of God. So, why did you want to know if they’d attended conferences?”

  “Because, one of the thoughts I had was that the collectors might have been targeted after they’d attended a conference. Maybe there’s a thief who attends conferences, identifies big collectors, and then goes after them later. But that theory is now shot to hell.”

  “How’s it possible that coin collectors have been murdered in these kinds of numbers without the FBI and the press making a big deal out of it? I mean, wouldn’t it be all over television and in newspapers about coin collectors being targeted?”

  “Good questions. Maybe the Feds have intentionally held back that information. Maybe they hope to use it at some point as confirmation when they finally arrest someone.”

  “We have to put out a warning through the association. They could be about to kill someone right now.”

  “Yeah, they might very well be. But there’s something that really bothers me. How do these guys know where to strike?”

  “Maybe they have access to the WCCA directory.”

  “Maybe. But that wouldn’t tell them who to target. There are members of the association who are vendors who sell stuff to collectors and people who are interested in coins but don’t have the money to collect coins. Is there a way to tell whether the people who were murdered had serious coin collections? I think Brownell and Kellerman fit that description, but I have no idea if the others did.”

  “You had a world-class collection,” Dunhill said. “I know what I sold you. Those coins alone were worth a lot of money.”

  “How can we determine if the other victims were in the same class of collector?”

  Dunhill’s hands shook as he stared at Race. He looked frightened to death. “Hell, I don’t know.” He remained silent for a while. “Other than you and Kellerman, the others on your list never attended a conference, according to the directories, which tells me they were very private about their collections. Perhaps we could check with dealers in the cities where the collectors lived.”

  “That’s a good idea. Could you do that tomorrow?”

  “Sure. What will you do?”

  “I’ll try to find some common element that ties all the victims together.”

  “What about warning other collectors? Shouldn’t we also share this with the police?” Dunhill waited for Race to respond. When he didn’t, he added, “How could the police not have made this connection?”

  “I could see how police departments might not relate one murder to another. Law enforcement is very fragmented; they might not see the whole picture. It’s the FBI that I wonder about. They should have made the coin collector connection and loaded it on the NCIC system. That would have alerted local police departments. That would have spread the word through the media.”

  “We have to put out a warning,” Dunhill said again.

  Race knew Dunhill was right. Hell, he could call Victor Graves at the New Mexico Herald-Tribune. There’s a story the guy would love to break. But he wanted a chance to find the last of the three men who’d murdered his family. Besides, Graves would expect him to identify himself and would want his personal story. He couldn’t survive that sort of exposure. Having met with Lieutenant Maggie Carter had been risky enough.

  “You know, any story we tell the media or the authorities will carry a great deal more weight if we verify that all the victims were major collectors. And, it would be nice if we could come up with a theory about how the killers identified their victims.”

  “You were the one who told me on the phone that someone else could die if we waited to meet in the morning.”

  Race nodded. “You’re right, Jim. So, let’s do this. Do you have access to a broadcast email list of the WCCA members?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Then why don’t you send them all a message that you heard a rumor that valuable coin collections are being targeted by a gang of thieves. Warn them to turn on their alarms and to notify their local police if they see anyone suspicious hanging around. Whether we come up with more information tomorrow, or we don’t, we’ll call the media and the Albuquerque police by the end of the day.”

  “Why not notify the police at the same time?”

  “Which police? Every department in New Mexico? In the country?”

  “Then what about the FBI?”

  “That makes sense except for one thing. You already wondered why the FBI isn’t all over these guys. Maybe it’s because they couldn’t identify any of the gang . . . until the Brownell murders. Maybe the Bureau didn’t want to release anything as long as they didn’t know who the Three Ghouls were. It could make them look ridiculous. Or, as I said before, they’re intentionally holding back information for later confirmation purposes.”

  Dunhill looked skeptical, but nodded.

  “Do you have a place to stay?” he asked. “You can spend the night at my place.”

  “Thanks, but I already have a motel room. If it’s all right with you, I’ll meet you back here in the morning.”

  “I open at 10, so I’ll make calls to dealers before that. Why don’t you drop by here at noon? I’ll close the shop then.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Race thanked Dunhill and shook his hand. As he turned to leave, Dunhill asked, “What have you been doing all these years? You used to have a software company, if I remember correctly.”

  “Consulting, Jim.”

  It took almost two hours to drive north from Socorro to Bernalillo, New Mexico in the Infiniti QX-80. The woman had just about driven McCall crazy during the drive. She’d lectured him about the legal consequences of his actions. She’d promised to never tell a soul about the kidnapping if he let her go. Then she’d whimpered and begged. On the far side of Bernalillo, he’d finally had enough and slugged her on the side of the head. She’d gone out like a light and slumped down in her seat. When she came to fifteen minutes later, she didn’t say a word. Seventy minutes later, he drove through Cuba, New Mexico and turned right on the road to Regina. Three miles up that road, he found a steep, snow-packed driveway that meandered up the side of a hill for a hundred yards and leveled out on a flat, wooded parcel of land. The driveway continued on for about a quarter-of-a-mile toward a cabin that appeared to be under construction. Concrete footings had been laid, but it appeared that work had ceased, perhaps with the advent of bad weather.

  “Perfect,” McCall muttered.

  DAY 9

  CHAPTER 31

  Race didn’t even attempt to sleep after he returned to his motel room. Something had niggled at the edges of his memory banks since he’d recognized two of the names on Lieutenant Maggie Carter’s list of home invasion victims. That niggling had only accentuated as he’d met with Jim Dunhill and they’d discovered more coin collectors among the list of victims.

  He focused on his own stolen coin collection, the conferences and conventions he’d attended, the communications he’d had with dealers and other collectors in an attempt to determine how he himself had become a victim. He racked his brain to find some action he might have taken that would have made him a victim. All the while, his thoughts were overlaid with onerous, painful guilt. What if he’d done something to make them vulnerable, and thereby been responsible for the deaths of his wife and daughters? Race had suffered from survivor’s guilt for ov
er three years. Now that guilt had ratcheted to an entirely new level. Perspiration poured off his forehead and his head ached.

  He’d invested millions in his coin collection. The worth of the collection was certainly sufficient justification for thieves to target him. Eight years ago, his coins appraised for insurance purposes at seven million, two hundred thousand dollars. He suspected that value would have risen dramatically since then. Hell, he thought, the 1742 Brasher Doubloon and the 1927-D twenty dollar gold piece would bring about two million, seven hundred thousand dollars alone.

  But how had they learned about his collection? Sure, he’d attended conventions and auctions, but it wasn’t as though he bragged about what he’d purchased or about the total value of his holdings. In fact, he couldn’t think of one person with whom he’d ever talked about the specifics of the coins he owned.

  Although he’d initially considered attendance at conferences to be a way that collectors had been targeted, his and Jim Dunhill’s research had shown that most of the victims had never attended a WCCA conference. Of course, they could have attended other conferences, but Race no longer believed that was how the thieves had identified large collections.

  There was another thought that consistently burrowed into his brain: What’s the connection between the psychopaths who commit the home invasions and someone who provides a market for the coins they steal?

  There was either someone out there who could fence the stolen items or there was a collector who bought the coins directly from the robbers. Although he had no proof as to whether or not the gang stole coin collections for someone else, he couldn’t fathom that they stole for their own account. If they sold stolen coins to someone else, who could that person be?

  Now, something else pricked at the corners of Race’s memory. Something he’d just remembered had generated a seed of a thought. But his brain and body were so exhausted from non-stop activity, inadequate sleep, and irregular meals, he couldn’t dredge up anything of value.

  CHAPTER 32