Dark Angel (Lassiter/Martinez Case Files #2)

by Joseph Badal

  “You think Rubinstein gets in this early every day?” Susan said. “I mean, 7 a.m. is downright uncivilized.”

  Barbara stood beside Susan in the Rubinstein Real Estate Development reception area as they waited for Jerome Rubinstein to grant them entry to his inner sanctum. She swept a hand around the space. “You don’t get this by working 9 to 5. Nice place, huh?”

  “Reminds me of our offices,” Susan said.

  “What offices?”

  “Okay, our cubicles.”

  Barbara rolled her eyes and shook her head.

  A tall, sinuous blonde in a sleeveless dress stepped through a door into the reception area. Her five-inch spiked heels beat loudly on the marble floor as she approached them. Barbara thought the woman would have looked more at home on an episode of The Housewives of Beverly Hills than here in a business office in Phoenix.

  “I’m Janette Willis, Mr. Rubinstein’s assistant. He can see you now.”

  She did an about face and marched back across the lobby.

  They were shown into an office that was big enough to hold a meeting of forty people.

  “Mr. Rubinstein, your visitors are here,” Willis announced.

  Rubinstein stood and came around his desk. He walked to Susan and offered her his hand. Then he greeted Barbara. “Please sit down over here, Detectives.”

  They followed him to a seating arrangement that included two facing couches, four chairs, and a coffee table, and sat on one of the couches. Rubinstein sat on the other couch.

  “When you called, you said you wanted to discuss the man who murdered my son.”

  “That’s right,” Barbara said.

  Rubinstein met her gaze. “What could I possibly tell you about that sick bastard that you don’t already know?”

  “Of course you know someone murdered Virgil Patterson?”

  Rubinstein nodded.

  “Whoever killed your son’s murderer placed a .45 caliber bullet in Patterson’s mouth after he was dead.”

  “I heard that from the Phoenix detective who handled the case.”

  “Why do you think that was?” Barbara asked.

  Rubinstein shrugged.

  “Do you think it might have had something to do with your son, Lee, being shot with a .45 caliber pistol?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Look, Mr. Rubinstein, we’re attempting to identify a mass murderer. We think the person who killed Virgil Patterson assassinated many other people.”

  Rubinstein rubbed his face and then dropped his hands to his lap. “Were the other people killed by this . . . assassin . . . also released on bail after murdering an innocent kid?”

  “How is that relevant?” Susan asked. “Murder is murder.”

  “I’m just interested, Detective. You see, we have a fundamental difference of opinion if you equate the murder of my fifteen-year-old son with the murder of a career criminal who had spent eighteen years in prison for a previous murder, and who shot and killed my son for his bicycle and pocket change.”

  “As I said, murder is—”

  “Bullshit!”

  Barbara didn’t like the way the conversation was headed. “Mr. Rubinstein, did anyone contact you after Lee was killed and Patterson was released on bail?”

  “Sure, hundreds of people called me to express their condolences.”

  “I mean, did anyone call you to ask if you would be interested in seeking revenge for Lee’s murder?”

  “You actually expect me to answer that question?”

  At 9 a.m., Barbara drove to their next—and last—appointment in Phoenix. Unfortunately, the result was almost identical to the results of their two meetings in Las Vegas and the meeting with Rubinstein.

  “There’s a noon flight to Albuquerque,” Barbara said. “Let’s grab a late breakfast and then head out to the airport.”

  “Sounds good to me. Wonder what Lieutenant Salas’s reaction will be when we tell him we spent money and accomplished nothing?”

  “Well, we did accomplish something.”

  “Yeah, we escaped cold weather in Albuquerque for a little while.”

  Barbara laughed. “We also learned that the families of victims hired an assassin to take revenge for attacks on their loved ones.”

  “Yeah, but prove it.”

  “You know I can’t. But, based on your observations during the four interviews, do you have any doubt about it?”

  “Nope. But where’s that get us?”

  “Hell, I don’t know.” Barbara drummed the steering wheel for a few seconds. “I’ll tell you one thing I’d bet a month’s pay on.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Whoever committed the murders probably contacted the families. Not the other way around.”

  “That makes sense. Some guy reads about the rape of Rosa Puccini and waits to see how the justice system deals with the perpetrators. When, as with the case of the three Las Vegas college football players, they get off without even a slap on the wrist, our vigilante calls the family and says, ‘Let’s make a deal.’ ”

  “You know, we both had some sympathy for this vigilante asshole, because he targets low-life scumbags. But I’m beginning to have another take on this guy. You notice something about all the people we’ve talked with. From Victor Graves, to the Puccinis, to Rubinstein, to—”

  “Yeah, they’re all richer than Croesus.”

  “Our vigilante killer is doing this for the money, not because he’s got some desire to right wrongs. If he was in it to do good for goods’ sake, why didn’t he take revenge against criminals who had victimized poor people?”

  “Good observation,” Barbara said.

  As Barbara took a right turn into a Denny’s lot, Susan said, “It would be great if we could get a copy of the phone records of the families. Maybe we’d find that they all received calls from a common telephone number.”

  Susan scoffed. “Don’t hold your breath on that one. First of all, we’d never get a court order allowing that. Second, the vigilante is way too smart to use the same phone. This guy’s operated for years without leaving behind any evidence. He’s like a ghost.”

  “More like a dark angel,” Barbara said. “At least that’s the way the families see him.”

  Inside the restaurant, the hostess pointed them to the only empty booth, big enough for six people.

  “I’m in the mood for some comfort food,” Susan said as she opened a menu.

  “Might be the only comfort you get,” Barbara said.

  “There’s pessimism if I ever heard it.”

  A young woman with strawberry-colored hair and a large hickey on the left side of her neck took their order.

  Barbara watched the young woman slump away, as though she was worn out. “Looks like our waitress had some comfort recently,” she said.

  Susan laughed and looked toward the restaurant’s glass-doored entrance as three very large men entered. The hostess raised a hand to them, as though to say hello, but the men ignored her and moved quickly toward Barbara and her.

  “Uh-oh,” Susan muttered.

  Barbara followed the direction of Susan’s gaze, then slid toward the edge of the booth. Susan did the same on the other side. But before they could stand, two of the men arrived at the booth and blocked the sides. The third guy—a square-headed, long-jawed man who was well over six feet tall and weighed at least twenty pounds over two hundred—placed his hands on the table, leaned over, and smiled.

  “Hello, ladies. Enjoying your visit to Phoenix?”

  Susan smiled back. “Who the fuck are you, the Welcome Wagon?”

  The man chuckled. “Feisty, huh. I like my women that way. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to discuss my personal likes and dislikes at this moment.”

  “You mean that this isn’t a social call?” Susan asked.

  The guy chuckled again. He looked at Susan and then at Barbara. Then he looked back at Susan and, humor in his tone, said, “I’m damned glad that you had to leave your pistols
back in Albuquerque. From the looks in your eyes, I suspect you would have drawn down on us by now.”

  While Susan glared at the man, she said, “What do you think, Babs, do we need weapons to deal with riffraff like these guys?”

  Barbara said, “Why don’t we listen to what these gentlemen have to say before we start a brawl. If we don’t like what they say, then I’ll stick this fork into this guy’s balls.”

  The man pressed up against Barbara looked down and grimaced. “Aw, shit,” he murmured.

  “Don’t move an inch, sweetheart,” Barbara said. “I might think you’re going to do something bad and I’ll have to stick this little old fork into your little old nuts.”

  The guy who leaned on the table moved in closer and, in a lower voice, said, “Just some friendly advice. You’re poking your noses in the wrong place. You’ve made some friends of ours very angry. I think it’s time to go back to New Mexico and focus on cattle rustling and drug smuggling, or whatever you usually do back there.”

  “You wanta tell us which friends of yours that we’ve made angry,” Susan said.

  The man laughed and straightened up. “You’re as cute as a button, honey. Maybe someday we can get together under different circumstances.”

  Susan lifted her purse off the booth seat and placed it on the table. She reached in and took out her badge case and took a calling card from one of the small pockets. She slid it across the table to the man and said, “Look me up the next time you’re in Albuquerque. I’d love to get you on my home turf.”

  The guy ignored the card. “Thanks, honey, but I know how to find you.” He backed up a step and said, “Let’s go boys.”

  Susan watched the three men walk outside and followed their progress across the parking lot to a Cadillac Escalade. After they drove off, she looked at Barbara. “Now, wasn’t that interesting?”

  “I suspect one of the families we talked with in Las Vegas or here in Phoenix sent them.”

  “Maybe,” Susan said. “Or maybe it was our dark angel.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Farmington, New Mexico was exactly as Reese McCall remembered it from five years ago when he and his crew drove through the town on the way to Colorado. Lots of pickup trucks, retail stores, bars, and businesses that serviced the oil and gas industry. A good number of Native Americans, too. He pulled into a motel lot near the juncture of the Animas and San Juan Rivers and booked a room. He’d swapped the Infiniti QX-80 for a black Ford F-150 pickup with a Navajo man in Aztec, New Mexico who’d thought he’d died and gone to heaven. An eighty thousand dollar SUV for a thirty thousand dollar pickup truck. No paperwork exchanged. McCall suspected the pickup was hocked to the gills or stolen, and the Indian was happy to dump it. He also guessed the Indian would take the SUV to the reservation where the lender or the cops might never find it.

  In his motel room, he looked at a map of Farmington and found the target’s street. It was nearly 10:15. He would FedEx the package of coins he’d taken from the Brownell home in Flagstaff. After that, he’d scope out the Farmington target’s place while it was still light. Then he’d wait for dark.

  Race jerked awake, startled. The nightmare again. He was bathed in sweat and his head rang with the echoes of terrible screams. The dream images had seemed to be awash in blood. He pressed his hands against the sides of his head, then groaned when he saw the time on the clock next to the bed: 10:15.

  “Damn it.” Although he hadn’t fallen asleep until 6 a.m., he hadn’t intended to sleep so late. He scrambled out of bed and quickly showered and shaved. Within twenty minutes, he was seated in front of his computer. He went through the notes he’d made earlier that morning before he collapsed on the bed. The niggling feeling returned as he read through them. He read from the beginning again and, this time, read his notes more slowly. His stomach seemed to flip when he stopped at the words Four years ago, had coins appraised for insurance purposes. What if there was a connection between the appraisal and the Three Ghouls? His appraisal was done about eight months prior to the invasion of his Amarillo home. Could that just have been coincidental?

  Then another question came to mind: what if the appraiser was somehow involved with the robbery? Then he said aloud, “What if the other victims used the same appraiser?”

  Race looked at his watch and saw he had about an hour until he would need to leave to meet Jim Dunhill at his shop. He recalled the name of the appraisal firm he’d hired: Holmsby Rare Coin Valuations. The company had emailed and snail-mailed a copy of his appraisal to him. He inputted the company’s name in Google and found its email address on its website. Then he opened his “brute-force” password cracking software, which used eight million combinations of letters and words per second to crack a password, and queried Holmsby Rare Coin Valuations/Invoices. The software put in motion a “dictionary attack” that would hopefully grant him access to the appraisal firm’s list of clients by digging up the password. The dictionary attack was a method to defeat a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or password by trying millions of possibilities. Anyone for whom it had conducted an appraisal would have received an invoice. If that client invoice file included the names of the other victims of the gang, then Race knew he would have taken a huge step forward in identifying how the home invaders chose their targets.

  He paced while he stared at his computer and listened to the hard drive hum as the cracking software seemed to agonize over its mission. It had still not discovered the password into the appraiser’s accounting system when it came time for Race to leave for his meeting with Dunhill.

  “I talked with eleven dealers in eleven cities where the home invasions occurred,” Jim Dunhill said when Race entered his shop. “Every single one of those guys acted like I was some weirdo, calling about dead people.” He paused a beat, then said, “Not just dead people, but people who were viciously murdered.”

  “I can imagine,” Race said.

  “And I didn’t get a thing. Each dealer was intimately familiar with the victim in his city. Hell, he’d sold coins to the guy. All the victims had impressive collections. I asked each dealer if anyone had ever contacted them about any of the collectors. You know, like someone might have wanted to know about their collections, or might have wanted the dealer to contact a collector about selling a coin. But they all said that had never happened.” Dunhill blew out a long sigh. “I’m sorry, Race. I got zilch.”

  Race patted Dunhill’s arm. “No sweat, Jim. Let me ask you something. Is there an appraisal firm that’s recognized as the best in valuing rare coins?”

  “Sure. Even the WCCA recommends Holmsby. I recommend them to my clients. They’re the best around.”

  Race nodded. “That’s the firm I used for my coin collection.”

  “You don’t think Holmsby had anything to do with these robberies and murders, do you?”

  “It’s just a thought at this point.”

  “Holy shit.”

  Nelson Begay drained the last of a Coors six-pack. He crushed the can and tossed it out the window. He smoothed his right hand on the SUV’s leather upholstery and giggled like a kid. “One righteous ride,” he muttered as he drove through Bloomfield on his way to Nageezi. He laughed as he thought again about that stupid paleface. He’d traded the dumbass a stolen Ford pickup for this beautiful Infiniti.

  He wondered how fast the SUV would run. It sounded as though it had a pretty powerful engine. When he crested the hill on Highway 550, south of Bloomfield, a little distance past the refinery, he goosed the motor. The vehicle took off. Begay smiled. He’d never driven anything this powerful, or this fast. He had it up to one-hundred-ten miles per hour and wondered what this monster would top out at, when the sickening sound of a siren penetrated his alcohol-induced buzz.

  “Aw, shit,” Begay said. He saw flashing lights in the rearview mirror. For a moment, he considered stopping, and tapped the brake pedal. But then he thought the cop behind him was from Bloomfield, and not from
the Rez. He wouldn’t screw with a Navajo Tribal policeman on the reservation. But the Bloomfield cops wouldn’t be able to follow him onto Navajo land. He decided to try to outrun the guy to the first cut-off onto the Rez.

  Begay pushed the accelerator to the floor and saw the speedometer hover at one-hundred-twenty miles per hour. His hands felt as though perspiration leaked from every pore. He wiped one hand and then the other on his jeans and gripped the steering wheel with force. The turnoff was about one mile ahead. He came over another hill and eased off the accelerator a bit. The dirt road on the right side of the highway approached at seemingly blinding speed. He stepped on the brakes and tried to control the huge SUV as he turned the steering wheel. He knew he was going too fast as the front wheels of the vehicle hit the surface of the muddy dirt road and the rear end fishtailed. Then everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The back of the SUV broke loose from the road and Begay felt as though he had been launched into the air. Then the vehicle crashed into a ditch beside the road, rolled three times, and came to rest on its roof.

  Bloomfield Police Officer Clarence True watched as the Infiniti he’d chased went airborne, rolled, and then, finally, came to rest upside down. He tried to keep his voice steady as he called in the accident to Dispatch: “Unit 12 to Base. I am on the scene of a 10-45, on Highway 550, three miles south of Bloomfield.”

  True parked beside the ditch and ran through a foot of snow to the SUV. He was prepared to see blood and gore inside the vehicle. The windows had all been blown out, side panels had been dented, and the roof had collapsed about six inches. None of that surprised True. He also wasn’t surprised to find Nelson Begay behind the wheel. True had arrested Begay multiple times on DUI, Drunk & Disorderly, Aggravated Assault, and Breaking & Entering charges. What did surprise him was that Begay was driving an expensive vehicle and, despite blood that had sprayed the front seat and dashboard, Begay was still alive. He groaned when True checked his neck for a pulse.

  “You’ve got a guardian angel, Begay,” True said.