Max had finally caught his breath. “Who the hell are they now?”
“My guess?” Evan said. “Dirty cops or contract washouts. Former operators, probably SWAT.”
“Sent by?”
Seven endless days ago, Max had come to Evan with one problem. It had turned into two problems, which had turned into three. The fourth problem—Bedrosov—had now led to a fifth. At this point, despite Joey’s assurances, it was barely worth getting surprised over.
Before Evan answered, Max said, “What’s to say the guys who just shot at us weren’t real SWAT?”
“The carbines,” Evan said, rubbing his head. “The muzzle flash looked to be from a sixteen-inch barrel. That’s an M-forgery, designed to have the look of an M4 without all the features. The legit select-buyer models have fourteen-inch barrels. Plus, the forgeries have only two positions—safe and semi. They were firing at us a round at a time. Federal- or state-acquired weaponry go to full auto, which, if they’d had, believe me, they’d have used.”
“You noticed all that? In the middle of everything?”
But Evan was already dialing his RoamZone.
Tommy answered immediately. “I knew you’d come to your senses about that Ballista.”
“It’s not about the rifle.”
“Well, fuck a duck,” Tommy said. “Why do I get the sense you’re about to do that thing you do? An urgent need followed by an urgent request followed by an urgent timeline.”
“You said you’re in L.A. today. I need to see you.”
Tommy sighed, cigarette smoke blowing across the phone on the other end. “I’ll text you times.”
“Oh. And I might need to swap out trucks.”
Evan disconnected before Tommy’s cursing could pick up steam.
He texted Joey: NEED ADDRESS FOR BENJAMIN BEDROSOV.
He hopped out, dropped the bullet-scarred tailgate, and retrieved another set of license plates from one of the flat rectangular vaults overlaying the bed. After swapping out the plates, he climbed back into the driver’s seat.
Max was leaning forward onto the dashboard, resting his forehead against his hands. He seemed to be catching his breath. He looked over and noticed that Evan was in the same posture—face to his knuckles, hands gripping the steering wheel, trying to breathe. The adrenaline spike had receded, the headache returning angrier than before.
“What’s wrong with you?” Max sounded genuinely worried.
“I’m okay. Just need to close my eyes for a sec.”
“Bullshit.”
When Evan let his eyelids fall, it felt so good he thought it might be nice to never be awake again. “Concussion,” he finally said. “Just … haven’t slept in a while. So.”
“Let’s get you somewhere you can rest.”
“No time.” Evan used his arms to shove himself back in his seat.
“Why?” Max said. “What are we doing now?”
Evan forced his eyes open. “Going fishing.”
55
An Elaborate Piece of Business
Benjamin Bedrosov’s house, a nothing-to-see-here single-story perched on a steep hillside in Beachwood Canyon, squatted beneath a riot of bushy magnolias. No guard booths, no security fence, no locked gate—from the outside it looked as innocuous as Bedrosov himself. The relative privacy that he no doubt relished worked to Evan’s advantage now as he took on the Medeco dead bolt of the front door. The alarm system had been disabled, the wires beneath the main panel inside cleanly snipped and bypassed.
“Someone beat us here,” Evan said.
Max looked around warily. “Who?”
“Let’s find out.”
Splitting up, he and Max moved swiftly through the house, their search streamlined by the sterile modern interior. Bedrosov, it seemed, was no more a fan of decor and clutter than Evan was, which had no doubt made matters easy for the search team who’d moved through ahead of them. The plentiful windows, shaded by encroaching boughs, threw blocky light across bare tile floors.
A metal swoop intended for logs sat empty by the hearth. On the marble counter, an acrylic pasta holder contained a silo of red fusilli. The pantry held four cans of vegetarian beans, the refrigerator a jug of salsa and a half-drunk bottle of Chianti. In the garage a Tesla slumbered beneath a car cover. A small workbench backed by a pegboard held a few basic tools and a partially finished model of a World War II Flettner helicopter.
“Hey!” Max called out from somewhere deep in the house.
Evan stepped back into the house proper and walked down a bare corridor to the bedroom. Small monitors paneled one wall. They provided security views all around the property, another of Bedrosov’s precautions that would serve them well now in case unexpected visitors showed up.
Max stood across the room before an open wardrobe, hanging suits raked aside to reveal a wall safe.
“It was hidden behind this.” Max pointed to a panel of drywall he’d pried off and set to the side. “Almost seamless. But the cut was nonstandard, so I poked around some.”
“Nicely done,” Evan said.
“Yeah, well. Don’t know how far it’ll get us. The safe has a fingerprint reader.”
Evan drew close and examined it. The safe was an elaborate piece of business—Israeli make, hingeless outer frame, no combination dial to drill through. He tapped the steel-plate door with his knuckles, judged it to be a half inch.
“Check this,” Max said, and hovered his thumb over the black square of the fingerprint reader. A green laser scan started up with a calming hum, mapping his print. The light blinked red. “You don’t touch it. It uses the laser to read your print in midair.”
“That can be more precise,” Evan said. “Sometimes when you press a print, it distorts the ridges.”
“Great. So there’s no way we can get in there.”
Evan said, “How do you know it reads your right thumb?”
“You can see finger smudges where he gripped the side of the safe to position his thumb. Look.”
The steel edge featured four dapples of oil corresponding to the four fingers of Bedrosov’s right hand. Evan looked at Max, impressed.
Max knocked the wall around the safe. “Sounds like it’s concreted in there between the slabs. I’d need a whole lotta gear and a whole lotta time to pry it out if we want to work on it in another location. Even then, I’ve never cracked a safe before.”
Evan scanned the room. A single nightstand with a single drawer. He opened it, hoping for a remote control. He got something better.
An iPad mini.
Touching only the edges, he lifted it carefully and set it on the bedspread. Then he crouched to eye the screen at a slant.
The alkali-aluminosilicate glass, expressly designed to capture touch, was marred by a beautiful thumbprint.
Evan turned to Max and said, “Don’t touch that.”
He walked back to the garage and retrieved wood glue from the cabinet beneath the workbench. Next to the telephone in the kitchen, he located a pencil. Back in the master bathroom, he found a shampoo heavy in glycerin and grabbed a few Q-tips. He returned to the bedroom where Max waited. Using the iPad as a palette, Evan squeezed a dab of wood glue onto the surface well north of the print. Then he stirred in a drop of shampoo to moisten and putty up the glue.
He smashed the pencil and used his fingernail to scrape graphite dust from the core, sprinkling it onto Bedrosov’s fingerprint. He blew the excess away, a layer of raised graphite clinging to the print.
Max said, “You are an insane person.”
Evan said, “Thank you.”
Scooping up a lump of the glue mixture with the Q-tip, he smeared a thin layer carefully over the print.
“Certifiable,” Max said. “Stark raving.”
The concoction dried quickly, and Evan peeled free the hardened slug of glue. The underside held an impression of Bedrosov’s print.
“Now you can just hold it up to the laser,” Max said.
“Not yet,” Evan said. �
�It’s reversed. A mirror image.”
He laid the dried glue on the floor with the print side up. Then he turned on the iPad. Bedrosov had turned off the password feature, a stroke of luck that meant Evan wouldn’t have to hack it.
Using the iPad camera, he took several close-up photographs of the fingerprint impression. Then he went to the app store and downloaded high-end photo-editing software. Using the program, he flipped the print from left to right, then reversed the color so the print was white and the background black. Using a digital enhancer, he brought the image to 2400 dpi, then sat back and admired his work.
“No way,” Max said. “No. Way.”
Evan crossed to the wardrobe, held up the iPad image before the safe’s scanner, and waited for it to initiate. The green laser scanned the digital print top to bottom, and then the door clicked open.
Evan and Max exhaled simultaneously.
Inside rested a single thumb drive. And nothing else.
Evan withdrew it. He and Max looked at each other.
The mission had begun with a thumb drive. Looked like it would end with one, too.
Evan jogged out to the truck, checked up and down the street, then retrieved his laptop. Back inside, he fired up the computer and plugged in the thumb drive.
He sat at the deco letter desk in the corner, Max hovering at his shoulder.
A profusion of spreadsheets invaded the screen.
The figures on these dwarfed the numbers they’d seen in Grant’s files.
Evan scanned the documents. Wires, dates, withdrawals, bank statements, multiple sets of doctored books, meeting minutes, shell-corp formation papers, LLC articles of organization and operating agreements.
And this time: names of the players at the top.
As Evan google-searched the names, Max made a dry noise in his throat.
Bedrosov and everyone who’d come before were nothing compared to this.
A city councilman. The city treasurer and the finance director. The economic-development director and a leading city-admin officer. The public-works director and the comptroller. An assistant officer in charge at LAPD’s Criminal Investigation Division. An LLC manager by the name of Stella Hardwick.
All stakeholders in a fund with the impressively forgettable name of the Los Angeles City Reserve Fund. Its balance, held in Bedrosov’s captured bank in Singapore, was two hundred and twelve million.
Evan read until the throbbing in his head grew almost unbearable, then leaned back in the chair and pressed his fingers to his eyes. He thought of the potholed city streets, the film of pollution wrapped around downtown, the ragged metropolitan facilities crumbling where they stood, desperate for cash allocations that never seemed to come.
A perennial shortfall.
City budgets had checks and balances to safeguard against embezzlement by segregating duties across a variety of departments. But it seemed Stella Hardwick had found a way around those safeguards.
“Looks like all the big players were in on it,” Max said.
“You don’t need all the players.” Evan pointed at a scanned PDF of the signature page of the LLC’s operating agreement. “Just one in each division.”
The scheme required a perfectly placed set of men able to verify a fake spending cut. To corroborate a supposed budget shortfall. To create fictitious invoices. To nudge investigations into the circular file.
A dozen men, with Stella Hardwick at the helm, had victimized an entire city.
At the end of the trail, there wasn’t a face but a committee. Not a head to the monster or even nine heads but a mini-bureaucracy. The more legitimate the veneer, the less anyone would question what lay beneath.
By plugging into Bedrosov’s existing criminal enterprises, Stella and her men had established an infrastructure beneath them to wash the money they skimmed off the city’s $9.2-billion budget. After routing their embezzled cash through his bank, Bedrosov fed it out through multiple franchises beneath him, like Petro’s. The money was cleaned and delivered in nonreportable, nonsourceable chunks to the men’s—and Stella’s—respective accounts. Bedrosov had kept the principals sealed off completely, insulated from the process. Which explained why Joey had been unable to pierce the veil of his enterprise.
Stella and her men had used the authority of their offices to cover up their corruption.
They had used dirty cops to further their abuses of power.
They had used contract killers, crime bosses, and psychopathic businessmen to neutralize their opponents.
And in the process they had gotten help from a very surprising source.
The awareness sat heavily in Evan. How awful for him and Max to have come all this way only to realize that the truth had been right there the whole time, right beneath their noses.
He waited a moment for the flush of the revelation to subside and then refocused. He returned to the laptop, studying the meeting minutes. They were aggressively specific, listing attendees and detailing procedures and the precise order of events. An ironclad assurance against an associate’s developing a sudden fit of conscience. If anyone went down, they’d all go down.
“God,” Max said. “Grant barely scratched the surface. I mean, he was still deciphering code names way at the bottom of the scheme.”
Chagrin washed through Evan, prickling his skin. He’d assumed that Max had put it together as well.
“Max,” he said, “Grant wasn’t investigating this case for the cops. He was cooking the books for Stella Hardwick.”
He could feel the heat of Max at his back, searching the screen. Could practically sense the wheels turning in his head, searching for traction.
“Wait,” Max said. “No.”
Evan’s head ached from the prolonged focus, so he reminded himself to speak clearly and with the same kindness he’d want to be shown if he were in Max’s shoes. “There were two sets of spreadsheets on the thumb drive Grant gave you,” he said. “We assumed he was working to unearth the real transactions. But he was actually the one burying them.”
Just before Evan had killed him, Bedrosov had referred to Max as Grant Merriweather’s cousin. In hindsight it seemed telling; Bedrosov knew Grant well enough to make him the point of reference. Grant had been hired into the operation to clean the books. Right away he must have sensed he was in over his head. Given the power players behind the scheme, he’d have figured he needed insurance for when he finished the job. He needed to be able to threaten mutually assured destruction to anyone thinking of taking him out.
So two months ago, shortly after he started the job for Stella Hardwick’s band of brothers, Grant had pulled some preliminary spreadsheets onto a thumb drive to be delivered into the hands of a Los Angeles Times reporter in the event of his death. Lorraine Lennox was an expert in L.A.’s crime networks. Evan recalled scanning over one of her articles that had made insinuations about a secret cabal of unidentified city leaders. Lennox had been sniffing around the bigger story, which was likely why Grant had chosen her once he realized he’d gotten himself in too deep. And why Stella’s hit men had wiped her off the board as soon as Grant fled with the damning thumb drive and they feared they might lose control of the narrative.
“Why would you say that?” Max’s voice was hoarse now, the truth dawning.
“What Grant gave you was only his rough work at the beginning of the job. Pieced-together files, partially encoded, even hidden. In case it fell into the wrong hands, he couldn’t trust you with something that had the explosive details—the names of the higher-ups—spelled out overtly.” Evan pointed at the screen. “But these books are dated fifteen days after the first set—right before Bedrosov got arrested. And they’re complete. Every last payment that’s been moved out of the city budget to the Singapore bank, laundered, and delivered to the principals has been codified by legitimate bookkeeping. That requires the skill level of a superb accountant.”
“Maybe they hired someone else,” Max said. “You don’t know that it was Grant. How cou
ld you know that?”
“Because,” Evan said, “Grant gave this thumb drive to Bedrosov.”
Evan slid the thumb drive out of the laptop and tilted it to the light. He hadn’t checked yet, but his gut told him it would be there.
Etched onto the metal plug of the USB connector was a nifty little logo, the right downstroke of the M merged with the rising slant of the A.
Merriweather Accountancy.
Max retreated until the bed struck the backs of his knees. He sat down abruptly, wrinkling the smooth duvet.
As Evan had anticipated, two thumb drives bookended the mission. Before and after.
He snapped the laptop shut and rose.
Max was still gazing blankly at the far wall, his eyes unfocused.
“I’m sorry,” Evan said. “But we’ve gotta go.”
56
The Fucking Mary Kay Lady
Tommy rattled up in his dually to meet them beneath a freeway underpass where the 10 met the 405. A traffic cacophony roared overhead, endless streams of cars tracing the cloverleaf’s ramps and exits.
Evan’s bullet-riddled F-150 was parked beneath the cramped rise of the overpass. Spots of black mold clung to the concrete above. Aside from a few overturned shopping carts and a ragged army of smashed beer cans, the spot was deserted. That’s why Evan had chosen it, sunken here beneath the city, a stone’s throw from a thousand Angelenos up in the real world moving too fast to pay any notice.
Tommy parked nose to nose and stared at Evan and Max through the facing windshields. Evan gestured for him to come over.
Tommy looked none too pleased about that.
He thumbed a wedge of tobacco into his lower lip, lit up a cigarette, took a help-me-Jesus drag, and then threw up his hands and kicked open his door. He slid out, landing hard on his boots, and took a moment to set his warhorse joints in order and straighten up.
Then he strode over to Evan in the driver’s seat and knocked twice on the door panel. “You may have noticed, I’m not the fucking Mary Kay lady.”
“Yes,” Evan said. “That’s evident.”
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