Bolthole

by Jeff Mariotte

  “Oh, sure. Sorry.”

  “Anyway,” Eric said, “they stopped for gas. The one guy whose face we had in the system happened to look right up at a camera as he was going into a convenience store at the gas station. That gave me a better image to work with. Eventually I found more footage of him, with three other men, six days ago.”

  “They were eating in a restaurant,” Nell said. “There was a camera over the cashier’s station, and they happened to be seated within view of it, and—oh. I got carried away. Sorry again.”

  “It’s okay, Nell,” Owen said. “Go on, Eric.”

  “That’s pretty much it,” Eric said. “I was checking out that footage, hoping we’d be able to capture the rest of their faces, when someone else came and sat down at the table with them.”

  “Julianne Mercer!” Nell said. She glanced at Eric. “I’m not sorry, that time. Anyway, it’s my turn now. Before she sat down, though, she gave that one man a kiss. More than a friendly kiss. That told us that she hadn’t been honest with us from the start, since she obviously knew those guys. So while Eric kept scanning for more times they were together, I started digging into Mercer’s past.”

  “And you found what?” Hetty asked. “Which was, after all, my original question.”

  “Someone with a rap sheet as long as your arm.”

  “My arm is not particularly long,” Hetty said. “Is there perhaps a more specific measurement?”

  Nell ran it down for her. Mercer’s first arrest had come at nineteen, when she had been known as Brianna Kondik, though that was probably an alias. No known parents could be located. As Kondik, she had served a couple of years on a minor drug possession rap. Since then, she had cycled through different identities—Dana Flint, Abby Wagner, Joan Clement, and Ruth Morrison among them—and different correctional institutions in different states. She had been pretty and smart and utterly without conscience, all of which helped her get away with lighter sentences than someone else might have earned. On one occasion, she had managed to avoid punishment altogether by starting a heated affair with the much older, married district attorney charged with prosecuting her. Once the charges had been officially dropped, she had disappeared, only to resurface in another city under another name.

  The crimes she’d been convicted of had not been violent ones, and she never spent much time behind bars. She was a skilled enough actress to pull successful cons on a variety of unsuspecting marks—almost always men—which made her a decent living.

  “There are a few gaps I haven’t been able to fill in yet,” Nell said after describing the rest. “But she’s been in Los Angeles for four years, as Julianne Mercer. She’s probably been involved in a few scams here and there, but mostly she’s been doing legit modeling and acting. I don’t know if she’s tired of the criminal life, or just making good enough money that she doesn’t need it, but—”

  “Or,” Hetty interrupted, “simply lying low while working on a major score.”

  “Or that,” Nell agreed. “Anyway, I’ll keep digging, as time permits. I mean, if you want me to. What with her being dead and all.”

  “Yes, I want you to,” Hetty said. “Her mortality does not affect my curiosity. We need to know how she came to know those bank robbers, and what they’re up to. There’s more going on here than a simple bank robbery, I’m certain, or there would have been no need to steal Kelly Martin’s assumed identity.”

  “We’ll stay on it,” Eric said. “And on the robbery crew, too. If they’re still in the city, we’ll find them.”

  Hetty paused, meeting each of their gazes in turn, as if to emphasize the importance of the moment. “See that you do,” she said.

  11

  “You’re Kelly Martin,” Sam said.

  Martin’s expression was antagonistic, his tone stubborn. Sam couldn’t really blame him. “That’s right. You want my rank and serial number, too?”

  Sam tapped a file folder on the table in the Boatshed’s interrogation room. “Got those. I don’t imagine Mitch Bostic has a rank or a serial number.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Don’t insult us,” Callen interrupted. “We know about the El Paso bolthole, about the Bostic identity. We also know that the identity appears to have been compromised.”

  “Sounds like you know pretty much everything you need to. And then some.”

  “Here’s something we don’t know,” Sam said. “What is the relationship between you and Julianne Mercer?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who just tried to shoot you,” Callen said. He was letting his exasperation show. Sam felt the same way. They had just saved this guy’s life, and he was treating them like they were the enemy.

  He opened the folder, took out a picture of Mercer, and slid it across the table.

  “Never seen her before. Except, you know, today when she pulled a gun on me.”

  “You haven’t thanked us for saving your ass,” Callen said.

  “How do I know you did?” Martin asked. “I never saw any of you before, either. It looked like some of your people were there with her. Maybe brought her there. You should be apologizing to me for setting me up. Can I go now?”

  “You’ll be here a while,” Sam said. “You might as well get comfortable.”

  “I have business to take care of.” Martin nodded toward the door. “Out there.”

  “Business with bank robbers who shot a cop,” Callen pointed out.

  “And stole your identity and your car,” Sam added. “Anything else?”

  “Did some serious damage to my bank account,” Martin said.

  “I’m assuming your bolthole was a closely held secret,” Sam said. “I get it; I was a SEAL, too. I understand why you’d want it, and why you’d be pissed if somebody got to it before you did.”

  “You say that, but you’re holding me here instead of letting me deal with it.”

  “Did you miss the part where they robbed a bank and shot a cop?” Callen asked. “And tried to kill you on at least two occasions that we know of?”

  “Two?”

  “We’ve connected Julianne Mercer to them,” Sam said. “We’re not sure yet how they link up, but we know she was with them shortly before she came to us, claiming to be your girlfriend.”

  “And we saw the fight at the Sea Vue, live on streaming video,” Callen added. “We’ve tried to tamp that down, but for all we know, it’s gone viral by now.”

  “Look,” Sam said. “We’re not trying to jam you up. There’s something going on here, and it involves you, and you’re still Navy. We think it also involves Bobby Sanchez. You know what happened to him?”

  Martin’s expression softened for the first time. He nodded glumly. “I heard.”

  “So help us help you, man. Tell us what’s going on.”

  “I’m only guessing on a lot of it,” Martin admitted.

  “That’s cool. So are we. Between what you know and what we do, maybe we can make sense of it.”

  “Start at the beginning,” Callen said. “Who else knew about the Bostic identity?”

  Martin took in a deep breath and eyed his two interrogators. Then, as if indicating that he’d reached a decision, he let it out and began. “Just Bobby.”

  “Sanchez was tortured,” Sam said.

  “That’s what I heard on the news.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I think I do now. At first, I wasn’t so sure. I just figured that if it happened to him, I might be next. Bobby was a fighter. I wouldn’t want to go up against him. So anybody who could do that to him was serious trouble. I figured it might be a good idea to disappear for a while.”

  “Logical conclusion,” Sam said.

  “I think there’s a ‘but’ coming,” Callen said.

  “But…” Martin continued.

  “There it is.”

  Martin ignored him and kept going. “…when I got to El Paso, I could tell somebody had already been in the house. The car was missing
from the garage, and some of my ID paperwork was gone. I checked my bank balance online, and found that the account had been drained. If Bobby had been found right away, I might have made it there first, but instead whoever killed him had a head start.”

  “How do you think someone got onto it?”

  “There’s only one possible answer to that. Bobby caved. I never thought he would, but he’s been in pretty bad shape lately. PTSD, depression. He’s a great guy, and he’s been trained to resist torture. But everybody has a breaking point, and his resistance might not have been the best, considering.”

  “So you came back to L.A.,” Sam said. “Why?”

  “By then I wasn’t scared, I was just pissed. I wanted to get my hands on whoever had hurt Bobby and taken my ID. When my car was called out as the getaway vehicle, I caught the first flight back here. I couldn’t stay in El Paso, anyway.”

  “How did you find them at the motel?” Callen asked.

  “A post on an internet personals page,” Martin said. “It said, ‘Mitch Bostic we have something of yours’ and gave the address.”

  “That’s pretty specific.”

  “I knew it was a trap. The whole point of using my car—letting it be seen and identified—was a trap to draw me into range. But I thought knowing that would give me an edge.”

  “You don’t seem to have any stray holes in you,” Callen said. “So I guess it did.”

  “Yeah, well, they didn’t get me but I didn’t get them, either. I call it a draw.”

  “Maybe a little better than that,” Sam said. “Since it was four to one.”

  “But I’m a Navy SEAL.”

  “Good point,” Sam said. “What about downtown?”

  “I was meeting a friend. Guess you guys have blown that for me.”

  “You still have friends you trust?” Callen asked. “Even with everything that’s going on?”

  Martin shrugged. “A couple. Maybe one less, now.”

  “Which brings us to the next big question. Do you know who they are?”

  Sam could read Martin’s thoughts by the way his lips tightened and his eyes shifted to the left. “We really are on your side, Kelly,” he said. “We want to find those guys before they hurt anybody else.”

  Martin’s face remained frozen a few seconds longer. He was thinking it over. Finally, he shifted his gaze to meet Sam’s. “It’s all I’ve been thinking about for days. I think I might know,” he said. “Not who they are, precisely. But why they’re after me.”

  “That’s a start,” Callen said.

  “It’s mostly just a guess at this point, but I think it’s the likeliest one.”

  “We all make enemies in this business,” Sam said. “You’re in the best position to know who yours are.”

  “Yeah, I guess there are plenty of people who’d like to take me out. But I’m pretty sure I can narrow it down in this case. When I was in Ramadi, back in oh-seven, Bobby and I came across four private security contractors who had just slaughtered six or seven Iraqi nationals outside this museum. They said they’d been ambushed, and in those days, in that place, that wasn’t hard to believe. We thought they were acting a little strange, and there were parts of their story that didn’t hold up. But we had just wrapped a pretty hairy mission ourselves. We went back to our base and hit the sack, and didn’t think much about it for a few days.”

  “What happened then?” Sam asked.

  “Nothing,” Martin replied. “Nothing at all. We didn’t see any official investigation of the incident. It was like the military brass never heard about it. But on the Iraqi side, it turned out people were talking about it. Only they were blaming al-Qaeda for the massacre. And the theft.”

  “Theft?” Sam hadn’t been sure there was anything about this story that would be surprising, instead of just sad. But this had come out of nowhere. “What theft?”

  “I said it was a museum, right? There were all these ancient artifacts in it. I never even heard what they all were, but one that the locals were upset about was a stone tablet that showed how to translate Sumerian into Akkadian, or something like that. Almost like a Rosetta Stone thing, I guess.”

  “But from the people who invented the first writing system,” Sam observed. “I can see why they’d be unhappy about losing it.”

  “Did you report what you knew?” Callen asked.

  “We didn’t really know anything. All we had were suspicions. For all we knew, the contractors really had been ambushed. A couple of the people they’d killed were wearing uniforms, not like police uniforms, so they could have been museum guards. But the guys might have taken off right after us, like they said they were going to. At that point, anybody could have gone into the museum and lifted whatever they wanted. We didn’t even know who the contractors were or where they were based, so we couldn’t exactly tell anyone to go search their bunks.”

  “And you hadn’t raised the alarm right off the bat,” Callen pointed out. “So you didn’t want to call attention to that.”

  “We had our own crap to worry about,” Martin snapped. “Ramadi was crawling with AQ, mostly operating out of a neighborhood called the Ma’Laab. We were trying to make it safe for our guys to put up a barrier. There was an op, called Operation Murfreesboro, which was intended to weed out the AQ presence there. It worked, too, but it wouldn’t have if we hadn’t cleared the way.”

  “I remember it,” Sam said. “Ramadi was a lot quieter after that.”

  “Bet your ass it was. So yeah, maybe we made a mistake. But we had a mission, and we did it, and it saved a lot of lives. American and Iraqi.”

  “Nobody’s questioning that,” Sam assured him. “I’m just trying to figure out the connection. If you’ve kept quiet all those years, then why would those guys be after you now?”

  “That’s what I can’t figure out,” Martin said. “After the firefight at the motel, I’m more convinced than ever it was them. They just fought like guys who’d been in the sandbox, you know? But I have no idea why they’re trying to kill me. That part’s just a gigantic question mark, far as I’m concerned.”

  Sam was going to answer, but the big video monitor behind him blinked to life with a buzz. He turned around to see the screen. Hetty.

  She didn’t waste any time. “Sam, I believe I can make Mr. Martin’s question mark go away.”

  12

  Kensi parked the Escalade in front of the Westwood apartment building where she had dropped Julianne Mercer off. It seemed like a week ago, or a month, but it had really been a matter of hours.

  “Nice place,” Deeks said as he climbed out. “Ritzy.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. The elevators magically know where you’re going.”

  “Magic? I like it.”

  “Well, the security guard in the lobby might have something to do with it.”

  “I like magic better, but it’s all illusion, right? Prestidigitation. Sleight of hand.”

  “What did you have for breakfast, a thesaurus?”

  “You know what I had for breakfast, Kenselina,” Deeks replied. “You gazed lovingly at me while I ate it.”

  “Maybe I was gazing lovingly at your Frosted Flakes.”

  “It was a Belgian waffle, as you well know, and it was delicious.”

  They passed through the big front doors, into the cavernous lobby. The security guard looked very small at the far end of the room. Deeks didn’t think he seemed very intimidating, but who knew what he had behind that high counter? A faraway security guard with a flamethrower or a bazooka could be plenty scary.

  Kensi’s heels echoed as she strode across the marble floor. “Excuse me,” she said, even though the guard’s attention was already riveted on her. “Do you remember me? I’m a federal agent. I was here last night with Julianne Mercer.”

  “I remember,” the guard said. He was probably in his sixties, but fit, and he didn’t look like someone who missed much.

  “Ms. Mercer is deceased,” Kensi said.

  “
I heard.”

  “We need to take a look in her apartment.”

  “Then I’m sure you have a warrant.”

  “We can get one, if it’s necessary. We were hoping to do it the easy way, before anybody else gets in there and compromises any evidence. You know she trusted me.”

  “I know you went up in the elevator with her. You didn’t look like close friends. For all I knew, she could have been under arrest.”

  “Are you going to be a hardass about this?”

  “That’s why I get the big bucks. The tenants here value their privacy.”

  “I’m sure they do. Okay, we’ll play it that way. I’ll go get a warrant. Deeks, stay here and make sure nobody goes near Mercer’s apartment.”

  “Gladly!” Deeks said, considerably louder than was necessary. He spun toward a sitting area. “Are those leather? I love leather!” Before the guard could respond, Deeks rushed over, hurled himself onto a couch, and put his sneakers up on a glass-topped coffee table. “This is cool, right? My shoes are almost new. Hey, do you have a snack machine? Or microwave popcorn? I love that stuff. Kens, you’ll be gone long enough for me to order in a pizza, right?”

  He caught the guard’s seething glare. “Do you like pepperoni? You look like a guy who wants the works. That’s cool, we can do that. Take your time, Kens. Charlie and I will get acquainted. That’s your name, isn’t it? Charlie?”

  “It’s Bryce,” the guard said.

  “Bryce? That’s a kid’s name. You look like a Charlie to me.”

  “Make yourself comfortable, Deeks,” Kensi said. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”

  “All right,” the guard said softly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You win. Go on up.”

  “Got a key?”

  “I’ll let you in,” he said.

  “See?” Kensi said, extending a hand to help Deeks to his feet. “Magic.”

  13

  They went up.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird?” Deeks asked as the magic elevator whisked them skyward.

  “What, that you could so thoroughly grate on someone in a matter of seconds that he couldn’t wait to get rid of you? Not in the slightest.”