Unwilling Accomplice - Barbara Seranella

by Barbara Seranella

  Mrs. Zimmer summoned Rachel and told the rest of her students to work on their math.

  Munch knelt before Rachel, bringing them eye level with each other.

  "Did you see Jill go with her sister?"

  Rachel nodded, no doubt wondering if she was in trouble.

  "Yes. They went out to the parking lot."

  "Were they happy or sad?"

  Rachel looked down and to her right. "Kind of both."

  "What were they doing?"

  "They hugged each other. I guess they were happy. They both smiled. Charlotte smiled, but then she was crying, too. I think it was happy crying."

  "Was there anyone else with them? A grown-up maybe?"

  Rachel scrunched her nose in concentration, then looked at the two adults wide-eyed. "No, and you know what?"

  "What?" Munch asked.

  "Charlotte had car keys and she got in the driver’s side. She’s not old enough to drive, is she?"

  "Not legally but that doesn’t always mean a whole lot." Munch patted Rachel’s cheek. "Thanks, honey You’ve been a big help. You didn’t happen to notice what kind of car it was, did you?"

  Rachel nodded importantly. "A green one, but not as big as yours."

  Lisa’s Dodge Dart had been green. Munch thanked the kid again. As soon as she was out of the classroom, she started running. She burst into the office. "I need the phone, now. "

  The woman who had been sluggish before stood at once.

  "Has someone been ‘hurt?"

  Munch lifted the receiver without answering and dialed Rico’s direct line.

  "Chacon."

  She explained where she was and what had happened.

  "Do you know the Dodge’s plate number?"

  "No. It’s a sixty-eight, I think."

  "I’ll see if it’s registered in her name."

  "Are you going to talk to her?" Munch asked. Lisa was going to freak. Or not.

  "Yeah, I’ll call the jail right now."

  "I think you should go see her in person. See how surprised she is."

  "You think she’s involved in this, too?"

  "I wouldn’t put anything past that bitch. Listen to this."

  Munch ran down the connection between "Micky;" the owner of the storage business, whom Lisa had known, and the nickname Mouseman.

  The woman behind the desk raised her eyebrows. Munch didn’t owe her an explanation. Maybe an apology for the language, although in truth she was being restrained.

  "What are you going to do now?" Rico asked.

  "I'm in a customer’s car. I have to take it back to work. If you hear anything, call me there."

  She hung up and turned to the woman. "Thanks. I’m sorry for the uproar."

  "Will you let us know when you find Jill?" The woman seemed genuinely concerned.

  "Sure." Munch hoped that the next report wouldn’t come from the evening news. She feared an ending to all of this that would make the headlines.

  Outside, in the parking lot, Munch lifted the Volvo’s hood. The source of the clunking noise was soon evident. Shavings of bright silver metal caught her eye. The three nuts that fastened the strut assembly to the body had worked loose. The tie-rod ends of the rack-and-pinion steering system attached to the spindle assembly at the bottom of the strut. So all the symptoms were accounted for. Her drastic U-turn must have worsened the condition. Fortunately the nuts were seventeen millimeter, same as the lug nuts. She went in the trunk, retrieved the lug wrench, and snugged the hardware back onto the strut housing studs. The car would need a wheel alignment, but now it was safe to drive.

  Pulling into the station, she was surprised to see she'd only been gone forty minutes. Lou was only a little perturbed with her.

  "You’ve got this guy’s been waiting for you," he said, jerking his thumb toward a brown Datsun 28OZ. Munch glanced at the license plate. The first three letters were VFW Veterans of Foreign Wars, she thought to herself.

  "Where is he?"

  "He said something about getting coffee."

  Munch explained about what had happened at the school and what she had found was wrong with the Volvo.

  "At least something good happened," he said.

  "Yeah, I feel very blessed."

  "Here comes that guy with the Datsun." They both turned.

  The owner of the Datsun was Chet Lombardi, Charlotte’s guidance counselor. He smiled when he saw her.

  "I was in the neighborhood," he said.

  "I’ve got some flyers for you, although you might not need to put them up."

  "Have you heard from Charlotte?"

  "She just took her sister out of school. I don’t know what she’s up to but at least she’s still in one piece."

  "Did you speak to her?"

  "I just missed her. Have any of her friends at school been in touch with her?"

  "Not that they’re saying. She needs to stop this nonsense and come home."

  "Nonsense is a little strong," Munch said.

  He looked at her sharply Munch supposed that in his business he was finally tuned to sarcasm. She felt a twinge of remorse. It wasn’t him she was mad at.

  "Will she go to your house?" he asked.

  "I don’t know. I hope she does so I can help her sort out her problems. I'd like to get her some professional help. She might need to be on medication."

  "Do you think she’s delusional?"

  "Possibly. There’s a lot of that going around." Munch thought that in Charlotte’s case, she probably felt that her life was crappy and was not going to get better anytime soon. Any therapist or counselor would have difficulty saying that wasn’t so. But there was hope. That’s what Charlotte needed to know. That’s what Munch would tell her if she got the chance.

  Lombardi was studying her. He was probably thinking that she was the one who needed medication. At times she wished she wasn’t an addict and that she could take drugs. The problem with that was she knew if she used any form of mind-altering substance, she would be using said substance all the time. Therein, ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages, lay the rub.

  But this situation wasn’t about her. "Did Charlotte ever mention a guy named Micky?" she asked the counselor, chastising herself for her self-absorption.

  "A boyfriend?" he asked.

  "I hope not. This guy is older. He owns a business and he takes the kids to Disneyland. From what I’ve gathered, I think he’s also this guy known on the street as Mouseman, runs a burglary ring of kids."

  "A modern-day Fagin," Lombardi said.

  "Something like that. Let’s not romanticize it. This guy screws up these kids’ lives under the guise of being a friend."

  Munch noticed Lombardi’s coffee was getting cold. "Don’t you have to get to work?"

  "I have sliding hours. Is there anything I can do to help you? Can you think of anywhere the girls might have gone?"

  "No. I’m in much the same dark as you."

  Thirty minutes after Lombardi had left, Colin Webster pulled up to the gas pumps. Munch recognized the bright red car. She made eye contact and he gestured for her to come over.

  "Check your oil, sir?" she asked.

  A gleam of excitement was in his eye. "I have news."

  "Someone offer you the merchandise?" She spoke out of the side of her mouth, sensing he would enjoy the air of intrigue. He nodded. "I made them describe the cameo in detail. I’m sure it’s the same one. I told him I would need to inspect the goods."

  "What arrangements did you make?"

  "I asked him to meet me at a restaurant in Westwood this evening"

  Munch smiled. "How would you like to arrive in a limousine?"

  He gave her his address and they agreed on a seven o’clock pickup.

  Rico arrived at noon with a composite sketch of the delivery driver for the now nonexistent Mobile Pet Supply As composite sketches went, it wasn’t bad. It easily narrowed the search to fewer than six thousand young white males in Los Angeles County.

  "Any word on
the girls?" she asked.

  "No, you wouldn’t believe how many sixty-eight Dodge Darts are on the road. We’ve pulled at least fifty traffic stops this morning already; and not one of them a hit. She’s either long gone or the car is stashed in a garage somewhere."

  Munch was disappointed, but not as worried as she had been all week. From what she’d seen of her nieces, they had good survival skills. She looked at the sketch again.

  "This could be the kid who died in Hollywood. Dave Limitz."

  Rico chewed on his lower lip. "The Hollywood PD has located his family. I’ll check with them and get a photograph. Maybe one of the burglary victims can pick him out of a six-pack." By six-pack Munch knew Rico was referring to a group of six photographs of similar-looking young men. lt was the police’s two-dimensional version of a lineup.

  "Wouldn’t really do to stand a corpse up alongside five other guys, would it?" she asked.

  "No," he said. "That’s what we would call a dead giveaway"

  When her hysteria finally died down, she decided she loved him. That she had never stopped loving him and couldn’t picture herself with anyone else. What she said was "You’re a sick man."

  "That’s my charm," he said. "We went back to the storage company with a warrant and searched the other units."

  "Find anything?"

  "It was strangely vacant. Your buddy with the bare feet was gone and several of the larger lockers were cleaned out." He lowered his voice. "I found some food wrappers, empty water bottles, and a couple of strands of hair. They might have been Charlotte’s. We’re testing them now."

  Munch absorbed the information. "How about the owner, Micky Did you get a line on him?"

  "The business is registered to a corporation. It’s going to take a little time to unwind the paperwork and come up with a name."

  "The name of the corporation wasn"t Sullivan Development, was it?" Weren’t Irishmen referred to as micks? Could Meg’s husband be Mouseman? Were the burglaries a source of merchandise for the antique store in Westwood?

  "No," Rico said. "But corporations can be formed by anyone with a little bit of money and paperwork."

  She told him about the stolen jewelry and her planned sting with the cameo.

  He thought a moment, then said, "When the seller produces the goods, and your buyer is sure it’s the stolen property, roll a stop sign. I’ll have a black-and-white pull you over. You just get out of the car like you don’t know what’s going on and we'll take it from there."

  "Sounds simple enough."

  "Simple is best," he said. "But even simple can go very wrong."

  "What about Lisa?"

  "That’s the other thing. She’s no longer in custody."

  "Since when? "

  "They kicked her out early this morning. The last thing she told the public defender was that she was going to sue us."

  "Sue who? The police?"

  "You and me."

  Munch scowled. "For what?"

  "Emotional duress."

  "I’ll give her duress," Munch said. "I’ve got her duress hanging." She aped an impression of a tough guy. A tough guy who would use the word duress. She didn’t know whether to be really pissed or to laugh. "The nerve of this woman." She pronounced nerve a la Curly of the Three Stooges. "What did the public defender say?"

  "Nothing, they hear that kind of shit all the time. I wish I'd known she was going to court this morning. I would have delayed her paperwork."

  "What you should’ve misplaced was her insulin."

  Rico looked mildly shocked. "You don’t really mean that."

  "I guess not." Munch didn’t see herself capable of premeditated murder, but that didn’t stop her from wishing certain people would do the honorable thing and die. Her morning reading of the obituaries was part morbid curiosity and part competitive interest. The Italian checklist.

  "Has Kathy called again?" he asked.

  Speaking of certain people. "No, why?"

  "She called my house last night and left a message. She wants to see me."

  "Have you considered changing your number?" Munch’s tone was light, her thoughts were anything but.

  "She’d just call me at work. I’m going to call her tonight and ask her to move on. l’m going to tell her I already have."

  Munch felt this conversation was long overdue. lf he had told Kathy the truth back in February, they might all have been spared a lot of grief. But then again, in February Kathy thought she was having his baby and nothing would have changed. Rico had chosen the baby, or the promise of a baby over what Munch and he had.

  "I thought you’d be happy" Rico said.

  Stupid man, she thought. "Let’s just find those girls. When they’re safe, we’ll talk about what’s going to make us happy. "

  "You’re right. When you’re right, you’re right"

  Chapter 22

  Somehow Munch got through the rest of her day. She was numb with self-recrimination. Jill had been entrusted to her care, and now she was out there somewhere in the big, bad world. Charlotte had taken her sister, and if Munch’s assumptions were correct, Ji1l’s disappearance meant that a valuable key to this whole puzzle was gone. Now with Lisa on the loose, anything was possible. That she hadn’t contacted Munch was telling. There was a good chance the three Slokums were together again. What a mess.

  The shop phone rang at three-thirty. Munch had a weird sensation as she approached the instrument. There were three incoming lines and the phone rang constantly for all different reasons. Customers, suppliers, salesmen, personal calls to the various workers, and the occasional wrong number. She gave out the number for line two to her friends, partly because it was the easiest to remember, and partly because it wasn’t the primary number on the work orders and business cards. That would be line one, the number most often used by customers. Line three was dedicated to the modem on the smog machine, but could be utilized when the other lines were tied up.

  The time between when the ringer sounded, line two lit up, and when she held the receiver to her ear stretched long enough for her to know with certainty that the information she was about to receive was critical.

  "You were right." It was Rico.

  "Which time?" she asked.

  "Dave Limitz has been positively ID’d as the driver for the pet food supply business."

  "Was he from the Venice area?"

  "As a matter of fact, yes. Why do you ask?"

  "Did he go to Venice High?"

  "That’s the other thing," Rico said. "The same school as Steven Koon and Charlotte."

  "His last name started with L." The inside of Munch’s head was screaming,

  Oh-God—Oh-God—Oh-God—shit. "That means Chet Lombardi was his guidance counselor, same as Charlotte and Steve. He was here at the station earlier."

  "The counselor? He came to your work?"

  "Yeah, he said he had a sliding schedule. He seemed just as anxious as I am to locate the missing kids. Now, I have to wonder, how pure are his motives? He asked me twice if I'd spoken to Charlotte. Maybe he’s afraid of what she’ll tell me."

  "Okay, you might have something. I’ll check it out."

  "Check it out? Go pick him up. He might be the one. He might be this Mouseman guy. If so, he’s killed two kids already. Two more won’t be so hard."

  "Whoa," Rico said. "Don’t worry we’ll find him and put a team on him. If he’s the guy he won’t get a chance to hurt anyone else. I have to follow procedure here."

  "What if you can’t find him? He’s on the road. He’s driving a brown Datsun 280Z, seventy-eight, I think. The plate is V-F-W something. I can’t remember the numbers."

  "How do you even remember the letters?"

  "I always look at plates, it’s how we keep track of the work we’ve done. I make a game out of the letters or sound them out. That was an easy one. Veterans of Foreign Wars."

  "All right, we’ll check out the counselor. "

  "Lombardi. Chet Lombardi."

  "I’m on it."<
br />
  "Roger that," she answered, but Rico had already hung up.

  Asia’s school bus arrived at four-fifteen. Munch felt her chest loosen. The bus only stopped here to deliver Asia. At least she hadn’t lost all the children in her care.

  "Is Jill here?" Asia asked.

  "No, I don’t know where she is." Munch explained the circumstances. How Jill had been seen leaving with her sister and that neither had been heard from since.

  "Is she going to be all right?" Asia asked.

  "I hope so. I’m worried about them. Jill shouldn’t have left school."

  "I'm sure you did your best."

  Munch pulled her daughter to her. Asia was such a nurturer.

  "Do you have any homework?" Munch asked, trying to return some sense of normalcy to their world.

  "I have some math, and we’re supposed to write three paragraphs about the missions, and one page on what we think we’ll be doing in twenty years."

  "I’d like to see that one."

  "You want me to do it now?"

  "Get started on it anyway and keep Jasper company. We’ll go home in about twenty minutes."

  Munch followed Asia into Lou’s office. The wood on the bottom of Lou’s door was deeply grooved by Jasper’s claws.

  Munch was touched at this evidence of his devotion. She hoped Lou wouldn’t be too pissed. Asia used to draw on his walls when she was a toddler.

  She watched her daughter unload her backpack. Her delicacy was a recent development. First came her pencil box, then her diary Two books followed: a math primer and an illustrated text about the missions. The last item took Munch’s breath away. It was the video box with the Beta tape.

  "Isn’t this Jill’s?" Munch asked.

  "She said I could borrow it."

  "Have you watched it?"

  "Not yet. Who do we know with a Betamax VCR?"

  "Wel1, there’s Garret."

  "Oh," Asia said. As if Munch, in mentioning her old boyfriend, might as well have told Asia she knew of a cassette player on the moon.

  "Pack up your stuff again, honey. We’re going to leave now."

  Munch made quick arrangements with the night crew, going over the work orders and explaining which vehicles needed to be parked inside the bays overnight, which customers were expected to be picking up their cars, and whose check was all right to take.