Bite Back Box Set 2

by Mark Henwick

  “He could be heading out to the Santa Monica Mountains looking for somewhere to throw the suitcases,” Keith said.

  “Stop him?” Julie was holding her cell, ready to make the call.

  My decision.

  “No,” I said. “He’s too smart. He wouldn’t have had her at his house, and suitcases can be traced. He’s got to suspect he’s being watched, even if he doesn’t know who it is.” I paused. “It might even be a trap to flush us out.”

  A clever move. If we stopped him and it turned out the cases were empty, he’d have enough ammunition to stop the entire police investigation and probably get us arrested.

  But if the cases weren’t empty?

  I leaned on the table and studied the map.

  Julie edged the marker indicating Forsythe and Spiegler further down Santa Monica Boulevard. I traced where it ran, into Santa Monica itself, down on the coast. North to the parks and mountains. South to the marina. And…

  “Jen, get Matt to check out whether Forsythe has a private aircraft, maybe in a hangar at Santa Monica airport, or a yacht at the Marina Del Rey.”

  No airline tickets, Matt had said, but Forsythe didn’t need airlines if he had his own plane.

  A minute later, Spiegler turned off the freeway to take Olympic Boulevard.

  Could mean either the marina or the airport.

  “Matt says Forsythe has a yacht,” Jen reported. “And Spiegler runs a company that owns a business jet.”

  A jet.

  Is he running?

  A film of sweat cooled on my forehead.

  Double bluff?

  Getting out right under our noses because we were too afraid to act until it was too late?

  I hedged. “Ask Billie if she can get to the airport ahead of them and take photos of them getting on the plane with those cases. If that’s where they’re going.”

  Julie relayed.

  “And ask Matt what kind of aircraft. What capability.”

  “Cessna Citation Mustang,” Jen read off her screen. “Four passengers. Range of 1200 miles, flies about 400 mph.”

  Shit. 1200 miles from LA! Dallas. Kansas City. Seattle. More than half of the USA in three hours. Most of the way to Mexico City.

  Is he running?

  “Ask Matt if he can hack the database for flight plans and tell us where they’re going.”

  Stop them now?

  Call Reed?

  I didn’t even know if Reed had told Forsythe to remain available for the investigation. And calling him now, after he’d told me to keep out of it, would only cause more problems. We needed some slam-dunk evidence.

  “Matt says nothing on the international flight plans,” Jen said, and minute later: “Nothing on domestic flight plans either.”

  “You don’t need to file flight plans for domestic flights,” Yelena said.

  Jen clicked on another message from Matt. “Spiegler’s company charters the jet out to business people, mainly US travel. They provide flight crews, and he can’t find any evidence that Forsythe or Spiegler is qualified to fly it, so there’s probably a pilot on board if that’s where they’re going.”

  “Good info,” I said.

  If they were flying somewhere, there would be another witness. And if we were right on it, Reed could arrange to have the plane met wherever it landed in the time it took to get there.

  “Turned onto Ocean Park,” Julie said. “Looks like the airport all right. Billie’s inside and she says any speeding tickets are coming to you.”

  I smiled, even as I wondered whether Tamanny might be on the plane already. Not unless the pilot was part of it. In a small four-seat jet, the pilot would be able to see every seat. Just too risky for Forsythe. This still felt like hiding evidence to me.

  And if he’d taken the chance and had gotten Tamanny on board, there were more layers of risk. The plane would be kept in a hangar in the middle of the airport; it would be difficult to get someone on board without anyone noticing. Security issues would spiral out of control.

  Not his style.

  No. Gut decision time. Tamanny wasn’t on board. Forsythe wasn’t running. That left him removing two suitcases of evidence to take them somewhere in the west of the US.

  He didn’t need to file a flight plan, but we’d know where he landed. The jet wasn’t the kind you could put down on a farm strip. It needed asphalt, and a lot of it. Any airport would log his arrival.

  What’s in those cases?

  If we knew where he was going, there was a chance that we could have someone ready to tail him when he landed. At least we’d know where the suitcases went. Then maybe…

  “Loading,” Julie said. “Both of them have gone inside.”

  “What—”

  Keith held up his hand. He’d taken over talking to Billie. “Billie’s stolen a handheld from a loader truck. What’s the radio frequency for the plane to talk to the tower?”

  Yelena rattled something on a keyboard. “One two zero decimal one zero.”

  “Forsythe’s getting back out,” Julie said. “Doors closing.”

  I let out a long-held breath.

  Yelena took over the cell that Billie was calling on and started to brief her, switching her to speaker so we could all follow.

  We could hear Billie’s voice over a background of hissing and cracking. “Why can’t they speak frigging English?” she complained.

  “Once he’s airborne, the pilot will switch to calling himself Cessna Zero Charlie Mike, okay?” Yelena said. “And he’ll probably refer to his destination using four phonetic letters starting with Kilo.”

  “Yeah, yeah, got it,” Billie said. “Hold on. He’s talking.” There was more buzzing background.

  “Jesus Christ! Listening to this is making my head hurt. Okay, he said something about overhead Kilo Bravo Uniform Romeo and en route Kilo Alpha Papa Alpha.”

  “He’s saying he’ll pass over Burbank, and he’s heading for Centennial at Denver,” Yelena translated.

  She and I looked at each other. We had one of those silent moments of complete understanding and agreement. Wherever the pilot had said, Spiegler wasn’t heading for Forsythe’s house in Denver. It was too obvious, too open, too unsecure. If the evidence in those suitcases was critical enough it needed to be out of LA, no way was she trying to hide it in his Denver house.

  “She’s not going to the house he owns in Denver,” I said. “So where?”

  Jen got Matt looking for other secure places that Forsythe might have access to in Denver.

  I looked at the maps. They were no good; they stopped at the boundaries of LA county.

  “If he’s told traffic control he’s heading for Centennial, is that like a flight plan?” I asked Yelena. “He’s expected there?”

  She shook her head. “It’s just to give them a vector for him to leave their area.”

  She got Jen to pass over the data that Matt had downloaded on the past operations of Spiegler’s jet.

  I grabbed Keith’s laptop and looked at a map of the western US.

  Yelena was frowning and copying numbers into a spreadsheet. “Yeah. These fuel costs aren’t right. No way this plane flies to Denver when Forsythe’s on board. Denver’s 900 miles from LA. He’d have to refuel there.”

  “He’s never flown to Denver?”

  “No, he flies to Centennial once or twice a year according to this data. The rest of the time he goes somewhere else, doesn’t record where, and comes back with…uh…say, half a tank.”

  I looked at the map.

  Something tugged at the corner of my memory. Forsythe’s house in Denver. The study.

  “Bellagio,” I said.

  Everyone looked at me.

  “It’s less than 300 miles to Vegas. Say 600 round trip. Half a tank. Vegas is pretty much directly on the way, so any LA radar pattern would show him heading the right way. Would that fit the fuel patterns you can see?”

  Yelena nodded.

  “Bellagio is one of the big casinos in Vegas,�
�� Jen said. “Why that one?”

  “We found a Bellagio chip in Forsythe’s house in Denver.”

  Vegas.

  Forsythe was involved in trafficking.

  Cash and clients flowed through Vegas. Child prostitution. Money laundering. Big empty spaces.

  Did he split his operation? Half in LA, half in Vegas?

  But if LA was his public face, Vegas would be where his criminal dealings were. And somewhere in Vegas he would have a place. With a basement. Vegas would be where he’d move Tamanny.

  Everyone was waiting. Time for another leap in the dark. Another opportunity to get it completely wrong and miss some vital clue.

  “He owns something in Vegas,” I said. “That’s where Spiegler is heading.”

  “That jet cruises at 350 knots,” Yelena said. “We’ve got less than an hour.”

  “We might be lucky.”

  We needed to be.

  I was. I called Nick Grey. Lynch, the were-cougar who’d needed our help changing at the ritual, had returned to Vegas, and Nick had his number.

  Five minutes later, I had a surprised and eager Lynch on the phone.

  “Of course, Ms. Farrell. You don’t need to ask. I’m getting in the truck and heading for the closest airport now.”

  “It’s Amber, and I do need to ask. You’re not my pack and you don’t owe me anything.”

  “Except my life.”

  I snorted.

  “What about the local pack?” I said. “You weren’t in when you came to Denver.”

  I heard the background sounds of his truck starting.

  “The Vegas alpha is walking a line,” Lynch said. “The big pack around here isn’t Vegas, it’s Toiyabe. They claim all of Nye County from the Toiyabe Range right down to the edge of Vegas.”

  “They’ve got a problem with you?”

  “They might. They’re not Confederation, but they’re linked by family to Wind River.”

  The Wind River pack, one of the three founding packs of the Confederation. The pack that had gone down to New Mexico to try and challenge Felix for Colorado. The pack whose alpha Julie had killed the same night that pack had been mauled by a combination of the Denver, Cimarron and Cheyenne packs.

  The Vegas alpha wouldn’t want to flaunt his adoption of a were-cougar in the face of that. They wouldn’t be in a hurry to help us.

  Everywhere we turned, there were complications.

  “We’ll talk about packs some other time,” I said. “You said the closest airport. How many?”

  “Three. The main international—”

  “Forget that one. The other two.”

  “Henderson Executive. That’s where I’m heading. It’s the most likely, I think. Ten miles or so south of the city, and I’m fifteen minutes away. The other one’s North Las Vegas.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Lynch, and call when you’re there, please. This is strictly watching from a distance, got it?”

  “Sure.”

  I ended the call.

  “Matt says there’s no information directly linking Spiegler or Forsythe with property in Las Vegas,” Jen said. “He’s still searching.”

  “He could have it hidden through several levels of ownership,” I said.

  “Might not even belong to him?”

  “I guess, but it doesn’t feel right.”

  I did some math in my head. “Plenty of time.” I hoped fifteen minutes was plenty of time. “Now, we wait.”

  “And hope.”

  Keith was listening on the cell he was using to talk to the stakeout teams watching Judge Veringen. He held up his hand to get my attention.

  “Situation here.”

  Chapter 55

  He switched the cell to speaker.

  “…she’s back outside, on her cell. I tell you, she don’t like what’s in there.”

  “Hold it,” Keith said to him and turned to me. “Someone visiting the judge, cleaning service maybe, just let herself in, came straight back out and upchucked on the flowers.”

  Shit.

  Gut call said the judge was dead.

  I could see two scenarios. Either the judge’s conscience got the better of him, or Forsythe decided he was a loose end.

  “Pull the teams back. Now,” I said. “If any of them in the area have a police band scanner, listen in. Get them to meet somewhere at least a mile away and call when they’re all together.”

  Keith and Julie made the calls.

  A couple of them had scanners in the cars. Not a bad idea for werewolves keeping a low profile.

  They relayed the calls over their cells. Cleaning lady reporting owner deceased. Apparent gunshot wounds. Ambulance on way.

  The address went out and a patrol unit responded.

  I checked the map. They’d be coming up from Sunset. Our lookout teams would be well out of the way.

  We listened as it unrolled in slow motion.

  The squad car reported being on the scene. A minute later one of the patrolmen called in with code 11-44.

  Dead body. Coroner required.

  I could imagine the scene.

  The uniforms would tape the house off.

  Detectives and a Crime Scene team from the Hollywood Division would be on their way.

  The media listened to scanners as well, and they knew what code 11-44 meant. The address had gone out. Someone was going to put things together and realize Judge Veringen was dead in suspicious circumstances, and when they did, a TV crew would be on site minutes later.

  There was nothing more we could do except listen.

  Lynch called from Henderson airport. No sign yet of Spiegler’s jet. She was late, or we’d guessed wrong.

  Matt still couldn’t find anything indicating Forsythe or Spiegler owned property in the Las Vegas area. A couple of people who worked for Forsythe’s show did.

  I shook my head. Something so important that it had to be flown out of LA, Forsythe wouldn’t trust that in anyone else’s hands.

  A detective arriving at the judge’s house passed some coded banter over the radio with a colleague attending another scene elsewhere in the division. I was sure they’d just bet on who would get the homicide case. It was the sort of graveyard humor they needed to get through the day, and it might give us our first indication of what had happened.

  At the same time, the judge’s stakeout teams got together in the parking lot of a mall and Julie started talking them through what they’d seen, trying to find if there had been any suspicious activity.

  Then Keith found newsfeeds. KLOX, KCBS and KNBC all had crews at the judge’s house. The on-scene reporters were making statements identifying the victim as Judge Veringen. They were circling like vultures, eager to be the first to break the inside news, reluctant to be the first to get it wrong.

  In the background, a guy whose look yelled ‘detective’ came out of the house and spoke on his cell, ignoring shouted questions from the reporters.

  There was no tension or urgency in his movements.

  That might just be his style.

  Then the KLOX reporter who’d gotten there last took the plunge and called it apparent suicide.

  The others followed like ducklings.

  Was it suicide? The stakeout teams, for all their enthusiasm, weren’t experts. I could have gotten a whole platoon of Ops 4-10 past them and they’d never have known. If Forsythe wanted to get rid of a judge to tie up loose ends, he’d use a professional.

  Lynch gave up at Henderson and set off for North Las Vegas. We’d guessed wrong.

  Damn.

  “Amber.” Keith pointed at the screen.

  The woman from KLOX was practically hyperventilating, listening to her earbud and trying to present at the same time.

  “And in breaking news here on KLOX…” She nodded unconsciously at her invisible source and then gave all her attention to the camera. Her face became very serious. “Questions are being asked as to whether the suicide of Judge Veringen this morning was in any way related to stories that are e
merging linking him to events at the StarBright fashion show yesterday. A fashion show from which a young woman contestant in the Tomorrow’s Faces competition, Tamanny Harper, is alleged to have gone missing.”

  For a second her face registered that she’d either gotten way ahead of the news curve, or effectively shredded her contract. Then training took over.

  “This is Jay Portillo, for KLOX, your LA news as it happens.”

  The screen flashed back to the studio where the anchor was blinking uncertainly at the camera.

  “That was Jay Portillo, reporting on the…err…death of Judge Veringen in West Hollywood this morning. And we have…” Her eyes flicked to the side and her voice became stronger, more confident. “We have an excerpt just coming in of an exclusive interview offered to KLOX by Tanner Forsythe, the owner of the Tomorrow’s Faces show, and organizer of the StarBright fashion event. We will broadcast the full interview shortly, and clearly, we’ll be discussing this topic and any developments in full during the day.”

  Forsythe’s face was suddenly onscreen.

  The shock of it was like being punched in the gut.

  His grinning face is right in front of mine. Sweat on his face. Eyes bright and manic.

  Others shouting. “Close up! Close up!”

  “Fuck, yeah,” he yells.

  Pain. Screaming. I will never be free.

  Jen’s hand was on my arm. I was free. I chose to be free.

  He was dead. He just didn’t know it yet.

  “Yes, Judge Veringen was there, and of course I know him,” Forsythe was saying. “We’ve met socially on many occasions.”

  “Were you surprised by his presence at a teen fashion show?” he was asked.

  “I wasn’t surprised to see him, no. Very many well-known people attend my events. Maybe he was picking some dresses for his daughter. I really wouldn’t want to speculate on that, or his death this morning. It’s not constructive to speculate. We have no knowledge yet.”

  “But it would appear highly unusual that your star goes missing, and a day later a judge who was present commits suicide.”

  “We know nothing yet. From all appearances, Judge Veringen was a respectable family man. Meantime, this is obviously a tragedy for Tamanny’s family, and a disaster for my company. I spent last night doing my utmost to assist with the search for Tamanny. I will continue to do so. My only concern at the moment is her safe return…”