Cold Aim

by Janice Cantore

  “The shoot-out wasn’t your fault. And look at the bright side—consider all the business those Feds brought to the town. Business is good even for a small town.” He grinned.

  “Good point. Casey even sold a record number of books during those two weeks.”

  “For two weeks Rogue’s Hollow was on the map.”

  “I just want the Hollow on the map for positive reasons: the river, the Stairsteps, our wonderful lodging, not crime and chaos.”

  “Keeping this girl safe to testify and putting a predator in jail would be extremely positive. In the national arena.” Oliver held his hand out and Tess put hers in it.

  She couldn’t argue with him there.

  “The chaos, I trust you to handle,” he said with a smile.

  She returned the smile. “All right. I’ll locate Agent Bass and tell him it’s a go.”

  –––

  Tess didn’t have to look far for Bass. He was waiting for her at the station.

  “I hope you have good news for me.”

  “I do. The Scaleses have agreed to house your witness. But before you jump for joy, I need to know all the particulars about the case and exactly what Beck is being charged with. And if anything goes right rudder, I’m letting the sheriff in.”

  “Fair enough. If you have the time, I’ll show you everything.”

  “I’ll make the time.” Tess led the agent into her office and sat while he opened his briefcase and passed her a file.

  “First, I’ll admit that this ball got rolling because of a stroke of luck. For the past couple of years, we’ve been conducting training with the airlines on what to look for regarding human trafficking. Traffickers are brazen at times and will fly with girls across country, even out of the country. A flight attendant on a flight from New York to Phoenix noticed something odd about a threesome in first class. She thought the girls looked out of place with the man they were traveling with. She phoned ahead, and Homeland Security in Phoenix met the trio at the gate. Turns out, the girls were being trafficked. One was missing out of Tulsa, and the other from Florida. The man with them couldn’t tell us much—he’d been given the girls by someone else—but he was taking them to the compound in Mesa. That gave us enough probable cause for the raid there.

  “At the compound, we found three more girls. Two were Mexican nationals, the other from California. The disturbing thing is, all the girls went to the compound voluntarily.”

  Tess nodded. “They were runaways. I bet the person who brought them there promised them work or a better life or something.”

  “Exactly, and interestingly enough, they all described being recruited in a way, by a man who promised them high-paying jobs. Once in the compound, they were groomed for something else.”

  “This compound, it belonged to Beck?”

  “Yeah, but it took a while to ferret that out. There were layers of shell companies, fake names—” he waved a hand—“but we figured it out. All the money trails lead to Beck. But it was talking to our adult victim that opened the floodgates. Chevy—that’s what she likes to be called—was brought to Beck’s brothel when she was fifteen. She became his favorite. That is, until she turned eighteen and was too old for him. She wasn’t being altruistic or brave when she stole the iPad; she was jealous because she knew she was about to be replaced. Our raid coincided with her theft, and the tablet is now in our custody.”

  Tess frowned. “He left his tablet out where one of his victims could get to it?”

  “No, she stole it.”

  “That sounds too convenient.” Tess hated coincidences, especially when they were attached to such a large and complex operation. Right now rule #7 said, “Trust but verify.” Should it be “Trust but verify every coincidence”?

  “I’ll take it, whatever you want to call it. We have the cause to ask a judge to issue a warrant for Beck. Evidence is stacking up. We’re hopeful that once we retrieve the information on the tablet, there will be enough evidence to arrest him without bail as a flight risk. While there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence, Chevy is the icing on the cake. She can tell a jury firsthand who Beck really is.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I am. And I’ll tell you, Beck has been at this for a long time. Do you remember the name Porter Cross?”

  Tess leaned back. The name was familiar, and then it clicked. He was a movie producer who, years ago, fell in a hard, public way. “Yes, I do remember that name. I think I was in the academy when he killed himself.”

  “Remember the name Isaac Pink?”

  Tess nodded. “Every cop in Southern California knows that name. He and his family were murdered in their home. The killer or killers were never caught.” She sat up. “Wait—Pink was sheltering a witness, a woman who supposedly had testimony to implicate Cross in a prostitution ring. Are you drawing a parallel here?”

  “Not necessarily a parallel. More like a straight line. That case was the bureau’s first stab at Cross and the first time Cyrus Beck came to our attention outside of environmental issues. The witness had been arrested for prostitution in San Pedro. Pink was a vice sergeant; he interviewed her. Heather Harrison was her name. He believed her when she told him she was being trafficked and forced into prostitution against her will. He contacted the FBI because she claimed she’d been moved from state to state, which made it a federal crime. She gave him the name Porter Cross and mentioned someone named Cyrus she didn’t know as well.”

  “I don’t recall Beck being attached to the Pink case at all.”

  “He wasn’t. Other than the fact that he was a known associate of Cross—they were often photographed at the same Hollywood parties—there was no hard evidence tying him to anything illegal. At the time, the bureau already had an open file on Cross—a lot of smoke, but again, no actionable evidence. Heather didn’t know his last name, but Cyrus was eventually determined to be Beck, and that was a new wrinkle.”

  He sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Back then, trafficking was not understood well, and it was often the women being exploited who suffered the full force of the law and not the traffickers. Sure, the occasional street pimp fell, but there were a lot of others who escaped the long arm of the law. It would have been standard operating procedure for Harrison to be charged and tried for prostitution because of the sweep, with no one considering that maybe it had never been her choice. In one way it was lucky for her that Isaac Pink was the vice cop who interviewed her.”

  “Lucky for her, not for him. Pink and his whole family were murdered with his service revolver, and she disappeared. She’s the prime suspect in the murders. She had access.”

  Tess frowned as she remembered the manhunt for Pink’s killer. Though she was not yet a cop herself at the time, her father was involved; he’d known Pink. And after the case was long cold, Pink’s partner, Aaron Graves, gave a presentation on the investigation to her academy class. He was convinced that Heather Harrison was complicit in the murder but conceded that she hadn’t worked alone. Tess had read that Graves died a couple of years ago, and his dying wish was that no one would forget Pink or stop looking for his killer.

  “That was the line of thinking back then,” Bass said. “When the girl disappeared, the grand jury was canceled. And the case against Cross disintegrated.”

  “Heather Harrison would have to have been a cold character. Along with Pink and his wife, his twelve-year-old daughter was executed that night,” Tess mused out loud.

  “If you truly believe she was the killer.”

  “You doubt that?”

  He shrugged. “There are just a lot of blank spots in the case. Back then, Harrison was not the only potential witness against Cross who disappeared. Twice before, he was implicated in crimes, not pandering, but murder. Once in Florida, a woman who’d been seen with him ended up murdered. Unfortunately, so did the person who could put them together. No charges filed. Then in Mexico he was involved in the deaths of two women. Mexican authorities tried to extradite him, but the case
fell apart when the witnesses recanted or disappeared.”

  “I hadn’t heard about those cases.”

  “They are still open and cold. When Pink contacted the bureau about Harrison, agents tried to stay out of things, make the case look local, so Cross wouldn’t be alerted too soon. But they worried enough about what could happen that they even set up a fake safe house, hoping if Cross did get wind of the investigation, it would draw him out, and maybe they’d catch him in the act coming for the witness.”

  “That was why Pink gave Harrison shelter in his own home.”

  Bass nodded.

  “There was a leak,” Tess said.

  “Yeah, Cross never fell for the fake safe house. The whole thing was only supposed to be for a short time, while a grand jury was seated. Everyone thought the security was tight enough, that Cross was in the dark. But two days before Harrison was set to testify for the grand jury, Pink and his family were murdered, and she disappeared.”

  Hearing his words, Tess felt punched in the stomach, reliving, in a sense, that day the news broke about Pink’s murder. Her father had been livid, inconsolable. Police work was a brotherhood. When a cop fell in the line of duty, it impacted everyone who wore the uniform. And Isaac Pink was slain in his own home with his family—that was particularly heinous. Daniel O’Rourke would have been upset even if he hadn’t known Pink; as it was, they’d attended a couple of training classes together.

  “He was one of the really good guys,” he’d said just before he left to help with the eventually fruitless manhunt.

  Pink died protecting a victim, and not too long after that, her father would be dead protecting a victim. Tess had to swallow and regroup her thoughts. Cops sometimes died protecting people—it was a fact of life.

  “The evidence at the scene was confused and confusing,” Bass continued. “There was no sign of Harrison, but she’d left a note in a jar where the Pink family kept extra cash. The cash was gone, and she apologized for taking it.”

  Tess frowned. “As I recall, that’s one of the reasons they named her as suspect number one.”

  Bass nodded. “It was an emotionally charged investigation. Everyone knew Pink. He was respected and well liked. The viciousness of the crime scene ramped everyone up. Pink’s department conducted a full-on manhunt for the girl. Well, you know every agency in the state was on the hunt for the killer. The agents on the case sat back and let the locals run with it. When Harrison was named as the prime suspect, they hoped it would flush her out, if she were still alive. After all, she stole the money, and Pink’s gun was never recovered.”

  “The case is cold now, still unsolved. But somehow I get the impression you don’t think Harrison is the assassin.”

  “No, I don’t. The man I took over for on the task force was convinced Cross was behind the murders, and I think the evidence backs up that theory. Forensics has come a long way in twenty-five years. Pink’s gun was a .357 caliber revolver. One such slug was removed from his body, but other slugs were recovered as well, from him and the wall behind him, .38 caliber, indicating a second shooter.”

  “Harrison could have had a gun no one knew about.”

  “I’ll concede that. But later we discovered the .38 slugs matched ballistics in other murders in LA. There was also blood evidence by the back door, blood that didn’t belong to any of the Pinks. And Isaac had been on the phone moments before being shot, talking to his partner. He told his partner the house alarm had been disconnected before hanging up, so . . .” Bass shrugged.

  Tess considered this as a memory surfaced. “My dad never believed that Harrison could have killed Pink. The sergeant was too savvy to be shot to death by the girl he was sheltering. Pops believed they were looking for someone completely cold-blooded.”

  “Your pops was wise.”

  Tess shared another of her father’s theories. “Do you think Harrison was killed as well and dumped somewhere else?”

  Bass spread his hands. “She never resurfaced. My guess is, yes, she’s dead. The bureau kept on the case after Cross. He left the country for a time, tried to live off the radar, but ten years later, his appetites eventually betrayed him. He came back to the States, and we caught him for kiddie porn. I was part of the child pornography task force that arrested him. When we caught him, he had more pornography on his computer and in his possession than any person I’d ever investigated.”

  “How did you catch him with the porn?”

  “We got an anonymous tip, then set up a sting. I hate dealing with kiddie porn, but the guy was truly a sick puppy. He fell, hook, line and sinker.”

  “I remember his pretrial press conference. He cried and swore that he was innocent.”

  Bass rolled his eyes. “After his arrest we were flooded with complaints—women, girls, boys, all with stories about what a sick puppy he was and how they’d been exploited. He’d put fear into all of them. Some claimed to know of people he’d murdered to keep them from talking to the cops. Him being in custody made them brave.”

  “Were you ever able to substantiate any of the claims?”

  “A lot of molestation, some rape, but we could never prove any murders. But now we get to the reason I bring Cross up at all. Like I said, Cyrus Beck was one of his closest friends—until, of course, the arrest.”

  Tess nodded, trying to remember more from that time period. It was big news when Cross was arrested.

  Bass continued. “Twenty-five years ago, like now, Beck had a lot of juice. Two years after Pink’s death, an FBI agent working out of the LA office was arrested for being on the take. He was thought to have passed information about federal investigations to several people, one of whom was Cyrus Beck. And this agent was privy to the case involving Harrison.”

  “Beck was the one to compromise Sergeant Pink?”

  “A possibility we could never prove. The agent refused to cooperate, but he was eventually convicted and sent to federal prison. He was killed in a fight after six months in custody.”

  “Wow” was all Tess could say.

  “When I began to poke around into Beck’s association with Cross and started to see some red flags and irregularities—he traveled a lot to Malaysia, Vietnam, countries with reputations for child trafficking—the task force was disbanded under the guise of budget cuts, and I was told to back off. I can’t prove it, but I believe Beck got the door closed on that investigation.”

  Tess nodded. Unfortunately, she believed that was entirely possible. Money could and did circumvent justice.

  “I kept after him anyway, on my own time. I built a file on Beck.” Bass showed her some timelines, a chronological record of the investigation of Cyrus Beck.

  “You’re certain that Beck has been involved in criminal activity for at least twenty-five years.” Tess’s stomach turned at the thought of over two decades of depravity.

  “I am. I haven’t had the hard evidence to prove it in court. Beck and Cross were thick as thieves for a long time before Cross’s death. He had the power to shut down my investigation for a time. But fast-forward to the present, because human trafficking is growing exponentially, it’s in the news all the time now, and another task force was formed. We scooped up Chevy and discovered that she had the iPad.”

  Tess studied the timelines and the accompanying FBI notes. It wasn’t long before she saw a pattern. With every protest Beck sponsored, girls went missing. All over the world, he used his supposed environmental awareness to victimize women. Mesa, where Chevy was apprehended, was also where Beck’s main US home was located. She could see it wasn’t far from the compound that was raided. The photos of the place were impressive. It was everything you’d expect a multimillionaire to have. She bet the estate, spread along a ridgeline, was at least six thousand square feet of living space. She counted three chimneys, a manicured yard, and two swimming pools.

  “He ran a brothel out of his home?”

  Bass shook his head. “The compound in Mesa has no direct links to him—at first glance. It to
ok a lot of digging, but we discovered that one of Beck’s shell companies was listed as owning the property. We believe that because he’s gone untouched for so long, he’s begun to think he’s untouchable. There is also a money trail from Beck to the man detained at the airport.”

  “He’ll flee.”

  “He may try, but we’ll impound his plane when the warrant is issued, and then when we bring him in, we’ll take his passport.”

  Tess glanced at the list of charges. “You have him for murder?”

  “Two prior witnesses, women who contacted the FBI in Arizona about the compound and Beck, have disappeared. We’ve found blood evidence in the compound that leads us to believe they were murdered there. It’s so Hollywood, but there’s a trail of missing women I’ve been following.” Bass shuffled some of the papers from his briefcase. “Something else interesting has come up, something I think exonerates Heather Harrison. For a while now the bureau has been consulting with agencies in Phoenix regarding some unsolved murders of women in the area.”

  “In the past, I’ve heard Phoenix called the unsolved murder capital of the country. A lot of the unsolved cases have female victims, but not many have been proven to be connected.”

  “We’ve linked seven unsolved murders to the same weapon, a .357 Magnum. Isaac Pink’s stolen handgun.”

  Tess sucked in a breath.

  “Right. Unless Harrison has evaded capture all these years and is killing women with Pink’s gun, someone else is. I believe that someone is the person who killed Pink twenty-five years ago.”

  “That’s a leap. Playing devil’s advocate here—Harrison could have given the gun to someone, lost it, or tossed it, even. Or if she is still alive, it could have been taken from her.”

  “Maybe. But I still think it’s a bigger stretch to believe she was involved in any way with Sergeant Pink’s death. And interestingly, Beck has owned this compound in Mesa for as long as Phoenix has been dealing with these record numbers of unsolved murder cases involving women.”