by G. M. Ford
Corso grabbed the remote and worked his way through the stations, looking for more footage of the helicopters. Ten minutes and twice around the dial and nothing. He started around for a third time when a knock on the door announced the arrival of room service. Corso pushed the mute button and threw the remote onto the bed.
Andriatta bounced up and opened the door. A brace of liveried waiters rolled a pair of pink-draped carts into the room. She followed the carts across the carpet like a hound dog on a trail, pulling metal covers from the plates as the caravan moved along.
By the time Corso had the wine decanted to his satisfaction, had tipped the waiters and sent them on their way, she was already halfway through her potato and making a serious dent in the chateaubriand for two.
Corso poured her a glass of wine, then watched with amusement as she put it down in a single swallow. He gave her a refill and started in on his own dinner.
They ate in silence, watching the muted television cycle from the local news to the world news and back. By the time Corso pushed himself back from the table, they’d made a serious dent in the second bottle of wine and a game show had replaced the news.
Chris Andriatta pointed across the table at Corso’s unfinished pasta. “You going to finish that?” she asked. Corso shook his head and watched as the remains of his dinner found its way onto her fork and down her throat.
Having consumed everything except the napkin rings, Andriatta wiped her lips with the starched napkin and dropped it into her plate with a flourish. “That was great,” she pronounced.
“It’s amazing you can eat all of that and stay…” He searched for the right word. “…you know and stay relatively svelte.”
She furrowed her brow. “Wadda you mean relatively?” she demanded. The wine had added slur to her speech. “I’ll have you know I’m the same weight I was when I graduated from high school.”
“Me too,” said Corso. “It’s just not all in the same place.”
She looked down at herself. “Are you suggesting…’’
Corso held up a moderating hand. “I was merely commenting that it’s a wonder how you maintain your girlish figure while eating like a marine division.”
She looked him up and down, searching for signs of irony. Satisfied, she crossed the room to the adjoining door. “I’m going to bed,” she announced.
Corso checked the clock. “It’s only seven-thirty,” he said.
“I’ve had too much to drink,” she said with a lopsided grin. “I’m going to bed before I make a fool of myself.”
“You’re among friends.”
The grin turned licentious. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said with a wave of her fingers and a toss of her hair. Corso watched as she crossed the carpet and disappeared through the doorway. After a moment the light came on in the adjoining room. From where he stood, Corso could see her reflection in the big wall mirror. He watched as she turned down the bed. Her back was to him as she shrugged herself out of the bathrobe. Corso held his breath and tried to turn away but found himself unable. The reflected curve of her back and hips held his gaze in a stony grip. Mercifully, she snapped off the light, leaving Corso breathless, staring into the darkness, listening to the rustle of sheets as she made herself comfortable. He thought about closing the adjoining door but couldn’t force himself to move. He turned away.
24
C orso wiped the hair from his eyes and tried, once again, to peer through the peephole in the door. No go. Either he’d developed glaucoma overnight or some unknown trick was required to screen one’s visitors through this particular aperture. He glanced over toward the rumpled bed, found the digital clock on the far bedside table. Six-fifteen. Figuring the hour was a bit early for bad guys, Corso shot the bolts and jerked open the door. Warren and another burly ATF agent stood on the carpet. Warren smiled in that folksy way of his.
“Howdy,” he said.
“Little early,” Corso growled.
“Crime waits for no man.”
The sound of Andriatta’s voice in the hall told Corso he wasn’t the only one being dragged out of bed. “What’s up?” he asked.
“Last evening…around eleven-thirty or so. We had a botched kidnapping attempt out in Thousand Oaks.” Warren gave Corso a moment to process and then jumped back in. “Same MO. Woman comes out to her car on her way to work and there’s a guy hiding inside with a gun. Except she’s a veterinarian, works graveyard at an all-night veterinary hospital out on Roweena Boulevard.”
“Yeah?” Corso ran a hand over his face.
“She always brings her dog with her. Seems Bozo tears up the furniture if you leave him alone in the house, you know, what the heck, she works in a vet’s office, so it’s no big…” Warren realized he was getting far afield and waved himself off. “Anyway, seems a 140 pounds of Rottweiler takes a serious exception to the guy in the car. Bites him all over hill and dale, according to the lady victim. Guy shoots the dog and gets away. She calls the local cops. They get a decent roadblock cordon around that whole part of the county in less than a half hour.”
“And?”
“They get the usual kind of thing we pick up with roadblocks. People driving on suspended licenses, no licenses, no insurance, folks with warrants…you name it, they get it. An hour later they’ve come up with two dozen people who they’re hanging on to for a variety of reasons.” Warren anticipated the next question. “They didn’t put two and two together. Wasn’t until the day shift came on this morning that anybody wondered if maybe it might be connected to what we’ve had going on.”
“So?”
“We want the two of you to have a look at them.”
Corso winced and scratched his head.
Warren made an apologetic face. “This is the first real break we’ve had. We want to make sure we’ve got our bases covered.”
“What bases are those?”
“We’re hoping maybe one of the detainees is somebody one of you ran into back East.”
Corso stepped halfway out into the hall. Another pair of carpet crushers held court at Andriatta’s door. “Hey,” he called.
Andriatta poked her head out.
“We go?” he asked.
“Son of a bitch shot a dog,” she said.
Corso nodded in resignation. “Gimme ten minutes,” he said to Warren.
Around L.A., nobody ever mentions the actual distance between places. The fact that one place is forty miles from another is utterly irrelevant. Ask how far it is from downtown L.A. to Thousand Oaks and an Angeleno will squint at his watch, allow for windage and the time of day and declare, “Just under two hours.”
What would have required ninety minutes was, with judicious aid of a siren, covered in just over an hour. The Thousand Oaks Police Department building could as easily have been a shopping center. All flowers and Mission architecture on a nice tree-lined street, an Officer Friendly sort of place if ever a wiz there was.
Warren handled the introductions, describing Corso and Andriatta merely as witnesses. Thousand Oaks officials had been gracious in the manner of those burdened with a visit from a dowager aunt, all stiff necks, tight lips and crow’s-feet.
Of those twenty-seven citizens detained in the minutes following the bundled kidnapping, eleven had been women. As was custom, TOPD had separated the suspects according to gender. The women were being held in what was normally a staging area for prisoners on their way to district court. Only reason they were using it today was because the males had filled up the general holding cells. Because surveillance was usually supplied by COs down on the floor with the prisoners, the need for one-way viewing windows had never before been called in question.
A pair of female officers escorted Warren, Corso and Andriatta into the room with the women suspects. “Line up against the back wall,” one of the officers shouted above the protestations and shuffling of feet. Four more shouted orders finally accomplished the organizational mission.
When they got everybody quiet and
settled in a ragged row, life’s rich pageant found itself spread out along artificially distressed bricks. Coupla poor souls whose lives had been heisted by one drug or another. Hiding behind hollow eyes, hoping like hell this was going away before the rush wore off. Couple or three who were probably not going to be able to come up with the requisite green card. Short vacation in warm climate to ensue. Two scared-looking housewives and a huffy-looking Hollywood honey from whose attorney the TOPD would most assuredly be hearing forthwith.
Point was though, no member of the assembly caused so much as a glimmer in either Corso or Andriatta. Never seen any of them before. End of story.
In the men’s end of the jail, things were no more civilized. They were led into a narrow hallway, dimly lit, smelling of stale coffee and staler breath. On the left, three empty interrogation rooms ran the length of the corridor. On the right, a single large holding area occupied the space. The men weren’t as diverse as the women. All in all, it was a pretty seedy-looking group, ranging on the social scale from about Biker to Bum and back. Nobody you’d be asking home to lunch. The correctional officer nearest to Corso pushed the intercom button. “Line up against the back wall,” his amplified voice directed. “Move in close; it’s gonna be tight,” she advised.
About a quarter of them did as bidden, another quarter began to shout one thing and another at the window, their inaudible protestations accompanied by a range of familiar hand gestures. Everybody else stood still and pretended not to have heard. The CO repeated the directions three or four more times before anything resembling a line began to form.
On the silent side of the glass, Corso worked his way down the row of sullen suspects, moving slowly, focusing on each man. Fourth guy down had one of those big square heads like the one he remembered from his rearview mirror in the moments before the SUV splashed into the lake. Corso was focused on the guy, trying to pull something…anything…out of his memory, when a movement from the far end of the line captured his attention.
Little Mexican guy. Freshly pressed shirt, buttoned all the way to the top. Baggy khaki pants and a pair of sneakers. Corso and everybody around him began to move that way. The guy was tearing at his clothes. Trying, it looked like, to tear the collar from his shirt. And then, no. He wasn’t trying to tear the collar off the shirt, he was trying to get at something that seemed to be sewn inside the collar itself.
And then he had it in his hand. Small and white. He popped it into his mouth and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a Ping-Pong ball, as the CO bringing up the rear called for assistance.
“Hey,” shouted the officer next to Corso.
The effect of whatever the guy swallowed was violent and immediate. Looked like he’d been tasered. His spine snapped to rigid. His limbs went spastic. He convulsed once and fell to the floor, where he flopped around like a fish on a riverbank. And then, as quickly as it began, it was over. A pair of male correctional officers appeared at his side, turning him over and checking for a pulse.
Andriatta’s fingers threatened to break the skin of Corso’s arm. They didn’t relax until the officer with his finger against the guy’s throat looked up and shook his head. Warren’s twang broke the silence. “What in Sam Hill was that?” he said.
25
“C yanide? You gotta be shittin’ me,” Warren said. He caught himself and apologized for his language. “But I mean…isn’t that just a bit excessive?”
“For what amounts to a traffic violation…” Corso said. “Yeah, I think you’d have to say suicide was a bit over the top.”
Warren turned back to the medic. “You sure?”
The medic jerked a thumb over into the room, where his partner and another CO were zipping the deceased into a black rubber bag. “Look at him,” the EMT said. “Look at his face. It’s textbook.”
What it was was cherry red. Fire engine red. The red that rhymes with dead.
“Guy smells like bitter almonds,” the medic said. “Gotta be cyanide.”
“Sounds like a James Bond movie,” Andriatta said.
“Sounds ridiculous,” Corso threw in.
“Got some kind of animal bites all over his torso and a serious-looking brace on his knee.”
Warren and Corso exchanged knowing glances before Warren turned the other way, toward the TOPD sergeant who was running the local end. “What do we know about this guy?” Warren said.
“Nada. Nothing,” the cop said. “No ID on him. Wouldn’t give his name to the officer. We patted him down and put him with the others.”
“What did he have on him?”
The cop opened the flap on a small manila envelope. He turned it over. A set of keys dropped out into Warren’s upturned palm. Warren pushed the button on the intercom. “Get a set of prints before you take him anywhere.”
“What was he driving?”
The sergeant looked embarrassed. “We don’t know,” he said. “Nobody bothered to keep track.” He shrugged. “This was way more people than we generally process at one time. They figured, you know…as long as we had the keys…”
Warren separated the keys. Held up a worn car key. “This is the only ignition key on the ring and it’s too darn worn to tell what it fits.” He turned it this way and that in front of his face. “Foreign, if I had to guess,” he said finally. He handed it to the sergeant. “Where are their cars?” he asked.
“Impound lot around the corner.”
“Let’s find out which vehicle was his.” Warren jiggled the ring of keys. “Find out what everybody else was driving and we’ll go from there.”
The cop nodded his approval, stepped around Andriatta and walked quickly toward the door at the far end of the corridor and disappeared.
Warren pushed the button again. “Hey…” he said. “I hate to do this to you, fellas, I surely do,” he said in his best good ol’ boy accent, “but I need you to take him back out of the bag for me. Sorry.”
They didn’t like it a bit, but did as they were told.
Corso and Andriatta followed Warren down the corridor around the corner and into the room where the body lay. Warren dropped to one knee beside the body.
The guy was somewhere in his fifties. Skinny, with bad skin tone. Tattoo of a skeleton ran down the inside of his right arm. Half a dozen dog bites on his legs and torso, blue around the edges and rimmed with blood. Tattoo on his chest said, “Death or Glory.”
Warren looked up at Corso. “Whatta you think?”
“Could be one of the guys from the hotel room. He’s the right size and the brace is on the right knee.”
Warren looked at Andriatta. She shook her head. She allowed how she’d, “Never seen him before.” Her tone suggested she was a little rattled. Warren put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Cyanide traps oxygen in the blood,” he told her. “Won’t let it get to the cells. That’s how come his face looks like that.”
A lab technician arrived. Everybody stood aside as he broke out his kit and took the guy’s fingerprints. He was still packing up his gear when the sergeant reappeared.
“White Mazda pickup truck.” He read the license plate number. “It’s two blocks over in the overflow impound yard.”
“You run the plate?”
“Truck’s registered to a Zuelma Santana. Address in Oxnard. Oxnard PD talked to the woman. She claims she loaned the truck to one of her neighbors so he could make it to a job interview. Guy name o’ Paco Reyes. Description matches the deceased, right down to the tattoo on the forearm.”
“Clear the area,” Warren said. “Establish a perimeter around the vehicle. I’ve got a team on the way. When they…”
“They’re already here,” the sergeant said.
A familiar voice chimed in. “The gang’s all here.”
The sergeant sensed the tension in the air and headed upstairs. Morales and another FBI agent stood in the doorway. Warren couldn’t prevent a wry smile from crossing his lips. “Look what the wind blew in,” he joked.
“We’d h
ave blown in sooner if we’d been notified,” Morales assured him.
“We’ve got it covered,” Warren assured him back.
Morales dropped to one knee and examined the body, going so far as to roll the stiff up onto its side so he could look at the back. Warren stood over in the corner whispering instructions into his cell phone.
A coroner’s team arrived on the scene. Bright yellow coveralls with black lettering on the back. Unlike the correctional officers, these guys were pros. They had the late Paco Reyes zipped into a bag, slung up onto the stainless-steel gurney and rolling out the door in three minutes flat. Warren used the interval to give Morales the short version of what had happened. “And you were here?” Morales asked incredulously.
Warren pointed at the one-way window. “Not ten feet away.”
“Never seen a cyanide vic before,” Morales said as the coroner’s team left.
“Only in the movies,” Warren said. The door clanked to a close.
“What now?” Morales asked. It was half question, half challenge, as if to say, “Okay, big fella, you’ve got the bit in your teeth here, let’s see what you’re worth.”
Before Warren could respond, his phone rang. He listened for a moment and hung up without saying a word. “The dog likes the truck in a big way,” he announced.
The air in the room changed from “maybe” to “probably.” They passed a worried look around in a circle. “Let’s go,” said Warren.
The morning dew had burned off. It was going to be a scorcher. They left the car in the parking lot and headed diagonally across the street on foot. Warren and Morales walking fast, Corso and Andriatta trailing along behind. Two blocks over, they slipped between buildings and entered the parking lot of a cute little strip mall. Overhead, eucalyptus trees hissed and groaned under the weight of the wind, seeming to shimmer, their leaves changed from light to dark and back again as they quivered in the suddenly insistent breeze.