“Yeah. The kids ambushed Advisor Omura and his retinue at some opening or the other in downtown L.A., the flashgang shooters firing from a storm sewer near the Disney Center.” K.T. paused to take a breath. The muzzle of her Glock never wavered. “The flashgang was carrying a lot of firepower—almost all of it illegal…”
Them, thought Nick. The giant ants and the army Jeeps and trucks trying to find the queen ant’s nest in the L.A. storm sewers. He and Val had loved that old movie.
“Advisor Omura wasn’t seriously hurt and some of his detail whisked him away in a limo while his security people and some L.A. cops returned fire and killed six of the flashgangers right there where the storm sewer opened onto the street,” said K.T. “The seventh kid was found dead a few hundred meters away in the tunnels, shot three times. Do you know him?” She flicked through the photos again and stopped on the death photo of a teenage boy, eyelids half lowered with only the whites showing, mouth open, front teeth broken off, two visible entrance wounds in his chest—some sort of interactive face on the blood-soaked T-shirt—and a terrible wound that had torn his throat open.
“No,” managed Nick. “I’ve never seen him before. You showed Val…”
K.T. waved away the question. “The L.A. juvenile-crime units say that Val ran with these boys… especially with this guy, Billy Coyne. Did Val ever mention him?”
“Coyne?” repeated Nick. He could taste vomit low in his throat. “Billy Coyne? No… wait, maybe. Yes, it’s possible. I’m not sure. Val never talked much about his friends out there. Is Val OK?”
“There’s an APB out on Val Fox, as he’s known at his school,” said K.T. “The LAPD haven’t been able to trace his phone. Neither he nor your father-in-law is at Leonard Fox’s address. We know he hasn’t tried to call you today or tonight on your phone, but have you been in touch with him some other way, Nick?”
Nick was thinking, absurdly, and with pain—I hate it that Val’s not using my last name.
“What? No!” he said, shaking his head. “Val hasn’t called and I’ve been meaning to phone him but… I mean, I missed his birthday the other week and… no, I haven’t been in touch with him. Is there any evidence that Val was in on this attack on Omura, or is it just a juvie-division hunch?”
“There must be some evidence,” said K.T. “Homeland Security has a national watch for Val. Right now they’re treating him as a material witness, but they and the FBI are serious about apprehending him.”
“Jesus,” whispered Nick. He looked K.T. in the eye. “You say this is the least bad news you have for me?”
K.T.’s brown eyes never seemed to blink. She was staring at Nick the way he’d seen her stare at perps they had to take down one way or the other. “What are you going to do, Nick?”
“What do you mean? Are you asking me to drop a dime on my son?”
“No,” said K.T. “I think you need to bring him in if he shows up in person. You still have cuffs, don’t you?”
It would have been wrong for Nick to have his DPD handcuffs, but he did indeed have some that had been part of his junior private detective kit when Nick had considered making money as a bounty hunter tracking down skippers who’d violated their bonds. He tried to envision slapping those cuffs on his son. He couldn’t. But Nick realized that he was visualizing Val as he’d been when he’d last seen him, not quite eleven years old, his face still rounded by baby fat. Even this recent high school photo showed a different person.
Nick said nothing.
“DHS and the FBI and local departments won’t mess around with him, Nick,” K.T. was saying. “It says on the APB that he’s armed and dangerous.”
“Who says he’s armed?”
“Galina Kschessinska,” said K.T.
“And who the fuck is Galina Kschessinska?”
“Formerly Mrs. Galina Coyne. The dead Billy Coyne’s mother. She once worked in an office that helped coordinate Advisor Omura’s travel and security in L.A.”
“So it was an inside job,” said Nick. “Why would Ms. Galina Kschessinska know if Val was armed or not?”
“She told the LAPD that her son had told her that he’d given a nine-millimeter Beretta to Val. The pistol had fifteen rounds in the magazine.”
And what’s teenager Billy Coyne doing handing out 9-mil Berettas and why hadn’t Ms. Kschessinska mentioned this to the cops before the massacre at the Disney Center? thought Nick. But he said nothing. If what the bitch said was true, then the “armed” part of the APB was appropriate. But the “dangerous”? Nick thought of how his son used to take his fielder’s mitt to bed with him, like a stuffed animal.
“They’re doing analysis on the two slugs taken out of Billy Coyne and the third one pried out of the tunnel wall behind him,” said K.T., her voice a monotone. “But CHP Assistant Chief Ambrose, who I spoke to tonight, said the one he’d seen that came out of the wall was nine millimeter.”
“CHP Assistant Chief Ambrose?” Nick repeated stupidly. “Dale Ambrose?”
“Yeah.” K.T. had lowered the Glock to the tabletop and covered it with a newspaper, but Nick knew that it was still aimed in his general direction. “You know him?”
“Yeah. No. I mean—the Old Man helped train Ambrose here in the Colorado State Patrol. I think they had sort of a mentor-sensei thing going. I know the Old Man thought that Ambrose was going to be a good trooper. Then, a few years before my father was killed, Ambrose moved out to California. Remember when I went out to L.A. about nine years ago to transport that child rapist-killer back? I spent some time with Ambrose then and he and I have called each other for some help on things. Last time I heard, he was an assistant chief in the CHP.”
“Maybe you should talk to him, then,” said K.T.
“Yeah.”
“Part of his job as assistant chief is to head up the CHP protection details for both the governor and the Advisor. It was Ambrose’s guys, along with Omura’s own Japanese security people, who exchanged fire with the kids.”
“But not with Val,” said Nick. “There’s no evidence yet that he was there.” His voice was hard-edged but hopeful.
K.T. shrugged. The APB on Val suggested that there was plenty of evidence to assume that Val had been in on the thing with his fellow flashgang members. With the state of DNA analysis these days, if Val had been in that tunnel and done so much as breathed, they’d have the evidence soon. Nick knew what K.T.’s shrug meant—The night is young.
Just the idea—fact—of Val being in an L.A. flashgang made Nick crazy. Denver’s flashgangs, committing crimes of violence just so they could relive them again under the flash, were made up of some of the sickest fucks Nick and K.T. had ever dealt with. And the L.A. flashgangs were said to be much worse than Denver’s.
Nick felt dizzy, almost as if he’d been tasered again.
“What else?” said Nick.
“You up to hearing the rest, partner?” asked K.T.
Nick blinked at the “partner.” Either Lieutenant Lincoln was being viciously sarcastic or she’d seen how hard the news about Val had hit him. Maybe it was a bit of both.
“Yeah. Tell me.”
K.T. slid a short stack of colored files toward him.
“You can read them without leaning or sliding closer,” she said softly. She’d covered her right hand and the Glock with some sort of open catalogue or brochure. “Use just your left hand to turn the pages. Don’t lift the whole file.”
“Jesus, K.T.,” Nick said disgustedly.
She didn’t respond.
Nick read, slowly turning pages with his left hand. When he was done he said nothing.
They were copied pages of a report stating that Dara Fox Bottom and Assistant District Attorney Harvey Cohen had shared motel and hotel rooms at least ten times in the five weeks previous to Keigo Nakamura’s murder six years ago. Along with the bald statements were copies of Harvey’s business credit-card statements and payment vouchers from the district attorney’s office.
“This is bullshit,??
? Nick said. He pushed the files back toward K.T.
“Keep them,” she said. “How do you know they’re bullshit?”
“This one voucher shows that Harvey and Dara shared a room at the Inn of the Anasazi in Santa Fe,” he said, tapping the green folder. “I happen to know that they didn’t. They had adjoining rooms there.”
Now K.T. blinked. “Dara told you this?”
“No, but I’ve been using flash recently to see times when she tried to tell me that something was going on—not between her and Harvey, I don’t think, but some special project that had them running around after Keigo Nakamura. Even down to Santa Fe.”
“The invoices say that they shared a room.”
“The invoices are bullshit,” repeated Nick. “I know. I talked to someone at the Inn of the Anasazi yesterday. A maid who’s been there about forty years and who remembers Dara being there six years ago. She liked Dara.”
K.T. shook her head. “I don’t get it. What were you doing in Santa Fe and how long have you known that there was a suspicion of Harvey and Dara sharing rooms together?”
Nick answered only the second question. “About thirty-six hours ago, Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev told me that Dara had stayed at the Inn of the Anasazi with Harvey six years ago, one day after Keigo Nakamura had interviewed him, just four days before Keigo was whacked. I was in the city, so I dropped by the hotel and asked around. The dipshit at the desk wouldn’t give me any information, despite me flashing my fake shield, but I found two old spanic maids who remembered Dara being there. The one old gal even remembered their room numbers—Harvey’s and Dara’s. Adjoining, but not the same room. Not even the same suite.”
“Why would a hotel maid remember someone’s room number after six years?” asked K.T. “Someone she only met once?”
“I told you,” said Nick. “The maid, whose name was Maria Consuela Zanetta Herrera, liked Dara. They chatted and discovered, Ms. Herrera told me, that they both had boys named Val… although Maria’s son’s name was short for Valentín. And her son was twenty-nine while she remembered Dara saying that her boy was only ten.”
“Sorry I doubted you,” said K.T. She didn’t sound sorry, only tired. “But, Nick, why would all these other hotel vouchers also be faked?”
“You haven’t told me where this crap came from,” he reminded her. “It almost looks like the kind of report you see submitted to or from a grand jury.”
“It is part of a grand jury report,” said his ex-partner. “Submitted to a grand jury but gathered during an internal investigation by the office of the district attorney in March, five and a half years ago. While Mannie Ortega was still DA.”
“An internal investigation?” muttered Nick. He’d rarely been so confused. “Two months after Dara and Harvey were killed in the accident on I-Twenty-five? An interdepartmental investigation and grand jury looking into whether one of the assistant DAs was having an affair with my wife? That makes no fucking sense. None at all.”
K.T. shook her head, as if in agreement. “The joint investigation wasn’t looking into whether Harvey and Dara were screwing behind your back, Nick. It was looking into who killed Harvey and Dara.”
“Who killed them?” whispered Nick. He was glad he was sitting down. As it was, he had to grab the sides of the old wooden chair to hold himself steady.
“I told you it got worse,” whispered K.T. “Can you take this last part? I’m serious.”
“Show me,” growled Nick. “Now.” His tone told her how serious he was.
She slid the rest of the colored dossiers across the table toward him.
Nick scooted his chair closer and hunched over the table, flipping photocopied pages and reading. If K.T. wanted to shoot him, let her shoot him. Instead, she pulled the Glock out from under the concealing catalogue and holstered it. Four white-stubbled men wandered by, talking about books and heading for the flashcave cots in the darkened room at the base of the ramp.
Nick was looking at more than two hundred pages of grand jury paperwork. The secret grand jury had been seated by then district attorney Manuel Ortega in late February of the year Dara had died—seated less than a full month after her death—and the thrust of the investigation seemed to be that ADA Harvey Cohen and his assistant Dara Fox Bottom, while working on a DA department project that was still classified, had begun a clandestine love affair.
That DPD Detective First Grade Nick Bottom had learned about the affair and arranged to have his wife and her lover killed.
Nick sat back, his mouth open. He felt like screaming or moaning but knew that neither would help. Lieutenant K. T. Lincoln was watching him very carefully.
“K.T… For more than five years l’ve tried to convince myself that Dara and Harvey died in a car accident. The facts stay the same. The old couple braked suddenly in front of them… the driver of the eighteen-wheeler behind them tried to stop, couldn’t… the driver died in the fire. And nobody knew anybody else, nobody was connected to anybody. That’s what all the reports said, remember?”
K.T. tapped the photo of the truck driver, her short fingernail making a sharp, ugly sound. “Do you recognize him, Nick?”
“Yeah, of course. Phillip James Johnson. I looked into it myself. He’d been a trucker for twelve years, no serious accidents, no safety violations. He just couldn’t…”
“The name and most of his paperwork history were bullshit,” said K.T. She slid another photo out of the heap. “Phillip Johnson was actually this man. Recognize him?”
It took the better part of a minute for Nick to do so. Even then he couldn’t believe it was the same man as the truck driver. He set the photos next to each other. The second photo was of a man sixty or seventy pounds lighter than Phillip James Johnson—different facial structure, even allowing for the fat, different nose, different chin, different hair color… hell, even the eye color was different.
“The DNA showed conclusively that Phillip James Johnson was actually your old CI, Ricardo ‘Swak’ Moretti.”
Nick kept looking. He’d used Moretti as a confidential informant when he’d still been a patrolman and a few times after he made detective. The petty crook’s nickname of Swak came from his involvement in insurance scams—especially highway and street swoop-and-squats where the mob enlisted the “victims” just as they did for slip-and-fall claims. Moretti had never become a made man, just the kind of scumbag always found bottom-feeding near the real mob, always running errands for punks and hit men, always dreaming of a real score. But as a confidential informant, Moretti had been unreliable in most instances—not even worth keeping on a small dole that came out of the patrolman’s or detective’s own pocket. Nick hadn’t talked to Swak Moretti in ten years. Longer.
He studied the photos again. Yes… it was possible. Something similar about the eye sockets and teeth—they hadn’t fixed the teeth—but…
“This guy’s undergone major plastic surgery,” Nick said aloud, rubbing his cheeks and hearing the stubble scrape. “Why? The mob would never pay for such a thing. Swak Moretti was a nobody. And if you’re paying a fortune in old bucks for cosmetic surgery, why make yourself fatter, with an uglier nose and bigger, dumber-looking ears? It doesn’t make sense. Plus, I read the original DNA identification, K.T. It showed the dead driver was Phillip James Johnson.”
“All good cover story,” said K.T. “Including the plastic surgery. Somebody was setting your old pal Swak up as a hit man, weren’t they?”
“It doesn’t make any…,” began Nick.
K.T. slid another stack of photocopies toward him. “We have phone records of you calling Moretti four times—twice in November of the year Keigo was killed, once in late December, a final time three days before the… accident… that killed Dara and Harvey.”
Nick’s head snapped back. “It didn’t happen. I never phoned him.”
K.T. touched the photo of the old couple who died when their Buick gelding had been struck first by Dara and Harvey’s car, then by the truck that had burst into
flames. “Javier and Dulcinea Gutiérrez,” she said. “Their names were real. Only their citizenship status on their NICCs and local background histories were fake. They were brought in from Ciudad Juárez three weeks before the so-called accident. We have Swak Moretti’s phone records arranging that as well.”
“I never phoned Moretti,” repeated Nick.
K.T. gave him the same look that he’d given to so many cornered and lying-through-their-teeth perps.
“Look, Nick,” she said softly. “You’re the one, just this week, who begged me to look into this stuff. I said it was an accident. I said ‘Who volunteers for a swoop-and-squat where you’re going to die?’ You said… You owe me this favor, K.T. Look into it. So I did. Here it is.”
Nick rubbed his cheek and chin again. “It doesn’t make any sense. Even if Moretti was some sort of deep-cover hit man for the mob—and trust me, K.T., the asshole wasn’t smart enough to be a hit man for anyone. Even the Denver branch of the Mafia, as decrepit and decadent as it is, wouldn’t think of hiring him… much less pay for all those weird plastic surgeries to hide his identity. And why would they hide his identity anyway? Mob hits are two twenty-two-caliber slugs to the skull so they rattle around in there, drop the gun, walk away.”
“Unless someone really didn’t want this to be considered a hit, Nick.”
“Yeah, but the mob doesn’t work that way.”
“I agree,” said the lieutenant. “But you could have.”
Nick didn’t answer. He pawed through the dossiers. “This grand jury stuff is nuts. They have enough evidence here—fake though most of it is—to indict anyone. But there was no indictment. The grand jury was dissolved in April, five and a half years ago, K.T., and this stuff has been sitting around gathering dust since then. How’d you get all this?”
“I called in every favor I ever had and made some promises I hope I never have to deliver on,” she said tiredly. “You asked me to, Nick.” She shoved the entire stack of colored folders closer to him. “But you keep it. If you ever say I know anything about any of this, I’ll call you a motherfucking liar.”