"That's your opinion, whoever you are. Were you one of those watching me in the goldfish bowl the other day?"
"Yes."
"Fooled you pretty good, didn't I?" he gloated.
Dance said, "Yes, you did. But my colleague's right. It's not going to work out how you want."
The young man said evenly, "You said nothing good comes from killing law. Well, you know what? I'm thinking a lot of good'll come of it. You been on my ass since Wednesday. I been hiding here, hiding there. That's a pain I don't need. So I think a lot of good is going to come from having you both fucking dead. Okay. Enough."
Dance said, "You shoot us and you think the agent out there won't hear? If he doesn't nail your ass, he'll keep you pinned down until a TAC team..."
Fishing in his back pocket, Serrano pulled a silencer out and screwed it onto the muzzle of his weapon. "I like the way you say 'ass.'"
Dance glanced at Foster, whose expression remained placid.
"So. Here. I'm a religious man. You take a few seconds to make your peace. Pray. You have something you want to say? Somebody up there you want to say it to?"
Her voice ominous, Dance said defiantly, "You're not thinking, Joaquin. Our boss knows we're here, a dozen others. I could get a call any minute. I don't pick up and there'll be a dozen TAC officers here in ten minutes, combing the area. Lockdown on the roads. You'll never get away."
"Yeah, I think I take my chances."
"Work with me and I can keep you alive. You walk out that door and you're a dead man."
"Work with you?" He laughed. "You got nothing. What they say in football, I mean soccer? Nil. You've got nil to offer."
The gun was already racked. He lifted it toward Foster, who said, "Lamont."
The young man frowned. "What?"
"Lamont Howard."
A confused look. "What're you saying?"
"Don't act stupid." Foster shook his head.
"Fuck you saying to me, asshole?"
Foster seemed merely inconvenienced, not the least intimidated. Or scared. "I'm saying to you, asshole, the name Lamont Howard." When there was no response he continued, "You know Lamont, right?"
The Latino's eyes scanned their faces uncertainly. Then: "Lamont, the OG run the Four Seven Bloods in Oakland. What about him?"
Dance said, "Steve?"
Foster: "You been to his house in Village Bottoms?"
A blink.
"West Oakland."
"I know where the Bottoms is."
Dance snapped, "What's this all about, Steve?"
Foster waved her silent. Back to the young man. "Okay, Serrano, here's the deal: You kill me, Lamont will kill you. Simple as that. And he'll kill everybody in your family. And then he'll go back to his steak dinner, because he likes his steak. I know that because I have been to his crib and had a steak dinner with him. A dozen of them, in fact."
Dance turned to Foster. She snapped, "What?"
"Fuck you saying, man?"
"Are you catching on? I'm Lamont's inside man."
Dance stared at him.
"No fucking way."
"Yeah, well, Serrano, I can say yes and you can say no way until you have to take a crap. But wouldn't it make sense just to ask him? 'Cause if you don't and you take me out, Lamont and his crew lose their one connection to CBI and points beyond. DEA, Customs and Border, Homeland. And I wonder which dry well you and your mother and sister will be sleeping out eternity in."
"Fuck. Wait. I hear something. A month ago. Some Oakland crew was getting solids from Sacramento."
"That's me." Foster seemed proud.
Dance looked out the window. Stemple, still looking away. She growled to Foster, "You son of a bitch."
He ignored her. "So, call him."
The Latino looked him over, not getting too close. Foster was much larger. "I no got his number. You think him and me, we asshole buddies?"
Foster sighed. "Look, I'm taking my phone out of my pocket. That's all. My phone." He did. "Ah, Kathryn, careful there."
Her hand had dropped toward a table on which a heavy metal lamp sat.
"Serrano? Could you..."
The young man noted that Dance had been going for the lamp. He stepped forward and roughly pushed her against the wall, away from any potential weapons.
Foster made a call.
"Lamont, it's Steve." He hit the speaker.
"Foster?"
"Yeah."
"What you calling for?" The voice was wary.
"Got a situation here. Sorry, man. There's a hothead, from one of the Salinas crews, with a piece on me. He's out of the..." Foster lifted an eyebrow.
"Barrio Majados."
"You hear that?"
Howard's voice: "Yo, I know 'em, I work with 'em. What's this about? Who is he?"
"Serrano."
"Joaquin? I know Serrano. He disappeared. There was heat on him."
"He's surfaced. He doesn't know who I am. Just tell him we work together. Or he's going to park a slug in my head."
"Fuck you doing, Serrano? Leave my boy Foster alone. You got that?"
"He with you?"
"The fuck I say?"
The gun didn't lower. "Okay, only...any chance he undercover?"
"Well, he is, then he's the only undercover took out a Oakland cop."
"No shit."
Howard said, "Asshole show up at my place unexpected. Foster, pop pop took him down."
"Steve, no!" Dance raged.
Howard called, "The fuck's that?"
"Another cop, works with Foster."
"That's just fucking great." The gangbanger sighed. "You two take care of her. I got shit to do here."
The call ended.
"Serrano," Dance began, "what I was saying before. You need to be smart. You--"
The Latino snapped, "Shut up, Kathryn."
With a cold smile, she said to Foster, "The story you told me before. You don't have a son, do you? That was a lie."
He turned to her, looking down. "I didn't know what was going down. Needed you on my side."
Dance sneered, "You can't be running a network on your own. You're not that smart."
Foster was indignant. "Fuck you. I don't need anybody else."
"How many people've died because of what you've done?"
"Oh, come on," the man said gruffly. Then: "Serrano, let's get this done. Do her, I'll get the asshole outside in here. We take him out. I'll tell the response team I got out the back and hid in the hills. I'll say it was somebody else here, not you. One of the crews from Tijuana."
"Okay with me" was the matter-of-fact response.
Then Foster was squinting. "Wait."
"What?"
"You...you said, 'Kathryn.' You called her 'Kathryn.'"
A shrug. "I don't know. So?"
"I never used her first name here. And I was at the interview last week between you and her. She never said it either."
I'm Agent Dance...
A grimace. The Latino accent was gone as the young man said, "Yep, I screwed up on that. Sorry." He was speaking to Kathryn Dance.
"No worries, Jose," she said, smiling. "We got everything we needed. You did great."
Foster stared from one to the other. "Oh, Jesus Christ."
"Serrano," who was actually a Bakersfield detective named Jose Felipe-Santoval, aimed his weapon center mass on Foster's chest, while Dance, relieved of her weapon but not her cuffs, ratcheted the bracelets on.
Adding to Foster's shock, the agent who'd been pretending to be the deceased Pedro Escalanza hopped to and dusted off his jeans, drawing his own weapon. He'd been lying facedown, head hidden from the trio in the hotel room.
"Hey, TJ."
"Boss. Good takedown. How's the blood?" He glanced at his legs, spattered red. "I tried a new formula. Hershey's syrup and food coloring."
"Big improvement," she said, nodding at the tile.
Foster gasped, "A sting. The whole fucking thing."
Dance pulled out her cell
phone. Hit speed dial five as she glanced down and noticed her Aldo pumps had a scuff. Have to fix that. These were her favorite shoes for fieldwork.
She heard through the phone Charles Overby's voice: "Kathryn? And the verdict is?"
"Foster's our boy. It's all on tape. He's the only one."
"Ah."
"We'll be back in a half hour. You want to be there, at the interrogation?"
"Wouldn't miss it for the world."
Chapter 90
Disgust overflowed in Foster's face as he looked from Al Stemple to Dance to Overby. They were in the same CBI interrogation rooms where Dance had held the phony interview of the phony Serrano last week.
TJ was elsewhere; the faux blood was good, yes, but it stained far more than he'd thought it would. He was presently scrubbing hands and ankles in one of the nearby men's rooms.
Foster snapped, "Jesus, you wanted Kathryn unarmed and demoted to Civ-Div but still talking her way onto the interviews with the suspect to track down Serrano. So I wouldn't feel threatened by her."
Yep. Exactly.
Overby added, "So you'd be free to cut a deal with Serrano when he pulled a gun on you."
Dance told him: "We made the case against the real Serrano ten days ago. Handed it over to the FBI, Amy Grabe in San Francisco. So you wouldn't get wind of it. She busted him. He rolled over on Guzman. They're both in isolation. The, quote, 'Serrano' you saw was Bakersfield PD. Jose works undercover. He's good, don't you think?"
Not professional, she observed of her comments. But she was in a mood.
"We got him because he looks like the real Serrano."
Anger joined Foster's revulsion: "Jesus. We were all suspects. And you faked the, quote, 'leads' to Serrano--with Carol, the bungalow in Seaside. With Gomez, the houseboat. At the motel just now. You ran the same set, the same play at every one of them. TJ played the dead snitch. All I saw was the legs and torso. Not his face."
Overby filled in, "Except at the houseboat. That was Connie Ramirez, playing...what was her name again?"
Dance answered, "Tia Alonzo." She continued, "It was a test we put together. The real traitor'd save himself. Those on the task force who were innocent? Well, I'm afraid they had a few bad moments when Jose turned his gun on them. But it had to be done. We needed to find who'd sold us out."
In the first set, Carol had suicidally lunged at the fake Serrano, knocking a table of ceramic keepsakes to the floor. Gomez had sighed and resigned himself to death and said a prayer.
And Foster had played the OG card, invoking the name of Lamont Howard to save himself.
"If you'd passed the test, it would have meant Steve Lu was the snitch. Since you said you told Kathryn you were the only connection, he's clean."
"You fucking set me up."
Finally, quiet Al Stemple spoke. "I think 'set up' means more wrongly implicating an innocent person, 'stead of trapping a guilty asshole. Am I being transparent enough, Steve?" He gave a loud grunt, then sat back and crossed his arms, wide as tree trunks.
The Guzman Connection sting had been Dance's idea and she'd fought hard for it. All the way up to Sacramento.
She'd decided to put together the operation after a horrific drive-by shooting in Seaside, a mother killed and a child wounded. The woman had been a witness to one of the Pipeline hubs. But no one could have known about her--except for a leak inside the operation itself.
"I went through the files a hundred times and looked for any other instance of operations that could've been compromised. TJ and I spent weeks correlating the personnel. We narrowed it down to four people involved in all of them--and who knew that Maria Ioaconna was a witness. You, Carol, Steve Lu and Jimmy. We brought you here. And set up the operation."
There'd been risks of course. That the guilty party might wonder why Dance was apparently working on the Solitude Creek case but was officially barred from the Serrano pursuit. (Overby had said, "Can't you forget about Solitude Creek, stay home and, I don't know, plant flowers? You can still show up at the Serrano sets." "I'm working Solitude," she'd answered bluntly.)
Risks to her physically too--as O'Neil had pointed out so vehemently: it was possible that their traitor would call someone like Lamont Howard, who would show up at one of the sets with his crew and waste everybody present.
But there was nothing else to do; Dance was determined to find their betrayer.
Foster stared at the room's ugly gray floors, and the muscles in his face flickered.
Dance added, "We never hoped for him directly. But getting Lamont Howard on the tape, ordering my hit?"
"Ah, that's righteous." Overby beamed.
A word she didn't believe she'd ever heard Overby say. He seemed to mull the line over and was embarrassed.
But Dance smiled his way. He was right. It was righteous. And a lot more.
Overby looked at his watch. Golf? Or maybe he was considering with some dismay the call to Sacramento, the CBI chief, to tell them the traitor came from the hallowed halls of their own agency. "Keep going, Kathryn. Convince him of the futility of his silence. Convince him of the shining path of confession. Whatever he says or doesn't, the media'll be here soon. You'll be at the podium with me, I hope?"
Charles Overby sharing a press conference?
"You've earned the limelight, Kathryn."
"Think I'd rather pass, Charles. It's been a long day." She nodded toward Foster. "And this may take a while."
"You're sure?"
"I am. Yes." Dance turned to her prey.
Chapter 91
A shadow in her office doorway.
Michael O'Neil stood there. Somber. His dark eyes locked on hers. Brown, green. Then he looked away.
"Hey," she said.
He nodded and sat down.
"You heard?"
"Foster. Yeah. Complete confession. Good job."
"Gave up a dozen names. People we never would've found. Bangers in L.A. and Oakland. Bakersfield, Fresno too." Dance looked away from her computer, on which she was typing notes from the Antioch March case. The promise of paperwork stretched out, long as the Golden Gate Bridge.
Documenting the Guzman Connection sting, part of Operation Pipeline, would be next, the arrest of Steve Foster.
She'd actually thought that he was the least likely suspect, given his obnoxious nature. She was so used to the apparent being different from the real that his guilt had not seemed likely. Dance had suspected mostly Carol Allerton. (What state cop didn't love bashing a fed?) But now she felt guilty about the suspicion. The DEA agent had been a good ally after the first sting operation. She was very pleased too that Jimmy Gomez, a friend, had not been the betrayer.
She now told Michael O'Neil about the finale of the sting. She, of course, didn't add that she believed she'd been right--that had she gone in armed, had she not maintained the sham of her suspension, Foster probably wouldn't have believed the scam.
Then she noted: O'Neil was listening but not listening. He regarded the photographs on her desk--the one of her with the children and dog. The eight-by-tens of her with her husband, Bill. Whatever happened in her personal life, she was never going to put their pictures away in an attic box. Displayed, always.
She fell silent for a moment and then asked, "All right. What is it?"
"Something happened today. I have to tell you." Then he turned his head, rose again and shut the door. As if he'd meant to do that when he walked in but had been so focused on what he wanted to say that any other thoughts had scattered like dropped marbles. He sat once more.
Something happened...
"The hate crime I've been working?"
"Sure." Had there been another defacing? Was it an actual attack this time? Hate crimes often escalated from words to blood. Dragging to death gays, shootings of blacks or Jews.
"Goldschmidt's house again."
"The perps came back?"
"They did. But it seems Goldschmidt wasn't completely honest with us. Apparently he found their bikes and kept them.
He wanted the perps to come back. He was using them as bait."
"So, they were bikers."
"No, bicycles."
"Kids were doing it?"
"That's right."
She looked at him levelly. "And what happened, Michael?"
"Goldschmidt had a shotgun. Didn't listen to you the other night."
"Goddamnit! Did he shoot anybody?"
"He was going to," Michael said. "He denies it but--why else keep a loaded Beretta by the garage door?"
"'Going to'?"
"While the kids were on the street, getting closer, I got a call. It was from one of the perps. He was warning me that something bad was going down. He was worried about weapons. I should get TAC and backup there immediately. He said TAC."
"One of the kids? Called you? And said that?"
"Yep." He took a breath. "I called PG police and they had cars there in a minute or two. They secured everything." The big detective sighed. "Kathryn, the one who called me was Wes."
"Who?" Curious for a moment. And then the name settled. "But you said one of the perps!"
"Wes, that's right. The others were Donnie, his friend, and another boy. Nathan."
She whispered, "A mistake. It has to be a mistake."
He continued: "It was Donnie tagging the houses. Wes was with him. Nathan and another friend were doing other things. Stealing traffic signs, shoplifting."
"Impossible."
O'Neil said, "That game they were playing?"
"Defend and...I don't know." Her mind was a whitewater rapid, swirling, out of control.
"Defend and Respond Expedition Service," O'Neil said.
"That's it. What about it?"
"It's an acronym. D-A-R-E-S. There were teams. Each side dared the other to do things that could land them in jail."
Dance gave a cold laugh. Here she'd been so pleased that the boys were playing a game with paper and pen and avoiding the violence of the computer world--which had seduced Antioch March and helped turn him into a killer. And now the analog life had proven just as destructive.
A game you played with paper and pen? How harmful could that be?...
"And Wes's team was dared to commit the hate crimes?"
"That's right. Donnie has some juvie time under his belt. Troubled kid. And tonight? He had a weapon. His father's gun. A thirty-eight."
"My God."
"He said at first he just brought it for protection but then he admitted he was going to rob Goldschmidt. Some dream of moving out of the house. I've spoken to his father. Frankly, hardly blame the boy. Whatever happens, he'll be better off out of that household. I think he confessed so he didn't have to go back home."