Dar shook his head again. “Are you suggesting that the stupid JATO thing or the seventy-eight-year-old man falling from his Pard is part of a massive insurance-fraud conspiracy? And that someone would import Russians to kill me over it?”
Again Captain Sutton of the CHP spoke. For such a big man—he was at least six five—his voice was very soft. “The JATO thing, we cleared. The human remains in the wreckage—teeth—were ID’d as nineteen-year-old Purvis Nelson from Borrego Springs, who lives with his uncle Leroy. Leroy buys metal in job lots from the Air Force. Evidently someone at the Air Force base didn’t notice that those two JATO units hadn’t been used. Purvis did, though. He left his uncle a note…”
“A suicide note?” someone asked.
The Highway Patrol captain shook his head. “Just a note dated eleven P.M. that night saying that he was going to break the land speed record and that he’d see his uncle at breakfast.”
“In other words, a suicide note,” muttered San Diego County’s Sheriff McCall. The sheriff looked at Lawrence. “The deposition mentions that when you and Mr. Minor met just before the shooting, you were on your way to document a stolen-vehicle transaction. A car-theft ring targeting Avis vehicles. Could this have been the cause of the attack on Mr. Minor?”
Lawrence laughed softly. “Sorry, Sheriff, but the Avis-theft thing was a strictly hillbilly family operation. You know, one of those good-old-boy Southern families where the family tree doesn’t have any branches?”
None of the sheriffs, police captains, nor the FBI man smiled.
Lawrence cleared his throat. “Anyway, no, this bunch I was following wouldn’t have any dealings with the Russian mafia. They probably don’t even know Russia has a mafia. It was an inside job. Brother Billy Joe worked at Avis and, as part of the usual checkout procedure, got the address where the car renters were staying locally. Then brother Chuckie would take one of the agency’s duplicate keys out and steal the vehicle—they liked sport utilities—that night. They’d meet in the desert with cousin Floyd, cleverly repaint the vehicle at a shop they had out there, and Floyd would drive it up to Oregon as soon as it was dry and resell it at a lot they legally owned up there. They’d change the license tags, but not the registration numbers on the vehicles. They were morons. I turned the photographs and notes over to Avis yesterday and they’ve given the info to local and Oregon police authorities.”
Chief Investigator Olson raised her voice slightly to bring the conversation back on track. “Which means that none of yesterday’s incidents were connected to the attempt on your life, Dr. Minor.”
“Call me Dar,” muttered Dar.
“Dar,” Sydney Olson said, and made eye contact again.
Dar was struck again by how she blended professional seriousness with that hint of amusement. Is it the sparkle in her eyes, or in the way she moves her mouth? he wondered, and then shook his head to clear it. He had not slept well the night before.
“You’ve done something, Dar,” she continued, “that’s convinced the Alliance that you’re on to them.”
“Alliance?” said Dar.
Chief Investigator Olson nodded. “It’s what we’ve been calling this fraud ring. It seems to be very extensive and well connected.”
Sheriff Fields pushed back from the table and flexed his cheek and jaw muscles as if he were looking for a spittoon. “Extensive fraud ring. Operation Clean Sweep. Missy, you’ve got a bunch of the usual losers out there on the highway deliberately fender-bending other people’s cars and then screaming whiplash. Nothing new. All this task force stuff is a waste of the taxpayers’ money.”
Chief Investigator Olson’s face reddened slightly. She gave the old would-be gunslinger a stare that might have come from Bat Masterson. “The existence of the Alliance is a reality, Sheriff. Those two dead Russians in the Mercedes—ruthless mafia members who, according to Interpol, killed at least a dozen hapless Russian bankers and businessmen in Moscow and probably one overconfident American entrepreneur over there—those two dead Russians are real. The Mac-10 slugs in Dr. Minor’s automobile are real. The ten billion or so extra dollars that fraud tacks on to the cost of California insurance…that’s real, Sheriff.”
The old man’s gaze broke away from Sydney Olson’s and his Adam’s apple worked as if he were swallowing rather than spitting his chaw. “Yeah, no argument. But we all got pressing things to get back to. Where does this… Project Clean Sweep…go from here?”
Deputy DA Weid smiled. It was a good smile, a reassuring smile. A once and future politician’s smile. “The task force is temporarily moving its headquarters to San Diego because of this incident,” he said happily. “The media’s screaming for the identity of the driver of the black NSX. So far we’ve actually kept a lid on the story, but tomorrow…”
“Tomorrow,” said Sydney Olson, looking at Dar again, “we’re going to release the official story. Some of it will be accurate, such as the fact that the two dead men were Russian mafia hit men. We’ll say that their attempted target is a private detective—Dar’s real identity and occupation will be kept secret from the press for obvious reasons—and we’ll announce that we believe the killers were after him because he’s close to uncovering their conspiracy. And after that announcement, I’ll be spending quite a bit of time with Dr. Minor and Stewart Investigations.”
Dar returned her challenging gaze. Suddenly she did not look as cute as Stockard Channing to him anymore. “You’re staking me out like that goat in the dinosaur movie…Jurassic Park.”
“Exactly,” said Sydney Olson, smiling openly at Dar now.
Lawrence raised his hand like a schoolboy.
“I just don’t want to find my friend Dar’s bloody leg on my moon roof someday, okay?”
“Okay,” said Sydney Olson. “I’ll insure that doesn’t happen.” She stood up. “As Sheriff Fields said, everyone has important duties to get back to. Ladies, gentlemen, we shall keep you all informed. Thank you for coming this morning.”
The meeting was over, and Dick Weid looked nonplussed at not having wrapped it up himself. Sydney Olson turned to Dar. “Are you going home to Mission Hills now?”
He was not surprised that she knew where he lived. On the contrary, he was sure that Chief Investigator Olson had read every page of every dossier ever opened on him. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m going to change clothes and then watch my soap operas. Larry and Trudy gave me the day off and I haven’t had any other calls.”
“Can I come with you?” asked Chief Investigator Olson. “Will you bring me along to your loft?”
Dar considered ten thousand obvious sexist responses and rejected them all. “This is for my own protection, right?”
“Right,” said Sydney. She moved her blazer aside slightly, just enough to show the nine-millimeter semi-automatic tucked in the quick-release holster at her hip. “And if we hurry,” she said, “we can grab some lunch on the way and still not miss any of All My Children.”
Dar sighed.
CHAPTER FIVE
“E IS FOR TICKET”
“WE’VE ONLY KNOWN each other a couple of hours,” said Syd, “and already you’ve lied to me.”
Dar looked up from where he was grinding coffee beans at his kitchen counter. They had grabbed a bite to eat at the Kansas City BBQ—Syd’s suggestion, she said she’d been staring at it from the Hyatt for two days and just the sign made her hungry—and then he’d driven her up to his old warehouse building in Mission Hills. He’d parked his Land Cruiser at his spot on the open ground floor, just a huge, dark room with a maze of pillars, and they had taken the large freight elevator—the only elevator in the building—up to his sixth-floor apartment.
Now he just looked at her as she wandered through the living area between the tall bookcases that delineated areas in the loft.
“So far I’ve counted…what?…about seven thousand books,” continued Syd, “no fewer than five computers, a serious sound system with eight speakers, and eleven chessboards, but no TV. How do
you watch your soaps?”
Dar smiled and spooned ground beans into the filter. “Actually, the soaps usually come to me. It’s called ‘taking statements from witnesses or victims.’”
Chief Investigator Sydney Olson nodded. “But you do have a TV somewhere? In the bedroom, maybe? Please say you do, Dar. Otherwise I’ll know I’m in the presence of the only real intellectual I’ve ever met outside of captivity.”
Dar poured water into the coffeemaker and turned it on. “There’s a TV. In one of the storage closets over there near the door.”
Syd cocked an eyebrow. “Ah…let me guess…the Super Bowl?”
“No, baseball. The occasional night game when I’m home. All of the play-offs and the Series.” He set mats on the small, round kitchen table. Bright light came in through the eight-foot windows.
“Eames chair,” said Syd, patting the bent wood and black leather chair in the corner of the living-room area where two walls of bookcases came together. She sat in it and put her feet up on the wood and leather ottoman. “It feels comfortable enough to be a real one…an original.”
“It is,” said Dar. He set two white, diner-type mugs on the tablemats and then poured coffee for both of them. “You take cream and sugar?”
Syd shook her head. “I like James Brown coffee. Black. Rich. Strong.”
“Hope this suffices,” said Dar as she reluctantly got out of the Eames chair, stretched, and came over to join him at the kitchen table.
She took a sip and made a face. “Yeah. That’s it. Mr. Brown would approve.”
“I can make a new batch. Weaker. Saner.”
“No, this is good.” She turned around to look back across the room and into the other areas of the loft that were visible. “Can I play chief investigator for a minute?”
Dar nodded.
“A real Persian carpet delineating your living area there. A real Eames chair. The Stickley dining room table and chairs look original, as do the mission-style lamps. Real artwork in every room. Is that large painting in the open area there opposite the windows a Russell Chatham?”
“Yeah,” said Dar.
“And an oil rather than a print. Chatham’s originals are selling for a pretty penny these days.”
“I bought it in Montana some years ago,” said Dar, setting his coffee down. “Before the big Chatham stampede.”
“Still,” said Syd and finished her mental inventory. “A chief investigator would have to conclude that the man who lives here has money. Wrecks an Acura NSX one day but has a spare Land Cruiser waiting for him at home.”
“Different vehicles for different purposes,” said Dar, beginning to feel irritated.
Syd seemed to sense this and turned back to her coffee. She smiled. “That’s all right,” she said. “I’m guessing you’re about as interested in making money as I am.”
“Anyone who discounts the importance of money is a fool or a saint,” said Dar. “But I find the pursuit of it or the discussion of it boring as hell.”
“Okay,” said Syd. “I’m curious about the eleven chess boards. Games being played on all of them. I’m only a duffer at chess—I know the horsie from the castle thingee—but those games look like they’re master level. You have so many chess master friends drop in that you need multiple boards?”
“E-mail,” said Dar.
Syd nodded and looked around. “All right, that wall of fiction. How are those books shelved? Not alphabetically, that’s for damned sure. Not by publication date, you’ve got old volumes mixed in with new trade paperbacks.”
Dar smiled. Readers always gravitated to other readers’ bookshelves and tried to figure out the system of shelving. “It could be random,” he said. “Buy a book, read it, stick it on the shelf.”
“It could be,” agreed Syd. “But you’re not a random kind of guy.”
Dar sat silently, thinking of the chaos mathematics that had made up the bulk of his Ph.D. dissertation. Syd sat silently studying the wall of novels. Finally she muttered to herself, “Stephen King way up on the upper right. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood a couple of shelves below, still on the right. To Kill a Mockingbird on the second shelf from the bottom. East of Eden way the hell to the left over by the window. All of Hemingway’s crap—”
“Hey, watch it,” said Dar. “I love Hemingway.”
“All of Hemingway’s crap on the bottom right shelf,” finished Syd. “I’ve got it!”
“I doubt it,” said Dar, feeling his feathers ruffled again.
“The bookcase is a rough map of the United States,” said Syd. “You shelve regionally. King’s up there freezing his ass off near the ceiling in Maine. Hemingway’s down there near the floor heating vent, comfortable in Key West…”
“Cuba, actually,” said Dar. “Impressive. How do you shelve your novels?”
“I used to do it according to the relationship between the authors,” she admitted. “You know, Truman Capote right next to Harper Lee…”
“Childhood friends,” added Dar. “Little, weakling Truman was the model for Dill who visits every summer in Mockingbird.”
Syd nodded. “With the dead authors it worked all right,” she said. “I mean, I could keep Faulkner and Hemingway the hell apart, but I always had to keep moving the live ones around. I mean, one month Amy Tan’s tight with Tabitha King, and the next thing I read, they’re not talking. I was spending more time reshelving my books than I did reading, and then my work started to suffer because I was frittering away my days worrying if John Grisham and Michael Crichton were still good buddies or not…”
“You’re so full of shit,” Dar said in a friendly tone.
“Yep,” Syd agreed, and lifted her coffee mug.
Dar took a breath. He was enjoying himself and he had to remind himself that this woman was here because she was a cop, not because of his devastating charm. “My turn,” he said.
Syd nodded and sipped.
“You’re about thirty-six, thirty-seven,” he said, starting with the riskiest territory and rapidly moving on. “Law degree. Your accent’s fairly neutral, but definitely devoid of back east. A little midwestern left in the corners of your vowels. Northwestern University?”
“University of Chicago,” she said, and added. “And I’ll have you know that I’m only thirty-six. Birthday just last month.”
Dar went on. “Chief investigators for even local district attorneys are some of the best enforcement people around,” he said softly, as if to himself. “Former U.S. marshals. Former military. Former FBI.” He looked at Syd. “You were in the Bureau for what? Seven years?”
“Closer to nine,” said Syd. She got up, went to the coffeemaker, and came back to pour them both more of the thick, black stuff.
“Okay, reason for leaving…” Dar said, and stopped. He did not want to make this too personal.
“No, go ahead. You’re doing fine.”
Dar sipped coffee and said, “That glass-ceiling sexism thing. But I thought the Bureau was getting better.”
Syd nodded. “They’re working on it. In ten more years, I could have been as high as a real FBI person could get—right under the political crony or career pencil-pusher that some president appoints as director.”
“Then why did you leave…” Dar began, and then stopped. He thought about the nine-millimeter semi-auto on her hip and the quick-release holster. “Ahhh, you enjoy enforcement more than…”
“Investigation,” finished Syd. “Correct. And the Bureau is, after all, about ninety-eight percent investigation.”
Dar rubbed his cheek. “Sure. And as the state’s attorney’s chief investigator, you get to investigate to your heart’s content and then go kick the door in when it comes time.”
Syd gave him a dazzling smile. “And then I get to kick the felons who were hiding behind that door.”
“You do a lot of that?”
Sydney Olson’s smile faded but did not disappear. “Enough to keep me in shape.”
“And you also get to run inte
ragency task forces like Operation SouthCal Clean Sweep,” said Dar.
Her smile disappeared instantly. “Yes,” she said. “And I’d be willing to bet that you and I share the same opinion of committees and task forces.”
“Darwin’s Fifth Law,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow.
“Any organism’s intelligence decreases in direct proportion to the number of heads it has,” said Dar.
Syd finished her coffee, set the mug carefully on the mat, nodded, and said, “Is this Charles Darwin’s law or Dr. Darwin Minor’s law?”
“I don’t think that Charles ever had to sit on a committee or report to a task force,” said Dar. “He just sailed around on the Beagle, getting a tan while ogling finches and tortoises.”
“What are the rest of your laws?”
“We’ll probably stumble across them as we go along,” said Dar.
“Are we going to be going along?”
Dar opened his hands. “I’m just trying to find this movie’s plot. So far it’s fairly formulaic. You’re setting me up as bait, hoping that the Alliance will sic more mafia killers on me. But you have to protect me. That must mean you’ll be staying within sight twenty-four hours a day. Good plot.” He looked around his living room and in toward the dining area. “Not sure where you’ll sleep, but we’ll think of something.”
Syd rubbed her brow. “In your dreams. Darwin. The San Diego PD will be sending extra patrols by at night. I was supposed to take a look at your living arrangements and give a…quote…security-wise sitrep…end quote, to Dickweed.”
“And?” said Dar.
Syd smiled again. “I can happily report that you live in an almost abandoned warehouse where only a few units have been converted to condos or lofts. There’s no security on the stairways…unless you count sleeping migrant winos as guards. There’s little light and zero security on the ground floor where you park your Sherman tank of a sport utility vehicle. Your door’s all right—reinforced, with three good locks and a police bar—but these windows are a nightmare. A blind sniper using a rusted Springfield without a scope could take you out. No drapes. No shades. No curtains. Are you a closet exhibitionist, Dar?”