by Dale Nelson
This was a lady you spent the night with.
Jack grabbed the landline phone in Reginald’s kitchen. Jack didn’t keep one himself, but he knew Reginald’s paranoia about communications. Jack dialed Paul Sharpe. Sharpe had gotten a new cell phone, but the private eye had figured that out and gotten Jack the number. Jack had a white noise app that he used when he was sleeping on planes. In addition to white noise, it had a variety of different ambient sound samples, including one called “Crowded Room.” He selected this and set the phone on the counter. The background noise would help disguise Jack’s voice and make it sound less like he was calling from someone’s silent kitchen.
“Hello?”
“Is this Mr. Paul Sharpe?”
“Who’s calling, please?”
“This is Triple A Towing in Long Beach.”
“Did you say Long Beach? I’m sorry, I’m having a hard time hearing you.”
“Sorry, it’s a busy night here. Mr. Sharpe, do you own a 2013 Ferrari California?”
There was a long pause before Sharpe said, “I do.”
He had to have bought that off the showroom floor. There’s no other way Sharpe could’ve gotten that car that fast.
“Look, I got a call to pick up your car about fifteen minutes ago,” he said, making it clear he was annoyed. “You left the car in a handicapped spot on Ocean. Normally, I’d just tow the thing, but it’s a really nice car and I don’t want to ding it, you know. Last time I did that, I had a guy try to sue me. Besides, dealing with the insurance companies is a pain the ass for cars like that.”
“I’m sorry, but you’ve got the wrong guy. My car is in the garage, and I’ve been here all night.”
“You sure? I gotta run the plates on every car we get, make sure they weren’t reported stolen. Well, I did, and your name came up. This is your car.” Jack had no idea if this was true or not, but it sounded good. He knew Sharpe wouldn’t know the difference either.
“That’s impossible.”
“So, look, you want to park in handicapped spots, that’s your business, but unless you got a tag, I gotta tow ya. I’m trying to do you a solid here and let you come get the car—you’re what, at dinner or something?”
“I’m at home in fucking Hollywood,” Sharpe snapped. “Hold on.” Jack could hear him walking, huffing as he moved, occasionally muttering to himself. Jack took another sip of the whiskey as he listened to Sharpe exit the house, walk down the pathway to the garage and then explode into a fugue state of profanity that probably registered on the Richter scale when he saw that his car was gone.
Unable to resist himself from turning the screws, Jack said, “Maybe it was your wife?”
“I’m not married! My fucking car was stolen.”
“Well, look, it’s at the corner of Ocean and South Termino, parked in the handicapped spot at the Jack in the Box. If you can get down here in the next thirty minutes, I won’t tow it.”
“Thirty minutes! I’m in fucking Hollywood. How am I going to get down to Long Beach in thirty minutes?”
“I’ll hold off as long as I can, but you better hurry.” Sharpe was about to try and bargain for more time when Jack interrupted him. “I got another call. You got a half hour, or it’s a tow and two hundred and fifty bucks. And I’m not liable for anything that happens to your car.” Jack hung up and put the phone down, smiling. He took another long, satisfying drink. Sharpe was most definitely on his way.
He refilled the glass another two finger’s worth and walked into the third bedroom that Reginald had converted into an office. The back wall was essentially a large window. To the left was a bookcase that occupied that entire side, to the right a desk with an iMac and a photo-grade printer. Jack started with the bookcase. Using his phone flashlight, he found the books on the third shelf that covered the wall safe. Jack pulled those off the shelf and let them drop, revealing the small safe set into the wall. Were it anyone else’s safe, he’d wish Enzo Bachetti and his watchmaker’s hands were here, but Jack knew Reginald. He knew where the old thief’s tradecraft was excellent and where it lacked. Jack tried six numbers on the keypad—04-14-03—followed by a resolute “click.”
The numbers were the day Reginald got out of prison.
Jack opened the safe and aimed his phone’s light into the empty space that looked like a depthless black hole against the muted darkness of the room. The safe was filled with documents of all sizes, most of which were organized in manila folders or Moleskine notebooks. Jack put the phone in his teeth and flipped through them one by one until he found what he was looking for—his. Reginald kept a meticulous accounting of all the different identities he’d created, the types of documents he’d used, be it passport, social security card, driver’s license, whatever. The books were organized by the person’s name, with all of the different identities and types of documents listed below, ledger-style. Curiously, Jack’s was in one by itself. He quickly thumbed through each one to make sure that he was only mentioned in the one book. That red Moleskine listed every identity that Reginald had ever created for him and had a variety of different headshots, all passport photo sized. This was what he’d come for.
Jack returned the rest of the documents to Reginald’s safe but didn’t close it. Next, he went over to the desk and tapped on the keyboard of LeGrande’s iMac to wake it. The machine popped to life, showing the home screen, which was a picture of a sunset over the Pacific, presumably taken from Reginald’s boat. “You’re getting soft,” Jack muttered. It wasn’t password locked, because no one who lived alone did that, regardless of what they had on their machine. Jack removed the memory stick he carried with him and plugged it in and selected the one file on it—a headshot of Paul Sharpe that he’d once used for staff bios. Reginald’s default photo app launched when Jack clicked the thumbnail. He printed a sheet of the photos, photo booth style.
Given his experience with the efficiency of the State of California thus far, Jack couldn’t rely on their ability to put all of this together and connect Reginald with Sharpe, so Jack decided he was going to give them a little help.
Jack picked up the glass of whiskey and walked over to the printer and sipped while it pushed out a single sheet of sixteen headshots against a generic blue field that could be the background on any driver’s license or passport. Smiling, Jack removed the printed sheet, careful to touch only the edges with the tips of his gloves and walked back over to the open safe. He pushed the photo sheet into the empty space, closed the safe, and replaced the books in front of it.
Jack finished his Macallan and set the glass on the table, toasting the empty air with his final sip.
Jack returned to the kitchen holding the notebook. Reginald had three candles in pewter stands all in a row in the center of his dining room table. Clearly someone had decorated for him. Jack grabbed one and lit it with a cigarette lighter he found in a junk drawer. He set that on the breakfast bar at the far end of the kitchen. Jack then walked over to the professional grade, six-burner gas stove and quickly turned each knob to high, turning on the gas flow and bypassing the pilot. He took the notebook and the bottle of scotch and bolted down the stairs. He made fast steps to the front door, slamming it closed as he passed.
Jack tore across the street to the Ferrari, making no effort to be inconspicuous. There was no time and being seen was also something of the point. He dropped into the car, started the ignition, and pressed the accelerator down. The Ferrari jumped to life and sprinted to the end of Lido Lane, engine roaring. The kitchen exploded as the car took off. Jack saw a flash of orange light and black smoke pouring out of the second floor windows, smearing the light of the streetlamps. He whipped around a traffic circle that spat him onto Appian Way and a winding route around the outer edge of the island to Second Street.
Jack took the Second Street bridge and continued for several blocks, hanging an impossible right on Pamona, barely slowing down to forty miles an hour and earning a long horn from some poor asshole he cut way off. Jack screeche
d into the parking lot behind a taco shack and hard braked as soon as he hit the asphalt. He dropped the Ferrari into a dull, throaty idle and eased his way through the parking lot, exiting the other side. He parked the car along the curb, next to a dumpster. It was illegally parked, but not overtly obvious. Jack shut off the Ferrari and gingerly exited, taking the notebook and the scotch. He locked the car with an over the shoulder shot from the fob and briskly walked to the street.
A siren wail broke the air, and another joined it almost immediately. Soon, there was a distant, terrible chorus.
Jack’s heart rate shot up and he could feel panic forming at the edges of his psyche. This was the first violent act he’d ever committed and his first crime on American soil in almost twenty years.
Jack dropped the Ferrari’s keys in a blue postal service mailbox on Second. If the car was still sitting there when the mail carrier emptied the box the next day, he was in for a surprise. Jack handed what was left of the Macallan, a good three-quarters of the thousand-dollar bottle, to a homeless man sitting cross-legged in a doorway asking for change. Jack told him, “cheers” when he gave over the bottle. A dirty face looked back, seemingly incapable of speech. The vagrant looked at the bottle, confused, trying to puzzle out the meaning of the gesture before abandoning the train of thought, opting instead for a healthy swig.
Jack hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to LAX and not to worry about the red lights. He had a flight to catch.
The cab picked up the 710, and Jack watched with vacant eyes as Long Beach blurred into the seemingly endless line of identical neighborhoods hanging off the freeway. The cabbie tried to make conversation, but Jack ignored him, if he even heard him at all. Jack was fighting the urge to tell the cabbie to drive, instead, to Beverly Hills and the restaurant that Jack told Reginald he would be at. Jack wanted to look Reginald in the face, to tell his mentor that he had figured out LeGrande’s game, had outplayed him. Jack burned to see the look of haughty, self-assured arrogance drain away as he took the call from the Long Beach Fire Department telling him that his house, his life, was in ashes. Then, to see Reginald begin to connect the pieces before Jack’s eyes, to see him realize that he had been beat.
He chastised himself for the lack of discipline. That kind of thinking was what got him in trouble in Rome.
But Jack had learned his lesson from that event. Learned that sometimes the act of revenge itself was enough, had to be. His drunken, enraged call to LeGrande a few days before revealed that Jack was onto the fixer, and it had cost him not only time but also the element of surprise. Jack would not allow himself to make that mistake again. Reginald would tell his FBI handlers that Jack lured him out of his house and then set fire to it. He would do this anyway, but if Jack met him in person, there would be people who could place him in Los Angeles, and that would make his denial of involvement so much harder to believe. As it was, he’d need to be seen out and about in Sonoma tonight to establish an alibi. Jack would simply have to trust that Reginald would piece together Jack’s hand in his undoing from a prison cell.
He’d just wished he’d had time to steal Reginald’s goddamned boat too.
Twenty-Two
Katrina Danzig walked up Frank Fischer’s driveway in the ubiquitous blue windbreaker with yellow, block “FBI” on the back, flanked by Riordan and their CHP liaison, Lieutenant Valero. They had four other CHPs with them, all wearing tactical vests, two several steps ahead, walking toward the front door, and two moving around back to cover the rear exit. They disappeared into the predawn darkness. Two more CHPs were at the end of the driveway watching the road. Danzig followed the lead CHPs to the door and waited until the radio crackled, signifying they were in position. She nodded. One of the CHPs, a no-necked former Marine named Tomlinson hammer fisted the door. “Police officer. Search warrant,” he barked loudly.
Danzig’s heart rate picked up, anticipating the confused look on Fischer’s face when he opened the door to find five cops on his doorstep with an arrest warrant. Danzig dropped the smile before anyone saw her. This was a major victory for Danzig—wrapping up an international jewelry trafficking ring that she had literally happened upon. Unless something broke their way with the French, they would not get Burdette for the Carlton InterContinental job unless he actually had some stones on him, and everyone believed Burdette was too smart for that. LeGrande couldn’t actually testify that Burdette was in France at that time, just that he’d set up the job for him. But, they could get him on several open and unsolved jewelry heists going back nearly a decade based on LeGrande’s information and his testimony.
Then, they’d nail LeGrande for forgery, and if they couldn’t get anything solid on him, she was sure that the Counterterrorism guys in DC would want to speak to him about whom he was making passports for. Danzig had seen his house in Long Beach—his actual house, not that bullshit flophouse apartment he rented and was conning his PO with. LeGrande was doing well for an ex-con working as a “construction foreman.” She seriously doubted that jewel thieves were his only passport customers.
This was shaping up to be a hell of a week.
A few moments passed, and Danzig realized everyone was looking at her. There was no answer at the door, and they waited for instructions on whether or not to break down the door.
The trend in law enforcement over the past twenty years was to use SWAT to serve high-risk warrants. Increasingly, that meant a squad of police officers wearing body armor and carrying long guns. But there had also been a trend in police departments getting warrants wrong—serving at the wrong address or even getting into shootouts with gun-owning homeowners who believed (rightly or wrongly) that their homes were being invaded. The SAC was specific on this point—there was nothing in Fischer’s profile that said he was violent or that this would be a high-risk service. In fact, their interviews with LeGrande suggested the opposite, a man who abhorred violence and didn’t own any personal weapons. Layered on top of this was a recent surge in police violence against civilians and the attendant public backlash. Approval to seek an arrest warrant for Jack Burdette/Frank Fischer came only after Danzig, with support from ASAC Sinclair, convinced Mark Lattimore, the Special Agent in Charge of the San Francisco office that Burdette was a significant flight risk. Danzig argued that if they didn’t take him down now, he’d escape overseas where he likely had the resources to stay hidden.
Lattimore was a cautious man and had his sights set on a position at one of the DC-based national intelligence fusion centers that would be a major stepping-stone in his already immaculate career. He wasn’t about to risk that by blowing a major investigation because his people went for the grab too soon and let their target escape. Lattimore argued that the evidence was insufficient, but Danzig knew he was just burdened by an abundance of caution. She was new to him, and he hadn’t yet evaluated whether to trust her judgment or not. The SAC knew her reputation, both good and bad, and Danzig was plainly aware that she carried those bags with her. But Sinclair was in her corner, and she knew that he’d pressed the SAC not to block her on this. Sinclair was of the older tradition of agents with law degrees, and he was able to explain how a judge would evaluate the warrant. Sinclair was convinced that the evidence Danzig presented would indeed satisfy a judge, and after a short but heated closed-door debate, SAC Lattimore agreed to let them put the warrant in front of a magistrate.
Lattimore acquiesced to the warrant, but there were conditions. First, they would have to involve California Highway Patrol in the warrant service. Danzig suspected that stipulation was SAC’s way of spreading the risk around. If someone got jumpy and used force, it would be easier for Lattimore to distance himself if it was from another law enforcement agency. Next, they absolutely could not use SWAT or CHP’s Warrant Service Team, a decision that nearly caused Valero to pull out of the operation entirely. Lattimore was clear, this had to go forward cautiously, and the stated objective was to take the subject quietly or they wouldn’t go at all. They were not going to
have a shootout in the middle of wine country.
Danzig didn’t care about who served the warrant. One local cop was as good as another in her opinion.
Thinking on that, she felt Tomlinson’s eyes on her, staring back from Burdette’s door, waiting for further instruction. She caught him flicking his eyes over to his lieutenant, but she couldn’t tell if it was to see if guidance was coming from Valero instead or if it was something more malignant. “Hit the door again,” she said.
Tomlinson hammer fisted the door with three hard hits and bellowed, “Police officer. Search warrant.”
Valero radioed his team in back to see if they observed any activity inside the house. They responded instantly with a negative—no lights, no motion.
“Do I go in?” Tomlinson asked, irritation heavy in his voice. Danzig could almost hear the “or what?” at the end of his question.
The SAC had filled her with enough doubt about the repercussions of being wrong that she was legitimately afraid of what would happen if she were. If Frank Fischer wasn’t actually Burdette’s alias, they’d blow their opportunity to nab the real Burdette, for one. Secondly, and more importantly, they’d have a public relations scandal for forcing entry into the home of a wealthy and well-liked Sonoma businessman, who would undoubtedly sue the bureau and CHP. Danzig looked to her partner, hoping to read a vote of support or urge of caution in his face. Riordan wanted to nail Burdette on general principle because he’d been so thoroughly outmaneuvered during their interview two days before. He wasn’t a guy who enjoyed losing, and that could sometimes cloud his judgment.
