by Don Winslow
“You have an idea how much?” Money asks.
“More than this.”
“That puts you close,” Money says, smiling.
Close to retirement.
Their deal.
Davis has a number in mind. The amount he needs to live well but not lavishly.
Then he’s done.
Retiring young.
Crime 101: Getting out one job too early puts you on the beach. Getting out one job too late puts you in a cell.
Then Money says, “This next job, it’s not down south, is it?”
“Why do you ask?”
“No, just some shit I heard.”
Davis waits him out.
“There’s this San Diego cop,” Money says, “apparently has developed a hard-on for you. Pushing a theory about the ‘Highway 101 Bandit.’”
Davis feels an electric jolt. “Does he have an ID?”
“No, nothing like that,” Money says. “Just a theory.”
Yeah, but the theory is right, Davis thinks.
“This cop have a name?”
“Lubesnick,” Money says. “Lieutenant Ronald Lubesnick. He’s very good.”
“How do you know all this?”
“It’s my business to know,” Money says. “Anyway, you might want to stay away from Dago for a while.”
Money enjoys the view for a few more seconds and then walks away. He always leaves the meeting first, and Davis always waits and walks around a little bit before going back to his car.
* * *
Crime 101: “Trust” is a word generally used by convicts and usually in the past tense—i.e., “I trusted him.”
* * *
Money gets into his Jag, drives to the Hyatt Regency, and sits in the parking lot.
Fifteen minutes later Ormon opens the passenger door and slides into the seat beside him.
Ormon has yellow hair.
Not blond—yellow.
Short—five-six or -seven—and thin.
Early thirties.
Black leather motorcycle jacket, black jeans, black Doc Martens.
“That was him, huh?” Ormon asks. “Beside you on the pier.”
“That was him.”
“Did he say anything about another job?” Ormon asks.
“He’s doing one in a few weeks,” Money says.
“Did he say what it is?”
Money just stares at him.
“But you’ll let me know,” Ormon presses.
Money nods.
Because Ormon isn’t Davis, not by a long shot, but Ormon isn’t one score from retiring either.
Money watches a lot of football. He knows the game. He knows you have to trade a star veteran when you can still get something for him.
* * *
Sam Kassem’s base store is in El Cajon, or “Al Cajon” as the locals call the east San Diego neighborhood since the Iraqi immigration came in.
Lou will never forget the time he went into a convenience store on El Cajon Boulevard to get a Coke and found a goat hanging upside down in the cooler.
“You have a goat in the cooler,” Lou said to the Chaldean owner as he checked out. Increasingly, the convenience stores, liquor stores, and other small businesses in the San Diego satellite neighborhoods are owned by Chaldeans, Iraqi Christians who came during the war.
“My daughter’s wedding,” the owner said, giving Lou his change. “Have a wonderful day.”
Now Lou pulls in to Sam’s parking lot.
Sam has high-end stores in all the trendy zip codes—La Jolla, Fashion Valley, Newport Beach, Beverly Hills—but he’s kept his base here in the old, run-down neighborhood that first took him in when he came over from Iraq.
Lou respects that.
“Why do you let me get robbed?” Sam asks when Lou comes in.
Lou sits down across the desk from him in the office in back of the shop. Sam looks over his shoulder through the one-way mirror so he can keep an eye on things.
“Why do you let you get robbed?” Lou counters, taking a page from Angie’s book. “Why don’t you use a real courier service?”
“He’s my brother-in-law.”
Lou lets the unspoken question sit.
Sam says, “The insurance people already asked.”
“I’ll bet they did.”
Lou is not without affection for Sam. A handsome man, always immaculately dressed, full head of distinguished silver hair, Sam came here from Baghdad and opened a jewelry store. Twenty-some years later, he has seven stores in Southern California.
It’s the kind of American immigrant story that Lou is still a sucker for. His great-grandparents came from some Polish shithole and worked the tuna boats in San Diego. His grandfather opened a sandwich shop, his father was a professor of literature at UCSD.
“Trust me,” Sam says. “Ben was terrified. Diana had to give him a what-do-you-call-it, an Ambien, last night.”
“That shit will mess you up,” Lou says.
It’s Sam’s turn to shrug.
“So how?” Lou asks.
“Did the robber know what Ben was carrying?” Sam asks, finishing Lou’s question. “You’re the detective, you tell me.”
“Who knew about the shipment?”
“Me, Ben and Houghton.”
“You trust Houghton?”
“I’ve done business with him twenty years,” Sam answers.
I’ve been married almost that long, Lou thinks. “Walk me through it again.”
Sam sighs but takes him through it. “Houghton got hold of him—”
“How?” Lou asks.
“He telephoned,” Sam answers. “Said he had a regular customer who was looking for a certain kind of stone—an emerald cut—six carats or bigger. Asked me if I had such an item.”
“And you did.”
“Sure,” Sam says. “Five of them that would fit the bill.”
“So . . .”
“So I told him so. He asked for pictures, so I sent them.”
“How?”
“Email,” Sam answers, “and he asked me to have Ben take them over.”
“You do that? Just on trust?”
“Twenty years.”
Yeah, Lou thinks. “Then . . .”
“Then Ben comes by on his route,” Sam explains, “I already have the stones wrapped up in their papers, Ben takes them, and I let Houghton know he’s on the way.”
“You phone or email?”
“Email,” Sam says. “Then I get a call from Ben, his voice is shaking. I was afraid he was going to have a heart attack.”
So the robber hacked Sam’s emails, Lou thinks. He gets up from his chair. “Hire a service. One of them with an armored car.”
“Do you know what that costs?”
“I’m guessing less than one and a half mil,” Lou says.
The insurance guy wants to talk with Lou.
Of course he does, a seven-figure hit.
They meet at a taco stand in old downtown El Cajon. Lou makes sure Mercer pays. They sit at a picnic table outside, and Mercer says, “It had to be an inside job.”
A scam as old as time, Lou thinks. Shop owner colludes in his own robbery, gets paid for his loss by the insurance company, buys the merchandise back from the thief at a discount, and sells it again on the black market.
Everyone wins except the insurance company, and everyone hates them anyway.
“Before we pitch our tent on the grassy knoll,” Lou says, “let’s consider the possibility that this wasn’t an inside job. Let’s consider the possibility that we’re looking at a real pro who knows his business and does his homework.”
Mercer unwraps his second taco from its paper, looks at Lou and says, “You gonna bring up your Superman theory again?”
“Same MO.”
“Say you’re right,” Mercer argues. “That still doesn’t preclude your lone guy using inside sources. I think you need to lean on Sam and his extended family a little bit.”
“You wanna know what I th
ink?” Lou asks. “I think you want to deny this claim while pushing me through the door ahead of you, and I think you can go fuck yourself—I’m not putting my unit between you and your insured.”
“I’m just making a suggestion.”
“Don’t,” Lou says. “You have information I can use, give me the information and I’ll use it. You want to be really useful, get the insurance council to offer a reward, put some heat on this guy. But don’t tell me how to do my job, Bill.”
Mercer crumples up the paper and tosses it into the trash can.
“Is that a no on the reward?” Lou asks.
“I’m going to polygraph Sam and Haddad,” Mercer says.
Lou isn’t surprised. The insurance company has the right to demand something called an Examination Under Oath and question its insured under penalty of perjury.
It’s the right move.
If Sam and Haddad flunk the poly, it will give the insurance company grounds to deny the claim. Mercer can’t demand a polygraph from Houghton because he didn’t suffer a loss and isn’t making a claim.
But Lou is betting that Sam and Haddad pass the test. Sam is a sharp businessman but honest and hardworking, and Lou really does believe that the insurance companies are prejudiced against Middle Easterners because the Iranian carpet merchants really hosed them back in the nineties. And when the needle doesn’t move on the Chaldeans, it’s going to point at Houghton.
If, Lou thinks, this was an inside job.
Which it kind of is, if the guy is reading their mail.
* * *
Davis stops by the fish market in Dana Point Harbor, asks what’s fresh, and buys two yellowtail fillets. Then he goes to Trader Joe’s and picks up a bottle of imported lemon-infused olive oil.
The asparagus he gets from Vons, ditto the dark chocolate (85 percent cacao) and some cream and fresh raspberries for the mousse.
He’s cooking dinner for Traci tonight.
* * *
Lou gathers his team in the staff room and stands by the whiteboard, where he’s listed every courier robbery in California over the past ten years and where he’s just finished writing down the latest.
“I want this guy,” Lou announces in the staff room.
This gets a collective, albeit suppressed, moan from the detectives, not one of whom believes there’s a “guy.” They also know where Lou is headed, and it’s going to be a bitch, because of the eleven robberies on the board only three of them are in the unit’s jurisdiction.
Lou jabs his finger at the board. “And to get this guy, we can’t just look at this robbery. We have to look at all these robberies for patterns.”
Another groan.
Lou and his patterns.
* * *
Crime 101: Every series of acts creates a pattern.
* * *
Lou knows that there are two ways to solve a crime:
1. A snitch.
Someone talks.
You can do all the CSI razzmatazz you want—that voodoo is for juries—but most crimes are solved because someone yaps.
2. Patterns.
With a serial criminal, unless you get a snitch, this is the ball game. A smart criminal can leave only minimal clues, but he can’t help leaving patterns, any more than you can help leaving footprints on the beach.
And the patterns always mean something.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that investigators also have patterns—ways of working, ways of thinking, ways of doing, and their patterns sometimes make it harder for them to see patterns, to look at a set of facts in a fresh way, to discern new patterns from the expected ones.
It’s like looking at a painting that’s been in your living room for twenty years—you see what you’ve always seen; you don’t see what you haven’t seen.
Like a marriage, Lou thinks.
Now he pushes his team to look at the facts again.
“I don’t want anyone to do anything today but think,” Lou says. “Sanchez, look at every unsolved courier robbery in California over the past five years, eliminate any that wouldn’t fit the lone-perp theory. Rhodes, get that smirk off your puss and see what the vics have in common. Ng—MO—look at verbs—he does this, he doesn’t do that. Geary, go over the geography—I want a map. McGuire—you review the time factor—there’s a pattern in the space between robberies.”
“What are you going to look at, boss?” McGuire asks.
“I’m going to look at all of it,” Lou says.
I’m going to stand back from the painting.
Lou is a bookish guy.
How Angie describes him anyway, and maybe this is one of their problems. In his rare free time, he’d rather get into a chair with a book, she’d rather go out. He usually yields and goes out, but she senses his resentment and resents it in turn.
“You’re becoming your father,” she told him one night after leaving a party early because he was sulking.
Don’t we all? he thought.
Maybe lawyers in Del Mar don’t.
But this is what he intends to do when he retires, sit back and read books.
Mostly history.
Lou just likes history, but he also believes in history, believes that most of the present’s answers can be found in the past. So that’s what he does now—he gathers stacks of old files and starts reading.
April 22, 2008:
A jewelry-store owner in Newport Beach goes to FedEx a custom watch—worth $435,000—to a customer. He gets hit in his own parking lot as he climbs into his car to drive to the FedEx facility.
September 15, 2008:
A salesman from New York flies into San Francisco with a suitcase full of mixed goods—colored gems, diamonds—to visit a number of regular clients in the Bay Area. He gets robbed at gunpoint in the parking lot of his hotel—$762,000.
January 11, 2009:
A diamond dealer from Belgium sells an inventory worth $960,000 to a store in Malibu and gets paid in cash. On the way back to LAX, he stops at a hotel on the PCH to meet a call girl and gets popped on the way out.
(At least, Lou thinks, the guy let him get laid.)
March 20, 2009:
A jeweler in Mendocino drives to FedEx to pick up a package of colored stones shipped from a store in Tucson. He gets hit just as he pulls back in to his shop—$525,000.
October 17, 2010:
Lou’s personal favorite. A local dealer goes to Lindbergh Airport in San Diego with a carry-on shoulder bag filled with custom watches, rings, colored gemstones and diamonds. He has to put the bag on the X-ray conveyor belt, then gets stopped and patted down as he goes through the line. When he gets to the conveyor belt, his shoulder bag is gone—$828K.
But Lou doesn’t know if he should add this to his list, because it doesn’t fit the pattern.
January 14, 2015:
San Luis Obispo. A South African diamond dealer comes into a shop and insists on only getting paid in Krugerrands—pure gold coins. He gets paid and then gets hit in the parking lot of the hotel at 4:00 A.M. when he leaves to catch an early connecting flight—$943,000.
May 2016:
A female store owner takes a range of sample diamonds to the home of a regular customer in Rancho Santa Fe. Gets a flat tire on the road up to the ranch, gets robbed as she goes to change the tire—$645,000.
Then there was this.
September 27, 2016:
A diamond dealer from Brazil comes into Los Angeles with merchandise he claims to U.S. Customs to be worth $375,000. He rents a car at Alamo and drives the Pacific Coast Highway up toward a jeweler in Marina del Rey, his first stop on a sales tour. He meets the jeweler on his fifty-foot fishing boat in the harbor, because why not? Well, because the robber walks onto the boat, takes the suitcase and walks off. Now the Brazilian is fucked because he can’t file an insurance claim on the merchandise he didn’t declare, rumored to be worth over $2 million.
February 3, 2017:
A Newport Beach jeweler gets a call
from a regular customer in Pelican Bay to come to the house with a selection of diamond necklaces for a twenty-fifth anniversary. He pulls in to the driveway and gets hit as he’s ringing the doorbell. Turns out the customer and his wife are celebrating their anniversary in Paris and the call was a fake. Call it $500K, give or take.
May 18, 2017:
San Rafael. A San Francisco jewelry store owner shifts some unsold merchandise to his store in Marin County. The courier gets hit as he arrives at the store—$347,000.
And now October 17, 2018:
Del Mar. One and a half mil in Sam Kassem’s diamonds.
If it is one guy, Lou thinks, he’s taken down something around $8,600,000 in the past ten years. Even after expenses and a commission to a fence, well . . .
The cases could be unrelated, Lou thinks.
Which is the received wisdom.
Lou doesn’t believe the received wisdom, because there’s too much of a pattern.
The robber has done his homework, is getting inside information from somewhere because he just doesn’t miss. Every hit is at least mid–six figures, and now he’s busting into seven. He knows who is carrying what where and for how much.
The guy has found a niche, Lou thinks, a very specific place in the criminal ecosystem. He hits the jewelers at their most vulnerable point—when they’re moving merchandise.
He’s selective—two or three jobs a year, always for big money and that’s it.
He knows his terrain—the most they have is a video-cam shot from the back, a man in a black hood. Useless. He hits and then just seems to disappear.
He’s mixing it up, never hitting the same jeweler or even the same insurer more than once. And moving around geographically, between police jurisdictions, up and down the California coast.
And always near a highway—never in the middle of a city.
What we have here, Lou thinks, is a highway robber.
And a specific highway robber.
Highway 101.
Lou’s torn between an iced tea and an Arnold Palmer.
On the one hand, the Arnold Palmer would taste better, but on the other hand the lemonade in it has sugar, which converts to fat, and the fucking lawyer in Del Mar looks like he has negative body-fat percentage from riding his seven-thousand-dollar Italian bicycle up and down the 101.
Lou goes with the plain iced tea.
And a turkey burger.
“Fries or a salad?” the waitress asks.
