Counterfeit Road dbr-2

by Kirk Russell

  ‘Why would I want to?’

  ‘Because he’s been bigger in your life than you acknowledge and it’s time you learn more about him.’

  Raveneau popped the CD out and changed the subject.

  ‘Let me show you our file closet here. It’ll give you more of an idea about us.’

  He was going with his gut here. He wasn’t exactly sure why he was doing this. Maybe it was because his own son would have been close to Candel’s age. Maybe he understood being young and a little bit unhappy and misguided. He unlocked the door to the closet. On the shelves to the left were cold case files.

  ‘Who was Kevin Collins?’

  ‘He was a boy that went missing and we tried hard to find him. That’s why those two big boxes are up there.’

  ‘But it’s got to be too late now.’

  ‘Cases get solved. A witness comes forward that can’t carry what they know any longer or DNA gives us a connection we didn’t have before.’

  ‘What about those? Who is Ramirez?’

  ‘He’s better known as the Nightstalker and he’s already in prison doing life, but his attorney is working hard on an appeal. If the attorney is successful we’ve got five good cases here so he can be charged again.’

  Raveneau listed off the five victims. He pulled out the case file of a young woman, Marsha Smith, killed in 1966. He knew Candel didn’t really see the effort as worth it so many years after a murder. Yet Raveneau wanted him to see this.

  After he shut the door, he said, ‘OK, let’s go, and I’ll drop you off on my way.’

  They rode the elevator down and in the car before pulling away from the curb Raveneau reached around back and picked up the photo. It was wrapped in brown paper.

  ‘Tom Casey gave this to me to bring back to you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Open it.’

  Candel unpeeled the brown paper as they waited at a light. He flipped the photo over then rested it on his knees, a studio shot, color, and bigger than 8 x 11, framed in oak, and Raveneau didn’t expect the intensity. He didn’t make a sound but tears started.

  ‘Mom. She looks beautiful. She looks happy.’

  ‘That’s your dad next to her.’

  But he wasn’t looking at his dad. He was looking at his dad’s hand resting on his head and was disbelieving. ‘Me?’

  ‘What’s the matter? Do you think the kid is too good looking? That’s you.’

  ‘That can’t be.’

  But Candel knew it was and as Raveneau turned left he heard the release and then a sob Candel tried to choke off and couldn’t. When he looked over there were tears running down his face. He bowed his head and tears fell on the glass over the photo. Raveneau drove slowly, gave him time before dropping him off.

  Candel wiped the tears off his face and said, ‘Sorry, I just never…’

  ‘So he did know you. You’ll have to talk to Tom Casey. He said to tell you that you’ve got a standing invite at his house.’

  Raveneau glanced over. ‘He didn’t make any offer like that to me. He gave me something else.’ Raveneau handed over the box Casey gave him. ‘He received two of these. Here’s one of them. Casey gave this to me to give you along with the photo.’

  Candel took the box from him but didn’t open it yet. He cupped it in his left hand.

  ‘Your half brother has the other one. He’s on Facebook if you want to contact him that way. He gave me the contact info. I’ll give it to you when we stop. Your father married a Vietnamese woman. According to Tom Casey that was to get her out of Vietnam but she was also pregnant by him. Your brother’s name is Matt Frank.’

  ‘A brother?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And he got the last name?’

  ‘He did and he’s got mixed feelings like you. That’s a story you’ll have to get from him. He’s older than you by a few years and he’s got a specialty coffee business he’s trying to take global. He gets to California a couple of times a year so you can meet him here if you don’t go to Hawaii first.’

  Candel opened the box with the dragon on it. He lifted out the medal.

  ‘Is this for dropping napalm on villagers?’

  ‘War is an often cynical calculation, but this is for exceptional heroism and bravery. They don’t hand them out like candy.’

  ‘But another bogus war.’

  ‘I know what you’re saying and I’ve had those feelings. My son died in Iraq. I had to find a way to separate how we got there from how my son did. Go talk to Tom Casey about your dad and figure out what the good things were. It’s time to turn the page.’

  FORTY

  Raveneau didn’t have any proof. He didn’t have any hard information and the Special Agent in Charge, Coe’s SAC, sat listening and then left in what Raveneau read as dismissal. Within ten minutes the other two agents excused themselves and Raveneau said to Coe, ‘I don’t need this.’

  ‘Everyone is looking for anything.’

  ‘I never said I had anything.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘All right,’ Raveneau said and stood, adding, ‘I’m going to go see Drury.’

  ‘Drury was arraigned on murder and kidnapping charges; he’s not going to talk to you. He’s not going to talk to any of us ever again. We don’t have anything he wants and in his view we screwed him.’

  ‘He’s right, but we do have something he wants.’

  ‘OK, what’s that?’

  But Coe wasn’t in a mood to listen. His eyes were red from lack of sleep. He was impatient, frustrated, exhausted, under pressure and carrying guilt for the blown surveillance. He expected Raveneau to come in and lay out a theory of the bomb plotters getting information from inside law enforcement at the federal level and Raveneau was nowhere near that.

  But he did learn some things. Coe told him before his SAC walked in that the FBI got nothing from Khan’s house, his bank and phone records, his emails, his car. ‘Zero, zilch,’ he said. What Raveneau saw in Coe today was an agent running scared and tired, a guy in his mid thirties, committed to law enforcement and on the climb now wondering if his career arc just flattened out. So Raveneau let it go. He moved the conversation to Drury and held it there.

  ‘Four employees were shot to death in a cabinet shop,’ Raveneau said. ‘The owner of that shop and his wife are dead. If the same people are cleaning up after themselves it makes sense they would also take out John Drury because Drury can identify the man who hired him. I’d like to point that out to Drury. Why don’t you come with me?’

  ‘Right now, if I want to use a bathroom I have to get it cleared.’

  Coe sighed. He pressed two fingers against his forehead as if he had a headache.

  ‘I’ll let you know if I learn anything,’ Raveneau said, and then paused at the door. ‘I got a call from Brooks this morning. Is he up to speed on everything?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, he’s right in the heart of it. He wants to know why the Secret Service weren’t part of the surveillance of Khan. Brooks is loud. Fuck him.’

  Raveneau picked up la Rosa and as they drove across the city to knock on the blogger’s door, she worried that Raveneau wasn’t tuned in enough. He didn’t have a Facebook page. He didn’t have a Twitter account.

  ‘Isn’t Celeste tweeting?’

  ‘Yeah, she thinks it’s a good way to get the word out on the bar.’

  ‘So you’ve seen it. You know what it’s about. And you’ve heard of Andrew Fine, right?’ la Rosa asked as they parked. ‘Do you read him?’

  ‘I’ve read him, but I don’t read him. He’s a good writer but you don’t have to read him to know where he stands on everything.’

  ‘Leave that at the door. If anything, we need to flatter this guy. We need him to talk to us. He has a Twitter feed. He’s very witty.’

  ‘Do you follow his feed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tweet this to him: the police are at the door.’

  La Rosa led in the Homicide Detail meetings where they sat around and
talked about social networking sites as valuable new tools to reach the public in investigations. All of which Raveneau agreed with, though he didn’t think it meant he needed to sign up for Facebook or anything else. But sooner or later, they’d have a serial killer tweeting about kills and taunting them. He didn’t doubt that or that tips would come that way, but he had no interest in following the musings of a media celebrity, sports star, or journalist turned blogger.

  ‘I don’t know why but I think this could be important,’ la Rosa said, and he knew she meant it. She rarely made statements like that, something he admired about her.

  Fine either hadn’t gone to bed last night or they had just awakened him. He looked puzzled then surprised, and then affected greater surprise and Raveneau guessed he was already in his head writing about the visit. It took him a moment of blinking in the sunlight standing in his doorway, looking a little like an owl he headlined as. But he adjusted fast.

  ‘If you’d called, I would have had coffee ready. My wife is a coffee freak. She’s an investment banker and up very early. She buys the best coffee. I was about to make some when you knocked. I usually write late into the night. Why am I getting a surprise visit from two homicide inspectors?’

  ‘We’re sorry we woke you up,’ la Rosa said.

  Raveneau wasn’t sorry.

  ‘Any takers on coffee?’ Fine asked.

  ‘Sure,’ Raveneau said, and remembered he forgot to bring the Kona from Hawaii to work with him to take to Celeste.

  Fine showed them the room where he wrote his blog and it wasn’t a back closet cubbyhole that he made his start in. It was more like a library with a couple of big-screen TVs and several computers. He pointed at chairs.

  ‘I just about live in this room. Sorry about the crumbs on the table.’

  ‘We have those at our office too,’ Raveneau said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I’ll go get the coffee going.’

  The chairs were leather, a type la Rosa called man-club style. They were comfortable and Fine’s life looked very comfortable, though la Rosa told him Fine paid his dues as a journalist and started the blog in desperation after his newspaper downsized him. Now the blog had strong advertising support. Still, being married to someone in the financial arts couldn’t hurt.

  He looked at la Rosa. ‘Is it what you pictured?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Nicer?’

  ‘Very nice.’

  The decision to be a cop is a decision to be middle class. It meant you could never be sure about the future. Fire and police pensions were about to get cut, if not this year, next year. California’s unfunded pension funds were a five hundred billion dollar time bomb and San Francisco had its own problems. Fine didn’t appear to have those problems. He returned carrying a tray with a modern, insulated silver coffee pot and three chipped mugs to keep it casual.

  ‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’

  ‘Sorry we surprised you,’ la Rosa said. Raveneau who couldn’t think of anything to be sorry about didn’t say anything.

  ‘So what can I do for you?’

  ‘We’re part of an investigation that you wrote about yesterday,’ la Rosa said. ‘It’s a joint investigation with Federal agencies, but we’re very much a part of it.’

  ‘Are you here to ask for my source?’

  ‘We’re here to talk with you about your source,’ she said. ‘As I think you’re aware, this is a very significant threat.’

  ‘I don’t understand. You’re homicide inspectors. It’s a terror plot investigation.’

  Raveneau believed there was a larger truth in the continuing polarization of politics in the country. Access to information tied into privilege. Fine was among the privileged, yet at the same time Fine obviously prided himself on his empathetic connection to the underprivileged and downtrodden. He wrote his belief in democracy with those threads and Raveneau figured Fine couldn’t help but notice right now that before him were two of the middle class. Not lower class but still they were probably pretty good stand-ins this morning. La Rosa’s clothes were from Target. His shoes cost less than the slippers on Fine’s feet. Fine’s desk alone was at least a ten thousand dollar sculpture of glass and steel.

  ‘It’s a complex and organized plot,’ Raveneau said. ‘We followed a lead in a homicide investigation and came into it from a different angle.’

  Fine turned to him.

  ‘I understand FBI teams were sent to Pakistan. Is that true?’

  ‘It might be true, but I think they were probably doing just what the plotters wanted.’

  ‘You do?’

  Raveneau nodded. Fine held Raveneau’s gaze then looked at la Rosa again. Raveneau knew from la Rosa’s tutorial that Fine graduated from Stanford, worked in New York then Washington for many years before returning to the Bay Area. He built his blog when competition was still thin and the postings sporadic. He brought a competitor’s discipline hardened from years of deadlines.

  ‘Who is most at risk?’ Fine asked, and la Rosa was ready. ‘We don’t know but we do know from the weapons where the real casualties will be.’

  That was like soft-pitching him one to hit out of the park. ‘On the street?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Fine leaned forward and poured himself more coffee. ‘Anybody else?’

  ‘I’m good,’ Raveneau said and then, ‘How much do you know about the bomb threat?’

  ‘If I tell you am I putting my source at risk?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even if the source is inside your department?’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘That’s true, but how could you possibly know that?’

  ‘No one in our department would care about a shakeup at the FBI. But another federal agency might and someone within that agency might have personal ambitions that could jeopardize our chances. I’m not talking about the public being alerted and aware. Frankly, I’m for that.’

  ‘So am I, Inspector.’

  ‘Your source must be too.’

  But that wasn’t necessarily the case and Fine seemed to acknowledge that.

  ‘There’s a point,’ la Rosa said, and paused, her lips briefly pursed, ‘a point where information can be useful to the plotters.’

  ‘You’re not going to try to sell me that old saw, are you?’

  ‘Worse,’ Raveneau said. ‘We’re going to tell you this time it’s different.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘There’s no proof and you can’t print it, but you could ask your source if there’s any chance of this. We’d like you to ask and gauge the response.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Your source will dismiss the idea but we see a pattern that suggests the plotters are getting help from inside law enforcement. That doesn’t mean it is local help.’

  ‘And you say my source will dismiss that?’

  ‘I’m betting he or she will.’

  Fine looked down at his coffee and Raveneau got the feeling Fine’s source might not be local.

  ‘You are asking me to say something I can’t say credibly. I can tell you my source is very bright and if I throw out an idea like this that I can’t possibly know about, I’m going to get questions. I may lose my access.’

  ‘Don’t lose your access.’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘Just hear us out. We’re going to give you something but we can’t give you much because we don’t know how much the other side knows or doesn’t know about the investigation. You’ll have to be oblique.’

  Fine nodded, barely, but it was a nod.

  ‘Reference the quadruple slaying at Khan’s cabinet shop and the subsequent murder of Khan and his wife.’

  ‘The burglar?’

  ‘It wasn’t a burglar. That’s very vague but can you work with that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In return we’d like to know what you learn.’

  ‘OK, but is the public going to get warned soon?’

  ‘That will probably co
me soon in a joint press conference with SFPD and the FBI. It might happen today. It might happen tomorrow, but it will happen because we’re not sure where this thing is at.’

  ‘So they’re covering their asses.’

  Raveneau left that alone and added, ‘Your source can’t know you were visited by homicide inspectors. That’s very important.’

  Fine’s eyes half closed and he was obviously skeptical. He was quiet then surprised Raveneau, saying, ‘That has implications I don’t even like to think about.’

  ‘It does and we need to ask one question about your source.’

  ‘I thought we agreed you weren’t going to.’

  ‘FBI or Secret Service?’

  ‘Who will know I told you?’

  ‘We’ll keep it to ourselves.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘For as long as we possibly can.’

  ‘My credibility depends-’

  ‘We’ll protect you.’

  He looked at la Rosa and back at Raveneau. ‘It’s an old connection. It’s someone I went to school with years ago. He’s moved steadily upward in all that time. He’s not in the FBI or Secret Service, and you’ll never touch him. He worked for the CIA and he’s in some offshoot now that doesn’t even have a name.’ He looked past Raveneau at the wall behind then said, ‘I’ll call you.’

  FORTY-ONE

  ‘ You still get to read,’ Brooks said, ‘but the situation has changed. You can sit at my desk and read what was sent to me, but I’m not going to print anything for you. And I have to tell you we’ve had a long-standing good relationship with SFPD and people here are angry we were bypassed the night the bomb casings were lost. It wasn’t our ineptitude but it’s going to fall on us. The field office here doesn’t look very good right now.’

  ‘I was in Hawaii.’

  Brooks was close enough for Raveneau to smell his aftershave. He was too close and too urgent.

  ‘This wouldn’t have happened if we’d been involved or if your CIU team was on them. The FBI lost them. They added agents. They brought in people that don’t even know the area. They’re arrogant. They are endlessly stupidly fucking arrogant, but it’s going to land here when the White House cancels the President’s visit and after everybody and his brother learns what happened. Some blogger has already written about them. I’m angry. I’m very angry.’