"There are at least fifty evidence tech workers at our new CSI science pod at Cal State," Jeb said. "There are a dozen more at the vehicle center. How's this stay quiet? Its bound to leak to the press. It always does."
"We limit the number of forensic techs to about six. We handpick people we know we can trust to stay quiet," I answered. "Then, instead of taking this truck to the new automotive garage at Cal State, we tow it to the old North Hollywood Medical Center on Riverside. That hospital is deserted and is being rented out for film and television shoots. Hitch woke up the location manager from Mosquito and that guy can rent it for us. The location fee is only fifteen hundred a day. Its got everything we need."
Hitch picked up the narrative. "We get one or two people from the ME staff who we can trust to keep a secret and get them to do their investigation of the remains in one of the old operating theaters there. Since it's just skeletons, they'll only be looking at bone and bullet issues. They'll need to do dental matches, but it's not anywhere near as complicated as a full soft tissue autopsy. It should work. Then we post a couple of patrolmen on this crime scene to protect the well house. Nobody gets in, especially the Dunbar family or their lawyers."
"And you think we can pull that off and keep this quiet?" Jeb said.
"I think it's a good idea," Alexa cut in. She was doing what I knew she would, thinking like a cop and not an administrator.
"What about ADA Wilkes?" Jeb asked.
"I think we need to keep her screened off," Hitch advised. "This old Brinks robbery touches her case and some of the same people may be involved. She won't see past the prosecutorial problems it causes. Murder defense is mostly about confusing the jury. She's gonna freak and start causing us major trouble when she finds out what we're up to."
"Doesn't matter," Alexa said. "We have to tell her anyway." Jeb nodded his head in agreement. "I'll stay here and help you with her, but if we fail to notify the DA's office on something this big, we're gonna be eating the fallout for years."
So Alexa made the call. She woke Dahlia up and told her to get to Skyline Drive immediately. She'd find out why once she got here. While we waited for her to arrive, Alexa looked at the search warrant Brooks had signed.
"You're learning," she said.
"Learn or burn," I replied.
A few minutes later, Sumner took me aside.
"That seventy-two-hour thing was brilliant, dawg."
"Thanks."
"It puts a tight clock on Act Three, and not for nothing, but we definitely needed a clock in this movie. You're showing some real producing promise. I'm telling you, when it's great, it's great. You just can't make shit like this up. This puppy is writing itself."
The problem was, he was completely serious.
Chapter 37
Dahlia Wilkes pulled up in a new red Lexus and parked down by the gate. It was five in the morning. The nights are long in December so it was still dark. As always, she was immaculately dressed. She set a fat designer briefcase on the fender of her car and regarded the four of us skeptically. Her hair ruffled in the brisk Santa Ana wind.
"So what s going on?"
"Something came up," Alexa said.
"It better not screw up my Sladky prosecution."
"It certainly touches on it," Alexa said. "It might affect it."
Dahlia turned on Hitch and me. "What have you two been doing?"
When neither of us answered, she started to walk up the drive to see for herself. Jeb blocked her way.
"This is a crime scene. Its restricted."
"Not from me. I'm the prosecutor on Sladky, or did you numbskulls forget that already?"
"Except it's not Sladky" he said. "Its Vulcuna."
She stopped, then pinned us with a withering courtroom stare. "What do you mean, its not Sladky? Why else would you call me? And who or what is a Vulcuna?"
"It's a cold case that just went active and it touches Sladky," Alexa said. "But unless you promise to give us seventy-two hours of confidentiality to work this situation, we can't let you on the crime scene."
"You're outta your mind."
"It's an unusual circumstance," Jeb said.
"By confidentiality, what exactly are we talking about?"
"Only you get to know what we've found here. We're extending this courtesy because you might have suggestions to protect your Sladky prosecution."
Dahlia's irritation had now turned to puzzled interest. "Of course, I have to tell Chase no matter what."
"Chase Beal doesn't need to know about this just yet," Alexa said.
"The District Attorney for the County of Los Angeles is to be kept in the dark? What are you smokin', girl?"
"This case has some political overtones. The DA is a politician. Without going any further, let's just leave it at that," my wife said.
Dahlia was definitely hooked. She wanted to know what we'd found, but she wanted to do it without putting her own ass on the line.
"What's to keep me from calling him right now, telling him what you people are suggesting? Our office will hit this property like a Panzer Division. Then we'll all know."
"If you intend to get the same excellent service from the LAPD on your cases in the future, I would advise against that strategy," Alexa warned.
"If I do this, I might as well tender my resignation to the section supervisor."
"I don't completely understand how things work in your office," Alexa challenged, "but we have solid reasoning behind this tactic. After Chase thinks it over, even he will acknowledge the wisdom of doing it this way."
"And I cant get filled in until I agree to this dumb-ass deal, in the blind."
"That's more or less it," Alexa said.
"Well, I've got to hand you guys one thing. You've definitely got my interest up."
She opened her calendar and looked at it. "Seventy-two hours is five A. M., Friday."
"That's right," Alexa agreed.
"Okay. I'll do you one better. Chase is in Sacramento this week meeting with some PACs to raise money for his mayoral campaign. He won't be back in town until Friday. As soon as he's back, I brief him. I should be able to get away with that."
"Deal," Alexa said.
"However, if he changes his plans and comes home early, he gets briefed then."
"That hardly works," Jeb objected.
"So nobody's completely happy," she said. "That's the way it should be in county government."
Alexa realized it was the best deal she could strike, so she agreed, and said, "Come on. We'll show you."
We all walked up the drive and headed toward the well house.
"Where the hell did that come from?" Dahlia said when she saw it.
We told her and then accompanied her inside. She looked at the truck and the two skeletons in the front seat. Five minutes later we were all outside again, standing in the predawn darkness, listening to the Santa Ana winds rattle through the forty-foot cypress trees.
"Where'd that Brinks truck come from?" Dahlia wanted to know.
Jeb had called in the plates and now confirmed that it was the armored car that went missing from Wilshire Boulevard in 1983 with fifteen million in gold bullion. He filled Dahlia in on the cold case.
"The third guard is probably in back," he concluded.
Dahlia sighed after he finished. She could see the trap we were in if this got out. 'Til keep it quiet until Chase gets back," she said, but wasn't happy about it.
We called two crime-scene photographers to the scene and six CSIs. Alexa and Jeb handpicked everyone. We worked fast. There wasn't any useful trace evidence inside the well house because over the years heavy rainwater had seeped in and anything that might have been there was long gone.
A police flatbed truck arrived at six and backed up the narrow drive.
The assistant coroner, Ray Tsu, pulled in at six thirty. The quiet Asian ME was called Fey Ray by almost everyone because he was rail thin and never spoke above a whisper. He'd worked half a dozen of my cases in the past.
>
He looked through the window at the two skeletons in the front seat. Because it was impossible to get inside the truck without torches, he made the decision to leave them in the armored car for transport back to the ambulance bay in the empty hospital in North Hollywood and remove the remains there.
As the sun came up, the tow drivers inflated the tires and winched the armored car out of the well house onto the flatbed. They tied a new tarp over the top to hide it from the neighbors, then drove the flatbed down the drive onto the street below.
Twenty-five minutes later we were pulling into the covered ambulance bay in the back of the old North Hollywood Medical Center.
The building was a big stucco four-story fifties-style rectangle with mismatching additions that architecturally resembled a bunch of shoeboxes. White with peeling green trim, it looked pretty run-down.
By ten A. M., our handpicked CSI team along with two forensic tech welders were hard at work in the ambulance bay opening the truck. The armored car was made of bulletproof steel so the techs had to use oxyfuel torches to cut through it. The door lock was finally freed.
Jeb had already assigned the armored car heist and its resulting murders to Hitch and me. As the new primaries on this three-decade-old cold case, we stepped up onto the truck s back bumper to open the rear door.
Because I now suspected that my new partner was afraid of ghosts, and because we were expecting to uncover a third skeleton inside, I did the honors.
I gloved up and pulled the door wide.
Chapter 38
The truck was empty.
No third guard in the back, an interesting development.
"So the third guard probably did the deed," Hitch reasoned. "He jumped his buddies and made off with the fifteen mil in gold bullion."
He was visibly relieved a third skeleton wasn't lying around in the truck like some gruesome special effect from Pirates of the Caribbean.
"We need to get the identities of all three Brinks guards from the old case file and compare dental charts so we can identify the missing one," Jeb said. "That should tell us which one of these guys was the potential doer."
He turned to Ray Tsu. "You can remove the two guys from the front compartment now."
We were just getting set to let the CSIs eome in to do a trace evidence sweep when I noticed four closed strongboxes pushed up next to the bench at the front of the compartment.
"I wonder why they didn't take those," I said. "Be easier to carry."
"Because you'd need a forklift to move fifteen million in gold bullion. The killer probably took it out in individual bricks," Hitch replied. "What would that much gold weigh anyway?" He reached down with a gloved hand and opened the top of the nearest box.
That's when we got the first big surprise.
Resting inside the strongbox were at least twenty-five gold bricks. They glittered brilliantly in the fluorescent light.
"Get the fuck outta here," Hitch whispered.
We opened the second box and, like the first, it was also filled to the top with bullion. So were the last two.
"Let's back out of here and think this over," 1 said.
We jumped down and told Jeb, Alexa, and Dahlia what we had just found. After they had all looked at the gold, everyone stood behind the truck talking at once.
The question was, why steal an armored car, kill at least two of the guards, and then leave fifteen million in bullion behind, parked with two skeletons in a concrete well house for over twenty-five years?
"Unless this gold is bogus," I offered. "Maybe somebody switched it out with painted lead or something."
"I'll get a metallurgist out here right away and find out," Alexa said. "The Jewelry Mart should have somebody who can assay this. I'll get someone who's bonded and sworn to secrecy."
While she was working on that, the rest of us tried to come to grips with this new find. It changed all my theories.
"What is going on here?" Dahlia said. It was the second time in two days I'd seen her off balance. "Was this a gold bullion heist or not?"
"We'll know more once these bars are tested," Jeb told her.
Ten minutes later I saw Hitch getting some coffee from a portable urn one of the CSIs had brought in. He carried an extra cup over to me behind the armored car. We stood, blowing steam across the cup rims, considering the new developments.
"I think you're wrong," I finally told him, pointing at the gold. "That's our Act Two complication."
He smiled widely at me. "You're absolutely right, dawg, and since we have Act One in place and this kick-ass complication in Act Two, now it's all about…"
ACT THREE
Chapter 39
An hour later, Alexa had returned to her office and Dahlia to her trial in progress at the downtown courthouse. There were now fifteen men and women from the MEs office and CSI assembled inside the deserted hospital building. Some wore CSI jumpsuits and carried satchels full of equipment, others were from the lab or the ME s office and wore white coats. None of them had been told why they were here. They stood listening as Captain Calloway filled them in on the old armored car case.
Hitch and I stood behind Jeb and listened. He finished with the briefing and then launched into a rant on security precautions.
"It s extremely important that you protect the confidentiality of this investigation," he said to the roomful of earnest-looking geeks. "You cannot tell anyone about this. Not your wife, not your brother nobody.
Because, while you may think you can impress upon them the severity of the situation, my experience has been once you tell anything to anyone outside the immediate scope of the investigation, it always leaks."
The tech team looked solemn, but who knew how seriously any of them were actually taking this warning.
Ray Tsu, as a supervising coroner, had agreed to personally wrangle the ME staff for us. He stood off to one side, looking like a wispy anime character: thin build, limp black hair pulled behind both ears, a hollow chest that was a concavity of bones. He may have looked frail, but he was well respected and one of the top MEs in the department.
"The perpetrators of this crime may still be around," Jeb warned. "We have to take every precaution to keep what were doing here absolutely quiet so they don't cut and run."
He paused for effect and looked at each face of his handpicked team. "Okay," he finally said. "You guys know what to do. Get at it."
Everyone broke ranks and the work began. The truck was already open. After a quick round of crime-scene photographs, the MEs went in and carefully removed the skeletons from the front seat, placing them on plastic sheets before moving them onto gurneys and wheeling them off.
The power inside the old, deserted hospital was still connected for the movie companies who shot there, enabling the coroner's crew to transport the bodies by elevator to the OR theaters on four.
After everything got going, there wasn't much for Hitch and me to do. I was out by the loading dock making notes when my new partner drifted outside to talk on his cell. I overheard a little of his conversation.
"You gotta slow it down, Jerry. This is better than even I thought, but I'm under a police department cone of silence. I can't tell you or anybody else what's going on. But when it breaks, you're gonna kiss me. Keep our auction warm, but don't bring it to a head quite yet. This is definitely going to be bigger than Mosquito."
He listened, then said, "Back attcha," and hung up. He noticed me sitting nearby and shot a wide grin in my direction. "Working on your second mil, dawg."
"Hitch, we need to stop trying to make money off all these dead people and just work the case."
"It's been my experience that the dead are extremely forgiving." This philosophy supplied by a man who seemed unreasonably terrified of them.
"Jeb is pulling the old Brinks case record. Like Vulcuna, it was in the hard-copy room at the warehouse. A runner is bringing the stuff over right now."
"You don't even care what UTA just told me?" He had a little grin tugging
at the corners of his mouth. "Not even a teensy-weensy bit interested?"
"Uh… well, I'm trying real hard not to think too much about all that money."
"It will make you happy," he teased.
"Not now. Can we just stay focused on the case, please?"
Twenty minutes later Jeb had a makeshift office set up in the ambulance dispatcher's old space. He had decided to watch over this part of the investigation personally, which was great by me. We were taking a big chance not telling Chase Beal what we were up to, and it's always good strategy to have a boss between you and any angry politician who's running for office.
The old hospital was basically without furniture. Hitch explained that on each production the set decoration department took care of that. Somebody had found a discarded desk and had moved it down to the ambulance bay along with an old scavenged sprung-back swivel chair. By the time the case file boxes arrived from the records warehouse, our captain was ready to go.
We started thumbing through two surprisingly thin case binders from '83 on the missing Brinks truck. The cops who had worked this heist were a couple of Metro Division bank squad dicks named Robert Carter and Jeremy Briggs. Hitch made a call downtown and found out both had retired in the late eighties and had subsequently gone EOW, which stood for End of Watch. Department-speak for dead.
"The Brinks truck was transporting this gold bullion to the airport, where it was scheduled to go to Switzerland," Jeb said, reading a page from Detective Carters case binder. "An L. A. outfit called Latimer Commodities Exchange was in charge of the transport. We need to find out if Latimer is still in business. According to Carters notes, they brokered gold, silver, and platinum contracts."
He licked his fingertips, taking more pages of case notes out of the binder. After reading, he handed each off to us one at a time. "Says here that the standard gold bar used for bank-to-bank trade is something called a London Good Delivery Bar."
Hitch and I had nowhere to sit, so we stood in front of the desk reading the pages after Jeb was finished.
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