Murder One

by Robert Dugoni

  “Heavily classified.”

  “But not for someone as skilled at getting information as you?” Sloane prodded, knowing Alex had more.

  “It was run out of the special action section of the Drug Enforcement Administration but had nearly complete autonomy, which I can tell you is highly unusual. In Washington you can’t fart without asking someone’s permission.”

  “Do you see why I love her?” Jenkins said. “Is she a classy broad or what?”

  Sloane put down the box and used a bottle opener to pry off the cap of a beer, taking a sip. “So why would this Centac be an exception to the norm?”

  Alex looked to Charlie. They had clearly discussed the same question. “Probably so no politician could be held accountable if the shit hit the fan and something went wrong.”

  Jenkins snapped apart a fortune cookie, munching on half while unfolding the small white slip of paper. “That would be Washington. Take all the credit but never the blame.” He read the strip of paper. “‘You will receive a fortune cookie.’ Brilliant.”

  Sloane exchanged the beer for the carton and continued eating. “So what did your contact know about it?”

  “The guy in charge was named Micheal Hurley. Bit of a wild card, according to my source, but some serious credentials in drug-task-force stuff—Afghanistan, Cyprus, Greece, Turkey. He was the real deal, a guy on the front lines of Reagan’s war on drugs. At any given time, he had fifty agents around the world working directly for him—”

  “Including Julio Cruz?” Sloane asked.

  “Looks like it. They worked with other agencies: the Internal Revenue Service, customs, foreign police agencies in about a dozen countries, many of which had no idea Centac even existed. When a case broke and the arrests were made, Centac quietly withdrew, leaving the headlines to the local officers and their politicos. Hurley wasn’t looking for photo ops, medals, or Christmas bonuses.”

  Sloane left the sticks in the box. “Was he successful?”

  “Centac took down the biggest marijuana dealer in North America, the largest cocaine and hashish supplier in the East, and about ten others over a four-year period.”

  Sloane said, “Let me guess. Four years. Change in administrations.”

  Alex nodded. “We went from the Reagan and Bush years of fighting the war on drugs to the Clinton years pacifying it. Centac got shut down.”

  “Does your source know what happened to Cruz?”

  She shrugged. “Records show Cruz went back to the DEA’s office in Miami, worked until he vested, and retired. Last known address the P.O. box.”

  Sloane thought about the information, continuing to pick through the carton. “Did your source know what Cruz worked on while he was with Centac?”

  Alex popped the other half of Jenkins’s fortune cookie into her mouth, chewing it. “Thought you might want to know that.”

  “That’s bad luck, you know, to eat another person’s cookie. Now my fortune won’t come true,” Jenkins said.

  She shook her head. “As successful as Centac was, one of the biggest fish eluded them. And drug agents are a lot like fishermen.”

  “It’s the fish that get away that bothers them most,” Jenkins said, reaching for a beer and using his hand to twist off the cap.

  “So who was the big fish?” Sloane asked.

  “A man named Petyr Sakorov. You might know him as the Russian billionaire who owns a dozen or so hotels and casinos around the world, at least one resort, and has his name on hospitals and civic buildings from Moscow to Siberia. He’s a heroin dealer, David. He went from being one of the proletariat to trafficking in heroin.”

  Sloane put down the carton and the chopsticks. “And Cruz was working on that investigation.”

  “Bingo,” Jenkins said, drinking a third of the bottle.

  Sloane considered them both, then moved aside the cartons and lifted his briefcase onto the table to retrieve his notes from his meeting with the tracking expert and a copy of Kaylee Wright’s report at Vasiliev’s home. He handed both to Alex and walked behind her chair. “Wright reports the presence of multiple shoe prints at the site that she has eliminated as being made by police officers. But look at the bottom line of the third paragraph,” he said.

  Alex read it out loud. “‘Two sets of prints, sizes ten and a half and twelve, of unknown origin.’”

  “Likely two men,” Jenkins said.

  Sloane went to the white board and used a red dry-erase pen to draw a crude house and a lawn sloping to a rock wall. He made squiggly lines to represent the water.

  “I hope you didn’t major in art,” Jenkins said.

  Sloane exchanged the red pen for black and drew a line on the right from the water to the house, then to a stand of trees and back to the water. “This is the track for the size-seven prints.” He drew two lines on the left leading from the beach to the back of the house. “She tracked these prints from the water to the patio and back, but on the opposite side of the lawn.”

  Jenkins asked, “Could one of them have been the shooter?”

  “That was my question. Wright’s report says these two sets of prints were made after the size-seven prints.”

  “How the hell can she tell that?” Jenkins said.

  “It has to do with the way the blades of grass lay over the top of one another. My point is that both she and the ballistics expert eliminate them as the possible shooter.”

  “The trajectory?” Alex guessed.

  Sloane drew the sliding-glass door at the back of the house and put two X’s on the left side of the patio. “According to the ballistics expert, the angle from where these two people stood on the patio would have been wrong based on the trajectory of the bullet.” He drew a line on the right through the sliding-glass door to indicate the actual trajectory of the bullet. “It would not have been possible for either person to have taken the shot. I have someone looking into it, but he appears right.”

  “So what were they doing there?” Jenkins asked.

  “That would be the next logical question, wouldn’t it? According to my expert, they left multiple prints in the sandy area below the rock wall.” Sloane circled the area. “And his guess is they were exiting and entering some sort of boat.”

  “So we assume one of those two shoe prints belongs to Cruz,” Jenkins said, “which would account for his fingerprint on the sliding-glass-door handle.”

  “Which brings us to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Sloane said, putting down the pen.

  “Why was he there?” Alex asked.

  “Maybe Cruz is dirty, like Pendergrass said,” Jenkins said. “Maybe he made some contacts back in the eighties, and now, retired, he’s working them.”

  “Or maybe Centac isn’t completely gone,” Alex said. “Maybe it’s like that fish that got away.”

  “They had Vasiliev under surveillance?” Jenkins asked.

  “It would explain why the Seattle DEA office claims ignorance,” Alex said. “They didn’t know.”

  “Okay,” Jenkins said. “But that’s a double-edged sword.”

  “I know.” Sloane picked up the carton and his chopsticks. “It doesn’t explain the size-seven shoe prints, but it certainly allows me a good reason to intimate why Vasiliev is dead. Maybe that ruse we played with Scotty Parker was a premonition. Maybe Vasiliev had cut a deal.”

  “Speaking of which,” Jenkins said, “you’re going to love this. Looks like old Scotty Parker is sitting on a keg of dynamite.”

  Alex smiled. “I found that connection you were looking for.”

  “How they keep getting off,” Jenkins said. “Four of them.”

  “Five, if you count Vasiliev,” Alex said.

  Sloane put both hands on the table, palms flat. He leaned forward, head cocked, disbelieving. “Kozlowski was the judge on every case?”

  “Every . . . one,” Alex said, rocking back in her chair.

  “And there’s more.” Jenkins smiled.

  “I talked with Rebecca Han,” Ale
x continued. “Kozlowski wasn’t originally assigned the Vasiliev matter. She’s going to look into how that came about, and she’s looking into the other four cases as well, whether they were originally assigned to him.”

  Sloane straightened, not sure what to make of the information and, more important, what to do with it.

  “A couple years back, Kozlowski went through a very public and nasty divorce,” Alex said. “It cost him a bundle in lawyers’ fees, over a million dollars.” She handed Sloane a document. “He stiffed his lawyers. They were creditors on his personal bankruptcy.”

  “Desperate people do desperate things,” Jenkins said, reaching for the final fortune cookie. “And you can never discount the allure of pure, unadulterated greed.”

  Sloane flipped through the bankruptcy petition. “What happened with the bankruptcy? Did you check?”

  “It was withdrawn,” Alex said.

  Sloane looked up from his reading. “Which means he somehow satisfied his creditors. Can we get any of his financial records? Determine if he suddenly had an influx of cash?”

  “I’m already working on it,” Alex said. “Federal judges are required to file financial reports every year. It should be simple accounting to determine how much reported income the judge had coming in and how much went out to satisfy his creditors.”

  Sloane put down the report. “How the hell do I prove Vasiliev bribed a federal judge?”

  Jenkins cracked another cookie and read the fortune. “ ‘Help! I’m being held prisoner in a Chinese bakery.’ These guys are a riot.” He munched half. “I’ll tell you how. You get the prosecutor to cut a deal with Scotty Parker and have him testify.”

  “A drug dealer’s accusation against a federal district court judge?”

  “It’s not just his word. You have the circumstantial evidence—the four recent drug busts, all in Vasiliev’s organization; Kozlowski somehow manages to end up with all four, and all four walk on technicalities.”

  “Maybe,” Sloane said, already thinking about the bigger problem. “But even if I can prove it, how do I get it in? What’s the relevance to Vasiliev’s murder?”

  No one had an answer.

  Sloane ran his hand through his hair, frustrated. “We need to find Julio Cruz, and sooner rather than later.”

  EIGHTEEN

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2011

  THREE TREE POINT

  BURIEN, WASHINGTON

  It would not be sooner. As the weeks passed, Julio Cruz remained a mystery.

  The crisp blue skies of September gave way to the cold, gray days of October, and the leaves on the trees changed color to autumn’s array in November. He and Barclay were driving home from Camano Island after celebrating Thanksgiving dinner with Alex and Charlie, CJ, and Charlie’s mother. It had been their first formal dinner together, and Sloane thought it had gone well, though he sensed some reticence from Alex, which he had expected. She and Tina had been close.

  They had settled into a routine, he and Barclay, much like a married couple, though they no longer spent every night together or made love at every opportunity. Despite taking a leave of absence, Barclay could not stay away from her firm. She went in several times a week to “mind the store,” as she put it. When not at her firm, she was busy performing research and working on her own defense. Sloane traveled to meet experts, to talk with witnesses, and even occasionally to attend to his other cases, though he had brought in another attorney to handle much of that workload. Outside of the office, they tried hard not to discuss the impending trial, but it lurked, like a distant train hurtling full speed and headlong down the tracks, and kept getting closer by the day.

  It was that train that had awakened Sloane in a cold sweat and sent him downstairs to his office. He sat at his desk with just a circle of light in the otherwise dark house, uncertain how long he had been at work when he heard the old house creak and moan—Barclay getting up from bed, searching for him. He heard her descend the stairs.

  The French door cracked open. “You okay?” she whispered, her voice hoarse from sleep. She walked behind him and slid her hands to his chest, resting her head on his shoulder. Her breath felt warm against his neck.

  Outside, the leafless branches of the cottonwood tree danced and swayed like anorexic arms and bony fingers as gusts of wind shook the house.

  “Storm’s coming,” Sloane said. “The weatherman’s predicting a bad winter.”

  “They always think the worst. But they never really know until it arrives, do they?”

  “None of us do.”

  He reached up and squeezed her forearm. Across the blackened waters of the Puget Sound, Sloane found the distant white light on Vashon Island, the one that he had been staring at before she came downstairs, the one that made him think again of that approaching train.

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2011

  KING COUNTY COURTHOUSE

  JUDGE REUBEN UNDERWOOD’S CHAMBERS

  A week before trial, the court administrator had called to advise Sloane they had a trial judge, Reuben Underwood, and that they would remain in courtroom 854E to accommodate the anticipated public interest. Underwood wasted little time jumping in, sending out an order he wanted to meet with counsel for a pretrial conference at eleven in the morning two days before the trial date.

  Sloane knew little of Underwood and had set Pendergrass to the task of gathering information, which he delivered the morning of the pretrial meeting. “He’s bright,” Pendergrass said. “Harvard undergrad, Yale Law School.”

  African-American, Underwood had grown up the son of two doctors in Atherton, an affluent neighborhood in Northern California. His parents had impressed on him, at an early age, the value of education. Though he was a swimmer and a tennis player who garnered interest from local colleges, sports were not in the game plan. Upon graduation from Yale, Underwood clerked for a federal district court judge in Alabama, where he met his wife, a native of Seattle, who, like most Seattle natives, had no desire to live anywhere else on the planet. Marriage and Seattle became a package deal. In Seattle, he forsook hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year offers from half a dozen law firms for the opportunity to immediately try cases with the King County prosecutor’s office. After fifteen years, and perhaps because he had five kids and the oldest was close to considering colleges, Underwood jumped sides and joined a prominent criminal defense firm where he gained a reputation as one of the best criminal defense lawyers in the state. After his children were grown, several prominent black businessmen and -women convinced him to seek election to the bench at the age of fifty-five. He had presided for the past five years.

  As Sloane and Cerrabone entered the judge’s chambers, Sloane noticed a large glass chessboard in the corner of the room beneath shelves stocked with books, framed family photographs, and plaques and trophies that indicated the judge still played in chess tournaments, as well as participating in competitive tennis and masters’ swimming meets, and was proud of it. Beside Underwood’s desk was an empty chair and, in front of it, a stenographer’s machine.

  Cerrabone and Underwood talked as if acquainted—inevitable, given that Cerrabone was not only a fixture in the prosecutor’s office, but his wife, Sloane had learned, worked in the clerk’s office.

  The judge wore thick black-framed glasses that he somehow made look stylish, with hair that had grayed along the sides. But he also filled out a starched blue shirt and had the lean features of someone who had earned the trophies on the shelf.

  “Thank you for accommodating my schedule,” Underwood said to both men. They took chairs across from his desk. “I like to get as much settled as we can before we start trial, any last-minute details, complaints, objections. I don’t like to keep my juries waiting.” He raised a hand, long delicate fingers and manicured nails. “Now, I know from experience that things come up during a trial that cannot be avoided, but I have found that most of those things are disputes that, with foresight on the part of the attorneys, could have been anticipated ahead of time.” H
e sounded like a man who very much likened a trial to a chess match. “I will therefore be reluctant to punish a jury by keeping them waiting in the jury room while we haggle over issues that should have been resolved. So you might consider this meeting like that moment when the minister looks out at a wedding crowd and says that if you have any objections, you should speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  Neither Cerrabone nor Sloane spoke.

  “Good. Let’s start with the media. It will be a circus. But not in my courtroom.” The judge eyed them both. “The media has a right to be present, according to my learned colleagues on the Supreme Court.” To Sloane, it didn’t sound as if Underwood agreed. “And I will accommodate that right, but I have discretion to limit that presence so as not to prejudice the defendant’s right to a fair trial. While I can’t limit the number of reporters, I can limit the number of cameras. There will be one in the back of the court on the far left that will provide a live feed for all of the networks. I do not want this trial played out in the media by either side. I am not imposing a gag order, but I am appealing to your sense of integrity and respect for the judicial system.” He paused again to give that glare. “Is that clear enough?”

  Sloane and Cerrabone answered in unison that it was.

  “Good. Then let me get my court reporter in here and we’ll get started.”

  Moments after Underwood hung up the phone, a red-haired man took the seat alongside the judge’s desk, his fingers moving as soon as the judge opened his mouth to note for the record the caption and case number, date and time. Underwood also noted they were present in his chambers to discuss the pretrial motions filed by both sides as well as other matters. Then he asked both Cerrabone and Sloane to state their appearances.

  He shuffled a set of papers. “Okay, let’s get started with the state’s motion to limit the evidence to be introduced about the victim’s involvement in drug trafficking.”

  Cerrabone sat up. “Your Honor, the state is concerned that the defense is going to try to poison the jury with evidence that Mr. Vasiliev was part of a criminal enterprise—the Russian mafia, if you will—to somehow justify his death. It is highly prejudicial and of limited probative value.”