Murder One

by Robert Dugoni

  Jenkins started the engine and pulled from the curb as the man got into a car and quickly headed south on Nineteenth Avenue. “Alex has Kozlowski. He’s likely headed home to clean up a pile of shit on the carpet.”

  “Who’s this guy?” Sloane asked.

  Jenkins glanced at him. “You mean if I were a betting man? If I were a betting man, I’d bet this is Julio Cruz.”

  INTERNATIONAL DISTRICT

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  Following Cruz without being noticed with the man’s senses likely on heightened alert would not be easy, but on a weeknight, Jenkins could use the other commuters for cover. Cruz worked his way to Madison Avenue, a major artery that traveled east to west, and turned west toward downtown. When he got there, he turned left on Second Avenue South, then made a right on Jackson Street and a few more random turns, though Jenkins thought it was to avoid pockets of traffic and not to determine if he was being followed.

  When Cruz turned down an alley, Jenkins pulled the car to the curb.

  “Get out. I’ll circle the block. If he drives out the other side, I’ll call you and let you know. If he doesn’t, find out where he’s going.”

  Sloane exited the vehicle and hurried down the alley, staying near the building walls, though it was dark, and he would not readily be seen. He found the car parked near the back entrance to a restaurant, which he deduced from stacked empty wooden crates that once held produce, and a blue garbage bin. He watched Cruz climb a wooden staircase attached to the original stucco structure. Sloane slipped into the shadows and called Jenkins on his cell as Cruz used a key to open an exterior door on the second story and disappeared inside.

  When Jenkins approached, Sloane gave him the lay of the land. “The door’s locked. He used a key.”

  “Were the lights on?” Jenkins asked, referring to light emanating from two aluminum-framed windows facing the alley.

  “Yeah,” Sloane said. “What do we do now?”

  “We go see what’s on the menu.”

  Jenkins led Sloane down the alley to the front entrance of the Golden Dragon restaurant. The tables were full, most everyone of Asian descent.

  “I’ll have to bring Alex here,” Jenkins said. “It must be good.”

  The hostess advised them the wait would be five minutes, which Sloane thought unlikely but didn’t really care. As soon as she left, Jenkins walked toward a hallway with a sign for the bathrooms and motioned for Sloane to follow. The interior staircase led to a second-floor, poorly lit, narrow hall with shabby carpet and cheap wood paneling that smelled of grease and fried food. Jenkins had his gun out, barrel pointed at the floor, as they crept forward.

  Nearing the door at the end that led to the outside landing, Jenkins stopped beside an interior door and raised a hand. Sloane heard voices from inside a room. They pressed their backs against the wall. Jenkins gripped the door handle and turned it, giving a nod to Sloane to convey that the door was not locked. With a second nod he pushed open the door and entered.

  Two men stood near a large desk. A third man sat in a chair behind it. He gripped the chair arms as if he might try to stand.

  “Uh-uh, partner. Everyone remain calm,” Jenkins said. He stepped farther into the room. Sloane followed, about to speak, when a voice also came from behind.

  “It would be wise for you to take the same advice.”

  In his peripheral vision, Sloane saw a gunmetal-gray barrel pointed at Jenkins’s head. Then Sloane heard a second voice, this one familiar and without any accent. “Same for you, big fella.”

  The man seated behind the desk spoke first. “We’re federal agents.”

  “And we’re Seattle police officers,” Rowe said.

  “I’m a licensed private investigator,” Jenkins added.

  “Well, if we’re playing Texas Hold’em, I fold. I’m just an attorney,” Sloane said. That brought a glimmer of a smile to the barrel-chested man behind the desk. He had broad shoulders and a snow-white goatee.

  Rowe said, “I want everyone to lower their guns and let them fall to the floor, then we’ll all step into the room and sort this out.”

  Sloane heard three thuds. As they stepped farther into the room, Detective Crosswhite moved in and stood over the guns, her own gun still in her hand.

  “Let’s start with you,” Rowe said to the man behind the desk. He identified himself as Micheal Hurley and said he worked for the DEA. He then identified the Latino man as Julio Cruz, one of his agents, and the second man, with reddish hair, as Jerry Willins, another agent.

  “And who are you, big boy?” Rowe directed the question to the man who had held a gun to the back of Jenkins’s head. His bald pate nearly skimmed the ceiling tiles and might have scraped the protruding sprinkler heads if he wasn’t careful. Standing in front of the window, he blocked the artificial light from the street lamp.

  “Sunyat Chelyakov.”

  “And what’s your role in what we’re all doing here?” Rowe asked.

  “He works for me,” Hurley said.

  “And what exactly do you do, Mr. Hurley?”

  Hurley stroked his goatee. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. But if you call the number I’m about to provide, you will have enough information to convince you that you need to walk out of here.”

  “Then I don’t think I want that number,” Rowe said.

  Sloane was developing a liking for Rowe. “Mr. Hurley runs an organization called Centac.”

  Hurley looked at Sloane with unrevealing coal-black eyes, but Cruz was not as good a poker player. When his eyes shifted to Hurley, Sloane knew Alex had been right on track. “You had Vasiliev under surveillance. That’s why Judge Kozlowski let him out of jail. You put Vasiliev back on the street so you could continue the surveillance. Am I close?”

  Rowe looked to Sloane. “What are you talking about?”

  Sloane laid out Centac’s role in fighting the war on drugs, as Alex had previously advised. “From what I can piece together, Centac has been after Petyr Sakorov for decades. So I’m guessing that the shipment of heroin to Vasiliev was part of an elaborate undercover operation that Mr. Chelyakov here arranged.” He looked at Hurley. “Chime in whenever you want.”

  Hurley’s face remained a blank mask. “But when the police officer doing a routine traffic stop stumbled onto the shipment in the tires, it put a huge wrinkle in the operation. The local DEA and the U.S. attorney’s office—neither of which knows anything about the resurrection of Centac—got involved. Vasiliev was looking at significant time, and Centac would have lost its best lead to Sakorov in decades. So you went to Kozlowski.” Sloane looked to Rowe. “But I don’t have to tell you that part, because you wouldn’t be here unless you also spoke to Scott Parker and he told you the same thing he told me about knowing how Vasiliev and the others were beating the charges. You figured out Kozlowski was the unifying factor and you’ve had the judge under surveillance.”

  Rowe nodded to Cruz. “Tell me how your fingerprint got on Vasiliev’s sliding-glass door?”

  Cruz looked to Hurley. This time he nodded his consent.

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2011

  UNION BAY

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  Jerry Willins set the headphones on the polished walnut table and rubbed his ears, inflamed and sore despite the cushioned padding. Standing, he stretched and rotated at the waist, hearing his vertebrae pop like a string of firecrackers as he took in the view out the rain-spotted windows. The storm had made the night ink-black, no hint of stars or moon.

  The light from the sliding-glass door at the back of the house—no bigger than a postage stamp from where they had anchored the boat—stood out like a lighthouse beacon.

  “It must be nice.” Julio Cruz exited the bathroom zipping his fly. “The fixtures in there are nicer than my home.”

  When Willins learned he and Cruz would be conducting surveillance from a seventy-two-foot Northwest Trawler, his mind had conjured up the image of a hollow metal fishing drum with the t
wo of them freezing in the hull like two large salmon. Thank God he’d been wrong. The mahogany paneling, leather upholstery, and incandescent lights made the boat far more yacht than trawler.

  “Might as well be your home,” Willins said, “the amount of time you spend in there.”

  “What, are you timing my bowel movements now?”

  “Make sure the door latches; the chemical smell is like sitting in the back row of an airplane.”

  Cruz pushed shut the door until it clicked, then pointed to the earphones on the table. “What’s our boy doing?”

  Willins held one of the earpieces near his ear and looked to the shore. Even at this distance, without the binoculars, he could see the flickering colors of the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. “Still watching the hockey game.”

  “Who plays hockey in September, anyway?”

  “It’s Detroit and Pittsburgh, from the Stanley Cup a few years back. He must have recorded it. Go do a visual from up top.”

  The rain continued to beat on the upper deck. “Screw that. What’s with the rain? It’s summer, man.”

  “It’s Seattle. It rains nine months of the year here.”

  “Yeah, and I thought this was supposed to be one of the months it didn’t rain. Good thing we’re in a boat, or I’d be building one.” Cruz walked to the fridge and pulled out a soda, popping the lid. “In Miami we’d be out dancing in the streets.”

  “And sweating in one hundred percent humidity.”

  “Maybe so, but that means the chiquitas would be sweating, too, and the more they sweat, the less they wear.” Cruz held up the can and swayed as if to some silent samba music.

  “Like they’d want your sorry old butt.”

  Cruz walked to the window and looked in the direction of the light from the house.

  “Who won?”

  “Won what?”

  “The Stanley Cup. Who won?”

  At close to three in the morning, after a week together, they were running out of things to talk about. “I don’t know. Pittsburgh, I think. You follow hockey in Florida?”

  “I wouldn’t know which end of the hockey stick to hit the puck with.” Cruz drank in gulps, then crushed the can. “Could be worse, right?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Our boy could be watching another porno.”

  “Thank God for small favors.” Willins eased the headphones back on.

  “Maybe he’ll go to bed before the sun comes up.”

  Willins pulled one of the earphones away. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing. I just said maybe he’ll go to bed—”

  Willins put up a hand. “No. I mean, did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  He set the padding back to his ear. Then pulled it away, head cocked. “You didn’t hear anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “Thunder. Did you just hear thunder?”

  “I didn’t hear nothing, man. I think you been on this boat too—”

  Willins grabbed a pair of binoculars hanging by the strap from a dowel on the wall as he hurried up the staircase to the deck.

  “Man’s going crazy . . . hearing things now.” Cruz picked up the headset and pressed it to his ear. “I don’t hear anything,” he said before following Willins up the stairs.

  Willins stood under the cover of the overhead deck, binoculars aimed at the shore, thigh pressed against the railing to keep his balance. The boat pitched and rolled. Cruz joined him at the railing, talking over the storm. “What did you hear?”

  “A bang, like thunder.” Willins shook the water dripping from his forehead and adjusted the focus. “I don’t see him.”

  Cruz looked to the shore, the rain hitting him in the face. “Maybe God answered our prayers and he went to bed.”

  “He left the TV on. He’s never left the TV on.”

  “So he got up to get another drink or take a leak.”

  “I don’t— Oh no.”

  “What?”

  Willins shoved the binoculars at Cruz and hurried to the back of the boat. Cruz grabbed the strap just before the binoculars fell over the railing into the water. He pressed the lenses to his eyes, shouting over the rain. “What am I looking for?”

  Willins manually cranked the winch to lift the Zodiac from its spot at the end of the boat and swung it over the water. “Just to the right of the sofa. The floor.”

  Cruz adjusted his focus. “Oh, shit.”

  He dropped the binoculars on the deck and rushed to help position the Zodiac as Willins lowered it into the water, then held the boat until Willins had climbed in and started the engine. Jumping in, he disengaged the winch and Willins hit the gas hard. The rubber boat bounced and skimmed across the whitecaps, the rain and foam from the waves spraying them. As they approached the shore, Willins cut the engine and let their momentum and the waves propel them to the strip of sand at the rock wall. Cruz jumped out into ankle-deep water with the nylon rope, stepped onto the sandy strip, lifted himself up the four-foot-high wall, and tied the rope through an eye hook cemented in the mortar. Willins didn’t wait, abandoning the boat and rushing up the sloped lawn, feet slipping in the wet grass. He slowed as he neared the concrete patio, realizing in his haste that he had not brought his firearm. Cruz caught up to him, also unarmed. Together they crept toward the sliding door, their eyes scanning the yard, both men wiping away the water, Willins having to take off his glasses.

  Blood splattered the inside of the glass door, and tendrils spread like a spiderweb from a concave hole. Their target remained on the sofa but had pitched forward and to the right, head slumped on the sofa arm. Blood leaked down the leather, pooling on the hardwood where the Persian throw rug did not reach.

  Willins heard another sound, turned, and took two steps toward the water, shielding his eyes.

  “What is it?” Cruz asked.

  “I thought I heard something.”

  Cruz slapped the side of his head like a swimmer trying to knock water free. “Man, I haven’t heard shit all night; I’m going to get my damn hearing checked.”

  Willins took two more steps toward the water, Cruz at his side. Then he turned and looked again at the sliding-glass door.

  “What do we do now?” Cruz asked.

  Willins no longer bothered to shield his face or wipe away the water. They were all getting too old—and running out of time.

  TWENTY - ONE

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2011

  KING COUNTY COURTHOUSE

  JUDGE REUBEN UNDERWOOD’S CHAMBERS

  The discussion in Judge Reuben Underwood’s chambers the following morning sounded like a family feud—each participant with his own agenda, talking over one another, offering counterarguments to arguments and shouting soliloquies until the court reporter threw up his hands in frustration and disgust. Underwood put an end to it with a raised hand and voice. He dismissed the court reporter; then, already perturbed that he had impaneled a jury and realized there was no way in hell they were going to start promptly at nine, he scowled, silently fuming.

  Micheal Hurley sat on the leather sofa between two attorneys from the Justice Department. The fact that the two suits had managed to fly across the country from Washington, D.C. for an early-morning meeting impressed upon Sloane what Hurley had said. People in power had his back. The two suits had informed them that neither Willins nor Cruz nor Hurley, for that matter, could be compelled to testify in a public forum.

  “We can’t allow that, Judge. And we have a court order signed by a federal district court judge of the District of Columbia as well as a letter from the United States attorney. It would jeopardize an ongoing investigation, not to mention endanger the lives of well-placed informants.”

  Cerrabone countered that he either wanted the court to compel Cruz or Willins to testify, or he wanted an order that no one be allowed to make any reference to their footprints or to Cruz’s fingerprint.

  “It’s irrelevant, Your Honor. We now know it has nothing to do with w
ho shot Mr. Vasiliev. It will greatly prejudice the state if it is introduced without explanation, and it will confuse the jury.”

  Sloane, just as adamant that the evidence be allowed, interrupted the argument with his own. “The state was prepared to go forward when they had no idea who’d made the footprints or how Mr. Cruz’s fingerprint ended up on the slider,” he said. “For them to now argue prejudice because they can’t explain something for which they had no explanation in the first place is ridiculous.”

  But Sloane knew he was treading water. Now that they could identify the two people responsible for the shoe prints, and they were not the assassins he had hoped for, there was no way Underwood would allow him to imply that to be the case to the jury. Having deduced this, he had already mentally moved to plan B, which was to try to at least be allowed to argue that federal officers were keeping Vasiliev under twenty-four-hour surveillance.

  “What inferences the jury draws from that is fair game,” he said. What he was hoping, of course, was the jury would infer other potential reasons Vasiliev had been shot, such as someone within Vasiliev’s organization having learned of the surveillance and had decided it was time for Vasiliev to go. It was thin, Sloane knew, and Underwood didn’t look to be buying it, though at the moment the judge didn’t appear to be buying anything. He brooded behind his desk, glasses off, elbows propped on the calendar pad, hands clasped beneath his nostrils. His eyes shot daggers at everyone in the room.

  The debate continued until Underwood put an end to it a second time and called for his court reporter to reenter. The red-haired man took his seat, hands on the stenographer’s machine.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Underwood said. “First of all, the fact that a federal district court judge may or may not be guilty of serious misconduct is not relevant to the case I have before me . . . which we were supposed to begin this morning.” He did not try to conceal his irritation. “There will be no mention of Judge Kozlowski or what he did or did not do in this proceeding. That will be a matter for the Justice Department, I presume, at some later date. As for the presence of the other two sets of footprints, Mr. Cruz will testify.”