Counterfeit Road

by Kirk Russell

  Four bombs when finished, a low tech transfer on a windy road at night and not unsophisticated, more like aware. Maybe we’re not seeing these people for what they are. He knew the Feds were here before dawn with dogs working their way up the shoulder of the road, but even now they weren’t sure when the casings were transferred. The driver was skilled, the surveillance teams bottle-necked. The driver made eight stops on the road and each time the surveillance assumed he was watching behind for them, but on one of those stops someone stepped out from the trees and unloaded the boxes before he drove on.

  As he came down the offramp into San Francisco he called Coe and asked, ‘Are these plotters getting inside help from somewhere?’

  ‘How do you come up with that?’

  ‘I’m asking if there’s suspicion.’

  ‘There’s always suspicion, especially after a big screw-up.’

  ‘Is the shakeup at your field office only about losing the bomb casings or is there another element?’

  ‘We’re getting into territory where I can’t say much, but I’m going to put you on hold and go talk to my SAC about bringing you in. But first tell me where you’re getting this.’

  ‘I don’t have anything. You’re getting ahead here. I’m just trying to make sense of things. I just drove the route you sent me and I’ve been thinking it over.’

  ‘Hold on.’

  Raveneau stayed on the line a couple of minutes then hung up. Coe had his number. Coe could call him. He did about five minutes later.

  ‘Raveneau, can you come here this morning? We’ve come to the same conclusion and we’d like to talk more with you. We think we’re dealing with people familiar with our methodology.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I think too.’

  ‘Can you come by this morning?’

  ‘I won’t be walking in with anything you don’t already know, but, sure, I’ll stop by.’

  THIRTY-NINE

  But he didn’t go to the FBI Field Office yet. La Rosa called and said Ryan Candel was at the Homicide office and in the family waiting area reading a magazine as if waiting for a dental appointment. The Homicide office had a tiny lobby. It was like walking into a phone booth with an ATM and a door in it. Once you got through the door the family waiting room was on the left. There was a couch, a chair, a coffee table with some magazines. There wasn’t a TV but then again it wasn’t a place many people wanted to hang-out.

  ‘Tell him I’m ten minutes away and ask him to wait. I’m going to ask him to do something for us.’

  Candel probably thought about it and decided he wanted to see that video. Went home, thought about it and decided he needed to know if the shooter was or wasn’t his father. When Raveneau walked in he was sitting on the couch texting somebody. He smiled but looked nervous and pale.

  ‘Does being here make you nervous?’

  ‘I don’t know but I’ve got to get outside.’

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Bus.’

  ‘I’ll give you a ride. I’ve got to go downtown anyway. Did you come in to see the video?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s short. Do you want to watch it first?’

  ‘Not really, but yes.’

  ‘You can watch it on the computer at my desk.’

  ‘OK.’

  That’s what he did. Candel watched it three times and didn’t show any real emotion. Raveneau started it once more and froze the frame on the shooter several times.

  ‘Have you ever seen a snuff film, Ryan?’

  ‘At a party once, but I’m definitely not into anything like that.’

  ‘See the height difference? Your dad was much taller. That’s not your dad.’

  ‘You’re positive?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s been looked at by some film experts.’ He waited a beat. ‘I just got back from Hawaii and I learned more about your father. I’ve seen where he lived. He’s dead, Ryan. He died in 2004 of kidney failure at a hospital in Honolulu.’

  ‘Probably from drinking.’

  ‘That would more likely be a liver problem. It was more of a long series of complications from being wounded during the Vietnam War. It took some phone calls but I talked to a doctor who remembered him. It seems many people remember him. I found his house and met the man who owns the property. He was a good friend of your dad’s. His name is Tom Casey and that friendship goes back to when they were young and pilots in Vietnam. Casey had your dad’s remains cremated and his ashes are at a memorial not far from the house. I think you should go there.’

  ‘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.’r />
  ‘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?’