NCIS Los Angeles

by Jerome Preisler

  “This is a police booking photo,” she said.

  “A mugshot?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I’d like to know if you recognize the person.”

  He eyed the display. It showed a dark-complected man in his twenties with curly brown hair, deep-set green eyes, and a large, long chin.

  “He doesn’t look familiar,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.”

  “His name is Isaak Dorani. Does that help?”

  “No.” He shook his head again. “Should it?”

  Kensi watched him closely, seeing no physical sign that contradicted his denial. She briefly considered telling him Dorani’s fingerprints were found on his desk after his abduction, wanting to see how he reacted, but her gut told her to hold off on that particular disclosure.

  “Dorani’s what the cops call a career smalltimer,” she answered instead. “He has a long history of petty crimes.”

  Holloway lifted a silver eyebrow. “And?”

  She shrugged, pulling the smartphone away from him.

  “I was just curious,” she said without further explanation.

  He sat looking at her as she returned the phone to its pouch.

  She rose off the sofa, Deeks standing up beside her.

  “Sir,” she said. “Before we go… is there anything you care to tell us?”

  “About?”

  “Whatever.” She gave another shrug. “Whatever comes to mind.”

  He looked at the agents for a protracted moment, then shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have nothing useful to offer.”

  She nodded, reached into her jeans for her wallet, and leaned forward to hold out her card.

  “You’ll let us know if that changes?”

  Remaining seated, Holloway took the card from her hand.

  “Of course,” he said. And suddenly looked up at her. “Elias was the last of a breed. A warrior with courage and scruples. He deserved a better end to his life.”

  She nodded, saying nothing.

  A moment later, Murphy came around to lead the agents toward the door.

  Deeks paused behind Kensi as she stepped outside, turned to look over at the Warhol print.

  “‘On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire,’” he said.

  Murphy gave him a questioning glance, holding open the door.

  “Blake,” Deeks said with a huge smile. “‘The Tyger.’”

  Murphy nodded.

  “Nice,” he said. “But you still stink.”

  6

  “Here we are… We call it Rusty Corners for reasons that should be obvious,” said the young duty officer, spreading his arms to gesture at the collection of deteriorated structures around him. “It’s officially designated Naval Construction Battalion, Area CRS-1.”

  Callen leaned back against the door of his Benz, Sam beside him, both men taking it all in. The officer, a straw-headed junior grade lieutenant named Harrison, had ridden out with them from the NCIS offices at Port Hueneme’s main entrance.

  “The CRS stand for Cargo Receiving and Storage?” Sam asked.

  “Right, sir,” Harrison said. “The numeral ‘one’ means it’s the first development of its type to be put up after the base was established.”

  Sam nodded thoughtfully, his strong arms folded across his chest. Set about a mile behind the beach, harbor inlet, and naval wharves, the compound was overrun with seagulls, scores of them. The birds squawked and flapped overhead as they wheeled in the ocean breeze or squabbled over perches atop the one and two story utilitarian buildings. All the structures stood on crumbled concrete slabs, with low gable roofs, corrugated metal sides, and large sliding doors through which crates of supplies and materiel would have been moved in and out. Some had open vehicle bays and attached sheds, and many wore a coat of peeling blue paint spattered with bird droppings.

  “These are the last buildings still standing from World War Two,” Harrison said. “You couldn’t have picked a better time to come see them.”

  “How’s that?” Callen asked.

  “Rusty Corners is scheduled for demolition,” Harrison said. “It’ll be gone in another few weeks, a month at the outside.”

  Callen regarded him through his sunglasses. “Somebody needed seventy-five years to decide it’s an eyesore?”

  Sam heard a gull shriek above him and looked up.

  “Think you just dissed one of the residents.”

  The young lieutenant chuckled. “I can’t tell you about the timing of the demo,” he said. “I do know a preservation assessment was recently conducted. And that it was hundreds of pages long.”

  “You know who ordered it?”

  “No, sir. But none of the prefabs met the government requirements for being added to the register of historic buildings.”

  “How’s that make sense?” Sam said. “This base made the Quonset huts that quartered our troops in the Pacific theater. I figure that’d be enough.”

  Harrison simultaneously shrugged and shook his head.

  “I wish I had greater knowledge of the evaluation process,” he said. “You can get the details from the History and Heritage Command. Or we could drive out to see the curator at the Seabee Museum when we’re finished here—it’s right on base.”

  Callen looked over the forlorn development, thinking it was about the size of some small, middle-of-nowhere town, the kind with a single traffic light where its single street intersected with the only county road passing through it.

  “Which of ’em is Building Thirty-One?” he asked after a moment.

  Harrison gestured toward a long-neglected roadway that went curving past several of the structures in a northwesterly direction. It was pitted and scrawled with cracks, and there were tall, dry weeds spindling up through the asphalt.

  “We can walk right up to it,” he said. “It’s the largest building… situated back near the old railroad tracks.”

  Sam crunched an eyebrow.

  “I know Hueneme has a railroad connection,” he said. “Didn’t know it goes all the way out here.”

  “It hasn’t since these buildings stopped being used,” Harrison said. “But there was an industrial siding that served them for over two decades.” He paused. “Want a look at it while I show you Thirty-One?”

  “Sure,” Callen said. “Might as well kill two birds with one stone.”

  Sam glanced up at the swooping gulls.

  “Not so loud, man. You’re upsetting the natives again,” he said, and boosted himself off the side of the car.

  Callen joined him, as Harrison turned to lead the way along the derelict road.

  * * *

  “Kens, is this the best or what?” Deeks said. He was in the passenger seat of her parked SRX, holding his smartphone up to the window, zooming its camera lens on the thin, dark-haired guy climbing the stairs of the shabby East Hollywood walkup across the street. “We pull into this spot and there he is. Which makes us two for two considering we had no trouble finding Holloway doing his lawn rumba—”

  “Zumba.”

  “Right, sorry.”

  She watched as the guy neared the second floor.

  “I admit we’re looking good,” she said. “Let’s check the face-rec results to be on the safe side.”

  Deeks nodded and tapped his phone’s display. Though it paid to be cautious, he was certain it was Isaak Dorani on the building’s outdoor stairs. They had, after all, driven here straight from Bel Air Palms, pulling his address out of Juarez’s unofficial file.

  Now Kensi checked the synched display on her dashboard as the federal NGI biometric system ran Deeks’s camera image against its exhaustive database. After a few seconds it beeped to signal a match, bringing up a preexisting photo of their man.

  They exchanged glances. No question, it was Dorani up on the stairs.

  “Bingo,” Deeks said.

  “Bull’s eye,” Kensi said.

  �
��Pin the tail on the donkey.”

  “You are so immature,” Kensi said, ignoring his frown. She watched as Dorani reached the second-floor walkway and trotted up to his door, keys in hand. “He’s sure in a big hurry,” she said.

  Deeks nodded, tapping his phone again to pull Dorani’s rap sheet from the NGI.

  A low whistle escaped his lips as it appeared on the dashboard screen.

  “Talk about repeat offenders,” he said. “Learning from his mistakes definitely isn’t one of his favorite activities.”

  Kensi scanned the laundry list of criminal offenses. Shoplifting, purchase of a handgun without safety certificate, petty theft, attempted burglary, possession and passing of counterfeit U.S. currency, resisting arrest, burglary in the second degree (automobile), grand theft person (pickpocketing), assault in the third degree…

  “Almost every one of those is a wobbler,” Deeks said, using LAPD jargon for transgressions that could be prosecuted as felonies, misdemeanors, or even mere legal infractions at the prosecutor’s discretion. “He’s probably skated a bunch of times.”

  “Especially the last time,” Kensi said. “That raised things to another level.”

  Deeks agreed. Back in his cop talk days, he would have labeled the break-in at Holloway’s condo a hot prowl burglary, one where the victim was home when the intruder entered, and where kidnapping or murder was a possible intent. A conviction for a hot prowl easily meant a five-to-fifteen year stretch behind bars, maybe longer for someone with Dorani’s prior criminal history. In the case of the Holloway burglary, the fact that he was abducted from his home, and that Dorani’s fingerprints were lifted from his desk, would have virtually guaranteed he got the book thrown at him.

  But the opposite happened.

  Dorani didn’t just receive leniency. Thanks to Holloway, he was given a free pass.

  It only made sense to Deeks if Holloway had something he wanted buried, and buried deep. Or if he was afraid of something.

  Or both.

  Now the agents watched Dorani push open his door and practically dive into his apartment, letting the door swing shut behind him.

  Deeks looked at Kensi. “Think we should go knock?”

  She thought about it a second, then tipped her head toward the apartment building.

  “A low rent dump like that won’t have a backdoor so he can tiptoe out on us,” she replied. “I say we hold off. And maybe find out why he’s in such a rush.”

  Deeks nodded.

  “Know any other game calls while we wait?” he asked.

  Kensi leaned back against her headrest, momentarily closed her eyes, and sighed.

  “Oh, what fun to be nine again,” she said.

  * * *

  Isaak took the cellphone from his pocket and checked the time. He had a half hour—well, twenty-seven minutes, to be exact—until his appointment. If he left here in the next five minutes, caught one of the bandit taxicabs that drove around in circles near the freeway entrance, and told the driver to put the pedal to the metal, he might, just might, make it to the hock shop with his swag.

  Now he shot across his furnished apartment to the bedroom, almost tripping over his three cats as they took off after him at full speed, chasing him and each other down the hall.

  The small, square room contained a single clothes closet, a plain metal bedframe and mattress, a wobbly old dresser, and a carpet that had been a stained, threadbare dust trap when he moved in four years ago, and now looked like something the city garbage collectors wouldn’t want dirtying up the back of their truck. Opening the closet to an avalanche of junk and rumpled clothes, Dorani quickly knelt and reached for the cartons at the bottom. The one he’d come to fetch was pushed far toward the back, and he would need to shift the others around to rummage it out.

  Sliding out the cardboard box, he propped it on his knees, and opened the flaps for a hasty look at the goods.

  The Edison cylinders he took from Sutton’s home were all inside, safely wrapped in newspaper. Fifty in their original tubes, with over half coming from the Blue Amberol 5000 series. From what he saw on the Web, the blues went for between five bills and a grand a piece, depending on where they fell in the series. It was plenty of getaway money even if Daggut nickel-and-dimed him to death.

  But he couldn’t stick around here calculating his take. If he knew anything with absolute certainty, it was that Daggut would pull his lockout routine if he was even a minute late.

  He needed to move fast.

  “Don’t miss me too much,” he said, looking down at the cats. They were wrestling on the floor now. “You’ll eat when I get back.”

  They kept rolling around, biting and knocking the hell out of each other, and damn if they weren’t ignoring him all of a sudden.

  Dorani dashed back along the hall, through the front door, and out of the apartment, barely pausing to lock the door before he sprang downstairs to the sidewalk.

  * * *

  Across the street in her SUV, Kensi and Deeks watched him turn toward the corner up ahead and then race off in the general direction of the Hollywood Freeway.

  “Well, wouldn’t you know,” Deeks said. “There’s our guy again.”

  “Wonder wherefore he’s bound.”

  “And what’s in that box.”

  Kensi reached for the ignition key.

  “Let’s find out,” she said.

  * * *

  The first thing Hanna and Callen noticed about Building 31 was its size. The shadow it cast in the midafternoon sun spread all the way across the wide cement lot it stood upon, covering it like a dark blanket.

  “Wow,” Sam said, walking up the pavement with Harrison. “You said the place was big. I didn’t expect humungous.”

  The officer smiled. “I remember saying it was larger than the rest, sir,” he explained. “Wasn’t intending to quantify it.”

  “Yeah, well. You ever invite me for a light lunch, I’m gonna prep for an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

  “Dude, please, no stretch pants,” Callen said from Harrison’s opposite side. He glanced at the lieutenant. “You seriously don’t want to see him in stretch pants.”

  Harrison laughed.

  “I’ll try to remember your warning, sir,” he said.

  They walked on under a shifting cloud of gulls toward the northern border of the lot, where the building stood against the sandy bluffs of Point Mugu State Park. With its double-gabled roof and solid metal hangar doors, it dwarfed the two galvanized steel Quonset huts shouldered up against its east and west sides.

  “You know what this place was originally used for?” Callen asked.

  “Yes,” Harrison said. “It was designed as a cleaning and stripping center for aircraft. They’d hangar several planes at a time.”

  “And how about those huts?”

  “They stored supplies used for the painting and stripping,” he said. “Flammable chemicals and other hazardous materials.”

  Callen looked thoughtful. Shaped like upside-down U’s, the long, low huts were almost immersed in the larger building’s shadow.

  “Anything inside them now?” Sam asked.

  The lieutenant shook his head. “They were cleaned out to the bare walls years ago. But some of the old fixtures are in the museum.”

  “The one here on base?”

  “Yessir,” Harrison said. “The collection might even have artifacts from Project Deep Dive. Be worth a visit, since that’s what you’re interested in.”

  Callen gazed past the Quonsets into the middle distance. There, between the lot and ascending hills, something on the ground was catching the sunshine, throwing off brilliant, silvery glints of light.

  Harrison saw him shift his attention.

  “That’s the rail siding,” he said. “The ridge just out back is where they had the big cookout.”

  Callen turned to him. “What do you mean?”

  “The CIA and Navy burned thousands of sensitive documents when they emptied Building Thirty-One,”
he said. “All authorized by Theodore Holloway… I thought you might be aware of it, since he was Project Director of Deep Dive.”

  Callen shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I had no idea.”

  “Well, he was the man in charge.”

  “You telling us he came back to Hueneme for it?” Callen said.

  Harrison nodded, meeting his gaze.

  “Oversaw everything,” he said. “As I understand.”

  Callen exchanged a quick glance with Sam. Something told him Harrison didn’t miss it, though the lieutenant gave no sign one way or another.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll give you that look at the tracks, and then we’ll double back to Thirty-One.”

  The three men walked across the lot in the building’s shadow. About three hundred yards up, the pavement’s crumbling edges gave way to a broad strip of sand and rampant sagebrush. Harrison pushed through the tall, stiff shoots, leading the way to the remnants of a low gravel embankment on the other side.

  The sun beating down on them now, their boots crunching on the gravel, they climbed the embankment and stepped onto the tracks. Callen turned to his left and saw the tracks running east for about a mile before they curved off to the south. A glance to the right revealed a corroded iron buffer stop only fifty feet away. There were faded but discernible letters painted in red on the crossbar:

  “Dead end,” Callen said. “Beyond here lies nothing.”

  Harrison motioned in the other direction, where the track ran straight for about a half mile before curving southward.

  “The siding ran back and forth from here to the harbor shipping wharves,” he said. “The local rail spur was there long before the Navy came in. And it’s still active.”

  “The base using it?” Callen asked.

  “Yessir, to bring in supplies,” Harrison said. “But this whole area’s agricultural country. Oranges, beets, grain, you name it. Farmers truck their crops down to the spur, then load them aboard trains for Los Angeles, where the line connects with Western Pacific.”

  “At Union Station?” Sam asked.

  “Right next door,” Harrison said. “Piggyback Yard. From there the cargo can go anywhere in the United States on the flatbacks.”