Forty Thieves

by Thomas Perry

  Sid said, “There are no guns in the house, Miguel. She made her money pulling armed robberies. She’s living alone, and the guy from Interpol told us all these people are ex-military. There’s no one thing that proves she’s gone for good. But there are a whole lot of little things that all point in that direction.”

  “Now you’re making me nervous,” said Fuentes. “If she hasn’t left any guns, she’s got them with her. Are you ready to go on the record with this little break-in?”

  Ronnie said, “If we ever want to talk to Mira Cepic, I don’t think we have a choice. She has to be found.”

  Fuentes picked up his phone and dialed. “Captain? This is Fuentes. Something just came to my attention. Sid and Ronnie Abel came to tell me our suspect Mira Cepic has packed up and left.” He listened for a time, and then said, “Justification? I’m sure they’ll be able to think of something. Okay, he’s right here.” He handed the phone to Sid. “Captain Albright wants a word.”

  Sid took the phone. “Hello, Captain.”

  Captain Albright said, “You broke into the woman’s house, right?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “You’re a retired cop, Sid. What were you thinking?”

  “We were aware that Mira Cepic lived alone, and was suspected of living on the proceeds of armed robberies. That made her a likely victim for robbery, kidnapping, and extortion. She was especially vulnerable since the house behind hers was unoccupied. We noticed a door in the rear of her house that looked as though it might have been forced, so we knocked to see if she was all right. Since there was no answer, we went in. As soon as we had gone into every room in her house to be sure she wasn’t lying on a floor dead or injured, we left. Then we came directly to the police to report what had happened.”

  “Very good for short notice, Sid,” said the captain. “Is any of it true?”

  “I would say that trained and experienced retirees like us had a responsibility to check on the woman. And because reliable reporting persons like us were alarmed at what we saw inside, your officers have probable cause to enter the house. It should be easy to get a warrant.”

  “Thank you, Sid. As soon as we’ve got it I’ll tell our guys on surveillance to go in.”

  “I would,” said Sid. “They’re wasting their time outside in that van.” Sid handed the phone back to Fuentes.

  Fuentes put the phone to his ear for a second, and then hung up. He said, “Thanks, I think.”

  Ronnie said, “Have you got any more names yet? Any other panthers who have moved into the LA area?”

  “I hear it’s only three so far, from Mira Cepic’s phone bill. They were cell phone numbers she had called. Major Crimes got the names and checked them against the list of panther suspects that Interpol had.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They haven’t told anybody the names yet. I do know that because of the phone company billing records Major Crimes thinks they’re all living in one house. They’re all Serbs, and they’re here on doubtful visas.”

  “Doubtful?”

  “Granted legally, but probably not factual. They’re here on EB-5 visas. That’s the kind where somebody brings in a certain amount of money and plans to use it to start a business that will employ people. I’m sure they brought the money, but they’ve had three years to start a business, but haven’t. And at least two have arrests in Europe they didn’t mention on their applications.”

  Ronnie said, “Has anybody gone to bring them in for questioning?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “They’re still using the list of panthers from Interpol and trying to see which ones entered the United States, so they can get them all at once.”

  “It’s probably the best way,” said Ronnie. “It’s impossible to know what the game is until you know who’s playing.”

  “I don’t know,” Fuentes said. “It would be great to stop a big robbery from happening, and obviously I’d love to keep anybody from being hurt. But we’re getting nowhere on the crime that got you—and me—involved. This has less and less to do with the murder of James Ballantine.”

  “Maybe,” said Ronnie. “But maybe this time we’ve just got to work our way through all the other things that have been happening and understand them before we can piece together the one thing that happened to Ballantine.”

  Sid said, “What do you think the department is going to do?”

  “I’m not making the decisions,” said Fuentes. “But I think the plan will be to watch the houses of the thieves we identify, and begin staking out all of the best places in the city for stealing diamonds.”

  26

  Nicole and Ed sat on opposite sides of a wooden picnic table at the edge of a grassy park above the ocean along Cabrillo Boulevard in Santa Barbara. After they had checked into the hotel across the street from the ocean, they walked down to State Street and bought a takeout lunch of sandwiches and beer at a restaurant and brought it back here.

  Their table was at the edge of the grass beneath the long row of tall coconut palm trees. The sandy beach began about six feet from Nicole’s bare foot, and sloped gradually down to the blue water a hundred and fifty feet away. Nicole was watching a family from somewhere far away, where people’s skin was still very white at this time of year, except on their necks, backs, and shoulders, where it had already been burned red by the sun. They were flying a box kite, and it had risen quickly into the blue sky, so now she could sight up the bright white string to the diminishing red spot of the kite.

  The palm fronds above her made a fluttering, whispery sound in the steady breeze. As she glanced up at them, they reminded her of movies she had seen that were set on islands in the South Pacific. For all she knew, they were filmed somewhere near here. They were only a hundred miles from Hollywood. She noticed a couple of greenish lumps up where the fronds met the trunk, and it occurred to her that it would be a terrible irony to survive two shootouts with the insect people, and then get brained by a coconut at the beach.

  She lowered her eyes again and rapidly scanned the park, the sidewalk, and the cars on Cabrillo Boulevard. She looked at the people walking along the beach where the surf washed up and subsided, leaving a firm, cool surface for their feet. Nobody she could see looked threatening. None of them stared in the direction of their table too long or too hard. None of the cars parked in the little lots along the ocean ahead of her had people sitting in them pretending to do nothing. That would have been a particularly ominous sight. This was a spectacular, sunny day with a faint breeze that smelled like a mixture of salt, air, and water. Parked cars were hot and cramped and smelled like plastic, and anybody preferring that would have been up to something.

  She touched the bag she’d set on the bench beside her, and the hard, metallic lump of the collapsed MP5 comforted her. She returned her eyes to Ed. He was facing the pier and the harbor beyond, and he had a good view of the cars that turned at the foot of State Street. It would be very difficult for any enemy to surprise them.

  “Well? What do you think?” she said.

  “About what?” Ed went back to chewing his sandwich.

  “What we should do,” she said. “We’ve stayed out of sight for a couple of days, but what’s next?”

  “I’m open to ideas,” said Ed.

  She was getting frustrated. All he seemed to want to do was eat. “We can’t go home. They know who we are and where our house is, and everything. Not to mention those three guys—the last ones.”

  “Right,” said Ed.

  “You say ‘right,’ but we’re not moving. We’re only a hundred miles from our house. We’re not hauling ass across the continent.”

  “Right,” said Ed. “They haven’t come for us yet. So maybe this is far enough.” He took another bite of his sandwich and another pull on the bottle of beer he had kept in the small paper bag from the restaurant. He swallowed. “If you think about this, it doesn’t matter if we’re a hundred miles away or ten thousand, if they don’t know which it is
. All they know is that we’re gone, and they don’t know which direction we took or how fast we went.”

  Nicole studied Ed for a few seconds. She wanted to stay frustrated and impatient with him. She had been prepared to be, but what he’d said made a certain kind of sense. She had even been planning to watch him eat while she was delivering her speech to him, and think about how gluttonous and gross he looked while he was gobbling his food. But even that wasn’t true. He had to keep eating longer than she did, to sustain that big body, but he was always pretty polite. As she watched, he gave up on his sandwich, collected all of their trash—hers too—and carried it to a trash can. Then he sat down across from her and waited.

  She said, “You don’t think they’re even bothering to search for us?”

  “I wouldn’t do it,” he said. “And they’ve got to be smarter than I am.”

  “Why wouldn’t they search?”

  “That guy told us they’re a bunch of thieves. We know they could afford to pay Vincent Boylan all that money to hire us. Like that guy said, we’ve got nothing they need. They obviously still have plenty of money. They just don’t want more trouble from us. They failed to accomplish that by killing us, but having us on the run accomplishes the same thing. So why poke the snake?”

  She turned away again and stared out at the ocean for a moment. “So we’re going to leave it at that?”

  “At some point, most people who live by stealing run into trouble and go to prison. A lot of the ones who carry guns meet other people who carry guns and die. That’s just odds. Maybe if we wait awhile, this bunch will disappear. Then we can go home.”

  “I don’t want to stay in Santa Barbara more than a couple of days. It’s too close.”

  “How about Las Vegas?” he said. “That’s more than twice as far from home, and it’s a lot bigger.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Las Vegas.” Then she added, “For now.”

  “We should be all right there,” said Ed. “They won’t go looking for us.”

  Nicole shrugged. “Of course not. Why poke the snake?”

  27

  The people of the group had gathered in the far end of the yard three hundred feet behind Gavrilo’s house. It was a quiet, peaceful place because it was separated from the house by the stand of old oaks that had been spared when the house was built. When they’d buried the three Russians, they had found that it was nearly impossible to dig a grave near the old oak trees because the roots had traveled outward a long way searching for water.

  Gavrilo had left the trees there because they were big enough to provide shade. Southern California was a parched, hot place, and he had installed round wooden benches around the trunks of a few trees so he could sit there to drink his wine and listen to the warbling of the mockingbirds. These benches were where most people sat and waited their turns to dig.

  They didn’t dig four individual graves, because a row of man-sized mounds would be seen by police helicopters and arouse curiosity. The three Russians who had been killed during the raid at the killers’ house had been buried in one grave, and these four would be buried together in another. The grave was a single wide hole with a sloping path going down into it, so each shift of diggers could walk down into the pit and up again. Most of the digging was done by the men, but a couple of the women, Mira Cepic’s old traveling companion Anica, and her closest friend, Marija, got into the grave and dug.

  When the hole was about seven feet deep and eight on a side, three men were posted to watch to be sure the sky remained clear, and then several others brought the bodies down on stretchers.

  Marija was forty-five, but still beautiful enough to make people stare at her when she walked on the streets of Beverly Hills. Today her wavy dark brown hair was tied back and her bright green eyes were hiding behind her sunglasses. She had changed into jeans and a sweatshirt to dig, and she had picked up a lot of dirt during the hard, sweaty work. She was aware that right now she looked like the peasant farmer she really was, but she was also aware that a little mud didn’t keep the men’s eyes off her. When she first became aware of herself as a child, the beauty was with her already, and it had never left her.

  She looked down at the wrapped body of her friend Mira. About eight months ago she had done her best to help Mira. It was a huge favor, and part of the favor was that she’d decided not to tell her about it. She had read in the newspaper the name of Detective Kapp, the police detective who was in charge of the James Ballantine murder, and begun to search for him. When she found him, she stalked him from a distance. She observed that he was a drinker—not a typical social drinker, but a man who went to bars alone after work and bought a drink, and then another, and another, until he walked unsteadily. When he had drunk enough to quiet whatever his pain was, he went outside, got into his car, and drove home to a small apartment in a big stucco building in Van Nuys. If he had not been a police officer he would probably have been arrested by then and gone to jail, and maybe gotten cured. Marija was glad that wasn’t what had happened, because another cop might not have been as easy for her.

  Marija made preparations. When she was ready she made sure she was alone in the bar that he liked best, which was the worst and most out-of-the-way place he frequented. She didn’t have to do anything to attract him. She’d never had to do anything except respond when men spoke to her. She smiled, talked with him, and drank with him, as she had with many other men over many years. With Kapp, instead of asking questions about jewelry stores and dissolving into the night, she had stayed long enough to put a dose of Rohypnol in his drink, and gone out to his car with him.

  Dragan and one of the Russians had been outside waiting in Dragan’s car, but the one who had known how it must be done was Marija, who had learned the method from her father. She had driven Kapp’s car out of the city and stopped on the shoulder of a winding road in the hills. Then she wiped off her fingerprints, and the two men helped her prop Kapp in the driver’s seat. She had used Kapp’s shoe as the wedge to hold down the gas pedal. Her father had taught her that the man must be drunk before he was put in the car, and that the drug she used had to be a natural substance that was quickly metabolized, and therefore difficult to detect in the blood or tissues. There could be nothing out of place in the car, nothing that wouldn’t have been there if the man had driven himself off the road and over the precipice. In automobile accidents, the victims often lost one or more shoes.

  Marija looked down at Mira’s body. By now you know how I tried to help you, she thought. And I know you would have done the same for me. Rest now. I’ll see you soon enough.

  Marija took her shovel and threw one shovelful of dirt on Mira, one on Jovan, one on Mihailo, one on Bogdan. Then she handed the shovel to her sister, Jelena. She walked up the sloping path to the grass and looked around her at the trees. It was going to be a shame to leave California. The air was warm like the breath of a baby. In most of Europe there was still snow on the ground.

  At the grave, while others put their shovelfuls of earth over the bodies of the four, Anton Karadzic recited from memory an approximation of what his father, who had been an Eastern Orthodox priest, used to say. When he was a boy, Anton had often gone with him to keep track of his vestments and supply muscle if the pallbearers were old enough to have earned the honor but too old to carry the coffin by themselves. Anton could also still perform a passable wedding ceremony, but unlike his funeral, it wasn’t binding.

  He spoke with some feeling. He had inherited a good voice, and his friendships with the four dead thieves was sincere. He kept talking long enough for the mourners to cover the bodies with about four feet of earth. As he finished, five of the strongest men took the shovels and energetically threw in the rest. When the grave had been filled and the ground had been scraped and tamped down even, Todor took the four copper plates he had etched with the names of the four dead thieves, and set them at their heads. Then he shoveled dirt on top so they would not be found easily.

  There was some talk tha
t they would eventually be able to bring the bodies back to be reburied in Europe, but nobody believed the talk. It was hard enough to smuggle one live thief across a national border. In most cases it didn’t matter. Whoever Mira’s relatives in Romania had been, they had never known her. And Jovan’s, Mihailo’s, and Bogdan’s closest relatives were probably the ones standing around their grave right now.

  After the grave markers had been covered, a few of the men walked across the lawn, lifted bags of gravel from the bed of a van, and poured gravel over the site. Todor and Tomislav leveled the site with rakes. Then the men who had carried the gravel lifted the prefabricated wooden gazebo they had assembled and set it over the grave.

  When all the work was done, the group gathered in the shade of the oaks and sat on the round benches. They opened bottles of wine and beer and drank a few toasts to their dead friends.

  Gavrilo, who seemed to be the obvious one to speak, stood up. “Thank you, friends. I hope that somebody has taken care of the belongings the four had set aside for their futures.” His half-lidded eyes drifted across the crowd and noted who reacted. Tomislav, Todor, Srdan, and Jelena all nodded and waved a hand to signify that they, as close relatives, had salvaged the money and valuables of the dead.

  Gavrilo knew that the others all assumed one of them had taken all the valuables Mira had left—possibly Marija or Anica. But yesterday while some of the younger men had carried Mira’s body out of his living room and some of the others had cleaned the blood off his marble floor, he’d had five minutes alone, and had rifled the backpack she had left in his hallway. He had taken most of the money and diamonds before anyone else could think to ask. Marija had come by later and picked up Mira’s pack and taken it with her without looking inside it. Gavrilo felt no guilt about the theft. Everyone was a thief—Mira, Marija, Tomislav, and all the others. And taking Mira’s money was like picking up a fallen soldier’s ammunition on a battlefield. She had no further need of it, but because of it, he could go on.