Troubleshooter

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “Did Jim get us the info from Border Patrol?” Tim asked.

  Freed held out his notepad. A list of vehicle descriptions and license-plate numbers. Toe-Tag, Whelp, and Diamond Dog had crossed the border on their Harleys, except on December 7 at 2:13 P.M., when Diamond Dog had gone through solo in a burgundy Toyota Camry, plate number 7CRP497.

  Tim tapped the car description.

  Freed’s eyes widened, an amusingly green response from a veteran.

  “Diamond Dog’s missing bike at the warehouse was a car.”

  “Might be. We’ll take a look. Who’s it registered to?”

  “It’s a dummy reg. Valid but under a false name.”

  “Our girl Babe Donovan’s work at the DMV?”

  “I’m guessing.”

  “Such a giving soul,” Bear said.

  Freed’s pager hummed on his belt, and he tilted it out so he could read the Blue Curaçao screen. “Chief’s credit-card statements just hit the fax. I’ll rescue Thomas from the in-laws, and we’ll get on it.” He hustled back to his Porsche, a seal gray Carrera GT underwritten by his family’s twenty-seven-state furniture chain. “Have Sheriff’s take over here, see if you can find the car, and I’ll meet you back at the office.”

  Bent into Diamond Dog’s Camry, Aaronson contorted at an angle generally reserved for Playmates. Tim heard his breathy whisper— “Gotcha”—and then he eased himself out, grasping a 7-Eleven cup by the rim with a pair of tweezers.

  Bear rolled his eyes and stepped back toward the curb; they’d been observing the slow-motion processing for the better part of a half hour. He and Guerrera had already voiced their preference for hot-assing it back to the command post to dig into the credit-card records. Tim, familiar with Aaronson’s predilection for a deputy on-scene, had promised the criminalist some on-site time. Besides, Thomas and Freed were the best financial investigators they had, and he wasn’t about to rush back to the post to stare at Visa statements over their shoulders.

  They’d found Diamond Dog’s car in minutes, parked less than a block from the warehouse where the biker had taken Guerrera’s bullet in the chest. It was road-trip sloppy, which Tim had hoped for, but so far Aaronson had excavated little more than fast-food wrappers, a few issues of Easyriders, and a crumpled poncho that looked more like a movie prop than an article of clothing.

  At Tim’s request, Aaronson had left Lash’s apartment early to process the car. He was an unhurried but meticulous worker, a finder of hidden gems. He’d once pulled a DNA sample from a piece of dental floss he’d found in the tread of a boot in the back of a crash-pad closet. Tim was looking for him to strike fertile soil again.

  Bear tapped his watch. It was eleven forty-five. Christmas was still hanging on by its fingernails. Tim couldn’t believe it was the same day he’d started with a visit to Uncle Pete at the clubhouse.

  Aaronson peered into the 7-Eleven cup, nose wrinkled curiously. “What do you see?”

  He moved the cup under Tim’s face, and Tim leaned back from the smell.

  “What is that?” Guerrera asked, his interest piqued.

  “Tobacco spit.” Aaronson swirled the murky brown liquid. “Dip. Skoal Wintergreen from the smell of it. But look here.” He tilted the cup, revealing a soaked piece of paper at the bottom. Through the sludge Tim could make out some faint lines, but the paper was too crumpled and stained for him to discern a pattern.

  “Why would he put paper in the bottom?” Guerrera asked.

  Tim, reformed stakeout dipper, said, “So it won’t splash out of the cup when you drive.” He peered over Aaronson’s shoulder. “Can you dry it out to get a read on the markings?”

  Aaronson was on his knees on the sidewalk, draining the liquid into a specimen jar. He used the tweezers to tease the paper flat without tearing it, and then he hooked a flexible-rod flashlight behind his ear and bent over the evidence with a magnifying glass. He looked like a Halloween costume come to life.

  Flattened, the marks were clearer, if abbreviated by the torn edge. A few squiggles locked within a circular perimeter, almost like a yin and yang. They appeared to be part of a logo. An alphanumeric was left, apparently in its entirety: TR425.

  Aaronson folded the soggy slip over and rubbed the back with a thin, blunt probe. “See that? It’s gummy.”

  “Sticker?” Tim asked, jotting the number in his notepad. “I’d say part of a shipping label. The number would be the confirmation or tracking code.” Aaronson pulled over a pad and meticulously sketched the visible lines of the logo. He ripped the sheet off and handed it back over his shoulder to Tim, his eyes never leaving the sample. “This should do until I get it under the sterozoom.”

  39

  Thomas leaned against the wall at the head of the conference table, exasperated. The room was lit, but a left-on projected photo of Den Laurey faintly colored half his face. “Look, we ran through all the ground-ballers on the credit-card statements, but it’s gonna take some time. We have nine months to cover—a lot of charges to run down. Visa’s got limited info, and we have to wait for businesses to call back.” He glanced at the clock. Half past midnight. “Which ain’t gonna happen until the A.M.”

  “How about the bank trail?” Bear asked. “Past cards? Visa must’ve run a credit report.”

  “Card was issued under Fred Kozlanski. Chief paid the bills from a checking account registered to the same name. Guy died a year back, Chief borrowed his identity.”

  “Who could do a thing like that?” Bear offered Tim, occasional ID thief, a sardonic smirk.

  “No ATM withdrawals?” Tim asked.

  Thomas said, “Credit card only.”

  “Any secondary cards linked to the account?”

  Freed shook his head. Miller exhaled and leaned back in his chair, lacing his hands behind his neck. About six more deputies had trickled back to the post, but the majority would return in the morning. Malane, technically still the FBI liaison to the task force, was conspicuously absent, probably plugged in to the Operation Cleansweep command center. Now that the undercover agent was out of the bag, he was no longer required in Roybal to regulate and impair. Smiles, dead man walking, had to disappear again to protect Rich’s cover.

  The days-old fruit rotting within the trash overflowing the can added a sickly undercurrent to the smell of coffee and glazed sugar. Tim glanced at the papers covering the surface before him like a tablecloth. The team had broken down the gas charges from Chief’s credit card, using the prices on the respective days to calculate the gallons purchased, and marked the location of each station on an L.A. County map with accountants’ “sign here” arrows. Chief had charged gasoline only at five stations near his crash pad. Tim studied the Post-its beside each arrow—3.25 gallons, 2 gallons, 24.92 gallons, 3.17 gallons.

  His gaze caught on the anomalous amount. Chief’s Indian sported a Fat Boy 3.5-gallon tank. The range of Sinners’ tanks, based on Guerrera’s appraisal of the surveillance photos of Nigger Steve’s funeral, only ran north to six gallons.

  “What’s with the twenty-five-gallon charge?” Tim asked.

  “It’s the one standout,” Thomas said. “We don’t know what to make of it.”

  “Maybe he bought beer, put it on the card,” Guerrera said.

  “That Shell doesn’t have a convenience store.”

  “How about cigarettes, oil?”

  “It was an autocharge at the pump. Comes in under a different code.”

  “Twenty-five gallons. Must be an SUV,” Bear said.

  “A big SUV,” Guerrera said. “Like a Hummer, maybe. Or a U-Haul truck or something.”

  “That’s the thing.” Freed held up a sheaf of DMV printouts. “The Sinners and deeds all have bikes or little Jags and Beemers. Not an SUV among them.”

  “Too coppish,” Guerrera said. “They want the opposite of big.”

  “So who’s filling up an SUV?” Bear’s hypothetical hung in the air.

  Tim thumbed through the photograph prints from the rolls of fi
lm Bear had found in the warehouse Dumpster. Solid black. All three sets. Every last one. Just as Thomas had reported.

  Tim tossed them on the table, frustrated. He rubbed his eyes so hard he knew he’d leave them bloodshot, but it felt so good he didn’t care. “Let’s run through the murder list again.”

  Miller raised his head. “Mexican girls between fifteen and thirty?”

  “We told you,” Freed said, “no red flags.”

  “Humor me.”

  Thomas shot a sigh and exchanged one hefty set of files for another. “Maria Alvarez. Twenty-two years old. Hit-and-run at Temple and Alameda. Alma Benito. Sixteen. Shot in a drive-by outside Crenshaw High.” The names kept coming, alphabetized, jurisdiction after jurisdiction, a roll call of the young and dead.

  Los Angeles, city of dreams.

  In the past three months, forty-seven deaths fit their search demographic. Thomas paused to catch his breath, and Bear said, “You forgot Venice.”

  “No questionable deaths in Venice fit our target demographic.”

  “Really? Happy day.”

  “Torrance,” Tim said.

  “I thought I read Torrance. Nothing there anyway. Just that chick who died on vacation.”

  “Vacation where?”

  “Cabo San Lucas.”

  “You crossed files. Jennifer Villarosa was from Sylmar.”

  “Not Villarosa. Sanchez, I think it was.” Thomas wrinkled his forehead. “Villarosa died in Cabo?”

  Tim thumbed through a line of file tabs, then whisked out the folder and flipped it open. An Immigration-application photo of Lupe Sanchez, plump face smiling beneath a heap of curly hair, was stapled above the report. Date of death: November 30.

  A jolt of adrenaline made Tim’s skin crawl, the tingle of still-dawning epiphany. The buried thread of the answer started to rise through the sand.

  Bear was on his feet. “How’d she die?”

  Thomas said, “Hiking accident.”

  “Jesus.” Guerrera was already dialing. The room quieted as everyone became aware of the sudden shift in energy.

  Tim grabbed the three packs of film, spilling some of the black rectangles as he pulled out the negatives. The first set of strips were foggy, as were the second. The third roll’s negatives were clear bluish gray. He looked back at the Post-it—24.92 gallons.

  Den’s sneering comment over Dray’s bleeding body echoed in his head—We should practice on this heifer. In her ninth month, Dray was big. Big like Marisol Juarez. Like Jennifer Villarosa. Like Lupe Sanchez. Tim had read Den’s lips on the vehicle cam’s recording, missing the intonation shift on the second-to-last word. We should practice on this heifer.

  He felt a meshing of gears, then the drop of cog into slot as the facts aligned and the solution pulled up into awareness.

  He knew how the Sinners were muling the drugs in even before Guerrera racked the phone and said, with bright, excited eyes, “Sanchez won a free Mexico trip through Good Morning Vacations.”

  40

  Drops of sweat cutting through the dust powdering his dark face, Gustavo Alonso readjusted the obese cadaver onto its left side, struggling with its weight until he found a better resting position. He paused to catch his breath, then tipped the chin to the chest to keep the esophagus open. A thin placement catheter ran down the girl’s throat, attached to an intragastric balloon that he’d already positioned in the ample stomach cavity. The endoscope dangled from the monitor cart like a black snake. He inserted the scope through the mouth, following the catheter down. His trembling hands made it difficult to steer past the hump of the lower esophageal sphincter, but he managed, and the weight-loss balloon loomed on the viscera-flecked monitor.

  Now he had eyes on the inside.

  He paused, exhaling and wiping his brow. His frayed scrubs were damp, with dark splotches extending down the sides. The task at hand was not making him perspire—he’d operated as a mortician on a forged license for the better part of twenty years, and between floaters, decomps, and barbecues, little could turn his stomach. He was sweating because of the scabs on his arms. They were hungry.

  Funeraria Sueño del Ángel was located up Highway 1 from Cabo San Lucas, on the inland outskirts of San José del Cabo. The rundown funeral home hid off a dirt road in a throw of local houses left unwatered by the tourist corridor. The noises of the bikers, carried on a dry breeze from the sagging porch, reached Gustavo in the mortuary. A loud punch line, slapstick shuffling, smokers’ laughter. Earlier, one of them had accidentally put a boot through the rotting wood.

  Checking on Gustavo, Toe-Tag pressed his face to the screen door. Always within gunshot range. He and Whelp had arrived last night and taken over possession of Allah’s Tears from the well-dressed Middle Eastern gentleman who’d shown up around midnight.

  Gustavo refocused on the body; his arms would not get fed until he completed his work. He removed the guide wire from the fill tube protruding from the cadaver’s gaping mouth. A bag of Allah’s Tears lay on the surgical tray to his side, labeled as saline but holding instead a liter of fluid euphoria. He primed the fill tube, then spiked the bag. Using a 50-cc syringe, he withdrew the liquid heroin, then shot it down the filling tube. On the monitor the intragastric balloon swelled, the pulse of a synthetic fetus.

  Taking great care to ensure that the fill tube stayed slack, he repeated the process, each plunger push street-valued at over a million dollars.

  It was painstaking work.

  The embalming table had not been well maintained; flakes of rust stuck up, lodging in the doughy white flesh of the eighteen-year-old body. Because the corpse had to look presentable at the end of its travails—with Catholics you could count on an open casket—he’d taken all the appropriate steps. He’d removed the clothes, then massaged the mounds of blue-veined flesh, manipulating the extremities to break up the incipient rigor mortis. He’d cleansed the body with antibacterial soap, working up a good lather, then sprayed it down with disinfectant. He’d swabbed the orifices with cavity fluid and packed them, except for the mouth, which he left accessible. Because of the facial cyanosis, he’d applied massage cream with a light touch to avoid further bloodstaining. He’d rinsed the eyeballs with a mild solution before inserting eye cups to hold the lids in place. The big toes he’d tied together to keep the legs in line, and he’d sutured the pillowy breasts together near the nipples so they’d be held in position. He’d inserted the trocar above and to the left of the belly button and used the long, pointed instrument to suck out the contents of the organs. He’d lifted arteries at the embalmer’s six points—the right and left carotids, axillaries, and femorals.

  The right carotid protruded just above the breastbone, the tongue depressor underneath still holding it above skin level though he’d long disconnected the pump. He’d already drained the blood, replacing it with embalming fluid and a solution to keep the skin bile pigment from turning the flesh green.

  It was a well-cared-for corpse.

  The shadows at the screen were steady now as the bikers watched from the safety of twenty feet and an outdoor breeze. The first intragastric balloon reached its liter limit. After the syringe’s final stroke, Gustavo pushed the residual through the line, then pulled back on the plunger, creating a vacuum in the valve and sealing the balloon. Gently, he withdrew the tubing, leaving the freestanding balloon inside the stomach. Though obese corpses were difficult to work with, larger stomach capacity was required for the procedure, and abdominal fat would help disguise the distention.

  He laid the corpse flat on its back. He embedded a hooked barb in the upper and lower gum line, then used a wire to cinch the mouth neatly closed. The chubby hands he positioned left over right, leaving the fingers slightly cupped.

  Relieved and exhausted, he leaned over and kissed the girl’s pale forehead.

  Shirt up over his nose, Whelp entered and retrieved the final fill bag from the crate of tribal trinkets. For all their rough-and-tumble posturing, the bikers were feeble around cada
vers. They were skilled at making corpses; they just couldn’t stomach the extended aftermath. After all Gustavo’s meticulous preparations, they’d mucked up the first three corpses on the other end, unable to cleanly incise the stomachs. He sincerely hoped that the new guy, with his much-ballyhooed blade skills, would prove a more effective craftsman.

  Drops of sweat hung from the ends of Gustavo’s hair. He rubbed his nose, and his fingers came away greasy. He scratched his arms—the imaginary bugs were back, just beneath the skin. “A taste?” he said in strong-accented English. “Just a taste?”

  “Not yet.” Toe-Tag stood behind Whelp, arms crossed.

  Gustavo followed his gaze to the far side of the mortuary, taking in the enormous corpse lying humped and naked on the second embalming table.

  The twin sister.

  Gustavo’s shoulders settled a few inches lower. He wiped his face on the inside collar of his scrub top and nodded a few times, sadly.

  Taking the bag of Allah’s Tears, he shuffled over to the second station and resumed his work.

  41

  The school-bus yellow backhoe lurched, the boom lowering the bucket into the plot. A clank as the teeth struck casket. Tim turned away from the spotlights illuminating the dark cemetery, pressing the cell phone tightly to his ear.

  What he heard was the unamused 2:00 A.M. voice of Jan Turaski, the LAX Customs resident-agent-in-charge who oversaw a joint task force that included Customs and Border Patrol inspectors. Tim had met her during his four months at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center; she’d been a field agent back then, on a cross-training stint.

  “You’d better give me a damn good reason, Rack. Or tell me you’re joking. I can smell the undue-hardship lawsuits already.” She laughed, a single dead note. “I can’t start popping coffin lids without some serious PC.”

  “I’m getting probable cause as we speak.”