M-9

by Marvin J. Wolf

  “I don’t know if I’ll still be here, Lopez. Quick as we wrap this murder up, I’m back at Fort Fremont.”

  “I’ve got your number. Maybe I’ll drive up.”

  “Great,” Will said, wondering what Lopez might look like.

  “Take care,” she said and hung up.

  A few minutes later, as Will parked in the PD lot, his phone rang again.

  “This is Tom Blair,” a familiar voice said in his ear. “Spider Santiago is awake and talking to his nurses. Call Chelmin and get over to the Arrowhead Burn Center in Colton if you want to talk to him.”

  “I’m on my way. Does Chelmin know?”

  “I left him a voicemail message.”

  Eighty-four

  Will presented his badge at the information desk and learned that Santiago was on the fourth floor. An elevator deposited him a short hike from the fourth-floor nursing station, where the charge nurse acknowledged his badge, then shook her head when he said Santiago.

  “He’s on his way to Kindred Hospital, in Ontario,” she said. “Left half an hour ago, with a police escort.”

  “Why was he moved?”

  The nurse frowned. “This is a critical care burn hospital. Evidently, the patient had recovered sufficiently that he can be treated successfully in a general hospital,” she said.

  “Do you know who ordered the move?” Will asked.

  The nurse shook her head. “The order came from the hospital administrator.”

  “How was the order delivered?”

  She pointed at her computer. “Same way all discharge orders are delivered. Transfer order from the Administrator. Five minutes later, the ambo crew turned up. Why all the questions, officer?”

  “Detective. It just seems odd to me. Santiago is a suspect in a terrorism investigation. Four people incinerated in an attack at the San Bernardino County Criminal Courthouse. An hour ago, the FBI told me that he was awake and that I could interview him. And now he’s being moved to another hospital.”

  “What can I do to help?” the nurse asked.

  “How long does it take to drive to Kindred Hospital?”

  “Ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “Can you call Kindred Hospital and verify that he’s arrived?”

  “He wouldn’t be in their computer yet. That could take a couple of hours.”

  “Then can you call the Administrator and verify that their office sent a transfer order?”

  The nurse picked up her phone and dialed a five-digit number from memory. She spoke in hushed tones, and Will couldn’t hear her end of the conversation clearly, but as the conversation went on, he noticed that the nurse’s face had gone pale.

  Finally, she looked up and shook her head. “They don’t know anything about moving Mr. Santiago. In fact, he’s supposed to be under a hold.”

  Will pulled his phone out.

  “Sorry, but no cell phones on this floor. It interferes with the critical care equipment.”

  “Call the police and tell them what happened. Ask them to contact the FBI. My name is Detective Spaulding, Barstow PD. Got that?”

  Ashen, the nurse picked up the phone again.

  Will dropped his phone in a pocket and sprinted for the elevator.

  Eighty-five

  Will stepped outside the hospital and pulled out his phone.

  Chelmin answered on the first ring. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Arrowhead Burn Center. Santiago’s gone. I’m pretty sure he was snatched.”

  “Explain yourself,” Chelmin said and Will related the events of the preceding ten minutes.

  “What should I do now?” Will said.

  “Nothing. I’m on my way to see Blair, and I should be back in Barstow by dinner time.”

  “What do you mean, do nothing? The gang probably has Santiago.”

  “And you won’t find him alive. No use making yourself crazy over this. We know the M-9 is highly sophisticated and well organized. It wouldn’t have been too hard for them to plant someone in the hospital, or bribe somebody on staff, and when Santiago woke up, hack the hospital computer, send a fake transfer order, and have a crew wearing EMT uniforms show up with an ambulance. Chances are he’s already dead, and someone will find him, probably in the ambulance, wherever they dump it.”

  “I just feel so—violated. And impotent. Like they’re always two steps ahead of us.”

  “Don’t let it get you down. We’ll get them. This is actually a small break: The fact that they took him suggests that Santiago could identify their Marine. And that confirms that he exists and is still in play.”

  Eighty-six

  Chelmin met Blair in a Denny’s restaurant off Interstate 15 at Baseline Avenue in San Bernardino.

  Blair said, “You go first.”

  Chelmin said, “Alvarez and Cardenas were very tight during boot camp. Beetle Bailey didn’t recognize Malone, although they were in the same company.”

  “You call Sergeant Major Bailey “Beetle Bailey?”

  “Like the comic strip character. Beetle Bailey. That was his nickname. As I told you, when I knew him, he was an A to Z fuckup.”

  “And he didn’t recognize Malone’s picture?”

  “You remember the guys that you see every day. It’s been twenty-seven years. If he was in another platoon, he probably didn’t know him. What do you have?”

  Blair nodded. “I saw the escrow papers on Cardenas’ real estate transactions,” he said. “All financed through the same Newport Beach bank. Each sale was $9,000 cash, the balance on a fifteen-year mortgage.”

  “But he paid them all off sooner?”

  “It looks that way. The oldest transaction was fourteen years ago. The most recent was three years back. I’m going to get a subpoena for his mortgage records. That could take a few days.”

  Chelmin said, “I’m betting Cardenas paid them all off in a year or two with weekly payments, in cash, no transaction over $9,000. And I’m betting the gang has someone in that bank.”

  “You could be right. It’s clear to me that he’s got way too much real estate for a man in his position.”

  “That means that he’s probably bent, but it doesn’t necessarily tie him to M-9.”

  “True. He’ll be under full-time surveillance as quick as I can make it happen.”

  “What about Lynch? Anything on him?”

  “The Los Angeles office opened an investigation yesterday. Too soon to know what they’ve found, if anything, and in any case, on the record, I can’t talk about it outside the Bureau.”

  “What about unofficially?”

  “Maybe. On a need-to-know basis.”

  “OK,” Chelmin said, “What do you have on Malone?”

  “We ran his financials, but nothing jumps out. He’s got about $12,000 in the Navy Federal Credit Union, a CD and savings. A couple of thousand in checking, but that balance goes to almost nil by the end of each month. He rents a small house in Victorville. Drives a four-year-old Lexis, paid off last year.”

  “No property?”

  “Nothing in his name or any of his siblings or parents. At least not in California or Nevada.”

  “No wife or children?”

  “Divorced, twice, has a sixteen-year-old son living in Maryland with his ex. Makes child-support payments by automatic draft from his checking account.”

  “Phone records?”

  “A few calls to Cardenas, one every few months, going back years. Nothing out of the ordinary for two guys who’ve known each other a long time.”

  “What about overseas travel? Has Malone visited any Central American countries?”

  “Two years back, he went to Costa Rica for a vacation. Two weeks. Traveled alone, as far as I can tell. Ten months ago, he went to Belize for a vacation, two weeks, traveled solo.”

  Chelmin said, “That’s interesting. My murder vic, Kendra Farrell, went to both places, shortly before she was killed. And Malone volunteered to me that when he retired, he was thinking about moving to Belize
or Costa Rica.”

  “We need to find out why Kendra went down there.”

  “My partner is working on that. Without much success, so far, but he’s a smart kid and not afraid to put in the time.”

  Blair said, “I guess I need to check if Cardenas went down there and, if so, when.”

  A waitress appeared and laid menus before them.

  The waitress asked, “Coffee, gents?”

  Eighty-seven

  Will parked in the underground garage and rode the elevator to the fifth floor, then went down the hall to Kendra’s apartment.

  Crime scene tape spanned the doorway. Will opened a pocketknife and sliced it away.

  The crime scene crew had replaced the light bulbs, removed the rotting food from the kitchen and swept up the glass from shattered windows. Otherwise, everything seemed to be pretty much as Will remembered it, down to the bullet holes in the walls.

  Kendra’s bedroom was the same mess that it had been on his previous visit. Then, he had barely glanced at the items littering the floor there and in the adjacent bathroom. Now, he squatted on his heels and peered closely at each item in turn. And with a little shock of discovery, stopped at a small round jar bearing the label of La Princesa Fiorella.

  Pulling on his gloves, Will picked up the jar and inspected it closely. It had once held some kind of pleasant-smelling lotion which had partially dried to the texture of beeswax. Most of the lotion was still in the jar, but someone had poked deep gouges into it, perhaps with a finger. It might have been Kendra, in the act of innocently applying some to her face, or it might have been an intruder, probing the jar for some unknown object.

  Will knew almost nothing about cosmetics, but he knew that he could probably find out if this product was sold in the United States.

  He dropped the jar into an evidence bag and resumed his detailed scan of the floor.

  Finding nothing else of interest, he moved to the bathroom, where he found another La Princesa Fiorella product, a box of face powder. He bagged that, as well.

  Back at his desk, Will googled “La Princesa Fiorella” and was rewarded with a link to a site offering corporate information, all of it in Spanish. Every other link turned up by the search was also in Spanish, including one that he had Google translate: It was a fairy tale intended for small children.

  He did another search, looking for cosmetics retailers in California, Florida, and Texas. That generated dozens of links to Websites for retail stores. He started calling them, one after another, asking each if they carried La Princesa Fiorella and was told, each time, that the store didn’t carry it and knew no one who did.

  He went back to the list of stores from Agent Lopez. The store was called La Princesa Fiorella de Panama. Changing the word “Panama” to “Belize” yielded a retailers Website, in both Spanish and English, for a location in Belize City. When he googled its address, he found that was an office building, whose tenants included lawyers and banks, among others.

  Will felt that he was on to something, but he wasn’t sure what it was. Did Kendra learn that someone at the Marine base had something to do with the cosmetics company, an outfit that the DEA suspected was involved in narcotics trafficking? Or was she laundering money through banks in Costa Rica and/or Belize? Whose money?

  Or was it something completely different?

  Maybe Chelmin has some ideas, he thought. And a moment later, his boss called.

  Without preamble, Chelmin said, “The San Berdoo police found Santiago.”

  Will said, “Dead or alive?”

  “Dead. A single shot to the forehead. Here’s the interesting part: His body was on the same park picnic table that he, Flores, and Maldonado were at when they fired the RPG at the Criminal Courts Building.”

  Will said, “And the other two died there, also of a single shot to the head.”

  Chelmin said, “So the point is, we are supposed to understand is that his execution was for the sin of being part of the team that fired that RPG.”

  Will snorted.

  Chelmin said, “I think that somebody is still trying to convince us that the Marine who hooked that crew up with an RPG had no connection to the M-9 leadership.”

  Will said, “Then somebody’s doing a crappy job.”

  Eighty-eight

  Will sat facing Chelmin in the motel coffee shop. A waitress appeared and carefully set plates of breakfast food on the table between them. Without delay, they both began to eat, pancakes and bacon for Chelmin, a cheese-and-chili omelet and hash browns for Will.

  When most of the food had disappeared, Chelmin pushed his plate away, wishing that he had a cigarette and despising himself for that.

  “You ever smoke?” he asked Will, who shook his head.

  “Not really. Tried a few times, in high school, but it didn’t do anything good for me. Besides, I was the starting quarterback. I didn’t need a cigarette in my hand to look cool.”

  Chelmin smiled. He had taken up smoking in his early teens, as much for social acceptance as to ease hunger pangs. “My father left us when I was eleven and my sister was nine,” he said, watching the shock registering on Will’s face.

  “My mom tried, my God she tried, she had two jobs, but there were days when we didn’t get much to eat. Maybe just one slice of fried bologna for breakfast and a slice of bread with peanut butter for supper. I found that I could bum or steal cigarettes easier than food and that a cigarette made me forget how hungry I was.”

  Will shook his head in wonder. “I never met someone with a life story that began that way and doesn’t end with jail time or worse.”

  “There’s plenty of us. Lots of kids in my school didn’t eat but one meal a day.”

  “Why didn’t you grow up to be a thief or a heroin addict?”

  “My mother watched us like hawks. When I was fifteen, she remarried, and things got better. We finally had enough to eat. We moved into a nicer apartment in a better part of Milwaukee. I finished high school and enlisted in the Marines, and my life changed for the better. But I was hooked on nicotine. Lots of Marines smoked. After Kuwait, I tried to quit. Three times, I’ve tried, but I always went back. I tried the patch, I had counseling. Didn’t help.”

  “But I’ve never seen you light up.”

  “Two days before you found the lady in the boxcar, I decided to quit again. So far, I’m good. But every time I eat, I want a cigarette. It’s a struggle. One day at a time, I guess.”

  “What are we going to do today?”

  “I’m going out to see Malone. See if he’s done any investigating that we don’t know about. But first, I’m going to Kendra’s old office and talk to some of her co-workers.

  “I want you to call her ex-husband in San Antonio, and then go back to see Alter. Ask both of them what they knew about Kendra’s work, about her co-workers, did she have any enemies, or was someone giving her a hard time? We need to find out why she was so anxious to move to Texas.”

  Eighty-nine

  It took Will half an hour on his computer to find Matthew Farrell at Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas. Farrell ran the pharmacy serving the Emergency Room at Brook Medical Center. A technician answered the line but was reluctant to get his boss om the line until Will identified himself as an Army CID After a wait of several minutes, Farrell came on the line.

  “This is Dr. Farrell,” he said. “If you’re not calling about a pharmacy issue, I’ll have to call you back when my shift is over.”

  “This is Special Agent Spaulding, Army CID,” Will said. “Are you the Matthew Farrell who was formerly married to Kendra Farrell?”

  “Yes. But we’re jammed up in here. The ER is overflowing with emergency patients, and my pharmacy has to keep up with filling prescriptions for those patients.”

  “When is your shift over, Doctor?”

  “In two hours and twenty minutes. What is this about?”

  “It’s about the murder of your former wife, Kendra Farrell.”

  “This better no
t be a joke.”

  “I assure you, murder is not funny. Here’s a number where you can reach me. I’m working out of the Barstow police station,” Will replied. “Area code 760-256-2211, Extension 187.”

  Farrell said, “Wait! Kendra was murdered? When?”

  “Call me back when your shift is over,” Will said and broke the connection.

  He got up and filled his coffee cup, helped himself to a stale doughnut, and returned to his desk. A moment later, the phone rang.

  Will picked up the receiver and said, “Special Agent Spaulding.”

  “This is Doctor Farrell. I couldn’t wait—when was she murdered? Where? Who did it? And where is my son, Spencer? Is he safe?”

  “I am told that Spencer is with Kendra’s parents in Seguin. She was murdered a little over a week ago, here in Barstow, but her remains were found at Fort Fremont, and that’s why we have the case. We don’t yet know who killed her or why. That’s what I want to speak with you about. Now, can you give me half an hour, or do I need to talk to you later?”

  “I’ll get another pharmacist to cover for me. Give me five minutes, and I’ll call back.”

  “Fine.”

  Fifteen minutes passed before Farrell called.

  “I apologize,” he said. “The reason that the ER is so busy is that we’re having our semi-annual mass casualty exercise. The whole base participates. Plus, the pharmacist I asked to cover for me had to come from another part of the base, and this is a big place.

  “While I was waiting, I called Seguin and spoke with Mrs. Fuentes to confirm that Spencer was with her.”

  “Okay. When did you last speak with Kendra?’

  “She was here for Christmas, and I went over to Seguin to see her and Spencer.”

  “You didn’t know that Spencer was with her parents?”

  “I did know. I was testing to see if you were really a CID agent. Anybody can be anything on the phone.”