by Glenn Rogers
“So, it's possible,” Alex said, “that he's so angry at you that he's taken Monica in order to draw you in.”
“Someone is,” I said. “I don't know if it's this guy or not, but we have to check him out.”
Alex got up and poured himself some more coffee. He sipped it as he paced across my office. He was thinking. He turned to me and said, “Maybe we're not going back far enough. This actor guy ...”
“Cole Randolph.”
“Yeah. He doesn't feel right. I agree we need to check him out, but I don't think he's our guy.”
“I know,” I said. “Doesn't feel right to me, either. You think it might be someone from my agency days?”
“You took down some serious people when you were an agent,” Alex said. “We ought to at least look into it.”
“Okay. Let's look,” I said. “But all those files are at your office.”
I locked up my office. Alex drove his car; I drove mine, Wilson riding in the front seat with me. I let down the passenger window so he could stick his head out and enjoy the summertime smells. He was happy.
On the way, I got a call from Patty.
“Have you made any progress?” she asked.
“Actually, we have,” I said. “Not anything we’ve done, though.” I told her about the two notes and what we were now thinking.
Patty was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Jake, you have to know that if that is what happened, Monica would never blame you for her being taken. And neither do we.”
“That’s very kind of you, Patty. I appreciate you saying that.”
“Do you think there will be more notes?”
“I think there might be. If they are after me, then they want me to find her.”
“Then they’ll have you,” she said.
“That’s their plan, I think.”
“So you have to turn the tables on them so that instead of them getting you, you get them.”
“Something like that,” I said.
More silence. Then, “Be care, Jake. Find her. But be careful.”
We arrived at the FBI building a little after eight. My cases had been archived. While Alex pulled them up, I went to the break room and got coffee for him and tea for me. He activated the big wall monitor so we could both read the information on the screen. By eleven thirty, we had three possibilities.
Chapter 22
Thursday Night
The first person we came across who might be holding a very big grudge against me was Evelyn Darwin. The case had involved interstate banking fraud. Evelyn and her daughter Diane, were draining the bank accounts of senior citizens. They would contact seniors, say they were working with their bank to add additional security protocols, get their personal account information and then move that person's money out of their account into an offshore account in the Caymans. They’d stolen millions. It was the first major case I broke as an FBI agent. In a moment when I’d been alone with mother and daughter, they offered me a third of what they had stolen. My share would have been well over a million dollars. They also offered themselves, in a tropical paradise. Access to either of them or both whenever I wanted it in a Caribbean beach house we would share. They were both good looking women. A different investigator might have taken them up on it. I didn't. The Darwin ladies were arrested and convicted. The daughter, who had a degree in computer programming, was the brains of the operation. Mom was just helping out. Evelyn, the mom, was sentenced to five years. Diane, the daughter, was sentenced to twenty. Two years into her sentence, Diane was killed in prison. Evelyn blamed me and swore she’d kill me. She’d gotten out of prison two and a half years ago but had made no attempt on my life. But maybe that’s what she was trying to do now.
The second case was not so much a person of interest as a gang of interest, a motorcycle gang called Brothers in Arms. I'd led a sting operation where I, along with two other agents, had bought serious quantities of marijuana, meth, and coke. Then we'd busted them. Five gang members and the president of the club, Nick Jarman, were arrested and convicted. After the conviction, Nick sent a message, delivered by one of his gang members, that when he got out, he'd be coming to see me. According to the records, Nick had been released six months ago.
The third possibility was the daughter of a man I’d had to shoot. His name was Harvey Connors. His had a daughter named Lindsey who had vowed that one day she would kill me. Her father was a psychopath who had planned to blow up a family in Encino if the governor did not sign a pardon for all the people in jail or prison for nonviolent sex crimes. He claimed that since sex was a normal part of life, nonviolent sex could not possibly be a crime. Lindsey, who we suspected was engaging in carnal relations with her father, agreed with him. We had been watching the father as his rhetoric had turned to accusations and then to threats. We had thought we were keeping pace with him, but he'd gotten ahead of us. He’d taken a family, a husband and wife and three children, hostage and had their house rigged to blow up. We had tracked his cell and had him cornered in the house. He had let me in the house to talk with him. I'd let him take my service weapon and was trying to talk him into giving up and telling me how to disarm the bomb. He wouldn't. He began to get agitated and started making additional demands. I knew if I could get the bomb squad in the house, they could disarm the bomb. But I had to get control of him first. Turned out not to be an easy thing to do. He was threatening to shoot the father. I had a small backup weapon of which he was unaware. He took his eyes off me for a moment to look at the father. I pulled my backup weapon and shot him. We got the family out and the bomb squad disarmed the bomb with two minutes to spare.
The daughter claimed that the FBI had executed her father for speaking out for the rights of wrongly convicted people. And I, she'd said, had been their executioner. She had vowed to avenge her father's death.
“So, who do you want to start with?” Alex asked.
“Nick Jarman,” I said. “I think the Brothers in Arms have a greater capacity for something like this than the others.”
As I drove back home, I began feeling guilty again. I was in my own environment, warm and well-fed, surrounded by friends and colleagues. I was in my own vehicle, on my way home to my apartment, to sleep in my nice comfortable bed. Where was Monica? Was she hurt? Hungry? Cold? Frightened? My gut told me I should be pushing this investigation twenty-four seven. Day or night, I should be busting down doors and rousting everyone who ever had any dealings with Monica or me until I found her, until I held her in my arms and knew she was safe. But in real life, it doesn't work like that. I had to be calm, methodical, calculating. I had to be professional. I was thankful for Alex. He was helping me hold it together, even if he didn't know he was. He was putting all the resources of the FBI at my disposal, yet giving me enough room to operate and feel like I was the one in charge of the investigation. Frank was helping a lot, too. It was just as I thought about Frank that he called back.
“Got the info on those four guys,” he said.
“And?”
“All still in prison.”
“Okay. Thanks for checking.”
“No problem. Something else.”
“Yeah?”
“Branch found a connection between Bonito Esposito and Rachel Pipestone.”
“I thought she might,” I said.
“Couple of years back, Esposito did some legal work for the Pipestones. Set up an offshore corporation. An import-export business based on Grand Cayman Island.”
“I wonder what they were importing and exporting,” I said.
“Probably just some little Caribbean craft items,” Frank said.
“Yeah, that's probably what it was. Either that or it is a way to launder their drug money.”
“Couldn't be that,” Frank said. “That'd be illegal.”
“Yeah. I'll have to ask him about that.”
“Ask carefully.”
“Sure. I wouldn't want to offend him.”
“You thinking that maybe Bonito and Rach
el are still working together?”
“I think we both know that's a pretty good possibility.”
“And are you thinking they sent the shooters?”
“I think they might have sent both teams.”
“Both?” Frank said. “I don't think I heard about a second team.”
I told him about the Asian guys who were following us.
“Uncommon to have Latinos and Asians working in the same organization.”
“That's what I hear,” I said.
“How you going to handle this, Jake?”
“I think tomorrow Alex and I will pay another visit to Bonito Esposito.”
I gave Wilson a few minutes outside before we went in. I was hungry, so I had a bowl of Cheerios. It was nearly one when I went to bed. I dreamed that Monica and I were sailing together on the ocean. The sea was calm, the breeze was gentle, the temperature was perfect. I turned to check the sail. When I turned back, Monica was gone. She’d fallen overboard. I called out to her. I searched the water around the entire boat. I did not see her. I jumped in the water to search for her and it was full of sharks and squid, octopi and jellyfish, manta rays and barracuda. They rushed at me but didn’t attack, encircling me instead, so that I couldn’t see into the water beyond them. I called out for Monica, but she didn’t answer. I felt her presence, but could not communicate with her. I struggled to get through the wall of sea creatures. When I finally broke through, into the open waters, Monica wasn’t there. I felt her presence on the other side of the boat. I dove deep and swam under the sea creatures and the boat and came up on the other side if it. Again, Monica was not there. I swam around and around and the sea creatures began to laugh at me. And then there were mermaids. All of them well endowed, like Monica, all with red hair like Monica, but none of them Monica. I swam around and around until I was sure that Monica was not in the water. When I decided to return to the boat, the boat was gone and I was alone in the ocean.
I awoke at five a.m., exhausted and unsettled. I took a long hot shower to try and relax, and then Wilson and I went for our morning run.
Chapter 23
Friday Morning
I got back to Alex's office a little before nine Friday morning. I told him about Frank’s call on my way home last night. We decided to go see Nick Jarman before we tackled Esposito.
According to the file on Jarman, he lived out in Lake Elsinore, about an hour and a half southeast of L.A. It had been years since I’d been to Lake Elsinore. As I remembered it, property around Lake Elsinore would not have interested most people looking for lake front property. The area had never developed into the exclusive weekend getaway developers had hoped it would. Most of the properties were run down. Most of the people who lived around the lake were either working class or the working poor. A number of the residents did not appear to have a job or a visible means of income. Drugs were readily available to those who could afford them. Lake Elsinore had become a place that people with money did not want to go.
Nick Jarman lived in a small house on the lake. It needed paint. The dirt yard was littered with junk and trash. A rusted old blue Ford pickup sat next to the house.
Alex parked off the paved road. There were no curbs, and since there was no grass either, it was hard to tell where shoulder ended and the yard began. As we approached the front door, we heard the distinctive sound of a shell being jacked into the chamber of a shotgun.
“That's far enough,” a voice said from inside the house. It was a woman's voice.
We stopped.
“Hands up,” the voice said.
We raised our hands.
“Who are you and what do you want?”
“FBI,” Alex said. “I'm going to reach slowly into my inside coat pocket and get my ID.”
He moved his left hand slowly to the lapel of the left side of his suit coat, pulled it open and with his right hand took his ID wallet out. He opened it and said. “Like I said, FBI. We need to talk to Nick Jarman.”
After a couple of seconds, she said, “Nick doesn't want to talk to the FBI.”
I said, “Tell Nick that Jake Badger's out here.”
In a moment, the voice said, “Okay, you can come in. But keep you hands where I can see them. This is a twelve gauge loaded with double 00 buck.”
We put our hands down and kept them where she could them. Alex opened the door and we went in. Half way across the room was a woman who could have been thirty-five or forty-five. She was skinny, pasty white, about five three, maybe a hundred and ten pounds. Her black hair was stringy with oil. Beyond her, in a recliner was an emaciated bald man who looked like death warmed over. It was Nick Jarman. The last time I'd seen him he weighted probably two twenty-five. Now he might have weighed as much as the woman who had the twelve gauge pointed at us. His eyes were sunken and dark. He looked like a wounded animal who'd been cornered.
He said, “You got a lot of nerve coming here Badger.”
“AIDs?” I asked.
He coughed and nodded.
“Before you went in or while you were there?”
“Doctors don't know. All they know is I'm gonna die soon.”
“Treatment?”
“Tried everything. Nothing works.”
I nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“Shit happens.”
I nodded again. “Last Monday morning,” I said, “a woman I know, name Monica Nolan, was taken from her apartment. You have anything to do with that?”
His sunken, drowsy eyes held mine for a moment, as a small smile crept across his ashen face. The smile faded and he said, “No.”
“He's dying,” the woman said. “Can't hardly get up to go to the toilet. He hasn't been outside this house in two months.”
Breathing was an effort for Nick.
“You could have asked some of your brothers to take her,” I said.
“Why would I do that?”
“To get even with me.”
He smiled again, then shook his head and coughed again.
“Two of them died inside. Two of them are still there.”
“Plenty of Brothers in Arms still on the outside,” I said.
He shook his head again. “None that would do anything I told them to do.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Not the same club it used to be. A real service club now. Bunch a weekend warriors. Respectable. No more drugs. No more brawling. They sponsor BBQs, children’s zoos. Go to schools and do programs on motorcycle safety. Raise money for Saint Jude's Children's Hospital ... crap like that. You can check with the local cops.” He coughed again.
“How long you got?”
“Three, maybe four months.”
I nodded again. There wasn’t much else to say.
“How come you gave up fighting?” he asked. “No one could beat you. You would have been champ.”
It really wasn't any of his business. It wasn't anybody's business. But people asked all the time anyway.
“Gomez,” I said.
He nodded. He knew what had happened.
“He got in the cage with you. He knew the risks.”
“I got mad,” I said. “Lost control. Didn't like that feeling.”
“So you just walked away.”
I nodded.
He thought about that.
“Probably harder to walk away,” Nick said, “than to keep fighting.”
In a way, it had been easy. But it had also been hard. Fighting had been an outlet for my pent up rage over Elaine. I didn’t respond to his comment.
He closed his eyes and let his head lay back on the chair. Just talking was wearing him out. I actually felt sorry for him.
I looked at his girlfriend. “You need anything?” I asked.
Her eyes were confused, suspicious, angry. “Need anything? NEED anything? I need everything,” she said, scornfully. “In a few months, the only thing I got will be gone. And you want to know if I need anything. Only thing I need right now is for you to leave.”
“Death is better quick,” I said. “Always sad to see someone suffer like that.”
We drove in silence for a while as we headed back toward the freeway. Finally, Alex said, “Esposito?”
“Esposito.”
Chapter 24
Friday Afternoon
It was a little over a hundred miles from Lake Elsinore to Esposito's Malibu home. We stopped on the way to eat lunch. It was just before one when Esposito's big gate swung open, granting us entry to the estate.
The same gorgeous Latina answered the door, this time wearing a little red dress. The day was clear and warm and she led us out to the patio again, where Esposito sat, flanked by the same two nude sunbathers as last time. As we came out, he put aside his laptop.
“Agent Watson, Mr. Badger,” Esposito said. “Care for some form of liquid refreshment?”
His two security guards stepped out onto the patio standing just where they had stood a few days earlier.
“No, thanks,” Alex said. “We need to ask you some follow-up questions.”
“Of course you do. Why else would you be here? I'm wondering, though, Mr. Badger, have you found your friend yet? What was her name? Ms. Nolan?”
