19th Christmas

by Patterson, James

  “I don’t know Loman,” Wallace said. “I know his name. That’s all.”

  Conklin, a.k.a. the good cop, said, “Ben. We know you aren’t the key man in this operation. You got swept up in something and now you’re in way over your head. You’re a small fish. But small fish sometimes end up in the boat if the big fish can’t be reeled in.”

  Ben was nodding.

  Conklin said, “Let’s start at the beginning. See where we go from there.”

  CHAPTER 78

  I LEFT THE interrogation room, dried the sweat from my face with my sleeve, and reset my ponytail.

  Then I wandered the hall until I found the vending machine. After three bottles of water had plunked down the chute, I picked them up and returned to the box.

  I pushed a bottle of water across the table to Wallace, handed one to Conklin. Then I sat down next to my partner and just kept quiet while he ran the interview. Wallace appeared to be responding to him.

  Wallace told Conklin, “It was my brother, Sam. He’s the one who got me into this airport job.”

  Conklin encouraged Ben Wallace to keep talking. The story he told was this: Ben’s brother, Sam, age thirty, had once been arrested for an unarmed liquor-store shoplift, caught with a bottle of ten-dollar hooch under his jacket. He was arrested, pleaded guilty, got bail, and immediately fled. There was a warrant out for Sam Wallace’s arrest, but he wasn’t one of the top ten, or even one of the top ten thousand, most wanted. So he was free, doing odd jobs, living with whoever would put him up, including Ben, but most often living on the street.

  Ben went on to say that last week he’d gotten a call from his brother about a man named Russell—whether that was a first name or a last name, Sam didn’t say—who worked with Mr. Loman, apparently as an agent or deal broker. Through Sam, Russell was offering Ben fifteen thousand dollars to be part of a robbery crew. He would be given a uniform and a gun, and all he had to do was put on that uniform and meet up with the three others in the crew at the airport outside the International Terminal. The uniforms would get them through security, and after they were in, they were supposed to take the AirTrain out to the cargo terminal.

  He went on to say, “Once we got to cargo, we had to look for a wooden box about one cubic yard in size.”

  He tried to show us, but the cuffs gave him only about twelve inches of range. “The box was, like, marked with Japanese letters, and some canvas bags of papers were inside. We were told that the papers were none of our business.

  “Once we had the bags, we were supposed to leave the cargo area and go outside to the parking lot. Russell was going to pick us up in his van and take us to a drop-off, I don’t know where.

  “It was supposed to be easy-breezy,” Wallace said, sniffling and crying now. “Look like airport cops, act like airport cops. Take the train. Grab the bags. Get the hell out. A half day’s work for fifteen K. I’m happy to make fifteen thousand a year.”

  I believed that Ben Wallace hadn’t questioned his third-hand instructions. He hadn’t doubted what he’d been told, that the job was a no-brainer.

  But I couldn’t contain myself. I had to jump in.

  “What about the guns?” I said. “What did you think about having a loaded gun in your possession?”

  “It was just for show,” he said.

  “But you fired it,” I said.

  He nodded miserably.

  Guns for show. Tell that to the former US Marine with a gut shot that might kill him.

  I’d been keeping my temper in check, but I was tired and I was convinced that Wallace knew where Loman was and how to find him.

  I said, “Ben, that’s a nice story, and I feel bad for you. You were used. But none of what you’ve told us gets us to Loman or even to his second in command. I’ll bet one of your dumb-ass crewmates might have some information for us. Maybe even be smart enough to throw you to the Feds and take any kind of deal in exchange for revealing Loman’s whereabouts.”

  After pausing to let that sink into his muscle-bound head, I said to Wallace, “Speak now, or I’m going to call, ‘Next,’ and interview one of the others on your crew. Ralph Burgess looks ripe to spill. And I’m going to launch an APB to grab up your stupid brother. There’s a warrant out for Sam. I think we can wring the truth out of him.”

  Conklin said, “I like that idea, Sergeant. Ben? Anything else you’d like to say?”

  Ben Wallace shook his head no.

  Conklin and I got up from our chairs. Conklin started to drag Wallace to his feet, but he twisted, bucked, started yelling, “Okay, okay. Please. I have a pacemaker. I could die right here.”

  I believed that. Steroid abuse could do major damage to vital organs.

  Conklin and I sat him back down. Gently.

  Wallace exhaled, said, “I need a deal.”

  “No promises,” I said, “until we have Loman.”

  “I’ll tell you everything I know,” said Wallace.

  CHAPTER 79

  WALLACE SAID, “BUT first I gotta go.”

  While Conklin escorted him to the men’s room, I sat there in the airless airport interrogation room thinking about our interview a few days ago with Julian Lambert.

  Lambert had told us a credible story and we’d believed him. He’d said that he’d heard Loman’s name on the street, that he was just a bit player, and that he didn’t know Loman at all.

  Now he was dead.

  Like Lambert, Ben Wallace claimed to be a pickup player. Also like Lambert, Wallace seemed entirely disposable. There was every chance that if he’d gotten out to the parking area, he and his crewmates would have been executed at the drop-off.

  In the last hour the airport had been closed. Flights had been canceled. Travelers had been evacuated. News outlets carried the story of a foiled terrorist attack.

  Our job was to find Loman, and right now the only living lead to him was Benjamin Wallace. Briggs and Rafferty had been charged with possession of unregistered firearms and drugs—the coke they’d had stashed in their cookie jar. They had a lawyer now and hadn’t said a word about Loman.

  Wallace was shaky. Was he ready to give it all up?

  The door opened, and Conklin settled Wallace back into the plastic chair across from us. Then Conklin started asking questions about Loman’s recruiter, Russell. Had Wallace ever met him? Wallace said he had, once. Conklin asked him what Russell looked like, what he sounded like, when he’d said he would pay Wallace his fifteen thousand dollars.

  Wallace answered that Russell was above-average height and had dark hair, a pointed nose, and unaccented speech. That he seemed nice. And smart. And that Russell was going to pay everyone off when they got to the van.

  I studied everything about Wallace.

  I listened to his vocal inflections and observed his body language, eye movements, looking for tells, for lies. I was checking him against all the hundreds of interrogations I’d done, trying to discern if he was telling us the truth.

  “This job we were doing,” said Wallace, “was supposed to be a whatchamacallit … a head fake.”

  The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up. A head fake was a ruse. A diversion. A diversion from what?

  “How so?” Conklin asked.

  “There wasn’t supposed to be any trouble. It was supposed to be cut-and-dried, a robbery at the cargo terminal and then out. Loman was doing a different job. I think so, anyway. And it was all going as planned until Leonard went rogue.”

  What had Wallace said?

  Was Loman’s big heist still in play?

  Wallace took off on a little side road then, talking about how he should have just kept to his lame job, minded his own business, not listened to his dopey brother.

  I picked up my water bottle and pounded it once on the table to get his attention. “You said ‘head fake,’ Ben. That you thought Loman was ‘doing a different job.’ Dig deep. Tell us about that.”

  “I don’t know,” Wallace whined. “I told you five times already, we were j
ust supposed to go to the cargo terminal, open the box, take the bags, and get to the parking lot. Look. Everything that went wrong was Leonard’s fault.”

  “Leonard was the red-haired one,” I said. He was the fake cop whose brains were spattered inside the shuttle train.

  “Johnny Leonard. I’d just met him, but I knew he was nuts,” said Wallace. “He saw cops on routine patrol in the terminal, and he thought he saw someone looking at him wrong, like an undercover, and he snapped.

  “Next thing you know, he’s shooting and cops are shooting back. And our easy-breezy plan just blew up. It was shoot or be shot. Once Leonard started firing, I knew I was a dead man.”

  Conklin said, “If you can’t tell us about Loman, you’ve given us nothing.”

  Said Wallace, “I don’t know anything else.”

  I slapped the table and said, “Okay, then. We’re done. Good-bye and good luck.”

  I meant it.

  CHAPTER 80

  “DON’T SAY IT like that!” Wallace shouted. “I’m going to be killed. Loman is going to have me killed, understand? Oh God.”

  Conklin said, “If I’m God, I’m pissed off, buddy. Your crew put a lot of innocent people in danger today, and maybe a US Marine, a passenger on his way to Cincinnati, is going to die. You should pray that he lives.”

  Wallace nodded and my partner went on.

  “You want us to help you? Or do you and your pacemaker want to take your chances with the FBI and DHS?”

  Wallace started to sob and shake his head no.

  Conklin put his hand on Wallace’s shoulder, and I could see something shift inside the young man.

  Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  He knew that he was done.

  Conklin said, “Hey, Ben. We’re the good guys. San Francisco police. In about three minutes the Feds are going to come through the door. They outrank us. The federal government trumps local PD. We won’t be able to help you, my friend, and that’s the truth.”

  Wallace shook his head some more, choosing between a rock and a hard place. He looked up and said to Conklin, “Loman’s going to hit a computer company. That’s the real job.”

  My adrenaline spiked again.

  Jacobi had been working on a tip about a hit on a computer company. Had that tip now been confirmed?

  I asked, “Where did you get that?”

  “Leonard told me.”

  The dead guy. I said, “What computer company? Give us a name.”

  Wallace was panting now, sweating profusely, lips trembling. I found him believable. Then again, I’d been wrong before. I cautioned myself not to interrupt Wallace as he went on.

  “If I tell you, that’s worth something, right? That’s worth a cell out of state, where I can get protection?”

  Conklin said, “You’re going to have to give us the name of the computer company.”

  “Black Stone,” said Wallace. “No. That’s not right. Black something. BlackStar.”

  Conklin put his card in Wallace’s breast pocket seconds before two DHS agents came in and took our crying, pleading subject out of the room.

  I pulled my phone from my pocket and called Brady.

  CHAPTER 81

  I RELAYED BRADY’S orders to Conklin as we edged and fought our way through the panicky crowd exiting the terminal en masse.

  “Brady says he’s rolling out a heavy emergency-response team at BlackStar,” I told him. “Jacobi is in command on scene.”

  The lanes around the airport were packed with patrol cars, taxis, buses, and passenger cars. Travelers on the sidewalk yelled at baggage handlers and anyone in uniform, shouted about flights they absolutely had to be on, about missing connections, about lost luggage, and about having no place to stay. Lawsuits were threatened and shoving fights broke out, fights that could become brawls.

  Cops weren’t charged with keeping airline customers happy. They had only one order, and it was freaking urgent: to get everyone out of the airport.

  The sounds of the stalled traffic, the horns honking and sirens blaring, was the very definition of hell on wheels.

  Our unmarked squad car was hemmed in at the curb, and we went Code 3 in place, blasting the sirens and the lights, leaning on the horn, until we were free to move.

  Conklin drove, and we had just cleared the airport lanes when Jacobi’s voice came over the radio. “I just heard from Brady,” he said over our dedicated channel. “You both okay?”

  “Yes. What’s your location?” I asked.

  “I’m in the surveillance van in the Truby Street parking lot. It’s right outside the BlackStar VR campus.”

  “We’re on our way out to you,” I shouted over the mike to my dear old friend and former partner. “Be careful.”

  Conklin took us onto the 280 Freeway north and from there past Colma, where the dead outnumbered the living. Colma contains the cemetery where a lot of people I know are buried. My mother is there. When we drove past Woodlawn Memorial Park, I placed my palm against the window. I miss you, Mom. And then we were speeding through the Sunset District and Golden Gate Park.

  I saw other unmarked cars leaving the park from their stakeout of the museum, some heading out to the airport and some, I hoped, to BlackStar’s campus.

  Jacobi had sent a map of the BlackStar compound, and as we drove, I told Conklin what we needed to know. He took Veterans Boulevard into the Presidio, then made a series of turns that brought us past the Main Post. Forty-five minutes after we’d left SFO, I could see the BlackStar VR campus on our left.

  It looked idyllic, a compound made up of half a dozen brick buildings built in the style of the old army barracks and officers’ quarters, located on twenty green acres fronted by a small lake with a waterfall.

  I read out the function of each building.

  “Buildings one and two are labs,” I told my partner. “That’s got to be new product development. Could be a Loman target, I’m guessing.”

  I consulted the map and went on.

  “Buildings three and four are executive offices. Building five is the BlackStar museum, and six is a tourist destination devoted to digital displays, like light shows. It also has a bank, a Starbucks, restrooms, a tourist info center.”

  Conklin pulled the car into the main lot, where we could see the attractive red buildings arranged like two loosely cupped hands, and the roads and footpaths leading to them.

  It looked calm, but I knew what Brady meant when he said he’d be rolling out a heavy emergency-response team.

  Cars in the lot and streets near the campus would be occupied by cops. SWAT would be manning ordinary-looking vans. A couple of ambulances would be in the vicinity, and Brady would have undercover operatives inside and outside the buildings, whatever he could pull together on Christmas.

  I got Jacobi on blue channel. He’d seen our car pull in and was on his way over from his post.

  Minutes later I saw his hulking form limping across the parking lot. I buzzed down my window and Jacobi stooped so he could see in.

  “Brace yourself,” he said.

  “I’m braced,” I said.

  “That mutt you grilled at the airport. Wallace. We picked up his brother, Sam, who gave up a name. Brady sent this.”

  Jacobi fiddled with his phone. His tech skills were not the greatest. He swore a little, then said, “Okay. Here he is.”

  He put his phone up to the window so we could see the photo on the screen. It was a candid shot of a balding, middle-aged man carrying a large briefcase, heading into a jewelry store on Post Street.

  “Meet William Lomachenko,” said Jacobi, “a.k.a. Willy Loman. He has no record. But we now know everything about his public life.”

  CHAPTER 82

  I STARED AT the photo on Jacobi’s phone.

  The picture was low-res, as if it had been taken from security-cam footage shot at the end of the day. I could see the light from the storefront reflecting off the man’s scalp. I noted his double chin, his paunch, his unremarkable clothes. W
illiam Lomachenko could be invisible in plain sight.

  “This is Loman?”

  “So I’ve been told,” said Jacobi.

  It was a huge breakthrough. We had a name and a photo ID, and with that, we’d learn more.

  I passed the phone to Conklin and asked Jacobi, “What do we know about Mr. Lomachenko?”

  “He lives on Avila Street. Been in the same house for twenty years. He’s self-employed. Buys gold chains from overseas and sells them locally. His wife, Imogene, does the books. We have her in custody as a material witness.”

  Conklin said, “No kidding.”

  Jacobi smiled. “Chi and McNeil are questioning her, making sure she doesn’t give Willy a heads-up. She says that we’ve got the wrong man.”

  Conklin said, “Any chance she mentioned where we could find her husband right now?”

  “Imogene told Chi and Cappy that the mister is out doing last-minute errands. He’s planning a surprise for her birthday.”

  I stared through the windshield, hoping to see an ordinary-looking white man in his late forties or early fifties, approximately five foot eight, 180 pounds, balding, with a potbelly, the kind of man who looked nothing like anyone’s idea of a criminal mastermind.

  Jacobi said, “FBI has people inside the Lomachenko house in case he comes home. If he calls his wife, we’ll trace the call.”

  My old partner looked good for someone who’d been on watch inside a surveillance van for about sixteen hours without sleep. I asked him if there had been any disturbances or if anything on this large campus seemed like a possible target for a heist.

  “It’s busy,” he said. “The CEO told me that BlackStar was officially closed until New Year’s. Maybe he meant closed for business, because it looks like Christmas isn’t a holiday for BlackStar employees.”