by Robert Ellis
“Maurice Reynolds,” the floor manager said. “He worked here for two weeks, and then I fired him.”
“Fired him for what?” Daniels said, aghast.
The man thought it over, his lips quivering. “He was lazy, sir. And I could never find him. He was never where he was supposed to be on the floor.”
“Show me,” Matt said.
The manager’s eyes flicked back to Daniels. Again, after considering the idea, Daniels nodded, then turned to his partners.
“We’re all going out there.”
Matt picked up the photographs and returned the file to his laptop case. He glanced at Cabrera but didn’t hold the look for fear of giving something away. They had been hoping to work themselves into a tour of the factory floor without a warrant—it had been part of their original plan. A goal to work toward, no matter how unlikely it might seem. Matt wanted to look around and get a feel for the place firsthand. But even better, he had one more card in his hand, and that’s where he wanted to play it.
Sonny Daniels and the floor manager led the way out of the conference room. Matt and Cabrera fell in line, with Ryan Moore and Lane Grubb bringing up the rear. As they walked down the hall, it was clear to Matt that Grubb was strung out and had issues. His hands were still trembling, and he looked like a man trying to hide whatever might be going on in his mind.
Matt let it go as they stepped through a double set of steel doors into the facility. A bin filled with clean hazmat suits had been placed against the wall. Matt grabbed one, checking the label and confirming that it matched the one they found in Moe Rey’s dryer. But before he could examine the jacket’s lining, the manager pulled him aside, shouting over the loud, echoey din of the factory floor.
“I’m gonna give you the nickel tour, so we don’t need to suit up, okay?”
“Okay,” Matt said.
The manager took the hazmat suit and tossed it back into the bin. Then he pointed to a yellow line that had been painted onto the floor and made it clear that crossing it would be a problem. They passed a locker room and several more storage bins and tried to stay out of the way of three forklifts that were loading fifty-five-gallon drums onto an exceedingly large pallet. Matt eyed the heavy cables attached to the pallet and followed them to a crane operated from the ceiling. The smell of sulfur was so rich, so overwhelming that it reminded Matt of a depiction of hell he had seen in a movie as a young boy. Somehow this seemed worse, though, and he couldn’t help wondering how much DMG Waste Management might be adding to climate change.
They passed a room where drums were being inspected, their welds X-rayed. A few moments later, a drum fell off a forklift and three men standing close by scattered in panic. A loud alarm sounded from the ceiling. The floor manager pointed to an open side door and waved everyone outside. But before Matt turned away, he saw the liquid dripping out of the container. A chemical so toxic it looked like it was burning a hole in the concrete floor. He watched the men who had scattered run back, picking the drum up and hosing down the floor. He could hear others shouting over the alarm and watched the crane lowering its cargo to the floor.
Matt felt himself being pulled outside into the fresh air and was grateful when the alarm shut down.
He looked around. There were two picnic tables here, both set on a lawn beneath a large oak tree. On the other side of a chain-link fence, he saw the employee parking lot.
“Satisfied?”
Matt looked up and found Sonny Daniels staring at him. Pulling the file out of his laptop case, he set two new photographs down on the picnic table.
“Not yet,” he said calmly. “Not just yet, Mr. Daniels. We found these hidden in Moe Rey’s house. Each bag is filled with a hundred grand in cash. Crisp new bills. Hundred-dollar bills. What do you make of that?”
Daniels stared at the photographs with a face that almost looked as if it had been flash frozen. Matt quickly turned to check on Moore and Grubb. They were leaning over Daniels’s shoulder, eyeing the photographs carefully.
All three looked more than interested.
All three appeared to be mesmerized by the cash, and Matt knew that he’d just struck a nerve. He let the moment ride. Then stepped closer, keeping his voice smooth and steady.
“You guys have any idea how a lowlife like Moe Rey could get his hands on this much money? This much cash?”
No one said anything. After a long moment, Daniels looked up from the photographs. When he spoke, Matt could see the effort it was taking to keep his emotions reined in. Sonny Daniels was seething.
“You said yourself that this man worked for a crime family, Detective. Why don’t you ask them?”
Matt met the man’s dead eyes and flashed an ironic smile. “We intend to, Mr. Daniels. We do. But let me ask you one more question before we leave. Why would a guy like Moe Rey want to work at a place like this? A place that smells like this? Why would a goon with this much money show up every day and punch in his timecard? If you guys come up with any ideas, you know how to reach us, right?”
No one said a word. Matt nodded, then returned the photographs to his laptop case and shouldered the bag.
“Thanks for your time,” he said. “We’ll show ourselves out.”
Matt looked over at Cabrera and motioned him toward the gate in the chain-link fence. He didn’t want to walk through the building back to the lobby and out the main entrance. He’d seen something in the employee parking lot beside the picnic tables. He wanted to walk through the lot and around the building to their Crown Vic parked on the street out front.
He led the way. He counted fifteen cars in the lot, but there were only three that really mattered. The three at the head of the line marked with the names of the three partners. As they passed by, he heard Cabrera say something under his breath. He knew that his partner was seeing what he was seeing but wondered if he had an idea what any of this was worth.
The three cars parked in the marked spaces might be called “high-end” by some, but that would hardly cover it. These cars were exotics. A black Audi R8, which Matt knew from his life in narcotics had a V10 under the hood and sold for just over $175,000. A BMW i8, which sold for about $165,000 without extras. But it was the third car that topped the list. The one Sonny Daniels drove. An Aston Martin DB11, which started at about $210,000, stripped.
He thought it over as they made their way around the building in the warm sun. Despite the rotten smell, business in waste management seemed pretty sweet.
TWENTY-ONE
Matt raised the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus. He was standing beside Cabrera on the grassy bank, eyeing DMG Waste Management and the Aston Martin DB11 that had just pulled out of the employee lot and was speeding up the private road. He smiled a little as he tilted the field glasses up and found Sonny Daniels behind the wheel. He could see the tension on the man’s face, the worry, and it felt like confirmation.
“So what did we learn?” he said to Cabrera.
“Sonny Daniels is the boss, Matt. No doubt about it. The other two will do whatever he tells them to do.”
Matt nodded, still following the car as it raced up the hill. “Anything else?”
“Lane Grubb’s the weak one. The one we need to work on.”
“I agree with that,” he said. “And he’s using.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s strung out on something, Den. Who knows what? Wanna look?”
“Yeah.”
Matt passed the field glasses over. Cabrera pointed them toward the Aston Martin until the car reached the top of the hill and vanished over the other side onto Baker Street. After a moment, he turned back toward the factory and adjusted the focus.
“At least we hit something,” Cabrera said.
“We did, but I’m still not sure what. When we got there, they were glad to see us. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Cabrera laughed. “Maybe they never saw it coming. They were thinking that this was about the girl, and then it changed into
something else.”
And that was the problem, Matt thought. If the waste management company was cover for a drug operation, if they were competing with Robert Gambini or doing business with the man and involved in the murders of two people, then what Matt and Cabrera needed was still lost deep inside that building.
“I think we should split up,” he said. “We need to get SIS involved. You should stay and bring them up to speed when they get here. I’ll talk to the deputy DA and see what he wants to do about Gambini. We can meet back at the station.”
Cabrera nodded, still looking through the field glasses. “Make the call.”
Matt dug his cell phone out of his pocket and found the number in his contacts list. The Special Investigation Section was the LAPD’s primary surveillance unit. It seemed obvious that the investigation needed more eyes and a bigger reach. It wasn’t enough to say that something was wrong with the three partners at DMG. There was too much gray area. Too many questions.
Was Sonny Daniels telling the truth when he claimed he didn’t know and had never heard of Robert Gambini? Was Daniels really that naive? Was he that far out of the loop? Had he never heard of or read the Los Angeles Times?
If all that were true, and Matt knew that it could be, then why didn’t Daniels want help and ask for protection? And why did he have that meltdown reaction when he saw the pictures Matt had taken of the money? Why were all three of the partners driving exotic cars and wearing their wealth on their sleeves the same way lowlifes do? Why did they want to stand out when they’d be so much safer living off the grid?
“I just noticed something,” Cabrera said.
Matt looked over at this partner and saw the concern showing on his face.
“What is it?”
“Here,” Cabrera said. “Take the binoculars.”
Matt handed over his phone. “I’m on hold,” he said.
Cabrera nodded, bringing the phone to his ear. “Down in the lot behind the substation. Check out the black car. It looks like the one you were talking about. The one that followed you through Venice last night.”
Matt brought the binoculars up to his eyes and dialed the substation into focus. After a moment, he saw the sun spiking off a windshield and panned across the lot.
It was the black coupe. The Mercedes.
He tried to steady his hands as the sun pinged off something inside the car. Then he tilted the lenses up slightly and fine-tuned the focus.
He caught the smirk. The angular face and vicious smile.
It was Robert Gambini, sitting behind the wheel with a pair of his own field glasses trained on the DMG factory. Matt looked over at the building, then back at Gambini. The man had positioned his car so that he could look through the front gate and open bay doors directly onto the factory floor.
Gambini had picked the perfect spot for the perfect view. A parking lot at the end of the road.
TWENTY-TWO
Matt was still wrestling with the details. Still lost in a sea of possibilities.
Stepping off the elevator with his ID in hand, he told the receptionist that he was there to meet Deputy District Attorney Mitch Burton. When asked to take a seat, he glanced at his watch and realized that he was almost half an hour late. He glanced back at the receptionist, who seemed more like a security guard than anything else. A young cop in uniform with a pistol holstered to his belt and the oversize chest and biceps of a bodybuilder. There was no one else in the reception area. Matt watched the cop pick up the phone and speak so quietly, he couldn’t make out what the man was saying. After a moment, the cop hung up the phone and turned.
“Someone will be out shortly,” he said.
Matt nodded. A few minutes later he saw a woman walk around the corner and start down the hall with her eyes on him. She looked older than him by ten or twelve years, forty to forty-five maybe, and was wearing a white blouse with a turquoise skirt cut three or four inches above her knees. Her hair was shoulder-length and a mix of light brown and blonde that looked natural enough, though he doubted she spent much time in the sun. She had a pleasant, straightforward, even stylish way about her. As she stepped into the reception area with an outstretched hand, she smiled at him.
“I’m Val Burton,” she said. “Mitch’s wife. I already know who you are.”
She laughed.
“This way, please,” she went on. “Mitch is looking forward to meeting you. I am, too.”
Matt walked with her down the hall. When she glanced his way, her blue-gray eyes seemed to dance all over his face. Though she appeared immediately likable, Matt couldn’t help wondering why she was here. He didn’t think she worked in the DA’s office.
They turned the corner, passed a conference room and a small library on the right, then stepped into an office suite. Matt understood why Val Burton was here the minute he walked through the door. He stared at the cardboard boxes scattered across the floor. Burton was packing up his office. The deputy DA was moving out.
Matt tried to hide his disappointment as he turned and saw Burton rising from his desk chair.
“Detective Jones,” the man said in a cheerful voice. “Welcome. I wish my office wasn’t in this sorry state of affairs, but change is good, don’t you think?”
Burton leaned over his desk and met his eyes while they shook hands. As Matt stepped back, he noted the stacks of files on the couch, the credenza, and across the windowsill. The prosecutor’s desk was littered with papers and files as well, along with row after row of notes jotted down by hand and set beside the telephone. On the walls were photographs documenting Burton’s rise to the top of the Organized Crime Unit. Big busts with recognizable figures from the mob, big business, and the entertainment industry that made the papers and wound up on the evening news.
One photograph in particular caught Matt’s eye. It was none other than Joseph Gambini himself, being escorted by Burton and four detectives out of a downtown building to a police cruiser waiting for them at the curb. The press had encircled the entrance. Gambini was dressed in a well-tailored suit and somehow appeared dignified. Despite all the cameras, despite the handcuffs, Joseph Gambini looked like a man who didn’t have a care in the world. Like his arrest was nothing more than a distraction some underling would take care of before lunch.
“You’re moving out of the unit,” Matt said.
Burton had been watching him take in the photographs. He shook his head and smiled, his blue eyes twinkling in the window light.
“Not with the cases I’ve got on my plate, Detective. Organized crime is a burgeoning industry. Especially here in LA, or should I say anywhere else that’s a magnet for money.”
“Then why are you packing up your office?”
“Some of my personal files are going back to the house, but the whole unit’s moving to the other side of the building. We’re doubling our staff and need more space.”
Matt felt an immediate sense of relief and took a moment to measure the man as he tossed it over. Burton may have been ten or fifteen years older than his wife, but he didn’t look it. He still had the spark. The juice. The drive. He stood just over six feet tall, the same height as Matt, with broad shoulders and the trim, limber body of someone who had jogged for decades. But even more, Burton’s reputation was stellar. Matt could remember a prosecutor he’d worked a drug case with last year calling Burton the brightest attorney in the building. The murders of Sophia Ramirez and Moe Rey had become more than a challenge, and he’d been counting on Burton’s experience ever since McKensie mentioned his name last night.
“I’m sorry I was late,” Matt said. “I’m guessing you spoke with Chief Logan and maybe my supervisor, Lieutenant McKensie.”
Burton nodded as he slipped on a pair of eyeglasses and began leafing through a file. “I’m up to speed,” he said, shooting Matt a look over his glass frames and laughing. “Sort of.”
It hung there for a moment. Matt glanced at the boxes on the floor—all the notes and files—and turned back to find Burton wa
tching him again.
“No worries, Detective. I’ve got plenty of time for a case like this. Where’s your partner?”
“We’re bringing in a surveillance unit to keep an eye on the waste management company. It turns out all three partners have expensive tastes.”
“Good,” Burton said. “And I set up a meeting with Joseph Gambini. I think that’s where we should start. I spoke with him on the phone this morning. I’ll explain everything in the car.”
“Where is he?”
“Terminal Island, at least for the next two years. But I need a minute before we go. I’ll be right back.”
Burton found the papers he had been searching for and hurried out of the office. Matt glanced at his wife, Val, who was clearing a space for him on the couch.
“Please,” she said. “Have a seat while you wait.”
“I’m okay, thanks.”
She moved the stack of files over to a table, then crossed the room to the window. She was staring at him, her eyes dancing all over his face again. She seemed so gentle.
“Do you have nine lives, Detective?”
“You can call me Matt, you know.”
She smiled. “And you can call me Val, Matthew. But I’ve been reading about you in the newspapers.”
“I hope you’re not talking about what you may have read today.”
“I wasn’t, but I did.”
That smile of hers came back. Matt took a moment, then sat down and tried to relax. Val Burton had a sense of humor and appeared to be as genuine as her husband. When she spoke, her voice was on the low side, like she didn’t want it to carry out the door.
“Your father,” she said. “All the things that happened to you in Philadelphia. And what about Greenwich? The snowstorm on the water? Most people who fall into the water in December drown. How come you didn’t?”
He gave her a long look. “I’m not sure,” he said finally.
“Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
“But how could you even be close to okay? The paper said you were on medical leave.”
