by DL Barbur
Bolle was talking into a cell phone. He looked pissed.
I let Casey into the passenger side of the car. She reached over to buckle her seatbelt and I realized she was shaking and shivering. She was wearing jeans and a tank top but I figured there was more to it than the temperature. I fished my trench coat out of the back of the van. I was about to shut it when I saw the duffel bag holding the shotgun sitting there. I snagged that too.
I handed her the coat. She wrapped herself up in it and nodded her thanks. I sat the duffel in her lap.
"Here. I took that from your apartment because I thought I might need it. I thought you might like to have it back."
She unzipped the bag, saw what was inside, and curled her hand around the pistol grip, all without saying a word. Her finger was off the trigger and the safety was on, so I figured what the hell.
Eddie cocked an eyebrow at me when I walked back over. "What's in the bag?"
"Her sawed-off shotgun."
"Sure that's a good idea? She seems upset."
“If you think she shouldn’t have it, you’re welcome to try and take it away from her.”
“Good point.”
Eddie walked over to the van, looked inside for a minute, then fished his butterfly knife out again. He started cutting around the edges of the carpet in the back.
Bolle snapped his phone shut and walked over to me.
"You want to explain to me what the hell you were thinking?"
"No." I let the word hang there in the air. I just stared at him, offering no other explanation.
He waited for a second, then got tired of the game. "What do you mean 'no'?"
"I mean, no, I don't want to explain it. If you don't understand why it was important to get Casey out of that van in a hurry, there's no amount of explaining I can do that will make you understand it."
Pissing off the new boss right after he got me out of jail probably wasn't the wisest thing in the world, but truth be told, I resented Bolle. He'd gotten me out of jail for his own purposes. I still didn't know what his game was, or what he expected in return.
The debt I owed Bolle scared me, and I always get angry when I'm scared. I owed Al my life, many times over, but that was different. I trusted Al. He'd had more than ample opportunities to screw me over, to use me for his own ends, and he'd never done it. Bolle was different. I didn't know if I could trust him, and that usually meant I couldn't.
"Look," Al said. "We need to get out of here. There's a dead man in that bathroom in there. Let's settle this somewhere else."
Bolle seemed to relax a little when Al got him focused on the immediate problem. It would be interesting to see how this played out in the long run. In the end, I didn't much care. My job was gone. My girlfriend was gone. What else were they going to do to me? Take away my birthday? At least Casey and Mandy were safe.
I heard a ripping sound and we all turned to look at Eddie. He had cut the carpet out of the back of the cargo van in one big piece, maybe five feet by six. He folded it in half, tucked it under one arm and dug in a pocket. He came out with a pair of latex gloves and extended them to me. He was already wearing a pair.
"Here you go, Wyatt Earp. Let's get our friend wrapped up and in the back of the van."
I accepted the gloves and followed him into the bathroom. We got Marshall onto the piece of carpet. Eddie plucked the wad of blood, bone and hair off the wall and dropped it on Marshall's chest. He pulled out the knife again, pried something out of the wall. I saw that it was the slug, its nose mushroomed from the trip through Marshall's head. It had hit a stud in the wall and, most of its energy spent had lodged itself close enough to the surface for Eddie to dig it out. The two bullets I’d put in Marshall’s chest hadn’t exited.
"Find your casings, bro."
I hadn't thought of that. I spent a few minutes shining my light around before I found the spent 9mm casings on the floor. I put them in my pocket.
Eddie wiped what he could of the blood and brain matter off the wall and floor with more of the towel roll. He pulled the rest of it out of the dispenser and wadded it up behind Marshall's head, where it would catch the worst of the blood still leaking out. Then with a mutual grunt, we rolled Marshall up in the carpet, hauled him outside and deposited him in the van.
Bolle and Al had broken into the maintenance shed and pulled out the "bathroom closed" signs and set them up on the sidewalk. Our luck was still holding, but I didn't think we could count on that for long.
Eddie slammed the rear doors of the van, brushed his hands off, and checked the sleeves of his suit coat for stains. He grunted in satisfaction when he saw that they were clean. I got the idea that he'd done this sort of thing before. Bolle was on the phone again.
I looked at Al. "I'm taking Casey with me. We’ll see you at the safe house."
He nodded, still a little pale-faced. I tossed the van keys to Eddie, who caught them with a wink.
I got in the car, started it and drove off, trying not to look at the van as we drove past. The guy in the hospital stairwell had been one thing, at least I'd left him there for somebody to find, at least I could say that was self-defense.
But Marshall was different. All the "sudden furtive movement" stuff aside, I'd shot him down in cold blood, and now I was helping hide the body. I started adding up the potential prison time and just decided to stop. The hell with it. I was supposed to be in jail right now. What was I worried about?
Casey was staring straight ahead. Her hand was still on the grip of the shotgun. Maybe Eddie was right. Maybe that wasn't such a good idea, but I didn't say anything. I just decided to drive extra careful and not get pulled over.
I drove south on the interstate, then got off and got back on going north at the first chance I got.
"I'm going to take us to a safe place. We can get you some clean clothes and you can figure out your next move."
She nodded, still staring straight ahead. "Ok. But I gotta go bury my dog soon."
I grimaced. "I hear you. But we need to lay low for a while. After we get a chance to settle in somewhere, I need you to tell me what you know about Marshall and his buddies, about what they were doing with the girls."
"Yeah," she said softly. "But it's all gone."
"What's gone?" I asked. But I had a sinking feeling that I already knew what she meant.
"The evidence. It's gone. I had it all, Dent. I decrypted email conversations between Marshall and addresses in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Uzbekistan, you name it. They never came right out and said what they did, but they talked about picking out the right package and had pictures of different girls attached. It wasn't too hard to figure out what was going on. It was like they weren't even all that worried about getting caught."
"How many?" I asked.
"At least a dozen. They got about a million for each. But it's all gone. I imaged the hard drives onto a different machine. That's what I was using to work from. It took a while to get it figured out but it was there. Emails, pictures, Cascade Aviation flight schedules, I managed to put together a dozen transactions when the news came out about you being in jail."
"None of that is true," I said hurriedly.
"I know. Do you think I'd be sitting in a car with you if I believed it? I figured they set you up somehow. I was sitting on the servers and the images, trying to figure out who to go to with it when they came in and took everything, the images, the servers, everything. And they shot my dog."
Dammit. I was hoping she was going to tell me she'd cleverly made a second copy, uploaded it to some site in the Bahamas or burned a copy disguised as a Buckaroo Banzai DVD or some cool computer hacker trick like that. I didn't understand this stuff very well.
"I'm sorry about your dog. But, ummm… you're sure you didn't have another copy?"
She shook her head and she looked like she was on the verge of crying again.
"No. They kept asking me the same thing, over and over, 'where's the other copy?' 'who else did you tell?' I think that's one
of the reasons they didn't kill me right away. They thought there might be other copies out there and they wanted to make me talk. That and Marshall had constructed a nice little fantasy for himself. I'm sorry the evidence is gone, Dent."
Damn. No evidence. But maybe it wouldn't matter. I guess we were about to find out just how far on the outside Bolle really operated.
"It's ok. We may be able to get them anyway."
"Who's we, Dent? You're supposed to be in jail. Who the hell were those guys back there? I recognized Al Pace. I met him a few times before he retired. But what about the other two?"
"They're Feds." Well, that was true in Bolle's case, and sort of in Eddie's.
"They're on a special task force,” I said. “I’m hoping you'll sit down with them and explain what you just told me. There still may be a way to get to these guys."
She broke her straight-ahead stare for the first time in twenty miles. "Do you trust them?"
I took longer to answer than I would have liked. "I think so. I trust Al. Implicitly. And he works for them, so that's going to have to do."
She seemed to accept that, went back to staring straight ahead. I hoped I hadn't sealed her death warrant by sucking her into this. Maybe I should just drive her to the airport and tell her to disappear. Knowing Casey, she could probably create a new identity for herself, book a plane ticket and transfer a million dollars into an offshore bank account with a laptop computer while she was sipping a latte at the airport coffee shop.
I didn't know Casey well, nobody did, but I knew her well enough that she probably wanted in on the fight, probably wouldn't walk away even if I tried to get her to.
The most important thing was Casey believed me. She knew I hadn’t beat up Mandy. I needed people like that around me right now.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The mood in the safehouse was hushed and tense when we arrived. Henry sat in his corner, pecking away at three different keyboards and watching a half a dozen different computer screens. He was wearing a t-shirt that said, "I see the Fnords!"
Bolle and Al were both talking into telephone headsets. Bolle was animated, gesturing as he spoke. There were two empty coffee cups on the table in front of him and he was drinking out of a third. Al just looked tired and rumpled.
Casey wandered over to stand behind Henry and look over his shoulder. Even after all she had been through, she couldn't resist the warm glow of a computer screen.
"Kind of an interesting crowd, huh?" A voice said in my ear, a voice I recognized.
I jumped and turned. Alex stood there, dressed in a sweater and jeans. Her hair was loose and spilled over her shoulders. I swallowed hard. Down boy.
"Alex! What are you doing here?"
She turned bright red, opened her mouth to say something, then apparently thought better of it.
She held up a plastic evidence bag. Inside was the syringe I'd taken off the dead guy in the hospital stairway, was it just last night? It seemed like forever since I'd done that.
"Dad called me in the other night for a little off the books work. The syringe is full of potassium chloride. It's the same stuff they use in lethal injections."
I shivered. That had been close. Another thirty seconds and I would have walked in Mandy's hospital room just as he was injecting it into her IV line.
"Mandy's doing fine," Alex said. "She's showing some signs of improvement. May and I have been sitting with her at the care facility. Mostly we've been getting in the way and annoying the nurses. They don't need the help of a pathologist and a psychiatrist, but Bolle wanted one of us to be with her all the time."
A wave of relief washed over me, competing with the confusion I felt at seeing Alex here. "I'm glad to hear that. What are her chances of getting better?"
She shrugged. "It's too early to tell. All we can do right now is wait."
Now that I was over my initial surprise at seeing Alex here, I took a closer look at her. She looked tired. There were dark circles under her eyes.
"How did you wind up here? I didn't know you were a part of this."
She smiled. "Dad likes to think he can keep things from me. He tried to tell me he was working some cushy investigator job for the Attorney General's office. When he called last night asking me to look after Mandy and identify the contents of a syringe, I made him level with me."
"Thanks for your help," I said. I meant it. I'd never lost a partner before, never come as close to losing one as I had the night before.
"You're welcome.”
Over at the table, Bolle took off his headset and put it on the table.
"Listen up, everybody. Time to have a briefing." The chatter died down and everyone started drifting towards the table.
"Thanks," I said. She reached over and squeezed my hand for a minute. What was that in her eyes? Just pity for a messed up cop or was it something else? And if it was something else, what was I going to do about it? I wondered if she regretted the pass she made at me and was here just out of a sense of obligation to her father.
Everybody sat down around three sides of the table, so we could see the huge flat screen monitor hung on the wall. This place reminded me of a cross between some kind of science fiction movie war room and a frat party. Bolle touched a button on a big remote control and the lights dimmed as the screen came on. Very theatrical. I bet it was Henry's doing.
"First up, Henry is going to bring everybody up to speed on communications intercepts."
Henry cleared his throat, took a quick, nervous look around the room, and started talking.
"Since the younger Marshall's… disappearance, there has been a tremendous amount of traffic on cell phones and landlines that we know belong to the Cascade Aviation people."
It was his turn to press a button. A bunch of line graphs with dates popped up on the screen. They didn't make any sense to me at all. I wondered if I should sit there and look dumb or nod my head sagely like I knew what I was looking at.
"They use decent encryption, so we can't tell what they are saying. We could maybe have them brute force decrypted by next summer if we can get the NSA to give us enough computer time.”
He paused to take a drink out of a giant coffee cup. “But even if we can't tell what they are talking about, the increased volume of traffic certainly does tell us that we've stirred up a hornet's nest.”
Another button press and another picture came up on the screen. This one was a grainy video of the side of a black SUV. I recognized Todd inside, with a telephone handset held up to his ear.
"Our opposition has a few blind spots. For example, this gentleman is making sure he's talking on an encrypted phone, but he sits and yaks on it in a location where we can bounce a laser off his window and use it to listen to his side of a conversation."
A recording started playing on the speakers in the room.
It was scratchy, at times distorted, but I recognized the voice. It was the same man Marshall had been talking to on the way south with Casey. Todd.
"… your son. I've got my best men out looking for him."
The laser microphone could only pick up one side of the conversation.
"Yes, sir. Yes sir," Todd's voice boomed out of the speakers again. He sounded nonplussed. "I'll put the next flight on hold if that's what you want. But I'm not sure this problem with Gibson is at all linked to our operations."
Todd was quiet again for a minute, listening.
"Yes, you are right. I can hold the Company off for twenty-four hours, maybe forty-eight, but after that, it is going to be difficult."
A few more seconds of silence.
"Yes, sir. I'll keep you updated. Yes, sir. Goodbye."
Todd hung up the phone. "Damn," he said softly, almost too quiet for the laser to pick up. He sat there for almost three full minutes, I knew because I watched the timer at the bottom of the screen. Then he picked up his phone and dialed a number
"We're not sure exactly where this call went," Henry said. "Somewhere in the Portland metro area. He
wasn't on long enough for us to track it down any closer than that."
"It's me," Todd said curtly. "The old man has got cold feet about Gibson disappearing and he's put all special flights on hold. You're going to have to sit on the packages for a little longer."
There was a long pause and Todd rubbed his bald head. "I know. I know. I'll have somebody deliver more dope later today. But keep them in good shape. This is going to be the last shipment for a long time. Gibson is no longer reliable. That little bitch he has with him needs to go sky diving. I hope to Christ he doesn't screw up and let her get away."
Beside me, I felt Casey stiffen. She looked really small sitting there in the dim light of the screen. I admired her for how she'd held up so far. Part of me wanted to reach over and squeeze her hand, or chuck her on the shoulder or something, but with Casey, you never knew how you were going to be received.
"Yeah, I know," Todd was saying. "Keep your act wired tight for a few more days and we'll have it made." He hung up the phone and did a deliberate scan of the area around him, starting with his right side view mirror, and continuing all the way around. I recognized it for what it was because I did it all the time myself, particularly after my attention had been taken away from my surroundings by a phone call.
I leaned forward. Did Todd stop for just a fraction of a second and look directly into the camera? He betrayed no sign of concern, and it was so brief I almost convinced myself I was imagining things. Something nagged at my subconscious, but I couldn't quite get it to come forward.
"This is where we stand right now," Bolle said. "Todd doesn't know Gibson is dead and that we have Casey. The elder Marshall just knows his son is missing. So right now we're on hold, waiting for them to make a move. Todd keeps referring to 'packages.' It sounds like he's got a group of girls that he wants to ship to the Middle East but he has no way to get them out of the country until Marshall gives the go-ahead for this special flight to come into the country."
Bolle stood. All eyes were on him.
"This is our chance. Todd will be waiting at the airport with the girls to send them out. We're going to hit them and hit them hard. That will be our chance to find out what's coming into our country on those planes."
