Bite Back 05 - Angel Stakes (42 page)

Traffic wasn’t as bad as the day before, but it still took us an hour to drive ten miles to the Major Crimes office in Downtown.

In the time, we pieced together what had happened with Dante.

It hadn’t even occurred to me that Dante might have actually picked up something useful working at the
Tomorrow’s Faces’
studio. The “fashion show” Tammany escaped from hadn’t taken place at the studios, and if girls were being used for sex, Forsythe would have wanted as few witnesses as possible. No brand-new gofers who couldn’t be trusted to keep their mouths shut.

But I’d underestimated Dante. Not only had she been keeping her ears open, she’d been doing some discreet digging as well.

Forsythe had a driver, a guy named Willard Bryant.

He’d been flirting with Dante. The more she pretended to brush him off, the bigger he made himself out to be. He was Forsythe’s main man. His go-to buddy. His fixer. The guy who’d been tasked to fix the problem down in South Central.

All of which was no slam-dunk. Some guys might say anything they thought would get them into her pants.

Dante had switched tactics. Said she wanted to move up in the industry and thought Forsythe would be the man to help her do it. Surely, Forsythe’s go-to buddy could arrange a meeting with the man. Only she didn’t want to make any mistakes. Not like that stupid girl at the StarBright. What would he advise?

It seemed his main advice was to practice on Willard before trying Forsythe, but apparently he’d leaked enough detail that Dante had been sure he’d been one of the people who kidnapped Tamanny, and he only did what Forsythe told him to.

There weren’t any other details, and Dante’s cell was turned off.

Why go to Reed? Given her background working at sex clubs, I’d have thought talking to the police wouldn’t have been Dante’s instinctive move.

Dominé thought it was all part of the same motive she’d had to try out this crazy idea anyway; that she thought it was what I would want her to do. Both Dante and Dominé had heard everything that was being discussed in the house, including what was being debated at the conference center. Dante had gotten the impression that we were in favor of the Athanate working with human laws. Then Elizabetta had talked of Lieutenant Reed.

Dante had leaped to conclusions.

For a while I was afraid we had a real security problem, but Dominé assured me that Dante would understand that she couldn’t tell the lieutenant anything about the Athanate, or why I was involved. This would be all about Forsythe.

There was no more information. No calls.

Reed wouldn’t take Dante seriously. Surely.

What kind of a reception was I going to get?

Juggling cellphones to talk to everyone, I got a good news update from Julie on the road downtown, and then to balance that, Lynch called just as we arrived at the police HQ: Spiegler’s jet had landed earlier at North Las Vegas airfield, but she was already gone by the time he got there. No one knew where.

He was going to stay to see when she came back. I passed the cell to Yelena as I went into the station.

The desk sergeant looked at me like I was a bug on his lunchtime taco.

“You’re expected,” he said, and directed me to Reed’s office. “The lieutenant will be in shortly.”

And he was.

I was expecting a long wait to show me who was boss, but it was less than five minutes before he sat down at his desk. His suit was creased now, and it looked as if he hadn’t slept at all.

“Level with me, Farrell, for God’s sake: who the hell are you?”

“Exactly the same as I told you yesterday. Let’s skip that and you tell me if you’ve got something from Dante you could work with.”

“I’m in deep shit as it is. You don’t look like you’re handing me a ladder, and what happens with your friend is police business. Why should I talk to you at all?”

My luck hadn’t been so good today, until Julie’s call. I took a deep breath.

“Because I may have a photo of the person who killed Judge Veringen.”

He blinked. His pupils dilated and his heartbeat kicked up.

His face remained completely blank. Almost bored.

“Judge Veringen committed suicide,” he said.

“You don’t believe that, any more than you believe Forsythe is a Boy Scout.”

There was a tic at the corner of his eye, which he tried to cover with a fake yawn.

“I don’t believe this. Didn’t we agree you would butt out of this?”

“No, you said it. I didn’t agree.”

“Spiegler is going to have your ass, and mine too.”

“She’s out of the office.” I snorted. “Spiegler, hey? Her real name is Fay Daniels, and she spent this morning ferrying suitcases to Las Vegas on her jet. Suitcases that Forsythe gave her.”

The eye twitched again.

“Proof?”

“Her identity? Look at the Denver South High yearbook. Right next to Forsythe. The jet? Photos from Santa Monica Airport this morning, with suitcases. Las Vegas North three hours later.”

I’d startled him, but he fought back. “So she changed her name after school, and she’s just taken a trip to Las Vegas. Big deal.”

“We both know he’s guilty and those cases were full of evidence he wanted out of your jurisdiction in a hurry. Got that search warrant yet?”

Twitch.

No.

Problems getting it signed, maybe.

“A murdered judge might get that signature on the warrant.”

“Evidence.” He ground out the word.

“I have faith in your forensics team, if they’re not ordered to leave it alone.”

Faking a suicide was incredibly difficult, especially in a hurry. There would be evidence, if someone looked hard enough.

“What about that photo of Veringen’s killer?” he asked.

“Photos of all the people who were anywhere near the judge’s house early this morning.”

Reed’s eyes narrowed.

Even if the photo showed the Mexican mafia’s top hitman strolling up the road, it didn’t prove the judge was murdered. But it could start the dominos falling. If the judge might have been murdered, who might have ordered it? Was it linked to Tamanny’s kidnapping? That
might
be enough to get a warrant signed to search Forsythe’s premises. The scope of the warrant
might
be broad enough. If Forsythe was anything like we believed him to be, it would be impossible for him to prevent us finding a trace of evidence of his activity. And a trace would be all that was needed.

I could see him wavering.

The door opened and Reed’s captain put his head around it.

Crap.

I’d been close to persuading Reed.

The captain came in, calling over his shoulder. “Bailey. In here.”

The woman who came in behind him might as well have had District Attorney’s Office tattooed on her head. And ADA Bailey was one pissed lady, from her sleek red hair down to her sharp black heels.

She ignored me, focusing on the captain and lieutenant with laser intensity.

“I guess I have you to thank for this cluster-fuck, Reed,” she said, pale with anger. “I’ve had it with you guys, both of you. You run this department like you’re the last holdout of the Wild West. When are you going to get it? We can’t move against establishment figures on your gut feelings and the testimony of a prostitute with some overblown claims by a junior employee, which, in case it escaped your notice, she extracted from him with promises of sexual favors.”

“She’s not a—” Reed beat me to it, but Bailey wasn’t interested.

“That’s what a jury would see her as. That’s how any judge is going to assess this. How credible is this witness? Well, I can answer that for you. Your witness would lose you the case the moment she had to reveal her job.”

“But all we’re asking for is a warrant. It’s the result of the search that would form the case—good, solid, forensic evidence.”

“You have no guarantee of that, even if he is guilty. The judge is risking his credibility to sign a warrant against a friend of the mayor’s, based on the unverified statement of a woman who works in a sex club. A friend of the mayor who has no history of criminal convictions. Not going to happen.”

“No
convictions
, but Forsythe is—”

“A snake. Also a well-placed, well-connected, well-known celebrity in a town that regards celebrities as gods. You know he’s a snake. I know it, too. I might stretch a point, but guys, not on this.”

She looked as if she had something more to say, but her eyes passed over me suspiciously.

I took the hint, held up my hands and went outside.

Wolf ears were better than good enough.

“You know he’s getting his retaliation in early,” she said. “I hear the commissioner’s been called in by the mayor.”

“Formal complaint?”

“One step below. Think of it as a practice run. You know your status with the commissioner. Get one toe over the line and this department is history. You’ll be making out parking tickets in South Central for the rest of your natural. Even if you don’t go over the line, I guarantee you will get a cease and desist from Spiegler tomorrow.”

That was greeted by a frustrated, glum silence.

She bent a little. Her voice dropped. “Get me a hook. A real hook, guys. Solid.”

She swept out and marched down the corridor, heels beating out a tac-tac-tac.

I went and stood in the doorway to the office, uncertain of my welcome.

To his credit, the captain wasn’t chewing Reed out.

“That,” Reed said to me, tilting his head to indicate Bailey, “is our only hope in the DA’s office, and our best friend.”

“Our
only
friend,” the captain said.

Reed cleared his throat. “Ms. Farrell says she might have photos of people in the vicinity of the judge’s house this morning.”

“We find someone we know. So what?”

“Let’s say all of this came from Tamanny’s escape out the window at the StarBright show,” I said, and got their attention back. “The judge started to panic, and Forsythe wanted to tie up a dangerous loose end. Well, that gives him less than six hours to arrange a hit. You can’t hide all the evidence with that little preparation.”

“So, we prove the judge didn’t fire the .22 into his own brain,” the captain said. “Still a leap to involve Forsythe. Still not enough for that warrant.”

“Unless we catch the perp himself.” Reed scrubbed his face with his hands. “Never gonna happen quickly enough. This is like wading through mud.”

Reed and his captain looked at each other, their faces mirroring unhappiness.

“Plan A just crashed and burned. Plan B, Lieutenant. I’ll push the button.” The captain shook his head and sighed as he left, muttering: “Parking tickets. South Central.”

I looked at Reed. “Plan B?”

He had the grace to look uncomfortable. “We wire your friend up and send her back in.”

“No!” It didn’t seem to be getting through, no matter how many times I said it. “This is crazy. Dante has no experience in police work. And you can’t use a civilian undercover in a police operation.”

“She agreed.” Reed was adamant. “She’s an independent adult, and she’ll be in no danger.”

“You guarantee that?”

“I’m betting the house on it. If she doesn’t get us something that Bailey will accept, Spiegler will close this investigation down tomorrow, and forget the jokes about the traffic division. We’ll be out of the force, both the captain and me.”

“I need to talk to Dante.”

“Not going to happen. As of five minutes ago, she’s part of a covert police operation.”

I made to move. I could show up at the studio and close this operation down.

Reed knew it.

“You need to think very carefully about what you do next, Ms. Farrell.” He leaned back in his chair. “You’re not under arrest. You can walk out that door, and I’ll update you on the progress of the investigation in due course and when I am able.”

Meaning never.

Of course, if the investigation failed it was over anyway.

A little shiver ran though me. I’d kill Forsythe myself. So much easier.

“Or you can stay,” he said, “and I would value your input, your
hands-off
input, into the operation. There is also a small matter of photographs which you may have in your possession, the retaining of which would classify as an obstruction of justice. Unless we were to sit down and go through them together.”

It was as much of an olive branch as I was going to get, and more than I expected.

I sat back down and asked for a laptop to download the image files.

Reed brought it, and coffee that threatened to strip the lining off my stomach.

He showed me how to store the images on the department network for active cases, and we put them on a USB drive as well, for us to look at. Then Reed hurried me down to the parking garage, where a listening post was being set up in a white van. Everything was last minute.

Dante was already on the way to the studio, so the van moved as soon as Reed and I were on board. A technician came with us to complete the tests on the installation. He’d have to get a cab back, and then we’d be down to a detective to listen to Dante’s wire, Reed, me and the driver.

Not enough. Too rushed.

I took a look at the equipment. I wasn’t interested in the quality of the audio, so much as the robustness of the system. I’d had bad experiences with signals dropping out at the wrong time. Ops 4-10 had lost personnel like that.

The technician walked me through the system as he worked. It was his project, and he was mother-hen proud of it. The hardware was the result of the most extensive trials that had ever been run on new surveillance equipment. Brand-new to the department. No one else had even seen it. The bug was flat—no thicker than a coin. It had the transmitter and a GPS built in. It shifted frequency and encrypted the signal. It was undetectable.

Yeah.

Dante was wearing it hidden in a belt. It had one special trick up its sleeve: as long as she left her cell on, the bug would transmit through the cellphone system, so its range was anywhere that had cellphone coverage.

That was slick.

“What transmission range without the cell?”

“A mile,” the technician said.

“In the open?” I’d heard these claims before.

“Well, yeah.” He squirmed. “It could come down to a quarter of that inside a building or a vehicle.”

Still not bad.

Major Crimes had good equipment.

“Bryant’s texted her,” Reed interrupted, listening to a message come in on his cell. “Wants to know where she is.” He waited a second. “Texted back that she’s on her way. And…he’s responded with ‘good, see you soon’.” He ended the call. “The man sounds eager.”

I hummed. Something Bailey had said was bothering me. “She really offered him sex in return for information?”

“Not the way she tells it. Bailey was giving the spin that a defense lawyer would be able to put on it.”

He was hedging. Lieutenant Reed had formed a low opinion of Dante.

The technician finished his tests on the receiving equipment. We let him out and the detective put the headphones on.

He called Dante and talked to her, got her to end the call and keep speaking for a few seconds. He gave us a thumbs-up. He was hearing her fine, and one of the screens showed her on a map.

“She’s walking into the studio now,” he said, pointing up at a marker on the screen. He settled back to wait for something to happen.

I sighed and turned to Reed so we could speak quietly.

“Forsythe’s bribed a couple of judges,” I said, and he nodded. “Why stop there?”

“What’re you getting at?”

“When did Daniels—or Spiegler, if you prefer—when did she show up at the station last night?”

“Right after we brought Forsythe in. Literally minutes later. He called her from the car.”

“And she didn’t go out again?”

“No.” He shrugged, still not seeing where I was going.

“So, how come she had a signed injunction to give to me?”

He scowled.

“
Me.
Not Elizabetta. Your stakeout in the café across from Tamanny’s hotel might just have known who Elizabetta was, but he wouldn’t have known who I was. Right?”

He nodded reluctantly, his eyes wider.

“So Forsythe got a copy of those photos in time to recognize me, get Spiegler to draft an injunction,
and
get one of their tame judges to sign, even before the StarBright.”

“You mean from someone in the department.”

“Looks that way.” I leaned closer till our heads were almost touching, wolf senses alert to every twitch in his body. “The captain?”

Reed shook his head. I had to go with his call.

And his body wasn’t sending me any signs it was him, either. A shame I didn’t have time to go through his whole division, person by person.

“What if this operation has leaked?”

“Then the guy isn’t going to show up. He’s going to run, as hard and fast as he can.”

“Maybe you give the captain a heads-up and he can keep an eye out for whoever is looking at those photos,” I said.

Reed didn’t argue, didn’t hesitate. He called on his cell, spoke briefly and nodded at me.

We might get one more little fingertip of evidence. An officer on the take. But in any long-term relationship, Forsythe would have built in some kind of protection. If we caught the officer, I was sure he’d only be able to tell us that someone he didn’t know and had never met was interested in anything the department did that concerned Forsythe. There’d be no obvious connection to Forsythe other than that.

We parked a block south of Forsythe’s studio.

Reed pulled up the photos that the stakeout team had taken on his laptop.

“They’ll all go through the facial recognition system, but let’s do a visual pass first,” Reed said. “Try and see if anyone stands out for any reason.”

I wasn’t exactly Lieutenant Reed’s greatest admirer, but he was a good man and he had some good ideas.

We sat together and started working through the images, one ear on what was happening at the studio.

The first image in his directory wasn’t from the judge’s house. It was the DMV photo of one Willard Bryant, Forsythe’s driver, a big man with a forehead like an anvil and sharp eyes.

I didn’t need to see the guy’s rap sheet.

Dante, what the hell are you doing?

But it had spiraled out of my control. She was in a studio surrounded by people, and she had code words to alert us if she felt threatened. We had a good audio feed from her. She was wearing a GPS tracker.

I kept glancing up at that blinking marker on the screen. I didn’t know about Reed, but I could be through those studio doors in less than a minute from where we were parked.

She was about as safe as she could be.

“This one.” Reed paused on a photo of a jogger. He was tall and looked fit. He was carrying a backpack. Brutally short haircut. What might have been a neck tattoo peeked out from above his shirt.

“Hmm.”

The guy got marked as suspect.

Too obvious for me. Reed might be right, but I was looking for someone who didn’t stand out.

We flicked on until one caught my attention.

A woman. Medium height. Red ponytail. Really baggy top. She could have been carrying an RPG under that, let alone a .22 pistol.

Her face was partly obscured. I squinted at the screen.

Nah.

She was breathing through a limiter to restrict her air intake. Training for a high altitude race.

Still, we were running out of photos, so Ms. Redhead joined Mr. Neck Tattoo on the suspect list.

More photos. Down to the last three.

Then Reed and I both reacted.

Mr. Nobody. Had a hoody, but it was down. Head down. Fists clenched. Medium everything, except his hair. It was long and he’d left it unbound. It partly obscured his face because of the way his head was tilted. And his jogging clothes looked so damn average it felt wrong—like there was no individuality in picking them.

“Could be a wig,” Reed said. He drummed his fingers.

“Or just a guy with long hair,” I said. “Bit tense for someone jogging, though.”

“Maybe he just got an unexpected email for an unscheduled meeting with his boss. Who knows? Could be any reason.”

Neither of us could pinpoint what made us suspicious, but the photo went into the suspect list in prime position.

There was no one else that raised any obvious doubts.

Reed called in and identified the three to concentrate on to a colleague he trusted.

There was nothing more we could do but wait and talk.

Reed and I played devil’s advocate to each other’s views about the case.

Forsythe had to have known the judge was dead very early, for him to have the time to call KLOX in to interview him. I thought it could only be because he’d hired the killer. Reed argued that it’d be just about possible for someone to have been listening to the police radio and call Forsythe immediately.

Reed thought Tamanny must have been bugged, for Forsythe’s people to be able to find her given the steps she’d taken—changing her clothes and hiding.

“A tracker in the shoes. Or some jewelry she was wearing,” he said. “Forsythe’s the sort of man who wants to keep tabs on his investment.”

I shivered.

“What about the mother? She must know something. Has she been paid off?” I said, the thought turning my stomach.

Reed grunted. “Maybe she has habits to feed.” I could tell it didn’t feel exactly right to him either. “According to Forsythe, she was hysterical and had to be sedated.”

“Convenient. He probably drugged her himself.”

Reed gave a shrug of acknowledgement. “Still doesn’t help us,” he said.

We went back to the timelines, looking for something that might prove Forsythe was involved in the judge’s death.

I got a steady drip-feed of calls on my cell.

Yelena was pissed that I had left without her, but Matt had given her my GPS position. She was on the Kawasaki, parked half a block away, with a line of sight to us.

In the afternoon, Lynch sent photos of Daniels in Vegas getting back into her jet, without the suitcases. I thanked him and sent him home.

We’d need to follow up, but I couldn’t be distracted from Dante.

I called Billie. She’d returned to watching Forsythe, who was back at home.

“Daniels will be flying into Santa Monica—”

“I’m getting short-handed,” she said. “The packs are calling some of their guys back. Something about Tarez asking for them.”

I’d set the levels for a secure tail, and I didn’t want to compromise that.

“Forsythe is the important one,” I said. “Keep the teams on him, but is there anyone you can spare to go tail Daniels?”

“I don’t want to, Amber. Forsythe’s just gotten himself some new bodyguards. These are not your normal musclebound dickheads, and you can tell by looking, it’s not their first rodeo. I need more people, not less.” She hummed a second. “Tell you what. There’s a cub the Redondo want to keep out of the rough stuff till he toughens up. Now that I’ve seen Forsythe’s guards, I don’t want him here. Name’s Jacob. I’ll send him and text his cell number to you.”

“Let’s go for that. Tell Jacob eyes only, okay? Only close enough to see where she’s going.”

“Got it.”

I ended the call and got through to Tarez.

He needed all the Were the packs could spare him to get rid of the Basilikos in LA with one final hunt. As for Forsythe, Tarez wanted me to back off. Naryn had brought Tarez into Diana’s Emergence project, and Tarez was already talking to Agent Ingram.