Blond Cargo (21 page)

Still, now that he was going to place Malic al-Yasiri under a microscope, he wanted to get a feel for how the man lived. Google maps were good, but a flyover was better.

Jack didn’t fear flying as such, but he was unsettled by the fact that if anything did go wrong with the chopper’s engines, there was no glide time. Just a gut-wrenching spiral of death and an unplanned burial at sea.

As if the pilot were prescient and reading Jack’s mind, he said in a voice tinged with pride, “Rolls-Royce engines. Good as gold.”

Jack started to appreciate the day once he settled in. The sky and sea were azure, and it was hard to tell where one plane started and the other finished. The pilot pointed out a pod of dolphins skimming the water and breaking the surface with graceful, playful dives.

“I’m doing something wrong with my life,” Cruz said, looking at the enormous mansions that populated the coastline. “Where the hell do that many people get that much money?”

“We attract wealth from all over the world,” the pilot said cheerfully. “The Chinese threaten Taiwan, the Taiwanese consolidate their holdings and pump their money into Southern California real estate. Trouble in the Mideast, they trade their oil wells for American terra firma. All of those jokers keep me and my company flush.”

He steered the chopper closer to the growing cliffs for a bird’s-eye view of the multimillion-dollar estates. “That’s Senator Jefferies’s spread. Retired from the Senate last year, flush with cash. And the architectural monstrosity up ahead, that’s Carmen Bellow’s pied-à-terre,” he said, enjoying his own humor. “Led the Averia Group into Chapter Eleven, negotiated concessions with the unions, turned around and fired five thousand workers, and landed comfortably here on her golden parachute. House is as cold as her body temperature.”

“Dog eat dog,” Mateo said without judgment.

Jack was a union man and wasn’t at all pleased with the alarming antiunion sentiment that was sweeping the country. It had recently hit Detroit especially hard. Turning Michigan into a right-to-work state amounted to union busting, he thought, but he had more pressing issues on his mind. Specifically, Malic’s connection to Detroit.

“What’s up ahead?” Jack asked the pilot.

“Palos Verdes Peninsula, and that’s the Terranea resort.”

Jack could see the shadow of their chopper moving along the sandy beach and playing over the sunbathers, and the multicolored umbrellas and beach chairs that were set in neat rows by the resort staff.

“That’s where the first body floated ashore,” Jack said, trying to imagine how the newlyweds must have felt having a dead body crash their honeymoon. “How far to our destination?” he asked the pilot.

“Five minutes, give or take a few. When do you want me to start shooting the video?”

“As soon as the property is in range.” And then to his men, “Doesn’t make sense he’d dump a body so close to home.”

“Unless there were riptides. Currents could have worked against them,” Mateo said.

As the chopper powered over cargo ships filled with red, green, yellow, and blue containers, sailboats with swollen spinnakers, and surfers bobbing like shark bait waiting for the perfect wave, the pilot pointed up ahead in the distance to Malic al-Yasiri’s compound.

“It’s the third mansion in that grouping, cliffside.”

Malic’s massive house was a modern take on a Greek revival. Stark white, with four massive columns that flanked the front entrance and supported a porch that ran the width of the house. It should have been overlooking the Potomac River, Jack thought.

All three estates shared a promontory that jutted into the Pacific. They were fenced and walled, built on huge expanses of property. Stairs were constructed into the sides of the cliff giving the owners access from their compounds to the water below. The steps at the first house led to a small private beach. The last two properties, including Malic’s, had wooden docks precariously built out into the ocean.

“You can start rolling now,” Jack instructed the pilot.

“I’ll take some wide shots and then push in tight when we get overhead,” he answered.

All three men took in the house as they approached. Up from the fragile wooden dock, at the top of the stairs, was what looked like a scene from
The Sound of Music
playing out on the expansive green lawn behind the compound walls and the sheer cliff
.

A woman was running after a child, her silk hijab head scarf billowing like a nun’s habit. She was chasing a little girl, Jack realized as they came closer. The woman scooped up the girl, laughing, and held her tight. The woman’s face darkened, and her eyes narrowed and locked on the candy-apple-red helicopter executing a slow flyover. It hovered in place for a moment as the pilot pushed in with his gyro camera, which was filming on the undercarriage of the bird.

“Pull up,” Jack said, not happy they’d been made. “Let’s push on down the coast and we’ll do another pass on our way back. Was she a blond?”

“Oh, yeah,” Mateo answered. “Very unusual for an Iraqi.”

“If she’s homegrown,” Jack said.

“Could be a bottle blonde,” Cruz tossed in. “Other than the color she looked like Sally Field in
The
Flying Nun
.”

“You’re too young to be able to reference that show,” Mateo said, amazed at the kid’s brainpower.

“Hulu,” was Cruz’s response.

Jack was struck by the similarities between what appeared to be Malic’s wife, Angelica, and the dead women. He didn’t buy into coincidence.

“They’re used to seeing real estate birds flying in the neighborhood,” the pilot said as he powered the flying machine past the main house, the garden, the pool and pool house, and a large guesthouse tucked into the rear corner of the property.

“What is it about rich folks and walls?” Cruz asked.

Jack looked back at the compound and could now see the woman urgently pulling her child by the hand. She glanced nervously over her shoulder at the receding aircraft and disappeared into the main house, shutting the door behind them.

The chopper flew down the coast a quarter mile, and the pilot executed a wide, banking, vertigo-inducing turn and powered back. Jack tried to unclench the tension in his jaw. From his new vantage point he could see the wooden stairway that had been built into the cliff face. There were no visible openings where the stairs met the eight-foot wall, Jack noticed, as if the rickety stairs were a vestige of a past owner’s design.

“Malic bought the property for eighteen mil,” Mateo said, answering Jack’s unspoken question. “Couple of months before he started infusing cash into Vargas and company.”

“Looks like they’ve got armed security on patrol.”

The men spotted what Jack had seen. A black car was moving slowly up the street and slowed in front of the compound’s entrance before continuing to the next property. It had the feel of a cop car without the numbers. There was only one street leading to the compound. It fed into another road that circled around the other two estates on the protected promontory before dead-ending. Surveillance would have to be done at the mouth of the road.

“And a guard shack,” Cruz added, the consummate professional now. “I see multiple camera setups around the perimeter. It has to be a state-of-the-art system. Throw in the eight-foot wall, the steel front gate, and the guard shack.” They could now see directly beneath them as they hovered above a circular driveway that could accommodate twelve cars. “If you don’t have an invite to the party, if you’re not on Malic’s guest list, you are shit out of luck.”

“That must be the guesthouse,” Mateo said, pointing to a large dwelling that was built against the wall on the side of the property hidden from the main house and the pool house.

The pilot powered up and then away, and the craft’s massive blades created a pounding downwash of air that left a billowing cloud of garden detritus and grass clippings in its wake.

“Some people build walls like that to protect themselves, their families, and their wealth,” Jack said, answering Cruz’s earlier question. “And some people build walls because they have something to hide.”

Jack had a strong suspicion the latter was the case, and he wasn’t going to stop until he found out what secrets were hidden behind the eight-foot wall.

Angelica couldn’t hear anything other than the muted silence in her glass cage. But the steaming water in the bath she had just filled suddenly rippled, like a pebble being thrown into a pond. She walked out of the bathroom into the bedroom, cinching her bathrobe tight around her waist.

It was the wrong time of day for a visit from her jailer, she thought. She listened, confused, for the metallic sound of a key being inserted in the exterior lock. Silence. She looked back into the bathroom and her tub water was still again.

Steeling herself, she shrugged off her robe and stepped into the hot water. She knew she was being watched and didn’t know what was expected of her.

Angelica slipped down into the water until only her head was above the surface and started soaping her body, her gaze drawn to the message again. Desperate childlike letters that had been carved into the bathtub caulking with someone’s fingernails.

HELP
.

There was no mistaking the urgent missive. She could read the fear in the rough markings.

Angelica prayed that the message had been answered. She caught herself doing that a lot lately. She didn’t know if her prayers would be answered. But she knew one thing with absolute certainty. She swore on the grave of her mother that she’d do whatever was necessary to stay alive and then find a way to punish her captors.

Retribution was something the Mafia had always excelled at. In this, Angelica was her father’s daughter.

Kayla locked the heavy door to her husband’s office behind her and turned in a circle, taking it all in. Dark paneled walls. Mahogany shelves filled with leather-bound books. An ornately carved desk in front of the window overlooked the garden, pool, and house. She hadn’t been inside Malic’s inner sanctum since the day the workers finished converting the pool house into his home office. He was very particular about his belongings and demanded one private space in the glorious house he had provided, and Kayla couldn’t have cared less. She called it his man cave, something she had heard about on
Dr. Oz
.

Her husband’s disappearance the other night, and the helicopter earlier in the day, had left her feeling uneasy. Kayla had brushed aside her fear, grabbed the spare keys that he kept hidden in the laundry room, and decided to have a look around. One key opened the door and the second key, larger, more ornate, remained a mystery.

Malic’s desk was as imposing as her man. No loose paper, nothing at all on the burnished top except his iMac computer. Not even a photo of his daughter. The drawers were locked, as was the mahogany file cabinet. Kayla wasn’t sure what she was looking for. A sliding panel directly under the desktop pulled out, and she uncovered the computer’s keyboard and a few assorted buttons. She pushed one at random and a mahogany panel to her right slid open, revealing a pin-spot-lit painting. It looked like a Matisse.

The oil painting on the wall was stunning, and Kayla wondered at its authenticity. Still, she wasn’t here to critique art. She pushed the button again and the panel slid back into place. She wasn’t about to telegraph to her husband that she’d been snooping behind his back.

She looked at the mahogany bookshelves that filled the back wall, but they didn’t contain anything out of the ordinary. Just his collection of first editions, many of which were works of historic importance. She suspected they came from the archives of the National Museum of Iraq.

Kayla looked at the fax machine in passing and then stopped and pulled a few sheets of paper out of the tray.

She noticed they had the letterhead of Dr. Khalil, their general practitioner. It looked like the results of a blood test. Everything listed on the two sheets of paper had been checked normal.

Kayla wasn’t aware her husband had been to see the family doctor, but he’d been less communicative of late. As she looked closer at the document, she realized that the blood test wasn’t for Malic but for an unnamed female.

Tests had been run for STDs and then one for HPV, the human papillomavirus. Kayla knew that the test was for the virus that causes cervical cancer; she’d been discussing the vaccine with her gynecologist.

Kayla’s stomach did a slight flip as she replaced the blood test in the fax tray and sat back down behind the desk. She was overwhelmed by a surge of panic.

She had suffered a similar feeling when her family had been surreptitiously evacuated from Iraq in the middle of the night with no prior warning. Saarah was only three at the time, and Kayla remembered the silence in the limousine as it delivered her family to an awaiting American jet moments before Ba’ath Party operatives broke down the door of their home and destroyed it. Their neighbors had reported that the automatic-weapons fire that tore apart the tiled walls and fixtures was meant for her family. If the American State Department hadn’t interceded and secreted them out of the country in the dead of night, it would have been their last.

She remembered the city lights of Baghdad spread out beneath her as they circled the airport in the military jet and then roared over the desert. Kayla knew she would never return to her homeland and vowed never to succumb to fear again.

Still lost in her thoughts, she pulled out the sliding panel under Malic’s desktop again and hit a second button.

A television was revealed behind another wall panel and the flat screen blinked to life.

Kayla made a noise that she didn’t recognize. It radiated from her throat but sounded disembodied.

She was staring at a naked woman bathing in a tub. That wasn’t the most unsettling part, though. The woman was blond and looked like she could have been Kayla’s younger sister. Or even more dreadful, Saarah’s older sister. Kayla couldn’t be sure, but it felt like the bather was in close proximity, in the next room. But that was impossible, she thought. The only other door in the office led to Malic’s bathroom.