Conspiracy (42 page)

Karr tucked his new reporter's notebook into his back pocket and ambled past the checkpoint and down the hall of the hotel. He'd pulled a sport coat over his jeans so he'd have enough pockets for his PDA and phone; the jacket placed him in the upper percentile of better-dressed journalists, at least in the room set up for the press conference. About fifty reporters were milling about, most of them hovering near the carts where coffee and donuts had been set out.

“Hey ya,” Karr said to no one in particular as he walked over. “Is this stuff free or do we have to pay?”

A few of the others laughed, thinking he was joking. Karr didn't see anyone taking money, so he helped himself to a coffee and a pair of Boston creams, which he stacked on top of each other chocolate to chocolate.

“Nothing like a sugar rush first thing in the morning, huh?” said one of the reporters nearby. She gave him a smile almost as sweet as the custard filling in the donut.

“Have to eat the whole table to get a sugar high going,” said Karr, his mouth full of donut.

“Theresa Seelbach,
Newsweek
,” said the reporter, sticking out her hand. “You local?”

“No, actually, I just came out from back east,” said Karr. He held up his credentials, from the
Daily Record
. The paper was legitimate, though tiny. Telach had actually arranged for Karr to work for them as an unpaid freelancer with the help of an intermediary. “Editors finally decided McSweeney's the real deal. I'm doing a feature.”

Karr wasn't exactly sure what a feature was, but the reporter seemed to be satisfied. She smiled at him.

“Been a reporter long?”

“Just about a year,” said Karr.

“First campaign, huh?”

“First big story,” said Karr.

“Your first story?”

“Oh, nah, nah,” said Karr. “Mostly I've covered like police stuff. And a fight in the city council. That was cool. Mayor got decked.”

The other reporter laughed.

“When does McSweeney get here?” Karr asked finally.

“Oh, not for an hour or so. He's out watering the money tree. Come on, the real coffee is in the lounge around the side. I'll buy you one.”

 

“WHY WOULD THEY
need DNA?” Mrs. Ball asked Lia. Her lip trembled. “Is he . . . did they find him . . . is he . . .?”

“He's still missing, Mrs. Ball. It's just a general precaution.” Lia struggled to find the magic formula that would get the DNA sample she needed voluntarily, without having to take out the warrant. Doing so would surely tip Ball off, if he wasn't tipped off already.

“It's how they identify bodies.”

“They can also use traces to see if someone was at a certain place,” said Lia. “You'd be surprised—sweat from a finger on an elevator button. I don't think they have anything specific, but they want to be prepared.”

“Maybe in his comb,” said Mrs. Ball finally. She led Lia upstairs to the bedroom.

“Does he have any places he liked to go to be alone?” Lia asked. “A place people might not think of, a park or something? Somewhere he might be contemplative?”

Some place where he might bring a nosey investigator, Lia thought, though she didn't say.

“I don't know. He wasn't—he didn't contemplate.” Mrs. Ball went into the bathroom and returned with a comb. Lia took out the plastic Baggie she'd bought at the supermarket and put the comb inside. Then she pointed to the medal she'd spotted yesterday and asked about it again.

Mrs. Ball shrugged. Her head was drooping. Lia thought she was resigning herself to her husband's death. She probably thought Lia was lying to protect her, and that he really
had been found and they wanted to cinch the identification before telling her.

Lia turned to another photo on the wall, one that showed Ball about twenty years younger, a rifle in his hand and a deer at his feet.

“Does he like to hunt?” Lia asked.

“Oh yes, of course. Every year he gets his deer. After a few weeks I'm quite sick of venison.” Mrs. Ball smiled, her mood lifting slightly.

“Where does he hunt?”

“A few places. The Castro farm down in Clinton. Then there's Irv Burdick's property along Stissing Mountain. That's pretty good. Irv keeps one of the old farmhouses in decent shape up there for some hunting friends, and the chief used to spend the night for a very early start. Car noise spooked the deer. Hasn't had to do that in a while, though—more deer than he can shoot. Plus, I think his back bothers him if he doesn't sleep on a thick mattress. Irv was a little cheap about that.”

“Could you point out those properties on a map for me?” Lia asked.

“He wouldn't be hunting this time of year.”

“Probably not,” said Lia. “But maybe he's up there thinking.”

 

BALL LEANED FORWARD
from the taxi's rear seat.

“Could you turn that up, please?” he asked the cabdriver.

The man, a dark-skinned Latino, flicked the radio's volume up a notch.

“. . . the President is expected to meet the governor tomorrow evening. The next day, he'll attend ceremonies at the Ronald Reagan Library, where among other guests at the nonpartisan event will be the man the opposition party seems to be leaning toward as his next opponent, Senator Gideon McSweeney. . . .”

“That's fine,” said Ball, leaning back in the seat.

At least he knew where McSweeney would be tomorrow. There was no question of getting him there, though; the security around the President would be too great.

When would he do it?

As soon as possible. The longer he waited, the better the odds would be that they would get him before he got McSweeney.

And he was going to get McSweeney.

 

CHECKING INTO THE
hotel presented Ball with another dilemma. He'd need a credit card. He didn't want to use his own, and was leery about using Amanda Rauci's as well. Someone was bound to be looking for her by now.

The fact that Ball had arrived before the hotel's 4:00
P.M.
check-in time gave him a brief reprieve. He told the young
woman that he would check in later if he could leave his bag. After she took it he walked back out into the lobby lounge area and sat down to think.

There were Web sites and criminal rings where you could buy credit card numbers, but obtaining the cards themselves required you to meet someone in person. There must be a hundred black-market dealers in LA, but they'd never trust him enough to deal with him, not quickly anyway. And finding them would be next to impossible: if he went down to South Central and just started asking around, he'd be rolled inside of an hour.

Maybe the solution wasn't to stay anywhere. He needed to use a computer, and there was a business center in the hotel; he'd give them a false room number. Beyond that, what did he need?

A shower would be nice.

And sleep.

There was too much to do to sleep.

Ball had just decided to use Amanda Rauci's credit card again when a better solution fell literally into his lap—a woman passing nearby dropped her purse on the floor. Ball got up and gave it up for her. There wasn't time to take the card from her wallet—she would have seen—but now that he had the idea, all he to do was find the opportunity.

Opportunity presented itself about a half hour later, at a hotel restaurant across the street. Ball positioned himself in the bar near the cash register, planning to swipe a card off an unattended tray after the cashier had run up the charges. But as Ball ordered a beer he noticed that the bartender and some of the waitstaff stowed their pocketbooks on a shelf next to the bar. He slipped his hand down and took out the bartender's wallet as she poured the beer at the far end of the bar.

Ball slid a ten across the bar and smiled at the woman's joke about it being a little early for anything stronger. Then he went to the men's room. The purse he'd picked had six different credit cards; he took the one that looked least worn
from swipe machines. Returning the wallet was easy; the bartender had gone into the other room to help set up for dinner.

Ball sat down and finished his drink, sipping slowly as he planned out what he needed to do next.

 

IT WAS ALL
about patterns, Johnny Bib liked to say; the universe had a certain order to it, and anything that violated that order did so for a reason. Anomalies were as informative as symmetry, many times more so.

Which made the unsuccessful attempt on Senator McSweeney's life stand out.

“It's the gas,” Gallo told Rubens. “Ball normally buys gas every two to three days when he's in Pine Plains. It's always twenty dollars. Clockwork. Habit. He never tanks up—except for the day before Gordon killed himself. Then there's no activity on his card during the three days around the time Gordon dies.”

“He used cash,” interrupted Johnny Bib. “And probably someone else's credit card.”

“Whose?” asked Rubens, looking at Gallo rather than Johnny Bib.

“Haven't figured that out,” said Gallo. “But getting back to the pattern, there's a gap around the time when Gordon dies, but no gap when someone shoots at McSweeney. And it's not because his wife was using his card—she uses a Discover Card, and the charge pattern is consistent.”

“It is consistent with what the wife told the op,” added Johnny Bib. “He was only away that time.”

“He wasn't the shooter,” said Gallo. “Maybe he killed Gordon, but he didn't shoot at McSweeney.”

Rubens looked at the billing information. It would have been much, much better to find positive evidence—a trail of
receipts that would have put Ball in a specific place at a specific time. But real life was messier than that—or maybe Ball was simply very clever.

“Keep working on it, Mr. Gallo,” said Rubens. “Continue gathering as much information as you can about the police chief. There's no such thing as too much information.”

That wasn't entirely correct, but neither man pointed that out as they left his office.

 

BY THE TIME
Lia made the connections with the courier at the county airport and shipped Chief Ball's hair off, it was already after six. Lia tracked down the properties the chief's wife had mentioned, and though it was dark she checked them as best she could, driving as much as she could through them and then walking around with her flashlight and even checking on an old building at the Burdick farm. Lia kept calling Amanda's name, though she had long ago concluded she wasn't going to find her alive.

Lia had no evidence, but she did have a theory: Amanda Rauci had found something in Forester's car, maybe one of his notebooks or something else the state police had missed. That led her to investigate the chief and then confront him. He'd killed her and then run away.

Or maybe not. Cold and tired, Lia went back to the hotel, had a quick meal, and fell asleep facedown on her bed without bothering to change. When she woke, it was two hours or so before dawn. Lia got up and went straight to the Castro property, not even stopping for coffee.

The place looked even more forbidding during the day. Dominated by an old gravel mine, it consisted of roughly a thousand acres. Large clumps of rocks and deep gouges in the earth made the landscape look like the back side of the moon. A stream ran through the middle of the property, bisecting a spider's web of dirt trails before disappearing in the woods.

Lia drove her rental car to the edge of the widest trail,
looking for signs that someone else had been through recently. She got out and walked up the narrower paths. But she saw nothing suspicious.

The old Burdick farm was several times the size of the Castro property, with even more places to dispose of a body. Besides the standing farmhouse that she had checked the night before, six or seven other buildings stood at the far end of the property, obscured by rows of bushes and young trees. They were all in various stages of disrepair, moldy, their thin walls bereft of siding and pockmarked with bullet holes.

Lia checked them all, without finding a body. It was a long, hot day, and even though she'd spent it entirely outdoors, Lia didn't feel particularly close to nature when she gave up looking for Amanda late in the afternoon.

 

TIMOTHY O'ROURKE HAD
worked for Senator McSweeney for several years, as a combination chauffeur-bodyguard. When the senator had geared up for the presidential campaign, he had been switched to a full-time security officer. But he'd been pushed aside even before the arrival of the Secret Service and the redoubling of the Service's efforts following the attempt on McSweeney's life. O'Rourke was considered a bit too old and too rough around the edges to really fit in.

Though that wasn't his interpretation of what had happened.

“These young guys and their BlackBerry thingers,” O'Rourke had told Ball bitterly several weeks before, when he had effectively been demoted to the status of an advance flunky. “They don't understand the importance of experience. What experience do they have, anyway? None.”

Ball remembered the conversation as he waited for O'Rourke to answer his cell phone. It was shameful how they pushed older guys out, he thought, though he knew in this case there was probably a bit more to the story than O'Rourke let on. The retired trooper was several years older than Ball, and not nearly in as good physical shape. And he'd never been as smart.

“O'Rourke.”

“Hello, Tim, how are you?”

“Chief?”

They exchanged greetings and caught up briefly, enabling Ball to ascertain that O'Rourke was in fact on the West
Coast. While he'd had a backup plan in case O'Rourke wasn't, things would be considerably easier this way.

“I wonder if you could do me a favor,” said Ball.