Playing the Game (29 page)

            ‘Know anything about that?’

            ‘I do as a matter of fact, yeah’, Bridges enlightened him. ‘We got a detective here, Patton, had his daughter abducted either last night or this morning. Not sure which. What I also know, well have heard through the jungle drums anyway, is that Patton laid one on McCrane this morning, roughed him up pretty good too’. Ah yes, that would explain the bruises on McCrane’s face when he’d seen him this morning.

            ‘What about Burr?’ Conway wanted to know.

            ‘Pretty sure he’s getting the same deal but I’ve not seen that one yet. Word is that they’ll both walk today while Patton’s investigation takes it’s course, then apprehended again if either of the conditions are not fulfilled’.

            ‘Can that happen?’ Conway wasn’t happy to say the least. ‘I mean, can they just walk?’

            ‘What can I say, they must have some powerful friends or some pretty big fucking influence themselves, I guess’. Well there was no denying that. Technically, he knew he shouldn’t have been released so easily after this morning’s shooting but they’d had no evidence that it had been anything other than self defence. The yet to be confirmed, but predictably forthcoming arraignment on that score would be a formality.

            ‘Well once they’ve given the LAPD what they need, all the information they have to assist in fulfilling those two conditions, they’re not going to want to be detained whilst the case plays out are they?’ Bridges clarified.

            ‘Can you find out what time they will be due to leave?’ Conway wanted to know, an alternative plan already beginning to form in his mind. One that he maybe should have used in the first place, even though there was a great deal more risk that he could be tied to what he had in mind.

            ‘More than likely’, Bridges stalled.

            ‘You get me an accurate time and you get another thousand this month’. That, it seemed, was all Bridges needed to hear.

            ‘No problem, I should be able to do that’, he confirmed.

            ‘I’ll need to know at least an hour in advance’, Conway warned.

            ‘I’ll sort that for you’, he was assured.

            Conway searched through his cell for another number, and seeing the name Leon Reno dialled the number.

            ‘Hello’, came a lazy drawl after several minutes.

            ‘You know who this is?’ Conrad asked.

            ‘Yes I do’, Reno replied after a brief hesitation.

            ‘I’m going to need a favour from you’.

79

            The revelation that Robert Farrington could be in contact with Sarah Caldwell, perhaps even helping her, rendered both Captain Williams and I speechless for several seconds. Farrington owned the third biggest television network in the country, just behind Fox and CBS, and was on the verge of going global. He had built his media empire up from a small cable network, starting over twenty years ago, and by all accounts operated his business with a ruthless efficiency and aggression rarely seen in today’s business arena. Rumour had it that he’d worked sixteen hours a day; maybe more on Sundays and that he cursed sleep for depriving him of the opportunity to expand his empire even further. He moved in the highest of circles, often seen on his own network rubbing shoulders with various members of the Whitehouse and A-List celebrities, who all seemed gracious that he’d taken the time out of his busy schedule to give them the time of day. I remembered seeing one newsbyte a few months ago where he said if he’d appeared on The Apprentice, he’d be firing Donald Trump. He’d been laughing at the time but the look in his eyes told me that he was probably serious. If there’s one thing I knew about him, it was that he had an ego to match the size of his network.          

            I glanced at Captain Williams, who was digesting McCrane’s speech, looking deep in thought. That was fully understandable. Giving McCrane, and now Burr, a deal was a big call that he had made, giving me his full backing. Going after Farrington was an equally big call; one false move and we would be splashed all over the television from Thanksgiving to Christmas, and beyond. And not in a particularly flattering light at all. Added to that, how did we know that McCrane was telling us the truth? Our only saving grace was that he did genuinely seem to want the housing fund charges that would be forthcoming nullified, and getting my daughter back and capturing Sarah Caldwell was the only way that was going to happen.

 Nevertheless I was still sceptical at McCrane’s revelation. Robert Farrington was a powerful, highly respected member of the state. It didn’t make sense that he would be involved with this, at any level. ‘You need to do better than that’, I shook my head. I knew Williams would never let us go after Farrington with little or no evidence; merely the word of the District Attorney who was now trying to dig himself out of a sizable hole and would no doubt say anything to help him do this. ‘You need to convince us’, I added.

            McCrane sighed and bowed his head slightly, almost as if he’d been half expecting us to require an explanation. ‘Off the record?’ he enquired.  Williams nodded silently in agreement.

            ‘There is a group of powerful individuals,’ McCrane began, ‘of which both Jameson and I are members; as is Robert Farrington’.

             ‘What kind of group?’ Williams demanded. McCrane looked at him as if the question was too demeaning to require an answer, almost as if we weren’t worthy enough to know. McCrane looked directly at me.

            ‘Your daughter does not have the time for me to fully explain what kind of group’, he retorted, ‘but I will say this; From time to time, we require certain kinds of individuals to carry out work on our behalf. Sarah Caldwell was one of these individuals. Needless to say, it is imperative that we keep track of these subjects to ensure we monitor their location at all times’.

            ‘And you implant them with a tracker?’ I clarified.

            ‘Exactly. Now it important you realise that only
three
members of our group knew about the tracking process; Myself, Mr. Burr and Mr Farrington. We implant the tracker into the big toe of whoever we need to monitor. Farrington was the one who came up with the process initially, the first time we carried this out’.

            ‘So what makes you absolutely sure Farrington is linked with Caldwell?’ Williams was keen to drive this point home.

            ‘After Sarah Caldwell escaped’, McCrane responded, ‘we received her severed big toe by courier. Now as I’ve said, only three people knew about where we implant the tracker, and two of them are sitting in front of you. I’m certain that the only person who could have informed Sarah Caldwell about the tracker and helped her extract it, so to speak, is Robert Farrington as neither of us did and no-one else knew about it’.

            ‘Why just the three of you who knew about the tracking procedure?’ I wanted to know. ‘What about the other members of your group?’

            ‘Well it keeps things simpler’, McCrane shrugged. ‘The less people who know about the specifics, the less can go wrong. At least that was the principal’, he added.

            I sat back thinking for a moment; taking in what McCrane had just told us. Was he telling us the truth? I reconciled my doubts with the fact that I was certain McCrane wanted the housing fund fraud dealt with in such as way as to preserve his freedom and standing within the state.

            ‘Believe me Detective’, he spoke again and it almost seemed like he’d been reading my thoughts. ‘I want the housing fund shit gone almost as much as you want your daughter back and Sarah Caldwell caught’. He spoke with a venom in his voice that suggested that he actually believed that equating my daughter’s life to some bullshit fraud charge was on some kind of level plane. I resisted the temptation to knock him out again, just for that.

            ‘What I’ve told you is the absolute truth and nothing less’, he added, almost as an afterthought. 

            Just as I was about to address that, the interrogation door flew open and a relatively new officer, just out of the academy signalled to me and the Captain, an excited look in his eyes.

            We followed him to outside the room to one of the grey, poorly lit corridors that I have become so accustomed to over the years, and he could hardly contain his excitement. ‘What is it son?’ Williams demanded.

            ‘The guys upstairs sent me to get you both right away, Sir’, he seemed quite nervous, but then if I was addressing an experienced detective and the Captain when I was a rookie, I’d have probably been the same. ‘They think they’ve deciphered the latest message from The Chemist’.

            The rookie was left standing, without a response, as both the Captain and I left McCrane and Burr sitting in the interrogation room wondering what was going on and rushed urgently back upstairs, praying that we were a step closer to my daughter’s safe return and wondering how exactly Robert Farrington fitted into this increasingly expanding puzzle.

80

            Leon Reno had only interrupted inhalations on his well-used crack pipe to take the Senator’s call. He’d been lucky he’d heard it ring at all. His equally high friend, Brett Silverman had heard a ring emanating from the back of the dogged sofa where they sat in the squat that they had long ago commandeered, in one of the most run down areas of Los Feliz. Not far from Silver Lake, where The Chemist had been improvising the previous day with her opportunistic murder of David Ferguson of the LAPD.

            Both in their early twenties and both from backgrounds that foretold their descent into crime and drugs, they both dropped out of school early on, although officially it was a lot later than any of their teachers probably realised, so seldom was their attendance.

            Spending their days running the streets instead of focussing their attention on their education, and turning to increasingly bigger and better crimes to fund their expanding drug habits, it was not long before both were disowned by their respective families, leaving them both to fend for themselves in the dangerous territory, rife with other drug users, dealers and hoodlums.

Before long, it was not uncommon for them to hold up a liquor store once or twice a month. There were plenty of them everywhere, so to them it was an endless supply of both money and booze. Dangerous yes, but a couple of hold-ups a month was better than lots of smaller robberies, and gave them more time to drink and get high.

It was as they were fleeing from one of these hold-ups about a year ago that they almost got caught. A cop had happened to walk into the liquor store they were holding up, purely by chance and things had gotten fairly intense pretty quickly. Silverman had instinctively cracked the cop across the head with the butt of his shotgun and they had both fled the scene, taking what little money they could. The cop, who recovered quickly from his assault, and his partner who was outside, gave chase. As Leon and Brett were both high at the time, they didn’t have the co-ordination that sobriety would have otherwise have brought, and as they ran, both of them were sure they were going to be caught. As they rounded a corner, with the cops in pursuit, an expensive Aston Martin had pulled up, and a stranger had told them to get in quickly, and that he wasn’t a cop and they could trust him. They had both done so, not knowing who it was, but sure that it wasn’t one of the cops who was chasing them at least, and that had been good enough. The stranger had asked them where they lived, and it had taken them a few minutes to describe to him where they were squatting.

The stranger dropped them home, finally introducing himself as Senator Conrad Conway, and telling them that from now on, whenever he needed a favour, if they were asked, they would accommodate him, no matter what the circumstances. If they didn’t, then he could find them and have them sent to jail. He also said that for every favour they successfully completed, they would get enough crack for a week, which seemed like a great deal to them.

They had done him a few favours in the last twelve months, each rewarded as Conway had promised, with a healthy supply of drugs. None of the favours they had carried out were on the magnitude of the favour Conrad Conway had just asked of them, but once again, it was a favour they found themselves unable to refuse.

81

            ‘What have you got then’, I demanded, as I swung the door of the operations room open, where Williams’ task force had been working on the latest message from Sarah Caldwell. I prayed that whatever they thought they had was accurate and that it was something I could use to get Katie back.

            ‘We think that
stationary event
means The Staples Centre’, said one of the tech guys, ‘There’s a rock concert on today; Masters Of Puppets, that’s what they’re called’, he informed me.

            ‘Never heard of them’, I shrugged, indifferent as to who was playing. ‘Is there anything else it could be? I mean
stationary event
? The Staples Centre is that all we’ve got? That’s our only option?’

            ‘That’s all we’ve got’, confirmed the tech guy. ‘
British Wheels
, well that probably refers to a British Car doesn’t it?’

            ‘The bad news’, another tech guy continued, ‘is that the Staples Centre has a twenty thousand capacity and it’s sold out. It also has four thousand car parking spaces, and the event has already started. It’s not just Masters Of Puppets playing, there are another five bands on; it started around an hour ago’.

            ‘And that means that most people are already there’, I concluded. ‘That most cars are already there. It’s not like we’re going to be able to check each car on the way in to see if it’s British’. It was dawning on me that the scale of trying to find a British make of car, never mind the right car, was going to be a huge operation.

            ‘How many parking lots?’ Williams wanted to know.

            ‘There are twelve, including Olympic West Garage, which is currently under construction’, the first tech guy told us, pulling up a plan of the parking structures on the screen for us to see. It was a massive area for us to be searching for something that needed to be found quickly. There were two freeways passing by the Staples Centre; the Harbor freeway and Santa Monica freeway, giving easy access to the twelve parking lots. Even with concert-day level traffic, it would be easy for anyone to get to. I felt slightly downbeat; even with several teams combing all the lots, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack and we’d need more than a little luck to find what we were looking for.