Blue Molly (Danny Logan Mystery #5) (25 page)

“Oh my God,” Steve said, looking inside. “There’s got to be a hundred bags in there!”

“Son of a bitch!” Miguel said, looking on in awe. The awe lasted only a minute or so, though. Then he said, “Everybody out!”

I looked at him, puzzled.

“We gotta get out of here and get a CSI Unit to process this. The Feds may make busts like this all the time, but I don’t think we’ve ever handled anything like this before last night, and now we have another one. I don’t want us to fuck it up. So everybody out!”

We filed back out the hidden door, Miguel closing it as we left. Steve went upstairs to call in the CSI Unit while Miguel turned to the two patrol officers. “Okay, you guys know what comes next, right?” Before they could answer, he said, “You stand here, and you stand here. Guard this place with your life. No one comes in and no one goes out unless it’s me or the CSI Unit.”

The men nodded. “Got it, Lieutenant.”

Miguel and I hustled back up the stairs. He walked over to Abby. “When’s the last time you saw Aaron Cunningham?”

“Yesterday. Just after lunch. He took some boxes to Kinko’s.”

“And then?”

“He never came back.”

“Something he’s done before?”

She shook her head again. “Never. UPS comes every day. I told him we could just ship the boxes like normal, but he said he’d take care of them.”

Now we were all curious. “What was in the boxes?” I asked.

She shook her head again. “I don’t know. He brought them up from downstairs. They were already sealed and ready to go.”

I thought for a second, then smiled. “C’mon, guys,” I said. “One more stop. I’ll explain things on the way.”

It’s said that crime doesn’t pay, and in the long run, I believe it. Then again, I suppose the real answer to the question may be more nuanced. It might actually come down to how you define “long run.”

Let’s face it, most criminals aren’t very smart, at least not the ones I’ve come across. In fact, most of ’em are pretty much the opposite of smart. They fall into a life of crime for the simple reason that they’re not equipped to do anything else. They got skipped the day God doled out the life skills. Sometimes violence plays a part in what they do, sometimes not, but these people aren’t prepared to face normal productive life. I’m not talking about purely antisocial wackos or even psychos—those guys have a loose screw. The people I’m talking about are otherwise normal. Don’t get me wrong, no one’s forcing them into their deviant lifestyle. For the most part, they have choices. But for whatever reason—maybe drugs or alcohol or a bad family history or maybe just bad luck—something happens, and a life of crime seems like a good option to them. But it doesn’t work. For these people, I’d define “long run” in terms of days, or maybe weeks, if they’re lucky. They wander through life, stumbling from one arrest to the next. The prisons are full of this type and, eventually, it becomes their home. For them, crime definitely doesn’t pay. Not for long, anyway.

But then there are the occasional criminals who don’t fit this pattern. They’re not dumb. In fact, they’re smart, maybe even wicked smart. The old saw about people thinking they’re the smartest ones in the room? For a lot of these people, it’s probably true. Unlike the norm, they
do
have skills—social, technical, you name it. They understand how to play the game inside the system, and they excel at it. They have the skills to get by and still, they’re driven by greed to choose a life of crime instead. In the end, smart as they are, even these people aren’t infallible, certainly not to the degree they might think they are. Eventually, even this genius type will screw something up and get caught by people like me. We may not be as smart as they are, but we’re smart enough. It’s still a question of when, not if. Again, it comes down to how you define “long run.”

The thing is, a small number of these people might be smart enough or lucky enough to get the chance to redefine “long run” so that it extends far enough into the future that it’s beyond their lifetime. And I suppose that if you do the crime, but you don’t have to do the time because you don’t get caught until after you’re dead, then hell, maybe for a few of ’em, crime
does
pay. Or at least, it doesn’t come collecting while they’re alive, which I guess to them means the same thing.

Which explains why I wasn’t surprised in the least when after the superintendent let us into Libby Black’s apartment, we found that the place was completely empty, and she was long gone. I wondered if she was one of these people. Her furniture was gone. The closets were bare. The drawers were empty. Even the refrigerator was empty and had been cleaned. The only thing left, conspicuous by its presence, was a small dining room table. On the table sat an empty aluminum briefcase with the lid wide-open. Libby must have left it for us to find, and if ever there was a clearer message—a final fuck-you salute—I’d never seen it.

I looked at the briefcase. “Miguel, I’m thinking the DEA can stop looking for the missing briefcase full of cash.”

He stared at the briefcase, his hand covering his mouth, then rubbing his chin. He nodded. “Yep. I think you’re right.”

“I’m told you have a theory, Mr. Logan?” I was in a large conference room two days later on the third floor at SPD, a room I’d never been in before. There were probably thirty people present, split about fifty-fifty between DEA agents and managers up from Los Angeles, and detectives and brass from SPD. My questioner was a man named Collin Rogers, Special Agent in Charge of the Los Angeles branch.

“I do.”

“Well, please tell us how this young woman, Olivia Black, escaped right out from under the noses of the Seattle Police Department with half a million dollars of cash. The floor is yours.”

The comment drew angry looks from the SPD brass. I smiled. Some things never changed. One thing about the Feds: they were experts at pointing the finger at someone else when the shit hit the fan. It had always been so. I shook my head and stood up.

“Thank you. My information comes from facts my company’s been able to piece together through the course of our investigation, along with recent testimonies from Abby Roth and Freddie Sokolov.” Turns out that now Laskin was dead and both Libby Black and Aaron Cunningham had disappeared, the people they’d left behind were only too eager to spill what they knew. Everyone wanted to talk.

“We think this whole thing—we’re calling it the Blue Molly episode—got started a little over two years ago when two young people moved to Seattle from Lexington, where they’d recently finished graduate work at the University of Kentucky. One of these people, Aaron Cunningham, has a master’s degree in organic chemistry. According to all accounts, he was a quiet young man and wanted nothing more than to work in his laboratory. His girlfriend, though, was more ambitious. Libby Black earned an MBA, and she and Cunningham lived together in Lexington. She knew that Cunningham had a special talent: he had the lab skills and the demeanor required to be able to produce ecstasy—in fact, lab-grade pure MDMA. She recognized an opportunity when she saw it. So after the two graduated, I think she must have weighed her options and concluded that the market potential of pure E was greater here in Seattle than it was in Kentucky. After all, Seattle was one of the top rave spots in the country. She convinced Cunningham to go with her, and the two of them packed up and moved to the Northwest sometime near the end of 2011.

“When she got here, she needed someone to do distribution. Somehow or another, I’m not exactly sure, she hooked up with a guy who was already set up in that line of work up here: Pavel Laskin. You already know his background, so I’m not going to go into that.

“With all the pieces in place, Libby needed to draw things together. She must have done some checking and discovered that the vacant space where the Pioneer Square Office Supply store was located could use the areaways to link directly to another vacant space where the Natural World Health Food store is. She could move product underground between her production and her distribution partners, and it would never be seen. But there was a problem: the areaway was blocked by concrete at the Occidental and Main intersection. She solved this problem by studying up on the art business and taking a job herself at the Sylvia Lyon Gallery. The gallery basement there has doors that open to both streets. So I figure, most likely using the profits from early sales of the E that Cunningham was making, she formed shell companies and leased both spaces and went to work. First thing, she set up Natural World Health Foods and built Cunningham his hidden lab. Then, she set up Pioneer Square Office Supply and helped Laskin learn how to run that. With both stores in place, and with the lab running, they were in business.

“This arrangement worked well for two years. So well, in fact, that Blue Molly became somewhat famous and gave Libby the opportunity to expand outside of Seattle. Enter Peter Mishkin from Los Angeles. I think she must have contacted him through Laskin. He was receptive, but the idea of expansion created a problem for Libby. Cunningham’s lab space was very compact. She knew that in order to take on a big-time customer like Mishkin, she needed to give Cunningham more lab space. But the problem was, there wasn’t any more room to be had. If she moved to a new location, she’d have to move two businesses, plus she’d lose the advantage of the areaway. So she decided the best way to do the expansion with the least amount of disruption would be to simply buy the Lyon Building using a third shell company. Her thought must have been that she could move Cunningham’s lab from his own basement into one of the larger empty basements, maybe even the one next door—it’s vacant. Cunningham could still access it from his shop—he’d just walk outside his own areaway door and go next door. She formed the company and had Laskin hire the lawyer who made the offers. You may be wondering how she could afford all this. She had the potential to make more than a million dollars a month selling Blue Molly through Laskin in Seattle and Mishkin in Los Angeles. That’s how.

“Unfortunately for Libby—fortunately for the rest of us, though—that’s about the time that her operation started to get the high-speed wobblies. Start with the fact that the Lyons didn’t want to sell their building, even when she told Laskin to have the lawyer raise the price. Must have utterly frustrated her, so she had Laskin turn up the heat on the Lyons in order to drive the tenants away. She must have thought that if the building became a huge cash drain, then the Lyons would be more amenable to selling. This turned out to be a mistake, too though, because Laskin was a clumsy man, no subtlety at all. Worse, he was extremely hard to control. It didn’t take long before he overplayed his hand when one of his men—Eduard Markovic—started a fight with the Lyons in a bar. The net effect was that the Lyons ended up hiring my firm. Of course, in her position, Libby knew everything that was going on with the Lyons. I imagine she must have been righteously annoyed at Laskin for not being able to control his men and carry out a simple order. She had to know that the whole operation was put at risk when the Lyons brought in a private investigator to start digging around. I’ll bet she really raked Laskin over the coals, because Sokolov says Laskin got really pissed at Markovic. And trust me when I say that Laskin was not the kind of guy you wanted to have mad at you. According to Freddie Sokolov, Laskin shot Markovic the same day he got released from jail. Then, for good measure, he tried to frame me by having his boys toss Markovic’s body into the Dumpster in our parking lot. Fortunately for me, no one at SPD got taken in by that move.

“Things pretty much deteriorated for Libby from that point on. Like I said, her plan had a major weakness in that Laskin wasn’t capable of withstanding much pressure. He reacted irrationally and violently. He showed up at our apartment late one night and planted a bomb in my Jeep, which he detonated the next day. My partner and I were lucky we weren’t both killed. There’s no doubt in my mind that Libby Black didn’t order this—I’m positive that Laskin was acting on his own.

“I think it was probably right around then that Libby must have decided the whole Blue Molly operation was a lost cause because of Laskin’s temperament, and that he was going to bring it all down and get her arrested. She wasn’t going to let that happen, so she pulled the trigger on her plan B—a bailout plan.

“First, the day of the raid, she had Cunningham pack up all the Blue Molly he could stuff into four boxes and ship it off to parts unknown. Obviously, Cunningham can’t use his regular UPS account to do this, or they’d be able to track it, so she has him take off early and no doubt take the boxes to four separate Fed-Ex offices to anonymously ship them. Apparently he couldn’t fit the one hundred thousand caps we recovered, but each of those boxes hold about fifty thousand caps, so we figure he probably got away with two hundred thousand Blue Molly caps as it was.

“As far as the Mishkin buy went, after she pulled the plan B trigger, Libby didn’t want the deal to happen at eleven p.m. anymore because she needed to be close in order to get hold of the money. And since she knew the whole place would be crawling with law enforcement after the raid, if it took place late in the evening, there would have been no plausible reason for her to be there, and she might have gotten caught trying to sneak away. So to fix this, she has Laskin change the time with Mishkin at the last minute. Then, she has a homeless guy who hangs out in the park make a 9-1-1 call to announce the change of time to SPD. She wasn’t aware that the guy she selected to make the call was an old friend of mine. Or maybe she was, I’m not sure.

“So Mishkin shows up at the new time, and the buy happens in Laskin’s basement. Laskin gives him a Blue Molly sample, which he has tested. It passes, of course, so he hands over the metal briefcase with the money and Laskin takes it out into the areaway where he meets Libby. She’s brought the agreed-upon two boxes with one hundred thousand capsules of Blue Molly. She’s already convinced Laskin to leave the money with her—no sense in giving Mishkin the opportunity to rip them off. Laskin has no reason to distrust her, so he goes back into his shop to deliver the goods and complete the deal.