Delta Ghost (16 page)

Franciscus murmured, “You’d think, with the number of people who would have had cell phones in their hands at that very moment, somebody might have been quick enough to take a photo.”

Venn turned in his chair and stared at Franciscus.

“Just a minute,” he said.

Franciscus watched him get up and stride to the closed door. He went in quickly, before Franciscus could see who was beyond.

Thirty seconds later, Venn emerged, a cell phone in his hand.

“Smart idea, counselor,” said Venn. He held up the phone so that Franciscus could peer at the screen.

It wasn’t the sharpest of pictures, but he could make out a street scene, with an ill-defined human figure stretched out on a sidewalk, and a car in the foreground. A black sedan, possibly a Chevy. The windows reflected the sun’s glare so it was impossible to make out who was inside, but on the passenger side, the one closest to the camera, a blurred elbow was sticking out over the lowered window.

Franciscus frowned. “Where’d you get this?”

“My colleagues are questioning somebody through there, in connection with a separate case. He happened to be on the scene when the shooting occurred. I checked with him just now if he happened to have taken a photo, and... hey presto.”

Franciscus felt a stirring inside him, a quickening of his pulse. He said, “May I speak to this person? The one who gave you the phone?”

“He’s peripheral to this case,” said Venn. “Like I say, we’re asking him about something else. He doesn’t remember anything about Kruger’s shooting. We’ve already checked. Just happened to be passing through.”

Franciscus said, “Might I ask what this other case is, that he’s involved in?”

“You can ask, but I won’t tell you,” said Venn. “It’s not germane.”

Franciscus didn’t push it. He waited while Venn forwarded the photo to the workstation computer, and craned in to study the enlarged image that appeared on the monitor.

Venn fiddled with the image, tweaking it, trying to improve the resolution. But there wasn’t much to see.

Except for the elbow sticking out over the window frame.

Franciscus narrowed his eyes.

What was that, one the forearm, high up near the elbow?

A tattoo. The details were impossible to distinguish, but the overall shape...

And things began to make sense to Franciscus.

He sat back in the chair, making it creak. “Lieutenant, there really doesn’t seem to be much to go on. I’m afraid I’ve wasted your time.”

Venn stood up. “Not really, counselor. I appreciate your help. Give me your card, and I promise I’ll call you if any new information comes to light about the Kruger killing.”

Franciscus shook hands again.

Before he left, he felt tempted to glance at the closed door. But he thought better of it, because Venn’s eyes were on his back.

Out on the street, he got into his BMW but didn’t start the engine immediately. Instead, he took out his phone and dialed.

The call was answered almost immediately, but there was no voice for a few seconds. Franciscus thought the person at the other end was somewhere public, perhaps in a meeting, and had hurried to a more private location before speaking.

“Yes?”

“Senator, we have a problem,” said Franciscus.

“W
e got a problem,” said Venn.

He’d summoned Harmony and Walter and Clune back out into the main office after Franciscus left, and stood for a moment, thinking, aware that their eyes were on him.

“So, my photo,” said Clune. “Was it any good? Did it help?”

When Franciscus had commented about people taking pictures at the crime scene, Venn had mentally cursed himself for a fool. Clune had been there, had seen Kruger getting shot. Why hadn’t he asked him if he’d captured anything on camera? To be fair, Venn had had a thousand other questions for the kid, and it was a reasonable expectation that any normal person would have volunteered spontaneously that they’d taken photos. But Clune wasn’t a normal person, as far as Venn was concerned. He was a serial liar, and little of what he said, or didn’t say, could be taken at face value.

So Venn had marched into the side office and asked Clune if he happened to have had his phone out at the time, and Clune said sure, he’d switched to camera mode automatically, just as he did whenever something interesting seemed to be going down, and he showed Venn a series of snapshots. Most were of terrible quality, blurred abstracts that couldn’t be read at all, but there was one which was of halfway decent quality.

Harmony said: “Boss? Something wrong?”

Venn came out of his reverie. “That guy just now. O’Dell’s lawyer. He saw something in the picture. Something he didn’t admit to, but it was there all right. I sensed it in his manner. He ended our meeting too abruptly, as if there was something he needed to take care of urgently.”

Venn indicated the image on the computer monitor. “See if you can spot it. Because I think I just did.”

Walter and Harmony and Clune leaned in, their eyes searching the pixellated screen.

Harmony was the first to speak. “That tattoo.”

“Yeah,” said Walter. He fished a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket, smoothed it out on the desk. It was a printout of the photo of the tattoo on Espinoza’s arm, two snakes twined round an M16 rifle. “Same goddamn shape.”

Clune grabbed the paper from Walter’s hand. He brandished it with something like triumph in his face.

“I
know
this. It’s the tattoo Salazar has. And most of the men who worked for him.”

Venn said, “The guys who grabbed you in the street market had this.”

“Yeah. On their forearms, up near the elbow. I assumed it was a gang symbol or something.”

Venn stared at his two colleagues, then walked over to a whiteboard on one wall. He picked up a Sharpie and with bold, sweeping strokes, began to draw circles with words in them, and to connect them with lines that sometimes crossed.

“Okay. Tattooed guys kill Kruger. They’re Salazar’s men. They try to kidnap Clune, because he robbed Salazar. Why do they kill Kruger? We don’t know. Maybe they know he’s had dealings with Clune. Maybe they just whack him because he was one of Flowers’ guys, and they’re mopping up, erasing everybody with links to Flowers.”

He paused, looking at what he’d drawn.

“This lawyer, Franciscus, recognizes the tattoo. He heads out of here. Why? What does the tattoo mean, and why won’t he tell me? The tattoo shows an M16. Franciscus is military, a Ranger. Is there a connection? Possibly. But lots of gangbanger symbols feature guns. There may be nothing significant in the tattoo’s design itself. What’s more important is what it represents.”

He turned to Clune. “Come on, kid.
Think.
Was there anything about these guys, Flowers and Salazar, that made them special? Anything that might interest a New York lawyer to the point that he hightails it out of a detective’s office like his ass is on fire?”

Clune pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead. “I’m thinking. I’m thinking.” He stayed silent for ten seconds, then raised his head. “Sorry. No. They were drug dealers, obviously. But beyond that... no. I don’t know anything about them.”

Walter said, “You didn’t ask, boss, but I assumed you knew what I’d say. I spent half of last night running that tattoo through every known database we have access to. I even got an ex-FBI contact of mine to do me a favor and compare it with the federal files. There was no match.”

Venn paced, sorting through the options in his head, arranging the priorities. “We need to pull Franciscus in. Find out what he saw in that photo, what the tattoo means.”

“Bust him, you mean?” said Harmony.

“Nothing to bust him for, yet,” said Venn. “I’ll call him back, tell him some new evidence has come to light and that I need him back here ASAP. In the mean time, Harm, I want you to start cross-referencing O’Dell and Kruger and the names Salazar and Oscar Flowers. It’s probably an Anglo version of Flores, so try that too.”

“Want me to help?” said Walter.

“No. We need to get the kid somewhere safe. Away from here. Salazar’s guys tailed him from here yesterday, so they might come back. Get him out, under cover, to a safe house. You got a list of those?”

“Yeah,” said Walter. “There’s a bunch of them we used to send battered women to when I worked Harlem. I can arrange for one of them to be held for us.”

“Whoah,” said Clune, staring from Venn to Walter. “You’re sending me out there? With
him
as protection?”

“Detective Sickert is an experienced officer,” said Venn. “And I gotta be places, kid. You can’t tag along with me.”

“We’ll be just fine, kid,” said Walter, his voice like a crypt door creaking open.

Venn dialed the number on the card Franciscus had given him. It went to voicemail. Venn told Franciscus he needed to meet with him again, urgently, back at the office.

By the time he’d finished, Walter was giving the kid instructions. “We get you out on the backseat, under a blanket. You stay there until I say you can come out.”

They left, Clune glancing back uncertainly at Venn. Venn shooed him along with a flick of his fingers.

He moved to look over Harmony’s shoulder, where she was bent over the computer keyboard.

“Anything yet?” he asked.

She was shaking her head in confusion. “I don’t get this,” she said.

Venn looked at the monitor. He didn’t get it either.

S
ean O’Dell – Stefan Kruger – Salazar – Oscar Flowers/Flores.

The string of keywords tripped a wire on a server located in Norfolk, Virginia, which in turn sent a signal to a board in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The operator who noted the signal made an immediate phone call on a scrambled line to an office in Washington, D.C.

The call was taken by a man named Cavendish, who was one of only six people in the nation’s capital with the necessary Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance for this particular issue.

Cavendish had wall-to-wall meetings for the rest of the day until after eight p.m. He cancelled them all.

Then he began to make calls of his own, to secure cell phone numbers throughout Washington and New York and San Antonio, Texas.

As the next fifteen minutes ticked by, the signals spread throughout the network, the parts of a well-oiled machine moving efficiently and in harmony.

One of the calls terminated in the office of the New York Police Commissioner, at One Police Plaza.

*

H
armony tried again. She typed the search words in a different order this time.

The same message came up:
Restricted access
.

“What the hell?” said Harmony.

Venn said, “Try leaving one or more of the words out. The first names, say.”

She did so. Again, the message in red.
Restricted access.

“Leave out one name at a time,” said Venn.

It produced the same result.

Harmony tried omitting pairs of names in combination. When she entered O’Dell’s and Kruger’s, a stream of data filled the screen. Kruger had rented a property from O’Dell a few months ago, and they had several mutual acquaintances.

But when Harmony tried the combination of Salazar and Oscar Flowers, once more the
Restricted access
legend came up.

“Something political,” said Venn. “It’s got to be.”

He took out his phone and dialed Captain Kang’s number. When it went to voicemail, Venn said, “Cap, I need you to get me authorization to access something on the database. I’ll explain when you call.”

At the computer, Harmony typed in Oscar Flowers’ name on its own. There were no results. When she tried Salazar – for whom they didn’t have a first name – the screen was flooded again.

“Too many people with that name,” she muttered. “Needle in a damn haystack.”

Venn’s phone rang. It was Kang.

“Yeah, Cap,” Venn began. “The database keeps freezing us out here. Can you –”

“You need to leave it alone, Joe.” Kang sounded harassed.

“Pardon me?”

“Whatever it is you’re trying to access. I’ve just had a call from the Commissioner himself. Don’t touch it. Top secret stuff.”

“The
Commissioner
?”

“He sounded like he was passing on orders from way above him,” said Kang. “Apparently you triggered some warning with a search combination you used. Whatever you’re looking at, it’s not for us. What are you looking for, by the way?”

Venn gave him a recap on everything, including Clune and his story. Kang listened without interrupting, then said: “Jesus. This guy came to your
house
?”

“Yeah. But forget that for now,” said Venn. “Listen, there’s something wrong here. I almost got killed yesterday facing these guys. If they catch the British kid they’ll kill him. They probably killed O’Dell, and certainly killed Kruger. I can’t let this go, Captain. Harmony and Walter and I are involved, like it or not.”

“Not any more, you’re not.” Kang’s voice could take on an edge when he wanted it to. “Look, Joe, I know it’s a pain in the ass. I’m a cop, too. I know how infuriating this political, Federal interference is. But we really can’t afford to screw up here. Times are tight. The funding of the Division of Special Projects is constantly up for review. We give them an excuse, they’ll shut us down.”

Venn closed his eyes in frustration. “Cap, aren’t you even curious? We bust our asses to pinch O’Dell, discover this kid Clune is connected, save his ass from those killers – and now we’re expected to just drop it all and walk away?”

“This time, yes, that’s exactly what you’ll do.” Kang paused. “Speaking of the kid.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You need to hand him over to Federal custody.”

“No, sir.”

“What?”

“He won’t talk to them. He doesn’t trust them. The only person he’ll engage with is me. God knows why, but there it is.”

Venn had never seen or heard his captain truly angry before, but he felt the venom spitting down the line.

“Whether or not he’ll talk to them isn’t my concern, or yours.
This is not our case any longer,
Venn. I can’t make myself any clearer. Understood?”