Unlucky 13 (10 page)

“Did you eat?”

“Hah. No.”

“Come on, my sweetheart. I’ll heat up some meat loaf and you can tell me all about it.”

I looked in on Julie, who was sleeping like a lamb.
Without warning, I flashed on her first months, when Joe and I were afraid that she might die—a memory that was too, too awful. I shook the thought away.

I straightened Julie’s blanket, kissed my fingers, and touched her cheek. I whispered, “Sweet dreams, baby girl.”

I turned to see Joe waiting for me outside her door.

“I turned off my phone,” he said. “And I unplugged the landline.”

“I should
turn off
my
phone, too, right?”

“How about it, Linds? Go off duty. We need some quality time, you and me.”

Turning off my phone was the easiest thing I’d done all day.

Joe served up meatloaf and green beans on a blue-and-white plate at the dining table, and he joined me in having a glass of Merlot. I asked for a refill, then attacked a bowl of pudding.

I took a long bath while Joe sat on the
toilet seat and we talked together about my day of corporate go-nowhere interrogations, Yuki and Brady’s magical honeymoon, and a scene of bloody awful domestic violence. He told me some good news. He’d been tapped for a consulting job, home-based, laptop variety.

We went to bed early in our blue bedroom with soft city lights glowing through our windows. It was a blessing to make love and not
think about the phone ringing.

And throughout it all, little Julie slept.

I WAS IN
the gym, huffing and puffing on the elliptical, when a hulking guy in a tan overcoat clumped across the red carpeting and approached me. I knew the elephant in the room. Knew him as well as I know myself.

“Boxer, hate to interrupt.” He grinned. He leered.

“This is a no-shoes zone, Jacobi.”

Warren Jacobi is my long-term friend and former partner. We spent about ten years
of day, night, and overtime shifts catching gang shootings and homicides by various means, including bathtub electrocutions and angel-of-mercy-spree executions, to name but a few.

When I was promoted to lieutenant, Jacobi teamed up with Conklin. Later I demoted myself out of the bureaucratic nightmare of squad management, and Jacobi took the lieutenant’s chair. Not too long after that, Brady
became lieutenant, and Jacobi, who had more street experience than all of us together, and who was suffering from old gunshot injuries and was also closing in on retirement, was bumped up to chief of detectives.

As chief, Jacobi was the go-to guy while Brady was on his honeymoon. I didn’t think the gym visit was a social call, but I got off the elliptical and gave him a sweaty hug anyway.

“What
brings you here, bud?”

“I’m just a messenger, Boxer.”

What the hell? What kind of message got the chief of detectives out of the office? I pulled back from the hug and scanned the creases in his face, his hooded gray eyes. Had Joe called him? Had something happened to Julie?

“Spit it out, Jacobi. What’s wrong?”

“Take it easy, Boxer. It’s nothing personal. You didn’t answer your phone.”

I
said, “So, okay. What brings you to Body Beautiful?”

He laughed. “I’m signing up so I can gawk at the spandex girls review.”

“Funny.”

“Okay. I’m running an errand for the FBI.”

“Oh. I guess my workout is over.”

“Yeah, good guess. Get dressed so we can talk in private.”

I took a quick shower, dressed PDQ, and met Jacobi in the lobby of the health club. We went out onto Folsom Street and leaned
up against the building.

Jacobi said, “There was a fatality in LA about an hour ago. A guy was having a breakfast burger in his car in
the parking lot of a fast-food joint when his stomach exploded. He was killed instantly. The glass blew out, blinding a pedestrian. There were other injuries, but only the one fatality.”

“This happened at a Chuck’s?”

“Correct. Chuck’s, Marina del Rey. Here’s
the phone number of the FBI agent who called me. Jay Beskin. We’ll get along with them better if we play nice. You want to work this case right, okay, Boxer?”

I told Jacobi that motherhood had brought out the sweetheart in me. He smirked, like
yeah, right
. We said good-bye and I called my current partner.

“Saddle up,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the Harriet Street lot, ASAP.”

CONKLIN AND I
took seats opposite Michael Jansing in his office/Chuck’s Prime museum of ads and artifacts.

Jansing, Chuck’s chief executive officer with the hay-colored hair and narrow blue eyes, glared at us over engraved plexiglass cubes, slabs, and obelisks on his desk, all trophies awarded for fast-food advertising.

I said, “Do you understand me, Mr. Jansing? The FBI is investigating
another death by Chuck’s as we speak. Do you want to help your company and cooperate with us, or should we just back off and let the Feds take you in and treat you to enhanced interrogation?”

Jansing got up from behind his desk and went to the doorway.

He said to his assistant, “Caroline, get Louis, would you?”

Jansing returned to his desk.

“My lawyer.”

“That’s fine,” said Conklin. “If that
makes you more comfortable.”

“Listen, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” I asked.

“I’m sorry. Our head of legal has something to tell you,” Jansing said.

A stooped man came through the doorway. He wore a corporate gray suit and a comb-over with a dark metallic sheen, and he had nicotine stains on the fingers of his right hand. I recognized him as one of the players at the executive Ping Pong meeting we’d
attended.

He came toward us and introduced himself again.

“Louis Frye,” he said and shook our hands before taking the chair next to Conklin.

Jansing said, “Lou, please tell these officers about the text messages.”

What was this? We hadn’t heard about any texts relating to the belly bombs. If Jansing had withheld information, he’d better have a damned fine reason or he was going to be charged
with obstruction.

“This text came from a prepaid boost phone,” Frye said. “I printed it out for you.”

He passed over a plain sheet of copy paper with a smattering of words: “Time to pay up.”

“When did you get this?” I asked.

“After the bridge bombs. It came to me,” said Lansing. “I thought it was spam. It meant nothing to me. We didn’t know that the bridge incident was related to us,” said
the
lawyer, “until the FBI descended on our Hayes Valley store.”

Frye said, “Then Michael got another text. Identical message, but they followed up the text with a phone call naming the amount. We decided to pay.”

Of course they paid. Chuck’s Prime only cared about keeping the company name off the record and out of the news.

“How much?” Conklin asked.

“Fifty thousand,” said Frye. He was slapping
at his pockets, looking for his smokes. He found a worn pack of an unfiltered brand, opened it, closed it, and put it back in his jacket pocket.

He said, “We bundled the bills in a Chuck’s Big Lunch Box and left the box in a garbage can at our Monterey location.”

Conklin said to the head cheese, “You’re telling us you believed that would be the end of it?”

“Yes. Of course. And we agreed, Lou
and I,” said Jansing. “Rather than let someone else die, we forked over the money. It seemed like the best course.”

I wanted to shout at the two suits, “You morons.”

Instead I said, “So rather than call the cops, have them monitor the transfer, you trusted a bomber, a murderer, an extortionist, when he
said
that there would be no more bombs.”

Jansing had gone pale around his eyes and mouth.
I didn’t think he was feeling remorse. More like he was realizing how much shit was about to hit the fan.

“We employ thousands of people, all of whom would be negatively impacted if the public—”

“The FBI contacted us two hours ago,” I said, cutting his self-serving spiel off at the knees. “A Chuck’s customer exploded from inside out. Happened in one of your parking lots in LA.”

I passed the
name of the FBI guy across the desk to Jansing and said, “I spoke with this gentleman, Special Agent Beskin, and he’s about to call you. I advise you to tell him everything you know. Any questions?”

CINDY WAS AT
her desk at the
Chron
, rereading her old Randy Fish files, straining them for any missed morsel of information that could lead to Morales. By 10:00 a.m. she had put down three cups of coffee and two churros, the only food groups that appealed to her in her current mood.

Apparently her body was telling her what she needed.

Henry Tyler was in Washington today, meaning Cindy
had a reprieve from a humiliating meeting where she would have to inform him that her story had gotten away from her and she wouldn’t be nominated for the Pulitzer anytime soon.

It was a conversation she
really
didn’t want to have.

Just then, a gaggle of her coworkers who were raving about a new reality dating show parked themselves in the
hallway outside her office. Cindy got up and shut the
door, and when she returned to her desk, an e-mail had arrived from
[email protected]
.

Hope sprang, leapt around, did a pirouette and a curtsy.

Hi Cindy,

Morales’s prints were found in the house, but they were dusty. So give yourself a gold star for figuring that out, anyway. Fyi, if you don’t know, there was a bank robbery in Chicago on Monday and the perp was tentatively id’d as our
friend Mac. According to what I got from our cop network, she shot and killed two people and got away with about a thousand dollars. Disappeared in plain sight, right outside of the bank. So maybe Morales was last seen in Chicago. Or maybe it was someone who looked like her.

All the best,

Pat

The few short lines felt to Cindy like bright sunshine breaking through the cloud cover after forty
days and nights of torrential rain. She’d been
right
that Morales had used the Fish house as a hideout.

And now here came a fresh lead.

Morales had staged a bank holdup and she had killed two people—both a measure of her psychopathy and of her desperation.

No question in Cindy’s mind, Morales was going to need money again soon and she would resurface.

Cindy went online, searched for “bank
robbery, Chicago” and spent the next hour reading about it in the Chicago papers. Mackie Morales wasn’t mentioned by name. Law enforcement was no doubt working according to the same principle as when Cindy had found out that the Fish house was wired with explosives.

Namely, they had to keep Morales out of the press so that she wouldn’t know that she’d been exposed.

Cindy located the videos from
the Chicago news broadcasts. Customers who had fled the bank right after the shootings had been interviewed by the local press.

Cindy noted the names, and she sent out an e-mail to the staff writers at the
Chron
, asking if anyone had contacts in the Chicago PD.

Then Cindy wrote to Henry Tyler:

To: H. Tyler

From: C. Thomas

Subject: Update Morales

Henry, Morales may have held up a bank in
Chicago and killed two people. Her name has not been released. I’m following up, digging in. More TK as I get info. Cindy.

Then Cindy wrote to Captain Lawrence, thanking him for the lead. Next, she booked a flight to Chicago.

MACKIE MORALES WAS
behind the wheel of the silver Acura she’d boosted from a parking space on State Street, a high-end shopping street in Chicago’s Loop. Well, she’d seen the keys in the trunk lock, so the Acura’s owner was definitely a dummy, probably still wondering where she’d parked the car, and would take her time to report the theft.

Meanwhile, as Mackie set out due west, she
and Randy had had some laughs. He said,
Sometimes life hands you dummies
.

“Good one, lover.”

When Mackie stopped for gas in Bettendorf, Iowa, two and a half hours west of Chicago, she found the dummy’s peacoat in the trunk. She transferred her gun from her
blue trench to the dummy’s felt coat and stuffed her own coat into the trash bin near the pumps.

About that time, she also found a pair
of leather gloves in the pocket of the peacoat, very handy, and about sixteen dollars in ones and coins. It would have been great if the dummy had had some real cash in the car, but there had been a package of Oreos in the console and Mackie had been glad for those.

Now, after several cash purchases—gas and snack and dinner in a truck stop outside Cheyenne—Mackie was keeping to the speed limit
on the interstate, cutting through the barren plains of southern Wyoming. She was looking for a good radio signal and a clear road with no cops. Instead, she saw a figure on the side of the road near the Laramie on-ramp.

As she drew closer, she saw that the figure was a young woman wearing jeans and a denim jacket. She had long dark hair and held a piece of cardboard with a sign written in marker,
reading R
OCK
S
PRINGS
.

Randy’s type. To a T.

Mackie slowed the Acura to a stop, and the girl picked up her backpack and ran toward the car.

Mackie buzzed down the window.

The girl said, “Hi, wow, thanks for stopping. How far can you take me?”

“I’m driving to Portland,” Mackie said. “I can take you all the way.”

“Oh, that would be great. Thanks.”

The long-haired girl took a bottle of water
from her backpack. Mackie saw the finger marks on her wrists just
before the girl pulled her jacket sleeves down to hide the bruises.

“I’m Leila,” she said.

“I’m Hannah,” said Mackie, picking a name out of the air. “Leila, sorry to be nosy, but why are you hitching this late at night?”

“Oh, boyfriend trouble. I was visiting my, well, I guess he’s my ex now, at the University of Wyoming.”