Troubleshooter Read online

  Malane sat with both hands run into his thin hair; it protruded in tufts from between his fingers. “I can’t fucking believe I missed it,” he said, for not the first time. “We’re dead-ended. All fronts.” He lifted his head, a movement that seemed to require great effort. “We’ll have to dismantle the Sinners’s drug-distribution network, hope to seize the AT in batches as we go. It’s not much of a plan, but it’s all we have.”

  “At least we’ve got Uncle Pete nailed,” another agent said.

  Smiles continued to review Uncle Pete’s seized financials. “These figures are ridiculous. Uncle Pete reported nineteen grand last year, but he drives a”—he turned aside the tax return and pulled out a yellow vehicle-purchase order—“seventy-nine thousand dollar Lexus LS 430.”

  A youthful agent said, “No shit? That ride cost seventy-nine grand?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Smiles said. “Our boy needed chrome wheels, air purifier, headlamp washers, voice-command nav system, headrest massager—”

  Tim bolted forward, snatching the document from Smiles.

  Smiles held up his hands, feigning offense. “Is that any way to—”

  Tim slapped the piece of paper with the back of his hand and looked up at the staring faces around the central table. Bear lowered the phone to his broad chest, his head cocked like a dog deciphering a bird call.

  Tim said, “We need Pete Krindon.”

  62

  Tim, Bear, and Guerrera waited in a pool of streetlight yellow outside the police impound lot. Bear heaved a sigh, and Guerrera rubbed his eyes. It was 9:45 P.M., and they’d been waiting on Pete Krindon since eight.

  Bear clicked his teeth bitterly and said, “Here’s where I wish I smoked.”

  A low-rider thumped by, the sunglasses-adorned driver bouncing his head to the beat, going for tough but looking more like a displeased chicken. He turned and stared at them, not breaking eye contact until his face drifted from view.

  “Reminds me of home.” Guerrera’s smirk flashed, tensing his soft features, and then he stared out at the dark street, his eyes troubled.

  Bear jerked his head to indicate the young deputy. When Tim responded with a shrug, Bear widened his own eyes imploringly. Tim returned the glare, exasperated.

  “Rey,” Tim finally said. “How you doing? About the shooting?”

  “Fine. No big deal.” Guerrera scraped his teeth with his tongue, then spit on the curb and stepped away. Discussion over.

  Bear waved off Tim’s palms-up hand gesture.

  A van parked at a meter up the block, elegant lettering proclaiming RUDOLPHO PAGATINI CATERING. The driver hopped out, straightened his waiter’s apron over his tuxedo, and headed toward them in a stiff, formal gait.

  “You gotta be shittin’ me,” Bear said.

  Because of his coiffed hair, sleek mustache, and wire-rim glasses, Pete Krindon wasn’t recognizable until he was within feet of them.

  Bear said, “I’ll have a ham on rye.”

  “How about you try the South Beach Diet instead.” Krindon nodded toward the garage. “Let’s get this done. I’m on a job.”

  “What? Serving meatballs to Lady and the Tramp?”

  “Very funny, Rack. Move it.”

  Krindon trailed behind them as they headed to the security station. The guard looked up from a roast beef sandwich, a line of mayo fringing his mustache. As Tim explained their purpose, the guard’s eyes took in the three displayed badges, then came to rest on Krindon’s waiter’s apron. His forehead wrinkled. “The fuck is this?”

  “He’s with us.”

  The guard tossed a clipboard down on the brief counter. “He’s gotta sign in. You all gotta sign in.”

  “He’s a freelance consultant,” Tim said. “He doesn’t sign.”

  From the warped radio on the counter, an AM deejay, revved up on caffeine and zealotry, ranted about Syria’s weapons of mass destruction. The guard folded his arms and leaned back on his stool. “Can’t let him in if he doesn’t sign.”

  Krindon leaned forward and scribbled on the form. As he drew back, Tim read the cursive scrawl: Herbert Hoover.

  “All set?”

  The guard’s glance lifted from the signature to Tim’s face. Then he broke eye contact with an it’s-not-worth-it expression of disgust and waved them through.

  They found Uncle Pete’s Lexus in a dark back corner. Locked.

  Tim, Bear, and Guerrera debated who would have to go back to retrieve the keys from the irritable guard, but then they heard the door click open, and Krindon returned a decoding transmitter to his pocket and slid into the driver’s seat. The car had been towed, the front seat still way back to accommodate Uncle Pete’s girth, so Krindon had plenty of room to maneuver. He tugged up the leg of his formalwear, revealing a slim jim tucked into a garter. He angled the thin metal bar beneath the box of the navigation system, then pulled a corkscrew from his apron and used it for leverage.

  The unit was well ensconced. After some directed jiggling, Krindon paused to wipe his brow. “I can usually get you down within a two-block radius. These nav systems are on satellite networks, so they trip sites like mobile phones or wireless modems. Same Orwellian shit.”

  Guerrera said, “So anyone can find out where a car’s been?”

  “No, not anyone.” Krindon made an angry noise and turned back to the navigation system. “Nothing’s ever truly deleted in a computer system. Only the pointers to the data get wiped out. But that data’s in there. You just have to know how to find it. And to know how to find it … well, you have to be me.” He jiggled the unit, and it finally gave, sliding into his lap. “So you want to trace Uncle Pete’s footsteps. What are you looking for? A crash pad?”

  “Or a safe house, a hangout, a business front, a meth lab,” Tim said. “Anywhere Den Laurey could be laying his head in a back room. He’s a little too recognizable right now to check in to a Best Western.”

  “How far back you want me to go?”

  “Give us the last six months.”

  “Den Laurey’s prison break was only six days ago.”

  “But this is Uncle Pete’s car. I doubt he’s visited Den since the prison break—I’m just hoping we can put together a list of Sinner-friendly locations and go from there.”

  Krindon tucked the nav unit under his arm and closed the car door behind him.

  Guerrera said, “We’d better lock the door agai—”

  Krindon’s hand tensed in his pocket, and the Lexus’s locks clicked. He turned and walked away, his shadow stretched long in the dim light. Over his shoulder he said, “I’ll be in touch.”

  63

  Though he doubted that Den would be dumb enough to play Hollywood stalker, Tim entered his house cautiously and safed each room, then double-locked the doors and closed the blinds. He kept the lights off.

  He called Smiles and Malane and filled them in, coordinating activities for the morning. He hoped they’d be able to come up with enough leads to construct a new game plan.

  The answering machine was maxed out. After the seventh media call, Tim pressed the “erase” button and held it down. When the case settled, he’d change the number. Again.

  He opened the refrigerator door, grimacing against the waft of spoiled food. He cleaned it out, throwing away the perishables, and returned to see what he was left with. An onion, a jar of jalapeño mustard, a bottle of Newman’s Own, two strawberry Crushes, and one turkey Lunchable.

  He arranged the Crush and the turkey crackers on the silver tray as he had for Dray the night before her encounter with Den Laurey, then stood in the dark kitchen, unsure where to take himself. The TV’s light would broadcast that he was home, so he ate at the kitchen table in the dark. Though he was accustomed to eating alone when Dray worked P.M. shifts, the new reality of his home life made even this simple activity a painful one. His mood grew heavy; it became evident why he’d spent virtually no time at home since Dray was shot. If he kept moving, he didn’t feel as keenly. But now, with the trails gone
cold and Pete Krindon working the sole lead on a freelancer’s schedule, he had no choice but to be still. A childish longing struck him, but he knew that sleeping beside her at the hospital would be nothing more than an addictive falsehood.

  At least half of Tim’s child-size meal wound up in the trash. On his walk down the hall, he paused outside the nursery and, without looking over, pulled the door closed. In the bedroom he picked up Dray’s sweats, folded them neatly, and set them on a shelf on her side of their shared closet. Each of her outfits, filled out by a hanger and gravity, matched an evening out, a mood, a mental snapshot. Navy blue button-up with a ketchup stain on the right sleeve—Dray pouty after consecutive gutter balls, drinking Bud from a bottle shaped like a bowling pin. Morro Bay sweatshirt—a pre-stirrups grimace before her last OB checkup two weeks ago. Yellow dress with tiny blue flowers—the first night they’d met, at a fireman’s charity. She’d worn it again the morning she’d come to meet him at the courthouse to take him home.

  An empty house and a full closet were only part of what Den Laurey had left in his wake, but Tim felt it as an utter and profound devastation. Marisol Juarez’s grandmother, knocking around her tiny apartment by the dim light of her Advent candles, felt her granddaughter’s absence the same way. We’ll do our best, Tim had promised her, and Marisol had wound up split open on a warehouse floor. Her death had been a matter of timing and chance, just as countless variables had aligned to land the pellet at the back of Dray’s rib cage. He wondered how, if he had to, he’d wrap his mind around the loss of his wife. If he’d learned one thing from Ginny’s death, it was that—despite all certainty to the contrary—he’d persist. Like the Northern Alliance fighter he’d seen through the blaze of the midday Kandahar sun, stumbling along a treeless ridge with blood streaming from both ears, carrying his own severed arm. He’d be separated from himself, diminished, but he’d stagger on.

  He slid into bed, occupying only his half. His exhaustion was overpowering. He had only a moment to be thankful for that petty mercy before slipping into sleep.

  When he woke up six hours later, a stack of computer printouts was waiting on the foot of his bed.

  64

  Tim had entered the squad room carrying the pages triumphantly. His energy proved contagious, and virtually all the other deputies had pulled chairs around his desk to dig back into the case. In the printouts Krindon had broken down the Lexus’s headings into five-minute snapshots, yielding a profusion of numbers, but still it took maps, a military GPS computer program, and trial-and-error strategy to evaluate the data. In some places Krindon had pegged the area to within a hundred feet, in others within a few blocks. Not until lunch did they start connecting the dots to figure out travel routes, which they then harmonized with the street maps and traced with red pens. Tim Sharpie-marked as potential destinations anywhere that no movement was recorded between snapshots, but this assumption didn’t account for traffic and was further complicated by the fact that satellite towers were not closely spaced in rural areas.

  At 2:15, Jim looked up at the wall clock and said, “It’s been a week. Since Den Laurey’s escape. Since Frankie.”

  They returned to the data with newfound vigor. Routes overlapped, but Uncle Pete proved to be surprisingly mobile. It quickly became plain that they had more leads than they could parse in a feasible time frame. Even once they carved up the routes between deputy teams and pulled in the FBI, they looked to be weeks away from completing the follow-up, and if Tim knew one thing, it was that they didn’t have weeks. Den Laurey would likely lie low until his face was off the front page and the news teasers; then he’d slip away to an ironically named desert town where cash was king and anonymity the rule.

  Tim was just resigning himself to the new set of frustrations when Bear floated out of Miller’s office holding a sheaf of faxes aloft like a waiter bearing a steaming entrée. “Do you know what I have here?”

  Jim, gamely matching his tone: “Why, no, Bear. What have you there?”

  “Here, my little friends, I have a set of billing records, sent to us by our dear friend at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Jeffrey Malane.”

  Tim felt his heart quicken.

  “And to whom, Mr. Jowalski,” Jim asked, “do those billing records belong?”

  “To one Dana Lake, Esq. And do you know what lawyers bill for?”

  Miller, thrice divorced, said, “Everything.”

  “Including phone calls.” Bear threw the sheaf on Tim’s desk, and Tim grabbed the top page eagerly. It was in spreadsheet format, the auto-spit-out of a computer billing program attached to Dana’s phone system.

  DL Telephone Conferences 11/4 Laughing Sinners, Inc.

  Time Number Description Hrs.

  10–10:14 A.M. (661) 975-2332 Scheduling .25

  1–1:28 P.M. (818) 996-0007 Doc review .5

  5:37–7:02 P.M. (805) 437-3178 Confidential 1.5

  The pages, maybe a hundred in all, were filled with type and red-stamped lawyer-client materials. Between providing legal counsel and coordinating the drug-exchange and money-laundering operation, Dana was in constant touch with her number-one clients. And, Tim hoped, with Den Laurey.

  “If there’s one thing you can count on,” Miller said, “it’s that a lawyer will bill. Precisely and relentlessly.”

  Tim hit the speaker button on his phone and dialed the first number from the top page, letting it ring and ring. Finally a puzzled voice answered, “Hello?”

  “This a pay phone?” Tim asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Where?”

  “I dunno.” Confused pause. “Valencia.”

  “Look around. You see a sign?”

  “Tipper’s Liquors.”

  “Thanks.”

  As the deputies set about scrutinizing the records, they discovered that though plenty of the calls went into the mother chapter and Sinner-owned businesses, many were to pay phones. The pay-phone calls were most commonly made precisely at the hour or half hour, consistent with prearrangement. It was not uncommon for those numbers to repeat throughout, probably corresponding to pay phones convenient to Sinner haunts, operations, or safe houses. Dana had logged a lot of hours talking to Sinners who didn’t want their locations known.

  Nomads.

  It took the entire Escape Team and half of the Probation/Parole Team nearly three hours to attach an address to each phone number and to cross-reference the locations on the maps bearing the data from Uncle Pete’s sat-nav box. A profusion of purple dots now spread across the master street map, laid on a spaghetti bed of red-pen routes. They wound up with just over a hundred strong leads. Prioritizing the locations proved less time-consuming. Guerrera ranked them in rough order based on his feel for biker routes and habits, and the hottest overlaps— places where the black dots of Uncle Pete’s destinations appeared to be within blocks of a Dana Lake–called pay phone. Tim put in a quick call to Malane, who promised three two-man teams for the first shift.

  When he hung up, all the deputies were looking at him. “Okay, everyone takes eight leads. Me, Bear, and Guerrera’ll take sixteen since we’re a three-man team.”

  Jim cleared his throat uncomfortably, met Tim’s eyes, then looked away. Light duty had been killing him; he seemed eager to hit the streets. The abrasions on his face from the shattered windshield glass had mostly healed, leaving slivers of scabs. His right ear had recovered nominal hearing.

  “Gimme a sec, guys.” Tim beckoned Guerrera out into the hall. “What’s up, socio?”

  “You and Jim can give us another team. We need the numbers.”

  Guerrera’s lower jaw slid out level with his top. A few days’ worth of stubble darkened his face.

  “You have a problem with that?”

  “I’d rather stay with you and Bear.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t need to baby-sit Jim.”

  “Maybe you do. Maybe not. But I need you to.”

  “Okay.” Guerrera’s eyes stayed on the flo
or tile. “Okay.”

  “You gonna be cool?”

  “I’m gonna be cool.”

  “Unless you have to be not cool.”

  “Thass ride.” The accent amped up with his defensiveness.

  Tim headed back in and said to Jim, “We need you in the field, too.”

  Jim’s face shifted. He nodded at Tim, took a deep breath, and rose. A few of the guys tugged on Kevlar vests beneath their shirts. The others rustled, checking their clips, their boot laces, the batteries in their flashlights.

  Tim pulled Guerrera aside again. “We have to split our top sixteen. Me and Bear should take one through eight. I’m thinking the locations closest to the Sinner clubhouse.” He indicated the scattering of numbers corresponding to pay phones on the outskirts of Fillmore and Simi. “That leaves you and Jim with the grouping around Kaner’s safe house.”

  “How come Guerrera gets nine through sixteen?” Thomas asked sharply from across the room.

  “Because Guerrera’s been running the case with us from the gates,” Tim said.

  Guerrera touched Tim’s elbow. “Listen, Rack, if you want the highest-odds locations, you should take the ones near Kaner’s safe house. Den would want to hole up near another nomad.”

  “More than he’d want proximity to the mother chapter?”

  “That’s right.”

  Tim studied Guerrera closely, for the first time unable to read his dark eyes. “You’re the expert.”

  The other deputies paired off and took their leads, and then everyone was silent for a moment beneath the quiet rasp of the heater.

  Tannino, who’d appeared sometime in the past hour to lean crossarmed against the doorframe and watch with a sort of paternal pride, said, “You know who you’re dealing with here. Watch your partner’s back and use your judgment. I don’t want to preside over another funeral.”