Kay Scarpet - The Last Precinct Part 25

CHAPTER 23.

WE HEAD EAST ON ROUTE 5 AND I AM MINDFUL of the time. Even if I could conjure up Lucy's helicopter, I would never make it back to Anna's house by two. I pull out my wallet and find the card Berger wrote her phone numbers on. There is no answer at her hotel, and I leave a message for her to pick me up at six P.M. Marino is silent as I slip the cell phone back inside my satchel. He stares straight ahead, his truck rumbling loudly along the winding, narrow road. He is processing what I just told him about the baby carriage. Bev Kiffin, of course, lied to us.

"The whole thing out there, wow," he finally says, shaking his head. "Talk about a creepy feeling. Like there were all these eyes watching everything we were doing. Like that place has a whole life of its own n.o.body knows nothing about."

"She knows," I reply. "She knows something. That much is obvious, Marino. She made a point of telling us the baby carriage was left by the people who abandoned the campsite. She volunteered that without pause. Wanted us to think it. Why?"

"Those people don't exist, whoever was supposedly staying out in that tent. If the hairs turn out to be Chandonne's, then I'm gonna have to entertain the idea she let him stay out there, and that's why she got all hinky about it.

The vision of Chandonne showing up at her motel office and asking for a place to stay for the night shorts out my imagination. I can't picture it. Le Loup-Garou, as he calls himself, would not take such a chance. His modus operandi, as we know it, was not to show up at anyone's door unless he intended to murder and maul that person. As we know it. As we know it, I keep thinking. The truth is, we know less than we did two weeks ago. "We have to start all over," I tell Marino. "We've defined someone without information, and now what? We made the mistake of profiling him and then believing our projection. Well, there are dimensions to him we've completely missed, and even though he's locked up, he isn't."

Marino gets out his cigarettes.

"Do you understand what I'm saying?" I go on. "In our arrogance, we decided what he's like. Based it on scientific evidence and came up with what, in truth, is an a.s.sumption. A caricature. He's not a werewolf. He's a human being, and no matter how evil he is, he has many facets, and now we're finding them. h.e.l.l, it was obvious on the videotape. Why are we so d.a.m.n slow on the uptake? I don't want Vander going to that motel alone."

"Good point." Marino reaches for the phone. "I'll go to the motel with him and you can take my truck back to Richmond."

"There was someone in the doorway," I say. "Did you see him? He was big."

"Huh," he says. "I didn't see anyone. Just the little kid, what's his name? Zack. And the dog."

"I saw someone else," I insist.

"I'll check it out. You got Vander's number?"

I give it to him and he calls. Vander is already on his way and his wife gives Marino a cell phone number. I stare out the window at wooded residential developments with large Colonial homes set back far from the streets. Elegant Christmas decorations shine through trees.

"Yeah, there's some strange s.h.i.t out there," Marino is telling Vander by cell phone. "So yours truly here's gonna be your bodyguard." He ends the call and we are quiet for a moment. Last night seems to fill the rumbling s.p.a.ce between us in the truck.

"How long have you known?" I finally ask Marino one more time, not at all satisfied with what he told me in Anna's driveway when I walked him out to his truck after midnight. "When exactly did Righter tell you he was instigating a special grand jury investigation and what was his reason?"

"You hadn't even finished her d.a.m.n autopsy yet." Marino lights a cigarette. "Bray was still on your table, to be exact. Righter gets me on the phone and says he don't want you doing her post, and I tell him, 'So what you want me to do? Walk in the morgue and order her to drop her scalpel and put her hands up in the air?' The dumb s.h.i.t." Marino blows out smoke as my dismay folds into a scary shape inside my brain. "That's why he didn't ask your permission to come snoop around your house, either," Marino adds.

The snooping part, at least, I had already figured out.

"He wanted to see if the cops came across anything." He pauses to tap an ash. "Like a chipping hammer. Especially one with maybe Bray's blood on it."

"The one he tried to attack me with may very well have her blood on it," I reply reasonably, calmly as anxiety inches through me.

"Problem is, the hammer with her blood on it was found in your house," Marino reminds me of a fact.

"Of course it was. He brought it to my house so he could use it on me."

"And yeah, it does have her blood on it," Marino keeps talking. "They already did the DNA. Never seen the labs move so fast as they are these days, and you can guess why. The governor's got his eye on everything going onin case his chief medical examiner turns out to be some whacko murderer." He sucks on the cigarette and glances over at me. "And another thing, Doc. Don't know if Berger might have mentioned this to you. But the chipping hammer you say you bought at the hardware store? It ain't been found."

"What?" I am incredulous, then furious.

"So the only one at your house is the one with Bray's blood on it. One hammer. Found at your house. And it's got Bray's blood." He makes his point, not without some reluctance.

"You know why I bought that hammer," I reply as if my argument is with him. "I wanted to see if it matched up with the pattern of her injuries. And it was definitely in my house. If it wasn't there when you guys went through everything, then either you overlooked it or someone took it."

"You remember where you had it last?"

"I used it in the kitchen on chicken to see what the injuries looked like, and also what kind of pattern the coiled handle would leave if I put something on it and pressed the handle against paper."

"Yeah, we found pounded-up chicken in the garbage. And a pillowcase with barbecue sauce on it, like maybe from your rolling the handle around." He doesn't think such an experiment is odd. He knows I engage in a lot of unusual research when I am trying to figure out what happened to somebody. "But no chipping hammer. We didn't find that. Not with or without barbecue sauce," Marino goes on. "So I'm wondering if a.s.shole Talley swiped it. Maybe you ought to get Lucy and Teun to turn their secret squirrel organization on him and see what they find out, huh? The Last Precinct's first big investigation. I'd like to ran a credit check on the b.a.s.t.a.r.d and see where he gets all his money from, for starters."

I keep glancing at my watch, timing our drive. The subdivision where Mitch Barbosa lived is ten minutes from The Fort James Motel. Taupe clapboard townhouses are new and there is no vegetation, just raw earth sprinkled with dead young gra.s.s and patched with snow. I recognize unmarked police vehicles in the lot when we pull in, three Ford Crown Victorias and a Chevrolet Lumina parked in a row. It doesn't escape my attention or Marino's that two of these vehicles have Washington, D.C., plates.

"Oh s.h.i.t," Marino says. "I smell the feds. Oh boy," he says to me as we park, "this ain't good."

I notice a curious detail as Marino and I follow the brick walkway to the townhouse where Barbosa lived with his alleged girlfriend. Through an upstairs window I see a fishing rod. It leans against the gla.s.s, and I don't know why it strikes me as out of place except that this isn't the time of year for fishing, just as it isn't the time of year for camping. Again, I think of the mysterious if not mythical people who fled the campground, leaving behind many of their possessions. I return to Bev Kiffin's lie and feel I am moving deeper into a dangerous airs.p.a.ce where there are forces I can't see or understand moving at incredible speeds. Marino and I wait at the front door of townhouse D, and he rings the bell again.

Detective Stanfield answers and greets us distractedly, his eyes darting everywhere. Tension between him and Marino is a wall between them. "Sorry I didn't make it by the motel," he announces curtly as he steps aside to let us in. "Something's come up. You'll see that in a minute," he promises. He is in gray corduroys and a heavy wool sweater, and he won't meet my eyes, either. I am not sure if this is because he knows how I feel about his leaking information to his brother-in-law, Representative Dinwiddie, or if there is some other reason. It flashes across my thoughts that he might know I am being investigated for murder. I try not to think about that reality. It serves no good purpose to worry right now. "Everybody's upstairs," he says, and we follow him up.

"Who's everybody?" Marino asks.

Our feet thud quietly on carpet. Stanfield keeps moving. He doesn't turn around or pause when he replies, "ATF and the FBI."

I notice framed photographs arranged on the wall to the left of the staircase and take a moment to peruse them, recognizing Mitch Barbosa grinning with tipsy-looking people in a bar and hanging out the window of the cab of a transfer truck. In one photograph, he is sunbathing in a bikini on a tropical beach, maybe Hawaii. He holds up a drink, toasting the person behind the camera. Several other poses are with a pretty woman, perhaps the girlfriend he lives with, I wonder. Halfway up is a landing and the window the fishing pole leans against.

I stop, a strange sensation lightly whispering across my flesh as I examine, without touching, a Shakespeare fibergla.s.s rod and Shimano reel. A hook and split-shot weights are attached to the fishing line, and on the carpet next to the rod's handle is a small blue plastic tackle box. Nearby, as if set down when someone entered the townhouse, are two empty Rolling Rock beer bottles, a new pack of Tiparillo cigars and some change. Marino turns around to see what I am doing. I join him at the top of the stairs and we emerge into a brightly lit living area that is attractively decorated in spare modern furniture and Indian rugs.

"When's the last time you went fishing?" I ask Marino.

"Not freshwater," he replies. "Not around here these days."

"Exactly." I am cut off by an awareness that I know one of the three people standing near the picture window in the living room. My heart jumps when the familiar dark head turns to me and suddenly I am facing Jay Talley. He doesn't smile, his glance sharp as if his eyes are tipped like arrows. Marino makes a barely audible noise that is like a groan from a small, primitive animal. It is his way of letting me know that Jay is the last person he wants to see. Another man in a suit and tie is young and looks Hispanic, and when he sets down his coffee cup, his jacket falls open and reveals a shoulder holster holding a large caliber pistol.

The third person is a woman. She doesn't demonstrate the devastated, confused demeanor of a person whose lover has just been killed. She is upset, yes. But her emotions are well contained beneath the surface, and I recognize the flare in her eyes and angry set of her jaw. I have seen the look in Lucy, in Marino and others who are more than bereft when something bad happens to a person they care about. Cops. Cops are offended and in an eye for an eye mode when something happens to one of their own. Mitch Barbosa's girlfriend, I suspect right away, is law enforcement, probably undercover. In a matter of minutes, the scenario has dramatically shifted.

"This is Bunk Pruett, FBI." Stanfield makes introductions. "Jay Talley, ATF" Jay shakes my hand as if we have never met. "And Jilison Mclntyre." Her handshake is cool but firm. "Ms. Mclntyre's ATF"

We find chairs and arrange them so all of us can look at each other and talk. The air is hard. It is flinty with anger. I recognize the mood. I have seen it so many times when a cop is killed. Now that Stanfield has set the stage, he slips behind a curtain of sullen silence. Bunk Pruett takes charge, typical FBI. "Dr. Scarpetta, Captain Marino," Pruett begins. "I want to state the obvious right off. This is highly, highly sensitive. To be honest, I hate saying anything about what's going on, but you got to know what you're dealing with." His jaw muscles bunch. "Mitch Barbosa iswasundercover FBI, working a big investigation here in this area, which now of course we have to dismantle, at least to a certain degree."

"Drugs and guns," Jay says, glancing from Marino to me.["_Toc37098926"]

CHAPTER 24.

IS INTERPOL INVOLVED?" I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY Jay Talley is here. Barely two weeks ago, he was working in France.

"Well, you should know," Jay says with a trace of sarcasm, or maybe I imagine it. "The unidentified case you just contacted Interpol about, the guy who died in the motel down the road? We have an idea who he might be. So yes, Interpol's involved. Now we are. You bet."

"I wasn't aware we'd gotten a response from Interpol." Marino barely tries to be civil to Jay. "So you're telling me the guy from the motel's some sort of international fugitive, maybe?"

"Yes," Jay replies. "Rosso Matos, twenty-eight-year-old native of Colombia, as in South America. Last seen in Los Angeles. Also known as the Cat because he's such a quiet guy when he goes in and out of places, killing. That's his specialty. Taking people out, a hit man. Matos has a reputation for liking very expensive clothes, carsand young men. I guess I need to talk about him in the past tense." Jay pauses. No one responds beyond looking at him. "What none of us understands is what he was doing here in Virginia," Jay adds.

"What exactly is the operation here?" Marino asks Jilison Mclntyre.

"Started four months ago with a guy speeding along Route Five just a couple miles from here. A James City cop pulls him." She glances at Stanfield. "Runs his tag and finds out he's a convicted felon. Plus the officer happens to notice the handle of a long gun protruding from under a blanket in the back seat, turns out to be a MAK-90 with the serial number ground off. Our labs in Rockville managed to restore the SN and traced the weapon to a shipment from Chinaa regular shipment to Richmond. As you know, a MAK-90's a popular knock-off of the AK-47 a.s.sault rifle, going rate of a thousand, two thousand bucks on the street. Gang members love the MAK, made in China, regularly shipped to local ports in Richmond, Norfolk, legitly in crates accurately marked. Other MAKs are being smuggled in from Asia along with heroin, in all kinds of crates marked everything from electronics to Oriental rugs."

In an all-business voice that only occasionally reveals the strain she feels, Mclntyre describes a smuggling ring that, in addition to area ports, involves the James City County trucking company where Barbosa was undercover as a driver and she was undercover as his girlfriend. He got her a job in the company's office, where bills of lading and invoices were falsified to disguise a very lucrative operation that also involves cigarettes en route from Virginia to New York and other destinations in the Northeast. Some weapons are being sold through a dirty gun dealer in this area, but a lot of them end up in backroom sales at gun shows, and we all know how many gun shows Virginia has, Mclntyre says.

"What's the name of the trucking company?" Marino asks.

"Overland."

Marino's eyes dart to me. He runs his fingers through his thinning hair. "Christ," he says to everyone. "That's who Bev Kiffin's husband works for. Jesus Christ."

"The lady who owns and runs The Fort James Motel," Stanfield explains to the others.

"Overland's a big company and not everybody is involved in illegal activity." Pruett is quick to be objective. "That's what makes this so tough. The company and most people in it are legit. So you could pull their trucks all day and never find anything hot inside a single one of them. Then on another day, a shipload of paper products, televisions, whatever, heads out and stashed inside boxes are a.s.sault rifles and drugs."

"You think someone put the dime on Mitch?" Marino asks Pruett. "And the bad guys decided to whack him?"

"If so, then why is Matos dead, too?" It is Jay who speaks. "And it appears Matos died first, right?" He looks at me. "He's found dead in these really weird circ.u.mstances, in a motel right down the road. Then the next day, Mitch's body is dumped in Richmond. Plus, Matos is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. I don't see what his interest would be hereeven if someone out there dimed Mitch, you don't send in a hit man like Matos. He's pretty much reserved for big prey in powerful crime organizations, guys hard to get to because they are surrounded by their own heavily armed thugs."

"Who does Matos work for?" Marino asks. "Do we know that?"

"Whoever will pay," Pruett replies.

"He's all over the map," Jay adds. "South America, Europe, this country. He's not a.s.sociated with any one network or cartel, but is a lone operator. You want someone taken out, you hire Matos."

"Then someone hired him to come here," I conclude.

"We have to a.s.sume that," Jay replies. "I don't think he was in the area to check out Jamestown or the Christmas decorations in Williamsburg."

"We also know he didn't kill Mitch Barbosa," Marino adds. "Matos was already dead and on the Doc's table before Mitch went out jogging."

There are nods around the room. Stanfield is picking at a fingernail. He looks lost in s.p.a.ce, extremely uncomfortable. He keeps wiping sweat off his brow and drying his fingers on his pants. Marino asks Jilison Mclntyre to tell us exactly what happened.

"Mitch likes to run midday, before lunch," she begins. "He went out close to noon and didn't come back. This was yesterday. I went out in the car looking for him around two o'clock and when there was still no sign, I called the police, and of course, our guys. ATF and FBI. Agents came in from the field and started looking, too. Nothing. We know he was spotted in the area of the law school."

"Marshall-Wythe?" I inquire, taking notes.

"Right, at William and Mary. Mitch usually ran the same route, from here along Route Five, then over on Francis Street and to South Henry, then back. Usually an hour or so."

"Do you remember what he was wearing and what he might have had with him?" I ask her.

"Red warm-up suit and a vest. He had on a down vest over his warm-up. Uh, gray, North Face. And his b.u.t.t pack. He never went anywhere without his b.u.t.t pack."

"He had a gun in it?" Marino a.s.sumes.

She nods, swallowing, face stoical. "Gun, money, portable phone. House keys."

"He wasn't wearing the down jacket when his body was found," Marino informs her. "No b.u.t.t pack. Describe the key."

"Keys," she corrects him. "He has the key for here, for the townhouse, and his car key on a steel ring."

"What does the key for your townhouse look like?" I ask, and I feel Jay staring at me.

"Just a bra.s.s key. A normal-looking key."

"He had a stainless steel key in the pocket of his running shorts," I say. "It has two-three-three written on it in permanent Magic Marker."

Agent Mclntyre frowns. She knows nothing about it. "Well now, that's really strange. I have no idea what that key might be to," she replies.

"So we gotta figure he was taken somewhere," Marino says. "He was tied up, gagged, tortured, then driven to Richmond and dumped in the street in one of our lovely projects, Mosby Court."

"Hot drug-trafficking area?" Pruett asks him.

"Oh yeah. The projects are big into economic development. Guns and drugs. You bet." Marino knows his turf. "But the other nice thing about places like Mosby Court is people don't see nothing. You want to dump a body, don't matter if fifty people were standing right there. They get temporary blindness, amnesia."

"Someone familiar with Richmond, then," Stanfield finally offers an opinion.

Mclntyre's eyes are wide. She has a stricken expression on her face. "I didn't know about torture," she says to me. Her professional resolve shivers like a tree about to fall.

I describe Barbosa's burns and go into detail about the burns Matos had, as well. I talk about the evidence of ligatures and gags, and then Marino talks about the eyebolts in the motel room ceiling. All present get the picture. Everyone can envision what was done to these two men. We have to suspect the same person or persons are involved in their deaths. But this doesn't begin to tell us who or why. We don't know where Barbosa was taken, but I have an idea.

"When you go back there with Vander," I say to Marino, "maybe you ought to check out the other rooms, see if another one has eyebolts in the ceiling."

"Will do. Got to go back there anyway." He glances at his watch.

"Today?" Jay asks him.

"Yup."

"You got any reason to think Mitch was drugged like the first guy?" Pruett asks me.

"I didn't find any needle marks," I reply. "But we'll see what comes up on his tox results."

"Jesus," Mclntyre mutters.

"And both of them wet their pants?" Stanfield says. "Doesn't that happen when people die? They lose control of their bladders and wet their pants? Just a natural thing, in other words?"

"I can't say losing urine is rare. But the first man, Matos, took his clothes off. He was nude. It appears he wet his pants and then disrobed."

"So that was before he got burned," Stanfield says.