Blond Cargo (25 page)

Philippe Vargas looked imperious in his gray pinstripe Armani suit, commenting on the fine work as if he had come up with the cutting-edge design himself.

Raul sat mute, pleased he had forced his father’s hand. Malic was now a full equity partner in Vargas Development Group. His job was to protect the flow of money and guarantee the financial feasibility of all future projects.

After Philippe’s frosty introduction of Malic as the newest member of the Spring Street team, Malic induced a slight thaw in the proceedings by suggesting the project be renamed Vargas Towers.

Malic’s cell phone vibrated, and when he looked at the incoming message his smile was wiped clean. It was a 911 text from Hassan, who knew better than to interrupt his boss unless it was a dire emergency.

Malic didn’t hear the end of the presentation. It became white noise as he rolled around the possibilities of what had gone wrong. But he stood at the appropriate time, shook hands with the architectural team, and then politely excused himself.

Malic had his cell phone pressed to his ear before his office door closed behind him. He glanced at the gold idol, which was not bringing the luck the Sumerians believed it possessed. If he hadn’t stolen the damned thing, he’d have demanded his money back.

Hassan hated to be the bearer of bad news, but he gave his boss the play-by-play of the bust, the shoot-out, the confiscated drugs, and the arrest of their man and newest girl.

Malic sat behind his desk, expressionless. The only part of his body that moved was the pulsating vein on his temple. He played all of the possible permutations that had led to the bust like a chess grandmaster.

Finally, he spoke.

“The money can be replaced. Move the boat, clean out the club, destroy the Jag, call Robert Jacobs at the law firm and have him set a bail hearing for Mustafa and make sure he gets out of the hospital in one piece. I want Jacobs by his side when the police interrogate him. Have him take control of the girl, Hassan, deal with immigration and then move her to a safe house before she can say too much. No loose ends. And when you talk to Robert, tell him I want the names of the men responsible for the arrest.

“I’m stuck in meetings until three, and then we’ll talk again. You are my right hand, Hassan. Make me proud.”

The company line was that Jack had been working a missing-persons case and tripped to the drugs. He had called in Nick Aprea at the eleventh hour. They followed the GMC Yukon, and when it pulled to the side of the road with engine trouble, Nick exited the highway, offered help, and then badged the driver questioning him about the broken taillight. All on the up-and-up.

It went bad when the raven-haired woman popped open the back of the Yukon and made a run for it. The Iraqi panicked because of the drugs in the vehicle, pulled out his nine-millimeter, and fired the first shot. Nick, Jack, and his team returned fire in self-defense.

The fact that six hundred pounds of marijuana with a street value of over three hundred fifty thousand dollars was recovered—plus, there were no dead bodies—went a long way to soothing the Ontario police department, who were happy to take full credit for the bust. No arguments from Jack’s team.

They decided that Nick, Jack, and Mateo had shown great restraint while returning fire in order to save innocent lives and went the extra mile, putting their own lives in jeopardy to save the life of an Iraqi gangster who tried to kill them. That and the fact that Jack’s and Mateo’s gun permits were in order sealed the deal.

Still, Jack was totally pissed. The time line was all fucked up now, and Angelica Cardona, if she was still alive, was in greater jeopardy. He hadn’t wanted Malic tripping to the surveillance or the bust. He wasn’t sure if the other gunman had made him, but the driver of the Porsche would lawyer up when he came out of sedation, and Jack’s name would become a matter of record.

If Angelica was still alive, she was a definite liability, and Malic would have to dispose of her one way or the other.

The raven-haired beauty told her story through a Ukrainian interpreter. She was an illegal alien who stubbornly insisted that she spoke no English. The young woman stated emphatically that she had no idea who had sponsored her trip to the States. It had been arranged over the Internet. She was unaware of the drugs in the vehicle and had, in fact, just met her driver that morning. She had no idea about her destination, only that she’d been promised a good job as a cocktail waitress in a big American city. The innocent young woman had come to the USA looking for a better life, and there were any number of Ontario’s men in blue who were more than willing to lend a helping hand.

Of course, she was lying through her bleached teeth and her true journey had only just begun. The photo of her entering and exiting the Iraqi club while Malic was present would open the door to questioning him.

The driver of the Porsche was in surgery for multiple broken bones and a fractured skull. Nick would interrogate the girl, and then the driver, the moment the gunman’s eyes blinked open.

Then he’d drop in on Malic al-Yasiri to pay a friendly visit.

Nick’s car was DOA, having taken multiple rounds in the engine compartment. The windshield and side windows were history, and one of the front tires was shredded.

Leslie corroborated the men’s bona fides but didn’t hide her irritation. Jack couldn’t blame her, because these phone calls were becoming all too frequent. She did agree to help procure a search warrant for the Iraqis’ club, the cigarette boat, and the metal shed where the drugs had been stored.

The LAPD was highly suspicious of Nick’s story, but they couldn’t argue with the drugs he put on the table. An arrest warrant was initiated for the driver of the Yukon and the owner of the Jaguar for attempted murder of a Los Angeles police officer. They wanted a full report at headquarters ASAP.

Jack rang up Lieutenant Gallina, brought him up to speed on his suspicions, and talked him into starting a paper trail on the cigarette boat docked at Newport Harbor. Gallina promised to get a tech crew down there as soon as the warrants were signed, and Jack suggested that they post an officer at the dock ASAP so that nothing mysteriously disappeared.

Gallina agreed to start his search at the Iraqi club after Jack reported seeing the blonde and the raven-haired girl enter the premises the night before. The blonde fit the description of the two dead women and Angelica Cardona.

He’d let Gallina run with the ball because Jack already had the hard drive and ledger from the club, and it would take some time to discover any latents or DNA traces of the dead women on board the cigarette boat docked at Newport.

After five hours of interrogation and filling out reports at Ontario PD, the men were released. Nick hitched a ride with Jack, and Mateo drove Cruz.

Jack had been awake for thirty-six hours and was in dire need of food, sleep, and a shower. Not necessarily in that order. He dry-chewed two Excedrin, holding off on the Vicodin until he was safely home.

Twenty miles outside of Ontario, Jack fielded a call from Lieutenant Gallina, who was standing in front of the Iraqi club, search warrant in hand. In a very un-Gallina-like move, Jack and Nick were invited to the party of Jack’s creation. They accepted.

Jack now had a link between Malic, the drugs, and a woman he was sure had been smuggled into the USA aboard a drug-laden panga boat.

Given Malic’s powerful connections, they didn’t have enough evidence for an arrest warrant, but Jack was tightening the screws. He was certain that Malic al-Yasiri was in the flesh trade and good for the kidnapping of Angelica Cardona. Raul had done the scouting, and Malic had dropped the net. Jack just had to prove it.

“Looking for something in particular?” Gallina asked as he entered the main room of the Iraqi club from the back alley.

Jack struggled up from a crouched position in front of the bar. The listening device he’d planted was gone, along with the device he’d secreted under one of the wooden tables that populated the room.

“Just a hunch,” Jack answered, almost relieved. It would have been a hell of a thing to get busted for an illegal listening device that hadn’t paid off, he thought.

“Uh-huh,” Gallina said, smelling a rat but not pushing the point. “Oh, I got a call from the lab on my way over. The wine bottle we grabbed at the Cardona girl’s apartment tested clean. But there were trace elements of Rohypnol in one of her wineglasses.”

“So, that’s how they grabbed her,” Jack said, not happy about the news. Rohypnol, referred to as the “date rape drug,” induced amnesia in the unsuspecting victim. Angelica might not remember a thing from the night of her abduction. If she was still alive, he thought, knowing the odds were stacked against her.

Jack walked down the hallway and opened the first red lacquered door on the right. It had smelled of sex and perfume the night before, and now it smelled heavily of Lysol disinfectant. The bed had been stripped, the mattress cleaned.

“They bleached the drains, sink, and shower. No residual hair or soap or any-fucking-thing,” Gallina said through a growl.

Nick was combing the second bedroom, where the clothes and toiletries had been, and Jack didn’t expect him to find anything of value.

Jack stepped past the disgruntled lieutenant and made the left into the office.

“We already tore it apart and came up empty,” Gallina said.

“Second set of eyes,” Jack replied mildly.

“Whatever.” Gallina marched up the hallway into the main room.

The computer on the wooden desk was gone. The ledger in the small drawer under the desktop, gone. The refrigerator magnet from the marina, gone. The file cabinet, empty, as was the garbage can under the desk.

Jack had forwarded his iPhone copy of the handwritten ledger to Kenny Ortega and downloaded the contents of the flash drive to his own computer.

He made short work of placing the microdevice between the back leg of the desk and the wall. Might as well bring the LAPD’s IT crew into the mix, he thought. Time was not Jack’s friend.

Nick entered the room and found Jack bent over. “Whattaya got?” Nick asked, keeping the suspicion out of his voice.

“Caught something,” Jack said over his shoulder as he picked the flash drive back up off the floor. He examined it as if for the first time and handed it to Nick.

“What?” Gallina barked, suddenly appearing in the doorway with Tompkins crowding the hallway behind him.

“Jack found this, must have fallen behind the desk,” Nick said, covering for his friend.

“We looked everywhere, goddamn it!” He threw a pained glare toward his partner, who raised his empty palms in frustration.

“Looks like a flash drive. They must’ve had a computer in the room,” Jack said.

“All right, my fucking eyes aren’t worth shit.” He snatched the memory device and walked out muttering, “Good catch.” He turned to leave the club, almost bumped into Tompkins, and stopped.

“You interviewing the girl?” he asked Nick.

“First thing tomorrow. She’s already lawyered up. Her and the driver, if he’s out of surgery.”

“Mind if we sit in? We got a hit on the first victim. The OD. Her parents are flying in from the Ukraine to identify the body and ship it home, and they sent a few pictures along. Might shake something up.”

“Bring the coffee,” Nick replied. They’d interrogated another suspect together in the 18th Street Angels case, and things had gone well enough, as long as Nick ran the show.

“We need to tie her to Malic,” Jack reminded the crew. “We need to tear his compound apart until we find something. He’s a dirtbag hiding behind a thousand-dollar suit.”

“I ran it by your girlfriend,” Gallina said. “And she said it wouldn’t fly with the DA.”

Jack bridled at the personal reference but let it go.

“Not until we get a direct link between Malic and the dope,” he went on. “Or Malic and one of the women. We got nothing substantive at this point except the stench.”

Gallina nodded curtly at Nick, and he and Tompkins split.

“It’s not nice making the police look bad,” Nick said.

“Eh, just a lucky find.”

“Right.” But Nick’s wolf grin said that he knew otherwise.

Jack stood at the kitchen island in his loft, reviewing the helicopter footage of Malic’s compound. He was too tired to sleep, and his back was roaring with pain. His hair was damp from the shower, and a half-eaten turkey sandwich remained on a plate next to an empty glass with red wine residue.

Something was off. He couldn’t tell if he felt that way because he was so tired or if he’d really seen anything. No, it was the cliff, he decided. He rewound the digital recording back to the beginning and then fast-forwarded and hit Stop just before the chopper crossed the water and passed over the dock, the wooden stairs, and then the compound wall.

Cruz had been struck by Malic’s staircase, Jack remembered. He had said the stairs went up to that monster wall and called it the bridge to nowhere. Jack thought it might have been some kind of relic from the past because he had seen no visible opening or gate built into the perimeter of the wall to access the compound from the stairs.

Jack rewound again and then he saw it. That was it . . . right in there, he thought. Something looked wrong about three-quarters of the way up the cliff’s face. Jack wasn’t sure if it was an anomaly in the rock, a reflection, or a glitch on the tape, but he could see a small grassy outcropping that hugged the sheer wall. That’s where the texture of the cliff changed. It was subtle but different.

Sleep was out of the question, so a boat ride down south seemed reasonable. Jack was going to get up close and personal and find the damn answer.

37

Angelica Cardona sat barefoot at the small round dinette table, nursing a cup of coffee. She was wearing an immodestly short skirt and a revealing blouse, one of many that had been provided for her. Her trim nails clicked against the edge of her cup. Her feet tapped nervously in the plush gray rug. She looked tired and confused, and her voice was a tightly wound band.

She blew over her coffee cup to cool it and took a tentative sip as if the dark liquid would infuse her with enough strength to go on.