House Justice (28 page)

Now what
? If he let Franco go, Franco would immediately call the person who had hired him, whether that person was Quinn or someone else. And Franco wouldn’t be worried about the florist coming for him again because now that Franco knew about him, he would be ready. Moreover, Franco and his ragtag army of tattooed thugs would hunt for him if he let Franco go, and if he had to remain in LA there was the possibility they might find him. If he killed Franco, that would solve all these problems, but if he did, and if Franco had lied to him about Quinn, then he would have destroyed the only lead he had. He mulled all this over and finally made the only decision he could make.

The florist could rationalize what he was about to do. He could tell himself that Jimmy Franco was a criminal and an accomplice to the murder of Dale Acosta, and he therefore deserved to die. But that still didn’t make killing him right; unlike Sandra Whitmore, Jimmy Franco was not one of those responsible for Mahata’s death.

Unfortunately, to complete his mission, he had no choice.

He shot Jimmy Franco, placed the body in a Dumpster, and covered it with cardboard.

He said a prayer for the man’s soul as he drove away.

Nothing was happening—nada, zip, not a thing—and this didn’t bother DeMarco at all.

It had been four days since the CIA had sent the Rudman recording to Rulon Tully, and so far Tully had done nothing. Nor did Ray Rudman resign from Congress. He did, as Mahoney had predicted, get protection from the Capitol police. Rudman was probably wondering when the other shoe was going to drop—when his name would be mentioned in the press as the source of the leak— and he was probably sweating bullets while he prepared the denials he would make to the media. But getting Rudman out of Congress wasn’t DeMarco’s problem—unless, of course, Mahoney made it his problem.

The cops had made no progress in figuring out who had killed Sandra Whitmore or Dale Acosta, and the media were in a feeding frenzy. Whitmore, alive, had never been popular and her fellow reporters had treated her with disdain when they found out that she’d been duped by Acosta. But now she was dead—the martyr she had never intended to be—and the reporters were screaming for answers. Two tabloids had suggested the CIA was behind her murder; the more respectable papers weren’t brazen enough to make that claim directly but they, too, hinted at dark conspiracies and were demanding that the cops find the killer of their fallen comrade.

As for the man who had kept DeMarco from being killed in Myrtle Beach, neither the police nor the CIA had any idea who he was. No one had gotten a clear look at him in South Carolina and he had left no useful evidence in the golf course parking lot. What was even more puzzling was that no one could understand what connection he might have to Mahata Javadi. And since the mystery man was still unidentified and on the loose, DeMarco, at Angela’s insistence, continued to reside at the Crystal City Sheraton.

Since DeMarco had nothing better to do, he pursued the assignment Mahoney had given him several days ago: finding out why the Republican congressman from Arkansas kept flying to Minnesota. He had been planning to follow the guy but couldn’t do that now because the CIA wanted him on a short leash. So he did something he didn’t normally do, and contacted a private detective with a proven reputation for discretion and had him bird-dog the congressman.

DeMarco had no idea how the detective managed to get the information—he was very good at his job—but he determined the congressman was HIV positive, had been so for a number of years, and the drugs he had been taking were no longer working. He was seeing a specialist at the Mayo Clinic trying to find an effective treatment.

“So, now that you know, what are you going to do?” DeMarco asked Mahoney.

“What am I gonna do? I’m going to say a prayer for the guy. And you tell this detective you hired that if this ever gets out I’ll run him out of town on a rail.”

Angela called and told him to meet her outside the main entrance to Georgetown University Hospital but her voice sounded odd when she talked to him—less confident, less in control.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine. I’ll see you at ten.”

DeMarco was waiting outside the hospital at ten but Angela didn’t
show up until ten twenty. When he saw her, she was leaving the hospital with a tall, well-built man. He was strikingly handsome and his blond hair was perfectly combed like that anchorman on the news, that Brian Williams guy. DeMarco knew immediately the man was Angela’s husband, a hunch that was confirmed when he gave her a little peck on the lips before he sauntered away. And he did
saunter
; he walked like he held the world in the palm of his hand—and maybe he did. He had Angela.

DeMarco waited until her husband was out of sight before approaching her.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said.

He knew if she was late it was her husband’s fault.

“Is everything okay with you?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Let’s get going.”

He could tell she wasn’t fine but whatever was bothering her, he knew she wasn’t going to share it with him.

“So what’s going on?” he asked. “Did something happen with Rudman or Tully?”

“No. And I can tell you that my boss isn’t too happy about that.”

DeMarco almost said, Well, making your boss happy ain’t my problem—but he didn’t.

“We’re still waiting for Tully to do something about Rudman,” Angela said, “but in the meantime, we’re gonna go talk to an FBI agent. He’s been checking out Marty Taylor and learned something he thinks we’d like to know.”

“Why would the FBI tell the CIA anything about Taylor?” DeMarco knew that interagency cooperation, particularly between the CIA and the Bureau, was rarer than flying pigs.

“We have an arrangement with this particular agent,” Angela said.

DeMarco assumed this meant that the FBI agent was some sort of CIA mole in the Hoover Building.

“I’m going to tell him you’re CIA,” Angela said, “because I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t like talking to someone from Congress. Let’s hope he doesn’t ask to see your ID.”

“And if he does?”

“Tell him to go piss up a rope. That’s the way a real CIA agent would treat an FBI dweeb.”

They met the FBI agent at a bistro on K Street and, fortunately, no rope pissing was required. His name was Ryan Schommer and DeMarco thought he looked like a weasel with a bad comb-over: he had shifty eyes, a pointy nose, a weak chin, and a dozen greasy strands of dark hair fanned across the top of his head. Or maybe he just looked like a weasel because DeMarco knew he was double-timing his employer.

After everybody had coffee cups in front of them, Angela said, “So, Ryan, what did you find out about Marty Taylor?”

“We never had any reason to look at him or his company until Diller met with the Iranians,” Schommer said. “And if you just look at public records, all you see is a company that’s not doing too well, which isn’t too surprising since Taylor seems to spend more time these days surfing and dating models than he does running his business.

“But then this thing happens with Diller. Taylor’s lawyers, of course, have said that Taylor had no idea Diller was visiting Iran, and so far we haven’t been able to crack that story. And then Diller goes and disappears.”

“You don’t have any leads on him yet?” Angela asked.

“Nope, and we have a platoon of guys looking for him. We found his car at LAX, but he never boarded a flight, not in LA or any other airport in the area. We’re sure of that. And because of what else we found, we think he may be dead.”

“So what else did you find?” Angela said, and DeMarco could tell that she was beginning to get a wee bit impatient with Mr. Schommer.

“The thing with Diller, it never made sense. Why would a guy like Marty Taylor ever try selling stuff to Iran? Even if his company’s headed for Chapter Eleven, why would he
personally
take that kind of risk?”

“You said Taylor wasn’t spending a lot of time watching the store, so maybe someone else at his company was the one working with Diller,” DeMarco said.

Schommer smiled at DeMarco—a weasel beaming. “That was our thinking, too. So we started looking hard at who else is involved in Taylor’s company.”

“Ryan, quit teasin’ me here,” Angela said. “What did you find?”

“Russian mafia. Maybe.”

“Connected to Taylor?” Angela said. “You gotta be kidding.”

“No. We got a warrant to look at Diller’s phone records and there was a phone call to an auto-body shop in Chula Vista just before he left for Iran. In that same phone bill were two calls to a BMW dealership in Del Mar. We do a little snooping and find out Diller and his wife both drive BMWs, they bought the cars from the dealer in Del Mar, and they were having the fifty-thousand-mile service done on one of the cars. So we wondered, Why the hell is Diller calling a body shop in Chula Vista? A yuppie like him wouldn’t even know how to find Chula Vista. So we pull the string and find out the shop is owned by one Jorge Rivera…”

“Who’s Jorge…”

“Probably an honest citizen. But Jorge’s business partner is a man named Yuri Markelov, and the San Diego PD suspects the place is a chop shop but has never been able to prove it. Hmmm, we said, and we pulled the string some more, which leads us eventually to the NYPD’s organized crime guys, which then leads us to a guy named Lev Nikolai Girenko.”

“Who is—” Angela started to say, but Schommer held up a hand, silencing her.

“Lev Girenko immigrated to this country twelve years ago and became a citizen at lightning speed. Your average Mexican, it takes him about ten years to get his papers if he’s lucky, but Lev was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in eighteen months, which means somebody got heavily greased. Anyway, not long after Lev gets here, he’s
got eight or ten guys working for him, mostly people he brought over from Russia. Lev and his crew operated in Brooklyn for about four years, then they all disappeared. Here one day and gone the next. NYPD had no idea where they went, and since they were out of the Big Apple, they didn’t care. They suspected that Lev found the competition too hot in Brooklyn or, for all they knew, somebody had buried him and his whole crew in a landfill. Yuri Markelov was Lev’s right-hand man in New York.”

“But what’s the connection between these Russians and Marty Taylor?” Angela asked, her exasperation growing. “I mean, other than one phone call to a body shop, which, for all you know, could be a wrong number.”

“It could have been a wrong number,” Schommer said, “but we didn’t think so. We got another warrant and looked at the body shop’s phone records and, lo and behold, a call was made from the shop to Iran at the same time Diller was in Iran. Now we have no idea who made the call, if it was Markelov or somebody else, and we don’t know who they called in Iran—all we could find out is that the call went to a cell phone. We’ve asked those sneaky fucks over at the NSA to see if they intercepted the call and they claim they didn’t, but who knows with those guys.”

“Are you saying that Diller was working for Yuri Markelov when he went to Iran?”

Schommer shrugged. “Again, we don’t know. But here’s one other little tidbit for you to think about. Right now, Markelov is living in a home that’s owned by Marty Taylor. That is, the deed to the house is still in Taylor’s name, but maybe Markelov is renting from Taylor or maybe he just bought the house and the paperwork hasn’t caught up with the sale. Whatever the case, Mr. Markelov’s current place of residence struck us as intriguing. But as far as Yuri or Lev being involved in Taylor’s company … well, that’s about ten levels above the way guys like them operate. What I’m saying is, when they were in New York, they would force their way into legitimate businesses, but
little
businesses. Beauty parlors, dry cleaners, restaurants. Body shops,
like the one in Chula Vista. They’d get their hooks into the owners through gambling or sex or flat-out intimidation, and they’d extort protection money from them, steal their profits, and eventually sell off the business’s assets. Then they’d move on to something else and do it all over again. But Taylor & Taylor isn’t a mom-and-pop operation, so it’s hard to imagine how they could be involved in a business that complex.”

“Why aren’t these guys in jail?” DeMarco asked.

Schommer shrugged. “They were never a priority for the Bureau or the NYPD. I said they were Russia mafia but that makes them sound, I don’t know,
grander
than they really are. Lev’s crew is a small gang of thugs; they ain’t the Gambino crime syndicate. The other thing is the cops couldn’t get anybody to testify against them. Lev had a reputation for dealing with problems in a way that made it difficult to find stand-up witnesses. So when Lev and his boys left New York, NYPD said good riddance and didn’t waste any more time on them.”

“What about the cops in San Diego,” Angela asked. “Have they got anything on them?”

“Other than their suspicion that the shop in Chula Vista is being used to move hot car parts, no.”

Schommer finished his coffee and said, “So, my friends, we’re missing a whole bunch of pieces here. We don’t know where Lev is. We don’t know if Yuri is still working for him or if he’s out on his own. We don’t know why Yuri is living in one of Marty Taylor’s houses. We don’t know why Diller was calling a suspected chop shop or why a call was made from the shop to Iran. But there is one thing we
do
know. We know that you don’t want to see the words Russian mob, Iran, and weapons technology in the same sentence, and we’re gonna get to the bottom of this.”

“This is good,” DeMarco said after Schommer left.

“Why’s that?” Angela asked.

“Because now you can let the FBI go after Taylor and you don’t have to do anything.”

Angela shook her head. “The FBI may get Marty Taylor but they’ll never get Rulon Tully. Even if Tully kills Rudman, they’ll never trace the killing back to him. And if Rudman was to come forward tomorrow and admit that he gave classified information to Tully—which he’ll never do—we still wouldn’t be able to get Tully.”