The Pain Scale (26 page)

“Hey,” I said to Patrick. “Did we ever finish the background on Roger Kroll?”

“Good question,” he said. We both started searching our notes and files. “It doesn’t look like it. Why? You have something on your mind?”

“Did he do any military service?”

“I don’t know.” His fingers started clacking on the keys again.

Before he looked up again, Jen came back into the room. “Just got the call from Bob. We’re good to go on the arrest. They want to take a SWAT dangerous-warrant team.”

“You call it in?” I asked. “They good to go?”

She nodded. “Ruiz, too. We’re meeting them a few blocks over from Tropov’s warehouse. Going in hard.”

“You want to come?” I said to Patrick.

He hesitated just long enough for it to be noticeable, then stood up and said, “Yeah,” with an enthusiasm none of us bought. The ATM shooting still had him rattled.

Jen looked at me, and I tried to indicate that I thought it was a good thing that he was ready to step back up to the plate. I don’t think she got it, though, because all I saw was a question in her eyes. Then Patrick caught us trying to figure out each other’s expressions, and I tried to break the awkwardness by tossing the keys to the unmarked cruiser we’d checked out that morning and saying, “You drive.”

It didn’t work, and the weird uneasiness followed us all the way down in the elevator and into the garage.

Patrick finally lightened the mood by saying, “If this one gets his head blown off, too, I’m going back to Computer Crimes.”

“What do you mean he’s not in there?” I asked the SWAT sergeant on the scene. His name was Phillips. We knew each other but hadn’t worked together.

“There’s someone inside.” He plopped a Panasonic Toughbook down on the hood of his Police Interceptor, flipped the screen up, and hit a button on the keyboard. “It’s just not him.” He spun the notebook computer toward us. “It’s this guy.”

Someone had snapped a photo of a man sitting behind Anton’s desk. They must have used a telephoto lens, because it looked like a close-up. And I could easily recognize the face.

“You know him?” Phillips asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well?”

Jen answered for me. “That’s Anton’s cousin. Yevgeny Tropov.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“Can we sit on him for a while?”

“For a couple of hours,” Phillips said. “After that, we’ll need to get a surveillance authorized. You want us to stay on him or on the warehouse?”

I looked at Jen. “What do you suppose Anton knows?”

“At the very least, he knows Turchenko’s got a new lawyer,” she said.

“And if he knows that, he must know there’s a good chance he flipped.”

“Stay on Yevgeny,” I said. “We’ll go back to the station and try to get a full surveillance authorization. You call us if he moves, and we’ll call you as soon as we get authorization for a new operation.”

“You got it,” he said.

“So you think Anton’s in the wind and we need to tail his cousin?” Ruiz asked.

“Yes,” Jen said.

“What are you asking for?”

“Everything,” I said. “Wire and cell taps. GPS smartphone tracking. Twenty-four seven eyes-on surveillance.”

“If I can’t get the captain to go for a full team, you think it’s important enough to sit on him yourself?”

Jen and I had talked about that on the ride back to the station. The decision hinged on what strategy we thought was most likely to get us to Anton. Would we be better off staking out Yevgeny and hoping he’d lead us to his cousin, or would the chances be better if we pursued other strategies? As long as we were staking out a suspect, we’d be pretty much useless in any other capacity.

“Probably not. If Anton is hiding, then he’s enough of a pro to know we’ll be looking at Yevgeny, and it’s not likely they’ll meet,” I said.

“I think we’ll get the taps, but probably not the team,” Ruiz said. “Let me make the calls.”

He was right. When Phillips checked in a few hours later, I told him to wrap it up. The GPS tracking had been authorized and we’d be able to monitor Yevgeny’s movements through his smartphone, assuming the Android in his name at Verizon was actually the one he was carrying. I suspected he’d be sharp enough to dump it somewhere and carry a throwaway. Or maybe even to plant it on a decoy. I thought maybe I’d try sitting on his house for a while on my way home.

Jen and I were back at our desks. Marty and Dave were still out. Ruiz told us they were working leads on another case. No new murders had come in since the Bentons’. That was good, but the squad still had half a dozen active open cases. We couldn’t put them on the back burner for very long. No matter how high profile our current case was, the other victims were every bit as dead as Sara and the children. And they deserved every bit as much effort no matter how much wealth and influence they didn’t have.

“Here we go,” Patrick said softly. I couldn’t tell if he was speaking to us or to himself.

“Sorry?” I said.

“I think we might have something,” he said.

“What?” Jen asked.

“I entered every address that came up anywhere in our records on the Bentons and had the database cross-reference it with every address in the location logs from the driver’s phone.”

We waited for him to go on. He didn’t.

“And?” I said.

“And the only match was an address at Olympic and Avenue of the Stars in Century City. He was there for about three hours last week.”

“Is that location supposed to mean something to us?” I was trying to keep the frustration out of my voice and not doing a very good job.

He picked up on it and got right to the point. “Sternow and Byrne,” he said. “That’s their building.”

“There was an article in the
LA Times
several months ago. I think it got a little TV play, too,” I said.

Patrick, Jen, and I had managed to corner Ruiz on his way out of the office. He had been ready to go—sleeves rolled back down, suit coat on again, briefcase in hand. But when he saw the three of us, he took off his jacket, let out a barely audible sigh, and sat back down behind his desk.

“Do you have a link to the article online?” he asked.

“Not yet. I will, though, and I’ll get it to you ASAP,” I said.

“Give me the gist of it.”

“Sternow and Byrne were huge and getting even bigger. They bought one of the smaller private military firms that had been operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Said they were going to turn it into a security, investigation, and protection arm that would work with clients worldwide. The international angle was a big part of how they were justifying the whole deal.”

“How much did they pay?”

“Nobody knows. The PMF was privately owned, and apparently the sale actually took place out of the country. Didn’t have to report anything.”

“Danny,” Ruiz asked, “what do you want to do with this?”

“First, we have the driver at their headquarters. Maybe he’s ex-military and trying to impress people with the green footprints. Or maybe with something else, but he was there. Also, there have to be government connections. Is the congressman tied to them in any way other than by his personal attorney? Are
there any business connections? Any congressional wheels getting greased with the PMF purchase? We need everything from their employment records on up.”

“If they’re doing government work, everything that might help us will probably be classified,” Jen said.

Patrick nodded in agreement. “We’ll send up red flags if we start making any formal requests. Let’s see what I can dig up before we do anything that might tip them off.”

“Good,” Ruiz said. “Find out everything we can before we go forward on this.”

“What about the feds?” I turned to Patrick. “Are they monitoring our investigation?”

“Probably,” he said.

“Anything we can do about that?” I asked.

“No. But I can poke without them knowing about it.”

“How?” Ruiz asked.

“I can use my personal machine, make sure nobody’s watching.”

Ruiz thought it through. “Do it,” he said to Patrick. “You two start thinking about the connections. What does it mean if the driver’s connected to Sternow and Byrne? Does that come back to the congressman? To Bradley? Check out every other building within half a mile of the Century City address. Be sure he couldn’t have been anyplace else. And follow through on the congressman. Find out if he actually was Pararescue. See if you can link him to anyone in the company besides Campos.”

“OT?” Jen asked.

“Whatever you need,” Ruiz said.

Patrick said it would be better if he didn’t use any city connections, so he headed home and told us he’d check in a few hours later or as soon as he found anything relevant.

“Should we get food?” Jen asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“What do you feel like?”

“Whatever sounds good to you.”

She gave me an odd look. “You always have an opinion about food. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just anxious to get to work.”

Needles of pain stabbed my shoulder and neck.

“You’re lying,” she said.

“Why would you say that?”

“You don’t want to leave.”

“We’re working the case.”

“No, it’s more than that.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”