Down Among the Dead Men (37 page)

'Possibly. But I think it's unlikely.' Frank's thinking of budgets and bureaucracy. Not to mention Lopez's warning. Assigning a tail on Noone because some Brit wants to talk to him is not going to happen. Too expensive and too time-consuming. It doesn't feel right.

Frank thinks about what would happen if the information was coming the other way, if the Americans were interested in someone in Liverpool. Would he authorise surveillance? Probably not.

'Let me try a few things,' says Koop. 'I'm at the apartment. I'll wait here to hear from Warren and I'll make some calls. Don't worry, I'll be discreet.'

'OK, I'll be there tonight. I'll come to the apartment from the airport. Around eleven your time if there are no delays. Lopez is handing me on to the LA field agent but I'm not seeing them until tomorrow, Sunday. We need to get our heads together. I thought we'd have a bit more time than this.'

'Maybe our boy is hurrying things along? Could be he's on a schedule.'

'What makes you think that?'

'The drive out to Palm Springs? I don't know. Do people drive there and turn round like that? It felt to me like he was going there for a reason.'

'Could be. Look, I'll talk later. The flight's being called.'

After Frank's call Koop rings Warren again but there's no answer. Koop puts down the phone and yawns. He feels like he could sleep for a week. Jet lag. If he's meeting Frank tonight he'll have to get some sleep. But not yet; there are things to do. Koop takes a shower to wake himself up and is stepping out when the phone rings. It's Warren. Koop presses redial and this time he connects.

'We need a new car,' says Warren. 'And I need a new ticker.'

Thirteen

Since Warren's going to exchange the rental for something else it'll take him three hours or more to get back to the apartment, so Koop spends the time doing some digging.

The first thing he does is call Sam Dooley.

In 2001 Koop had spent six months on an all-expenses-paid holiday to Los Angeles. At least that was the way his MIT colleagues had seen it at the time. Merseyside Police and the LAPD, as part of some now forgotten political initiative, had joined an information and skills program, the IPPP. The acronym stood for the International Police Pooling Program. Koop had applied during a time when he was beginning to think about retirement. Six months in California sounded fantastic and it was. Dooley had been Koop's liaison at the LAPD. Now he's a senior detective on the Gang Detail working out of the City of Burbank Police Department.

Koop calls him, and after some bullshit about being in LA on holiday and agreeing to meet for drinks, he asks Dooley to check the plate number on the blue Toyota.

'Now?' Dooley's tone, warm until this point, drops a couple of degrees. 'Why? You're on vacation, Koop.'

'Can you find that information, Sam?' Koop feels bad asking, but it can't be helped.

'Yeah, I guess. But I don't like it, Koop.'

Koop doesn't say anything. Dooley doesn't have to like it, just so long as he does what Koop asks. There's a pause.

'It's registered to a company. Daedalus.' Dooley spells out the word letter by letter and gives Koop the address.

'OK. Thanks.'

'That's it? No details on why?'

'It was nothing, Sam. You know what cops are like. I thought I saw something funny today but a woman told me it was for reality TV. I wanted to check.'

'Right.' Dooley is outright frosty now. Koop finishes the call awkwardly and, alone in the apartment, shakes his head. Another tiny little relationship dies in the name of information. It's happened too many times down the years. Good coppers are always losing friendships.

Koop sits with the phone for a minute and then calls Sam Dooley again.

'Sam,' says Koop, when Dooley picks up, 'I feel bad about doing that.'

'Yeah, well, maybe you should. What is it now? You want something else? Tickets to Disney?'

'Don't be bitter. I said I was sorry; I'm not going to send you flowers. Listen, I want to talk to you about something you might be interested in. An exchange of information.' Koop does feel bad about using Dooley but knows that to get traction on this thing over here they're going to have to have some allies. Frank always was a lone gun type but it's not going to work in Los Angeles. Dooley's a friendly face and, besides being the right thing to do, eating a little humble pie might help the cause.

'I'm listening,' says Dooley.

'Not now,' says Koop. 'It's too complicated. Can you meet for coffee or lunch tomorrow?'

Dooley's got a court appearance at eleven so he arranges to meet Koop at one at a coffee shop down the street from the Burbank Courthouse. By the time he rings off Koop's recovered some of the ground he'd lost from the first call.

After the call, Koop gets online and tries for information on Daedalus. It doesn't take long.

Daedalus is the name of a large private security and intelligence gathering service with links to the US Department of Corrections and a number of high-profile blue-chip companies. From what Koop can see, Daedalus do everything the modern CEO might want in the way of security, from supplying shopping mall guards to preventing insurgents blowing up your oil pipeline. Daedalus is
owned by an even larger parent company called Loder Industries. Loder has interests in a wide swathe of industries, chief among them engineering and supply logistics. To Koop it sounds about as interesting as accountancy but the numbers are huge. Current valuation of Loder stands at over $120 billion. Loder's biggest customer is the US government.

Koop puts the information on Loder to one side and concentrates again on Daedalus.

There are a number of news items but he has no luck finding anything that mentions Noone, even tangentially.

Koop gets a Coke from the fridge and drains it in an attempt to stay awake longer.

He switches his attention back to Noone. After Frank had contacted him about coming to LA, Koop had done as much background as he could on Ben Noone. Koop pulls up some of that information onscreen again now and reads over it once more. Like DC Magsi, Koop had found information on Noone difficult to come by.

The bare facts are that he was born in LA in 1983. Noone's father, Larry Grant, an LA native, had died before Noone was born, leaving him to be brought up by his mother, Deborah Sterling, originally from Connecticut. Deborah had died two years ago leaving Noone, her only child, to inherit.

Koop stares for several minutes at the screen, the cursor blinking at the end of the word 'inherit'.

He leans back and folds his hands behind his head. An old phrase came to him, so overused that it had become a mantra. In all the fire and blood and sex of the crimes committed in Liverpool, Koop thinks there's perhaps one thing they hadn't truly examined in enough detail. So intensely personal, so mired in gore and perversion are the crimes, that Frank may have forgotten the mantra of all investigations, the words that should be tattooed on the hand of every cop on the planet.

Follow the money.

Fourteen

A beer never tasted so good.

Frank clinks the neck of his bottle against Koop's and then leans across the balcony table to do the same with Warren.

The three men drink and Frank rubs his neck. He landed an hour and a half ago and took a taxi to the apartment. His brief, unsuccessful stop in New York, followed by another long flight, has done nothing to improve his outlook, but the beer's helping.

And being with friends is good. Warren he only met ten minutes ago but if Koop's happy with him then that's good enough for Frank. Hearing Koop's Liverpool accent – even one softened at the edges by three years in Australia – also helps.

Five floors below the sounds of a different city drift up to the apartment and, despite it all, Frank gets a tang of that holiday feeling. It always surprises him when he travels that places don't look like they're supposed to, as if somehow there's a conspiracy to hide the real version of a place from everyone. But LA is exactly like LA should be. There are palm trees and smog and cars and neon and all the thousands of tiny visual details Frank, like everyone else in the western world, has been absorbing frame by frame their entire lives. As with New York, everything looks like a film set and, consequently, nothing appears real. Taxidrivers, waitresses, cops – everyone seems to be playing a role in some vast production.

It's dangerous thinking, Frank knows that. But for now, sitting back with a cold beer as the clock ticks towards midnight, it's OK to let his mind drift along those paths.

'Frank.' Koop's voice jerks his eyes open.

'You need some sleep.'

Frank nods. He sits up and rolls the kinks out of his neck. He glances back into the apartment where the TV's showing football. Not proper football: the American kind.

'I got into this a bit when I was over here,' says Koop, following Frank's eye. 'Started watching it.'

'It's like rugby,' says Warren. 'For poofs.'

Frank can't work out if Warren's kidding. From the little he's seen it's hard to tell with the Australian.

'How so?' says Frank.

'He's from Queensland,' says Koop, by way of explanation.

Warren ignores Koop. 'All that padding, helmets and the like. Seems a bit . . . girly.'

Frank looks at Koop, who shakes his head.

'Queensland.'

Warren winks at Frank. 'He's easy to stir up.'

They go over what they have and decide what to do in the morning. Frank's got to meet his liaison at LAPD headquarters so it's down to Koop or Warren to tail Noone.

'Do you think it was coincidence, him being in the toilet at the petrol station?' asks Frank.

Warren takes a pull on his beer. 'I was thinking about that on the way back here.' He drags on his cigarette and speaks through a cloud of smoke. 'And the conclusion I reached was no. I mean, what are the odds?'

'So what was it?' asks Koop.

'I think he wanted a close look at me. See if I was a cop.'

Warren looks down at himself. He's out of shape, dressed in the shirt and khakis Koop had bought as cover. 'I think he was reassured. I didn't say anything in case the accent spooked him.' Warren doesn't tell them how scared he'd been.

'You think he's definitely our bloke?' he says. 'He didn't look like a loony.'

'He's the one,' says Frank. 'Not sure that loonies generally look like loonies.'

'Did you hear that story about the Queen visiting Ashworth?' Koop looks at Frank.

Frank shrugs.

Koop turns to Warren. 'Ashworth's a high-security mental hospital in Frank's patch.' He turns back to Frank. 'Anyway, the Queen visits and the head guy introduces her to this bloke, John. John's a trustee, says the head guy; very well behaved. He's going to show you round today, Your Majesty. So John shows the Queen around and is very well spoken and all in all seems to be a pretty nice feller. If you don't mind me asking, John, says the Queen, what did you do to get locked away inside here?'

'Is this going to be a long one?' says Warren, getting to his feet. 'Because I could do with another beer.' He pushes inside and takes a fresh one from the fridge.

'So John says to the Queen: funny you should say that, Your Majesty, but there's been a terrible mistake. I didn't commit the crime they say I did but no one will believe me. All I need is for someone to check a few facts and I would be a free man. The Queen nods and says she'll do whatever she can tomorrow. Thanks, says John, and the tour continues. An hour later, the tour over, the Queen's heading for the Bentley when a brick hits her on the back of the head. She turns round to see John waving at her. "You won't forget now, will you?" he yells.'

Warren laughs. Frank smiles. He's heard it before.

'OK, fair enough,' says Warren.

'If Frank says Noone's the guy, then Noone's the guy,' says Koop.

Frank moves to the couch and stares blankly at the TV. His eyes are heavy, and although he can hear Koop and Warren talking, he can't make out what they're saying. The last thing he sees as he drifts into unconsciousness is a graphic onscreen with the words 'pass interference'.

Fifteen

Money makes the world go round.

There's money somewhere in the picture, Koop's sure of that. For Frank, who'd been on the ground back in Liverpool, the money doesn't seem important. Nicky Peters dying like that. Sexual abuse. The abattoir scene. McCluskey's finger. All of this means that Frank has this case wired as a hot one. Hot in the sense of being about blood and violence and instability. Money, at best, is a means for Ben Noone to evade capture by hiring expensive lawyers.

Menno Koopman's not so sure.

In the morning, early, Warren heads to Santa Monica in the new rental to keep an eye on Noone as best he can. Frank never made his hotel and slept on the couch. Koop shakes him awake and pushes him towards the shower. By seven-thirty he's in a taxi heading to his hotel before meeting the liaison officer at nine. Frank's due at LAPD headquarters on West 1st Street to start selling his contact on elevating the MLAT to an extradition order at some point. What he's hoping is to find a sympathetic ear for his theories, someone willing to consider the circumstantial evidence. The fact that the liaison is willing to meet on a Sunday is promising.

Alone in the apartment, Koop's first act is to book a second car rental with a hire company who'll deliver the vehicle at nine. He gives himself an hour to get across to Burbank to meet Dooley at eleven.

Koop pours a cup of coffee and settles in front of the computer to do some online background chasing of his own before the meeting. Noone's Los Angeles address had been part of the package of information that Frank's already received. While the lack of an
attempt to conceal the address might not mean much, it's an indicator to Frank that Noone's confident about any investigation.

Koop starts with Noone's house in Santa Monica. He doesn't have Frank's faith that Noone's lack of concern means that it's a dry well. In Koop's experience, if there's property, there's a paper trail. Or digital.

On the LA County Assessor's website he finds the steps to follow after someone has died and left property. It takes time but he digs up the Change of Ownership Statement filed when Deborah Sterling died. It's all on public record once he knows where to look. Benjamin Noone's listed as the new owner. The property was assessed at a value of just under four million at time of transfer. There's nothing Koop can see that raises any flags and he's sure that this is all material accessed by Frank's team in Liverpool.