Greed: A Detective John Lynch Thriller (12 page)

“So we got Mr .22 showing up as a second act?” Lynch said.

“Looks that way,” said McCord.

Lynch blew out a breath, pursing his cheeks. “I notice Fatso’s got an empty holster. Is Skinny strapped?”

“Skinny’s got an empty shoulder rig. Haven’t done the formal test yet, but Skinny’s got some gunshot residue on his right hand. I could smell that.”

Lynch looked out at the lake.

“So some guy drives down here with Skinny and the Fat Man. Since they’ve both got holsters, we gotta figure they’re both armed. And I’m thinking our mystery guest isn’t, since he stabs Skinny in the neck with a pen instead of just shooting him. Skinny gets a shot off but misses. Then our guy disarms Skinny, disarms Fatso, throws rocks at him, gets back in the car, and leaves. Then Fatso walks back up toward South Shore, and Mr .22 pulls in, shoots Fatso dead, and he drives off.”

McCord shrugs. “How it adds up.”

Bernstein’s phone went off, the Kanye noise again.

“What the fuck is that?” McCord asked.

“Ring tone,” said Lynch. “He’s working on his street cred.”

“You threaten to shoot him yet?”

“Threatened to shoot the phone,” Lynch said. “He’s next.”

 

Lynch’s cell buzzed, he checked the ID. Liz. She was flying back in from her network gig that night, going to be in town for a couple of days. Between her book launch and the network gigs, it was getting hard to see her. Lynch was looking forward to it, though. He took a few steps away from Bernstein and McCord.

“Hey,” he said. “You at LaGuardia yet?”

“Yeah,” she said.

He could hear it in her voice. “But?” Lynch asked.

“But I’m on my way to LA.” A pause, like she wanted him to say something. He had nothing to say.

“I’m sorry, John; it’s some film deal thing. My agent just dumped it on me an hour ago. I know this sucks. It’s just, with everything going on right now, so much crap is up in the air.”

“Yeah,” Lynch said. “Look, I can’t really talk now. I’m down on the South Shore looking at a couple of stiffs.”

“You’re angry.”

Lynch exhaled. “Not at you. Just, ah hell. Call me tonight if you get a chance.” Lynch thinking the “if you get a chance” was a bit of a cheap shot even as he said it. She’d call. He knew she’d call.

“I will. I’ll call tonight.” In the background, some airport PA noise. “We’re boarding,” she said, “I gotta go.”

Another pause.

“Are we OK?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Lynch said, trying to sound like he meant it. She ended the call.

Lynch looked out at the lake. What he’d had with Johnson the last year, it was something he’d given up on. Figured it just wasn’t in the cards, maybe just wasn’t in him. Gotten used to being alone, stopped really trying not to be. Got to where it didn’t matter that much, sort of the way, if you don’t eat long enough, you might be starving, but you don’t really feel hungry anymore. He was hungry now. He’d gotten used to her being in his life, in his bed. Now, more and more, she wasn’t.

It had been kind of exciting at first, Johnson hitting the big time. He’d flown out to New York with her once, been wined and dined with some of the network people, the publishing people. Lynch getting the star treatment too, some guy from Harcourt and Johnson’s agent tag-teaming him, trying to talk him into doing a book too.

At the hotel that night, some five-star joint, Johnson had put her two cents in too, not really understanding why he didn’t want a bite at the apple, Lynch not sure how to explain it, just that it didn’t sit right with him for some reason, Johnson taking that as a shot at her, not how he meant it. Been a little tense then, not a fight exactly, but Lynch looked back at that moment as a kind of divide. Things had looked up until then. Seemed like they’d gone downhill since.

Lynch had read it wrong, figured it was a temporary deal, figured it would calm down. It hadn’t. Johnson was playing in a different league now. It wasn’t just the book. She was smart, beautiful – the Hastings case had put her on the radar, but she had the chops to stay on it. The
Trib
was pretty much a part-time gig now. TV was the big thing. And TV, for a political reporter, meant Washington, meant New York. Chicago was flyover country.

Lynch knew she was working at it, spending more time in town than was good for her, probably. And shit, she’d won the media lottery, it’s not like he expected her to give it all up. Nobody’s fault, nothing to be done about it. Didn’t mean he had to like it.

Lynch had a couple tickets to the Hawks game for tomorrow night – Minnesota in town, and Johnson being a Minneapolis girl, she liked her hockey. It was going to be a surprise. Took his phone back up, dug up Dickey Reagan’s number, reporter at the
Sun-Times
Lynch went way back with. Dickey was a hockey guy. Lynch figured he throw Dickey a bone, stay on his good side.

 

Bernstein worked the phone all the way back to the station, getting background on Hardin while Lynch turned the facts over in his head. The body count was now four: three with .22s, one with a ballpoint. He had a rich trader, an African refugee, and two mob soldiers. On top of that, he had a witness that put Hardin in Stein’s box right before the first killing, and now he had a video that tied Hardin to a movie star who happened to be in town. The only other time the two of them had been in the same place at the same time, far as anyone knew, was five years ago in Africa, and the two of them had gone at it then. This Membe guy was from Africa, but better than a thousand miles from Darfur. What’s that song from that kid’s show? “One of these things is not like the other?” Christ, Lynch would be happy if any of these things had anything to do with anything. This was like a goddamn random clue generator or something.

 

 

CHAPTER 18

 

Lynch and Bernstein sat in Starshak’s office, Starshak up futzing with the giant fern that hung in his window.

“What you got on this Hardin, Bernstein?”

“French national,” Bernstein said. “For a good stretch, he worked as a sort of logistics and security guy for news crews doing stories in Africa. That’s how he got involved with Jerry Mooney. Met him at some point, ended up as his right-hand man, pretty much set up that whole Dollars for Darfur thing for him. That’s when he got into that punch-up with Shamus Fenn, not much on him since. Couple of people I talked to said maybe he came out of the Foreign Legion – nobody remembers him saying it, it was just what people heard.

“Anyway, I checked the airlines. This Hardin flew Air France out of Casablanca three days ago – Casablanca to Kennedy, connection on United to Chicago. The flight landed just after 10am the day Stein got shot. I checked the car rental places, working on the hotels, but it doesn’t look like he’s used the Hardin ID since he got to town. So either he brought a pile of cash with him or he’s got another ID.”

“Gotta have some kind of ID,” said Lynch. “Can’t even rent a hotel room without one.”

“So maybe something he can flash for a hotel, but that he didn’t trust enough to get him through an airport?” said Bernstein.

“Makes sense,” said Starshak. “Either way, we’ve got an Air France pen in the mob guy’s neck. You said he was on Air France.”

“Yeah,” said Lynch. “Listen, we got his arrival time at O’Hare and we got his picture. Get that to the techies, he’s got to be on video at the airport, right? Track him out, see does he rent a car, does somebody pick him up, does he take the L, or what.”

“That gives us a place to start,” said Starshak. “Pretty clear he came here to see Stein. Any thoughts there?”

“He must have had something to sell, all I can think of,” said Bernstein. “Stein’s got his fingers in a lot of pies. Lots of commodities in Africa, lots of shady deals. If Hardin had the right dope on something, Stein could pony up pretty good for it.”

Lynch’s cell rang. He checked the screen. McCord. “Yeah?” said Lynch.

“You remember the dirt on Stein’s pants; I told you we’d check it out?”

“Yeah,” said Lynch.

“OK, first off, this is actual dirt, soil of some kind. When we get something here that looks like dirt, usually it’s pollution; road salt, urban grime. So this being actual dirt seemed a little strange. First of all, it’s fresh. Not worked into the fabric all that deep and it’s not like Stein couldn’t afford to get his suits cleaned. Gotta figure he got it on him that night, so that’s weird cause there ain’t much loose dirt around the United Center. And the weather the last few days, what dirt we got is frozen solid. Second, being actual dirt, it’s got geological properties that can tie it to a location. Thing is, this wasn’t our usual nice Midwestern sediment. This shit was funky. I had to ship it over to a geology guy at UIC. I’ll send you all the fun science – stuff about alluvial deposits and riverine something or another – but bottom line is this: the dirt’s from West Africa. And this dirt-specialist guy, he had an interesting question. He wanted to know had anybody brought up diamonds. Said this type of dirt is consistent with the geology around West African diamond deposits.”

“Diamonds?” Lynch asked.

“Yep,” said McCord.

Lynch hung up the phone, filled in Starshak and Bernstein.

“So diamonds from West Africa, which is where this Hardin just came from,” said Starshak.

“Yeah,” said Lynch.

“And we have this Membe guy, also from there, who maybe had his hand lopped off for stealing diamonds,” said Bernstein.

“Yeah,” said Lynch. “Kinda feels like an actual lead.”

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 19

 

Munroe stifled a yawn, popped a go pill and looked out his hotel window across Michigan Avenue and Grant Park at Lake Michigan. Needed about ten hours sleep, but the go pill would take care of that. Jet lag was for pussies who hadn’t been shot much.

Munroe hated Chicago. His first time had been during the convention in 1968 a few years after he’d officially crossed over to the dark side. Got lent out to track down a Soviet agent provocateur who had been whispering unpleasant ideas into the Yippies’ ears, been teaching them to blow shit up. The Chicago cops found that guy bobbing in the lake, bouncing off the breakwater by the Planetarium, bump on his head. They wrote him off as some stoned fuck who didn’t know that getting high and going for a swim didn’t mix.

Next day, Munroe was out of his hippie mufti, back in his Brooks Brothers, trying to flag a cab out of town, when some long-hair pelted him with an open baggie full of human shit. Shouldn’t blame the city, he supposed, but the whole exercise left a bad taste in his mouth. And, of course, there was Hurley the First: classless troglodyte every bit as venal and ham-fisted as any third world thug Munroe had ever had to make nice with. Kind of guy that made you wonder if you were really on the right side.

But the new Hurley? At least this guy loved his cameras.

Munroe was scrolling through a slide show of al Din shots the tech boys had pulled together for him. Pretty clear that al Din knew about the cameras, too, and understood there was no way he could stay off them, so he did the next best thing. He stuck his mug in front of every camera he could find. North side, south side, west side – if there was a camera, al Din was on it. Suburbs weren’t wired up, not like the city, but al Din was doing his level best to pop up out there, too. Mall security, ATMs. If Munroe was going to piece together al Din’s play based on video footage, al Din was not going to make it easy.

The slippery little bastard still had his ways of dropping off the radar every now and again – an hour here, a couple hours there. Never could track him to a hotel, a base. But that’s how you got to the top of the game. If radical Islam had an MVP badass right now, al Din was it.

Munroe’s phone peeped. He looked at the screen. Guy at the NSA that was riding herd on the electronic intel for him.

“Yeah?”

“The Chicago PD just ran some prints against the DoD database. An ex-Marine, Michael Xavier Griffin. Two tours, made Scout/Sniper. He mustered out in 1994. This will not be in anything the Chicago police see, but during Gulf War I, he was detailed to Mossad to help on anti-SCUD efforts.”

“So he might have a Mossad tie? Might know Stein?”

“Yes. And he is from the Chicago area. He left the Marine Corps after being involved in an altercation with a local drug dealer and two of his enforcers. He killed all three of them. One of them was Jamie Hernandez’s younger brother.”

“Hernandez as in Mexican cartel Hernandez?”

“Yes. Hernandez put out a contract on him and Griffin left to join the Foreign Legion. He did a hitch there, and has been working as logistics and security support for TV news crews in Africa ever since, using the French ID he received coming out of the Legion, Nicholas Hardin. According to a source with FRANCE 24, he tried to pitch them a story on the evolution of the blood diamond trade a few months ago, but they were not interested.”

Munroe closed his eyes a minute, rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You telling me this Hardin has the stones? This whole thing is just a straight-up robbery? Only reason al Din’s still in town to run him down?”

“Best theory based on the evidence.”

A pause, then Munroe again. “Wait, you said prints. Why was Chicago PD running this guy’s prints?”

“Found them on a murder weapon. Two Chicago mafia soldiers were killed at an abandoned industrial site. It appears that Hardin killed one of them.”

“One of them?”

“Al Din killed the other.”

“What the fuck? Could they be working together?”

“Evidence shows al Din arrived after Hardin left.”

Munroe stopped for a minute, trying to decide what to ask next. “OK, so what’s the mob’s interest in this? Stein got popped and Hardin had to shop for a new buyer, tried them, maybe they got greedy?”