Notorious (18 page)

O
n the plane to
Vegas, Melanie was trapped in the window seat as the enormous Papo West snoozed beside her, his mouth hanging open. When the flight attendant gave the all clear to use electronic devices, Melanie reached into her bag for her iPod. She yanked on it, and it came out all tangled up with that Saint Jude's medal that had once belonged to Lester Poe, the one Brenda Gould had given her. She'd thrown the necklace in her handbag late last night while she was packing, on an impulse. Plenty of people brought lucky talismans to Vegas, but Melanie wasn't planning to gamble. She was just nervous about this trip. They needed a break on the case soon, or it would be too late, and crazy as it sounded, the Saint Jude's medal gave her confidence that she'd prevail.

Melanie untangled her iPod headphones and then scrolled to the Atari Briggs music that Linda had downloaded. Maybe listening to the hottest rapper on the planet wouldn't feel like work to some people, but it did to her. Other than the occasional old classic like Tupac, who had soul and something to say, Melanie didn't like rap. Too much glorification of the type of violence that destroyed lives,
with too little artistry masking the depravity. But if Linda said there was solid information about Atari's crimes in these tracks, Melanie believed her. It wouldn't be the first time. Every narcotics defendant she'd ever locked up had a rap demo to promote, and they all drew material from their real-life experiences in the drug trade. Why should Atari be any different?

She went straight to the track called “D Is for Dead,” the one that Linda had identified for her. Sure enough, it was like listening to Atari confess his role in whacking Little D. She listened to it several times to catch all the lyrics, and the track began to worm its way into her head. It was catchy—the sound harsh, with a hypnotic beat, Atari's voice rough and insinuating and sexy. Each time she listened she found another detail that lined up with the facts of the murder, just as each time she listened she felt a little more drawn to the artist. She couldn't deny it. The man had star quality.

She wondered if there was a video that went with this track, and if so, what it would reveal. She wondered whether Bernadette would allow a rap song into evidence. Even if the judge agreed to it, was that
a smart thing to do? The press was on the DA's back already about prosecuting Atari for his music. A crafty ploy on Evan Diamond's part, making it politically dangerous for the prosecution to use this powerful evidence.

Melanie jotted down the lyrics of “D Is for Dead” in her notebook and moved on to some of the other songs.
Myrtle Avenue Mayhem
was Atari's breakout debut album, nearly ten years old now but still selling mad copies in download. Linda had told her that every track on the album described a different murder. If the lyrics were true, and not merely the posturing of an ambitious showman, then Atari Briggs had a lot of bodies on him. Eleven, to be exact, not counting Little D. When Papo woke up, she'd make him listen. Maybe they could match the tracks up with unsolved murders. That would be a new one—handing over an iPod full of tunes to Cold Case and telling them to go to town.

After a while, all the songs started to sound the same, and Melanie zoned out, lulled by the noise and vibration of the jet. Outside her window, far below, a sprinkling of snow clung to the frozen plains. The first couple of verses of “Cold Hard Flash” went right by her. It wasn't until halfway through the track that the allusions to the world's most precious gem caught her ear.

She went back and listened to the track from the beginning. By the end, she was too excited to wait for Papo to wake up on his own.

“Hey,” she said, shaking his shoulder.

He struggled to raise his eyelids. “What? Huh? We landing?”

“No, you have to listen to this.”

She yanked off her earbuds and held them out to him.

“Naw,” Papo said, waving her away. “I don't want music. I'm catching some z's.”

“Papo, this is Atari I'm listening to. He did a song about the hit on Little D and another one on Evan Diamond. Atari and Diamond go back a long way. According to this, there was some kind of falling-out between them, some kind of war. People died because of it. Diamond might've tried to kill Briggs. Please, listen.”

With obvious reluctance, Papo sat upright and put on the earbuds, and Melanie scrolled back to “Cold Hard Flash.”

“Atari doesn't come right out and say Evan Diamond's name,” she said, “but I'm convinced that's who he's talking about. Listen and tell me if I'm crazy.”

From Papo's expression, Melanie expected to be told in short order that she
was
crazy. But then she rolled the track and watched him get drawn in.

“Play it again,” he said.

Papo listened to “Cold Hard Flash” twice more before removing the headphones.

“Here's what I can tell you,” he said. “KP is a pretty common street name because the initials stand for ‘kingpin.' Could be any number of different guys. RT I never heard of. But Fro Joe was a real guy, a well-known player in Bed-Stuy in the nineties. Went down in a hail of bullets during a war with a rival faction. Whether that's the same guy Atari's talking about in this song, I don't know for sure, but probably.”

“What about Diamond? Doesn't it sound like he was mixed up in the war, too? Like maybe even he tried to have Atari killed?”

“I don't see where you get Diamond off this song.”

“‘Cold hard flash like your name'? ‘You can cut glass'? How obvious could it be?”

Papo looked at her with the dull eyes of someone who'd rather be sleeping. “You
are
crazy.”

“But Fro Joe was real.”

“He
was
real. So what? Every cop who worked narcotics in Brooklyn knew Fro Joe. All the little bangers like Atari Briggs knew him, too. So Atari put him in a song. It doesn't mean Atari slung junk with him, and it certainly doesn't mean Evan Diamond was in that drug war.”

“I never said that.”

But Melanie looked so disappointed that Papo patted her head. “Tell you what, kiddo. Once we're set up in Vegas, I'll call headquarters and get one of the old-timers on the phone. If there's something about Atari Briggs and Evan Diamond and a drug war, we'll find out.”

W
hen you're a New Yorker
, you think you've seen it all, but Melanie had never seen anything like the MGM Grand. The green glass building on the Las Vegas strip was butt ugly, but so arresting in its garishness that she found it impossible to look away. A gold lion stood guard out front, so enormous that it might've beamed down from a planet full of giants. It seemed to shoot off alpha rays, but really it was reflecting the setting sun as the strip turned orange and cobalt and purple. Inside, the lobby was vast, with a polished checkerboard marble floor spreading out in all directions, punctuated by crystal chandeliers that packed enough candlepower to outshine the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. And everywhere, the people were just as megawatt as their surroundings—white, black, Hispanic, and Asian, dripping jewelry, rocking the tight clothes, and showing plenty of skin. Melanie held her own in Manhattan, but here she felt like a hick.

“How'd you pick this hotel?” she asked Papo West as they stood in line at the registration desk.

“It's so big that we can blend into the crowd.”

“You might. Not me. Not unless I take a pair of scissors to my clothes.”

“You look fine.”

“I look like a J. Crew ad that got lost and wound up in the Frederick's of Hollywood catalog.”

Papo wasn't much for talking about personal style, and anyway, his Nextel was chirping. He took a call from one of the local DEA agents. Melanie continued to feast her eyes on the dazzling freak show all around her, her nose twitching at the unfamiliar aroma of cigarette smoke wafting through the air. Nowhere in New York did it smell like this anymore, like the inside of some old-time speakeasy. Her gaze meandered around the cavernous room until a familiar shape at the elevators arrested its progress, and, for an instant, seemed to stop the very beating of her heart.

Was it him? The height. The breadth of those shoulders. That dark hair falling in crisp waves against his neck. Could it possibly be—
Dan O'Reilly
? His back was to her. The jacket was different. Had he bought a new jacket? Would he have gotten here from Spain so quickly? And why would he come
here
? Had his investigation into the role of Gamal Abdullah in the car bombing led him to Las Vegas? That seemed too startling a coincidence. Could he be here to see her? But she'd made it so clear they were over. It couldn't be him.

But did any other man have that body?

In a daze, Melanie stepped out of line and took two halting steps toward the elevator before a large group of Japanese tourists flooded into the lobby and blocked her view. She got lost among them like a salmon swimming in the middle of a turbulent school. By the time they'd cleared, Dan, or the mirage of him, had disappeared.

“We're next!” Papo called.

Melanie went and checked in. But this business trip had just changed irrevocably for her. Even if the sighting of Dan had been a mere hallucination, a figment of her lingering passion, she wouldn't
be able to forget it. She'd be searching every face in the crowd now, just to catch a single glimpse of his blue eyes.

 

W
hen Melanie and Papo sat down with local DEA in person, around a conference table at DEA's bustling Las Vegas Boulevard district office, relations improved dramatically. Andre Ferris was the supervisor of the Las Vegas district office, with nearly fifty men under his command, but he'd taken time out of his day to meet with them and appeared to be trying to help. He was lean and sun-burnished, with black hair and a Wild West swagger about him. The two junior agents—Duvall Smithson and Alejandro Morales—were low-key and easier to read. Melanie and Papo quickly became convinced that the three of them were telling the truth about having independent information on Vegas Bo. They'd received a tip about the same stash location weeks before Papo had called to ask for assistance in making the arrest. They'd just been taking their sweet time acting on it.

“We appreciate you meeting with us so late in the day,” Melanie said. “Beyond that, we owe you an apology. We really believed you fabricated that tip so you'd have an excuse to poach our target. We were wrong.”

“I'm sorry, too,” Papo said. “Especially since I called you guys every name in the book.”

The DEA–6 report in question was lying on the table. It listed the very same address in the desert town of Pahrump, Nevada, that Melanie and Papo had originally heard about from Vashon Clark, except the report was dated three weeks before Vashon told them.

“All it took was one measly backdated report to get you people off our backs?” Ferris said.

After a second of awkward silence, Ferris winked, and everybody broke out laughing.

“A little humor to ease the mood,” Ferris said. “No hard feelings.
This happens all the time. Two separate investigative teams zeroing in on one and the same target from opposite directions. To me, it says we're all on the right track.”

“I couldn't agree more,” Papo said. “Right target and right location. Now all we need to do is figure out where the dirtbag ran to.”

“We have an informant who can help with that, but first I'll give you some background,” Ferris said. “The tip on the stash location was part of a bigger investigation we started about six months ago. We heard that a bunch of serious players from back east were muscling in on our Mexican gangs. Previously, most of the heroin in Vegas was Mexican black tar. Cheap and plentiful, but the most godawful stepped-on shit you're ever gonna find. Suddenly we're seeing this beautiful pure product. It took off like wildfire. Users dropping like flies left and right, overdosing because they couldn't handle the purity.”

“Have you seized any of the pure stuff?” Melanie asked Ferris.

“Haven't done rips yet because we were building our case brick by brick and didn't want to burn it. But we made a couple of small-scale buys. Your next question's gonna be did we send that heroin to Washington for chemical analysis. Answer's yes. They believe its Central Asian in origin, probably Afghan, and very similar to samples that have been turning up recently in Chicago and Atlanta and Detroit.”

Just when Melanie was about to give up and decide that Gamal Abdullah was either a hoax or a phantom, along came new evidence that Vegas Bo and other big players were indeed being supplied by an Afghan source. Melanie threw Papo a meaningful look.

“Afghan. Fits with our terrorism angle,” she said.

“Yup.”

“Not only did the new heroin cause ODs,” Ferris continued, “it caused bloodshed. Suddenly we had a gang war on our hands, because the Mexicans weren't going quietly into the night. They were giving the East Coast boys some push-back, and it was getting ugly.
We've had sixteen drug-related homicides so far this year. That's a big number for us. So if we can take this Vegas Bo down, we can solve a serious problem.”

“What do you hear about these players from back east?” Melanie asked. “Who are they? What type of backgrounds do they come from? Criminal histories?”

“We believe they're blacks from New York.”

“African-American?” Melanie asked. “American-born, as opposed to Caribbean or African immigrants or—?”

“Right. Americans, not foreigners. New Yorkers. My informants are very clear on that part. Seems to add an element of stress to the interaction.” Ferris raised a bushy eyebrow humorously.

Melanie smiled. “What about their history in the trade?”

“Longtime players is what we're hearing. But we were just getting started with the identification process when the lot of 'em cut and run. Let me show you some surveillance pictures.”

He slapped an eight-by-ten glossy down on the table.

“Here's the stash location in Pahrump,” he said, pointing to a photograph of a mobile home mounted on a cinder-block foundation. The place appeared desolate in the extreme, mint-green paint peeling off in long strips and several broken windows taped over with plastic. The front yard was lumpy red dirt, barren of vegetation except for a few scraggly weeds and littered with garbage.

“The mobile home isn't on what you'd call a street per se,” Ferris said. “It's more like a dirt path. Duvall'll drive you out there in the morning for a look-see so you can better understand. There's nothing around for a quarter mile in either direction except vacant lots and your occasional coyote. For these boys to sit on the place night and day just wasn't feasible.”

“Yeah,” Agent Smithson said. “As it was, we were as careful as we know how to be, and we still scared 'em off.”

“I can't figure it at all,” Agent Morales added. “We limited our
selves to drive-by surveillance. Different car every time. Never even slowed down when we took the pictures. And there
is
occasional traffic on that road, so the car alone wouldn't've hinked them up. Yet they made surveillance anyway.”

“You do think that's what happened, right?” Melanie asked. “That they made you?”

“What else could it be?” Ferris asked.

“Somebody tipped them,” she said, shrugging.

“It would have to be either somebody in our shop or somebody in yours. Who'd do that?”

“You're right. I don't think so, either,” she said.

“Okay, when we did surveillance, before the targets hightailed it, we did get some decent pictures,” Ferris said. “There was a lot of activity in and out of the location. Here you go, two nice clear ones with your boy Kevin Bonner.”

Ferris laid out two more glossies. Vegas Bo looked just the same as he had in his mug shot taken a decade earlier—scary, with a big scar on his face and home-drawn gang tattoos scrolling down his neck. In one of the pictures, he was with somebody, and in context, standing next to another person, he was one huge dude. Mean, ugly, and nasty, not somebody you'd want to run across in a dark alley.

“He'll make a beautiful witness, won't he?” Papo joked, echoing Melanie's thoughts.

“Witness? Wait a minute, you're thinking of flipping this goon?” Ferris demanded.

“That's why we're here,” Melanie said. “Didn't your U.S. Attorney's Office tell you? We have Bonner nailed on a hit from a decade ago. Atari Briggs ordered it. Bonner provided the gun. And a third guy, our cooperator, was the shooter. We're hoping Bonner's willing to fess up and finger Briggs for ordering the hit.”

“Whoa, hold your horses. In our case, Bonner's the kingpin. He's the one running the show. If we let him flip and take his cooperation,
he ends up cooperating down the food chain against the lowly workers. We don't do that in this office. Looks bad.”

“I understand your discomfort, Andre, really,” Melanie said. “But Atari Briggs is a high-priority target according to Main Justice. We've been told to move heaven and earth to bring him down. I'm sure they'll take the same line with you.”

“So I don't have anything to say about it, is what you're telling me.”

“Not really. But look on the bright side. If Bonner flips, he'll give you a lot of people on your end. C'mon, who else've you got in those surveillance photos? Maybe some of them are big fish.”

Ferris looked disgruntled, but he handed over the folder with the surveillance photos nonetheless. Melanie proceeded to lay out the remaining ones on the table. There were five in all, each one showing a view of a different man entering or exiting the mobile home. In several photographs, the subjects carried duffel bags, a sure sign of narcotics activity inside the trailer.

“Three of these mopes have been ID'd by scanning their faces into the mug-shot database. All three come up as previously arrested in New York or New Jersey on narcotics or weapons charges. Duvall can give you the details. The other two, we don't know who they are.”

Melanie and Papo were both studying the photos. Papo reached out and placed a fingertip on one of them.

“Him?”

“Nope, not ID'd yet,” Ferris said.

“I was looking at him, too,” Melanie said thoughtfully.

The photograph was the only one of a white man, and he had a distinctive appearance. Hulking of build, with the squashed-in face of an ex-boxer, under a thatch of ginger hair that looked wrong for him, like it belonged on the head of a smaller, gentler human being.

“When was this photo taken?” Papo asked.

“The day the boys did their big surveillance. What was that, Sunday?”

“Yes, boss,” Smithson said.

“He looks familiar, doesn't he?” Papo asked Melanie, his brows knit.

“Yes. But from where?”

“Our hotel?” Papo asked.

“I don't think so.”

“Yeah, I don't, either.”

They looked at each other. She looked back down at the photograph, concentrating with all her might.

“I think it was back in New York,” she said. “I think I saw him in court, at our status conference yesterday.”

“That's it. You're right. I saw him, too.”

“That status conference was closed to the public. He wasn't just a spectator. Either you had a press pass or some connection to the defense or the government. They didn't let civilians in because of the disruption the last time.”

“So either he's a member of the press…,” Papo began.

“Or he's part of the defense team,” Melanie finished.