October's Ghost (8 page)

“Ringing,” Tomás said.

A minute later, almost three thousand miles away, ten digits appeared on the screen of a cell phone buzzing inside a man’s pocket. With just a single look, he knew what to do. His
USA Today
had been finished hours before with his breakfast.

*  *  *

Art Jefferson walked off the elevator on the fourth floor just after sunrise, at a time when the L.A. office would normally be quiet for another two hours. This day, though, there were more than a hundred agents already on duty, more than half there on their day off. That was just the way it was. You didn’t kill an agent without striking a chord in the collective body of the FBI. Art pitied the perps who had robbed Thom Danbrook of his life.

“Art.” It was Cameron Lowe, the supervising special agent of the L.A. office’s Violent Crimes Section—Art’s boss.

“Morning, Cam.” Art walked to his desk in the bullpen area of the floor, which was divided into dozens of “rooms” by attractively upholstered shoulder-high dividers. He and Frankie shared one on the north side of the floor, near the row of glass-enclosed offices that housed the supervising agents of the office’s sections. Art had rated one once as head of the OC (Organized Crime) Section. That time was now just a fond, detested memory.

“How’s Aguirre?” Lowe asked, leaning his short frame against the pseudo wall that surrounded Art’s and Frankie’s desks.

“I made sure Shelley got her home last night.” He slid out of his jacket, hanging it on the single metal hook clipped to the divider’s top edge. “It ain’t easy, Cam. She’s hurting.”

“Are you going to need someone else to back you up on this? I mean, if she needs some time...”

Art’s head shook. Frankie had made it clear that she wanted in on this, and Art expected no different. He’d never known an agent to back away from the chance to catch the killers of a fellow agent. The offer had to be made, but... “No. She’ll be in. Is everything squared away with LAPD?”

“All set.” The LAPD, which had jurisdiction over the area where the murders were committed, had technical authority to be the lead agency on the case. But the fact that a federal officer had been killed in addition to the other victim had prompted the local police to cede the lead to the FBI. Now they had two murders to solve, and that of the other victim presented the best chance at finding the killers. Thom Danbrook had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. “TS figured out what happened with his gun.”

“What?” It was a subject of interest to the Bureau as a whole, as
every
agent carried the same Smith & Wesson Model 1076 that had somehow failed at the critical moment. The office’s Technical Services Section had immediately gone to work to determine the cause of the failure.

“Shooter error,” Lowe explained, pulling his own 1076 out. He removed the magazine and cleared the round in the chamber before proceeding. “Look.” He gripped the weapon in the proper manner, with the off hand supporting the front and underside of the gun hand. “Danbrook had a nasty gash on the skin webbing between the thumb and forefinger of his off hand.”

Art’s head dropped. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. He held it like a revolver, off hand wrapped over the side with the thumb on top. When he fired his first shot, the slide hit his hand and didn’t travel far enough back to pick up the next round. He reverted to Academy training when the stress kicked in. Unfortunately we were still with revolvers when he went through.” Lowe reloaded and reholstered his weapon. “That’s why the weapon failed, but I don’t know if he could have done anything to change the outcome.”

It was a cop’s nightmare: walking in on something and having the initiative in the bad guys’ favor.

“Anything on the getaway vehicle?” Art inquired, sitting down and turning on the ten-cup coffeemaker strategically placed on his side of their area. Frankie had her own on the small credenza, the result of the caf-decaf wars soon after their pairing.

Lowe had been there all night, giving Art a chance to come down from the adrenaline high and get some sleep. “LASO found it in back of the Pacific Design Center, on fire.” The Los Angeles Sheriffs Office patrolled the nearby city of West Hollywood, just blocks from the site of the murders. “Listed as a stolen out of Culver City.”

“These guys get around,” Art commented.

“Listen, I appreciate you taking this on,” Lowe said.

Art waved off the gratitude. “Cam, it’s no trouble. You knew his folks. You should be there.” Lowe and his boss, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Jerry Donovan, were leaving on a midday flight to St. Louis to deliver condolences to Danbrook’s parents. It was common for ranking members of the office where a fallen agent was assigned to visit the family, and at the request of the San Francisco office, Lowe and Donovan were going to do the duty. It was fitting, as the young agent had spent the majority of his short career in L.A. “How’d Bill take it?”

“Like a sock in the gut” Lowe answered. Special Agent in Charge William Killeen was at the Bureau’s Quantico, Virginia, academy for a meeting of all fifty-eight SACs to advise the deputy director on budget and manpower needs for the next fiscal year. “He wanted to come back, but I convinced him to stay there. He can’t do anything more than we already are.”

The machine was only up to cup number two, but Art couldn’t wait. He switched it off and poured himself a cup, then turned it back on. “You want any?”

“Leaded?”

“Un,” Art answered, getting a polite shake of the head in response. “Where are we at?”

“Jacobs is going to bring down an evidence list in a while and anything that might help.” They could use anything at this point.

“What about the other victim?” Anyone other than the dead agent was an “other.”

Lowe motioned with his head to the file folder on Art’s desk. “Not much more than last night.”

Art read through it quickly. “Francisco Portero. Sixty-five. Florida driver’s license.” He looked up. “Miami have anything yet?”

“Luke Kessler promised it by seven,” Lowe replied.

“Hmm.” It was the slimmest of the slim. Art was in charge of an investigation without a well-defined starting point. “Witnesses sure aren’t plentiful.”

“That blond waitress is still in shock. The only thing she gave us was that Portero said he was meeting someone. No descriptions from her, though. Looking at the statements, I’d say your busboy is the best so far. His description matches the one you gave of the van’s driver more closely than any of the others.”

A sudden hush fell over the room, the silence soon filled by condolences and comforting words as Frankie Aguirre waded through the sea of her fellow agents. She set her purse on the desk and went to the open arms of Cameron Lowe.

“How’re you doing, little lady?” The senior agent, a father figure in the L.A. office, was entitled to call her that, probably the only guy in the place she’d let get away with it.

“I’m okay.” Her eyes were a little swollen, but there were no tears. She had cried them all out the previous night.

“Much sleep, partner?”

“A few hours,” she answered, stepping back from the security of Lowe’s strong arms. “Enough for now.”

Lowe reached out and placed his hands on her shoulders, bending his head to look her in the eyes. “You go easy.”

“This is where I need to be, Cam. I need to help find the guys.”
I want them
.

“We will,” Lowe said, bringing his hands away. “I’ve got to run home and get cleaned up before Jerry and I leave. Lou is senior here until Jerry gets back.” Lou Hidalgo was deputy assistant special agent in charge. “He’ll be in about nine, but he’s wrapped up in that investigation group that’s running with ATF.”

“Right. Pass along my...you know.” Art hated these moments. Death had never been something he’d handled well. When his grandmother, the woman who’d raised him, had passed, he had withdrawn for almost a year, secluding himself in the dorm at the University of Alabama. His grades went up, but A’s and B’s had seemed almost meaningless at the time. Now he knew better. It was what she had wanted, what she had pushed him to do. This death, though, was an aberration. His grandmother’s time had come. Thom Danbrook’s had been chosen by another with no authority to do so. There was only one power in the universe with that authority. The ultimate power. The ultimate protector. The ultimate judge. Thom’s killers would come to know the latter intimately, Art vowed.

“You want some coffee?” Art asked once Lowe had left.

“Yeah, I’ll settle for your stuff today.” Frankie slid her empty mug across their adjoining desks, which faced each other. “I don’t need anything wiring me today.” She took the steaming cup and sipped it gingerly for a moment. “A lot of bodies here this morning.”

“You’ve never seen this before, have you?” She shook her head. Art knew she hadn’t. “It’s terrible when it happens, but it really shows you what people are made of.”

“I saw a few folks on the way in who rode Thom pretty hard when he was here,” Frankie said, remembering that Thom, the perfect gentleman, had kept his private life just that. But rumors were rumors, and they always found a way of starting. The truth had started the ones circulating about Thom, first quietly questioning his sexual orientation and later openly attacking it. Still, he hadn’t run away from his life. The request for a transfer to the Bay area had been made when he first arrived in L.A. years before. Frisco was where he had been accepted to law school on a part-time basis. Thom Danbrook, attorney. Frankie wanted to cry at the thought of it never happening.

“Mortality is a powerful teacher,” Art said. He hoped it would be enough to end the stupid, silent discrimination against those who just wanted to do their job. Thom had drawn his gun and faced down two shooters, for Christ’s sake! Wasn’t that enough? “We’ve got ‘em all at our disposal.”

“What’s the plan?” Frankie looked at the roster that Art handed her.

“Omar Espinosa is coordinating the field teams. He’s got three of them over at the other victim’s place.”

It occurred to Frankie that she had no idea who the man was. “Who was he?”

Art related the particulars. “He had a little apartment up off of Highland. Manager’s card was in his wallet, which was a break. We wouldn’t have had an address this fast otherwise, ‘cause the DL is out of Florida.

“The other teams are going to start hitting the areas where the van was stolen from and where it turned up.”

Either the killers had someone waiting for them, or they had other wheels already procured. That was the way pros would have done it, and these guys were looking like pros, which didn’t bode well for a quick resolution. Still, the agents had learned that all criminals, by way of their choice of profession, had some innate stupidity that, somewhere along the line, would cause a slipup. Catching the mistake was the trick.

“I’d say we have to find out why these guys wanted to kill Portero,” Frankie suggested.

“The busboy said one of them...” Art flipped back through his notes. “Medium height, curly black hair, mustache. That one called Portero’s name before they fired. He also saw the other one, the balding guy who shot at me, bend down and take something from Portero’s shirt pocket.”

“If this leads to anything, I think we owe that busboy a lunch.”

“I told him we’d put in a good word for him with the INS,” Art said. “He’s been trying to naturalize for a couple years now. Anyway, so we have two shooters who knew their intended victim and who wanted something from same.” His eyes asked for Aguirre’s read of the situation.

“Contract hit,” she observed flatly. “But still, why Portero?”

There were several possibilities that Art could think of, and probably a dozen more he knew would crop up along the way. “Okay, all the primary participants are Hispanic. One is from Florida.”

“Could have some OC involvement,” Frankie surmised, the activity of investigation easing the pain of grief. “There are several Cuban crime families that are trying to expand their influence, and they’re pretty ruthless from what I remember of the briefings.”

“Salvadoran and Panamanian, too,” Art added.

Frankie drained her first cup and slid it back for a refill. “That gives us a few thousand suspects, not counting the million or so we haven’t thought of yet.”

“Slow and steady. That’s how we win this race.” Art had come across that lesson after much grief. His natural tendency was to push, push, push. Getting past that sometimes destructive trait had been one of the biggest hurdles in his life. “We’ve got ten teams slated to run down things once we get a little more from Miami.”

Art’s phone rang. “Jefferson.” He smiled at Frankie. “Speak of the Devil. How’re you doing, Luke?... Yeah, it’s appreciated. He was a good kid. You have anything?” It took a minute for the Miami agent to relate the information. “Well, that is interesting. Sure appreciate your help. Hey, get some sleep. Bye.”

“Well?” Frankie inquired, wanting desperately for there to be something they could start with.

“Francisco Portero fled from Cuba earlier this year,” Art explained. “He came over on that commuter flight that just hopped across the Keys. There were a couple other flights that did the same thing back in ‘92 or ‘93. Can’t remember which. Maybe both. But that isn’t even the frosting.” His partner’s eyes scolded him for the pause in his release of the information. “Portero, up until he left, was translator for the Cuban ambassador to the UN.”

“So this was a defection,” Frankie observed, a question immediately coming to mind. “What language?”

“Lang—” Art smiled with embarrassment. It was the little things, the nuances, that he missed. He was a global thinker, while Frankie saw the trees in the forest. “I forgot to ask. I’m sure it’ll be in the hard copy he’s faxing.”

“Kind of a new spin on things,” Frankie commented. “A former Cuban diplomatic type defects and ends up dead before year’s end. Hit from home?”

It couldn’t be ruled out, Art thought, but the evidence didn’t point that way. “I don’t know about that. The busboy said the guy who called to Portero didn’t trill his
R
’s. He said it was pure gringo talk. If it is the case, though, then it points toward a silencing. Like Portero knew something that someone at home didn’t want him to tell.”