Playing the Game (28 page)

            ‘Oh Katie’, she smiled, ‘you’re so much like your father’. Like lightening, she swung a clenched fist across Katie’s face, knocking her back into unconsciousness and drawing blood, which trickled from a cut across Katie’s eyebrow.  ‘Oh yes’, she repeated as she placed the hood back on her victim. ‘So much like your father’.

            Katie would have to keep, for now. She had something in the back of her Cadillac that required her immediate attention; something she hadn’t planned on until about an hour and a half ago, but it was certainly a wonderful addition to the game. And something that would give Patton another big surprise.

76

            ‘So who was responsible for releasing Sarah Caldwell?’ I asked McCrane. ‘We know it’s not just you and Tassiker’. I suspected that even though the deal was in place, the more he thought we knew, the more forthcoming he might be.

            ‘You know that do you?’ he asked. ‘And who else do you suspect might have been involved then?’

            ‘Why don’t you tell us McCrane?’ Williams chimed in. ‘You’ve got your deal, but if we don’t get Katie Patton back alive and if you don’t give us anything that leads us to Sarah Caldwell, your deal’s not worth shit’.

            In truth, although Paul McCrane really didn’t know much else apart from the fact that he and Burr had engineered her release from prison and that she had subsequently killed the two guards and disappeared. He had been piecing together bits of the puzzle himself.

            What eluded him the most was how she could just simply disappear. Between them, he and Burr had pulled in favours all across the state trying to track down Sarah Caldwell. She must have had assistance from somewhere, otherwise he was sure that they would have located her by now. They had been looking for her for the best part of six months.

            Williams brought up the surveillance tapes of him leaving San Quentin with her. ‘That’s you and Caldwell, right?’ he stated. Well there was no point in denying that was there?

            ‘As you can clearly see’, McCrane retorted, ‘that is indeed me, and that is indeed Sarah Caldwell’.

            ‘Where did you take her after that?’ Patton wanted to know.

            ‘Well there’s little point in denying that Jameson Burr, who you no doubt have in an interrogation room somewhere assisted me in extraditing her from San Quentin’, there was no harm in giving them something they had already probably worked out. ‘She was taken to a government safe house in Florence. We placed two guards with her who thought she was a witness to a mafia hit. Perfectly plausible’.

            ‘And she escaped?’ Patton continued for him. ‘Where did she go?’

            ‘That I cannot say, for I do not know Detective Patton’, he was thinking on his feet now. Someone close to him and Burr must have known. He had thought that they had been the only two people, Tassiker aside, who had known about their operation.

            ‘One thing I want to know’, Williams asked, ‘is why you released her in the first place?’

            McCrane wasn’t about to divulge the existence of the Animi; certainly not to those as undeserving of the knowledge as a LA Police Captain and one of his detectives. At the thought of the Animi, another thought hit him from left field. Could one of the Animi have known about Sarah Caldwell before they had told them at the last meeting?

            ‘Did you have no means of tracking her?’ Patton asked, firing another question at him. ‘Surely you realised how dangerous she was?’

            Tracking her? Of course they had, as they usually did. Caldwell hadn’t been the first prisoner they had recruited to do their bidding over the years. Burr had taken care of the tracking implant himself, at the safe house. Caldwell would have been unconscious for the implanting wouldn’t she, so how would she have known she was implanted with a tracker? More to the point, why had he not thought of this before?

            As far as he was aware, the only individuals that knew of the implanting process were the members of the Animi. It dawned on him that the only way Sarah Caldwell could have known she was implanted with a tracking device was if she had been told. He hadn’t and he was pretty sure his colleague who had been arrested this morning hadn’t either. That only left a pretty short list of possibilities. Who had told her?

            ‘I need to speak to Jameson Burr’, he announced, standing up. From the look on Patton and Williams’ face it didn’t look like they were going to accommodate him.

‘Five minutes’, has added. ‘I need to clarify something important with him’.

            ‘Tell us what’, Patton demanded.

Having no other choice, McCrane complied.

            ‘I might be able to give you the individual that has helped Sarah Caldwell since her escape from my custody’.

77

            By the time he was marched down to the interrogation room where Burr was being detained, he’d gone over several different scenarios in his mind. He thought he had worked out who had aided Sarah Caldwell, possibly hiding her as McCrane and Burr had pulled in their respective favours all over the state, failing to locate her. He was annoyed with himself for not working it out sooner.

            He had hoped that Patton and Williams would have given him time to speak to Burr in private, but they weren’t taking the chance that Burr might pass something onto McCrane that would not be reciprocated in their direction. As they entered, Burr looked up in surprise, alarmed to see McCrane was now sporting several bruises since he’d last seen him.

            ‘Five minutes has started’, Williams instructed. Seeing that they weren’t going to get any privacy, McCrane hoped Burr would pick up his signals and try to get himself a deal. Regardless of whether Burr did or didn’t however, he still needed to clarify something with him.

            ‘Jameson’, he began, ‘I’ve been forced to help these gentlemen with their enquiries regarding Sarah Caldwell’. Burr looked startled. What had McCrane done that for? How had they known about that in the first place?

            ‘I need to clarify something regarding the implanting of the tracker’, he continued. ‘Something only you can verify’, he added, hoping that Burr would pick up on that. Thankfully, it worked.

            ‘I’m happy to help’, Burr announced turning to Captain Williams, ‘however, I sense that my good friend Paul McCrane here has struck some sort of deal with you gentlemen, and my assistance with your investigation into Sarah Caldwell would of course be subject to the exact same terms’.

            I turned to Captain Williams myself, aware that one deal on the table was more than he needed to have offered. Two deals would certainly be pushing it.

            About thirty seconds passed whilst the Captain mulled it over, finally nodding his head. ‘You’ll get your deal but you talk now. Non-negotiable; take it or leave it. I find you’ve held anything back from us, I’ll null and void it and you’ll be looking at a minimum of ten to fifteen from what I’ve seen in this mornings papers’.

            ‘In that case, I’ll take it.’ Burr practically snapped his hand off. ‘Now then’, he turned to McCrane, nodding in silent recognition of how his friend had engineered his deal. ‘What exactly do you need to clarify?’

            ‘It’s about when you implemented the tracking device’, McCrane re-stated.

            ‘Ah yes, well as usual, we …’

            ‘As usual?’ I interrupted. ‘You mean you’ve done this before?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That was a slip up McCrane hadn’t been expecting, but he was quick to act.

            ‘Whether we have or we haven’t’, he said immediately, ‘Neither scenarios pertain anything relevant to us releasing Sarah Caldwell’, he stated imperiously, ‘and are therefore irrelevant to your case’. He turned back to Burr. ‘What I need to know is if you followed our discussed implanting procedure to the letter?’

            ‘Of course I did’, Burr said indignantly.

            ‘So you’re positive that Sarah Caldwell was unconscious when you implanted her with the tracking chip? You were alone? There’s no way she would be aware of the procedure?’

            ‘No way at all’, Burr confirmed. ‘She was certainly unconscious and I was alone. The guards remained outside until I went; they wouldn’t have known anything’.

McCrane stood up. ‘Thank you Jameson’, he shook his friend’s hand. ‘Your deal will be delivered, will it Captain?’

            Unsure as to the relevance of the information Burr had just given, Williams nodded ‘Subject to the two conditions being met’.

            ‘Conditions?’ Burr enquired.

            ‘That Sarah Caldwell is caught and that Katie Patton is alive when found’

            ‘Ah, she has you’re daughter’, Burr directed at Patton. ‘Well I hope for my sake, you get her back’, he almost laughed.

            Whilst Patton and Williams hadn’t understood the pertinence of the information just confirmed by Jameson Burr, Paul McCrane did. He knew that only three people were aware of the tracker implanting process when Sarah Caldwell escaped; and he now knew who must have assisted her.  

            Certain now that one member of the Animi had known about Caldwell’s release before they were told about it at the meeting a few days ago, McCrane turned to Patton and Williams.

            ‘I’m not sure how or why’, he informed them, ‘but I’m fairly certain that one individual may have assisted Caldwell on the outside. Maybe even still is’. He knew that aside from himself and Burr, only one other person, prior to the Animi's last meeting, had known how they were going to track Sarah Caldwell once she had been released from San Quentin. That person was the individual who had suggested implanting their subjects with the tracker in the first place, the first time it was needed. Neither Patton nor Williams spoke. The next question they would have both asked blindingly obvious.

            ‘And I think that individual is Robert Farrington’.

78

            Not particularly wanting to return to the scene of this morning’s incident quite so soon, Conrad Conway did so under considerable duress from his wife who had seemed mildly annoyed that her early afternoon coffee with her friends at some swanky restaurant on Melrose had been interrupted by her husband shooting and killing an intruder at their home that morning. To his not entirely unexpected surprise, she had ranted the entire duration of the mercifully short journey from the police station where she picked him up to their home in Beverly Hills that the luxurious carpet she had picked out for the hallway eight or nine months ago during one of her not too infrequent house restyles had better not be ruined. Not that he’d been paying too much attention, but he was sure she had asked about the state of the carpet before his well-being!

            Reassuring her that by the end of the day, Los Angeles’ finest carpet cleaning company would be there to assess the damage, he turned his thoughts to how his plan to take McCrane and Burr out of the picture was proceeding. They had both been brought into custody this morning, and McCrane had looked positively livid for a moment when they passed each other before in the corridor of the police station. The fact that McCrane now knew he had masterminded his arrest must have come as a double-whammy of a shock when he’d realised that the plan to kill him had been thwarted.

            His cell rang and seeing the number that it screened, he knew this was a call that required a certain level of privacy to take. Leaving his wife to flap around the blood stained carpet in the hall, he strolled through to the kitchen and out into the spacious garden, which even on a cold November’s day such as this one, retained a certain degree of warmth, with flush green grass and blooming flowers cascading throughout. Their gardener did a splendid job, no doubt about that, but on the money he paid him every month, he damn well should do! He winced slightly as he lifted his cell to his ears; his ribs, although not broken as he’d first suspected, were bruised and despite the couple of pain killers he’d taken, were still causing him some pain. Not that he was about to go and get any medical advice, he had other matters to attend to today.

            ‘What have you got for me?’ he demanded as he answered his ringing cell. The caller was Steve Bridges, one of his several informants within the infrastructure of the LAPD. Bridges worked as an administration clerk, and was also often used as the ‘go-to’ guy between certain departments. Conway had telephoned him, along with all his other informers, from a payphone on the corner of 6
^th
just after he had left first thing this morning, instructing him to call if he should hear of anything pertaining to the individuals named on the front page of the Times this morning. Bridges was an astute individual, who Conway kept on his extremely unofficial books with a couple of hundred dollar-a-month retainer. Not earning a particularly great deal in his current job, it was a couple of hundred bucks that Bridges was always happy to receive.

            ‘Just thought you should know’, Bridges answered, ‘that McCrane struck a deal about an hour ago. I don’t know exactly what he’s giving them but all charges relating to the housing fund are being dropped’. Conway almost dropped his cell in surprise.

            ‘Dropped? What the fuck do you mean, dropped?’ he exploded.

            ‘Just saw the file now’, Bridges stated. ‘I had to take it up to the Captain straight from the legal department, about an hour ago. It’s not quite done and dusted but it’s not far off’.

            ‘What do you mean?’

            ‘The deal seems to hinge on two conditions being fulfilled’.

            ‘What fucking conditions?’

            ‘Well’, Bridges recalled, ‘the first one is the apprehension of someone called Sarah Caldwell; don’t know who she is though, never heard of her before’.

            ‘And the second one?’ Conway enquired. He certainly knew who Sarah Caldwell was, even if Bridges didn’t.

            ‘The safe return of Katie Patton’, Bridges informed him.