the Prostitutes' Ball (2010) (30 page)

"Slow down and talk me through it," Dahlia said.

She set a digital tape recorder on Jeb's desk between us. We gave them everything we had, including all of our suspicions. When we finished, Dahlia weighed in.

"You can't pin any of that on San Diego. You got nothing that sticks to him except the fact that Stender Sheedy ran out there after you braced him in his den, which is not a crime. No judge is going to write this."

"I didn't say we had it completely nailed down," I defended. "But these people have somehow tripped to our investigation. Sheedy went directly out to Skyline Drive after I started talking about gold contracts. My bet is he wanted to check that well house to be sure we hadn't found the truck. When he couldn't get on the property, he went straight to San Diego. That tells me they're all involved in that eighty-three bullion heist and the deaths of at least two guards."

"Circumstantial, nonbinding, probative, and inadmissible," Dahlia said, firing these legal concepts at us like clip-fed bullets.

"Maybe, but how 'bout this?" I said, switching tactics. "An hour ago we were both shot at. The slugs are in Hitchens s car. We search that ranch. If we find the long gun out there that fired those bullets and ballistics can make a match, that's physical evidence tying the gun licensee to an attempted double cop killing."

"It's upside down, Scully, and you know it," Dahlia said in frustration. "You need the gun and the ballistics match first, their you get the search warrant. I'm trying to help here, but it's all speculative. You need to give me more."

Of course she was right.

Just then, Barry Matthews from the Financial Crimes desk rode in on a white horse and saved us. There weren't enough chairs so everyone stood as he launched into his report.

"In eighty-one the DEA thought Diego San Diego was a silent partner in Eagle's Nest Studios," he began. "But it was never proven. There were also rumors he was funding that studio's bank overdrafts."

"Why would he do that?" Hitch asked.

"The DEA thought Diego San Diego was a silent partner in the company and was setting Eagle's Nest up as a potential money laundry for the Columbian drug cartels. Apparently, this was going on without Thomas Vulcunas knowledge. Vulcuna found out in December of eighty-one. They had at least one public argument over it. It almost came to blows at the studio Christmas party."

"The night he supposedly killed his wife and daughter, then shot himself," I said, looking at Dahlia. She had a neutral wait-and-see look on her face.

"A lot of the DEA stuff I got dealing with Diego's past relationship with Vulcuna was redacted," Barry continued. "So I don't know exactly what was going on there, but somebody in our federal system wanted to keep San Diego out of that murder-suicide case and blacked out about ten paragraphs of their own report. Back then, the DEA was running a big probe on the Colombian drug cartels. From all that blacked-out language, it looks like the feds had flipped Diego San Diego and he had started giving up names on his drug buddies."

"So the feds protected him," I said.

Barry nodded. "They didn't want him compromised as a witness before they could get their major drug case to court. He wouldn't make much of a wit if in advance of those cases, he got accused of Vulcunas triple murder."

I said, "That's why McKnight and Norris were yanked off the Vulcuna case and it got closed down so abruptly."

Hitch now took one of the few chairs, opened his journal to a fresh page, and started writing furiously.

"How does a production company operate as a drug laundry?" Alexa asked.

"You invest dirty drug cash in the production company and take ownership in the shows it produces," Barry explained. "Then after two network runs, when Eagle's Nest finally sells the shows into syndication, the owners take their money out in distribution and syndication profits. Everybody pays their income taxes and walks away rich and happy."

"And how does the Dorothy White Foundation fit?" I wondered.

Barry started grinning. "That's the really neat part. You'll never guess who Dorothy White really is." He paused for effect.

We all just waited him out and the moment was lost, so he shrugged and pushed ahead.

"Dorothy White is Diego San Diego's sister-in-law. Diego's wife was Maria Elaina San Diego, but her maiden name was Blanca. Blanca is white in Spanish."

"Duh," Hitch said.

"Yeah, duh. But you guys walked right past it. Dorothy and Maria Elaina were sisters," Barry continued. "Dorothy married Thayer Dunbar. Maria Elaina married Diego San Diego. Their grandfather changed his name to White from Blanca when he emigrated from Colombia in the fifties. It was a very common practice for immigrants to do that."

It's exactly what Chrissy Sweet had done when she married Karel Sladky. Another weird parallel between those two cases.

Hitch finished writing this and shouted, "He shoots, he scores!"

Everybody in the room turned to look at him. His red journal was still open in his lap. His left fist up pumping air. The smile on his face quickly faded under the roomful of glares.

"He's excited because that's the main subplot that's been lying beneath the surface since the inciting event that nobody saw until it finally jumped up in the third act and tied these two cases together," I said.

Now everybody was staring at me.

"Maybe we should explain it later," Hitch muttered.

"So, Brooks Dunbar is what? Diego San Diego's nephew through marriage?" Alexa asked.

Hitch nodded. He was still grinning.

In the next hour an arrest warrant came through for Diego San Diego and twenty John Does as material witnesses and potential suspects in the hijacking of the Brinks armored truck and the killing of its two guards. A search warrant was written for Diego's ranch located at the end of W. Potrero Road.

Jeb called a Realtor in the West Valley and found a nearby farm that was for sale near San Diego's spread. He made arrangements for us to use it as a staging area.

I was tapping my foot impatiently while I imagined the ranch house emptying out, with the old Colombian drug boss scurrying to his jet for an escape to the town of his birth somewhere in the hills above Cartagena.

We were on the road less than ten minutes after we had the warrants in hand. I was in the back of an armored rescue vehicle with Hitch, Jeb, and a SWAT warrant delivery team.

"We need more SWAT shooters, Skipper," Hitch said, leaning forward, an intense look on his face.

"We have one unit," Jeb told him.

"Two SWAT teams would be better," Hitch pressed. "Three if possible."

Jeb wasn't convinced, so Hitch went into verbal overdrive. "This shoot-out will soon become LAPD campfire lore. The heroics of your takedown will be talked about for years, Skipper. They write folk songs about shit like this. It could end up being called the Battle of Simi Valley or, less favorably, Calloway's Catastrophe." Then he lowered his voice. "You want to protect your guys, Skipper. It's better to have extra SWAT and not need it than to need extra SWAT and not have it."

Jeb was still reluctant, but a sense of caution finally prevailed. He made the call.

"I'd also get the SWAT chopper up over the target with a couple a Colt CAR-15 assault rifles," I suggested in the clutches of the moment.

We sped along on the 101 freeway. A caravan of five Suburbans full of armed cops in flak vests followed by a SWAT team in a black ARV, with two more on the way.

"We're over twenty-five years late serving this warrant," Hitch said. "But the LAPD is on a collision course with justice."

It sounded like the tagline for our movie.

Chapter
52.

The ranch Jeb had found was small and only a quarter of a mile from Rancho San Diego. It was a holdout property that had finally been sunk by California's high state taxes. The few farm buildings were in desperate need of repair. We pulled up the drive and parked next to an old barn with faded, peeling paint.

Hitch and I walked over to the SWAT van and borrowed a couple of Second Chance flak vests, strapping them on over our clothing. Then we each checked out Heckler & Koch MP-5 9 mm submachine guns from the weapons box. These full-autos were acknowledged by most cops to be the Rolls-Royce of assault guns.

LAPD SWAT squad teams were commanded by a sergeant and consisted of two five-man elements. There was a hard-entrv team an
d a
n intelligence officer who was assigned the job of detailing everything about the target and the location.

The two-man sniper teams consisted of a shooter who carried a long-barreled AR-15 and his spotter, who was assigned the job of identifying potential targets with a scope.

We waited for our two additional SWAT teams, who had just called to say they were ten minutes out.

The first pictures appeared on the intel officer's closed-circuit monitor in the back of our black ARV, sent down to us by a camera in SWAT's hovering air unit. Everyone in the truck huddled around the screen and looked at the shots being beamed down by the chopper, currently flying at five thousand feet over Rancho San Diego. We could hear the faint THUMPA-THUMPA of the rotor blades.

The air unit was broadcasting a front-down view of the huge ranch house. Even on TV, it looked impressive. The two-story California Spanish with its magnificent courtyard sat facing a stable building and horseshoe-shaped paddock.

"Looks like nobody's left yet," jeb commented, watching the monitor, which showed half a dozen Lincoln Town Cars and Suburbans parked in front of the house, being loaded with bags. Off to one side, next to the big horse barn, I could see the red and white Bell Jet Ranger that had been out at Trancas Canyon this morning.

"You need to keep that bird from leaving," I told Jeb, who relayed that instruction to our air unit.

Then the two arriving SWAT units rolled up the drive in their new black Armored Rescue Vehicles. The commanding officers of the three SWAT teams began making geographic drawings of the site.

About ten minutes later we reviewed the layout of Rancho San Diego. As we watched the monitor, we could see the red and white chopper was now being loaded with big suitcases.

"If you want to keep it contained, we need to do this now," the SWAT lieutenant advised. He was a tall, raw-boned guy with too much chin named Rick Sherman.

He called his guys together and huddled with his SWAT sergeants, working out the plan.

Jeb, Hitch, and I were given radios and told to stay on TAC frequency six. We were also instructed to follow the entry teams up the drive, but to stay well back until the site was secured.

"We don't want you guys getting hurt or in the way," Lieutenant Sherman said.

"In the movie, we can take a little creative license with that," Hitch assured me after Sherman left.

There were over thirty of us as we drove off the borrowed property and headed up Potrero. The first line of resistance was the guard shack, which sat under the driveway arch. When the plastic badge saw our armored black caravan, he stepped out and held his hands high over his head.

"I surrender," he said. "Don't shoot."

The security guard, in his late sixties, was ordered to toss his gun in the dirt and was quickly cuffed.

We left two men to secure the exit and our army of flakked SWAT officers drove up the lane in the deadly looking black ARVs toward the beautiful two-story Spanish farmhouse that sat at the top of the hill. Hundred-thousand-dollar grazing thoroughbreds turned their heads and watched placidly as we rumbled past.

The SWAT teams poured out of the vehicles just below the house and, with their MP-5s at port arms, quickly fanned out to secure all first-floor exits. Several stewards who were just coming out of the house carrying luggage stopped in surprise.

"LAPD! Hands in the air! Everybody on the dirt. Spread em!" Sherman shouted.

The men dropped Gucci bags, threw their hands in the air, then proned out on the ground and were handcuffed.

The SWAT teams ran up the short hill and went through the open front door into the main house. Hitch and I brought up the rear. In the entry hall, five more Colombians were carrying suitcases down from upstairs. All of them surrendered without incident.

"The shootings gonna start any time now," Hitch panted in my ear, still out of breath from running up the hill.

We followed a SWAT team into the kitchen, where we found two more men and one woman packing food into a wicker basket.

"SWAT. Put em up. Assume the position!" a SWAT sergeant shouted.

They all hit the floor and spread their arms, then laced their fingers behind their necks. They were cuffed and pulled into the entry.

Hitch and I stood with them under an old Spanish wagon-wheel chandelier, pointing our MP-5s at these frightened employees who sat handcuffed as SWAT teams continued to sweep through the house.

We heard doors being thrown open upstairs and officers yelling, "SWAT! You're under arrest!"

Several minutes later one man and three women in household staff uniforms were herded down the staircase by SWAT members and secured next to our picnic basket packers.