The Third Rule Of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (6 page)

“Jesus. Mook, not gook. Didn’t you see
Goodfellas?
” Bill sighed. “No, of course you didn’t. Who do you need to ping, anyway?”

I gave him the shorthand on the trace, leaving out certain key details, such as who, what, and why. “The phone contract’s under my client’s name, but she can’t go the cell phone-carrier route to trace it, for reasons of acute paranoia—I mean, privacy. Otherwise, what I have to work with is a bunch of blanks.”

“I don’t envy you,” Bill said. “Even with NamUs expanding its national database, we’ve had a helluva time tracking down unregistered aliens reported missing. I can think of maybe one success story out of hundreds, and she wasn’t even missing, just shacked up with a new boyfriend. I mean, think about it—where do you even start? Half of them have no ID, and the half that do trace back to someone who’s deceased, or living in another state, happily ignorant that his or her personal information has been hijacked. Needle in a haystack, Ten. That’s what you’ve got going on.”

“Nobody said being a gumshoe was easy.”

I waited. I knew Bill well.

“Ah, crap. Give me the fucking number. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks,” I said, but he had already rung off. I texted him Clara’s number and added a smiley-face emoticon, guaranteed to make him mad all over again, in that best-of-friends way. Bill and I saw each other rarely these days, but once a partner, always a partner.

I thought about what he’d said. If NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, had problems tracking down illegals, my own chance of success seemed pretty slim. Everything hung on the cell phone.

I was grateful for his help. I always had my recovering hacker, Mike, data jockey extraordinaire, on call as a backup plan, but as Bill pointed out, tracing someone else’s cell phone was illegal for anyone but the cops. I hated to knowingly ask Mike to break the law. I had kept him out of prison as a juvenile; I didn’t want to send him there as an adult.

As I pulled up to my house, I pressed a random button on my phone. Once I reached my front door, the little genies inside the system would have already authenticated me and lowered their guns. I mentally bowed down to the genius of Mike.

“It’s simple,” he’d said, after setting up the personalized feature for me. Mike’s phone was connected to my Guard-on breach alerts, and I’d woken him up several afternoons—Mike sleeps all day and works all night—by accidentally setting off the alarm. By the time I made it inside my house, it was too late to disarm the system. “All I had to do,” he went on, ignoring the growing glaze coating my eyes, “was assign your wireless network a static IP address and set up a Guard-on network item to ping the IP every five seconds. That way, when you’re close, you return the ping, and the system can check the MAC and initiate a bunch of macros, alerting the house you’re home. Easy-peasy.”

Welcome to Mike’s brain—and my world.

Tank met me at the door, his tail swishing. I reached down to pet him. He sniffed my hand and stalked away.

“It’s horse,” I said. “And if it helps, I don’t like them any more than you do.”

I washed my hands and made peace with a tuna-water offering. I was hungry myself and decided on peanut butter on toast. Only I couldn’t find the peanut butter, and my bread had broken out in suspicious little green splotches. I settled on a banana. As I peeled the fruit, I noticed a small yellow Post-it had fallen on the floor by the counter. I picked it up.

“Dr. K. M F 6!!!” was inked on it, in Heather’s looping, little-girl script. A small daisy was doodled next to the time.

Who was Dr. K.? More to the point, why did he deserve a daisy?

My cell phone buzzed.

“Found it,” Bill said. “I can get you within three hundred and twenty-eight feet.”

“That was fast,” I said.

Police used to rely on cell-tower triangulation to track down the geographic location of a phone. It wasn’t an exact science, but at least it gave us a general sense of locality and position. But the newer phone models have incorporated a form of GPS triangulation that pulls much more precise information from a cluster of satellites constantly low-orbiting around our planet. The rapid cross-referencing of data can identify and place a phone to within 328 feet. Why 328, as opposed to 327 or 329, I have no idea.

Bill recited a street address on Serrano.

“Koreatown?”

“Close. Little Armenia.”

“Thanks, Bill,” I said.

“Don’t thank me. Thank Big Foot.” Big Foot, aka Melvin Skinner, was a Texas drug dealer whose “mule” was a deluxe motor home stuffed with thousands of pounds of marijuana. In 2006, the local cops used data from his throwaway cell phone to track him down en route to Alabama to make a delivery. He was arrested and charged for a laundry list of drug-dealing behaviors. His lawyers cried foul, claiming the DEA had violated his Fourth Amendment rights because they never issued a warrant, but those of us doing metropolitan police work cheered. The court ruled cell phone use to be a public, rather than a private act. That ruling was appealed, of course, and the case had been passed along to a higher court, but for now, no warrants were necessary.

“Thank you, Big Foot,” I recited obediently.

I heard twin shrieks in the background.

“Gotta go,” Bill said. “Lola has Maude in a headlock.”

I traded the blazer for a dark blue windbreaker and retrieved my .38 from its nylon gun bag, locked in the safe in my closet. I had cleaned the Wilson only yesterday, and the stainless steel barrel and walnut handle gleamed. I hefted the weapon once or twice in my hand. It felt snug there, at home. Other cops preferred bigger guns, but most of them had bigger hands. I pulled out the Jackass Rig shoulder holster as well.

“I’m off,” I said to Tank. “Wish me luck.”

Tank blinked. That counted, I guess.

I activated the Guard-on deities yet again. They were armed for action, and so was I.

I switched to my beater Toyota, entered the address in my phone, and called upon MapQuest to get me there—so much easier than trying to decode the microscopic squiggles of the
Thomas Guide
while driving. Not that I’m complaining—Sherlock didn’t even have that. Sunday afternoon traffic had started to build, and well over an hour later I was finally parked on Serrano Avenue, just around the corner from a massive church topped by multiple golden, onion-shaped domes that rivaled the Taj Mahal’s.

Assuming Clara Fuentes’s phone wasn’t shopping in the Food 4 Less, there was only one building that made sense within my 328-foot radius of possibilities. The peeling three-story apartment house was a dingy rectangle, its faded tan the color of regret. A makeshift square of poured concrete out front housed a rusting pickup, canted to one side. Several swarthy old men, gray hair sprouting from beneath their undershirts, sat hunched on plastic lawn chairs dragged onto narrow balconies. They aimed rings of cigarette smoke at the pavement below. A baby was crying inconsolably, and a woman’s voice shouted in frustration.

Across the street, graffiti disfigured the cement wall bordering the Food 4 Less, and a pile of blankets fenced in by overturned shopping carts indicated a homeless person had claimed one small piece of sidewalk real estate as his own. The whole block was derelict, the gleaming church around the corner a serious misplacement of priorities.

I holstered my gun under my windbreaker and got out of the car. I strolled up to the building’s entrance, a metal gate meshed with chain-link, pushed it open, and walked to the front door of the apartment. The back of my neck prickled. I could feel the eyes of the old men following my every move, like silent prison guards.

The front door was not quite closed, a piece of luck. I stepped inside and studied a directory of names and apartment numbers hanging over a metal case of mailboxes. Half the handwritten names were too faded to read, and the other half were illegible. That meant a door-to-door. Three floors, six apartments per floor. I began at the beginning. The first two apartments were empty, or else no one was answering my knock. At the third door, I got a response, but the tiny, wrinkled woman, her walnut face bound in a flowered scarf tied tightly under her chin, spoke no English. I moved on.

Finally, upstairs on the second floor, in the second apartment, I got lucky again. A young Latino man not only opened the door but spoke English, and he used that English to invite me inside, once I told him why I was there.

“Sure,” he said. “I know Clara. Best refried black beans in the city. She’s Sofia’s cousin, right? She visits here a lot.”

“You know Sofia?”

“Not well enough.” He grinned. “But that may have just changed.” He pointed to a cage in the corner, half-covered with a striped beach towel. “Sorry about the towel. The bird wouldn’t shut up.”

He crossed the room and pulled off the towel. A gray parrot sporting a crown of yellow feathers and two orange spots for cheeks pinned us with a beady-eyed stare. “Cockatiel,” the young man said.

SQUAWK!

He covered the cage quickly. “See what I mean? Harsh.”

He indicated a lumpy sofa, and we sat. The apartment consisted of a 12-by-12-foot square that housed a twin bed; a desk and chair; a small sofa; a tiny kitchen area, including a wooden tray-table set up to eat on; one window; a bathroom the size of a postage stamp, and a cockatiel in a cage. No balcony.

“I’m bird-sitting,” he explained. “Sofia came by earlier today in a big rush and asked me if I’d watch it for her. She loves that bird. No joke.”

“When was that?”

“Let me think. Maybe two, three hours ago? She seemed pretty stressed.”

“And Clara?”

“I haven’t seen her for a few days. I’m Carlos, by the way.”

“Ten,” I answered.

“Ten?”

“Ten.”

“Cool. So what, Clara’s in some kind of trouble? Hard to believe.”

I explained that an employer of hers was concerned and had hired me to look into her absence. “Can you show me Sofia’s apartment?”

“Sure. Two doors down,” Carlos said. I followed him into the hallway. The corridor was poorly lit, the linoleum underfoot sticky. A strong scent of stewing meat wafted from under one doorway, and I remembered I was starving.

“We’re the only Latinos in the building,” he said over his shoulder. “So, you know, we kind of got to know each other by default. Still, it’s all good. My neighbors leave me alone, the rent’s cheap, and I can catch the Red Line at Western and Hollywood to go downtown. I work two jobs, and at night I go to LACC. I’m studying to be a teacher. “

I found myself liking Carlos more and more.

“Here you go,” he said. “Whoa. Shit, man. That’s not good.”

We stared at the wooden door frame. The jamb was splintered, as if the door had been jimmied open. I motioned Carlos behind me and slipped my right hand inside my windbreaker, curling my palm around the Wilson’s wooden handle.

“Hello?” I said. “Sofia? Clara?” I nudged at the door with my foot. It swung open, revealing a one-room boxy studio identical to Carlos’s. Either Sofia was the worst housekeeper in the world or someone had ransacked the place. A pullout futon lay in pieces, the mattress and pillows shredded, the wooden slats broken. A small coffee table was overturned, and torn clothing and broken dishes littered the floor. An entire sack of birdseed had been dumped onto a woven throw rug.

“Did Sofia leave you a key, by any chance?” I said.

“Um.”

“Because if she did, technically, you’re in charge of her place while she’s gone.”

Carlos was a bright boy. “In that case, I’m sure she did.”

“Care to invite me in?”

“
Por favor.
” He walked through the door.

I followed him in. I executed a quick visual search for signs of a violent altercation or hasty departure. No visible bodies. No bloodstains. No half-eaten plates of abandoned food. Most especially, no cell phone in sight.

“How many electrical outlets in your place?” I asked.

“Five,” he said. “No, sorry, six. Three in the main room, two in the kitchen area, and one in the bathroom, stuck behind the toilet for some reason. I have to use an extension cord to charge my shaver and toothbrush.”

I was in the bathroom in three steps. I got down on all fours. Sure enough, an iPhone was charging, resting on its back on the stained linoleum behind the toilet. I had forgotten to bring any latex gloves, but I had a handkerchief in my back pocket. I used it to recover the phone and charger.

I made a second assessment of the apartment, this time slowly and by foot. There was a small stack of unopened mail—mostly flyers, it looked like—on the kitchen counter, but I left it alone. Private mail, unlike phones, was not to be touched by private investigators, not under any circumstances. The same goes for garbage, unless it’s been moved to the curb, and after the alleged break-in, the whole apartment qualified as trash. Nothing else jumped out at me, and I was fine with that. One, this was Sofia’s place, not Clara’s, and two, I had a feeling all the answers I needed were already wrapped inside my handkerchief.

I gave Carlos a business card. “Call me if either Sofia or Clara shows up, okay?”

“You think I should let the cops know, in case Sofia’s missing, too?”

“Definitely report the break-in. As far as Sofia goes, it’s up to you,” I said. “But unless she’s a minor or has Alzheimer’s, you can’t even file a missing person’s report until she’s been gone for twenty-four hours. Hopefully she’ll be back by then.”

Carlos stowed my card in his wallet. He fished a pen from his other pocket and put out his hand. “Got another one?”

I did.

He scribbled his name and phone number on the back and returned it to me. “Let me know, man, if you need me for anything. That Clara’s a nice lady. She reminds me of my
abuela
, my granny, you know?” He frowned at the upended room. “I don’t have a good feeling about this,” he said.

I didn’t either, but I wasn’t ready to say it out loud.

As I walked outside, I debated asking the Armenian death squad if they had seen or heard anything suspicious. I looked up at the balconies. The old men, with their impassive, smoke-wreathed stares, were as promising as a row of cement blocks. I took a step in their direction anyway, and as one, they seemed to melt back into their apartments. I was too hungry to pursue them further.