Three Shirt Deal (2008) (27 page)

"Alexa, around back!" I called out.

A few seconds later Alexa rounded the corner. She immediately saw the tape and stopped. "What the hell happened back here?" she said, crossing to the fluttering yellow ribbon, and pulling it off the fence.

We needed answers, so Alexa took the neighbor's house on the left, while I took the one on the right.

After showing my identification to a fish-eye peephole, the front door of my house was opened by a pale, middle-aged woman in a brown-beige Polo shirt dress. She studied my badge carefully before telling me her name was Judy Parker. I said that we were trying to get in touch with her neighbor, Ron Torgason, and asked if she knew where he was.

She stood for a moment, drying her hands on a dish towel, gazing at me through the screen door with a puzzled look on her face, then said, "Well, he drowned in his pool. I'm surprised you don't know. The police investigated it for almost a week. Gosh, that was almost a year ago."

"Drowned?"

"The coroner called it death by misadventure or some term like that."

"How did he drown?" I asked.

She put the dish towel down on an entry table, warming to the gossip. "I don't think they really know exactly. Maybe he slipped and hit his head on the diving board. Apparently, he was knocked unconscious and just sank down to the bottom. One of the neighborhood boys who did yard work for him found the body down by the drain. They said by the time they got him out, he'd been underwater for almost a day."

I looked up and saw Alexa walking up the path to the porch.

"Drowned last August," she said, as she joined me on the front porch. I nodded and turned again to Mrs. Parker. "Was there anything you can remember about that incident that seemed strange or out of the ordinary?"

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. "He was a good guy, Ron. A retired Customs agent. Made us all feel safe to have him as a neighbor."

"If he died in August, how come the house is still not sold?" I asked, struggling with the year-old timeline.

"I heard there was a fight between his heirs. The house got stuck in probate," she replied. "Just went up for sale two weeks ago."

We exchanged numbers. Then Alexa and I returned to Torgason's front lawn and stood looking at the vacant house.

"Those two dirtbags killed him," Alexa said flatly.

"Yep. Last August. Puts it close to the time when Olivia Hickman was killed. So that probably makes him the second shirt. That means there's still one more murder we don't know about."

"Shirt?"

I never told Alexa when I was in procedural quicksand. The old Alexa always got frustrated when I stretched the rules. But who knows how she would feel now, so I decided to run my BlackBerry caper past her. "On Wade Wyatt's BlackBerry there was a text message the night they killed Olivia Hickman. It said, "This just became a three shirt deal." I think 'shirt' is shorthand for a murder. Tru's mom was the first, now Ron Torgason is two. If I'm right, somewhere in this case there's another body connected to all this. One that we don't know about yet."

"Wade's BlackBerry?" Alexa asked arching her eyebrows. "You managed to get paper to go through Wade Wyatt's IMs? What was your probable cause? We need to stay really friendly with any judge who'd write you a warrant without a fucking shred of probable cause." Not much got past her.

"I didn't exactly have a warrant," I admitted, wondering how she would react to that.

"You either had one or you did an illegal search. Which was it?"

"We accidentally switched phones," I said putting some spin on it. "I accidentally saw some of his text messages before I discovered the mistake and traded him back." Curious if my BS had any traction.

"Since when did you get a BlackBerry?" she said, sniffing the lie.

I dug into my pocket and showed her my new phone. She took the unit and held it for a minute. Then she turned it on. Of course, it still wasn't even set up. She flipped it over. Dumb-ass that I am, I hadn't even bothered to remove the Best Buy price sticker.

"You're simply amazing," she said, shaking her head in disbelief. Then the mischievous smile suddenly appeared.

"It was an honest screwup," I said.

"More to the point, you can't inadvertently violate constitutional protections," she said. "There has to be prior knowledge and premeditation. Of course, the evidence you found is lost forever. But the information you attained was probably worth it."

My reasoning exactly. So why did it worry me so much to have her say it?

Chapter
39.

"THE WAY I SEE IT, RON TORGASON BECAME A BIG PROBLEM FOR

these guys after Olivia was murdered. They needed to switch the ownership of the rare. In order to do that they had to either buy Torgason off or bump him off. If Torgason was a Gately-vetted cop then you know he probably wasn't for sale."

"So that leaves murder," Alexa said. We were back on the Freeway heading toward Los Angeles.

"Right. The original plan was to let Hickman cash the rare and just take the million away from him. But after Olivia's killing, that all changed. In order to get the ownership of that six-pack transferred to someone else, they waited until after Torgason filled out his affidavit. Then once the documentation was sent to Cartco, Wade took it out of the file, changed Hickman's name to Morales. Then before Morales collected the prize, Church rolled out and knocked Torgason unconscious, pushing him into his pool, making it look like an accidental drowning. That way Torgason's not around to say that Morales isn't the real winner and his affidavit was altered."

We rode in silence for a moment, both thinking about it. The structure and timeline seemed solid, but we still had no proof.

"That's only two shirts," Alexa finally said. "Who's the third?"

"Don't have a clue." I sat deep in thought, watching her drive.

"I think maybe you have these murders in the wrong order," she said. "What if Torgason isn't the second shirt but the third? On Wyatt's BlackBerry the night they killed Olivia, Mike Church text-messages that this just became a three shirt deal, right?" She looked over at me.

"Yeah. That's what it said."

We were coming into the West Valley near the Chatsworth Reservoir. It was almost three o'clock, and the normally light traffic was beginning to pick up.

"Okay, if Olivia was a mistake and after the murder Tru couldn't cash the prize, then they knew at that moment that they'd have to pass the rare to someone else. That meant they had to kill Torgason in order to keep the scam alive. Olivia is probably the second shirt and he's the third. If so, the first shirt had to predate these other two. The first shirt happened some time before August tenth."

This was neither the angry, confused Alexa nor the wild-eyed kamikaze. This was the sharp-thinking, brilliant woman I married.

"We should start hunting around in all of these back stories for a dead body that got murdered before August tenth," she finished.

We rode in silence again, thinking about it. Just as we crossed the transition to the Hollywood Freeway out by the reservoir, I got an idea and said, "Go downtown to North Mission Road."

"The coroner's office? How come?"

"The only death I know about that happened before Olivia's, was Mike Church's father, Juan Iglesia," I said.

Alexa looked over at me with a frown on her face. "Why would they kill him?"

"So Mike Church can get his inheritance, the garage, and everything."

"How does that add up? Wade Wyatt isn't part of that crummy garage. What's in it for him? Or Morales and Devine? These three murders all have to be connected to our main players, and they have to connect up to what we already have. Either that, or our whole structure is wrong."

This was definitely the old Alexa. My heart warmed. "It all comes back to that bus company," I said, enjoying the back and forth. "He needed his father's inheritance and that included the nonprofit bus line. I don't know why, but something tells me this is all about the North Van Nuys Transit Authority."

"But how does it work? What the hell good does it do to be a police commissioner for a nonprofit bus line?"

"I don't know."

"And how does the Bud Light rare that Morales won fit in? Why give the money to him?"

"I don't know. Somehow the money needed to go to Morales. For his campaign, maybe."

"It's not enough money to make a difference. And why would Mike Church and Wade Wyatt want to finance Tito Morales's campaign for mayor? This isn't working, Shane."

"What if they didn't use the money to finance his campaign?" I said, grabbing at a new idea. "What if Morales found a way to get the money back to them so they could use it to buy those four new hundred-thousand-dollar buses, and all that security equipment?"

"Why?" she said, eyeing me as she drove. "It's a nonprofit company, Shane. Nonprofit means it doesn't throw off any earnings. Morales isn't going to lend a million dollars to them for that. And the Fed won't let them pay out any cash to themselves from the operation. These guys would have to file tax returns on the bus line in order to keep its nonprofit status. None of this makes any sense." Of course, she was right.

"It's some kind of scam," I said.

"But what's the scam?"

"Look, I just had a stroke. My head isn't completely functioning yet. Why don't you come up with something?"

"Hey, I was shot in the brain eleven months ago. Don't put this on me."

We were both grinning. This was a flash of the way it had once been between us. Back before Stacy Maluga fired that bullet and changed who Alexa was. In that moment we both felt it and it felt really good.

Alexa transitioned onto the 5 heading toward North Mission Road. "Why do you want to go to the chop shop?" she asked.

"If we can find a way to get somebody down there to give us a look at the death reports, I'd like to compare Juan Iglesia's and Ron Torgason's head injuries. The neighbor said Torgason might have hit the diving board and fallen into his pool. What do you bet that Torgason's injury looks a lot like the one Juan Iglesia got when he slipped and hit his head on that shower faucet?" I waited for this to sink in before adding, "What if there's a lead pipe or a lug wrench lying around? A murder weapon clotted with hair or blood forensics that ties those two killings together."

Alexa drove for a few minutes considering it. Then she looked over. "That's good," she said, smiling. "I like that."

Chapter
40.

JANE SASSO WAS VACUUMING UP WHAT WAS LEFT OF MY POlice career. Both Alexa and I had become high-profile Internal Affairs priorities and the department rumor mill had already made everyone on the job aware of the jackpot we were in. With all this against us, Alexa was now talking about doing a black bag job on the M
. E
.'s computer in broad daylight. I've made a career of skirting rules and if you intend to survive these kinds of misadventures there's a certain gruesome technique that goes along with it. My new, wild-eyed, adrenaline junky wife didn't seem to comprehend that at all.

We parked in the lot at the North Mission Road complex. The plain, four-story shoebox-shaped death house loomed above us. It was going to be extremely difficult to get our hands on those two M
. E
.'s reports and I had just finished pointing this out to her.

"What's so difficult? We just grab the stuff and split," she said. "I still have the juice. Nobody in there is going to deny me computer access."

"The minute you put in your command ID number, they're gonna know it was us. We gotta use a little finesse, Alexa."

"This isn't some MENSA-powered, cyber-giant like Google; it's the LAPD," she countered. "They run on jelly doughnuts around here. Believe me, nobody's gonna check back on this."

"I'm not scamming this computer," I said bluntly. Boy, talk about your role reversals.

"We' re working a triple homicide, Shane. All this caution isn't like you. Where's the old rule-breaker? Where's the old, don't worry, it's-gonna-work-out guy I married? If we hit this piggy
-
bank hard enough, case facts will rain down like quarters."

"A pig metaphor?" I groaned. Then I reminded her, "It was just this kind of thinking that used to keep you up nights worrying about me back when you ran the Detective division."

"I'm just going to walk in there and tell them I want the two files. Don't worry, I'll get them."

"What you'll get is a standing ten count from I
. A
. At least let me do this," I said, thinking if one of us was going to go down, it would be much better if it was me. Her pension was larger.

She shook her head. "You don't know my computer password and I'm not giving it to you. The computers are on the second floor, huh?"

"Yes. Don't you ever come down here?"

"I'm a supervisor. I hate the smell of chloroform."

"Nobody uses chloroform anymore. It's formaldehyde now, with methanol, ethanol, and a bunch of other smelly shit."

"Thanks for the update." She was already out of the car.