Frankie skipped to the next passage marked by a sticky note. “And this:
March 1986,
John is a charming man. He reminds me so much of father. Intelligent. No… wise. That is the word. And what power there is to his vision!”
“She sounds infatuated with him,” Hal commented. “What’s that Defender reference?” Lou asked.
“It’s some quarterly white power rag put out by an old minister who acts as a sort of clearinghouse for all the groups’ writings,” Frankie explained. “And Burlingame found an interesting ad in one from three years back. Placed by some Afrikaner mercenary type who said there were, quote, ‘former East Bloc specialists eager to work for the right price,’ unquote. An interesting spin on Royce’s trip, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would say. You read all these?” Art asked, gesturing at the stacks of diaries.
“Every page.” Three solid days it had taken, holed up in a vacant office one floor up. Frankie, a diary writer herself, felt she knew Canadia Conyers Royce now, a state of familiarity that had pity and anger as tagalong emotions.
“So she read something by Barrish and…what?” Art wondered.
“This goes back further than Barrish’s piece in the Defender,” Frankie explained, recalling the passages laid upon the yellowed pages eighty-odd years earlier. “It goes all the way back to the Civil War. Mrs. Royce’s family was originally from Charleston. Big shipping people. Her grandfather squirreled away his money in gold, and when the war started he fought for the Confederacy. He lived through it all and moved north with his booty when it was all over. But he didn’t forget his suthun ways. He was one of the original organizers of the Klan in Massachusetts, and his son — Mrs. Royce’s father — followed in his footsteps. The business Gramps had set up did well and they never hesitated to support their fellow hood-heads.”
“So Mrs. Royce had a background that lent itself to John Barrish’s way of thinking,” Art proposed.
“Step one: like ideology. Step two: contact. After she read the Defender she started corresponding with Barrish. Eventually they met, and she liked him a lot.”
“A May-December thing,” Hal suggested facetiously.
“In a way it was,” Frankie responded. “For her, at least. Women think differently, fellas. Older women like Mrs. Royce in particular. There’s a romantic sort of thing about being ‘connected’ to a younger, powerful man. And she saw John Barrish as very powerful.
“So, step three: assistance. She started giving him money for the AVO, just like her father and grandfather had done for the Klan.”
“How much altogether?” Lou inquired.
“She never said in the diaries, but she was loaded.”
“The money was hers, not Monte’s,” Omar reported. “He had the business, but she had the family fortune tucked away. We ran down her accounts and found withdrawal after withdrawal, all cash. And remember those cash bundles in the desk drawer? Those match exactly in amount with several withdrawals.”
“And who — need I ask — did the actual withdrawing?” Lou wondered needlessly.
“Mrs. Royce’s signature on the papers, Monte Royce’s hands on the cash. She’d okay it, he’d go pick it up.” Omar shrugged. “From him it somehow got to Barrish and Kostin and whoever else she was supporting. But we do know it totaled over fifteen million from the time she met Barrish.”
“Fifteen million?” The A-SAC slid back in his seat at the head of the table. “That’s a lot of mad money.”
“Hate money,” Art corrected the emotion.
Lou Hidalgo nodded. “So Mrs. Royce bankrolled Barrish because she liked him.” His face screwed into a frown.
“That, and some of the nostalgic connections,” Frankie expanded. “Remember what she said about Trent? That’s Felix Trent.”
“The guy Barrish put on a pedestal?” Hidalgo said, leafing through the thick mental file devoted to the AVO leader.
“The same one,” Frankie confirmed. “Mrs. Royce’s father was a friend of Trent’s. In a way she thought of her connection with Barrish as a sort of divine signal.” She paused, feeling a connection herself to Mrs. Royce. But it was only gender, and that was grossly insufficient to allow understanding of her actions. “The stupid old woman.”
“What else do we know?” Hidalgo asked.
“The minivan the Barrishes used was found at a shopping center in Palmdale,” Art reported. “Their house was deserted.”
“What about the Mankowitz and Royce hits?” That was something Hidalgo was puzzled about.
“Royce and his mother were hit sometime between five and eight,” Art answered.
“That was the coroner’s finding,” Frankie added. “But some things at the house point to a more concrete time. Royce was up, dressed, and in the kitchen. The nurse said he usually got up at six. Give him half an hour to dress and make his tea, and that puts it back to six-thirty. And the alarm was manually turned off at seven-fifteen. The security company that monitors their system records the times the systems are active for liability purposes.”
“So whether Royce or someone else turned off the alarm, we have them getting hit at the earliest at seven-fifteen,” Art said. “Mankowitz we know was hit at one minute after eight from the nine-one-one calls reporting glass breaking and strange sounds. They used silencers, we’re certain, otherwise it would have been a ‘shots fired’ call. All the callers were hearing was the sound of the rounds hitting Mankowitz’s Mercedes.”
“Forty-five minutes apart and different calibers,” Hidalgo observed.
“Three-eighty on the Royces, and forty-fives on Mankowitz,” Lightman said. “And two forty-fives on World Center’s plant manager. All the spent casings were clean. Wiped before they were loaded. Smooth prints. Pro-like.”
“The only people we know of that Barrish had to work with him are his family,” Art said. “A wife and two sons. No record on any of them.”
“This is a lot of work for four people,” Hidalgo commented. “The Royces, Mankowitz, the World Center. All within an hour and fifteen minutes.”
Art had no answer for that obvious and very correct observation. But there had to be one, and he would find it.
A single tap on the conference room door preceded Special Agent Dan Burlingame. His expression told those gathered to drop what they were doing. “KMOC just got a call from some group claiming the World Center as their work.”
“We have a hundred claims, Dan,” Art reminded him.
“Did any of those others know that the cylinder of nerve gas was in the A/C ducts on Seventy-four?”
The silence after Dan’s revelation of the message’s most important part was brief, just long enough for looks to be exchanged.
“I have a team going over for a copy of it,” Burlingame said.
“Who made the claim?” Art asked.
“Some group called the New Africa Liberation Front.”
Art’s eyes narrowed. New Africa? What in the hell was going on?
“I made a quick check on this group,” Burlingame reported. “We have them listed only as a matter of record, but LAPD has a file on them.”
“They’re an actual group?” Art asked skeptically.
Burlingame nodded. “I’ve got the address LAPD has on them.”
“Liberation Front?” Espinosa said. “Sounds like a revolutionary bunch.”
“That’s what LAPD said,” Burlingame confirmed.
“Are you saying this is a black group?”
Burlingame nodded to Art. He knew it wasn’t the answer desired. But it was a fact. “Black revolutionaries. That’s what LAPD called them.”