“I’ll come out,” she said. “To handle… arrangements. I’ve done it before. My parents. I never thought I’d be doing it for my baby brother-how did you connect Desi to me?”
“Phone messages, ma’am.”
“Oh. That must’ve been the times Desi called to talk to Sam-my daughter. If I can catch a flight, I’ll leave tonight, Lieutenant… I’ll have to make sure Scott’s okay with that… oh God, I’m going to have to explain to Sam. This is unreal.”
“Ms. Flatt, could you please clarify that remark about it being political?”
Silence.
“Ma’am?”
“Let’s talk in person, Lieutenant. I’ve got so many things to do.”
NCIC had nothing to say about Doreen Fredd. Neither did DMV, Social Security, any other port in cyberspace.
“Still a phantom.” Milo logged off. “And Sister Ricki gets all squirrelly about ‘something political.’ This is starting to smell real bad, Alex.”
Turning to his phone, he punched numbers so hard the apparatus jumped. “Hal, this is Milo. For the third time. Is it my breath or are you on some sort of overpriced taxpayer junket and can’t be bothered to help the locals? I’ve got a name for my Jane Doe, no thanks to you. Doreen Fredd.” Spelling it with exquisite, enraged enunciation. “And guess what, Hal, even with that, she’s a ghost, not even an SSN. So now I’m thinking your not calling back isn’t negligence, it’s proactive deception. Which is bullshit, Hal. You owe me big-time on that Aeromexico thing and I need you to come through. All in the name of God, Country, and my ready access to the chief, Hal. Who will not be happy to learn that no good deed has, yet again, gone unpunished.”
Slam. He slumped. “Ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”
I said, “Ready access to the chief?”
“The federal government understands entitlement. Ends justifies the means. Political… the obvious link is Teddy but what the hell would a newly graduated architect have to do with Sranil?”
“Maybe he had a previous life.”
“As what, a super-spy?”
“As something political,” I said. “Or maybe, given his libido, he’d partied with Teddy’s alleged victim, whom he met through Doreen. The two of them cooked up the blackmail scheme, leaned too hard and paid for it.”
“Pretty damn stupid to think they could go up against someone that powerful.”
“How much of your job revolves around smart people, Big Guy? And Backer being involved could explain how Brig-Doreen ended up at Masterson. Teddy’s name doesn’t appear on any of the Borodi paperwork, but that design journal listed the firm’s involvement in a ‘pied-à-terre’ for a foreign owner. Backer was an architect, that’s his type of reading material.”
“He does background, Doreen worms her way in to get the details. The two of them somehow send a message to Tariq or the sultan, one of them makes a call and a local pro is hired.”
“Or even someone flown in for the job.”
“Morons,” he said. “Thinking they could play in that league. Then they have the nerve to go up there again for fun under the stars. Fouling the rich bastard’s nest in the process. Freud’s probably got a name for that, huh?”
“Der payback.”
Tight lips parted slightly, emitting something close to a smile. He pressed psychic delete and turned grim again. “Desi and Doreen, hugging a tree. P-L-O-T-T-I-N-G.”
CHAPTER 18
At six twenty, just as we were leaving for dinner, John Nguyen dropped in.
The deputy D.A. was dressed for court in a navy pinstripe, white shirt, blue tie, American flag lapel pin. Four evidence boxes were stacked on a wheeled luggage rack. Nguyen’s posture was as straight as ever, but his eyes drooped.
“John, what’s up?”
Nguyen unclasped the top case, pulled out a sheaf of printouts, and dropped it on Milo’s desk. “Mr. and Mrs. Holman’s financials. You owe me.”
Milo scanned the face page. “How’d you pull it off?”
“Been doing a robbery-gangbang trial for three days running, brand-new judge, absurdly biased toward our side so I figured she might go for your spurious logic.”
Licking a finger, Nguyen slashed air vertically. “Score one, J. N. I got one of my eager new interns to push everything through with the banks. Which, I’d like to point out, is normally your responsibility, not mine, not to mention significantly below my pay grade. But you put in the time on the marsh murder trial, so consider it an advance Christmas gift.”
Milo flipped pages. “Your stocking stuffer’s on the way, John… don’t see anything interesting.”
“That’s ’cause there isn’t any,” said Nguyen. “He’s a retired professor, she’s an unfamous architect, their income, expenditures, retirement fund, et cetera, are all commensurate with a cautious, mature lifestyle. Meaning they can probably keep their house and continue to have health insurance if they don’t get really sick or go out to eat too often.”
“This is definitely all of it, John?”
“What, some secret bank account for paying hit men? They budget tighter than my ex-wife’s-never mind.” Nguyen moved toward the door. “I can lead a judge to warrant, dude, but I can’t stop the stink.”
We walked a couple of blocks to Café Moghul, the Indian place that serves as Milo’s supplementary office. He tips huge, is dramatically omnivorous, and the owners are convinced his grumpy-mastiff demeanor wards off danger. The bespectacled woman who works the front always beams when he lumbers through the door, begins piling on the food before his chair warms.
Tonight was lamb, beef, turkey, lobster, three kinds of naan, a garden plot of vegetables.
He bore down, as if tackling a massive culinary puzzle.
I said, “Hail to the sultan of West L.A.”
He wiped sauce from his face. “Keep your geography straight, Rajah. For one brief Cinderella moment.”
“Then the pumpkin appears?”
“Then it’s back to Untouchable.”
Midway through his fourth bowl of sweet kir rice pudding, Sean Binchy strode in, bright-eyed and cheerful as ever.
“Give me some good news, kid, then you can eat.”
“No, thanks, Loot, Becky’s cooking tonight and that’s always a treat. More like good news and bad news. I got lots of names of construction workers but no Montes or anything close.”
“What’s the good news?”
“I’m going to analyze it super-carefully.”
Uttered with absolute sincerity.
“That’s great, Sean.”
Binchy said, “Anything with an M for starts, and if that doesn’t produce, I’ll just check every single name for felony records. Like you always say, tortoise beats hare.”
He left.
Milo said, “Tortoise sometimes gets squashed in the middle of the highway by an eighteen-wheeler, but sure, keep the faith, kid.”
He phoned me at eight the following morning. “Sister Ricki’s due in my office in an hour.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Thought you might also want to know that Doreen Fredd is, indeed, a real person. I searched genealogy sites last night, found a distant cousin living in Nebraska, e-mailed the photo. Family hasn’t seen Doreen for years but verified that she got sent to Seattle when she was a teenager. Naughty girl, ended up in a group home.”
“Why Seattle?”
“The family originally hailed from Tacoma, where Doreen’s daddy worked at a gas station and mommy clerked at a food store. Nice people, according to the cousin, but major alkies, no ‘parental supervision.’ Doreen started running away at an early age. Finally, the court declared her incorrigible. The home worked out for a while, but Doreen split from there, too. She stepped off the map, no one’s heard from her in all this time, she was an only child and both parents are dead.”
“Is the group home still in business?”