Cold Hit

Chapter 22

I settled into the chair on the opposite side of the partner's desk in his cubicle, and gave him my best blank stare.

There was a long moment while he tried to decide how he wanted to play it. I obviously wasn't going to go away, so he heaved a deep sigh and said, "I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

He was one of those guys who had scored big in the gene pool. Mocha skin, square jaw, white teeth, piercing black eyes. But there was also a healthy dose of arrogance.

I reached into my back pocket, fished out my worn leather badge case and dropped it onto the desktop between us. He did the same. Then we each slid them across the three-foot polished surface at each other.

He was Roger Broadway, Detective III. On the job since '87. The picture looked like it came out of a modeling portfolio. We airmailed our creds back, both plucking badge cases out of the air simultaneously.

"You don't have a clue what you stumbled into, Scully. Your John Doe is in good hands. Cut your losses." I gave him more attitude so he continued. "This is a CTB special op. My best advice is, dial it way down, go back to that task force pinata party you got going, and forget this."

"That's kinda shitty advice, Roger. Especially since I'm working a front-page serial murder, and I got half the deputy chiefs in this building walking around in my asshole with flashlights." I tapped a picture of the coffin. "So in the spirit of interdivisional cooperation, why don't you start by putting a hat on this guy for me?"

"He ain't Mike Eisner," Broadway said, holding my gaze. "And he also ain't one of your Fingertip murders. He's an international intelligence asset. Beyond that, you don't have to know."

I reached into the envelope and pulled out the rest of the pictures and dropped them onto the desk. "This was a very eclectic turnout."

He picked up the pictures of the lumbering Russian in the brown tweed, and the bald man in the blue blazer from the Israeli embassy. He studied them for a second before he shrugged and handed them back to me.

"I want some answers," I said. "Why were you there, and why did all these embassy people show up?"

"Leave it be," he said softly.

Yeah, right. . I thought. Pushing on then. .

"I think my John Doe victim is a foreign national, possibly Russian. Maybe even Odessa Mafia. I agree, he's not one of the Fingertip murders, but my bosses want me to keep him in the mix. If I stumbled into a CTB covert op, I can walk softly, but this is still my one-eighty-seven, and the sixth floor wants it put down. So if you hardball me, I'll be forced to take it to Deputy Chief Ramsey and we can do this hair-pulling thing in his office."

"Great White Mike can't cover you," he said, but there was worry flickering in his coal-black eyes.

"Help me and I'll help you. I have no desire to bitch up your investigation, but I'm not going away, especially after throwing this funeral and watching half the spooks in L. A. show up."

"I hope that ain't no racial epithet." A smile found the corner of his mouth. "Hate to have to one-eighty-one your Gumby white-slice ass." Talking about an Internal Affairs complaint.

"Your best bet of containing me is to trade with me, Roger."

"Right. And once that happens and you share our covert information with that buncha literary hopefuls downstairs, how long till it's on sale at Amazon?"

"I'll keep what you tell me strictly between us."

A bald-faced lie, because I knew I probably couldn't do that. I had to report this meeting to Underwood, and he could do anything he pleased with the information. My last line of defense was Alexa, but right now my beautiful wife wasn't all that happy with me. However, now wasn't the time to hesitate.

I pulled out the picture of the attractive blonde who had been sitting in the back of the church and showed it to him. "Teammate?" I asked.

He didn't take the picture out of my hand, but I saw another flicker of something in his black eyes.

Then a shadow fell over me. I looked up. Standing in the doorway was his partner-pencil-thin, bad haircut, hips like a wasp, chewing a soggy toothpick.

"You're in my chair, pard." His Southern accent was thick as pork gravy. All that was missing was the banjo solo from Deliverance.

I stood up and handed him the packet of pictures. He sorted through them quickly.

"That puts some hair in the biscuits, don't it, Rog?" He glanced over at Broadway.

"I'm Scully, Homicide Special."

"We know who you are, Joe Bob," he drawled around his toothpick. "You're the dummy running that mess down on three."

"Not running it anymore. We have a cool new FBI leader. Lunar calendars, party hats. Come on down and get a shit cupcake."

Broadway said, "This is my partner, Emdee Perry. Emdee is a name, not initials. This cracker's from the hills a South Carolina, so he ain't above burnin' a cross on your lawn. But the motherfucker sure knows how to kick up a shed."

"This cracker-bashin' Oreo finally got somethin' right," Emdee deadpanned.

I knew they were just stalling, putting up smoke, doing the dozens.

Broadway said, "Detective Scully's wondering who he was getting set to bury. That's how far off the pace the boy is."

Perry studied me, rolling the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. "We ain't actually getting set t'deal with this fool, are we, Snitch?"

Then I knew who they were. They had flashy nicknames-Rowdy and Snitch. Two colorful characters who were fast becoming LAPD legends.

"Don't make me take this to Deputy Chief Ramsey," I said. "He has big pressure coming down from the super chief. He won't like me being stonewalled."

"Great White Mike can shit in his hat," Broadway said. "We report to Deputy Chief Talmadge Burke in Support Services, and he doesn't like us to stand around and yap about secure cases with people who ain't been baptized."

"I can't believe you two humps want to start a turf war over a little deal like who my dead guy is. I'm gonna find out anyway."

Broadway and Perry exchanged some kind of subliminal look. The trick for them was to only give me info I would eventually discover on my own, and keep the rest hidden. My job was to run a good bluff and get things they shouldn't reveal.

Finally, Roger Broadway leaned back in his chair. "Your stiff is named Davide Andrazack. He's an Israeli black ops agent working for the Mossad. End of story."

"Except the guy had a contact lens for an eye condition called Keracotonus. According to our lab he was damn near blind. Are you two trying to tell me that a world-class black ops service like the Mossad is down to hiring blind guys?"

Emdee Perry cleared his throat, then threw the chewed toothpick into the wastebasket. "Since his eyes went bad, Andrazack don't work black ops no more," he said. "These days he's more of what you'd call an electronic plumber. Fixes computer leaks."

"Before he caught the big bus, he was their best guy for E-ops," Broadway said. "A master cracker." He glanced at Emdee. "A term of endearment." Emdee bowed his head magnanimously.

"Our file on him says he once penetrated Level Four Pentagon security. We think he was in the U. S. scoping the Israeli computers looking for a leak at their embassy."

"I'm still not buying this," I said. "A foreign intelligence agent with a record of hacking Pentagon data gets a visa from our State Department to come over and hack embassy computers? Not in the post nine-eleven world I live in."

"You're over cookin' the grits here, Joe Bob. Just accept what we're tellin' ya and move along," Emdee said.

"You guys haven't heard the last of me. See ya up on six."

I started to leave, but Emdee grabbed my arm.

"He was over here off the books. When they can't get a visa, the Israelis have been known to drop one a these hog callers in a rubber boat from a mother ship three or four miles offshore and run the man in. Not just the Mossad. Everybody does it. Any given day we got enough unidentified illegal spooks in this town to haunt a house. Idea is, they only stay here long enough to do one quick job, then it's back to the beach and adios."

"INS never knows they were here," Broadway said. "Only this time, looks like Davide didn't move quite fast enough and somebody skagged him. Whoever did that piece a work knew it was gonna stir up trouble, so they dressed Davide in homeless clothes and tried to ditch him in your Fingertip case."

"End of story," Emdee said firmly, and glanced at his partner. Neither of them wanted this to progress any further.

I didn't mention that we had held back the symbol carved on the chest and that there was no way the espionage community could have dumped Andrazack into our serial murder without knowing about that. Instead, I asked, "If Andrazack's dead, why are you guys still involved?"

They looked at each other, and I could see they were through with me.

"I guess you can just take it up with Great White Mike then," I said.

"Tell you what," Broadway replied. "Why don't you leave all these pictures with us? We'll run it past Lieutenant Cubio and if he signs off on you, we'll give you a call." Lt. Armando Cubio ran CTB.

"Make it happen, guys," I warned. "'Cause there's big trouble hiding behind Door Number Two."

"Man, I think I just shit my drawers," Perry drawled.