Evidence

CHAPTER 20

Detective-room brew has the refreshing tang of roofing tar and a meth-like ability to scrape the nerves raw.

Special Agent Gayle Lindstrom downed half a cup without complaint, rubbed her eyes, stretched and yawned and stretched again. Milo goes through a similar act when he’s faking casual. Lindstrom needed more practice.

Taking another sip, she finally gave the expected grimace, set the cup aside.

“Yes, Doreen finally surfaced. I had nothing to do with it but it still makes me cringe.” Reaching for the cup, she deliberated another swallow, decided against it. “Nothing the Bureau did pulled her in. Her own stupidity did.”

“She did a bad thing and got caught,” said Milo.

“She got busted for prostitution and dope five years ago. Want to take a wild guess where?”

“Seattle.”

“Heart of the city, downtown. I wouldn’t be surprised if she never left. Even though she spun us all kinds of tales about hitchhiking around the country, living off the land, none of her details came together correctly and what I get from her file is the bio of a natural-born compulsive liar.”

I said, “Des Backer traveled around the country for ten years. Did she claim to be with him?”

“As a matter of fact, she did, Doctor. Not as a constant companion, off and on. She spun weird yarns about living in forests, eating roots and shoots, foraging for wild mushrooms, whatever. But like I said, when it came to closing the deal on the finer points, as in dates, towns, cities, states, she fell apart. Bureau shrinks labeled her a histrionic personality.”

Milo said, “They examined her?”

“I’ve seen no clinical report.”

I said, “Meaning the diagnosis probably came from reviewing the file.”

“Do you disagree with the diagnosis, Doctor?”

“I don’t know enough to agree, or disagree.”

Lindstrom frowned. “No offense, but the psych stuff doesn’t really matter, does it? Same for Fredd’s nature-girl tales. Maybe part of it was true, maybe she was double-, triple-, quadruple-bluffing. The point is, no eco-crimes during that period can be traced to her, so either she was real good at covering her tracks or she and the other Seattle kids weren’t any big deal in the first place.”

I said, “Five years ago, Des Backer was in architecture school. Doreen’s turning to prostitution around then says they’d probably parted ways well before.”

“And…?”

“I’m just trying to nail down the time line.”

“I won’t argue with your logic.”

Milo said, “So she gets busted for hooking. How’d that lead to federal snitch?”

Lindstrom said, “I haven’t said anything about turning her.”

“Her identity was erased, cut the crap.”

Lindstrom played with a strap of her tank top. “Yes, we turned her, but it wasn’t the prostie part that scared her, it was the dope. We’re talking kilos of weed, pills in neat little bags plus some chunks of rock. Enough to put her away for a real long time.”

“She was a major-league dealer?”

“The stuff was found in the basement of a rooming house where she habitually took johns. Downtown Seattle, not far from the Pike market.”

“She just happens to be rooming with all that?”

“Sitting on top of it,” said Lindstrom. “Literally. One of those under-the-bed trapdoors right below her bounce-for-bucks mattress. Doreen’s bad luck was popping pills in front of a john who turned out to be undercover Seattle vice. She claimed it was Advil and that was later verified. But meanwhile, the room got seriously tossed. The city had just instituted one of those temporary moral crusades-too many tourists hassled by lowlifes-so warrants were a snap. Doreen claimed she had no idea the hatch existed in the first place, had never even looked under the bed. Maybe that’s even true. Lots of girls used the same room and the building was owned by a couple of Cambodian restaurateurs suspected of bringing in all sorts of bad stuff. By the time the Bureau got called in, they were gone and wrapped in layers of paper that dead-ended in Phnom Penh. Our plan was to confiscate the entire property under the RICO statutes but Seattle PD claimed the prize as theirs. There’s a cute little shopping center there now. Designer coffee, sushi bar, Italian café with great pastries, yuppie gym. Tanning salon, too, which could come in handy in Drizzle City.”

“You’ve visited recently.”

“I was there yesterday. Trying to learn what I could about Doreen. After we found out what happened to her here.”

“What’d you learn?”

“Not a thing.” Smile. “I did have a good panini at the Italian place.”

“How long since you had contact with Doreen?”

“I never had contact with her,” said Lindstrom, “I inherited her. And a bunch of others like her. If that sounds defensive, it is.”

“Bunch of snitches living off tax dollars who end up burning you. Business as usual, Gayle.”

The skin above Lindstrom’s neckline turned rosy. “Like it never happens to you guys? I happen to know for a fact that six years ago, one of your best female vice D’s was set up as a pimp in an apartment in Hollywood. Not some decoy thing, LAPD had a genuine D Two hiring and working real-life hookers on the street, running everything real businesslike, keeping books, recording income. All so you could pull in high-profile johns because a feminist on the city council screamed loud enough to get heard. So what happens to your grand plan? The street girls your D is supposed to boss slip her a roofie, strip her naked, take pictures of her being ganged by some of their thug boyfriends, put the photos online, and abscond to Mexico with the cash. There’s police work at its best.”

Milo’s expression said he’d never heard any of it before.

Gayle Lindstrom said, “News to you, huh? Well, then thank the LAPD obstruction squad. My point is, Milo, we all win some, lose some. And we all cover our collective butts. Yes, the Bureau thought Doreen might be useful because during the same period she claimed to be nature-girling with Backer, the whole eco-crazy scene had heated up in a really nasty way. I’m talking two small children of a genetics researcher-toddlers, for God’s sake-with third-degree burns after animal liberation nuts set fire to the family house because Daddy ran rats. I’m talking a bunch of loggers near the Washington-Canadian border getting blinded and losing limbs due to tree spikes. A Ronald McDonald house sprayed with threatening graffiti then overrun with live rats, with families living there. Families of kids with cancer, for God’s sake. All because someone doesn’t like Big Macs. These people are lunatics and they’re vicious. And in addition to that, at least a dozen residential construction projects had been turned to charcoal, so why wouldn’t we try to use Doreen? Everyone knew the dope really wasn’t hers, why not deal?”

I said, “What made you think Doreen had anything to offer?”

“She told my predecessors that she did. Started spilling the minute they had her in lockup, claiming all sorts of insider knowledge about the most radical fringe of the movement. People she’d come into contact with during her years on the road. What made her credible was her insistence on getting a pass for herself on anything she talked about. Implying she had been more than a bystander.”

Milo said, “But…”

Lindstrom turned to him. “You’re enjoying this way too much, but fine, I’ll open a vein for you: We protected her and she screwed us over. Happy, Father O’Shaughnessy? How many Hail Marys do I need to do?”

Milo didn’t answer.

She said, “Looking back, it’s easy to see the pattern, but at the time?”

“What was the pattern?”

“Once Fredd was cleared of the dope charge, she put off blabbing by claiming she was scared for her life, needed a new I.D., a safe house in another city, a spending allowance. That took months. Once she was set up, she faked depression, said she had no energy to deal with life, made suicidal noises. Bureau assigned a physician to give her a full checkup, and a review by a shrink.”

I said, “Not the one who labeled her histrionic.”

“No, a doc who thought she was a sociopath. But we needed to go along with it, not confront her. Several more months, then she brought up a new medical issue-”

“Plastic surgery,” said Milo.

Lindstrom glared. “Don’t play with me. Am I repeating stuff you already know?”

“It came up on her external exam at the morgue. Why’d Doreen want her nose nubbed all of a sudden?”

“What do you think? ‘I’m scared, I need to change my appearance.’”

“Des Backer’s sister recognized her even with the nose.”

“So why didn’t she go for something that really worked? Like I said, hindsight’s twenty-ten. For all I know, she just wanted to look cuter and use our tax dollars to pay for it.”

I said, “Surgery, then recuperation. A few more months of delay.”

“By the time she got talking, over a year had passed. It started off promising, she spit out all sorts of horrendous stuff. Including nonsense about an interface between domestic eco-nuts and foreign terrorists, some major Armageddon conspiracy. But like I said, it all dead-ended.”

Milo said, “She give you anything righteous?”

“Like most liars she spiced up her bullshit with morsels of reality. Piddling stuff, but just enough to keep us going.”

“Like what?”

“False reports of endangered species sightings in order to halt public projects-phony DNA smeared on trees, that kind of thing. Nonviolent fish-huggers setting out in canoes and cutting up nets, greenies perched in old, venerable trees so they wouldn’t get chopped down for shopping centers. Which-off the record-I can’t say bothers me. Giant redwood gets that old, for God’s sake, let it live out its golden years in peace. And when I drive through miles of clear-cut dirt where a forest used to be, it doesn’t make me feel patriotic. In any event, Doreen snitched minor league, nothing came of it, but it took us a while to chase down all her bum leads.”

“Did you go back and question her about the dead kid in Bellevue?”

“You bet we did,” said Lindstrom. “She never wavered from her initial story: She was snugly bed-a-bye at Hope Lodge the night it happened, was sure none of her pals were involved, they’d never do something like that.”

“She did mention Backer being her travel companion,” I said.

“But she didn’t incriminate him in anything, Doctor. In fact, each time we brought his name up, she made him out to be Johnny Appleseed, not some maniac firebomber. Still, we checked him out and like you said, he was in architecture school, channeling his green impulses in a socially acceptable manner.”

Milo said, “How soon after you gave her deep cover did she split?”

“She’s been off our screen for thirty months, two weeks, and three days,” said Lindstrom. “You want hours and minutes, I’ll go back to my federal cubicle and use a calculator. I was assigned her file-and others-a little over a year ago, have been staring at her face with nowhere to go. All of a sudden, there she is on the evening news and I just about spew my Lean Cuisine. Your artist did a pretty good job.”

“My name was on the screen, too, Gayle. So instead of picking up the phone, you tell Hal to stonewall.”

“No choice, the directive came from on up.”

When Milo didn’t respond, she said, “Like it’s different with you?”

“I’m sensing a theme here, Gayle. Everyone does it as a defense.”

“What do you want from me?” said Lindstrom. “Flash back to your Hollywood D all roofied up with her legs spread and guess what, you won’t find a trace of those dirty pictures anywhere on the Web. Any written record of the operation, period. What comes from on top filters down to the peons. Our job is to clean up messes.”

“Fine,” said Milo. “Kafka’s God and we’re all cockroaches. But even bugs know how to be social. Why did your bosses want to obstruct me?”

“They wanted to make sure everything was squared up before we interfaced.”

“As in cleaning Doreen’s file of anything useful so as not to look stupid?”

“As in getting my own facts straight. As in a sudden trip to Seattle yesterday morning in a coach seat next to a snoring fat guy.”

“If I hadn’t bugged Hal, would we be sitting here, Gayle?”

“I can’t answer theoretical questions,” said Lindstrom. “Point is, I’m here and I told you what I know about Doreen. If it helps you close her out, I’ll celebrate along with you. Because one of my assignments is to get her the hell off my desk.”

“Then write a bullshit report. I’m a cockroach enabler.”

“First enable some more. As in telling me what you can about Doreen’s murder.”

“Doreen and Backer were enjoying sexual congress in a big house and got surprised in the act.”

“Ouch,” said Lindstrom. “Mode?”

“He was shot once in the head, probably a.22, she was strangled.”

“Forensics?

“His and her prints in expected places, no one else’s, nothing at Backer’s crib. No crib at all for Doreen, because some unnamed government agency helped her go bye-bye and let her stay underground even after she screwed them. Why, once you realized she’d conned you, didn’t you put her factoids back in place?”

“It’s not done that way.”

“She was an embarrassment, so no sense calling attention to her before the next begging session at Congress.”

“Whatever,” said Lindstrom. “I really wish you’d stop bitching, because I didn’t cause any of this. All I’m after is enough data to write her damn epitaph. What else do you have?”

“Nada.”

She toed her bag closer. “I did some checking and the owner of the property might be of interest.”

“Really,” said Milo. Grinning, his hands had curled into massive flesh-mitts, pink and glossy and twitching. Like a pair of Christmas hams revivified by some mad scientist.

Gayle Lindstrom watched them, fascinated.

Milo stood. “Special Agent Lindstrom, I believe we’re through here.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “What’s with you?”

“First you say you’ve told me everything, then you toss in your own little morsel to spice up the bullshit. Unlike the Bureau, I don’t have years to put up with gamers.”

Lindstrom’s jaw jutted. “I never used the word everything.”

“Well, that sure clarifies it,” he said, heading for the door.

Gayle Lindstrom said, “I am not gaming you. I didn’t say anything in the beginning because I assumed you knew about the owner. After you didn’t say anything, I thought you didn’t so I told you, okay?”

Silence.

“I didn’t think I had to spoon-feed you basic-”

“Who owns the property, Gayle?”

“You really don’t know?”

Milo smiled.

“C’mon,” said Lindstrom. “Just like you, I’m a salaried employee far from the top of the food chain. You want to keep picking at me, I can’t stop you, but it won’t close your double homicide. You want me to go first, fine? Prince Tariq of Sranil, aka Teddy.”

Milo sat back down. “More coffee, Gayle? We’re nothing if not hospitable.”

Lindstrom gaped. “Not that it matters, but I only learned about him right before I came over here. You don’t consider him a suspect. Not directly, I mean. He’s back in Sranil.”

Milo said, “He’s alleged to have killed another girl.”

Lindstrom sat up. “Who, where, when?”

“Don’t know, don’t know, around two years ago. It’s still at the rumor level, a foreign national, maybe a party girl, maybe Swedish.”

“Who’s your source?”

“Someone who heard a rumor.”

“Who?”

Milo shook his head. “We’ve got secrecy issues, too. For all I know, it’s baloney but the timing’s right: just when construction stopped on Teddy’s shack. And he rabbited back home right after.”

“Then Doreen ends up there.” Lindstrom shook her head. “I’m not seeing any obvious link.”

“Anything related to Sranil ever come up in Doreen’s stories?”

“Nope. And that I can be sure of because soon as I found out about Teddy owning the property, I re-read every damn word in her file.”

“But she did talk about foreign terrorists confederating with local eco-nuts.”

“It never came to anything, plus she never mentioned anything about Asians or Swedes or Ugandans or Lithuanians.”

“Just Ahmed,” said Milo.

“Quote unquote ‘al-Qaeda types.’”

“Sranil’s Muslim, Gayle. And the sultan’s got two groups of extremists itching to cut his head off and get control of all his oil. One of them’s fundamentalist.”

“Interesting,” said Lindstrom. “You’re really thinking this could be political?”

“God, I hope not. Doreen ever travel abroad?”

“Never even had a passport.”

“Same question, Gayle.”

“I just told you-oh. No, Lieutenant Sturgis, as far as my peon status can carry me, I’m unaware of the Bureau or anyone else furnishing her funny travel papers.”

Milo said, “So someone upstairs could’ve granted it.”

“Sure, but why would the Bureau help her evade when we were paying her to blab and she hadn’t come through? The only time she could’ve traveled abroad would’ve been between splitting on us and now.”

“Exactly,” said Milo.

Lindstrom thought about that. “Okay, I’ll make some calls, promise to give you righteous info. Fair enough?”

He nodded. “After Doreen asked to be moved away from Seattle, where’d you safe-house her?”

“Sorry, not authorized. But trust me, it wasn’t anywhere outside the continental U.S.” Smiling. “Think acres of plains, not a mountain in sight.”

Milo said, “Not here in L.A.”

“Not even close.”

“Seeing as you just read every damn word of the file, is there anything in there about a gal-pal who had traveled abroad? Or came from abroad?”

“Swedish party girl? Negative, yet again,” said Lindstrom. “You’ll have to believe me on this, but that file contains squat-all international intrigue associated with Doreen Fredd. And you’ve got no serious evidence Prince Teddy actually offed anyone. But even if he did, how would it connect to Doreen and Backer two years later? Burning down a big showy house, I can believe. They probably did that back in Bellevue and God knows how many other times. But targeting Teddy, specifically? This turning into some obnoxious 007 deal? I’m not seeing it.”

Milo said, “What if Doreen and Backer somehow found out about the alleged murder and tried to cash in? From what you know about her, would that make sense?”

“Blackmail… sure, why not? She wasn’t a woman of high character.” She sat forward. “She and Backer hooked up more for old times’ sake, decided to do more than eat dandelions and screw? Hey, anything’s possible, but there’s nothing along those lines that I can help you with.”

“Does the name Monte appear anywhere in your files?”

“Nope. Who is he?

“Maybe no one, Gayle.”

“Obviously, you think he’s someone.”

“What happened to the other two kids Doreen and Backer hung with back in Seattle?”

“Dwayne Parris and Kathy Vanderveldt? They both went off to college and got on the straight and narrow. She was pre-med, he was pre-law. Tell me about Monte.”

“Just a name that came up in a tip.”

“As…”

“Someone who might’ve known Doreen.”

“Might? That mean you don’t think the tip’s solid?”

Milo gave her the details.

“Geezer without a cell,” she said. “Monte. Nope, doesn’t ring a bell, but the moment I get back, I’ll re-read the file, just in case it slipped by me. We’re talking seven-hundred-plus pages.”

“Doreen was small-time but she merited an encyclopedia?”

“One thing we’re good at is churning paper.” Lindstrom smiled. “Poor trees.”