The Enemy Inside

TWO

Here is the mystery. Alex Ives’s blood alcohol report showed up at our office this morning. And surprise, Ives was not over the legal limit. In fact, he wasn’t even close. In California, the threshold is set at a 0.08 percent blood alcohol level. Ives barely tilted the meter at 0.01. You would probably show a higher blood alcohol level hosing out your mouth with some mouthwash. There is no question concerning the accuracy of the test. They drew blood. It is beginning to look as if Ives’s story of having only one drink is true. He may not have even finished it.

In the world of simple citations for a DUI, driving under the influence, that would probably be the end of the case. The prosecutor would dump it or charge Ives with a lesser-included offense, speeding or weaving in the lane if they saw him driving. But the charge of vehicular manslaughter has them looking deeper. The cops are now back, burning Bunsens in their lab looking for drugs. The chemical tests for these take a lot longer. So we wait.

Harry and I have delivered the good news and the bad news to Ives in one of the small conference rooms at the county lockup.

“You sure you weren’t on any medications?” I ask him.

“Nothing,” says Ives.

We are trying to prep for a bail hearing tomorrow morning, looking for anything that might stand in the way of springing him from the county’s concrete abode.

Ives looks at us from across the table. Sandy haired, big bright blue eyes, well over six feet, a tall wiry rail of a kid, and scared. Jimmy Stewart in his youth unburdening his soul to two hapless angels.

“If there is anything in the blood they will find it,” says Harry.

“I don’t do drugs,” says Ives.

“Good boy,” says Harry.

“What do we have on the other driver?” I look at my partner. Harry hasn’t had time to read all the reports. They have been coming in in bits and pieces over a couple of days now. “Any alcohol in her body? Could be she was drinking.”

“If she was, it went up in the flames,” says Harry. He is master of documents this afternoon, a growing file spread out on the metal table in front of him. “According to the accident report, the victim’s name was Serna, first name Olinda. Forty-seven years old. Out-of-state license, driving a rental car. . ”

“What did you say her name was?” says Ives.

Harry glances at him, then looks down at the page again. “Serna, Olinda Serna. I guess that’s how you’d pronounce it.”

“Can’t be,” says Ives.

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“Can’t be her,” says Ives.

“Can’t be who?”

“Serna,” he says.

I glance at Harry who has the same stagestruck expression as I do.

“Are you telling us you knew her?” says Harry.

“No, no. It must be somebody else. Maybe the same name,” says Ives.

Harry gives me a look as if to say, “How many Olindas do you know?”

“Assuming it’s her, I didn’t really know her. Never met her. I just know the name. It’s a story we’ve been working on at the Gravesite. My job,” says Ives.

Harry is now sitting bolt upright in the chair. “Explain!”

“We’ve been working on this story close to a year now. Major investigation,” he says. “And I recognize the name. Assuming it’s the same person.”

“Where was this person from?” asks Harry. “This person in your story. Where did she live? What city?”

“It would be somewhere around Washington, D.C., if it’s her.”

Harry is looking at the report, flips one page, looks up and says: “Is Silver Spring, Maryland, close enough?”

“The cops never told you who the victim was?” I ask Ives.

“No, I didn’t know until just now. No idea,” he says.

“Do you know what this other woman, the one in your story, did for a living?” Harry looks at him.

“She was a lawyer,” says Alex.

“Mandella, Harbet, Cain, and Jenson?” says Harry.

Ives’s face is all big round eyes at this moment, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Well, I guess if you have to kill a lawyer, you may as well kill a big corporate one,” says Harry.

According to the police report, the cops found business cards in the victim’s purse, what was left of it. They ID’ed her from those and the VIN number on the burned-out car that was traced back to the rental agency.

Mandella is one of the largest law firms in the country. It has offices in a dozen cities in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The minute the ashes cool from the Arab Spring, you can bet they will be back there as well. They practice law the same way the US military fights its battles, with overwhelming force, cutting-edge weapons, and surprise flanking power plays. If their clients can’t win on the law, they will go to Congress and change it.

The multinational businesses that are not on their client list are said not to be worth having. One of their long-dead managing partners, it is rumored, got the feuding Arab clans to put down their guns long enough to set up OPEC, the world oil cartel, at which point the Arabs stopped robbing camel caravans and started plundering the industrialized West. If you believe Mandella’s PR, lawyers from the firm secured the foreign flag rights for Noah’s ark. They would glaze the words “Super Lawyers” on the glass doors to their offices, but who needs it when the brass plaques next to it show a list of partners including four retired members of the US Senate and one over-the-hill Supreme Court Justice. The finger of God is said to be painted on the ceiling of their conference rooms, franchise rights for which they acquired when Jehovah evicted their client, Adam, from the Garden of Eden.

“Listen, you have to believe me,” says Ives. “I had no idea. I don’t remember anything about the accident or anything about that night. Nothing. I don’t remember the other car. I don’t remember hitting it. I don’t remember getting in my car to drive. The last thing I remember is going to the party, having a drink, and then nothing.” He looks at us for a moment, to Harry and then back to me. “I mean. . I know it looks bad. The fact I even knew who she was. But I never met her.”

“It appears that you ran into her at one point,” says Harry. Bad joke. “You have to admit, it’s one hell of a coincidence. Let’s hope the cops don’t know.”

Harry and I are thinking the same thing. The police may change their theory of the case if they find out there was any connection between Ives and the victim before the accident.

“Tell us what this story is about,” says Harry. “The one involving Serna.”

“Oh, I can’t do that,” says Ives.

“What?” says Harry.

“Not without an OK from my editor.”

“An OK from your editor?” says Harry. “Do you understand what you’re facing here? If the cops get wind of any involvement between you and the victim, they are going to start turning over rocks looking for evidence of intentional homicide. Depending on what they find, you won’t be looking at manslaughter any longer but murder. Was there any bad blood between you and her?”

“Not on my part. It was just a story. Nothing personal,” says Ives.

“What is this story about?”

“You don’t really think I killed her on purpose?”

“For my part, I don’t. But I can’t vouch for the D.A.,” says Harry. “So why don’t you fill us in.”

“It’s big. It’s a very big story. At this point there are a lot of leads. What we need is confirmation.”

“Confirmation of what?” Harry is getting hot.

“That’s what I can’t tell you,” says Ives. “It’s not my story. I don’t have any personal stake in it. That’s what I’m saying. I didn’t have any reason to harm Serna. I never met her. She was a name. That’s all.”

“But she was involved?” I ask.

“Her name kept popping up during the investigation,” says Ives.

Alex is what passes for an investigative reporter in the age of digital news. The changing tech world has dislocated everything from journalism to jukeboxes. It has untethered us from the world we thought we knew and left us to swim in a sea of uncertainty. Like primitive natives, we are constantly dazzled by shiny new stuff, smartphones that respond to voice commands and mobile hot spots the size of a thimble that connect us to the universe. But like the native jungles of the New World, the industries in which we work may disappear tomorrow, victims of the shiny new stuff, the treasures that have seduced us. Where newspapers once existed, now there are blog sites. More nimble, faster, some of them blunt-edged partisan weapons for dismantling a republic. Alex works for one of these, a blog site headquartered in Washington. He is their West Coast correspondent.

“I’m not sure how much I can tell you. We’ve been working on it for about a year now. Mostly in D.C., but also out here on the coast. It’s the reason I know her name.”

“If you want us to represent you,” says Harry, “you’re going to have to trust us.”

“I do. But you have to understand the story is not mine, it belongs to the Gravesite.” Ives is talking about the Washington Gravesite, the digitized scandal sheet owned by Tory Graves, Ives’s boss and the purveyor of the hottest political dirt since the days of Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. What TMZ is to celebrity news and entertainment gossip, the Washington Gravesite is to those who work in politics. It parcels out breaking news to the various cable stations, which feed upon it depending on their particular partisan political bias. It is unclear how Graves makes his money, whether he gets paid for exclusive stories or is funded by various interest groups with an ax to grind. Either way he seems to be surviving in what is by any measure a political snake pit of Olympian proportions.

“Did you ever talk to Serna, interview her, have any direct contact with her at all?” asks Harry.

Ives is shaking his head.

“Did you communicate with her in any way?” I ask.

“No. And I can’t tell you anything beyond that, not until I talk to my editor.”

Harry and I look at each other. I give Ives a big sigh, shrug my shoulders, and slowly shake my head. “We’re just trying to help you.”

“I know you are and I appreciate it,” says Ives. “But I can’t talk about my work. That’s confidential. It’s off-limits.”

“Let’s hope the court agrees,” says Harry. “But I can tell you it won’t.”

“Let’s leave it for the moment,” I tell him. “I assume your parents are good for the bail bond?”

“I think so. How much do you think it’ll be?”

“No way to be certain until we get in front of the judge. It’s a bailable offense, at least at the moment. But the D.A. will probably try to up the ante. Make it expensive. Have you done any recent international travel?”

“For work,” he says.

“How long ago and how often?”

“Europe, twice in the last year.”

“Where?” says Harry.

“I went to Switzerland with my boss, Tory Graves.”

“We can assume Serna wasn’t into chocolates,” says Harry. “Watches? Rolexes?” He looks at Ives. “Banking!”

The kid’s face flushes. He looks up at Harry.

“Bingo. Well, we can’t put him on the stand,” says Harry. “They won’t need a lie detector to test his veracity. Just measure the movement of his Adam’s apple. I hope you don’t play poker, son. If you ever take it up, try to sit under the table.”

“You can be sure they will want your passport until this is over,” I tell him. “As for bail, you have a job and contacts in the community. That’s a plus. Superior Court bail schedule says a hundred-thousand-dollar bond for a death case involving DUI. That means you or your parents have to put up ten percent, ten grand.”

Ives shakes his head, looks down at the table. “I suspect my parents can raise it. But I’ll want to pay them back.”

“Of course.”

“And your fees,” he says.

“Let’s not worry about that right now.” Harry gives me a dirty look.

“What about the girl, the one you say you met who invited you to the party? What can you tell us about her?”

“Not much,” he says. “Only met her the one time.”

“How did you meet her?” says Harry.

“Let me think. I guess it was about noon. I was out in the plaza in front of my office trying to figure where to go to grab a bite. This girl came up to me, real cute, you know, and she asked me for directions.”

“To where?”

“I don’t remember exactly.”

“Go on,” I tell him.

“It must have been somewhere close. I mean, she didn’t come out of a car at the curb or anything. Not that I saw anyway. So I assume she was on foot.”

“Was she alone?” I ask.

“As far as I could tell, she was.”

“But you don’t know where she was going?” says Harry.

Alex shakes his head.

“And then what?” I ask.

“We got to talking. She had a great smile. Said there was a party at some rich guy’s house that night. She said she was gonna be there. It might be fun. Said she was allowed to invite some friends. Would I like to go? What could I say? Beautiful girl. I had nothing going on that night. I said sure. She gave me the information. .”

“How?” I ask. “How did she give you the information?”

“A note,” he says. “It had the address and a phone number. The address was the location of the party. She said the number was her cell phone in case I got lost. It wouldn’t have mattered. I went to call her when she didn’t show and my phone was dead.”

That means we can’t subpoena the cell carrier to try and triangulate the location of the house where the party took place.

“All I can remember is it was someplace up near Del Mar. Big house in a ritzy neighborhood. I remember it had a big pool, great big oval thing. I might recognize it if I saw it again. The problem is, you use this high-tech stuff, GPS, you tend to rely on it and you don’t remember anything because you don’t have to.”

Alex is right. How many of us can remember telephone numbers for friends or family? We push a button and it replaces our brains.

“I loaded the address into the GPS in the car and I didn’t pay any attention. I just followed the verbal directions. It took me right to the front door,” he says.

And of course Alex’s car, which he borrowed from his parents’ company, was charred in the accident. Its GPS is toast. I make a note to check and see if we can access the information from its provider, OnStar or NavSat or one of the others.

“Oh, there was one more thing,” says Alex. “She gave me a name. Some guy. She said that if anyone stopped me at the door, I was to tell them I was to be seated at this guy’s table.”

“What was the name?” says Harry.

Ives looks at us, first to Harry and then to me. Shakes his head. “I can’t remember,” he says. “Bender or Billings, something like that. I think it started with a B.”

“This note, with the address on it. Did she write it down or did you?” I ask.

He thought about it for a moment. “Come to think,” he says, “neither one of us did. She already had it written out. She just handed it to me.”

“Didn’t you think that was a little strange?” says Harry. “A girl you just met handing out invitations to a party to strangers on the street?”

“She looked like the kind of girl who would have rich friends,” says Ives. “When I got to the party, I realized I wasn’t exactly dressed for it,” he says.

“What do you mean?” says Harry.

“I mean, there were guys there wearing tuxes, women in expensive dresses and a lot of jewels. And they were all older. Gray hair everywhere I looked. I felt out of place, like maybe she should have warned me. I went looking for her. My first thought was maybe there was a younger crowd somewhere in the back. It was a big place, a lot of ground in the yard. Chinese lanterns lighting everything up. She was right about one thing. Whoever owned the place was part of the one percent,” he says. “A lot of money.

“When I didn’t see her or anyone our age, I decided to leave. That’s when he came by.”

“Who?” says Harry.

“The waiter with a tray of drinks. They didn’t have any beer, but they had champagne. I took one glass, and that’s it. That’s all I can remember until I woke up in the hospital.”

“Do you remember what he looked like, the waiter?”

“Not a clue. Didn’t even look. It was crowded. There were people everywhere. I grabbed the glass and that was it.”

“Do you remember what the girl looked like?” I ask him.

“Yeah. You couldn’t forget her. Asian. Beautiful face. Great smile. Long straight black hair down to the middle of her back. Dark eyes. Bronze skin. About this tall.” Ives puts his hand flat on edge as if drawing a line across his upper body about nipple high.

“What are you saying, about five five, five six?” I ask.

“Yeah, I’d say that’s about right.”

“Was she slender, heavy? How was she built?”

“Yeah.” Ives gives me a kind of quick sheepish grin, the college jock. “I’d say she was pretty well built. You know what I mean?”

“Tell us.” Commander Lust, Harry wants all the details.

“Well, you know. . showing some good cleavage. It was a nice sunny day. Summertime. A lot of the women, secretaries, come out of the buildings into the plaza showing a lotta thigh, short skirts. Hers was right up there. You couldn’t miss it,” he says. “As I remember, she was wearing a blue print dress of some kind, tight, a lot of curves, all in the right places, and. . oh, yeah, she had a tattoo.”

“Yes?” I look at him.

“It looked like the tail of a dragon, blue and red; it was a colorful thing. It was on the inside of her left thigh. Fairly high up. By the way she was dressed I could only see the bottom part of it. But you could bet I wanted to see more.”

“Looks to me like she was waiting for you,” says Harry. “Everything but a pole with a lure on it.”

“With that kind of a lure, she didn’t need the pole,” I tell him.

This thought is not lost on Ives. “I’ve wondered about that.”

“Do you think you could have been drugged at the party?” I ask.

“I’ve thought about that, too,” he says. “I guess I’m pretty stupid. But they didn’t rob me. They didn’t take any money, my watch, my phone, nothing.”

“Any idea how you got way out to the accident site?” says Harry.

“I’m not entirely certain where that was,” he says.

“Try sixty miles out of town,” I say. “East, out in the desert.”

He shakes his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. You think I could have driven all the way out there, gotten into an accident, totaled two cars, killed somebody, and not remember anything?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “The only connection from what you’re telling us is your job, this story you were working on.”

“She was part of it,” says Ives. He’s talking about Serna.

I sit there looking at him, waiting for him to fill the nervous void. “Just give me some clue,” I tell him.

“In general terms?” he says. “What it’s always about when it comes to politics and business. What do they say? Follow the money. What the Swiss bankers call Ben and Bin.”

“What does that mean? Ben and Bin?” says Harry.

“In international financial circles, Ben is a hundred-dollar bill. Bin is a five-hundred-euro note,” says Ives. “Follow the money. It’s always about the money.” Then he suddenly gives us a distant stare as if he’s looking right through the cement wall in the cubicle. “That’s it!”

“What?” says Harry.

“Her name. The girl. The one who invited me to the party. Now I remember. Her name was Ben.”