The Last Precinct

Chapter 24

IS INTERPOL INVOLVED?" I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY Jay Talley is here. Barely two weeks ago, he was working in France.

"Well, you should know," Jay says with a trace of sarcasm, or maybe I imagine it. "The unidentified case you just contacted Interpol about, the guy who died in the motel down the road? We have an idea who he might be. So yes, Interpol's involved. Now we are. You bet."

"I wasn't aware we'd gotten a response from Interpol." Marino barely tries to be civil to Jay. "So you're telling me the guy from the motel's some sort of international fugitive, maybe?"

"Yes," Jay replies. "Rosso Matos, twenty-eight-year-old native of Colombia, as in South America. Last seen in Los Angeles. Also known as the Cat because he's such a quiet guy when he goes in and out of places, killing. That's his specialty. Taking people out, a hit man. Matos has a reputation for liking very expensive clothes, cars_and young men. I guess I need to talk about him in the past tense." Jay pauses. No one responds beyond looking at him. "What none of us understands is what he was doing here in Virginia," Jay adds.

"What exactly is the operation here?" Marino asks Jilison Mclntyre.

"Started four months ago with a guy speeding along Route Five just a couple miles from here. A James City cop pulls him." She glances at Stanfield. "Runs his tag and finds out he's a convicted felon. Plus the officer happens to notice the handle of a long gun protruding from under a blanket in the back seat, turns out to be a MAK-90 with the serial number ground off. Our labs in Rockville managed to restore the SN and traced the weapon to a shipment from China_a regular shipment to Richmond. As you know, a MAK-90's a popular knock-off of the AK-47 assault rifle, going rate of a thousand, two thousand bucks on the street. Gang members love the MAK, made in China, regularly shipped to local ports in Richmond, Norfolk, legitly in crates accurately marked. Other MAKs are being smuggled in from Asia along with heroin, in all kinds of crates marked everything from electronics to Oriental rugs."

In an all-business voice that only occasionally reveals the strain she feels, Mclntyre describes a smuggling ring that, in addition to area ports, involves the James City County trucking company where Barbosa was undercover as a driver and she was undercover as his girlfriend. He got her a job in the company's office, where bills of lading and invoices were falsified to disguise a very lucrative operation that also involves cigarettes en route from Virginia to New York and other destinations in the Northeast. Some weapons are being sold through a dirty gun dealer in this area, but a lot of them end up in backroom sales at gun shows, and we all know how many gun shows Virginia has, Mclntyre says.

"What's the name of the trucking company?" Marino asks.

"Overland."

Marino's eyes dart to me. He runs his fingers through his thinning hair. "Christ," he says to everyone. "That's who Bev Kiffin's husband works for. Jesus Christ."

"The lady who owns and runs The Fort James Motel," Stanfield explains to the others.

"Overland's a big company and not everybody is involved in illegal activity." Pruett is quick to be objective. "That's what makes this so tough. The company and most people in it are legit. So you could pull their trucks all day and never find anything hot inside a single one of them. Then on another day, a shipload of paper products, televisions, whatever, heads out and stashed inside boxes are assault rifles and drugs."

"You think someone put the dime on Mitch?" Marino asks Pruett. "And the bad guys decided to whack him?"

"If so, then why is Matos dead, too?" It is Jay who speaks. "And it appears Matos died first, right?" He looks at me. "He's found dead in these really weird circumstances, in a motel right down the road. Then the next day, Mitch's body is dumped in Richmond. Plus, Matos is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. I don't see what his interest would be here_even if someone out there dimed Mitch, you don't send in a hit man like Matos. He's pretty much reserved for big prey in powerful crime organizations, guys hard to get to because they are surrounded by their own heavily armed thugs."

"Who does Matos work for?" Marino asks. "Do we know that?"

"Whoever will pay," Pruett replies.

"He's all over the map," Jay adds. "South America, Europe, this country. He's not associated with any one network or cartel, but is a lone operator. You want someone taken out, you hire Matos."

"Then someone hired him to come here," I conclude.

"We have to assume that," Jay replies. "I don't think he was in the area to check out Jamestown or the Christmas decorations in Williamsburg."

"We also know he didn't kill Mitch Barbosa," Marino adds. "Matos was already dead and on the Doc's table before Mitch went out jogging."

There are nods around the room. Stanfield is picking at a fingernail. He looks lost in space, extremely uncomfortable. He keeps wiping sweat off his brow and drying his fingers on his pants. Marino asks Jilison Mclntyre to tell us exactly what

happened.

"Mitch likes to run midday, before lunch," she begins. "He went out close to noon and didn't come back. This was yesterday. I went out in the car looking for him around two o'clock and when there was still no sign, I called the police, and of course, our guys. ATF and FBI. Agents came in from the field and started looking, too. Nothing. We know he was spotted in the area of the law school."

"Marshall-Wythe?" I inquire, taking notes.

"Right, at William and Mary. Mitch usually ran the same route, from here along Route Five, then over on Francis Street and to South Henry, then back. Usually an hour or so."

"Do you remember what he was wearing and what he might have had with him?" I ask her.

"Red warm-up suit and a vest. He had on a down vest over his warm-up. Uh, gray, North Face. And his butt pack. He never went anywhere without his butt pack."

"He had a gun in it?" Marino assumes.

She nods, swallowing, face stoical. "Gun, money, portable phone. House keys."

"He wasn't wearing the down jacket when his body was found," Marino informs her. "No butt pack. Describe the key."

"Keys," she corrects him. "He has the key for here, for the townhouse, and his car key on a steel ring."

"What does the key for your townhouse look like?" I ask, and I feel Jay staring at me.

"Just a brass key. A normal-looking key."

"He had a stainless steel key in the pocket of his running shorts," I say. "It has two-three-three written on it in permanent Magic Marker."

Agent Mclntyre frowns. She knows nothing about it. "Well now, that's really strange. I have no idea what that key might be to," she replies.

"So we gotta figure he was taken somewhere," Marino says. "He was tied up, gagged, tortured, then driven to Richmond and dumped in the street in one of our lovely projects, Mosby Court."

"Hot drug-trafficking area?" Pruett asks him.

"Oh yeah. The projects are big into economic development. Guns and drugs. You bet." Marino knows his turf. "But the other nice thing about places like Mosby Court is people don't see nothing. You want to dump a body, don't matter if fifty people were standing right there. They get temporary blindness, amnesia."

"Someone familiar with Richmond, then," Stanfield finally offers an opinion.

Mclntyre's eyes are wide. She has a stricken expression on her face. "I didn't know about torture," she says to me. Her professional resolve shivers like a tree about to fall.

I describe Barbosa's burns and go into detail about the burns Matos had, as well. I talk about the evidence of ligatures and gags, and then Marino talks about the eyebolts in the motel room ceiling. All present get the picture. Everyone can envision what was done to these two men. We have to suspect the same person or persons are involved in their deaths. But this doesn't begin to tell us who or why. We don't know where Barbosa was taken, but I have an idea.

"When you go back there with Vander," I say to Marino, "maybe you ought to check out the other rooms, see if another one has eyebolts in the ceiling."

"Will do. Got to go back there anyway." He glances at his watch.

"Today?" Jay asks him.

"Yup."

"You got any reason to think Mitch was drugged like the first guy?" Pruett asks me.

"I didn't find any needle marks," I reply. "But we'll see what comes up on his tox results."

"Jesus," Mclntyre mutters.

"And both of them wet their pants?" Stanfield says. "Doesn't that happen when people die? They lose control of their bladders and wet their pants? Just a natural thing, in other words?"

"I can't say losing urine is rare. But the first man, Matos, took his clothes off. He was nude. It appears he wet his pants and then disrobed."

"So that was before he got burned," Stanfield says.

"I would assume so. He wasn't burned through his clothing," I reply. "It's very possible both victims lost control of their bladders due to fear, panic. You get scared badly enough, you wet your pants."

"Jesus," Mclntyre mutters again.

"And you see some asshole screwing eyebolts in the ceiling and plugging in a heat gun, that's enough to scare the piss right out of you," Marino abundantly illustrates. "You know damn well what's about to happen to you."

"Jesus!" Mclntyre blurts out. "What the fuck is this about?" Her eyes blaze.

Silence.

"Why the fuck would someone do something like that to Mitch? And it's not like he wasn't careful, not like he would just get in someone's car or even get close to some stranger trying to stop him on the road."

Stanfield says, "Makes me think of Vietnam, the way they did things to prisoners of war, tortured them to make them talk."

Making someone talk can certainly be one reason for torture, I respond to what Stanfield has just said. "But it's also a power rush. Some people are into torture because they get off on it."

"You think that's the case here?" Pruett says to me.

"I have no way of knowing." Then I ask Mclntyre, "I noticed a fishing pole when I was coming up the walk."

Her reaction is a flicker of confusion. Then she realizes what I am talking about. "Oh, right. Mitch likes to fish."

"Around here?"

"A creek over near College Landing Park."

I look at Marino. That particular creek is at the edge of the wooded camping area at The Fort James Motel.

"Mitch ever mention to you the motel over there by that creek?" Marino asks her.

"I just know he liked to fish over there."

"He know the lady who runs the joint? Bev Kiffin? And her

husband? Maybe you both know him since he works for Overland?" Marino says to Mclntyre.

"Well, I do know that Mitch used to talk to her boys. She has two young boys and sometimes they'd be out there fishing when Mitch was. He said he felt for them because their dad was never around. But I don't know anybody named Kiffin at the trucking company, and I do their books."

"Can you check that out?" Jay says.

"Maybe his last name's different from hers."

"Yeah."

She nods.

"You remember the last time Mitch went fishing out there?" Marino asks her.

"Right before all the snow," she replies. "It was pretty nice weather up until then."

"I noticed some change, a couple beer bottles and some cigars on the landing," I say. "Right by the fishing pole."

"You sure he hasn't been fishing out there since it snowed?" Marino picks up my thought.

The expression in her eyes makes it evident that she isn't sure. I wonder just how much she really knows about her undercover boyfriend.

"Any illegal shit going on at the motel that you and Mitch are aware of?" Marino asks her.

Mclntyre starts shaking her head. "He never mentioned anything about that. Nothing like that. His only connection to the place was fishing and being nice to the two boys, on occasion, if he saw them."

"Just if they happened up when he was fishing?" Marino keeps pushing. "Any reason to think Mitch might have ever wandered over to the house to say hi to them?"

She hesitates.

"Mitch a generous guy?"

"Oh yes," she says. "Very much so. He might have wandered over. I don't know. He really likes kids. Liked them." She tears up again and at the same time simmers.

"How did he identify himself to people around here? He say he was a truck driver? What did he say about you? You supposed to be a career woman? Now, you two weren't really boyfriend and girlfriend. That was just part of the front, right?" Marino is on to something. He is leaning forward, his arms braced on his knees, staring intensely at Jilison Mcln-tyre. When he gets like this, he fires questions so rapidly, people often don't have time to answer. Then they get confused and say something they regret. She does that this very moment.

"Hey, I'm not a fucking suspect," she snaps at him. "And our relationship, I don't know what you're getting at. It was professional. But you can't help being close to someone when you live in the same damn townhouse and act like you're involved, make people think you are."

"But you weren't involved," Marino says. "Or at least he wasn't with you. You guys were doing a job, right? Meaning, if he wanted to pay attention to a lonely woman with two nice little boys, he could do that." Marino leans back in his chair. The room is so silent, it seems to hum. "Problem is, Mitch shouldn't have done that. Dangerous, fucking stupid in light of his situation. He one of those types who had a hard time keeping his pants on?"

She doesn't answer him. Tears jump out.

"You know what, folks?" Marino scans the room. "It just might be that Mitch got tangled up in something that doesn't have a damn thing to do with your undercover operation here. Wrong place, wrong time. Caught something he sure as hell wasn't fishing for."

"You got any idea where Mitch was at three o'clock Wednesday afternoon, when Matos checked into the motel and the fire started?" Stanfield is putting the pieces together. "Was he here or out somewhere?"

"No, he wasn't here," she barely says, wiping her eyes with a tissue. "Gone. I don't know where."

Marino blows out in disgust. He doesn't need to say it. Undercover partners are supposed to keep track of each other, and if Agent Mclntyre didn't always know where Special Agent Barbosa was, then he was up to something that maybe wasn't germane to their investigation.

"I know you don't even want to think it, Jilison," Marino goes on in a milder tone, "but Mitch was tortured and murdered, okay? I mean, the guy was fucking scared to death.

Literally. Whatever someone was doing to him, it was so awful, he had a fucking heart attack. He wet his fucking pants. He was taken somewhere and strung up, gagged and then has a weirdo key put in his pocket, planted, what for? Why? He into anything we ought to know about, Jilison? He fishing for more than bass out there in that creek by the campground?"

Tears are rolling down Mclntryre's face. She wipes them away roughly with the tissue and sniffles loudly. "He liked drinking and women," she barely says. "Okay?"

"He ever go out at night, barhopping and that sort of thing?" Pruett asks her.

She nods. "It was part of his cover. You saw…" Her eyes jump to me. "You saw him. His dyed hair, the earring, all the rest. Mitch played the role of a sort of, well, wild party guy and he did like the women. He never pretended to be, uh, faithful to me, to his so-called girlfriend. It was part of his cover. But it was also him. Yeah. I worried about it, okay? But that was Mitch. He was a good agent. I don't think he did anything dishonest, if that's what you're asking. But he didn't tell me everything, either. If he got onto something going on at the campground, for example, he might have started poking around. He might have."

"Without letting you know," Marino confirms.

She nods again. "And I was out doing my thing, too. It's not like I was here every minute waiting for him. I was working in the office at Overland. Part-time, anyway. So we didn't always know what the other was up to every hour of every day."

"I'll tell you this much," Marino decides. "Mitch stumbled onto something. And I'm just wondering if he wasn't out at the motel around the time Matos showed up, and maybe whatever Matos was into, Mitch had the misfortune of being spotted in the area. Maybe it's just that simple. Somebody thinks he saw something, knew something, and next thing, he gets picked up and gets the treatment."

No one argues, Marino's theory, actually, is the only one so far that makes any sense.

"Which brings us back to what Matos was doing here to begin with," Pruett comments.

I look at Stanfield. He has wandered out of the conversation. His face is wan. He is a nervous wreck. His eyes drift to me and quickly move away. He wets his lips and coughs several times.

"Detective Stanfield," I feel compelled to say to him in front of everyone. "For God's sake, don't tell any of this to your brother-in-law." Anger sparks in his eyes. I have humiliated him and don't care. "Please," I add.

"You want to know the truth?" he angrily retorts. "I don't want nothing to do with any of this." He slowly draws himself to his feet and looks around the room, blinking, his eyes glazing over. "I don't know what this is all about, but I don't want no part_I mean, no part of it. You feds are in it already, up to your eyeballs, so you can just have it. I quit." He nods. "You heard me right, I quit."

Detective Stanfield, to our amazement, collapses. He falls so hard the room shakes. I spring up. Thank God, he is breathing. His pulse is running wild, but he is not in the grips of a cardiac arrest or anything life-threatening. He simply has fainted. I check his head to make sure he hasn't injured himself. He is all right He comes to. Marino and I help him to his feet and get him on the couch. I make him lie down and prop several pillows under his neck. Most of all, he is embarrassed, acutely so.

"Detective Stanfield, are you diabetic?" I ask. "Do you have a heart condition?"

"If you just got a Coke or something, that would be good," he says, weakly.

I get up and head into the kitchen. "Let me see what I can do," I say as if I live here. Inside the refrigerator, I get out orange juice. I find peanut butter in a cabinet and scoop out a big spoonful. It is while I am looking for paper towels that I notice a prescription bottle by the toaster oven. Mitch Barbosa's name is on the label. He was taking the antidepressant Prozac. When I return to the living room, I say something about this to Mclntyre and she tells us that Barbosa went on Prozac several months ago because he was suffering from anxiety and depression, which he blamed on the undercover assignment, on stress, she adds.

"That's interesting," is all Marino has to say about it.

"You said you're going back to the motel when you leave here?" Jay asks Marino.

"Yeah, Vander's going to see if we might have any luck with prints."

"Prints?" Stanfield murmurs from his sickbed.

"Jesus, Stanfield," Marino blurts out in exasperation. "They teach you anything in detective school? Or did you get sent ahead several grades because of your goddamn brother-in-law?"

"He is a goddamn brother-in-law, you want to know the truth." He says this so pitifully and with such candor that everybody laughs. Stanfield perks up a little bit. He sits higher against the pillows. "And you're right." He meets my eyes. "I shouldn't have told him one peep about this case. And 1 won't tell him nothing else, not a word, because it's all politicking to that one. It wasn't me who dragged in this whole Jamestown thing, just so you know."

Pruett frowns. "What Jamestown thing?"

"Oh, you know, the dig out there and the big celebration the state's planning. Well, thing is, if the truth be known, Din-widdie got no more Indian blood in him than I do. All this horse crap about him being a descendent of Chief Powhatan. Pshaw!" Stanfield's eyes dance with resentment that I doubt he rarely touches. He probably hates his brother-in-law.

"Mitch has Indian blood," Mclntyre says somberly. "He's half Native American."

"Well, for Christ's sake, let's hope the newspapers don't find that out," Marino mutters to Stanfield, not buying for one second that Stanfield is going to keep his mouth shut. "We got a gay guy and now an Indian. Oh boy, oh boy." Marino shakes his head. "We got to keep this out of politics, out of circulation and I mean it." He stares right at Stanfield, then at Jay. "Because guess what? We can't talk about what we think is really going on, now can we'? About the big undercover operation. About Mitch being undercover FBI. And that maybe in some fruitloop way, Chandonne is all wrapped around what- ever the shit's going on out here. So if people get all caught up in this hate crime shit, how do we turn that around when we can't tell the truth?"

"I don't agree," Jay says to him. "I'm not ready to say what these murders are about. I'm not prepared to accept, for example, that Mates and now Barbosa aren't related to gun smuggling. I do think without a doubt their murders are connected."

No one disagrees. The modi operandi are too similar for the deaths not to be related, and in fact, committed by the same person or persons.

"I'm also not prepared to totally ignore the idea that they're hate crimes," Jay goes on. "A gay male. A Native American." He shrugs. "Torture's pretty damn hateful. Any injuries to their genitalia?" He turns to me.

"No." I hold his gaze. It is odd to think we were intimate, to look at his full lips and graceful hands and to remember their touch. When we walked the streets of Paris, people turned to stare at him.

"Hmmm," he says. "I find that interesting and maybe important. I'm not a forensic psychiatrist, of course, but it does seem in hate crimes the perpetrators rarely injure the victims' genitals."

Marino gives him an incredible look, his mouth parting in blatant disdain.

"Because you get some redneck homophobic sort, and the last thing he's going to go near is the guy's genitals," Jay adds.

"Well, if you really want to go around this mulberry bush," Marino acidly says to him, "then let's just connect it to Chan-donne. He never went near his victims' genitals either. Shit, he didn't even take their fucking pants off, just beat and bit the shit out of their faces and breasts. Only lower body thing he did at all was to take off their shoes and socks and bite their feet. And why? The guy's afraid of female genitalia because his own's as deformed as the rest of him." Marino surveys the faces around him. "One good thing about the bastard being locked up is we got to find out what the rest of him looks like. Right? And guess what? He ain't got a dick. Or let's just say that what he's got I wouldn't call a dick."

Stanfield is sitting straight up on the couch now, his eyes wide in amazement.

"I'll go with you to the motel," Jay says to Marino.

Marino gets up and looks out the window. "Wonder where the hell Vander is," he says.

He gets Vander on the cell phone and we head out minutes later to meet in the parking lot. Jay walks with me. I feel the energy of his desire to talk to me, to somehow come to a consensus. In this way, he is like the stereotype of a woman. He wants to talk, to settle matters, to have closure or to rekindle our connection so he can then play hard to get again. I, on the other hand, want none of it.

"Kay, can I have a minute?" he says in the parking lot.

I stop and look at him as I button my coat. I notice Marino glancing our way as he gets the trash bags and baby carriage out of the back of his truck and loads them into Vander's car.

"I know this is awkward, but is there some way we can make it easier? For one thing, we have to work together," Jay says.

"Maybe you should have thought about that before you told Jaime Berger every detail, Jay," I reply.

"That wasn't against you." His eyes are intense.

"Right."

"She asked me questions, understandably. She's just doing her job."

I don't believe him. That is my fundamental problem with Jay Talley. I don't trust him and wish I never had. "Well, that's curious," I comment. "Because it appears people started asking questions about me before Diane Bray was even murdered. Right about the time I was with you in France inquiries began, as a matter of fact."

His expression darkens. Anger peers out before he can hide it. "You're paranoid, Kay," he says.

"You're right," I reply. "You're absolutely right, Jay."