Three Shirt Deal

Chapter 38.

ALEXA WAS TAKING LUTHER'S MEDICATION FOR HER CONVULsions, and I was not yet one hundred percent, so she drove as we headed back to Los Angeles. Along the way, I thought again about what Secada told me about the mountain people in the towns of Mexico. Suddenly, the idea that had escaped me in her hospital room fell right in my lap. We stopped for gas about forty miles out of L. A. and while Alexa was in the bathroom, I called Walter Finn. He was a source I'd been saving inside the Records Division who owed me a favor. I asked him for two deep backgrounders. "Sure," he said. "Gimme your case number." That started a short discussion and negotiation because, of course, I didn't have one. The LAPD had new strict policies forbidding unauthorized record checks. Before Alexa was shot, she had actually been the one who'd instituted these new rules in the wake of a recent scandal where it was alleged in the L. A. Times that cops were selling files from the Records Division to a Hollywood private detective, which he was then using to extort huge divorce settlements for his rich and famous clients. Finn reminded me of Alexa's involvement in these new policy guidelines. He was trying to shrug me off. I asked him how his sister was doing. I'd taken care of a stalker problem for her. It was a low blow professionally to bring it up, but I needed the favor. He got quiet after that, so I begged. I promised never to ask him for another favor again. In the end, he came through. I was just putting my cell away when Alexa came out of the ladies room and got behind the wheel. We pulled back onto the 101 Freeway. Twenty minutes later we crested the hills west of Thousand Oaks and dropped into the Valley. She glanced over and said, "That courtesy check I did on Ron Torgason came back this morning. Treasury faxed his topsheet over. You might want to check it out. It's in the folder." I picked up our now well-used manila file. The fax bore the seal of Homeland Security. Torgason had retired from the U. S. Customs Service in 2003 as a GS-15 assigned to Special Ops out of D. C. I scanned down through the list of cases he'd worked on and found that he had been part of the very controversial, but effective, Operation Casablanca, back in the nineties. I knew all about that case because it had been run by Bill Gately, a friend and a now-retired U. S. Customs ASAC. Gately had figured out that several large Mexican banks were laundering Colombian narco-dollars from their U. S. drug operations by using bank-to-bank wire transfers. He proceeded to organize a covert sting inside Mexico, using Spanish-speaking Customs agents who pretended to be Columbian drug dealers. Operation Casablanca had finally netted over thirty corrupt Mexican bankers and set off a screaming match over territorial integrity on the floor of the United Nations between then U. S. President Clinton and President Zedeho of Mexico. "You see he worked Operation Casablanca?" Alexa said and I nodded. "He had to have been cool before he went to Promo Safe, or Gately wouldn't have used him." "Kinda makes you wonder how Church and Wyatt managed to turn him," I said, still reading the report. "Says here his last address in on Valley Spring Drive, Thousand Oaks. That's only a few miles from where we are right now. Want to swing by and ask him?" "Thought you'd never ask," she said, a mischievous smile playing at the corners of her mouth. Alexa exited the freeway at Westlake Boulevard, and ten minutes later we were on a street lined on both sides with middle-income homes. A lot of retired cops lived out in the far West Valley because the houses were nice and priced in a range that allowed law enforcement officers on twenty-year pensions to afford them. The houses in this development looked to be no more than ten years old. We turned onto Torgason's block, which was in a white-picket-fence neighborhood, nestled up against the low hills. After a short search, we pulled to the curb in front of his address, and found a neatly cared for, yellow-and-white, two-story faux Georgian house with shutters and a wide front porch. The lawn looked freshly mown and there was a big Century 21 real estate sign hanging from a white post driven into the center of the yard. "For sale," I said. The house had a vacant look. We got out of the car and were met by a gust of warm desert air that was blowing across the Valley, bringing a low level of hazy, brown pollution with it. We walked up to the front door and rang the bell. Nobody answered. Alexa stayed on the front porch while I walked around back. A wrought-iron fence protected a nicely landscaped backyard and kidney shaped pool. As I looked around, something fluttered at the corner of my vision. I turned and spotted a little, two-inch-long piece of faded yellow ribbon snapping in the brisk wind. It was tied to the fence near the garage. I didn't have to look twice to know it was a remnant of police crime scene tape. I'd strung miles of this stuff over the years. "Alexa, around back!" I called out. A few seconds later Alexa rounded the corner. She immediately saw the tape and stopped. "What the hell happened back here?" she said, crossing to the fluttering yellow ribbon, and pulling it off the fence. We needed answers, so Alexa took the neighbor's house on the left, while I took the one on the right. After showing my identification to a fish-eye peephole, the front door of my house was opened by a pale, middle-aged woman in a brown-beige Polo shirt dress. She studied my badge carefully before telling me her name was Judy Parker. I said that we were trying to get in touch with her neighbor, Ron Torgason, and asked if she knew where he was. She stood for a moment, drying her hands on a dish towel, gazing at me through the screen door with a puzzled look on her face, then said, "Well, he drowned in his pool. I'm surprised you don't know. The police investigated it for almost a week. Gosh, that was almost a year ago." "Drowned?" "The coroner called it death by misadventure or some term like that." "How did he drown?" I asked. She put the dish towel down on an entry table, warming to the gossip. "I don't think they really know exactly. Maybe he slipped and hit his head on the diving board. Apparently, he was knocked unconscious and just sank down to the bottom. One of the neighborhood boys who did yard work for him found the body down by the drain. They said by the time they got him out, he'd been underwater for almost a day." I looked up and saw Alexa walking up the path to the porch. "Drowned last August," she said, as she joined me on the front porch. I nodded and turned again to Mrs. Parker. "Was there anything you can remember about that incident that seemed strange or out of the ordinary?" She thought for a moment, then shook her head. "He was a good guy, Ron. A retired Customs agent. Made us all feel safe to have him as a neighbor." "If he died in August, how come the house is still not sold?" I asked, struggling with the year-old timeline. "I heard there was a fight between his heirs. The house got stuck in probate," she replied. "Just went up for sale two weeks ago." We exchanged numbers. Then Alexa and I returned to Torgason's front lawn and stood looking at the vacant house. "Those two dirtbags killed him," Alexa said flatly. "Yep. Last August. Puts it close to the time when Olivia Hickman was killed. So that probably makes him the second shirt. That means there's still one more murder we don't know about." "Shirt?" I never told Alexa when I was in procedural quicksand. The old Alexa always got frustrated when I stretched the rules. But who knows how she would feel now, so I decided to run my BlackBerry caper past her. "On Wade Wyatt's BlackBerry there was a text message the night they killed Olivia Hickman. It said, "This just became a three shirt deal." I think 'shirt' is shorthand for a murder. Tru's mom was the first, now Ron Torgason is two. If I'm right, somewhere in this case there's another body connected to all this. One that we don't know about yet." "Wade's BlackBerry?" Alexa asked arching her eyebrows. "You managed to get paper to go through Wade Wyatt's IMs? What was your probable cause? We need to stay really friendly with any judge who'd write you a warrant without a fucking shred of probable cause." Not much got past her. "I didn't exactly have a warrant," I admitted, wondering how she would react to that. "You either had one or you did an illegal search. Which was it?" "We accidentally switched phones," I said putting some spin on it. "I accidentally saw some of his text messages before I discovered the mistake and traded him back." Curious if my BS had any traction. "Since when did you get a BlackBerry?" she said, sniffing the lie. I dug into my pocket and showed her my new phone. She took the unit and held it for a minute. Then she turned it on. Of course, it still wasn't even set up. She flipped it over. Dumb-ass that I am, I hadn't even bothered to remove the Best Buy price sticker. "You're simply amazing," she said, shaking her head in disbelief. Then the mischievous smile suddenly appeared. "It was an honest screwup," I said. "More to the point, you can't inadvertently violate constitutional protections," she said. "There has to be prior knowledge and premeditation. Of course, the evidence you found is lost forever. But the information you attained was probably worth it." My reasoning exactly. So why did it worry me so much to have her say it?