The Fourth Gunman Read online

  Jack took a moment before responding. “I’ll be damned if you don’t make me feel like a million bucks. But . . . it will be complicated, it already is, and things could go very wrong very quickly. I’m on a case that possibly pits me against your father’s family. There may be no overlap; there might be no culpability in Luke’s disappearance; but it’s possible. I don’t have the answers yet, but I won’t stop until I get them. And if it goes south on me, I don’t want you caught in the middle.”

  “Let’s take a flier, Jack. Let’s have some fun, and you do what you do best.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Make love to me,” she said, smiling. “And then find Luke Donato.”

  Jack put his drink down. Angelica did the same. She set the timer over the oven, turned the gas off the pot of sauce on the stove, and they walked hand in hand into the bedroom.

  Nineteen

  Day Ten

  It was midmorning before Jack left Angelica’s apartment. He was driving with the top down, listening to KNX Newsradio, and feeling good, optimistic, and hell, damned good. Nick Aprea was right. He’d lose sleep but wake with a smile on his face.

  There was a news story about Virgin America’s airline, and it gave Jack pause. There had been something disconcerting about his run-in the day before with Roxy and Trent. He called Agent Hunter, who picked up on the second ring.

  “How’s it going, Jack?”

  “Do you need a passport when you’re flying to Mexico these days?”

  “You’re right: why waste words on social niceties?”

  “Sorry. I’m good, thanks.”

  “You sound chipper.” Liz wondered if she’d come off defensive.

  “I am—”

  “Yes, you do need a passport. Ever since the State Department implemented the WHTI.”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “And you thought the feds had an acronym fetish.” She put the glimpse of a smile back in her voice. “It’s the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, why?”

  “Then I need a favor,” he said, evading the question.

  “Jack—”

  “Roxy Donnelly and her boyfriend, Trent Peters, claim to have been in Baja the past few days, and I know their passports were still in L.A.

  “I showed up unannounced yesterday as they were stepping out of an Uber van, and the only luggage they carried for a three-day trip was a sports bag and a carry-on. That might fly when you’re eighteen, but I’m not picking up a hippie vibe from either of them. Could you run two cell calls for me?”

  “How do you know they were traveling without passports?”

  “Good question.”

  “Jesus, Jack, text me the numbers and the time of your calls and I’ll get it done.” Now she knew she sounded snarky.

  “Greatly appreciated, Liz. And do you have Vasily Barinov on your radar?”

  “What’s the interest?”

  “He’s a high roller running a scam on the gambling boat, and if Luke was on to him, it would give him motive. He was big in the Russian oil game in the nineties, but was might be the operative word. If he’s hurting for cash and cheating at cards, half a million American would go a long way to getting him healthy again.”

  “I’ll plug him into the system and get back to you.”

  “What’s the word on Rusty?” Jack asked. Liz paused, roiling Jack’s gut. “Don’t tell me you’re cutting him loose.”

  “I was going to fill you in when the ink was dry, but he lawyered up, and his legal team filed for a 1275 bail hearing before he was even processed. Turns out his mother owns the family home on Staten Island outright, and she’s guaranteed a secured bond, using her house as collateral. It’ll take forty-eight hours to go through the system, but he’ll make bail, and we’ll have to cut him loose.”

  “What about the hijacking?” Jack asked, his good mood spent.

  “We may convene a grand jury, but Flannery doesn’t want to drop the hammer on Cardona just yet, and Washington is in agreement. We have too much skin in the game to take him down piecemeal. I’ll give you a heads-up before Rusty leaves the building.”

  “Thanks, Liz.”

  She hung up without saying goodbye.

  Jack turned from news to a jazz station and cranked up the volume.

  * * *

  “Four series of numbers, nine top to bottom.” Cruz was seated at the desk in the cabin cruiser, showing Jack his ideas about Luke’s doodles in the margins of the magazines left in Miranda’s apartment.

  “Any thoughts?” Jack asked.

  “If I put them side to side, could be a combination lock, numbers to a safe. I checked out the Powerball, but there were six, including the Power number. This doodle here that turns into a man’s head after the first four numbers: could be an N. Hard to say. And after the forty-five, the period that turns into a curlicue, not a clue. If I plug in north after the first sequence of four, then the period could be degrees and might be maritime coordinates. I get a GPS hit near a marine sanctuary out in the Pacific. Nothing that makes any sense.”

  “What about Miranda’s computer?”

  “Nothing of relevance, unless he was shopping at Nordstrom or Overstock.com. Most of the hits were restaurants, clubs, and travel plans.”

  “Where were they looking to travel?”

  “Baja, Hawaii, Indonesia, some wildlife preserve, I think it was called the Farallones.”

  “Too bad.” Jack rang up Agent Hunter again. “Hi, Liz, what did you find in Rusty’s apartment? And what’s the status of his girlfriend, and the other woman who was working the front of the shop?”

  “We cut the worker loose. If she didn’t wear slip-ons, she’d be running around barefoot. And Cory, his girlfriend, is struggling to make bail. She’s part of the business and can’t provide legitimate pay stubs to corroborate how she pays her rent. There’s a sixty-thousand-dollar Jaguar in her name, and we found twenty thousand in cash in her freezer and five in a spare handbag. She’s being advised to dummy up from the same lawyer who’s handling Rusty’s case, but might be more forthcoming after a few days in lockup.

  “You’re going to love this—Rusty’s condo has a ceiling panel that houses his air-conditioning unit. It also held fifty grand in vacuum-wrapped hundreds. When I dropped the bomb on Rusty, he didn’t blink. Says he lost faith in the banking system during the Wall Street bailout. And get this, he said his financial adviser told him to keep a year’s cash reserves in case of another market downturn.”

  “Christ. And how much was confiscated at the store?”

  “Thirty grand, with Wells Fargo deposit slips from the previous week for twenty-five. So he’s good for laundering charges.”

  “Just chump change. They must have been giving the Abbot Kinney location a test drive. No way to link the cash to Luke or the Bella Fortuna?”

  “No, and nothing in either condo ties them to my brother.”

  “I’ll stay on it, thanks.”

  “Jack . . . you’re doing good. You’re asking the right questions,” and Hunter clicked off, not comfortable handing out compliments.

  Jack understood her growing sense of dread. Each day that passed without an answer turned the case into a murder investigation. She never admitted out loud that her only brother might be dead and not MIA. But Jack knew that was exactly what she was feeling. It was a numbers game, and Luke’s cards were stacked against him.

  * * *

  “The medical examiner’s office is behind the eight ball,” Nick Aprea said to Jack, as he banged the bottom of a ketchup bottle with his big hand. The guys were sitting in their regular booth at Hal’s grabbing lunch. “Molloy said he’d get to it when he could get to it. I said, ‘Look at it with a magnifying glass, Sherlock.’ He didn’t appreciate the literary reference but slid your samples under a microscope and compared them to the hair pulled from the brush.”

  On the fourth whack, Nick buried his fries under a mound of red. He ate a mouthful and washed it down with a longneck Dos Equis da
rk. Jack waited, knowing if he even sighed, Aprea would go into a laughing jag and continue the torture.

  “I told you she’d be good for you.” Nick said, changing the subject to Angelica. “You are exercising control. You’re more relaxed. Very impressive.”

  “Nick.”

  “Hah!” came out like a bark. “Molloy said it wouldn’t stand up in court, but he thinks there’s a clear match. You got your red sample and two different browns. One of the browns, the longer of the two samples, matched the hair taken from Luke’s brush.”

  “Huh.”

  “Eh? What does it tell you besides the guy was randy, which you already knew, and the woman was hiding their affair, which is typical?”

  “I nailed her yesterday, and she withheld information again. No, she pulled off her sunglasses, stared me down, and bald-faced lied.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Jack, but you’re just a PI. She don’t owe you squat. You need a badge. The better to scare people with.”

  “Thanks for the career advice,” and Jack went silent. He grabbed his wallet and pulled out the receipt he had taken from the wastebasket in the galley of the catamaran. He unfolded it and read.

  “What?”

  “Huh. When I was, uh, looking through the window of Roxy’s catamaran, I happened to notice that she had a new cover on the bed. It had that new-fabric smell.”

  “And you sussed that out through the glass?”

  “Yeah, and check out what I found stuck to the bottom of the garbage can.”

  Nick grabbed it. The game was more fun when he was running it. “Bed Bath and Beyond. Duvet cover, three hundred dollars.”

  “And look at the date. If I’m not mistaken, it’s about two days after Luke and the money disappeared.”

  Nick took a bite of his cheeseburger and a swig of beer, knowing where Jack was going. “Maybe she was having her period and bled on the old cover. Couldn’t get the stain out and bought a new one before her boyfriend saw it.”

  “You could be right about a bloodstain.”

  “It’s a stretch.”

  “Something to think about.” Jack grabbed the receipt and filed it back in his wallet. “That’s all I’m saying. Thanks, Nick. Let me know when the DNA results come in.”

  “No problem, pard.”

  And Jack was out the door.

  * * *

  From a distance, the Queen Mary sat proudly in the afternoon sun. As Roxy got closer, she saw the old broad was aging. White paint flaked and peeled like the skin of a surfer who’d forgotten sunscreen. Roxy took note of pairs of security cameras covering the entrance to the ship on all exterior decks.

  Roxy stepped off the elevator on the fourth floor, walked up the gangplank, and entered the wood-paneled Promenade Deck. She was a brunette again, wearing dark glasses and a tailored silk pantsuit, carrying a gray Coach bag, looking like she was embarking on a transatlantic trip. The fact that the ship was permanently docked in Long Beach Harbor did nothing to shatter the illusion. She was overdressed, but the tourists who stood in line for the tour paid her no mind.

  She walked down the uneven hardwood flooring of the wide promenade and didn’t readily see any interior cameras. She found one at the far end, but again, it appeared to be covering people entering the aft of the ship and not the long promenade. She checked out the ladies’ room: no visible cameras.

  Roxy walked up a flight of stairs at the aft of the ship and exited on the sun deck. The wind was blowing off the Pacific, but the warm sun on her face calmed the nerves that nagged at her the closer they got to D-day. She stepped onto a wooden gazebo and took stock of the location.

  The Queen Mary was surrounded by a moat, a protective stone security wall constructed like a rock jetty. A Carnival Cruise ship was docked off the ship’s aft. And a large waterway separated the Queen from the Long Beach Shoreline Marina, where the Bella Fortuna was moored.

  In the distance Roxy saw the sea of skeletal cranes that jutted like Erector-set models in Long Beach Harbor, off-loading huge container vessels filled with materials shipped from around the world.

  On the port side, R Deck, second floor, were two gaping doorways where supplies, fresh seafood, flowers, alcohol, and assorted vendors’ goods were delivered to the ship. It gave her a second option, if needed.

  Security was light but ever present. The crew and waitstaff were relaxed, and that made Roxy feel confident she could carry out her mission.

  Their terrorist plot was two-pronged. Roxy’s job was to secret one of the dirty bombs on the Queen Mary and engage the bomb on a time delay.

  Sukarno would notify the major television networks.

  When the Coast Guard and first responders were alerted that the Queen Mary was under attack and deployed, all hell would break loose. They wouldn’t have the manpower to cover the cell’s main target: a Chinese tanker heading for the Port of Long Beach, which housed the second busiest container port in the United States.

  * * *

  Jack was in a holding pattern and getting antsy. The Bella Fortuna was leaving port in two days, and he didn’t have any answers about Luke’s disappearance. He was waiting on DNA results from Nick and a phone trace from Agent Hunter. If Luke was still alive and he had inside help from Roxy and Trent, they might have met up in Baja.

  It was worth a try, Jack thought as he looked out the window of the Boeing 737 and marveled at the aqua-blue Pacific and then the crystal-clear water of the Sea of Cortez. The plane made a hard tire-squealing landing. Jack unbuckled his seat beat, stood up, and grabbed his carry-on luggage from the overhead bin before the jet lurched to a stop.

  He laughed to himself, knowing what Agent Flannery’s reaction would be to the eight-hundred-a-night ocean-view junior suite’s invoice he was going to submit to the FBI for reimbursement.

  Jack checked into his room, tipped the bellman, and got down to business. He started at the concierge desk, where he struck up a conversation with Tim, whose name was etched on a silver nameplate prominently placed on the expansive white lacquered desk. Tim was a slender man in his thirties who was as stylish as the hotel and very accommodating.

  “So, just one night, Mr. Bertolino?”

  “Some friends of mine were thinking of coming down for a few days. We had tentative plans to meet up. Roxy Donnelly and Trent Peters. But they look like a no-show.”

  “Oh, yes, a terrific couple,” Tim said. “But they haven’t been here in a few months. In fact, if memory serves, the last time they were here was December, over the holidays.”

  “I was sure they said they were flying in.”

  “I would have known. Let me pull them up on the computer.” He tapped a few keys. “No, their last visit, as I said, was December twenty-third through the twenty-seventh.”

  “Too bad. I was looking forward to spending time. It’s almost impossible to coordinate schedules.” Jack pulled a photo of Luke Donato out of his pocket and slid it across the glossy desktop. “Have you by any chance seen this gentleman?”

  “Why do I feel like I’m talking to the police? And it’s against corporate policy, I’ll have you know,” Tom said in a mock scolding voice.

  Jack discreetly passed two crisp twenties to the young man, who made the cash disappear like a sleight-of-hand magician.

  “In all honesty, this man, Luke Donato, has gone missing. I’ve been hired by a distraught family member to discover his whereabouts.”

  The concierge glanced from the front desk back to the photo. “No, I would have remembered if he stayed at our resort.”

  Jack raised his eyebrows in a question.

  “He’s my type,” Tim said without attitude.

  Jack slipped another twenty across the desk. “Would you mind giving me a list of the other hotels in the general area? And if you could recommend a restaurant, I’d appreciate it.”

  “No problem, Mr. Bertolino. We do everything we can to make our visitors’ stay at the Las Ventanas al Paraiso a pleasurable one.”

  Jack
didn’t doubt him for a second.

  * * *

  The moment Jack’s taxi pulled away from the resort, Tim scrolled down a contact list on the computer, pulled out his cell, and punched in a number.

  “Miss Donnelly, this is your favorite concierge at Las Ventanas. I’m fine, darling, thanks. I just wanted to let you know that a Mr. Bertolino checked in to the resort this afternoon and was hoping you were also arriving today. No? Okay, I just thought you might be interested. It was no problem at all. I always take care of my clients.”

  * * *

  Six resorts and eight bars later, Jack had come up empty. He was eating at the open-air bar at an Italian restaurant overlooking the Sea of Cortez. The water was like nothing Jack had ever seen before. A blue so light, it seemed fluorescent. He polished off a Caesar salad, a plate of scampi, and a side order of spaghetti aglio e olio. The bartender came over during a lull in the service and refilled Jack’s glass with cabernet. Jack was never one to worry about wine pairings. He drank what he liked.

  “How long you in town for?” the bartender asked as he made Jack’s dishes disappear under the bar.

  “I leave in the a.m. Sorry to go.”

  “It’s one hell of a spot.”

  Jack looked at the bartender, early forties, relaxed attitude, looked like he had job security, great window on the world. Jack almost envied him.

  “I’m looking for an old friend and coming up empty.” Jack slid the photograph of Luke across the bar.

  “Luke Donato,” the bartender said, brightening. “Great guy. Great tipper and a real good guy.”

  Jack straightened on his stool. “Have you seen him lately?”

  The bartender gave that a moment’s thought. “Can’t say that I have. But he usually comes in with a nice gal. African-American. Good-looking.”

  Jack took a drink of wine. The bartender was referencing Miranda. “Have you ever seen this couple?” and he showed him the photograph of Roxy and Trent sitting dockside in front of the Bella Fortuna.