The Devil's Necktie Read online

  He flew off the freeway at the next exit, executed a tire-squealing right turn, fishtailing before gaining control of his Mustang as he rocketed back up Sepulveda Boulevard. His speedometer inched toward seventy-five as he screamed past MountainGate, toward the top of the ridge.

  Jack thundered by the American Jewish University and swung a hard left onto Longbow. His Mustang kicked up a spray of sand on the uneven surface as he tore down the steep road. Blowing through two stop signs, he slammed the wheel into a hard left, skidding onto Vista Haven. The party next door was still in progress, and Jack forced himself to take a deep breath.

  He saw no sign of the police car as he pulled into Mia’s driveway and set the parking brake. Maybe he was losing it. Then Jack’s eye caught the reflection of a large pool of oil on the driveway. He was sure that hadn’t been there when he left the house.

  He jumped out of his car and banged on the black-lacquered door while ringing the bell insistently. No answer.

  Maybe Mia was in the pool. Be in the pool, he thought.

  Jack felt a tightness behind his eyes and his head was pounding as he heard the glad screams from the pool party and that damn loud music and the fucking barking dogs. He ran around the side of the house, saw that the rear lights were on, and jumped over the low side gate.

  The pool was empty, but Jack could see that the sliding screen door had been kicked off its runners at the far end of the house and lay bent in on the bedroom rug.

  Jack dialed 911 and shouted out his location as he ran into the empty bedroom. The smell of blood flooded his senses even before he stepped into the bathroom.

  Mia’s naked, brutalized body was hanging in the sunken shower stall. The white tiles were stained dark red with her flowing blood.

  Jack never cried, but he felt a roar erupt from his throat and blinding tears obscure his vision as he struggled to unbuckle Mia’s belted wrists from the chrome showerhead.

  Her blood soaked his clothes as he stubbornly checked for signs of life. He knew it was hopeless. Her neck was entirely still.

  Jack used to say that ice water ran through her veins. But it was hot and red and mortal now.

  Jack’s arms grew leaden from trying to calm Mia’s spasming naked body as she bled out in his arms. He squatted in a growing pool of her blood, cradling her broken and mutilated body. Too little, too late, he thought, waiting for a response to his 911 call.

  The drug kingpins called it a Colombian Necktie. Some called it the Devil’s Necktie. The murderers had slit Mia’s throat and pulled her tongue out through the opening, leaving it hanging and swollen and bloody.

  Jack Bertolino forced himself to look at the inhuman, tortured expression on her once beautiful face. He didn’t want to forget. He’d never forget her crystal blue eyes, cloudy and sightless in death. They would spur him on—until he took down the animal who had killed her.

  3

  Jack’s frozen shock was shattered by a vortex of sound, fury, and blinding light as a massive LAPD police helicopter, like a breaching whale, rose from below the edge of the property line. Its thousand-candle spotlight arced across the house and blasted through the bedroom, into the bathroom, where it lasered onto Jack holding Mia’s broken body.

  The light shifted briefly, revealing the ominous black-and-silver helicopter that blocked out the night sky and reflected light from the valley floor below. The thundering downwash created by the flying machine’s blades created choppy waves in the pool and a swirling cloud of garden detritus and olive leaves. Jack thought it looked like something out of an action movie, as if Matt Damon would suddenly leap out of the flying monster, AK-47s in both hands, guns blazing.

  The backyard filled with LAPD swat team members, rifles trained on Jack. Their shouted orders were muted by the thrumming, rotating blades.

  Jack tenderly laid Mia’s lifeless body down on the bloody tiles. He had already placed a towel over her horrific wounds, knowing full well he had altered a crime scene. It had been the right thing to do.

  Ten men brandishing weapons with hairpin triggers rushed the house and surrounded the bedroom. Orders were shouted. It was all white noise to Jack.

  Finally the loudspeaker on the chopper came to life, cutting through the deafening roar, and a disembodied voice intoned, “Move away from the body and get down on the floor! Move away from the body, get down on the floor, and place your hands behind your head!”

  Jack knew he had to force himself to move or things would go from ugly to deadly. He’d been in his share of these high-intensity situations and understood that with one false move he’d never see his son graduate from Stanford.

  Jack’s back was spasming, and all he could muster was the strength to crawl out of the bathroom and collapse on the brown Berber carpet in the bedroom with his arms and legs spread-eagled. He’d wait until the energy in the room settled down a bit before trying to communicate who he was and how he came to be there. Jack knew supplication was the better part of valor.

  —

  “Sit down, Jack. Jack, we can’t continue the interview until you take a seat.” Lieutenant Gallina was trying to sound collegial but was losing patience.

  Jack remained standing, refusing to acknowledge the stabbing pain running up his leg and shooting into his lower back. He wouldn’t allow these detectives to look down on him and put him on the defensive.

  When Jack was a rookie, the precinct cops used to sandpaper the front legs of the chairs in the interrogation room, forcing the suspects to lean forward, keeping them off balance. They’d turn up the heat in the summer and turn off the heat in the winter. Feed the perps dry baked goods but no liquids. Fill the bad guys with carbonated soda, but not allow them to use the john, anything to control their environment. Keep the bad guys on edge and facilitate them spilling their guts. Jack knew all the tricks.

  “Fuckin’ Serpico,” Lieutenant Gallina muttered under his breath to his partner.

  “What did you say?” Jack snapped.

  “Nothing, let’s get down to it.”

  “No, spit it out.”

  “It’s always the cops with you, huh, Bertolino?”

  “Respectfully, go fuck yourself.”

  Jack had taken down more than his share of dirty cops in his career. Anyone who was an active player was constantly being tested. It went with the territory, and his history was all in his files. Gallina, clearly, wasn’t a fan.

  But to Jack’s mind, if you were a drug dealer, you couldn’t hide behind a three-thousand-dollar suit, and if you were a dirty cop, you sure as hell couldn’t hide behind a badge. He hadn’t spent a career in narcotics to make friends.

  Lieutenant Gallina’s jaw tensed, and his left eye reflexively twitched. He was in his midthirties, prematurely balding, struggling to keep control of his weight. He kept glancing up to his left. It was a tell, and Jack was now sure his interrogation was being secretly taped.

  He had been driven from Sherman Oaks to the Parker Center downtown. The brand-new police administration building was located at 100 West First Street. The building was a vast expanse of glass; geometric angled walls; and tall, solid columns decorated with mosaic tiles.

  “Sit down, Bertolino. It’s not a request.”

  When Jack was just a boy, his grandfather had taught him never to poke a snake with a stick. The old man’s wisdom made absolute sense to Jack, but sometimes his response was just street.

  “Turn off the camera, take off your badge, and send Frick out for a doughnut so it’s just the two of us. I’ll beat the shit out of you.”

  Gallina all but jumped out of his loose skin before he recovered himself.

  “Oh, the man’s funny. He spends twenty-five years on the force, and I think he missed his calling. I’m thinking he should take his act on the road.”

  “I’m Frick to your Frack,” Gallina’s African-American partner deadpanned.
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  “How’d you get your shield? Time in?” Jack couldn’t help himself.

  “You see, that was a good delivery. Leno would be all over a talent like that.”

  Jack was dressed in a black rock ’n’ roll T-shirt with CBGB emblazoned on its front, and sweatpants provided by Terry Molloy, the on-scene medical examiner. Jack had dropped his blood-soaked clothing into a green evidence bag for forensics and was more than happy to squeeze into dry, clean clothes, even though the proffered T-shirt and sweats were a size too small and made Jack feel exposed and vulnerable. Jack made a mental note to return the clothes the following day.

  He took control of the interrogation room. “You need to get a list of everyone who was at the party next door. The music was loud enough to cover the attack, but someone may have been getting a blowjob out in a parked car or smoking a joint, whatever. And the neighbors across the street had a direct view into the victim’s driveway. If there was a squad car parked there, someone must have seen something.”

  “I never thought of that, did you, Tompkins?” The lieutenant’s eyes drilled into Jack, his expression as acerbic as his tone.

  Jack went on as if Gallina and Tompkins weren’t in the room. He had already laid out the call and text he’d received from Mia, their professional history, and his theory as to what he thought had gone down. He failed to mention their sexual encounter, though he was sure the ME would do a rape kit, and they’d find his DNA. He was hoping for a few days of grace to find some answers. He couldn’t accomplish much sitting in a jail cell.

  Jack started talking to the men behind the camera. “You need to take a sample of the oil spill in the driveway. It wasn’t there when I left the house the first time or I would have stepped in it.”

  “He still doesn’t get the concept of pecking order,” Gallina said to his partner and then turned back to Jack.

  “You no longer wear a badge. You are no longer an inspector,” he said sharply. “Therefore, you do not get to ask the questions. You admit to altering a crime scene. You were drenched in the victim’s blood, and you’re not being forthcoming about your personal relationship. The vic was naked at the time of her death. By your own admission you’d only been gone twenty minutes.”

  Gallina was working up a full head of steam now, enjoying the sound of his own voice, playing to the suits on the other end of the camera.

  “You developed a close working relationship with a confidential informant, and now here you are, retired, and trust me, I understand the temptation. A little quid pro quo doesn’t seem out of line. She was a beautiful woman, after all. She flies into town, rings you up—your own words—and you think she’s yours for the taking. Mia maybe doesn’t see it that way. Maybe she tries to brace you for some unpaid debt. Who knows? One thing turns into another and things get out of control.”

  Tompkins, who was six feet tall, without an ounce of body fat on him, was about to add something to the dialogue, but Jack cut him off.

  “The cop driving was a young Hispanic male, about twenty-eight years old. Had the look of a player. The passenger was a blur but filled the seat, thick shouldered, around one-eighty. I didn’t pass them on my way back to the house, so it’s likely they took another route away from the residence. They had a ten-minute lead, but they couldn’t have been inside the house for more than five. In and out, professionals. Could be a cartel hit. It was their MO.”

  Jack was keeping it analytical, one step removed from the guilt and pain, objectifying the images swirling around in his head. He’d deal with his own emotions at a later date.

  “It looked like there was blunt-force trauma to Mia’s face. They must have startled her in bed, knocked her out, dragged her into the bathroom, belted her to the showerhead, and slit her throat. There should be blood spatters on the bed from the initial assault. If she wasn’t startled and knocked out, she would have put up a fight, so I’d check under her fingernails. There would be trace DNA on the bedding.

  “I’d check all male Colombian nationals, twenty to forty-five, traveling in and out of LAX, Burbank, Long Beach, and John Wayne airports in the past seventy-two hours, and cross-reference them with ViCAP.

  “Someone rented those men a police car. I’d check with all the film rental companies in the area but I’d start in the valley. Now, if you don’t have anything else, stop wasting my time and yours and start the investigation. I’m out of here. You know where to find me.”

  Jack walked over to the door without looking up at the camera.

  “Any objection to leaving a DNA sample?” Gallina added.

  “None. And my fingerprints are a matter of record.”

  Gallina’s nod to the camera was almost imperceptible. The door to the interrogation room was pulled open by a uniformed officer who had been standing guard. A med tech who was positioned next to the young cop looked to Jack for permission to collect the DNA sample. Jack answered the unspoken question by opening his mouth, allowing the man to insert a mouth swab and rub it gently around the inside of his mouth, gathering cells. The tech then waved the cotton swab to air-dry it, like an old-school family doctor preparing a mercury thermometer, before placing it in a small brown envelope to preserve the sample. Jack nodded to the two men as he stepped past. Hell, he thought, they were only doing their job.

  Gallina followed, hard in his wake. He stopped Jack in his tracks.

  “Hey, that was a good show you put on for the suits.”

  Jack, who was bone weary, summoned all of his strength to keep from knocking this ego with a badge on his ass.

  “Just find the pricks who did this.”

  Even as the words spilled out of his mouth, he knew the odds were close to none. The killers, if they were cartel hires, had probably crossed into Mexico or Arizona and were chasing shots of tequila with lines of coke on a charter plane to Mexico City and then home to Colombia. Jack knew he’d have to discover who ordered the hit, and then do a regression analysis. If they were local, he’d hunt them down.

  Gallina stared at Jack for a beat. His eyes narrowed, creasing into a smile with no warmth.

  “Between you and me, Bertolino, I think I’m looking at him.”

  4

  The blackout shades were drawn in the modest apartment in Ontario, California. It could have been two in the morning or high noon. A young woman was handcuffed to the metal bed frame. Naked, gang tattoos across her chest and small, firm breasts. A dreamy look on her hard face. Her pupils tweaked, her dark eyes framed by eyebrows that had been plucked into nonexistence, replaced by a thin, harsh pencil line.

  The light green wall paint was peeling in patches where rainwater had seeped through. A movie poster was thumbtacked to the wall behind the bed. Al Pacino seemed to be looking down on the naked woman over a huge pile of cocaine, SCARFACE printed in bold red letters at the top.

  A twenty-something Hispanic man was sitting at a computer. He was also naked, his wiry body lit only by the green glow of the empty computer screen. He was in the process of downloading a silent video image from his cell phone to his laptop. He hit Enter and his partner Hector’s jerky image filled the screen and quickly moved off.

  The video screen pixilated and then refocused as Mia, startled, disoriented, sat up in bed and the large bull of a man—wearing latex surgical gloves—punched her squarely in the face, breaking her nose and knocking her head back against the wall unconscious. Blood spattered the pillow, the white sheets, and arced across the wall behind her. He dragged her across the bed, ripping out one of her earrings, and muscled her into the white-tiled bathroom like a child’s doll, her bare feet scarcely touching the floor.

  The camera jerked wildly and then found the action as the broad man with thick ham hands whipped a leather belt from his pants, cinched it around Mia’s wrists, and fastened her to the overhead shower fixture. He was all business.

  Hector’s father had been a butcher and
had taught his son the trade. Beaten the knowledge into him. Hector’s job as a boy had been to prepare the carnitas for the Easter feast. Failure was not an option. The suckling pig would squeal and scream like a human baby when Hector cut its throat. It bothered him at first and then not at all. He was a natural.

  Cutting Mia was child’s play compared to the thick skin of a pig. He had been told this woman was not only a pig but also a whore.

  “Come back to bed, Johnny,” the woman purred seductively.

  Johnny didn’t respond, concentrating on the task at hand. Anyway, he thought, Angelina wasn’t going anywhere. The cuffs had been her idea.

  Johnny Rodriguez, with black hair that fell over his ears, dark smoky eyes with thick lashes, and a youthful face that was almost too pretty, averted his eyes from the screen and stared at his handcuffed girlfriend as Hector pulled out his carving knife and went to work. Hector used the shower curtain as a butcher’s apron to keep the blood spray off his rented police uniform and methodically drew the knife across Mia’s neck, slitting her open from ear to ear. The one earring that remained on her head swayed as the blood pulsed out of the gaping mortal wound.

  Johnny, the man who had videotaped the murder with his new cell phone, knew what had come next. He’d have nightmares reliving the horrible scene until the day he died. He’d killed men before, but that was gang-related business, cut and dried. A man had to build street cred to get ahead in his world. But this murder was bad, it was a woman. He thought guiltily about his own mother and two sisters.

  With the download completed, he typed in an e-mail address, banged the Send key with more force than was needed, and in a matter of seconds, after the proof of the kill was transmitted to Arturo Delgado, thankfully hit Delete. The now empty green screen gave him some relief. No reason to keep evidence that could put him away for life. The phone would be disposed of, the cost of doing business.