Michael Prescott - Mortal Faults

“And no one saw him leave?” Crandall asked.

“In this neighborhood, no one ever sees a thing.”

“How about phone records?” Tess asked. “If we know who he was talking to within the last twenty-four hours-”

“Already got ’em. He had two phones, a landline and a cell. The cell received a call from another cellular phone yesterday afternoon. He called that number back from his landline a little later. Later still, he called the same number from his cell. That was at five-forty-two p.m.”

5:42 was right after the assailants fled the scene in Santa Ana. “The first two calls involved preparations for the hit,” Tess said. “The last one was his after-action report.”

“So we assume. But there’s a hitch.” Carson smiled. “Isn’t there always? The other cell was a clone.”

A cloned cellular telephone was a unit programmed with someone else’s ownership data. Tess knew it would be impossible to determine the actual caller. “Do we at least know where the cloned phone was operating from?”

“Somewhere between McFadden and Edinger, near Harbor Boulevard. But that covers a lot of territory. And it’s prime turf for the Scorps. Unless we find the cloned cell in someone’s possession…”

Crandall looked unhappy. “It’s probably already been destroyed or reprogrammed.”

“Probably,” Carson agreed. “These Scorps aren’t so dumb. They do know how to cover their tracks.”

Tess asked him what was happening now.

“We’ve rounded up most of Garrick’s scumbag friends for Q and A. So far it’s all Q and no A. They’re shut up tighter than a nun’s-well, they’re not cooperating.”

“You grilling anyone in particular?”

“Yeah. Shanker.”

Tess remembered Hauser mentioning him. “Ronald Shanker. Her runs the club.”

“His official title is president.” Carson noted Tess’s raised eyebrow. “Oh, yeah. They’re organized, these guys. Got themselves a vice president, a secretary-treasurer, and a sergeant at arms.”

“How corporate.”

“They’re essentially a business concern. Sell ecstasy, coke, crystal meth. Stuff is manufactured in Latin America, and the Scorps do the distributing here in the states.”

“Sounds lucrative.”

“For the top membership, it is. The guys at the bottom don’t get much of a cut.”

“Are the gang members still being held?”

“Some are. Some aren’t. They’ll all be let go before long. Nothing to hold them on. Being a dirtbag isn’t a crime. Though maybe it should be.”

“How about Garrick’s whereabouts before he was shot?”

“He was with his buddies. They were all hanging together last night. The guy who popped Dylan was probably chugging beers with him a couple hours earlier.”

“Where did they hang out?”

“Bar, name of Fast Eddie’s.”

A bar. The kind of place where Dylan Garrick might have met someone. A female someone. “Did he leave the bar alone?” Tess asked.

“I told you, no one’s talking.”

“How about employees of Fast Eddie’s?”

“We talked to the bartender. He’s as tightlipped as the rest of ’em. Word is, he’s an honorary Scorp himself.”

“And no one saw him come home?” Tess pressed.

“Folks in this building aren’t too talkative, either, like I said. Besides, the guy was always coming and going at all hours. Believe me, we’re following up every available angle. We’ve got this thing covered.”

“I’m sure you do,” Tess said, though she was pretty sure there was one angle they had missed. Her gaze panned the bedroom, and she noticed Crandall watching her with unusual concentration. The look on his face disturbed her. He seemed to be reading her thoughts.

“Now if you’ll excuse me,” Carson said, “I have to use the can.”

Tess frowned. “Here?”

“Scene’s already been processed. There’s no harm in it.”

Tess knew there wasn’t any harm. But using Dylan Garrick’s toilet seemed… disrespectful, somehow. What made it worse was that Carson grabbed one of Garrick’s porno magazines for reading matter before disappearing into the bathroom.

Crandall tapped her on the arm. “Let’s talk,” he said quietly.

She didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you think we’ve been doing?”

“Let’s talk about something else. On the landing.”

She followed him out of the apartment. He stood looking over the parking lot, not facing her.

“Something wrong, Rick?” she asked, keeping the tone light.

He still didn’t look at her. “I know something funny went down at Andrea’s house yesterday. Making me stay outside while you cleared the premises-that wasn’t standard procedure. Was Abby in there? Did you send her away before I came in?”

She hesitated a long moment. “You don’t want me to answer that.”

“God damn it. I knew it had to be something like that.” He finally turned to her. “She killed Dylan Garrick, didn’t she?”

Tess gave him an honest answer. “I don’t know who killed Garrick. Abby denies having anything to do with it.”

“You already interrogated her?”

“I asked her,” Tess corrected. “Not interrogated. Asked.”

“That’s why you disappeared from the field office after the briefing. You had to do a little briefing of your own.”

“I didn’t brief her. I asked her what she was up to last night.”

“Is she alibied?”

“No. But she says she had no way of tracking down any of the assailants.”

“And you believe her?”

“I’m not sure what I believe.”

He thrust his hands into his pockets. “We cannot keep a lid on this, Tess. We have to tell the ADIC.”

“No, we don’t.” She said it firmly, leaving no room for discussion.

“Then how about Hauser?”

“I’m not saying anything to anyone until I find out what happened.”

“You can’t keep covering for this woman.”

“Just let me handle it, Rick.”

“You’ve been handling it ever since the Rain Man. You’re in really deep. I’m not sure you still have a professional perspective on the situation.”

“Are you saying I’ve lost my ability to make sound judgments?”

“Where Abby Sinclair is concerned, quite possibly.”

“She doesn’t have any sort of hold on me. I just want to be careful, that’s all. I’ll keep you out of it. Carson can take you to the RA. You can talk to some of the people they’ve rounded up.”

“And where will you be?”

“Running down some ideas of my own.”

Crandall sighed. “It’s getting harder and harder to back you up on this. What if she’s gone rogue? What if someone else dies? The congressman, even?”

“There’s no chance of that.”

“How do you know? You can’t say what she might do. We need to tell Michaelson and get it out in the open.”

“It hasn’t reached that point yet.”

“I think it has.”

She felt a flutter of dread. “You’re not planning to go to the higher-ups on your own, are you, Rick?”

“No. I wouldn’t do that.” But he said it with less conviction than she’d hoped.

“Just let me handle it,” she said again.

“Right. So far you’re handling everything just great.”

Crandall walked back inside. Tess stared after him. He wouldn’t rat her out. She was almost sure of it.

But he would never again be her friend.

Abby waited in the restroom until she was sure Andrea had lured the FBI guys into the food court. She didn’t want to be spotted by the feebs. It was always possible that one of them would remember her cameo appearance in the Rain Man case.

Besides, she really did have to pee. She had kind of a nervous bladder today. Nervous everything, in fact. She felt like she was hopped up on some designer drug that had her thoughts racing and her body humming.