Forty Thieves (34 page)

She put down the newspaper. “Oh my God,” she said. “What if you’re right?”

“Don’t make it sound like a fluke.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. She sat in silence, staring across the palm-lined row of pools and baroque fountains planted in the long fake piazza. Her mind was working its way through all of the details she knew about this gang of thieves. Now and then she would say something.

“When those idiots killed that man and dumped him in the sewer, most people would have just called the whole operation off, and moved on. When the Abels started looking for the idiots, offering rewards and things, they’d certainly leave.”

Ed didn’t open his eyes or move. “Mm-hmm.”

“They stayed, and hired somebody to get rid of the detectives. Us—no, Vincent Boylan, who hired us. They were committed to staying awhile, and to keeping it a secret.”

She didn’t detect a reaction from Ed, but she went on. “They spent time planning robberies at what’s got to be some of the hardest places in California to rob. We always assume that what happens after something like that is a quick getaway that very minute. But these people know a lot. Running away is usually the part that gets you caught. Getting away is a second whole job. It takes time to plan, time to arrange.
And there’s no reason you have to do it right away, or all at once.”

Ed still didn’t say anything, but she saw a little tremor at the corners of his mouth.

Nicole got up and walked off across the sun-warmed, smooth pavement, past the fountain pool with the four-sided bearded face blowing streams of water onto the bathers, to the long rectangular pool beyond. It was getting to be past breakfast time now, and already there were people sitting on the submerged benches that ran the length of the pool on both sides. She swam to the far end and back, and then did it three more times. She stood, leaned back at the edge to catch her breath, and returned to the chaise beside Ed.

She lay still, feeling the water baking off her, the gentle abrasion of the desert breeze, and the looseness of her arm and leg muscles. She said, “So where do you think they are now?”

He said, “Their houses are out. The cops have already been watching those places. So they must have found somewhere else. They’re foreigners. There are a bunch of them. They don’t have a lot of options.”

“Name one.”

“A house they know for sure is empty and the owners aren’t coming back. Vincent Boylan’s house, or our house.”

“Jesus,” she whispered to herself.

She turned to look at him again. He lay there looking like some big dumb guy who’d been in a lot of fights. And he was that. But he was something else. She sat up, leaned over, and kissed his cheek. “Come on,” she said.

“What for?”

“I want to show you something.”

He opened his eyes. “Where is it?”

She stood up, threw her cover-up over her head, and stepped into her sandals. “It’s going to be upstairs in the room.” She began to walk toward the rounded arch leading into the hotel. In a few seconds she heard him catching up with her.

30

It was late afternoon as Ronnie Abel stood in line at the post office on Tujunga Canyon Boulevard. She was wearing a blond wig. It was uncomfortable, but it was a good match for the color and cut of Mira Cepic’s hair on the pictures she and Sid had taken of her. The handout from the meeting with Agent Roche from Interpol had included the first two pages of her passport, including the picture. Her California driver’s license picture was even better, because the terrible digital camera in the Department of Motor Vehicles office had taken Mira Cepic by surprise, and the lighting had made the wear on her skin show. She and Ronnie could easily be the same age. They both had bright blue eyes, and were about the same weight and height.

Ronnie couldn’t be sure this would work. But she and Sid had spent a lot of their lives looking for people who had not wanted to leave anything around that might tell the police where to find them. Mira Cepic wasn’t the first to leave a house so clean it was difficult even to find a clear fingerprint, let alone paper. It was easy to throw away paper. The hard part was to make sure no new paper appeared—new credit
card bills charged for plane tickets, new charges for stores in different cities, monthly reports for bank accounts. The simplest way to keep that from happening was to stop the mail.

Ronnie waited patiently while the three people in front of her in line took their turns at the counter. The bored postal workers worked methodically and politely to fulfill the requests of the patrons, weighing things, selling stamps, taking the money and credit cards. She was afraid that she would get the woman on the right, but hoped for the man on the left. He seemed to be thinking about other things, the kind of person who worked automatically, letting his hands do the thinking. The woman seemed sharper to Ronnie, not daydreaming, but studying customers to keep her mind occupied. In Ronnie’s experience women tended to be better at picking out small flaws in a person’s appearance. Men glanced and moved on.

The two workers were moving through their backlog of patrons at roughly equal speed, and then the woman drew a man who only wanted to buy a roll of stamps with a credit card. She took care of him quickly, and then it was Ronnie’s turn. Ronnie looked behind her and saw that the customer after her was a young woman with two toddlers. She was holding a stack of boxes in her left arm and letting her two toddlers each hold a finger of her right. She looked miserable. Ronnie said, “Come on. Go ahead of me,” with a slight accent.

The girl smiled and frowned at once. “Really?”

“Sure.” She ushered the woman up to the counter. As they arrived, the bored postal woman met Ronnie’s eyes, as though to say, “We’ve been there, haven’t we?” She and Ronnie both smiled.

The man in the other position sent his customer away with a receipt for his certified mail envelope, and Ronnie stepped up to him. She said, “I have a hold on my mail, and I’d like to pick it up, please.” She was careful not to overdo the accent, but she had practiced it in case she needed to pretend she didn’t understand the rules. She used it so it wouldn’t suddenly appear if she needed it.

“I’ll need ID.”

Ronnie took from her purse the copy of the California license and the copy of the first two pages of Mira Cepic’s passport and put them on the counter. “My wallet was stolen while I was away in Europe, so all I have is the copies.”

The man looked at Ronnie and then at the copies, and then at Ronnie again. His mind seemed to stall. “Hold on.” He took the papers and left his station. Ronnie began to hope.

The man went to the woman’s station. He showed her the papers and said, “This lady had her wallet stolen. Is this okay? Can we take this so she can get her mail?”

When the woman looked at the copies, her face seemed stern. Then she looked over at Ronnie, smiled again, and nodded. “Sure. This will be fine.”

In a moment, Ronnie was signing a yellow receipt and taking a bundle of Mira Cepic’s mail, held together by rubber bands.

A half hour later, Ronnie took off the blond wig and brushed out her hair. The hot, tight wig had been awful, and taking it off was a relief. She watched as Sid went through Mira Cepic’s mail on the table in their hotel room. There were a
few bills, a lot of ads and catalogs, a number of solicitations for charities of all sorts, a couple of women’s magazines. He kept setting things aside, and then he stopped.

“Veronica,” he said.

“What, Sidney?”

“It looks as though she got a card from a friend.” He held up a square white envelope. He began to open it with the knife on his keychain, careful not to cut the return address. He pulled out a birthday card.

Ronnie stepped up behind him and looked over his shoulder. “Of course. I was just staring at a copy of her driver’s license. Her birthday is two days from now.” She picked up the envelope. “Alexei Malikov. That address is north and west of here. Can you get the directions and send them to my cell phone while I put on some comfortable shoes?”

“Sure.”

He cut and pasted the address into the map site, and watched the directions appear.

Ronnie said, “We’ll have to stop for surgical gloves and stuff on the way. Maybe we should pick up a pry bar too.”

“The stuff we used on Mira Cepic’s place is in the car,” Sid said. “I’m hoping this place is like Mira Cepic’s.”

In another few minutes they were in their latest rental car, heading west toward the address of Alexei Malikov. As Sid drove, Ronnie looked at the traffic map on her phone.

“The freeway looks pretty clear. All you have to do is get on the 101 and stay on it until the Topanga exit. Then turn north, and I’ll tell you what’s next. Malikov. That name sounds Russian, doesn’t it?”

“It does to me,” said Sid. “But I don’t speak Serbian or Russian, so I’m not the one to ask.”

“You’re all I’ve got. Agent Roche did mention that the thieves are from a lot of different countries, so I guess it fits.”

“We’ll just have to see what we can find out,” Sid said. “Maybe this guy will be at home, waiting to tell us where Mira Cepic is.”

They arrived at the house in a half hour. The neighborhood was relatively new, composed of two-story houses that all filled their lots, barely leaving enough space for a wheelbarrow to pass between them. Sid and Ronnie parked a distance away and watched the house as evening came on. No lights went on in the house, and no vehicle entered or left the garage. Ronnie looked at her watch.

“What do you think?”

Sid looked at his. “I guess so. Mr. Malikov is clearly not home. And there are no police watching the place.” He opened his door and got out of the car, and Ronnie got out on her side.

They walked around the block to the next street, and took advantage of the darkness to walk between two of the houses to approach Malikov’s house from the rear.

When they reached the back door, they both put on their latex gloves. Sid took out the powerful magnet he’d bought at the hardware store, knelt beside the door, and moved it slowly along the bottom of the door until he felt a bit of resistance. He located the small magnet that had been embedded in the door by the alarm company. Its purpose was to hold the switch beneath it in an open position until the door opened. Once the magnet was moved out of position the switch would close and the alarm would go off. Sid carefully positioned his magnet so it attracted rather than repelled the alarm magnet in the door, and then stood up. He opened his pocketknife, pushed the blade in by the doorknob so it depressed the lock bolt, and then stopped.

Sid nodded to Ronnie. She grasped the knife handle and kept the bolt out of the way while Sid knelt again. He pushed the door open slowly. As the door moved, he slid his magnet inward a fraction of an inch to be certain it was holding the alarm switch up. Then he and Ronnie stepped inside and closed the door until it was still open only a crack.

Sid and Ronnie closed curtains and blinds as they moved from room to room in the dark. When they were satisfied they had made it difficult to see inside from any angle, Ronnie turned on a lamp.

They searched the house thoroughly, but efficiently. They were aware that once they’d broken into the house, each moment increased the chance that they would be caught.

It was apparent immediately that this house had not been cleaned out the way Mira Cepic’s had. There was dust, there were cans in the recycling basket in the kitchen, and there were male clothes lying on the floor of the first bedroom. Then they found a second bedroom, and a third, but they had been neither occupied nor cleaned.

Ronnie went back into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, then quickly closed it again. “He’s gone, but he left in a hurry,” Ronnie said. “And it was a few days ago. There’s old food in there.”

In the first of the bedrooms there was a desk, with old receipts and a calendar. Sid sat down in the desk chair and began examining the papers. “Half these things are in the Cyrillic alphabet.”

“Take everything that might be personal, or isn’t a power and water bill. We’ll try to figure out what all of it is later.”

When Sid had cleared all of the paper from the top of the desk he looked at the calendar. “The twenty-third,” he said.

“What about it?”

“That’s the last day on the calendar. The one he hasn’t torn out. And the check register shows that as the last day he wrote a check.” He opened the next drawer. “Ammo. All of it 9mm.” He opened the next drawer. “This one’s got nothing but supplies—file folders, envelopes.”

“Okay,” Ronnie said. “I’ll get started on the other rooms.”

A half hour later, Sid found her in the last spare bedroom. When she saw him come in she said, “It’s all about the same—9mm ammo, a gun-cleaning kit, but no guns. A small amount of cash, but nothing special.”

“Ready to give up?”

“More than ready,” Ronnie said. “We’re pushing our luck.”

They went downstairs and slipped out the door, set the lock on the knob, and closed it. Sid took his magnet away, holding his breath, but the alarm didn’t sound.

On the way home, Ronnie said, “Do you think we should tell Miguel Fuentes what we found?”

“We don’t know if we found anything, or just helped the guy clean his house.”

“You know what I mean. Should we tell Miguel we went to the house and took a look around?”

“I don’t see how we can,” said Sid. “He and Brenda Albright let us slide on breaking into Mira Cepic’s house. They’re not going to do it again. Anyway, the whole department is in on this now. They’ve been keeping people on long shifts for three days waiting for the panthers to do something or try to leave town. If anybody finds out we were in there, we’re going to jail.”

“I guess we’d better go back to the hotel and see if we can find out what we were taking that risk for.”

31

The drive from Las Vegas to Los Angeles was 270 miles, and it always made Nicole a little bit nervous. It was at least four hours of driving with the least risk-averse group of travelers ever to be on a public highway. The fact that most of them had just had a lesson in the folly of optimism only made them impatient, and a few of them mean.