Kane (10 page)

“… similar to the murder of a family last month in the Orange County community of Mission Viejo.  Although members of the Los Angeles police have not yet officially linked the two crimes, Channel Two Action News has learned that authorities fear a serial killer may be at large in the Southern California area.  Here with more from Pacific Palisades is Lauren Van Owen.”

The scene switched to a police-choked residential street.  Carns listened as a self-assured female reporter embarked on a somber description of Saturday night’s murders.  Partway through her report, she stopped.  The camera lurched, then followed as she hurried after a large man who had exited the house.  Despite Van Owen’s prodding, the man, later identified as Detective Daniel Kane, refused to comment.  Initially Carns dismissed the rough-looking investigator as another muscle bound Irish cop.  But something about him—a flinty gleam of intelligence in his pale-blue eyes, the unforgiving lines around his mouth—prompted Carns to take a closer look.

The clip ended with the detective promising, “Sooner or later, we’ll get this maggot.”

Carns flipped to CNBC, then ran through the other channels, searching without success for further coverage on the killings.  As he was about to switch back to CNN, a call came in on his trading line.

“Carns,” he said, lifting the receiver.

“Good morning, Victor,” a male voice replied.

Carns recognized the clipped diction of John Hall, the CEO of United Western Packers, an Omaha meat packing conglomerate that routinely purchased over thirty-five percent of all cattle sold in the United States.  As Carns started to respond, he heard a telltale beep on the line.  He checked the recorder switch on his phone terminal.

Off.

Without a word, he hung up.

The phone rang thirty seconds later.  Hall again.  “Victor?”

Carns waited before replying, making sure that this time Hall had called on an unrecorded line.  At last he spoke.  “Don’t ever do that again,” he said softly.

“Of course not.”  Though Hall replied pleasantly, Carns detected something in his tone that sounded as hard as steel.  An alarm went off in Carns’s mind.  In his day-to-day transactions, Hall had no reason to be using a recorded trading line.  So why had he called on one?

An accident?

Unlikely
.

In the event of any suspected impropriety, the National Futures Association and the USDA routinely scrutinized recorded transactions.  Carns knew that if brought to light, his association with Hall and their ingenious but extremely illegal market manipulation involving cattle futures would, at minimum, garner them both speedy trials, gigantic fines, and adjoining cells in the nearest federal prison.  Hall knew it, too.

“Victor?  Are you still there?”

“Yes.  Why are you calling?”

“Two things,” Hall answered, his voice brusque and businesslike.  “First, United Western Packers has been out of the market for five weeks now, and our captive supply is running short.  In order to keep our plants running efficiently, UWP will need to start buying soon.”

“I anticipated that,” snapped Carns.  An understatement.  In truth, he had thought of almost nothing else over the past weeks.  In futures trading, especially with a position as heavily leveraged as Carns’s, the specter of financial collapse always loomed on the horizon.  Of course, if that happened Hall would lose his share of the profits as well, but it was Carns’s money at risk.  And more than anything, Carns hated being in someone else’s power.

“How much time do you need?” Hall demanded.

Carns glanced at the cattle chart.  All red for the past five weeks and still falling.  “Two or three days,” he answered, deciding not to reveal that he’d already begun closing out his contracts.  The more time he had to scale out, the less probability of causing a price jump.

“I can hold off for two additional days.  No more.”

“Fine.  You indicated that you had another reason for calling?”

“I did a little investigating, Victor.  I was astounded to learn that you took a larger position than we originally discussed.  A much larger portion.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you do.  Does five thousand contracts ring a bell?”

Carns said nothing, realizing that Hall’s sources at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and contacts with various brokers on the floor must be far more extensive than he had thought.

“You’ve substantially increased our risk,” Hall continued, his tone hardening.  “As a result, my cut just got bigger.  More risk; more reward.  I want half.  And that’s on all five thousand contracts.”

“I don’t believe I heard you correctly.”

“I think you did.”

Carns paused, remembering the recorded line on which Hall had first called.

A warning?  Had Hall recorded other conversations as well?

“Half, Victor.  That’s nonnegotiable.”

“Or else what?”

“You don’t want to know the answer to that.  Be here in two weeks with my share.”  Without another word, Hall broke the connection.

Furious, Carns replaced the receiver and pressed his thumbs to his temples, attempting to relieve the crippling throb that had begun pounding behind his left eye.  Groaning, he rose and crossed to the kitchen.  He took a small vial from the cupboard, shook out two tablets, and swallowed them.  From experience he knew that the prescription drug wouldn’t eliminate the pain, but he hoped it would take off the edge until he could get to something that might.

Carns returned to his desk.  Referring to the cattle-futures chart on his center screen, he checked the market one last time.  Satisfied, he activated his trade-line recorder, lifted the phone, and contacted his representative in the cattle pit.  Speaking quietly, he placed buy orders to cover his “short” position, spreading them out over the next two days.

After time-stamping his trade tickets, Carns again let his thoughts drift.  Over the past several weeks, with every downward tick in the market, he’d done the math.  Nonetheless, he did it again, manipulating the numbers in his head.  Even with the inevitable upward jog that closing out his contracts would precipitate, he would average at least an eleven-and-a-half-point move on five thousand contracts, times four hundred dollars per point per contract.

Twenty-three million dollars.

Less commissions, of course.

And Hall’s cut.

Abruptly, Carns rose from his desk and left the office.  Near the end of the corridor he took a stairway down to a large basement, stopping at the foot of the stairs.  To his right lay a pistol firing range; to his left, the blank metal surfaces of two fireproof doors.  The room behind one housed a state-of-the-art darkroom, little used now with the advent of digital cameras.  With the exception of Carns, no one had ever viewed the interior of the other room.  Carns hesitated, then turned on his heel and walked to the firing range.

Years before, during early months of construction, Carns had hatched the idea of installing a private shooting facility beneath his house.  Subsequently he’d had the foundation contractor lay seventy-five yards of large concrete drainage pipe, burying it under the hillside between the mansion’s basement and the northern property line of the estate.  Complete with lights and an overhead pulley system with orange track markers, the four-foot-diameter underground shaft allowed Carns to run targets out to preset distances, all the way to a pile of sand in a vault at the far end.  It was simple, effective, and soundproof.

Carns entered his shooting room and moved to a gun cabinet against the back wall.  After sliding out a middle drawer, he selected two handguns—a .22-caliber High Standard ISU Olympic target pistol, and a .45-caliber Colt Combat Elite MK IV automatic—grabbing boxes of ammunition for each.  Next he stepped to the maw of the waist-high tunnel.  Smelling a must of earth and mildew wafting from the interior, he placed his pistols on a sighting bench, donned ear protection, and cranked a human-shaped Alco paper target out to the twenty-five-foot marker.

For the next twenty minutes Carns shot steadily from a two-handed combat stance, firing two rounds to the body, one to the head—alternating pistols and distances, replacing targets as necessary.  He got “good paper” on most, at twenty-five feet clustering all his rapid-fire shots within the black inner-target partitions, most shots at fifty feet, and over sixty percent at seventy-five.  After finishing, he returned his pistols to the cabinet.  Although his high-tech ear protection had all but blocked the sound of his firing, his headache was worse.  He realized that he needed something else to help him relax, and it wasn’t shooting.

Carns exited the gun range and walked to the opposite end of the hall.  There he ducked into the darkroom and opened a cabinet beneath one of the stainless-steel sinks.  Groping the inside surface of the cabinet face, his fingers closed on a key.  Key in hand, he returned to the hallway and inserted the key into the deadbolt lock on the second door.  The metal-clad portal swung inward.

With mounting anticipation, Carns stepped inside, the soothing darkness of his secret room enveloping him like a blanket.  He fumbled with a switch on the wall.  A single lamp came on across the chamber.

Carns glanced around the windowless space, his heart now beginning to race with excitement.  Black soundproofing panels covered nearly every visible inch of wall and ceiling, lending the twelve-by-twenty-foot enclosure a surreal, cavelike appearance.  On the right, facing a gigantic TV screen flanked by twin bookcases, sat a leather chair.  Beside it was a wooden table with sound and viewing remote-control units, along with a carousel slide projector.  Above, a rolled up projection screen lay within a ceiling recess, bracketed by a number of surround-sound speakers.  Straight ahead, at the far end of the room, the doors of a mirrored closet shimmered like quicksilver.

Carns moved to the nearest bookcase.  Its middle shelves held a stereo, tape deck, VCR, and DVD player.  The upper and lower levels contained hundreds of video and audio tapes from the past—relics he’d hadn’t yet transferred to digital—each labeled in Carns’s crabbed cursive.  He started to select an ancient videocassette, one of his favorites, then changed his mind.  After moving to the other bookshelf, he perused racks of chronologically arranged slide carousels and DVD discs.  Still not finding what he wanted, he trailed his index finger over a library of audiocassettes, finally selecting one from the top shelf.

Smiling, Carns flipped on the stereo, slipped the tape into the playback slot, and pushed the rewind button.  As a soft whirring emanated from the unit, he glanced toward the closet.

Costume party?

No.  Today, only sound, he decided.

The simplest pleasures are often the most satisfying.

Carns dimmed the lights and delivered himself to the cool embrace of his armchair.  As he waited for the tape to rewind, he mentally revisited Hall’s call earlier that afternoon, realizing his association with the CEO of United Western Packers had become tiresome.  Today, for the first time in their relationship, Carns had sensed more than avarice in Hall’s voice.  Something furtive had been there as well, something dangerous.

More to the point, half of twenty-three million was a lot of money.

A soft snick sounded as the rewind motor clicked to a stop.  Carns lifted the remote control, feeling the throb in his temple finally beginning to abate.  Gratefully, he closed his eyes, savoring what was to come.  Able to wait no longer, he touched the play button.

A moment later the screaming began.

7

I
kept telling Banowski that the bet wasn’t how
wide
…”  Detective Paul Deluca paused for dramatic emphasis.  “… it was how
long
!”

Having heard the story before, I smiled as I crossed the West Los Angeles Division squad room, approaching a knot of men gathered around Deluca’s desk.  Deluca’s tale involved a contest years back between then considerably younger Detectives Deluca and Banowski.  In the competition, which had followed a boisterous retirement party at the Police Academy, each contestant was challenged to urinate a continuous and relatively unbroken line as he walked—more like stumbled—forward, with the longest trail winning.  By the time of the assigned piss-off, however, Banowski—having during the preceding hours prepared for the match by judiciously consuming as much beer as possible—had long since passed the stumbling stage and required the assistance of friends simply to make it to the field of battle.

Detective John Banowski, a thick-necked man with thinning, military-style hair, glowered at Deluca from an adjacent desk.  “If you’d moved up the start time like I asked, I wouldn’t of hadda go so bad.”

Deluca grinned and passed his hand over the dark stubble covering his chin, rubbing a five o’clock shadow that typically made its appearance before noon.  “Tough,” he laughed.  “Anyway, we get to the starting line up there on the obstacle course, and—”

“Hey, Dan,” a heavyset man interrupted, noting my approach.  Levering his blocky frame from the edge of Deluca’s desk, my ex-partner and retired homicide detective Arnie Mercer assumed a look of mock insult, his salt-and-pepper eyebrows bristling with bogus indignation.  “I finally accepted your invitation to drop by this morning and witness firsthand you guys wastin’ taxpayers’ money, and you didn’t even have the decency to show up.”