Past Crimes (11 page)

Corcoran grinned at the phone, showing small yellow teeth. “The little shithead screwed the pooch this time.”

For once Jimmy C. and I could agree.

I
LEFT HOLLIS AND THE
others and let myself out of Corcoran’s building. Dono’s truck was parked down the street at a meter. I’d had to take his truck. The headlights on my rental Charger were smashed after the collision with the Ryder van the day before.

It had turned into a clear morning, cold and sharp. Traffic on I-5 Northbound was just starting to ease out of the morning jam. To edge around a rusty hatchback, I changed lanes. A hundred yards behind me, a large burgundy-colored Ford SUV did the same.

Maybe my nerves were just keyed up after the story about Dono following Corcoran all the way across the state. Or maybe I was just paranoid.

I changed lanes again, as if I had suddenly decided to take the next exit. The burgundy SUV hastily did the same, cutting off a minivan. I heard the outraged blare of the van’s horn in the distance.

It wasn’t paranoia.

It wasn’t the cops either, unless they’d sent rookies to tail me. Whoever was driving the SUV was clumsy on the brake. And he kept edging out to see around the cars in front of him. Either he was very bad at following people or he didn’t give a damn if I knew he was there.

Was it the burglar from the house last night? Or maybe the three
stooges who had tried to stomp my head when I’d met Hollis. I was making friends all over town.

Dono’s little revolver was in the truck’s center console. I took it out and put it in my coat pocket.

I took the next exit ramp. Its long upward slope ended in a stop sign. I stopped at the end of the line waiting to go through the intersection.

The SUV joined the line four cars behind me. Mud or something like it was spread over his license plate. By the time I’d reached the stop sign, there were more cars stacked up behind the SUV, blocking him in.

I set the parking brake of the truck and edged over to the passenger side and got out, keeping my head down. My hand was on the revolver in my pocket.

The BMW coupe behind me started leaning on the horn even as I moved quickly past him. The noise must have alerted the driver of the SUV. Its engine revved, and it lurched forward and to the left, smashing into the back of the Lexus hybrid in front of it with a hollow thump and the crash of taillight glass.

I started to run toward it. I couldn’t see the driver through the glare off the windshield. The SUV lurched again and forced its way out of the line with a squeal of anguished metal.

And for the second time in less than ten hours, I caught a glimpse of curly white hair. The burglar.

He didn’t hesitate, hauling ass straight down the steep grassy incline and onto the side of the freeway, tires spinning and throwing up big rooster-tail gouts of wet earth. I watched as he floored the accelerator and joined the northbound stream of traffic. Mud on the rear license plate, just like in the front.

As I walked back to the truck, half the people in the line got out of their cars to better hear the railings of the unlucky driver whose Lexus had taken the brunt of the SUV’s sudden departure. Nobody paid much attention to me, except for the guy in the BMW behind my truck. He was still hollering obscenities at me from the safety of his car.

I considered shooting the asshole, just so the day wouldn’t be a total loss. Instead I got into the truck and drove to the nearest gas station.

Whatever skills the burglar had, tailing people wasn’t one of them. He’d just been stumbling along after the truck. I knew he hadn’t been behind me earlier in the morning when I’d driven from the house to Corcoran’s apartment.

So how had he found me now?

I parked the truck by the station’s air and water pumps and opened the back of the canopy to take out the toolbox that Dono kept there. I lay down on the wet asphalt and shimmied under the truck with a flashlight.

It was easy to see. A plain black rectangle of plastic, about the size of a paperback book, bound with metal-reinforced tape to the cross brace of the chassis. I cut the tape away with a utility knife and edged myself back out to get a better look at it.

A GPS transmitter. Handmade from separate components, as the bugs had been. Judging by the dirt on the black box, it had been taped under Dono’s truck for at least a few days. The power light shone green.

Why would the burglar follow me so closely if there was a tracking device already on the truck? Most transmitters allowed for online tracking. The burglar should be able to see anywhere I drove just by looking at a Web site.

Unless he couldn’t afford the few minutes’ delay while the Web site map caught up to my real location. There was more to the burglar’s motive than just wanting his expensive toys back. He was acting desperate.

He’d broken into Dono’s house to reclaim his bugs. Maybe he wanted this transmitter back, too. Wanted it enough to risk following me closely, hoping I’d stop somewhere long enough that he could steal it out from under the truck.

I kicked myself for not thinking earlier that there might be a tracker planted on Dono’s truck. The old man had been under some serious surveillance—of course whoever was after him would want to follow his movements.

If I had found the transmitter immediately, I could have laid a trap. Now the fucker was spooked. He probably wouldn’t try again.

I pried the plastic lid off the transmitter and popped its lithium battery out. The little green light went dark.

Before I drove away from the gas station, I checked every inch of the truck, over and under. I didn’t put it past the clever white-haired bastard to have planted a backup somewhere.

AT HARBORVIEW THERE WAS
no cop outside Dono’s door. Or even a chair where a cop would sit. I called Guerin. He didn’t answer, so I called Kanellis.

“Yes?” he said after I’d identified myself. Not trying to keep the impatience out of his voice.

“Where’s the detail on my grandfather’s room?” I said.

“We can’t keep a uniform on his door around the clock. The sergeant at East said they’ve warned hospital security not to let anyone but family into his room.”

The casing creaked on my phone as I gripped it. “Dono might be able to ID his shooter. A two-week wonder strolling by every twenty minutes isn’t going to cut it.”

“We could take him into protective custody.”

“What would that mean? A prison hospital?”

“Or the infirmary in County. He’d be downtown.”

“Forget it.” Dono needed neurologists, not some intern working a triple shift to pay off his tuition load.

“Harborview will allow a private cop. Celebrities do it all the time, I hear.”

I hung up. I’d already pissed off the detectives once today. If I stayed on the line with Kanellis, I was going to say something that would make it two for two.

Hire a rent-a-cop. Jesus.

With what was in my bank account, I might be able to swing a week of twenty-four-hour coverage from a reliable security firm. I didn’t want to go cheap. Just like with most skilled jobs, you got what you paid for.

I turned my phone back on, pulled up local branches of national
firms, and started calling. When I found one called Standard Security Services, which employed off-duty cops and would allow me to contact the guard on duty directly at any time, I gave them my credit-card number for the thousand-dollar deposit. They promised to have someone meet me at Harborview within two hours.

Dono hadn’t twitched once during my conversation with Kanellis. I sat down by his bed to wait. The room smelled of astringent over the thicker, grassy scent of a wilting bouquet of daisies in a plastic vase by Dono’s bed. No card, but the vase had a Harborview price sticker on it. Probably from Addy Proctor, on one of her frequent visits. I owed that old woman.

Dono looked about the same as yesterday, like his long body was half melted into the thin mattress. The lines around his eyes might have been a little deeper. I listened to the rasp of the ventilator, up and down, and closed my own eyes and tried to breathe in time with the sound.

I
T HAD STARTED TO
rain outside Harborview, an insistent drizzle borne on gusts of wind, the drops looping their way under awnings and around corners. Water painted the buildings as negative images. The concrete darkened, and the windows gleamed as the struggling sunlight reflected off the sheen.

I had left the guard from Standard Security by Dono’s bedside with clear instructions to call me if anything changed and to pick up his phone if I called, no matter what the hospital said. I was halfway down the hill toward the parking garage and enjoying the cold trickle of rainwater on the back of my neck after the stuffy hospital room.

Davey and his brother, Mike, were near the end of the street, jogging through the downpour. Davey held his coat up over his head. Mike waved a hand. They took shelter in the entryway of an apartment block.

“My head’s still killing me,” Davey said in greeting when I caught up to them.

“I think I can see and raise you on that one. Was Juliet pissed?”

“Naw. Special circumstances.”

“Were you with Dono?” asked Mike.

“Of course he saw Dono, you moron,” Davey said. “Why else would he be here? How is he?”

“He’s still unconscious,” I said.

Davey nodded. “He’s a tough fucker.” He pulled his leather jacket’s collar up against the wind. “We went by the house first and guessed you’d be here. You gotta come to dinner with us.”

“I’m not up for family time, Davey,” I said.

“Don’t even fucking try that. If you’re not there, I have to make excuses, and Ma will get bent out of shape because she already shopped. And Juliet will grill me about why. Don’t make me sit between them on my own, man.”

I smiled. “I’ll stop by. Let me grab some rest and a shower first. Otherwise Evelyn’s liable to toss me right back outside.”

Mike nodded. “We’ll sit with Dono for a while,” he said.

“They won’t let you in,” I said, and explained about the guard.

“What about the cops?” Mike said.

Davey snorted.

“We could look after him,” Mike persisted. “You don’t need to go broke.”

“Not 24/7,” I said. “And that’s the only way I’ll be able to relax.”

Davey grinned. “So relax a little. Be at our house by seven. Bring beer. Ma conveniently forgot to pick that up.”

I
WAS PULLING UP
to the house when my phone rang.

“Shaw. It’s me.”

Nasal and nasty. Jimmy Corcoran.

“I traced the number that the bug was dialing,” he said. “Nothing special about the account except unlimited capacity on the recorded messages. So the bugs could record for days and days without any problem. The account was opened two months ago. The name on it is George Lincoln. That mean anything to you?”

“No. Sounds fake.”

“I figured. Might as well be Abraham Washington or Franklin Delano Jefferson.”

“Can you get the recorded messages off the account?” Those recordings
were what I really cared about. Hearing what had happened at Dono’s house the night he was shot.

“No,” said Corcoran. “That’s the royal bitch of it. The account was closed the night before last. Actually around two in the morning. And the voice mails were erased.”

I wanted to slam my fist through the windshield. That would have been only an hour or so after I’d been hit over the head by the burglar at Dono’s house. The little fucker must have run home and started erasing his tracks right away.

“What about backup tapes?” I said through clenched teeth.

“Nah. My guy there says the company doesn’t hang on to backups of personal voice mails. Too much trouble. But I got more.” He sounded jazzed. The thrill of the hunt. “About a dozen different phone numbers have called that voice-mail account. You got a pen?”

“Go ahead.” Corcoran read me the account number and then a list of phone numbers. Most of the numbers were sequential, ending in 7704, 7705, 7706, and so on.

“The numbers belong to the bugs,” I said, thinking out loud. “He bought a dozen phones from one store, and he cannibalized the works to build the bugs.”

“No shit,” Corcoran said. “There’s hundreds of calls from these numbers to the account during the two months it was active. Almost every call is long. Ten or twenty minutes.”

Making up dozens and dozens of overlapping hours of recorded junk. Televisions playing, shower noises. Even Dono snoring in bed. It would have been a full-time job just to skim through it all.

I ran my eyes down the list. “There are thirteen numbers here. But there were only eight bugs at Dono’s.”

“You sure?”

“I searched. The cops searched. Only eight. So there are more bugs planted somewhere.” I slapped my hand down on the porch railing. “Dono’s not the only person this son of a bitch has been watching.”

“Okay, I buy that. Let’s see if you can spot the real clue, smart-ass,” Corcoran said.

I looked at the list of numbers. Twelve were in the same sequence as the others. One was completely different.

“It’s his personal number,” I said. My pulse throbbed in my temples. “He called the voice-mail account to listen to what the bugs had recorded. Maybe even to download the recordings somewhere else.”

“Not as stupid as you look. But don’t get too excited, kid. It’s probably just another burner phone.”

“But if he’s still using it, it’s traceable.”

Corcoran sighed. “You going to spend all day telling me shit I already know?
If
your boyfriend turns his personal phone back on
and
my guy at the company can catch it, then maybe we have a shot.”

“What about the other four bugs? If they’re still active …”

“They’re active. Two calls from them, late last night.”

Where were they planted? Who else was the burglar following?

“Can you zero in on the address the bugs are calling from?” I asked.

Corcoran hummed a moment to himself, thinking it over. “I can find the nearest cell site that caught the calls. It’ll have the GPS coordinates of the calling phones. Within a hundred yards, give or take.”

“Good enough.”

“Unless it’s somewhere in the city. At that point you’re stuck with knocking on doors, looking for a short guy with white hair.”

“Move fast. This asshole is going to ground.”

“I know we have to move fast, you dumb fuck. You think I don’t? Shit.” Corcoran hung up. Right back to his old angry self. Which meant he was feeling good.