The Night Cafe (29 page)

O
nce she had finished telling Captain Peña where to find the painting, Hannah felt like some useless drone in this busy little federal hive. They all had their well-groomed heads together, working out the logistics of collecting the painting, arranging for her to deliver it to Gladding by his deadline—making sure he didn’t
actually
get his grubby hands on a masterpiece—and set the net and haul the man in before whatever he had planned could be carried out.

Since her going back to her condo seemed to be a nonstarter, she was left twiddling her thumbs in the dreary little side office in which Towle had parked her. Even Teagarden seemed to have been temporarily initiated into their fraternity—or had stormed the gates, maybe, since his primary concern in all this was the safe recovery of Yale’s van Gogh.

She tried calling Ruben and Travis, but her calls kept going to voice mail. Chances were they were still tied up at the doctor’s office with Mellie. She hoped they weren’t avoiding her calls—although who could blame them if they were? She asked them to call and let her know they were okay.

Somebody dropped by with a copy of the newspaper she hadn’t finished that morning. She read that, drank some really bad coffee, leafed through a copy of
The Congressional Record
and memorized every gray hair and wrinkle on the presidential portrait on the wall. Finally, it occurred to her that there might be a way to check on Ruben and, as a bonus, hear a friendly voice—at least, she hoped it would still be friendly.

“Hey there, stranger,” she said when Russo picked up his cell.

“Hi. I was just looking for you. Where are you?”

“Wilshire Boulevard, the Federal Building.” She told him about the flurry of activity going on around her.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “What happened to interagency cooperation? Last I checked, we were supposed to have a joint task force between them, us and the LAPD. Suddenly the feds are nowhere to be found and we and the LAPD guys are wondering who moved the party. I’m only surprised it took them twenty-four hours to elbow us out. But hey, at least they’re letting
you
play.”

“Not hardly. All they’ve needed me for was to say where I hid the painting. Now they’re just keeping me on ice until they can decide what to do about Gladding. I think I’m going to be the minnow on the hook when they’re ready to reel him in. Is there anything new on Rebecca’s murder?”

“Lindsay’s just heading back from the crime lab now. We found some surfers who said they saw a car parked next to her red BMW on Monday night. Saw the driver toss a Coke can in the bushes. We recovered it and the lab is trying to pull prints and DNA.”

“That’d be a break. Listen, I know you’re probably swamped, but I wondered if you might be able to do me a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“Any chance you could swing by my place, check on my neighbors?”

“I just did, actually—drop by your place, I mean. Quiet as a tomb over there.”

“That’s because my neighbors had to go into hiding, thanks to me.” She told him about the threats Gladding had made. “I left ahead of Ruben this morning, but I’d like to know he and the baby are okay.”

“I’m just pulling into the office to meet Lindsay,” Russo said. “We have some other calls to make. We’ll swing back over to your place while we’re out.”

“There’s an extra key to the guys’ place hidden outside. Do you think you could go in, take a look around?”

“Sure. Where’s the key?”

“Under the ficus pot on the patio.”

“Under a flower pot? Are you kidding?”

“Ruben’s a big guy. He worries less about intruders than he does about getting locked out with the baby.”

“Good grief. Okay, we’ll check it out.” Russo chuckled. “You know, annoying as I find it that the Bureau has taken the ball and gone home, I know someone who’s going to be really ticked off with her big brother. You’re getting payback, kid.”

“I don’t need payback. She’s okay. If things had gone differently, that might have been me. Anyway, I don’t do catfights.”

“That’s my girl.”

She hung up, smiling.

Puerto Vallarta

Unless he was mistaken, Peña thought, he was now being followed by two cars. Between him and Sanchez, his useless brother-in-law, was a white Corolla carrying three men. His wife’s idiot brother he could handle, but who were these other men following him to the airfield?

Teagarden had warned him to be careful. Now, he began to regret that he had not brought backup. Of course, if a member of his own family could be bought, who could be trusted?

He pulled out his cell phone and tried not to swerve as he punched in the pilot’s number. “Get the plane on the runway and keep the engine running. I’m almost there, but I’m being followed.”

“What in the name of Jesus, Mary and Joseph are you getting me into?”

“I’ll explain later. Just be ready to take off the second I’m on board.”

“These people following you, they have guns?”

“Probably.”

The pilot hesitated, and Peña feared his old friend might back out. Instead, he chuckled. “I haven’t had a good fight in years. I am not without weapons myself, you know.”

“You’re armed?”

“Do you know how often I run into bandits and drug runners, my friend?”

“Tell me when we’re airborne.”

Peña almost took the last turn toward the airfield on two wheels, throwing up a spray of loose gravel. Sweat was running into his eyes, but he needed both hands to steer. He shot through a grove of trees and onto the taxiway. The Cessna was already revving its engines at the end of the runway. Peña was tempted to take a shortcut across the open field, but last night, an unexpected downpour had soaked the area. Good for the parched landscape, but bad luck for him. If he got bogged down, he’d have to run through mud with the bulky painting.

Instead, he roared to the end of the taxiway and careened into the unbanked curve, praying the car wouldn’t flip. Behind him, the Corolla fishtailed wildly, then recovered. In his rearview mirror, Peña saw Sanchez’s Cortina miss the curve and bog down in the mud.

“Good,” he muttered. “Bastard!”

His back window shattered and he felt a buzz of air next to his ear. He zigzagged to the Cessna, hearing the rattle of metal on metal as bullets peppered the car. Slamming on the brakes, he grabbed the painting and jumped from the car, keeping low as he dashed toward the plane.

Suddenly, a loud boom sounded over his head. He glanced up to see his friend take aim for a second shot with a high-powered rifle. He fired again as Peña scrambled aboard. The plane was already taxiing down the runway as he pulled the door shut and rammed home the locking bar. By the time he dropped into his seat and buckled up, the plane was lifting off, the pop of gunfire behind them fading fast.

As the Cessna rose and circled, Peña waved to his grimacing brother-in-law, who stood ankle-deep in mud, a cell phone to his ear.

Los Angeles

Gladding ignored the call from the idiot policeman and took the one instead from the backup team in the Corolla that he’d been forced to gather at the last minute.

“The Cessna is gone,” the team leader said. “The pilot filed a flight plan for Tijuana.”

“You’re sure?” Gladding said.

“Yes.”

“All right. Stand down, then. No, wait,” Gladding added. “One more thing.”

“What?”

“Take care of that moron Sanchez. Then clean up and go to ground. Your payment will be wired within the hour.”

Gladding hung up and drummed his fingers on the chair, ignoring the pain that racked his body. The game wasn’t lost yet. The painting was heading for the border, which meant the courier had put wheels in motion, allowing it to be recovered from her hiding spot. This Nicks woman was obviously not without resources. He didn’t fool himself that the government wasn’t working in the background on the recovery effort, but with the right incentive, she could still be persuaded to pull an end run and get his painting to him. And convincing others to do his bidding was where he excelled.

The more Gladding thought about it, in fact, the more he realized that this might all work out. It was important for him to have the painting to hand over in trade to the Libyan. But after the bomb maker’s double cross with the hit on his villa, Gladding had no intention of keeping his end of the bargain. He would take the bomb, kill the Libyan and keep the painting. He would arrange for it to be shipped back to Geneva and locked away—a posthumous bequest, perhaps, to his grandchildren, to be delivered a few decades from now. He would explore the legal ramifications and decide later. In the meantime, the Swiss could always be relied upon to keep secrets.

There remained only the matter of exploding the bomb, and Liggett, for his own twisted reasons, wanted this demonstration as much as he did.

Whether or not the dirty bomb did much actual damage to the San Onofre generating station was almost beside the point. The radioactive debris it contained would set off a wave of panic and hysteria that no amount of government reassurances would be able to counter. It would start a cascade of economic damage, from the cost of the cleanup effort, the inevitable population flight from Southern California, and a renewed opposition to nuclear power, which the public was only now, thirty years after Three Mile Island, beginning to accept as a possible solution to foreign oil. The demoralizing effect of this terrorist act would also be significant when it was learned it had come not from foreign enemies but from a homegrown one.

From such sparks are mighty conflagrations lit, Gladding thought. America was at a tipping point, and economic depressions had been triggered by less. The last superpower of the twentieth century was about to enter the spiral of its inevitable decline. The age of American domination was over, and the arrogance of the once powerful would be shattered with the realization of their own pathetic impotence.

And then, Gladding thought, he would die satisfied.

Russo’s news could hardly have been worse.

“Blood?” Hannah gasped, when he told her what he’d found inside Ruben and Travis’s condo.

“A fair amount,” Russo said, “mostly in the kitchen, which was trashed. There’s a bloody knife on the floor. We’ve sealed off the scene and we’re just waiting for the LAPD.”

“Are you sure the guys aren’t in there?”

“We searched the whole house and the garage. No cars. What do they drive?”

Hannah described Ruben’s Mustang and Travis’s Jeep.

“We’ll pull the DMV info and get an APB out right away.”

Hannah nodded. There was a commotion outside the door of the room she was in, and she looked up to see Towle and Teagarden coming in. “Let me know as soon as you hear anything?” she asked Russo.

“You bet.”

She hung up and told the others what he’d found back at her condo.

“I’m sorry, Hannah,” Teagarden said. “But the fact that Detective Russo didn’t find your friends is reason to hope.”

She didn’t feel very hopeful.

“In the meantime,” Towle said, “we’ve come up with a plan of action. We need to take a drive.”

“You want me to go?” Hannah said.

Teagarden smiled and held out an arm. “You, my dear, are the most important member of this little excursion.”

The destination, it turned out, was August Koon’s studio. There was no one around when they pulled up his driveway, but yellow tape was still strung around the scene and the LAPD
Crime scene—Do not enter
seal was on the door.

Agent Towle held up the tape for the others to pass under, then ripped the seal off the door and pushed his way in.

“Did you get clearance to do this?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “It’s always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. We’ll make sure your name doesn’t come into it, I promise.”

“Gee, thanks.”

The pool of blood where they’d found Koon had soaked into the wood floors and dried brown, and almost every surface in the place was coated with gray fingerprint powder. The paintings Hannah remembered as having been blood-spattered had been taken in evidence, as had the murder weapon, the curved blade on which she’d stupidly left her fingerprints.

“So, what are we looking for?” she asked.

Teagarden circled the room, measuring canvases with a tape measure he pulled from his pocket. After a while, he put the tape measure away and started lining paintings up along the workbench. He had about a half dozen when he waved her over.

“Take a look at these,” he said. “They’re the same size canvas as the van Gogh. Do any of these resemble the painting you carried to Puerto Vallarta?”

Hannah crouched down and studied them, one by one. She’d stared for hours at the one she and Rebecca had picked up on Monday, trying to see what was worth a quarter of a million dollars. She would have thought it was permanently imprinted on her brain, but as she looked at this bunch, they seemed to run together.

“Everything he does looks alike to me,” she said, “but I think a couple of these might be close.”

“You’ll have to do better than think, lass,” Teagarden said. “Your life might depend on it.”

She looked at him, then at the federal agents, and their brilliant plan suddenly dawned on her. “You want me to deliver a fake to Gladding.”

“A fake camouflaged van Gogh, maybe,” Towle said, “but a genuine August Koon.”

“We’re going to give Mr. Gladding a taste of his own medicine,” Teagarden added.

“Oh, joy. And I get to hold the spoon.”

She turned back and studied the canvases more closely. As Teagarden said, her life could depend on it. She pulled four out of the line, compared them, eliminated two, then tried to decide between the other two.

“So I go in with the Koon,” she said. “What’s to keep Gladding from killing me?”

“Luck,” Towle said. “And plenty of discreet backup, of course.”

She grimaced. “Easy for you to say. Okay, fine. This one, I think.”

It had too much blue in it, but if they were right and Koon’s painting was just a disguise for a van Gogh, then Gladding had probably never even laid eyes on the overpainting job he’d blackmailed Koon into doing. He wouldn’t care what it looked like, as long as he believed the van Gogh was beneath. She could throw paint on canvas herself and he’d probably be none the wiser. She handed it to Teagarden and he zipped it into a case.