Private jm-1 Read online

“Teddy’s,” the actor said to his driver. “I don’t want to see you again,” he said to Cruz.

  “Only at the movies, dude.”

  Emilio Cruz settled back into the plush leather. The case was starting to make some sense, at least. Shelby Cushman, the girl with the golden heart and a rich husband, also had a drug dealer. Maybe she was hooking to support her habit.

  Andy wasn’t going to like that, and neither was Jack. Nobody liked hearing that somebody they loved was a junkie.

  Chapter 59

  Uncle Fred was on his mobile, leaning against a wall in a corner of my office with his back to the door when I walked in. It had been almost a week since he, David Dix, and Evan Newman had hooked me in with a major assignment and a big bonus sweetener. So far, I felt we had barely earned the retainer.

  Fred had looked worried then. Now his forehead was so rumpled he reminded me of one of those Chinese dogs. Football was not only his livelihood, it was his passion, the one thing he’d found to love in life. He’d told me as much a dozen times or more, ever since I was a kid. If the game was fixed, his world would become a sinkhole.

  Fred said into the phone, “He’s just walking in now. I’ll get back to you.”

  The big guy who used to tousle my hair when I was small came toward me with a limp that betrayed his bum knees. He shook my hand with both of his, then sat down heavily in a chair.

  “I thought we were supposed to meet on Friday,” I said.

  “I got a call last night, Jack. I didn’t want to tell you about it over the phone.”

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of smokes, put them back, said, “I’m trying to cut down. This doesn’t help one bit.”

  Colleen came in to say good night. “I put Mr. Moreno’s phone number in your briefcase. You’ve got a phoner with the office in Rome at seven a.m. tomorrow. About the retainer for Fiat. Need anything else, Jack?”

  “Thanks, I’m fine. Good night, Molloy.”

  She closed the office door.

  “So how are you doing with our project?” Fred asked me. “Please tell me we’re somewhere.”

  “We’re making progress. I think Del Rio is onto something interesting. It’s going to take a couple of days to check it out. Tell me about the phone call.”

  “Barney Sapok,” Fred said. “I’ve known him for, I don’t know, fifteen years. He’s never called me at home before.”

  Fred reached for the cigarettes again, resisted. “He said our friends in the ‘gaming industry’ are poking around, coming to the same conclusions we did. Something’s not kosher this season.

  “I should’ve come to you earlier, Jack. I just didn’t want to believe it. Now I’ve got mafiosi asking questions the commissioner should have asked. But didn’t. Whatever’s going on, I’ve got to know before they do.”

  “I’m not going to let you down. This whole operation is at your disposal.”

  “I know. You’re my guy. You were always the smart one.”

  I walked my uncle to the elevator, then stepped back as the doors closed.

  I stood for a moment and watched as the numbers above the elevator counted down. I thought about the Mob looking into those iffy plays that had sent final scores skidding sideways in the last moments of the games, moments that had probably cost organized crime multimillions. Someone would have to pay for that.

  But who had been clever enough to fix pro games with dozens of cameras and millions of witnesses watching any suspicious move? For the life of me, I couldn’t figure how it could be done.

  Chapter 60

  Sci’s apartment was on the top floor of a run-down building that had once housed a printing press, back in the days when some people in Los Angeles actually read.

  The space was open, with metal columns supporting the high ceilings. Photos were being projected onto white walls in a looping slide show: the Vatican at night, the Tatshenshini River in the wilds of Alaska, the quad at Harvard, an aurora borealis, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem shot from a high floor at the King David Hotel. Some of Sci’s favorite things to behold.

  A twelve-foot-long tiger shark was suspended above the space by chains attached to a framing timber.

  Trixie, Sci’s lab monkey rescue, was perched atop her cage, greedily eating banana chips, while Sci, seated in front of his computer, chatted with his beloved Kit-Kat by webcam.

  Her pretty face and large body filled the screen.

  “You’re very anxious tonight,” she said. “This case has really upset you, hasn’t it?”

  “It’s all about sick fantasies that have turned into real murders. Sound about right, Kat?”

  “Ja. That’s how these rotten killers operate. Happens all over the world.”

  “Only this time, there’s no pattern we can see.”

  Sci knew that Kat was a biochemist. He also knew she was married and that she lived in Stockholm, but he didn’t know Kit-Kat’s actual name. They had no plans to meet, because that would ruin everything, wouldn’t it?

  “I called because I found something for you, Sci. It’s just a whisper. I can’t confirm it. Rumors of a wireless spy-bot program that originated in the US. It lets the user grab the signal of a particular cell phone and clone it. Undetected.”

  Sci felt his heart pumping pure liquid hallelujah. He’d often imagined such a program, and now Kat was telling him that it existed.

  “Tell me everything, Kat, my sweet girl.”

  Trixie the monkey shrieked, threw down her snack, and ran across her rope line. She leaped to Sci’s shoulder, where she squatted and chattered at Kat’s image on the screen.

  “Hello, beautiful Trixie… Anyway, this program seemed a little familiar, Sci. So I chased down a different program that’s a few years old but with a similar signature. That program was created by a gamer called Morbid. Don’t take this for more than it is, darling, please. It’s an educated guess, built on a rumor. I have been searching everywhere, though.”

  “Kat, I can’t thank you enough. This is the closest thing I have to a lead yet.”

  “I have to go in a few minutes,” Kat said. “I have just enough time…”

  Kat unbuttoned her blouse, and techno music with a complex melody and a pounding beat came over the speakers. Sci’s thoughts about a spy program moved to the back of his mind as he locked Trixie in her cage and turned to Kit-Kat.

  The very large, very lovely woman took a clip out of her thick blond hair and began to slip out of her clothes. “Tell me what you like tonight, my lover,” she said. “Then I will do the same.”

  Chapter 61

  Later that night, Sci sat in the shadow of the fearsome, wondrous shark, his fingers on the keyboard, his eyes on the screen.

  Since signing off with Kit-Kat, he’d run the name Morbid through his browser, coming up with trash bands Morbid Angel and Morbid Death, and morbidity in every absurd category imaginable.

  When he’d exhausted Google and Bing, he signed on to one geek message board after another, searching for references to a spy-bot that cloned cell phones wirelessly and to a programmer called Morbid.

  He ransacked every board he subscribed to and came up dry. So Sci e-mailed his good friend Darren in India. Darren worked for a major Internet provider and he responded to Sci’s e-mail with links to exclusive websites that were restricted to high-level tech professionals. Darren also sent Sci his IDs and passwords.

  Sci made coffee and then prowled the back corridors of the Internet. He struck gold on a supergeek board he hadn’t even known existed, and that in itself was news. He plucked the name Morbid from a recent thread and read a post saying: “Morbid-the-great has taken to the streets. Rumor has it he’s a key player in a combat game IRL called Freek Night.”

  Sci was virtually bolted to his chair, both excited and afraid that this lead might run into a wall. This was why Private was the best-they had the best resources, and they weren’t constrained in ways the police were. They operated with their own sense of justice.

  Using hi
s friend’s ID, Sci posted a query about Freek Night, and he got an instant message from a member who believed Sci to be Darren.

  “Darren, dude. What I can tell you. Freek Night is so sick, it’s transcendent. It takes fantasy to a new level-real life.”

  “How do you know about this?”

  “A gamer named Scylla posted a couple of times on Extreme Combat. He said he was recruited into the game. Could be bullshit tho. I tried to get in myself. Never got a reply.”

  “First I’ve heard of it,” Sci replied as Darren.

  “Because you live in a dungeon in Mumbai. LOL. In most places, murder is not a game. Even so, Scylla must’ve been high when he wrote that post.”

  Sci bookmarked the site, guessing that yes, Scylla was high. Like many addicted gamers, he no longer separated his real life from his virtual one-or even knew the difference. He’d become his screen name, invisible and invincible.

  Sci searched the gamer board Extreme Combat until he found a post from Scylla: “Our game is warriors vs. sluts,” he had written. “Come Saturday night, think of me!”

  A new thread was later started by a member called Trojan: “Saturday plays. Sunday pays. Scylla flew off his own terrace. Flying is easy. It’s hitting the pavement that’s hard.”

  Sci opened the site’s user profile pages and found that Scylla had listed his name as Jason, his address as Los Angeles.

  It was four a.m. in Los Angeles when a board administrator noticed that “Darren” was using an unapproved IP address and blocked Sci from the board.

  Sci made fresh coffee. His fingers were stiff, and his hands were shaking.

  He cupped his mug until his fingers relaxed, then he trawled a legitimate news blog for a man named Jason who had fallen from a terrace in Los Angeles the night Marguerite Esperanza was killed.

  He found an article in the Times online, read it twice, then he called Mo-bot.

  She growled at him, “Late-night phone calls are one of my least favorite things, Sci. Right behind having my tits in a mammogram sandwich.”

  Sci told her what he’d found, and she listened to all of it before saying, “So who is this Morbid? I’m out of rocks to turn over. I’m calling Jack.”

  “Let him sleep. I guess this will hold until morning.”

  Chapter 62

  I picked up the phone, yelled into it, “Not yet!” then I chucked it back onto the nightstand.

  I’d been dreaming, actually peering into the downed CH-46, looking into the cargo bay. I could almost see my subconscious, and I’d made a decision about what to do next.

  Now the dream was gone.

  What was the question?

  What had I decided?

  The phone rang again. My annoying death threat caller had never called back once I’d answered and hung up.

  This time, I looked at the faceplate. It was Sci.

  He said, “I’ve got a lead on Schoolgirl.”

  Chapter 63

  A half hour later, I was at Starbucks, drinking an orange-mango Vivanno with Sci. He was wearing blue pajama bottoms with smiley faces and a Life Is Good T-shirt with a pink heart in the center of his chest. His hair was flattened into a bowl shape from his motorcycle helmet. I would’ve ribbed him about his wardrobe, but I was still tired and he was so intensely, deadly serious.

  I stirred my smoothie with a straw and tried to focus on what he had on his mind.

  Sci said to me, “The thing is, some guy named Jason did go off his terrace right after the Esperanza girl was found dead. It was a suicide, according to LAPD.”

  “Jason is a programmer?”

  “He’s in public relations. Was.”

  “I don’t get it. Explain the connection to me again.”

  Sci sighed. He knew that I wasn’t like him. I know my way around a computer, but I’m no geek.

  “Look,” Sci said, trying again. He grabbed a shaker of cinnamon and a shaker of chocolate powder, one in each hand.

  “The cinnamon is a wireless program that can clone phones and send and receive messages, okay? The chocolate is a combat game-in real life. It’s called Freek Night.”

  He clinked the two shakers together, said, “What these two items have in common is a gamer who uses the screen ID Morbid.”

  I said, “Explain to me the part about the computer games again.”

  “Most of the really popular ones are war games. Mo-bot plays one of them. World of Warcraft. It’s an MMORPG, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, that is ongoing twenty-four hours a day around the planet. It has eleven million players a month.”

  “War games on the computer. Trust me, that has to be better than the real thing.”

  “Most of these games concern big wars with armies. The gamers play to take over countries or planets, past, present, or future. It’s addictive, seriously addictive. It feels real. Get that? You with me so far?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “A few games are one-on-one, where the players fight like old-time samurai or Roman warriors. Sometimes they have teammates or allies, like war buddies.”

  “I know this is going somewhere, Sci, or you wouldn’t have called me at five thirty in the morning.”

  “Hang in, okay, Jack? I haven’t slept at all.”

  “I’m with you. I’m here.”

  “Okay. Imagine a player whose screen name is Scylla bragging about playing a real live combat game called Freek Night. He describes it as ‘warriors versus sluts.’ ”

  “In real life.”

  “Bravo, Jack. And the night Marguerite Esperanza was killed, Scylla-who’s actual name is Jason-took a swan dive off his terrace. I found a story in the Times online. A man named Jason Pilser suicided that night.”

  “To review,” I said, “a programmer using the name Morbid created a wireless clone program to get into people’s cell phones.”

  “Evidence suggests.”

  “And he is also a player in this offline combat game called Freek Night?”

  “Offline. Very good,” said Sci.

  I picked up the cinnamon shaker and said, “And a guy going by the name of Scylla, actually Jason Pilser, the PR guy, was a player in this game. And he killed himself Saturday night-”

  “That’s what I’ve got, Jack. It hasn’t all come together yet, but it’s jellin’. There are too many connections to be coincidental. Even dead, Jason Pilser is a lead with legs. I think we’re getting very close.”

  “So-be careful?”

  “Be extremely careful.”

  Chapter 64

  Being extremely careful started right here, at Jason Pilser’s apartment building on Burton Way in Beverly Hills. It’s uncommon to find rows of high-end apartment buildings in Beverly Hills but this block was an exception.

  The buildings on this side of Burton had terraces and extraordinary views of the hills.

  I counted up to the sixth-floor balcony. The sliding doors were closed behind the terrace wall. I said to Sci, “Why would Jason Pilser jump?”

  “Remorse, maybe? Nah, I doubt that.”

  I’d gathered some information about Pilser in the past few hours. He was twenty-four, an account executive in a notable public relations firm. He had probably earned fifty thousand a year, not bad for a young guy in these tough times, but not the kind of income that would make this address affordable. I smelled “trust fund” or maybe rich, divorced parents.

  There was a whoosh of tires as Bobby Petino’s car pulled up to the curb. He got out in his three-thousand-dollar black silk suit and put a card saying that he was here on official business under the windshield wiper.

  He said hello to Sci and me, set the car alarm, and said, “A spanking-hot lead at long last. Nice work, Sci. Jack, what did Justine say about this?”

  “She’s working the case from another angle. We’re covering it any way we can.”

  “Okay. I’m starting to feel cautiously optimistic,” said Petino. “Getting a prickling sensation in my oversized ears.”

  We followe
d Bobby’s ears through the lobby doors and across the black marble floor toward the security desk with its huge and twisted bouquet of exotic flowers. Petino introduced us all to the doorman, Sam Williams, an elderly man in uniform, and showed him the search warrant.

  “Has anyone been inside Mr. Pilser’s apartment except the police?” Petino asked Williams.

  “Mrs. Costella in six-A took back her ficus tree. I was told to keep the door locked after that and to wait for Mr. Pilser’s mother to arrive from Vancouver.”

  I asked, “Did you happen to see Jason Pilser the night he died?”

  “Never did. He was home when I came on. I sent up a delivery guy from the drugstore, and at around eleven, Mr. Pilser called down to say he was expecting a few friends.”

  “Pilser’s friends,” I said. “Did he mention any names? Did you see them?”

  “Nope. Just ‘friends.’ And they must’ve come after my shift ended at midnight. No one is on duty until Ralph comes on at six in the a.m.”

  “You have security cameras?” I asked.

  “That one there. It’s on a forty-eight-hour loop. It’s already recorded over Saturday night. What’s this about, you mind telling me? You think it wasn’t a suicide?”

  “Thanks for your help,” Bobby said to Williams. “We might want to talk to you again when we come back down.”

  The doorman nodded. “You know where to find me.”

  I thought of one more question. “Mr. Williams, what did you think of Jason Pilser? Just between us.”

  He nodded, then spoke in a low voice. “Asshole. Major.”

  I talked to Bobby as we walked to the elevator. “I suggest you clear the way for Private to search Pilser’s place. If I turn Sci and his crew loose, we’ll have everything processed by this time tomorrow, and you’ll have a report in your hands by the end of the day.”

  “Consider it done,” Bobby said. “Let’s find out what this asshole was up to.”