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  The tallest of the detectives eyed me coldly, then suddenly smiled as he broke off from his buddies and walked over.

  “Here we go,” Agent Rothkopf said to me, under his breath. “Hope you’re wearing a cup.”

  “I’m Terry. Terry Bassman,” the large thirty-something detective said, shaking my hand too hard. “You’re Bennett, right? Your federal friends here were telling me all about you. They said they were bringing in some more help, and what do you know? Here you are. The guy who lost Perrine in the flesh.”

  The cop grinned back like a fool at his giggling buddies as I broke his grip. He was six foot four, about two-fifty, broad shouldered, in good shape. He popped a piece of gum into his mouth, the expression on his lean face that of a man who didn’t take too much shit from anyone. Which was pretty convenient, since he was so big that he probably rarely had to.

  But what the hell? I decided to give him some shit anyway.

  “It’s true, Terry,” I said, loud enough for everyone in the crowded room to hear. “I lost Perrine. But you know what? I figure it’s better to have caught him and lost him than to never have caught him at all. You know, like you crackerjack LAPD guys so far.”

  That stopped the giggling pretty quick. In fact, it got so quiet, you could have heard a firing pin drop. I glanced at Rothkopf, who was biting the inside of his cheek to keep from cracking up.

  I stared back at Bassman innocently. I don’t like to bang heads, but, like any cop worth his salt, I can when I have to. With the best of them, actually.

  Bassman stared levelly at me, his square jaw working as he chewed his gum. Then he clapped a hand painfully on my shoulder as he smiled again.

  “Well, if you need anything, Mr. Bennett—directions to Disneyland, star maps, anything at all—remember, the LAPD is here to protect and serve,” he said.

  CHAPTER 44

  AFTER THAT ROUSING ENCOUNTER with the welcome wagon, I pored over the case files on all the murders.

  The most disturbing photos by far were of the crime scenes at the Licata home and at rap mogul Alan Leonard’s house. The pale and naked bled-out bodies were so chilling, like something out of a documentary about Nazi human experimentation. And we had no idea what had killed them. The FBI lab was still working on the toxicology of the lethal substance.

  Parker stared at the horror-movie stills with me.

  “I wonder if shock value is the point,” she said, letting out a frustrated breath.

  “Probably,” I said. “Things have gotten so bizarre of late that Perrine has to get creative in order to grab people’s attention.”

  “He certainly has mine,” Emily said. “I mean, this is simply incredible. I’ve read reports that indicate the cartels turned to all these horrors, like beheadings and body mutilations, after seeing them performed by Islamic terrorists on the Internet.”

  “Bull,” I said, turning over a photograph. “Narco traffickers south of the border have always been famous for incredibly brutal killings. Where does the Colombian necktie come from? My pet theory is that this recent, really sick garbage has more than a little to do with Santa Muerte, the spooky quasi-religious death cult that many of the cartel soldiers adhere to.”

  “So you’re saying it’s like a cycle,” she said. “The more the cartels rise in power, the more and more its members want to satisfy Santa Muerte’s thirst for blood?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s a little out there, Mike. Isn’t this about money and drug trafficking, not Perrine’s evil cult?”

  “If it’s about just money and drug trafficking, what’s up with all the bodies, Parker?” I said. “Twenty-nine dumped in Nuevo Laredo. Forty-nine in Juarez. They’re hung from bridges. Bags of heads are found along highways. The victims aren’t even cartel members. They’re innocent migrant workers or people trying to cross the border into the US. To kill a mule for stealing a load is one thing, or to go after a witness. I’m telling you, this is new. Or, more accurately, old.”

  “Old?” Emily asked.

  “Have you ever heard of the Thuggee cult?”

  Parker rolled her eyes. “Had a lot of reading time on our hands up there on the prairie, Detective?”

  “A little, Parker. Anyway, in India there used to be this criminal cult called the Thuggees. They were a secretive organization of robber-murderers. They’d strangle their victims and then bleed them, offering their blood to Kali, the goddess of death. Some say Santa Muerte is a modern incarnation of Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec goddess of death.”

  “So what are you saying? It’s us versus the goddess of death?”

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “You’ve been watching too much History Channel,” she said.

  “Have I?” I said. “These cartel people are engaging in the kind of unhinged, deranged behavior usually reserved for serial killers. Is it that crazy to believe that there’s some sort of ideology behind it? I think we have to at least consider it. We have to stop thinking that this is just about a bunch of greedy dope dealers.”

  CHAPTER 45

  ABOUT AN HOUR LATER, on our way to get a bite to eat, I knocked on the dash of Parker’s metallic-brown Crown Victoria as we pulled out of the Olympic Station lot.

  “What’s up with this ride, Parker?” I complained. “As my preteen daughters would say, this car is ‘so not cool.’ You’d think, this being LA, that they’d assign you some kind of convertible, at least.”

  Parker smirked at me from behind her Ray-Bans.

  “Tell you what, Mike,” she said. “You bag Perrine, I’ll see to it you get first bid on his Bentley at the government auction.”

  “Bentley, huh?” I said, scratching my chin. “How many passengers can a Bentley fit? I need seating for a dozen, two of them car seats.”

  Parker laughed.

  “Just a dozen? Aren’t you leaving someone out? What about Seamus?”

  “We usually put him in the trunk, or on the roof with the cat.”

  Parker shook her head, sighing.

  My chop busting was, of course, just show. I actually loved the Crown Vic, the FBI radio crackling beneath its dash, even the bad gas-station coffee in the holder beside me. In fact, it felt fantastic to be back at work.

  I was even more excited about our dinner plans. Parker had spoken to Agent Rothkopf, who, with the help of a cousin or something, got us reservations at some hip restaurant called Cut, in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. It was a Wolfgang Puck steak house where Tom Cruise supposedly ate from time to time. I couldn’t wait.

  It was our LAPD hosts who had been less than accommodating. As I’d watched them read reports and brood about them, it’d become painfully obvious to me that the cops in this clique of LAPD heavy hitters were doing their own thing, working their own leads, their own contacts, while completely leaving the feds in the dark.

  Though I’d been pretty tribal myself about my home turf back in NYC, the fact that I was now among the feds being boxed out kind of pissed me off. I didn’t come in off the farm to be a benchwarmer.

  Parker’s phone rang.

  “One second,” she said. “I’m driving. Let me hand you to Detective Bennett.”

  “Who is it?” I asked, holding her BlackBerry against my thigh.

  “Bassman.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said, lifting the phone. “Bennett here. What’s up, Detective?”

  “Hey, where’d you guys go?” Bassman asked. “I’ve been looking all around for you.”

  Yeah, right, I thought. We’d been sitting there for hours, twiddling our thumbs. My guess was that he’d somehow heard about our reservation and had finally come up with a way to ruin it. A goose chase, no doubt. The cartels were blowing people away, and the only thing Bassman was interested in was more chop busting. This guy was the full package, a complete ass.

  “I don’t know how they do things in New York, Bennett, but this task force is a team. Anyway, I have a lead for you and Parker. A guy arrested for DUI involving a fatality swears he saw Perrine t
his morning. How about you guys run down to the hospital and talk to him.”

  “Hospital?”

  “Yeah, he’s in the psycho wing at the Metro State Hospital in Norwalk. Apparently, this guy is on speed or ecstasy or something.”

  I knew it. The task force was getting thousands of useless calls a day about Perrine’s locale, and here Bassman was sending us to talk to some guy who was drugged out of his mind. Sure, he saw Perrine. Riding a giant green velvet bumblebee over a rainbow, no doubt.

  Whatever, I thought. Tom Cruise would have to eat his Kobe fillet without us. We had to start somewhere.

  “No problem. Hit me with the address.”

  Bassman harrumphed. He seemed upset that I wasn’t complaining. As if I’d actually give him the satisfaction of squirming.

  “Here you go, Bennett. Ready? I’ll make sure and go real slow so you can type it clearly into the GPS.”

  CHAPTER 46

  THE METROPOLITAN STATE HOSPITAL in Norwalk was due southeast from our location, a full forty-minute ride down Interstate 5.

  As we rolled along haltingly on the traffic-filled six-lane superhighway, it wasn’t really the traffic but the immense sprawl of the city that made me stare in astonishment. Back east, as an NYPD cop, I only had to worry about five measly, cramped boroughs. Here in LA, they had to cover five counties.

  The state mental hospital was housed on a large, leafy, wooded piece of land that might have resembled a college campus if college campuses had ten-foot chain-link, barbed-wire-topped fences running their perimeter.

  “Didn’t they film The Silence of the Lambs here?” I asked as we pulled into the driveway. “Or Terminator Two? No, wait. It was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

  “I’d advise you at this point in to keep a lid on it, Bennett, or they might not let you back out when we’re done,” my trusty partner said.

  After calling ahead, we badged our way through the gate and met California Highway Patrol Sergeant Joe Rodbourne in the front vestibule of the new administration building. The burly, bald sergeant got right to it. He slipped on a pair of granny reading glasses as he freed his notepad from the bulging breast pocket of his khaki uniform shirt.

  “OK, here’s what we got. At four twenty-five or there-abouts this afternoon, a BMW tried to make an illegal U-turn at a highway patrol turnaround on the Seven Ten near the Santa Ana Freeway in East LA. As the car made the turn, a southbound Peterbilt hauling a trailer ran right over the top of the Beemer, killing the female passenger instantly. Witnesses say the truck and the tanker rode the median for a quarter mile, throwing sparks, but luckily came back down without going over and killing God knows how many other people driving home from work in the middle of rush hour.”

  Rodbourne licked a callused thumb and turned the page.

  “The driver of the BMW, named Scricca, Mathew J., was miraculously unscathed. He’s a deep-sea fishing-boat captain down at Marina del Rey. He gets around some, apparently, by his priors. His last one was attempted assault with a deadly weapon outside a Sunset Boulevard strip club on New Year’s Eve last.”

  “Scricca is on something, they said?” I said.

  The weather-beaten cop studied me over his bifocals.

  “The attendant at the ER swore it’s GHB. You know, that nifty new date-rape drug all the lovely young club-goers are experimenting with these days? Makes sense. Scricca reportedly had some, eh, visual disturbances at the scene. Kept going on about flowers. ‘Keep the flowers off me. Get the flowers out of my stomach.’ Interesting stuff like that. That’s why they sent him here.

  “We called you guys in when he came down, a little over an hour ago. Make that came down a lot, after he was informed of the fatality he was responsible for. He immediately asked to deal. He said he had something big. Something about Manuel Perrine.”

  Parker and I looked at the veteran cop, then each other. We could practically read each other’s minds. Boats. Smuggling. Perrine. So far, so interesting.

  “Take us to him, if you would, Sergeant,” Parker said with a smile.

  CHAPTER 47

  SERGEANT RODBOURNE FOUND AN orderly, and we went in through the administration building and then out through a covered passageway to an older, one-story brick dorm.

  We were buzzed through a gate and went down a long, worn, once-white corridor. The hospital’s emergency lockup was lined with the kind of heavy doors usually seen on walk-in freezers. The blast doors had peekaboo windows in them, with thick crisscrosses of chicken wire beneath the smudged, shatterproof glass.

  “Are you still dreaming of the lambs, Clarice?” I whispered to Parker, who immediately elbowed me in the solar plexus.

  As we stopped at a door near the end of the hallway, I looked through the screened window to see Scricca, shirtless and on his back, handcuffed to a hospital bed.

  I was surprised to see that he was good-looking. He was deeply tanned, with long, shiny black hair and pale-gray-green eyes, and was muscular in a wiry, rock-climber kind of way.

  Even the creeps have to keep up appearances out here in the land of make-believe, I thought.

  I saw ubiquitous tattoos, inked only on his torso in a vestlike pattern. It looked like he was wearing a paisley blackjack-dealer vest of snakes and soaring eagles and eight balls and evil clowns.

  “Style. I like that in a man,” Parker mumbled as the orderly cracked the clasps on the door.

  What Sergeant Rodbourne said was true, I thought, quickly scanning Scricca’s face as we went into the room. Though his eyes were bloodshot, he didn’t look deranged. If anything, his tired, forlorn expression was quite sober, that of a man who had just awakened to find himself as far up shit’s creek as one could go, and without a paddle in sight.

  “Hi, Mr. Scricca. I’m Agent Parker,” Emily said with the slow, deliberate speech one would use with a toddler or a stoned-out junkie. “I work for the FBI.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sorry that girl is dead,” Scricca said, nervously chewing on the thumbnail of his free hand. “I got two girls of my own. One of them near her age, but, like I told them, she was the one with that mind-bending shit. She told me it was coke. It was bath salts or something, right? To tell you the truth, she was the one who suggested I make the U-turn. She dared me, in fact. Said I didn’t have the balls.”

  “You’re a piece of work, Scricca,” Sergeant Rodbourne said, stepping toward him. “First you throw your date under a truck, now you throw her under the bus.”

  Sensing trouble, I took a quick step sideways, into the brawny and angry cop’s path.

  “Thanks, Sarge,” I said, steering him toward the rubber-room door. “We’ll take it from here.”

  “We’re not here about the accident,” Parker said after I pulled the door shut. “You made a claim that you saw the wanted cartel leader Manuel Perrine here in LA. Where did you see him?”

  “It’s not a claim,” Scricca said, folding his arms as he slowly looked back and forth at us. “I saw him this morning, before all this happened. He was with someone I know.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said, peering at him. “This morning, Manuel Perrine, the world’s most wanted and most ruthless killer, just strolled past you with a buddy of yours? That’s what you’re trying to tell us? Because when I meet people who have crossed Perrine’s path, it’s usually in a funeral home, not a loony bin.”

  “He didn’t see me. I was a couple hundred yards away,” Scricca said, knocking hard on the bed railing with a knuckle. “I saw him with binoculars. I even looked at my cell phone at the FBI website to double-check the face. I’m not shitting you. It was him. Mr. Public Enemy Number One himself.”

  “This was on the water?” Parker tried. “You saw Perrine when you were out on your boat?”

  Scricca took a deep breath, his handcuff scraping on the bed rail as he squirmed back against the wall.

  “I can’t tell you that until I get a deal. I’ll tell you everything I know when you write up some immunity and my lawyer O
Ks it. Being a rat makes me sick, but I can’t go back inside. My old lady tried to kill herself last time. I can’t do her like that. Not again.”

  “OK, Mr. Scricca. I see. We’ll be back,” Parker said, ushering me out.

  “What a noble guy, to consider his wife like that, don’t you think?” I said as we hit the hallway. “After he kills the girlfriend he’s been out drugging with and gets busted, his old lady is the very first person he thinks about.”

  “The question is, what do you think of his story, Mike?” Parker said. “You think this waste of life might actually know something?”

  “Yes,” I said, after a few seconds of looking back in at him. “Other than his taste in three-piece-suit body art and his obvious self-destructive tendencies, oddly enough, he actually seems like a pretty sharp cookie.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “Screw it. Let’s bite. Offer him a deal based on Perrine’s arrest and capture. If it doesn’t pan out, then what do we have to lose? It’s not like we have any other promising leads.”

  “I’m down,” I said. “As long as there’s no cow milking involved, I’m pretty much down for anything.”

  Parker took out her phone. She smiled mischievously as she waited for the line to get picked up.

  “What’s so funny, Agent P.?” I asked.

  “This goose chase that jackass Bassman sent us on,” she said. “How hilarious would it be if we just found the one that lays the golden egg?”

  CHAPTER 48

  AS IT TURNED OUT, we did strike gold out here in California.

  After Emily called back to the task force with our hunch, Bill Kaukonen, the LA County assistant district attorney on call, came to the hospital, and a deal was quickly struck.

  Captain Scricca made out like a pirate. He would get a suspended sentence and a six-month stint in rehab for his role in the vehicular homicide if his information led to the capture of Perrine.