3rd Degree Page 5

  Oh fuck. I looked at Chin. This wasn’t a homicide. It was an execution. A declaration of war. And he was right, the Lightower bombing did just get a lot more complicated.

  The note was signed, August Spies.

  Part Two

  Chapter 26

  My first call was to Claire.

  We had about an hour. That was all we had before this grotesque, seemingly random murder became headlines around the world as the second killing in a vicious terror spree. I needed to know how Bengosian had died, and fast.

  The second call was to Tracchio. It was still before five

  A.M. The night duty officer patched me through. “It’s Lindsay Boxer,” I said. “You said to make sure you knew the minute something went on.” “Yeah,” I heard him grunt, fumbling around with the phone. “I’m at the Clift Hotel. I think we just found the motive for the Lightower bombing.”

  I could visualize him bolting upright in his pajamas, knocking his glasses onto the floor. “One of those X/L partners finally come clean? It was money, wasn’t it?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, “war.”

  After I hung up with the Chief, I looked around Bengo-sian’s hotel room. No blood, no sign of a struggle. A half-filled champagne glass rested on the conference table. Another shattered, at Bengosian’s feet. His suit jacket was thrown onto the couch. An open bottle of Roederer.

  “Get a description of who he came up with,” I told Lorraine Stafford, one of my Homicide inspectors. “They might have security cameras in the lobby if we’re lucky. And let’s try and track down how Bengosian spent the early part of his night.”

  We have declared war, the note read, on the agents of greed and corruption…

  A chill went right through me. It was going to happen again.

  I knew that in the next few hours I had to find out everything I could about Bengosian and Hopewell Health Care. I had no idea what he had done to be murdered like this.

  I picked up the crumpled note.

  We will find you, no matter how large your house or powerful your lawyers. We are inside your homes, your workplaces… Your war is not beyond, but here. It is with us.

  Who the hell are you, August Spies?

  Chapter 27

  By the time most people were turning on the morning news, we had descriptions of a “cute brunette in a suit” (the night doorman) who “looked like she was totally into him” (their waiter at Masa’s) and had accompanied Bengosian back to his room last night.

  She was either the killer or an accomplice who had let the killer in. A different girl from the one we were seeking as the au pair.

  I looked up from the papers on my desk and saw Claire. “Got a second, Lindsay?”

  Claire always maintained an upbeat side, even in the grimmest of cases, but it was clear from her expression that she didn’t like what she had found. “I owe you a couple of hours sleep,” I said.

  Her worried eyes said, No, you don’t.

  “I’ve been doing this work ten years.” Claire sank into the chair across my desk and shook her head. “I’ve never seen the inside of a body that looked like that.”

  “I’m listening,” I said, leaning forward.

  “I don’t even know what to call it,” she said. “It was like jelly in there. Total vascular and pulmonary collapse. Hemorrhaging all through the gastrointestinal tract. Massive splenetic and renal necrosis … Degradation, Lindsay,” she said, seeing my eyes glaze.

  I shrugged. “We talking some kind of poison, Claire?”

  “Yeah, but with a toxicity that’s way beyond anything I’ve seen before. I skimmed through a few journals. I once worked on this child who had a similar vascular collapse and edema; we tied it to a rare adverse reaction to, of all things, castor oil. So I’m thinking castor beans. Not the case. It’s ricin, Lindsay! Relatively easy to make in large quantities. Protein derived from the castor plant.”

  “Obviously, it’s poisonous, right?”

  “Highly toxic. A couple of thousand times more powerful than cyanide,” Claire said, nodding. “Easily secreted. A pinprick would stop your heart. It can also be released into the air, Lindsay. But I was thinking ricin alone wouldn’t leave someone looking like that, unless it was delivered …”

  “Unless it was delivered how?”

  “Unless it was delivered in such massive amounts that it accelerated the destructive cycle by a factor of ten … fifty, Lindsay. This Bengosian, he was dead before the champagne glass fell. Ricin kills over a period of hours, even a day. You get severe, flu like warnings, gastrointestinal pains; your lungs fill up with fluid. This guy came back at eleven-thirty and they were calling it in by three o’clock. Three o’clock.”

  “We found a champagne glass shattered on the floor. We sent it to the lab. They can test for this stuff, right?”

  “Testing for the stuff isn’t what concerns me, Lindsay. Why kill him like this, when a tenth of this dosage would’ve done the trick?”

  I saw where Claire was going. Whoever killed them had studied both victims. Both murders had been planned, set up. And the killer possessed weapons of widespread terror.

  We are inside your homes, your workplaces… They were telling us, We have this stuff. We can deliver ricin in massive quantities if we want to. “Jesus, they’re warning us, Claire. They’re declaring war.”

  Chapter 28

  We called in everyone now. The Metropolitan Medical Task Force. The Bureau of Public Safety. The local office of the FBI. We weren’t talking murder any longer. This was terrorism.

  The trail for the missing au pair had gone cold. Jacobi and Cappy had come back empty after passing her photo around the campus bars across the bay. One thing did pan out, though: the article Cindy put in the Chronicle on X/L. With news crews plastered all over their offices and the threat of a subpoena, I got a message from Chuck Zinn that he wanted to deal. An hour later, he was in my office.

  “You can have your access, Lieutenant. In fact, I’ll save you the trouble. Mort did receive a series of e-mails in the past few weeks. The entire board did. None of us took them very seriously, but we put our internal security team on it.”

  Zinn unbuckled his fancy leather case and placed an orange file on the table and pushed it across. “This is all of them, Lieutenant. By date received.”

  I opened the file and a shock resonated through my system.

  To the Board of Directors, X/L Systems:

  On February 15, Morton Lightower, your CEO, sold 762,000 shares of his company stock totaling $3,175,000.

  On that same day, some 256,000 of your own shareholders lost money, making their net return –87% in the past year.

  35,341 children of the world died from starvation.

  11,174 people in this country died from disease that were deemed “preventable” with proper medical care.

  That same Wednesday, 4233768 mothers brought babies into conditions of poverty and hopelessness across the world. In the past 24 months, you have sold off almost $600,000,000 of your own company stock and purchased homes in Aspen and France, returning nothing to the world. We are demanding contributions to hunger and world health organizations equal to any further sell-offs. We are demanding that the board of X/L, and the boards of all companies, see beyond the narrow scope of its expansionist strategies to the world beyond, which is being crushed by economic apartheid.

  This is not a plea. This is a demand.

  Enjoy your wealth, Mr. Lightower. Your little Caitlin is counting on you.

  The message was signed, August Spies.

  I skimmed through the rest of the e-mails. Each was more belligerent. The menu of the world’s ills more grievous.

  You’re ignoring us, Mr. Lightower. The board has not complied. We intend to act. Your little Caitlin is counting on you.

  “How could you not turn these over to us?” I stared at Zinn. “This whole thing might have been prevented.”

  “In retrospect, I understand how this must appear.” The lawyer hung his h
ead. “But companies receive threats all the time.”

  “This isn’t just a threat.” I tossed the e-mails back on my desk. “It’s extortion, coercion. You’re a lawyer, Zinn. The reference to his daughter is a blatant threat. You came in here to deal, Mr. Zinn. Here it is: This doesn’t get out. The name on these e-mails stays between us. But we send in our own team to ascertain where they originated from.”

  “I understand.” The lawyer nodded sheepishly, handing over the file.

  I skimmed over the e-mail addresses. Footsy123@ hotmail.com. Chip@freeworld.com. Both signed the same. August Spies. I turned to Jacobi. “What do you think, Warren? Can we trace these?”

  “We already put them through our own investigation,” Zinn volunteered.

  “You traced them.” I looked up, shocked.

  “We’re an e-traffic security company. All of them are free Internet providers. No user billing address. Nothing needed to open an account. You could go to the library, the airport, anywhere there’s an open-access online terminal and open one yourself. This one was sent from a kiosk at the Oakland airport. This one from a Kinko’s near Berkeley on University. These two, from the public library. They’re untraceable.”

  I figured Zinn knew his stuff and was right, but one thing did jump out at me. The Kinko’s, the library, the real Wendy Raymore’s apartment.

  “We may not know who they are, but we know where they are.”

  “The People’s Republic of Berkeley,” Jacobi said, and sniffed. “Well, I’ll be.”

  Chapter 29

  I stole away for a quick lunch with Cindy Thomas. Dim sum at the Long Life Noodle Company in Yerba Buena Gardens.

  “You see the Chronicle this morning?” she asked, a pork dumpling sliding off her chopsticks as we sat on a ledge outside. “We lowered the boom on X/L.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I won’t be needing you to run a follow-up.”

  “So, now it’s your turn, right, to do a little rhythm for me.”

  “Cindy, I’m thinking this isn’t going to be my case much longer, especially if anything leaks out to the press.”

  “At least tell me”—she looked at me solidly—“if I should be feeling these two murders are related?”

  “What makes you think they’re related?”

  “Gee,” she chortled, “two big-time businessmen murdered in the same city two days apart. Both of them ran companies on the wrong side of the headlines lately.”

  “Two totally different MOs.” I held my ground.

  “Oh? On one hand, we have a greedy corporate high roller sucking off tens of millions while his sales are going to rot; the other’s hiding behind a bunch of high-priced lobbyists trying to screw poor people. Both are dead. Violently. What was the question, Linds? Why do I think they might be related?”

  “Okay.” I exhaled. “You know our arrangement? Absolutely nothing gets into print without my okay.”

  “Someone’s targeting these people, aren’t they?” She didn’t mean the two already dead. I knew what she was saying.

  I put the noodle container down. “Cindy, you keep your ear to the ground across the bay, don’t you?”

  “Berkeley? I guess. If you mean pitching in with a couple of ‘real-life success’ pep talks in Journalism 403.”

  “I mean under the radar. People who’re capable of causing trouble.” I took in a breath and looked at her worriedly. “This kind of trouble.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. She paused, then shrugged. “There is stuff happening over there. We’ve all become so used to being part of the system, we forget what it’s like to be on the other side. There are people who are growing … how should I put it … fed up. There are people whose message just isn’t getting out.”

  “What kind of message?” I pressed.

  “You wouldn’t hear it. For God’s sake, you’re the police. You’re a million miles away from these things, Lindsay. I’m not saying you don’t have a social conscience. But what do you do when you read that twenty percent of the people don’t have health insurance or that ten-year-old girls in Indonesia are pressed into stitching Nikes for a dollar a day. You turn the page, just like I do. Lindsay, you’re gonna have to trust me if you want me to help.”

  “I’m going to give you a name,” I said. “This can’t appear in print. You run it around on your own time. Anything you find, no copyeditors. No ‘I have to protect my sources.’ You come to me first. Me, only. Are we right on this?”

  “We’re right,” Cindy said. “So give me the name already.”

  Chapter 30

  “Beautiful,” Malcolm whispered, his eyes narrowed through surgeon’s operating lenses at the bomb on the kitchen table.

  With still hands, he twisted the thin red and green wires that ran from the explosive brick into the terminal on the blasting cap and molded the soft, puttylike C-4 into the frame of the briefcase. “It’s a shame to have to blow this up,” he exclaimed, admiring his own work.

  Michelle had come into the room and she placed a hand tremulously on Mal’s shoulder. He knew this scared the shit out of her—wiring the thing, current and charges going everywhere.

  “Relax, honey. No juice, no boost. It’s the most stable thing in the world right now.”

  Julia was on the floor, listening to the TV, the auburn wig ditched after her assignment last night. There was a news interruption about the murder at the Clift. “Listen.” She turned it up.

  “While police are not yet linking Bengosian’s death to Sunday’s bombing at the home of a prominent Bay Area tycoon, sources say there is evidence to connect the two incidents, and they are looking for an attractive brunette female in her early to mid-twenties who was seen entering the hotel with George Bengosian.”

  Julia turned down the volume. “Attractive?” She grinned. “Honey, they will never know. Whatya think.” She covered herself in the wig and struck a modeling pose.

  Michelle pretended to laugh, but inside, she wished she hadn’t been so stupid as to leave that goddamn inhaler lying around. She wasn’t like Julia, who had killed a man last night looking right in his eyes. And now she was laughing about it, gloating.

  “Mica, honey.” Malcolm turned around. “I need you to be a brave girl and place your finger on this spot.” He taped the wired blasting cap to the soft C-4 and molded in the rigged cell phone. “This is the delicate part. I just need you to hold the green and red wires, baby, so they don’t cross.… That would be very bad.”

  Mal always made fun of her. Just a Wisconsin cheese head, he would say with a laugh. But she had proved herself. She put her finger on the wire, trying to show that she was brave. She wasn’t a farm girl anymore.

  “Nothing to get worried about.” Malcolm winked, seeing her unease. “All that drama about crossing the wires, that’s for the movies. Now what is certifiably hairy is that I set these little wires to the ringer, not the phone battery; otherwise, they’ll be picking up our parts as far away as Eau St. Claire.” Her hometown.

  Michelle’s finger was trembling. She didn’t know if he was toying with her or not.

  “Done.” Malcolm finally exhaled, pushing the lenses up onto his brow. He wheeled back in the chair. “Juiced, as they say, and revved up to roar. Blow the dome right off of City Hall. Come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea.

  “Think we should take her out for a little test drive?” Mal said. “Whatya say?” Michelle hesitated. “C’mon,” he said, grinning, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  He handed her a second cell phone. “Number’s already punched in. Just remember, it’s just a toy until the fourth ring. That’s a no-no. You don’t want to hear the fourth ring. Take the wheel, honey… Let her rip.”

  Michelle shook her head and handed it back to him. Mal merely grinned.

  “C’mon, nothing to worry about. No juice, no boost. It’s all set up.”

  Michelle took a deep breath and pressed the SEND button, just to show she could. A second later, the phone wired to the
bomb jangled.

  “Contact.” Malcolm winked.

  A chill shot through her. Mal was so confident. He had it all planned. But things could go wrong. In the Middle East, Palestinian bombers blew themselves up all the time.

  Beep. Her eyes went to the briefcase. Second ring. She tried to look calm, but her hand was shaking. “Malcolm, please.” She tried to give it back. “You see it works. I don’t like this, please.…”

  “Please, what, Mica?” Malcolm held her wrist. “You don’t trust me?”

  The bomb phone jangled again. Third ring …

  Michelle’s blood went cold. “Cut it out, Mal.” She fumbled for the disconnect button.

  The next ring was contact. “Malcolm, please, you’re scaring me.”

  Instead of complying, Mal pinned her hand. All of a sudden she didn’t know what was going on. “Jesus, Mal, it’s about to —”

  Beep. Fourth ring.

  The sound split the room like a scream. Michelle’s gaze locked on the phone. On the bomb.

  It began to vibrate. Oh shit… She looked into Malcolm’s eyes.

  A buzzer sounded.

  No explosion. No flash. Just a sharp click.

  On the blasting cap.

  Malcolm was grinning. He lifted the disengaged cap he’d been holding. “I told you, baby. No juice, no boost. So what’d you think? I think it drives just fine.”

  Michelle’s body relaxed. Inside, she was screaming. She wanted to punch Malcolm in the face. But she was too spent. Sweat was pouring through her T-shirt.

  Malcolm took the blasting cap and wheeled the chair back over to the device. “You think I was gonna set this beauty off?” He shook his head. “Fat chance, baby. She’s got important work to do. This bomb is going to blow the minds of everybody in San Francisco.”