The Mourning Missed Read online

  Grinning, Lilly drew her pistol and flashlight, adopting the traditional crossed-wrist stance of pistol over fisted flashlight used the world over. Stepping into the dim room, she wound her way through the debris to the service elevator in the rear. It too was open.

  “This smells very much like a trap,” Clint observed.

  “Well, if you’re quick enough, you can take the cheese and not get caught,” Lilly snarked.

  “Relying on our increased speed and strength can cause overconfidence,” he rejoined.

  “I’ll be careful,” Lilly promised.

  “Listen, I’ve been meaning to tell you this, but I believe I can control part of your body,” he offered.

  “Say what?” Lilly blurted. “How would you do that?”

  “Like this,” he replied, lifting her left hand from under her right and placing it atop her head.

  “Cut that out, it’s not funny,” she said, struggling to regain control of her errant limb.

  When he relaxed his control, her arm flew from her head to her side, where here flashlight struck her thigh painfully. “Oww,” she cried. “Oh, if only I could punch you right now.”

  “Hey, you told me to stop,” he replied, but she could hear the chuckle in his delivery. “Seriously, this could be a benefit to us if you allow me to fight with your left side. After all, I’m left-handed, so it would make you perfectly ambidextrous.”

  “We need to work on this in a practice environment, not when we’re about to rush headlong into possible danger,” she replied.

  “Well you’re the one rushing headlong, I’m just trying to be helpful,” he reminded her.

  Pausing to consider the possibly huge importance of this revelation, she finally acquiesced. “Okay, if things get dicey, don’t hesitate to save our collective ass,” she allowed. “But try to tell me you’re going to if there’s time.”

  “Right, Boss.” She could still hear his grin.

  Stepping into the elevator, she pressed the number three button.

  THE FLOOR WAS STILL well-lighted and still empty. “This is where they kept me,” Clint said softly in her head. “And the ladies room across the hall is where I heard the leaking faucet.”

  Pushing the door open, Lilly walked into the sterile room. There was no trace of any evidence in the room that a man had been allowed to die while comatose on a gurney. Walking the perimeter slowly, they both looked for any telltale of what had transpired here.

  “Smell that?” Clint asked.

  “Yeah, smells like bleach,” Lily replied.

  “The room’s been professionally cleaned; recently,” he observed.

  “Let’s check the ladies room,” she said.

  As they walked across the hall, the elevator clanked to life as it was summoned from the ground floor. Quickly deciding on whether to hide or confront, Lilly took up an aggressive stance in front and just off to the side of the elevator door. Having put her flashlight away, she held her weapon at the ready, tensing as the rising car stopped. When the door slid open, an old familiar face greeted her.

  “Well, hello, bitch,” Carmichael grinned as he launched himself across the short distance, arms extended, fingers grasping.

  “You just don’t learn do you, shit-bird?” Lilly barked as she side-stepped his bar-fighter’s rush. Her left foot snapped up into his exposed abdomen as she did so and she heard the satisfying grunt as his gut responding to the impact.

  Not completely helpless, Carmichael swung his brutish left fist toward her diminutive form and Clint threw her left arm up just as the blow would have caught her in the side of the head. The force of the impact numbed her arm from the shoulder down. Forced to stumble back to regain her footing, Carmichael took the moment to gather himself and continue his assault.

  Rounding on her, he stepped in swinging. The clumsy blows whistled through empty air where she had stood an instant before. Every time he swung, he was rewarded with a painful blow to one of the many nerve plexus on the human body.

  “Stand still so I can hit you,” he finally bellowed in frustration, winded and gasping in pain.

  “Why?” Lilly replied. “This is so much more fun. But why don’t we call a truce and let you catch your breath so I can ask you some questions?”

  “The only thing I want to hear out of you is your last breath,” he growled, lunging toward her again.

  The hallway was wide enough he had no chance of trapping her within its walls, even though his arm span was nearly six feet. Realizing he only needed to get lucky once, Lilly upped the ante. Ducking under his questing reach, she berated him as she slammed the slide of her pistol into the vulnerable spot behind his ear. “What’s the matter, Ho Ho, didn’t you learn anything at the academy before they booted you out?”

  “Don’t call me that,” he raged. “I hate that name.” Stopping suddenly, he stood fully upright, his head seeming to almost touch the eight foot ceiling. A look of dawning realization came over his usually slack features and he appeared to deflate all at once. Turning almost casually to the elevator, he pressed the call button.

  “What are you doing?” Lilly asked curiously.

  “I’m leaving. I can’t catch you and break your stupid neck as much as I’d like to, so I’m just going to go. Pretty smart for a big dumb guy, huh?” Carmichael stood passively, turned partially away as he waiting for the elevator car.

  “So, while we’re waiting, care to tell me who gave the orders for Dumb and Dumber to kidnap Clint? Because I know the two of them together don’t have the brains to figure out how to do what they did on their own,” she asked.

  “Yeah, like I’d tell you anything,” he remarked. “Just leave me alone, okay?” His voice had turned plaintive, and she almost felt sorry for the big lummox.

  The elevator door opened and Carmichael stepped inside. Moving to the open doorway, Lilly tried once more. “Just tell your boss I’m going to take you all down, however long it takes.” And Carmichael got lucky.

  Lilly had ventured within arm’s reach, lulled by his act of passive surrender. She saw the flash of victory in his eyes a moment too late as his hand shot out and grabbed her upper arm. Dragging her into the car, he punched her in the chest with his massive free hand. The impact of his fist, half as wide as her chest, knocked all the breath out of her as she collapsed against the base of the car’s wall.

  Looking up, she saw a gargantuan boot coming toward her face and flung herself bodily to the side. The stomp caught her just above the eye as she moved out of its path and the glancing blow stunned her. Rather than attempting to stand, she opted for fighting from the floor. There, he was limited to using his slow, clumsy feet or stooping over to grab for her with his hands while off-balance.

  Her first kick caught him on the outside of his knee and he yelped as he danced backward, trying to shield his fragile joints. Spinning on her backside like a street-corner brake dancer, she launched a series of kicks at his knees and ankles. Keeping him on the defensive, she managed to recover her pistol, which had fallen from her grasp when he punched her. Crabbing into the furthest corner, she pointed it at him and screamed. “I will shoot you if you don’t stop right now.”

  “You shoot me and you go to prison for murder,” he replied with an evil grin. “I think I’m willing to take that, just knowing you’ll be somebody’s bitch for the rest of your life.” He lunged across the cabin, arms outstretched.

  The bark of the 9 millimeter was deafening in the tight confines of the elevator car and her ears rang loudly. The small box filled with the acrid stench of burned gunpowder. She watched as blood began to flow freely from the hole in his upper thigh, just as he screamed and grabbed the entry and exit wounds.

  Shifting her aim, she shot him in the same place on the other leg; the meaty part of the outer thigh. Screaming again, he dropped to his knees, agony etched plainly across his Neanderthal features. Lilly took the opportunity to cold-cock him with the pistol slide. His unconscious hulk thundered against the floor of the cab
in and the car actually jumped on its cables.

  Twenty

  “CARMICHAEL LAWYERED up, even as he was being wheeled into surgery,” Samuels informed the other two as they walked into his office. “It was almost as if one of the responding officers, or someone in the ambulance, coached him on what to say and do. Also, I’ve done some discreet checking on the PC and I found out some very interesting things.”

  “How wide-spread is their network and how many are involved, if they can get to him in an ambulance on the way to the hospital?” Sarge blurted. “We may need to reevaluate our assessment of the reach on this organization.”

  “Remember I said both the PC and Hank referred to their organizations,” Lilly interjected. “There may be something there we can use; some territorial or leadership challenges.”

  “That’s way past where we are now, but definitely something to keep in mind,” Phillip smiled warmly at his protégé. “For now, we need to figure out what we have in hand. And the PC is very much in hand.”

  When the other two remained silent, Samuels took it as tacit permission to enlighten them; which he did. “Our beloved PC has a rather checkered past, once you get beyond his aliases.”

  “You said that as a plural,” Lilly remarked.

  “Yes, I did. Before he was brought into Montrose City to be the mayor’s fair-haired boy, Hanson Perth was known as Mitchell Wainscott. He was Chief of Police in Peabody, Utah. I only know this because I obtained his fingerprint record from when he was processed in as Police Commissioner. I am not cleared to access that particular record, so mum’s the word.” He smiled at them with a catbird grin. “Our good friend Special Agent-in-Charge Brimmer was kind enough to run them through his database for me on the pretext it was for a case I intended to turn over to him once I confirmed the identity of my suspect. Unfortunately for him, the confirmation wasn’t who I thought it would be.”

  Still grinning as both of the others burst into smiles at his sleight-of-hand, he continued. “He left Peabody abruptly after he was indicted by a Utah Grand Jury for embezzlement of public funds and witness tampering. The only witness in the case suddenly recanted her statement the same day the indictment was released.”

  At their raised eyebrows, Samuels continued. “She originally testified she had heard him bragging about ripping the city off while she was a waitress at the high roller’s club he frequented. She left town the next day and subsequent attempts to track her down proved futile. Even though there was circumstantial evidence of coercion, it wasn’t enough for the indictment to stick.”

  “So, this makes it look like the mayor and Commissioner Perth knew each other before his appointment,” Sarge mused.

  “So it might seem,” Samuels agreed. “But it gets better. Before he was Chief in Peabody, Mitchell Wainscott was known as Arthur Cullingham, a senior partner at a company providing federal contracts for covert operatives of the US government.”

  “How did you possibly find all that out?” Lilly gasped, amazed. “If the FBI knew that, they wouldn’t have given you the information. They’d have been after him themselves.”

  “I know a guy,” Phillip smiled at having shocked her. “And this guy tells me Arthur skipped town and disappeared, right as his company was being locked down by federal agents. He and two others were charged with embezzlement, defrauding the federal government, international espionage, and suspicion of murder.”

  “Huh,” Sarge grunted. “So, is he a spook, or just an opportunistic sociopath?”

  “Maybe both,” Samuels replied. “My contact tells me he still has friends in high places at NSA and CIA. That helps explain not only how he can disappear so completely but also how he can change identities so readily. This is beginning to smell like more than we need to be tangling with by ourselves.”

  “If anyone within the federal intelligence community is involved, we won’t know who to trust,” Lilly observed heatedly.

  “Exactly, which is why I’ve called in a few old friends I know I can trust,” Phillip explained. “I’ve worked with them on a few other sensitive cases. They deliver.”

  “What do they deliver? What exactly are you getting us into?” Sarge asked pointedly.

  “I’m not getting anyone into anything,” Samuels shot back. “The door is open and I’m not forcing anyone to stay.” After 30 seconds, during which neither Sarge nor Lilly budged, he continued. “My guys are on their way to Utah as we speak. I don’t want any record of their travel, so they’re driving straight through in 24 hours. They’ll make discrete inquires and gather as much info as they can in a couple of days. We’ll know more how to approach this once they’re back.”

  “In the meanwhile, we just sit on our hands?” Lilly asked, clearly frustrated.

  “Well, there will be the IAD hearing on your shooting of Carmichael to contend with,” Samuels offered.

  “But the marks on your face, arm, and chest are fairly substantial evidence to support your claim of self-defense,” Sarge interjected. “So you won’t have a weapon again until they release yours, unless you want to use one of mine. I know you don’t like being without one and I don’t like it either.”

  “Ditto,” Samuels added.

  “We’ll go get one as soon as we have a plan of action,” Lilly offered. “Right now, I want to know what else we can do to find out more about the connection between the mayor, the PC, Hank Mitchell, and whoever else is running the show.”

  “What makes you think the mayor is involved?” Samuels asked, ever the ADA.

  “What makes you think he’s not, given his history with the PC?” Lilly replied.

  “We don’t know they have a history,” Sarge started, before he reconsidered. “Never mind, it is pretty damning, isn’t it?”

  “Considering all that we know thus far, I’d say so. This is first-hand knowledge according to everything Clint heard while being held captive. The Police Commissioner and the First Sergeant for Central Division are running independent organizations of police officers and other city public servants. Plus there’s at least one other boss and one other organization,” Lilly expounded.

  “They facilitate the inflow, distribution, warehousing, cash exchange, and delivery of illegal drugs from Mexico and Central America. They do so utilizing networks of city employees on their payroll. They use high school students as distributors to their fellow classmates. Members of the police force are providing protection for the students and who knows else to prevent their arrests. When there are arrests by good cops, there’s a network of lawyers on retainer to get them released on bail.” She had been ticking the items off on her fingers as she spoke. Now she stopped, waiting for the gravity of the situation to sink in before continuing.

  “If the mayor truly doesn’t know, he’s an idiot as an administrator,” Lilly accused. “There weren’t any names mentioned in all the conversations; the references were all to departments.”

  “Can you give me an example of what you mean?” Samuels asked, rubbing his temples as if he had a serious headache.

  “Clint heard the PC say he needed to call Public Works to see if the latest shipment had been processed and sent to the evidence room. He had to make sure the cage was available for it. They’re using evidence lockups to store drugs,” she exclaimed. “And it sounded like he was bragging to Hank, like he’d one-upped him or something. He also said to make sure finance had the cash available to pay the cartel, because they didn’t like to wait. Clint doesn’t know who he was talking to, because the other man in the room just said yes, sir.”

  “I wonder who or what is finance?” Sarge said distractedly. “Because the Commandant uses the term to mean our finance office, as do most police administrators. Is it possible he’s laundering drug money through the city’s accounts receivable?”

  “And it sounds like Public Works is being used to transport the drugs from how and wherever they arrive in the city to the evidence rooms. What PW vehicles could possible do that?” Samuels wondered aloud.

&
nbsp; “Stormwater and wastewater vehicles have access to the lines right outside the buildings, under the streets,” Lilly said with a flash of inspiration. “I wonder if they could possibly have access to the building basements from there?”

  “But, how is it getting into the city?” Sarge asked vehemently. “They can’t very well just truck it in.”

  “Actually, they can,” Samuels replied. “The city warehouses have tractor-trailer deliveries almost daily. Individual departments often retrieve their shipments with departmental vehicles. It wouldn’t be difficult to unload crates from a truck into the warehouse, where they would set undisturbed until someone from PW came by with a pickup or flatbed and moved them to their compound. Once there, they could put them in whatever sized loads were convenient for delivery to evidence. That means the evidence sergeant has to be involved.”

  “How do you know all that?” Lilly asked curiously.

  “I headed a task force two years ago on theft of goods from the warehouses by city employees,” Samuels replied. “We were losing 12-15% of everything the city ordered to black marketeers. Seven city employees went to county jail for one to three and dozens were terminated with cause.”

  “We’re still missing how the drugs get from the warehouse to PW,” Sarge said. “Not how they’re transported,” he said, raising a finger when Lilly opened her mouth to object. “How does PW justify the large number of crates the traffic demands?”

  “Actually, depending on the size of the crate, the frequency of the deliveries, and the purity of the drug, it could be as little as one a week. That wouldn’t draw anyone’s attention,” Samuels observed. “And if there are at least three organizations, there may be three delivery networks. It doesn’t sound to me like they play well together.”

  “Which gives me pause to wonder if there might be some incipient turf wars blooming,” Lilly added.

  “There’s plenty to look into, and just the three of us,” Samuels said. “We need to prioritize our efforts so we don’t miss something important while looking at something trivial.”