Intersecting Lines Book 2
11 Revelations
Anastasia's viewpoint
We were reconvening in FIDs conference room, yet another after-hours discussion so Jane had suggested that Natalie and Maura join us, that way we could head straight home afterwards.
I'd spent some time earlier this afternoon talking to Justice, which had been about as painful as pulling teeth; the info I'd finally dragged out of them though was disturbing, to put it mildly. Now I was getting to share the 'fun' around.
"I have the final figures on the Witsec deaths here in Los Angeles and its worse than we first thought" I got a collection of questioning looks and raised eyebrows as I continued. "In total nine Witsec protected people have died here in LA in the last four years, plus another who disappeared and reappeared back in Mexico" Sharon marginally beat Brenda, her voice reflecting her stunned surprise.
"Nine?"
"You're joking" I nodded.
"I wish I was; nine" Staring at me, Brenda's voice was full of sardonic disbelief.
"To lose one or even two might be mischance, but nine, that sounds like carelessness" I smiled at her joke before looking back down at my notes.
"One died in a jewelry store robbery gone wrong, shot by a security guard" Nat smiled.
"Looks like someone was sliding back into bad habits" I nodded and smiled as a glance passed between us; that had been Justice's take as well.
"Another died in a car accident, ran a red light and was collected by another car, a kindergarten school teacher would you believe?" Brenda smiled and looked at Sharon.
"I think we can discount that one" Sharon gave her a sideways glance and a tiny smile before speaking, her voice deadpan.
"A teacher? No, they don't really fit the profile" Maura leaned forward, an intrigued look on her face.
"And the others; were they all former cartel members?" I looked down at my notes once more although I already knew the answer.
"Yep, all seven remaining Witsec people were former Mexican cartel members, four were ex-Sinaloa, the others were from the Tijuana, Juarez and Gulf cartels, all dead in the last four years. Five of them at the hands of cops, all in Robbery / Homicide; three by Kennedy, one by Powell and Lieutenant Di Marco's one" There were stunned looks around the table. Sharon had given me the names of all Robbery/Homicide fatal OIS victims for the last five years and I'd spent the afternoon going through them, comparing them to a list of the Witsec deceased, that one provided by Justice's Witsec-cleared computer person.
"A tenth person, a former Sinaloa cartel accountant, they were the one who disappeared. She'd had an apparent attack of conscience, turned up at a Bureau office in Texas four years ago and handed over her set of books, the resultant investigation cost the Cartel tens of millions. She was put into Witsec and they gave her a new life as a bookkeeper for a studio here in LA. She didn't turn up for work one day about five months ago and an investigation started, she was eventually found in Mexico a week later, dead" I shook my head, trying to banish the description of how she'd been found from my mind. Brenda looked like she'd tasted something foul.
"That means we have potentially four members of Robbery/Homicide involved" Nat looked confused.
"Four, how do you figure that?" Sharon looked across at her.
"It's likely that each of their partners were involved, to provide an alibi for the OIS, that means that Di Marco's partner Julia Humphries is almost certainly involved, providing an alibi even if she's not the one's actually doing the shooting" Jane nodded as she looked over to Nat.
"Nat, cop partners are close, they spend most of their working day together, they work together, sit at adjacent desks, eat together, share stakeouts, many socialise together with their families out of hours. The chance of Di Marco pulling this off without his partner's knowledge and support are practically non-existent" I saw Nat look to me with an unspoken question so I nodded.
"For most of the time you've known me I've been a liaison officer, running solo. Before that though I've had partners, both in the Bureau and back in the Army, I was pretty close to some of them" She nodded.
"Do you miss that?" I waggled my hand in a noncommittal gesture.
"Yes and no. There's good and bad in every partnership, some were good at their jobs but had some personality traits that I didn't particularly care for. I've kinda got used to being a liaison officer" Brenda looked up.
"Besides, if you have a partner here, it's probably Jane" I looked across at Brenda in surprise. "You may not work with her all the time but you're close enough and work well together" I looked across to Jane and saw her thinking it over as well, before she looked up at me.
"Possibly" She grinned at me. "Someone's got to keep her out of trouble" I snorted.
"You; the hell you are, you can't even keep yourself out of trouble" I saw Maura and Natalie give a nice display of synchronized eye rolling as Brenda and Sharon smiled, before Maura shook her head, smiling indulgently at Jane. I saw Nat smirking at me and spoke, a little defensively.
"What?"
"Maura and I need to keep you out of trouble" We grinned at each other for a moment, I could tell she was thinking over all the trouble we'd got into together before Sharon dragged us back on track.
"You mentioned that seven Witsec protectees died; how did the other two non-OIS victims die?" I flipped open my notes.
"Lorenzo Medina, 31 year old male, formerly a Juarez cartel drug courier handler before he flipped. He was found dead in his apartment, together with a prostitute, both shot in the head, apparently killed during a robbery over two years ago" I glanced up to see everyone frowning, I'd done the same when I heard that, the coincidences were a little too pat.
Maura leaned forward in her chair.
"Was the case ever closed, a suspect found?" I shook my head.
"Nope, there was almost no evidence found, so the case is still open" She pursed her lips and sat back, saying nothing, obviously thinking about it. Brenda looked at her, then across at me.
"Gunshots to the head of both victims seems a little too careful for a robbery gone wrong" I nodded.
"So you'd think, but the case went nowhere" Brenda frowned as Sharon spoke.
"What about the other one, let me guess, an unexplained death too?" I nodded unhappily.
"Afraid so, Esteban Alonso, a former pimp manager for the Gulf Cartel, found dead in his bedroom with a 9mm gunshot to the head at short range, so short in fact that the shot had to have come from less than three feet away" Nat looked confused..
"Pimp manager, what's a pimp manager?" Jane jumped in.
"Someone in a gang who controls the actions of a number of pimps, makes sure each pimp's meeting his quota, that there are no turf fights about where each one's string of girls are operating, basically a mob's middle management position" Nat shook her head.
"Sounds more like a corporation than criminals" I smiled, this was an area I knew something about; I'd done a stint in organised crime at the Washington Field Office before my posting out to Seattle.
"That they are, more and more they've taken on the same trappings, partly because it's an efficient way to do things, partly because more and more senior criminals either have business degrees or employ advisors with MBAs" Nat just shook her head again.
"What's the world coming too?" Suddenly Maura leaned forward; something in her eye caught my attention.
"Which detectives were assigned to these two unsolved cases and do they have any connection to Robbery / Homicide?" I smiled for a moment at her perspicuity before turning to Sharon.
"I did some digging, it turns out the Medina case was assigned to a detective who had been recently assigned to Robbery / Homicide, Tony Di Marco" Brenda frowned; I could see her joining the dots.
"What about the other case?" I shrugged.
"It was a Robbery / Homicide case too but I didn't have the details about who was lead officer" She nodded to herself for a moment then looked across at Sharon, their eyes meeting.
"Sharon, could you please get a list of all Robbery / Homicide OIS cases going back at least four years?" Sharon nodded slowly, obviously they were both thinking along the same lines, it didn't surprise me really, those two, for all their personality and exterior differences often thought in almost spooky synch. She stood and moved towards the door.
"Be back in a few minutes" I saw her head to her desk as Brenda spoke.
"Jane here suggested that there might be more than one bad apple in Robbery / Homicide and it looks like she's right"
"Wish I hadn't been" Jane muttered, loud enough for us to hear, before she looked up at Brenda "What are you thinking?"
"I think we need to sit down and look for patterns across all the OIS involving Robbery / Homicide for the past few years, see if there's a common theme to any of them" I nodded, seeing Maura and Nat nodding as well.
"If we're right, it means that there are at least four rotten apples in Robbery Homicide, maybe more" Nat looked between us.
"More?" I nodded slowly, thinking it through.
"If they could recruit one or two cops, why not recruit more, it must have been getting more and more difficult to explain away Kennedy and Powell's OIS, this way the shootings have been spread across another pair of detectives, who are we to assume that they stopped at one pair of accomplices" Jane's voice was quiet.
"Hmm, what do you think they're offering to make cops turn to killers?" Brenda's voice was quiet.
"I'd hazard a guess and suggest it's one of the three classic motivations"
"Classic?" It was Jane. "What do you mean?"
"There are a number of primary motivations for people doing things which betray their allegiance" Brenda had been sitting quietly at the end of the table, letting us talk it out, that was often how she worked, let her people talk it out, occasionally stepping in to steer the direction but mostly letting her people have their head. "Ego, money and revenge, the same ones that motivate the majority of spies and defectors" Maura looked across at Brenda and nodded.
"In this case it could be ego, driven by the need to act as some sort of vigilante" She frowned for a moment. "Unlikely but possible, however a far more likely reason would be money, a detective's remuneration is not all that generous and a suitably appropriate monetary incentive may explain the decision" Jane nodded.
"I don't think they're doing it out of revenge, if they were killing criminals indiscriminately I could kinda understand it but this is way too targeted" She looked round the table. "I think we all know who'd pay well to have people in Witsec killed" We nodded as Nat put it into words.
"The cartels have been moving into the states for the last few years, they've had a few setbacks, like their attacks last year, but that won't stop them for long" I nodded to back her up.
"This way they get revenge on people who've betrayed them while staying at a distance"
"We need to find several things" Brenda frowned. "How they're finding these people in Witsec, how they're contacting the cartels, if that in fact is who's paying them to do it, and how many might be involved"
Just then Sharon walked back in, a sheaf of papers in her hand.
"I can't help with the first two, but I may have a lead on the third one" She dropped the papers on the desk. "This is a list of all the Robbery / Homicide OIS cases for the last five years" I looked over at the sheaf of papers and felt my eyebrows rise. Maura beat me to it.
"Exactly how many are we looking at Sharon?" Sharon looked down at the list.
"One hundred sixty four" At our shocked reactions she held up her hand. "That's total investigations, most of which were cleared, officers shooting in response to being shot at, that sort of thing. Sometimes it's three or four officers all discharging their weapons at the same target, each is considered a seperate OIS investigation. The total number of fatal OIS is fourteen" She frowned as we glanced around the table in shock.
"It's a high number but not totally out of line with a division that investigates and arrests people who commit murder in the course of their crimes, many of them don't particularly wish to surrender peacefully. For example Major Crimes over the same period has a similar number of OIS, fewer fatals though" Brenda nodded once.
"Assume that we ignore all but the fatal ones, how many officers are we looking at?" Sharon leaned forward and separated the papers into two bundles, pushing the larger pile to one side and then spending a few seconds sorting the smaller pile before she spoke, leafing through the sheets in her hand as she did.
"In date order we have Kennedy, Kennedy again, Powell, Richards, Di Marco, Cortez, Powell, Schmidt, Chan, Lopez, Di Marco, Taylor, Osmond and Kennedy once more" Nat looked up from her notepad where she'd been keeping score.
"So fourteen fatals committed by ten officers" Sharon nodded.
"I think we can discount Richards though, his was a pretty straightforward case, a suspect tried shooting it out at a 7/11 robbery gone wrong" She looked down at the names again. "Schmidt's probably clean as well, he was only three months off retiring, he took early retirement after the shooting" At their looks she clarified her words. "During a shootout with a gang, his shot missed and went through a window, hitting a child inside, a head shot, the boy died instantly"
There were grimaces around the room; it was a cop's worst nightmare. Finally Jane shook herself out of the collective reverie and spoke.
"Assume then that Powell and Kennedy were the first, based on the date of their first Witsec-related shootings" There were nods all round. "That means that DiMarco and Humphries somehow got involved; recruited to join them, with possibly some of the others also roped in" Nat looked up from her list.
"Discounting Kennedy, Powell and DiMarco, plus Schmidt and Richards that leaves us with Cortez, Chan, Lopez, Taylor and Osmond" I suddenly frowned.
"Taylor? Commander Taylor?" Sharon nodded.
"He was involved in an OIS, the same one as Lopez actually, a gang targeting small bank branches. They'd hit several before the Robbery / Homicide team worked out their pattern, they were waiting for them at the next bank they hit, most went quietly but one didn't, he decided to shoot it out and both Taylor and Lopez fired, both shots were fatal, so both qualified" Brenda cleared her throat.
"God knows I'm no fan of the man..." She paused as a wave of agreement swept the table, only Jane didn't have to deal with Taylor regularly, the rest of us unfortunately did. "But even I can't see him being a part of something like this" I nodded; the man was a sexist pig and a scheming fool, but a murderer, nah, not likely. Maura looked around the table.
"That would seem to discount Detective Lopez as well, would you not agree?" We looked around the room and nodded in general agreement as Nat ran her pen through two more names.
"That leaves Cortez, Chan and Osmond" Brenda turned to Jane.
"I'd like you to work with Sharon and me on this, doing the legwork as we look into all three officers please" Jane nodded once as Brenda turned her attention to Maura.
"Could I please ask you to take a look at the autopsy reports of those three shootings? It's not that I don't trust Doctor Morales' original findings, but you're coming at it from a different perspective" Maura smiled.
"Of course, I will commence first thing in the morning" That set off a wave of checking watches and phones; it was starting to get late. Brenda nodded.
"Time to wrap up for the evening" She looked round the table. "I'm sorry to hold you all back" We stood and started gathering our things when Nat spoke up.
"One question though, how do you go about recruiting a cop to become an assassin? Hey Joe, you want to kill people as a hobby?" Maura frowned.
"I will grant you it does rather seem far-fetched" Jane nodded.
"You're not wrong; we're going to need some definitive evidence before we can take this to anyone senior" Brenda tilted her head at Jane in acknowledgement.
"That's the evidence we have to find" She looked across at me. "We also need to find some way to link Kennedy and Co back to Justice" I nodded, that would be my job, I was the only one with access to Justice, they were pissed enough that I was sniffing around, no way they'd sit still for someone from the LAPD sticking their noses in. Jane looked round the room, taking us all in.
"Looks like we're all going to be busy"