Mountain Blizzard Page 12

  While Sean and Levine talked about Morelli, trying to figure out if he could be trusted, she pulled her cap lower on her forehead and slouched down in the booth. How was she ever going to make sense of this tangled mess? Maybe Sean had been right when he suggested leaving town and forgetting all about Wynter and human trafficking. She could retract her witness statement and start her life over.

  But she couldn’t ignore her conscience, and, somewhere in the back of her mind, she imagined the ghost of the murdered man haunting her. She owed it to him to bring his killer to justice.

  She spoke up, “It seems like everybody knows I’m the witness. I should just go to the SFPD.”

  “Makes sense,” Sean said. “And that’s ultimately what you’ll have to do. But right now we’re flying under the radar. Let’s take advantage of the moment.”

  “Where do we start?”

  “If we figure out why Patrone was murdered, it takes the focus off you.”

  Similar ideas had been spinning through her mind, but he pulled it together and made perfect sense. Why was Patrone killed? What was the motive?

  After the waitress delivered their breakfast, Emily took a bite of her omelet and looked over at Levine. “You might be able to help us.”

  “What do you need?”

  “More background data on Roger Patrone. I know about the gambling operation in the strip club. And I know the woman who took him into her home is Doris Liu.” Emily had visited her once and gotten a big, fat, “No comment” in hostile Cantonese. “Patrone must have had other friends and associates outside Wynter’s operation.”

  “He almost married a woman who owns a tourist shop in Chinatown on Grant. Her name is Liane Zhou. Nobody bothers her because her brother, Mikey Zhou, is said to be a snakehead.”

  Emily shuddered. The snakeheads were notorious gangsters who smuggled people into the country. “Does Mikey Zhou work with Wynter’s people?”

  “Their businesses overlap.”

  “If you can call crime a business,” she said.

  “Hell, yes, it’s a business.”

  “A filthy business.”

  Her own fears and doubts seemed minor in comparison to these larger crimes. Tearing people away from their homes and forcing them into a life of prostitution or slave labor horrified her. According to her research, parents in poverty-stricken villages sometimes sold their children to the snakeheads, thinking their kids might achieve a better life in a different country. Others signed up with the snakeheads to escape persecution at home.

  “Human smuggling is a complex job,” Levine said as he carefully smoothed the thinning hair across his forehead. “They need ledgers and accounting methods to track how many have been taken and how they’re transported. Most often, it’s in shipping containers. Then they have to determine how many arrived, how they’ll be dispersed and the final payout for delivery. But you know that—don’t you, Emily? Isn’t that why you were on Wynter’s yacht in the first place? You intended to steal his computer records and ledgers.”

  “So what?” She hadn’t actually told him about her plan to download Wynter’s personal computer, but it wasn’t a stretch for him to figure it out.

  “Did you get the download you were looking for?”

  She’d failed. After Frankie and the boys had cleared out of the office, she had spent the rest of the night running and hiding. But she didn’t want to share that information with Levine. There was something about him that she didn’t trust. “The only thing that matters is stopping Wynter. How can we disrupt his business?”

  “Cut into his profit,” Sean said. “But that won’t work as long as there’s a market for what he’s selling.”

  “It’s slavery,” she said. “Twenty-first-century slavery. And it’s wrong. How can people justify the buying and selling of human beings?”

  “Don’t be naive,” Levine said. “People argue that prostitutes are a necessary vice. And slave labor keeps production costs down. The freaking founding fathers owned slaves. It took a civil war to change our ideas.”

  She glanced between Levine and Sean. The FBI agent thought she was a wide-eyed innocent who had no clue about the real world. Her ex-husband had told her dozens of times that she was unrealistic and immature. But those complaints were years ago. Sean was different now.

  Looking him straight in the eye, she said, “It’s our responsibility as decent human beings to expose these crimes and disrupt this network of evil and depravity.”

  Levine chuckled. “That sounds like a good lead for one of your articles.”

  “Sounds like the truth,” Sean said.

  “Do you really think so?” she asked.

  “I’ve always tried to be a responsible man.”

  A man she could love. She bit her lower lip. Don’t say it, don’t. After the divorce, she’d wondered how two people who were so unlike each other could be attracted. What had she ever seen in him?

  This was her answer. At his core, Sean was decent, trustworthy and, yes, responsible. He was a good man.

  She straightened her posture and dug into her breakfast. If she was going to save the world, she needed fuel in her system. Listening with half an ear, she heard Sean and Levine discussing lines of communication that wouldn’t compromise Sean’s location and would make Wynter think his wiretap at the FBI was still operational.

  “Then there’s Morelli,” Sean said. “Can you use your snitch to feed bad information to Wynter?”

  “He wasn’t always lying to me,” Levine said. He fussed with his hair and finished his second Bloody Mary. “I made a couple of arrests based on intel he gave me.”

  “You can’t trust him,” Sean said firmly. “Get that through your head. Morelli isn’t your pal.”

  Emily felt Sean’s temperature rising. He was getting angry, and she didn’t blame him. Levine was beginning to slur, and his eyelids drooped to half-mast.

  Before Sean blew his top, she needed information from Levine. “What can you tell me about Jerome Strauss?”

  “The editor of BP? He’s fine, already out of the hospital.”

  Good news, finally! She waved her hands. “Yay.”

  “Strauss is one lucky bastard. He’d fallen asleep at the office and just happened to wake up a few minutes before the bomb—which was on a timer—went off. Strauss was in the bathroom when it exploded. The EMTs found him wandering around with no pants.”

  “So he wasn’t badly hurt?”

  “If he’d been in the office near the window, he’d be dead. All he had were some bruises and a minor concussion. Lucky, lucky, lucky.”

  Or not. Emily enjoyed fairy tales about pots of gold at the end of the rainbow and genies in lamps who granted three wishes, but life wasn’t like that. There were few real coincidences. Strauss had escaped, and she was glad but...but also suspicious. He might have been complicit in blowing up his own office.

  While she and Sean dug into their food, Levine scooted to the edge of the booth. “I should get back to work,” he said. “I can’t say it’s been great to see you.”

  “Same here,” Sean said.

  “If I can be of help, let me know.” He gave a wave and whipped out the door, obviously glad to be leaving them behind.

  She watched him lurch down the street. He stumbled at the curb. “He’s about three months away from getting a toupee.”

  “I didn’t remember him as being so nervous.” Sean sopped up the last bit of syrup with his pancake. “The FBI in SF has gone downhill since I left.”

  She nudged his shoulder. “I’ll bet you were the best fed since...who’s a famous FBI agent?”

  “Eliot Ness.”

  “The best since him,” she said. “Tell me, Nessie, what do we do next?”

  “I already talked to Dylan this morning,” he said, “but I need to c
all him again and make sure he’s hacking in to Wynter’s personal computer, the one he had on the yacht. Levine seemed way too interested in whether you’d managed a download.”

  She was pleased that she’d picked up the same nosy, untrustworthy attitude. “Something told me I shouldn’t share information with him.”

  “Good instinct, Emily.”

  “Thanks.”

  He didn’t allow her time to revel in his compliment. “We also need to talk to your friend Jerome Strauss. I’m not buying that coincidental escape from the bomb.”

  “Me, neither,” she said. “But if he knew about the bomb, why would he stay close enough to be injured?”

  “His injury makes a good alibi.”

  So true. The bomb almost killed him; therefore, he didn’t set the bomb. She wanted to ask him why. What was his motivation for risking his life? “First we need disguises. Can we please go by my apartment? I’ll only take a minute.”

  “We had this conversation last night.”

  “And I agreed that we shouldn’t stay there. But a quick visit won’t be a problem.”

  “Unless Wynter has men stationed on the street outside, watching to see if you return to your nest.”

  “They’d never notice me. I have a secret entrance.”

  * * *

  HER APARTMENT WAS on the second floor of a three-story building that mimicked the style of the Victorian “painted ladies” with gingerbread trim in bright blue and dark purple and salmon pink. Following her directions, Sean drove the rental car up the street outside her home.

  “Nice,” he said. “You’ve got to be paying a fortune for this place.”

  “Not as much as you’d think,” she said. “One of my former professors at Berkeley owns the property and makes special deals for people she wants to encourage, artists and writers.”

  “Wouldn’t she rather have you writing poetry?”

  “She likes that I do investigative journalism. It’s her opinion that more women should be involved in hard-boiled reportage.” She shrugged. “Otherwise, how will idealism survive?”

  “Hard-boiled and idealistic? Those two things seem to contradict, but you make them fit together.” He glanced over at her. “You’re a dewy-eyed innocent...but edgy. That’s what makes you so amazing.”

  Another compliment? He’d already noticed the cleverness of her gut instincts, and now he liked her attitude. He’d called her amazing. “Turn at the corner and circle around the block so we’ll be behind my building.”

  “Your secret entrance isn’t something as simple as a back door, is it?”

  “Wait and see.”

  The secret wasn’t all that spectacular. It had been discovered by one of the other women who lived in the building, an artist. She’d been trying to evade a guy who’d given her a ride home. He wanted to come up to her place and wouldn’t take no for an answer. She said goodbye and disappeared through the secret entrance.

  On the block behind Emily’s apartment, she told him to park anywhere on the street. She hadn’t noticed anybody hanging around, watching her building. But it was better to be cautious.

  As soon as she got inside, she intended to grab as many clothes and shoes as she could. Living out of one suitcase that had been packed for snow country didn’t work for her.

  She led him along a narrow path between a house and another apartment building. The backyards were strips of green dotted with rock gardens, gazebos and pergolas. People who lived here landscaped like crazy, needing to bring nature into their environment.

  Her building had three floors going up and a garden level below. A wide center staircase opened onto the first floor. Underneath, behind a decorative iron fence, was a sidewalk that stretched the length of the building. She hopped over the fence, lowered herself to the sidewalk and ducked so she couldn’t be seen from the street. There were three doors on each side for the garden-level apartments. She opened an unmarked seventh door in the middle, directly below and hidden by the staircase leading upward.

  She and Sean entered a dark room where rakes and paint cans and outdoor supplies were stored. She turned on the bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. “In case somebody saw us, you might want to drag something over to block the door.”

  He did as she said. “And how do we get out?”

  “Over here.” She’d found a flashlight, which she turned on when she clicked off the bulb. They went from the outdoor storage room to an indoor janitor’s closet with a door that opened onto a hallway in the garden level. She turned off the flashlight and put it back.

  The sneaking around had pumped up her excitement. She ran lightly down the hall and up two staircases to her floor. Her apartment was on the northeastern end of the building. She wasn’t an artist and therefore didn’t care if she had the southern or western light.

  As she fitted her key in the lock, she realized that she was excited for Sean to see her place. When they were married, they had enjoyed furnishing their home, choosing colors and styles. For her place, she’d chosen an eclectic style with Scandinavian furniture and an antique lamp and a chandelier. Her office was perfectly, almost obsessively, organized.

  The moment she opened the door, she knew something was wrong. Her apartment had been tidy before she left for Colorado. Now it was a total disaster.

  Ransacked!

  The sofa and coffee table were overturned. Pillows were slashed open and the stuffing pulled out. The television screen was cracked. All the shelves had been emptied.

  “No,” she whispered.

  In her office, the chaos was worse. Papers were wadded up and strewn all across the floor and desktop. Every drawer hung open. All her articles were reduced to rubble. Why? What were they doing in here? Were they searching?

  Barely conscious of where she was going, she stumbled into the bedroom. If they were searching, there was no need for them to go through her clothing. But her closet had been emptied and the contents of her drawers dumped onto the carpet.

  Numbly, she stumbled back to the living room. On the floor at her feet was a framed photo that had hung on the wall, a wedding picture of her and Sean. She was so pretty in her long white gown with her hair spilling down her back all the way to her waist. And he was so handsome and strong. She had always thought the photo captured the true sense of romance. Their marriage didn’t work, but they had experienced a great love.

  The glass on the front of the photo was shattered.

  Sean waved to her, signaled her. “Emily, hurry—we need to get out of here.”

  She heard heavy footsteps climbing the staircase outside her apartment. Her door crashed open, and she gave a yelp.

  It was one of the men she’d seen with Frankie on the yacht when the murder was committed. She knew him from mug shots she’d studied when trying to identify Patrone.

  “Barclay.”

  She knew he was a thug, convicted of assault and acquitted of murder. Not a person she’d want to meet in a dark alley.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The man who stormed into her apartment didn’t turn around. He had his back to Sean, and he paused, staring at Emily.

  This would have been an excellent occasion to use a stun gun. Sean didn’t want to kill the guy, but Barclay—Emily had called him Barclay—had to be stopped.

  “How do you know me?” Barclay demanded.

  “I’m a reporter. I know lots of stuff.” Emily hurled the framed photo at him. “Get away from me.”

  When Barclay put up an arm to block the frame, Sean saw the gun in his right hand. In a skilled move, he grasped Barclay’s gun hand and applied pressure to the wrist, causing him to drop his weapon.

  Barclay, who was quite a bit heavier and at least eight inches shorter than Sean, swung wildly with his left hand. Sean ducked the blow but caught Barclay’s le
ft arm, spun him around and tossed him onto the floor on his back. He flipped Barclay to his belly and squatted on the man’s back.

  Sean glanced up at Emily. “I really need to start carrying handcuffs. This is the second time in as many days that a pair of cuffs would have been useful.”

  Barclay squirmed below him. “Let me up, damn it. You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”

  “I know exactly who you are,” Emily said. Her face was red with anger. “You were with Frankie when he shot Patrone.”

  “How the hell would you know about that?”

  “I was there.”

  “No way.” Though Sean had immobilized him, Barclay twisted around, struggling to get free. “Nobody was anywhere near. Nobody saw what happened.”

  She kept her distance but went down on her knees so she could stare into his eyes. “Three of you dragged Patrone into the office. You took turns slapping him around and calling him a coward, a term that more accurately should have been applied to you three bullies. You threw him in the chair behind the desk. Frankie screwed a silencer onto his gun and shot Patrone in the chest, twice.”

  Barclay mumbled a string of curses. “This is impossible. We were alone. I swore there was no witness.”

  “You misspoke,” she said.

  “Don’t matter,” he growled. “It’s your word against ours.”

  From his years in the FBI, Sean knew Barclay’s assessment was true. A hotshot lawyer could turn everything around and make Emily look like a crackpot. Still, he wished she hadn’t blurted out the whole story and confirmed that she was a witness. She would have been safer if there had been doubt. “Emily, pick up his gun please.”

  Barclay twisted his head to look up at her. “You cut your hair. I wouldn’t have recognized you.”

  But now he would. Now he’d tell the others and they’d know exactly what to look for. Sean bent Barclay’s right arm at an unnatural angle. “Why are you coming after her? What do you want from her?”