The Bricklayer, стр. 43
Suddenly the floor shook with an explosion. Vail shined the light over at the elevator. Dust and debris billowed out from the crack between its doors. Kate said, “I guess that was meant for us. Good thing you never pressed the Down button.” She looked for a reaction from Vail, but his mind was once again racing ahead.
TWENTY-TWO
VAIL LEANED ON THE FENDER OF THEIR RENTED CAR AND WATCHED Kate come out of the hotel entrance. Her gait was measured and she listed a little to the left. He opened the passenger door for her. “Did you check your stitches?”
“No more blood on the bandages. How did you make out with LAPD last night?”
“They were pretty decent about it. I was there two, two and a half hours. They want to get your statement today.”
Once she was in the car, Vail went around and got behind the wheel. “How’d you sleep?”
“Off and on. I was pretty wired up,” she said.
“I’m usually the same way when I knife and shoot a guy.”
She tried not to laugh. “How’d you sleep?”
“Fine, until the two a.m. messenger arrived.”
“The two a.m. messenger?”
“It’s when I go to bed with something on my mind. Sometimes my brain does the work and wakes me up, usually at two a.m.”
“With the answer?”
“Always with an answer; sometimes it’s even the right one.”
“Can’t you make your mind do that during daylight hours?”
“Usually not. It has this obstinacy. I know, I know—where could that possibly come from?”
Kate held her side. “Please don’t make me laugh.” She straightened up. “And what problem did it resolve this time? Was it the same one that was bothering you when that elevator exploded last night?”
“Actually, the elevator exploding was my problem.”
“You don’t think that was meant for us?” she asked.
“Only if we survived the shoot-out. I think there’s a high probability it was meant to take out whoever survived. Otherwise, why didn’t it explode on the way up?”
“I don’t understand. I thought it was Radek who was killed in the explosion.”
“The legal agent met me over at LAPD last night so I could give both statements at once. He said that the body was so badly damaged that they might have to go to DNA to identify it. If they can even come up with Radek’s DNA from other sources. He wanted to know if I had any ideas, which I didn’t.”
“So it’ll take a while, so what? It’s not like he’s going anywhere.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what? You don’t think it’s him?”
“We have to consider the possibility. You have to admit he’s no dummy. Why would he get in an elevator knowing once it started down, it was going to blow up?”
“Maybe it was an accident. You shot him twice. Maybe he’s not as smart with a couple of bullets in him.”
“Maybe.”
“Do you ever get the feeling that the two a.m. messenger is just screwing with you?”
“Almost always,” Vail said.
“I got a call first thing this morning,” Kate said. “There’s a briefing in the major-case room at ten a.m. Maybe it’ll put some of your demons to rest.”
“Who called you?” Vail asked.
“Some clerk. It wasn’t Kaulcrick, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I imagine your boss is not pleased with our lack of sharing.”
“A deputy assistant director wounded in a shoot-out with murderers? He can’t land on me with both feet. Not today anyway.”
“You know what your real sin is? When you guys go back to Washington, you’ll have the better stories at cocktail parties.”
“And all I had to do was get shot.”
“But do I get thanked?”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And since you’re being gracious, what do you say I take you out to dinner tonight? Out out, not something that comes in cardboard containers.”
“That depends.”
“On?”
“Do you want to take me to dinner, or is this something you do for all the women who get shot around you?”
“Usually I just drop them off at the emergency room and keep going.”
“When you make me feel that special, how could I not accept.”
They pulled up to the federal building and could see that both the front and garage entrances were swarming with reporters and their news vans. “If I let you off at the corner, do you think you can sneak by the media without stopping to show them the bullet holes?”
“I’d be lying if I said yes.”
WHEN VAIL AND KATE walked into the major-case room, a smattering of applause erupted. There was nowhere left to sit, but a couple of agents got up and offered Kate their seat. Vail said, “This is typical. Where’s my chair? I shot somebody, too.”
Kaulcrick and the SAC were at the front of the room. “Okay, if we could have everyone’s attention,” Hildebrand said. Everyone turned toward them. “As I’m sure most of you know, last night, Deputy Assistant Director Kate Bannon and Steve Vail were involved in a shoot-out with three of the individuals who were responsible for the murders of five people, two of whom were our own. Assistant Director Kaulcrick and I feel that these three men along with Lee Davis Salton, who was recently killed, and Vince Pendaran made up the group calling itself the Rubaco Pentad, which was responsible for extorting five million dollars from the United States government. Sewed into the lining of the jackets of two of the men were false IDs. Through prints, we discovered their true identities, Wallace David Simms and James William Hudson. Both of them, along with Lee Davis Salton, were convicted bank robbers who served time together in the federal prison at Marion, Illinois.
“We believe the fifth man, the one killed in the elevator explosion, was Victor James Radek, the leader of the group, also incarcerated with the others at Marion. Unfortunately the body was so badly damaged by the blast, we’re having trouble positively identifying him. Along with the phony identification, we found about ten thousand dollars on both Simms and Hudson. All hundred-dollar bills. The serial numbers matched those from the extortion. Also in the lining of their coats, Simms and Hudson each had deposit slips from a New Hampshire bank in the amount of six hundred thousand dollars. After we recovered three million dollars two days ago, that left two million to be split three ways, since Pendaran is in custody. Which, with the amounts already recovered, would come to roughly six hundred thousand a man.”
Don Kaulcrick stepped forward. “As you can imagine, we were pretty excited about finding out where the bulk of the remaining money was, so we contacted the Boston office, who rousted out the bank’s president in the middle of the night. He found that the slips were indeed from his bank, but the account numbers were phonies. It turns out the slips were forgeries. So it seemed we were back to square one. But we did have some good fortune. Tracing phone numbers that were called from a cell phone we found on Simms’s body, we were able to locate an apartment Victor Radek was using. A search of that apartment revealed the blank deposit slips that he used in preparing the forgeries. There was also another cell phone in the apartment. We’re presently pulling those records. Keep your fingers crossed. We have two evidence teams there right now processing the entire place. Radek was originally from New Hampshire, so he could have had connections at that bank. The Boston office is looking into it. We are working under the assumption that Radek was looking to eliminate his partners, and at the same time, a couple more FBI agents. We figure he gave the members of his gang the deposit slips to convince them that their share had been deposited for them. Then whoever survived the gun battle, whether it was his people or ours, was supposed to die in the elevator.”
Someone asked, “Then why did he use the elevator?”
Hildebrand said, “We asked the same question. So we had Sergeant Mike Henning from the LAPD bomb squad give us a hand at the scene as he did at the tunnel drop. Mike.”