A Spill of Blood Ch. 04

The Centennial was in my hand without me consciously drawing it. The cold savagery poured back in like ice water in my veins. I came back out that door as fast as I went in, and it all made sense when I saw.

My rush from safety startled Gibson as he recovered his balance from her double-tap into his chest. His hand reoriented like the finger of death toward the woman squirming for the cover of a body. He had her. He knew it. She knew it despite her crawl. It was in her eyes. He had her.

Maybe he was right to shoot at me first, I thought in his moment of surprised hesitation. Fight or flight wasn't a choice that part of me ever paid attention to. He saw it in my face. He tried, just as I'd been trying when Santiago went for my gun. This time, though, it wasn't a close race, and I wasn't first among losers.

They don't train cops to shoot to wound. It's a harder shot and the perps can still shoot back. But I knew he wore a vest. One of the things—other than Jess's rock-like presence—that occupied countless days during that early sobriety, that took my mind away from the dark paths it wanted to go down, was the shooting range. Box after box until it became rote. Switch weapon, do it again. Metal silhouettes clanging and paper perforating. I wasn't going to win the Camp Perry championship or go to the Olympics, but this was only the width of an elevator foyer.

The slug punched through khakis, underwear, skin, muscle, and found bone. I'd aimed a trifle high and wide. I wanted to smash an ilium, not sever an iliac artery.

He slumped. He wasn't as tough as Santiago. There was a half-hearted effort to bring the gun up. The temptation to put a round through that carefully coiffed hair was a black flame raging through me. I fought it even though it was a war I wanted to lose. But I wanted a live one... one fucking person I could wring some answers out of.

I hobble-rushed over and body-slammed him. He went down with a strangled groan. I kicked the automatic away. I put my head on a swivel trying to cover everything as I moved to Allen. She was ignoring the growing stain of red on her uniform shirt as she frantically pawed at her partner. "He's gone," she said dully. "Kenny's gone."

I knew that from his glassy stare, but I didn't say it. Something like a marriage breaking up had just happened to her. "The rounds went through the vest?" She nodded.

"Okay. I'm really sorry, but look, this may not be over, so I need you to focus on me for a second. Where are you hit?"

She looked up abstractedly, then down as if noticing for the first time. "It's in my shoulder." Her body was flooding chemicals into her to dull the trauma, but I saw the awareness of pain hit. The honey-colored skin paled and her eyes tightened.

"I need you to focus," I repeated.

I watched her pull it together, inch by inch. The eyes stayed tight, the gaze averted from her partner's body, but she sharpened. Dullness turned to rage. She glanced around to find the nearest wall, then butt-scootched over so she was sitting up. "Okay."

Giving her a look of approval, I moved quickly to skid the plethora of guns strewn around toward her side. All except one, that one I picked up. "I know it was just used to kill a cop, but my prints are already on it, and I'm a lot more comfortable with it." She didn't protest.

I debated sending Nikki for a towel, but I couldn't risk letting her out of my sight. "Get over here," I snapped at her. She looked at me blankly and didn't move. "Now!" I snarled. She scuttled.

"Take your shirt, wad it up, and put pressure on her shoulder. She'll tell you when it's the right amount." Something in my expression said I wasn't going to ask again. I ignored the resulting view, that kind of thing wasn't even remotely on my mind right now. I didn't ignore Allen's warning lift of her pistol as Nikki neared her. She was back in the game.

I limped over and stared down at Gibson. His face was screwed up against the pain, but he was alert. He was lying flat to ease the hip.

"Is Beck in there? Anyone else?" It had been another miscalculation. Mine this time, and I hadn't prepared enough for it. The result was Hopkins dead. I didn't care about the other two pieces of filth, but I felt like shit about that.

I had assumed Beck was hiding in Nikki's apartment. I hadn't considered that he'd get himself a place right near his mistress. A place that made him a tenant who could hand out permanent passes. A place where gunmen could lie in wait.

"If you're lying, I shoot you first."

He didn't flinch at the threat. "I thought Beck would be here, but he's gone. It was just the three of us." I took him at his word. I wasn't going to do anything if that door didn't open. Let the police on their way deal with it. I could hear Allen's voice behind me as she updated the incoming reinforcements.

"I never thought about you," I said. "You didn't give me much, but there were a couple little things that should have made me wonder. I saw you with Lindqvist. She was a Jane Doe; you connected Emerald to him too fast. And how did you know exactly which apartment she was in if you were responding from across the street to shots fired?

"And today, you said, '... talk to the doorman.' How did you know it was an apartment and not an office or store? All I said was building. How did you know there was a doorman? Because you were sitting in it, waiting for me. It went right by me because I was distracted thinking about that alley," I admitted.

He gave a humorless laugh. "It was supposed to be the alley. I changed it. It wasn't supposed to go this way," he gritted out.

"No? How was it supposed to go?" I asked him.

"Obviously, you were supposed to be lying here, not them. You've been a fucking lucky man, Harry. That open call to 911 saved you that first time. That and those two badges showing up. They slowed us down a few seconds or it all would have been over."

"How?"

"Shot in the act of killing that hooker."

"How was that supposed to work? My gun wasn't going to match the rounds in her."

That got a flicker of a smile. "Brady used an M&P like yours for the job, and the barrels are interchangeable in that gun. Yours would have matched when we were done."

"And let me guess. My gun would have been fired by the time others got there. There would be GSR on my hands. There'd even be spent shell casings matching my gun around?"

He gave a nod. "But it was just being sure. Nobody was going to do forensic analysis. Perp killed in the act. Justifiable before the board. Case closed."

"And them?" I nodded to where Allen was slumped against the wall, listening, and watching with blazing eyes while Nikki pressed white-turned-red cloth into her shoulder.

"They were an unfortunate wrinkle. Maybe I shouldn't have called in that ten-ten, but we were trying to make it look legit. Just bad luck they were cruising that block. Five minutes more and it would have been all over."

"You said the call saved me. You were going to pop them too, weren't you?"

He didn't answer. We all knew what it was anyway.

"So, the big question: why? Why all this?"

The flow dried up. He'd answered the questions that didn't matter anymore; we had him for murder and attempted murder, and none of what he said would be admissible. But that was all he was giving me.

I smiled. It was the same cold one his hired stooge had seen one floor up as I watched his life bubble out his throat.

"If I hear that elevator go down, or feet pounding up those steps without you telling me, I'm going to put one more round from the same gun right through your gut. They'll probably be able to patch you up before you die in agony from peritonitis, but there's nothing they'll be able to do about the severed spinal nerve. Prison sucks for cops. Prison and unable to run? I'll send you a tube of butt lube each month."

I heard breath suck in behind me. I paid no attention to it. I stared down with the cold eyes that had only surfaced twice in my life, now a third. He recognized what lurked in them. Promise.

"Alicia?"

I didn't understand the non sequitur, then I saw his gaze go past me. I glanced back. Allen's eyes were locked with his, hooded and inscrutable.

"You okay with that?" Gibson said. "I'm already down."

The tableau held. Nobody breathed.

"Why did Kenny die, Gibson?" The voice was implacable. The meaning was clear: yeah, I'm okay with that.

His faint hope extinguished.

"You've got minutes, maybe seconds. Officer down... they're coming fast."

He caved.

"Beck used me. He's a long-time customer of the people I work for. We've done a little work here and there for him in the past. Like a favor, you know? Anyway, he came to me, told me he heard some shit over some pillow talk. He said some hookers had gotten some solid stuff on things and came to you. He said you needed to be dealt with fast before things go out of hand 'cause he didn't think you were going the blackmail route. Thought you might talk to someone downtown. The boss is out of the country, and—"

That rang a bell. "Richard Bertram?"

"Yeah, him. So we acted. It wasn't until today that I found out Beck had been lying to cover his sorry ass over ripping them off. I came to see him, but he'd rabbited when he realized we were wise to it."

I could tell he wanted to shrug; it just hurt too much.

"But we'd made you into a problem, so we had to clean you up anyway. Only thing was, we were going to leave you in his apartment like you did that other guy. We figured it'd jam Beck up good until we could find him."

I didn't turn to look at Allen as Gibson outed me about the killing in the building. He hadn't been explicit, but somebody might put it together.

"And her?" I didn't point, but he knew I wasn't talking about Allen. His eyes went over my shoulder again and he shrugged. Another dead hooker, that shrug said. I heard another catch of breath behind me and a whimper.

"And what's this business of Bertram's?" He got stubborn again. But once you cracked once, cracking again is easier. I laid the muzzle of my automatic against his forehead and pressed the barrel of the revolver into his stomach. "Right about here, I think."

Death, taxes, and me pulling that trigger if he didn't give.

"He runs girls through a front," he spat out. "High class. Not all of them here legally. I was in a position to facilitate that."

Yeah, as a vice detective, I guess he would be in a position to help.

"So his import business is a front for trafficking?"

Gibson shook his head. "No. The girls are just a side thing he does. Maybe a couple come in with a legit shipment. I dunno." I didn't believe the legit part. "The front's an agency."

"Eroticos? Gallerie?" I named the two who'd sent girls to the party.

"The first one."

"So, her?" Again, everyone knew who I meant. I glanced over at Nikki as I asked. She was shaking her head, her eyes wide.

"Uh-uh. Two different sides to the setup. Different people doing the booking for one type than the other. Different rules." By type, I figured he meant forced into it versus recruited. I remembered Sydney's description of Kimi's situation.

I finally turned to Nikki.

"No!" She echoed his denial. She stared at both of us like a bird with a broken wing staring at a snake. "He just asked me to give you the briefcase."

"You knew Larry was the one who stole from Regan?"

"No!"

I remembered the big-eyed doe. I remembered the story of the paddle-wielding dominatrix. This woman was good at dissembling. I wondered. I remembered she alibied him for an entire evening. I stopped wondering.

"Where's the briefcase? And where's the gun you had?"

"I think the gun's still in the bar. The briefcase is inside."

She'd popped the deadbolt when she'd come out to stop the door from closing and locking her out, apartment-dweller habit. I pushed it open and saw one of those aluminum Zero Halliburton cases on the hall table.

What was really in there?

Beck wasn't going to buy me off. He'd planned on Gibson, Brady, and Santiago giving me my farewell. Cash to run?

"You got Gibson?" I asked Allen. "I'm going to make sure Beck's not in there and secure the gun."

Her Glock came to rest on a bent knee. "Oh, yeah." The voice was hard. The eyes were furious.

I ducked in and grabbed the case, then continued to the bar. The Colt was gone. I unclipped the latches on the briefcase. No stacks of bills. Four pieces of paper. I folded them and put them in my pocket.

"The gun's gone," I reported. "The case is empty."

Nikki jerked in surprise. I thought it was real, but she'd fooled me before.

"So," I said to Allen as I looked at the growing pool of blood by Gibson's hip. "Do you want him to bleed out here or take a shiv in prison?"

Hers was the pitiless gaze of a great white shark on its final run toward you. "If he dies here, some fucker upstairs will decide it's best to sweep it under the rug and he'll be 'killed in the line of duty.'"

• • •

I was out. It had taken almost forty-eight hours. Two days in which my lawyer was a constant presence. Two days in which Alicia Allen's story was unwavering on who the bad guys were and who had "assisted the police." Two days in which Gibson's mouth didn't open except to say, "Lawyer." Two days in which Nikki did a non-stop Sergeant Schultz impression. Two days in which Murray showed up and said, "You're ruining more of my fucking week every day, Morgan."

"You said get you something... that was a something."

"I said let IA handle it." He sighed. "You gonna survive the next one?" He said it with heavy irony. He had a point.

"There's a next one?"

"It's out of my hands right now, but a birdie in IA isn't peeping. I take that as a maybe."

I maybe out-sighed him. Maybe not; he'd had a lot of practice.

Now, I sat in my office and studied the pieces of paper in front of me. What the hell were these things? Two thousand bucks... less than a day-long date with Sasha for Regan. Cypriot Interconnect... a company that screamed, "shell corporation."

I ran them between my fingers. They didn't have that rough feel of engraving like I expected. On a hunch, I pulled out my keychain and a magnifying glass. Yeah, I had a magnifying glass. Shamus Morgan, that's me.

I flipped off the overhead light and used the tiny blue LED flashlight on my keychain to light the paper. Yep! There they were: microscopic yellow dots on the paper showing black under the blue light, each one a mere two-hundred-fiftieth of an inch across, almost invisible to the eye. A machine identification code—a steganographic watermark that identified the printer model and usually the date printed. I didn't know how to read the codes they contained, but it told me someone was using a regular office printer to produce these, and that didn't seem normal to my layman's brain.

A bearer bond... one where you couldn't just ask the company to send you a new certificate. You had to have this piece of paper. But laser printed?

I stared at words until they swam. I admired the fancy border, but the magnifying glass showed nothing except loops and whorls. I used Google to translate the French, Greek, and what I learned was Turkish. They were all pretty close to the same legal gobbledygook.

What makes you, Mr. Bond 15999977, so valuable?

I looked again. Then I compared the second one to it. Then I thought some more, and brought out one of the bonds from a different company we'd snatched.

"Well, I think I've figured out the MacGuffin we've been chasing," I said to the two women later that day. With the hunters gone and Beck on the run, Sydney had returned from Uncle Jimmy's. But she wasn't eager to go to her apartment.

"There was a dead body in there. It gives me the jeebies."

Jess and Sydney leaned in. I could have just told them in one sentence what I guessed, but where's the thunder in that? I set three of the certificates in front of them, the two we'd been looking for plus one of the others I'd pulled from the briefcase.

"First, look at the serial numbers on the two from Cypriot Interconnect taken from Regan: 15999977 and 16000023. I started wondering why they used eight-digit serial numbers for thousand-dollar certificates. Did they really issue over 16 billion dollars' worth of bonds? But as I stared at them, I noticed something. Add them."

"Thirty-two million," Jess said after a half a second.

"A nice round number, don't you think? Coincidence? Maybe. But wouldn't thirty-two million be a lot more reason for people to be killed than two thousand?"

I had their interest now.

"You're suggesting the serial numbers are how much they're worth," Jess said.

I nodded. "And that was the key."

"Knowing their values?"

"No... starting to think in terms of it wasn't the certificates. It was an easy mistake to make. They're bearer bonds, so in theory, they're worth cash to whoever holds the piece of paper at any given moment. But that was a red herring. It was what was written on the paper. And there are only three differences between those two Cypriot certificates: the serial number and the printer's marks at the bottom."

I pointed at the tiny writing at the bottom of the document.

"They're on everything. People pay no attention to them. Hell, even a dollar bill has its plate number, position on the sheet, and Federal Reserve District. But if you asked most people what numbers were on it other than the value and maybe the serial number, they'd give you a blank stare."

Jess studied them. "But... shouldn't they be the same? I mean, these would have been printed at the same time."

I touched my finger to my nose. "Bingo! And wouldn't you expect them to have a different format on this bond from another company?" I gestured at the bond issued under a different name.

"Some kind of code?" Sydney asked doubtfully.

"Sort of. That bit at the bottom right, it seems like random characters but if you look at all three documents, the only characters are zero through nine and A through F. Those are the characters used to represent hexadecimal values... one way of representing computer values." I'd spent a lot of time on Wikipedia once the idea got in my head. "And there are exactly sixty-four on each paper. I'd bet a ton of money that's a 256-bit encryption key. In other words, a password."

"To what?"

"It took me a while, but I had an idea." My finger slid over to a couple of identifiers on the bottom left. "Completely random numbers and letters. Not just A to F, and there's both uppercase and lowercase. But glue them together and maybe what you have is a Bitcoin address. Each of these fits in the lengths Wikipedia says are allowed."

Neither Jess nor I were computer experts, and I didn't think Sydney was either. But we all lived in the twenty-first century; we knew what Bitcoin was in layman's terms. Like Swiss bank accounts you could access from anywhere.

• • •

"Well, here're your payoffs from whatever your racket is." I set the two certificates on Regan's desk.

Something in my tone caused him to look at me sharply. "What do you mean by that?"

"Thirty-two million. That's a lot of money."

The stare was long and heavy. It was decidedly unfriendly. "You've figured it out." It was a statement, not a question.

"I figure Bitcoin addresses and keys."

"Not Bitcoin, per se, but electronic currency, yes. Did you go into the accounts?"

"No. I wasn't sure how to do that."

He nodded. "Well, let's confirm that, shall we?"

"What do you mean?"

The smile came back at knowing something I didn't. "You can see every transaction on electronic currency. Come with me."

He rose and, sandwiched between him and Mitchell, I had no choice but to follow him out of his office and down the hall to another room that was fitted out like a real office: desk, chair, filing cabinet, and computer. It was spartan, not like the luxurious den he called an office down the hall. He sat. I stood.