I WOKE IN a sitting position, my back propped up in bed, a partial clump of papers from the 1,200-page police report lying facedown on my chest. Two-and-a-half reams of paper in total, and with all of those cops out shaking the trees, they couldn’t find even one good lead. Marie sat in bed next to me, her legs crossed, her reading glasses perched on the tip of her cute little nose as she read from the same file, the pages scattered out before her. She wore a dark copper-colored silk nightie that accented her skin. She smelled of lilac.
I tried to peer around her to the clock. “What time is it?”
She didn’t look over when she answered, “Three twenty-one a.m.”
“You shouldn’t be reading that.”
No reply.
“It’ll give you nightmares.” I was groggy and hadn’t thought that one through. Night terrors still visited her most every night. In them, she stood, gun in hand, debating the most difficult decision of her life. Shoot or don’t shoot. And she had to make it in a split second. She turned and looked over the top of her glasses.
I held up my hand in surrender and gave her my best smile. “You know you look sexy with those glasses on.” I leaned over to kiss her. She gave me her cheek. Still angry over what had happened the day before. Just hours in the past, really.
I shuffled together the loose pages on my chest. “You find anything interesting?”
She took off her glasses. “This whole thing is interesting to me. I’ve never read anything like it. The money drop debacle is right out of a locked-room mystery, like the ones I read when I was a kid. Right from the pages of Agatha Christie. Well, sort of.”
“I haven’t gotten that far,” I said. “I’m still in the interviews surrounding the abduction.”
She nodded. “That’s some dry reading; no wonder you fell asleep. Nothing there at all unless I missed something. It is odd though—no one, and I mean no one, saw a thing in regard to that child being kidnapped.”
“Oh, is that right? You’re Sherlock Holmes now?”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way until now, but yes, and you’re the bumbling Doctor Watson.”
I chuckled. “Thanks for that. Tell me, wise ol’ Ms. Holmes, what can you derive from the lack of clues in the witness statements?”
She thought for a moment. “Well, if absolutely no one saw anything”—she held up a good chunk of pages—“and let me tell you, these guys left no stone unturned. They talked to everyone and everyone’s brother and sister for that matter. Then I’d have to surmise that the butler did it.”
“Meaning?”
“The nanny, Lilian Morales, has to be involved.”
“I only read the ten or fifteen pages before I fell asleep, but in the summary, it said the ransom demand included the return of Emily and Lilian for the two million dollars.”
“That’s right, but couldn’t that be a ruse, you know, a ploy?”
“Is that what you believe?”
She fanned through the pages. “There are some supplemental reports from FBI agents who were sent down to Guatemala to interview all of Lilian’s relatives. The family is in debt up to their eyeballs, probably due to the cost of getting Lilian into the U.S. That’s what one agent thinks. Lilian sends them money every month through Western Union. Lilian’s two friends here in the States both say she’s the salt of the earth and lives very frugally. She eats beans and rice and vegetables and only allows herself chicken on Sundays. She wears secondhand clothes and sits in the park feeding the pigeons for entertainment on her days off. Every extra penny goes south to her folks.”
“Answer the question. Do you think she’s involved?”
“That’s not fair, Bruno. All I have here is paper. I wasn’t there to look any of these people in the eye.”
“Based on the paper in your hand.”
“The only avenue that makes any sense to me is Lilian being involved. Are all kidnap cases like this one?”
“No.” I didn’t want to give her the stats on outcomes. Especially ones where the victims aren’t recovered after the money drop. “Tell me about the drop.”
She shuffled the papers again, came up with what she wanted, and put her glasses back on. “Five days ago, two million dollars in twenties and fifties were put into a specific kind of Louie Vuitton bag, two of them. The kidnapper gave the model and size. Then the kidnapper ran the father, John Mosely, from one location to another to see if he had a tail. Until finally they told him the address in Altadena—311 East Sierra Madre Boulevard. It says here that it’s almost exclusively an African American neighborhood.”
“Eldridge, the guy I’m going to talk to in the jail in a few hours, is a Crip, and the Crips run that hood. In fact, they run most all of Altadena. Go on.”
She handed me some cocoa butter. I knew what to do and started to rub some on her tummy to avoid stretch marks, a nightly activity.
She said, “The kidnapper didn’t give the FBI any time to check the address for the drop. On the pay phone, they told Mosely to go inside the townhouse, set the two bags of money down in the center of the living room, and leave. The door was unlocked when he got there. The FBI had the back and the front covered. They watched it for about an hour when this Eldridge character pulled up to the front of the townhouse in a stolen Lexus, a gold four-door. He went in, stayed for less than ten minutes, and then ran out. He jumped in the Lexus and took off at high speed.”
I stopped rubbing. “Did he have the two Louis Vuitton bags?”
“Hey?”
“Oh.” I continued the massage.
She said, “He had two brown paper grocery-type bags, crumpled up and used. They chased the Lexus around for”—she referred to the report and read from parts of it—“twenty-one minutes. He wasn’t running very fast. One agent said it was almost as if Eldridge didn’t really want to get away. They never lost sight of him. And there was a helicopter right over the top of him the whole time. The LAPD patrol unit finally did a PIT Maneuver, a Pursuit Intervention Technique, on the Lexus. It spun out and wrapped around a magnolia tree. Eldridge got out and fled on foot. He was caught.”
“And the money wasn’t in the car?”
“Right. The paper bags contained wadded-up dirty clothes that belonged to the people who owned the townhouse. FBI went back to the townhouse and the Louis Vuitton bags and the money were not there. They tore the place apart looking for it.”
“What about the GPS bugs the FBI put in the money and the bags?”
She eyed me. “I thought you said you didn’t read that far into the report?”
“It’s standard procedure.”
“The bugs were left sitting in the middle of the floor where the bags had been left—now gone.”
“Okay, tell me. What happened to the money?”
She smiled. “The FBI screwed up. The agent who was covering the back of the townhouses left his position. He said he thought the action was with the pursuit and that Eldridge had to have the money. He thought that logic dictated he jump into the chase. He didn’t tell anyone he was leaving his position.”
“That was a rookie move. Commanders usually post the rookies at the back or in a position where the least amount of initiative will be needed.”
“Anyway,” Marie said, “this agent caught himself after only three minutes—or so he says in his statement—realized his error, and went back.”
“Three minutes, that’s plenty of time to get away.”
“But the agent didn’t come forward with this mistake until all the agents were called in to be interviewed individually, by this Harold Purdy from D.C. He’s the guy who interviewed Eldridge in jail. That’s when this FBI agent, Joseph Danforth, admitted to his error.”
“You want me to get your thighs?”
“Nice try, cowboy. Just keep on with it, you’re doing fine.”
I continued to rub. “They suspended him, didn’t they?”
“That’s right, how did you know?”
“It’s the FBI we’re talking about. They don’t hold with mistakes; they’re a black eye on the entire Bureau. And to compound matters, the victims are the Deputy Director’s family members.”
“Bruno.” She shook some of the supplemental reports. “Chulack sent us everything. They have a team watching their own agent. They’re following him in a surveillance around the clock. As if they think he might be in league with the kidnappers. Can you believe that? They even did a financial background check on him.”
“Dan said they checked everything that could be checked. I don’t blame him. Who did the townhouse belong to?”
“The owners were both at work. Nice couple, Simon and Nora Wilson. They checked out okay. The kidnappers just picked out some random townhouse.”
“So where did the two million dollars get off to?”
“Good question.”