Sid and Ronnie Abel walked into the North Hollywood police station and saw Detective Miguel Fuentes already waiting for them near the front desk.
“This is urgent, right?” he said. “Because that was the word you used. ‘Urgent.’”
Ronnie said, “I only said urgent because saying ‘too late’ seemed pessimistic.”
“What is it?”
“Mira Cepic has split.”
“Come to the back with me,” said Fuentes. “I’m going to have to make some calls.” He reached over the counter and took a couple of visitors’ badges out of a drawer, and handed them to Sid and Ronnie, spun a clipboard around, signed them in, and took them to the bay where the homicide detectives worked.
As soon as they were in his cubicle, he indicated the two chairs facing his desk, and they sat. “How do you know she’s gone?”
Sid said, “We drove back to her house.”
“You knew you weren’t supposed to do that.”
“That’s why we didn’t need to ask. The first time we went there, we went through the yard of the house behind hers, that faces the next street. This time when we did that, it was daylight. We could see through a side window that the house was empty. No furniture on the whole first floor except a couple of lamps and some curtains. It occurred to us we might want to rent the place so we could keep an eye on her while we investigated her relationship with James Ballantine. We called the county clerk’s office to have somebody look up who owned the house.”
“Who?”
“Her,” said Ronnie. “Mira Cepic.”
Fuentes said, “So she had enough money for two expensive houses. Enough even to keep one empty. That’s the upside of being a diamond thief. You think she did that to prevent anybody spying on her?”
Sid shrugged. “The place has a very good view of the windows of the house where she was living. It also provided a way to come and go without being seen. She could go from her back door across both yards to the other house’s back door and into that house’s garage, then drive out onto the next street.”
“Do you think she did that?”
Ronnie said, “We looked at her house—both of them, in fact—and didn’t see her. There was still a car in her garage, and none in the garage of the house behind hers. But that garage had tire marks and a few recent drips of a liquid, probably condensation from a car’s air conditioner.”
“So what convinced you that she hadn’t just gone to buy groceries or something?”
“We went inside both houses,” Sid said. “The one behind hers hadn’t been occupied for a while. The heating and air-conditioning had been turned off. Upstairs there was no furniture either, just more lamps on timers. Nobody had done any dusting for at least a few months. I doubt that she ever had a reason to go up there.”
Ronnie said, “We watched her main house for a while longer, and then went in. It has a two-car attached garage, but she used one side for storage—gardening equipment, pots, bags of soil and mulch, a lawn mower. The car is in perfect shape and has gas. It’s a year-old Mercedes. The engine was cool, so we knew she hadn’t used it in a few hours. She couldn’t have gone out and returned without our seeing her. So we went into the house and found signs that she wasn’t coming back.”
“Like what?”
“For one thing, as of today, she has no paper,” said Ronnie. “The woman no longer owns any. There’s a thick carbon deposit on her otherwise-pristine fireplace where she probably burned some bills, receipts, and so on. And there’s a blender on a kitchen counter drying, so she may have used that to destroy other papers. It does a better job than most shredders, and if you’re never planning to use the blender again, it’s fine.”
Fuentes said, “Okay. I get that she did a major housecleaning job, and that you didn’t meet her while you were in her house. But if I were an international thief going away for even a day, I’d be careful I didn’t leave anything incriminating lying around too. That’s the downside of being an international thief. I mean would she just walk away from a house worth about three million? Make that two houses worth six million? And her car?”
Sid said, “There are no guns in the house, Miguel. She made her money pulling armed robberies. She’s living alone, and the guy from Interpol told us all these people are ex-military. There’s no one thing that proves she’s gone for good. But there are a whole lot of little things that all point in that direction.”
“Now you’re making me nervous,” said Fuentes. “If she hasn’t left any guns, she’s got them with her. Are you ready to go on the record with this little break-in?”
Ronnie said, “If we ever want to talk to Mira Cepic, I don’t think we have a choice. She has to be found.”
Fuentes picked up his phone and dialed. “Captain? This is Fuentes. Something just came to my attention. Sid and Ronnie Abel came to tell me our suspect Mira Cepic has packed up and left.” He listened for a time, and then said, “Justification? I’m sure they’ll be able to think of something. Okay, he’s right here.” He handed the phone to Sid. “Captain Albright wants a word.”
Sid took the phone. “Hello, Captain.”
Captain Albright said, “You broke into the woman’s house, right?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“You’re a retired cop, Sid. What were you thinking?”
“We were aware that Mira Cepic lived alone, and was suspected of living on the proceeds of armed robberies. That made her a likely victim for robbery, kidnapping, and extortion. She was especially vulnerable since the house behind hers was unoccupied. We noticed a door in the rear of her house that looked as though it might have been forced, so we knocked to see if she was all right. Since there was no answer, we went in. As soon as we had gone into every room in her house to be sure she wasn’t lying on a floor dead or injured, we left. Then we came directly to the police to report what had happened.”
“Very good for short notice, Sid,” said the captain. “Is any of it true?”
“I would say that trained and experienced retirees like us had a responsibility to check on the woman. And because reliable reporting persons like us were alarmed at what we saw inside, your officers have probable cause to enter the house. It should be easy to get a warrant.”
“Thank you, Sid. As soon as we’ve got it I’ll tell our guys on surveillance to go in.”
“I would,” said Sid. “They’re wasting their time outside in that van.” Sid handed the phone back to Fuentes.
Fuentes put the phone to his ear for a second, and then hung up. He said, “Thanks, I think.”
Ronnie said, “Have you got any more names yet? Any other panthers who have moved into the LA area?”
“I hear it’s only three so far, from Mira Cepic’s phone bill. They were cell phone numbers she had called. Major Crimes got the names and checked them against the list of panther suspects that Interpol had.”
“Who are they?”
“They haven’t told anybody the names yet. I do know that because of the phone company billing records Major Crimes thinks they’re all living in one house. They’re all Serbs, and they’re here on doubtful visas.”
“Doubtful?”
“Granted legally, but probably not factual. They’re here on EB-5 visas. That’s the kind where somebody brings in a certain amount of money and plans to use it to start a business that will employ people. I’m sure they brought the money, but they’ve had three years to start a business, but haven’t. And at least two have arrests in Europe they didn’t mention on their applications.”
Ronnie said, “Has anybody gone to bring them in for questioning?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “They’re still using the list of panthers from Interpol and trying to see which ones entered the United States, so they can get them all at once.”
“It’s probably the best way,” said Ronnie. “It’s impossible to know what the game is until you know who’s playing.”
“I don’t know,” Fuentes said. “It would be great to stop a big robbery from happening, and obviously I’d love to keep anybody from being hurt. But we’re getting nowhere on the crime that got you—and me—involved. This has less and less to do with the murder of James Ballantine.”
“Maybe,” said Ronnie. “But maybe this time we’ve just got to work our way through all the other things that have been happening and understand them before we can piece together the one thing that happened to Ballantine.”
Sid said, “What do you think the department is going to do?”
“I’m not making the decisions,” said Fuentes. “But I think the plan will be to watch the houses of the thieves we identify, and begin staking out all of the best places in the city for stealing diamonds.”