The Gods of Guilt(99)

The video then jumped to another view—this one from a camera in the backyard pointed toward the rear of the house. I noticed that the time count jumped backwards ten seconds. I watched and waited and then I saw two figures emerge from both side yards of the house and meet at the rear door. Under the light over the door I could make out their faces. Again it was Lankford and Marco. Lankford knocked on the door but Marco didn’t wait for an answer. He squatted down and went to work on the doorknob, obviously attempting to pick the lock.

“This is amazing,” I said. “I can’t believe we got it.”

“What exactly is it?” Lorna asked. “Cisco wouldn’t tell me. He said it was top secret but a game changer.”

“It is—a game changer, I mean. I’ll tell you in a minute. It’s not top secret.”

I silently watched the rest of the video. Marco got the door open and looked back at Lankford and nodded. He then disappeared inside while Lankford waited outside, his back to the door, and kept watch.

The video jumped inside the house to an overhead camera in the kitchen. It was a fish-eye lens, most likely housed in a smoke detector. Marco walked beneath the camera from the back door to a hallway but then turned around and came back to the kitchen. He crossed the floor and went to the refrigerator, opened the freezer, and reached in. He started checking through the various frozen food containers until he selected a package that contained two pieces of French bread pizza. Living alone, I knew the brand and the pizza well. Marco carefully opened the box without tearing the flap. He then took out one of the plastic-wrapped pizzas and secured it under his arm while he reached into the pocket of his black-leather bomber jacket and removed something. His hand moved too fast for me to identify what he held, but whatever it was, he shoved it into the pizza box and then put the pizza back in on top of it. He returned the box to the freezer under several other packages and turned to the back door.

The video jumped outside again and I saw Marco step out of the house, lock the door, and close it. He had been inside under a minute. He nodded to Lankford and they separated, each walking down the side of the house they had come from. The video ended there.

I looked up to see where we were. Lorna was about to turn onto the 101 from Sunset. I could see down the ramp that the freeway was the usual morning parking lot. I felt the first slight tightening in my chest that always came with thoughts of being late for court.

“Why’d you go this way?”

“Because I asked you and you told me to be quiet. You try so many different ways every day, I didn’t know what you wanted.”

“Earl always took pride in beating the traffic. He always tried different ways.”

“Well, Earl isn’t here.”

“I know.”

I put it aside and tried to think about what I had just seen on the video. I wasn’t sure yet how I would use it, but I knew without a doubt it was courtroom gold. We had captured on film a rogue drug agent and his accomplice planting drugs in Stratton Sterghos’s house as some sort of scheme to eliminate or control him as a witness. This took things far beyond anything I was expecting.

I whistled low as I closed the iPad and then started putting it back into Lorna’s bag.

“Okay, now can you tell me what that is and what you’re so excited about that it has you whistling?”

I nodded.

“Okay, you saw that we amended our witness list yesterday, right?”

“Yes, and the judge wants to talk about it today.”

“Right. Well, that was part of a play.”

“You mean like one of Legal Siegel’s moves?”

“Yeah, but it’s my move. We’re calling it ‘Marco Polo.’ The amended list had lots of new names on it. You heard Forsythe complain about them.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, one of the names on the list was Stratton Sterghos. The list was designed to make it look like we were cloaking him, sort of hoping to slip him through with all the others. He was listed right in the middle of all the names of the tenants from Gloria’s building. But the play is that we wanted the prosecution team to think that we were up to something and to look for the name that we were hiding in plain sight.”

“Stratton Sterghos.”

“Right.”

“So who is Stratton Sterghos?”

“It’s not really who he is. It’s where he lives. This video is from his house in Glendale. It is directly across the street from a house where ten years ago two drug dealers were murdered.”

“And what’s that have to do with Gloria Dayton?”

“Nothing directly. But we’ve been trying to make the connection between Lankford, the DA investigator who was following Gloria before her murder, and Agent Marco with the DEA, who she snitched for. For our defense theory to work, those two have to be connected somewhere down the line. That’s what Cisco has been working on and we thought we found it in that unsolved double-murder case. The lead investigator on it was then–Glendale police detective Lee Lankford. And the two victims were connected to the Sinaloa Cartel—the same group Hector Moya is connected to. We know Marco had a hard-on for Moya back then, so it stands to reason he and his unit—the Interagency Cartel Enforcement team, ICE-T for short—were aware of and maybe even working on the two guys that got whacked in that house.”