“This text came from a prepaid boost phone,” Frye said. “I printed it out for you.”
He passed over a plain sheet of copy paper with a smattering of words: “Time to pay up.”
“When did you get this?” I asked.
“After the bridge bombs. It came to me,” said Lansing. “I thought it was spam. It meant nothing to me. We didn’t know that the bridge incident was related to us,” said the lawyer, “until the FBI descended on our Hayes Valley store.”
Frye said, “Then Michael got another text. Identical message, but they followed up the text with a phone call naming the amount. We decided to pay.”
Of course they paid. Chuck’s Prime only cared about keeping the company name off the record and out of the news.
“How much?” Conklin asked.
“Fifty thousand,” said Frye. He was slapping at his pockets, looking for his smokes. He found a worn pack of an unfiltered brand, opened it, closed it, and put it back in his jacket pocket.
He said, “We bundled the bills in a Chuck’s Big Lunch Box and left the box in a garbage can at our Monterey location.”
Conklin said to the head cheese, “You’re telling us you believed that would be the end of it?”
“Yes. Of course. And we agreed, Lou and I,” said Jansing. “Rather than let someone else die, we forked over the money. It seemed like the best course.”
I wanted to shout at the two suits, “You morons.”
Instead I said, “So rather than call the cops, have them monitor the transfer, you trusted a bomber, a murderer, an extortionist, when he said that there would be no more bombs.”
Jansing had gone pale around his eyes and mouth. I didn’t think he was feeling remorse. More like he was realizing how much shit was about to hit the fan.
“We employ thousands of people, all of whom would be negatively impacted if the public—”
“The FBI contacted us two hours ago,” I said, cutting his self-serving spiel off at the knees. “A Chuck’s customer exploded from inside out. Happened in one of your parking lots in LA.”
I passed the name of the FBI guy across the desk to Jansing and said, “I spoke with this gentleman, Special Agent Beskin, and he’s about to call you. I advise you to tell him everything you know. Any questions?”
CHAPTER 32
CINDY WAS AT her desk at the Chron, rereading her old Randy Fish files, straining them for any missed morsel of information that could lead to Morales. By 10:00 a.m. she had put down three cups of coffee and two churros, the only food groups that appealed to her in her current mood.
Apparently her body was telling her what she needed.
Henry Tyler was in Washington today, meaning Cindy had a reprieve from a humiliating meeting where she would have to inform him that her story had gotten away from her and she wouldn’t be nominated for the Pulitzer anytime soon.
It was a conversation she really didn’t want to have.
Just then, a gaggle of her coworkers who were raving about a new reality dating show parked themselves in the hallway outside her office. Cindy got up and shut the door, and when she returned to her desk, an e-mail had arrived from
[email protected].
Hope sprang, leapt around, did a pirouette and a curtsy.
Hi Cindy,
Morales’s prints were found in the house, but they were dusty. So give yourself a gold star for figuring that out, anyway. Fyi, if you don’t know, there was a bank robbery in Chicago on Monday and the perp was tentatively id’d as our friend Mac. According to what I got from our cop network, she shot and killed two people and got away with about a thousand dollars. Disappeared in plain sight, right outside of the bank. So maybe Morales was last seen in Chicago. Or maybe it was someone who looked like her.
All the best,
Pat
The few short lines felt to Cindy like bright sunshine breaking through the cloud cover after forty days and nights of torrential rain. She’d been right that Morales had used the Fish house as a hideout.
And now here came a fresh lead.
Morales had staged a bank holdup and she had killed two people—both a measure of her psychopathy and of her desperation.
No question in Cindy’s mind, Morales was going to need money again soon and she would resurface.
Cindy went online, searched for “bank robbery, Chicago” and spent the next hour reading about it in the Chicago papers. Mackie Morales wasn’t mentioned by name. Law enforcement was no doubt working according to the same principle as when Cindy had found out that the Fish house was wired with explosives.
Namely, they had to keep Morales out of the press so that she wouldn’t know that she’d been exposed.
Cindy located the videos from the Chicago news broadcasts. Customers who had fled the bank right after the shootings had been interviewed by the local press.