A Shooting at Auke Bay Read online

  “It’s equally important now for you to remain strong,” Dr. Shannon continued. “That’s the best thing you can do for Trent now. Strength and patience.”

  After Dr. Shannon left, the two women stood at the window looking in at Trent. His head was now wrapped in a white bandage. He was breathing with the assistance of a machine. But he was breathing.

  “Your husband is one tough guy, Darcey,” Nancy said. “He got shot in the head and he looks like he’s only having a nice nap. Remember, too, when the dirty cop slipped that nasty bug into Trent’s clothes. The bug’s bite put a virus in his blood that doctors had never seen before. He survived that. Does he still have symptoms from that?”

  “Not many in the last couple of years. The antidote and vaccine Dr. Raymond made from the powder Preston Johnson gave us before he died seems to have worked.”

  Johnson was Darcey’s friend and neighbor in San Francisco. Darcey didn’t know he was also a legendary assassin known as Jimmy Shadow who did his job in ways that made it difficult to know how his victims died. He had supplied the bug to former New Orleans cop Steve Burgess who sought revenge against Marshall.

  When Johnson discovered that Burgess used the bug in an attempt to kill his friend Trent, he lured Burgess to his home. There it was Burgess who died, run through with the steel blade concealed in the cane Johnson was never without. Before he died after drinking a rare champagne to which he had added poison to his own glass, the old man gave Trent a powder from which the cure could be made.

  “And then there were the lunatics who tried to kill you and Trent and your mother in Louisiana because they thought a fortune in stolen Confederate gold was stashed on your family’s farm,” Nancy reminded her friend.

  “Yeah, another crooked cop and my crazy, long lost distant cousin from Colorado. Well, they were right,” Darcey said. “The gold was there though we never knew it until Trent figured it out. And if it weren’t for those lunatics we would never have met. I wouldn’t have Trent and Kelli now.”

  “But there are less stressful ways to meet men.”

  “Yeah, and I’m getting tired of people trying to kill my husband,” Darcey declared.

  “I think you guys need to get a new hobby. Take up bowling or something.”

  “Life with Trent Marshall is never dull,” Darcey said with a sad smile as she continued to stare at her wounded husband. “That won’t change, Nancy. Ever.”

  At ten o’clock Robert introduced SFPD Captain Christopher Booth to APD Chief Ben Kline. They talked cop stuff briefly and soon were on a first name basis.

  Robert told the chief they had a new development.

  “I didn’t want to discuss it on the phone, Ben,” Robert said. “I brought Christopher along because he’s the one who made the connection.”

  “I recognized one of your leading citizens last night, Ben,” Booth said, “as a very dangerous criminal who disappeared from the Bay area four years ago. Jim Segal, who I understand owns JS Bistro, is really Pietro Greco, or sometimes Peter Greco.”

  The chief was taken completely by surprise.

  “Jim Segal?” Kline said. “That’s hard to believe.”

  “What do you really know about Jim Segal, aka Peter Greco, aka Pietro Greco?” Robert asked.

  “Not much really,” the chief replied. “He hasn’t been here long. He’s a native Alaskan who made it good elsewhere and came home with a ton of money. Or at least that’s the story I heard. Never had any reason to doubt it until now. What I do know is that on any given night his restaurant is filled with some of the most important people in the state. So what do you know about him?”

  The last statement was directed at Booth.

  “Pietro Greco was both consigliere and underboss to Jonathan Rossi, the last don of the Rossi Mafia family in San Francisco,” Christopher responded. “I always thought he was the real brains behind the family’s business ventures.

  “Whoever had the brains convinced three other criminal organizations to join the Rossi family in a super federation of crime. The Thai gang Spitting Cobra. Some outlaw bikers calling themselves the Barons of Lucifer. A mysterious Middle Eastern group known only as the Scourge. Together the four of them could put an army on the street.”

  Kline whistled.

  “That’s impressive,” he said. “But what does it all have to do with Trent Marshall?

  “I was assigned to figure out how the alliance was managing to do business, specifically how they were moving illegal money around the globe and getting it into the legitimate economy. Since I had no experience in such things, I figured somebody wanted to be sure any investigation into the gangs’ businesses wouldn’t go anywhere.

  “Jordan Baron is a cop in New Orleans who I worked with on a case involving both our cities. He knew Trent had knowledge of international money laundering from a story he had published back in his days as an investigative reporter. Jordan got us together. With cooperation from the FBI and the police force in the suburban community where the Barons had their headquarters, we developed a strategy we called Operation Den of Snakes. The goal was to disrupt the trust among the four groups so they would turn on each other. The strategy worked.”

  “So our boy Segal escaped the net?” Kline asked.

  “I think he did a little more than that,” Booth replied. “The leaders of all four gangs were assassinated by someone. They all kept large sums of cash at their headquarters as emergency money. Each time we got to the scene of one of the murders, the money was gone. Additionally, Rossi was thought to keep a safe deposit box with another large amount of cash. As his underboss, Greco would have had access to that as well.

  “Finally, a very expensive yacht owned by the leader of Spitting Cobra disappeared about the same time,” Booth wound up his briefing.

  “When did all this happen?” Kline asked.

  “Four years ago.”

  “Hmmm. I think it was around that time that Segal showed up here. It was obvious he had a lot of money and didn’t need to work. For a while, he just wandered around the state. He said he’d been gone for a long time and wanted to get reacquainted with his native land,” Kline said. “He opened the restaurant about a year after he got here. Said he was bored, wanted something to do, and had always wanted to own a restaurant.”

  “Did he ever tell anyone how he made his fortune?” Monk asked.

  “No, he was pretty vague about it. This is all quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  Monk shook his head.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Robert,” Kline said, sounding more lighthearted than he felt. “There’s no such thing as coincidence in crime, corruption or politics. So where do we go from here?”

  “I thought Segal spotted Trent and feared he would be recognized if Trent saw him,” Christopher said. “But Robert thinks there’s more to it than that.”

  “If that’s all it was, Segal could have just stayed out of sight until Trent and his family left town. It was obvious they wouldn’t be around for long,” Monk said. “No, I think there’s something big going on that Segal wants to protect. He didn’t want to take the chance that Trent might stumble onto something. Don’t yet know what it is but I think it goes beyond Alaska.”

  “Do you have any more leads?” Kline asked.

  “Just one possible,” Robert said. “You know the shooter also killed Warren Perkins, the Nanuq’s deck hand. I’ve been asking myself why he would do that. It seems unnecessarily risky unless there was a good reason. The Nanuq’s owner told me that Perkins spent every evening at a waterfront dive bar in Seattle when they were in their home port. I wonder if Segal somehow found out that Trent and his family were planning a private Alaska cruise. If so, I can theorize that he might have flown to Seattle himself. He could easily arrange to meet the deck hand at his favorite bar. He could probably just as easily bribe Perkins. With a member of the crew on his payroll, Segal would know where Trent was on any given day.

  “We’re thinking about one of us flying t
o Seattle to talk to people at the bar Perkins hung out in. If we show them a picture of Segal we could get lucky. Someone might remember seeing Segal and Perkins together. At least we’d know we’re on the right track.”

  “I’m going to call my contact with the FBI in San Francisco today,” Christopher added. “He might be able to get one of his guys in Seattle to do the legwork and save us the trip.”

  “Meanwhile, what can I do?” Kline asked.

  “Not much to do now, Ben,” Monk said. “Maybe just quietly keep an eye on Segal. We have to make sure he doesn’t get spooked and disappear again. We appreciate that you’ve had your guys discreetly looking after Trent in the hospital. Keeping tabs on Segal has to be discreet as well.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got some good guys I’ll put on Segal. They won’t be spotted. He’s opening a restaurant in Juneau. He flies down there every couple of weeks. Can’t do much about that. But if he leaves town, we’ll know about it. And if he tries to get at Marshall again, we can stop that.”

  “What about here in Anchorage, Ben?” Monk asked. “Anything out of the ordinary recently?”

  Kline frowned.

  “I hate this kind of thing,” he said. “We don’t want to say anything but we might have a serial killer on our hands. A maid in one of our rent-by-the-hour hotels found a body this morning. This is the third one. They show up about every six months.”

  “Doesn’t sound good,” Monk said.

  “This one is strange, Robert,” Kline said.

  “Serial killers are all strange,” Monk observed.

  “Yeah, but this one is even stranger than usual. In most of these cases it’s a man offing women in some kind of kinky sex thing. There might be a sex connection in this one, too, but the first two victims were men. The DNA indicates the killer is a woman but we can’t be certain. Then the body found this morning was a woman. Tough to figure.”

  “You’re right,” Christopher said. “That doesn’t fit a pattern.”

  “Don’t breathe a word of this, Christopher,” Kline urged. “The last thing I need is a city full of panic-stricken people.”

  Monk and Booth both pledged their discretion and rose to leave. Monk stopped at the door.

  “I just had a thought,” he said, turning back to the chief. “Maybe there is something you can do.”

  Segal walked the few blocks to the restaurant just before noon. He liked to be around when both the lunch and dinner crowds began arriving. Playing host was what he enjoyed. He had Jayne and other staff to handle everything else.

  After half an hour greeting arriving guests, he walked the short distance to the stairs leading up to his office. He noticed again the young woman with black and red striped hair as he passed the kitchen.

  She intrigued him. Never more so than today. She turned away from him at an angle. From the side, he saw something he’d not seen in her before. Feminine curves. It occurred to him that she dressed to downplay what he now saw was an attractive body. Curious, he thought. Perhaps she might be worth getting to know.

  He found Jayne at her desk as usual but looking haggard. She was chain smoking, lighting one cigarette with another.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, not out of concern for her but rather wanting to be assured that all was well with his business.

  “Yeah, I’m all right. Just couldn’t sleep last night.”

  He nodded though he wasn’t sure she was being truthful. He thought he would have to keep an eye on her.

  The young woman never looked directly at Segal but always watched him from beneath lowered lashes. She saw him hesitate as he walked by the kitchen. She felt his eyes roaming over her body. So far, she had successfully avoided attracting him. With sudden perspicacity, she thought maybe she should stop avoiding him.

  Following the success of Operation Den of Snakes, the FBI Special Agent in Charge for the San Francisco area was called back to Washington, D.C., with a significant promotion. Joseph Brady, the agent who had actually led the FBI contingent assigned to Booth’s task force, was also rewarded by being named the new SAiC.

  Christopher got the answer to his second question when he asked the first.

  “I’d like to help you, Christopher,” Brady said, “but we’re stretched about as thin as we can get.”

  “What’s going on, Joseph?”

  “Smuggling like we’ve never seen before,” Brady answered. “We’re drowning in pirated goods.”

  “CDs? Movies and music?”

  “Some of that but streaming movies and apps to download music cheap have made that market hardly worth the risk,” Brady said. “We’re seeing fake everything else. Designer fashions. Designer jewelry. Shoes. Ladies accessories. Everything you can imagine. All fake. Our good citizens are happy paying a quarter of the price a legitimate merchant would charge for the real goods. If they fall apart a few months later, it’s no big deal. There’s plenty more of the fake stuff for sale cheap. The big stores are screaming at us to put a stop to it.”

  “Is it just in the Bay area?” Booth asked.

  “It’s all up and down the west coast,” Brady’s replied. “This stuff is showing up everywhere. We’re not sure where it’s coming in. It has to be by water. Air and ground traffic are both watched too closely. The coast from the Canadian border to Mexico is fairly congested. But there are some secluded coves. The Coast Guard is patrolling but they can’t be everywhere. Meanwhile we’re working on land to figure out who’s behind it all.”

  “Sounds like you have your hands full.”

  “More than my hands can hold,” Brady said. “I’d like to help you, Christopher, but all my guys are working long hours now. Seattle’s the same.”

  “It’s not a problem, Joseph,” Booth assured the federal cop. “I was being lazy. Trying to save myself some shoe leather. I’ll get it handled.”

  The mood was more somber when the group gathered for the cocktail hour on the deck. Darcey brought out two bottles of Napa Merlot. Darcey remained subdued after her conversation with Dr. Shannon. She had been so optimistic that she would find Trent moved out of ICU. The disappointment visibly affected her.

  Robert discussed his plan for their next step. His idea didn’t improve her mood.

  “I guess I’ll be going to Seattle,” Christopher said. “My FBI buddy tells me they have their hands full. He can’t spare anyone to do our legwork.”

  “What’s tying them up?” Robert asked.

  “Smuggling. Fake goods. Everything from fashions and accessories to electronics. Even pharmaceuticals. Viagra. Lipitor. Plavix.”

  “Fake blood thinners and cholesterol medicine?” Nancy said, acrimoniously. “That’s cruel. There are a lot of people who’ll buy cheap drugs because they can’t afford the prices the big drug companies charge. And they won’t know they’re taking fake pills. I hope Joseph catches whoever’s doing this and shoots them. Then treat them with their own fake drugs.”

  Robert started to say something but stopped himself. Something Nancy said triggered a thought but it was elusive. He stared out over Cook Inlet trying to capture it.

  Same day. Dimension unknown.

  Trent thought he was alive. He was still connected to machines so he must be alive.

  Nothing more had changed as far as he could tell. He couldn’t open his eyes. He couldn’t speak. He could hear. He could sense the presence of others.

  He knew Darcey had been here earlier. Someone was with her. Another woman. He didn’t know who it could be. Betty perhaps? It would seem logical that her mother would be with her.

  He hoped Kelli was well. He knew Darcey, Betty, and Ivy would see that she was. He thought he was the only one injured. But he had no way of knowing.

  His head felt different. It felt like he was wearing a hat. Why would he wear a hat? Made no sense.

  He was tired. No, not tired. He was drowsy. It was hard to stay awake.

  Drugs. They must have given him drugs to make him sleep.

  Why did they want him to sle
ep?

  Dimension still unknown.

  July 14th

  Bastille Day in Anchorage promised to be the warmest day of the summer so far though the sky was gray. The bright blue of the past few days was blotted by clouds, none of which threatened the city with cooling rain.

  The specialty hospital, which had been treating Trent Marshall, had erected a podium in the lobby, complete with microphone. Five of the reporters in the room had added their own microphones. Three cameras were set up and ready when APD Chief Ben Kline entered the room. He was accompanied by Dr. Natalie Shannon. Conversation in the room stopped.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Kline began. “Thank you for being here. This is not a happy occasion nor is mine a pleasant duty.”

  He paused before continuing.

  “It’s my sad duty to inform you that a well-known visitor to our state has been shot. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Trent Marshall was shot by an assassin in Juneau six days ago. Despite the heroic efforts of Doctor Natalie Shannon and her associates here, Mr. Marshall has not regained consciousness. It is becoming apparent that the odds of his survival are not good. My office is supporting the Juneau Police Department as it investigates this case.”

  “Do you have any leads, Chief?” was the first question.

  “I would classify them more as theories at this point,” Kline said. “Whoever shot Mr. Marshall was very good at his job.”

  “A professional hit?”

  “I would say so,” Kline responded. “We are approaching the investigation with that assumption. As you might imagine, that means a far more extensive search for the shooter.”

  “Were there any other victims?” was the next question.

  “Yes, one other man was killed,” Kline said. “His name hasn’t yet been released as we’re having difficulty finding his next of kin. I can only tell you the second man was not a resident of Alaska either. Now that’s all I have. If you have any questions regarding the injuries Mr. Marshall suffered, Dr. Shannon will address them.”

  Darcey had refused to watch Chief Kline’s press conference. She knew it was coming. She knew what he would say. She wouldn’t watch him. She wouldn’t listen to him. Nancy brewed a pot of tea. They sat together in the sitting room. In silence.