Toni smiled. “No problem. This guy here-” that would be me, “-talks like that all the time.”
“What makes you say he’s a little scary?” I asked.
At that moment, Nancy Stewart walked out of a door marked Authorized Personnel Only. She held the door open and said, “Good morning, everyone. You guys ready?”
Mickey turned back to me. “I’ll go over it when we’re all together,” he said.
We followed Nancy back to a large conference room. Tyrone Allison was already there, along with another man whom I recognized. Captain Gary Radovich headed up the Seattle SWAT unit. He was medium height and solid in build, probably in his mid-fifties. His prematurely silver-white hair was cut in a tight military-buzz style. He saw us enter and immediately stood up. We’d accompanied his team on a SWAT raid on the apartment of a suspected drug cartel member last August. I’m not sure he remembered me, but most people tend to remember Toni. He smiled. “I remember you two from last year,” he said.
“Captain Radovich,” Toni said, “It’s good to see you. I didn’t know you’d be leading this raid today.”
“It’s Toni Blair, right?”
She nodded, smiling. “You remembered.”
“Of course,” he said. He turned to me. “And you are. .?”
“Danny Logan,” Toni said, filling in his blanks. There. I was right about his memory, after all.
“That’s right,” he said. “Good to see you two again. And to address your point, Ms. Blair, yes, I am heading up the operation today.”
“Wonderful,” Toni said.
Two other men walked into the conference room. Radovich nodded toward them. “Let me introduce these two mean-looking guys,” he said. “Dave Bryant and Lonnie Charles from the narcotics unit. Apologies for their generally unpleasant demeanor. They have to deal with crackheads, tweekers, and various other druggies all day long, and it tends to make them cranky.”
“Very funny,” Bryant said.
The men said their hellos and took their seats.
“Let’s get going, then,” Nancy said. “I’m going to provide a little background for everyone and then Gary, I think you’ve got an operation all planned out?”
He nodded. “I do,” he said.
“Good. So what we’ve got is a house on the western edge of Ravenna Park.” She used a projector to flash an aerial photo of the boys’ house up on the screen. She walked the group through the history of our investigation, including a description of Donnie Martin and DeMichael Hollins.
“I can add a little about Donnie Martin,” Mickey said. “Since we talked to Danny here a couple of days ago, we’ve been doing a little digging.” He turned to Javier and nodded.
“Donnie Martin, as Nancy just explained, is a twenty-two-year-old career criminal. He’s already spent six years of his life locked up in one institution or another, starting when he was eleven years old. He served two different stints at the Green Hill School in Chehalis. And, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, Green Hill is not known for being a college prep school. Martin’s no petty thief-he’s a violent young man. He’s been arrested twice for assault- once when he was sixteen. The second time was two years ago, when he was twenty. He beat another gang member nearly to death with a baseball bat, but the case got dropped when the victim refused to testify-said he tripped going down a flight of stairs. All the other witnesses suddenly developed amnesia and recanted.”
“I can add to that as well,” I said. “In the course of our investigation, we interviewed a friend of Donnie’s family, Reverend Arthur Jenkins. Reverend Art’s the pastor of the Twenty-Third Street Baptist Church over in the Central District-the area where Donnie Martin and DeMichael Hollins grew up. He knows the boys well-in fact, he presided over Donnie’s aunt’s funeral a year ago. He told me that when he tried to talk some sense into Donnie then, Donnie just laughed and wouldn’t have any of it. According to Reverend Art, the word is that Donnie Martin said no way he was going to end up in Walla Walla-he’d rather go out shooting.”
“Great,” Gary said, sarcastically. “Your basic nutcase. I’ll make sure my men are briefed. Thanks for the heads-up.”
I nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Back to our raid. What do we know about the house?”
“Not too much,” Nancy said. She turned to me. “Danny, you guys staked this house out, right?”
“Not this one,” I said. “The NSSB gang has a total of three houses that we’re aware of. We staked out one of the other ones. But we do have some familiarity with this house.” I squirmed a little as I said this. The police were unaware of my clandestine recon mission the day before yesterday.
“Inside layout?” Radovich asked. “That’s what would really be helpful.”
“A little,” I said.
Nancy looked at me curiously for a few seconds. She cocked her head slightly and gave me a look that was equal parts skeptical and suspicious.
Oh, what fun. When I’d made my little recon excursion into the house, I hadn’t thought that the information I’d gathered would become vital to the success of a police raid. Now, if I held back information in order to protect myself from a possible B amp;E charge, I might possibly be endangering the lives of Radovich’s SWAT team members. I made a quick no-brainer decision. “Look,” I said. “You’re going to have guys putting their lives on the line in a couple of hours, so I’m not going to hold out on you. I’ve been in that house. Don’t ask how.”
Gary and Nancy both looked at me. Then Radovich shook his head and said, “I don’t care how. Tell me what you know.”
Whew! I stepped over to a whiteboard and grabbed a marker. I sketched a rough outline of the floor plan as I described it. “The house has three floors-main floor, upstairs, and basement-except when I was in it, I didn’t know about the basement. The main floor has a big porch and a front door with a sidelight window. You can definitely see outside onto the porch from inside the house.” I drew clever little sight lines to illustrate my point. “Be careful. The front door opens up onto a living room and formal dining room area. There’s also a back door that opens up onto a family room. If the blinds are open, you can definitely see into the backyard from the family room.” I drew more squiggly little lines. “Again, be careful. The kitchen is also in the back near this area. And then there’s another door on the north side of the house that enters into an office area, here.”
“Any bedrooms on the main floor?”
“Yeah, what looks to be a guest bedroom.”
He nodded. “Upstairs layout?”
I drew a separate box and started sketching. “Stairway at one end, here, and then a long hallway with three bedrooms on either side. The last bedroom in the back of the house is set up as kind of a bedroom photography studio.”
He took notes. “Basement?”
“Yeah. Like I said, I didn’t even know about it when I was there. But apparently, there’s a basement with an entry in the office down here on the main floor.” I pointed to it.
Nancy looked at me for a moment, then she looked down at her notes for a few seconds. “The judge talked to our witness-a juvenile female-last night,” she said. “Our witness told her that the gang keeps marijuana in the kitchen pantry and that they keep cocaine, methamphetamine, and weapons downstairs in the basement. Also-and this is very important-she said there are two bedrooms in the basement that lock from the outside; they’re essentially jail cells. We have reason to believe that a missing juvenile-Isabel Delgado-may be held in one of these basement bedrooms. Although the judge gave us our warrant specifically for illegal drugs, the warrant allows us to search those bedrooms-for drugs-and to make sure our officers are safe. If you happen to discover a young girl being held against her will while you’re in there, well, let’s just go ahead and bring her out, too.”
Radovich nodded. “Agreed,” he said.
“Any idea what we’re talking about in terms of dope?” Bryant asked.
“I think there’s at least ten kilos in the kitchen pantry,” I said, pointing to the closet I’d sketched in the back of the kitchen. “I think it’s in one-kilo bricks. I don’t know anything about the blow or the crystal.”
He stared at me for a minute. I didn’t know what to make of his dark, beady eyes. Maybe he just didn’t like me. “You seem to have pretty good information,” he said.
I smiled. “I do,” I said. I didn’t elaborate.
“How about the guns?” Radovich asked. “Do we know anything about their weapons?”
