Dodge beamed his flash into the far corners of the lab. 'There’s a bunch of burned-out computers over there. Nowadays all this gear is hooked up to computers.'
'Worth a look.' She doubted the arson unit had spent much time in that part of the room. There might be something to find.
'I don’t mean to come across as either obstinate or slow-witted,' Dodge said, 'but what exactly is it we’re looking for?'
'Anything that doesn’t belong here. Anything Mobius may have left behind.'
'Does he ordinarily f-uh, make mistakes like that?'
'No. But I’m hoping he’s gotten careless.'
She produced two pairs of rubber gloves, handing one pair to Dodge. 'Put these on. They’ll protect your hands a little.'
They worked in silence for a few minutes, each picking through a separate pile of rubble under the glare of a flashlight.
'So tell me about Black Tiger.'
Tess was startled. 'How’d you know about that?'
He shrugged. 'Things get around…'
This was no answer, but evidently it was all she was going to get. 'I don’t want to talk about it,' she said.
'An officer of the law who doesn’t like to tell war stories? It’s unheard-of. Come on, spill.'
'Well…' It seemed easier to tell the tale than to put up a fight about it. 'I was stationed in Miami, new in the bureau, back in the early nineties. Every kind of bad guy was operating down there. We had animal smugglers-guys who would bring in endangered species from Latin America for sale to private collectors on the black market. Mercenaries selling war surplus stuff to revolutionaries or counterrevolutionaries. Kidnappers who snatched tourists in Mexico and demanded ransom from their relatives. We had expatriate Cubans training in the Everglades for the next Bay of Pigs operation. You get the idea.'
'Sounds colorful.'
'It was, actually.' She’d almost forgotten the excitement of those days. 'I’d joined the bureau for adventure, and in Miami you get all the adventure you can stand.'
'So…the case.'
'Yes, well, in addition to the cast of characters I just described, we also had the drug trade. There were major interdiction efforts going on. DEA and Customs handled border control, but there was always plenty for the bureau to do. One of the major players we had our eye on was a guy called Black Tiger.'
'Scary moniker.'
She smiled, warming to her memories. 'You know how he got it? He liked black tiger shrimp. No joke. He hung out at this sort of pseudo-Cajun place in South Beach, eating platefuls of the stuff. He was a tall, lanky guy with a gut like a bowling ball hanging out over his pants. He told me he worked out for two hours a day, but if he did, he wasn’t doing ab crunches, that’s for sure.'
'He told you?'
She shrugged. 'One of several conversations we had.'
'How’d that happen?'
'I was part of a surveillance detail watching him in that Cajun dive. It was pretty routine. I was sitting alone at the bar keeping an eye on him in a mirror. I don’t know if I was too obvious or if he had some kind of sixth sense, but he seemed to realize I was looking at him. So he leaves his table and comes over to me, offers to buy me a drink. I play hard to get, mainly because I’m so flustered I don’t know what to say. But I think he liked me better for being stand-offish. He was used to having women fawn all over him. He saw me as a challenge.'
'Sounds like my kind of guy.'
She ignored him. 'We talked. Afterward there was an emergency meeting of the squad. Big discussion. Do they let me go back to the restaurant and pursue the relationship, or do they take me off the case right now?'
'You wanted to continue.'
'Damn straight, I did. This was a golden opportunity to get close to this guy, learn about his operation.' And she had been young, eager. Another thing she’d nearly forgotten.
'It’s not every day you have a chance to date a drug lord,' Dodge said.
'He wasn’t a drug lord. His end of the business was money laundering. He cleaned the cash for the cartels and took a hefty percentage of the proceeds.'
'Hence his ability to finance his shrimp habit.'
'He financed more than that. He had an estate on Key Biscayne, a house in Boca, a penthouse condo in South Beach. Limo, couple of sports cars, not to mention personal bodyguards and assistants, half the cops in Miami on his payroll…' She remembered that she was talking to a cop. 'Uh, sorry.'
'No offense taken. I’ve heard there might even be a few corrupt cops in the LAPD.'
She finished her inventory of Black Tiger’s assets. 'Onshore and offshore holding companies and shell companies. A porno movie production company. An orange grove. Some real estate near Walt Disney World. And a yacht.'
'This guy sounds like quite a catch. Why didn’t you marry him?'
'I’m allergic to shrimp. Anyway, the upshot of our squad’s emergency meeting was that I would be allowed to reinitiate contact, but if it looked like I was getting in too deep, I would be pulled out.'
'What constitutes ‘too deep’?'
'A, uh, bedroom situation. Or a threat to my safety. Of the two, I think the bedroom worried me more.'
'What were you trying to find out?'
'His contacts in the drug trade. We knew he did business with the cartels, but we didn’t know who he was meeting or where or when. We had his phones bugged, his mail intercepted and opened, his homes under surveillance, his movements watched-but we never caught him with anybody who could be linked to drug trafficking.'
'Until you came along and busted him.'
'How’d you know?'
'Nobody tells stories about cases that didn’t clear.'
She couldn’t argue with that. 'Well, you’re right. I figured it out on our third date. You know what clued me in? At the shrimp restaurant he always looked at the menu.'
She waited for Dodge to catch on, but he said only, 'I don’t get it.'
'He ordered the same thing every night-black tiger shrimp. So why read the menu?'
'Because there’s more to it than the catch of the day?'
She nodded. 'The menu he got was a communication from the other bad guys, giving him account numbers and other instructions. Black Tiger might not have been much to look at, but he had a photographic memory. He would glance over the information and memorize it all. When he paid his bill, he wrote his answer. The restaurant’s owner was the middleman who passed the messages back and forth.'
'And you worked all this out just by dining with this gentleman?'
'I’m very perceptive. Also I was strongly motivated to solve the case before things got hot and heavy.'
'Were you in on the collar?'
'I was in on the kill.'
She looked off into the shadows in the far corner of the room. This was the part of the story she didn’t enjoy.
'I couldn’t get away from him that night. He wanted to show me his latest toy-a plane he’d bought, a Cessna. He drove me to the airfield. I thought I had backup behind me. I knew they wouldn’t let him take me on the plane. Trouble was, while I was figuring him out, he’d figured me out. I don’t know how, but he’d made me. And he’d had his people create a traffic accident to block the road and cut off my pursuit. I was alone out there, and all of a sudden he wants me aboard the plane and he’s not so friendly anymore.'
'How many of them were there? I mean, I have to assume he hadn’t arranged a one-on-one encounter.'
'Three. Black Tiger, his driver, and the pilot.'
'You were carrying…?'
'Sig Sauer nine in a thigh holster under my skirt. But no way could I get to it with all of them watching
