There were over thirty of us as we drove off the borrowed property and headed up Potrero. The first line of resistance was the guard shack, which sat under the driveway arch. When the plastic badge saw our armored black caravan, he stepped out and held his hands high over his head.
'I surrender,' he said. 'Don't shoot.'
The security guard, in his late sixties, was ordered to toss his gun in the dirt and was quickly cuffed.
We left two men to secure the exit and our army of flakked SWAT officers drove up the lane in the deadly looking black ARVs toward the beautiful two-story Spanish farmhouse that sat at the top of the hill. Hundred- thousand-dollar grazing thoroughbreds turned their heads and watched placidly as we rumbled past.
The SWAT teams poured out of the vehicles just below the house and, with their MP-5s at port arms, quickly fanned out to secure all first-floor exits. Several stewards who were just coming out of the house carrying luggage stopped in surprise.
'LAPD! Hands in the air! Everybody on the dirt. Spread em!' Sherman shouted.
The men dropped Gucci bags, threw their hands in the air, then proned out on the ground and were handcuffed.
The SWAT teams ran up the short hill and went through the open front door into the main house. Hitch and I brought up the rear. In the entry hall, five more Colombians were carrying suitcases down from upstairs. All of them surrendered without incident.
'The shootings gonna start any time now,' Hitch panted in my ear, still out of breath from running up the hill.
We followed a SWAT team into the kitchen, where we found two more men and one woman packing food into a wicker basket.
'SWAT. Put em up. Assume the position!' a SWAT sergeant shouted.
They all hit the floor and spread their arms, then laced their fingers behind their necks. They were cuffed and pulled into the entry.
Hitch and I stood with them under an old Spanish wagon-wheel chandelier, pointing our MP-5s at these frightened employees who sat handcuffed as SWAT teams continued to sweep through the house.
We heard doors being thrown open upstairs and officers yelling, 'SWAT! You're under arrest!'
Several minutes later one man and three women in household staff uniforms were herded down the staircase by SWAT members and secured next to our picnic basket packers.
So far, not a single shot had been fired.
'I think there's a large contingent of shooters in the backyard,' one of the SWAT sergeants said over the radio TAC frequency.
'That's where they'll make their stand,' Hitch told me earnestly.
'Right,' I replied. We were both gripping our 9 mm machine guns with sweaty palms.
SWAT took the backyard in less than ten seconds.
Every single person back there threw their hands up and submitted immediately to arrest without incident.
We followed SWAT into the courtyard, where ten or so celadores were being arrested, cuffed, and pushed down on their haunches next to a garden wall. There was only one person left.
An elderly gray-haired gentleman was seated in a high-backed wicker chair beside a large Spanish fountain. He had a blanket over his knees and was holding a calico cat on his lap.
'Diego San Diego?' Lieutenant Sherman demanded.
'Yes,' the old man replied in a weak, shaking voice. He was no longer the powerful, fit man I'd seen in the picture from four years ago. He looked sick. He had lost weight. His hair had thinned.
'You are being issued an arrest warrant as a material witness and potential suspect in the hijacking of a Brinks armored truck and the murder of two guards,' Sherman said as he put the paper in the old mans hands. 'Get up, we need to cuff you.'
'I'm sorry, I can't stand,' the almost ninety-year-old man said. 'My doctor forbids all movement. I've got severe phlebitis in my legs.'
'In that case, stay where you are and remain absolutely still,' Sherman said.
'We're clear upstairs,' one of the SWAT teams called out.
'Clear in the main house,' another called.
'Courtyard is clear,' someone behind us shouted.
Lieutenant Rick Sherman turned and looked at Jeb.
'We're secure here, Captain.'
The cat on Diego San Diego's lap stood, arched its back, and yawned.
Then Hitch leaned in toward me and whispered, 'This ending is gonna need a big fuckin' rewrite.'
Chapter 53
When I first came on the job I had a training partner who used to say that runny shit always floats. A gross but often accurate work metaphor in law enforcement.
The first thing that floated was the Kalashnikov Series 100 assault rifle that had fired on us up in Trancas Canyon.
It was still in the red and white helicopter tucked behind the back passenger seat. When we ran the AK-100, it came back registered to Diego San Diego. The stock had been wiped clean of prints, but Ballistics was able to match the slugs to the ones we dug out of Sumner s Porsche.
That afternoon, Stender Sheedy Sr. was called in to the district attorneys office. Chase Beal was strangely unavailable for this interview, so Dahlia Wilkes did the questioning for the county.
With his attorney at his side, Stender first denied knowing Diego San Diego at all.
My statement about having followed him up to Rancho San Diego was read to him. It quickly turned into a case of my word and Hitch's against the word of one of L. A.'s most powerful power brokers and prominent legal minds.
Sheedy insisted we were mistaken. That it was a preposterous claim. For the time being, it was a standoff. Next he was questioned extensively about his relationship with Thayer Dunbar. Dahlia wanted to know how Stender was connected to the suspected money launderer Diego San Diego.
'Preposterous,' Sheedy said. 'Outrageous.'
Dahlia had found some billing records that revealed Sheedy once did some real estate work for the Colombian. Stender Sheedy Sr. finally admitted to knowing Diego San Diego, but tried to claim attorney-client privilege, saying he knew nothing about the Vulcuna triple murder.
That's when Jack McKnight drove in from Marina del Rey and identified Sheedy s picture out of a photo six- pack. He nailed him as the man who had stood silently in the Chief of D's office in 1981 to make sure McKnight and Norris closed the Vulcuna case.
Sheedy had no explanation as to why he would involve himself in that particular murder-suicide, but he was starting to panic. He could feel the case slithering out of a deep black hole in his past and, like a giant anaconda, it was starting to wrap itself around him.
Sheedy had been the legal counsel for Thayer Dunbar and his wife, Dorothy, since the seventies. As their attorney, he did have privilege, but it was pretty obvious to all of us that he was also the conduit funneling cash between Thayer and his criminal brother-in-law. Diego's money had paid for all those Houston oil-lease deals.
Thayer Dunbar was at the very least complicit in the Brinks truck hijacking because it now seemed he had allowed that armored car with its two dead drivers to be parked on his property at Skyline Drive over a quarter century ago.
Another good piece that floated was a weathered, nut-brown guy named Daniel Morales. He was in the group of people we'd pulled in during the raid on Rancho San Diego. When we ran his fingerprints, they matched up to an old Brinks Company's employee ten-card for Sergio Maroni.
So our missing armored truck guard had, at last, been found. He had changed his name and gotten a cushy job from his patron, breeding thoroughbreds. He was now fifty-seven. A day later he was charged with double
