'Yeah, and just how you think you're gonna do that, Tony?'
'You put a guy in my department without clearing it with me first. I'll get the district attorney to subpoena your Command Directive, then I'll roll it up and jam it so far up your ass, you'll be able to start breathing through it.'
The county sheriff took off his titanium glasses, pulled a silk handkerchief out of his pocket, and went to work giving the lenses a thorough cleaning… Then he slipped them carefully back onto his nose.
'Okay, let's also say, just for the hell of it, that I might acknowledge that Sergeant Lane was working in an undercover capacity inside your department.' Messenger was speaking slower now, as if his words had solemn weight. 'And let's say he stumbled into your rogue Viking unit. Since your man here says he's dead and can't report in, that would seem to end it. How am I supposed to help you?'
'He'd been undercover for two months… I don't know how you guys supervise UCs, Bill, but over in my 'strange' shop, we set up phone drops, get interim reports. So unless you're running this place like a Carnival Cruise, you got his re-back file. We need those reports. We need to know everything Sergeant Lane found out, 'cause this thing is coming unglued. Most of that unit is already dead, and the ones who ain't are running for the airport. Like I said, we don't have a lotta time.'
Bill Messenger pushed his titanium rims higher up on his nose. He went to his desk, opened a bottom drawer, then took out a metal lockbox. He opened it, pulled out a file, and threw it on the desk between them.
'You keep the ops reports in your desk drawer?' Tony said, smiling.
'For obvious reasons, I was supervising the Viking mop-up myself,' Messenger said in a hard, clipped voice. 'What do you need to know?'
'We're trying to get a line on an Argentine national named Jose Mondragon,' Tony said. 'We need to know where he lives when he's in L. A. We think one of our Viking cops is about to kill him. We need Jose alive, to make a money-laundering case we're settin' up.'
'I can already tell you his L. A. residence's not in there. He stayed in hotels,' Messenger said, motioning toward the manila folder. 'But help yourself.'
Shane picked up the file, opened it, and found the section on Jose Mondragon. 'House in Palm Springs,' he read. 'We already know about that.'
'No kidding,' Messenger complained. 'You hit that place harder than a Mexican pinata. That was the one good contact point we had.'
'Maybe if we'd known you guys were in on our case, we coulda worked something else out,' Tony fired back.
Shane scanned Tremaine's report quickly: 'Jose is married to a diplomat's daughter. Didn't know that. Lives half the year in Argentina.' He looked up. 'Anything in here about an Argentine colonel named Raphael Aziz?' Shane asked.
Messenger shook his head sharply, so Shane kept scanning Tremaine's UC report. 'Polo… Says here Jose's a member of the L. A. Polo Club. Plays polo at Will Rogers Park in Santa Monica.' Shane looked up at Messenger.
'We checked that out. Jose stopped playing there two years ago, then shipped his polo pony back to Argentina. It's a dead end.'
Shane kept reading. 'His license plate number for his Jag is in here. Did you run it?'
'Yep,' Messenger said stiffly. 'Car is registered to one of Blackstone's companies in Switzerland, no local address.'
'Dead end,' Alexa said.
The sheriff nodded.
'Known associates, Lisa St. Marie,' Shane read.
'She'd be a good place to start,' Messenger said quickly. 'Go find her. Jose Mondragon used her as a sexual spy, so if you roll her, she probably has some good stuff on him.'
'Lisa ain't gonna be much help,' Tony said.
'Why not?'
'She just ain't.'
'I thought we were cooperating,' Messenger snapped.
'She was tortured and shot five times in her condo a few hours ago. She's at the morgue.'
The diminutive sheriff didn't react.
Shane kept reading: 'He once kept a single-engine plane at the Santa Monica Airport, but sold it two years ago.' Shane looked up. 'If he played polo in Santa Monica and flew his plane out there, I wonder if he had a house out there, too.'
'Don't know. Sounds like a good place to start.' Messenger glanced at his watch, anxious to be rid of them. 'Why don't you check it out?'
Shane closed the file and looked up at the sheriff. 'Can we get a copy of this?' he asked. 'I'd like to look it over more carefully.'
'If my man is dead, then you can have it. But you'll have to take a poly first. I want to know you're telling the truth about all this.'
'Good going, Bill. Good cooperation,' Filosiani snapped.
'Tony, Tony, Tony,' Messenger sighed. 'You never cooperated with anybody. Not once in your whole career. I can't take any more bad press on this Viking thing. This all started here at the Sheriff's Department, so if you kick it up again, I'm gonna have to suffer through a bunch of newspaper and TV recaps. We looked like a buncha Klansmen when the Los Angeles Times broke that piece three years ago. I'm finally getting past it. If it's spread to your department, I'm sorry, but my responsibility is to see it's not back here. That's what Sergeant Lane was trying to determine.'
'I'll take the polygraph,' Shane said suddenly.
'All you gotta do is convince my poly operator that Sergeant Lane is really dead. If that's the case, then I can't protect him anymore, and you can have his files.'
Shane took the polygraph and passed.
Half an hour later they left the sheriff's office with a copy of the classified folder.
When they reached the parking lot, they looked up and saw Bill Messenger staring down at them from his office window on the fourth floor of the big, boxy Sheriffs Building.
He looked even tinier standing behind the huge expanse of glass.
'First time I actually liked that prick' Tony said as they got into the Crown Vic and pulled away.
Chapter 49
THEY READ THE file in Chief Filosiani's sparsely furnished office. There was nothing in the Sheriffs Department folder that gave them any clue to Jose Mondragon's whereabouts. After going over it several times, they began to lose hope.
Shane used the phone in the chief's office to call Chooch at Filosiani's house.
'Thank God, you're safe, man,' his son said, relief in his voice.
'Get your stuff ready; Alexa and I will be over to get you in an hour.'
They checked the Santa Monica Polo Club and talked to the club manager, who confirmed that Jose Mondragon had not been a member for years. The club had no address on file for him, or anybody else for that matter; they didn't even have a membership list because all you needed to play was a horse and enough friends to make up a team. The team captains rounded up their players and scheduled the matches. The manager did remember Jo se's horse, though, because he said it was a world-class polo pony, a coal-black Arabian named Sir Anthony of Aquitaine. He confirmed what Bill Messenger had told them. The horse had been shipped to Argentina two years ago.
The polo club was a dead end.
So was the airport where Jose had kept the plane. The Cessna he flew didn't even belong to him. It was
