When Cole reached his car, he phoned Sarah Manning. He had not heard from the girl with the purple hair, and wished now he’d gotten her phone number. He was disappointed when Sarah’s voice mail picked up.
“Hey, Sarah, it’s Elvis Cole. I never heard from Lisa Topping. Would you please reconsider giving me her number? Thanks.”
Cole left his cell number, and hung up. He checked the time. He had been waiting for only eight minutes, and Chen might get hung up forever.
Cole couldn’t think of anything else to do, so he thought about Grebner. Grebner had really blindsided them with that business about Jakovich, which seemed all the more believable because Rina had so readily admitted she knew him. They both seemed believable, but Cole knew from experience the best liars are always believable, and the very best lies were mostly the truth. Here was Grebner with his party house in the hills, and here was Rina, who claimed to have attended his parties along with other Serbian prostitutes so Grebner and his gang-set buddies could boogie with girls they trusted.
Cole wondered if there was a way he could find out if this was true, and thought he might be able to get the information from one of the other prostitutes.
Cole didn’t have the files, but he had his notebook. He had copied the dates of Rina’s arrests, and now he phoned the district attorney’s general administration office. He worked his way through three clerks and spent almost twenty minutes on the phone before he found someone to look up the case number and identify the deputy district attorney who handled the case.
“That would be Elizabeth Sanchez.”
“Could I have her current posting and number, please?”
Deputy District Attorney Elizabeth Sanchez was currently posted to the Airport Courthouse in Playa del Rey, south of the Los Angeles International Airport.
Cole thought he would likely get a voice mail, but a woman picked up the call.
“Lauren Craig.”
“Sorry. I’m calling for Elizabeth Sanchez.”
“Hang on, I think I can-”
Cole heard her call out, then the muffled clunks of the phone being handled, and a different voice came on the line.
“Liz Sanchez.”
Cole identified himself, gave her the date and the case number, and told her he needed the names of the other prostitutes scooped up in the sting.
Sanchez laughed.
“That was almost six years ago. Wow, I was still a Grade Two. You can’t really expect me to remember their names.”
“I thought it might stand out because of the nature of the arrest.”
“A vice sting?”
“A Serbian sex ring. They worked for a Serb gang set.”
“Ah. Okay, that sounds familiar. NoHo Vice took down thirteen or fourteen girls over by CBS Studio Center. A joint task force deal with OCTF.”
Organized Crime Task Force.
“That’s it.”
“Serbians. Okay, sure. They had cribs all through those complexes. They had so many hookers around the pool over there it looked like the Playboy Mansion. Not that I’ve ever seen the mansion.”
“That’s the one. I want to talk to them about events occurring on or about that time.”
Sanchez said, “You mind if I ask what this is about?”
“A gang pakhan named Michael Darko. Darko heads up the set that owned these particular girls.”
Sanchez said, “Darko.”
“Yeah. One of his lieutenants probably ran the operation, but Darko was the man. The pakhan. I have some questions about Darko these girls might be able to answer.”
The silence from Sanchez was thoughtful.
“I don’t think that was it. I don’t think that was the name.”
Now it was Cole’s turn to hesitate.
“Darko?”
“Well, I’m thinking.”
“Was it Grebner? Might have been Grebner.”
“Hold on. The OC guys weren’t happy with the way it turned out. The Vice coppers were fine-they took down thirteen hookers-but the OC dicks were pissed. They wanted to move up the food chain, but none of the girls would roll. I remember because the OC dicks were totally pissed off. They couldn’t get the girls to roll.”
“Yeah, that would be Darko, or maybe a guy named Grebner.”
“No, I remember it now-his name was Jakovich. That’s who they wanted. His set ran the girls.”
“Jakovich.”
“That’s him. The OC dicks just murdered his name. Everything was Jakoffovich, Jerkoffovich, Jakobitch, like that.”
“You’re telling me these prostitutes worked for Milos Jakovich.”
“Absolutely. That’s why OC planned the sting. They wanted Jakovich. We had thirteen prostitutes coming out of a prelim, and none of them-not one-would roll.”
“Thanks, Liz. You’ve been a big help.”
Cole put down the phone. He stared at the empty sky, and knew, once more, how well some people could lie.
His phone rang, and he answered, feeling dull and slow.
A young woman’s voice came from far away.
“Mr. Cole? This is Lisa Topping. Sarah Manning called. She said you want to speak with me?”
Lisa Topping was Ana’s very best friend, and knew things no one else knew.
35
PIKE FOUND THE ADDRESS for Diamond Reclamations on his Thomas Guide map, then wedged the picture of the red-haired baby on his dash. He drove north on the Hollywood Freeway in silence. The creaks and whistles made by the speeding vehicle were faraway reminders of his progress. He studied the baby in brief glimpses. The kid looked nothing like Rina or Darko, but Pike had never been good at that kind of thing. Pike saw a baby, he thought the baby was either cute or not, and this kid was not a cute baby. Looking at the picture, he couldn’t even tell if the child was male or female. He wondered if it would turn out to look like Jakovich.
Pike followed the Hollywood Freeway into the northeast part of the Valley, joined up with the Golden State, and dropped off less than a mile later into a flat landscape where low buildings stood guard over empty lots veined by dried weeds and crumbling concrete. Rows of faceless buildings lined the larger streets, surrounded by equally faceless tract homes, all of which were bleached by the hazy light, and perpetually powdered by dust blown down from the mountains. Telephone poles lining the streets were strung with so many cables and wires they cut the sky like spiderwebs, as if to snare the people who lived there.
Pike did not have to check the Thomas Guide again. Having seen it once, he knew the route, and skirted around the Hansen Dam Park past nurseries, outdoor storage facilities, and row after row of sun-bleached, dusty homes. He found Diamond Reclamations on a four-lane boulevard at the foot of Little Tujunga Canyon, fenced between a Mom’s Basement public storage location and a stone yard where Bobcat loaders were moving slabs of limestone and marble. A huge Do-It-Yourself home improvement center sat directly across, surrounded by acres of parking and a couple of hundred parked cars. Dozens of sturdy brown men were clustered at the entrances to the Do-It-Yourself, come up from Mexico and Central America, ready and willing to work.
Pike pulled into the Do-It-Yourself center, hiding his Jeep in plain sight among the parked cars and trucks. Diamond Reclamations was a scrap-metal yard. A yellow single-story building sat at the street with eight-foot red letters painted across the front: SCRAP METAL WANTED SALVAGE AUTO PARTS STEEL. A gravel drive ran past the front building to a small parking lot.
Behind the parking lot was a larger, two-story corrugated-steel building. The front building blocked most of what lay behind it from view, but Pike could see that the grounds were crowded with stacked auto chassis, rusting pipes, and other types of scrap metal. Two new sedans were parked out front on the street, and two more sedans and a large truck were in the parking lot, but the gravel drive was chained off, and a sign in the front office window read CLOSED. As Pike watched, a man in a blue shirt came out of the front office building, and crunched across the parking lot to the corrugated building. As he reached the door, he spoke to someone Pike didn’t see, and then that man stepped out from behind the parked truck. He was a big man with a big gut, and thick legs to carry it. The two men laughed about something, then the man in the blue shirt went into the building. The big man studied the passing traffic, then slowly returned to his place behind the truck.