Renee read the brief report again. This was exactly the kind of thing she’d been trying to warn the chief about. It needed to go into the daily intelligence flyer so that officers could be aware of this possibility; she set the report aside from the rest for that purpose.
River City was growing. There’d been a time when the population was easily ninety percent white. Since she’d come to work for the police department in the late 1980s, though, the city had begun to diversify. Small populations of numerous racial and ethnic groups had filtered in and slowly grown little neighborhoods across the patchwork town. She guessed the vast majority of about two hundred thousand residents was still Caucasian-say seventy percent or so-but even in that category, they had a variety of cultural groups. Like the Russians she’d just read about.
Renee reached for her coffee. She didn’t identify much with any particular group, and while that probably took away from being able to have any sense of cultural pride, it also made her appreciate all of the cultures that were out there. In her off time, she liked to frequent different bars and restaurants, particularly those run by some sort of ethnic owner. She enjoyed getting to know more about all of them-Italian, Greek, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexican, you name it. What she found was that her favorite motto was almost always true: People are just people, everywhere.
That sentiment sat well with her, especially since the people she spent her days reading about and analyzing were almost exclusively bad people. If she hadn’t had some of those nice experiences all around town, she’d start to get a little bit jaded about some people.
Which brought her back to the Russians. Somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand lived in River City. Several hundred were clearly involved in crime. That was pretty much on par with every other group she took the time to look at. It didn’t change her concern, though. And with Battaglia’s report, she was all that much more worried.
“Renee?”
She looked up to see Charlotte at her door. “Yes?”
“The chief would like to see you.”
“Now?”
Charlotte smiled, but Renee saw the strain in her face.
She set aside her coffee cup. “Do you know what it’s about?”
Charlotte shook her head. “All I know is that there’s an FBI agent in there with him.”
Renee raised an eyebrow. “FBI?”
Charlotte nodded.
Renee glanced down at the dress pants and purple blouse she was wearing. “Do these look like confident clothes?” she asked.
Charlotte’s smile warmed. “They do. The little bit of lace does the trick.”
“Good.” Renee grabbed a pen and a legal pad.
“All the same,” Charlotte continued, “I wouldn’t make any jokes like that while you’re in there. He appears to take himself very seriously.”
“Thinks he’s pretty important, huh?”
“Exactly.”
“I think I still have a power suit from the eighties in my closet,” Renee said. “You know, the ones with the shoulder pads in them. Should I run home and change?”
The two women laughed. After a moment, both collected themselves and walked to the chief’s office, where Charlotte rapped on the door.
“Come!” a loud voice bellowed.
“Good luck,” Charlotte whispered.
Renee steeled herself and went inside.
The chief of police sat behind his desk, his fingers interlaced and his elbows on the arms of his chair. Directly across from him sat a sandy-haired man in a dark blue suit. Both men looked up at her as she approached.
“Renee,” the chief said, “this is Special Agent Maurice Payne. He’s with the FBI organized crime unit.”
Renee held out her hand. Payne gave her a perfunctory, loose-gripped shake.
“Renee is one of our crime analysts, focusing on emerging trends,” the chief explained. He gestured for her to sit in the empty chair next to Agent Payne. “She’s been following the emergence of our Russian gang problem here in River City for some time.”
“Excellent,” Payne said tersely. “Do you have any sort of organizational chart that we can take a look at?”
Renee shook her head. “Unfortunately, our intelligence is not that far along.”
Payne looked at the chief, then back at her. “Oh, really?”
“No,” she said. “While I know that these particular gangs are highly organized, it has been difficult to-”
Payne raised his hand. “How do you know that?”
“Know what?”
“That they’re highly organized.”
Renee paused, a little confused. “I thought you were with organized crime,” she said haltingly.
“I am. I know how organized they are. I want to know how you think you know that.”
She cleared her throat and spoke slowly. “I have attended a number of gang schools over the past several years. One of them focused specifically on European gangs.”
“Who put on that school?” he asked, condescension in his voice.
“That one would have been the FBI, sir,” she answered.
Payne paused and swallowed. “Uh, good. Okay, what else?”
Why the hell was she justifying her job to him? She glanced at the chief, but his stony gaze told her that she would have to answer the question. “I read a lot,” she said, anger brewing in the pit of her stomach. “Professional journals, books, bulletins. Whatever I can find on the Internet.”
Payne took a deep breath and nodded. “Yes, that’s excellent. But be careful about the information on the web. Anyone can put anything out there, you know?”
“I pretty much stick to official sites,” Renee answered, starting to fume inside. I’ve been using computers since we stored data on cassette tapes, while you were popping pimples and reading Richie Rich comics, you little dipshit. “What’s this all about?” she asked.
Payne took another deep breath and affected a grave expression. Renee waited for him to speak, fairly certain that his tone would have a similar sense of measured gravity.
“What I’m about to tell you is completely confidential,” he said in a rehearsed voice. “It is classified based both upon the nature of the information and the source. Do you understand?”
Renee nodded. “Don’t tell anyone. I get it.”
Payne’s eyes narrowed. “It’s nothing to be flippant about,” he said. “Violations carry federal sanctions. If you can’t be trusted-”
“She can be trusted,” the chief rumbled from his leather throne. He cast a cautionary look at her. “Just let her know what’s going on, Agent Payne.”
Payne pressed his lips together as a slight redness crept into his cheeks. He looked like a schoolboy that had just been corrected by the teacher, but it quickly passed. “Do you know Oleg Tretiak?”
Renee shook her head.
Payne sighed. “Well, you should. He’s been the bookkeeper for Sergey Markov for the last two years. You do know Sergey Markov, right?”
Renee nodded, ignoring his tone. “Markov has been a suspect in a couple cases of fencing property, but he’s more likely in charge of a chop shop operation in town. Last year our detectives raided a garage in Hillyard. His car was parked in front of the house, but he wasn’t there.”
“Did any of the suspects talk?”
Renee gave him a baleful look. “No. They don’t talk. That’s the problem. Even the normal good citizens won’t inform on them. It’s a holdover from the old country.”
“They’ll talk,” Payne said. “It just takes a lot to make that happen.”
“Like what?”
Payne smiled coldly. “Well, if you try to kill a man, that tends to loosen his tongue.”
“Not with the Russians.” Renee eyed him carefully. “Are you saying you have an informant?”