‘Took most of his head clean off,’ the officer added.
‘Got it,’ the forensics officer said with satisfaction as he yanked something small out of the wall and inspected it. ‘If that was a gun it sure fired a strange kind of bullet.’
He carried the object in a pair of tweezers and placed it on a plastic evidence bag on the table. They all took a close look at the small, twisted, charred piece of metal the size of a fingernail.
‘Looks like there’s a pattern along one of the edges,’ the forensics officer said, holding a magnifying glass over it. ‘A coin, maybe,’ he added, glancing at his buddy who gave him a surprised look.
Hobart straightened to study the walls and windows of the corridor once again. He was interested in the bit of metal but would wait until the lab report to find out precisely what it was. There was a concentration of pockmarks in the wall and door directly opposite the cubicle, suggesting some kind of back-blast effect from whatever had gone through the window. Hobart had had a lot of experience with explosives, particularly in Kosovo, and had seen many bodies shredded by bits of flying metal from mortars, grenades, artillery shells, mines and booby-traps and such like. He had never seen anything quite like this before, though. If he had to choose a word to describe how it stood out from other examples he had seen, that word would have to be ‘precision’. This had been an IED of some kind, he was sure of that, and it had been small, clean and exact.
Hobart looked back at the two officers who were still examining the piece of metal. ‘Sergeant – or is it Lieutenant?’
‘Sergeant Doves,’ the first officer said.
‘I want every piece of debris collected up – every bit of cloth, metal, glass, everything – and placed inside its own evidence bag and sent to the FBI office on Wilshire.’
Doves looked around at the countless bits covering the floor, some of it stuck to the soles of his own shoes. ‘You gonna be sending down one of your teams?’ he asked hopefully but not expecting much. Resent ment was his underlying response to the request since it meant that he was effectively working for the Feds.
‘Not if you do a good enough job, sergeant,’ Hobart said, looking directly at both men, making his point clear, before walking away.
16
Stratton leaned against the concrete barrier that skirted the top of Santa Monica’s cliffs a hundred feet above the Pacific Coast Highway, a road that stretched, with some interruptions, from Panama to Alaska. He was pretending to read a newspaper while at the same time keeping an eye on all movement into I Cugini, an Italian restaurant on a corner just south of his apartment building. It had a broad, exposed entrance with quiet sidewalks and most of the clientele arrived by car. After drivers and passengers had alighted the vehicles were whisked away by redwaistcoated valets to an underground parking lot beneath the large, modern shopping complex of which the restaurant was a small part.
This was the fourth day in a row that Stratton had occupied the same spot in the busy park during the lunchtime hour to observe everyone who went into the place. Seaton’s file had listed two of Ardian Cano’s favourite daytime food stops, the other being a Japanese restaurant in Beverly Hills. I Cugini was certainly the most convenient for Stratton, being literally a stone’s throw from his apartment building. Had it not been for a hotel next door he would have been able to watch the restaurant entrance from the comfort of his living room.
It was nearing the end of the lunch period and still there had been no sight of the Albanian. Stratton was beginning to have doubts about this method of finding him. The file described Ardian as passionate about his food and a creature of habit and listed several of his night-time hangouts where he was often joined by colleagues as well as by his brother Ivor – or Dren. Stratton preferred not to run into that crowd again unless it was on his own terms and placed his hopes on the Italian restaurant.
The newspapers had revealed sufficient detail to confirm that Bufi was dead. The police were not prepared to discuss the cause other than saying that a projectile had entered his head. The media turned this into a grenade attack, based on advice from their so-called experts. The papers went on to describe Bufi’s crime-syndicate dealings and the beating-up of his girlfriend, stating how he was a generally unsympathetic character that the world was better off without. Typically, the media dramatised it further by speculating that it had been a contract killing commissioned by rival mobsters.
Stratton had considered tracking Ardian from outside one of his nightspots to one of the three places where he was thought to be living: with a girlfriend, with a colleague, and – the third and most likely location – his brother’s house in the plush residential area immediately north of Sunset Plaza. Stratton decided to give the Italian restaurant another couple of days before reviewing the matter since it was too convenient for his apartment – and also for visiting Josh who was little more than a mile away. The boy continued to weigh heavily on Stratton’s mind since the child’s immediate future remained unclear. Still, according to Vicky there were signs of stirrings from the UK side.
Vicky and Josh had been visibly shocked by Stratton’s bruised face, which looked even worse two days later. But he managed to satisfy their curiosity with a tall story of a bar brawl between him and two short but stocky Irishmen who had taken a dislike to him for being English, though it had to be said that they’d been a little drunk at the time and Stratton had not been very polite on first meeting them, distracted by all that had happened.
Vicky was sceptical at first. But by the time Stratton had added the finishing touches to his elaborate tale, colouring it with historical ‘facts’ to help explain the Irishmen’s ill feeling, she was so absorbed in the stories that went back as far as the Roman Conquest that she couldn’t begin to imagine what else could have happened to him. He created a happy ending by explaining how, being typical, big-hearted Irishmen, after the fight was over with no clear winner they’d returned to the bar and bought each other a couple of rounds. All Josh wanted was to be reassured that the other guys had come off worse than Stratton. He was not disappointed with the descriptions of their injuries – out of earshot of Vicky, of course.
The one bit of bad news concerning Josh, which Vicky asked Stratton not to share with the boy, was that even though it looked as if he would be flown back to the UK sometime soon, possibly in the next two weeks, he might have to move to a temporary foster home until that day because of the child-protection centre being overcrowded. The trouble with that was that it would be more difficult for Stratton to see Josh since the visits were essentially a privilege bestowed upon him by Vicky and because he was not a relative that privilege would not transfer with Josh to the foster family. Stratton decided to deal with that when the time came but at least for the time being things seemed to be moving ahead.
Another problem was Sally’s body. The FBI were dragging their feet – deliberately, it would appear – in processing the paperwork needed to release it to be shipped back to England. But still Stratton remained optimistic, hoping it could all be sorted out around the same time and sooner rather than later.
Then, as if the gods had heard Stratton’s other plea, a sedan pulled up outside the restaurant and a man who matched the file’s photograph and description of Ardian lifted his large frame out of the passenger seat and onto the sidewalk. He had a brief exchange with the Mexican valet as if they knew each other. Then he walked up the short flight of steps with the driver and in through the restaurant entrance.