The Big Gamble - Michael Mcgarrity [98]
Time passed and Fidel started getting bored again. Too bad Debbie Shea wasn’t with him. It would be a kick to have her go down on him, parked fifty feet outside of the sheriff’s office.
He slipped his semiautomatic out of the shoulder holster and checked the magazine. He’d always wanted to put a couple of caps in a cop. Maybe Rojas would change his mind.
He put the handgun away. A vehicle pulled into the parking space reserved for the sheriff, and a big guy dressed like a cowboy got out and went inside.
Cowboys and Indians, Fidel thought. Carrizozo was total fucking hicksville.
From his time with the state police Kerney knew that the state government telephone system was unique in certain ways. A computer recorded all the calls made from each individual phone, and a monthly report was distributed to supervisory personnel so that they could track personal calls made by employees at work and request reimbursement for any toll charges.
In his office Kerney compared the faxed telephone record of calls made from Senator Norvell’s private legislative office phone against the information in the Montoya case file. Norvell had made an eight-minute call to Anna Marie’s work number on the day her appointment with the senator had been canceled.
The case against Norvell was building, but Kerney still needed more.
Sal Molina had left updated information on his desk, and Kerney read the hurried notes Detective Piño had prepared from the interview she and the APD sergeant had conducted with a woman named Stacy Fowler. Along with what Kerney had learned from Helen Pearson and Molina’s late-night briefing, it suggested that something more than a small team of detectives would be required to conduct the investigation from this point on. It would take a task force to get the job done right.
He told Helen Muiz to push the meeting back by two hours, and started making phone calls. Once he explained his agenda, it didn’t take much cajoling to get everyone on his list he could reach to agree to attend the meeting.
Kerney failed in his attempt to reach Paul Hewitt and secure his participation on the task force. He considered calling Clayton and dismissed the idea. As sheriff, only Hewitt had the authority to commit his department to Kerney’s plan. Most likely, Paul would agree to come onboard, so Kerney decided to proceed under that assumption and talk to him after the meeting.
A little after two, he walked into the packed conference room, where the original team had been bolstered by his second-in-command, Larry Otero, two of Molina’s detectives, the district attorney, the resident FBI agent, the APD deputy chief of police, a lawyer from the U.S. Attorney’s office, an agent for the Internal Revenue Service, a supervising DEA special agent, and the commander of the state police criminal investigation bureau.
With Helen Muiz at his side taking notes, he got the meeting rolling with quick introductions, and then asked Molina, Piño, and Vialpando to make brief presentations highlighting their investigative findings to date. He wound up the overview with his own report, got a buy-in from everyone present to participate on the task force, and opened it up for discussion.
The IRS agent would coordinate a team to look at the partners’ personal and corporate tax records.
DEA would handle the drug-trafficking end of it in all known cities where the partners operated. The FBI would do the same on the out-of-state prostitution rackets, and seek wiretap warrants on all partner communications including Internet E-mail. State police agents would dig into money laundering. Their first targets would be State Senator Gene Barrett’s CPA firm and Representative Leo Silva’s law practice.
Additionally, agents from the state police district headquarters in Alamogordo and Roswell would be pulled into Lincoln County to target Tyler Norvell. APD vice, with Detective Piño as lead investigator, would go after Bedlow, Tully, and Deacon. The FBI would use El Paso special