Chapter 8

The whole way back to the LA office, Taylor was still bothered about how she could possibly be tailing them. It seemed impossible. She couldn’t have known which vehicle the local office would have loaned them, so she couldn’t have put a tracker on the car.

It was possible she picked them up at the AUSA’s office, although that then led to the question of how she knew that’s where they were going in the first place. It was probable she hadn’t been on them when they dropped off Finney, otherwise, she’d know where he was, and wouldn’t need to follow them. She might not be able to get to Finney on the army base, but she would have known where he was and known that all she needed to do was wait until he left.

No, the only thing that was clear was that she didn’t know what Taylor had done with Finney, and she was trailing him in hopes of finding her target.

Until he found out who she was and learned more about how she operated, it was unlikely he was going to figure out a way to stop her from tailing him. He was still doing all the things Whitaker had taught him in the early days when they started working together, checking for trailing cars by making unexpected turns, looping back on his own path and noting distinctive markings on any cars following him, but something told Taylor that wasn’t going to work.

He had a plan and, as little as he liked doing more research, it was what he was going to go with. Of course, deciding to do that was the easy part. Back in DC, most of the case files going back decades had already been digitized. They even had a whole department devoted to it, pulling in old case files and getting them scanned into the system so they could be searched in whole batches. They were even taking investigators’ notes from current cases and putting them in the system.

The field offices, sadly, weren’t as far ahead. Los Angeles wasn’t some backwater field office, but they still didn’t have the budget that the Bureau headquarters had, and it showed. Most of the time frame Taylor was looking for hadn’t been digitized. Taylor supposed he should be thankful this office was large enough to have a well-organized records room and procedures for storing any notes, files, or records connected to a closed case, but it still meant hours of digging through dusty stacks of paper to find what he was looking for.

For a while, Taylor found nothing, or at least not what he was looking for. There were lots of killings in the early days of the Randazzos’ rise to power. Shootings, stabbings, men and their mistresses found dead in hotel rooms, and a string of disappearances, but nothing that suggested any kind of skill.

While it was possible some of these were the work of the shooter in her early days, before she learned finesse, Taylor didn’t think so. He’d worked back from the last killings he was pretty sure he could attribute to her, and he expected some kind of progression. Nothing happened in a vacuum and a killer didn’t go from being a novice to someone capable of what this woman had been doing overnight. He was looking for those in-between stages, the growing pains of a killer working her way up to her prime. Maybe attempts at a killing masked as natural causes that didn’t quite go undetected, or a botched shot.

Had she been a man, Taylor would have considered the possibility of her learning period happening in some professional capacity, say with the CIA, KGB, or some other government-funded wet-work team. As a woman, it seemed unlikely.

Not that spy organizations had a problem with women assassins. There’d been a long history of those organizations hiring women who could blend in, and easily be written off by men as nothing more than service staff if they acted unobtrusively enough. The reason Taylor discounted that was that, yes, she would have learned to kill using poisons and the like, but it wouldn’t explain her being able to make the shot on either Randazzo or Bartolini. The CIA preferred to get their shooters from Delta or the SEALS, likening them to be rough and tumble with battle experience.

Someone able to both shoot and be knowledgeable in more untraceable methods would have had to learn their trade on their own either apprenticing to another hitter, which would be fairly uncommon, or through trial and error. Of course, figuring out by trial and error from run-of-the-mill gang violence was nearly impossible without some kind of other corroborating information. Taylor had been confident he could find it using what he’d learned about the Randazzo family and its rise to power, but the more he looked, the less confident he was that she’d learned her trade with the Randazzos.

After almost five hours in the records room, skimming through file after file, Taylor shifted to the computers, pulling in what records he could from Vegas, since that was where the Randazzos had come from, but continued to come up empty. He was about to call it quits and start trying to think up another option for finding her when something caught his attention.

It was a note about a killing in Vegas involving an associate of Randazzo Sr. The killing itself was so open and shut that Taylor had almost skipped it entirely. It involved an associate retaliating for an attack on his younger brother by what looked like a fairly corrupt cop on the payroll of a rival group. The associate had ended up running across the cop in a convenience store and, after an exchange of words, the associate pulled a gun and shot the officer.

Besides the clerk and a guy paying for gas, the incident had been caught on video, leading to a very open and shut case. The DA had gone for first-degree murder, citing the man’s desire for revenge for the assault on his younger brother by way of pre-meditation. The defense, knowing they didn’t stand a chance of getting off at all, put all their efforts into getting a conviction for second-degree murder instead, which would have taken the death penalty off the table.

Part of their reasoning was that the guy had, in fact, thought about killing the cop, going so far as looking for someone to do the job for him, before deciding against it. Apparently, the defense of ‘I tried to hire a hit man before deciding not to and then just happened to shoot him later’ didn’t sell the jury, who sent the guy to the electric chair. What interested Taylor were the details around the hit man the guy was trying to hire. The hitter was selling their services online and had been used once by someone the guy on trial knew.

In one place during cross-examination, the guy said ‘she’ when referring to the hitter. It was possible that was a slip of the tongue, except in every other place, the guy had used gender-neutral terms, which was telling in of itself. Nearly every hitter Taylor had heard of was a man. Until Randazzo had said the person was a woman, Taylor had just assumed this one was too. So had Robles and Whitaker, all three of whom had been referring to a ‘hit man.’

Organized crime wasn’t exactly the most progressive environment, especially not in the late nineties when the case Taylor was reading about happened, which was before gender and whatnot became something people talked about.

The only reason someone like that would avoid saying ‘he’ or ‘hit man’ was because he knew the hitter wasn’t a man at all, which meant the ‘she’ was a slip, but not a slip of misidentifying the hitter’s gender. The mistake was in correctly identifying the hitter as a woman. Someone who’d shoot through an FBI agent to keep from being identified was not someone this guy would have wanted to give any information about, even if it was simply to confirm she was a woman.

It was interesting, but this was the sole mention Taylor had seen in all the records he’d read of the woman he was trying to find.

“Excuse me,” Taylor said to the agent working in the records room. “I’m trying to find something on a woman selling murder-for-hire services over the Internet in the late nineties. I’ve only seen one reference in the areas I’ve looked. This is a long shot, but have you seen anything like that?”

“Nope. Have you talked to anyone in Internet Crimes?”

“No. I just found the reference a little bit ago.”

“I mean, you could keep looking, but without something identifiable you’re just hoping to get lucky. Those guys have been tracking that kind of stuff for decades now. If anyone is going to know, they will.”

“All right, thanks,” Taylor said.

Taylor was still a novice when it came to Bureau hierarchy, but as far as he knew, Internet Crimes wasn’t a regional division, which should mean it was located back in Washington. He was surprised to learn that LA had a section of that division located in their offices. In hindsight, it made sense. With so many tech companies in Silicon Valley and around the state, a lot of the systems and people the department regularly needed to interact with were here, thousands of miles away from the main Bureau headquarters. Since LA was the largest office in California and coordinated with a lot of the smaller offices in places like San Francisco and Sacramento, it made sense they’d be located here.

Taylor made his way up one floor from Records to their offices and poked around a bit until he found someone still working. He’d spent the entire day in the records room digging through files, so he counted himself lucky to find anyone at all. Field agents might work around the clock, but specialty departments like this tended to hold banker’s hours unless they had something urgent happening.

“Could you help me out for a second?” Taylor asked, sticking his head into the guy’s office.

The guy gave Taylor’s badge, which he was wearing on his belt since he kept getting asked if he was supposed to be in this area or not, a once over and waved Taylor in.

“I can try.”

“I was down in Records and found references to a woman selling her services as a hit man online when looking into some cases in Las Vegas in the late nineties. The ads don’t specify that she’s a woman and, as far as I can tell, most of the people involved didn’t know it either, but everything else fits what I’m looking for. I couldn’t find anything else on these, I guess I’d call them ads, and the lady in Records suggested I come talk to you guys about it.”