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“Apparently the guy who’s running this is named Arseny Stepashin, a Russian gang guy,” Letty told her, after telling her what had happened. Nowak didn’t seem flustered, as she had been after the call about the Loren Barron murders.
Nowak said, “Wait one.” A moment later, “All right, Stepashin’s on the FBI’s radar, but not prominent, there’re no current investigations.”
“They should start one. He’s the guy behind these killings,” Letty said.
As she said that, Cartwright touched her arm: “Cops are coming.”
Letty took the phone away from her ear, heard the sirens, more than one, and she said to Nowak, “The police are on the way here.”
“What about this Sovern person?” Nowak asked.
“He’s gone out to sea,” Letty said. “I don’t know how you track somebody on a sailboat. He told us that he doesn’t have a lot of food or fuel on board, so he’ll have to come back somewhere, to stock up, probably tomorrow. His boat’s calledGreen Flash, and it has a windmill-like thing hanging on the back.”
“Okay. We’ll get the Coast Guard to spot him. Try to be nice to the police.”
The uniformed copsarrived cautiously, coming around both ends of the motel and down the lobby, guns drawn. Letty said to the uninjured Russian, “Walk down to the end of the dock. Put your hands up or they might get antsy and shoot you.”
The Russian did that, and Letty said to Cartwright and Baxter, “Hands up.”
When they all had their hands up, the cops crept around the motel and down the dock and Letty shouted, “That’s the Russian, close to you.”
The cops ordered the Russian to lie down, cuffed him, then called, “You the FBI guys?”
“Homeland Security,” Letty called back. “FBI’s coming. We need an ambulance.”
“On the way...”
The ambulance arrived along with two detectives, who disarmed the wounded man and sent him to a medical center, impounded the guns from both Russians, placing them in plastic evidence bags, decided the shell from Cartwright’s gun was probably in the water, briefly interviewed them on the dock, sent the unwounded Russian to jail.
Cartwright told the lead detective about the surveillance teamthat had spotted Sovern for the killers, suggested that the team might still be watching, and pointed to a couple of places where they’d be, a man and a woman.
The cop was skeptical but sent a couple of uniforms to look; the uniforms came back shaking their heads, and one of them said, “There was a couple kind of floating around a while ago, but they’re gone now.”
A crime scene crew arrived, and Letty and Cartwright led them through the sequence of events and they went to work. That done, the cops invited Letty, Baxter, and Cartwright to come to police headquarters for a longer interview and to wait for the FBI.
They went.
Police headquarters looked like a two-story cake with thick vanilla frosting on top. The cops took them to a conference room, where they all spread around a table.
Cartwright didn’t want to cooperate at all, but Letty suggested that everything would go more quickly if she did. During the preliminary interview, before the feds arrived, Cartwright told the Oxnard detectives that she was a consultant with the DHS, and never mentioned the Unspecified Agency.
Letty outlined what had happened, including the killings in Los Angeles and the SWAT-team shootout in the Valley and asked that the interview end there, at least until the FBI arrived. The cops knew a developing multiple-agency food fight when they saw one, and agreed to wait, offering soft drinks and packs of cheese and peanut butter crackers while they waited.
Cartwright told Letty and Baxter, “Always eat, drink, and pee when you can,” and she and Baxter began devouring the crackers.
Letty, Baxter, and Cartwright had made it from LA to Oxnardin an hour, but the FBI took two, as they needed to bring a supervising agent with them, and finding one took a while.
The conference was almost exactly the same as the one that took place at FBI headquarters after Letty shot the man during the SWAT action. One difference was that Nowak took part, via a Zoom call. Letty again related the story from the time they learned of Sovern’s identity, to Sovern’s departure from the marina and the arrival of the cops.
The FBI wanted Cartwright’s pistol, and, to Letty’s surprise, she gave it up without complaint.
The bureaucracy took two hours and when it was done, they were allowed to leave. Nowak’s last comment was “I’ll be calling. Wait for it.”
Back in the truck, two o’clock in the morning, leaving Oxnard, Letty took the call from Nowak, who said, “Good. Now we’ve got something. We had the local Coast Guard admiral jack up his command and we should have located Sovern by tomorrow morning. The FBI will be all over this Stepashin guy, so we don’t have to worry about him. I would like a report with all the names and identifying data on the Ordinary People you’ve spotted...”
“Sovern’s pretty smart,” Letty said. “If he doesn’t want to talk to you, it might not be so easy.”
“We’ll see. I’ll look forward to the report, and now I’m going back to bed,” she said, and she hung up.
