“Our guys have been poking around in Chicago,” Hockley said once he was settled on the couch with a steaming mug of coffee in his hand. “Questioned Anders Pilman, tried to activate a few sources within his organization—that sort of preliminary action.”
Hockley’s casual hand wave made Jericho want to smack him. Like it was no big deal that Hockley could set things in motion way over in Chicago. “What’d they find out?”
“Primarily background, but some of it might be interesting to you. Did you know Pilman’s been working with the bikers for a couple years now? Apparently a good chunk of what they bring across the border is his, or at least goes through him for distribution.”
“No,” Jericho said slowly. “I didn’t know that. Wade made it sound like Pilman was new to the area.”
Hockley’s nod was carefully nonjudgmental.
“So what changed?” Jericho was mostly asking himself, but Hockley might already have an answer to the question. “They’ve been working together for years, and then three dead wiseguys and a burned clubhouse. What went wrong?”
“You want my personal working theory?” Hockley asked. “No proof of it, just what my gut says.”
“Okay. Let’s have it.”
Hockley leaned back on the sofa cushions. “Wade Granger.”
Jericho stared, and Hockley sat quietly, giving him time. “Motive?” Jericho managed to ask, but Hockley continued to wait. “Shit. You think Wade wants to take over the bikers’ business? He wants to expand, I know that. Wants to use the information from that fucking thumb drive to build a damn empire. And maybe—yeah, maybe the thumb drive included the contacts in Chicago. Wade got in touch, said he wanted to do business . . .” Jericho tried to think the rest of it through, but this time Hockley jumped in.
“And Chicago said they already had good connections in this area.”
“So Wade needed to make the connections not as good. Do you really think he has the mojo to do that?”
“I’ve been working on Wade Granger for the better part of a year,” Hockley said. “He’s interesting, because he doesn’t have a large organization himself, which means, of course, fewer people to betray him. The few he does work with closely are intensely loyal. You know how these things go—we get most of our information from informants, plea deals—criminals telling us what other criminals are up to. In Wade’s case, it’s been hard to get much of anything. But we do know he’s got connections throughout the region. We know he has greater power through influence than through actual foot soldiers. I mean, the man is one persuasive, charismatic son of a bitch, isn’t he?”
There was no way Jericho was going to respond to that. “So Wade somehow used his influence over the bikers to make them kill three men from their partner organization? That goes beyond ‘persuasive,’ doesn’t it?”
“We have no proof the bikers killed those men. Could have been Granger himself.”
Could have been Granger.Could have been Wade killing three men. Jericho needed to do this. Needed to think of Wade, and three dead bodies, and a possible connection between them. Needed to keep himself from forgetting that there might be more bodies in Wade’s past, and one of them might have been Jericho’s father.
It wasn’t as if Jericho hadn’t killed people himself. Enemy combatants, a gangbanger in LA who’d shot first, and of course, the crooked feds not that long ago. Yeah, he’d killed, but only with good reason. Wade, executing three people just to stir shit up with the bikers? Just to make money? Jericho didn’t want to believe it.
“What about his bar being burned down? That happenedbeforethe men were killed, right? So Chicago was already in town, already causing trouble.”
“Seems likely,” Hockley agreed slowly.
“That fire is about the only connection between Wade and any of this. Otherwise all we’ve got is a beef between criminal partners, which, let’s face it, is not exactly unusual.”
“But we do have the fire,” Hockley replied calmly. “Same accelerant, same MO as the biker HQ fire. Unless there’s a fourth player in all this, we can reasonably assume the Chicago crew set both.”
“So what’s your theory? Wade approached the Chicago crew, they didn’t like his terms and burned down his bar to teach him a lesson? Okay, maybe. But killing the Chicago guys for revenge? No.” He was relieved by how true the words felt as he said them. “Not for revenge. To send a message, to protect himself or his interests, to create an opportunity—maybe for any of those reasons. But three deaths as revenge for his bar burning down? A building that wasn’t even valuable enough to have bothered to insure? No. That doesn’t sound right to me.”
“So what about those other motivations? Sending a message, protecting his interests, creating an opportunity. You see any of those here?”
“Not really.”
“So say Granger didn’t do it.” Hockley twisted his mouth like he didn’t like the taste of those words, but he continued anyway. “Say the three from Chicago went to see the bikers, since they were in town, and maybe they pissed the bikers off somehow.”
“Maybe they tried to use Wade as a bargaining chip. Said they’d had a better offer from someone else so the bikers would have to match it or lose their business.”
“Doesn’t seem like enough to kill them over.”
“Not unless it ties in with whatever’s going on between Larry and Mike,” Jericho mused. “Your source give you anything on that?”
“Confirmed the tension, didn’t have details.”
“Could he confirm the killings? Does he think the bikers did it?” Jericho frowned. “They were indirectly bragging about it, actually. Before you pulled up at the garage that day, one of them was saying something about how the bikers could take care of themselves. Definitely made it sound like he was talking about the three guys.”
