When Bob and Rae stood to leave, the woman asked, “Can you tell me who the man is? The injured man?”
Rae said, “You heard about the Louisiana cannibal?”
“Oh... no...”
—
WHEN THE SEARCHWARRANTarrived at the Eli brothers’ shop, delivered by two robbery cops, Mallow handed it to Tommy Eli, who frowned and said, “I gotta talk to my attorney about this.”
“Talk to him all you want,” Mallow said. “In the meantime, we’re gonna search the place.”
The cabinets along the wall, which looked like the ordinary filing type, were essentially keyed safes. Mallow asked Eli for a key, but Eli shook his head. “Bobby must have it. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
“Are those cabinets expensive?” Lucas asked.
“The best,” Eli said.
“Too bad,” Lucas said. To one of the robbery cops: “You got a pickax or a sledgehammer?”
“Yup. We also got a guy with the Jaws of Life. All we need to do is beat in the front of the drawer to bend them so we can get the jaws in the crack and then we can rip them right open, like ripping a door off a car. I’ll go call him.”
As he headed for the door, Eli called out, “Wait. I remembered. There might be a spare key.”
—
THERE WASa lot of jewelry. Lucas was no expert, but most of it looked like junk. Much of it was older, like nineteenth-century, with semiprecious moonstones or onyx and probably eight-karat gold. There was one flat-out safe, in which they found fifty-one thousand dollars and several hundred euros. In the velvet-lined bottom drawer of the eighth cabinet, they found five pieces of Charles Loloma jewelry that matched the photos given to them by the Wrights.
Eli said that the jewelry had been brought in by two men. He’d seen one of them before, a big guy who said his name was Richard. The other guy didn’t mention a name, but was, Eli said, “An evil-looking fuck.”
They were pushing him on it when one of the cops said, “There’s another drawer.”
He’d pulled the drawer out, which was shallower than the others, and then reached back into its cavity, where he foundanother handle. He pulled it, and in a second compartment were nine pistols, ranging from a piece of crap .32 to a .50 caliber Desert Eagle.
Mallow went off on Eli again and was still hassling him about selling guns illegally when a cop brought Bobby Eli into the room. Eli asked, “What the fuck?”
“That’s what the marshal and I were saying,” Mallow said to him. “What the fuck? We look in one drawer and we find guns, and we look in another and we find a buttload of jewelry stolen by the Louisiana cannibal. I never would have believed you guys would have joined up with an animal like that. I thought you were the friendly neighborhood fences. And then we’ve got OxyContin all over the goddamn place...”
“Wait a minute,” Tommy Eli said. “The fuckin’ cannibal?”
—
THE ELIS HADtwo things relevant to the Gang of Four. The first was a scrap of lined yellow paper, ripped from a legal pad, with a license number scrawled on the back. While Tommy was paying the two guys who’d brought in the Loloma, Bobby had run around the block to watch them leave. He followed them to a Dodge Challenger with Oregon license tags. Bobby had written down the number, should it ever be needed.
Mallow called the number in to his office and was told that they’d get back to him as soon as they could.
The second was that in the negotiations for the Loloma jewelry, “Richard” had mentioned he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before because of the fuckin’ planes taking off.
The Elis had written down the date that the Loloma had come in, and Mallow called somebody at the Las Vegas sheriff’s office and asked them to call somebody at the Federal Aviation Administration to find out which way the planes had been taking off the night before they’d brought in the jewelry.
The narcs eventually took the Elis off to jail, though the brothers protested that they were victims, not perpetrators. The burglary guys were working through the office space inch by inch. They’d already solved a couple of burglaries and were hoping to solve more.
“That OxyContin was the biggest break we ever had back here,” Mallow told Lucas. “We never had a way to get inside before. I’m a happy guy. Thank you.”
“I’ll be happy if you can help me get to Deese,” Lucas said. “The rest of them are all yours.”
—
LUCAS WAS STILLat the Eli brothers’ office when Bob and Rae called about what they’d found at the medical center. “We got a subpoena on the way. We ought to know about the prescriptions and where they were filled inside the hour.”
