Текст книги "Solitude Creek"

Автор книги: Jeffery Daeaver

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

CHAPTER 31

‘Tomorrow Is the New Today … You have to think not about the present but about the future. You see, you blink and what was the future a moment ago is the present now. Are we good with that? Does that speak to you?’

The author looked like an author. No, not in a tweedy sport jacket with patches, a pipe, wrinkled pants. Which was, maybe, the way authors used to look, Ardel believed. This writer was in a black shirt, black pants and wore stylish glasses. Boots. Hm.

‘So while you’re focusing on the moment, you’ll miss the most important part of your life: the rest of it.’

Fifty-nine-year-old Ardel Hopkins and her friend Sally Gelbert, sitting beside her, had come to the Bay View Center, off Cannery Row, right on the shoreline, because they were on diets.

The other option, as they’d debated what to do on this girls’ night out, was to hit Carambas full-on, two hours. But that would mean six-hundred-calorie margaritas and those chips, then the enchiladas. Danger. So when Sally had seen that a famous author was appearing up the street, at the Bay View, they’d decided: perfect. One drink, a few chips, salsa, then culture.

Didn’t preclude an ice-cream cone on the drive home.

Also, good news: like everyone else, Ardel had been worried about a crowded venue – after that terrible incident at Solitude Creek, intentionally caused by some madman. But she and Sally had checked out the Bay View hall and noted that the exit doors had been fixed so they couldn’t be locked – the latches were taped down. And a thick chain prevented anyone from parking in front of the doors and blocking them.

All good. Mostly good – problem was, this guy Richard Stanton Keller, supposedly a self-help genius, was a bit boring.

Ardel whispered, ‘Three names. That’s a tip-off. Lot of words in his name. Lots of words in his book.’

Lots of words coming out of his mouth.

Sally nodded.

Keller was leaning forward to the microphone, before the audience of a good four hundred or so fans. He read and read and read.

Tomorrow Is the New Today.

Catchy. But it didn’t make a lot of sense. Because when you hit tomorrow, it becomes today but then it’s the old today and you have to look at tomorrow, which is the new today.

Like time-travel movies, which she also didn’t enjoy.

She’d’ve preferred somebody who wrote fun and talked fun, like Janet Evanovich or John Gilstrap, but there were worse ways to spend an hour after digesting a very small – too small – portion of chips and one marg. Still, it was a pleasant venue for a book reading. The building was up on stilts and you could peer down and see, thirty or forty feet below, craggy rocks on which energetic waves were presently committing explosive suicide.

She tried to concentrate.

‘I’ll tell you a story. About my oldest son going away to college.’

Don’t believe a word of it, Ardel thought.

‘This is true, it really happened.’

Not a single word.

He started telling the story of his son doing something bad or the author doing something bad or the author’s wife, the boy’s mother, doing something bad because they’d been living for today and not tomorrow, which really was today. Hm. Did that mean—

Suddenly a loud bang, from somewhere outside the hall. Nearby.

Everyone looked toward the lobby. The author fell silent.

Now screams from outside too. Then another bang louder, closer.

That wasn’t a backfire. Cars didn’t backfire any more. Definitely a shot. Ardel knew it was a gunshot. She’d been to a range a couple of times when her husband was alive. She hadn’t wanted to fire a gun, so she’d just sat back and watched the fanatics shiver with excitement over the weapons and talk shop.

Another shot – closer yet.

The manager hurried to a fire door, which he pushed open. A fast look out. He stepped back in fast.

‘Listen! There’s a guy with a gun. Outside. Coming this way!’ He pulled the door shut but it swung open, thanks to the taped-down locks.

People were rising to their feet.

Another shot, two more. More screams from outside.

‘Jesus Lord,’ Ardel whispered.

‘Ardie, what’s going on?’

One man was on his feet, a big guy. Former military, it seemed. He, too, looked out. ‘There he is! He’s coming this way. He’s got an automatic!’

Cries of ‘No!’, ‘Jesus!’, ‘Call nine one one!’

Several people ran for the emergency exit. ‘No, not that way!’ someone called. ‘He’s out there. I think he’s shooting people outside.’

‘Get back!’

A brilliant security light came on. No! Ardel thought. All the easier to see his target.

The author didn’t say, ‘Stay calm,’ or anything else. He leaped up and pushed some attendees out of the way, running for the lobby. A dozen people raced after him. They jammed the doorway. One woman screamed and fell back, clutching a horribly twisted arm.

Another shot from the direction of the lobby. Most of those who’d run that way returned to the main hall.

Ardel, crying, grabbed Sally’s hand and they tried to move away from the exit doors. But it was impossible. They were trapped in a sweating knot of people, muscle to muscle.

‘Calm down! Get back!’ Ardel cried, her voice choking. Sally was sobbing too, as were dozens of others.

‘Where’re the police?’

‘Get back, get off me …’

‘Help me. My arm – I can’t feel my arm!’

Deafening screams, screams so loud they threatened to break eardrums. As the mass pressed back from the exit doors, several people stumbled – one elderly man went down under a column of feet. He screamed as his leg bone snapped. Only through sheer strength, superhuman strength, it seemed, did two young men, maybe grandsons, manage to pry apart the crowd and get the man to his feet. He was pale and soon unconscious.

Two more shots, very close to the exit doors now.

The crowd surged away from the doors and toward the windows. Everyone was insane now, possessed with fury and panic. Slugging each other, trying to move back, thinking maybe, if anybody was thinking at all, that if they were not in the front line the bodies in front of them would take the bullets and the gunman would run out of ammunition or be shot by the police before he could kill more.

And moving relentlessly toward the only escape: windows.

Ardel heard a loud snap in her shoulder and her vision filled with yellow light, and pain, horrific pain, shot from her jaw to the base of her spine. A scream, lost amid the other screams. She couldn’t even turn to look. Her head was sandwiched between one man’s shoulder and another’s chest.

‘Ardie!’ Sally called.

But Ardel had no idea where her friend was.

The voice on the PA – it wasn’t the author’s: he was long gone – cried, ‘Get away from the door. He’s almost here!’

A series of crashes, breaking glass, behind her and the mob surged in that direction, Ardel with them. Not that she had any choice: her feet were off the ground. Finally Ardel could turn her head and she saw attendees throwing chairs through the windows. Then silhouettes of desperate people climbing to the window frames, some cutting hands and arms on jutting shards of glass. They hesitated, then jumped.

She recalled looking out of the window earlier. It was three stories above the shoreline – you’d have to leap far out to hit the water, and even then it seemed there were rocks and concrete abutments just below the surface, some bristling with rebar steel rods.

People were looking down and screaming, perhaps seeing their friends and family hit the rocks.

‘No! I’m not jumping!’ Ardel shouted to no one in particular. And tried to use her good arm to scrabble in the other direction. She’d take her chance with the gunman.

But she had no say in the matter, no say at all. The writhing mass pressed closer and closer to the windows, where some people were hesitating and others pushing the reluctant ones down and climbing on their backs or chests or bellies to launch themselves into the questionable safety of the stony shoreline below.

‘No, no, no!’ Ardel gasped, as the cluster around her mounted the fallen bodies and made it to the sill. She couldn’t look down, couldn’t steady herself, couldn’t even find a safe place to land, if there was such a place.

‘Stop it!’ she shouted to the crowd.

But then she was tumbling through space, curiously grateful, in those two or three seconds of free fall, to be out of the constrictor grasp of the surging crowd.

Then a jarring, breath-wrenching thud.

But she wasn’t badly injured. She’d landed on top of the man who’d jumped just before her. He lay, unconscious, on the outcrop of rock, the right side of his face torn open, jaw and cheek and arm shattered. She’d even landed more or less on her feet, and slid back on her butt, avoiding what would have been a catastrophic, torturous collision of her shattered shoulder and the cracked rock.

A massive spray of pungent salt water flared over Ardel and those around her, sprawled and sitting and crawling on the stone, cold as ice.

Screams from the victims, roaring from the water.

She rose, unsteadily, looking around, clutching her shoulder.

By now the police would be swarming the hall, and the gunman shot or arrested. She’d just stay here and—

‘Ah!’ Ardel barked a scream as one of the falling patrons landed directly behind her, propelling her off the rock. She stumbled forward and fell into the raging water.

A wave was now receding, pulling her in the undertow, fast, away from the shore.

She inhaled at the pain and got only water. Retching, coughing, looking back for help, looking back to see how far she was from shore. Fifteen feet, then twenty, more. The chill stole her breath and her body began to shut down.

She glanced at her useless right arm, floating limp in the water.

Not that it mattered: even if it had worked perfectly fine, there was nothing she could do. Ardel Hopkins couldn’t swim a stroke.

CHAPTER 32

Antioch March had returned from the Bay View Center and was sitting in his Honda parked about five blocks away from the venue, near the Sardine Factory, the wonderful restaurant featured in Play Misty For Me, the harrowing movie by Clint Eastwood. It was one of March’s favorite flicks, about a beautiful woman obsessed with a radio disk jockey. Psychotically obsessed.

It was really about the Get, of course.

Anything to seize what she desired.

He stretched and reflected on the plan he’d just put into place. It’d gone quite well.

Forty minutes earlier he’d carted a Monterey Bay Aquarium shopping bag along Cannery Row, then slipped behind a restaurant near the Bay View Center. He’d changed into his ‘uniform’, militia chic, he joked to himself – camo, bandana, gloves, mask, boots. Then, ten minutes after the self-help author had started his reading, time for rampage.

He’d slipped out from the hiding spot and, firing his Glock, walked closer to the Bay View Center, aiming in the direction of people but not actually at them. Everyone scattered. Everyone screamed.

He made his way toward the center’s fire-exit doors, shooting away. He figured he had about four minutes until police showed up.

Then, when people began leaping out of the windows, falling on the rocks and into the ocean, he’d turned and slipped back to his staging area. He stripped the camo off and was once again in T-shirt, windbreaker, shorts and flip-flops, pistol against his spine. The costume went into a mesh dive bag weighted with rocks and he’d tossed it into the bay, sinking thirty feet into the kelp.

Then, newly touristed, March made his way along the shore to where the Honda was parked. On a prepaid he called 911 and reported the gunman had moved off – toward Fisherman’s Wharf, the opposite direction from where March now was. He then called a local TV station and said the same thing. Another call – to a Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant, not the one he’d eaten at last night, to report that the crazed gunman was approaching. ‘Run, run, get out!’

A lot of police – not everywhere, since this was a small community, but plenty of them. Not a single one paid any attention to him. Their focus was elsewhere. He’d wondered if they had any idea he’d masqueraded as the fire inspector, Dunn, to conveniently make sure that the exit doors were taped open. Probably not. The ‘precautions’ the venue used had assured the success of the attack.

He’d waited for a while but then decided he could return to, yes, the scene of the crime.

The streets were congested, of course, as he made his way toward the venue where the tragedy continued to unfold. In the water, he could see, a dozen police and Coast Guard boats cruised and floated, blue lights, searchlights. Some people bobbing, mostly divers. People on the rocks too, beneath the shattered windows of the venue. Some sat, seemingly numb. Some lay on their backs or sides. Rescue workers had carefully descended along a steep line of rock, slick with vegetation, like green hair, and salt water, to get to the injured. Several had lost their footing and gone into the ocean. A fireman was one of these, flailing in the water as it lifted and dropped him against the shore. Two fellow workers pulled him to safety.

He wasn’t, March noted, the Hero Firefighter. But March was sure Brad Dannon would be there somewhere.

Through an alley and onto Cannery Row itself. Across the street and up the hill overlooking the Bay View Center.

What delicious chaos …

March eased close. He saw three body bags resting respectfully in the side driveway of the Bay View, near the emergency-exit doors, which were all wide open. Not a bad plan, this one, sending the self-helping book buyers out of the windows and onto the craggy rocks or into the breathlessly cold water.

March glanced down and noted another vehicle honking its way close to the Bay View.

Ah, what have we here?

My friend …

The gray Nissan Pathfinder featured an impromptu blue flasher on the dash. The vehicle parked near him – because of the congestion of the crowds and emergency vehicles it couldn’t get close to the center itself.

Kathryn Dance climbed out, frowning. Looking around.

March had been to her house, of course, but hadn’t been able to see much. There’d been dogs, people coming and going. He’d gotten some details about her life, her family, her friends, though he hadn’t managed to get a good close look at her. Now he did. Quite attractive. A bit like that actress, Cate Blanchett. She wore a dark jacket and mid-calf skirt. Stylish boots. Her hair was back in a taut ponytail, secured by a bright red band.

Ah, interesting: in this outfit, with this hair, she looked a bit like Jessica, from the holy trinity of Antioch March’s life, along with Serena and Todd.

She walked quickly up to several uniformed police and flashed her badge, though the officers seemed to know her. Others approached and gave her information, the way they’d greet a queen. His impression from the other day, at the theater, had been right: she’s the one pursuing me. The lead detective, or whatever they called it. He supposed she was smart. She had a piercing, studious frown, an unyielding jaw.

In five minutes or so, she’d dealt with all the requests and had issued orders. She walked up to the bodies, looked down, grim-faced. Then into the hall itself.

When she was out of sight, Antioch March eased down the hill. Because of the congestion Dance had parked outside the police line perimeter and he was easily able to walk up to her car without being stopped.

Equally convenient, she’d been so focused on the Bay View Center disaster scene that she’d neglected to lock the SUV.

He looked around, saw nobody was paying him the least attention and popped open the driver’s-side door.

CHAPTER 33

‘About fifty people jumped. Most hit the rocks.’ Dance was explaining this now to Charles Overby in her office at CBI headquarters. O’Neil and TJ were present too. ‘Half ended up in the water. The temperature was forty-five degrees. You can stay alive for a little while in water like that, some people can, but the ones who died couldn’t swim or were stunned or injured by the fall. Then some were just picked up by the waves and slammed into the rocks. Knocked unconscious and drowned. Two got tangled in the kelp.’

‘The count?’

O’Neil: ‘Four dead, thirty-two injured. Twelve critical. Two are in comas from the fall and hypothermia. Three’ll probably lose limbs from the fall to the rocks. No one missing. All accounted for.’

‘No security?’

‘No,’ Dance said. ‘The manager was in the front line, trying to help. The author? He hid in the bathroom. Women’s room, actually. Then the shooter vanished – about three minutes before the police showed up. No sign whatsoever.’

‘How did that happen?’

‘We think he was wearing throwaways,’ O’Neil said.

‘The camo?’

Dance told her boss, ‘There were plenty of places along the shore where he could have gotten out of sight, stripped, thrown everything into a shopping bag and strolled into the crowd, vanished.’

‘There were reports he was headed toward Fisherman’s Wharf.’

‘We think he was behind that,’ Dance explained. ‘Called Dispatch, a TV station and another restaurant. Prepaid mobile. Bought in Chicago with cash about a month ago. And when I heard that I ran the call records the night of the Solitude Creek incident. Somebody called Sam Cohen from the parking lot and told him the fire was in the kitchen and backstage areas of the club. That sent more people into the crush.’

‘The number the same?’

‘No. But it was from Chicago too. Bought at the same time. I’ve sent a request to Chicago PD to see what they can find. I’m not holding my breath. Now, at the Bay View the manager said there was no security video. I saw cameras, in the hall and outside, but apparently they weren’t hooked up.’

‘And the unsub,’ Overby said slowly, ‘never went inside. Never actually hit anybody. Why?’

‘The first question Michael and I asked about Solitude Creek. Why not just burn it down? Why not shoot his victims? He prefers them to kill themselves. He plays with perceptions, sensations, panic. It doesn’t matter what people see. It’s what they believe. That’s his weapon, fear. And he knows what he’s doing. I talked to one of the survivors. A woman named Ardel Hopkins. She was crushed in the mob and shattered her shoulder. She was about to drown but the Coast Guard fished her out. From what she said, it sounded just like Solitude Creek – people went insane. Nobody listened to reason. Security lights came on, bright ones. That added to the panic. Somebody must’ve broken a window and jumped. And the rest followed. Lemmings. Nobody looked to see if the shooter was actually inside. They just heard one person say, “Jump!” and they did. The manager said they’d just had a fire-department inspection – the venue could either cancel the event or submit to the inspection, which required them to make sure no vehicles could park in front of the exit doors and to tape the latches open.’

‘At least the MCFD’s being proactive. I didn’t hear that. But it’s ironic, hmm? The manager took all the right precautions – only that contributed to the frenzy.’

O’Neil said, ‘Forensics is going over the site now. Oh, we did get the shoeprint analysis back from CSU – of the prints Kathryn and I found at Solitude Creek. And? Turns out the unsub’s shoes’re pretty rare.’

‘What makes shoes rare?’ Overby asked.

‘Ones that cost about five thousand dollars a pair.’

‘What?’

‘The tool mark people’re ninety percent sure. Louis Vuitton. I’m having somebody run sales throughout the country but, well, there’s rare and then there’s rare. They sell about four hundred pairs a year. And I’m betting our boy paid cash for those too. And the tire evidence for the Honda? Wheelbase, track and tires mean it’s an Accord. Within the last four years.’

‘Why’s a man with five-thousand-dollar shoes driving a Honda?’ Overby mused. Then obvious answer: ‘Because it’s the most common vehicle on the face of the earth.’

‘Jesus. Five-thousand-dollar shoes.’ Overby laughed. ‘Who on earth is this guy?’ He began to say something else but then glanced at his computer screen. ‘Well. Oh.’

‘What, Charles?’

He read for a moment. ‘This’s from the Pipeline wire – Oakland task force. Two bangers burned down one of the G-eight-two’s warehouses. The one on Everly Street.’

‘Burned it down?’ Dance grimaced. She explained to O’Neil, ‘We found the place was a front, about a month ago. We could’ve raided it but decided to let it keep operating and put surveillance on it. So we could get the IDs of trucks headed south.’ She sighed. ‘Now the G-eight-twos’ll find someplace else and we’ll have no idea where. This’ll set us back.’

Overby continued to read: ‘Was loaded with about ten thousand rounds of ammo. Quite the fireworks display.’

Dance said, ‘I don’t get it. The ’house was neutral territory. All the crews knew that. Doesn’t make sense to take the place out.’

‘Well, somebody didn’t go along with the neutrality part,’ O’Neil said. ‘Maybe a renegade outfit from the south. Or here.’

Overby continued to read. Then looked up. ‘Except it’s odd. The guys who torched the place were white. At least, that’s what the video showed. All the crews involved in Pipeline’re black or Lat. But maybe they stepped on the wrong toes.’

‘And the owner wouldn’t do it for the insurance. Not with ammo inside,’ Dance said. ‘He’d wait till it was empty.’

Overby added, ‘Oakland PD and DEA have a partial on the arsonists’ license tag. Checking now. And video in the area, witnesses.’ Shaking his head, he turned from the screen.

Just then TJ Scanlon appeared in the office. He nodded to everyone. ‘Just want to keep you in the loop. I got some info on Anderson Construction.’

Ah. Dance explained to Overby that they’d found a crew of surveyors near the roadhouse. She’d hoped a construction worker might have seen the unsub near Solitude Creek.

‘Anderson’s been approached by a company in Nevada to do some development in the area. Nobody from Anderson has been at the site in two weeks. But they think the Nevada company’s had some people over there recently. I’ve left messages.’

‘Thanks, TJ. Get on home now.’

‘See you in the a.m. Night, all.’

Overby left as well, then Michael O’Neil after him.

Dance noted the time: it was nearly eleven p.m. As she ordered files on her desk, she glanced at her computer, on which was streaming a local TV news account of the Bay View incident, the sound down. Who was on but Brad Dannon, the Hero Firefighter. He hadn’t been the first on the scene this time but a close second or third. She watched the stark images. The blood on the doorway, the shards of glass from the shattered windows and the rocks, the huddled survivors who’d been fished from the water and wrapped in thin, efficient hypothermia blankets. People stumbling through the parking lot and among the crowd of onlookers, calling out, pathetic, for their missing relatives or friends.

A new, related story appeared. Dance turned the volume up. Henderson Jobbing had been sued by eighteen people for negligence in not securing their vehicles and keys. The commentators said bankruptcy was likely, not because of liability – it probably wasn’t responsible legally – but because defending the suit would be so expensive that it would have to close down.

‘The company has been a Monterey employer for years, providing warehouse services and running trucks throughout the state … and internationally as well. A local success story, but now, it seems, it will be shuttering its doors for good.’

Dance turned away from the screen. And thought, too, about poor Sam Cohen. The roadhouse would surely close, as well.

This is something you never recover from. Ever.

She pulled out her phone and made a call.

‘Kathryn,’ the man’s voice said.

‘You still here, Rey?’

‘Sure am.’

Rey Carreneo was an agent she described as older in heart than in years. The man had been a patrol officer in Reno, Nevada, where he’d got quite the lesson in policing. He’d had a rich past, some good, some dark, and he bore a tiny scar in the Y between his thumb and forefinger; it was where a gang tat had resided not too many years ago before he’d had it removed.

‘Need some help.’

‘Sure, Kathryn. The Serrano case?’

‘No, this is our Solitude Creek unsub. I need you to look into a couple of things. Can I come to your office in five?’

‘I’ll be here.’