Текст книги "Solitude Creek"

Автор книги: Jeffery Daeaver

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

CHAPTER 24

An hour later, back at CBI headquarters, Al Stemple was leaning back in a Guzman Connection task-force conference-room chair. It groaned under his weight.

The others were here too, the whole crew. The two Steves – Lu and Foster – along with Jimmy Gomez. Allerton, as well, was back from the Seaside bungalow mission.

‘What happened to you?’ Gomez asked her. She had a bandage on her arm.

‘That lead to Serrano? He had a big-ass Doberman in the back bedroom. Sleeping dog, and all that. He woke up. Didn’t like visitors.’

‘You get bit?’

‘Just scratched getting out of the way. Knocked over a table of crappy glass and china. Serves him right.’

‘Al, you didn’t shoot any dogs, did you?’ Gomez feigned horror.

‘Reasoned with it.’

Foster was on the phone, saying to a CHP trooper, ‘Those’re your procedures, not my procedures, and it’s my procedures you’re going to be following. Are we transparent on that? … I asked you a question … Are we transparent? … Good. No more of this shit.’

He hung up with nothing more.

What a dick, Stemple thought, and wondered if he’d have an excuse to dice the man verbally into little pieces. That’d be a challenge. Foster seemed like a good dicer too. It’d be fun.

Now that Foster had finished transparenting the Highway Patrol trooper, Allerton took the floor. ‘The lead didn’t quite pan out like we hoped. The Serrano Seaside connection.’

Gomez asked, ‘Who was it?’

‘A painter – a contractor, you know, a house painter. Not an artist. Tomas Allende. Serrano used to work with him. Uh-huh, he actually did day labor for a while before he got into turning people into skeletons.’

Foster grumbled, ‘Whatta you mean didn’t pan out?’

‘I said didn’t quite pan out. I’ll tell you what we found.’

We.

Nobody noticed. Probably thinking she meant her and Stemple.

Surprise, surprise, surprise.

The stocky woman rose and walked to the door, looked out, then closed it.

Gomez frowned. The two Steves simply watched her.

‘I have to tell you, I didn’t go alone. Kathryn came with me.’

‘Kathryn Dance?’ Gomez asked.

‘How’d she do that?’ Foster seemed both perplexed and put out by this information. Not an easy combo, Stemple thought. ‘She’s suspended. Or did something change that I haven’t heard about?’

‘Nothing’s changed,’ Allerton said.

‘Then what do you mean she was there? I don’t need her to fuck up another operation in this case.’

Stemple stuck his legs out and brought his boot heel down on the linoleum hard. Foster didn’t notice the sound. Or didn’t care if he did.

Gomez said, ‘Steve, come on. We don’t need that.’

‘Need what? I’m saying it’s because of her we’re in this situation.’

Allerton: ‘She asked and I said yes. She knows she made a mistake and she wants to make it right. Look, she was good, though, at the house in Seaside, Steve. She was. You should’ve seen her.’

‘I did. With Serrano. I wasn’t impressed. Who was?’

Stemple scratched a scar on his thigh, not new, but a

.40 round leaves a thick streak and humidity could really kick off the itch.

‘You can’t bat a thousand every time,’ Gomez said. Normally soft-spoken, he sounded brittle.

Thanks, Jimmy, Stemple thought.

Steve Lu, the chief of detectives from Salinas, said, ‘Okay. She went. I don’t see the harm. What happened?’

Allerton continued, ‘The subject, our painter, used to work with Serrano? He was cooperating and telling us all kinds of things but swore he hadn’t heard from Serrano for six months. He’d lost all contact. He was going legitimate. I mean, I believed him. Everything he was saying, completely credible. And Kathryn was all, “Sure, sure, I understand, interesting, thanks for your help.” Then, bang, she pulled the rug out from underneath him. Just like that. Caught him in a dozen lies, went to work and in the end he talked.’

‘What about the non-panning lead?’ Foster grumbled.

‘He didn’t have Serrano’s present location. Not surprising, considering Serrano’s warranted and on the run. But the painter said the word is that he’s still in the area. He didn’t head out of state.’ Allerton continued, ‘But more important he gave up another name.’

‘Who?’

‘A woman was recently a girlfriend of Serrano’s. Tia Alonzo. No warrants on her but she’s keeping low. TJ Scanlon’s on it, getting her whereabouts.’

‘You really think Picasso’s telling the truth?’

‘Who?’ Lu asked.

‘The painter.’ Foster sighed.

‘Kathryn does. I do.’

‘When’ll we have a location to go with Señorita Alonzo?’

Allerton said, ‘Soon, TJ said. He’s convinced within a day or two.’

‘Convinced.’

Allerton said, ‘Now. With Kathryn. It was off the books.’

‘Which means?’ From Foster.

Sub-rosa …

‘She didn’t tell Overby.’

Foster: ‘She snuck in to interview this dingo in Seaside?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Jesus.’

Allerton said, ‘I understand Charles is doing what he has to but she’s too valuable to sit this out. What I want—’

Foster said, impatient, ‘Yeah, yeah, she wants to go around Overby’s back and stay on the team. On the sly.’

Sub-rosa …

Allerton snapped, ‘Yes, Steve, that’s exactly what she wants to do. And I say yes. She knows the area, knows these people. After all, she wasn’t the only one who got taken in by Serrano. We watched the whole thing ourselves. Did anybody here suspect anything? I didn’t.’

Finally the asshole fell quiet.

‘I say yes,’ said loyal Jimmy Gomez, nodding his crew-cut head.

‘Can’t hurt,’ Lu agreed.

Foster looked Stemple up and down. The urge to dice returned. Foster said, ‘What about you? How do you vote?’

Stemple replied, ‘I’m just muscle. I don’t get a vote.’

Foster turned and regarded the others. ‘You’ve thought this through, all of you?’

‘Thought it through?’ From Gomez.

‘Have you? Have you really? Well. Alternative A: Dance sits on the sidelines per orders and we handle it, the Guzman Connection, the hunt for Serrano, everything. She does that and, say Serrano nails a banger or, worse, an innocent. Even then she might just survive. She can claim she didn’t have the chance to fix what got broke. Or Alternative B: she’s back on the case, unofficial, and there’s a screw-up, hers or anybody else’s, that’s it. Her career is over.’

Well, that was transparent enough.

Silence.

A second vote. The result was the same.

‘You?’ Allerton asked.

Foster muttered something.

Gomez: ‘What?’

‘Yeah, yeah. I’m on board. I got work to do.’ He swung back to his keyboard and started typing.

CHAPTER 25

After the Serrano mission, which had been somewhat successful, Kathryn Dance returned to the hunt for the Solitude Creek unsub.

She logged on to the National Crime Information Center to look for any similar incidents. The unsub was clearly a repetitive actor. Had he done this before?

NCIC revealed only one crime that echoed Solitude Creek, six months ago in Fort Worth, Texas. A man had wired shut the doors of the Prairie Valley Club, a small country-western venue, and set a fire just outside the back door. Two people were killed and dozens injured in the stampede. There was no connection to her case, though, since the perp, a paranoid schizophrenic homeless man, had died after accidentally setting himself alight too.

A search of the general media sent her to similar incidents, but nothing recent. She read about the Happy Land social-club fire in New York City in the eighties. Hundreds of people were packed into an illegal social club when a man who’d been ejected returned with a dollar’s worth of gas and set the place on fire. Nearly ninety people died. In that case, there wasn’t much of a stampede: people died so quickly in the smoke and flames that bodies were found still clutching their drinks or sitting upright on barstools.

The classic case of a deadly stampede, she found, was the Italian Hall disaster in Calumet, Michigan, in 1913. More than seventy striking mine workers and their families were killed in a crush at a Christmas party when someone yelled, ‘Fire,’ though there was none. It was believed that a thug connected with the mining company subject to the strike started the panic.

She found a number of accidental stampedes. Particularly dangerous were sporting events – the Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield, England, which her father had witnessed, for instance. Soccer seemed to be the most dangerous of organized sports. Three hundred people had died in Chile, at Estadio Nacional, when an angered fan attacked a referee, resulting in police action that panicked the attendees. Before the 1985 European Cup final at Heysel Stadium in Belgium had begun, nearly forty people had died when Liverpool fans surged toward rival Juventus supporters. The tragedy led to a multi-year ban of English soccer teams playing on the Continent.

Even more deadly were stampedes during religious events.

During the Hajj, the Islamic religious pilgrimage, thousands had died over the years when crowds panicked and surged from one event to the next. Stoning the Devil, a station of the Hajj, had taken the most lives. Hundreds of similar occurrences.

Dance flipped through the documents cluttering her desk. Reports had come in of scores of tall, brown-haired men seen lurking suspiciously in the area. None of these sightings panned out. And the continued canvass of people who’d been at Solitude Creek Tuesday night had yielded nothing.

By six that evening she realized she was reading the same reports over and over.

She grabbed her purse and walked to the parking lot to head home. She was there in a half-hour. Jon Boling met her at the door, kissed her and handed her a glass of Chardonnay. ‘You need it.’

‘Oh, you bet I do.’

Dance went into the bedroom to de-cop herself. There was no gun to lockbox away tonight but she needed a shower and a change of clothes. She set the case files on her desk, stripped off the suit and stepped into steaming water. She’d been to no crime scenes other than the theater that day – at which there’d been no actual crime, no bodies, nothing graphic to witness; still, something about the Solitude Creek unsub made her feel unclean.

Then a fluffy towel to dry off. A fast collapse on the bed, eyes shut for three minutes. Then bounding up again. Dressing in jeans and a black T, a Kelly green sweater. Shoes? Hm. She needed something fun. Aldo’s, in loud stripes. Silly. Good.

Downstairs, heading into the kitchen. ‘Hey, hons,’ Dance called.

Maggie, in jeans with Phineas and Ferb T-shirt, gave a nod. She seemed subdued again.

‘All okay?’

‘Yep.’

‘What did you do today?’

‘Stuff.’ She disappeared into the den.

What was going on? Was it really nerves about the talent show? ‘Let It Go’ was a challenging tune, yes, but within Maggie’s range. Lord knew she’d rehearsed plenty despite the deception the other night about not knowing the lyrics.

Was it something else? It was approaching that time in her life when hormones would soon be working their difficult changes in her body. Maybe they already were.

Adolescence. Wes was already going through it.

Heaven help us …

Or was it what she’d discussed with O’Neil? Her father’s death.

But Maggie had seemed uninterested in talking about the subject. Dance had noted no unusual emotional affect patterns or kinesic messages when the subject of Bill came up. Still, kinesics is an imperfect science and, while Dance was talented when conversing with those she didn’t know, witnesses and suspects, her skills sometimes failed her when it came to family and friends.

She now trailed her daughter into the den and sat down on the couch. ‘Hey, babes. How’s it going?’

‘Yeah. Okay.’ Maggie was instantly suspicious.

‘You’ve been kind of moody lately. Anything you want to talk about?’

‘I’m not moody.’ She flipped through one of the Harry Potter books.

‘How’s “distracted”?’ Dance smiled.

‘Everything’s fine.’

Thinking of the other children’s movie song, ‘Everything Is Awesome’, which Michael O’Neil had threatened playfully to sing. Just like in that movie, where everything wasn’t so awesome, Maggie wasn’t fine.

She tried once or twice more to get her daughter to engage but she’d learned that it was impossible to do so if the children refused. The best solution was to wait for a different time.

Dance concluded with the standard, ‘If there’s anything you want to talk about, anything at all, let me know. Or I’ll turn into a monster. You know what kind of monster I can be. Mom Monster. And how scary is that?’

Her smile was not reciprocated but Maggie tolerated the kiss on the head. Then Dance rose and stepped out onto the Deck, where Boling sat beneath the propane heater.

They spoke about the case – to the extent she felt comfortable – then about some of his projects, new code he was writing, the reasons why his college-level students hadn’t finished their assignments.

‘I wish I could give them a grade for the best excuse. I mean, there were A-pluses there.’

Dance glanced down at the end of the Deck, where Wes and two friends were intensely involved in a game. She recognized Donnie. She’d seen the other boy but couldn’t come up with the name.

She whispered to Boling, ‘And that’s …’

‘Nathan.’

‘Right.’

He was taller than the others, stocky. The first time he’d been there he’d walked in with a stocking cap. Dance had started to say something, when Donnie noticed and, eyes wide, said, ‘Dude? Seriously? Respect.’

‘Oh, sorry.’ The hat had vanished and he’d never worn it again.

The boys were now on the back deck playing the game they’d made up themselves. Its name was, she believed, Defend and Respond Expedition Service, or something similar. She supposed there was some shoot-’em side to it but that didn’t bother her. Since it was played with paper and pen, a variation of a board game, she didn’t mind a little military action. Dance kept her eye on video games and movies. TV shows now too. Cable opened the door to anything-goes. Wes had asked if he and Donnie could watch Breaking Bad. Dance had screened it first and loved the show but after the acid-dissolved body fell through a ceiling, she’d decided: No. Not for a few years.

But a game you played with paper and pen? How harmful could that be?

‘You boys want to stay for dinner? Call your parents?’

Donnie said, ‘Thanks, Mrs Dance, but I have to go home.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ Nathan said, looking embarrassed and guilty at the same time – the essential expressions of adolescence.

‘Start packing up. We’re going to eat soon.’

‘Okay,’ Donnie said.

She looked at her son and, when she spoke, she quashed ‘honey’, given that his peers were present. ‘Wes, Jon and I were talking. You ever see Rashiv any more?’

Silence for a moment. ‘Rashiv?’

‘He was nice. I haven’t seen him for a while.’

‘I don’t know. He’s kind of … He’s got a different bunch he hangs with.’

Dance thought this was too bad. The Indian American was, as Jon Boling had observed, funny and smart and polite. Which meant not only was he good company but he was a good influence too. Her son was getting to the point where, in the middle school he attended, there would be increasing temptations to steer toward the dark side. ‘Well, if you see him, say hi for me.’

‘Sure.’

After Wes’s friends had left, Dance herded Maggie from the den and the two ladies prepared dinner. Whole Foods had been instrumental – sushi, a roast chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans and a complicated salad, which included cranberries, some kind of mystery seed, bits of cheese and impressive croûtons.

Boling set the table.

As she watched him her thoughts segued to the two of them, Dance and Boling.

The hours he spent with her and the children were pure comfort. The times she and he got away alone for a rare night at an inn were so very fine too. (He never stayed the night when the children were here.) All was good.

But Kathryn Dance wasn’t long a widow. She monitored the pulse of her figurative heart, on the lookout for subconscious blips that might sabotage the relationship – the first since Bill’s death. She was not going to make fast decisions, for her own peace of mind, and the children: they were the north star by which she and Boling navigated their relationship. And it was Dance’s job to be in control. To keep the speed brakes on.

Then her hand, holding a large spoon, paused as it scooped mashed potatoes from carton to bowl. And she asked herself: Or is there another reason I’m keeping things with Jon Boling slow?

He looked up from the table and caught her eye. He smiled. She sent one his way too.

‘Dinner’s ready!’ she called.

Wes joined them, pulling a juice from the fridge.

‘Put the phone away. No texting.’

‘Mom, just—’

‘Now. And how can you text and open a Tropicana?’

He mumbled but his eyes grew wide when he saw the potatoes. ‘Awesome.’

As they sat down, Maggie said, ‘Are we going to say grace?’

This was new. The Dance household was not particularly religious.

‘We can if you’d like to. What do you want to say thanks for?’

‘Thanks?’

‘Grace is where you say thanks to God for something.’

‘Oh,’ Maggie said. ‘I thought it was where you asked for something.’

‘Not grace,’ Boling explained. ‘You can pray for things but grace is where you thank somebody else.’

‘What did you want to ask for?’ Dance looked at her daughter’s face, which revealed no emotion.

‘Nothing. I was just wondering. Can have I the butter, please?’

CHAPTER 26

Antioch March walked into a restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf and got a table near the window.

Tourism on steroids. Nothing like the days of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, he guessed.

He ordered a pineapple juice and looked at his prepaid once again. Nothing on the information he was expecting.

March ordered a calamari steak with steamed vegetables.

‘Sorry, they’re only sautéed. I don’t think the chef—’

‘That’s okay. I’ll take them that way.’

Another sip of juice. He opened his gym bag and began looking over maps and notes – what was planned for tomorrow. The theater had been denied him, set him back a day, but this would be just as good. Even better, he now reflected.

He glanced around the restaurant. He wasn’t worried about being recognized. His appearance was very different from what had been reported. What a stroke of luck that the police had released his description to the public and not kept it to themselves. If the theater employee hadn’t given that away, he might be in jail now.

Or dead.

He was studying a family nearby. Parents and two teenagers, all looking like they should be enjoying the pier more. In fact, it was a little anemic. Shopping mostly. No rides, except fifty cents bought little kids a turn on a space ship, up and down, in front of a shell shop.

Family …

Antioch March’s father had been a salesman – yes, a real, honest-to-God traveling salesman. Industrial parts, American made (though maybe some components, tiny ones, had been teamed together in China. Dad, politically conservative, had been less than forthcoming about that).

The food came and he ate. He was hungry. It had been a long time since McBreakfast.

March’s father was never home, his mother either, though she hadn’t traveled much. She worked a lot, though young Andy could do the math. Shift over at five but not home till seven thirty or eight, for a shower, then downstairs to ask about her boy’s day as she made him supper.

Not every day. But often enough. Andy didn’t care. Mom could do what she wanted. He had what he needed. He had his video games.

‘How’s your calamari, sir?’ the young waitress asked, as if she really, really cared.

‘Good.’

She tipped him with a smile.

March used to think that was the reason he was drawn to, well, less healthy interests than his classmates: Dad never around, Mom tackling her own Get in her own special way. Plenty of free time as a boy. The solitary games.

Come on, Serena.

A little closer, Serena.

Look what I have for you, Serena …

Was he angry at their absence? March honestly couldn’t say if he would have turned out different if he’d spent his evenings curled up in jammies as Mom or Dad read Lord of the Rings to him.

No, not much anger. Sure, Markiatikakis became March but that just made sense. He kept Antioch, didn’t he?

Though I prefer Andy.

And he’d followed in his father’s shoes. Life on the road. Life in business. And he was a salesman in a way.

In the employ of the website.

And working for his main boss.

The Get.

He could recall the exact moment of coining the term. In college. Hyde Park, U of C, the week of exams. He’d aced a few of them already and was prepared, completely prepared, for the rest. But he’d lain in bed, sweating and chewing on the inside of his cheek with compulsive molars. He’d tried video games, TV to calm down. No go. He’d finally given up and picked up a textbook for his Myths in the Classical World as Bases for Psychological Archetypes. He’d read the book several times and was prepared for the test but, as he flipped through the pages, he came across something he hadn’t paid attention to. In the Oedipus story, where a son kills his father and sleeps with his mother, there was this line that referred to Oedipus as ‘the get of Jocasta and Laius’.

The get …

What did that mean?

He’d looked it up. The word, as a noun, meant ‘offspring’.

Despite his anxiety that night he’d laughed. Because in this context the word was perfect. Something within him, a creation in his own body, something he’d given birth to was turning on him. The way Oedipus would destroy father and mother both.

And – he couldn’t help but think of the pun – whatever this feeling was, it forced young Antioch March to do whatever he could to ‘get’ peace of mind, comfort.

And so the hunger, the lack, the edge was named.

The Get.

He’d felt it all his life, sometimes quiescent, sometimes voracious. But he knew it would never go away. The Get could unspool within you anytime it wanted.

It wanted, not you. You didn’t have a say.

And if you didn’t satisfy the Get, well, there were consequences.

Somebody wasn’t happy …

He’d talked to doctors about it, of course – well, shrinks. They understood; they called it something else but it was the same. They wanted him to talk about his issues, which meant he’d have to be open about Serena, the Intersection, about Todd. Which wasn’t going to happen. Or they wanted to give him meds (and that made the Get mad, which was something you never, ever wanted to happen).

March tried to be temperate on his jobs. But the Asian family’s death had been denied him, the theater disaster too.

What the hell?

‘Miss? A Johnnie Walker Black. Neat.’

‘Sure. Are you finished?’

‘I am, yes.’

‘A box?’

‘What?’

‘To take home with you?’

‘No.’ The Get made you rude sometimes. He smiled. ‘It was very good. I’m just full. Thanks.’

The drink came. He sipped. He looked around him. A businesswoman eating dinner accompanied by an iPad and a glass of grapefruit-yellow wine glanced his way. She was around thirty-five, round but pretty. Sensuous enough, probably Calista-level sexy, to judge from her approach to eating the artichoke on her plate (food and sex, forever linked).

But his gaze angled away, avoiding her eyes.

No, not tonight.

Would he have a family some day with someone like her? He wondered what her name might be. Sandra. Joanne. Yes, she would be Joanne. Would he settle down with a Joanne after he got tired of the nights of Calistas and Tiffs?

March – yeah, yeah, so fucking handsome – could have asked Joanne, sitting over there with her artichoke and wine, a bit of butter on her cheek, to dinner tomorrow, and, in a month, a weekend getaway, and in a year to marry him. It would work. He could get it to work.

Except for one thing.

The Get wouldn’t approve.

The Get didn’t want him to have a social life, romantic life, family life.

He thought of the attack, at Solitude Creek.

How was that for a sign? Though Antioch March thought this in a droll way: he didn’t believe in signs.

Solitude …

The family was preparing to leave, collecting phones, bags of chocolate sea otters, leftovers to be discarded in the morning. The father had the keys of his car out. Keys didn’t jangle any more. They were quiet plastic fobs.

And, in this damn reflective mood, he couldn’t help but think about the intersection. Well, upper case: the Intersection.

Serena had changed his life in one way but the Intersection had changed it most of all. Everything that came after was explained by what had happened where Route 36 met Mockingbird Road. Reeking of Midwest America.

After Uncle Jim’s funeral, driving back.

‘Nearer My God To Thee’.

‘In Christ There Is No East Or West’.

The insipid, noncommittal Protestant hymns. They had no passion. Give me Bach or Mozart any day for gut-piercing Christian guilt. March had thought this even then, a boy.

It had been quiet in the Ford, the company car. His father, home for a change. His mother, being a wife for a change. Driving on the bleak November highway, winding, winding, pine turned gray by the mist, everything still.

Then around a bend, rocks and pines with stark black trunks.

Then: his mother gasping a brief inhaled scream.

The skid flinging him against the door, the brakes locking, then—

‘Sir?’

March blinked.

‘Here you go, sir.’ The waitress set the bill in front of him. ‘And at the bottom you can take a brief survey and maybe win a free dinner for the family.’

March laughed to himself.

For the family.

He doled out bills and didn’t tell her that after his business was concluded here he wouldn’t be coming back to the area again for quite a long time, if ever.

When March looked up, the couple and their children were gone.

It would be a busy day tomorrow. Time to get back to the inn.

His phone hummed with an email.

At last.

It was from a commercial service that ran DMV checks. The answer he’d been waiting for.

That morning as he’d enjoyed the Egg McMuffin and coffee, parked near the multiplex that would have been his next target, March had noted an assortment of police cars and – this was curious – a gray Nissan Pathfinder.

He couldn’t learn anything from the other vehicles or the uniformed or sport-coated men who climbed out of them. But the occupant of the Pathfinder, that was a different story. It wasn’t an official car. Not a government plate. And no bumper stickers bragging about children, no Jesus fish. A private car.

But the driver was official. He could tell that from the way she strode up to the officers. The way they answered her questions, sometimes looking away. March was at a distance but he supposed she had a fierce gaze. Intense, at least.

Her posture, upright. March had sensed instinctively that this woman was one of the main investigators against him.

The search had revealed that the Pathfinder belonged to one Kathryn Dance.

A lovely name. Compelling.

He pictured her again and felt a stirring low in his belly. The Get was unspooling. It, too, was growing interested in Ms Dance. They both wanted to know more about her. They wanted to know all about her.