“Someone must have deleted it,” Trapp said, and cast Mason a sideways glance.
“No.” Schaub hadn’t made a fortune in this arena without highly developed survival instincts. He knew the consequences of bringing them to his inner sanctum and not giving them what they wanted. “This is the actual recording. The camera’s been disabled.”
“You really expect us to believe that this one recording just mysteriously doesn’t work?”
Trapp nodded to one of the computer specialists, who stepped forward and hovered over Schaub until he vacated his seat.
From where Mason sat, it looked like the new set of hands was doing the very same thing as the older, sweatier ones.
“I’m telling you, the system recorded exactly what you see. No image. No sound. Either the cord was cut or the camera itself was disabled,” Schaub said.
“Then shouldn’t we have seen someone disable it?”
“Not if the camera wasn’t recording at the time. It only goes live when someone pushes the button on the control panel in the safe.”
“So you’re telling me—”
“He’s right,” the agent said. In addition to having some of the best physical evidence specialists in the country, the RMFL boasted the cream of the crop when it came to the science of computer forensics. “The feed was disrupted at the source.”
“There’s no way of retrieving any footage or sound?” Mason said.
“There never was any to retrieve.”
“Were the other rooms functional on that same day?”
Mason rarely worked this type of investigation, so he’d never dealt with either of these agents. The man at the console looked more like a buzz-cut marine than your stereotypical computer whiz. His partner fit the computer geek mold, though. All he was missing was a bow tie and a pocket protector. Or maybe Mason was too quick to judge him. The bulge beneath his jacket didn’t quite mesh with that profile. The agent caught him looking, smiled, and showed off his holstered SIG Sauer P229 Equinox .40 S&W.
The screen filled with an image of a woman with a dragon tattoo on her lower back sitting astride a man. She leaned back and gripped him by the knees. She wore a black-and-white sequined Mardi Gras mask with peacock feather fringes over the upper half of her face and a pout meant for the camera. The noises she made were obviously for the viewer’s benefit. The man beneath her kneaded her thighs and grunted. The overall image quality was startlingly good, even in the low light conditions.
“It looks like the cameras in the other rooms were working just fine,” the evidence tech at the computer said.
“They weren’t the only thing working,” Trapp said.
“The time and date stamp are within an hour of the other recording.”
“How does the manager determine which room he assigns to a guest?” Mason asked.
“The, um, regulars get the rooms along the front.” Schaub cleared his throat. “One through eight. They have the best, uh, lighting. The parking places are also clearly visible from Federal. The rooms around back are reserved for guests who require more … discretion. The parking slots are set down the hill behind the trees, so they’re invisible from every direction. Room nine is the farthest from the office, which adds an extra dimension of privacy.”
“Or at least the perception of it,” Trapp said.
“So Everett would have made that determination on the spot?” Mason asked.
“As long as there wasn’t another guest in there. In which case, he would have assigned them to number eleven, two rooms down. Again, privacy.”
Every time Schaub said the word privacy, Mason had to fight the urge to lunge from the chair and squeeze him around his fat neck. He stared at him long and hard, watched even more sweat bloom from the sleazebag’s forehead and upper lip.
“What aren’t you telling me, Ralph?”
“Nothing. I mean, nothing that really makes any kind of difference one way or the other.”
“Ralph.”
“The guy who died. I recognized his picture from the paper. I’ve seen him around, if you know what I’m saying.”
“You knew who he was and what he did and you were building a file you could use to blackmail him.”
His head turned as red as a tomato and the collar of his shirt visibly darkened with sweat.
“Look, I … we—”
“The woman whose picture was in the paper with his. The woman who died in room nine. Had you ever seen her before? Were you building a file on her, too?”
“Mason,” Trapp said. He felt his partner’s hand on his shoulder. He didn’t realize he’d jumped up out of his seat. Schaub had both hands in front of his face in anticipation of the blow, which, fortunately for both of them, never came. “Take a walk, okay? Go get some air.”
“We have video from the office,” the tech said.
Mason shrugged off Trapp’s hand and turned to face the monitor. There were two different angles, as he’d anticipated, only from opposite corners than he had been led to believe by the nonfunctional decoys Everett had pulled down.
The two cameras were pointed at each other, but also downward at roughly a forty-five-degree angle. The monitors on the left displayed the feed from the camera behind the front desk. They were date- and time-stamped Thursday, October 29, 11:19:36 A.M. and featured a solid view of the safe at the bottom right, the hinged door, and a portion of the rack filled with brochures at the top left, above the counter upon which the sign-in sheet was situated. The names were clearly legible. The registrant would have to have been right up against the counter for his or her face to be visible, though.
There was a man standing near the brochures. Only his polished black shoes, slacks, and the bottom of his long overcoat were on the screen. He was facing the rack. In his left hand was a small black rectangle that could easily have been a cell phone.
The images on the right featured the same date and time stamp. One had real time, the other elapsed time. Both showed the front desk from the vantage point of the camera mounted beside the front door, directly above the rack of brochures, although only the far end of it was visible in the bottom right corner. The primary focus was on the counter where the guests registered. The man standing by the brochures was outside the camera’s range. His shadow stretched across the floor and up the front of the desk. He wore some sort of broad-brimmed hat. Angie’s auburn hair was a frozen blur of motion near the bottom as she entered through the front door.
“You sure you want to see this?” Trapp whispered.
Mason could only nod. He already knew the transcript by heart. How much worse could the visual accompaniment hurt?
The tech let the feed roll, and Mason watched his wife walk away from one camera and appear on the next with the same clicking of heels he would never be able to forget. From behind, she looked calm and composed. He was glad not to be able to see her face. She’d worn a tight black skirt that accentuated her curves and a button-down blouse that revealed just a hint of the lace on her bra. A man with long, greasy brown hair stepped out of the doorway from the back room on the left screen and in front of the camera on the right. Terrence Everett, live and in the flesh.
“What can I do you for?”
He dragged the stool forward and plopped down on it.
“I need a room.”
The lower legs of the man holding the cell phone turned subtly toward Angie in the upper corner of the screen on the left. On the right, his shadow stretched up the backs of her calves.
“How, um, long you think you might be needing it?”
“Just one night.”
Everett gestured toward the clipboard and Angie signed it while he leaned beneath the counter and plucked the key from its slot.
“How you want to pay for that?”
“Cash.”
She set a bill on the counter. Everett opened the safe, dropped the fifty into the cash box without offering to make change, and pressed the button for room nine.
The legs behind Angie and t
o her right stepped closer to the rack. The man removed one of the brochures with a gloved hand.
Everett scooted forward and started to hum an off-key rendition of “Strangers in the Night.” He slid the key across the counter and leaned onto his elbows in what appeared to be an effort to get a peek down Angie’s blouse.
“Room’s around back. Corner suite. Park right in front of the door and no one will be able to see your car from the road.”
She snatched the key from the counter in one quick motion and turned to leave. Mason had a clear view of her face on the right monitor when she said, “No interruptions.”
The thundering of his heartbeat ceased. He tried to read her expression. To glean the truth from it. To detect the lie. To gain any sort of insight into what had been going through her mind, but her expression betrayed nothing and her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses.
“You got it, Miss…” Everett spun the clipboard around and grinned. “… Smith.”
Angie strode toward the door.
The lower legs turned and the man stepped into her path. Just his shoes were visible on the left. On the right, the shoulder of his charcoal overcoat, the brim of his hat.
She glanced up at him.
“Excuse me.”
He tipped his hat as she brushed past him. Mason caught a glimpse of the man’s gloved thumb pass over his cell phone.
And then Angie was gone.
“Something I can do for you, bud?” Everett said. “They got movies and a live show across the street.”
The man glanced in Everett’s direction on the right monitor and the desk clerk nearly toppled backward from the stool.
Without a word, the man in the overcoat and hat turned and headed for the door. When he passed across the camera’s view, Mason saw just his heels on the left and the wide brim of a crisp fedora that matched the overcoat on the right. The man held the brochure he had plucked from the rack in front of his face for good measure, and then he, too, was gone.
“Rewind until you find where the man in the overcoat enters,” Mason said.
“What are you looking for specifically?” the tech asked.
“A clear shot of his face.”
Angie walked backward into the office, spun to look at the desk clerk, who bounced around for a moment before retreating into the back room. Angie slapped the bell and then walked in reverse out the door. The man’s feet vibrated as he shifted his weight from side to side for a good length of time before he finally whirled and walked backward out the door.
“Slow it down,” Mason said.
The tech reset the feed and slowed the playback speed. The man entered the office with his head down, his face shielded by the brim of his hat, his collar turned up around his neck. With the gloves on, it was impossible even to distinguish his skin color, let alone any identifiable traits.
“Damn it.”
“Hang on,” the tech said. “I’ve still got one idea I think might work.”
Mason stepped closer and watched the monitors as the tech forwarded the footage to the point where his wife finished her transaction and turned to leave.
“What kind of magnification is this beastie equipped with?” the tech asked.
Schaub had been slowly inching his way toward the door behind them.
“More than I ever had any use for.”
The tech played the recording forward in slow motion. One step. Two. Angie was away from the counter. The man’s feet moved on the left screen and his shoulder appeared in the bottom corner of the monitor on the right. Angie raised her eyes to meet his. As her lips parted to speak, the tech paused the feed. He zoomed in on her face, readjusted his central focus, and then zoomed in even tighter on the lens of her sunglasses over her left eye until it filled the screen. The image was distorted and out of focus. A series of filters passed over the image. With each pass, the picture gained resolution and contrast. By the time the tech leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head, Mason was pretty certain his heart had stopped beating.
Despite the distortion caused by the contour of the reflective lens, he had no problem making out the details. The man had tipped his hat with his right hand, which obscured a good portion of his face. The skin on his left cheek was mottled and sinewy, as if it had been badly burned. No eyebrows grew from his scarred forehead. The raised collar of his coat concealed his mouth and nose, but what little Mason could see was more than enough.
The ground dropped out from beneath him as he stared at the man’s eye.
It was a shade of blue unique in all of nature.
In fact, he’d only seen irises that color on one person.
And until that moment, Mason had been certain he was dead.
23
By the time Mason got home again, darkness and exhaustion reigned. The thought of climbing into a scalding shower to scrub off the taint of Schaub’s world sounded incredible, but he couldn’t bring himself to cross the front threshold. He just stood on the porch, staring through the open doorway at a house that was no longer his. The part of him that lived inside had died with his wife.
It struck him that they would never bring a child home to this house. He would never throw a ball with him in the yard or swing with her in his lap. He would never walk through this door to the sound of laughter or the smell of his wife’s spaghetti. He would never hear her breathing in his ear or feel her hands on the muscles in his back.
He stared at the furniture in the living room and the paintings on the walls, and at the dinette in the kitchen, where his investigative files were spread around his wife’s final communication to him. We need to talk tonight. Please. There was nothing he wanted to do more and yet it was the one thing he would never be able to do again.
This was a stranger’s house. Or maybe he had become a stranger to it. The thought of spending another night in it was more than he could bear, but when it came right down to it, he had nowhere else to go.
He was at a crossroads and the time had come to decide which direction his life would take. The decision itself was so monumental that he had to break it down into a series of smaller, less significant decisions. He wasn’t accomplishing anything just standing there, so he made the decision to enter the house and close the door behind him.
Heading upstairs for a change of clothes was an easy decision. Easier still was the decision to get in the shower. The hot water worked its magic and he emerged looking and smelling like a new man. Or at least a clean man. It also helped him formulate his thoughts. He had brought all of this pain upon himself. He had brought evil back with him from Arizona and tracked it through his home. He was responsible for his wife’s death. He had failed to kill the monster who murdered his partner and then his wife. That one moment had changed everything. That one decision.
Take the shot, damn it!
Had he shot the man with the blue eyes first, his partner might still be dead, but his wife would be alive. A split second to think it through. Not even that. He had acted on instinct and made the wrong decision. He needed the next one he made to be the right one, for the answer to the question he was about to pose to himself would set the course of the rest of his life.
What should I do now?
The answer was so simple that even he couldn’t screw it up.
He was going to track down the man who had murdered Angie and Kane. He was going to find the man with the blue eyes. And he was going to kill him.
He changed into clean clothes, holstered his Glock under his left arm, and looked around the bedroom that was no longer his. Angie was in everything he saw. Her scent haunted the room. She was no longer here, though, and she would never be coming back.
Neither would Mason.
He loaded Angie’s personal laptop into its case, took it by the handle, and went down the stairs. He stopped dead in his tracks on the landing. A yellow triangle protruded from the seam around the door. He opened it and a folded piece of paper fell to the floor.
Another page torn from a phone
book, covered with scores of fingerprints, none of which would lead him to the person who had left the message. It consisted of only four words this time.
WILL YOU HELP ME?
He took one of his business cards from his wallet, stepped out onto the porch, and wedged it in the door behind him. When whoever left the notes was done playing games, he could pick up a phone and call Mason. He didn’t have any more time to waste. If the man with the blue eyes was still alive, then there was a chance he’d brought the virus with him.
Mason was already formulating a plan when he climbed behind the wheel of his Cherokee. He needed to consider everything he knew about the man with the blue eyes, who obviously knew his identity, which meant he had to assume that the man knew everything there was to know about him. He couldn’t afford not to. Unfortunately, that meant the man with the blue eyes also knew about his father, which opened up a whole new can of worms, but he had to consider every possibility.
What did he know for sure?
The man with the blue eyes favored fire as his means of erasing any sign of his presence, assuming he was also responsible for the string of fatal blazes leading northwest from the Arizona-Mexico border. Perhaps his flair for pyrotechnics stemmed from having been severely burned; maybe his facial disfigurement was as a result of it. If so, there was likely a record of it somewhere.
He was part of a group trafficking pathogens into the country, and Mason’s gut told him the end goal was weaponization, which fit with the fact that even Ramses couldn’t find out what was being sold on the third floor of the building by the old airport. The same group was responsible for the deaths of thirteen law-enforcement agents at the stone quarry, and he fully believed they had known the strike force was coming because someone had tipped them off. Someone within their own ranks.
He’d been shot in the shoulder. Mason had seen that with his own eyes. Maybe the man with the blue eyes wanted to exact his revenge, but if that was all, why not come directly at him?
It wasn’t much, but Mason had worked with less.
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