by Barry Eisler
She didn’t consciously consider what she was doing. It was all instinct. She just melted back along Garfield, moving downhill until the man and the sculpture were out of sight. Then she cut between two houses and onto a jogging trail in the heavily forested park behind the lookout. She moved counterclockwise until she was past his position, then crept up the wet hill, careful with her footing in the mud and wet leaves. All she could hear, other than the steady drumbeat of the rain, was an occasional car passing on Fifteenth Street, the sound of water spray and tires on wet pavement, above her position.
The last ten feet of the climb were too slippery to proceed upright, and she dropped to a crawl until she reached the top, level with the sculpture but positioned on the other side. As expected, she couldn’t see him from here. Which meant he couldn’t see her.
She crept closer, her boots squishing softly on the wet grass. Her heart was pounding hard and she breathed deeply, all the way in, all the way out, taking the tension down a notch the way she always had in wrestling and judo competition. She lowered the hood so she could see better.
She came to the closest pillar and paused next to it. Concealment—and cover, too, if it came to that.
She dropped her hand to the belly-band holster, undid the strap, and gripped the Glock. But she would use it only if she absolutely had to. It wouldn’t matter if she was cleared in another officer-involved. Cleared or not, she’d be under even more of a microscope, and examined by even more people. She doubted this time she could survive it.
She took one more deep, silent breath, pushed it out, inhaled again, and eased clockwise around the pillar.
She saw him an instant before he did her. He was still kneeling, focused on something inside the open attaché case. Then his head snapped around as he detected movement in his peripheral vision. She saw recognition in his expression—his eyes wide, his mouth open, everything equal parts fear and surprise. He slammed the case shut and jumped back, his hand whipping around to his waist, digging inside the trench coat—
She moved in fast, much faster than he could backpedal, blasting straight into him with her right side at the same instant she grabbed his right sleeve and left lapel. The shock of the impact knocked him back, and his arm came forward, his hand out, and in her peripheral vision she saw the gun, but she was already spinning counterclockwise, bending at the hips, yanking out and up with the sleeve hand and launching an uppercut into his chin with the lapel grip, her right leg reaping upward directly into his balls. Uchi mata—but for the testicle impact instead of the inner thigh, a classic judo throw and one of her favorites. His body somersaulted, his legs whipping past, both heels slamming into the overhang of one of the steel blocks, ringing it like a gong. Then he was past her, his head rocketing toward the ground, and she drove her knuckles into his throat as the back of his cranium took the impact, and she heard a loud crunch, felt something like a glass rod breaking behind his Adam’s apple. Her right leg was still raised and her momentum threatened to carry her past him, but she got a hand out on the ground and blasted a knee into his liver, arresting her momentum. She groped for his wrist, found it, and yanked it high, but the gun was gone, lost on impact, and he was seizing now—whether from the cranial impact or the blow to the throat, she didn’t know—his body twitching, his arms flapping, his heels making a weird rhythmic pattering noise on the wet ground. She rolled off him, stood, and checked her perimeter, her hand on the butt of the Glock. No one. Nothing but the steady downpour.
She saw Little running down the street, arms pumping, the umbrella closed in his left hand, keeping his right free. She waved parallel to the ground in a slow-down gesture—it was done, now the trick was to avoid attention. Her heart hammering, she glanced around at the mud and wet grass. There, the gun. She picked it up—HK45 Compact—and shoved it into one of the pockets of her cargo pants.
Little came in under the sculpture, knelt, and held his fingers to the man’s neck. The seizing had stopped and the man’s face had gone blue. Little looked at her. “He’s done. Get out of here.”
“What are you going to—”
“I’ll drag him into the underbrush and come back for him,” he said, glancing left, then right. “If he’s found, or I’m found with him, I’ll take the heat. Just go. Now.”
She knew he owed her. But she hesitated.
“Damn it, Livia, for once in your life would you just listen?”
He was right. Either both of them could take the risk, or one.
She raised her hood. “How do I reach you?”
“Meet me at Fremont Canal Park. Midnight.”
“No. We’ve already been there too many times. And you were followed, Little, do you get that? You need to watch your back. Change hotels. Turn off your cellphone. You need to figure out what weakness they exploited, and fix it.”
“I do turn off my cellphone. And you can’t be sure—”
“You’re used to tracking people electronically! It’s natural that’s the way you think, that’s the area you’re careful about. But the old-fashioned shit still works, and if someone couldn’t track your phone with a Gossamer, they’d resort to something more traditional. Do you get it? When the lights go out, candles still work.”
He opened his mouth as though to argue, then closed it and glanced around again instead. “You’re right. I’ll be extra careful. Do you still have the burner I left for you?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I’ll get a new one, just in case, and I’ll text you from someplace where I’m not staying long. Turn on the burner whenever and you’ll know the text is from me. You tell me a time to meet. That’s all. Nothing else over the phone.”
“Where are we meeting?”
“You tell me.”
She thought for a moment. Somewhere central, so Little could get to it easily, but reasonably discreet. Someplace she could see in multiple directions at once.
“The reflecting pool at Cal Anderson Park,” she said.
“Reflecting pool. Cal Anderson Park. Got it.”
She nodded and leaned down to grab the case, thinking to examine its contents later. But what if there was a tracking device?
She knelt and opened it. There was a large tablet computer affixed to the top. In the bottom section, a keyboard, dials, and toggles. And foam protective casing, surrounding something that might have been a hummingbird, if it hadn’t been obviously mechanical.
Little took hold of the lapels of the guy’s coat. “What is it?” he said.
She stared at the contents of the case, having a hard time accepting the truth of what she was seeing. Then she looked at Little.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I think . . . it’s a drone.”
15
Little watched as Livia walked off. When she was across the street and had broken into a jog, he turned back to the matter at hand.
Whoever he was, the guy was clearly dead. He’d stopped moving, his mouth was a rictus, and above the collar of his shirt his throat had blossomed into a giant purplish balloon, like the neck of some exotic tropical frog. Little wasn’t sure what Livia had done—broken the guy’s neck or crushed his larynx. Not for the first time, he felt a flush of admiration, and gratitude, and even a degree of envy.
He used his grip on the lapels of the guy’s coat to drag him toward the dense underbrush on the west side of the overlook. When he reached the edge, he stopped. Livia had disappeared from view.
He looked around. Some cars going past on the street in front of the cemetery. No pedestrians. The guy had clearly chosen the sculpture for the concealment it offered, and between that and the weather, Little was pretty sure no one would have noticed any of what had just happened.
He thought for a moment. There had been no gunplay, so no ballistic evidence to worry about. In fact, given the amount of rain, he doubted there would be forensic evidence of any kind at the scene. So no real reason not to leave the body where it lay. It would be discovered, and then the local cops would run
the prints, search his clothes. Maybe they had his face in a database, or his DNA.
You could learn something. Maybe a lot.
But then a coroner would fix the time and manner of death. And Livia had told him the kind of shit she was dealing with at the office—shit he couldn’t deny he had made substantially worse. He imagined her getting back to headquarters soaking wet and covered in grass stains and mud. Would anyone think to connect that with what got found here? Especially given her martial-arts skills and the broken neck.
No. He couldn’t just leave the body. He had to do something to disappear it more permanently. He circled around, got his hands under a thigh and shoulder blade, and braced to roll the guy over the edge.
A voice spoke up in his mind, loud and insistent:
Leave him. Let the local cops find his corpse. Let them investigate. Do you want to solve this fucking thing? Do you want to find the men who took Presley?
For a long moment, he was frozen, stranded in some awful purgatory, trapped between decency and desperation.
He knew he was in a bad place. Maybe not even completely in his right mind. Livia had sensed that, and she hadn’t been wrong.
But he’d never been this close, so fucking close to knowing. Just knowing. If he could just know what had happened to that sweet girl. Just that and no more. He’d be satisfied. He’d be grateful.
But please, God, give me an hour alone with the ones who did it. Yes, please, God, give me that. Please.
He tried not to imagine what he would do to them. Sometimes he swam in those fantasies—of a MAPP-gas blowtorch, an eighteen-inch butcher saw, a twenty-volt hammer drill—and sometimes, the fantasies threatened to drown him. There were weekends he would stop at a hardware store, handling the wares, imagining how he would use them. He had spoken to butchers and construction workers and forensic pathologists, drawing them out about the various tools they used, the applications, the advantages and disadvantages, the reasons they preferred one over another.
There were times things like that could soothe him. Give the helpless, boiling rage a direction, bleed some of it off. Sometimes he fell asleep to extraordinarily precise and detailed fantasies about what he would do to the men, what instruments he would use, the ways he would employ them, how careful he would be not to make a mistake that could end things prematurely, so that the punishment he inflicted could be both maximally excruciating and maximally long.
If he ever caught them. If he ever had the chance.
And now, maybe, maybe, maybe . . . he did. But he had to focus on the mechanics, not the endgame. Work the evidence, step by step. Do everything he could to push away all the emotion and just . . . investigate.
If he could do that, he would find them. He would.
Then leave the body. Let the police do their job.
He wanted to listen to that voice so badly that he actually groaned from the effort of overruling it. And then he began to cry.
I’m sorry, he thought. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
He didn’t know who he was apologizing to. Presley, for restraining himself? Or Livia, for having almost betrayed her?
It didn’t matter. He felt like he had walked to the very edge of a horrible, dark abyss, and looked over, and somehow . . . held back.
This time.
He patted the guy down. But for a Tracfone, which was almost certainly a burner from which Little would learn nothing, his pockets were empty.
He jammed his hands deeper under the shoulders and both legs, then half lifted, half shoved the body over the edge. It tumbled down the side and disappeared into a tangle of brambles.
He remained there for a moment, breathing hard. Then he stood, opened his umbrella, and walked out to the street. He was parked just around the corner. He’d come back after dark, drag the body into the trunk of his car, and dispose of it somewhere more permanent. The whole Seattle area was shot through with rivers and lakes. All he had to do was find the right one and dump the body there.
Of course, he’d need to punch it full of holes first, to ensure that it would stay sunk. That meant a trip to a hardware store.
He laughed out loud at the thought, and wondered if he might be going crazy. And maybe he was. Because he didn’t even care.
16
An hour later, Livia was back at headquarters. She’d wanted to go to her loft in Georgetown to change out of her wet, grass-stained pants, but she’d already been gone too long. So she’d jogged back from the cemetery, stopping at a Safeway to buy a shopping bag in which she could carry the HK and the attaché case. She was paranoid about tracking devices, but the drone, if that’s what it was, had an obvious battery, which she removed, and the tablet was powered off. She bought a few innocuous items for cash and loaded them into the bag on top of the gun and the case.
Naturally, she was just out of the elevator at headquarters and on her way to her cubicle when Strangeland popped out of her office. The lieutenant looked her up and down, then raised her eyebrows. “You fall into Puget Sound?”
The bad luck was so predictable it could have been funny. Livia gave her a sardonic smile. “Something like that.”
“Seriously, what happened? You look like you dove for third base out on Safeco Field.”
“Got caught in the rain. Took a dumb shortcut.”
“Where?”
“Community Garden.”
That would be the Danny Woo Community Garden, an acre or so of terraced plots tended by elderly Asian residents of the International District. A half mile southeast of headquarters, it was a nice place for a stroll, at least when the weather was good.
Strangeland laughed. “What, you growing your own kale now?”
Livia didn’t like the laugh. It was too disarming. And the conversation had already gone on too long. “Yeah,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone, or they’ll all want some.”
Strangeland could have pushed it if she’d wanted, and though Livia had answers, they wouldn’t have been great ones. But maybe the lieutenant didn’t really want to know, because all she said was “Just be careful you don’t catch a cold.”
Livia recognized the subtext. For a second, the enormity of what she’d just done, what had almost happened at the overlook, crashed through the barricades and into her consciousness.
She shoved it away. The trick was to not think about it. Little would either handle the body or not. It was up to him now. The best thing she could do was focus on being a cop. Her job. Her calling.
And weirdly, she supposed, the safest thing she did.
She checked her cellphone. There was a message from Mrs. Cuero, wanting to know if she’d found anything.
Yeah, she thought. Though I’m not sure what.
But she would try to tell the woman something. Eventually. The thought of leaving someone marooned in the kind of hell she herself had endured over Nason was unbearable.
There was another message, this one on the office line. A woman responding to information on the SPD blotter about a rapist tied to three attacks through new DNA evidence. A man matching the blotter description had offered the woman a ride in his SUV late at night in Capitol Hill a year earlier. The woman had declined the offer and nothing had happened, but it sounded to her now like the same man.
It was good news. So as not to infect the testimony of potential witnesses, the department hadn’t made it public, but the man they were looking for had a signature line he used when offering his victims a lift: Hey there, you look like someone who could use a ride. Within the department, they were even calling him the Hey There Rapist. The hope was that other women would recall being offered a ride by a man fitting the physical description and using the line, and that eventually, someone would remember a key detail, or some new facet of the pattern would reveal itself, which would lead to an additional piece of evidence, and eventually to Mr. Hey There himself.
Livia called the woman. She was named Amy, and she worked as a waitress at a place in Capitol Hill called the Pine Box, so named in p
art because the building was previously a mortuary. Amy had to be at work at three, but yes, she could meet now. Ghost Note Coffee, right around the corner from the Pine Box? Perfect. See you there in fifteen minutes.
Livia headed out, the shopping bag in hand. She made sure to pause outside Strangeland’s office on the way to the elevators. “Might have a lead on the Hey There Rapist,” she said. “Woman who says a man matching the description tried to give her a ride a year ago. Going to interview her now.”
Strangeland glanced at the shopping bag, then nodded. “Let me know what you find,” she said.
Livia nodded and moved off. She’d caught the glance at the shopping bag. Yeah, Strangeland had questions. For now, the lieutenant preferred not to ask. But that might change. Livia couldn’t let it.
In the basement garage, Livia shut down her phone, got in her Jeep, and headed out—northeast on James, left under the I-5 overpass onto Seventh Avenue, then Hubbell, and finally Pike. She pulled into an alley across from the Starbucks Roastery, dumped the innocuous items and the HK from the shopping bag, hit the power button on Little’s burner, and photographed the contents she’d taken from the attaché case. Then she logged on to the Starbucks Wi-Fi, brought up Signal, and called Kanezaki.
He answered instantly—a habit she remembered from the previous times they’d worked together. “Hello.”
“You recognize my voice?” she said.
There was a pause. “I think so.”
“Good. I have something that might interest you.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know exactly what it is. I thought you might.”
“Is this for my benefit, or yours?”
Carl had warned her that information was Kanezaki’s coin of the realm. And that anything he offered, he would expect to be paid for.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m hoping both. Can I text you photos?”
“Go ahead.”