by Barry Eisler
She didn’t like where he seemed to be going. “What are you planning to do?”
“Leave of absence. Use all my resources to get on Boomer like the proverbial stink on shit. Wait for Snake to make his presence known.”
“Homeland Security going to be okay with that?”
“Homeland Security’s not going to know a damn thing about it. If Tilden won’t approve my leave, I’ll retire, effective immediately.”
“You pull the plug like that, Tilden will know exactly what’s behind it.”
“If Tilden tries to get in my way, he can personally greet Boomer and Snake when I send them to hell after him.”
“You’re going to kill your boss now?”
He looked at her, his eyes flat. She realized she had been too optimistic in thinking she’d be able to talk him down.
“I told you,” he said. “It’s like the drone operator. Anyone who’s protecting the men who took my little girl, knowingly or otherwise, should thank whatever God they pray to that I’m willing to focus on the principals.”
“Okay, fine. But abruptly retiring is already a neon sign that you’ve finally found the men you’ve been looking for and are going to kill them. Killing your boss first? That’s beyond just a sign. You’ll be trying to get to Boomer and Snake ahead of a federal law-enforcement manhunt focused on you.”
“What do you propose instead? That I try to make a case?”
She said nothing. The truth was, she was conflicted herself. And she wasn’t sure they even had a case. Or could find a way to make one.
“No,” he said. “Out of the question. You know as well as I do that we have nothing but happenstance and circumstantial evidence against the war-hero congressman scion of the goddamn vice president of the United States. Even if I were interested in that fight, and I’m not, I’d know I couldn’t win it.”
“Look—”
“No, Livia. I’m not sending them to prison. I’m sending them to hell. With some parts missing. You understand?”
“I do understand. I do. But we’re talking about different things. You’re talking about what you want. I’m talking about whether it will work.”
Little didn’t respond. She couldn’t tell how much he was listening, or whether he was listening at all.
“Think about this,” she said. “Even if your leave were approved, and you didn’t have to quit, or kill anyone. Tilden would still know. You think you’re going to get to Snake through Boomer? All your enemies, every operator intent on protecting these scumbags, will be thinking the same about you. ‘Stay on Boomer, and Little will walk right into the ambush.’”
He clenched his jaw and looked away. Yeah, he was listening. But trying not to.
“Little,” she said. She suddenly remembered Carl, sitting behind her on the big Kawasaki as they raced out of Pattaya and shouting over the engine roar, I know you want Sorm bad. But you gotta also want him smart. The memory conjured his presence so powerfully she actually looked behind her. But there was no one there.
“Little,” she said again. “Look at me.” She paused, then added, “Please.”
He looked at her. His eyes were wet.
“I know,” she said, returning his gaze. “I know.”
He shook his head—whether to deny that she could understand what he was feeling, or at the grief and horror his obsessions were barely holding at bay, she didn’t know.
“We’re going to speak for Presley,” she said. “We’re going to speak for all those girls. We are.”
He shook his head again, but less vehemently this time. “How?”
“By being smart. And patient. As smart and patient as you’ve been for ten awful years. Because all those smarts, and all that patience, is what brought you to this moment. To this threshold. Of course you’re not going to rush across it. You’re not going to let anyone bait you into that. You’re going to be deliberate. And methodical. And you’re going to win. Because you’re still Presley’s father, and you’re not going to let her down.”
His face contorted and a fresh stream of tears ran down his cheeks. “I already did.”
“No,” she said, and she felt her own eyes fill up. “It wasn’t your fault. There was nothing you could do to stop it, and you would have given anything, everything, if you could have. But what you can do, what you’re going to do, is make sure no one stops you from being her father now.”
He took off his glasses, looked down, and blinked. Tears fell to the ground. Then he closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and forced out a long breath. When he put on his glasses again, he looked more in control.
“How?” he said again.
She looked at him intently and said, “Like this.”
23
Chief Best watched the mayor pacing back and forth as though he owned Best’s office. If she hadn’t been seated behind her desk, he probably would have taken her damn chair. But she knew better than to tell him to sit his ass down on the couch and show some respect. Mayor Martin Woods looked at every reasonably prominent Seattleite as a potential political rival, and couldn’t help engaging in various domination rituals when he was with them. Best didn’t know whether the behavior was intended to remind the potential rivals of who was boss, or to remind Woods himself. Either way, it was better to let the man self-comfort. Because hell yes, Best was a rival. The difference was, she knew better than to let someone see it coming.
Besides which, the occasion for his visit was delicate. And presented some potential opportunities, as well. So why interrupt the man’s flow?
“All right,” she said. “You don’t know who the caller was.” It was a short summary of what he’d just spent nearly a minute fulminating about. Every cop knew that feeding back a summary was a powerful elicitation technique. Mayors, it seemed, not so much.
“No idea,” Woods said. “The call was blocked. And how the hell did he get my cellphone number?”
Best made it a habit to ignore rhetorical questions, so she said nothing.
Woods paused in front of her desk and ran his fingers through his perfectly cut steel-gray hair.
Come on around to my side, she thought. You know you want to.
On cue, he circled to her side of the desk, leaned against the wall so she would have to turn to look at him, and crossed his arms. “You’re the cop,” he said. “What do you make of it?”
She shrugged. Not at the question, but at how little his body-language games mattered to her. She cared less about a man being rude than she did about his being predictable.
“You know as well as I do that Officer Lone has enemies,” she said. “Two assassination attempts. And that was before the child-pornography ring she was investigating turned out to involve Secret Service agents and senators. So—”
“I’m not saying she doesn’t have enemies. Of course she does. I mean, you think the guy who called me was a friend? I’m asking if you think there’s anything to the caller’s accusations.”
She knew perfectly well what he was asking. She just wasn’t going to answer until he said it.
“I’m not sure,” she said, not so much because it was true, but because it was tactical.
He looked at her. “Really? I mean, this caller had extremely detailed information. Dates of travel to Bangkok and Paris. A connection to both a dead senator and a murdered military contractor, both of whom died while she was vacationing in their neighborhoods. Did you know about any of this?”
“No,” she said, glad she was able to say so truthfully. “I remember reading last year about Senator Lone’s heart attack. And about Oliver Graham’s abduction and assassination last month.”
“You didn’t know Detective Lone was there when both those deaths happened?”
“Assuming that part is even true? No. I didn’t know. And regardless, as I just noted, Senator Lone died of a heart attack. You think my detective caused that?”
“The caller said it wasn’t a heart attack. And he said her stepfather, the senator’s brot
her, had a heart attack, too, when Detective Lone was being fostered in his home.”
“Well, I’m no doctor, Martin, but it sounds to me as though heart disease might run in the Lone family.”
“I just told you, the caller said it wasn’t a heart attack.”
“Respectfully, Martin, the caller could have told you the moon is made of green cheese, and if he had, I hope we wouldn’t be having a conversation now about whether he meant Jarlsberg or Havarti.”
He frowned, obviously not appreciating the sarcasm, but also not having a good response to it. She wondered why she was pushing back. She wanted something on Lone, didn’t she? And Woods was offering it up. But if Lone was akin to a bird with a tendency to fly places she shouldn’t, Woods was more like a poisonous snake. The one was annoying. The other was dangerous.
After a moment he said, “So you think the call was bullshit.”
She shrugged. “We seem to agree on the obvious—that whoever contacted you did it in an attempt to hurt Detective Lone. Given the motivation, I think it would be foolish for us to assume the person would slavishly adhere to the truth.”
“He must have known we’d confirm the dates.”
“Oh, I’m sure he was counting on that. And I imagine the dates will indeed check out. But the other thing he would have been counting on is that when we learned he was being truthful about one thing, we’d assume he was being truthful about everything else. Is that what you’re doing?”
“I’m not assuming anything. I just want to know what your detective has been up to.”
She caught the your detective. As in your responsibility. Your scandal, if it comes to that.
She waited, letting the silence draw him out.
“Because what are we talking about here?” he said after a moment. “Secret contracts with the feds? Some kind of assassin in the department? What?”
“Are those your theories?”
“Those are my questions. And I have another: Is any of this going to bite us on the ass? And if so, what are you going to do about it?”
She looked at him. “I don’t know Detective Lone all that well. But I’ll start by having a conversation with her lieutenant, Donna Strangeland. I’m sure Donna can shed some light on whether we have La Femme Nikita on the payroll.”
“Don’t make light of it, Charmaine. I understand your detective has enemies. We all do. But payback is one thing. Blowback is something else. I don’t have to tell you, your department is under a spotlight because of the DOJ settlement agreement. You don’t want that spotlight shining on you, you better find a way to point it somewhere else.”
That’s your specialty, not mine, she thought.
But what she said was “I’ll talk to Lieutenant Strangeland.”
24
Livia was in her cubicle, working on a chart. Something was nagging at her about Boomer and Snake—the intuition she’d felt when talking to Little at the reflecting pool, but couldn’t quite grasp. Something was there, she knew, and if she diagrammed out the dates and places of the disappearances, maybe the visual would bring into focus whatever was shifting in the shadows of her mind. So far, though, the chart wasn’t helping. She didn’t see a pattern she could make sense of, or anything else other than opportunism—two men who didn’t care where or when, as long as their crimes were committed far from their regular whereabouts.
It wasn’t helping that she couldn’t find anything online about Snake, and had to go on only what she had learned from Fallon. She wondered about the abusive-sexual-contact conviction. She’d looked up the charge in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Apparently, it was a step down from rape and sexual assault, and she assumed Snake had pled to it rather than risk a longer sentence. Whatever he’d actually done in Iraq, it seemed a safe bet Boomer had done it with him. After all, what they’d been doing in the States had stopped when Snake had gone to prison. And started up again shortly after he’d been paroled. But why had Snake taken the fall then, and not Boomer? Had Boomer just been lucky? Had his father pulled strings?
What she wanted most of all was information about what the two of them had really been doing in Iraq. Rape? Murder? She wasn’t interested in what Snake had been convicted for, or even what he had been charged with. What mattered was what they had actually been doing, and how Snake had been caught. Why sexual assault in Iraq, but kidnapping in the States? Or were they taking girls in Iraq, too, and the army had charged Snake only with what a judge-advocate prosecutor thought could be proved, like Al Capone and tax evasion?
Well, Fallon was working his contacts, and though she doubted anyone in Boomer’s or Snake’s old unit would talk to her, there was always a chance. And depending on what she learned, she could also try the army judge advocate who had been in charge of the prosecution. If she could fold together what they were doing in Iraq and what they were doing in the States . . . she didn’t know. Maybe she could make a case. Maybe she could predict their next move.
She was lucky her caseload was light at the moment. She was scheduled to give testimony at a domestic-abuse trial later in the week, and she had appointments with witnesses in two assault investigations, but her interview of Amy the waitress hadn’t gone anywhere. The woman remembered the man calling out to her, Hey there, you look like someone who could use a ride, which was encouraging because it matched reports from the man’s victims. But Amy hadn’t been able to recall anything new, anything Livia didn’t already have. On top of which, the overall haziness of the woman’s recollection would get picked to pieces by a good defense lawyer: How can you remember so clearly something that happened over a year ago? Was the vehicle’s interior light on? Oh, you didn’t clearly see the man inside? Weren’t you tired after a long shift? Had you had anything to drink before heading home? Etc.
But there had to be other women the man had approached. For every burglarized house, there were fifty more the burglars had cased and rejected. And for every woman who was raped, there were fifty others who’d been stalked, or assessed, or approached by a rapist who’d decided for whatever reason to go hunt elsewhere.
It would be that way with Boomer and Snake as well. What she knew about them so far would be only a tiny fraction of the truth.
She had that sense again, that feeling of seeing the contour of something but not being able to make out the details.
What?
Little knew as well as she did that serial crimes had three high-level aspects: victimology, modus operandi, and signatures. There was overlap, of course, but generally speaking, the terms referred to the kind of victims a given rapist or killer preferred, his method of committing the crime, and the fetishes he indulged that weren’t useful for the commission of the crime itself.
The victims Boomer and Snake favored were black and brown girls. The method was what Little had pieced together—the quiet neighborhood street with few houses, the walking-distance convenience store, time of day around sunset. Okay.
But what was the signature? There was almost always something. A kind of rope. Poses the rapist would force his victims to assume, or a pose in which the killer would leave a body. Words rapists would force their victims to say. Or words they would use themselves, like the Hey There Rapist. By contrast, Boomer and Snake’s crimes seemed characterized almost by the absence of a signature. No DNA at the scene. No body recovered. Just nine girls, vanished.
It didn’t make sense. There was something she couldn’t see. It felt like . . . a shadow. But she couldn’t find a way to illuminate it.
She did a quick online search for news about Boomer. And was surprised to see an article in a Portland newspaper. A gruesome double murder: a woman named Hope Jordan, raped and strangled to death, and her two-year-old son, suffocated. Authorities were searching for a homeless man witnesses claimed to have seen in the parking garage where Jordan and her son were thought to have been abducted. The article was almost entirely about the crime. But the last paragraph noted a tragic coincidence: Jordan had been a high-school classma
te of Congressman Bradley Kane III, now locked in a tight race for the senate in California. Boomer.
Livia stared at the screen for a moment, trying to process it. Noreen Prentis had accused Boomer of raping her in high school, and then disappeared. And now another woman, Hope Jordan, had been raped and murdered. After being abducted. She hadn’t disappeared, like Noreen Prentis, like those nine teenaged girls. But maybe this time, the disappearance wasn’t the point.
She felt a hot surge of hate. She didn’t mind hate. In fact, she welcomed it. She had lived with hate most of her life. Hate was what had given her the strength to save herself from Fred Lone, and later to avenge Nason. Justice was her vehicle, but hate was the fuel it ran on.
But she needed to navigate, too, and for that, hate was too powerful. So she waited until the hate had receded and she could think clinically again.
Had Jordan accused Boomer, too? If so, surely the article would have mentioned it. She searched for other news about Hope Jordan. But there was nothing, only the report of her death.
How had a reporter even found out where Jordan had gone to high school? It was an unusual area to inquire into about a victim who had graduated twenty years earlier. And why would the paper have printed it? It would be guaranteed to draw flak from Boomer, and maybe even from his father, too.
Because someone thought it was newsworthy.
Maybe. Who was the reporter? She checked the byline: Helen Matlock. She clicked on the name and saw that Matlock was the paper’s crime-beat reporter.
Why would Matlock have included that information about Boomer? It was the last paragraph and read like a parenthetical, but it was in there.
Matlock knew there was a connection between Prentis and Jordan. She was afraid to be more direct, or her editor wouldn’t allow it. So they printed just the simple fact. In the hope that it would lead others to start digging more deeply.
Again, maybe.
She thought about Rick. Her step-uncle was retired now, but he still had contacts in the Portland Police Bureau. He might be able to shed some light. And unlike some of the other routes she might use for information, she knew she could trust him. Both to be discreet and to always have her back. He’d taken her in after his brother-in-law Fred Lone’s “heart attack,” after all. And though she knew he suspected a lot, he had never even come close to asking.