The Thin Edge

by Peggy Townsend

  “Monster?”

  “Stay in the booth with them. Ten, twelve hours of questions. It’s not torture if you’re doing it, too, right?”

  Unless the interrogator had had a good night’s sleep and wasn’t afraid for his life, Aloa thought.

  “Chris helped cut off a Taliban supply line that way, and he was a ballsack hair away from getting us to Osama bin Laden’s video guy, but then the CIA sends in some girl who tells the guy he’s going to rot in prison unless he talks. Two weeks of work down the drain in less than ten minutes.”

  “I’ll bet Christian wasn’t happy.”

  “I told the gal she’d better keep on the other side of the base for a while. Some people thought Chris was arrogant, that he played fast and loose with the rules. But he got the job done.”

  “How did he play with the rules?”

  “You know, he pushed things. He liked to start work at two a.m. He’d figure out what the guy was afraid of and dig into that. Like if he sensed the guy had a thing about dogs, he’d have an MP bring one to bark outside the door. Or maybe he’d tell the guy he didn’t hurt people but that there were other people who did and give him a blow-by-blow of how it might feel to be stuffed in a four-by-four wood box and left for a day or two. He had one guy curled up in a ball under the table, blubbering the name of his recruiter and his training camp after only four hours.”

  “Was there a prisoner there he couldn’t break, one who willed himself to die?” Aloa asked, remembering her conversation with Davenport.

  Everson gave a low snort. “If you call stabbing yourself in the throat with a pencil willing yourself to die, then yeah. The brass was all over us for that one.”

  “Did that kind of thing happen often?”

  “Nope. That was the only time Chris’s name came up in an investigation.”

  Aloa sat up straighter. Davenport had been investigated for a prisoner’s death?

  “What happened with the investigation?”

  “Nothing, which is exactly what should have happened.”

  “No evidence he had anything to do with the guy’s death?”

  “I don’t like what you’re saying.”

  “I understand there were problems with prisoner interrogations in Afghanistan, that’s all. A couple of people died, right?” She’d read reports in the New York Times about the cruelties: inmates left naked in freezing cells, waterboarding, detainees who’d died under suspicious circumstances.

  “Is that a question?” Everson said. “Because it sounds more like you’re one of those bleeding-heart liberals who don’t know a thing about war or care about our freedom. Chris did a great service. He saved the lives of American soldiers, of fathers and sons and brothers. He should be considered a hero, not a scapegoat.”

  “He left after one tour. Was he forced out after the prisoner died or did he leave on his own?” Aloa asked.

  “I’m done talking to you,” Everson said.

  The line went dead.

  Aloa slowly set down the phone.

  Aloa’s phone rang twice in quick succession after the call with Everson. The first call was from Rick Quinn, who said he and a tech had gone to the old factory and found evidence of bloodstains in the room she’d described, and that an undercover cop also had heard something on the street about vigilantes going after drug dealers—which was as close to an apology as she was going to get for his anger and for his accusation that she’d stepped on his case.

  “How about lunch?” he said. “I can take your statement there instead of you having to come to the office at two.”

  “I’m busy.” She wasn’t about to admit the lingering smell of dead body made eating impossible.

  “How about a beer, then? I get off at four. You could give me your statement then.” He named a spot where cops and reporters mingled after hours. A working place, not a date place. Good.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “And a cigar works best,” he said.

  “What?”

  “To get the dead-body smell out so you can eat again. I’ll bring you a couple of Gran Habanos.”

  She could hear the smile in his voice.

  The second call came as she finished reading an investigative piece on death, torture, and the CIA during the Iraq War.

  “Hey, Doc,” she said, tucking the phone between her shoulder and ear.

  “I can’t talk long,” he said. “We’re on the move. Me, Tick, P-Mac, and the kid.”

  Aloa stopped working. “By ‘kid,’ I hope you don’t mean Burns Hamlin.”

  “We couldn’t wait. Tick said the pigs were closing in,” Doc said.

  “Where are you?” she demanded.

  Doc ignored her. “If something comes up, you call this number. Let it ring twice, hang up, then call back. One of us will answer.”

  “Running is the worst thing you can do,” Aloa said.

  “Two rings, hang up, then call back,” Doc said.

  “This is such a bad idea, Doc,” Aloa said, but she was already talking to empty air.

  Aloa stared at the phone and cursed. Tick had called as she was about to get into the shower and she’d told him Ruiz was dead, but that it didn’t mean there weren’t other possibilities. Why hadn’t she kept her mouth shut until she could explain more to him?

  She slammed into her bedroom, changed into her running clothes, added the pink beanie, and let herself out the front door. She needed to think, to get the dead bodies out of her mind—and her nostrils.

  Her feet took her down to Fisherman’s Wharf. She ran hard, pumping her arms and skirting the few hardy tourists who’d ventured into the fog. Seagulls hunkered on railings, resigned to a day without overflowing trash cans to loot. According to the news, the city was struggling under the weight of what had turned into a slow-speed disaster. School had been canceled. Businesses closed. Hospital beds were full. Hotel beds were empty.

  Aloa ran the path around Aquatic Park, the protected lagoon now empty of the hardy swimmers that usually plied its calm waters. Breath filled her ears, salt and sea replaced the scent of death. She lengthened her stride. Two miles in, an idea sparked. By mile three, it had caught and spread. She turned and headed for home.

  Aloa knew the best sources weren’t always at the top of the food chain. Sometimes it was the clerks and the janitors, the housekeepers and hairdressers—the invisible people who saw things, who heard conversations, and who had a better sense of right and wrong than the people they worked for—who could lead you to the truth.

  Aloa hoped this would be the case as she parked her bike in front of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice, a concrete block that looked like it belonged in some outpost in Siberia. She found her way to the district attorney’s office, where two women sat behind a small reception counter—one young and one older. The younger woman was on the phone. The older one, gray-haired with skin like a cracked and drying creek bed, looked up.

  “Can I help you?” the woman asked. Her hair was cut short and close to her head. Her lipstick was pink.

  “I hope so,” Aloa said. “My name is Aloa Snow, and I’m a reporter working for Novo, a news website, and I was hoping to talk to you about Corrine Davenport.”

  “You mean you want to talk to her old supervisor,” the woman said.

  “No, I’d rather talk with you, if that’s all right.” Aloa smiled. “I’m guessing you know more about what goes on than anybody else here. And that includes the big boss.”

  “I’ve been here thirty-eight years,” the woman said.

  “So you remember Corrine Davenport?”

  “Poor thing. Life just didn’t treat her right.”

  “It must have been tough,” Aloa agreed. “Did you ever see her after she left here?”

  “I liked her. We stayed in touch.” Intelligence shined from the woman’s pale-blue eyes.

  “Did she ever talk to you about anybody who gave her trouble?”

  “Besides Kyle and that husband of hers?”

  Aloa glanced
at the nameplate in front of the woman. “Could I buy you a cup of coffee or lunch, Ms. Pianelli? It would be really helpful to hear more.”

  “It’s Wendy, and I was going to take a smoke break in ten minutes. Meet me around the corner, where we have to huddle like lepers so we don’t destroy the lungs of innocent bystanders.” She winked at Aloa.

  “I’ll see you there,” Aloa said.

  Wendy, dressed in a purple down coat, appeared eight minutes later and, lighting up within seconds of her arrival, blew a stream of smoke into the icy air. “I’m going to die of pneumonia before these cigarettes get me,” she said.

  “It’s freezing,” Aloa agreed. She’d crammed the pink beanie on her head and wrapped her neck in Erik’s yellow scarf. Between her and Wendy’s purple jacket, they looked like a gathering of Skittles in the fog.

  “Tell me about Kyle,” Aloa said, pulling her Moleskine out of her pack. It was always better to start out with an open-ended question and see where it might lead.

  “He’s a piece of work, I’ll tell you. Corrine said it was like living with a mean little lap dog. One that bit.” Wendy took a long drag on her cigarette. “If you ask me, she should have gotten out of there. But she was loyal and felt guilty for what she’d done. It was a bad combination.” She flicked the ash from her smoke into a small tin she carried.

  “If that’s true, why’d she keep Kyle around?”

  “Because she was exhausted, because she wanted a life. She’d wanted to hire a day nurse early on, but that husband of hers wouldn’t hear of it. He said he didn’t want a stranger in the house, so she quit to take care of him. It was Kyle or nothing.”

  Not the same story Davenport had told.

  “Those first years were rough,” Wendy said and blew a funnel of smoke from the corner of her mouth. “It was like she couldn’t do anything right. I understand you’d be angry if one second you were healthy and the next second you couldn’t even scratch your nose, but he was a first-class jerk. He’d complain his tea wasn’t hot enough, that she’d used the wrong detergent for his clothes, or the temperature in the room was all wrong. She got up in the middle of the night to turn him so he didn’t get pressure sores. She wiped his behind and gave him baths and kept the house spotless because he was such a neat freak. She told me that, once, she mentioned how tired she was to one of Christian’s doctors, and that he was livid when they got home. He accused her of disloyalty and weakness.”

  Wendy took a long pull on her cigarette and held the smoke for a moment before releasing it into the air. “That’s when he made her get that weird tattoo.”

  “Wait,” Aloa said. “Christian told me the tattoo was her idea and that he tried to talk her out of getting it.”

  “Oh, god no. She hated that thing, but that husband of hers insisted. Something about proving she loved him, which, strangely, she still did. Maybe it was like those hostages who supposedly fall in love with their captors. I don’t know. Then he hires Kyle as his assistant. To help her, he says, and, for a while, it works. But then it was like two people humiliating and mistreating her instead of just one.”

  Aloa frowned. “How did Kyle mistreat her?”

  “Not exactly mistreat, I guess.” Wendy pinched a fleck of tobacco from her tongue. “He came in and rearranged all their furniture and ordered new clothes for Christian, saying it would make Christian feel like less of a patient. He nudged Corrine out of the way when it was time for Christian’s bath, criticized her for the way she did his physical therapy, and insisted she was hurting her husband’s health by not buying organic food.”

  Wendy leaned in. “Once, Kyle gave her a schedule for spin classes at a nearby gym. ‘Christian thinks you’ve gained a few pounds,’ he said.”

  “No wonder she fell for her poetry teacher,” Aloa said.

  “I think Kyle would have been happy if she were out of the picture.”

  “You mean like get rid of her.”

  Wendy shook her head and took another drag from her cigarette. “That was the first thing I thought when I heard she’d been murdered, but I guess I was wrong. From what I hear, everything points to that professor of hers.” Her blue eyes sparked. “But I do know that Corrine had a big life insurance policy, her husband was a jerk, and that Kyle was a little punk who enjoyed humiliating her. It wouldn’t surprise me if Kyle . . .” She paused and stubbed out her cigarette in the little tin. “No. I shouldn’t say that. It’s just that . . .” She stopped.

  “Go on,” Aloa said.

  “Oh, what the heck. Don’t say I told you, but you should look up this guy named Aat Bon Tae.” She spelled the name for Aloa. “He lives in Dogpatch. You’ll see what I mean.”

  She snapped the lid on the tin with the cigarette leavings and tucked it into her jacket pocket. “I have to go. I want to grab a Diet Coke before my break is over. Call me if you find something.”

  Aloa promised she would.

  Aat Bon Tae was a slender man with long dark hair and bright eyes framed by a pair of black-rimmed glasses. As soon as he heard Aloa was a reporter who wanted to talk about Kyle Williams, he invited her in.

  “That dude is trouble, man,” he said.

  He poured Aloa a mug of coffee and they sat in the living room of the cottage, which, he explained, had been built in the late 1800s to house immigrant workers and now was priced somewhere in the million-dollar range.

  “Crazy, huh?” he said.

  “That’s one word for it,” Aloa agreed.

  The room held a low-slung couch, a desk, and a basket full of Legos that told of the presence of at least one child. Beyond it was a modern kitchen with a gleaming stainless-steel refrigerator, granite counters, and a table with metal loft-style chairs.

  According to Bon Tae, he and Kyle had met when they worked for a big tech company and had come up with an idea for an app that would connect aging homeowners with young people who needed a place to live. Called SharePair, the app was designed to provide affordable housing for a young person or couple in exchange for helping the elderly with shopping and light housekeeping. The arrangement provided the homeowner with an antidote to loneliness and the young person with stable, cheap housing. At one point, they were working so many hours Kyle moved into the apartment where Bon Tae had lived with his wife and their sixteen-month-old son. Sometimes Kyle would watch the baby if Bon Tae had to travel and his wife was at work.

  “We trusted him,” Bon Tae said.

  “Did you know about his background?” Aloa asked.

  “Not until later. If we would have known, I don’t think we would have left Sam with him.”

  By year two, the company had raised $2 million in funding and connected its first hosts and renters. A newspaper story about a young teacher who brought his ninety-two-year-old landlord, a WWII vet, to his high school history class to talk about the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp, put the app in the public eye. Six months later, a national magazine recounted how one renter had so fallen in love with her aged housemate, she’d nursed the woman through stage-four ovarian cancer. The result was another round of funding and a prediction that SharePair would revolutionize the way Americans lived. Everything looked good.

  “We had enough funding to hire a few employees and to buy this house,” Bon Tae said. “When we moved, Kyle came too. We had so much stuff going on, it was better to have both of us around at the same time. Our boy, Sam, loved him.”

  Bon Tae’s hands curled around his coffee mug.

  “Then everything hit the fan,” he said. “We got named in this lawsuit. Supposedly, one of our clients had persuaded her elderly roommate to put her in his will. Four months later, some eighty-year-old dude tried to rape the twenty-two-year-old housemate we’d matched him with.” Bon Tae’s eyes narrowed. “Kyle said it was my fault for making him rush the app, but it was his incompetence that left a hole in the background checks. We got in a big fight, and Kyle lost it. He threw my computer out the window.”

  “Wow,” Aloa said.

/>   “Yeah. My wife was hysterical. I told Kyle to pack his bags and get out. An hour later our kid, who was four, had a seizure.” Bon Tae set down his cup and ran a hand through his hair. “The docs found THC in his system. My wife used edibles, weed-laced cookies, to sleep. But I swear they were always in a jar on top of the refrigerator. We told the docs that, but Child Protective Services came anyway and took Sam, and we didn’t get him back for two months. We had to do counseling and drug testing and these ridiculous supervised visits.”

  Bon Tae’s gaze met hers.

  “We could never prove it, but I know it was Kyle who gave the cookie to Sam. He was a vindictive little prick. He knew where to hurt me the most.”

  “Did you file a police report?” Aloa asked.

  “We told Child Protective Services, but they said it didn’t matter who did it. It was our fault for keeping the edibles in a place that wasn’t safe.”

  “How’s your son now?” Aloa asked.

  “We think he’s fine, but we won’t know for sure for a few more years.” Bon Tae set his coffee mug on the small table. “Until then, I wake up every day thinking about how to make Kyle’s life as miserable as I can.”

  Aloa waited. Silence was often the best way to draw out confidences.

  “I lost track of him for a while,” Bon Tae said finally. “I heard he went to Seattle to work. Then, one day, I saw him at the CalTrain station and followed him to this house. I talked to an old friend of his, heard he was caretaking this handicapped dude, and went up and told the dude’s wife what Kyle had done to my boy.”

  He smiled. “She told me she was going to fire his ass.”

  “When was that?” Aloa asked.

  “I’d say it was three weeks ago, give or take a few days.”

  A week before Corrine’s murder.

  When Aloa told him the “dude’s wife” was now dead, Bon Tae got serious. “I wouldn’t put it past him,” he said of his old partner.