“Well, it was pretty bad form, Marlow.”
“I am well aware of my form, Travers. Much more than you think. Let it go, all right?”
She was surprised that he seemed upset about it, so she backed off. “Well, you don’t have to worry. Someone up high is giving you all the room you need for this case. Charges were mysteriously dropped.”
“You wouldn’t have had anything to do with that, would you?”
She looked out the window. “No. Why would you ask that?”
“I just think it’s odd that no one’s checking up on me. No one at all.” He glanced over at her, but she was watching the side of the road. “The reports back to headquarters must say I’m competent.”
“ ‘Competent’ might be an overstatement,” Travers finally said. “Let’s let this go, too, huh?”
Jade nodded.
“McGuire’s house was a nightmare. Atlasia’s still more than a step ahead of us.”
“I’m getting there,” Jade said. “He’s definitely gonna go after his parents. We got that in the open after the theater ruse. On the phone, he called it ‘the real test.’”
Travers whistled. “I still can’t believe he called you again. You really got him hooked.”
“He loves talking about himself so much he can’t resist. And his parents. He said he couldn’t wait to get his ‘little hanz’ on them.”
Travers laughed. “That’s great.”
“What?”
“It’s a parapraxis, a classic Freudian slip. ‘Little Hans!’ Freud’s most famous case study about the boy—”
“—with the unresolved Oedipal complex,” Jade finished. “It’s more like a pun than a slip. Allander’s fully aware of the game here. But still, great call, Travers.”
Her eyes darted around the dashboard as she tried not to smile. “Well, you’re not the only one doing your homework.”
“His ‘little hands,’” Jade repeated. “He’s been trying to prove how small all his victims are compared to him. Compared to his experience. He’s just been building himself up psychologically to face his parents. And he’s ‘little’ only when he faces them. David and Goliath. The final challenge is the one that scares the shit out of you.”
“The one nobody else can take on,” Travers said.
They were quiet for a while as the car sped across the city. It had taken some time, but Travers had finally learned to ride with Jade without gripping the door handle.
“You seem pretty excited about this lead,” she said. “What makes you think it’s related?”
Jade flushed. “Just a hunch.”
“It’s a completely different MO, though,” she said.
“It was a functional killing.”
“Functional?”
“Yeah. He must’ve wanted something specific or he would have left more than two bullet holes.”
“Well, the body was moved. Abrasions on the elbows and the heels of the shoes. Left in a deserted lot on the edge of Sutro Heights, but from the twigs and dirt samples they picked up, looks like he was killed somewhere more rural. Nothing was found at the crime scene except the body.”
“That’s the whole point,” Jade said. “We need to figure out what’s missing.”
“I don’t get it,” Travers said. “It looks nothing like Atlasia to me. Nineteen-year-old male, killed by a gunshot, outdoors, no mutilation.”
“He can break character,” Jade said softly.
“What?”
“He’s not trapped in the pattern—his killings aren’t a compulsive ritual, they’re more like a performance. He can step out of it if he needs to.” Jade rubbed his eyes with a thumb and index finger.
Travers looked over at him as the car bounced over a few dips. “You all right?” she asked.
“I think—” Jade cleared his throat, covering his mouth with a fist—“I think it might be my gun that was used in the killing.”
“Oh God, Jade,” she said. “I’m sorry. Was it …? How did …?”
“He took it from my backyard when he came over and dropped the note. I kept a Glock under a back counter.” Jade’s expression hardened again. “Look, there’s nothing I can do about it now. Let’s use it for what it’s worth. See if it can lead us to him. That’s all I can think about right now.”
Travers didn’t say anything, but she nodded in agreement. Jade silently thanked her for being quiet. He needed quiet right now.
Steve Francis’s parents lived in Sunset, close to McGuire’s house, though his body was found at Sutro Heights. Their nondescript single-story home was painted yellow and trimmed in white. For some reason, they had decided to paint their mailbox a bright fire hydrant red, post and all. Jade wondered how many dogs relieved themselves on it daily.
Travers took Jade by the arm as they headed up the walkway to the door. “Look,” she said. “They’ve just lost a son. They sound okay on the phone, but they almost didn’t consent to see us. They’ve been dealing with a parade of police and press all day. Why don’t you let me handle the bullshit and just ask questions when they’re important?”
“We’ll see,” Jade said.
The door opened to reveal a woman with white hair pulled back in a bun, a pair of circular spectacles perched on the end of her nose. She looked like a retired librarian. Her eyes were not red from crying.
Jade let Travers do most of the talking. She expressed her condolences to Mary and Len Francis for the loss of their son. Len was a carpenter. Jade could tell that much from the muscular arms that protruded from his starched, short-sleeved shirt, and the outline of the tape measure worn in the back pocket of his jeans.
The parents were very much in control. They were not accustomed to expressing emotion, particularly to strangers, and the strength of their suppression was visible in their tightly drawn mouths. They were not the type of people to fall apart, even over the loss of a son.
The interview progressed routinely until Travers asked what Steve was doing at Sutro Heights. “Did he like to hike? Do you think he went there on a walk?” she asked.
Mary and Len looked at each other blankly. “No,” Len said. “Steve wasn’t the hiking type. Liked more thrills than that. Pole-vaulting maybe, but no hiking.” He laughed.
The back door banged and a boy about fourteen came in. He looked a lot like Steve, at least judging by the crime-scene photograph.
“Hi Mom, Dad,” he said.
He caught Jade’s eye and walked over. “Frank Francis,” he said, offering his hand. Travers smiled at his confident swagger, trying not to laugh out loud. “Jade Marlow, right?” he asked.
“Right,” Jade said, feeling ridiculous for shaking a boy’s hand with such severity.
“I want to be in the FBI when I grow up,” Frank said. “Just like you were. Then I want to quit and work special cases.” He pursed his lips seriously. “Probably homicide.”
Jade nodded wearily. “That’s great, kid,” he said. “Good luck.” He turned back to the parents. “So you have no idea why Steve was over in that area?”
“Not the foggiest,” Len said.
“Hey,” Frank pulled on Jade’s sleeve. “Want to check out Steve’s room?”
Jade pulled his arm away, yanking his sleeve from Frank’s hand. Frank grabbed it again. “Hey,” he said loudly.
Jade glared at him and started to speak. But he reminded himself that Frank had just lost a brother, so he held his tongue. Then he noticed that the boy was winking at him.
“Why don’t you let me show you Steve’s room?” he said again.
The interview with the parents didn’t seem to be offering any leads, so Jade figured he’d find out what the kid wanted to tell him. He stood and followed Frank down the hall.
Once the door closed to Steve’s room, Frank whirled around and addressed Jade in a deep whisper. “I know why Steve was at Sutro Heights. He went there to parachute.”
“To parachute?”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “Free-fall jumping off cliffs. He
was crazy about it—did it all the time. It’s illegal, so I didn’t want to tell Mom and Dad. Might upset them, you know?” He nodded maturely, cueing Jade to agree.
“Are you sure you’re not fucking around here, kid? This is an important investigation.”
Frank got on his hands and knees and crawled partially under the bed. He pulled out what appeared to be a parachute pack. “See?” he said. “I’m not fucking around.” He really emphasized the words “fucking around.” Jade could see just how much he enjoyed using them.
“If he was there to jump, then why’s his parachute at home?”
Frank waved him off. “He was a fanatic. Had like four ’chutes.”
“Did he usually parachute alone?”
“Sometimes, I guess, but mostly with a buddy.”
Jade turned the pack over in his hands. “Well, thanks for the info, kid.”
“No worries. Just don’t tell Mom and Dad. They’re sort of having a hard time, you know?”
Jade nodded dumbly and turned to leave. When he got to the door, he looked back at Frank. “How are you doing?” he asked.
“About Steve?”
“Yeah.”
Frank shrugged. “Okay. He was kind of an asshole.”
Jade bit his lip. “Fair enough.”
Travers fingered a bullet hole in the side of the passenger door, then climbed in the car. Jade flipped through the radio stations.
“What a weird kid,” she said.
Jade laughed. “Yeah, you could say that. He thought his brother was in Sutro parachuting.”
“Parachuting?”
“Like jumping-off-cliffs parachuting. Don’t ask me, I just work here.”
“That’s interesting,” Travers said. “They didn’t find a parachute with the body.”
“Obviously, if it was moved. But now we can cautiously assume he was killed somewhere in the hills.”
Travers laughed. “Let’s do that. Let’s cautiously assume, shall we?”
Jade threw the car into drive. “The kid said his brother didn’t usually jump solo, so we might have a missing body.”
“I’ll get a list of males from eighteen to, say, twenty-five who’ve disappeared in the past couple of days. It might be slow because we’ve got the forty-eight-hour window for reporting missing persons.”
Jade nodded, watching the blur of pavement ahead of the car. Ever since he’d found out about Steve Francis, Jade had been telling himself that there was a good chance it wasn’t his gun. There were a lot of .40s out there, and even if forensics discovered that it was a Glock, there was no shortage of those either. But now that the parachute was a potential lead, he found himself hoping that his gun had killed Steve Francis.
That’s how these things progress, he thought. Through bodies.
He pulled out from the curb, and though she tried not to, Travers grabbed the seat to steady herself. “We’re thinking about going door-to-door,” she said. “Within the neighborhoods you circled.”
Jade shook his head. “No way. There’s too many places. Plus, he’s way too smart to get caught with something that obvious. No hope.”
“We’re running in circles here. And the clock’s ticking.”
Even though her tone was sharp, Jade said nothing. She was right. The clock was ticking. He heard it all the time.
The leads had all been followed as far as he could run with them. Now it came down to waiting. And Jade hated waiting more than anything, especially with a rising body count. He had been straining to think of another proactive strategy, some way to draw Allander in, to turn the chase upside down. But he’d only come up with dead ends. And, as Travers had said, the clock was ticking.
51
WOTAN pivoted his great black leather chair as he surveyed the files spread on the desk before him. Picking carefully through photographs and notes from headquarters and from Agent Travers, he assessed Marlow’s progress, glad to see that Travers had come to recognize the former agent’s utility.
It had been difficult, but he had managed to hold the case together for Marlow. He kept the FBI’s resources open to him, and he had ordered the squad’s full cooperation. Stifling some of the press and police complaints hadn’t been quite as easy, since they fell outside his normal jurisdiction, but he had managed.
Wotan never once doubted the wisdom of bringing Marlow in early to handle the situation. Atlasia was worse than a time bomb; he was a disease. He had to be either captured or killed before the damage got out of control.
Wotan’s task was to keep the world stitched shut around both of them, to keep Marlow in the chase and in the fight. It wouldn’t be so hard now that Atlasia had struck blood within the FBI.
For obvious reasons, Wotan had to find a replacement for McGuire, and had selected Fredericks, one of his senior agents. The other agents understood and no doubt shared the pain felt by McGuire; it was every man’s nightmare that his vocation would put his family in harm’s way. They wouldn’t object to cooperating with Marlow now. Marlow’s involvement promised Atlasia’s delivery. It virtually guaranteed it. Nobody knew that as well as Wotan.
Wotan shuttled the bullet slug across the tops of his knuckles. It was a holy fight. He had learned that the hard way.
Jade and Travers were exhausted. The dark circles beneath their eyes that usually came and went had taken on a look of permanence.
The enthusiasm Jade had felt at McGuire’s house had faded. They had a start on locating Allander, but it was definitely a long shot. Jade had taken to counting all the dark-green houses he drove past. So far, he was up to twenty-three.
Travers pointed to the bold white letters on an exit sign. “Could get off here to eat. There’s a great restaurant a ways back. A little French cafe.”
Jade was quiet.
“I have my beeper in case anyone needs to reach us,” she added.
“They won’t,” he said. “If we’re dead-ended, it doesn’t bode well for everyone else.”
He flipped on the radio as he took the exit, and clicked through the channels, trying to find a good station. His search ended when he heard jazz pouring through his speakers. Abruptly, he pulled his head to the side and cracked his neck.
Travers directed him through some back streets to the restaurant she had in mind. It sat by itself at the edge of a yellow field that curled around the base of the Woodside hills like a sleeping cat. A rare summer storm was brewing in the heavy air, and dark clouds drifted overhead, blocking the late-afternoon sun.
As Jade pulled into the parking lot, the disk jockey started his wind-down. “That’s right. We’ve got the golden sounds of Joshua Redman to carry us into evening. Don’t forget we have a busy weekend coming up, with the Cantab Singers rocking Saturday night at the House of Jazz in downtown San Jose. And for you more sophisticated listeners, there’s the annual symphony hall fund-raiser at Singspiel’s Restaurant up in the city tomorrow night, followed by Haydn’s Drum Roll and—”
Jade turned the radio off. “Joshua Redman. Great young performer.”
“I didn’t know you liked jazz,” Travers said, genuinely impressed.
“You mean I might not be all bad?” He smiled quickly, holding her eyes with his until she looked away. They got out of the car simultaneously.
Twenty minutes later, they faced each other across a table laden with food. Jade was quiet, leaning over his plate and inhaling deeply as the smell of chicken and brie rose to his nose. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until the food arrived, and he began to eat in large, slow bites, finishing his meal before Travers was halfway through.
The waiter asked if they wanted wine, but Jade waved him off without even looking at him. He looked instead at the woman seated across from him. Jennifer Travers. She wore her hair down around her neck, and it fell in radiant, blond strokes. Her collarbone was just visible beneath the neckline of her shirt, and Jade watched it move slightly as she breathed.
Meanwhile, his mind was filled with details from the case. He didn’t l
ike the way it felt right now, as if he was chasing and not getting any closer. The leads had dried up and he didn’t have much to show for them. It had been nine days since Allander’s escape. With the entire state of California watching him, he was standing by while the body count rose.
“I feel terrible for McGuire,” Travers said.
Jade shrugged.
“I mean, imagine. A wife dead and both children permanently impaired.”
He shrugged again.
“Jade, for Christ’s sake, his sons’ eardrums got blown out. I mean, we should really try to do something for him.”
“Why don’t we get him tickets for the symphony?” he suggested coldly, looking down at his meal again.
Travers’s jaw tightened, and there was a long silence.
“I don’t get why he doesn’t fuck them,” Jade finally said, his voice loud in the relative quiet of the restaurant. A couple of people at nearby tables turned to stare.
Travers cleared her throat. “Fuck … them, Jade?” she repeated quietly after the waiter dropped off the check.
“The kids. I mean, he’s a victim of child abuse himself, and an early sexual offender. Why would he stop now when he’s got ample opportunity?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Sexual insecurity, maybe even impotence.”
The waiter came up in his white starched shirt and rubbed his hands together. “Can I take that?” he asked, pointing delicately at the brown check folder.
“Uh, we’re not quite ready yet,” Travers answered.
“Could be he’s just waiting to direct all his sexual energy toward his mother. Building up for the rape, you know.” His last remark drew another stare from a woman at the next table.
“We have to prevent it. We just have to stop it.”
“Well, no shit, Travers. I think we’re doing everything we can.” Jade picked up his water glass and looked into it with one eye.
The waiter returned with a half bow. “Hello again, do you think I could—”
Jade didn’t even look over at him. “I believe we said WE’RE NOT READY YET!” The waiter blinked several times, backing away.
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