“You wouldn’t get her on a plane,” Karen had chimed in. “Not yet. She’s still adapting.”
Kat Morgan’s mobility problems, yet another legacy of the Marchant affair, meant she now relied on a wheelchair to navigate any distance greater than a quarter-mile and a pair of walking sticks to get around the specially-modified house in Blackheath she now occupied. She had money these days, like the rest of them; could afford private physiotherapy, and a lot of it. But she was struggling, still, with the day-to-day limitations the head trauma she’d suffered in the course of their last job had imposed on her - and it was very likely she’d consider a twelve hour flight across the Atlantic, even in first class, too ambitious an undertaking in her present condition.
“Someone else, then,” Ruby had insisted. “We ain’t so short-handed we can’t scare up someone.”
“That won’t be necessary,” said Sita. “Rose is perfect, don’t you see? She’s exactly right.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Rose said.
“Not sure I do, neither,” said Ruby. “Think you might have to walk me through this one. Perfect how?”
Sita’s already-broad smile had widened to a beam - the full-toothed grin of a card-sharp about to lay a straight flush on the table.
“She’s perfect,” she said, “because she won’t be grifting. She won’t have to grift. All she’ll have to be is herself.”
Wainwright didn’t move; didn’t speak.
“Everything okay?” El asked him, when too much time had passed for the silence between them to be comfortably ignored - letting a little of Angela Di Salvo’s nervous concern edge into her voice.
He didn’t react, seeming aware of nothing at all but Rose’s face on the screen in front of him.
“Mr Wainwright?” she tried again.
“98% accurate,” he said, sounding dazed, distant. “That was what you said the other day. Is that right? You’re not just saying it to get me or one of the tech blokes you’re meeting to make you an offer?”
She hesitated, Angela Di Salvo thrown by the question.
“I don’t think you understand,” she said slowly. “You can’t fake the results. If the software didn’t work, it’d be obvious. All you’d need is two photos, a Before and an After. If the aged-up image it generated didn’t match the real After photo, you’d know in about two seconds. Anyone has any doubts or any questions, they can just… test it. Do you want to try for yourself?”
It was a gamble, offering to let him play around with the program. If he said yes - if he wanted more proof, really did need more of a convincer - then the whole con would be blown. Over and done, in the time it took him to figure out that the only two adult faces Karen’s hastily mocked-up program would ever give him belonged to Becky and Rose.
She didn’t think he would, though. She’d seen enough marks on the cusp to know what she was seeing in his glazed eyes, the front teeth biting, probably unconsciously, into his knuckle. He wanted to believe what she was showing him.
“No,” he answered after a beat. “No, don’t worry. It’s enough, what you’ve showed me.”
Generally, it was a moment she let herself enjoy - the mark not just on the hook but reeled in, the magnesium flare of elation at having judged it all just right. But not here; not now.
“Does that mean you’re interested?” she asked him.
He looked confused, momentarily - then remembered the pretext for her visit, the lie he’d spun her about his possible interest in buying the rights to the program.
“It means I might be,” he said evasively. “I’ll need to go away and have a think about it. It’s a lot to take in, what you’ve just showed me.”
“I understand,” she said. “But just to be completely transparent: one of the companies I’ve met this week has put in an offer already. So if it is of interest, it would be good if you could let me know fairly soon.”
He was barely listening, she thought; his mind somewhere else altogether, debating an entirely different question.
“I’ll let you know,” he said, distractedly. Then: “The… what did you call it, the After image of the photo I gave you - can you make me a copy? Print it out for me?”
“I can do better than that,” she answered, parroting what Karen had told her. “If you’ve got an email address, I can send it to you right now. Save you the paper.”
“I’ve got one, but it’s my secretary who deals with it,” he said. “I’ll get her to…”
The door to the conference room, hitherto closed, burst open, revealing a worried-looking young woman with eyebrows plucked almost to invisibility - and behind her, Sita, fearsome in a funereal navy suit, conservative jewellery and a mask of stern, bureaucratic displeasure.
“I’m so, so sorry, sir,” spluttered the girl - an office temp, El guessed, and one unlikely to have her contract renewed after today’s performance. “I explained you were in a meeting, but she insisted…”
“Mr Wainwright,” Sita interrupted, her New York twang so effortlessly convincing El could picture the Staten Island walk-up she was raised in, “I’m Special Agent Meena Gupta with the IRS. The Criminal Investigations Division of the IRS.”
She flashed a gold ID badge in his direction, a four-digit number and a Department of the Treasury stamp emblazoned across it.
“What’s this about?” said Wainwright, suddenly panicked - probably, El thought, recalling some of the recent interactions he’d had with law enforcement officials in his own country, and how well they’d ended for him. “Criminal Investigations? Do I need to ring my lawyer?”
“That’s really up to you, Mr Wainwright,” Sita replied. “There are no formal charges against you right now, although I’m obligated to tell you that situation could change as our investigation moves forward. Right now, we just want to talk. There are a few questions about your last audit that we were hoping you might be able to clear up for us.”
“Sounds like my cue to leave,” said El, closing the laptop, shoving it back into its case and hastily zipping it closed.
“Can I ask who you are, ma’am?” Sita asked her, suspicious.
“Just on my way to an appointment,” El said, throwing the case over one shoulder and making for the doorway. “I’ll send you that email this evening,” she added to Wainwright, almost tripping over her feet in her haste to leave.
“Don’t forget, will you?” she heard him shout, as she hit the corridor - and then Sita was closing the door after her, trapping him and the unfortunate office temp inside.
Leaving the Fine Cloth Company in her wake, she headed for the Mission, with a view to grabbing lunch before returning to Presidio Heights. On Folsom Street, where a cluster of motorbike showrooms and auto repair shops segued seamlessly into shuttered bars and steam-filled taquerias, she paused, certain she was being followed, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling - but then, turning, saw nothing but the usual crop of teenagers on skateboards, restaurant workers on cigarette breaks and loud-shirted tourists photographing murals and graffiti.
Wondering whether this new paranoia was the cross she had to bear after the Marchant job, or whether it was nothing but a side-effect of geographic dislocation, of being out of the UK and on unfamiliar turf, she lit a cigarette of her own, and carried on walking.
It was almost four o’clock when she got back to the house. Only Sophie was there, still in the sunroom but now transplanted to the carpet, where she lay on her back, her thumbs hovering above the buttons of a Sega Game Gear.
“I’m back,” El told her - intending to escape to her bedroom, in the privacy of which she could finally shed the second Angela Di Salvo’s uncomfortable piercings and excessively baggy slacker-wear before hopping into the shower.
(“You have the name already,” Sita had insisted of the Angela Di Salvo persona, despite El’s objections. “Why not get a little more use from it, before it retires?”)
Sophie, though, had questions.
“What’s going on with you and
my Mum?” she asked, making no effort to get up from the floor but putting down the Game Gear and looking El straight in the eye.
El stopped dead in the sunroom doorway.
“That’s a strange thing to ask,” she said - uncertain of the kid’s exact meaning, much less her motivations, but willing to believe that only snares and pitfalls lay ahead. “Why do you ask?”
“You’re being evasive,” Sophie said knowingly. “Answering a question with a question. It’s what people do when they’re nervous or about to lie to you about something.”
“Did Ruby tell you that?”
“Sita.”
“Well, she isn’t always right. Language is complicated. People are complicated. There’s no blanket rule you can apply to every situation.”
“Do you like her?”
“Sita?”
“My Mum.”
El fidgeted uncomfortably where she stood, horribly aware that the kid would read the motion as a tell. Especially if Sita had been sharing some of her life-lessons.
“Sure,” she said, as neutrally as she was able. “She’s great.”
“But you didn’t like it when that woman took her out to the auction. Kate.”
Don’t panic, El told herself. Everything’s fine. She’s a kid, not CID. You’re not actually being interrogated.
“I didn’t like it or dislike it,” she said, trying for nonchalance and, if the crack in her voice was any indication, failing miserably. “It was part of the job. Had to be done.”
Sophie gave her what El’s own mother would have called a very old look - the deep, cynical stare of an ancient oracle in a cave on the slope of a mountain.
“You didn’t look like you liked it, when she was here,” she said.
“I was just tired,” El lied. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a lot going on.”
“Ruby said she thought you were jealous.”
El was, again, outraged.
“Ruby said that?” she asked.
“Sort of. She said you had a touch of the green-eyed monster, or something like that. But I knew what she meant.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Whatever.”
Sophie, no longer entertained enough by El’s reactions to bother carrying on the conversation, turned back to her game.
“I like your Mum,” El said, feeling the need to clarify her position. “But not like that. Not romantically.”
Sophie seemed not to hear her, her attention now entirely focused on the console in her hands.
El suppressed a sigh, wondering again why she’d let herself be persuaded that bringing a teenager along on a job was anything but a terrible idea.
She stepped backwards and out of the sunroom, reaching involuntarily for the cigarette packet in her pocket.
“She’ll be disappointed,” Sophie called, when she was halfway to the front door, cigarette in her mouth and plastic lighter in her palm. “She likes you, I think. You know… romantically.”
Chapter 17
The Tenderloin, San Francisco
September 1997
El had to take Ruby’s word for it that events thereafter played out the way she described them.
But even allowing for the creative licence the old woman had almost certainly taken with the looping thread of her narrative, it seemed to El likely that what had happened was this:
On the morning of the 19th of September - not quite 72 hours after El had left the US headquarters of Fine Cloth, the sensation of being watched pulsing under her skin like a low-level electrical charge - Ted Wainwright took a taxi from his Classical Revival mansion off Pacific Avenue to a small, one-room office above a Vietnamese restaurant on O’Farrell Street, in the altogether less salubrious Tenderloin district.
The woman who buzzed him up and greeted him on the second floor, her handshake firm enough to crack walnuts, could have been the twin separated from Ruby at birth. The eyes were the same, piercing blue and crafty as a raven’s, and the same knowing wickedness rippled the corners of her mouth when she smiled, but the rest was different, in both subtle and more obviously quantifiable ways. Her hair was a faded ginger, salt and paprika, tied back in a practical ponytail that had no aspirations to style; her teeth were yellow and tobacco-stained and, though she was white, what even a cursory glance could identify as a lifetime spent outdoors in the Southwest sun had darkened the skin on her face to the leathery brown of a baseball glove and freckled the backs of her hands with liver spots.
She wore stonewash jeans held up by a Longhorn belt buckle, a tan waistcoat over a loose denim shirt and a pair of well-worn cowboy boots, each boot decorated with a tangle of yellow roses.
“Glad to meet you, sir,” she told Wainwright, with all the politeness of a native-born East Texan raised on good manners and Southern hospitality. “Why don’t you come on inside, and you and me can talk?”
Three days earlier, just as El was taking her slow walk along the mural-lined streets of the Mission, Special Agent Meena Gupta and her associate, the quietly menacing Special Agent Karen Torres (née Baxter) had been laying breadcrumbs.
Flustered by SA Gupta’s unexpected, and surely inauspicious, appearance in his conference room, Wainwright had sought to buy himself time - to think, to compose himself, to try to puzzle out what the hell a tax inspector could want with him when he’d barely been a year in this bloody country - by proposing that they retire to his private office on the fifth floor.
SA Gupta had graced the suggestion with a single, thin smile.
“My partner is up there already,” she told him, tapping just once, very lightly, on one of the earrings that Wainwright would have been astonished to discover was connected to the small, circular piece of conductive plastic right then resting in SA Torres’ left ear canal. “We thought one of us ought to wait there, just in case.”
“In case what?” Wainwright had asked, flabbergasted.
The thin smile had evaporated.
“You may be surprised to learn, Mr Wainwright,” SA Gupta said, “that not everyone is happy to see the IRS when we pay them a visit. Some even try to duck out on us, when they discover we’re looking for them. So we find it expedient to consider where they might want to duck out to, and make our way there too. Ahead of time.”
“So you can ambush them?”
“We’re the IRS, Mr Wainwright. We don’t ambush. We don’t have to. We’re very, very good at waiting.”
On the fifth floor, alone in a gleaming office suite with a larger footprint than her first flat in Tulse Hill, SA Torres slipped into the In tray on Wainwright’s desk two items: a deep purple flyer crammed with bold, black, uppercase text (“LOST SOMEONE CLOSE TO YOU? WE FIND YOUR MISSING LOVED ONES - OR YOUR MONEY BACK. CALL 800-555-LOST”) and a business card in the same vivid colour. The card bore similar text to the flyer, with some additional information: a woman’s name (“Laurel Hopkins, Private Investigator”) and the address of a building not far from Union Square, on the corner of Polk and O’Farrell.
Outside, if the local boys she’d hired three days after she’d arrived in the city had done their jobs, the same advertisement would be leaping out at drivers and pedestrians from five fourteen-foot billboards strategically positioned along key points of what she’d judged to be Wainwright’s daily commute from home to Fine Cloth and back again. A sixth billboard, she was pleased to see, had been placed directly opposite his office, and was now not just visible but impossible to avoid from the large back window she imagined Wainwright spinning ‘round to stare through every time he took a call or gave dictation.
After a moment’s thought, SA Torres removed the business card from the In tray and laid it flat on the desk, beside a pile of papers.
A minute or so later, when SA Gupta and her profusely sweating quarry entered the suite, Torres was standing to attention on the opposite side of the desk - hands on her hips, weapon holstered and badge dangling from a chain around her neck.
“Edward Wainwright?” she as
ked him, in the generic Midwestern accent that was, she’d previously argued, the best she could muster at short notice.
Wainwright nodded, meek as a terrified kitten.
“I’ve told Mr Wainwright he’s not under arrest at this time,” said SA Gupta, “and he’s agreed to answer a few questions without his lawyer present.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Torres. “Why don’t you take a seat, Mr Wainwright?” she added, in a tone that suggested refusing to do so really wasn’t an option.
Wainwright moved gingerly in the direction of what could only be his chair - then, seeing Torres look pointedly down at the seat opposite, the visitor’s chair, immediately changed paths.
Gupta, when he was seated, began to walk the perimeter of the desk, taking inventory of every fax and scribbled Post-It she found there. Halfway around, she stopped - her bureaucrat’s eyes seeming to zoom in on the purple business card.
“A private investigator, Mr Wainwright?” she asked, neutral curiosity barely covering her suspicion. “What is it you could want with a private investigator?”
“What?” he asked, confused by the question. “What investigator?”
Gupta picked up the card by its edges, as if handling evidence to be bagged and tagged, and turned it to face outwards, until it was only inches from Wainwright’s nose.
“‘Laurel Hopkins,’” Torres read, giving every impression of seeing the card for the first time. “She work for you, Mr Wainwright?”
“I appreciate you coming out here to see me,” the woman in the waistcoat said, hooking a desiccated thumb into the space between her belt and buckle.
“It’s no bother,” said Wainwright, from the lumpy couch she’d urged him into before pressing an ice-cold bottle of water into his hand. “I’ve not been here long enough yet to mind poking ‘round different bits of the city. It’s all interesting to me, still.”
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 15