Apparently, her face told him that she wanted more, so he explained: “We were lifting some woman out of the L.A. River. Her car had skipped over the guardrail and gone over a bridge. McKenna and me are in the chopper, the other crew member is on the end of the cable with this woman. As we’re pulling them up, the cable on my hoist gets tangled around some rebar sticking out of a gash in the side of the bridge. All of a sudden we’re tethered to the bridge and I’m having trouble controlling my bird. But I can’t use the cable’s safety release because my guy and this woman are already fifty feet above the ground.”
The creases around his eyes deepened, as if pulled taut by the memory. “Anyway, before I know it, that crazy-ass McKenna shimmies down the cable with no safety harness, no nothing, and works it free. Then he climbs back up the line like he’s some kinda monkey. We’re talking a good twenty-five feet or so in the downwash of chopper blades.” He shook his head. “Once he’s back inside, he gives me this no-big-deal look like he’d just gone out for some air.”
Susan had a silly grin on her face. “Whoa.”
The pilot said, “I still don’t know how the hell he did it. But I’ll take him along on a rescue any time.” He looked at each of them in turn. “He around?”
“His shift ended an hour ago,” Susan said.
“Well, tell him Handlebar says hello.” His eyes brightened and he pulled on one end of his moustache. “He’ll know who you’re talking about.”
A scream came from behind the heavy metal doors. The nightmare did not bloom, though, until the doors opened with a whoosh.
A nurse pushed her way into the room, followed by three men carrying a woman’s body, her crimson torso dangling just above the floor. One man was carrying her by the arms, his hands drenched in blood, his grip slipping. The other two—teenage boys—each held the woman by one of her legs. A stream of blood trailed behind them. The woman’s head was lolled back, and a rivulet of blood streamed from a pucker in the middle of her forehead. Pulsations of thick crimson oozed from her chest—her heart was still pumping.
Megan shouted at Susan: “Call Surgery and tell them we have an adult female with multiple GSW’s—head and chest!”
The man holding the woman’s arms slipped on some blood, and the woman’s shoulder hit the ground. A wavy smear of red marked the spot.
Megan turned to the pilot. “Help me lift this woman onto the table.” To no one in particular, she yelled, “Get me something I can use for pressure bandages. And someone call upstairs. We need six units of O-negative whole blood…”
• • •
Luke felt a mix of frustration, fatigue, and disgust as he left Kolter’s at 11:00 P.M. Did Kate decide to back out of their meeting? That wasn’t like her. Timid, she was not—at least not when he had known her. So where was she?
He had no way to reach her. When they spoke she had offered her cell phone number, but he told her it wasn’t necessary because he would meet her at the deli without fail. It hadn’t occurred to him that she would be the one who failed to show.
Luke looked up at the hospital’s third-floor administrative wing while trotting across the street. The lights were dark. Apparently, Barnesdale had given up on him and left.
As he jumped onto the curb, two black-and-whites sprinted by, passing behind him with lights flashing. They turned at the end of the block, probably racing to the hospital’s emergency entrance that was just around the corner on a side street. At this time of night it was a good bet that a gang banger had landed in their E.R. after catching a knife or bullet.
Twenty-five minutes later Luke pulled his Toyota 4Runner into the driveway of his duplex apartment. The air was soaked with the sweet scent of night-blooming jasmine, and an aging oak tree on his neighbor’s front lawn flickered like a silent movie as fast-moving clouds crossed in front of a full moon.
He leased the upper unit of a two-story Spanish-style duplex, nestled in the Los Feliz area on the south side of Griffith Park. The duplex sat at the base of a tall hillside, and his living room window looked out over the red-tile roofs of his neighbors’ homes, and beyond that, the L.A. basin. He’d had sweeping views of the city when he first moved there, but the century-old trees along his street hadn’t been pruned in several years and his vista had shrunk to a few bare spots left by irregular growth patterns. He wasn’t thinking about the view as he climbed the brown terra-cotta stairs to his entry door.
A light came on in one of the first-floor windows. Walter, the owner and landlord, lived in the ground floor unit, but they rarely saw one another. In fact, they talked only when Walter inserted his sizable nose into their neighbors’ business and felt the need to share his discoveries with Luke.
As he came through the front door, Luke glanced at his answering machine on the entry table. The NEW MESSAGES display was flashing the number 1.
He pressed the playback button and kept walking. He was halfway to the kitchen when he heard the background hiss of a cell phone, then: “Luke…it’s Kate. I…I know it’s been a while, but I need to talk to you. I’ve been calling the emergency room—I hope you’re not ignoring my messages. It’s a little after nine and I’m going to try you again at the hospital. If you’re hearing this message and we haven’t talked yet, call me at home. I don’t care what time it is when you get this message. Please, we need to talk…”
There it was again, the fear seeping from her voice.
“…Check your e-mail. I’ll explain it when I see you.”
He walked into the living room and flipped on his computer. Luke was a holdout, refusing to use an e-mail-enabled cell phone. He was already tethered around the clock to his pager and phone. Knowing about every new hire, carpooling opportunity, and departmental bake sale in real time was something he could live without.
He grabbed a Mr. Goodbar from the desk drawer and bit into it as the hard drive groaned at him. A minute later he clicked on a small icon at the bottom of the screen. Two messages showed in the mailbox for his personal e-mail address. Both were advertisements.
He logged onto the hospital’s e-mail server. Four days worth of e-mail messages popped into his inbox. None was from Kate.
He checked again. Nothing.
Where was her e-mail? Kate was anything but careless about such things.
Again he asked himself why she hadn’t shown up for their meeting. The explanation he had settled upon earlier—that she simply changed her mind, stood him up for her own selfish reasons—now left too many unanswered questions.
Luke grabbed his jacket on his way out the door.
He took the stairs three at a time.
10
It was just after midnight when Luke turned onto Bronson Avenue, a quiet tree-lined street just south of Paramount Studios in Hollywood. The night air was wet, and the canopies of the jacaranda trees that lined Kate’s street were hidden in a mantle of fog.
Her home was a one-story bungalow, and Kate had always parked her car under the driveway overhang. After four years, he didn’t know what make of automobile he should be looking for, but it turned out not to matter. When he pulled up in front of her house, there was no vehicle under the overhang.
A light was burning in one of the rooms along the side of her house. Kate was into saving trees and whales, and small insects that he would sooner squash. She had never been one to leave a light on, even for security. She was naive in that way.
Kate was also a creature of habit, and Luke wondered why the living room drapes were drawn. He couldn’t remember her ever having closed them. It occurred to him for the first time that she might not live there anymore.
On the other hand, it had been several years. People change, habits change.
He got out, went to the front door, and knocked. Nothing.
He walked around to the driveway and peered into a side window.
A reflected image showed in the glass—a silhouette on the neighbor’s lawn eclipsing a street lamp.
He spun around and a flashlight beam hit
him in the face. Below the light, a hand on a holstered gun.
“Police. Hold it—hold it right there,” the male voice said.
A second heavyset cop in an LAPD uniform moved quickly up the driveway, flanking Luke. “Hands on your head. Now,” he yelled.
Luke did as he was told.
The beefy cop patted him down, then cuffed him.
“Dispatch, this is One Adam Fourteen,” the first cop said into his radio. “We’re Code Five on the four hundred block of Bronson Avenue and may have a fly in the trap. Put me through to Detective O’Reilly.”
Luke spotted their black-and-white down the street, behind a large dumpster of the type used by construction companies. They’d been watching her property from there.
Something was terribly wrong.
The cops asked no questions and answered none of his. Luke’s temper was flaring by the time a blue unmarked sedan pulled into the driveway fifteen minutes later. The license plate bore the letters CA EXEMPT across the top—government plates, like those used on unmarked police vehicles.
A sloppy-looking man got out of the car, his right shirt collar hanging outside the lapel of his camel’s-hair sport coat. A large notepad protruded from his jacket pocket. He introduced himself as Detective Sergeant O’Reilly, LAPD homicide.
Luke’s stomach went hollow.
Five minutes later he knew that Kate had been murdered, and that it had happened right under his nose, in a parking lot less than fifty yards from where he’d waited for her in Kolter’s Deli.
Detective O’Reilly hadn’t told him any of this, and would not confirm it, but the cop’s questions concerning Luke’s knowledge of her, his whereabouts between 10:00 and 11:00 P.M., and Kate’s physical description, left no doubt. It also told him that they were probably working from her vehicle registration and hadn’t positively identified the body.
O’Reilly flipped between two pages of notes he’d taken. “When Dr. Tartaglia called you at the hospital, you said she sounded upset.”
Luke was slow to respond. He was remembering the limp figure being carried across the street as he had looked on indifferently from inside the deli. “That’s right.”
“And you didn’t bother to ask what was upsetting her?”
“I did ask. Kate told me she’d explain it when we met.” Seeing a persistent wariness in O’Reilly’s eyes, he added, “Listen—it didn’t sound like she was in physical danger. It was more like something was troubling her.”
The detective scratched his ear. “I’m a little confused here. If her concerns didn’t seem like such a big deal to you, why drive out to her house in the middle of the night?”
“When I got home, there was a phone message that she’d left earlier. Kate wanted me to get ahold of her, no matter what time it was. There was something in her voice that worried me. She also mentioned an e-mail that she’d sent. I couldn’t find it.”
If O’Reilly thought that his last observation was significant, he didn’t show it. Instead, the detective looked Luke up and down while tapping his upper teeth with a pencil. Then he said to one of the patrol officers, “Take the cuffs off.”
A watchfulness lingered in O’Reilly’s eyes, but he seemed to conclude that one unarmed man wasn’t a threat to three armed officers.
Luke gave them no reason to think otherwise.
O’Reilly asked several more questions about Kate’s personal habits—was she the type to drive without a purse or license, how much cash did she usually carry, did she wear expensive rings or jewelry? Whoever had killed her probably took her purse, together with her license and keys. The police had staked out her address on the chance that Kate’s killer might be brazen enough to try and ransack her home.
“Anything else you can tell me?” the detective said. “Anything that I haven’t asked you about?”
Luke looked back at the house, then at O’Reilly. “Two things you should know about Kate Tartaglia. She never left a light on—ever. And she never drew the curtain over that front window that I can remember.”
The cop’s right eyebrow arched, as if Luke had just offered his first useful tidbit. If this was a simple robbery-homicide, the thug had gotten to Kate’s house before the police unit.
Had some two-bit punk snuffed out Kate’s life for a petty haul he’d sell on the street for a few hundred bucks?
For all of Luke’s disillusionment with the choices she’d made, the thought that her life had ended in this way sickened him.
“Dr. Tartaglia’s phone message,” the detective said. “Did you save it?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t erase it.” He handed Luke a business card. “And when you find that e-mail, I’d like to see it.”
• • •
Calderon’s muscles were beginning to burn from crouching in the rear of their green van. He ignored the pain and adjusted the focus of his Kowa TSN-821M spotting scope. The man in handcuffs was a block and a half away, but he filled the lens.
“Bang-bang, McKenna,” he whispered. “You’re dead.”
“You say something?” Mr. Kong asked from the driver’s seat.
“Just thinking out loud.”
It had been eleven—no, twelve—years since he’d been this close to the spineless cockroach. He could take him out now, and the cops around him, but that would draw unwanted attention.
Killing McKenna would have to wait. Besides, when the time came he wanted McKenna to know that it was he, Calderon, who was annihilating him. The right time would come, and anticipating the kill would make it all the more satisfying. After everything that McKenna had taken from him, he felt he deserved whatever small pleasures he could squeeze from the moment.
McKenna had never belonged in Proteus. He was an Annapolis boy who couldn’t stomach the work and got in the way of those who could. The shitty little coward had blindsided him—Calderon could still hear his ACL snapping, his knee a crumpled mess—all because McKenna didn’t have the spine to let him do what was necessary to pry information from one of their captives.
Just like that, Calderon was damaged goods, no longer a perfect physical specimen. After seven years of giving everything he had to the U.S. military, he was out and that was that. Thank you for your service to our country, Staff Sergeant. Now get lost and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
He had kept the incident a private matter. It seemed the smart thing to do. But then, how could he have known that two months after the cockroach ruined his military career, the ripples from McKenna’s gutless cheap shot would take the only other thing that mattered in his life—his mother, Rosa Valenzuela Calderon.
His mother, always the worrier, had taken on extra cleaning jobs when he returned home to Oklahoma with a limp and no job. She didn’t know that he already had plans to put his specialized skills to work in the private sector.
Oh, Mamácita. Calderon kissed his thumb and traced an X over his heart.
At a time in her life when she should have been slowing down, his mother had added two overnight shifts to her already exhausting fifty-hour-a-week daytime schedule. Thanks to that miserable cockroach, she was in the basement of an industrial park office building one evening when a tornado blew away half of it and brought down the rest of the structure, burying her alive under a pile of rubble.
Rescue teams had decided that it was too dangerous to attempt an extraction from her building. It was deemed “too unstable.” At least, that’s what the scrawny little government bureaucrat had told him. So they left his mother to suffocate and die in the collapsed wreckage, left her there like some piece of garbage.
Calderon rubbed his knee as he worked to control his breathing, quiet his rage. A year after his military discharge, the knee had completely healed but not his heart. Never his heart.
McKenna had killed his mother, just as if he’d stuck a knife in her.
Even after doing what needed to be done to avenge his mother’s death, the pain had stayed with him like radioactive waste. He
had learned to recycle the pain, to use it in his work. He stoked it like a flame, kept it burning like a hellfire, knowing that the right time would come. He had waited twelve years to settle up with the sonofabitch. It was time.
The only reason that Calderon had taken the job of managing security for the Guatemalan project was its connection to McKenna. As soon as his client had mentioned the name McKenna during their initial discussion—albeit a reference to the cockroach’s father—Calderon had known that he would accept the assignment. Of course, the client knew nothing of his connection to Elmer McKenna’s son. Telling his client would only have raised unnecessary questions and concerns.
Calderon grabbed the cell phone. After a minute of pulsing tones and hissing, the encryption code synced and his call connected. “I have the items you asked for.”
“Good,” his client said.
“What do you want done with it?” Calderon surveyed the objects strewn across the van’s scuffed floorboard: Tartaglia’s laptop computer, a box filled with flash drives and CDs, a digital camera, and enough jewelry and stereo equipment to make it look like an unfocused robbery. While he had been busy eliminating the woman, his assistant, Mr. Kong, had swept her house. Asians were good at that sort of work.
“Save the laptop and the data files,” his client said. “I need to determine what she knew, and what she didn’t.” A pause, then, “Destroy everything else.”
“Any other loose ends?”
“None,” his client replied. “She was all alone in this. We’re sure of that.”
Calderon had come to the same conclusion while interrogating the Tartaglia woman in the final moments of her life. Her eyes never moved from the sound suppressor on his handgun, her voice choked off in fear. Her terror was complete, her honesty virtually assured. She had nodded at his reassurances—if she told the truth and gave him what he wanted, he would let her live. She probably hadn’t believed him, but people grabbed at straws in the face of death.
In any case, the truth was what he got from her. He knew the inflection of truth, its gestures, its cadence. More importantly, the information she gave him matched what he and his client already knew. She told him about her visit to the village, about the serum samples she had collected, about talking to her boss.
Stigma Page 7