Tess spotted it instantly.
After a moment, she turned to me and, out of Alex’s earshot, whispered, “He really does seem scared of you.”
I nodded ruefully. “I told you. It’s really frustrating. I don’t know how to get him past it.”
She reached out for my forearm. “He just needs time. You were there when she died. He associates you with what happened to her.”
“Yeah, but this is something else . . . it started before.”
Tess’s face scrunched up with confusion, then she turned to look at Alex.
“Why don’t we get him out of this room? Take him out somewhere nice, give him something to smile about.” She didn’t wait for an answer and went up to Alex. She kneeled down so her face was level with his.
“How about that, Alex?” she asked him. “Would you like to go out and get some pizza or something? What’s your favorite food? Anywhere you like, just say the word.”
It didn’t take long for Alex to succumb to her charms, and she coaxed the first quasi-smile I’d seen out of him when she said the Cheesecake Factory was her favorite, too. I watched from a distance as they debated the relative awesomeness of Key lime versus Oreo, but then the glowing kindling in my stomach got snuffed out when Alex asked the killer question he’d asked so many times before.
“What about my mama? Is she going to come with us?”
Tess glanced at me, then turned to Alex, reached out and held his hand, and said, “No, sweetheart, I’m afraid your mommy won’t be coming with us.”
“Why not?” Alex asked. “Where is she?”
Tess hesitated, then I saw her take in a deep breath and she said the words. “She’s in heaven, sweetheart.”
I felt my chest wall cave in.
The three of us ended up taking Alex to SeaWorld after that heart-wrenching chat, and throughout it all, Tess was nothing less than remarkable. She’d even managed to get him to eat something, which was more than Jules or I had managed. Alex was still clearly wary of me, avoiding eye contact and using Tess as a buffer between me and him. I decided the best I could do was to give him some space and let Tess keep on working her magic. We had a whole life ahead of us to work things out.
We got back to the hotel at about six, and Tess went off to try to put Alex to bed. Our setup was a one-bedroom suite, which had a separate living room, and an additional bedroom connecting to it. I went down to the bar and got myself a beer. I was feeling real antsy. A whole day had passed and I’d done nothing to try to get to the bottom of what happened to Michelle beyond streaming through a few hundred cold, troubled, or just plain vacant stares. I wasn’t used to being this passive, and it was killing me. Problem was, it was now Sunday evening, and I was kind of helpless, waiting for Villaverde to come back with news from the tech guys or from the homicide detectives who were investigating the shootings. I was also aware of the need to make sure Alex was being looked after, and having Tess around had certainly helped make him feel better.
Still, I needed to do something. But I was drawing a blank at what I actually could do.
I was debating whether or not to order another beer when Tess showed up and slid onto the stool next to mine.
“You come here often?” she asked, a tired smile struggling to break out.
I managed a brief smile back. “My girlfriend’s in our room. We’ll have to use yours.”
She raised an eyebrow and said, “You know what? That line came to you way too easily.” Her eyes lingered on me for a mock-scrutinizing couple of seconds, then she turned to the barman and used her fingers to indicate we needed two more bottles.
“Is he asleep?”
Tess nodded. “Jules is with him. She’s great, by the way. A real find. You were lucky to have her here.”
I shrugged and stared away into nothing. “Yeah, it’s been a lucky weekend all around.”
She moved in closer and ran her hand through the hair at the back of my head. “You okay, baby?”
I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. I stayed silent for a moment, just staring at the monster collection of bottles behind the bar. “It’s weird,” I finally said. “I haven’t thought about her for years. I mean, literally. And then she calls up and . . .” I turned to face Tess. “She’s gone, and I have a son. Just like that.”
“I know,” she just said, the strokes of her hand tightening somewhat. “It’s horrible, what happened to her. It’s beyond horrible. And yet . . . you have a beautiful baby boy, Sean.”
I heard a crack in her voice and saw her eyes glisten. She blinked away a tear, and I couldn’t help but reach out, right there at the bar, and pull her close, and kiss her. We stayed like that for a long moment, then I just kept her right up against me, feeling her breathing against my ear and the flutter of her eyelashes against my cheek.
“You gonna be okay with that?” I mumbled.
“More than okay, baby,” she whispered back. “More than okay.”
We stayed like that for a few minutes, just breathing each other in and finding our compasses again, then I gave her another kiss and edged back. I raised my bottle in a silent toast. Tess met my eye and, softly, clinked her bottle against mine. We each took a long swig.
“I spoke to Stacey this morning. You remember Stacey Ross?”
The name rang a bell, then it came back to me. Stacey was a psychiatrist who specialized in treating kids. The two of them had become friends when Stacey was treating Tess’s daughter, Kim, after they had both got caught up in the bloodbath at the Met the night we first met. Kim was nine at the time, and Stacey had really helped her work through the emotional fallout from that night.
“She gave me a few pointers. For Alex.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said he’ll go through the five stages, same as an adult would. You know . . . denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. But she also said boys and girls deal with these things differently. He’s likely to be more locked in than a girl would be in his situation. And it might set back his maturity a bit. That’s what we’ll need to help him with. Talking things out and not keeping it all in. But we’ll get him through this,” she insisted, a film of moisture making her eyes glisten again. “We’ll get him through. And she’s there if we need her.”
I nodded as she took another swig, and I could tell that this was hard on her. We’d talked about her fears in the past, about how the thought of something bad happening to her and leaving Kim behind terrified her—it was a major factor in her turning to writing her novels and trying to leave the call of the wild behind.
“What else did she say, in terms of right now?”
“Well, he’ll cry a lot, obviously. He’ll be prone to waking at odd hours and he’ll sleep intermittently. Maybe some bedwetting. Beyond that, she said we shouldn’t lie, which is why I talked to him about heaven. He needs to believe that she’s happy, that she’s fine, even if she can’t be here with him. She also said we needed to give him as much continuity as possible. I imagine going back to Michelle’s house is off-limits for him.”
I nodded.
“And it wouldn’t be great for him anyway, without her there. But he needs some favorite things around him, wherever he is. Transitional objects, she called them. Toys, maybe his pillow or his blanket. His favorite drinking cup. That kind of thing. Maybe even Michelle’s nightgown or something that smells of her. Would that be okay with you? I could ask Alex about what he’s missing and go there tomorrow and get them for him.”
Michelle’s house was still a crime scene, and I wasn’t too thrilled about having Tess go there, but I could see the need for it. “Sure. I’ll take you there tomorrow.”
“Great. Also, do you know if any of Michelle’s close relatives are around, people Alex was comfortable around? Her mom maybe, or a sister?”
I told Tess the little I knew about Michelle’s family, and said I’d find out what I could in the morning. She drew in again and kissed me, then kept her hand cupped on my cheek. “We’re go
ing to help him get happy again, Sean. I promise you that.”
I gave her a small nod and a smile, and she squeezed my arm before heading back up to check on Alex. I stayed there alone, nursing another beer and spiraling back into my darkest thoughts, until my cell rang.
It was the cavalry.
Not only that, but Villaverde sounded upbeat.
He asked about Alex, but there was nothing much to say on that front. I knew it would be a while before I’d ever be able to answer that question with a cheerful and casual, “He’s fine.” Then he got to the reason for his call.
“Ballistics came back with a match for the nine-mil Michelle took off the shooters. You remember that armed double-kidnap up at that research center near Santa Barbara, about six months ago?”
My mind flashed to vague snippets from the news footage. “Some kind of medical facility, right?”
“That’s the one. The Schultes Institute. Anyway, we got a match. Your shooter was one of the crew that did the hit.”
This was solid.
I remembered that, apart from the missing scientists, people had died that day. “Was the match from a kill shot?”
“Yep,” Villaverde confirmed. “A security guard. It also matches the slug from Michelle’s boyfriend.”
I got a small uplift from the fact that Michelle had, most likely by her account, not just taken out the guy who’d shot Tom, but that he’d also killed before. It wasn’t going to bring her back, but right now, I was happy to grab any satisfaction I could get hold of, no matter how small.
“But that one’s still unsolved, right?” I asked.
“I’m waiting for some callbacks, but as far as I know, it’s cold.”
“Whose case is it?”
“It’s joint DEA-FBI.”
“LA offices?”
“Yep.”
I frowned. The inevitable beckoned. “I guess we’re definitely going to need to talk to my good old buddy Hank Corliss.”
“Yep,” Villaverde repeated. “I already put a call in. We’re seeing him in the morning.”
14
Less than three miles north of the hotel, a chartered Embraer Legacy private jet was touching down at Montgomery Field. It had taken off a little less than five hours earlier from Merida International Airport in the Yucatán and was carrying four passengers, all male.
The lone customs agent who boarded the small aircraft verified the passengers’ identities and cleared them for immigration in under two minutes.
He had no reason to subject them to any further scrutiny. The charter company was one of the most reputable around, and he’d met the crew on several previous occasions. The passengers, all Mexican, were well groomed, smartly dressed, and soft spoken. The plane’s paperwork was impeccable, and the men’s passports bore the stamps of several European countries, as well as a few in the Far East. It all reeked of quality and, more importantly, had that intangible, disarming aura of integrity.
Shortly after the customs agent’s departure, the four men disembarked and got into two chauffeured Lincoln Town Cars that had already been there long before the plane landed. Comfortable beds were waiting for them in a luxury six-bedroom oceanside villa that had been rented for them on a quiet street in Del Mar.
They would need a good night’s sleep.
They had a lot of work ahead of them.
MONDAY
15
I left Tess, Alex, and Jules at the hotel and went to meet Villaverde at his office. Our sit-down with Corliss was set for ten thirty, allowing us to dodge Los Angeles’s brutal morning rush hour traffic and giving us a chance to sample its delightful mid-morning snarl-ups instead. Tess was eager to go to Michelle’s house and collect the stuff that her friend had recommended to give Alex a measure of comfort, and Villaverde had arranged to have an SDPD squad car drive her to the house while we were away and watch over her while she did her thing.
The first half of the drive was easy enough, a straight run up the interstate with the sun at our backs and nothing but the ocean to our left and sand dunes and rolling hills to our right for a good chunk of an hour. Then we hit San Clemente and its pastoral settings helped ease us into the less attractive aspects of human colonization and the chaotic asphalt cauldron that was downtown LA.
We drove past the building and turned in to take the ramp that led down to the underground parking. Outside the building’s entrance were four huge fifty-foot metallic sculptures, flat cutouts of male figures leaning into each other like they were in a huddle. They were pockmarked with hundreds of small round holes and looked like they’d been shot up by a crazed army of gangbangers. I wasn’t sure that was the best imagery to have outside a federal building, but then again, I never claimed to get modern art, and the symbolism that eluded me was probably much deeper and more sophisticated than anything I could hope to grasp.
We went up to the twentieth floor and were ushered into Corliss’s office, and I got two small shocks.
The first was seeing Corliss after all those years. I knew what he’d been through, of course—it had happened after I’d left Mexico, but it was big news at the bureau back then, in all of its gory detail—yet I was still surprised by how much he’d aged. Not so much aged as worn out. The Hank Corliss I knew back in the day was a tough, hard-headed, and generally unpleasant sonofabitch with a crafty set of neurons firing away behind a pair of vigorous eyes that didn’t miss a trick. The guy who greeted us from behind his desk was an antique-mirror reflection of the guy I remembered. His face was gaunt, his skin was lined and ashen, and he had black bunkers under his eyes. He moved with a slow step, and my grandmother, in her eighth decade, had a handshake with more of a kick to it.
The second was seeing Jesse Munro there with him. Two blasts from the past, two revenants from an unpleasant chapter of my life. Munro, however, hadn’t aged a day. Hell, I knew he spent enough time at the gym looking after his finely preened image to make sure of that. He was pretty much as I remembered him. Thick blond hair gelled straight back, deeply tanned, unbuttoned shirt over a deep-V-necked white T-shirt that showed off his upper pecs, bright solid-gold chain. And that cocky, shit-eating grin, of course, that was never too far from the surface.
Corliss motioned us all into a seating area across from his desk.
“So,” he said as he scrutinized me like I was there for a job interview, “I hear you’re doing some good work out in New York. Looks like the move back there sure did you a world of good, didn’t it?”
The wry smile that flitted across his lips confirmed the subtext in his words, not that I thought for a second that he’d forgotten the heated exchanges we’d had in Mexico. At the time, I was livid at myself at having killed—executed—an unarmed American citizen, Wade McKinnon, whom I knew little about beyond that he was a chemistry whiz who had developed some kind of superdrug for a narco named Navarro. Munro was with me on that ill-fated mission, and he’d done even worse things that night—things no one should be allowed to walk away from. And whereas Munro didn’t seem to have qualms about it after we got back, I had a lot of trouble dealing with what I’d done. It kept gnawing away at me until it got to a point where I felt I had to do something to make amends—see if I could find any relatives of McKinnon’s, let them know what had happened, come clean, get some kind of absolution or face whatever punishment I was due. Corliss and the rest of the suits, on the other hand, had no such misgivings and couldn’t give a rat’s ass about my inner demons. Most of all, they didn’t want me out there blabbing about it either. So they dangled a carrot for me—a transfer to the New York City field office with a primo seat at the antiterrorist desk, a trophy position they knew might hit the spot. After endless deliberations and torturing myself over it for days, I’d ended up taking the carrot—not my proudest moment, I admit—and here we were, five years later, with the ghost of Corliss past looking all smug about it.
Anyway, I was going to answer that it did us both a lot of good, but given what he went through after I lef
t, that would have been a seriously uncool thing to say. Instead, I went with a middle-ground peace offering.
“It’s been a real hoot.”
He watched me, like he was unsure about how to respond to that, then adjusted his seating position and got down to it.
“I’m very sorry to hear about Martinez. She did some good work for us, even if her leaving the agency was a bit, um, abrupt.” He looked at me as he said it, like I had something to do with it. Which, as it turned out, I did, though I was pretty sure he didn’t know about that. I mean, he knew we were seeing each other—it wasn’t exactly a secret—but Michelle had told me that she hadn’t made her pregnancy public knowledge within the agency. “Tell me how we can help.”
He and Munro listened attentively as I took them through what I knew, then Villaverde filled them in on the ballistics match, which they were already aware of and was the part of the story that piqued Corliss’s interest, given that it was a live lead into a dead investigation of his.
“So,” he said when we were done, “you got any other handles on the crew?”
“Not yet,” Villaverde said. “That’s why we’re here.”
Corliss pursed his lips and spread his palms out. “Hey, I was hoping you were coming here with something more for me, something that’d help us nail these fuckers.”
“Right now, that’s all we’ve got.”
Corliss frowned. “Well that makes two of us then. We hit a wall on our end. These guys showed up, did their business, and got away clean. They had face masks. The cars they used were stolen, we found them wiped clean and burnt to a crisp. Ballistics and CCTV footage didn’t get us anywhere either. No word on the street, no jackass shooting his mouth off in some bar, nothing. And six months later, it’s all gone beyond cold.”
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