We Can See You

by Simon Kernick

  ‘I’m aware of that,’ said the doc. ‘I’ve been watching the news, like everyone else. And I’m also aware of who her husband is.’

  ‘You know him?’ Giant asked.

  This time Wallace’s smile was devoid of humour. ‘By reputation. He’s not a man I’d like to cross. But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t tell you what I think.’

  ‘And is there any way you could be mistaken?’ asked Jenna.

  He shrugged. ‘I guess it’s possible. But I don’t see how, unless Mrs Reyes had taken hold of the gun at some point and then it was snatched from her, placed against her head and the shot fired. Which seems highly unlikely. She doesn’t have any obvious defensive injuries to suggest that a struggle took place, and my understanding is that you guys were on the scene very quickly. How was she positioned when you found her?’

  ‘She was lying on a tarpaulin sheet. According to her husband, he and a couple of his security people were trying to move her body, so it didn’t make a mess …’ Giant didn’t bother keeping the scepticism out of his voice.

  Wallace raised his eyebrows. ‘I’d have thought a man with Tony Reyes’s reputation would have known that you should never move a body from a murder scene.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Giant, ‘so would we.’ He stood up and Jenna followed suit. ‘Thanks for your time, Gary. I’d appreciate it if you could keep what I’ve told you to yourself. And I’ll keep your name out of any media briefing.’

  ‘I’d appreciate that,’ Wallace said, shaking hands with both of them. ‘If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not be in Tony Reyes’s black book.’

  Giant knew that he himself was already in it, and in truth the thought unnerved him. But it also bugged him hugely that it was common knowledge amongst those within, and connected to, the law-enforcement community that Tony Reyes was a murderous thug whom you went out of your way not to cross. Giant had always thought America had got rid of the era of untouchable gangsters like Al Capone and John Gotti – that they’d finally been tamed. But the truth was they’d been replaced by men who knew that adopting a high profile is dangerous. The gangsters of today worked around the clock to keep themselves as far away as possible from the crimes carried out on their behalf, and they’d turned out to be just as untouchable.

  ‘This case, Ty, it gets stranger and stranger,’ said Jenna when they were back outside in the sunshine.

  ‘The Chief’s not going to like it,’ he said.

  ‘What do you think’s going on?’

  Giant would have loved to come up with a solid, workable theory, not least because he knew it would be a good way to impress Jenna, but right now he couldn’t think of one, so he was honest. ‘I really don’t have a clue. We know Tony Reyes’s security guys were also shot with a nine-mill, so probably with the same weapon. Maybe it was Reyes’s wife who shot them, and he’s protecting her memory.’ He shrugged. ‘The point is, we may never know for sure. Tony Reyes will stick with his story that Connor shot Maria, and there’ll be no way we can disprove it. You heard what Gary Wallace said in there – if he was a betting man, he’d say Maria killed herself. That’s not proof, it’s opinion, and it’s not going to be enough to sway a jury. And Reyes’s men aren’t cooperating, either.’ He and Jenna had tried to question them earlier at the hospital and had been referred to their lawyers. Giant knew that by the time they gave official statements – if they ever did – they’d be giving exactly the same story as their boss.

  ‘Brook Connor will probably give us her side of the story,’ he said, ‘but it’s going to be her word against theirs. And right now, her word doesn’t count for much.’

  ‘So Tony Reyes walks free, even though we found his wife wrapped in tarpaulin? It doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘I know, but for once it seems he hasn’t done anything. Nothing we can prove, anyways.’

  Jenna looked at him. ‘You should have been more careful – the way you talked to him last night.’

  There was a tenderness in her voice that Giant hadn’t heard before. She actually cares about me, he thought. ‘Reyes won’t hurt a cop,’ he replied, with more confidence than he felt. ‘He’s not that stupid.’

  ‘Just be careful next time.’

  ‘I will be,’ he said, conscious that they were still looking at each other.

  ‘Your phone’s ringing,’ she said with a smile, and he realized with surprise that it was.

  It was Detective Joe Padilla. ‘I’ve been tracking further back through Brook Connor’s phone records,’ he said, ‘and there are two calls in the week running up to the murders to a cellphone that we’ve ID’d as belonging to Chris Cervantes.’

  ‘I know that name,’ said Giant, although he couldn’t recall where from.

  ‘He used to be on the squad, long before your time,’ said Padilla. ‘He was invalided out of the Force three years ago, after he got shot in the hip during a raid. He’s a private detective now, still based in Monterey. Do you want me to go see him?’

  ‘No. Leave it with us. We’ll go there now.’ Giant took down the address and ended the call, before telling Jenna what Padilla had just told him.

  Her expression became serious. ‘Chris Cervantes? Oh yeah, I can tell you a story about him.’

  ‘Tell me on the way over to his place,’ said Giant, getting in the car.

  41

  Sunday

  6.40 p.m.

  The Rav4 was close to running on fumes by the time Brook parked on Chris Cervantes’s driveway next to his Dodge Avenger. But she had a plan of action and, if all went well, she wouldn’t need it again anyway. She knew Cervantes wouldn’t want to see her, which was why, once again, she didn’t ring the front doorbell.

  Cervantes was in his study. He tried to duck down, but he wasn’t quick enough. Their eyes met and he gave her an exasperated look.

  ‘Please,’ Brook mouthed at him through the window.

  With an angry shake of his head, he got up from his chair and motioned her round to the back door. It was locked this time (she guessed he’d learned, after her last visit) and she waited while he walked slowly down the hall, leaning heavily on his stick, and unlocked it for her.

  He didn’t stand aside to let her in, but stood motionless in the doorway. He was wearing cheap suit-pants, socks with no shoes and a dress shirt that was greying around the collar. It was obvious that he wasn’t seeing clients today, and Brook wondered how many he actually had.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. ‘You need to give yourself up before they kill you.’

  ‘Paige’s kidnappers have been back in touch,’ she said.

  Cervantes looked at Brook like she was making up the whole thing.

  ‘I put the phone on loudspeaker and I taped the call. It’s all on here.’ She held up the tape-recorder.

  ‘What did they want?’ he asked, still making no move to let her in.

  ‘They said they’re prepared to give me Paige back tonight if I turn up at the same place as last time with all the money I’ve got, plus some jewellery. Please. Listen to it, if you don’t believe me. All I want to do is make sure Paige is safe.’

  This time he finally moved aside and she went in.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked Cervantes as they walked back through to his study. His limp seemed a lot more pronounced.

  ‘With this leg, I have good days and I have bad days. Today’s one of the bad ones.’

  He motioned for her to sit down, and Brook faced him across the desk. ‘This doesn’t seem right, Ms Connor.’

  ‘Just call me Brook,’ she said wearily. ‘And what do you mean?’

  ‘Why are they calling you now? If they’d wanted more money, either they would have asked for it in the first place or – if they wanted to extort more from you – they would have done it the next day, before you were on the run and while you still had access to cash. And if they were interested in handing Paige back to you, why did they set fire to your house?’

  ‘I asked them that, too, a
nd the man on the phone said they weren’t the ones who set fire to it.’

  Cervantes frowned. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

  Brook could see that she was losing him. ‘Look, they even sent a photo of Paige. And check the date on it. It was taken today.’ She rifled through her bag and pulled out the phone, bringing the photo back onto the screen. She paused to take a look at it, feeling a mixture of despair and hope, then handed the phone to Cervantes. ‘It’s definitely her,’ she said. ‘And those clothes have been bought by someone else for her.’

  ‘The date could have been doctored – it’s not that hard to do,’ he said and handed the phone back, giving her a sympathetic look.

  When a man who looks as beaten by the world as Chris Cervantes feels sorry for you, you know things really are bad.

  He folded his hands on the desk and leaned forward. ‘You said the kidnapper who called you told you to go to the same place you went before, right?’

  Brook nodded. ‘Tonight at midnight.’

  ‘I’d put a bet on it that if you turn up there tonight, you’ll be met by the police.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘Because that way the kidnapper – or kidnappers – can collect the reward that’s out on your head. You know it’s two hundred grand, right?’

  ‘I thought it was a hundred.’

  Cervantes shook his head. ‘Tony Reyes doubled it this afternoon. What happened at his house, by the way?’

  She gave him the short version.

  When she’d finished, he gave her a grim smile. ‘You’ve got balls, Brook. I’ll give you that.’

  ‘I’m going to give myself up anyway, so will you come with me if I go to the rendezvous tonight, in case they do have Paige? I’ve got six thousand dollars in cash on me. If they’re not there, you can keep that money, as long as you promise to try to find her after I’ve been taken into custody.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve discharged my debt to you, Brook. You can call the police from here and wait here until they come for you, if you want, but that’s the full extent of my involvement.’

  All the earlier hope Brook had been feeling vanished now. What Cervantes was saying about the kidnappers made sense, and she suddenly felt foolish for believing they’d risk a handover for the sake of six thousand dollars and some jewellery. But she was determined to go to the rendezvous. Just in case.

  ‘At least listen to the tape of the kidnapper’s phone call,’ she said. ‘You might get a better idea of who I’m dealing with. Please.’ She leaned across the table with the tape-recorder.

  Cervantes sighed impatiently, but he took it and pressed Play.

  There was a slight pause and then Brook’s own voice came out of the tinny little speaker, clearly enough to hear the fear in her voice.

  ‘Where’s my daughter?’

  ‘She’s safe,’ said the kidnapper.

  On the tape, the tension in Brook’s voice was obvious as she asked why the kidnappers hadn’t given Paige back and, as she sat there in Cervantes’s cramped little study, she could feel the hairs on her arms stand up as the man spoke again. ‘We wanted to make sure you hadn’t involved the police.’

  She looked across at Cervantes as the tape continued, and straight away she could see that something was wrong. His eyes were wide with shock, his mouth hanging open.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  He stopped the tape and slammed the tape-recorder on the desk as if it was white-hot, then sat staring at it for at least ten seconds before he finally spoke, his voice shaking with disbelief. ‘That man who phoned you about Paige …’ He paused.

  ‘What about him?’ she said urgently.

  Cervantes stared at her and it looked as if he might cry. ‘He’s my son.’

  42

  ‘I used to work pretty closely with Chris Cervantes,’ said Jenna as they drove towards his house. ‘We’re a small department, right. He’d probably been with us ten years at least when I joined, but originally he came up from LA, where he’d been with Robbery Homicide. People used to like him. I did. He was one of the boys. A good cop. Not afraid to get his hands dirty or to take on suspects.’

  Giant flinched inside when she said this, because he didn’t like to get his hands dirty or take on suspects. The previous night’s incident with Tony Reyes had been an aberration. In truth, Giant was a run-of-the-mill cop just trying to do his job and, for whatever reason, that made him feel inadequate around the rest of the department, and particularly around Jenna.

  ‘But he was also a bit of a fuck-up,’ continued Jenna. ‘He liked a drink too much, and the word was that he had a bit of a thing for hookers. And his son was a real bad seed. Cervantes never talked about him, but I know he’d served some serious time for drug dealing, robbery – that kind of thing. Anyways, although Cervantes had way more experience than me, we ended up getting partnered together.’

  Giant smiled. ‘Lucky him.’

  She shrugged. ‘He didn’t see it that way. He thought he was going to end up being Chief of us detectives.’ She paused. ‘And then one day he got shot.’

  Giant looked at her. ‘What happened?’

  ‘We were going to arrest a suspect who lived in an isolated place out in Moss Landing. The guy was a meth- and coke-dealer called Billy Harvey. But he was strictly small-time – a stick-thin little white guy with no history of violence – which was why there were only the two of us going around there. In hindsight, we should have taken backup, but that’s what I meant about Chris. He preferred to go in and make the arrests himself. I think it was because he came from Robbery Homicide, where he was used to a bit more action.

  ‘We parked some distance away, because we wanted to surprise Harvey. The place he lived in wasn’t much more than a tumbledown shack set at the edge of a wood, which you could only reach down a long track, so it was well out of the way of the neighbours. We approached on foot, and we could tell he was in, because his car was out front. Chris reckoned that if we both knocked on the front door, Billy would run out the back and disappear into the woods, and Chris wanted to be the one to take him down. So he headed around to cover the back door and told me to give it a minute before I knocked on the front. I remember Chris was pretty pumped up, considering Billy was so small-time, whereas for me it was just a routine bust.’

  She paused and screwed up her face in concentration. Giant thought it made her look cute. ‘I remember everything about what happened next, like it was a couple of hours ago. I hammered on the door, but there was no answer. All the curtains at the front were pulled, so I couldn’t see inside. I hammered again, shouted that it was the police, but again there was nothing. I didn’t hear any commotion out the back, either, so I guessed Billy was hiding in there somewhere, hoping we’d go away. We had a warrant and the door was unlocked, so I drew my gun and went inside.

  ‘It was silent in there, and very hot. We were right in the middle of a hot spell at the time, and the place stank of sweat and fried food. And straight away I started to get this bad feeling. I called out Billy’s name again. And that was when I heard it. This kind of low whimper, coming from down the hallway. It was definitely human, and it sounded like someone was in pain. I went towards where it was coming from. There was this narrow little hallway with a door on either side that led down to the back of the shack.’

  She paused again. The car was silent. Giant was completely wrapped up in her story. ‘Both doors were open,’ Jenna continued, ‘but I didn’t know from which one the sound had come. But then it came again, from behind the door on the right, except this time it was different. It was like a gasp. A sharp intake of breath. And then nothing.’ She sighed. ‘Jesus, this is tough for me talk about, you know. I’ve never really spoken about it to anyone before.’

  Giant knew all too well how hard it was to put into words those grim experiences that fill your nightmares. Experiences like seeing the small, tortured bodies of the Hernandez children. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to tell me, if you don�
�t want to.’

  She continued as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘I stood there in the hallway for two, three seconds. I had both hands on the gun, because that sharp intake of breath, it was like the sound of someone dying, and I was scared to go inside and find out who or what it was. I was alone in that house. I couldn’t see or hear Chris. I called out again, something lame like “Billy, is that you? Are you okay?” Like they do in those teen horror movies I used to watch when I was a kid.

  ‘And then, just like that, I saw a shadow appear in the opposite doorway and this figure, dressed all in black, came rushing out of it. He was a blur. Then there was this loud bang. I knew he was shooting at me. It was weird. We were only a few feet apart, and I didn’t think – I just pulled the trigger, again and again. At the same time, because he was firing at me, I fell backwards and landed on the floor, and immediately I thought I’d been hit. I’d hit him, though, and he was stumbling all over the place, but he was still upright and holding the gun. He had a scarf pulled up over his face and was wearing a thick jacket, even though it was a boiling hot day, and I realized he probably had a Kevlar vest on, so I kept shooting, aiming at the head now. At the same time, two other guys came running out of the other room and one of them also had a gun pointed at me. I remember shooting him, and him going straight down like he’d been poleaxed, falling over the other guy I’d shot and landing face-first at my feet.

  ‘The whole thing happened that fast. Three, four seconds at most, from the moment the first shooter came out, to the two of them dying in front of me. And I was in a complete state of shock, because nothing like this had ever happened to me before. You’ve never shot someone, have you?’

  They were stopped at an intersection in a residential area not far from Cervantes’s place. There was no traffic about. Giant looked at her and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, trying to sound nonchalant, as if he needed to let her know that, if it came down to it, he definitely could. ‘I’ve been lucky.’

  She let out a long breath. ‘It’s a strange feeling. You’re exhilarated, spaced out, frightened, ecstatic, depressed – all at the same time. And then suddenly you’ve got to drag yourself back to the present, because there’s another suspect making a run for it. I got up as fast as I could and changed magazines on my gun, because I knew I’d let off a lot of shots. It turned out later that I’d fired nine, and six of them had hit their targets. The first guy had fired three as well, but they’d all missed. My ears were ringing from the gunfire, but even so I still heard the back door swing open as the third guy made a bolt for it. Then there was a delay of a couple of seconds. I always remember that, because I’d already taken off down the hall towards the back door, and then there was a single shot. I kept running out into the yard and saw Chris lying on the ground, holding his hip, while the suspect was running off into the trees. I checked to see that Chris was okay. He was in a bad way, but conscious and, typical of him, was telling me to get after the suspect. So I radioed it in, told Chris I’d be right back and took off after the guy. The problem was that he was fast and had a head start, so I lost him.