Last Ferry Home
Page 12
“Yeah. Tell me something I don’t know. The pressure to release the scene, she is building, amigo,” Marvin said.
“It could be here — the nanny’s phone. It might tell us something. Who she was texting, who she was talking to, photos. Was there a boyfriend? We need that phone,” O’Higgins said. “If we can’t get our hands on Rishi’s we need Kumar’s for Christ’s sake.”
“We’ve looked,” Marvin said.
“We have to look again,” Michael said. “Screw releasing the scene until we find the girl’s phone.”
“What if the killer took it? It’s possible.”
“He didn’t take it,” O’Higgins said.
“Oh, you know that? How do you know the grandfather didn’t take it? He took Rishi’s.”
“I just want to make sure it’s not here. There’s something weird going on, Marvin. The father of the victim takes the victim’s phone and now we can’t see it. Why? Why wouldn’t he, of all people, want us to see what’s on his son’s phone? And why is Rishi Chaundhry’s cell phone such a big deal to the Indian government? He’s a businessman, not a diplomat. Why is the Indian government getting in our way? Why are the two little girls being taken to India, away from their mother?”
“Towler said Chaundhry could be the next Prime Minister of India. That’s what Towler said. Chaundhry senior is very tight with our State Department, apparently. I guess our victim was too. Who knows what’s going on,” Marvin said.
“Well, I don’t think the nanny was working for the government.”
“Very funny. No, I don’t think so.”
“Nobody at the Consulate gives a shit about the Kumar girl, is my guess,” Michael said.
“We give a shit,” Marvin said, and he meant it.
“Why would a random neighbor change her story? There’s got to be a reason.”
Marvin got a text. Michael heard it hit Marvin’s iPhone.
“It’s from Towler,” Marvin said. “We have to release the scene. We have twenty-four hours.”
Michael had glanced down at his iPad. He looked at his partner and stood up. The iPad’s slide show was still showing views of the nanny’s bedroom. He saw a close photo of the girl’s neatly stacked clothes on the end of her bed.
“It might be in the jeans she left on the bed,” Michael said suddenly.
“Didn’t you look?” Marvin said. “Last night?”
“No. It was the one place I didn’t look,” Michael said. “I picked up the stack of clothes and looked under them, but I thought the jeans and blouse were clean and unworn. What if they weren’t clean? They might have just been folded neatly.”
Michael rushed up the house’s three flights of stairs. Before the accident, when he was exercising a lot, the run would have been nothing. Now, as he hit the third floor and broke down the hallway toward the nanny’s room, he was breathing hard.
The iPhone was in Bharti Kumar’s still-folded jeans’ back pocket— exactly where she’d left it. The phone’s battery icon was red, warning the phone needed to be charged. O’Higgins searched the room and then the closet, looking for the charger. He finally found it in a drawer in the bathroom.
“Put the fucking thing on airplane mode, it will charge quicker,” Marvin said.
***
He wasn’t even sure why he’d picked the fashionable restaurant to meet Madrone. He’d driven by it several times lately and seen people standing in the bar. It had looked inviting. The bar catered to well-heeled Financial District types and younger people who wanted to be seen, even if they were only working as temps. The bar was always packed by 5:30. He supposed, parking his un-marked Ford in a red zone nearby, that he’d picked this place because he wanted to be buoyed by the young crowd. In a crowd, he’d thought, he could figure out what he’d done and what he was doing asking out a girl—a stranger, really—he’d just met.
“She was sure. She told me 5:45,” Madrone said. She looked entirely different for the date. She was wearing a dress, for one thing, and had her hair down. She was pretty and very feminine; she didn’t look anything like the way she looked in uniform. Her petite body looked good in a dress.
“She’s lying, I think,” Madrone said.
“But why?” he said.
She was looking at him. It was a look of appraisal. Was she too wondering why the hell he’d asked her out?
Talking about work was easy. He’d told her about going to the Gilberts’ and interviewing the wife. They couldn’t get a seat at the bar, it was too crowded, but he managed to get them two glasses of wine. She found them a perch by the windows facing Jackson Street. It was still raining. At times the rain seemed more like a mist that painted the street and the small park beyond.
“Why did you become a cop?” Madrone asked.
“I needed a job.” He smiled. It was the same reason he’d given his brother, who never understood why he’d wanted to be a policeman. His brother was an intellectual who, he admitted once, found the police frightening.
“Me too,” she said and smiled back.
She had flecks of mica-green in her eyes. He’d never seen that before. He knew why he’d called her. He’d felt a strong physical attraction from the moment she’d handed him the sign-in sheet at the scene. It was the second time he’d felt the physical pull of a woman since the accident. The first time had been with Asha Chaundhry, on the ferry. This one was less complicated because it was hundred-percent carnal.
“I’ve never seen someone so — hysterical. It was terrible. The wife,” Madrone said.
“Yeah.” He didn’t want to talk about the case, he realized. He wanted to get away from it. Every time he thought about it, he saw Nirad Chaundhry’s supercilious look when they’d been at his attorney’s office. I’m going to shut down that smile. “Do you like it — patrol?” he asked, taking a sip of the wine. He was relaxed with her, maybe because she wasn’t a civilian.
“Yeah, I do. I was in the military, and it’s close to what I did in Iraq. MP.”
“Yeah, I was there — Iraq.”
She looked at him quickly.
“Marine Corps,” he said.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
He wanted to touch her arm. He looked at the muscle of her arm. She looked strong. “Here,” he said. “I grew up here in town. You?”
“Colorado. Farmington.”
A young black couple, the young man in a grey suit, walked by them trying to squeeze into the three-deep bar and buy drinks. The girl gave up and the young man tried his best to get the bartender’s attention. He was short, so it was going to be a long night for him.
“I’ve never been here,” Madrone said. “Fun place. Starchy, but fun.”
“Greek food. It’s good,” he said. “I don’t know your first name. It’s embarrassing.”
“Katie,” she said. She touched his left hand unexpectedly. “I thought you’d never ask.”
“Michael,” he said. “My first name. Friends call me Mike.”
“Good. I didn’t want to call you Detective all night,” she said. She let go of his hand. It was a signal, of course, and he understood it. It was what he wanted to know, whether the gate was open to that place. It was.
“I have a boyfriend,” she said. “On-and-off type thing. Mortgage broker, wants to be rich. He’d like this place. He wears ties and shoes without socks. Loves the Giants.”
“Really,” he said, not giving a damn about her boyfriend and knowing the frat-boy type.
“Yes,” she said. “So you know. Don’t want to — keep it to myself.”
“I see. Is he on right now, or off?”
“Not sure about him. Off tonight. I was hoping you’d call. I thought about calling you,” she said. “I’ve trouble with civilians. The boyfriend doesn’t know shit about shit — you know what I mean? Can’t understand why I joined the Army.
” She took a drink. Half the glass of wine disappeared in one swallow. She looked at him and then toward the bar.
He took a sip of his drink. The noise in the restaurant was getting to that point where it surrounded you, made you feel good about being alive. He looked out the window. A middle-aged homeless guy with a beard, wearing a clear-plastic poncho, was rolling a shopping cart full of his dilapidated life-stuff into the park across the street to put up for the night.
“I don’t care about your boyfriend if you don’t,” he said.
The boyfriend knocked on her door while they were making love two hours later. Madrone had a place up on Chenery Street in the Mission. It was a small basement apartment. It was like a warren, the ceilings very low. She said she was lucky to have found the place. San Francisco was becoming impossible, rents constantly pushed up by twenty-year-olds working at Twitter or Facebook, or rich kids from all over the country who could afford anything they wanted.
He got high with her. She liked to smoke weed, she told him, looking directly at him when she said it. He couldn’t have cared less. He was in the mood to be out of himself, completely. He wanted—needed—to change himself, or just lose himself.
After they made love the first time that night, she told him — half-dressed, lying on her couch — that she wasn’t stoned on duty. He thought she was probably lying about that. He could tell from her quick facial expression, her white skin red from the frantic lovemaking after they walked in the door. She handed him the bong, its glass dirty from a lot of use.
Many of the vets he knew were using drugs to get by, narcotizing their PTS symptoms. It turned out she’d gone to Iraq at eighteen, the 82 Airborne Division as an MP during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2009.
He’d been having a dream before it happened. In his dream he was talking to his wife, trying to explain why he was sleeping with a girl he’d just met. His wife was in jail—SF County jail—and he was talking to her over a phone. A thick Plexiglas divider separated them. All his wife did was nod. The Plexiglas was horribly scratched, almost white. It obscured her face, but he could tell Jennifer was crying. The Plexiglas had one clear spot, unscratched. He could see his wife’s eyes were red from crying through the one clear spot in the glass.
“What happened?” Jennifer said finally. “What happened, Michael? Why?”
He’d woken with a start. Madrone had a black-metal bed. It had made a noise while they’d made love, the frame giving and moving along with them. It built toward something with their bodies, its energy, swaying madness, a disjointed kind of swaying movement punctuated by Katie’s quiet, breathless “Fuck me!” over and over as a mantra — exciting, but frightening too.
It was early morning, and the light was tinged grey and dirty looking. He was disoriented. Madrone was slamming a baton down on a man’s wrist, breaking it instantly and forcing the automatic the intruder was pointing at O’Higgins to fall from his hand.
In shock and pain, the dark-skinned man turned toward the direction of his attacker. Like a mad person, Madrone whipped the black steel baton across the man’s temple, opening a dime-wide cut and blinding his right eye. The baton’s tip gouged the pupil, splitting it open. The intruder screamed.
By then O’Higgins was standing, also naked, his brain processing the scene all at once in a surreal burst of language-less information coming out of the demi-light: the naked girl-woman striking the intruder with her elbow, directly in the nose, so violently that his head snapped back and to the right. Katie’s hair wild, moving counter to her violent motions with the baton.
The intruder was holding Kumar’s phone in his other hand. He sagged. O’Higgins dove toward the pistol, which had landed on the foot of the bed. Picking it up, he yelled for the man to get on his knees. He tried to see what kind of weapon it was so he could determine if it was ready to fire. He moved the barrel and pulled the trigger. A round went off and he heard it smash something.
The man, recovering from the elbow to his nose, looked directly at him. Their eyes met.
O’Higgins moved the gun barrel back and centered it on the man’s chest. It was over. The man understood that if he attacked, he would shoot him. It was then, as the intruder tried to look for an escape, that Madrone split his skull, whipping the baton straight down on the top of his head as she’d been taught. Then she hit him again, striking him on the side of his knee. He collapsed on his ass, his right knee smashed and unable to hold him up.
O’Higgins picked up Kumar’s phone while Madrone, her naked and freckled shoulders hunched, stood directly above the intruder and kept hitting him across the face. The sprung baton hit his face with an awful sound. He finally pulled her off, her own face splattered with the intruder’s blood and bits of teeth, all while screaming at the man that she was going to kill him. She was not only out of control, but completely ruthless.
CHAPTER 13
He had come to Dr. Schneider’s office without an appointment. It was wrong, but after what had happened at Madrone’s the night before, he’d been in a panic. His life seemed to be spinning out of control, or gone into a destructive hyper-speed, crashing through walls.
No, he thought, riding the elevator up to her office, they’re crumbling away. I’m not right. Nothing is right.
Katie Madrone had beaten someone to death last night. An intruder, an Indian, had broken in. Had Madrone not stopped the man, O’Higgins would probably have been killed. Madrone had stopped him cold, beating him to death in the most savage way.
O’Higgins believed it was karma, a result of sleeping with the girl. As he looked at the dead man’s face, almost completely obliterated, front teeth shattered, O’Higgins was sure he was seeing Death’s messenger. Foiled again, countless times, on the ocean and in war. Why was it he who was always saved? Why?
“You know that you can’t just come here and expect to see me,” Dr. Schneider said.
“Yes, I understand. I’m sorry,” he said. “I — something happened, and I felt like I was losing it.”
He’d come from the hospital, where Madrone had been admitted after the fight. There would be no charges, but Captain Towler himself had come out to the scene to investigate. He seemed angry at the both of them, despite the obvious case of self-defense.
The intruder had not yet been identified. He’d been armed and was in his thirties or perhaps older, carrying no ID. Prints had matched nothing in any police or agency database, including the FBI’s, which included visa applicants from around the world.
He’d knocked on the inner sanctum and Schneider had come to the door, obviously miffed that someone had come to her office without an appointment. He was interrupting a session. She’d opened the door and told him to sit in the waiting room. She would see him when her session was over.
He sat in the small waiting room filled with National Geographic and Conde Nast Traveler magazines with ads for luxury spas. He thumbed through pages filled with what seemed to be sheer out-of-touch gobbledygook. He forced himself to stop on one photo. It showed a perfect white-sugar sand beach, a young svelte couple canoodling alone with the ocean in front of them—tame. He wanted to believe in the photo’s promise of happiness and contentment and safe places … Out-of-touch bullshit.
He put the magazine aside and looked down at his shoes. His left shoe was stained with blood from the beating—castoff from the baton. Katie Madrone, 24, the ex-Army MP, had lost it. He’d seen her repressed anger as she swung, stark naked, again and again, her whole body into it slamming her weapon down on the man’s face — the way she’d kept on hitting the intruder long after he was unconscious, had gotten to him, unnerved him.
The vicious attack had brought back all his own PTS feelings and fears. He’d screamed at Madrone to stop once the man’s brains were spilling out of his skull. The intruder was obviously dead, but she’d refused until he’d grabbed her and picked her up, his arms wrapped around her tiny waist.
He put the magazine back in its place carefully and replayed the last few hours. They seemed surreal. He’d found Bharti Kumar’s iPhone charger in a drawer and charged her iPhone, password blocked, putting it on airplane mode so no “kill signal” could be sent to delete its memory, as the SFPD criminalists had trained him to do. Once the phone was charged, Marvin had ticked the phone’s security by using the emergency call feature and applying a hack he’d learned from his last partner. They got through.
Bharti’s phone stored a series of texts from India, the most recent only a few minutes old. The same number had been calling her. The messages were all in Hindi.
O’Higgins called the number back in India, using his own phone. He spoke to someone who identified himself as Bharti Kumar’s brother. O’Higgins explained that the man’s sister was dead, and that he was investigating her murder. Kumar’s brother, frantic and speaking in English, had refused to believe his sister was dead, and hung up on him.
He’d taken Kumar’s phone with him to the bar at Kokkari, something he should not have done. They’d gone to Madrone’s place and made love; it had been frantic, almost violent. He’d fallen asleep and woken to see Madrone stark naked, swinging her Smith & Wesson 16” police baton, battering an intruder who was holding Kumar’s cell phone in his free hand.
O’Higgins first instinct, jumping up from the bed, was to protect Kumar’s phone. When it was over, while they were waiting for the police to come, he checked. The phone was intact, but the man had managed to take it off airplane mode, leaving it susceptible to a kill signal. Whoever sent him, the man had come for Kumar’s phone. Whoever sent the man had succeeded. The phone’s memory had been wiped clean.