I swiveled back into my seat and looked out the windshield at the dark shapes of trees across a small grassy clearing, a midnight blue sky above them speckled with dim pinpricks of white. I tried to approach the situation logically, but following a train of thought was like chasing a flash of silver through a school of fish. I knew the man was dead, but the image of his eyes staring at the back of my head kept creeping me out. I turned and reached back across the seat to thumb his lids closed. A streetlamp shone on his face, reflecting dully off corneas that had already started drying out. His eyes were blue with gold flecks. But as I stared, the flecks in one eye looked more like lines. Startled, I blinked several times and looked again. The lines disappeared until I moved slightly so the light caught them. The gold flecks that had caught my attention lined up like quotation marks at the outer the edge of his iris.
I heaved my torso over the seat back, held my breath and pushed my face up close to his. At this distance, the pale lines formed a pattern of interlocking rectangles resembling a circuit board. I looked from one eye to the other and finally saw two gold flecks on the other eye, too, marking the thin edge of a contact lens. Steeling myself and mumbling another apology, I pried it off his cornea with a thumb and forefinger. Careful not to pinch it too hard or lose it, I carried it over the seat back, and examined it under the streetlight shining through the windshield. Tron-like, it definitely looked like a circuit. Who the hell was this guy?
Holding the lens carefully, I unscrewed the bottle of water in the cup holder with my other hand, and dropped the lens inside. I screwed the top back on and stared at it for a moment. The lens had virtually disappeared in the water. If I hadn’t known about the faint linear pattern I’m not sure I‘d have been able to spot it.
I should have called the cops. Most people would have after being kidnapped at gunpoint. But the dead guy wasn’t my problem. I’d been minding my own business, doing my job. In addition to giving me what looked like an impossible task, he’d put me behind schedule. I needed to get back to work. Bringing in the cops would mean hours of questioning. I could call the tip line anonymously, but didn’t have much faith that the call wouldn’t lead back to me somehow. My recent experiences with SPD hadn’t been positive despite the fact that one of my best friends—one of my only friends—was a cop on the force. I briefly considered finishing my route with the dead guy in back, but decided to pass. The idea was creepy. The next logical choice was dump the body, finish my route and fess up later. But then, I hadn’t taken my meds. What I considered logical wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of normal.
I opened the door and hoisted myself out of the car. While I unfolded my limbs and stretched to work the kinks out, I turned a slow three-sixty to see if the dead guy and I had company. A pickup truck parked in shadow on the far side of the lot looked empty. I checked my watch. A patrol wouldn’t drive through this part of the arboretum more than about once an hour at this time of night. Charlie-Three was a big beat, but also quiet until the joggers and boaters came out early in the morning. I had no idea when an SPD cruiser had come through last, but I took the risk.
Rounding the back of the car, I opened the rear door. The man’s torso fell out, head banging against my thigh. I grabbed his collar and held him up. He’d rolled halfway out, and the dome light revealed something I hadn’t seen, couldn’t have seen, earlier—two small holes in the back of his windbreaker, rimmed with bloodstains the size of quarters, not enough to suggest major wounds. Small caliber bullets, I guessed, at least one of which had clipped an organ or artery. He must have bled out internally. That put a whole new spin on things and sent a shiver running up my spine. I didn’t have a choice now.
I stooped and turned to get some of his weight over my shoulder, and hauled him out. Kicking the door shut behind me, I took another panicky look around the lot and jogged across the grass out of the light toward the trees. The bouncing of the man’s dead weight on my shoulder made my bad knee ache after only a few paces, but the titanium hip gave me no problems. Both were the indirect result of an old wound unrelated to my recent history and my college basketball career. Well, not entirely true. Playing basketball hadn’t caused the old wound, but the bum knee and hip had ended my playing days. Water over the dam, under the bridge and out to sea. The dead guy weighed more heavily on me at the moment.
I stayed away from the path leading to the boat ramp and headed straight for the water, looking for a place where I could work my way through the trees to the edge. I found a small clearing close to one of the waterways that wend their way around the three or four small islands jutting into Lake Washington. Lily pads carpeted a large surface area, the clear waterway a black ribbon through them.
I rolled the man off my shoulder, and he hit the ground with a thud that startled a nearby waterfowl. It squawked, flapped its wings and took off into the dark. Cloud cover had scudded in from the northwest, blotting out half the stars visible a few minutes earlier. The clouds reflected enough city light to make out where I needed to go. The rush of the intermittent traffic on the SR520 bridge floated across the water, white noise that washed out most other sounds. I walked to the water’s edge and followed its curve from one side of the clearing to the other, then picked a spot sheltered by some low-hanging shrubs.
Hurrying back to the body, I pulled out the penlight I kept on my keychain and did another quick search for something that might tell me who he was. His windbreaker didn’t have a label. I rolled him over and checked inside the waistband of his pants. Same thing. I rolled him onto his back again and unbuttoned his shirt. A necklace circled his throat under his collar—black wire, another small electronic controller with three buttons dangling from it like a pendant. From the icons, a communication device. Which meant earphones or a headset, or… I shined the penlight at his ear. Something black protruded from inside the ear canal. Gritting my teeth, I worked my fingers in and pulled out a tiny earbud, wiped it on my pants and tucked it in a pocket. I worked the wire necklace over his head and stuffed that in my jacket, too. Moving his head to the side I turned his collar inside out. The label was gone. The situation kept looking worse all the time.
I wrestled him into a fireman’s carry and took him to the edge of the water. Kneeling, I eased him off my shoulders and into the lake with hardly a splash and pushed him under the lily pads. Without weights to pull him down, he wouldn’t stay hidden for long. A kayaker would probably find him when it got light, but I’d be long gone. Breathing heavily, I stood and hustled back to the car. The pickup truck at the end of the lot still held no sign of life. Anyone inside was likely asleep. Surprised the cops hadn’t rousted the owner by now, I finally spied the parking ticket under the wiper on the driver’s side.
I shivered as if a cold wraith had passed through me to escape the confines of my tiny clown car. I faced the open door. A dark smudge on the back of the rear seat caught my eye. Blood stained the gray cloth upholstery. A small spot, given the amount of internal damage he must have suffered, but something to worry about later. The gun lay on the floor where it had slipped from the dead man’s fingers. I scooped it up with a folded newspaper, shut the rear door and climbed in the driver’s seat. I shoved the gun in the glove compartment and got out of there.
Five minutes later I was one door down from the apartment building where the guy had snatched me, tossing a newspaper onto Mr. Griswald’s drive, already second-guessing myself. Having ADD was a little like having a defect that the quality-control people missed—everything worked, just not the way it was expected to. A car with crossed wiring. Most of the time everything operated normally. Once in a while, turn on the headlights and the wipers flapped. Turn on the wipers and the radio changed stations.
One street over and several deliveries later, I pulled up to the curb and took the electronic gear out of my pocket. The dead man had worn it for a reason, either communicating with or listening to someone. With a shiver I poked the earbud deep into my ear canal. I looped the wire necklace over my head, pr
essed the mute button on the pendant and tucked it down under the front of my shirt. I flipped the switch on the little box. The green LED glowed and the earbud instantly crackled. I slipped the box into my pocket and sat for a moment. Besides a little static, the earbud was silent. I put the car in gear and moved on.
The voices started a few houses down the block, gruff and guttural. First one in a foreign language—Slavic, Russian or Ukrainian—then a sigh and another in accented English.
“How many times I tell you? English, Marko.”
“Fucking American, you mean. English at least make good tea.”
“That may be, but American women better looking.”
“Not like our women. They are soft, stupid.”
“Stop complaining, Marko. Things could be worse.”
“How much worse? We lost him!”
“He will turn up. He has nowhere to go.”
“How much longer we look for him?”
“Not long. But he can’t have gone far, so we look.”
The voices fell silent. Just as well since it had gotten so noisy in my head I wouldn’t have heard much more of their conversation. The range of the electronics gear couldn’t be very far. The speakers had to be within a few blocks. Closer, it turned out, as a car turned onto the street behind me, headlights sweeping across the faces of the houses until the light reached into the back of the car and grabbed me. I leaned over and picked up another paper off the passenger seat. Tunney was the next house on my route list. I flung the paper out the window like a flying disc and watched it sail halfway up the drive.
The car slowly caught up as I delivered the next two papers, then swung into the left lane to pass. I let it go by. It nosed in front of me and braked, lights turning the interior of my car into a window parlor in Amsterdam’s Rosseburt. I pulled up behind it and stopped just short of parking in its trunk. A silver Mercedes badge stared back at me, unblinking, from the middle of a blank expanse of shiny black sheet metal. A newer E63 sedan with monogrammed tail feathers that dared me to ask how much it cost. Smoked glass wrapped around the passenger cabin like Foster Grants on a movie star, obscuring anyone inside.
The driver got out and came toward me, hands out, wearing an expression of concern. Close to my age, late thirties maybe, with the wide, craggy brow and sharp features of a Slav. He would have looked at home in jeans and wife-beater. Instead, he looked out of place in sharply creased black silk slacks, dress shirt and black leather blazer.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said as he walked up to my window. His accented voice was one of the two I’d heard through the earbud, muffled now because of it.
I slipped a hand in my pocket and toggled the switch on the little box to off. “Help you?”
“I am looking for my uncle,” the man said. “An older man, with a beard. He is—how you say?” He twirled a finger in the air around his ear.
“Alzheimer’s?”
He nodded. “Yes, dementia. He slipped away ven no one vas looking, and now ve are vorried. Have you seen this man?”
I shook my head. “Just doing my job.” I looked at my watch impatiently.
His hands wiped an imaginary spot a few inches above my car door. “Yes, yes, of course. My apologies.”
“No problem. Hope you find him. I’m sure he’ll turn up eventually. I’ll keep my eyes open.”
“Yes. Thank you.” He turned and made his way back to his car.
“Who should I call if I see him?” I called after him. “The police?”
He spun around wiping the air with his hands. “No, no, that’s not necessary. We will find him. Perhaps a hospital if he looks ill.”
I nodded and pulled my head inside the car, pressing the switch again as he climbed behind the wheel of the car ahead. The passenger craned his neck to look at me through the rear window as I pulled an ever-present scrap of paper from my pocket. My fingers scrabbled for a pencil stub in the ashtray as I repeated the license plate number to myself over and over. My cop buddy Charlie might be able to do something with it later. A stream of Russian filled my ear, followed by a single, “Nyet,” and they drove off. I jotted down the number and sat a moment longer until my heart slowed to a more normal rhythm. Then I checked my list and drove to the next house on my route.
I’d really stepped in it this time.
Chapter 9
July 25—Seattle
I had to wait to call Charlie. Since Babs left him, he’d thrown himself into his career. Once content to be a patrol cop on third watch in East Precinct, he’d taken the sergeant’s exam. A year later he’d applied for SPD’s week-long detective school. When he passed, he was assigned to the Crimes Against Property unit, working burglaries and thefts out of East Precinct. Which meant he worked days now.
To kill time, I drove by the bus station and stashed the dead guy’s gun in a locker near the one I kept there for items I’d find handy in an emergency. I kept the electronic gear and the strange contact lenses to look at more closely later. When I got home, I stuffed the gear into a drawer filled with odds and ends in the kitchen and put the water bottle containing the lenses in the fridge. Still, I was able to catch Charlie before he left for the precinct house.
“What do you want?” he said.
“So much for brotherly love.” We’d been in the same college fraternity and friends on and off for twenty-odd years.
“Come on, Blake. I gotta get to work.”
“Get a pencil.”
He sighed. “I’m not looking up the license of the car that keeps blocking your street parking spot. Okay, got it. Go ahead.”
I rattled off the serial number of the gun Dead Guy left behind. One favor at a time. The license plate could wait. “Check that against your sheet, would you?”
“What’s this?”
“A serial number—”
“I know what it is. Whose gun? Why are you asking me to see if it’s stolen?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Charlie, if I knew whose damn gun it was I wouldn’t be asking you to check the sheet.”
He sighed. “Which means it’s stolen. And because you have it, that means you’re in possession of a stolen gun. And I just don’t have the time to come arrest you right now, so tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m hurt. Who says I have a weapon in my possession?”
“You didn’t get that number off a box of cereal.” He sounded as if his fuse burned shorter every second.
“No, but someone could have given me the number and asked me if there was any way to check whether or not a gun had been stolen. I did, in fact, read that number off a piece of paper, not a box of cereal or the gun in question.”
“It’ll take me a few days,” he groused. “I have real work to do.”
The line went dead before I had a chance to reply. A shower did little to remove the scent of death in my nostrils and the coating of grime left on my soul by oily Russians. Exhausted, I fell into bed and a fitful sleep punctuated by dreams and thrashing that left me sweaty and tangled in damp sheets. The loud reports of the dead man’s gun in one dream jolted me from sweat-soaked sleep into a crouch next to the far side of the bed. The shots slowly morphed into the sound of someone’s fist banging on my door as I roused toward wakefulness.
“Open up!” someone shouted. “NCIS!”
I worked some saliva into a mouth as dry as Sahara sand and listened to the erratic pounding of my heart and the ragged breathing that went with it. A bright rectangle framed the blackout shade in the window. Daylight. The banging started again.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” I yelled. “Keep your pants on!”
I yanked on the pair I’d thrown over the arm of a chair before going to bed, trembling fingers struggling to button them. I raked my fingers through my short hair and bent to look through the peephole in the door. Two uniforms stood outside. One of them swung a ham on the end of his arm. I jerked back as it came right at me, afraid the b
low would give me a black eye through the wood. The sound of his fist hitting the door reverberated through my skull, assuring me that the headache I thought I’d left on the pillow was still with me.
Swinging the door open, I squinted against the sunlight. “Damn, you guys are impatient. Working man, here. Third watch. Can’t you let a guy sleep?”
Both of them came up to my chin. Together they equaled a mark twain. They wore all the accoutrements of the NCIS uniform including embroidered ball cap and windbreakers, but nothing at all on their faces. They could have doubled for mannequins in Nordstrom’s men’s department, indistinguishable from each other except for hair color, one light brown, the other a darker brown. Their presence at my door puzzled me. My guilty conscience had half-expected SPD uniforms, coming to take me downtown for a chat with homicide detectives. But I had no clue what NCIS might want with me until I thought of Reyna. These guys worked for a different branch than Reyna, but all of them wore navy colors. I wondered if Reyna had put them up to this. But if she was pissed at me, it was too long after the fact for her to play a practical joke.
Dark Brown held up a shield, but lowered it before I had a chance to read the fine print. “Are you Blake Sanders?”
“Last I checked.” There were days when I did have to check.
With a grim nod he acknowledged the comment, but let the humor float on by. “We’d like you to come with us, please.”
“What for?” It wasn’t a prank. The other possibilities made me break into a cold sweat. I jammed my hands into my pockets in an attempt to hide the shakes.
His partner, L.B., chimed in. “As polite as he sounds, it wasn’t a request. Get a shirt and shoes.”
D.B. peered at me. “You okay? You’re not going to puke in our car, are you? I hate when that happens.”
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