Janet looked at her questioningly. Reyna just mouthed the words, “I’ll call you,” and she was gone.
Chapter 12
July 26—Seattle
I went straight home at the end of my route to shower and change. I kept seeing the dead man’s eyes glinting dully in the half-light like those of a cyborg powered down for the night. Death is peaceful sometimes, but rarely pretty. And it wasn’t death itself that bothered me—circle of life and all that—so much as the suddenness and occasional violence of it. I could choose the way I wanted to live my life, more or less, but a man dying in my car reminded me that I had little or no choice in where or how I would die. I found myself shaking at the shock of it, the abruptness, and stood in the shower until the stream of hot water loosened the muscles and stopped the twitching. The anxious feeling didn’t rinse away so easily.
To distract myself, I focused on her—the girl he’d tasked me with protecting. She’d meant something to him. A lot. The only place to start was his apartment. Dressed in khakis, button-down shirt the color of a hazy summer sky and oxblood loafers—almost formal for Seattle—I grabbed a couple of my ex-wife’s business cards and retraced my route back to D’Amato’s apartment, a small, square, twelve-unit building of white stucco and wood not far from Interlaken Park.
Like a subdivision in a bedroom community, the neighborhood saw little traffic during the day. North-south avenues dead-ended at the edge of the park. Volunteer Park and the cemetery bounded the cross streets on the west, limiting access. No Russians showed up on a slow trip around the block, so I nosed the car into a small space not far from the building and walked back.
The building directory listed the manager’s apartment on the first floor. I rang the bell and waited. A voice asked me through the tinny speaker what I wanted. I couldn’t tell if it belonged to a man or woman. I briefly explained why I was there and waited some more in silence. Just as my patience told me to push the buzzer again, a small, bookish man appeared on the other side of the glass entrance and peered at me through round, black-framed glasses. Gray slacks, a plaid dress shirt topped with a heather cardigan buttoned halfway up and worn penny loafers completed the ensemble. He opened the door a crack and stood in the opening as if to stop me from entering. With a little effort I probably could have stepped over him. I introduced myself. He didn’t move.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “What’s your interest in D’Amato?”
I held out one of Molly’s cards. He glanced at it briefly.
“I work with the attorneys handling his estate. I’m trying to find out if he had any relatives that you’re aware of.”
His eyes mapped my face. “That’s not your name on the card.”
“No. Ms. McHugh is one of the attorneys at the firm. As I said, I work with them. You can call Ms. McHugh if you want.”
He stepped back and opened the door wide. “I’m not sure how I can help you. D’Amato was one of my best tenants. Quiet. Respectful. Neat and tidy. I didn’t see much of him, to tell you the truth. Always paid rent on time. Never a problem.”
“Could I see his apartment? He might have photos of children or grandchildren.”
He balked.
“Look, you don’t want a barrage of nasty letters from a big law firm. Neither does the building owner. I won’t disturb anything. Just a quick look around to see if there are personal photos. Anything that might tell me if he had heirs.”
“I doubt it.” He shrugged. “He wasn’t married to my knowledge. But suit yourself.”
He led the way to an elevator across the lobby. We rode silently to the third floor. Two doors cut into the wall at the end of the hall stood side by side. Yellow crime scene tape in an “X” across one of them marked where D’Amato had lived. The manager scurried down the hall ahead of me and ripped the tape off the doorframe before inserting a key in the lock.
“Are you sure that’s okay?” I said.
He looked over his shoulder. “The police took whatever they needed to take. It wasn’t much, I guarantee you. They won’t be back.”
The door swung open and he waved me through. I stepped through the dangling yellow ribbons into a light, airy, two-bedroom apartment on the top floor done in minimalist modern. The IKEA look, or maybe it was Dansk. If it weren’t for the few magazines neatly arranged on a low coffee table and splashes of color on the clean white walls in the form of abstract prints, the place could have been called Spartan. I slowly turned a full circle, but didn’t see a single item that might be considered personal.
“I told you,” the manager said. “Fastidious.”
I faced him and saw his small smile of satisfaction, pride even. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Jepson. Mark Jepson.”
“Did you see what the police took with them, Mr. Jepson?”
A look of indignation crossed his face, but he thought better of it and lifted a shoulder. “His computer. Nothing else that I saw. As you can tell, he lived rather simply.”
Again, judging from his expression, I sensed pride, and imagined that Jepson’s apartment looked much the same save the tools and records he needed on hand to do his job.
I took another glance around the living room and open kitchen. “The other rooms are the same?”
Jepson nodded, then colored. “From what I could tell. I had to open a slow drain for him once in the bathroom.”
I wouldn’t learn anything more without a thorough search. I had the keys, so I could come back at another time.
“Thank you, Mr. Jepson. The law firm and Mr. D’Amato’s estate appreciate your time.”
He nodded and let me precede him out so he could close and lock the door behind us. I waited by the elevator. In a moment, he joined me and craned his neck to look at the lighted numbers over the elevator door. It slid open with a muted ding. Inside, we turned and stood a few feet apart, facing forward.
“You can’t think of anyone who might be related?” I said.
The doors started to slide closed.
“Hold the elevator!” a reedy voice said.
Jepson jabbed a button and the door retreated to one side. He poked his head through the opening and looked back the way we’d come. “I’m holding it for you, Mrs. Rasmussen.”
“Yes, I see that, Mark,” the voice said. “Thank you. I’m coming.”
A stooped woman with white curly hair framing a round face scuffled into view pushing a small cart. She squinted at me as she got on the elevator.
“When are you going to take down that awful tape, Mark?” she said.
His mouth set in a straight line. “As soon as I’m finished with this gentleman.”
“Awful, just awful,” she murmured with a shake of her head.
“Did you know Mr. D’Amato?” I said.
Her head swiveled around. “He was my neighbor. Of course I knew him. Quiet man. Best kind. Never gave anyone a problem. Why anyone would want to kill that man is beyond me.”
“Did he have a wife or girlfriend?”
She snorted. “Never struck me as the type to have either. But now that you mention it, there was a girl several years ago.” She focused on the manager. “Remember? Can’t think of her name, but she was a lovely girl. Not at first, mind you. Looked like a hooker first time he brought her up. But once you got to know her, a very sweet girl. What was her name, Mark?”
Mark stared up at the numbers, his spine stiff. “I’m sure I don’t remember.”
“Oh, sure. You know who I’m talking about. Little blond girl.”
“Brunette,” Jepson said. “That color only comes from a bottle.”
“Anya,” the woman said, ignoring his comment. “That’s it. I don’t know how I could have forgotten. That’s been seven or eight years ago now.”
“Seven and a half,” Jepson said.
She poked a finger into Jepson’s arm. “I knew you remembered.”
He sighed and rubbed the spot. “It’s my job to be observant, Vera. You know that. Ah
, here we are.”
The elevator settled with a soft bump and the door slid open. Jepson held the doors, and the old lady pushed her cart over the transom. I pulled the photo of the young girl D’Amato had given me and quickly stepped into the foyer abreast of her.
“Have you ever seen this girl before?” I held the photo in front of her face.
She stopped to examine it. Jepson glanced at it over her shoulder.
“No, I can’t say as I have. Sorry.”
I glanced at Jepson, but he shook his head. “Well, thank you both for your time. If you think of anything, please call me.” I scribbled my phone number on the back of the card I’d flashed at Jepson and handed it to him. “I may be back later if I have other questions, and we’ll clean out his things if we can’t find a relative to do it.”
“As long as you have authorization,” Jepson said, “the sooner the better. I need to get that unit rented out.”
“The poor man’s not even in the ground yet, Mark. How you talk…”
I left them to their prattle and hurried out. A flash of sunlight on brightwork caught my eye. A black Mercedes with tinted windows sat parked down the block.
Chapter 13
July 26—Seattle
Someone my size was hard to miss. When no one confronted me or followed me out of the neighborhood, I figured either the Mercedes wasn’t the same car I’d seen two nights earlier or my Russian friends had lost interest in me. Churning in the pit of my stomach voted for “none of the above.” After five minutes of driving the way I normally did on my route—erratically, that is—I pulled into a grocery store parking lot and considered my options.
The photo in my pocket showed a girl of seven or eight with dark, almost black hair, eyes the color of an ice cave in Skaftafell, and a bucktoothed smile brighter than the sunlit backdrop. She hugged a doll tightly to her chest, the collectible kind that comes with a name and pedigree. The girl wasn’t pretty so much as cute, but it didn’t take much imagination to see that she’d be heartbreakingly beautiful in ten or fifteen years. I kept thinking there must be some way to tell where the photo had been taken when the answer smacked a palm against my forehead.
The girl in the photo sat on a bench with the grassy lawn of a park behind her and the wood the city. But in the upper left corner of the photo, a piece of a bulbous black sculpture nosed into the picture. In the three-by-five photo, the little bit of sculpture almost disappeared against dark trees in the distance, but a splash of blue at its base limned the nose of an orca. Recognition sparked. Delving in my memory for clues to when and where I may have seen it, I dredged up an image of another photo, not the real thing. Definitely not on my normal stomping grounds, so I must have seen it in the paper. My phone said there was a “water spray play area” that featured orcas in a Bellevue park near the Crossroads mall. Better than nothing.
Seattle is tall and narrow, bounded on both sides by water, Puget Sound to the west and Lake Washington to the east. Scoured out by a retreating glacier several millennia ago, the ribbon lake is twenty-two miles long and skinny, barely three miles at its widest and maybe only three hundred yards in the channel between Mercer Island and the east side. Two floating bridges carry traffic between Seattle and the east side. To the north, the Evergreen Point Bridge carries State Route 520 from Montlake over to Medina. Several miles south, the Lacey Murrow Memorial Bridge carries I-90 traffic across Mercer Island to Bellevue.
Back in the early ’90s, the state built a new floating bridge alongside the existing I-90 bridge to add capacity. During construction, someone left a seacock open in one of the floating concrete pontoons. In a storm, it sank, taking most of the rest of the bridge with it. Engineers managed to salvage most of the southern bridge, but not much of their pride.
The northern Evergreen Point Bridge opened in 1963, but by 1997 state engineers declared it would reach the end of its useful life by 2017, so voters approved construction of a new bridge at a cost of $4.65 billion. To pay for construction of the new 520 bridge, the state implemented a toll on the existing one. The project had been plagued by problems from the beginning, including shoddy workmanship on the concrete pontoons that resulted in leaks. Rather than sue the contractor, the state ended up eating the cost, leaving taxpayers and commuters to pay the bill.
I couldn’t help wonder why engineers around the world could build structures that lasted hundreds of years. New York had the Brooklyn Bridge, London had the Tower Bridge. Paris had bridges even older than those, but engineers in Washington couldn’t build a bridge with a useful life of more than fifty years. I’d lived here more than half my life and it still irked my Midwestern sensibility. Out of principle, even though I was less than a quarter of a mile from 520, I headed south to take the I-90 bridge across the lake. Nervously, I checked the mirror for signs of the Mercedes as I wended my way over Capitol Hill. I threw in enough turns and doubled back a couple of times to convince myself that no one followed me.
On the other side of the lake, I got off the interstate and headed north on Bellevue’s city streets. Less than a mile from where the topography descended steeply down to the shore of Lake Sammamish, another glacial finger lake, I passed Crossroads Mall. The mall had been a hotbed of gang activity in the 1980s, though it had paled compared to L.A.’s problems. “Swell-View” had cleaned up its act since then, pushing the gangbangers back underground, or least back to their ’hoods. The large family-friendly park just east of the mall showcased trimmed, expansive lawns, neat and tidy paths, and a wide cross-section of stroller brands occupied by an equally varied representation of the world’s ethnicities.
I found an open parking spot in the lot on the southwest corner of the park, and followed the sound of high-pitched squeals and laughter across the grass toward the bright blue water park. The weather and lack of school conspired to fill the park with pint-size people, most of whom barely came up to my waist. I dodged several as they chased each other or errant balls and Frisbees. The sight of one tow-headed knee-beater running after a soccer ball a quarter of his height triggered a mental image of Cole at the same age that stopped me in my tracks. I clutched my chest and dropped to one knee, gasping for breath.
A small tyke walked up to within six or eight feet of me and cocked his head. “Are you sick?”
I waved him away and managed to suck in enough air to answer. “I’m fine.”
“I know CPR. My dad taught me.”
“I don’t need CPR.”
The kid pointed a finger. “Then why are you holding your heart?”
“Pledge of Allegiance,” I muttered. “Go away.”
“You mean like ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag…?’” His little head swiveled. “But there’s no flag.”
“Really, kid, I’m okay.” I stood on wobbly legs, a different sort of fear running through me even as the panic and chest pain ebbed. “I just had a moment, that’s all.”
“Ty-ler!” a voice called. The boy’s head jerked around, and I followed his gaze to a woman with hands on hips at the edge of the playground a hundred yards away. “You leave that man alone and come back here!”
“Okay,” he shouted. He ran off without a backward glance.
I straightened and took several deep breaths. Though the episodes occurred less frequently than they had at first, sometimes a reminder of my son felt like someone punching a hole through my heart. The anxiety attacks, on the other hand, were new. The vise grip on my chest loosened.
Slowly making my way to the playground, I scanned the faces of the kids running everywhere, looking for a match to that in the photo. The task was sheer madness, like looking for Waldo in a constantly moving, constantly changing picture. My gaze took an economy tour, skipping the commentary from the docent. None of the little girls was the right age. When I turned and looked in the direction of the mini water park, I realized I stood close to the spot where the photographer had snapped the photo in my pocket. The details matched those in the photo. At least I’d found the right pla
ce.
I circled the “spray-ground” at a distance, close enough to look like I was keeping tabs on a child, but not so close that I appeared predatory. The squeals of delight and surprise were louder here. That and the white noise of cascading and spraying water virtually drowned out all other sound. Raven-haired girls caught my eye a couple of times, making me stiffen like a dog on point. On closer inspection, one had the darker skin and features of a Latina, and the other was far pudgier than the girl in the picture. Every time I thought about the ludicrous fool’s errand I’d taken on, I saw the dead man’s eyes, the pleading in them before they’d simple gone blank and lifeless. The girl was in trouble. She probably didn’t know it—I didn’t either, for sure—but the man who’d given me her picture had used his last breaths making me swear to protect her.
Agreeing to help was like the impulse to get a puppy. It sounded like a good idea—they’re so cute—but then came eighteen or nineteen years of dog food and vet bills, walks at ungodly hours in the cold rain, picking up untold amounts of shit, and accepting that everything you own will either smell like dog, be covered in dog fur or get chewed to mangled versions of their original forms. Sure, there was the companionship and the unconditional love, but…
I had to find her first.
I rubbed my eyes, wondering how many years had passed since I’d had a solid night’s sleep. Odd how hard it was for me to stay asleep at night, but how easy it was to fall asleep during the day. Honeyed sunlight poured over me, sweet and warm as it rolled from the top of my head down my face, lulling me into a trance. I looked for a bench to sit on before I sank onto the grass and passed out. Five minutes, I told myself as my lids drooped. Closer to twenty disappeared before I jerked awake with a start, head coming off my chest. Sweat pasted my shirt to my skin. I wiped away the drool that had pooled in the corner of my mouth and run down my chin, glancing around in embarrassment. Probably not the first time they’d seen someone fall asleep in the sun at the park. I yawned widely and stretched. Time for a different approach.
Night Strike Page 10