by Zoe Sharp
‘Two days ago. He came to see me on the evening he disappeared from my property.’
My property. So, Bane’s quasi-religious beliefs did not put him above avarice, it seemed.
‘Disappeared, huh?’ Gardner repeated. She made a show of frowning over the file. ‘There’s nothing here about you filing a missing persons report.’
Bane eyed her for a moment. ‘We have learned from experience that LA’s finest are neither interested nor effective when it comes to matters that concern us.’
Gardner’s tone was cynical. ‘You got some proof of that?’
‘Naturally,’ Bane said. ‘Over the last year or so our community has been plagued by a spate of attacks, harassment, vandalism, scare tactics, but no official investigation has been launched.’
‘News to me,’ Gardner said. ‘They still going on, these alleged attacks?’
‘Not since I hired my own security personnel. They have handled things very effectively.’
A sudden vivid image of the girl, Maria, exploded behind my eyes. Her desperate flight brought short by the men sent to chase her down, and the terrifying delicacy of Bane’s touch when she’d been brought back to him. What else did they handle, I wondered?
‘And was Witney personally affected by any of this?’ Gardner asked.
‘He was injured in one of the early attacks. Run off the road on his way back from the city and ended up in the bottom of a canyon. His legs were broken.’ There was nothing in Bane’s voice as he added, ‘The police claimed he must have been driving too fast,’ but I heard the censure.
Gardner chose to ignore it. ‘He mention he was worried about something more recent?’ Gardner asked. ‘He seem scared?’
‘Not at all.’ The denial came fast and easy, a little too much of both.
I glanced at Sean. We both remembered the way Witney reacted the day we’d seen him teaching his little class under the juniper tree.
He’s lying.
I know.
‘So, why’d he come see you?’
‘He wanted to borrow a book. JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.’
There had been a book on the bedside table in Witney’s room, I recalled, the night we’d gone in to bring him out of Fourth Day. A slim volume with a largely red cover. I hadn’t taken note of the title.
Gardner jotted it down. ‘Why that particular book?’
Bane shrugged, the first animation he’d shown. ‘It was next on the shelf,’ he said simply. ‘I am something of a bibliophile. Thomas had expressed a desire to work his way through the classics.’
‘Well, everybody needs a hobby, I guess. Me? I’m more interested in philately – stamp collecting, y’know?’ Gardner said casually. ‘So he borrows a book, then rabbits. That worry you?’
‘Yes,’ Bane said. ‘I thought it highly unlikely that Thomas would have decided to leave so suddenly, without a word, in the middle of the night, in just the clothes he stood up in. I assumed, of course, that he had been taken against his will.’
‘Any signs of forced entry?’
‘I expected none. The people who took him were, no doubt, experts in their field.’
‘This was, what? Two days ago?’ Gardner rubbed a dubious hand across her chin. ‘And still you didn’t file a report?’
‘Would you have taken it seriously if I had?’
‘Well now, he’s a cool one, isn’t he?’ Sean murmured, and there was a certain heightened interest in his tone.
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ Sagar mumbled, shifting miserably, as though just to stand within earshot of Bane was a painful experience.
‘What makes you so sure Witney didn’t just up and leave?’ Gardner asked now, on the other side of the glass. ‘Seeing as how he was free to come and go.’
Bane ignored the sly dig. ‘Thomas was happy within our community,’ he said. ‘He felt secure there.’
‘Secure from what?’
Bane paused before answering, as if gauging how far to let Gardner push. The detective sat back in her chair, looking relaxed, patient, as though there was nothing at stake.
‘When Thomas first came to us, he was in a state of some emotional and psychological distress,’ Bane said. ‘We gave him time out, in order to heal, to find peace with himself.’
‘That so?’ Gardner said, her voice still pleasant. ‘Only, I dug out an old report, filed by Mr Witney five years back, in which he alleges that Fourth Day in general, and you, sir, in particular, were responsible for the death of Liam, his son.’ She sat forwards, opened the file and scanned what looked like a sheaf of old photocopies, leaving the pages on view. Bane would have needed superhuman willpower not to sneak a peek, but he didn’t even glance at the top sheet, so temptingly displayed. ‘The same Liam Witney who, shortly before his death, also joined your cult.’
That got a response. Something bright and quick snaked through Bane’s eyes, concentrating his gaze into icy daggers that triggered my automatic flight response. I felt my blood pressure step up slightly as the adrenaline constricted my arteries, boosting the flow to my heart. Beside me, Sagar shifted from one foot to the other. Sean leant fractionally closer to the glass, the natural predator in him sensing weakness.
‘Your information is incorrect, Detective,’ Bane said, covering smoothly. ‘Liam’s unfortunate death occurred some months after he’d left our congregation.’
Gardner’s voice was part mocking, part surprise. ‘Is that how you see your organisation – some kinda church?’
‘I prefer to think of Fourth Day more along the lines of a self-help organisation. But if a man knows himself, it does not matter what others call him,’ Bane said, but there was a tightness around his jaw as he said it. ‘And “congregation”, I believe you’ll find, means simply an assembly of people.’
Yeah, nice theory. Shame about the practice.
‘So, Liam was what?’ Gardner asked, and I could tell by her tone that she’d registered the hit. ‘Some kinda disciple?’
‘Liam chose to be with us for a while,’ Bane said, his emotions well back inside his fist now, held tight in check. His voice had regained that calm, almost hypnotic penetration, as though he was trying to project the force of his will directly through it. ‘He was a young man trying to find his place, looking for the right path to follow.’
‘And you helped him find it, huh?’ Contrasting to Bane’s restraint, Gardner’s scepticism was unbridled.
‘Some of us are lucky enough to find a path. Who can tell if it’s the right one?’ Bane said. He straightened his shirt cuff beneath the sleeve of his jacket. ‘Liam believed he’d found his, and therefore his time with us was over.’
Gardner paused, making a play of flipping through the pages of the file, as if hoping Bane would feel the urge to justify what he had or had not done to counsel Witney’s son. Sadly, he did not.
‘So, let me get this straight. Two months before his death, Liam Witney joined a radical eco-group called Debacle,’ the detective said, slapping the facts down cold and hard on the table between them. ‘And now you claim he’d already left Fourth Day at that time? That you had no influence over his decision?’ She looked up sharply. ‘Thomas Witney sure as hell blamed you for that at the time. We got a whole box full of the complaints he filed against you, Mr Bane.’
‘And yet no charges were ever brought,’ Bane said, his manner regretful but unshaken. He sighed. ‘For a time, I believe Thomas blamed everybody. In the end, he blamed only himself.’
‘Damn, he’s convincing,’ Sean allowed.
‘I told you,’ Sagar muttered in a strangled voice.
‘We looked into it at the time, of course,’ Gardner went on as if Bane hadn’t spoken, ‘but no evidence was found to support those allegations – something that caused Mr Witney a good deal of anger. Now, I’m sure you can appreciate, sir, the difficulty I’m having, putting that alongside what you’re telling me now, that Mr Witney only felt safe when he was with you, when it seems that his original intent
ion was not so much to join you, as to infiltrate your organisation in order to expose it.’
She sat back again, rocking, but it was not the hoped-for bombshell. Bane gave a slight smile, his expression almost sad at her childish attempts.
‘Thomas came to us seeking truth,’ he said. ‘And – having found it – he decided to stay.’
‘You expect me to believe it’s really as simple as that?’
‘Why not?’ Bane said. ‘You must be aware that when Thomas joined Fourth Day, he left instructions that if he did not return to the outside world of his own accord inside six months, he be retrieved from our evil clutches – by force if necessary.’
For the first time, a note of self-deprecation, a trace of irony, had crept into Bane’s voice. His knowledge of Witney’s safety net shouldn’t have surprised me. If Witney had gone over, he would have confessed all to Bane.
‘Before that time was up, Thomas arranged for a representative from this agency to visit with us. I thought Thomas had successfully convinced him that he wished to cancel his arrangements.’
I glanced at Sean again. Epps?
He shrugged, frowning.
On the other side of the glass, Bane rose, smooth and elegant, and buttoned his jacket. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘as you’ve been so careful to leave me an open door, unless you have anything else you wish to ask, I think we’re done here.’
Gardner said nothing, just flapped a dismissive, distracted hand. Bane almost reached the doorway, then turned back.
‘If you were looking for someone with an interest in removing Thomas Witney from Fourth Day’s protection, and using whatever means they saw fit to find out what he’d learned during his time with us,’ he said in that compelling voice, allowing his gaze to sweep across the mirrored wall behind Gardner’s chair, ‘then you may find it instructive to speak to that representative. His name, as I recall, was Parker Armstrong. He was part of some kind of specialist close-protection agency out of New York.’
My eyes flew to Sean’s. ‘What the hell…?’
‘Tricky bastard,’ Sean murmured.
Gardner didn’t immediately respond, but I saw from the way her neck tensed just a fraction that this was news to her. And I knew Bane must have seen it, too.
‘Maybe I’ll do just that,’ she said at last, grimly.
He nodded. It was entirely my imagination, but just for a second Bane’s eyes seemed to lock directly with mine through the opaque glass, before he added, ‘I’m sure you’ll have no trouble in finding them.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It took us a while to disentangle ourselves. Detective Gardner was understandably unamused that, in her opinion, we’d let her go into interview half-cocked.
There was nothing on record to prove or disprove Bane’s allegation about Parker. Sagar claimed he’d never been privy to the meeting, although he could confirm something had taken place, a few months after Witney joined the cult. And afterwards, he said, Witney’s training had begun in earnest.
It didn’t help that Parker’s plane had already taken off and he was conveniently unavailable to answer questions. I shied away from believing he’d deliberately withheld something so important. At the same time I couldn’t help but remember his evasiveness over the whole assignment.
And, particularly, the way Witney’s gaze had swept over Parker as much as Epps at the handover in Santa Clarita, his obvious shock, took on new resonance. ‘Better late than never, huh?’ he’d said.
Because up to that point, I realised, Parker had been careful not to let Witney catch a direct glimpse of him. Except during the extraction itself, and the midazolam would have ensured he didn’t remember any of us the next day. Was that, I wondered now, cynically, why Parker had chosen to use it?
The only thing we could do with Detective Gardner was plead ignorance and let her blow off steam, patently disbelieving. We were well aware that was all she could do at this stage, with the spectre of Epps hanging over the whole case. I knew Sean was loath to call on the government man to intercede if it could be avoided but, fortunately, Gardner didn’t know that. As we departed, I had a feeling that was the end of any cooperation we might hope to receive from the LAPD.
Sean left curt messages for his partner to call us. Parker’s cellphone would have been switched off in the air, but even well after his New York arrival time, he still hadn’t been in touch. With our own flights confirmed back to the east coast for the following evening, and most of the team already gone, we were just killing time until we could get to the office and have it out with him.
If it hadn’t been for the presence of Chris Sagar, Sean and I might even have enjoyed our last night in the Calabasas palace. As it was, we kept a standard watching brief over him, almost out of habit. For his part, Sagar seemed edgy after his dislocated encounter with Bane. He stuck close, clingy as a dog just back from kennels, ensuring that any personal conversation was kept to a minimum.
Just before he hit the sack, Sagar announced, somewhat defiantly, that he’d like to go out for a run first thing in the morning. Neither Sean nor I objected.
‘If I gotta sit for eight hours on a goddamn bus, I’m gonna stretch my legs,’ he said, and I couldn’t blame him for that. It was probably prudent of Epps not to waste government funds delivering him back to northern California by the same plush means as the outward leg, but it smacked of pettiness all the same.
‘Suit yourself,’ Sean said with a shrug. ‘But I’ve got the letting agent coming by early to do a walk-through – make sure we didn’t steal any of the fittings.’
‘I’ll go,’ I offered, noting the little gesture of wry relief from Sagar. ‘I could do with the exercise myself.’
So, with the not-yet-risen sun turning the sky ashy pink above the dew-glittered hills, I found myself out on the terrace the next morning. I was in an old polo shirt and sweats that included a hooded zip-up top, doing warm-up exercises.
Almost exactly a year previously, I’d taken a 9 mm round straight through my left thigh. At the time, the second bullet – the one that had gone tumbling through my chest cavity – had seemed the greater evil. Time had proved the leg injury more costly, both in terms of physio and temper.
I’d worked bloody hard to rebuild the wasted muscle carved out by the passage of the round through my flesh, to regain full mobility and strength. Even so, I knew the fact I walked entirely without a limp now was as much down to luck as it was to determination on my part. The bullet’s path had somehow threaded past the vital nerves, bones and sinews. I could just as easily have been crippled for life.
A noise to my right had me straightening fast. I turned to see Chris Sagar in the open doorway. He was dressed in sweat pants and a vest and looked still half-asleep.
‘Good morning!’ I said with unnecessary cheerfulness.
‘It is?’ he grunted, stumbling out onto the terrace and flopping into some half-hearted quad stretches.
I lifted my left foot onto the back of a chair and folded my body down over my knee slowly. There was still tension in the underlying tissue, but overall the leg felt pretty much OK.
‘You were the one who wanted to be up and at ’em at this hour,’ I pointed out as I swapped onto the easy side.
‘Did you have to remind me?’ he groaned. ‘I like the benefits of exercise, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy the process, y’know?’
I raised an eyebrow as I rolled into a lateral stretch, aware of the solid weight of the SIG lying in the small of my back under my shirt. ‘Well, if you’ve changed your mind, speak now. I’m happy to go back to bed.’
He grinned at me then. ‘Hey, is that an invitation?’
‘Only if you like your food liquidised and fed to you through a straw.’ It was Sean who spoke, coming out of the French windows, barefoot and dressed in a loose black karate gi. He spoke lightly, but his eyes didn’t entirely share the joke.
‘Hey, sorry, man,’ Sagar said, flushing. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘You do
n’t need to apologise to me,’ Sean said mildly as he came past us. ‘I’m not the one who’s likely to break your jaw.’ He skirted the lap pool and moved out onto the open area of terrace overlooking the canyon, dropping almost immediately into the first of his formal morning katas, so practised that each move flowed into the next, brimming with a lethal grace and utter focus. The similarities between Sean’s level of contained concentration and that demonstrated by Randall Bane were not lost on Chris Sagar.
‘Uh, you all set?’ he mumbled, as though trying not to attract Sean’s attention again.
But for a moment my eyes were locked there, and my imagination had ghosted in a little figure alongside him, a tousle-headed boy perhaps, in a miniature outfit, scowling with the concentrated effort of matching his movements to those of his proud father.
Sean pivoted towards me. His face was a blank mask, his gaze inward, showing nothing. I forced myself not to pass a defensive hand across my belly.
‘You OK?’
I turned to find Sagar watching me.
‘Yeah, sure,’ I lied, dry-mouthed. ‘Let’s go.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I let Sagar set the pace, half-prepared for him to take off like a rabbit at a greyhound convention, but he didn’t seem inclined towards heroics. We started out at a fairly sedate jog, only picking up speed once we realised our comparative levels of fitness.
We fell into a matching rhythm, pounding up the dusty shoulder of one of the winding canyon side roads. The temperature was perfect at this time of day, just cool enough to be pleasant and just warm enough to dry the sweat on our bodies almost as it formed. I tried not to think about the tobacco-tinged air I was sucking into my lungs.
Sagar had an awkward running style, almost shambling, but he covered the ground with deceptive speed.
‘Why do this if you don’t enjoy it?’ I asked.
He flashed a sheepish smile. ‘You wanna know the truth? Bane, that’s why,’ he said with engaging candour. ‘He had this idea you should do something you didn’t wanna do, every day, y’know?’