Solitude Creek: Kathryn Dance Book 4

by Jeffery Deaver

  Nashima was still examining hers when Dance took the lead. ‘Congressman, we’d like to ask about your connection with Solitude Creek.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ The man sat back, relaxed though stony-faced. His movement and gestures were precise.

  ‘Please. It’ll be easier for everybody if you cooperate.’

  ‘Cooperate? About what? You walk in here, accusation all over your face. Obviously you think I did something wrong. I don’t have any idea what. Give me a clue.’

  His indignation was credible. But that was common among the High Machiavellians – expert deceivers – when they were called on lies they’d just told.

  Calmly she persisted, ‘Are you trying to purchase property on Solitude Creek north off Highway One, the building and the land the roadhouse is located on?’

  He blinked. Was this the point where he would demand a lawyer?

  ‘As a matter of fact, I’m not, no.’

  The first phrase was often a deception flag. Like: ‘I swear’. Or ‘I’m not going to lie to you’.

  ‘Well, your attorney made an offer for the property.’

  A pause. It could mean a lie was coming and he was trying to figure out what they knew. Or that he was furious.

  ‘Is that right? I wasn’t aware of it.’

  ‘You’re denying that Barrett Stone, your lawyer, talked to Sam Cohen and made an offer to buy the property?’

  The Congressman sighed. And lowered his head. ‘You are, of course, investigating the terrible incident at the roadhouse.’ He nodded. ‘I remember you, Agent Dance. You were there the next day.’

  O’Neil said, ‘And you came back a few days later to look over the property you wanted to buy.’

  He nodded. ‘You’re thinking I orchestrated the attack to drive the property value down. Ah, and presumably the second attack at Cannery Row was to cover up the motive for the first attack. Make it look like some kind of psycho was involved. Oh, and the hospital too, sure.’

  He was sounding oddly confident. Still, what else was he going to say?

  ‘I have alibis for one or all of the incidents … Oh, but that’s not what you’re thinking, I’m sure. No. You’re thinking I hired this psycho.’

  Dance remained silent. In the art of interrogation and interviewing, all too often the officer responds to comments or questions posed by the subject. Keep mum and let them talk. (Dance had once gotten a full confession by asking a suspected murderer, ‘So, you come to Monterey often?’)

  Daniel Nashima now rose. He looked both law enforcers over carefully. Then set his hands, palms down, on the desk. His face revealed no emotion whatsoever as he said, ‘All right. I’ll confess. I’ll confess to everything. But on one condition.’

  CHAPTER 75

  Donnie and Wes were hanging on Mrs Dance’s back porch, huddling in the back, along with Nathan (Neo, from the Matrix) and Vince (Vulcan – no, not the race of the dudes from Star Trek but the X-Man).

  Fritos and orange juice and a little smuggled Red Bull were the hors d’oeuvres and cocktails of the hour.

  ‘So, what’re you? Like grounded?’ slim, pimply Vince asked.

  Wes sighed. ‘My mother’s running that case, that thing at Solitude Creek, where the people got killed. And the Bay View Center?’

  Nathan: ‘No shit. Where people jumped into the water and drowned. She’s doing that?’

  ‘And she’s like all paranoid he’s going to come around and mess with us.’

  ‘Get a piece, dude. Really. Waste him, the fucker shows up.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Wes said.

  Vince asked, ‘How’re you gonna play the game, man? Jesus.’

  Wes shrugged. ‘I gotta have rides to school and home. But I can still get away. Just have to be careful about it. Not when my mom’s here. But Jon? I can tell him I’ve got a headache or need to take a nap. Get out through my window. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.’

  Donnie waved to Mrs Dance’s boyfriend, Jon, who, Donnie thought, was spying on them, though maybe not. The guy actually seemed friendly enough and sure as shit knew machines: he hacked epic code and showed Donnie how to write script for games. Donnie had this fantasy about taking the Defend and Respond Expedition Service game onto the net, making millions. Where you’d fuck with people in the virtual world.

  Yeah, it could be a good game. Mucho more interesting than wasting zombies with machine-guns.

  Donnie shifted on the bench and he must’ve winced. Wes noticed. ‘Yo, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing, bitch. I’m fine.’

  Except he wasn’t fine. His father’d noticed the missing bike and, even though he seemed to believe the lie that Donnie had lent it to a friend, he’d whacked him a half-dozen times with the branch for not asking permission to lend out a present. (‘And you know how much it cost?’) He was under orders to produce the bike tomorrow, or face even worse punishment.

  And, with Donnie’s father, worse always meant worse.

  Big Nathan, who didn’t take as many showers as he ought to, moved his hair out of his eyes. ‘So here.’ He flashed a picture on his Galaxy of a stop sign, uprooted and sitting in Vince’s garage. His mother never used the place. His father might have killed himself in there – that was the rumor – so nobody in the family ever went inside or did anything with it. So it had sort of become their clubhouse.

  ‘Can I get an amen?’ Nathan asked. ‘Team Two scores.’

  Fist bumps.

  ‘Cool,’ said Wes. ‘How much did it weigh?’

  ‘Tons,’ Vince said. ‘We both had to carry it.’

  ‘I could have,’ Nathan said fast. ‘Just, it was long, you know. Hard to get a handle on.’

  If anybody could muscle it, Neo could. He was a big fucker.

  ‘Nobody saw you?’ Donnie asked.

  ‘Naw. Maybe one kid but we looked at him, like, you say anything and you’re frigging dead.’

  Nathan said ‘frig’ instead of ‘fuck’. He’d come around, Donnie thought. Wes had.

  We’ll totally fuck you up …

  Donnie pulled out the official Defend and Respond game score sheet, illustrated by him personally. Titans, X-Men, Fantastic Four, zombies everywhere. A couple of the hot girls from True Blood.

  He wrote on the Nathan/Vince side: Challenge 5, completed.

  Donnie had come up with the idea of challenging the team to steal a stop sign, not just any sign. No ‘Yield’, no ‘School X-ing’, no ‘No Parking’. But a real fucking stop sign at a four-way intersection. Copping that would mean they’d have to be at an intersection, where it’d be riskier to get caught. And then, too, a missing stop sign would mean that a car might fuck up another in a crash.

  Vince grimaced. ‘Only, like a half-hour later, not even, there was another one up.’

  ‘That’s fucked up,’ Donnie said, disappointed.

  Wes gave a sour laugh. ‘Who drives around with signs to put up?’

  ‘Dunno. Just was like all that work was wasted,’ Vince said.

  Nathan slapped his arm. ‘Shit, dude. We got the point.’ A stab at the score sheet. ‘Am I right, ladies?’

  Donnie would’ve liked a big fucking car crash but the challenge hadn’t been to keep stealing stop signs until there was a big fucking car crash; it was steal a fucking stop sign. Period.

  ‘Dude,’ Wes was talking to him. ‘Show ’em.’

  Donnie pulled his iPhone out and displayed the Die Jew picture.

  Nathan didn’t seem happy. He and Vince were down two points.

  Vince said, ‘That thing, that’s Indian.’

  Impatiently, Donnie said, ‘What thing? And what Indian? Like Raj?’

  ‘What’s Raj?’ Wes said.

  His mother didn’t let Wes and his sister, Maggie, watch much TV.

  Donnie scoffed. ‘Raj, man, the brainiac on Big Bang Theory. Jesus.’

  ‘Oh. Sure.’ Nathan seemed to have no clue.

  Vince said, ‘No, what I’m saying, Indian like bows and arrows
and tepees.’

  ‘It’s called a swastika,’ Wes said. ‘The Nazis used it.’

  Donnie added, ‘The Indians did too. I saw a special. I don’t know.’

  Nathan asked, ‘Is a swasti-whatever, is it like a blade you throw? I mean, are those knives on the end?’

  Wes said, ‘It’s just a symbol. On their flag.’

  ‘The Indians?’

  Wes cocked his head. ‘No, dude. The Nazis.’

  ‘Who were they again?’ Nathan asked.

  Donnie muttered, ‘They and the Jews had a big war.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Game of Thrones. Like that.’

  Donnie’s shoulders rose and fell.‘I guess. I don’t know. Couple hundred years ago, I think.’ Then he was tired of history. He added their point to the score sheet.

  Nathan said, ‘Okay. Our turn. We’re challenging Darth and Wolverine to the following dare. You know Sally Caruthers, the cheerleader? We challenge you to get some Visine in her drink at school. It gives you the runs.’

  ‘That’s way gross,’ Wes said.

  Donnie liked the idea of the challenge and knew it wasn’t a bad idea to stop dissing Jews and blacks for a while. But he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, but the game’s on hold for a couple days.’

  ‘Yeah?’ asked Nathan, frowning.

  Wes sighed. ‘The asshole, the house we tagged, perped our bikes.’

  ‘Put ’em in his garage. Me and Wes were talking about it, what to do.’

  Wes said, ‘To get ’em back.’

  Donnie nodded for Wes to continue.

  ‘And we need some help. Backup, you know. You up for that?’

  Vince considered it. ‘We’ll help you but we get a point.’ Tapping the score sheet.

  Nathan said, ‘Dude, that’s mad brilliant.’

  Donnie furrowed his brow. He was, though, only pretending to debate. He didn’t care about the point. The fact was that for the plan he had in mind, which he hadn’t told Wes about, he definitely needed the others.

  Finally he said, ‘All right, you ladies get a point.’ And popped the Red Bulls and passed the cans around.

  CHAPTER 76

  They were driving along Highway One, O’Neil behind the wheel of his patrol car, Dance in the front passenger seat. In the back were Al Stemple and their confessing suspect, Congressman Daniel Nashima.

  This was the condition to his confession: a drive to the scene of the crime, where he’d tell her everything she wanted to know.

  He wasn’t under arrest, so no cuffs, but he had been searched for weapons. Which had amused him.

  The compact man was silent, staring out of the window at the passing sights – agricultural fields of Brussels sprouts and artichokes on the right; to the west, the water side, were small businesses (souvenir shacks and restaurants) and marinas, increasingly downscale as they moved north.

  Finally they turned off the highway and took the driveway to the parking lot; the roadhouse was boarded up. The trucking business was operating but Dance wondered for how long: she remembered the story on the news about the company’s probable bankruptcy.

  O’Neil was about to stop but Nashima directed him to the end of the lot, not far from where Dance had discovered the path that led to where she’d found the witness in the trailer, Annette, addicted to cigarettes and music.

  ‘Let’s take a walk,’ Nashima said.

  Dance and O’Neil exchanged glances as together they climbed from the car and followed Nashima as he started along the path. Stemple plodded behind, boot falls noisy on the gritty asphalt. Both he and O’Neil kept their hands near their weapons. The unsub, armed with at least one nine-millimeter pistol, was still at large, of course.

  Was he headed for the cluster of residential houses? And why did he seem to have no interest in the roadhouse itself?

  I’ll confess …

  He didn’t get far along the path, however, before he turned left and walked toward Solitude Creek, through the grass and around the ruins she’d seen earlier, the remnants of concrete floors, fences, walls and posts. As they got closer to the water, she found a barrier of rusting chain-link separating them from the glistening creek.

  He turned to them. ‘When I said I didn’t know if the lawyer made an offer, that’s because of a blind trust.’

  ‘We know about it,’ Dance said.

  ‘I put all my assets in it when I took office. Barrett controls everything as trustee. But he knows my general investment and planning strategies. And when he heard about the roadhouse, I imagine he made the offer because he knew I was interested in all the property here.

  ‘But the trust sets out the guidelines he has to follow in purchasing property and he’ll stick to those. He’ll buy it if the conditions are right; he won’t if they’re not. I can’t tell him to do anything about it.’

  Dance was beginning to feel her A-to-B-to-Z thinking might end up short of the twenty-sixth letter.

  The Congressman said, ‘If you know about the trust then you know about the company it owns. The LLC in Nevada.’

  ‘Yes, planning to do some construction here.’

  ‘That company also owns all of this.’ He waved his hand. He seemed to indicate everything from the parking lot, along the shore of Solitude Creek almost to the development where Dance had discovered Annette.

  Nashima continued, ‘The company I’m referring to is Kodoku Ogawa Limited. The Japanese words mean “Solitude Creek”.’ He fell silent momentarily. ‘Curious about the word for “solitude”, though. In Japanese, it also means isolation, desolation, detachment. “Solitude” in English suggests something healthy, regenerative.’ He turned to them with a searing gaze. ‘Have you figured out the purpose of Kodoku Ogawa Limited yet?’

  No one responded. Stemple was gazing out over the grassy expanse, arms crossed.

  Nashima walked to an ancient fencepost topped with rusted barbed wire. He touched it gingerly. ‘In nineteen forty-two, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order Ninety Sixty-six, which gave military officers the right to exclude any person they saw fit from quote “designated military areas”. You know what those military areas were? All of the state of California and much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona. And who got excluded? People of Japanese ancestry.’

  ‘The internment,’ Dance said.

  Nashima muttered, ‘A nice word for pogrom.’ He continued, ‘Nearly one hundred and twenty thousand people were forced out of their homes and into camps. Over sixty percent were US citizens. Children, the elderly, the mentally handicapped among them.’ He laughed harshly. ‘Spies? Saboteurs? They were as loyal as German Americans or Italian Americans. Or any Americans, for that matter. If there was such a risk, then why in Hawaii, where only a small minority of Japanese were rounded up, was there no espionage or sabotage among the tens of thousands who remained free?’

  ‘And this was one of those camps?’

  ‘The Solitude Creek Relocation Center. It extended from that crest there all the way to the highway. It was a charming place,’ he said bitterly. ‘People lived in large barracks, divided into twenty-foot apartments, with walls that didn’t go up all the way to the ceiling. There were only communal latrines, not separated by gender. There was virtually no privacy at all. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire, five strand, and there were machine-gun towers every few hundred feet.

  ‘There was never enough food – diet was rice and vegetables, and if the prisoners wanted anything more than that, they had to grow it themselves. But, of course, they couldn’t just stroll down the road and buy a couple of chickens, could they? And they couldn’t fish in the creek because they might swim away and slit the throats of Americans nearby or radio the longitude and latitude of Fort Ord to the hundreds of Japanese submarines in Monterey Bay just waiting for that information,’ he scoffed.

  He strode to a reedy plot of sand. ‘I’ve reconstructed about where my relatives were incarcerated.’ He looked the spot over. ‘It was here that my grandfather died. He had a heart
attack. The doctor wasn’t in the camp that day. They had to call one from Fort Ord. But it took a while because, of course, the yellow menace would feign a heart attack to escape, so they had to find some armed soldiers to guard the medical workers. He was dead before help arrived.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ O’Neil muttered.

  ‘He, like my grandmother, was a nisei – second generation, born here. My father was a sansei, third generation. They were citizens of the United States.’ He looked at them with still, cool eyes. ‘We need to keep the memory of what happened here alive. I’ve always planned to build a museum to do that. On this very site, where my relatives were so badly treated.

  ‘The sign at the entrance will read “Solitude Creek Kyōseishūyōsho Museum and Memorial”. That means “concentration camp”. Not “relocation center”. That’s not what it was.’

  Almost as an afterthought he said, ‘Before you go to a judge to get warrants to arrest me, look up the corporate documents for Kodoku. It’s a non-profit. I won’t make a penny on it. Oh, and about murdering people to buy some property cheap? You’ll see from the plans we’ll be filing for permits, I don’t need the roadhouse. If Sam Cohen sells we’d just doze the club down for an extension of the parking lot. If not, we’ll buy some of the property closer to Highway One. Or, if Sam would like to keep the land, he could tear down the building and put up a restaurant.’ The Congressman cocked his head. ‘I can guarantee him a good supply of clientele if he puts sushi and sashimi on the menu.’ His eyes strayed to the waving grasses, the ripples on gray Solitude Creek.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking: I could have told you this in my office, yes. But I don’t think we can ever miss an opportunity to remind ourselves that hate persists. What happened here happened only seventy years ago.’ A nod at the concrete borders along Solitude Creek. ‘That’s a drop in the bucket of time. And look now, on the Peninsula. Those terrible hate crimes over the past month. Synagogues, black churches.’

  He shook his head and turned back toward the parking lot. ‘We haven’t learned a thing. I sometimes doubt we ever will.’