by Ted Galdi
“It’s a word,” her husband says. “But not in that context.”
“Yeah. Right, right.” She turns back to Jordana. “This place is so stupid. But I love it.”
“Ha. Same.”
“We live around the corner. We come a lot after we have sex. Especially when it’s really good.”
“Ah. Okay.”
“We get a drink. Then take a stroll on the beach.” She grins. “Join us. We’re going right after this.”
“Thanks, but—”
“Come on.”
Jordana glimpses Tommy. He shrugs as if to say, Why not?
“We’re down,” Jordana tells her.
“Yay.”
They finish their drinks and walk three blocks to the beach, the married couple’s arms around each other’s backs. The sun has set, the sand appearing dark purple in the night. They wander a path, a breeze carrying over the scent of the sea.
Jordana talks to the wife about some new type of rentable scooter available in parts of San Diego, Tommy to the husband about shark attacks. Tommy was at first skeptical of him, felt he might be full of himself, but decided he likes him. He seems like the type of guy who could be his friend.
“I have an idea,” the wife says, slipping off her shoes.
“What?” Jordana asks.
“It’ll be fun.” She trots onto the sand.
The other three join her. She asks Tommy and Jordana, “You ever do a fight in the pool, with those noodles, girl on guy’s shoulders? Same thing but with Hoot and…Zeb.”
“How drunk are you, honey?” her husband asks.
“Four out of ten.”
He makes a doubtful face.
“Six out of ten,” she says.
“I’ll buy that.” He turns to Tommy and Jordana. “What do you think?”
Tommy peeks at her. She shrugs as if to say, Why not? Then climbs on his shoulders.
The wife gets on her husband’s, says, “First couple to tip over loses. You’re not a couple, whatever, but you know what I mean. Ready?”
“Ready,” Jordana says.
The men take a couple steps toward each other. The women start whacking each other with the stuffed animals. Laughter.
“What sort of an owl is the size of a zebra?” Jordana says. “That thing is a mutant.” She wobbles. “No.” She falls off Tommy’s shoulders. He catches her.
“We win,” the wife shouts. “Yes.”
Jordana smiles. Then turns to her, says, “Let’s go again.”
“Bring it on, girl.”
Tommy and Jordana take the next round. They do two more, each team winning one. Then catch their breath on the sand. The four have a conversation about beach volleyball. It morphs into one about how much real gold is used in Olympic medals. According to Google, they are all wrong.
They walk into the ice-cream shop across the street. Red curtains, wicker tables, photos on the wall of old-time surfers.
“What’re you getting?” Jordana asks Tommy.
“They have banana. Most places never have banana.” He smiles at the attendant, points at the tub of ice cream through the glass case. “Large cup, please.”
The four sit at a table by the window and eat their ice cream with plastic spoons. For the first time since his attempted-robbery arrest, Tommy feels like a normal person.
“Excuse me guys,” Jordana says. “I’m getting a call.” She pulls her vibrating phone from her pocket, scans the screen, and steps outside.
Tommy follows her. “Intelligence?”
“We’re about to get our list of suspects.”
Thirty-Three
Glen rips a piece of duct tape off a roll. On a ladder in his den, he sticks the corner of a strip of cardboard onto a tall window. The Prince Troy audiobook plays through his headphones. The demon’s army is stronger than the prince and his allies expected. But they’re about to retrieve the Shield of Armatron, which could protect them. Only those with pure goodness in their hearts can unleash the powers of the shield. Glen believes Prince Troy is one.
“Glen?” Cora says.
He pauses the story, takes out his headphones. “Hi cutie.”
In a robe, she peers at the pile of torn cardboard on the floor beside him. “What’re you doing?”
“I heard there’ve been a few burglaries in the neighborhood,” he lies. “Trying to stay safe is all.”
“I didn’t hear that.”
“Yeah. Some people were talking about it at Whole Foods.”
“The window looks so…ugly like that. How is cardboard keeping us safe?”
“Probably a few tweakers running around. Anything to get that next high. What we don’t want is them snooping through a window, seeing one of our paintings, a piece of your jewelry, anything else of value, then trying to get inside to take it. I closed all the curtains and blinds. Make sure you keep them that way. For any window without a cover, I figured I’d put up cardboard. It’s just temporary. Until the cops catch them.”
“We have an alarm system. And cameras.”
“I know. I know. I guess after having such a close call today with the accident, safety is on the brain. I never, ever want to let anything happen to you and Jade. If a little cardboard could help, call me paranoid all you’d like. I’m still doing it.” He yanks the duct tape, a curuck noise echoing through the room.
“All right. I guess as long as it’s temporary.”
“One other thing, now that you’re down here.”
“What is it?”
“Bo has really been having a hard time with his girlfriend. We spoke for a while in the car before. But he still has a bunch to run by me. Wants to come over later. We won’t leave my study. You won’t even hear us. Is that all right?”
She holds her stare on him for a while. “That’s fine.”
“Appreciate it.”
She paces out of the room. He has an urge to run over and tell her everything. That he’s not blocking the view of burglars, but murderers. That the gang is after him because he rescued a teenage girl from an atrocity in Mexico. That he was in Mexico in the hopes of continuing his conducting of life-saving transplants.
But he stays on the ladder. Cora, like the rest of America, would never forgive him even if she understood him.
Thirty-Four
Tommy watches Jordana’s face during her call with the Intelligence analyst. Her complexion’s turned pale. “I don’t know,” she says into the phone. “You did all you could…Okay…Bye.” She hangs up, paces along the sidewalk.
“How many names are on the list?”
“What the hell am I doing? I’m the lead agent on this case and I’m what…drinking margaritas and eating ice cream instead of making progress? What’s the matter with me?”
“You were just waiting for them to get back to you. Everyone needs a break sometimes. So?”
“Huh?”
“What’d the analyst say?”
She sits on the curb. Rubs her forehead. “Zero.”
“What?”
“You asked me how many names were on the list. He told me zero.”
“How is that possible?”
“This is my first case as lead. Everyone is waiting for the twenty-six-year-old rich girl to screw it up. And this is the hand I get dealt. All we went through in Mexico to get that phone. Led to nothing. I have nothing to work with.”
“Maybe the analyst botched it. Get…a second opinion.”
“It’s not his fault. Anything we were hoping to learn from the data just isn’t there.”
“Maybe the data is incomplete. Ask the phone company for…more.”
“Not their fault either. They sent over the complete record for the leader’s burner. He only used it to make calls to two other numbers. The first is Ayala’s. The second is another US burner. Probably belongs to the other White male your sister saw on the box truck. If he even called a single regular, registered phone, we’d have a contact’s name, someone to interview. But no.”
“
What about texts?”
“He received zero in the phone’s six-month existence. Sent zero.”
“Everyone texts. That has to be wrong.”
“No. It has to be by design. He must’ve known the phone company keeps records of all texts, even for burner devices, must’ve known we could get our hands on them if we wanted. So he planned ahead. Avoided them entirely. Which means he’s not only savvy. But disciplined.”
“What about voicemails? He left one on Ayala’s phone. He obviously didn’t avoid them.”
“Sure. He probably does have voicemails on his phone. And they’d probably teach us a lot. But telecom firms don’t store copies. Audio files take up a lot of digital space, would be too expensive for carriers to duplicate every one in their data centers. VMs only live on phones themselves. We were able to listen to Ayala’s because we had his physical device. But we don’t have the leader’s.”
“You seemed optimistic about the cell-tower location data before. Did that come back?”
“Was nearly as useless as everything else. The phone company identified a region of San Diego where the burner sent the bulk of its cell-tower pings. The issue is it was the only high-activity region. We were hoping for two, one for work, one for home, so we could cross-reference the information. There were other pings, but they were too scattered for a pattern. He likely planned for this too. Concentrated almost all his phone business to a single place to keep himself anonymous if we ever got his usage file.”
“But he’s not anonymous. You said they identified a region. I get one isn’t as good as two. But it’s way better than none. Pull up the names of any middle-aged White men who work or live there and see if any registered a white box truck with the DMV.”
“Yes, the team is doing that.”
“Great.”
“Not really. Based on the sort of forward thinking he exhibited with his phone, I doubt he registered his truck under his own name.”
Tommy sits next to her. Quiet for a while. Then he says, “I’ll go door to door in the region, question every White guy between forty and fifty. Ask if they killed my sister. When I come across the one who did, I’ll know. I’ll see it in his eyes.”
“Come on, Tommy. You sound desperate.”
“Maybe. But desperate sounds better than hopeless. That’s what you sound like right now. Like you gave up.”
“I’m not giving up. I’m just thinking practically. I have to stay practical if I’m going to find a guy like this. The high-activity area the telecom company identified is the part of San Diego where the VA Hospital is. That place is the size of a small country. It employs thousands. Many if not most of them middle-aged White men. Going up to each, looking into their eyes, and hoping for a hunch isn’t the answer. I need to do better than that.”
“So he works at a hospital?”
“Likely.”
“He could have surgical experience, maybe even be a doctor?”
“Sure.”
“My organ-trafficking theory. It’s got to be right.”
“Fine, you were right. And I was wrong. Congratulations.”
“Jesus. What’s with the sarcasm? I’m just trying to…talk you through this.”
She closes her eyes. “Sorry.” Then opens them. “It’s just…this is all a lot. And it’s all my responsibility now. I can’t even call Gabor for help.”
A pause. “Well…you have me.”
“Thanks. Really, thanks.” She folds her arms, looks toward the ocean. “According to the timeline, just one more day before they kill again. If I don’t figure something out by tomorrow, this is going to turn into a nightmare.”
“San Diego police are keeping a close watch on the city’s homeless encampments for a white box truck. They may need more time before attempting another attack.”
“Not with a leader like this. I studied criminals like him in Quantico. He’s a planner. He’ll stay on schedule.”
“Of the eight related missing-persons cases, only two were a week apart. There were longer gaps between the others. His next move’s spacing may be more like theirs.”
“You mean the eight missing-persons cases we know about. Most residents in tent cities are zonked out on drugs or booze. There could’ve been plenty more incidents of homeless people disappearing the last six months that nobody even noticed, that were never reported. If we knew about all of them, based on the suspect’s attention to planning, I wouldn’t be surprised if they all fell a week apart, give or take maybe a day.”
“Why?”
“Anything shorter would’ve drawn too much attention, too many disappearances in just one city. And anything longer wouldn’t be characteristic of the suspect’s diligent profile. If he decided a week was a sufficient amount of time once, he wouldn’t allow himself longer in the future. It’d feel to him like cheating.”
Tommy tries to assemble in his mind an image of this man she’s describing. He sees a body, but no detail in the face, just a red blur.
“The one thing that did change from attack to attack is his victim count,” she says. “But not for the better. The first four disappearances involved just one person. In the next three, two. The eighth, three. In the last, Danielle’s, five. Meaning he’s getting better at this. Getting comfortable. And the next attack he has planned should dwarf all the rest.”
“Why?”
“In the voicemail he left Ayala, remember that line about promises? People I made promises to.”
“Yeah.”
“Who do you think those people are?”
“Sick people who need organs.”
“Yes. But likely not just any sick people. The word promise implies a personal connection, like this is about more than money. Since he was interrupted with Danielle’s group, he didn’t get any of those organs. Meaning the recipients they were earmarked for didn’t get them either. In his next attack, he has to make up for last week’s loss of supply, plus account for this week’s recipients. For him to keep his commitment to all these people, we’re looking at something massive in the next attack. A double-digit body count.”
Thirty-Five
Glen leads Bo into his study and locks the door. Bo says, “You might want to sit down for this shit.”
Glen descends into his desk chair. “Hit me with it.”
“You convinced me junkies really don’t want to live, that they’re filling themselves with poison because they have a death wish on some level. While sick vets want the opposite. They’d give anything just to live a little longer. Which is—”
“A life in exchange for another life, one its owner doesn’t want anymore traded for one its owner is clinging onto.”
“Right. We’ll still help the troops. But we can’t use drug addicts anymore to do it. It’s not just the loss of Los Hombres del Vacio preventing it. But the ramped-up presence of cops by homeless encampments.”
“Where’re we going to get the organs then?”
“We relied on the gangsters to lure targets out of tent cities so we could take care of them in isolated areas. What if we went for targets who didn’t require any luring?”
“People who would willingly drive to their own death? Makes no sense. How do you bypass a lure?”
“I’m warning you, we’re going to have to open our minds here. But if we do, we can save the vets we gave our word to. Isn’t that all that should matter?”
“I suppose. But—”
“Plus, you won’t have to go out of pocket for the sixty-five-hundred-dollar-per-body hit fees Los Hombres del Vacio were getting. And we won’t have ask the vets to cover any of those costs.”
“So what’s the catch?”
“When I drive to work, I pass a bunch of farms in Imperial County. Plots of quiet land, isolated for miles on all sides, nowhere near police or possible witnesses. A lot of farmworkers sleep on the properties. No need to be lured to another location for handling. We can—”
“You expect us to kill innocent farmworkers? No way. No Goddamn way.”<
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“We’ve been killing innocent junkies, haven’t we?”
“Because they have a death wish. Farmworkers don’t. They’re some of the hardest working people in the country. They don’t deserve to die.”
“So soldiers deserve to die instead?”
Glen puts his elbow on his desk and sets his forehead in his hand. Silence for a while.
Bo nods at a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant hanging beside a shelf of medical textbooks. “When Grant won the Civil War, did everyone his army kill deserve to die? Of course not. A lot of victims were innocent civilians. Women and children. Fellow Americans. But they had to die for him to achieve his goal. And isn’t the country better off because he did?”
“Yes. But he was at war. It’s—”
“So are we, dammit. We’re soldiers. At war for the lives of other soldiers left behind by their own government. I know this isn’t easy. War is about making hard decisions for a cause bigger than yourself.”
Glen sighs. Then logs into the dark-web site for black-market trade. A stack of over twenty unanswered messages in his inbox. Three from a woman named Susan Birch. A veteran of the War in Afghanistan with severe cirrhosis who filed a transplant application with him over two months ago. Last week he assured her he’d have a liver for her by now. He reads her latest message:
My doctor told my husband and me this morning we should start thinking about what we want to say to the kids. He suggested we stop putting any spin on it. Gather them into a room and tell them mommy is going away. Not just like she does when she visits grandma. But going away forever. Since they’re so young, and might not be able to comprehend my goodbye now, he also suggested I write each of them a letter. Ones they shouldn’t open until they’re fifteen.
I started mine to Dylan, my oldest, about an hour ago. But had to stop because my nose gushed blood all over the paper. I am down to 89 lbs. I don’t know how much longer I can go. You are my only hope sir. Is it money? Is that why you’re not writing me back anymore? The cost seems so low. Do you want more? My husband and I talked. We can sell things. We can get you $14,250. Is that enough? –Sue