by Steven James
He went inside, then called back. “No trays.”
Huh.
“You thinking prints?” he asked when he returned.
“Possibly.”
I recalled one case involving the homicide of an elderly woman who’d been beaten to death in her apartment. She lived alone, and although a female caregiver would visit twice a week to assist her, that was it as far as visitors. When we investigated the scene, I noticed that the toilet seat was up and I thought: Why would a woman who lives by herself tilt the toilet seat up?
Sure enough, we dusted under the lid and found partials from the forefinger and middle finger of a guy in the system with a rap sheet for half a dozen previous assaults.
He confessed, and would now get to spend the rest of his life in prison thinking about how he’d been caught because he tipped up the lid, used the toilet, and without thinking, left that lid up.
No one thinks of everything, and if you study those fault lines between intent and action long enough, you’ll find the truth.
I spent a lot of my life analyzing fault lines.
In the bottom drawer, I located a pair of vise grips that I figured would do the trick.
“Where are you going with this?” Ralph asked me.
“Someone might have touched this ice before dropping it into the glass.”
“DNA?”
“Or prints.”
I used the vise grips to transfer the ice to the freezer in the hopes of preserving any fingerprints that might have still been present. Then, as I stepped into the garage again, I found myself evaluating the layout of the house in relationship to the size of the garage.
“No,” I muttered. “That’s not right. It’s not long enough.”
“Long enough?” Ralph said.
“This garage.” I leaned into the house to have another look. “Based on the size of the rooms we passed through to get here. It looks like it’s maybe two meters too short.”
“There you go with meters again,” he grumbled.
Back in the garage, I studied its dimensions. “We need to catch up with the rest of the world.”
“We’re America. They can catch up to us, or at least try to—but you’re saying the garage length? You took note of the house’s floor plan? What? When we were outside?”
“Yes.”
“Because everything matters.”
“Yes.” I was combing the wall for some sort of entryway. “Give me a hand here.”
It took some searching, but at last we located a false back to a shelving unit.
Ralph knelt and steadied his weapon as I flung the panel aside.
He went in first, then a moment later called for me to join him.
No one inside.
A cluttered desk, a dated computer, and a folding chair were crammed into the narrow sliver of a room.
Dozens of papers were pinned to one wall. Charts, graphs, memos. All handwritten in a nearly indecipherable script that looked Russian.
The other wall had the photographs of victims—chemical burns, lesions, boils, febrile rashes, pitted and gangrenous limbs. Many of the pictures were black-and-white. Some were faded Polaroids that might have been taken years or even decades ago. Most of the recent ones appeared to be of teenage girls.
A number of the victims were clearly deceased when the photos were taken.
Many were not.
Ralph cursed under his breath.
“Germ warfare?” I knew that from Ralph’s military background he had more expertise in this area than I did. “Biological weapons?”
“Yeah. And more than one kind.”
Based on what we knew so far, I was glad there were no vials or chemicals in the room.
Ralph’s Russian was suspect and mine wasn’t even rudimentary, so we weren’t able to make much of the scribbled notes. The Evidence Response Team must have already been en route because they arrived soon after we’d begun examining the room for anything not written in Russian.
We came up short on that, except for locating the torn corner of a shipping manifest to a Great Lakes port.
The ERT took over processing the scene, and after sweeping the house and finding no sign of any contagions or bioweapons—thankfully—they cleared us to leave. However, as Ralph and I spoke outside, I was still a bit torn between taking off and lingering a few minutes longer.
He glanced at his diving watch, the Reactor Trident that his wife, Brineesha, had given him recently for their ten-year anniversary. “You should probably get to the airport, bro. Do you have your stuff with you?”
“I left it at Christie’s place this morning.”
He gave me a knowing smile.
“The couch, Ralph. I was sleeping on the couch.”
“Right.”
“I’m afraid things on that front are not exactly where they could be.”
“Ah. Her religion.”
“She puts a high value on marriage, on the implications of intimacy. I have no problem with that.”
“But it hasn’t been easy, though, huh? The couch, I mean?”
“True enough,” I admitted. “But last night, that wasn’t the issue.”
“Go on.”
“We had a . . . well, a slightly heated discussion.”
“From my experience, discussions like those are never ‘slightly heated.’ They’re either served ice-cold or burned to a crisp.”
“This one was kind of crispy.”
“And?”
“We’ll work it out. Don’t you have a flight too?”
“No. I was gonna speak at that symposium in Chicago, but I pulled out so I could focus on this case. Keep me posted on things in Detroit.”
“I will.”
“Now get your ass moving. The last thing I need is Assistant Director DeYoung on my case for you missing your flight.”
4
Blake checked the screen of his ringing phone.
The number of the man he knew as Fayed Raabi’ah Bashir came up—or at least the cell number the jihadist was using today.
A terrorist.
A freedom fighter.
Depending on how you looked at things.
“What’s the status?” Fayed asked as soon as Blake answered.
Blake had never met him, didn’t know what he looked like. There were rumors he’d studied in the States. Whatever his background, he was nearly as fluent in English as he was in his native Arabic.
“All taken care of. The FBI doesn’t know what they’re looking for. And even if they did, they’re searching in the wrong place. The ice should be enough to keep them occupied. I haven’t heard from you about Maria. Is she still alive?”
“My people are editing the video. It’s nearly complete. You will have a copy of it tomorrow.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“She served us well. I called to tell you that the first half of your payment has been transferred. Where are we with—”
“She wasn’t supposed to serve you well, you were supposed to serve me well. When I delivered her to you, you made me certain assurances. Have those been kept?”
“We will have more information for you soon,” Fayed reiterated, still avoiding a direct answer.
After a brief internal debate, Blake decided to let the topic of Maria’s condition be for the time being. After watching the video, he would take whatever action the circumstances called for. And the more time passed, the more definitive a response he expected he would have to give. “Are we still on schedule?”
“Ali is flying in tonight. He should get to Detroit by eleven. The rest of the money will be wired to your account on Friday after the first responders arrive.”
“And the events up in Michigan with—”
“It’s all been arranged.”
Then Fay
ed ended the call and Blake slowly lowered the phone, thinking about Maria, about why he’d taken the measures he had, why he’d handed her over to the former Muslim Brotherhood member who’d started The Brigade of the Prophet’s Sword three years ago.
A group that was responsible for at least a dozen terror attacks since then.
For Blake, dealing with Maria was business.
But it was also personal.
Sometimes it’s just not possible to separate the two.
He’d known her for twelve years, ever since first meeting her in L.A. back when he was still a deep undercover narcotics cop and she was getting her feet wet with her new role as an Office of Professional Responsibility lawyer with the FBI’s L.A. Field Office.
They shared certain tastes and proclivities, and their friendship had extended into territory that neither of them had anticipated. Sometimes friends become more than friends and lovers become less. Over the years, they’d found themselves on both ends of that continuum.
But recently, Patrick Bowers had been poking around in corners where he didn’t need to be looking and she’d failed to cover her tracks as well as she should have.
Blake knew that if Bowers found her out, he might find him out. And so, he’d made the necessary, albeit painful, decision to end his relationship with Maria. Fayed agreed to provide him with a service regarding her that his own feelings toward her had precluded him from personally carrying out.
Still, he had no malice toward her, no desire to see her suffer, and so he had required Fayed’s word about making her death swift and painless.
But over the past few days, based on what Fayed had told him—and what he had not—Blake had started having profound doubts that the Islamist had honored his promises.
________
Now, seated at the table nearby, Mannie was typing, his meaty fingers somehow flying nimbly across his computer’s keyboard with amazing precision, almost never double-punching any keys or accidentally pressing the wrong one. Born in The Gambia, Mannie’s skin was luxuriously black. His eyes, sharp and knowing.
“I might have something,” he said in his gravel-pit voice.
“Where?”
“Minnesota, a couple months ago, not long after he was released. Someone used a grenade. Killed a woman in a cabin near a remote lake close to the Canadian border. She used to be a model. Says she’d been cuffed to the bed.”
This did not involve Fayed, at least not in a way Blake knew of.
But it did involve him and someone close to him.
“A model?”
“From L.A. Represented by Brenning Talent Associates.”
“That’s him.”
“Do we go to Minnesota?”
Blake evaluated the situation. “Not if it was several months ago. It’s likely that an isolated rural community would be close-knit. If people started going missing, it would attract too much attention. He’ll likely have moved on.” He indicated the computer. “Keep looking. Anything else with grenades.”
“Or with the movie?”
“Yes. Or with the movie.”
5
I left Christie’s apartment, toting my computer bag and rolling the carry-on suitcase behind me toward the elevator. She walked quietly by my side. Her fifteen-year-old daughter, Tessa, trailed behind us.
Christie was a single mom. Understatedly pretty. Though deeply grounded in her conservative fundamentalist Christian faith, she had a soft, alluring mischievousness in her eyes. We’d hit it off right from the start, meeting in the rain, sharing an umbrella. It was, as she put it, “maddeningly romantic,” just like that original “Bus Stop” song by the Hollies back in the sixties.
Sharing an umbrella.
And then more.
But now, we’d barely spoken since last night when we’d said all those things we hadn’t meant.
Fire and blame and barbed words. We’d both apologized, but arguments can leave open sores that apologies aren’t always able to heal. Sometimes the passage of time provides you with a stronger salve. Sometimes it doesn’t.
A text came in from Ralph and I passed the handle of the suitcase to Christie so I could check the message. Blunt and direct: No sign of Blake. No ID on the victim. Ice too melted for prints.
I texted back: Check for prints on the freezer door handle and the cabinet where he kept his whiskey glasses.
“So then, as far as the guy I was telling you about,” Tessa said, picking up a story she’d started sharing about a guy she’d met at her favorite bookstore, the Mystorium. The place specialized in rare and out-of-print crime novels and she couldn’t seem to get enough of them—or of the college guys who liked to hang out there. “I’m like, ‘What do you do?’ And he’s all, ‘I’m between jobs.’”
“And how old was he again?” Christie asked.
“I don’t know, whatever, a couple years older than me. Twenty. Twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five is ten years, Tessa. Not a couple.”
“Alright, so a couple of a couple. Of a couple.”
The girl was brilliant, moody, opinionated, and needy in ways she wasn’t even aware of. She wore a torn long-sleeve T-shirt that read I’LL STOP PROCRASTINATING TOMORROW and a slightly too-short black skirt over fishnet tights, despite the summer heat.
She moved up to walk beside her mom. “So I said to him, ‘Between jobs? Seriously? Who do you think you’re fooling?’ I mean how many employers are out there saying, ‘Oh wow. Look at this guy. He’s not unemployed, he’s just between jobs.’ Anyone who claims he’s between jobs should automatically be disqualified from applying for anything that requires a modicum of intelligence or integrity for being either too much of an idiot to realize he’s really just unemployed, or too much of a coward to admit it.”
“That’s a little harsh,” Christie chided her.
“Harsh is the new nice.”
“I see.”
We arrived at the elevator and before I could press the down button, Tessa punched it somewhat aggressively. “I mean, people don’t do that with anything else: ‘Don’t worry, I’m not an alcoholic, I’m just between drinks . . .’ ‘I’m not really divorced, I’m just between marriages . . .’ ‘I’m not making a pig out of myself with these buffalo wings, I’m just between diets.’”
The doors opened.
She let out an irritated sigh. “Stupid people annoy me.”
And in this, we had something in common.
We entered and I tapped the button for the ground floor.
As the doors glided shut, Tessa gestured toward my bag. “You travel light, Patrick.”
“It’s just until the weekend. I should be back Saturday night.”
“So, by that time, I’ll no longer be a virgin babysitter.”
“Excuse me?”
“My daughter might have put that a bit more delicately,” Christie offered. “She’s just explaining that she’s going to babysit for the first time tomorrow night.”
“Ah. Nice. Who’s it for?”
“My friend Rachel will be out of town. I suggested Tessa watch her two kids.”
“Yeah, thanks for that, Mom. For sentencing me.”
“Volunteering you.”
“Right. I mean, really—Patrick, can you picture me babysitting?”
Hmm . . . Not exactly, I thought.
“Sure,” I told her.
“Yeah. Like I believe that.”
“It’s just two kids—a baby and a five-year-old,” Christie reassured her. “You’ll do fine.”
“If ‘fine’ means everyone surviving the night and not burning down the house while boiling milk for the baby, then we can only hope. I just better not have to change any diapers.”
“That usually goes with the territory. And you don’t need to actually boil the milk.”
“Oh. Right. Too hot.
Gotcha.”
Tessa’s biological father had never been part of her upbringing. Christie didn’t talk much about him so I didn’t know the whole story, but I did know that after she became pregnant back when she was still in college, her relationship with him had ended. She raised Tessa alone.
It’d been a rough journey for her—for both of them—I knew that too.
Christie’s choice not to put Tessa up for adoption fifteen years ago had meant tight finances and long hours working two jobs ever since. Only recently did a promotion allow her to cut back to just the management position at the graphic design studio.
________
Once we were outside the building, I asked Tessa to give us a second and she walked over to hail a cab, mumbling something about ride sharing and why hadn’t I entered the twenty-first century yet.
When Christie and I were alone, I said softly, “Listen, last night. I know we—”
“Both said things we didn’t mean. I’m sorry.”
“Me too. I feel like we’ve been missing each other lately.”
“Ships passing in the night.”
“Are we at least heading toward the same shore?”
“I think so. We’ll talk it through when you get back.”
A cab drove past without slowing down. Tessa flipped off the driver.
“I don’t want to leave knowing things aren’t okay between us,” I told Christie. “Are we good for now?”
“We’re good.”
“Alright.”
“I love you,” she said.
“You too,” I replied instinctively, but then immediately backpedaled. “I mean I—”
“No, it’s okay. Don’t worry. It’s fine.”
This was actually one of the issues that’d come up between us. Last week she’d offhandedly noted that I used those two words a lot.
“Which words?” I’d asked her.
“When I tell you ‘I love you,’ you say ‘You too.’”
“And I do. I . . .” But then it hit me. “You’re saying there’s a big difference between telling someone ‘I love you’ and saying ‘You too.’”
“I don’t want you to feel pressured into saying anything, into making any kind of promise or commitment you’re not ready to make. I . . . I didn’t—I don’t ever want to do that.”