Kiss

by Ted Dekker

  C. Smith.

  Corbin Smith?

  She reached out to pick up the camera, then stopped at the sight of a laminated tag attached to the camera strap by a plastic toggle.

  It was a press badge. Corbin’s photo ID smiled up at her from the ground.

  All lingering doubts she had allowed herself to entertain regarding the intentions of Wayne Spade solidified into certainty.

  The fear that rushed her now was new and unfamiliar. Blood rushed out of Shauna’s head, causing her to drop to her knees for balance. She shivered.

  It occurred to her that Wayne’s decision to hide these here made no reason-able sense. Did he mean to point the finger at her?

  She had the presence of mind not to touch Corbin’s things with her bare hands. Holding her jacket in front of her, she slipped her arms into the sleeves and swaddled the camera, then the phone, and held the bundle close to her chest.

  When her lightheadedness eased, she closed the door of the truck with only a click—loud in her ears—and moved as quickly and smoothly as possible to Rudy’s little two-seater.

  Inside, she locked the doors right away. She was parked at the front of the guesthouse and knew that firing the engine would awaken someone. So she slipped the car into neutral and allowed it to roll backward down the sloping drive that led up to the guesthouse. She backed it into the area near the garages of the main house, then turned the key in the ignition and drove off the property.

  No doubt one of those security agents had caught sight of her. They didn’t worry her, though, not like Wayne worried her.

  Within minutes she was on the 183 headed south out of Austin.

  As she passed through Lockhart, she spotted a WalMart, took the next exit, and doubled back to buy a box of latex gloves. When she couldn’t find these, she settled for a pair of rubber cleaning gloves. They were bulky, but at least she was still able to handle the phone and camera.

  Parked under a lot light, Shauna pulled Corbin’s things out of her jacket, then fished for the slip of paper she hoped was still there. It was. She opened it up and stuck it on the display panel in front of her speedometer.

  Then she flipped Corbin’s phone open. She scrolled through the contacts list but didn’t recognize any of the first few names. She quickly scanned the list of calls made and found, at the very top, all three of the troubling text riddles sent to her phone the morning of Corbin’s murder. There was her reply as well: Who are you?

  Corbin had sent these? Why?

  These riddles taunted. Shauna take warning . . . 4get and b happy. Her two encounters with Corbin were full of mystery but not threat. These messages were closer to the poetry, the fragment the killer had left for her to read. Better by far to forget and smile . . .

  She checked the times. Nearly half past three in the morning. Had Corbin’s killer sent these, wanting her to make the connection? Why? To frighten her into giving up this pursuit?

  Was Wayne the killer?

  He had known Corbin wanted to see her in the morning.

  He could have left the bungalow that night without her detecting it.

  She hadn’t mentioned these text messages and wondered now what he made of her keeping the information from him. She returned to the contacts list and searched for Miguel Lopez. She found him, listed with just one number, an Austin area code. Without thinking of the time, she sent the call and hoped for—

  What on earth was she hoping for?

  A message told her the number had been disconnected or was no longer in service. Of course. He wasn’t in Austin anymore. Only then did she realize how foolish she had been to use the missing cell phone of a murdered man.

  Even so, she forced herself to check every other entry, just in case. Near the bottom, she stopped. Sabueso. The handle on the e-mails from Khai’s envelope. The phone number was attached to a 312 area code. Corpus Christi?

  Was Sabueso Miguel Lopez? The hidden Lopez? She had no idea, only a Latino name and a Spanish word . . . maybe.

  Should she use the phone at all? She’d already made one call. A second couldn’t make anything worse than it already was. She pressed send. It was not even a quarter after five.

  The phone rang and rang, without a voice mail service to pick it up.

  Discouraged, she tossed the phone into the plastic shopping bag on the floor of her car and picked up Corbin’s camera, a high-end digital Nikon. D3, the face said. She didn’t know much about cameras but imagined a professional photographer would have invested generously in something like this. Shauna hoped she hadn’t damaged the mechanisms in dropping it.

  It took a few minutes of fumbling, but Shauna figured out how to power up the LCD monitor and scroll through the stored images.

  First were photos of an accident scene. Auto versus motorcycle. Dated Saturday. Then what appeared to be a board meeting of some sort. Perhaps a school—angry young people and their (she guessed) parents. Dated Friday. A few other images.

  Shauna caught her breath. Digital time stamps for Friday and Thursday ran at the bottom of dozens of photos of her. Standing in line at the Dobie Theater with Wayne. Entering her appointment with Dr. Harding. Wayne kissing her at Barton Springs. Arriving at the guesthouse on her father’s estate! How had he gotten onto the property? Outside the courthouse. Outside the courtroom. Her making a plea at the arraignment.

  Corbin Smith had documented her every move in the days following her arrival home. Had she known, she might have been more frightened of him than she had ever felt toward Wayne.

  Scrolling past Thursday, into the earlier part of the week, Corbin seemed to have been entirely focused on work.

  Shauna viewed the stories in images all the way back to the previous Saturday and was prepared to shut the camera down when she spotted a familiar face.

  Wayne, in conversation with two other men at a location she couldn’t identify. A dozen photos of the same gathering gave her only slightly more context; they were in an industrial complex of some kind. A shipyard, maybe.

  The battery in the camera died. For now at least, there was no way for her to recharge it. Taking caution, she shut off Corbin’s phone too.

  What was Corbin’s interest in Wayne? Surely these photos were taken on the sly. Wayne had not recognized Corbin outside the courthouse. Either that or Wayne had lied. Again. Everything Wayne had ever said to her was open to question now.

  Shauna sighed, knowing nothing more than she had a half hour ago. She looked at the clock on Rudy’s dashboard. Nearly five twenty-five. She retraced her path and headed back toward Victoria.

  At six thirty, she borrowed a local map from a gas station attendant, and by six forty-five, as the morning sun was casting a glare on the dirty windshield, she drove past a modest park in a middle-class neighborhood. She made two left turns and found the home she was looking for, a small brick bungalow with a neglected front yard buried in brown leaves.

  Shauna sat behind the steering wheel, disbelieving that she had come on such a harebrained adventure. Certainly she didn’t expect to knock on a door at this hour of the morning and find a man with the answers to all her questions.

  Yes, that was exactly what she expected. Anything else would fail her. She got out of the car, passed through a chain-link gate, crushed leaves underfoot on her way up the walk, and lifted her fist to the peeling blue door.

  19

  If her entire morning hadn’t already been saturated in self-doubt, Shauna might have been more certain of what she saw behind Miguel Lopez’s tired eyes in the heartbeat it took him to scan her face.

  She had seen the fleeting expression one other time, when her mother’s doc-tor exited the surgery room to bring her father life-changing news. Shauna did not understand what the doctor said, and she kept her face turned up to read her father’s expression. His eyes told her that their lives were irreversibly changed.

  In the moment Miguel Lopez registered Shauna’s features, she saw hope and anticipation, devastation and disappointment, accidentally
colliding at such top speeds that it was hard to describe what had happened, or if they had in fact existed at all. Because on impact they vanished, nothing more than a magician’s illusion, leaving her feeling stunned and slightly manipulated.

  He murmured a Spanish word that she could not make out.

  She blinked, and Miguel Lopez’s eyes were only emotionless black asphalt.

  She stuck out her right hand.

  “I’m Shauna McAllister. I’m hoping you can talk to me for a few—”

  “No.” He moved to close the door.

  “Please! Your friend Corbin Smith is dead!” she yelled at the closing door. The door stilled. “Murdered. Please let me talk to you.”

  She kept her eyes on the two-inch crack in the door. It widened.

  “He called me here not more than an hour ago.”

  “You’re Sabueso?”

  Miguel neither confirmed nor denied it.

  “That was me. I called, looking for . . . I have his phone.” She swiveled to face the car. “I can show you the call logs.”

  The man hesitated but did not speak.

  “Why didn’t you answer the phone?” she asked, turning back to him. He refused to answer that as well.

  Shauna held up the folder of e-mails and articles that she clutched in her left hand. “We’ve corresponded. About the presidential campaign.” She shoved the folder toward him. “Please,” she said again.

  Miguel Lopez reopened the door and took the folder from her hands. His eyes glistened as if rain had fallen on their dark surface.

  Facing her, he flipped open the folder and dropped his attention to the top page. An article he had written and a photograph Corbin had taken. She read the headline from her upside-down vantage point. He turned to the next page. An e-mail printout. From Sabueso to ShaunaM.

  HealthWay profits up 30%, production up only 6.3%. Retail steady. Let’s find out where it’s coming from.

  He stepped back from the door as if making room for her to come in but now seemed to avoid looking at her at all. “You drop in on everyone at this hour?”

  “I can come back later.”

  “You’re here now.” He left her standing in the entryway and stalked off.

  Drawn curtains darkened the little house, which smelled damp but clean. She closed the door behind her, unsure whether to follow or wait.

  “When did it happen?” he asked from another room.

  Shauna knew without needing clarification that he was speaking of Corbin. “Yesterday.” She stepped into an eat-in kitchen that held a glass table flanked by two chrome chairs. He flipped the light on over the sink and stood with his back to her, still reading—or pretending to read. He stopped turning pages, didn’t say anything for a while.

  Then, “How?”

  “In his sleep. They cut his throat.”

  Miguel’s shoulders slouched. The hair at the back of his head was matted. She’d dragged him out of bed for the awful news.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “From what I hear he was a very good friend of yours.”

  Miguel turned around and frowned at her, tilting his head slightly as if perplexed by what she said. Or maybe he was studying her intentions.

  He finally said, “Corbin was like my brother. He always said that . . .” Miguel sighed and shook his head. “How did you find me?”

  “Corbin gave me your address. In a way. He didn’t tell me what it was, but I found it, and it was a gamble, but I thought maybe . . .”

  As she spoke, Miguel closed the folder and crossed the floor as if to give the documents back to her. Instead he held them close to his chest with one hand and stepped into her personal space so that their toes were inches apart. He held her eyes with his, asking an unspoken question that she couldn’t decipher.

  She could see how smooth his skin was, and each hair at the edge of his beard. A long cut over his right eyebrow was in the last stages of healing. Tiny laugh lines framed the corners of his eyes, though he wasn’t smiling now. She imagined he was at his worst at this hour, tired, rumpled, dragged out of bed by a crazy woman pounding the door. And yet she found him attractive.

  She took an involuntary step backward.

  He matched it, closing the gap. His cotton T-shirt smelled like laundry soap. Someone she knew used that kind of detergent.

  His gaze was persistent, but she didn’t understand. She dropped her eyes to his olive skin and splayed hand pressing the folder to his chest. She could hear him breathing and felt her own lungs quicken, which confused her. She held her breath to bring it under control.

  This did not feel like fear, but like a high school crush about to be devastated. Was he angry that she had come? Was her intrusion offensive? What was he going to do?

  She knew in a second: he was going to refuse to help her.

  The image of him raising a pistol to her face sent her backward one more step. Her heel hit a wall.

  This time he did not move except to hold the papers out to her.

  “Mr. Lopez . . .” she said.

  The light laugh that escaped his lips at this formality was more a burst of sound, a single short note that could have suggested either mirth or pain.

  Shauna reached out with her left hand to take the papers and he grabbed hold of her palm, flipped it over, rubbed his thumb across the back of her fingers once in a quick gesture at once intimate and impersonal, then let go.

  He finally broke eye contact. “Thank you for telling me,” he said. And then he left the kitchen as if to see her out.

  She caught her breath, then followed. “There’s something else.”

  He continued to the front door, opened it, and kept his hand on the knob.

  “Corbin was helping me to reme—to investigate some things.”

  Miguel stayed where he was.

  “I was in an accident. My brother . . . almost died. I was driving.”

  Miguel looked at the tile floor. Shauna approached him but stayed at a distance.

  “The story they’re telling me about what happened doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’s that I don’t want to believe it, but really, I can’t. I couldn’t have done what they say I did.”

  “How is it that you don’t know what you did?”

  “I can’t remember it.”

  “You can’t remember?”

  Shauna swallowed, hearing aloud how improbable that sounded.

  “I was in a coma. A drug trial. My head—look at me, please.”

  Miguel would not.

  “I’ve lost months. I need to get them back.”

  “I’m a journalist, not a brain surgeon.”

  “Corbin says—said—he was in contact with a witness. Someone who has a different version of the story to tell. I need to find this person. Do you know—did Corbin ever tell you?”

  Miguel released the doorknob. Crossed his arms. “Did he say he told me?”

  “No.”

  “Then he didn’t. I can’t help you. You really ought to go.”

  Two observations kept Shauna rooted to her spot. The first was that the weight of disappointment simply would not allow her to move. It pressed down on her shoulders and wrapped around her hips and screwed her heels into the carpet. Miguel Lopez didn’t know anything. Her last resort was a dead end. All the other questions she might have asked him had this not been the case fled her mind and exited the open door.

  But the second realization turned her eyes back to Miguel’s mouth, which had formed the words you really ought to go but got the tone all wrong. The shape of the words was regretful rather than adamant, self-contradicting in fact, and seemed to say instead, I really hope you won’t.

  She heard what she wished for, and the disappointment released her. Shauna kicked off her shoes to make her refusal clear, turned into the adjacent living room, and took a seat on one end of the sofa.

  She began counting, hoping the numbers would lead her to the right thing to say, the right questions to begin with. She had reached number eleven when she he
ard the front door gently close. Miguel came into the living room.

  “I really can’t help you,” he said. She believed he wished he could.

  “Can I have a cup of tea?”

  “Tea?”

  “Do you have any?”

  Miguel took a deep breath, looked up at the ceiling as if tea might be hanging there from a string, then returned to the kitchen.

  Shauna stayed put and listened to him fill a kettle with water, riffle through a cupboard, set a cup on the counter, free a tea bag from its paper envelope. He did not speak while he waited for the water to boil and did not come out of the kitchen while the bag steeped.

  Nine minutes later, Miguel returned.

  “I’ll take a little milk and—”

  “Take it or leave it.” He held out the cup filled with tea the color of caramel. There was already milk in it. She sniffed the steam. And sugar. She tasted it. Raw sugar. The way she preferred it. As if she had made it herself.

  Miguel watched her.

  Her hands turned clammy against the warm mug. “You know me,” she said.

  “We’ve corresponded.”

  “About how I take my tea?”

  He sat on the other side of the coffee table in a chair and asked, “Why are you still here?”

  “Because you haven’t thrown me out yet.”

  “Yet. I mean it. I can’t help you.”

  Maybe she had only imagined his prior wishful tone. She sipped.

  “How did we know each other?” she asked.

  “I covered your father’s campaign for a while.”

  “I cut the campaign a wide berth.”

  “I’m a journalist. I see people who don’t want to be seen.”

  “And when did you become one of us?”

  “Who is us?”

  “People who don’t want to be seen.”

  Miguel shrugged. “I really don’t know what you mean.”

  “You left the Statesman within days of my accident.”

  “I imagine a lot of people you don’t know did a lot of things within days of your accident.”

  This was a veritable tea party with the Mad Hatter.

  “Why did you leave the political beat?”

  “I didn’t. I just left the Statesman.”