The Crooked Street

by Brian Freeman

  “Well, I don’t like to fight. I hate it. But I also know he’s right.”

  “About what?”

  “I’ve been putting him off about the wedding. I’m not ready to take that step.” She grabbed Shack from her lap and hugged the cat to her chest. “The truth is, I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready. Not with him.”

  “Tabby,” Frost murmured. “Come on. You said yourself this is just a phase. Duane loves you. You love Duane.”

  Her green eyes shone with tears. “Do I? I don’t know anymore. Lately I don’t know what I feel.”

  He was shocked to hear her say that. “Why the change?”

  “I wish I could tell you. I’m trying to figure everything out myself. Life is just so complicated right now. I’m sorry, Frost. Here I am putting you in the middle, and that’s not fair of me. Duane’s your brother. I know you have to put him first. Really, I’m sorry. Please don’t say anything to him.”

  Tabby put Shack down. She wiped her eyes and looked embarrassed. Then she changed the subject. “Did you find Mr. Jin?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think he’s okay?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I hope so.”

  Tabby twisted her fingers together. She still looked uncomfortable. “This other man who was killed last night, did you know him?”

  “Not well, but yeah, I knew him. He was a decent guy.”

  “Why was he killed?” Tabby asked.

  “He knew things that somebody didn’t want exposed. The irony is that he’d been talking about it for years, and nobody listened to him. Me taking him seriously is probably what got him killed. As it is, I still don’t understand how they—”

  Frost stopped in midsentence.

  “What?” Tabby asked.

  He didn’t answer. He sat there, frozen to silence, thinking through the chain of events from the previous night. The meeting with Fawn’s sister. His phone calls to Coyle. The attack on Coyle’s office. He realized it couldn’t possibly be an accident that Lombard had targeted them just minutes after Coyle told Frost about the connection between Fawn and Detlowe.

  “They knew,” he murmured to himself, barely aloud.

  “Knew what?” Tabby asked in a normal voice.

  Frost put a finger over his lips to warn her to stay quiet.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m just thinking aloud. Hey, would you mind making me a cup of coffee? I need some caffeine today.”

  Tabby gave him a puzzled look. “Sure. Okay.”

  She headed for the kitchen, and Shack followed her. Frost got up from the sofa with a wince and retrieved his black sport jacket from the chair where he’d thrown it when he returned from the hospital. He held the jacket up in his hand and rifled through the pockets. Left side, right side, breast, inside. He found nothing. Maybe he was wrong.

  Tabby came back into the living room with coffee from his Keurig machine in a Mark Twain mug. He took a sip and put the mug down. She waited for him with her arms crossed and a curious, expectant expression on her face. He studied the sport jacket in his hand again, and this time he flipped both of the lapels back. Still nothing. Then he turned the jacket around and flipped up the collar.

  There it was.

  The square electronic device was smaller than a postage stamp. It clung to the inside fabric of the jacket with little metal teeth. He tried to remember who’d bumped into him and where it might have happened, but it could have been anywhere.

  Tabby saw the bug and opened her mouth in horror to say something, but he quickly held up his hand to stop her. She shut her mouth without saying a word. He put the jacket back on the chair and walked up to her. Without even thinking about what he was doing, he put his arms around her waist and put his face next to her cheek and whispered in her ear.

  “It’s a listening device.”

  She murmured back. “Well, don’t you want to destroy it?”

  “Not yet. I don’t want them to know I’ve found it.”

  “How long has it been there?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “That’s so creepy. Who would do that?”

  “That’s what I want to find out.”

  There was nothing else to say. At that moment, they had no reason to be as close as they were. And yet they didn’t move. His hands were on her waist, they were face-to-face, but he didn’t let go right away. She was warm and soft and close. The sun through the bay window turned her hair to fire.

  Frost stepped back and let his arms fall to his sides. He bent down and retrieved his coffee. “I have to go,” he said. “I’m late.”

  “Me too.” Tabby’s voice was hushed. Her eyes blinked with confusion.

  “Thanks for checking on me.”

  “Of course. Do you want me to come back tonight? I mean, if you want me to cook dinner for you, I can—”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I know. I just thought—”

  She didn’t go on. Her words hung there, unspoken, and they both left them there. Without saying anything more to him, she turned and walked away. He heard the quick tap of her shoes in the foyer, then the opening and closing of the front door. She was gone.

  He was alone.

  Then he looked at his jacket and remembered that he wasn’t alone at all. It was time to figure out who was behind this.

  21

  When Frost drove toward the headquarters building in Mission Bay, the charcoal BMW showed up on his tail again, as he’d expected. The driver played it smarter this time, leaving several cars between them. Frost had to keep a careful eye on his mirror to see the BMW come and go in traffic. The car was far enough away to disappear if necessary, but close enough to listen in on the bug.

  When he reached Mission Bay, Frost didn’t stop. He headed past the police headquarters building and continued south on Third Street. His wary follower stayed a couple of blocks behind him.

  Frost tapped a button on the steering wheel and used the voice commands to dial his brother.

  “Bro!” Duane answered, and Frost could hear a crowd of voices in the background. “I’m wrapping up the lunch rush. You okay?”

  “I’ll live.”

  “I asked Tabs to check on you. Did she show up?”

  “She did.”

  He heard a metallic bang as Duane put down the phone, and his brother’s irritated voice grew muffled in the background. “Raymonde, you call this al dente on the linguine? Are you kidding me? Dump it, start over, hand this crap out to the kids as shoelaces.”

  Frost smiled to himself. In the kitchen, Duane was still the Beast. But his smile faded as he thought about his conversation with Tabby.

  His brother came back on the line. “Sorry. Usual craziness. What’s up?”

  “I have a question. Tabby mentioned an Asian chef named Mr. Jin. Do you know him?”

  “Sure. Man’s a genius. First time I had his xiaolongbao, I swear I cried. Why, what’s up?”

  “He’s missing, and I’m trying to find him,” Frost explained, and then he shifted into a lie for whoever was listening in the BMW behind him. “I got a text from a guy who claims he’s a sous chef for Mr. Jin and might know where he is. I’m meeting him down at Candlestick Point. I thought maybe you knew some of the chefs on Mr. Jin’s team.”

  “Sorry, bro. I don’t.” Duane’s voice became muffled again. “There’s too much ginger beer in the marinade, damn it! You’re not making a fricking Moscow Mule!”

  “I’ll let you go,” Frost said.

  “Yeah, sorry to rush you off. Glad you’re okay.”

  “Thanks,” Frost said, but then he continued before his brother could hang up, “How about you, Duane? Are you okay?”

  “Me? Great, never better. Why?”

  “It’s just something Tabby said.”

  “She told you about our fight, huh? Don’t sweat it. The harder we fight, the hotter it is when we make up. We’re fine.”

  Frost knew that wasn’t true, but he didn’t know how to tell his
brother. He wanted to say something more, but he didn’t want to say it this way, and he didn’t want to say it with someone listening to every word. “Well, good.”

  “I’m glad she talks to you, you know,” Duane went on. “You need somebody to talk to, Frost. Nobody’s ever going to replace Katie, but I like that you and Tabby are already like brother and sister.”

  “Yeah,” Frost replied, his voice clipped. “I like that, too. Later, Duane.”

  “Later.”

  He clicked on the wheel to end the call.

  He cleared his head and checked the mirror again. The BMW lagged behind him, but it was still there. The trap was laid, and now it was a question of who walked into it. He turned off Third Street as he approached the waterside trails near the old site of the Candlestick Park stadium. This was an area that had a lot of memories for him. As a teenager in the 1990s, he’d gone to dozens of Giants and 49ers games at Candlestick, huddled under thick blankets against the frigid night winds off the bay. Sometimes it was the whole family. Sometimes it was just him and Katie. She’d always been the rabid sports fan between the two of them, yelling herself hoarse at every game.

  Driving past the land where the stadium had been, he could picture Katie with her Giants cap tugged low over her blond hair and mustard on her face as she ate a foot-long hot dog. Duane was right. He missed Katie; he missed having a sister he could talk to.

  Duane was also wrong. Frost didn’t see Tabby as a sister at all, and the guilt behind his feelings was eating away at him.

  He pulled into a parking area practically across the street from the old stadium site. He was alone for now. He took his sport jacket and slipped it on as he got out. The wind blew in from the water not even a hundred yards away. The sun was high, but the air was cold. He followed a paved trail past flat marshland that was emerald green after a winter of rains. He didn’t look back to see if anyone had shown up behind him. When he reached the water’s edge, he tramped off the trail into the shelter of a thick stand of fir trees, where he was invisible.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  Another man appeared on the walkway that led to the bay. Frost peered through the branches at him. He was young, probably not more than twenty-five years old, with tanned Hispanic skin, glasses, and a trimmed businessman’s haircut. He wore a suit, which was unusual in San Francisco, but he also wore athletic shoes that muffled his footsteps. He wasn’t tall or muscled; he was the kind of unmemorable man who would blend in with just about any surroundings. The cords of his earphones wound from his suit pocket to his ears, as if he were listening to music on his phone, but Frost knew he was listening to something else.

  Him.

  He could see a flash of puzzlement in the man’s eyes as he studied the trail ahead of him. He was wondering where Frost had gone.

  In the trees, Frost murmured aloud, “That’s far enough. Stop right there.”

  The man was good. He covered his shocked reaction so quickly that Frost would have missed it if he hadn’t been watching carefully. The man stopped dead on the trail. He removed his phone from inside his suit pocket and fiddled with the buttons as if he were simply switching songs on his playlist. But his eyes were moving, and he glanced sharply in every direction around him.

  Frost took out his gun and badge and emerged from the trees.

  “Looking for me?” he asked.

  The man slid his earphones out of his ears. His gaze shifted to the badge and the gun in turn, and he demonstrated just the right amount of surprise and fear. He let the earphone wires hang down his suitcoat and raised both arms in the air with his fingers spread wide. “I’m sorry, Officer, is there a problem?”

  Frost pushed through the brush to the paved trail. He kept his gun pointed at the ground. “I know you’ve been following me,” he said. “Let’s not pretend, okay? I found the bug.”

  The man acted his part. His eyes widened. “I think there’s been some kind of mistake. I’m just here taking a walk.”

  “What’s your name?” Frost asked.

  “Luis Moreno.”

  “What kind of car do you drive, Mr. Moreno?”

  “A gray BMW.”

  “And where were you coming from?”

  “Nowhere, really. I mean, my last job was in South Beach, so I thought I’d come down here and take a hike on my lunch hour.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a city inspector,” Moreno replied. “I can show you identification.”

  Frost nodded. “Slowly, please.”

  “Oh yeah. Of course.”

  Moreno did as he was told. He peeled back the flap of his suit coat and carefully removed his wallet using two fingers. Awkwardly, he flipped it open and held out his driver’s license and city identification for Frost to see. He was telling the truth. Luis Moreno worked in code enforcement for the city’s Department of Building Inspection.

  “Hand me the earphones,” Frost told him.

  “What?”

  “I want to hear what you’re listening to.”

  Moreno’s brow wrinkled with confusion, but he held the purple earbuds out to Frost, who held one of them close enough to hear the beat of loud music. He recognized a song by Pitbull, rather than an echo of their own conversation. Moreno had already switched away from the listening device as soon as he knew Frost had spotted him. Frost was sure that the man had also deleted the app on his phone that controlled the electronic surveillance.

  These people were professionals.

  Professional spies. Professional assassins.

  “Are you armed, Mr. Moreno?” Frost asked.

  “What, like a gun? No, of course not.”

  “Gun, knife, any kind of weapon,” Frost said.

  “Well, I carry pepper spray. It’s for self-defense. I deal with a lot of people who aren’t too happy to see me, and I’m often inside abandoned buildings where criminal activity goes on.”

  The man had an answer for everything. His cover story was perfect. He was also a liar, but Frost knew he was never going to prove it.

  “Let me see your fingernails,” Frost said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Moreno held out his hands, and Frost checked the nails carefully. There were no traces of blood. If Moreno had been the man to kill Coyle, he’d cleaned up well, but Frost didn’t think this was the same man. Even so, there was one way to be certain.

  “Untuck your shirt, lift it up. Let me see your stomach.”

  “Look, Officer, I’ve been very patient—”

  “We can do this here, or we can do it at our central processing facility, Mr. Moreno.”

  The man nodded quickly. He yanked the flaps of his dress shirt out of his belt and bunched the fabric so that his midriff was revealed. Frost checked his stomach and sides and saw no bruises. He’d landed a solid blow on the body of the man last night, and there would have been evidence of where the golf club had hit him. Moreno wasn’t the killer.

  Frost reached behind his collar and slid the small listening device into his hand. He dropped it on the concrete trail and crushed it under his shoe. Then he waved his hand toward the marshland on the other side of the trees.

  “Get the hell out of here, Mr. Moreno. I better not see your car behind me again, okay?”

  “Um, sure, yes,” the man replied.

  Moreno stuffed part of his shirt into his pants again and backed up awkwardly, just like an innocent man who’d been accosted by the police. But he wasn’t innocent. Frost knew that. When he was a few yards away, Moreno turned and half walked, half ran toward the parking area.

  “Hey, Moreno,” Frost called after him.

  The man looked over his shoulder. At that distance, Frost could see a glint of the truth in the man’s eyes. The I-know-nothing expression on his face had disappeared, and his mouth had hardened into an arrogant smirk. Moreno knew he’d won.

  “I’ve got a message for you,” Frost said.

  “What kind of message?”
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  “I’m coming for Lombard,” Frost told him. “Pass it along.”

  22

  Captain Hayden looked up over his reading glasses as Frost came into his office. The captain filled the high-backed chair, all bulk and muscle. His hand-carved walnut desk was as big and imposing as he was. Cyril stood behind him in crisp dress blues, and the angle made Hayden’s assistant look like a vulture perched on the captain’s shoulder. Trent Gorham was in the office, too, leaning against the wall near the large window that looked north toward AT&T Park.

  “Close the door, will you, Easton?” Hayden said.

  Frost did, and then he sat in a chair across from the captain. He felt surrounded by the other men, as if the setup had been designed to intimidate him.

  “Nasty business last night,” Hayden continued, shaking his head. “You wrote up your statement? You gave Trent the information he needs?”

  “I did.”

  Hayden’s mottled black-and-tan brow wrinkled like a topographical map of the world. “I’m not happy that the killer got the better of you, Easton. You had a murderer in the room with you, and you let him get away. Now we’re starting from scratch to catch whoever it was.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry, sir.”

  “I don’t like it when the criminals are better fighters than the people on my team.”

  “This man was well trained, that’s for sure,” Frost said.

  “Military?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Did you get any kind of description?” Hayden asked.

  “No, the room was pitch-black,” Frost explained. “I never saw him.”

  Hayden’s breath rumbled loudly, like an engine in need of tuning. “Well, this business with Coyle is unfortunate, but it’s also a distraction. If you’re a private dick, you better develop eyes in the back of your head. Trent will go over the man’s case files and see what he can find.”

  “I’d like to help with that,” Frost said. “I knew Coyle. I want to put his killer away.”

  Hayden shot him down with a wave of his big hand. “No, leave this to Trent. I want you focused on the Denny Clark homicide. I’m getting a lot of pressure to put that one to bed quickly.”