Maddy thought instantly of Abigail. Had she been on the receiving end of anonymous hate like this? Had she been terrified in the weeks leading up to her death, fearing it was coming? Lowlifes like this guy must have been a dime-a-dozen at the Opium Den or hanging around outside. Had Abigail been quaking with fear but too scared to talk about it, even with her sisters? Or perhaps Quincy knew. Perhaps she had known all along.
Maddy needed to stay focused. What was certain was that Rosario Padilla had been getting messages like this, at this intensity and volume, for, what, weeks? Months? How long did this go on for? Had she told her brother? He hadn’t mentioned anything, even though it was surely highly relevant. Had the police mentioned it to him after Rosie’s death? Surely they would. Almost the first thing you’d look for in the homicide of a young woman: after the boyfriend or husband, you’d search for any sign of a past lover, would-be lover or stalker. That was obvious. There was no reason they would keep that from the brother. Perhaps he was ashamed. Maddy pictured the crucifix on one wall of the Padilla home, a Madonna and Child on another. Maybe he didn’t want to tell a stranger, Maddy, of such things. Maybe he had not told the rest of the family, keeping Rosie’s ordeal from their mother and father. In life, Rosie had probably done the same.
Maddy looked up. Leo was paying her no attention.
No wonder these papers were classified. Jesus, the way these institutions behaved. Somebody stood to be badly embarrassed by the discovery that a murder victim had already complained to the police and no one had acted. Padilla had told them she was targeted by a violent man and she had been right. Yet, by the looks of things, the police did nothing (and then had the nerve to imply Rosie had taken her own life). Whoever within the police department had made that decision had blood on his hands – or that’s how it would look on Weibo or the front of the LA Times or, most likely, both.
Maddy turned the page to see a written request from Rosario Padilla, seeking a restraining order. Except the name of the subject of the order was blank. On this evidence, it seemed she had not known the name of her tormentor.
As Leo sipped his coffee, Maddy flicked through to the next item. To her great surprise, it was a photograph. A straight-on, unsmiling portrait of a white man, aged thirty or so. The background was a dull grey. Was this a police mugshot, perhaps of a suspect?
No. She looked closer at the border of the picture to see the image had been cropped from a driver’s licence, then blown up. Why would someone take the time to do that? Why not simply print out an image of the licence itself? And if they had the photograph, that meant they had identified a suspect. So why was there no mention of his name? Had they known but withheld that crucial information from the victim, Rosie?
She stared longer at the face, the hair short, the lips thin, the neck suggesting a man fit and strong. Could it be? The answer was yes, it could. Hard to be certain, given that this photograph had been taken front-on, while the CCTV in the Great Hall only ever caught him from the back or the side. But yes, this could be the same man – the last person ever seen with Abigail.
Chapter 30
She thanked Leo as warmly as she could manage. He lingered on their hug. Maddy could sense him breathing in the scent of her, his chin caressed by her hair. It felt good to be held by him too, to feel the muscle of his arms, to have the smell of him wreathed around her. When she pulled away, his face hovered close by. She could see he wanted to kiss her and part of her wanted it too. It had been nine months but the memory of their skin touching, of how they had devoured each other, had not faded. She remembered his tongue and his taste.
But she was serving Abigail now, no longer her own master. Thanks to Leo, she now had a serious lead, one the police had clearly put to one side. Her duty, the only thing that mattered, was to follow it.
From the inside of her car, she pulled out the phone with which she had photographed the key pages from the file. It had taken her no time at all to do it, while Leo had busied himself with sugar, stirrers and lids for the coffee. He would understand. In fact, he’d expect nothing less.
She drove ten minutes to a strip mall off Veteran where she found a bodega and for thirty dollars each bought three ‘burners’: cellphones with a pay-as-you-go SIM already installed. She paid in cash.
That move wasn’t a precaution against being tracked. Katharine had worked her magic to disable that function in Madison’s phone long ago: unlike most of these devices, it would not reveal her location. But that still left the risk of surveillance. The only way to guard against the eavesdroppers was to use a different phone altogether, one unknown to those keen to listen in.
Ten minutes later, she turned onto a side street, her eye briefly caught by a car she thought she saw make the same turn a hundred yards behind her. One minute it was there, its headlights on – not so unusual in this smog – the next, the lights cut out. She squinted into the rear-view mirror. Was it still moving, slower now and with its lights off? Or had it come to a stop, killing its lights as it did so? Or perhaps the car she was now staring at had been there all along, parked and stationary for hours. Which car had she seen? She was now confused. Had she watched a car turn that corner at all or was her mind seeing things that were not there? That was possible. Sleeplessness could generate its own dreams, even in the daytime.
Madison switched on one of the burners, its battery pre-charged as promised. Next to her, scribbled on a reporter’s notebook, was a note of the number she needed. Normally stored in her phone, it was almost the first time she had seen it.
She keyed in the digits and drafted the text message.
Only do this if it’s easy. But if you can tell me who this guy is, I’d be very grateful. M.
Katharine would know it was her and would know from the new phone number that something was up. She would understand the caution, given the story Maddy had published that morning. The only question was whether she would be forgiving enough to help.
The radio was on, playing that infernal ear-worm of a song, ‘Shanghai Style’. The video had gone viral, every kid in America learning that funny little movement of the knees and ass. The singer, a schoolteacher from Shanxi in her fifties, was the unlikeliest pop star; Maddy turned it off. She needed to think.
Now she selected the driver’s licence image, attaching it to the text message. She checked the number one last time, to be sure it was K’s. And then she pressed send.
Katharine Hu’s response came an hour later, during which time Madison had driven around, bought a soda, checked her email, texts and Weibo, along with Abigail’s Facebook page, and had between thirty seconds and ten minutes of sleep, a strange, convulsive spell of unconsciousness rather than a rest. Her legs had been twitching, a nerve behind her eye too. She had wondered before if this was how she would die, her nervous system reduced to a series of spasms and tremors until it eventually packed up. In all the hours she had spent online since this disease gripped her, those were two words she had never put together in a search: insomnia death. She didn’t want to know.
The phone, on the new number, rang. Unknown.
Madison picked up. ‘Yes?’
‘OK. You need to say more than that so I know it’s you.’
‘Thank you for calling. When you didn’t reply, I thought maybe you—’
‘Don’t thank me. I haven’t done anything yet. You know I think this is crazy, right?’
‘You’re the one who always said, “Think like a paranoid.”’
‘Not the phone thing. That’s sensible, given the shitstorm you’ve started today. This. This whole thing. For once your older sister is right. You should not be doing this. Enri—’ She stopped herself, just in time. No names, no identifying details: those were the rules. That Katharine had forgotten them told Madison her friend was shaken by this situation. ‘Certain people think what you’re doing is a big mistake.’
‘A mistake?’
‘For you. For you. There’s only so much a person can deal with. And you keep adding
to it.’
‘Did you look at what I sent you?’
‘You’re not listening to me, are you?’
‘I am. But I have to do this. You know why.’
There was a pause, in which she could hear Katharine conceding.
‘Look, I can’t swear this is the guy. Online facial recognition software is good but not perfect. OK?’
Katharine spelled out the name, letter by letter. She gave a date of birth and a last known address, though that was three years old. She repeated that she could not be certain, though it looked a good match. She did not ask why Madison was interested in this man. Finally she said, ‘And please. Look after yourself.’ But the tone suggested she had little hope her plea would be heeded.
Tony Gilper, aged twenty-nine. Madison stared at the name in her notebook, trying to squeeze something from it. What was that, Irish? She looked back at the mugshot stored on her phone, staring back at her. So maybe she had been as wrong as Howard Burke said she was about the connection to the garrison. She thought back to her short, coded conversation with Jeff Howe. Hadn’t he, through his silence, confirmed her story? She replayed their last, rushed exchange in her mind.
If my story’s plain wrong, there’s no connection between my sister and these other deaths, hang up right now. OK?
Only now did she realize her error. In the haste of that moment, she hadn’t asked Howe to stand up the China element of her story and he hadn’t. By saying nothing, he had simply confirmed that there was a connection between the deaths of Abigail, Rosie and Eveline. And Gilper could be that link.
She did an instant search. Tony Gilper, chiropodist, San Luis Obispo. A few clicks told her he had qualified in Pennsylvania long enough ago to be in his late fifties now. Next came Tony Gilper of Eagle Rock. He was a father of three young daughters, which made her shudder. His age seemed to fit too. But his Weibo profile led to a personal site, complete with photos, which established that this Tony Gilper was an African-American.
She kept searching, hitting dead-end after dead-end. The only nugget she unearthed that looked to be of any value came from the Eastsider LA website, a paragraph recording that an Anthony Gilper of Huntington Park had been arrested and charged for a DUI nearly four years earlier. It gave his age as twenty-five. The story mentioned a street address that she knew, as soon as she saw it, was no longer valid. If you did this kind of work long enough you developed a gut instinct for such things.
Still, she made the journey, the 101 emptier thanks to the New Year. She fought the gentle pull to sleep, at its most seductive when sleep was impossible. She stared straight ahead, glancing in her rear-view mirror too rarely to see what was going on behind her. Even if she had, the smog would have made it hard to make anything out with certainty.
Once there, among the projects and abandoned stores, garbage piled high in the doorways, she walked quickly, anxious to get this over with. When you’re going through the motions you want to keep each one as brief as possible.
Sure enough, when she got inside the building, climbing the stairs to the sixth floor, the nameplate for what had been listed in the DUI story as Gilper’s apartment was covered by a sticker. The name on it, Martin, was crossed out. If Gilper had ever lived here, there had been several occupants since. Maddy looked at the plain, scratched door and the stained, threadbare doormat, searching for any identifying mark, but found none. She knocked once and, of course, there was no reply. She knocked again. Still nothing.
Now, from the foot of this concrete stairwell, there was a sound – not a series of footsteps so much as a single thump announcing a human presence, several storeys below. Instinctively, she called out: ‘Hello?’ But there was only silence.
She wanted to get out. She would check out this next apartment on the landing and be off. She rang the bell once, then tapped lightly on the door. Nothing. She was about to try one last time, when the door opened to reveal an elderly, slightly stooped Asian woman – Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Maddy was uncertain. Half the woman’s face was covered by a face mask against the smog.
As she began to speak, explaining herself, it came again, that thump, like a single, heavy footstep from the stairwell. It was nearer this time. It stopped Maddy in mid-sentence, bringing a look of confusion on the face of the old lady. What had begun as a sensation in her gut was hardening into a certainty: she had been followed.
Maddy rattled out her question – a man, Tony Gilper, maybe Anthony, white, twenties, next-door, do you remember? – doubtless too fast for the woman to digest, presuming, that was, she spoke any English at all. Still stooped, she shook her head, blankly. ‘So many,’ she said eventually. ‘So many.’ Maddy took that to be a commentary on the transience of the population of this building, churning too much for anyone to keep up, but it hardly mattered. Her mind was now elsewhere.
Maddy thanked the woman and was about to head down the staircase when something caught her eye. There, at the other end of the corridor of the old lady’s apartment, was the fire escape, invitingly accessible thanks to a back door, ajar even now on a mid-winter evening, despite the smog. Perhaps, in her confusion, the elderly resident thought it would somehow let in fresh air. Maddy glanced at the stairwell, source of those unexplained sounds, then back down the apartment corridor directly in front of her.
‘Thank you so much,’ Maddy said once more, hunching to look directly in the old lady’s eyes, touching her arm as she did so in what she hoped was a gesture of softness signalling no danger. And then, a half-second later, she walked past her, as if it were perfectly natural, as if she were a girl visiting her grandmother and heading for the kitchen to fix herself some milk and cookies.
The Chinese woman was so stunned, it took her three or four seconds to call out – ‘Hey, you!’ – but by then it was too late. Maddy had already pulled the back door open and was on the narrow, metal staircase, swiftly descending, the soles of her shoes clicking against each rusting step.
Once at the bottom, six flights later, it took her a moment to get her bearings, to work out that she needed to do a half-circle around the block to get back to the street and her car. Now there, she slammed into first gear and took off as fast as she could, eyeing the other cars parked nearby, singling out a too-clean Lifan 620 as the likeliest suspect. This time she checked her rear-view mirror, but was too far away to be certain if the dark-jacketed figure she saw emerge from the apartment building was her pursuer or just someone who happened to live there. Just as she could not be sure the noises she had heard from the stairwell were not a faulty boiler, coughing its way through early February.
She headed a few miles west on the 10, pulled off at a random junction and dumped the car, hiding it down a residential road where, she hoped, it would not catch anyone’s eye. She walked back to the main drag and, for the second time in as many days, did that most un-LA of things: she took a bus, getting off as it approached the Fashion District. Looking over each shoulder, she guessed – or hoped – she had given her follower the slip.
But she was no nearer finding Tony Gilper. She found a café, took a seat at the back and pulled out her laptop. She had tried this on her phone, but now she would be more methodical, looking for Gilper online. She went to Facebook, found several men of that name – and a woman called Toni – but none were him. She tried variations of the name, playing with Tony, Anthony, Antony and assorted combinations of numbers. AnthonyG plus the birth year, rendered in both two digits and four, TGilper expressed the same way, as well as TonyG, TG, AG and a dozen other variants. She added LA to some and CA to others. She searched for these imagined, virtual men on Weibo, on Renren, on Weico and other photo-sharing sites – anywhere she could think of. He was nowhere to be found, perhaps smart enough to understand that a man who sends violent sexual messages to women needs to remain out of sight.
Over a long hour and a half, the tables around her filling up and emptying and filling up again, Maddy monitoring the new arrivals, assessing them for danger, she sunk her dril
l into the ground only to hit hard, unyielding rock. Either nothing fitted or, if it did, a photograph established there was no match. She let her face fall into her hands.
From deep inside her bag, her phone rang. Quincy. Madison weighed the risk but she couldn’t keep blocking her sister forever. She pressed the green button and closed her eyes.
‘Christ, Maddy – like having one dead sister is not bad enough.’
‘Hi Quincy.’
‘Where are you? Where the hell have you been?’
‘It’s a long story, Quincy.’
‘It always is, Maddy. It always is. Did it ever occur to you that you might be needed? That there might be things that have to be done? Things for Abby?’
‘Yes, Quincy. As a matter of fact, that had occurred to me. Had it ever occurred to you that I might be doing things right now that are all about Abby?’
‘I very much doubt that, Maddy. I really do. Whatever it is you’re doing, I very much doubt it’s really about Abby.’
‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean, Quincy?’
‘And while we’re at it, what’s all this about a secret between you and Mom?’
Maddy could feel herself swallowing. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I hear that at this moment of severe trauma for our mother, you rushed over there not to console her but to swear her to secrecy.’
Paola. Listening from the kitchen.
‘Listen, Quincy. You don’t want to be doing this and I don’t want to be doing this. We’ve both got things to do. Why don’t we both just do what we need to do?’
The 3rd Woman Page 23