“Nina Baynam,” she said. “Feds.”
Sometimes she said Feds or Feebs rather than FBI, and sometimes it made a difference, heartily using a more casual term or one they might employ themselves. Not this morning, evidently, and those three letters had not been a passport to respect even before Waco and allied screw-ups had given everybody new angles from which to bust their balls. On every body-language wavelength the cops broadcast a single question: what the fuck are you doing here?
Nina was wondering the same thing. She walked over to Monroe, who turned away from two other cops and started talking hard and fast without preamble.
“Two witnesses. One saw it from a second-story room in there”—he pointed across the street at a battered-looking building with bleached-out signs offering weekly lets at suspiciously low rates—“and the other was at the coffee stand. Ryan and Peterson arrive about seven-thirty; Peterson goes across the street, leaving Ryan in the car. Ryan has his eyes shut some of the time. He doesn’t see a short-haired white male in glasses, trim build, dressed in either green and brown or brown and gray, coming down from there and approaching the vehicle with a hand behind his back.”
Her boss pointed again, this time up the shallow rise of parking lot that led to the entrance to the Knights, a two-story courtyard motel. “Guy walks straight down here and stands next to the patrol car. He says something and then takes his shots. Bam, bam. Then he’s gone.”
“Gone how?” Nina said, turning to look around. “The guy’s partner is, like, thirty feet away.”
Monroe nodded toward an alley a little farther along the street. “At the speed of sound. Found the gun up there. By the time Peterson’s heard the shots, checked Ryan, started running, it’s too late. The shooter’s vanished.”
He started walking toward the motel. Nina kept pace.
“Nobody knows anything about Ryan except he’s a decent cop. Not the brightest, uniform for life, but doing a good job. No one has anything about him being on the pad or dirty in any way. So it looked like they just have a random psycho cop-killing until someone talks to the manager up here.”
The entrance to the Knights was wide enough to drive a car through. There would be no reason to do this, however, because the inside held only a small and scrubby courtyard with the long-dead remains of a small concrete fountain. A few plants were trying to prove life could triumph anywhere. They looked dispirited. On the right was a cinder-block addition holding ice and Coke machines. Cops were milling all around the other side, stepping back reluctantly as Monroe led Nina into the glass-fronted office on the right. They had the air of people who’d been stopped from doing a job they thought was theirs. There were four more cops inside the office, along with a fat guy in baggy jeans and a clean white T-shirt.
“Tell us what you told them,” Monroe said to the fat guy. Tall, his hair cropped around a receding line, and with the shoulders of a long-ago college boxer, people tended to speak up when Monroe asked a question.
“I don’t know anything,” the guy whined, for nothing like the first time. “Just what the chick in 12 told me when she checked out. Said there’d been noise from next door, this was a couple days ago. I only mentioned it to the officer because they said the guy who shot the cop had short hair and glasses and I thought, you know, that’s kind of what the guy in room 11 looked like, in fact.”
Nina nodded. Her eyes were on a magazine half-hidden under the counter. The manager saw her looking, and seemed to find it kind of a thrill. “I just adore that stuff,” she said, looking back up at him. “Makes me want to fuck every guy on the planet. You want to get it on right here, right now?”
The guy looked away. “As I thought,” Nina said. “So meantime give us the keys to rooms 10, 11, 12.”
Monroe took the keys and pointed at three of the cops. They followed the agents as they left the office and turned into the courtyard. Room 11 was four doors down on the right-hand side. The drapes were still drawn. Two of the policemen were given the keys to the doors on either side.
They drew their weapons, opened the doors quietly. Pulled them wide and then slipped inside the rooms.
A minute later both came out. One shook his head. The other said, “I could hear something. Could be someone talking.”
“Three areas,” the other cop observed, quietly. “Sitting room, bedroom in back, bathroom.”
“Okay,” Monroe said. For just a second Nina thought she saw him thinking about handing the remaining key to one of the cops, then realizing how it would look. That kind of thing—plus just turning away from people as if they didn’t matter, the way he had done when she’d arrived—was precisely why the street cops didn’t love them like brothers. She got her own gun out, holding it with both hands and clear of her body. She was careful not to let anyone see a small wince. Three months now, and her right arm still gave her trouble. Two doctors and three physiotherapists had told her there was nothing wrong with it anymore. Nina thought maybe it was the small round scar on the upper right side of her chest talking, saying it knew all about guns now and wanted nothing to do with them. Tough, in that case. FBI agents are constrained to have their weapon with them at all times. Personally, she slept with hers under the bed.
Monroe squared up to the door, Nina just behind. He told the cops to be ready to follow, but to give them time. They nodded. They looked more up for this than she felt, but that was part of being a guy, she knew. Any one of them looked weak in front of a colleague, no one would want them at their back again.
Monroe slipped the key in the lock. Turned it. Waited a second, then pushed it. The door opened to a dark room. The drapes on the other side were drawn too. It was warm.
“This is the FBI,” Monroe said. His voice was steady. “Put down any weapons and come out with your hands up. This will be your only warning.”
They waited. No one said anything. No one appeared. The old conundrum, polarizing options for the near future: either there was no one in the room and everything was cool and after-the-fact, or there was a very bad man inside and he had in mind shooting him some cop.
Nina was in position. She stepped into the room.
Leathery dark. Heavy air. Really, really warm, like someone had turned off the air conditioner twenty-four hours before. Room a square, holding battered sofa, two chairs, desk, big old prehistoric television. No personal effects evident. Flicker-light from doorway in corner on courtyard side. Door partially ajar.
Also a low sound. Very likely television.
Who’s watching it?
Nina sidestepped across into the body of the room, making space for Monroe. He came in silently, hand held back to signal the cops to stay where they were. Once he was positioned on the door to the other room she turned, moved silently to the closet. Held her gun short arm while she eased it open.
Empty but for the smell of dust. Left it open. Turned on her right foot to face back to the room, nodded to Monroe. The cops at the doorway stood quiet and ready. Monroe moved toward the door to the second room. Nina came up, a yard and a half behind. Stopped.
Everything flattens out into now:
Monroe pushes the door gently with his left hand. It swings. Reveals more of the side wall of the bedroom, a gray-blue shifting light, and a little more sound. The sound has that rustling, high-pitched note above the low rumble. It’s television for sure. Sometimes people leave them on. It’s company. They forget when they leave. They figure who cares, it’s not my electric buck.
Monroe takes another step. This puts him on the threshold. A beat. He takes one more and turns quickly, gun pointed past the door into an area Nina cannot yet see.
But she sees Monroe’s upper back do a kind of thud, as if his leading foot found itself two inches lower than he expected.
Another long beat. “Ma’am?”
Nina’s stomach goes cold. She hears Monroe swallow with his mouth open, a dry click. He is staring. He is wired. He is ready to shoot. He takes another half pace forward, seems to bend down an
d look upward. Then he sidesteps out of sight. There is silence for a moment, then a quiet swishing sound. Silence again.
“Nina,” he says finally, “come in here.”
She knew that meant just her, so she raised a hand to signal the other guys to hold position. She allowed her other arm to drop a little, but wasn’t yet ready to let go of the gun.
The bedroom seemed even hotter than the other room. There was a strong odor. The television was a low burble up high to the left, fixed to the wall with a metal bracket. Monroe stood on the other side of a queen-sized bed.
A woman sat in the bed, watching television. She was in her late twenties. She had long brown hair. She didn’t move when Nina entered, because she was dead. She was sitting bolt upright in bed, her head flopping slightly forward. She was dressed in well-worn blue cotton night-clothes with a floral motif. Her stomach had begun to distend. Her face looked like painted putty. Her eyes were open. So was her mouth. Something had been put inside it.
“Jesus,” Nina said.
She leaned forward. The object in the woman’s mouth was about the size of a waitress’s notepad, about a quarter of an inch thick, two inches wide, and probably a little over three inches long, though it was difficult to be sure without removing it. It seemed to be made of shiny metal. A very narrow label along the protruding end had a string of numbers and short lines on it.
“What the hell is that?” Monroe said. He was breathing hard, and a line of sweat glinted on one temple.
Nina shook her head. “I don’t know.”
THIRTY MINUTES LATER NINA STEPPED OUTSIDE. The first wave of forensic geeks had arrived. With the drapes still drawn and the heat still trapped, it was like milling around in a crowded, hellish cupboard. Nina made sure to take a thorough look around the suite, which was always easier when it had been established you weren’t going to be shot at, and then left. Monroe was still inside. It would take the arrival of cameras to flush him out.
There were no other bodies in the room. The swish Nina had heard was the sound of Monroe checking the bathroom. It was devoid of personal possessions. There was no sign of the clothes the woman must have been wearing when she arrived. You can’t wander into a motel dressed in pajamas. Even at a place like the Knights. You would normally think to bring some toiletries, too, a handbag. There would be identification of some kind, somewhere, however accidental. Cops were already canvassing missing persons reports, but something told Nina news wouldn’t arrive soon.
She walked out through a sunny courtyard that was full of yet more cops and the quickly moving bodies of civilians who thought they were going to be able to check out of this death block quickly and get back to their anonymous lives, but who were about to spend a large number of hours being asked a small number of questions. That evening they would see, on television, the place they’d spent the night before, as the media repeated its name again and again to make it one of those venues the mention of which would tug at the memory for years and possibly decades to come. Nobody involved was going to forget today in a hurry, least of all the woman Nina saw when she left the courtyard and walked back out into the lot. Patrolman Peterson was still sitting on the bench. Two of his colleagues were trying to restrain this woman, whose name was Monica, who had arrived to find that her husband’s remains had already been taken to the morgue and who was screaming at his ex-partner because there was nothing else to do.
Only when Nina was clear of the entrance and standing some distance from anyone else did she get out her cell phone. She walked to where she couldn’t be overheard, and hit John Zandt’s number on speed-dial. He didn’t answer after twelve rings, and she was put through to the phone’s answering service.
“Hi, it’s me,” she said to the machine. “I know you don’t want to talk about this kind of thing anymore. But I could use your help.” She hesitated, not knowing what else to say, then added, “Hope you’re okay.”
Then cut the connection, and stood irresolute. For just a moment she felt odd, fluttery at the back of the neck, as if someone was watching her.
She turned, but there was no one. No one she could see, anyhow.
AT JUST AFTER TWO SHE SAT STIRRING A COFFEE while her boss talked on the phone. They were perched outside a scruffy café half a block from the Knights. All but one of the squad cars had now moved on to other things, but from where she sat she could see four unmarked vehicles that were part of the investigation. She sipped her coffee and watched as further pieces of room 11 were hauled out to be analyzed in depth. It had been established that the room had been rented five days before, cash in advance. Nina hoped the clerk/owner was being grilled yet again, and she hoped it was somewhere airless and hot and that they took their time.
Monroe closed his phone. “It’s done,” he said, with evident satisfaction. “Olbrich is assembling a task force: RHD of course, us, FD and D, the whole Serious Crime Cluster fuck. This needs to be kept tight. There’s a lot of angry officers around. I wouldn’t want to be found creeping around the back of anyone’s house tonight.”
“Clipping a cop in broad daylight. Even by whacko standards, that’s extreme.”
“Whacko?”
“Come on, Charles.” Nina had lost patience with official nomenclature round about the time she assisted with the extrication of a young black kid from a trash can. The kid had been there a week, in weather as warm as today’s. His mother I.D.’d the body, then killed herself three weeks later by walking off the Palisades. That had been a few years ago. Monroe still went through the motions of using impersonal and uninflected terminology for people whose deeds shredded whole families and histories in their grubby hands. “What would you call him? Inadequately socialized?”
“This is going to happen fast,” Monroe said, ignoring her. “A cop-killing in broad daylight. This is not a man who has control of himself anymore. We’re going to have to hit the ground fast.”
Nina rolled her eyes. Out of control, begging to be caught. And yet nowhere to be seen. The most high profile investigation she had yet been involved in—officially, at least—had been the Delivery Boy murders back in 1999/2000. Again, here in Los Angeles, and also working under Charles Monroe. He’d made similar assumptions then, about a man who’d taken the lives of three bright and worldly young women without leaving a trace. He had killed again, more than once, and then disappeared, and had never been caught. Monroe had floated on to the next job, upward and onward. The girls’ parents still took the world one day at a time. “Question is, will there be others?”
“There may be, yes. That’s what I’m saying. Unless we—”
“No. I mean have there been any before this? If this is the end, as you think, where is the beginning? What got him to here? What’s this guy spiraling out from?”
“People are on it. LAPD are cross-checking as we speak.”
“And we still have no idea who she is.”
“No purse, no possessions apart from old pjs, dickhead behind the desk says he never saw her before she was dead. A photo will be prepared once they’ve cleaned her up a little: people will be on the street with it by the end of the afternoon. You know what that thing in her face was?”
Nina shook her head, a coppery taste in her own mouth. She had seen many dead bodies, some of them in states around which she’d had to build a wall in her head, so she didn’t come upon the memory unexpectedly. But there was something about the ones where they did things to the victim’s mouth. Sexual mutilation you almost took for granted. The mangling of a public part of the body, like the eyes or mouth or hands, somehow seemed a more social desecration. Sexual was private, a personal assault: public said “Look, Universe, at what I have done.” It was outward-directed, some magical statement designed to change the world. Or so it seemed to her.
“A hard disk,” Monroe said. “A small one, like in a laptop. One of the techs recognized it before it was even out of her head.”
“No prints?”
He shook his head. “Clean. But someone
in a lab is finding what else it can give us. There’s a serial number, for a start. It came from somewhere, was bought somewhere. And there may be something left on it, of course. We’ll know tonight.”
He caught the expression on Nina’s face this time. “He left it there for a reason, Nina. Let’s get back to work.”
He stood up, thumb already dialing another number on his cell. Thunk, thunk, thunk. She wouldn’t want to be Charles Monroe’s phone, Nina thought. That was a job for a phone with tough abs.
She drained the rest of her coffee, aware of his eyes on her, critical. “What, Charles?”
“How’s your arm holding out?”
“Fine,” she said irritably. He wasn’t asking about her arm. He was reminding her of unfinished business and of why their professional relationship had taken its second turn for the worse. She got the message. “Good as new.”
He looked like he was going to say something else but then got an answer on his cell and turned and strode away, already in midflow. Someone was learning just what a damn fine SAC Monroe was; how in control, how just right on top of things.
As she followed him, Nina checked her own phone for something like the twentieth time. She saw there was a text message from Zandt, at last, and quickly called it up.
It said: I’m in Florida.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered, then stuffed the phone back in her bag and walked back out into the heat.
CHAPTER FIVE
I CHECKED INTO THE ARMADA ON POWELL, IN downtown San Francisco not far from Union Square. It was appealingly expensive and had a guy dressed as a Spanish soldier standing on the pavement outside. Passing tourists were taking photographs of each other with him, presumably so that back home they could tell their friends that here they were, with a guy in a costume, outside a hotel they weren’t staying in. By the time I was settled it was too late to do the big thing on my agenda, so I went for a walk instead.
The Upright Man Page 6