by Steph Cha
“Is that when you quit?”
“It was the beginning of the end. I had to call my mom and go through a big existential crisis first. It’s not easy walking away from a six-figure job when you’re six figures in debt.”
“You’re six figures in debt?” An incredulous laugh sneaked its way into the question.
He smiled at me, a crooked smile showing a dimple and a sliver of teeth. “Whoops. I guess I should’ve kept that one in my pocket.”
There was something unbearably wonderful about him just then, something tender and thin and irresistible, like the bubbled surface of a topped-off glass, quivering on the edge of overflow. I reached for his hand, addressing this spark of longing—not sexual, exactly, but analogous at least, a fierce desire for contact, fusion. I hooked my index finger around his and held it tightly, as if I were holding him suspended at a great height. I didn’t have to wait long for the answering pressure, knuckle pushed back against knuckle. I leaned into him and he mirrored my body until our foreheads were almost touching. When we kissed it felt inevitable. My nerves flooded with relief.
We came up for breath, and he spoke with my face cupped in his hand, his words crossing into my mouth between parted lips. “Never thought student debt would be a selling point.”
“I’m a sucker for martyrs,” I said. “I’ve never been good enough to be one.”
Our burgers were cold by the time we separated. I felt flushed and silly, making out with a boy in an In-N-Out parking lot like I was in high school. We joked around while we finished our burgers, then I drove us back to the Gasparians’.
“I’d invite you in,” I said, “but I live with my clients.”
He grinned. “Next time.”
I watched him drive off, then started up the stairs to the front door. A large hand on my shoulder stopped me cold. It was followed by a blast of cologne and an oily voice, saying, “Don’t scream.”
His hand kept me facing forward, but I didn’t need to see him to recognize the thick-fingered Turk.
A chill ran through my body, followed by a deepening heat, my nervous system sounding the alarm. I’d gone looking for this man in a public place, and here he had me alone, in still suburban darkness, outside my clients’ home.
“I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
He spoke quietly, but his voice sliced into me and lodged itself so his words seemed to reverberate in my own throat.
My wrist ached where he’d grabbed me, in fearful anticipation. I tried to find my voice, but I didn’t know what to say.
“I understand you’re looking for Nora Mkrtchian,” he said, speaking into my ear. “That is why you were following Kizil.”
I didn’t move or answer, and he went on.
“I never liked how he went on about that girl. He was too inflamed by her. I should have known he might bring trouble.”
I ventured a question. “You knew he was stalking her?”
“I knew he had taken too much interest in her.”
I swallowed. “Did he kill her?”
“He did nothing to her with my pardon,” he said, his tone genteel. “But regardless, Kizil was my man. He was my burden. Not yours.”
I felt my face slacken as I processed what he was trying to tell me. “Kizil was your problem. And you fixed him.”
“No,” he said. “Now you put words in my mouth. But it is true that the problem is fixed. There is no further need to pick at this wound. It has scabbed over. The scab has fallen off. There is no point in it bleeding out all over again.”
“Is that what you came here to tell me?”
“Yes. Your work is done. Further prying would embarrass us all. It would upset me.”
I remembered the power of his hand on my wrist, the cool way he looked into my eyes as he crushed me beneath his gaze. He had seemed so calm and unruffled, as if I’d barely qualified as an annoyance. I did not want to see him upset.
“If Kizil killed Nora, then where is her body?” I listened in horror as the question slipped out of my mouth.
His grip tightened on my shoulder.
“If she’s dead I need a body. I can’t just tell the people who love her, ‘This scary man says she’s dead and don’t worry about the details.’”
“That is not my problem,” he said. “That sounds very much like your problem. It is not the biggest problem you can have.”
“You can’t produce a body, can you?” I whispered. “You’re bluffing. You don’t know anything at all.”
“I know what I need to know. The rest is not your business.”
“But it is my business. It’s exactly my business.”
“I didn’t come here to argue with you. I came to relay my message, and I have told you everything that, in fairness, I believe you ought to know.” He let go of my shoulder.
I turned around and watched him walk down the street, rounding the corner out of my sight. I had no idea where he’d come from.
*
Lusig called my name when she heard me come into the house. I went to her room and found her in bed with a book. She put it down when she saw my face.
“You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” she said. “Sit.”
My legs went limp and I sat down on her futon.
“I guess now is a good time to give you an update.”
I recapped the evening’s adventures, ending with the encounter on the Gasparians’ front steps. I left out one thing only—my suspicion that Kizil was dead. It seemed like too upsetting a prospect to introduce if it might not be true.
“You can’t tell Ruby all this,” she said, seriously.
“I brought a dangerous man to the house, Lusig. It may be the kind of thing I have to report.”
“No, you can’t do that. She’ll fire you.”
I thought about that. “Yeah, that seems likely.”
“So you can’t do it. You can’t do that to me.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed and clasped her hands together. “I need you on my side. Please.”
Twelve
Rubina and Lusig had gone to a doctor’s appointment when I woke up the next morning, and I put off thinking about the man at the Gasparians’ doorstep. Instead I spent my Saturday morning debating whether to call Veronica. She called me first, just before noon.
I felt my pulse spike at the caller ID. I knew why she was calling—she’d found Kizil, probably dead. It wasn’t entirely impossible that she’d found Nora along with him, in whatever state she was in. I’d given her a solid lead after all.
“Hey, what’s up?” I asked, speaking too quickly.
Instead of talking, she took a deep breath and released a heavy, exaggerated sigh that took five whole seconds to complete.
“What? What is it?”
“J.S.” she said.
“V.S.”
“You fucking troublemaker.”
“Just get to it, will you? You’re making me nervous.”
“I got a new case today, thanks to you.”
There it was—Veronica was a homicide detective. She was crediting me for landing her a murder.
“Not Nora, I hope.”
“No,” she said. “Your missing girl is still your missing girl.”
“Then, who?”
“Your friend Enver Kizil.”
The confirmation still came as a shock. My shoulders slumped, and I sank into my chair. I didn’t like Kizil, thought he was a scumbag, maybe worse, but I was never happy to hear tidings of murder. I’d already come across more dead bodies than likely as a civilian, and I’d entered this case hoping I’d exit without seeing any more.
“We checked out his apartment yesterday. We searched the place, but he wasn’t there. Turns out, he was out getting murdered.”
“When? Where?”
“He was found a few hours ago in Redondo Beach, at the pier. Dead at least a day.”
“How was he killed?”
“Classic execution. Three shots to the back of the head.” She sighed. “
Look, Juniper Song, we’re going to have to meet and talk about this in person.”
“Sure,” I said. “When are you free?”
She laughed huskily. “Free? This is work. You come into the office. Formal interview, the whole thing. As soon as possible is best.”
“Shit,” I said before I could stop myself. “Of course.”
“Relax. I don’t think you did it.”
“You sure?” I tried to sound light, but my voice came out clunky.
She ignored me. “When can you come in?”
Veronica worked at the station downtown, a place with bad associations for me and probably everyone else who went in without police colors. She met me outside and led me into a sparse interrogation room.
“Aw,” I said, going for levity. “This is where we first met, isn’t it?”
“Yup. You were a nightmare to interview.”
“You were poking around about my client.”
“I’m hoping you’ll be more forthcoming this time around.”
“Sure.” I thought about the shadowy Turk, the ominous smell of his cologne. “I have no loyalty to Kizil.”
“Do you want coffee or anything?”
I shook my head. “I’m good. Where’s What’s-his-face, your quiet partner man? Are you interviewing me solo?”
“Redding’s around. We decided we’d keep this friendly. I told him I knew you.”
“Sure, friendly.” I smiled. “Meanwhile you’re trying to assess whether I might have emptied three shots into the back of someone’s head.”
“Hey, hey, hey. No need to get smart,” she said, waving her hands as if to disperse a fart. “But we are going to have to talk about Kizil.”
I was nervous, and she could tell. I didn’t want to talk about my visit to that apartment. I didn’t want to be one of the last people to have seen him alive. I didn’t want to implicate a scary man I didn’t even know by name.
“When did you last see him? Tell me the exact time.”
I steeled myself and answered. “It must’ve been about nine P.M. Wednesday.”
She asked me about Kizil’s movements that day, and I told her about his trip to the strip club.
“Was he meeting anyone?”
I hesitated. “I can only be vague,” I said.
She scowled. “This isn’t PI playtime, J.S. It’s serious.”
“I know. I mean I only know enough to be vague. But I’m pretty sure I’ve met the person who did this.”
I told her about my encounters with the man who’d claimed Kizil as his burden.
“I know nothing about him,” I said. “Not a name, not an occupation. I can’t even say he lives in L.A. My guess is he’s a Turkish national, and if so, he’s probably back home, out of reach by now.”
“You don’t know nothing. You have a theory. Let’s hear it.”
“Don’t laugh at me,” I said. “I think he’s Turkish intelligence. JITEM.”
I saw her stop herself from laughing. “What? Explain.”
I told her about EARTH and the Kahraman connection, about the speckled history of Turkey and their Gendarmerie.
“Okay, hold on,” she said. “Assuming any of this is true, why would Turkish intelligence kill Kizil if they hired him in the first place?”
“Because when they picked him, they didn’t figure him for a pervert. They didn’t count on him getting obsessed with a blogger, then stalking and killing her.”
“You don’t know that he killed Nora.”
“No, I don’t. But it looks that way, doesn’t it? It must look that way to the people he works for, and they can’t afford to have their PR tank even further.”
“How do you even know he was stalking her? You said you knew he had her address, but we didn’t find anything.”
“I had access to his computer. He opened the door for me, and he used the restroom.”
Individually, all these statements were true. Somehow, knowing this made it easier to lie. “Nora’s Web site and home address autocompleted in his web browser.”
She shifted in a way that brought her whole figure into sharper focus. “You’re sure about that.”
“I didn’t hallucinate. Why?”
“Because we pulled his laptop. The browser history was wiped. I checked personally.”
“Of course,” I said, thinking this over. “Of course it was. This guy, Kizil’s handler—he must’ve wiped it. They knew what I was sniffing around about, and they must’ve come to the same conclusion I did. But they didn’t kill Kizil to solve a murder for us. They killed him so they could cover one up.”
“You’re sounding pretty paranoid with your ‘theys’ and your government conspiracies.”
“These theories are all I can manage now,” I groaned. “Kizil died without admitting anything. He was my best lead.”
She stood up and patted me on the back. To my relief, the interrogation was over, at least for now. “It happens,” she said. “Sometimes all the answers get buried with the dead.”
*
I called a meeting when I got home. Van was out, so Rubina, Lusig, and I sat in the kitchen like we had on my first day in the house. It felt like a long time had passed since then.
I told them about my visit to the station, along with everything I knew about Kizil’s murder. They listened, rapt and gaping.
“Shit,” said Lusig, when I was done. “Holy shit.”
“Yeah, that’s about what I said.”
The cousins sat in a mournful silence, processing the news of death. I remembered that most people were pretty unacquainted with the business of murder and wondered if I was callous—Kizil’s death had surprised me, but I didn’t think the world would miss him on balance.
Lusig’s face was white when she spoke again. “And if he’s dead,” she whispered, “what does that mean for Nora?”
I’d been running the same question through my head since I heard what happened to Kizil. Murder had been lurking at the edges of the picture this whole time, but now it revealed its true position, front and center. Even if Kizil hadn’t killed her, the possibility that she was dead rather than missing seemed more compelling now that there was another body.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Look, we all know nothing good happened to Nora, right?”
“We don’t know,” Rubina said, with a tone of rebuke.
“We can hope for the best, but the fact is she’s been missing a long time. We all know she could be dead. If she’s being held somewhere against her will, that is literally one of the best outcomes we can hope for. No one believes that she just ran away. We would be taking different tactics if we thought that were really possible.”
Lusig started crying silently, holding her face in her hands. Rubina rubbed her back and whispered in her ear.
“I’m going to lay out what I think is going on here, and then we’ll have to decide how to move forward,” I said.
Rubina nodded over Lusig’s shoulder.
“Here’s how I see it: Kizil was murdered by the people behind EARTH. They killed him because they knew about his obsession with Nora, and came to the conclusion I’ve been trying to verify—that he was responsible for Nora’s disappearance.”
Lusig sniffled. “You mean that he murdered her.”
I nodded. “It would’ve been bad news for them to have Kizil arrested, for him to be conclusively tied to her death. It would’ve made the anti-genocide cause look even more ridiculous, and if I’m right and the Turkish government is running EARTH, it might have been an international scandal.”
“I don’t see that he’s been exonerated by his own murder,” said Rubina, stroking Lusig’s back.
“He’s not exonerated, but he’ll never be charged, and he’ll certainly never talk. If there had been evidence that he killed her, it would’ve been found by now. We know that he stalked her, but that isn’t conclusive. The question is—is it good enough for the two of you?”
Lusig looked up with an expression of panic. “You mean,
this is it?”
“I’m asking you guys,” I said. “Because if Kizil killed her, we may never know with one-hundred-percent certainty. And we can look for alternate theories, but obviously, if he did kill her, that’s the only answer out there. We’ll never find anything else.”
“But we have to know,” she said. “We can’t give up. There isn’t even a body. How can we say we’ve done what we can if we don’t even know if she’s dead or alive?”
I felt her protests run through me like the gritting of my own teeth. Because after all this, where was Nora? And if the answer was not in this world, then where was the body? I could feel the madness around this uncertainty. The tension entered our speech, our thoughts, and every moment we hoped and grieved, hoped and grieved, picking up her traces and wondering what they were meant to be—just things, the ordinary markings of a woman on the world, or remainders to be cherished, revered, enshrined. If her body surfaced, it would destroy the people who loved her, and yet it must bring with it a measure of relief, from the mental agony of toggling between gears, modes of thought, modes of living. I found it exhausting, and I’d never met the girl—here were all these people who loved her.
“We may never know,” Rubina said gently. “We may have to accept that possibility.”
“No,” said Lusig. “We don’t have to do anything. There is no we here. I am the only one here who cares about her, and I won’t give up, even if you do.”
“There’s something else I have to mention.” I looked at Lusig, then lowered my eyes in apology.
“No,” she said. “No, don’t.”
“I have to,” I said. I could feel the sharpness of Rubina’s attention as sure as an ant feels light through a magnifying glass.
“Please,” Lusig mouthed, her face twisting into a look of agony.
I averted my eyes from her and addressed Rubina. “I have to tell you that looking for Nora could be dangerous. And I mean more so than we thought.”