Guardian of Lies

by Steve Martini

  “Katia, please. Don’t be angry with me. I didn’t realize that I was upsetting you. Please forgive me.”

  “I forgive you,” she said. “When are we going home?”

  “A few more days.”

  Why? she thought. What was he waiting for?

  She studied his face for a moment. It was impossible to read what was going on behind those eyes. He would tell her in a few days or a week now, but he would tell her anything to keep her here, to keep her quiet. He was lying and she knew it.

  A single tear shimmered slowly down her cheek, like mercury running down a piece of silk.

  THREE

  Once over the fence, “Muerte Liquida” moved swiftly across the grass and slipped between the bushes at the side of the house. A thick row of camellias now shielded him from anyone who might be wandering in the yard or near the wrought-iron fence behind him.

  He moved through the shadows toward the back of the house and climbed the steps two at a time. Halfway up he stopped. He reached out with a gloved hand and felt the deep, almost rutted, grain of the smooth fiberglass surface on what appeared to be the wooden handrail of the stairs. The entire exterior of the house, from the siding to the railings, every detail, was made of exquisitely fashioned fiberglass, all of it molded and shaped by artists who knew their craft. Whoever had done the finish probably worked at one of the Hollywood studios. It was all designed for illusion.

  He climbed to the top of the steps. Once on the deck at the back of the house, he could see the broken balustrade. It completed the false impression of disrepair. The gap in the railing at the edge of the deck was covered by a clear sheet of acrylic, forming a solid barrier for safety. Unless the acrylic caught the glint of the sun or you were within a few feet, you would never see it.

  It took him less than thirty seconds using a set of picks from his pocket to work the pins in the cylinder of the dead bolt at the back door. Using a tiny tension wrench and a pick, he aligned the pins along the sheer point inside the lock, and turned the cylinder until the dead bolt snapped open. In less than a minute he was inside and into the darkened pantry.

  Liquida knew the routine. The owner was a bachelor. The maid and the cook came and went, neither of them lived in. The maid came three days a week and always left by four in the afternoon. The cook was there each day, from just before breakfast until just after dinner. Without exception she was always gone by seven thirty in the evening.

  It was now just after ten at night, which meant that only the owner and his single houseguest were at home. The woman was part of his contract, but only because she was at the house with the old man. He knew about her from the photographs taken with a telephoto lens.

  The presence of the woman complicated things, but only slightly. They had to be taken separately, without a sound and in different rooms. Otherwise, he ran the risk that one of them might get to a phone or a door, or worse, a loaded gun. No one had told him to expect firearms, but he had to assume there might be one, perhaps more. It went with the turf, the nature of the old man’s business.

  He stood stone still, listening for sounds, the hum of a motor in the kitchen, and something else, maybe a fan, an exhaust vent somewhere. In the distance he could hear voices, faint, almost muted. He couldn’t be sure, but they sounded as if they were coming from somewhere upstairs.

  He glanced around the corner of the door into the kitchen. There was no one there, but there were two dirty dishes on the counter, small dessert plates, forks, and coffee cups. They must have had a late-night snack. The motor he’d heard from the pantry was the dishwasher. It was chugging away.

  Even though the nearest house was a hundred yards away, Liquida moved in a crouch, low, beneath the line of windows over the sink. He saw what he needed on the countertop of the island in the center of the kitchen. It was a hard wooden block with slots and the handles of eight knives were sticking out of it. He had his own, a folding survival knife with a razor-sharp blade. But he loved to use what was at hand, to make it look as if the murders were the result of a botched burglary.

  Down on one knee he reached up over the top of the counter and with a gloved hand sampled the cutlery. He pulled one out and then an other until he finally settled on a ten-inch chef’s knife. It had a needle-sharp point and a solid wooden handle that matched all the others. When the cops found it they would know where it came from. He could tell by the swirls in the metal that the blade was high-carbon steel. He tested it with his gloved finger. The cook, no doubt, kept the edge honed to a sharp finish.

  He moved away from the bright lights of the kitchen and down the dark hallway toward the living room and the front of the house. He knew from the floor plan that the stairs were to his left. The voices upstairs were now growing louder. He could make out a few words. They were arguing over something. The woman wasn’t shouting, but there was a definite edge of anger in her tone.

  Liquida strained to listen, trying to pick up the threads of the conversation on the second floor. Perhaps it was for this reason that he didn’t see the maid until he rounded the corner and faced the foot of the stairs. At first sighting, his eyes opened like saucers. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She had her back to him and was walking the other way, down the hall toward the dining room. Liquida froze in place, then tried to lean back into the shadows of the hall. At the last second, before he could retreat, the maid turned and saw him. She must have sensed the motion behind her.

  For a split second she stood there, a quizzical expression on her face, wondering who he was, or, perhaps more to the point, what he was.

  Liquida’s appearance often had this effect, for he wore a hooded lightweight neoprene wet suit to easily rinse the blood off. He closed the distance in an instant, and before breath could carry sound from her body, his gloved left hand was over her mouth.

  A stream of warm blood ran like a river from her abdomen down over the handle of the knife and the neoprene diving glove on his right hand. From the vigorous pulsing he knew it had severed a main artery. He kept his hand to her mouth until her knees buckled, her body convulsing.

  “Woman, what are you doing here at this hour?” he whispered in her ear. Liquida did not kill from wanton disregard. It was his business. He harvested people in the way a farmer harvests crops, because he was paid to do it. When fate placed a life under his knife because of the vagaries of chance, there was always regret. The fate of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The maid had stumbled into death in a cosmic collision between time and space.

  She went limp in his arms. He looked straight into her eyes, her pupils open like the lens of a camera. Her full weight was now completely supported by the handle of the knife wedged in her body. He eased her to the floor and slid out the knife.

  FOUR

  At this moment Katia had but a single thought as she looked at Emerson across the green felt inlay of his desk. It was strewn with more than two dozen gold coins of different sizes and shapes. Some of them were clearly hammered and stamped by hand. There were gold escudos from the old Inca mines of Peru and double eagles from the SS Central America that had sunk off the East Coast of the U.S. in 1857. They glinted in the muted light of the large study.

  In the morning he would go a few miles away to La Jolla to see his client. He would take Katia with him and make her sit in the car and wait. He had done this before. If she was lucky he might give her a few dollars and tell her to go shopping. But the cash he gave her was never enough to go far.

  He had already loaded most of the coins he would take tomorrow into a small sample case on the floor near the desk. They were valuable just for their gold content. They were worth much more to collectors. She had heard Emerson talk about this. Other coins encased in two plastic sheets lay scattered, off to the side of the desk, near the phone and the needle-sharp letter opener that some might have mistaken for a replica of a Byzantine dagger. Katia knew better, because he had told her. The dagger was real, fashioned from the finest Damascus steel and dating to
the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century. Emerson Pike had paid more than forty thousand dollars for the piece at a Christie’s auction three years ago. This was supposed to mean something to her, but it didn’t, other than the fact that Emerson Pike had more money than he could use.

  “I’m sorry I was so angry,” she said. “I don’t know why. I think I am just tired.”

  With the very suggestion he yawned. “Of course you are. Listen, I’m going to take a shower, try to wake myself up so that I can finish up here. Then I’m going to come to bed. Why don’t you go on ahead of me? I’ll be there in just a few minutes.”

  He put his hands on Katia’s shoulders once more. This time she did not pull away. Now was not the time to provoke him. Let him continue to believe.

  He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead, called her “sweetie.”

  She hated it when he called her that. It reminded her of Tweety, the stupid yellow bird in a cage in the cartoons. Still she gave him a smile, the full twinkle job. Two could play this game.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I am tired. But first I want to get a glass of milk. Do you want anything more?”

  “After that meal? You have to be kidding. I’m stuffed. Why, I’m falling asleep. But it was delicious. Don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re not a good cook,” said Emerson.

  “I won’t.”

  He yawned once more, stood there, and smiled at her.

  She could tell by the satisfied look on his face that Emerson believed she was back in the fold, at least for now. He would be fondling his ego in the shower, having won another battle. Emerson thought that at least there would be no need for separate bedrooms and the locked doors that could follow.

  Katia turned and headed out of the study, her heels clicking on the hardwood floor until she reached the plush carpet of the hallway outside. Emerson followed her. Katia turned toward the top of the stairs that descended to the first floor. Emerson headed the other way, toward the master bedroom and the shower. “See you in a few minutes, sweetie.”

  “Yes.” She could tell that the jaunty bounce was gone from his stride. Still, Katia was afraid that with the coffee and the shower Emerson would revive himself. It would be a long, uncertain night wondering if he was asleep, afraid each time she moved that he would wake. And by then the coins on his desk might be locked away.

  She took two steps down the stairs, then suddenly stopped and turned. She waited as she watched Emerson disappear down the long hallway and into the master bedroom.

  For a few seconds Liquida stood over the maid’s body, ten feet from the foot of the stairs. Straddling her, he carefully avoided the spreading pool of blood as he studied the situation. It presented complications, but nothing insurmountable, matters of adjustment to the original plan, little details. Still, they were important if the authorities were to believe what he wanted them to. He worked it out quickly in his head.

  Then he heard footsteps coming from upstairs, a woman’s heels on wood and then silence. Only at the last second did he realize she had traversed from the wood to a carpeted surface and was still moving this way and at speed. She was above him, directly behind him in the hallway at the top of the stairs.

  He slipped toward the shadows of the dining room, away from the foot of the stairs, and watched. If she saw the maid’s body before he could get to her on the stairs, everything would change. If he had to chase her up the stairs with the bloody knife, he could throw the plan out the window. He would have to torch the house, burn it to the ground to cover the physical evidence. If she screamed and the old man grabbed a gun, the coroner might be rolling his body and not theirs out to the hearse in the morning.

  She came into view on the landing above, started down two steps, and then suddenly stopped, as if she’d remembered something. The adrenaline pulsed through his veins. He was sure she saw the body. He gripped the knife. In his mind he was already flying up the stairs to take her until he realized—she wasn’t looking this way. Her attention was drawn to something behind her in the hallway upstairs. She stood there for two or three seconds and then, as suddenly as she’d appeared, she was gone, back up the steps and down the hall.

  He waited almost twenty seconds, certain that whatever fleeting distraction caught her attention would soon be dealt with and that she would be likely to return. But she didn’t.

  He listened intently. There was nothing but silence. Then he heard the sound of running water drumming on a hard surface somewhere toward the back of the house, a bathtub or a shower. Maybe they were settling in for the night. That would make it much easier.

  He retreated silently back down the hall, toward the kitchen. He was dripping blood from the knife on the hall carpet, but it didn’t matter. As long as he didn’t step in it on the way back and track it upstairs everything would be fine.

  Katia paused on the stairs, then turned around, headed back up, and entered one of the guest rooms along the hall. Working in the dark, she fished under the bed for the overnight bag, the one with her passport and visa. She ditched her heels, dropped them into the bag, changed her dress for a pair of hip-huggers and a blouse, and then put on a pair of running shoes and a jacket. It broke her heart to leave behind all of the clothes and some of the other things Emerson had bought for her, but there was no way to carry all of it. As it was, the small overnight bag was full.

  By the time she was finished, the water from Emerson’s shower had been running full bore for almost five minutes. Without a sound, she crept into the master bedroom. She had carefully thought it all through. This had to be her first stop. He had gone to the ATM that afternoon. She had watched him count the bills before he put them away in his hip pocket. He had left his pants on the bed. She pulled his wallet from the back pocket and quickly counted the cash, two hundred and sixty dollars in twenties along with a few smaller bills. She breathed a sigh of relief. She knew from her search on the Internet that this would be enough, at least for the first part of her journey. She took it all and tossed the empty wallet back onto the bed.

  She grabbed Emerson’s cell phone from his belt and, with the overnight bag over her shoulder, headed back down the hall, this time almost at a run. She ducked into the study and went directly to his desk. There she scooped into her bag every loose coin she could reach from the top of the desk. She took both of the plastic sheets with coins and stuffed them into the bag as well.

  Then she grabbed a piece of paper, one of Emerson’s embossed letterhead. Her eyes scoured the top of the desk for a pen but there wasn’t one. Typical of Emerson, he had every trinket and toy imaginable on his antique desk except something to write with. She fished in her purse and found a pen and scrawled a quick note in Spanish. She knew that he would be able to read it. Whether he would comply was doubtful.

  I am going back home to Costa Rica. I took some coins but only for airfare. Please do not try to follow me. I do not want to see you again. If you come near me, I will call the police.

  She signed it with a large letter “K,” dropped the pen on top of the paper, and then grabbed the letter opener, the Byzantine dagger, off the desk and laid it across the top of the note as a paperweight.

  He looked at the window over the sink, then checked his watch. He had no choice. He had to move and move quickly. He could not stay below the level of the windows and complete what he had to do. The way he was clad would cause anyone outside who happened to be looking to take immediate notice. He reached around the corner of the door and flipped off the lights in the kitchen. He quickly stepped up to the sink, washed the blood from the knife carefully, making sure that he got it all. Then without taking it off he rinsed the blood from the neoprene diving glove on his right hand as well as from the suit covering his forearm. The instant he was done he stepped away from the windows and back into the hall. He used a small dish towel to dry the gloves, the surface of the suit, and then the knife.

  He started down the hall, headed for the unfinished business upstairs.

&nbs
p; Zipping up the overnight bag, Katia ran out of the study and back down the long hallway toward the master bedroom and the back of the house. As she passed the door to the master bedroom, she realized suddenly that Emerson had turned off the water in the shower. He would be coming out any second.

  She dashed toward the end of the hall, toward the door that led to the back stairs and to the garage below. There was only one more thing she needed. She held the door behind her so that it closed with a gentle click. Then she moved down the steps as quickly and silently as the rubber-soled tennis shoes would carry her.

  Emerson would be donning his robe, running a brush through his hair and heading back into the bedroom any moment. Katia knew the routine. She had maybe two minutes, if that. By now she knew every move she had to make. She had thought it out carefully. This was her last chance.

  FIVE

  He was halfway up the stairs when the steady sound of running water somewhere at the rear of the house stopped. In the abrupt stillness, Liquida froze in place. In the momentary silence he thought he heard something.

  It was a distant and muted whisper of sound, faint, almost imperceptible. Perhaps the brush of a shoe across the deep pile of the carpeted floor somewhere at the other end of the hallway overhead.

  He readied the chef’s knife, now clean and bright in his hand, and crouched on the stairs, ready to spring the instant anyone appeared on the landing above. Liquida strained to hear and for several seconds listened motionless on the stairwell. There was a slight creak and then a click. It could have been a switch snapping on or off somewhere at the other end of the hall. Or maybe it was just the house settling, causing it to creak. He listened for several seconds, his gaze trained like a laser on the landing above. There was nothing, no one, no movement. In the silence after the constant sound of the running water, his hearing was playing tricks on him.