Guardian of Lies

by Steve Martini

  It was so simple, made to order. He picked it up by the blade between gloved fingers and used a heavy hardbound book to pound the end of the handle. He drove the dagger between the old man’s ribs in the upper chest area. Two good strokes and the blade was embedded almost to the hilt. He grabbed the note off the desk, flinging the light plastic pen onto the floor where it hit his foot and went under the desk. He didn’t care. He had what he wanted. He folded the note and slipped it into his pocket.

  Then he searched for the documents. He found what he thought might be one of them, but he wasn’t sure. It was the right size, a glossy print. It appeared to be hidden under a magazine on the desk. But it didn’t conform to what he remembered from the description of the photos he had been given. All the same, he unzipped the front of his suit and stuffed the single photograph into a quart-size ziplock bag. He placed the bag back against his chest and zipped up the suit. He would let them decide if it was part of the deal.

  He searched the desk drawers and two antique wooden filing cabinets that stood against the wall behind it. He went through every file. There was no sign of any of the other documents. He looked around the study. All of the coin drawers would have been too small to contain the photos, eight by ten inches from what he had been told.

  He spent several minutes looking in the master bedroom, the only other place he could think of where the old man might have kept them. But he had no luck. He looked in the bedroom where the woman kept her clothes, some in the closet and others folded in the bureau drawers. He combed through them. He didn’t find the documents, but he did find her camera. This was on the short list of items they wanted. It was in a case with one additional storage chip and an extra battery. He took the whole thing.

  He gave up the search for the documents and went back to the study. The only other item he was specifically instructed to look for was Pike’s laptop computer and any storage devices that might be hooked up to it. The laptop was on the desk with a single thumb drive plugged into it. He bagged the computer and the thumb drive. Then he went to work with his survival knife, the one strapped to his leg. He jimmied more than twenty locked drawers in the study and swept everything that looked like gold from each drawer into a large folding canvas bag that he’d brought for this purpose. By the time the bag was full, between the gold, the laptop, its cord with the power box, the thumb drive, and the woman’s small camera, he was afraid the bottom would fall out of the canvas bag. He could barely lift it.

  The gold was an added perk, the freedom to take whatever he wanted from the collection of coins as long as he disposed of them in a manner that could never be traced. There would be no way for the police to know how many coins the woman took or who broke into the drawers. Now, instead of a random burglary, they would solve the crime quickly and in the process take care of the woman for him.

  Down in the kitchen he washed up the chef’s knife one more time and left it on the sink. As a finishing touch, he added just a tiny trace of blood from the maid. This he picked off her body with the point of his own knife and carefully transferred to a crevice near the handle. He knew that the evidence technicians would find this and that police would conclude that the maid was killed last. He transferred smears of blood from Pike onto the maid’s clothing, this to further reinforce the order of death. A little blood smeared on the front door near the handle, with the door left partially open, and Liquida made his escape. He went out the way he had come in, out the back door, locking it behind him.

  Eighteen hours later police in Arizona picked up the woman. One enterprising reporter for an Arizona paper got wind of some of the coins taken by the female suspect and interviewed the pawnshop owner where she’d peddled them. Everything was working perfectly, or so he thought.

  Liquida had never been in this much trouble before on any job. The people who hired him were not happy. It is the problem when you are hired to kill people but you are not told why, which is often the case.

  He had been led to believe that the woman was not critical to the job. They had told him that if she was away from the house at the time Pike was killed, that that would be acceptable. In which case he was to use his best efforts to find and retrieve the documents, the photographs if he could, and to forget about the woman. He was told that killing Pike was critical in order to separate the old man from the documents. If he could find the photographs, he was to get a bonus.

  The problem was that the man and the woman seemed inseparable. One never left the house without the other. It was for this reason he concluded that he would have to take them both.

  But according to his employers, allowing her to escape death was one thing, setting her up for murder was another. His plan to have her arrested had blown up in his face.

  In Liquida’s business, clients were never interested in excuses, or in how difficult a job was. You commanded a high fee because you could do the work. Once you failed on a major contract, word got out. If your failure jeopardized people in high places, you could lose more than just your career.

  This morning as he sat drinking his coffee he was waiting for a message. All of the machines inside the Internet café were busy. He would have to wait.

  Liquida never used cell phones. They were far too dangerous. Even dynastic drug lords thought to be immortal were visited by death from the sky, found charred and frozen, their ears gone, but with one of the tiny plastic phones melted to the side of their head.

  Instead Liquida maintained no less than twenty different e-mail addresses, each under a separate alias and all of them free—Hotmail, Yahoo, and a dozen more. The best, the most protected, were operated by overseas providers, in places where the reach of the U.S. government was limited or, better yet, nonexistent. He would contact employers on a regular basis and they would reply.

  He used each address only once, and discarded each daily, like underwear. He alternated among providers to make it difficult for the government to set him up, to track his movements, or to read his mail.

  To mask the messages he used encryption, not the stuff for e-mail that came loaded on your home computer, but custom made. In Liquida’s world, paranoia was an acquired discipline. This meant that the keys to almost all commercial encryption software were already in the possession of the American government.

  He hired a gentleman in Guadalajara who fashioned the encoding software from complex algorithms. After that the man destroyed the master key to prevent anyone else from getting at it. Liquida knew this because he’d watched him do it, thirty seconds before he killed the man, cutting his throat and torching every inch of his office with gasoline.

  After Pike’s murder and the disappearance of the woman, there was relative silence for a time. This changed abruptly with the news of the woman’s arrest. According to Liquida’s contact, the go-between who had acted on behalf of higher-ups to commission the job, the inefficiency with which it was done was now threatening ominous results.

  While Liquida was not told why this was a problem, he was told that people would soon be asking questions about Pike and his background. He knew very little about the old man.

  Pike’s documents were still unaccounted for. The one he produced was on its way to them by DHL along with the old man’s computer.

  But the most ominous problem, the one that caused him to stay up nights wondering if they might soon be issuing another commission, this time on his own life, was their unbridled anger over the woman’s arrest. Either she was important or she wasn’t. If she was critical to their plan, they should have told him this, in which case he would have arranged it so that she could not escape.

  The answer came in an encrypted e-mail message five minutes later. He took the message from one of the computers inside the café and downloaded the encoded machine language onto a tiny thumb drive plugged into the computer’s USB port. Then he erased the message from the in-box, removing it from the most obvious location inside the computer. He knew there would be copies of it in other places, both inside the computer an
d with the various providers along the ether chain. But this could not be helped and all of the copies were scrambled. And even if someone could read it, unless they knew what they were looking for, they might not understand it.

  He removed the thumb drive and retreated to the table outside and his coffee.

  From his backpack he removed a small antiquated notebook computer. It was the size of a thin hardcover novel. Somewhat beaten up and worn, it had never once been connected to the Internet or any other computer network. It contained no data of any kind, only the basic operating system and a single user program.

  Liquida booted up the computer and punched up the program. He slipped the thumb drive into the single USB port on the back of the machine and pulled up the message. After several clicks on the keyboard the words appeared, not encrypted, but in plain Spanish. As usual, it was brief and, except to the most discerning reader, it would have been completely obscure.

  The following is a riddle. See if you can find the solution:

  You have released the serpent of coiled and twisting justice. The head is female but with scaled eyes. She does not see, and therefore cannot strike. But beware the thrashing tail. It may turn over rocks not comprehending what is there and snag vines not knowing to what they are attached. It may crawl into places it should not go. Solution: how do you dispatch a serpent?

  It was not what Liquida expected. They were not worried because the woman had information she might reveal. She knew nothing. Her eyes were scaled.

  He studied the message, and from the lines of the riddle he quickly deduced the problem.

  He had driven the woman to the one place he should not have, into the glare of a trial in an American courtroom. It was not what she might say, but what they might discover as a consequence that worried his employers. The serpent’s thrashing tail was the probing investigators and inquisitive American lawyers who would attach themselves to the woman before and during her trial.

  Unlike other places it was a process that could not be sedated, put to sleep with bribes. Kill the judge here and it was instant national news. Shoot one of the lawyers and another would take his place before they could remove the body. If you became too obvious, the hammer of the American federal government, with all of the dark forces at its command, would fall on you. Liquida knew that his own employers would kill him long before they allowed that to happen.

  He took a deep breath. He had no idea what they were up to, but whatever it was, they now believed it to be in jeopardy because of what he had done. The serpent “may crawl into places it should not go” in the words of the riddle. He had set in motion something neither he nor they could control.

  It was by far the largest contract he had ever received. People didn’t pay that kind of money unless what they were doing was substantial and with a high degree of risk. What revelations might be uncovered he had no idea; what’s more, he didn’t care. He didn’t want to know. It was not his business.

  What was his business, and the only thing that occupied his mind at the moment, was how to achieve the ultimate message of the e-mail, the answer to the riddle. The way you kill a serpent is by cutting off its head.

  TEN

  The fact that Katia told us about the note first, about writing it and leaving it on Pike’s desk, but never mentioned the dagger is, according to Harry, part of the deeper equation of truth.

  “Think about it,” he says.

  This morning Harry, I, and Herman Diggs, the investigator we have used for some years now, are inside the yellow police tape that surrounds Emerson Pike’s house on the hill above Del Mar. Herman is inside the house with one of the homicide detectives going over details of the crime scene.

  The other homicide detective and a small cadre of uniformed cops stand huddled out near the front gate. Harry has the public defender’s file, including copies of the police and investigative reports from that night and for several days afterward as they processed the scene. Everything has now been transferred to us.

  “If she plunged that dagger into Pike’s chest, then I’m a sword swallower and I’ll eat it whole,” says Harry. He is talking softly, under his breath, even though the officers are too far away to hear anything.

  “You saw the look on her face. She didn’t know a thing about it. Nothing clicked until I mentioned her fingerprints and then only because she realized she moved the damned thing when she put it on top of the note.”

  Harry is preaching to the choir. The entire chain of events leading up to and surrounding the murders reeks of contrivance. I had decided to take the case long before that point. Katia reminded me of my daughter. I could see Sarah caught up in circumstances in a foreign country, and I wondered if anyone would put out a helping hand. Katia had felt trapped and I knew it, though Harry did not.

  “None of it makes sense,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “Then why don’t you say something?”

  “Why, do you need convincing?”

  He gives me one of those patented Harry looks. “Strangest damn house I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Looks like it’s falling apart until you get up close. Place gives me the willies.”

  “It’s what Katia said, remember, when she asked Emerson about it. He just passed it off, told her he had a strange sense of curb appeal and that she’d get used to it in time. She didn’t understand what he was saying.”

  What is clear is that Pike designed the house to avoid attention. It wasn’t what you would call an eyesore, just enough so that you wouldn’t look twice. It was all he had, that and the security system, to protect the place when he was away, which was most of the time.

  “Weird,” says Harry.

  “Maybe.”

  “There’s so much, I don’t know where to start. Nothing we’ve heard, read, or seen so far makes any sense,” says Harry. “So I guess the house fits right in. We’re supposed to believe that Katia stuck the dagger into Pike in a rage, then stumbled into the maid downstairs and killed her, but then had the presence of mind to wash off the knife only to leave it on the sink…”

  “With a trace of blood on it,” I remind him.

  “Yeah, pure as a transfusion, no cross contamination,” says Harry. “She stabbed Pike and then the maid with the same knife and all we get on the knife is a trace of the maid’s blood, none of Pike’s.”

  “And you would think she’d have rinsed her hands at the same time she washed off the knife,” I tell him.

  Harry gives me a quizzical glance as we cross the grass near the side of the house.

  “Begs the question, how did the blood get on the front door?” I ask. “According to the lab report, again, all of it belongs to the maid, no cross contamination, though they found evidence of Pike’s blood on the maid’s clothing.”

  He thinks about this for a second. “The cops will probably say she touched the door before she realized it, then went back to the kitchen to ditch the knife.”

  “I see, so she caught herself, but then forgot about the dagger upstairs, the one in Pike’s body with her prints all over it, and no blood at all on the handle, just her fingerprints. So why didn’t she wash them off?”

  “Because she didn’t plant the dagger to begin with,” says Harry. “Some other dude did it. It’s the only thing we’ve heard so far that makes any sense.”

  “To us, maybe.”

  In the early going it can often look like a slam dunk, all the little inconsistencies in the state’s case, the things a prosecutor won’t be able to explain. In most cases, you can be sure that before they get to trial the state will find a way to wrap them all neatly into their case.

  “We both know what the DA is going to say, through his experts, of course,” says Harry. “That your average killer is scared witless. That after the crime Katia panicked. And because of this she made stupid mistakes, blood on the door, dagger in the body. Three cheers for panic and stupidity.”

  Harry makes all of this sound sufficiently plausible to worry me. Jurors might just b
elieve it.

  Harry is looking at his notes. “Seems for a while the cops thought they might have had evidence of drugs, but it turned out negative.”

  I look at him.

  “They found three or four little muslin bags, the tops tied off with string. They tested the substance. It came up catnip.”

  “Three or four of these, you say?”

  Harry pages through the report, finds it with his finger. “Actually five. One of them was ripped open. Some traces of dander on it, so they assume a cat must have gotten it.”

  “Did Pike own a cat?”

  Harry shakes his head. “Not as far as I know. No animals. Police would have brought in animal control. And there’s no indication in the report. According to the people who knew Pike, he was out of the country more than half the year, traveling. Mostly in Latin America, I assume for business. He would have to board an animal if he had one.”

  “Let’s check it out. See if there’s any record of Pike having owned or boarded a cat.”

  Harry makes a note.

  We cease our aimless prowling along the grass at the side of the house and look for the motion sensors, part of the security system that was down the night of the murders.

  “Do we know where the motion sensors are located?”

  “In this area somewhere,” says Harry. He looks through the file. There is a diagram of the outside of the house, but it is not to scale. Harry can’t be certain where the nearest sensor is located. “Let me check with one of the homicide detectives,” he says. “Gimme a second.”

  Harry heads off toward the gate, where the cops are all clustered.

  In the meantime I wander toward the house. A breeze hits the line of camellias as I approach them and something catches my eye. The wind keeps the bush open for a second. It could be a piece of trash, perhaps a small paper wrapper. In the fluttering leaves I see it dangling inside the foliage, off white and oval shaped. As I peer closer, it appears to be streaked by a tea-colored stain.