His tires crackled over the quartz rocks, leaving Daniel holding his money.
Chapter 15
By the time Daniel neared home, the sleeplessness of the prior night had caught up to him, turning the dusk beyond the windshield even blurrier. He groaned when he saw the car double-parked in front of the house next door. And there Ted was, popping into view behind the raised hatchback, shuffling reusable shopping bags and three children and gesturing for Daniel to come say hello. Daniel forced a smile as he pulled in to the garage, then walked out to where Ted waited beside the Subaru Outback—the one he’d gone to great pains to tell Daniel was built at a zero-landfill plant.
“Hey, Ted.” Hoping to convey hurriedness, Daniel moved to check his and Cris’s mailbox at the edge of their small front lawn. It also gave him an excuse to avoid full eye contact and—he hoped—engagement.
“Daniel, listen, Danika and I are having another implosion-sculpture event in the back courtyard this Friday, and we’d love it if you and Cristina would come.”
The last one had been excruciating, everyone standing around slurping white sangria while the air was sucked from a giant steel cube, collapsing it in an ostensibly artistic fashion.
Daniel scooped out the mail and paused, collecting himself here in the gorgeous golden Pacific Heights dusk. He was smitten with more aspects of San Francisco than he could keep track of. And then there were Ted and Danika Shea.
Danika had been third-tier on a start-up that in the nineties had blown up sufficiently to turn third-tier stock options into professional-athlete money. Since then she and Ted had dedicated themselves to a life of unremitting self-focus, each trend embraced with the aggressive, authoritative air of the recently converted. Paleo one week, macrobiotic the next. Almonds for sex drive, açai berries for weight loss, fair-trade coffee for the soul. Cross-fit, suspension training, Bikram that will save your life. The celebrity chefs spoken of in intimate terms—You know how Emeril is with his andouille! And the causes brandished like weapons or NPR tote bags—carbon offset, female genital mutilation, orphans in Rwanda—each charity-of-the-week paid the same loving devotion as the newest windsurf board or Manchego. Five years ago the home births had started, with candles and doulas and tubs of body-temperature water, all recounted with inappropriate detail in bizarrely riveting holiday newsletters. The products of these mystical deliveries were indistinguishable mop-headed blond boys, Jayden and Lucas, who, armed with metal water bottles, were currently dueling over the head of their younger adopted sister, Simone.
Tonight Daniel’s irritation with the Sheas was closer to the surface than usual, perhaps because he’d been worn thin by the past twenty-four hours. Or perhaps it was in reaction to the fun-house-mirror effects his neighbors wreaked on his own values, the contradictions blown huge, the hypocrisies stretched wider. The Sheas were colossal phonies, sure, but Daniel had his own flickers of self-doubt, those mornings when he felt like he was faking it, too, dressing down and going out into the real world. Evelyn’s voice returned: How are you these days? Still rubbing elbows with criminals for a living?
Finally turning to face Ted, he mumbled an excuse for why he and Cris could not make the implosion-sculpture event.
“Well, do your best,” Ted instructed. “I mean, this is silly. We live right next door, and we never see each other.”
Jayden or Lucas bonked the girl on the head, and she gave out a strident wail. Ted crouched, took Jayden or Lucas gently by the shoulders, and said, “I’m hearing Simone say she doesn’t like that.”
Daniel used the diversion to slip away.
* * *
Rain hammered the wall of glass, turning the city lights into smears of orange and yellow and making the second-floor perch of their living room feel like a tree fort. Cris lay curled into Daniel on the couch, reading the Chronicle and sipping a Pacífico with lime. His feet were propped on the glass coffee table next to their dirty dinner plates, his knees forming a makeshift desk on which he attempted to fill out the termination agreement. Though he was doing his best to concentrate, his mind kept wandering back to that slightly ajar red door at Chestnut Street.
Except this time, instead of pausing, he kicks right through, tearing it from its hinges. The masked man appears in the kitchen doorway, startled, and then he and Daniel charge each other like something out of a samurai-warrior flick. Barely slowing, Daniel embeds the butcher knife in the would-be killer’s solar plexus, and he crumples, and Daniel gets to Marisol, and she’s terrified, yes, but still breathing, and he’s able to untie her hands and dab the blood from her cheeks, telling her help is on the way, it’s all okay now, and—
“You all right up there?” Cristina asked.
“Huh?”
“Your knees are jiggling. I’m getting whiplash.”
The room strobed with a double flicker of lightning, and an instant later the rumble moved through the floorboards. The effect of the vast window and downslanting rain turned the world outside into something treacherous.
“Sorry,” he said. “I…”
“What?”
“I wish I’d gone through her door quicker.” He hadn’t stated it so starkly yet, at least to his wife, and the words hauled up the emotion from where he’d tamped it down.
Cris reached up to touch his face. “I know, mi vida. But who knows what kind of mess that would’ve led to? Maybe Marisol would be dead anyway and I wouldn’t have you here tonight.” She pushed herself up to face him. “That half hour waiting for your call, Daniel, it felt like a month. And I went through it all in my head. The death notification. Your funeral. How I could never live here without you because you’re everywhere I look in this house. And how goddamned angry I’d be with you for running out and getting yourself killed.”
“Okay. Let’s not get angry now.”
She touched his face again. “Take me upstairs.”
He tossed down the paperwork and stood, hoisting her over his shoulder.
“Stop it! Your back! I’m too heavy. And those creepy Shea kids—Grayson and Chase—will see through the window.”
He dumped her on the couch, laughing. “Jayden and Lucas.”
She was cracking up now, tugging at his shirt, trying to pull him down on top of her. “Hamilton and Greydon. And their sister, Baba Ghanoush.”
Still chuckling, he fell, bracing himself against the arm of the couch. Through the rain-streaked window, a figure in the street caught his eye, the sight freezing the grin on his face.
A feminine form in a bright yellow rain slicker, hood pulled up over her head, standing in the precise middle of the street. But it wasn’t just her reckless position that stopped him cold. It was that she remained perfectly still, like one of Castanis’s corporate goddesses. Her face was cast in shadow, but the tilt and focus of the dark oval beneath the hood made clear: She was staring directly up at him.
Then she did something that turned the blood in Daniel’s veins to frost.
She lifted an arm, dripping with rainwater, and pointed at him.
A car skidded past her on the slippery asphalt, horn blaring, throwing a sheet of water against her yellow slicker, but she didn’t so much as flinch. A stone statue pointing, it seemed, in accusation. Accusing him of what?
Cris had slid up on the couch to peer over the leather arm. He heard a breath catch in her throat.
The drops running down the pane and the ongoing deluge turned the woman into a blurry outline. Daniel couldn’t exhale, couldn’t move. It seemed she had frozen him there by some curse.
A fierce rattle beside them broke the spell. He jerked violently, and Cris fell back on the cushions, grabbing her chest.
It was just his cell phone, vibrating against the glass table.
Keeping his eyes glued on the woman, he reached behind him and fumbled for the phone. Finally he glanced down.
A text from UNKNOWN CALLER. Dooley? Thank God.
He tapped the screen, and a photo came up.
Recognition dawned in d
egrees. First that the startled face, bleached fish white by the camera flash, belonged to him. Second, that his alarmed posture—recoiled against a wall beside a narrow doorway, brandishing a butcher knife—conveyed nothing so much as terror. Third, that the feathering of blood that marked the kitchen tile beyond Daniel’s frozen image was Marisol Vargas’s last breath, sprayed through the slit in her neck.
When he finally came back into his body and tore his gaze from the phone, the woman in the street had vanished.
Chapter 16
He heard Cristina’s worried queries as if he were underwater, the edges of her words blunted and warbling. When he handed her the phone, it trembled in his grasp. The double shock had taken the air right out of his lungs, and he lowered himself to the couch and calmly caught his breath while Cris sprang into action, calling Dooley, forwarding the text message, and firing off a reply text to the picture’s sender, only to be answered by a red error exclamation point.
“He has,” Cristina said breathlessly, “your number now.”
“They know where I live.”
“So you think that woman is working with the killer?”
“It has to be related. Doesn’t it? The timing, my phone going off just then—”
“They found you.” Her voice, low with dread. “This quickly.”
He thought of his goddamned picture tacked up on that glass-encased staff bulletin board on the third floor of Metro South. How easy it must have been for someone who frequented the building to connect the dots.
Cris had asked something. She repeated the question: “Why was she pointing at you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe just to show that they know who I am.”
“But she seemed to be, I don’t know…”
“I have no idea.”
The text alert on his phone chimed again. The picture, re-sent.
Then again. Again. Again. Populating the screen before his and Cristina’s horrified eyes with image after image of that snapshot. A relentless barrage.
“Turn it off,” Daniel said.
Cris remained motionless, so he grabbed for the phone and powered it down.
They sat side by side on the couch, breathing. Then Cris rose and began to clear the plates. He followed suit. They washed and loaded the dishwasher and ran the trash compactor, and then Cris turned into him suddenly and they hugged each other tightly there before the sink.
“Dooley got the forwarded text,” Cris said into his chest. “She’ll pull our phone records and try to trace it. I told her I’d sign off on all that.”
He nodded. Clutched the fragile stalk of her neck. “How about the woman?”
“She didn’t know what to say about that but thought the phone route was the strongest play for her to jump on now. Keep the doors locked, alarm on. Duh.”
They listened to the rain beating against the walls, thrumming off the roof.
“How do you think he got your phone number?” she asked. “Our address?”
Daniel reached over and dropped the Pacífico bottle into the slide-out recycling bin. “Records at work.”
“Those are supposed to be private.”
“It’s not exactly Fort Knox. And the building’s rife with fucking bottom feeders.”
The words flew out, hard-edged, followed by a wash of regret.
Cris just looked at him.
“Come on,” he said. “What? I’m angry right now, Cris. Do I have to watch my phrasing in my own house?”
“No. You shouldn’t ever have to watch your phrasing.”
“So what’s that? I say something when I’m being threatened and that means it’s my secret truth coming out?”
“Of course not.” She started walking upstairs to the bedroom.
“What then?”
She turned, gripping the railing. “When I was a baby, my mom smuggled me into this country on the birth certificate of my cousin who died at three months. I wasn’t even legal until I graduated high school. And no matter what my last name is now, I will always be that.”
“What are you saying? You’re worried you can’t get past your background?”
“No. I’m worried you can’t get past yours.”
Anything he was going to say next, he knew he’d regret, so he kept his mouth shut.
“There is a killer who has your cell-phone number,” Cris said, her voice cracking. “Your number. That bastard has slaughtered two people already. Believe me—I get the stakes here. But it still throws me to hear you … I don’t know, channeling Evelyn.”
He took a few breaths, tried to untense his shoulders. “All right,” he said. “But we also can’t start dragging our histories into this.”
“If you’re allowed to say stupid shit when you’re mad, then I’m allowed to say stupid shit when I’m terrified.” She blinked, and tears fell. “Okay? We both need to reserve our right to say stupid shit sometimes.”
She stepped down into his embrace, squeeze-hugging him around the neck hard enough to choke off his air. “I want to get someone to guard you,” she said. “All the time.”
He tugged at her arm a little, and she loosened her grip. She was one stair higher than him, the perfect relative height, her cheek warm against his. At the end of the day, only the faintest traces of her shampoo and lotion lingered, orange blossom and vanilla blending with the delightful, intangible smell of her.
“Let’s talk about it,” he said.
“What’s to talk about? Think what this guy did to that woman’s face. And to Jack Holley. He promised he was gonna kill them, and then he just … did.”
“No one’s promised to kill me yet.”
“He saw you. And then he took your picture. And then he sent it to you on your own cell phone. And probably sent someone to our house. Whatever he’s doing, it’s escalating.”
The doorbell rang.
Chapter 17
The alarm was on, knob locked, deadbolt thrown, security chain hooked. Daniel and Cristina stood on the bottom stair, confronting the front door across the foyer.
Daniel stepped down, crossed the tile, and pressed his eye to the peephole, making out a distorted bulge of a masculine face. He barely recognized the menacing rumble of his own voice. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Leo.” A clipped, hard-to-place accent. “I—”
“Step back from the door,” Daniel said. “To the edge of the porch.”
The man complied, coming into better focus through the peephole. Bald, short, and stocky—a bowling pin of a man. His nose seemed smashed against his face, pounded flat from multiple breaks. Rain caught him there at the porch’s lip, but he barely seemed to notice.
“What do you want?”
“Mrs. Evelyn Brasher sent me.”
Cristina made wary eye contact, her hands up, confused.
“Are you a bodyguard?” Daniel called through the door.
“Not specifically, no.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I’ve dealt with situations like this. On a lot of continents.”
“Like what?”
“Like this.” The man clasped his hands at his belt line, motionless save for a slight shift of the knee that betrayed his impatience. “How can I put this? I’m overqualified for this particular job.”
“You still haven’t answered why you’re here.”
“I told you why I’m here.” A pause. Then, “Mrs. Brasher has a lot of money.”
“And you want to … what? Follow us around everywhere?”
“No. My job is to protect you here. At home. While you sleep. Think of me as a very expensive guard dog.”
“You plan on sleeping here?”
“Not sleeping, no. But staying through the night.”
“No thanks,” Daniel said.
He turned from the peephole, but Cristina put her hand up on the door, her arm blocking him. She drew close and whispered, “Marisol’s killer has your picture. He has your phone number. He knows who you are. And where we live. You’re my
husband, which means I get a vote.”
“I am not taking anything from my mom,” Daniel said, doing his best to keep his voice low.
“Your life is at stake here,” Cris said.
“We can get our own bodyguard.” His teeth were clenched. “Through our own contacts.”
“That’ll take time. We have a problem tonight.”
Cris, stiff as a plank, up on her tiptoes, their faces close enough to kiss. Trying to have a whispered argument behind the proverbial closed door. A bead of sweat slid down Daniel’s side, tickling his ribs.
The gravelly voice came from outside. “You really want to risk getting dead because of some stupid pride bullshit with your mother?”
Releasing a breath, Daniel looked into the patterned whorls of the miniature Zen garden on the table. Cris read the answer in his body language, and the tension eased out of her. She kissed him on the cheek, turned off the alarm, undid the locks, and twisted the knob, but then Daniel put his palm on the door and banged it shut again, hard.
“How do we know my mother sent you?” he called out.
The man cleared his throat and said, flatly, “‘And do try to avoid tangling with Catalina, that angsty wife of his.’”
Daniel lifted his hand from the door in surrender, and Cris, biting back a smile, swung it open.
Chapter 18
The following evening, before parking and unpacking himself from the smart car, Daniel circled the entire garage level of Metro South to check the shadows, as he’d been instructed by Leo Rizk, the man sent by Evelyn. After they’d let him in from the rain last night, the man had proved highly focused and capable. Leo claimed they should now consider their house a fortress, and Daniel had to admit that he felt no small measure of comfort with the guy there. This morning when he’d headed down for his run, he’d found Leo sitting on the stairs with ramrod-straight posture and his handgun resting on his thigh. He’d turned his alert stare on Daniel and said, “No iPod, right? We need you alert and aware out there,” and Daniel had lowered his hood to show him that he wasn’t wearing headphones. Leo had snapped off a nod and scooted over to let him pass.
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