City of Strangers (Luis Chavez Book 2)

by Mark Wheaton

  Michael eyed his boss. She was taking it pretty hard. He wondered if she was still holding out hope that her reelection possibilities could get back on track with this case. She must know now that it was all over.

  “Did anything show up on the cameras?” Michael asked.

  “Not a damn thing. The deputy used his own cuffs. We’re pretty sure the poison was applied when he was at home. We checked the cuffs of everyone else on shift, and his were the only ones that had been tampered with. They clearly didn’t care if he died, too.”

  “No,” Michael said.

  “‘No’ what?” Rebenold asked.

  “Wearing latex gloves is practically procedure these days for anyone that has direct contact with inmates. They must’ve known that. He wouldn’t have actually touched the poison unless he had a reason to take the cuffs out before he went on shift.”

  Rebenold stared at him. In that moment Michael felt her taking his measure. He was the better investigator of the two. He had the instincts.

  “Any word from the Chinese government?” he asked.

  “Of course!” Rebenold said, throwing up her hands. “There are already endless newspaper articles filled with speculation and quotes about the ‘tragic situation,’ selling Yamazoe’s ‘suicide’ as an ‘honorable man acknowledging his guilt.’ They’re talking him up like he’s a hero, a man of great sacrifice avenging a crime against his family by a vile Western priest.”

  “Jeez.”

  “But you know the best part? The detail that won’t ever come out really but will keep me awake for years to come?”

  Michael waited to hear it.

  “A Hong Kong paper was among the first to run the story online. It hit about twenty minutes after we announced the death to the press. There was a quote by some minor government functionary expressing sympathy for Yamazoe’s family and how his suicide restored the honor of his name after the murder.”

  “Random.”

  “Right, but it was very explicit, very thought-out. So I searched for the guy online. It turned out that he’s one of those types that’s drawn to a television camera like a moth to a flame. He was, in fact, on a talk show the entire time, from the announcement until his quote ran.”

  “Live? Not pretaped?” Michael asked.

  “Live. If anyone asks, I’m sure they’ll say his office provided the quote, not him. But he has deep ties to the Hong Kong triad. He must’ve known what was about to happen. And if he knew, a lot of people knew. I’ll never be able to prove it, but I’ll never not believe it.” Father Chavez had said something like this about a misdeed of Michael’s not long ago. Michael thought he’d even used the exact same words.

  “You talked to Jeff Lambert last night,” Rebenold said.

  It wasn’t a question. Michael looked over at Rebenold to see if she was hunting his face for a lie, but she wasn’t looking at him. He knew she’d be able to tell from his voice anyway.

  “I told him no,” Michael said.

  Rebenold scoffed and turned to him. “Look, I was initially pissed off that they made the decision without consulting me,” Rebenold said. “It was an ambush, it couldn’t have happened in a vacuum, so I started looking around for who might have been on it. For a time I thought that included you.”

  “I had no—”

  Rebenold raised a hand to silence him. “I know. But once I realized the fix was in and I was out, the idea of moving to DC began to reveal its appeal. Burt has family back there. Baltimore. Frederick. And there’s nothing worse than hanging around when everyone’s waiting for you to show yourself to the door.”

  Michael said nothing. He didn’t necessarily care what Rebenold had to say about all this, but he knew better than to do anything but let her say her piece.

  “So, if you magically ‘think about it some more’ and decide to run, you’ll have my full support. Cool?”

  Michael hadn’t expected this. When he’d postulated the various scenarios that ended up with him on the election trail, one of the big what-ifs was how it would look to the public if his former boss didn’t endorse him, much less campaign for him. Now, if she was out there waving signs and giving speeches, this just might work.

  “I appreciate it, but I don’t know if I’m ready. What do you think I should do?”

  Rebenold laughed so loud and with such vicious incredulity that Michael wished he could tuck himself into one of the morgue’s cold chambers.

  “You’re going to have to do a lot better than that if you want to win a political election, Michael,” she chided. “Your silence was enough. Trying to ingratiate yourself when you already know damn well you’re going to run is just déclassé. Make this all about you on your own time, Michael.”

  With that, Rebenold exited the postmortem examination room. Michael took one last look at Yamazoe’s body, plucked his cell phone out of his pocket, and dialed a number.

  “Yes, Mr. Lambert’s office, please. Thank you.”

  Luis was escorted from the sick woman’s bedside directly into an isolation room of his own. A security guard was stationed outside.

  “You’re being quarantined for your own good,” a nurse told him. “We don’t think there was any exposure, but part of this is because you were a real jackass back there. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Luis said.

  As soon as he was alone, he took out his phone and ran the name he’d seen on the paramedic’s form: Esmeralda Carreño.

  For a moment he thought he’d come across the wrong person. The woman whose Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn pages came up was a larger person who looked about twenty years younger than the woman in the isolation tent. But then he recognized the eyes, and it horrified him even more. How quickly had she disintegrated?

  Beyond the photos and a résumé, there wasn’t much to go on. No address, no son’s name, no link to a Mrs. Gomez. He wasn’t sure what he expected, but he had less than nothing to go on. He wished he’d waited to see if someone brought in her purse or ID, but that might’ve been risking a call to the police.

  He had tried to make his case to the two security guards on the way to the isolation room, but they weren’t having it.

  “If she’s got a sick kid out there, the cops’ll take care of it,” said one of the guards. “You don’t understand. Two days ago we started getting weird calls like this one. People who shouldn’t be getting this sick from what looks like a summer flu are dying.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Luis asked.

  The guard shrugged. “My girl is on the night shift here. She said people are talking. Doctors have been told to look for certain symptoms. They’re not letting the information go wide, because they know it’ll start a panic. But something’s going on. You saw how fast those masks went on in there.”

  Luis had, but he hadn’t thought much of it. It was a hospital. People were sick. Masks seemed smart. Whatever.

  But once he was in the room alone, he couldn’t think like that. Ms. Carreño had found him, had asked him to do something for her. She obviously knew she was dying. Her only thoughts were for her son. This was not something he could take lightly. God wouldn’t have put it in front of him if he’d meant for his priest to look the other way.

  So Luis raised his phone and dialed a number he’d probably called three dozen times in the past two weeks alone. He prayed the voice mail wouldn’t be full when it clicked over. When it beeped, he spoke as quickly and as plainly as possible.

  “This is a matter of life and death. Not mine. A woman at Good Samaritan named Esmeralda Carreño was just brought in at death’s door. She’s worried that her son is infected, too. He’s at a ‘Mrs. Gomez’s house.’ That’s all I have. I’m afraid that if he doesn’t get to a doctor soon, he may end up here, too.”

  There was so much else he wanted to say, but he knew better. He hung up and hoped for the best.

  For the next half hour Luis alternated between praying and searching the websites of local LA news outlets for word on the other death
s. He found nothing to substantiate what the security guard had said. But that didn’t mean anything.

  When his phone rang, the caller ID read 310-111, not even a real number. He answered immediately.

  “Miguel,” Luis said.

  “The son’s name is Federico,” said a voice, distant and flat. “Mrs. Gomez is Abigail Gomez of 3432 Sierra Street in Montecito Heights.” Then he gave a phone number.

  As there was no paper or pen in the isolation room, Luis put the phone on speaker and quickly typed the number into his notepad.

  “Thank you for this,” Luis said. “I really appreciate it.”

  The silence that followed went on for so long that Luis thought Miguel might’ve hung up. He wouldn’t have blamed him. But then he heard the young man shift his weight.

  “Are you still there?” Luis asked.

  Miguel said nothing. Luis pressed on.

  “I sent you an e-mail about the murder of a priest. Somebody paid off his killer. I think it was the LA triad. I was wondering if you could look into any bank records or—”

  The line went dead. Luis cursed himself for using this opportunity to speak to Miguel for something like a case rather than to find out how the young man was doing. Pastor Whillans was wrong. He was failing the young Higuera boy every chance God provided him.

  Luis dialed the number Miguel had given him for Mrs. Gomez. She picked up, thankfully, after two rings.

  “Bueno?”

  In Spanish, Luis identified himself as a priest, explained where he was, and quietly informed Mrs. Gomez about what had happened. He expected perhaps hysterics, but she was cool and collected. He realized that this wasn’t likely her first time dealing with a tragedy.

  “I will call the boy’s father right now and tell him what you said,” Mrs. Gomez replied. “It should be him that informs his son.”

  “Yes, I agree.”

  “He’s going to have to be a man now,” she said. “His grandfather passed only a couple of days ago, too.”

  Alarm bells went off in Luis’s head.

  “Had he been sick?”

  “Not at all,” Mrs. Gomez replied. “He was a hard worker. Then one day he went to bed and didn’t get out. It sounds like that’s what happened to his daughter, too. Do you think they had the same illness?”

  The thought sent a chill down Luis’s spine. He needed to tell one of the doctors in the hospital.

  “Who’s the boy’s doctor? Was it Esmeralda’s doctor, too?”

  “Oh, she’s everyone’s doctor,” Mrs. Gomez said. “The whole neighborhood goes to her or her clinic. Hang on. I’ve got the number on the refrigerator.”

  Mrs. Gomez stepped away from the phone. Luis could hear cartoons in the background and pictured the unsuspecting Federico enjoying the last moments of innocence his life would know. He said a silent prayer for the boy and then added Miguel.

  God, please be a guide to the motherless sons.

  “Ah, I have the number right here,” Mrs. Gomez said, returning to the phone.

  She read it off. Luis again typed it into his phone.

  “And the name?”

  “Dr. Susan Auyong. She’s in San Gabriel.”

  There it is again, Luis thought, the everlasting proof of the Almighty’s hand.

  “SARS?” Tony hissed into the phone. “Are you kidding me? Who’s saying there’s a SARS outbreak? That’s the kind of thing that makes it into the news.”

  “There’s some emergency directive from the FAA and the CDC that just hit,” Shen Mang said quietly, the noise of the airport in the background. “They’re trying not to panic anyone. But there have apparently been three deaths already. They’re now testing other suspicious deaths from the last twenty-four hours or so.”

  Tony didn’t know what to think. There were flu outbreaks, the measles outbreak tied to the antivaccination crowd. He’d even heard of the occasional listeria or scarlet fever epidemic. But SARS was a boogeyman akin to Ebola or bird flu. People sat up and took notice.

  “Right now they’re just talking about posters for incoming passengers, but there’ll also be screenings for anyone coming in from an Asian country or carrying an Asian passport. If you have anyone arriving in the next few weeks, you’re going to have to get word to them of what they can and can’t say to Homeland Security, or they’ll be pulled aside and really questioned.”

  Just when things were starting to look up, too.

  “Keep me informed,” Tony said. “If I don’t hear from you by this evening, I’ll call back.”

  “You got it, Mr. Qi.”

  Tony hung up and glanced around the office for solutions. He knew in an instant what a SARS outbreak could mean for both of his businesses and those of his brethren. The losses could be staggering.

  He had to get out in front of it.

  Picking the phone back up, he dialed the cell of the hotel’s general manager, Garth Rinker. It was the middle of a workday, so Tony figured he was on the links at the Hillcrest Country Club around the corner.

  “Sir? It’s Qi. I need to put something on your radar.”

  Twenty minutes and several brief conference calls later, the hotel’s corporate office in New York had confirmed with the Los Angeles city government that a press conference announcing the quarantine of patients with SARS-like symptoms would begin momentarily. The crisis communications group they had on retainer was looped in, and a strategy was outlined in broad strokes.

  “When SARS hit Toronto, the losses to the hotel business were in the tens of millions,” said one crisis manager. “I think with the proper response we can greatly reduce our exposure to something like that. In the short term you need to tell your front-end managers like Mr. Qi that the staff needs to lead by example. Guests are going to have questions immediately. We’re not going to have all the answers. What we can provide is calm.”

  “A good thing we have Qi in place then,” Rinker said. “Nobody’s calmer in a storm than he is.”

  Tony beamed. “Thank you, sir.”

  “All right,” the crisis manager said. “The press conference is getting underway. Let’s all watch and circulate questions. Mr. Qi, please keep us in the loop as directly as possible. We’ll help you with any responses or special cases that arise. And when it comes to cancellations there’ll be a lot of reactionary ones, and we have to just let that go. The better we handle things on that end, the better they’ll feel about coming back when this all blows over.”

  Everyone hung up. Tony unmuted the television he had on across the room as a man in a gray suit with thinning hair was introduced by no less a personage than the mayor of Los Angeles as a representative from the CDC.

  Why did it have to be SARS? Tony fretted.

  Though it stood for something else entirely, Tony didn’t know a person who didn’t think the SA stood for “South Asian” the way the ME in MERS stood for “Middle East.” Because it was thought to have come from Asia, it might as well have.

  “SARS is contagious only through direct contact with bodily fluids, such as mucus or other respiratory secretions emitted during sneezing or coughing from an infected individual,” the CDC rep on the television was saying. “Washing your hands and avoiding contact—”

  Tony’s cell phone rang and he lowered the volume on the TV. He figured it was his general manager calling him back. It turned out to be an assistant to Wanquan Yang, the San Gabriel Valley’s Dragon Head.

  “There’s going to be an emergency meeting tonight. Your attendance is mandatory.”

  “I’ll be there,” Tony said.

  As photos of Esmeralda and César Carreño, Rabih Chaumon, and then a fourth victim, a five-year-old girl named Meredith Boyers, flashed on the screen, Tony sank into his chair. If the bosses were already calling an emergency meeting, it might be worse than he knew. If SARS in Toronto hurt the hotel business that bad, what about all the businesses that kept the hotels supplied? And Asian-owned businesses in general?

  He thought about this for a long momen
t. But then a plan—a wide-sweeping, almost mad but amazingly complete plan—formed in his mind.

  He grabbed his cell phone and made what he hoped would be the most important call of his life.

  XIII

  “You’re very lucky, Father,” a doctor, who’d introduced herself as Dr. Sohmer, chided as she examined Luis. “You never touched her. You weren’t masked, but that hardly matters with SARS, unless she sneezed or coughed directly into your face.”

  “I’m in the clear?” Luis asked.

  “I’ve learned to never say never, but there’s another matter at play here,” she said. “The media knows there was a priest who ministered to a very sick woman at personal risk. As we let people know about how SARS spreads, using you as an example of someone who had safe contact is helpful.”

  “I apologize for all that. I’m not sure what came over me.”

  “Of course you are,” the doctor said. “Everybody in the room saw. It was compassion. I’m sure you converted more than your share in that moment. Did you find the son she mentioned?”

  “I did.”

  The doctor’s eyes widened a little. “And?”

  “The boy’s father is taking him to the doctor immediately.”

  She clasped his hands together. “That was a very good thing you did. Thank you.”

  Luis listened attentively as the doctor proceeded to give him a list of symptoms and informed him that if he felt any of them, even ones he assumed were born from suggestion, he should come back in. She then told him he was free to go.

  But as he went to the door, she moved to him tentatively.

  “Will you maybe pray for us? Say a blessing or whatever it is you do? This could be nothing, an isolated incident, or it could be very bad for a lot of people. We don’t know yet.”

  Luis nodded. He blessed the doctor and her hands. He blessed the hospital. He prayed for the other doctors, nurses, and orderlies. Then the two of them prayed against the disease.

  As Luis made his way to the parking lot a few minutes later, he passed an orderly pushing a frail old woman in a wheelchair. She glanced up to the priest in surprise, then took his hand. She said a few faint words that he couldn’t understand until he leaned closer.