“Is that water on their feet?” Brooke asked as the two creatures padded around, sniffing everything, leaving wet pawprints behind them.
Shit. “Oh,” I said casually, “maybe.”
Brooke bent down and dabbed her finger in the liquid, then put it to her nose. “Brooke—” I warned.
“It’s urine.” She glanced at the two brown creatures making their way around the apartment. “Damn it, guys.” She went to the kitchen area and brought back a spray bottle and paper towels. “I’ll get the floor,” she said, handing me a clump of Bounty. “You can take care of the cage.”
Cleaning dog pee out of a dog cage: not my idea of a good time after pulling an all-nighter. But I did it. Then I showered. Then, thank God, I slept.
CHAPTER 55
Marine Bank of California, Number 12, Redwood City Branch, stood alone in an old commercial strip near the train tracks. It was a big building, but as with most places in this part of California, the look of it was almost purposely nondescript.
As we made our way across the parking lot, Brooke said, “You know they’re not going to let us into the box.”
“Of course they are,” I replied. “We have the key.”
“This isn’t Switzerland, Nate. You need ID to get into these things. ID and the key.”
Oh. I hadn’t counted on that. In fact, I didn’t have the first clue about safety-deposit boxes. No one in my family—no one that I ever knew of, at least—had a safety-deposit box.
“Why didn’t you tell me that earlier?” I pushed through the doors and was blasted by air-conditioning.
“I was sleep deprived and didn’t think of it.”
“I’ll sweet-talk them.”
“Good luck,” Brooke said.
In the bank, the teller stations stretched out to the left, while a few lonely desks were situated along the right side of the room. I spotted a pleasant-looking matron sitting behind a desk, bundled in a thick cardigan against the Nordic microclimate. Marnie Gill, Customer Service.
She smiled and asked how she could help.
“I need to get into this safety-deposit box,” I said, fishing the key out of my pocket. Brooke rolled her eyes.
Marnie took the key and laid it on the desk. “Your account number?”
“I, ah, don’t really have an account here. This is a friend’s box. She gave the key to me.”
Marnie hammered away impassively at the keys on the computer in front of her. “I’m sorry, but without express permission, we can’t give you access to the security boxes here. The name on the account?”
“Harriet Tobel.”
More typing; she stopped for a second and fished a small manila envelope from her desk drawer. She took the key and dropped it inside.
“Ah, that’s my key,” I protested.
“It’s not,” she said tartly. “It’s the bank’s key. And our policy in situations like this is to retain it for the proper account holder.”
Brooke was smirking. She mouthed: Sweet sweet-talk. I wanted to wrap my hands around her neck.
Marnie said, “Could you spell the last name?”
I did.
The computer chugged and Marnie slipped the envelope and the key into her top desk drawer. She typed a few more characters into the computer. “Yes. Harriet Tobel.” She looked at me. “What’s your name?”
Great, I thought. She’s going to call security, they’ll call the police, then I’ll spend the rest of the day explaining to the cops why I’d stolen Dr. Tobel’s personal effects. . . .
“Nathaniel McCormick,” I said. “Look, maybe we should just leave. We can take care of all this later—”
“Wait, please.” Marnie’s nails clicked on the plastic keys.
Brooke wasn’t smiling anymore. She actually looked a little worried.
“Could I see a picture ID?” Marnie asked.
I gave her my Georgia driver’s license. She studied it for a beat, looked at me, then handed it back.
Marnie opened the top drawer of her desk and removed the envelope with the key. I braced myself for her call to security to bust us. Instead, she slid the envelope across the desk to me. “I’m sorry for any inconvenience, Mr. McCormick. We must be careful, you understand.”
She must have seen the confusion on my face. “The account holder changed access privileges for this account yesterday, adding your name. It’s why your name didn’t come up right away. Again, I apologize for any inconvenience.” She stood.
“Yesterday? Can you tell me what time she came in to change the access?”
“Sure.” Marnie bent back over her keyboard. “Five forty-five. Just before we closed.”
And just a few hours after we’d met for lunch, a few hours before Dr. Tobel died.
While Brooke sat at the customer service desk, flipping through a really interesting brochure on mortgage rates, Marnie led me to the bank’s vault. Outside of it, a desultory guy in a uniform sat at a desk, reading the San Francisco Chronicle. The guy pointed to a sign-in sheet on the desk, which I guess was Marnie’s signal to scram.
“A pleasure serving you, Mr. McCormick,” she said.
I thanked her and initialed the sheet.
The thick vault door was open flat against the bank’s wall; a metal grate covered the opening to the vault itself. The guard put down his paper, asked for ID. I showed him my license. After a longer look than was needed, he pushed himself out of the chair and unlocked the grate.
“Follow me,” he said.
I did, down a short hallway to a long room faced with hundreds of small doors. He went to one of them, opened the little door, exposing the locked metal box inside. He jutted his chin toward the box, which I assumed meant I was to take it. I pulled it out and followed him across the hall to a room with a small table and a single chair. The guard closed the door as he left.
It was just me and the box.
Nathaniel, please call me when you get this message. It’s very important. Ivory Coast.
I held the key in my sweaty hand, Harriet Tobel’s last words to me whirling in my brain. Before I knew it, I’d slid the key into the small lock and turned it. I pulled open the top of the box.
Inside, a single item sat on the gray metal. It was a videotape.
CHAPTER 56
The day was beautiful—not too hot—and it should have been nice to be riding in a BMW convertible with a beautiful blonde. But both Brooke and I were freaking out a little about what we might see on that tape. And then there was that question pounding in my head like an ominous drumbeat: Did Harriet Tobel die because of this?
At the apartment, all was peaceful. The dogs were asleep, the cat wide-awake, scheming, no doubt, a painful murder for the dogs.
“Shall we?” I asked.
Brooke nodded.
I pushed the tape into the VCR and grabbed the remote. “We should get some popcorn,” I said.
“Funny.”
I fell back onto the couch next to Brooke. As I did so, my pager went off. A familiar cell phone number popped up on the LED screen. “Tim,” I said.
“Are you going to call him back?”
“Later.”
“Are you going to call him before we see what’s on the tape?” Brooke asked.
“No.”
“Okay, Nathaniel, we need to watch this.”
“Okay.”
Still, I didn’t move.
“Come on.” And with that, Brooke reached over my hand and pushed Play on the controller. The screen scrambled for a second. Brooke didn’t move her hand.
An image appeared: grainy, black-and-white. An image from a surveillance camera set high in a room. A bed filled most of the field, the bottom of the bed at the bottom of the screen. There was a figure in the bed—a woman—with a few monitors surrounding her. An IV ran from her chest to a stand hung with bags of fluid. Okay, I thought, we’re in a hospital. The woman looked like she was sleeping.
The time stamp on the bottom of the screen dated the scene almost tw
o years before. Above the time stamp, I recognized three block capitals that designated the university medical center where Dr. Tobel had her lab. That meant the security tape had been taken somewhere in the hospital.
Brooke said, “A hospital room.”
“Strong work, Doctor.”
“Shut up.”
Nothing in the room moved except the flashing digits on one of the monitors.
“This is it?” Brooke asked, sounding disappointed.
“I assume it’s not. I hope it’s not.”
“Number three, it says.” Brooke pointed to the blocky white digit next to a two-letter abbreviation. “Room three.”
We watched for five more minutes. Nothing changed but the numbers.
“Time to fast-forward,” I decided, and hit the button.
But for the speeding time in the bottom of the screen, nothing changed—the woman didn’t move, no one entered, until—
“Look—” Brooke said as a figure sped into the field of view. I rewound the tape and played it at normal speed.
It was a man. The camera was high and to his back; his face was covered in a face shield and surgical mask, so we couldn’t see his features. He wore a gown and gloves. He pushed a cart in front of him.
“What’s on the cart?” Brooke asked.
“Basin, maybe.”
The man began to undo the woman’s gown, exposing her breasts, torso, and the blue plastic diaper around her hips. A large scar ran across her right side, from under the arm to the midline about four inches below the breast.
The man put a couple of towels underneath the woman’s buttocks, unfastened the diaper, removed it. Dropped the soiled thing into a biohazard bag. Throughout, the woman didn’t move.
“Well,” I said, “she appears to be comatose.”
“Strong work, Doctor.”
He brought the cart closer to the bed.
“He’s bathing her,” Brooke said. “He’s going to bathe her.”
Indeed he was, moving a sponge underneath and between the buttocks. It was disturbing, the way he’d wash, then pat dry. Too loving almost. A catheter snaked from between the woman’s legs to a bag of urine attached to the side of the bed; the man moved the catheter to one side, then the other, cleaning around it. Wash, pat dry. Wash, pat dry. The sequence moved up the belly to the breasts, armpits, neck, face.
“What is this, Nathaniel?” Brooke asked. “He’s bathing her. Big deal. Fast-forward.”
“Wait,” I said.
The man toweled off the naked body, then fished around in the cart. He moved to the woman’s hands and began filing.
“He’s just an orderly, Nate. Let’s move on.”
As the man moved from filing fingernails to toenails, I caught a glimpse of the eyes through the face shield, above the mask. I froze the picture. “Can you make out a face?”
“No,” Brooke said.
I pushed Play. The man finished with the toenails and stood at the foot of the bed. I thought he would return to the cart, but he just stood there, his back to us, looking the length of the nude body.
Then he stepped to the cart, I guess to put the nail file down, and grabbed a tube of something. Then he stepped back to the foot of the bed. He kept staring at the body. I saw his right hand move to the front of his hips, lift his gown.
“Oh, no—” Brooke said beside me.
The hand began to move slowly and rhythmically. After a moment of that, he undid his pants from beneath the gown. He undid the cap to the tube and squirted something into his right hand.
Brooke said, “He’s whacking off? This is what we’re supposed to see? Oh—”
Just then, the man put down the tube and climbed onto the bed. “I can’t watch this,” Brooke moaned. And she didn’t. She turned her head.
I, however, did watch as the orderly maneuvered between the legs of the comatose woman, moving the catheter to the side. He thrust into her a few times; his body went stiff when he came. The whole thing was over in two minutes. Finished, he climbed off her, cinched his pants. He took the sponge and cleaned up his mess, put a new diaper on her, redid the gown, smoothed back the woman’s dark hair. For a long moment, he looked at her. Then, slowly, he lifted his face shield and pulled down his surgical mask. He bent and kissed the woman on the lips.
The man replaced the surgical mask and face shield, so when he turned toward the door, I still couldn’t get a good look at him. Then he began to pull the cart out of the room. Then he was gone.
CHAPTER 57
“Is it over?”
“Yes.”
“He raped her.”
“Yes.”
The tape continued to play, but it looked as it had in the beginning: a woman lying in a bed, nothing moving. It was sickening—she didn’t look like she’d just been raped.
“This is awful,” Brooke said. “Please turn it off.”
“I need to see if there’s anything else.”
Brooke was silent. A thousand things were flying through my mind. Who was the man? Who was the woman? Why had Dr. Tobel wanted me to see this? The tape, of course, was just the beginning. It was only the opening to a conversation Dr. Tobel and I would never have.
And this—the tape itself, the circumstances of how it had come to me—spawned other questions. I let the ideas churn for a while. Finally, I said, “They killed her.”
“Who killed who?”
“Dr. Tobel. Somebody killed her. So she wouldn’t say anything about this.” I gestured toward the television.
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t, okay? It’s just what I think, Brooke. Somebody didn’t want this thing to get out.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I guess whoever would be affected most by a fuckup like this.”
We stared at the screen. “Oh, Nate,” Brooke said. “If that’s true, we need to find out who the man is. And who that poor woman is.”
Very astute questions, Sherlock, I thought. Then, unwisely, I said it.
Brooke glowered at me, but didn’t say anything. Eventually, she spoke. She said what I was thinking but what I sure as hell didn’t want to hear. “You know, your Dr. Tobel must have been involved in this somehow.”
Your Dr. Tobel? “What do you mean involved?”
“She had the tape. She saved the tape.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning she didn’t just stumble across it. This is a rape, and last time I checked, it was highly illegal. There’s got to be some reason she didn’t turn it over to the police.”
“Maybe she did turn it over to the cops.”
“I don’t think so. She wouldn’t have had any reason to keep it, then. She wouldn’t have hidden it away in a safety-deposit box. This is secret, Nate. And there’s got to be a reason why Harriet Tobel kept the secret.”
“Until now,” I said glumly.
“Right. Until now.”
Just then, the tape went black. “That’s it,” I said, and hit Rewind.
My pager vibrated. Tim.
“Still no more new cases,” Herr Lancaster said.
“That’s great.”
“Great and not great. Bryan Tinings died last night. Same way as the Fillmore woman. Multiple organ failure.”
“Jesus. Maggie Phelps’s boyfriend.”
“Yes. She’s pulling out of it, but she’s not taking the news about her beau’s death real well. We’ve locked down all the group homes where we’ve had cases—”
“Is that wise?” I interrupted. “I mean, they’re going to be stuck in the homes, screwing each other’s brains out.”
“That’s a risk I’m willing to take. It’s only five homes at this point. We’ve narrowed the incubation time to seven to ten days.”
“So we’re in a holding pattern.”
“Holding our breath, if that’s what you mean.”
Okay, I thought, time to drop the bomb. “Tim, I’m delaying the flight.” Brooke sat cross-legged on the couch next to me. S
he’d been lost in thought, but her head shot toward me with “delaying the flight.”
“Why—?” Tim Lancaster asked, annoyed.
“A friend of mine out here died. . . .”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I want to stay around until her funeral.”
Tim chewed that one over. “When’s that?”
“Today’s Thursday. She’s—she was—Jewish. She needs to be buried by Friday sundown. Shabbat.”
“You’re a Jew?”
“With a name like McCormick? No.”
“Well, your mother could have been. . . . Anyway, I need you in Atlanta. Tomorrow latest.”
Even for Tim, this was a little too much. “Tim, you said we’re in a holding pattern.”
“No, you said that. And I’d like someone familiar with the Baltimore situation down there. We need to coordinate the lab work between Atlanta and the locals up here. I need you to ride them down there.”
“This was one of the most important people—”
“This is growing beyond us now. The FBI’s involved—”
“And you’re the one who brought them in,” I pointed out. To Brooke, I mouthed: F-B-I.
“No, Nate, my bosses brought them in. Goes the whole way to the top.”
“Great.”
“Besides, it’s for the best. Takes some of the heat off us. But we need to keep up appearances. It would be good for you to be down there as point man.”
“If it’s so important for me to be point man, then bring me back to Baltimore. Maybe you should go to Atlanta. That’s your turf. I’m a field officer, not a—”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“I know that you don’t want to do that.” Icy silence. I’d gone too far. “At least let me stay out here to follow up on Gladys Thomas.” I was going to tell him about the tape, about the weird circumstances of Harriet Tobel’s death, but decided not to. Tim was ambivalent enough with my performance on this case so far; I didn’t need him thinking I was throwing around conspiracy theories. Not yet, anyway.
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