by R. J. Jagger
Raven nodded.
“I want this guy.”
Wilde tilted his head. “Keep your money,” he said. “This one’s on the house.”
Raven lit another cigarette. “Thanks, but I want you motivated. The important thing is for you to stay off this guy’s radar screen. You need to find him without him knowing you’re doing it.”
Wilde chewed on it.
“Has he taken anyone yet?”
“No one that I’m aware of,” Raven said. “Jessica Dent was taken on a Wednesday, so maybe tomorrow’s the day. Anyone who goes missing, I’ll make you aware of it right away.”
Wilde nodded.
“You do that,” he said. “I’ll need access to all your old files.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“Is it possible?”
“No, you’re a civilian,” Raven said. “I’ll have to sneak them out of the office. Give me a couple of hours to figure out how.”
He stood up and headed for the door, leaving the photos and the money on the desk. Before he got out Wilde said, “Hey, Raven.”
The man stopped and turned.
“What are you going to do if I don’t find him?”
“If that happens, it will just be me and him on Friday,” Raven said.
Wilde frowned.
“He’ll kill you.”
“Maybe.”
“He’ll still kill the woman,” Wilde said. “You realize that, I hope. Maybe he’s saying it to you, You will die on Friday, but he’s saying it to her too.”
“You don’t know that.”
“That’s why he takes her early in the week,” Wilde said, “so he can sit back and watch her contemplate her death for a few days.”
20
Day One
July 15
Tuesday Afternoon
The more Durivage envisioned an impending attack by Kent Dawson, the more he didn’t want it to happen while there was a dead body in the basement.
An alley ran behind the house.
Zongying got the Packard as close to the back door as she could, opened the truck and surveyed the area for nosy neighbors. She saw none, either in the area or looking out windows, and rapped on the back door.
“Come on.”
Durivage stepped out with the body under one arm, wrapped in a blanket. He dumped it in the trunk as fast as he could and slammed the lid.
Then they got the hell out of there.
“I don’t think anyone saw us,” Zongying said.
“Time will tell.”
Thirty minutes later they were on an abandoned gravel service road that ran next to railroad tracks. Two miles down, Zongying brought the Packard to a stop.
“Here?” Durivage said.
It was a little too out in the open for his comfort zone.
“Remember when I told you about my friend Jessica Dent getting murdered?”
Yes.
He remembered.
“This is where the killer dumped her body,” Zongying said. “Right where we are. I’ve been back here fifty times. It’s always been totally deserted just like it is now.” She shifted into first and drove another hundred yards down the road. “We’ll dump Spencer here. If by chance anyone sees my car leaving, I’ll have an excuse that I was visiting Jessica’s site.”
“Clever.”
They looked around, saw no one and stuffed the body into the cover of a six-foot rabbit brush, taking the blanket with them.
On the way out they encountered no one.
No trains.
No cars.
No walkers.
No nothing.
Five miles down the main road, heading back into the city, Durivage threw the blanket out the window and watched it disappear over the side of a bridge.
There.
Done.
When they got back to Zongying’s, the place was trashed.
Drawers were pulled out and dumped on the floor.
Same for the cupboards.
The couch and chair cushions had been slit open and the guts pulled out.
Same for the mattress, slit open.
The TV was smashed face down on the carpet.
The back had been pried off.
“This isn’t Kent Dawson being pissed off or sending you a message,” Durivage said. “Someone was looking for something.” He locked eyes with Zongying and said, “Tell me who it was and what they were looking for.”
She wrinkled her forehead.
“If it wasn’t Dawson, I don’t know who it was.”
21
Day One
July 15
Tuesday Afternoon
Jina sat at a table at the Down Towner Café on 17th Street late Tuesday afternoon and second-guessed the sanity of what she was about to do. The scroll had transformed her. It had been doing it all day and she’d done nothing to stop it. Taylor Lee maneuvered her voluptuous body through the front door at exactly 4:30 p.m. and headed over.
They ordered coffee.
Jina relayed her meetings today and what she’d learned about the scroll.
Taylor’s forehead got tighter and tighter.
When Jina stopped talking, Taylor said, “The scroll isn’t yours and it isn’t mine. It belongs to a client. We don’t have the right to be making paper imprints of it or having it examined by third parties.”
“So, you’re mad at me?”
“Not mad,” Taylor said. “I’m just saying, you’ve gone way out of your bounds. I’m a little astonished, to tell you the truth. I’ve never seen this side of you before.”
“Yeah, well, get used to it,” Jina said.
Taylor leaned back and studied her.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I have a proposition for you.”
“This isn’t going to a good place, I can already tell,” Taylor said.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Jina said. “What’s been bothering me all day is the way the scroll got dumped on our table so anonymously. Now, why would a client do that?”
Taylor shrugged.
She didn’t know.
“I’ll tell you why,” Jina said. “Because he stole it. He’s using us to safeguard it.”
“Could be,” Taylor said.
“Here’s what I suggest we do,” Jina said. “I suggest that you and me make a pact to join forces. We don’t know who the mystery client is yet and whether he belongs to you or me. But we join forces nevertheless, irrespective of whether he eventually belongs to you or to me. Then, when he shows up, we try to confirm that he actually stole it.”
“Why?”
“Because then we steal it from him,” Jina said. “Only if he stole it, though. If it turns out he got it legitimately, we return it to him.”
Taylor laughed.
“You’re kidding, right?”
Jina finished chewing, took a sip of water and said, “If it turns out he stole it, what’s he going to do? He can’t file a police report.”
“He could kill us,” Taylor said. “How about that?”
“He won’t know it’s us,” Jina said. “What we do is make it disappear innocently in a way that doesn’t implicate us. Maybe we set up a charade where it appears to have been stolen from us, something along those lines.”
“These are dangerous ideas you’re playing with,” Taylor said.
“Yeah, I know,” Jina said. “Play it out, though. Suppose he stole it and we do nothing. The scroll will end up hidden from the world. If we take it, though, here’s what we do. We keep it secret while we find the second scroll, the one with the starting points. Then we find the five buried treasures. We then keep the treasures and the second scroll, but turn the first scroll over to the proper authorities, where it can be shared with the world. We can turn it over anonymously, without even demanding any money. That way the client will never know it was us who had it.”
“You’re crazy,” Taylor said.
Jina nodded.
“We need to kno
w where the first scroll was found,” she said. “We can’t make the scroll disappear and lose the client until we have that information under our belts. Otherwise, we’ll never find the second scroll.”
Taylor tilted her head.
“What do we do with the second scroll and the five treasures, if we find them?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when that bridge comes up in front of us for crossing. One thing we could do is sell them to the proper authorities,” Jina said. “We get rich and everything goes on display for the world to see. Everyone wins. Isn’t that worth a little personal risk?”
22
Day One
July 15
Tuesday Afternoon
After the detective left, Alabama came out of the back room and said, “That was a close one. I thought for sure he came here about Grace Somerfield. If he started to take you in, I was getting ready to come innocently into the room, snatch your gun out of the drawer before he knew what was happening and shoot him in the leg.”
Wilde pulled $75 out of the envelope.
“First of all, don’t ever shoot anyone, especially on my watch, and more especially with my gun. Second of all, what I want you to do is go out and buy some clothes,” he said. “Get some day wear, some stalking wear—by which I mean all things black—and get a nice sexy evening dress, plus some nylons that have a line up the back. Get some black high heels, too. Black or red, I don’t care.”
She took the money.
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Lots of stuff,” he said. “Go to one of the department stores on 16th Street.”
“You’re the boss.” She headed for the door. “Hey, Wilde, where do you want me to sleep tonight? With you?”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’ve been staying over at the Metropolitan,” she said.
Wilde winced.
The Metropolitan Hotel, a block over on Market, was the king of the fleabags, a full flea’s head and shoulders above the other bags of flea. It rented closet-sized cubicles for $1 a week, payment in advance, no questions asked. It was one step above the alley but not a giant one.
“We’ll figure something out,” he said.
She ran a finger down his chest.
“What did you have in mind, exactly, cowboy?”
He lit a cigarette and said, “You’re not here to be screwed so get it out of your head. It’s not going to happen.”
She headed for the door and said over her shoulder, “Yes it is.”
Then she was gone.
Suddenly her head stuck back in through the door.
“Caught you picturing it,” she said.
Then she was gone again.
She’d be gone a couple of hours. Wilde used the time to hop in the MG and head over to the BNSF line and drive down the service road to where Jessica Dent’s body had been dumped in May of last year.
The killer had been there.
It was as good a place as any to start.
Wilde killed the engine and stepped out.
The sun beat down.
The terrain was largely prairie grassland, punctuated with rabbit brush and yucca.
There were hardly any trees.
No one was around.
How did the killer know about this place?
Did he ride his bike back here when he was a kid? Did he grow up a few miles away? Did he work for the train company? Did he bring the high school girls back here to screw?
Did he return every now and then to replay the night in question while he jacked off?
A black-and-white Magpie landed on a bush where it studied Wilde for a few seconds, then cawed and took off.
Sweat poured down his forehead.
It was every bit of a hundred right now.
This was the hottest summer he could remember for a long time.
He sat down on the ground on the shady side of the MG and leaned against the rear wheel. It felt good. The MG/TC was his baby, British Racing Green over tan leather, a two-seat roadster that only got made from 1946 to 1949. The English steering wheel was on the wrong side and it didn’t have bumpers or a heater or a radio or hardly any other amenities, but it did have a drop top and a Moss Magnacharger engine. It also tended to make the women spread their legs ever so slightly when they sat in the passenger seat.
Women.
Wilde should be concentrating on the Raven case, but his thoughts turned to Neva, his mystery client from this morning.
Broken glass.
Broken glass to crawl over and smell her neck.
He needed to find her.
He needed to get into her life.
He needed to do it quickly.
She was the antidote to Night, who he’d fall back in love with, if he hadn’t already.
When he got back to the office, Alabama was already back, dressed in blue shorts and a white blouse. Her legs were shapelier than Wilde expected and her arms were firm. Under different circumstances, he’d make a move on her.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” he said. “The one thing we know for sure is that we’re looking for someone who hates Raven enough to go to a lot of trouble to screw with him.”
Alabama sat on top of the desk and dangled her legs.
“Okay.”
“Now, the first go around, Raven was concentrating on his past cases to try to find who hated him.”
“Right.”
“Here’s what I want you to do,” Wilde said. “I want you to hit the gambling houses and whore houses and bars and find out if Raven has a secret side.”
Alabama looked puzzled.
“Why?”
“If someone hates him, maybe it comes from that world and not from his detective world.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “If that was the case, why wouldn’t he just tell you about it?”
Wilde lit a cigarette.
“He wouldn’t have been in a position to tell his own department members something like that the first go around,” Wilde said. “I don’t think he’d open up, just because it was me now instead of someone else. He’d want to delude himself into thinking that it was his detective life that drudged the killer up. So, get out there and find out if he has a secret life.”
Alabama hopped off the desk.
“I’m going to need some seed money.”
Wilde handed her a twenty, then thought about it and gave her a second one.
“Don’t go overboard,” he said. “Don’t put your neck on the line. Just sniff around and report back to me.”
“Okay.”
She reached into a bag and pulled out a pair of white cotton panties.
“Thanks for this,” she said. “I’ll model it for you later.”
Then she blew him a kiss and headed out the door.
23
Day One
July 15
Tuesday Evening
Nicole Wickliff showed up at Lloyd’s building shortly after six, not looking anything like what Durivage or Zongying expected. She wasn’t dressed up, anything but, in plain black pants and a simple white blouse, but she was hypnotic on a scale that rivaled Zongying, if that was possible.
Long, dirty-blond hair.
Sensual.
Thirty.
Tall.
Taut.
She emerged from the hotel five minutes later, presumably with a gun, got into a cab that was waiting for her, and disappeared to the north—probably to her hotel.
“I had a weird thought,” Zongying said.
“How weird?”
“Pretty weird,” she said. “Do you think she speaks English?”
Durivage nodded.
“No one would send her if she didn’t,” he said. “She couldn’t function.”
“Why don’t I try to get in good with her?” Zongying said. “I could meet her by accident and buddy up to her. Maybe she has information we don’t as to where Emmanuelle might be. If nothing else, at least I might be able to get a rea
d as to when she’ll strike.”
Durivage frowned.
“That’s dangerous,” he said.
Zongying laughed.
“I can take care of myself,” she said. “I thought you had that figured out by now.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Durivage said. “What I’m talking about is you getting feelings for her. I might have to take her down, in fact I probably will have to take her down, we both know that. I don’t want to have to second-guess your allegiance when that time comes.”
“Trust me, my allegiance is with you.”
“That’s easy to say now. You haven’t met her yet.”
“Yeah, well—”
“French women can get a hold of you,” he said. “They’re not like American women. They’re totally different. They can make you fall in love with them even if they’re not trying and even if you don’t want to.”
“God, Durivage, you’re so paranoid,” she said. “This is an infiltration mission, nothing more and nothing less.”
He studied her.
“I promise,” she added. “So, is that an okay I see in your eyes?”
He considered it.
“Okay.”
She kissed him on the lips.
“Good,” she said. “I want her to find me attractive. How should I dress?”
Durivage looked at her.
“This isn’t a game,” he said. “If she figures out you’re working against her, she’ll slit your throat and never even blink. That’s what she does. Don’t ever forget it even for a second.”
The words resonated.
Zongying’s face got serious.
Then she eased up and said, “You didn’t answer my question. What should I wear?”
24
Day One
July 15
Tuesday Evening
The first thing Jina did when she got back to her apartment was yank open the freezer door to make sure the scroll was still there, which it was. She pulled it out and stuck it under her pillow. So far the mystery client hadn’t contacted either her or Taylor.
Maybe he was dead.
That wouldn’t be good.