“I remember.”
“Dali goes to Internet cafés because they provide anonymous access. It’s a faceless location. He goes to a library for the same reason, and while it does provide the anonymous computer access, the location isn’t faceless. Think about it. Libraries are personal places. They’re cared for by someone, and they belong to a community. Librarians remember people. They keep an eye on the books, make sure the patrons don’t mistreat them; there’s a sense of ownership in a library that you’re not likely to find in an Internet café.”
“Not to mention the difference in the level of traffic going through it,” James adds.
“Okay,” Callie says slowly. “I’m starting to understand.”
“Dali’s careful, and while the choice of a library’s not exactly what I’d call high risk, it is a behavioral anomaly. Remember what Earl said: Mental maps are formed both consciously and unconsciously. They exert their influence in both ways too. So why does Dali feel a connection with this library? Why does he feel unconsciously safe enough to use it?”
Alan snaps his fingers. “Because it’s familiar.”
“That’s right. And why is it familiar?”
Callie supplies the answer this time. “Because it’s in the area.”
James sits down at his computer. He checks the library address and types it in. A moment later the location appears on Google Maps. “Down in the Valley,” he says. “Near Reseda and Oxnard.”
“Where are the property searches you guys did?” I ask.
“Here on the computer. I tabulated them by zip code. It didn’t lead us anywhere. Too many of them, incomplete records, and so on.”
“It’s a shot in the dark, but let’s try again. We can narrow the area now. Let’s take the lists five miles in each direction from the library and look for anything that pops out. From what I recall, Cooper was on the money. It felt like a storage place. It had six-to eight-foot-high chain-link fencing around it.”
“Lot of storage places in that area,” Alan says.
“We can eliminate any franchises,” James provides. “You’re required to pay royalties, and you run the risk of inspections.” I nod. “That’s good. So?”
“It’s better than nothing,” Alan agrees. “Start printing, James. We’ll divvy it up and see what we see.”
Five miles yields nothing. Excitement wants to die, to become discouraged, but we’re used to this. Sift through the useless, nine out of ten times you find nothing but more useless. One time in ten you find a diamond. We’ve all found enough diamonds over the years to keep going.
We widen the diameter to ten miles. Alan grinds his heavenly grounds and brews coffee for all of us except James, who drinks green tea. He’s always been that way. I’ve never seen him drink whiskey or Coke or take a sip of coffee. Tea and water, that’s it.
When it does appear, it stands out in neon, and it makes my stomach dip. It’s too simple, far too cute, and it makes me wonder again about Dali and the truth of what drives him.
Meet Storage Solutions, the entry says.
I’m just storing meat. Those were his words.
I check the distance. Just eight miles away from the library.
“I think I have it,” I tell them.
I explain. Callie makes a face of disgust. “‘Storing meat’? Gross.”
James takes the address and types something into his computer. A page comes up with a list of facts. “It’s been in business for more than twenty years. The building itself has been there longer than that, but not by much.”
“He could have converted an existing structure,” Alan points out. “Lot cheaper to do that in Los Angeles.”
“Building permits were pulled twenty years ago,” James confirms. “Doesn’t say what they were for, but there were quite a few. The building was a concrete structure from the beginning.” He taps a few more keys. “No income information. That’s all I have. Not enough to be sure or to get a warrant, on the face of it.”
“Let’s go see it,” I say. “I’ll know if it’s the place, and my testimony will get us a warrant if it is.”
Space exists at a premium in Los Angeles, as with any large city. The best butts up against the worst, as all try to live in relative harmony. The address we find ourselves at sits on a large lot on a side street off Victory Boulevard. Next to the structure is a fenced-in, boarded-up gas station. A sign asks patrons to PLEASE BE PATIENT WHILE WE UPGRADE OUR FACILITIES! The sign is rain-battered and sun-faded, as though the upgrade of the gas station is long forgotten.
A half block away is Victory Boulevard, busy at all times of the day and night. Just around the corner is a bustling adult-video store, a fish-and-aquarium shop, and a haberdashery, just to name a few. Most signs are in English, some are not, but other than the gas station, every storefront seems occupied.
We’ve parked on a side street, and I stare at the structure from a distance. I’m standing outside the car. It’s late afternoon now. The sun is still up but is lower in the sky, and a cool breeze kisses my baldness.
Is that it? Is that where it happened?
The fence looks the same, but I’m starting to understand just how little I actually got to see. Dali’s brilliance, as James had said. The chain-link gate is padlocked.
“Well?” James asks.
“I can’t get the angle I need to be sure.”
“Then get the angle you need.”
I raise an eyebrow. Sweat beads on my upper lip. I am a dichotomy of emotion. Flippantly afraid. “You mean climb over? That’s breaking the law, James.”
He looks away. “Leo Carnes was an agent. You’re an agent. If we don’t make someone pay for this, then we’re all in danger. I’m going to emulate Dali’s pragmatism on this one.”
I look at Callie and Alan. “How do the two of you feel about this?”
“Hell is freezing over.” Callie winks. “I agree with James.”
“You know where I’m at,” Alan says.
I examine my injured finger, flexing the hand. It hurts.
“I don’t think I can climb it.”
“We could cut the lock,” Alan offers.
“No. What if he’s there and watching the entrance? Even if he’s not, what if he comes back while we’re trying to get a warrant, sees that we’ve cut the lock, and bolts?”
“Good point. Then what?”
I use my hand as a visor, scanning the surrounding area. The gas station sits to the right. “What if we cut the lock to the gas station instead?”
We find a hardware store just a block away and buy a pair of bolt cutters. We cut the chain rather than the lock, so we can make it seem as though the fence is still buttoned up tight. “Here goes nothing,” I say. I enter the lot.
I make my way past the side of the station, parallel to the Meet Storage Solutions building, until I reach the back of the lot. I put my face close to the chain-link fence and peer at the concrete structure. I see a roll-up door that’s big enough to let a car through. I turn around, putting it and the fence to my back. I crouch down, trying to get myself to the level I would have been when I was in the trunk. I stare at the sky, searching for certainty. I see nothing I could swear to recognize under oath.
But you know this is the place. Do what’s right.
In my years as an agent, I have always prided myself on the truth that never once have I bent the law to serve my own ends. Searches have always been preceded by a warrant cleanly gotten. Arrests have always included a reading of rights, and those rights have been respected.
What’s a little lie if the plan is to kill him anyway?
Something inside me answers, but I block it out. I walk back to the front of the lot and exit the gate.
“This is the place,” I say. “This is where Dali took me.”
“Goooood,” Callie purrs. “Let’s go get our warrant, my hubby’s team, and a bunch of guns.”
I’m going to voice my agreement when we hear a loud bang, as from a gunshot. Everyone reaches for
their weapon.
“That came from the Meet Storage building,” Alan says.
“Sounds like probable cause to me,” I say. “James, cut the lock.”
He doesn’t hesitate—none of them does—and this, if nothing else, gives me pause. I am the leader. The shot caller. We should call it in, ask for backup. Let the guys with the big guns do the job they’re trained for.
Another gunshot goes off, obliterating my doubts. We draw our weapons. Another gunshot.
“Jesus,” Alan mutters. “What if he’s executing prisoners in there?”
“Go!” I say.
James shoves the gate open and we make a beeline for the building’s front door. I try the knob.
“Locked!” I whisper. I wave to the right. “Let’s go around.”
We head at a dead run toward the right side of the building. Sweat runs freely down my scalp. My heart hammers in my chest. My teeth chatter, and I feel cold and hot at the same time.
We get to the roll-up door. “Try it,” I tell James.
He reaches down and, to our surprise, it opens without difficulty.
I recognize the space immediately. My heart does a jig. This is where the darkness came.
“This is where he brought me,” I say. “Entry into the main part of the building is through that door.”
James rushes forward and tries it. Again, it opens without a problem. My finger throbs and, for a moment, I wish I could take a Percocet after all. Bells of alarm clang away in my head.
“Too easy,” I tell James, putting my free hand on his back. “Let’s go slow.”
He frowns back at me. Nods. He takes the lead, entering. I am behind him. Callie and Alan are behind me. We head down the hallway, passing the three doors that I remember, turning right to find the stairs. We climb the stairs until we reach the top. To the right is the door that leads to the hallway my cell was in. To the left is another door.
“Left one,” I whisper.
James opens it and we enter a longer hallway. Doors are on both sides. My stomach churns when I see the padlocks and hasps.
How many? Ten doors on each side? Are they all occupied?
I ignore my nausea and the yammering. We head down the hallway until it turns, and then there are only two doors, one at the end and one on the wall to the right. The doorway to the right is open. James puts a finger to his lips and inches toward it. I smell blood and death, that scent of shit and copper. James enters the room, gun trembling in his hands. I follow. The smells are stronger here.
I almost faint when I see the two tables and the two women there.
This is it. The place where he made me choose.
I lurch forward and vomit. Not because of the women with the fresh bullet holes in their foreheads, but because of the memories. My vision swims, and I stagger to one knee.
“You okay?” Alan whispers.
I can’t respond. I point out to the hallway. We have another room to clear.
Then a sound of another gunshot, the fourth and last, louder this time. James and Callie race out the door toward the other room. I hear a door open and then I hear nothing. I force myself to ignore the flashing white lights behind my eyes. The meadow calls, maybe my baby is there waiting, but now is not the time. I walk out of the room on unsteady legs. The other door has been flung wide.
“What is it?” I call out. “Is everyone okay?”
“Come and see,” Callie calls back softly. “Come and see.”
I enter the room with my head and finger throbbing. It’s a large room, made into an office. It’s stark. The floor is uncarpeted, the walls bare and unpainted. A single file cabinet sits next to a cheap faux-wood desk. There’s a computer monitor on the desk. A man is there too. His brains are splashed on the wall behind him.
“Coward,” James mutters. “He must have known we were coming.” He sounds frustrated. I understand. I wanted to kill Dali too.
“What about it?” Callie asks. “Do you recognize any part of him?”
I lean forward. I see an obliterated forehead above a set of surprised eyes and a slack mouth. I put him in his late forties to early fifties. His hair is in a crew cut, and it’s a semi-handsome but mostly unremarkable face. All of these things fit, except for perhaps the most important thing: the thing I saw and kept to myself. I wasn’t sure why I did it, before. Now I do.
“Yes,” I say. “That’s him. That’s Dali.”
It’s a lie, but that’s okay. I think I understand everything now.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
We sit in my living room, Tommy, Kirby, and I. Bonnie is being watched by Alan and Elaina for a few days. They think it’s to give me time to recover from everything that’s happened. The truth is that it’s to give me time to do what must be done.
“He knew you were coming because he was tracking the GPS chip in your phone,” Tommy says. “The techs didn’t find anything when they checked out your phone because there was nothing to find. He just locked on the signal and kept an eye out. A little reverse telemetry gave us what we need.”
Kirby examines me with an unreadable gaze as she cracks her gum. “You sure about this, boss lady? I have no problem with it, but this is new territory for you.” She nods a head at Tommy. “And you.”
“I’m sure,” I reply.
Tommy says nothing.
“Okeydokey,” Kirby says, grinning. “Let’s saddle up.”
Eric Kellerman. That is the name of the man with the obliterated forehead. He was forty-eight years old. He was an orphan, adopted by no one but the city, put out to pasture when he was eighteen. There’s not much after that but an excess of evidence.
His fingerprints matched the unknowns that were inside the body bags. Videos and photographs of the car accidents were found at the Los Angeles location, along with some poetry he’d written about how watching a car crash was better than having sex with any woman. There was a trunk containing over fifty thousand dollars in cash. Finally, in a desk drawer, held inside a plastic bag covered with his fingerprints, was the severed end of my own finger. It was all incontrovertible.
“The symphorophilia is what really clinches it,” James had remarked. “The statistical probability that someone else would have that particular paraphilia at that location combined with all the other factors is next to nil. He was Dali.”
The victims were the worst. Three women, all missing for a various number of years, most of them in worse shape than Heather Hollister. The husbands of these women were rounded up. Some broke quickly, some broke slow, but all of them broke. They were cowards at the core, narcissists whose biggest regret was being caught. They each had the same story, just sung to a different tune.
There were no clues to the locations of the Oregon or Nevada buildings. That’s okay. Tommy, Kirby, and I found them ourselves. It took a little work, but we have them, and we’ll provide an anonymous tip once we’ve done what we need to do.
I asked for time off, and it was given without any fuss. I think AD Jones was too relieved at my request to be suspicious. I hope. Director Rathbun wanted to do a press conference first, but he relented when I insisted I was in no shape to get in front of the cameras.
“Fine,” he said. “Go home; rest. Get yourself together. But don’t let the hair grow in too much before the conference. It’s a great image. We’ll use it to our advantage.”
It wasn’t all a lie. I did take a day or two to rest. Then I sent Bonnie packing and pulled in Tommy and Kirby and told them everything: what I knew, what I suspected, what I was unsure of. They were skeptical at first, until I told them about the thing I’d seen. After that, they shut up and listened.
Tommy had been the one to figure out that Dali was tracking the GPS chip in my phone. It’s how Dali knew that I was closing in on the LA location. Once again, simplicity had been his brilliance. He knew the techs at the FBI would check out my belongings for bugs, so instead of installing one, he just figured out how to track what was already there.
Tommy had used
his knowledge and technical contacts to reverse-engineer the GPS. This enabled us to track Dali. We counted on him taking no chances, and he didn’t disappoint. Declared dead or not, he kept the tracker active, wanting to be sure that he knew where I was. Pragmatism was his higher power and, I had to admit, it had served him pretty well, until now.
He’d been busy, spending time in Nevada and then in Oregon. It was pretty simple to figure out the addresses of the other locations. He was in Nevada now, and we were getting ready to go see him. To end this.
To kill him.
I long to kill him. I want to watch the life go out of his eyes. His death will be like water pouring down a parched and dusty throat. Will it quench my thirst? I don’t know. But it will keep him from coming after the people I love. That’ll have to be enough.
“I’m going to give Raymond your phone,” Kirby says. “He’ll carry it around with him while he’s watching Bonnie; that way it’ll look like you’re still here in LA.”
“Good. Are we ready?”
“I am,” Tommy says.
“The family that slays together, stays together,” Kirby chirps, then giggles.
Tommy and I don’t laugh.
We leave in the afternoon so we can arrive around dinnertime. The dark is better for what we’re after. There isn’t much talking; even Kirby keeps relatively silent. I watch California turn into the desert, feel the change of the temperature in spite of the air-conditioning. Watch as nothing turns back into the overwhelming something of Las Vegas. It appears as it always does, like some Flying Dutchman of a city. Mammon pricked his finger and let a drop of blood fall onto the sand. Up sprang Las Vegas.
There are two locations. One is the storage facility where he’s kept his Nevada victims. The other is a house, titled to a name that surprised me, even as it confirmed what I suspected about Dali based on what I’d seen. The reverse GPS confirms that Dali is at home.
We rent no hotel. No paper trails, thank you very much. Besides, we won’t need one. If you’re going to commit murder, better to come in and leave with the night. A page from Dali’s playbook of simplicity.
Abandoned: A Thriller Page 37