Second Life (Will Finch Mystery Thriller Series Book 4)

by D. F. Bailey

  “So,” Eve began as she settled on the sofa in the living room. She pulled her calves up onto the cushions and nestled in her cat pose. She took a sip from her coffee mug and studied him for a moment before continuing. “I had an interesting meeting with the Parson brothers today.”

  “Interesting?” Finch echoed the word with a half-hearted smile. “I’m famished. Completely starving.”

  “Dinner’s on the counter.” She thought he looked tired and a little angry. “The seafood sauce is in the fridge.”

  He returned from the kitchen, sat on the recliner, and set the plate of spinach salad and crab cakes on his lap. He checked the clock on the fireplace mantle: 9:38. He dipped a piece of crab cake in the pool of seafood sauce and devoured it. After the third bite, his hunger pangs began to subside.

  “So I think I’m going to accept their offer,” she continued as though there’d been no break in the conversation.

  “Seriously. This is going to be real?” He paused in mid-chew. “You’re going to buy into the eXpress?”

  “I think so. Part of it, anyway. My lawyer and accountant think it’s a legit business, although neither of them see any upside in online media outlets. They think the market’s saturated. But if we refocus the eXpress on covering crime and corruption exclusively—well, that’s been my life for the last eight years. You’ve got to admit, I know the turf.”

  She paused to assess his reaction. She knew this would be a big move, not just for her, but for them as a couple. At some level it would affect how they related to one another. The balance of power. The sexual dynamics. She didn’t want to change any of that. Things were perfect as they were and this decision could upend their world.

  He forked some salad into his mouth and set the plate aside. He chewed steadily with a look of contemplation. After he swallowed he wiped his mouth with a napkin and took a sip of coffee.

  “What are they offering?”

  “Ten percent for five million with an option to buy another forty-one percent after one year. The accountant says I should offer three and settle at four mill.”

  She watched him run though some mental calculations.

  “Could be about right,” he said. “We have thirteen people on payroll. There’s the cost of paying freelancers, operations, rent—which by the way, goes to another Parson holding company. Four million will probably carry us through one more year. So you’d be buying time. Enough time to determine if you should invest in the option. During the first year you’d have to come up with new income streams. Wally told me last week that ad revenue is faltering even though readership is expanding. So be prepared. The internet has made an already a crazy business go insane.”

  True enough, she thought. But she had an idea that might solve the revenue flow. An idea she’d keep to herself for now.

  “Well, it’s just money,” she said with a wave of her hand.

  He smiled at that. Their private joke. “You know I still can’t believe it sometimes.”

  “Me too.” She thought about her windfall. Millions of dollars, stocks, bonds—and bitcoin, of all things—had suddenly poured into her life. Unasked for. She’d donated twenty percent to a national foundation to support abused women. And millions more still sat in the bank. Money to coax this new dream to life.

  “But I’m worried about something, Will.” Her face took on a serious expression. “If I buy in, what happens to us?”

  He looked at her and nodded, unsure how to respond.

  “This deal can’t stop what we have,” she added and waved a hand around the room, a gesture to include everything surrounding them. The cottage. The life they’d built. “I won’t do it if you don’t think it’s right.”

  He smiled. “Don’t worry about that. It’s safe, Eve. We’re safe.” He walked to the sofa and sat beside her. “This deal will be good for you—and us. Take it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  He wrapped an arm around her and they kissed. After a moment, he pulled away.

  “But there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “About the list. Finkleman found something new about the list.”

  “What?”

  “A sort of statistical analysis.” He looked away. “Let me brew another coffee. Then I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  ※

  On his way into the newsroom the next morning, the severity of the threat facing Finch began to weigh on him. The previous evening he’d spent almost three hours dissecting his situation with Eve. She was unshakable in her belief that the SFPD would never reopen the file about Fast’s murder. “No cop in his right mind,” she’d argued, “would unzip a triple-bagger without outside pressure. Fast, Squire, Gianna. It ain’t gonna happen.”

  Instead, she’d insisted that the FBI would have to pick up the investigation. With one death in San Francisco, one in London and now a third at MIT, they could tap into Interpol and tie all three murders from the list into an international murder-for-hire conspiracy. In the meantime, she wanted Will to start packing a gun. When he refused, she unlocked the bedroom vault and slipped her Colt Cobra .38 Special into the nightstand drawer beside her pillow. The same pistol he’d used to kill Alexei Malinin. Five slugs to his back and chest. The memory still haunted him.

  By the time they’d rolled into bed, they agreed to wait another day to consider the options. To reopen the case, Eve and Will knew they needed proof that someone other than Toby Squire was behind Martin Fast’s death. But where could they find concrete evidence? Maybe from the man in the photograph, Raymond Guzman. Who was he? What was his role?

  When Will sat at his desk at the eXpress, he noticed the message light blinking on his landline phone. He tapped his password onto the keypad. The AT&T voice messenger calmly announced, “You have thirty-three new messages.”

  Of course. The tipsters and whistle-blowers in Gilly’s podcast audience would be all over this. It took him over two hours to sort out the spam from the more likely leads. Whenever he hit upon a genuine possibility, he returned the call to determine if the informant possessed any valid information about Raymond Guzman.

  It wasn’t until he hit the nineteenth message that he felt a surge of optimism when a woman spoke into the voice mailbox in a near breathless whisper: “I know him. The man you’re looking for on your radio show. Guzman. He’s done some time, but he ain’t paid for his crime. Room 505, in the Mentone on Ellis. Don’t try calling me. You never heard of me. And you never will.”

  He knew the message was hot. Every other tip required a call-back. “Phone me for details.” “For fifty bucks I’ll show you his room.” “Saw him last night at the Whiskey Thieves Bar. Meet you there at six.” Message nineteen was different in every way.

  As he played it a second time, Finch wrote down the details. When he finished he saved the message, then turned to the map directory on his computer and found the address of the Hotel Mentone on Ellis Street. He grabbed his courier bag and phone and slipped past the other writers in the bog, all of them diligently ticking away at their keyboards.

  On his way out the door, he paused at Finkleman’s desk and caught his attention. “Gabe, have you got the picture of Toby Squire I gave you? I need it.”

  “Right here.” Finkleman pulled the picture from his drawer. “I scanned it and I’m running it through some low-grade facial recognition software.”

  Finch paused. “The eXpress has facial recognition software?”

  “Open source. Nothing special, and it takes forever so don’t lose sleep waiting for it.”

  Once again surprised by Finkleman’s resourcefulness, Finch gave the rookie a thumbs-up and took the picture in his hand.

  “By the way, I got a lead on Raymond Guzman. Check through the state penal records. I think Guzman did some time in the can.”

  “You got it,” Finkleman said.

  Finch turned into the corridor and made his way to the staircase at the end of the hall
.

  ※

  The Mentone Hotel rose five storeys above a bar and pool hall called the Cinnabar on the corner of Ellis and Jones Streets. A brick-faced box, the hotel looked to be one of the many Depression-era projects constructed to restore the broken economy and draw a few more men back into the labor force.

  Finch parked his car on Ellis and crossed through the unlocked security gate under an arched canopy. The lobby appeared to be empty, the front desk abandoned. A single hallway led to a staircase near the rear of the building. Finch took the stairs two at a time. At the first landing he had to climb over an old man with a gray, foot-long-beard spotted with what Finch assumed was day-old spaghetti sauce. The hobo’s skin was so pale that Finch worried that he might be dead. He detected a faint pulse in the man’s wrist and prodded his arm with a gentle nudge. After a moment the old-timer’s eyelids fluttered open and shut.

  “You all right, pal?”

  “Ga fack off’n me,” he mumbled.

  Finch released his arm and continued his climb up the stairs.

  As he ascended to the fifth floor, Finch absorbed the sounds of the building. The low groans and psychotic shouts of men shuttered behind the thin doors mixed with the wheeze and sighs of the building’s creaking vents and broken floor boards. The stale air, laden with the odor of cigarette smoke, human spunk and excrement brought a new sense of despair to Finch’s recurrent fears for the city’s homeless. How could life sink to this depth? And one day, would it drown him, too?

  On the fifth floor he ghosted past the row of six doors on the street-side hallway. 501, 503 — 507, 509. He returned to the unmarked door between 503 and 507 and knocked once. Nothing. He examined the keyhole, an old-fashioned eyelet designed for a standard lever-lock key. He dug through his courier bag and pulled out the wallet of lock-pick tools that he’d acquired during his training in military intelligence. The large pick and levering bar both slid into the keyhole without resistance. He jimmied the two together until he felt the longer blade hit the cylinder teeth. After a few seconds he found the resistance point, gave the pick a clockwise turn and entered Raymond Guzman’s room.

  ※

  A cot, a hot plate, a kettle, an empty can of Campbell’s Tomato soup holding a collection of assorted cutlery. Two glass mugs, a can of Folger’s coffee sealed with a cracked plastic lid, a chipped laminate desk, one plastic deck chair, a narrow closet covered by a torn curtain. On the desk: a worn Bible written in Spanish, sales flyers from local merchants, the front section from a two-day old edition of El Tecolote, the local Spanish newspaper. The closet contained a pair of worn work boots, three shirts hung on wire hangers, a lumberman’s jacket and a pair of denim jeans double-parked on a hook. Next to the closet floor were two open cardboard boxes holding unsorted socks, underwear, t-shirts, a belt, an empty canvas duffle bag.

  Within five minutes Finch had surveyed the room and its contents. Then he stood at the window and pulled the tattered drape to one side. From his vantage point, five storeys above the street, he could see the City Hall rotunda in the distance. Its grand appearance, with the gold accents on the domed peak, added one more insult to the misery on the sidewalks below.

  On the longest wall, perhaps ten feet in length, a dozen Polaroid pictures of a woman and a young girl had been taped to the plaster in a rectangular arrangement. Perhaps these two were the mother and daughter that Alice had mentioned to Finch in the Hyde-Turk Mini Park.

  Finch’s phone pinged. He sat at the desk and read an email from Finkleman: Bingo. Guzman did two stints in prison for assault. Chuckawalla and Ironwood. Arrested for the abduction of Fay Flood and her daughter, Teejay Flood, but released because the mother refused to testify. See the attached PDF for details. Not much else on this one. Good hunting, Gabe.

  Before he could open the PDF, he heard footsteps treading along the corridor towards 505. The door swung open. Guzman stepped inside and closed the door behind him before he realized that he had a guest. He hesitated and then slipped his denim jacket onto the cot. Finch guessed he was in his late thirties. He stood about five-foot-ten but he had a broad chest and probably weighed close to two hundred pounds. He dragged his fingers through his short, black hair and let out a tight snort through his nostrils as if he were a bull preparing to charge.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Since Lenny Earl shot himself, I’m your new best friend.” Finch smiled and gestured to the cot. “Have a seat, Raymond. We need to talk.”

  He hesitated, just long enough to assure Finch that he had the right man.

  “Earl? I don’t know any Earl.” He shifted his weight on his feet. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Then tell me who’s the man in the photo with you.” Finch pulled the polaroid from his pocket and held it a few inches from Guzman’s face.

  “Wha’ the fu… Lemme see that.”

  With a quick snap of his wrist he tried to grab the photo. It fell to the floor and then Guzman shifted his weight and took a swing at Finch’s nose with his left hand. Finch side-stepped, let the fist glide past him then caught Guzman’s extended arm and twisted it backwards and down. It was a two-step move that immobilized Guzman in an arm lock.

  “Do that again,” Finch whispered in his ear, “and I’ll put you down.” He tightened his grip on the forearm and notched it tight. One more inch and the ulna would snap.

  Guzman’s chest slumped forward in a show of resignation. After a moment Finch relaxed his grip and released him. Guzman expelled a long jet of air and sat on the edge of the cot. “Look, I don’t talk about nothin’ until you tell me who the fuck you are.”

  His English was almost accent-free. It resonated with a note of latino intonation, enough to suggest he was American-born but raised in an immigrant family.

  “I’m not a cop, and I’m not going to turn you in. If you help me, that is.” He picked up the photograph, slid it into his shirt pocket and fixed a smile on his lips.

  Guzman’s posture stiffened. “Turn me in? For what?”

  “Take your pick.” Finch pouted as if he were considering the options from a list of possibilities. “How about accessory to murder.”

  “What?” Guzman jumped up from the bed and glowered at Finch. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Will waved a hand, a gesture to settle down. “Raymond, I know you’ve done time in Ironwood and Chuckawalla. One more strike, amigo, and you’re going away for a very long time. So don’t even think about it.” He notched his head to one side to suggest that even if Guzman won a fight, he’d still end up in a pen.

  Guzman clenched his jaw, walked toward the window and grabbed the curtain. As he scanned the street he seemed to consider the gravity of his situation.

  “What murder are you talking about?”

  “Last week. When Lenny Earl shot Martin Fast down on Market Street. Just a few hours before he did himself in.”

  Guzman turned to face Finch. “I heard about that. How’s that touch me? I did nothin’.”

  “You got him the gun.”

  “Gun? I don’t know nuthin’ about no gun.” Guzman scoffed and walked back toward the cot.

  “Lenny Earl had the mind of child, Raymond. Did he tell you about his brain surgery? About the coma he was in? He wasn’t capable of stealing a gun on his own.”

  “I told you, I don’t know about any fuckin’ gun.”

  Will could detect Guzman’s weariness, his pending capitulation. For the first time Finch noticed a fading bruise on the side of Guzman’s cheek below his right eye. Someone had given him a good shot and left his mark. He decided to press harder. “And then there’s the Armani jacket you stole.”

  “What fuckin’ jacket? I don’t have no jacket!”

  Finch swept his fingers over the screen on his phone and brought up the image he’d taken on the trunk of his car after he’d bartered for the jacket with Alice. When he saw the image, Guzman’s face betrayed a look of surprise.

  “What bothers
me is what I don’t know,” Will said. “I don’t know how and where you got the jacket and the pistol. But one way or another that .38 ended up in Lenny’s hands. And you helped him. Then Lenny shot Martin Fast. Killed him. That makes you an accessory to Fast’s murder.”

  Finch could see Guzman’s throat tighten as he realized how the implications could doom him. His Adam’s apple wobbled as he tried to speak and then choked back his words.

  Finally he managed to speak coherently: “Who are you?”

  “You don’t need to know that. It’s better for both of us. All I want to know is where—and how—you got the jacket and the gun.”

  Guzman sat on the cot again and dropped his head into his hands. He let out another sigh, lifted his head and studied Finch’s face as if he had to make a choice before he could continue.

  “Right now you have to make a very simple decision, Raymond. Do you talk to the cops—or to me? If you talk to me, after today you will never see me again. But if you talk to the cops … well, that could be the last conversation you have as a free man.”

  This was the second time that he’d raised this prospect and now Finch decided to stop talking. He had nothing more to say, no better deal to offer. Years of experience had taught him that when he reached a precipice like this, he should simply shut up and let the weight of silence apply the necessary pressure.

  “If I show you something,” Guzman whispered, “if I show you anything—what do I get in return?”

  Finch shrugged and softened his voice. “That’s a good question.” Now that Guzman had turned the conversation to the bargaining stage, Will knew he could draw out all the information he needed.

  “First, one more day of freedom. Second, one hundred bucks. Enough to buy you a meal with a cold beer and a bus ticket to Tijuana.” He paused to wave a hand around the room. “From there you move on, find another town and a new name. And your link to Lenny vanishes.”