by D. F. Bailey
“Shit!” he moaned and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and bound it around his wounds.
He turned back to the grate. All four sides of the vent now stood an inch above the floor. He folded the blade of his knife, slipped it into a pocket, and with both hands worked the steel rectangle from the opening and set it aside. Sure enough, just below the open space lay a metal container. He lifted it onto the carpet. Then, another surprise. The receptacle was nothing more than a tin box, no lock, no keypad. No protection. The bitch must have thought that simply hiding everything under the false duct would provide all the security she’d need.
This time when he glanced through the window, his heart exploded with a rush of adrenaline. Eve was halfway across the boulevard with some joe. No time to waste! Toby dumped the box upside down on the rug. The contents spewed on top of the mess that he’d created during his rampage over the last twenty minutes. Papers, jewelry, photographs, computer disks. Worthless relics! He swept all of it aside under his bleeding fingers. As his heart pounded in his chest, he fumbled some of the jewelry in his hands — thinking that he could make his break-in appear like a flash robbery. Yes, that would throw her off. He shoved two necklaces into his pocket, then he dropped everything else and ambled toward the exit, his right leg hitching to the side with every step, a round-about motion to compensate for his shorter left leg.
At the top of the stairs he tuned his ears for the sound of the front door on the street. Again, nothing. But as he made his way down the back staircase, he could hear the sweep of the front door open and close, the soft, contained laughter of a woman followed by the low sniggering of a man. Disgusting. They deserved what they’d find upstairs.
He entered the back alley and hobbled around the building up to the corner of Geary and 22nd Avenue. His eyes scanned the sidewalk in front of the building. No one. Be like a cat, he whispered to himself. Just like you used to do back in South Shoreditch.
※
Will watched in silence as Eve’s expression shifted from warm anticipation to surprise, shock and then — rage.
“Shit!” she screamed. She walked across her living room, careful to lighten her steps as she trod across the books, papers, framed pictures, audio equipment, media discs, jewelry, and a hundred other items that had been dumped on the floor.
“There’s blood here!” She stood next to the window, staring at the stains on the floor. “Don’t touch it.”
Will examined the broken door lock and took a step into the condo. Over the years he’d attended at least a dozen crime scenes following a police raid. In some cases, the plaster had been ripped from the walls, the ceilings torn away and dumped on the floors. The destruction to Eve’s home didn’t match the worst of what he’d witnessed but the violence of this break-in felt unnerving. He eased across the carpet and stood for a moment beside the bathroom door where he observed that every moveable object had been thrown to the floor or into the bathtub. He tiptoed past the kitchen — littered with broken plates, glass, cutlery — over to her bedroom. He leaned on the door frame and gazed into the disaster before him. The mattress had been flipped against the wall. A sharp blade had cut a long, jagged X that ran from corner to corner and intersected in the middle where clumps of foam spilled onto the carpet through the flaps of the incision. Dresser drawers, all dumped on the floor, lay atop the pile of clothing torn from the closet.
He turned toward Eve, feeling as if he’d entered a private space, a part of her world that even she could barely identify as her own.
“Unbelievable,” he whispered, “Somebody really wants that cell phone and thumb drive. Either that or they don’t much care for your cooking.”
A look of disgust crossed her face. She folded her arms, turned away and stared through the window. “Look, there he goes!” she screamed. “Stay here. He might have a partner. Whatever you do, don’t call the cops,” she added and dashed through the front door and down the stairs to the street.
Finch walked toward the window, careful to tread around any breakable items. He watched her step onto the road and halfway toward the boulevard median she raised her fist and let out a curse. Finch tried to make out the license number on the black BMW but the car turned onto 22nd Avenue and disappeared.
As Eve stood on the street he could see her body deflate as if someone had punctured the skin between her shoulder blades so that her body collapsed through her chest. She bent over at the waist and for a moment he considered running down to her. Then she set her hands on her hips, braced herself and looked at him standing at the window frame.
“Stay there,” she called. “I’m going to check something back at the restaurant.” She dipped her head with a look of defeat and walked back across the street to Ton Kiang’s.
As she entered the restaurant, Finch turned his attention to the mess at his feet. Whoever had broken into the condo was an idiot. A pro would never have touched a thread. Better to enter the apartment, conduct a thorough search, pocket the phone and thumb drive. Then simply vanish. A zero-trace job. If the thief came up empty-handed Eve would never suspect that she’d been targeted. And if the job had been properly executed, he mused, he would now be at play with Eve in her bed for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe longer.
Feeling her despair, he leaned over to inspect the blood still damp on the papers, discs and photos at his feet. Certainly enough fluid to provide a DNA profile. He pulled a pen from his courier bag, squatted, and poked the pen tip through the scattered papers. One document caught his eye, a legal monograph folded in three and stapled to a blue cover page. He lifted it in his fingernails and studied the title: “Declaration of Settlement and Non-Disclosure.” In a smaller font, a subtitle filled two lines: “Agreed to by Eve Angeline Noon, and the City of San Francisco and the San Francisco Police Department.” He blinked. In his hand he held Eve’s settlement with the cops for their sexual harassment and assault.
He opened the document to the last page. Besides Eve’s signature, it displayed three other inscriptions. Above the signatures a statement of award laid out her compensation: an immediate one-point-two million dollars, annual payments for three years of one hundred thousand, followed by ten years at fifty thousand per annum. All in return for her silence. He shrugged and wondered what could have gone so wrong. Or so right.
Now a second consideration entered his mind: This is your insurance policy. His means to counter the tyranny Eve had imposed on him from the moment they’d met. He knew she’d either have to surrender her advantage over him — the report identifying his DNA on Gianna’s corpse — or he’d have to find equivalent leverage. Perhaps this was it. Seconds later he heard the sweep of the front door opening and closing on the street below, followed by her athletic steps climbing the staircase to the apartment. Without another thought, he slipped the document into his courier bag and zipped it shut.
When she stood at the door and he saw her troubled face, he realized the only way to reset the balance in their relationship would be to reveal that he had taken the non-disclosure agreement. And that he was fully prepared to publish it.
※
“Connie told me Ton Kiang keeps a closed-circuit TV monitor focused on the front of the store. She says we can look at it when they shut down at nine. Even though it was parked across the street, there’s a chance we can read the license plate on that BMW.”
We can read the license plate. Finch tried to decode the meaning underlying these few words. Had she already reset their relationship? Were they now gliding along a new level of mutual trust? He studied her face, tried to assess the moods behind her shifting expressions. A facade of optimism gave way to hopelessness, which soon yielded to a look of despair. As she walked from room to room, her shoulders slumped and she knotted her hands in fists.
“What a bloody mess,” she moaned and her eyes clouded with tears. She moved toward Finch, who stood next to the window above the floor vent. “Who is doing this to me?” She opened her hands at her waist, a beseeching motion
close to surrender.
“I don’t know.” He tipped his head to one side and draped an arm around her shoulder. “But don’t worry, we’ll find out.”
“Damn it,” she whispered, and rolled against his chest so that his arm slipped along her back.
“You smell so good,” she said as she inhaled the fragrance radiating from his skin. She swept her arms around his waist and let her palms drift along the trapezius muscles up to his shoulders. “So strong.”
He felt a stream of tears slip from her eyes onto his cheeks. She pulled away to brush a hand across her face.
“None of that,” he murmured and set his eyes on hers. He drew her closer and he could feel her heavy breasts rise against his chest. His right hand dropped to the small of her back and he braced his hips against her so that she could feel him.
When she released herself, when everything in her body began to yield, he nestled against her so that they could both savor the moment and the pleasure that lay before them. He closed his eyes and kissed her, a slight caress that she pressed eagerly to her lips.
She pulled away for a moment. “Just don’t stop,” she whispered. Then she kissed him again. And again.
※
An hour later Eve looked at Finch, her face grinning with a hint of adolescent delight. From what appeared to be a complete disaster she’d secured one small victory: the affection of Will Finch. She kissed his cheek and traced a finger along his jaw up to the tip of his missing earlobe.
“I’m going to miss that part of you,” she said and nibbled lightly at his ear.
“That’s two of us.”
She rose from the torn mattress that they’d flipped onto the floor in their fit of passion. Then she pulled on a camisole and her underpants and walked into the living room.
After a moment he followed her and watched as she surveyed the damage. Apart from a single curtain clinging to a bent rod, little had been spared by the intruder. She approached the drape and on a whim, tugged the right side of the curtain rod until it crashed to the floor at her feet. Her catastrophe was now complete.
“I always hated those drapes,” she said with a short laugh and cast her eyes across the ruins that lay around them. “All right. Now I think I can deal with this. Maybe.”
After they dressed, her first priority was to collect samples of the blood next to the vent. Will, still buzzing with the afterglow of sex, leaned against the wall and observed her meticulous handling of the DNA swab kit. She opened the small vial and dipped the tip of the sampling stick into the thin pool of blood on the floor. Then she snapped the plastic post, released it into the vial and sealed it with the fold-over cap. She took a second sample for back-up.
“Just in case they screw up at the lab,” she said and set both kits on a shelf in her refrigerator. She glanced at him and smiled, a look of sympathy. “Take your time, Will.”
“Sure thing,” he muttered and pulled his courier bag from the chaos littering the floor and set it next to the front door.
“Poor boy. You look so drowsy.” Her lips curled in amusement and she walked into the bedroom closet.
A moment later she returned to the living room with a batch of forensic tools. Over the next ten minutes she dusted and lifted fingerprints from around the apartment: the door knobs, cupboard handles, broken plates, ceramic pieces, the pots and pans tossed from the stove to the floor.
“There’s bound to be something here,” she said. “I’ll check it against the data base.”
“Data base?”
“I still have friends in the SFPD. A few of the women, anyway.”
She studied him a moment. He’d righted the sofa and perched himself on the armrest. She eased across the room and touched his cheek with the back of her hand.
“I’m going to clean up the bathroom and take a shower. Everything okay?”
He shrugged, unsure how to respond.
While she sorted out the bathroom and showered, Finch considered what he’d learned about Eve in the past two hours. So much of what he’d assumed about her had proved false. He no longer perceived her as a bitter ex-cop trying to re-live her days of glory. No longer saw her as the manipulative witch who’d blackmailed him into serving her scheme to restore Gianna’s honor. Instead, he realized that she’d been damaged and demeaned by her employer. Worse, she’d been publicly humiliated for it. Why else would the cops have settled out-of-court and granted her such a generous compensation? He calculated the math set out in the agreement of non-disclosure tucked away in his courier bag. Two million dollars over thirteen years.
Finch now recognized someone completely different in Eve. With her stipend she had no need to work. She could do almost anything she wanted, yet she’d launched herself on an almost impossible crusade. An act of selfless loyalty under fire, the sort of thing he’d only witnessed in Iraq.
In addition to her devotion, her intelligence stood her apart as a street-smart operator with the ability to remain focused. During those moments when he’d observed her sorting through a problem — in the library, over the meal last night, and at dim sum this morning — he witnessed how she staked out the logic of the task at hand, identified a sequence of events, tested them against other possibilities, and then discarded one theory for another when the facts pointed to a new direction. She must have been an effective cop. Maybe too successful for the boys on the beat.
Moreover, she was beautiful. Gorgeous. But where were the other men in her life? He hesitated on that thought and then brushed it aside. He knew Eve was far more discriminating in her choice of men than Gianna. After her experience with the SFPD she could easily have joined the ranks of outraged man-haters, posting wild accusations on Twitter and Facebook. But she’d done none of that. And now, in less than an hour, they’d established a new relationship with one another. Or was this just another illusion? The sort of thing he’d embraced in the past, only to regret it later. No, this might be different. As he considered the synergy between them, he glanced at his courier bag and wondered if he’d need his new insurance policy.
After her shower they discussed how to restore some sense of order to the apartment. She pointed out where the pictures should be placed on the walls. Then Finch righted the chairs in the living room and then loaded all the books into the bookcase in alphabetical order according to the author’s last name.
“Not exactly how I had it arranged,” Eve said, “but it’ll do.”
Next, he repaired the mattress by applying ten-foot strips of duct tape to the broad X cut across the fabric, then he flipped it back onto the box spring and pushed the frame against the wall. Eve made up the bed with fresh linen that had gone undisturbed in her closet.
“I’d been meaning to change the sheets for the past week,” she allowed. “It took that asshole to bring me around to it.”
While Finch tried to re-assemble the kitchen, guessing where the pots and plates might go in the open cupboards, Eve turned her attention to the scramble of papers and photos still strewn across the living room floor.
“Hey,” she said in a low voice as she stared at the open vent.
“What?”
“Maybe the break-in has nothing to do with Gianna.”
“What do you mean?” Finch turned to look at her. “Who else would do this?”
“The cops.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I know what they were looking for.” She stood up and glanced around the room. Her face blanched. “Apart from some worthless costume jewelry it’s the only thing missing.”
“What?”
“My compensation agreement. From the SFPD.”
Finch felt his stomach tighten. “But why would they take that? After two years?”
She thought a moment. “If someone publishes it, it’ll void my agreement. I’ll have to pay everything back,” she said and stood at the window and peered outside as if she might see a squad car speeding along the boulevard. “But that doesn’t make sense either,” she continu
ed, “The agreement’s void only if I disclose it.”
Finch shook his head as a feeling of dread coursed through his gut. He realized that he could tell her the truth now, or never. If he waited to reveal that he’d stolen the document, then he’d have to explain the delay and his on-going manipulation of her. If he never told her — and the missing document became the focus of an endless search — then he’d shift her attention away from Gianna’s murder. And if she ever discovered the truth on her own without his confession, she’d likely never forgive him.
“Hell.” He rolled his hands into fists and walked to the door where he’d set his courier bag on the floor.
“What?”
He unzipped the bag and tipped his chin forward, an invitation for her to look inside the bag.
“What is it?”
“You remember telling me that if I was resourceful I might find my own insurance policy? To balance what you know about me and Gianna.”
Her brow rose slightly, enough to etch two or three lines across her forehead. “So?”
“So when you went back to Ton Kiang I found this.” He lifted the non-disclosure agreement in his right hand. “It was sitting on the floor in plain sight. Next to the open vent. I thought it could give me the edge I needed. To balance what you hold over me.”
She took the document in her hand and set her eyes on him. A look of anger knotted her face but after a moment she sat on the sofa with an expression of confusion. “This is crazy.”
“Yeah.” He stood in front of her. “Look, Eve … what we just had, I mean last night and today, is fantastic. I mean it. And where it might go … it could be something, you know?” — his head swung around as if he’d lost direction — “But I can’t work like this anymore. We both know that if word gets out about me and Gianna, it’s the end for me.” He paused, uncertain how to continue. “So now you’re safe,” — he pointed at the document clutched in her hand — “and you’re free to say whatever you like about me. But if you want to see me again, Eve, you’re going to have to pledge never to reveal what you know.”