“Kincade would redeem it for ten thou in cash?” Trey finished skeptically. “What if the receiver hands the tooth to the cops instead?”
“Believe me, the Boy Scouts cleared out of that neighborhood a long time ago. And anybody with street smarts would know that if he turns in the tooth to the cops, they’ll give him a pat on the head—maybe—and zip reward. If he brings it to Kincade, he’s paid and paid well.”
“I s’pose it could have happened that way,” Trey conceded, “but me, I like things simple. I’m leaning to the roommate theory. Even if Singh killed her for love, he had to know the tooth was valuable. He’s the guy who helped Lia arrange her auction. So why not grab it on his way out the window?”
“And the watch?” She hadn’t mentioned Cade’s question of the night before.
“The watch is easy. If the girl had two things of value that came from the same place, it’s likely she stored them together. Whoever grabbed the box, got them both.”
“Mmm, maybe.” Raine wandered to the sliding-glass doors and stared out over her own tiny balcony, at a green and cluttered oasis. Tiers and rows of similar balconies jutted out from the backsides of the brownstones that faced on the next block—the hanging gardens of Upper Westside cliff dwellers. Walled-off from the rumbling streets, the balconies formed a precious and secret refuge, all the wilderness most of her neighbors would ever explore. She made a face. The city was starting to get to her, right on schedule.
She peered up at the rectangle of hazy blue enclosed by the rooftops. It was hours yet till dark, when she could go prowling. Try to find some facts to replace all these theories. Surely the cops wouldn’t stake out Lia’s apartment two nights in a row?
“Speaking of the watch, was that sketch I faxed you of any use?” she asked idly. To the best of her memory, she’d drawn the butterfly-shaped lake—if it was a lake—with the range of mountains below it. If Trey could locate this spot within Borneo, perhaps she’d start her search there.
“Not so far. Maps of the interior are mostly vintage World War Two, and they come with polite little disclaimers that say in effect ‘nobody’s ever been here or seen this, but rumor has it that maybe, just possibly, within a couple of hundred miles of hereabouts, you might find…’”
“Hmm. I’ll see what I can find at this end. Now about my field kit. Should I take a folding kayak?”
The e-mail message from the B-frog opened with its usual warning:
You have fifteen seconds to hit the print key!
Cade executed the command. While the hard copy slid out of his printer, he watched the digital words melt into rain and drizzle down to make a puddle at the bottom of his computer screen. A frog stuck his head up from the pool. Out shot its tongue to nail a letter k that had turned into a frantic butterfly. With a gulp and a rude belch, the bullfrog sank from view. Then came the sound of a flushing toilet; the water drained away.
Most e-mail messages were recoverable even after their receiver had deleted them, the B-frog had warned Cade at the start of their association. But not his. Cade reached across his desk for the hacker’s hard copy, from which all origination info had been omitted. If this paper ever fell into enemy hands, it would incriminate only himself.
Latest activity on the Ashaway credit cards. First: Raine Ashaway is ticketed Raffles class, seat C-1, on flight 143, Singapore Airlines, leaving Newark Airport, September 28 at 11 p.m. Booked nonstop to Singapore. No connecting reservations so far. I note that there’s still space on this bird, in case you’re interested.
Second: someone just purchased a folding kayak in NYC.
All for now. You can wire my usual fee to:
Never the same bank twice, Cade noted as he read the routing instructions. And he doubted the money would stop there. Wherever and whoever the B-frog was, he didn’t mean to be gigged for the services he provided.
Cade jotted a note for Marc, who’d gone out to lunch.
I need a folding kayak, and reservation on this flight, this date.
He smiled grimly to himself. His private assistant drew the line at dealing with hackers, but Cade had no such qualms. He’d use whomever or whatever it took to bring the Ashaways down.
Funny. He’d always expected to feel a savage satisfaction at the end of his quest. A bleak closure on the day he finally stamped their debt Paid in Full. But in all his years of planning toward that goal, he’d never dreamed he’d feel such pleasure in the task itself. This eagerness that lifted him and carried him along from hour to hour.
He shrugged, then bent his head to the note to add a final line.
And Marc, I want the seat next to C-1. Make it happen.
Chapter 11
He didn’t dare go back that same night, but the next, Szabo spotted only one cop on stakeout. The stupid shitheel was parked down the street, where he could look up from the comfort of his unmarked car at the windows of Lia’s apartment. Slurping coffee and watching for the lights to come on.
Not a problem. Szabo had brought a flashlight. Hands in his pockets, he sauntered on down the street, cutting his eyes at the spot where she must have hit the ground. By the yellow rays of a streetlight, he made out a stain that might be somebody’s oil leak—or might be hers.
The hair stood up on his arms and he laughed under his breath. He’d forgotten how it felt, that funny glow. Hadn’t felt it in years. Like a joyride in a rich man’s car, only better. Like the end of the joyride, when you pushed the big shiny Cadillac off a cliff, just to hear it go smash.
Silly bitch. If she hadn’t bitten him, he’d have let her live. Probably. Leastways long enough to tell him all he needed to know. But she’d clamped down on his arm with those sharp little teeth and he’d…lost it for a second there. The ol’ Ranger training had kicked in, and next thing you knew, her ear was resting on her skinny shoulder. Haste makes waste, as Gran always said.
Then somebody had started kicking down her door. He’d tossed her out the window, hoping they’d think she’d jumped. He’d turned and—bingo!—there was the box, on a shelf above her desk.
But once he’d had time to look through it, he had more questions than ever. So here he was, back where he’d started. She’d shared her place with a couple of guys, he’d noticed when he scouted the place. If he could lay hold of one of them, maybe the roomie would know something useful. Women never could keep their traps shut.
Szabo strolled on around the block, then cut through a backyard and over a fence. Went in through the broken basement window, same as he had the last time. Up all those damn stairs to her door, which had been patched back together with epoxy and ring nails. A yellow tape marked it as a crime scene. Mine, he thought with a twinge of pride as he knocked. “Hey, anybody home?” he called cheerfully, with one rawboned fist cocked and waiting.
When nobody answered, Szabo stood and pondered. He could kick it in, sure, but if somebody heard? Or if the cop stirred his lard ass, and came up to check things out?
Better to go in the same way he’d gone out.
The cop in the unmarked car had a clear view of the front door to Lia’s building. He might not recognize her from the night before, but Raine was taking no chances. She circled the block and walked down the alley at the right side of the tenement. The hinged ladder to the fire escape was folded up. If she stood on the Dumpster beneath it and leaped from there, then maybe…She wrinkled her nose at the smell of rotten fish wafting up from the bin. Gotta be a more elegant approach.
Twenty minutes later she stepped out on the roof of the building to the left of Lia’s. Padding across its tarred gravel, she stopped to consult a gray cat that approached with its tail in vertical “greetings” position. “All clear?” she inquired as it performed the obligatory circle and strop.
Rubbing its cheek along the haft of her knife—she wore it strapped to her ankle beneath her climbing pants—the cat seemed unworried. Politely it accompanied her to the edge of the building. They sat together on the low perimeter wall, peering down.
> A gap of some three feet separated this building from Lia’s. An easy downward jump of about six feet, since the roof of Lia’s building was slightly lower. Coming back would be nastier. “Must be nice not to have an imagination,” she groused to the cat. The thought of slipping down that black slot between…Raine shuddered, then put it firmly from her mind. “Why go to the carnival, if you’re not gonna ride the roller coaster?” She crouched—and leaped—teetered for an instant along the brink with arms outstretched, then stepped briskly to the rooftop. “Piece of cake,” she assured the cat.
Who gave her a look of mild astonishment—then rolled back on its haunches to hoist a hind leg at the sky. Dipping its head, it licked its inner thigh, then paused, lost in thought.
At the far side of Lia’s building, Raine looked down at the fire escape which ended one story below. She could have made the jump—reluctantly—but that would be foolish. The iron framework would vibrate and groan. Apartment dwellers in the city tended to notice strange sounds on the fire escapes.
She pulled a length of climbing rope from her backpack, and tied it to a vent pipe. Knotting in a half dozen foot loops for the return trip, she eased it over the drop-off, wrapped it around shoulder and hips, then followed, walking slowly down the bricks.
Stealthy as the cat, she picked her way down two flights of quaking iron to the sixth-floor landing. Nobody had bothered to reinsert the window screen, or close the window. She crouched near the square of darkness and listened. Bogdanovich should be working his graveyard shift at the hospital, and Ravi? By now he must surely have learned he was a murder suspect. If he had any sense, he’d caught a bus for Toronto.
Shifting closer along the ironwork, she bumped something with her knee—she winced as it clinked. What the heck? Her fingers explored the open grid of…ah, a milk crate! Of course. Lia and her friends had expanded their limited storage space beyond their apartment. Raine’s fingertips played over the mouths of empty bottles. This must be the recycling bin.
As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she made out other shapes shoved up alongside the building. Her pulse quickened with a thought. Sure, the police had searched the apartment, but had they checked the fire escape? If Lia had hidden her tooth out here…
Exploring by Braille, she found more bottles, an open box containing parts of a bicycle? Something stringy and damp and disgusting that at best interpretation was the head of a mop. She made a face and reached again—“Youch!”
Swearing silently, she yanked her hand back. Who would have thought that Lia would have a green thumb? Or go in for cacti? This was one of those big floppy octopus types with an attitude.
Raine sat for a moment, picking out needles, then decided: Enough of this. She was stalling. Time to enter the cave. If Lia was now an angry and frustrated ghost, her main grudge shouldn’t be with Raine.
Flattening one hand on the sill, she reached past it with the other, to trace the smooth border of a metal sink. That would be fun to climb over. She shifted her weight forward—then froze. Jeez, was that a light?
For an instant the doorway on the far side of the kitchen seemed to glow, as if a faint light had been switched on beyond. Holy, holy, ohmigod! She duckwalked back from the window, then peeked with one eye around its frame, ready to bolt.
Cool, be cool, stay cool, she chided herself. Maybe it was just a headlight, reflecting off something below? Or the police around in front, shining a spotlight up at the windows?
From somewhere beyond the kitchen, a voice spoke—one muffled note of inquiry. The light went out.
“Gran?” said Szabo, when his grandmother finally answered her phone.
“Godalmighty, boy, do you know what time it is?” She launched straight into a tirade, ripping a strip off him while he propped one hip on the desk and switched off his flashlight. The old bat had no reason to bitch; she never went to bed till after Letterman. But she’d spent her whole life bitching, so why quit now?
Szabo waited till she ran out of steam; the emphysema sort of limited her scope, these days. Then he answered her last question. “I didn’t call you before, ’cause there’s no phone in my hotel room.” And he didn’t feel like dropping quarters in the lobby pay phone, while the whores lined up behind him to check in with their pimps.
He’d figured there wasn’t much risk in calling his Gran from Lia’s apartment. Lia had phoned him twice from this number already. If the cops ever checked, which he sincerely doubted they would, he had his story worked out: Her grandma had met his granddaddy back in Borneo, during WWII. Met him and showed him a jumping good time, he amended with a private grin. Better than Gran ever gave him.
When she got to the States, Lia had presumed on this long-gone connection to hit him up for a loan. He’d told her what she could do to herself, but she’d kept right on phoning. And can you believe it, now her roommates had taken up the cause. Like he’d give a gook a nickel, but hey, hope springs eternal as the preacher said.
“Hmmph!” Gran wheezed for a minute, then got down to business. “Did you get your granddad’s watch?”
“I got it.” Now here came the hard part. “And she had more than that.”
“The treasure! Don’t tell me she had the treasure!”
“Now, Gran, think a minute. In Granddad’s letter, did he ever say ‘treasure’?” Szabo knew he didn’t. Same as she’d done with his daddy before him, she’d raised him on that one letter that made it out of Borneo, two years after the war ended. Some kids got bedtime stories, he’d been tucked in with her reading him that raggedy old scrap of paper. He could recite it line by line. “He said he and his buddies were digging up something of great value and someday, after the war, we were gonna be rich as kings. Richer than King Midas. That’s what he said, do you remember?”
“But what else can you dig up that’s worth a king’s fortune? It had to be buried treasure!”
“I always figured it for a gold mine, myself,” Szabo confessed. “Or maybe a diamond mine.” That time he’d gone to Borneo to try and claim the family fortune, he’d heard tell about lost diamond mines, way up in the mountains. Though try to find anybody who’d ever been there.
“A gold mine would be good,” Gran allowed, though she sounded pissed. “I guess gold would do.”
“Gran, you’re not listening. I never said it was gold, I said I used t’figure—oh, shit.” He paused, frustrated. “Look, it wasn’t gold. It’s something much better.” At least he hoped. “I mailed it to you, ’long with Granddad’s watch, so look for it ’bout day after tomorrow. And don’t you go showing it to anybody, once it gets there.”
“What ever is it then?”
He squirmed on the desk. “Well, first I thought it must be a whale tooth. But then I ask myself, what’s a whale doing smack-dab in the middle of Borneo?” He’d made a careful drawing of it, and taken it back to that pretty reference librarian at the New York Public Library. The same babe who’d helped him track down Lia’s address. “So I asked somebody who oughta know, and she says it must be a dinosaur tooth.”
A thunderous silence echoed down the phone line.
“And it’s not just any old dinosaur tooth,” he hurried to say before she could find her tongue. “It’s made out of precious stone. Opal, like that ring Grandaddy gave you for your engagement. But not just an itty-bitty chip. It’s a great whacking chunk of opal.”
“I told that silly fool that opal’s bad luck,” she muttered. “I said he ought to return it and buy me a proper diamond, but would he? Oh, no, he went all mulish.”
Bet he won it in a poker game, Szabo thought with a smirk. No returns.
“But look who got the bad luck in the end?” she said with brooding satisfaction. “Dropped into some godforsaken jungle…Probably eaten by leeches or those piranha fish.”
All the nature shows she watched, she ought to know piranhas only lived in the Amazon, but Szabo knew better than to correct her.
She heaved a grudging sigh. “Well…I suppose it’s better than
nothing. So when are you coming home?”
Try never. Since they’d released him from Leavenworth a couple of years back, he’d been moping around the home place. Grieving his lost career. Envying his old buddies, who were stationed in Afghanistan these days. They must be having a hot old time of it.
But coming to New York had given him a much-needed kick in the ass. There were still plenty of good times to be found, if a guy sniffed around. Still ways for him to be all he could be.
“Amos?”
Aw, wasn’t that sweet; she must be missing him. “Ain’t quite finished here, Gran.” He’d asked his librarian if she knew anything about dinosaur bones made out of opal, and at first she’d thought he was crazy. But then she’d searched her computer. There were even a couple of Web sites where companies offered to buy opalized fossils. Somebody with the weird name of Raine Ashaway promised to meet you anywhere in the world, if you had opalized dinosaur bones for sale.
“I got to thinking about Granddaddy’s letter. He said he and his buddies were digging up something. And you recollect how he said they’d persuaded some of the natives to help them?” She wheezed agreement, so he continued. “Well, the tooth I’m sending you is ’most as big as a loaf of bread. Wouldn’t take any time at all to dig it up, and the job sure wouldn’t take a whole squad of paratroopers plus a pack of gooks. So I’m thinking—” He tipped back his head and laughed at the ceiling, thinking it. “I’m thinking the whole dang sucker’s gotta still be out there somewhere! Going by that tooth, it’s as big as a firetruck. And my friend says it’d be the rarest thing in the world. A gold mine won’t even touch it. I’m thinking that’s worth finding.”
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