The back of the house had a paved patio and a Jacuzzi that seemed rather forlorn. Cameron scanned the windows: they were dark and the only sign of life was the hum of the insects. In three steps he was standing by the French doors. A gutter downspout ran the height of the house along the thick trunk of a mature wisteria that reached up to the roof. Cameron grabbed hold of it and in seconds he had reached the second floor and a Juliet balcony. From there he kicked up to the small attic window, pushed hard against it, and it gave way. It had taken him only seconds and the view from the alley had been shaded by the thick vegetation.
The attic was a rectangular room, and in the half-gloom he could see the bare wooden floor and his own footprints in the dust from the last time he had been here. Turned out dust was smarter than the top-of-the-line alarm system the owner had installed.
Nathan Quinn did not like Los Angeles very much. He liked four seasons and real winters and the summers would have driven him crazy. The private charter landed in Van Nuys Airport at 10:37 a.m. and his car was ready for him. He knew where he was going and he was traveling light: the single file in his leather briefcase was all he needed.
For what he was about to do there was no exam in law school and no qualifications for the bar. For what he was about to do he called upon the steely chill that he had felt from the moment he woke up, long before dawn. He had to use it to freeze everything else. Aristotle said that the law was reason, free from passion. Nathan Quinn did not have a name for what he was about to do, but it sure as hell had little to do with the law—at least the written kind.
Nathan Quinn drove to Woodley Park and parked by Lake Balboa. A Wednesday in late November was not a popular time for picnics, but on weekends the place would come alive again. His black eyes tracked the runners and the dog walkers—sparse human presence and no CCTV. He saw the solitary figure standing under the pergola, where the ground curved by the side of lake, and he left the car.
The path led him directly to the pergola, but the man was lost in thought and did not look up until Quinn was ten feet away from him. When he saw Quinn, his chin went up and his shoulders stiffened.
“Special Agent A.J. Parker,” Nathan Quinn said. “Good to put a face to a name, don’t you think?”
Parker looked around.
“No, you’re not meeting your contact,” Quinn said. “You’re meeting me.”
Special Agent A.J. Parker of the Drug Enforcement Administration knew exactly who Nathan Quinn was. “What do you want?” he said.
“I want to help you,” Quinn replied, and saw something flitting across the eyes of the other man. “You’ve come to Seattle a number of times in the last year or so to meet with Detective Madison of the Seattle PD, but you’ve never met with me. I’m here to correct that oversight and make sure you know precisely where you are and what is going on.”
“I know where I am,” Parker replied.
“I don’t think you do,” Nathan Quinn said. “But it’s something we can easily remedy.”
He opened his briefcase and took out the thick file. He didn’t offer it to Parker and saw the agent’s eyes locking onto it.
“You joined the DEA ten years ago and for the last eight you have worked for a number of drug cartels. Here I have bank account numbers, payments, dates, and details of the information you passed on to them. I have pictures of your meetings with a Rojas man and corresponding payments into your secret account. I have reports on all the work you’ve done playing different cartels against each other and against the DEA: two undercover agents, lost in the line of duty because of you; five seriously injured; one on permanent disability. Shall I go on?”
Parker’s hand moved unconsciously to his sidearm and rested on the grip. Nathan Quinn was unarmed. He looked at the semiautomatic in the other man’s holster.
“Put it away, Agent Parker,” he said. “This is not going to get solved with ammunition.”
Parker’s face had slowly flushed pink like a bad sunburn. His hand stayed on the pistol grip. Quinn offered the file. Parker took it with one hand, flipped it open, glanced at the first page, and returned it.
Quinn continued. “You were the one who listened to the wiretap recordings and recognized the potential of a little blackmail that might get you John Cameron—what’s the price on his head today? And you pushed the Office of Professional Accountability to start an investigation into Detective Madison.”
Parker bristled. “What do you want?”
“You mean money, don’t you? That’s what people like you always mean.”
“Like me?”
“Like you, yes. Petty, sadistic, greedy, opportunistic little shits.”
Parker’s mouth was a thin line. He flipped the safety latch on the holster, cleared leather, and held his piece close to his leg. Around them the park was empty, the closest dog walker only a speck on a distant hill. Quinn was three inches taller and a whole world scarier than Parker could ever be—even with the threat of gunmetal.
“I’ve told you to put it away, Agent Parker.” Quinn’s gaze did not waver. “I’m here to help you.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m going to tell you in a second, but first you should know two things. The first is that if I don’t contact my associate in a few minutes—and you don’t need to guess who that associate might be—all these documents will be released within the hour to the relevant authorities. Which means you will be arrested—don’t even think about running—and your options will shrink to two: to go to prison and wait to be killed to make sure you don’t tell tales; or to turn informant, go into witness protection, and then wait to be killed for actually telling tales. Also, you’re more than aware that these people are not dainty: your family—a wife and three children under fifteen—will be target practice just to make sure you get the message. The second thing,” Quinn said, checking his watch, “is that the little house in Brentwood with the Jacuzzi in the backyard and the pretty flowers was perhaps not the best place to hide the recordings and everything else you wanted to keep safe. We already have them—the recordings, that is—the rest I don’t care about.”
Quinn made sure his words had sunk in before continuing. “This is what I want . . .” he began. “I want you to help your family—the people you’ve dragged into this mess—by letting them have the good fortune of a future without you, and without the implications of a cartel revenge.”
Parker frowned, trying to get his head around this novel interpretation of his life.
“You can’t run far enough—with or without your family—and you don’t want to be caught by your enemies. Which you will be.”
“What . . . ?”
“I suggest fire,” Nathan Quinn said.
“What?”
“You need to die, Agent Parker, or in twenty-four hours these documents will be made public and, instead of mourning the death of a law enforcement officer who had dedicated his life to the pursuit of justice, your family will be left with the tragic understanding of who you really are, without the support of a police pension—and with many questions to answer from people they should never have to meet.”
“I need more time. I want three days.”
“You have twenty-four hours.”
“What difference does it make to you? I’ll be dead either way.”
“It would be two extra days of potentially catastrophic ideas and plans you might try to carry out in order to save your neck. Twenty-four hours is a kindness, Agent Parker. Put your affairs in order and be done with it.”
“You sonofabitch.”
“I’m offering you the chance to do the right thing. Cover your tracks and make sure your death looks sufficiently accidental that no one looks into it. By the way, they will need to be able to recover a body for identification purposes.”
Parker returned the gun to his holster.
Quinn met his eyes.
There was nothing more to say.
Special Agent A.J. Parker drove to Brentwood. He had to salv
age what he could from the safe, place a reasonable amount in his own home safe for his wife to find, and get rid of the weapons and the drugs. He was not exactly thinking straight; it was more like watching himself thinking and driving. I suggest fire. He went over ten different scenarios that started with going on the run and invariably finished with a slow and painful death at the hands of the men he had brought into his own life. He thought only briefly about his family—it seemed surreal that they could be a part of this in any way. His wife worked in an optometrist’s office and his kids played in little league.
Parker pulled up to the curb, unlocked the wrought-iron gate, and drove in. The alarm was still on—the bastards had been able to reset it without tripping it, or it would have sent him an alert. He disarmed it and walked into the house. The air was warm and stuffy; he couldn’t remember the last time he had been there—definitely a few weeks. His steps echoed in the empty house as he rushed upstairs to the second bedroom.
The safe had been constructed where the walk-in closet would have been. Parker dashed across the room and placed his thumb on the biometric pad and, after the beep, punched in the eight-digit combination. The safe lock clicked and released just as the point of a knife pressed lightly against the soft spot between Parker’s jaw and his neck.
“I’d ask you not to do anything foolish,” John Cameron said as he patted the man down, “but we’re way past foolish here.”
Before Agent Parker knew it he was on the floor, his wrists bound by plastic cuffs, and his weapons—the sidearm and the backup—were on the other side of the room, on the floor next to their magazines.
He watched as Cameron walked into the safe and he could see that everything was still where he had placed it, including the box with the recordings.
Parker blinked and tried to make sense of a day that had already stretched him to the breaking point. The safe had been intact when he had arrived in the house; he had opened the safe for John Cameron. All the other man had done was get into the house without tripping the alarm. He had opened the safe.
John Cameron turned and took one step toward him. Parker scuttled backward and bumped into the wall behind him.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Cameron said. The shoebox with the wiretap recordings was under his arm. “I have what I’ve come for.”
Parker felt emboldened by the sheer hopelessness of his situation. “Take off the cuffs. How can I . . . ? Just take off the damned cuffs.”
Cameron regarded him with his head on one side like a curious bird. “There’s a man I will write to at this time tomorrow,” he said, “who remembers you very well. Two years ago you identified him as a police informant to the cartel who had employed him from time to time. And by that I mean who had forced him to do their bidding. After you betrayed him, they cut up his face and they amputated his right hand. He was shown dozens of pictures and he identified you as the cop in the pocket of the cartel.”
Parker struggled against the cuffs and let out a bellow of anger, frustration, and fear.
“He was a doctor,” Cameron continued. “And he managed to survive. Now he lives in a place far away from here where what happens in this room, in this city, doesn’t matter at all.”
Parker tried to breathe, but all the air had gone out of the room.
The last thing he remembered was John Cameron crouching by him and a needle going into his arm. When he woke up—thirsty and disoriented—fifteen minutes later, the cuffs had been snapped off and his weapons were on the floor. Parker curled up, holding his knees tight to his chest. Cameron was gone and in the open safe he could see the piles of used bills, stacked in bundles of a thousand each, three .50 BMG rifles, and four clear plastic bags of cocaine.
John Cameron drove to Van Nuys Airport and returned his rental car. The charter plane was waiting for him, and once he was on board the pilot started the Cessna Citation X takeoff procedure.
Cameron slid into the seat opposite Nathan Quinn and passed him the shoebox. It was done.
The flight assistant—a young man named Rory—brought them sodas and warm, moist towelettes. “All set? You’ll get home just in time for Thanksgiving,” he added with a smile and then left them to their silence.
When John Cameron had first approached him to do this, Nathan Quinn had wondered how he would feel about it afterward. What had he done today? He had helped Parker’s family avoid evils they knew nothing about and he had hand-delivered a death sentence. Much of the answer to the question, though, was contained in the shoebox on the seat next to him.
The reason why Parker hadn’t doubted for a moment that the recordings had already been taken from his safe house was that Nathan Quinn had told him. Anyone else he might have doubted, but not Quinn. Because the lawyer had come unarmed to tell a man with a gun that his life was over.
There were dozens of cherry trees all around the lake, Nathan Quinn thought, and in spring the grass would be covered in petals like a delicate pink snowstorm. Special Agent A.J. Parker had already seen his last spring, and these final hours they had granted him were more than some of his victims had been allowed.
Cameron watched his friend and knew to let him be. He didn’t wrestle with what they had done: for him it had been a good day.
Chapter 37
A time capsule. Fred Kamen’s idea had taken root in Madison’s mind and it was becoming the key through which she was beginning to read all of the killer’s work. A time capsule.
Madison sat at her desk. Her eyes were fixed on the map—as was her habit now, whenever she was thinking. She gazed from pin to pin, as if the location of each crime was in and of itself a kind of coded message that she should be able to interpret.
This man—this repugnant accident of a human being—had created these stories that they had so easily believed. The elements for each one had been the same: a crime, a murdered victim, and a scapegoat—and they were still waiting for the poor guy who would take the rap for Matthew Duncan to emerge. The details changed, the locations changed, the ages and genders of the victims changed, but the storyline remained the same: on every occasion the killer had been present but never really been part of it because nothing of him was left, except by accident, at the scene. He was completely absent from his great, complex works, from these massive achievements. Except . . . except for one small act of vanity: the desire to inject himself into the narrative somehow, in a way that only he would know about but that would be present, though hidden, in perpetuity.
It was the artist’s signature on a painting, and he had not been able to resist.
In the box with Chris Kelly, the ex-husband of the murdered woman had launched himself at the glass of the one-sided mirror and howled in pain and fury. He wasn’t being aggressive toward Kelly, he was lost and disoriented. Madison looked at the lists next to the map. She thought of the distraught man—who was being counseled by a lawyer and a medic—and she thought of Henry Karasick, at the top of the scapegoats list. A victim, just as much as Mitchell and Duncan were. Damn.
“Sarge . . .” she said.
Brown looked up. Madison’s eyes stayed on that single name. Henry Karasick.
“When we investigate a murder, we start with the victim and then we find the killer. That’s what we usually do, isn’t it?”
It was not the time for a flippant remark and with great effort Brown waited to see where this synaptic flicker would end up.
“I don’t think that’s how he does it,” Madison continued. “I don’t think he looks first for a person to kill and then for a scapegoat. He does it the other way around. See, he found Karasick first, and everybody who knew the two men knew they hated each other. He had the perfect patsy for his game—and really it could very well have been Karasick who ended up dead and Mitchell in prison.”
Brown sat back in his chair. “Why?” he said.
“Think about it . . . it’s much harder to find the perfect fall guy. That’s the real challenge: to find someone who is going to fit into his narrative of murd
er and be totally believable. In all these cases, all of them,” Madison placed her hand on the pile on her desk, “everybody had motive, opportunity, and a weapon that could be transferred easily, together with trace evidence. He knew them, Sarge. He knew each one of the scapegoats he used, and from each one he inferred a victim. This was not random. He sought them out and found them. It took him months for each one of them.”
“And we couldn’t see that because . . .”
“. . . because we start by getting acquainted with the victims and he starts by identifying his ‘perpetrator.’”
“We didn’t get anywhere looking for what the victims had in common because they don’t have anything in common.”
“But the scapegoats do.”
“Karasick was the first,” Brown said.
“Yes, Karasick was the killer’s way in. Once he tapped in to that notion, he was home.”
Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown was the kind of man he was for many reasons. But perhaps one of the most important—and what made him a great teacher—was that he could see a brilliant idea even when it was somebody else’s.
He checked his watch. “We could catch Karasick’s priest before the day is done.”
Madison nodded, and in three minutes they were out and driving.
Chris Kelly wandered over to Madison’s desk, picked up a pin from the plastic box, and stuck it into Seattle, next to the other ones.
Father Richard O’Reilly hadn’t changed much in the last seven years. His hair was a little thinner and grayer, but for the rest he was very much the man Brown remembered—short, barrel-chested, and remarkably confrontational. He was in his late sixties and had small, dark eyes in a round, ruddy face.
“I wasn’t a priest until I was thirty-five,” he explained to Madison. “And before that I was a grave digger, a soldier, and a boxer, which maybe gives me some understanding of the burdens people carry into my anger management support groups. Then, after the seminary, I got a degree in psychology and learned the fancy words to go with the actual experience.”
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