Killer Karma

by Lee Killough

  Cole listened with growing dismay. Listening to Flaxx, it was clear he knew nothing about Sara disappearing or the supposed affair until Lamper told him. Making it unlikely he knew about the hit, either. Which meant he never ordered it.

  So who did?

  A rising heart rate caught his ear. He stared at Irah. She appeared to be listening calmly, not even surprised at the story about Sara and him. But mention of the security tape had sent her heart into a jog.

  Mental flags shot up, bells jangling. Cole came off the desk and over to the chair. “Were you here?” He did not remember seeing her among the group leaving, though the only faces of interest at the time were Gao’s and Sara’s. “Did you sabotage the tape?”

  He bent down for a close look at Irah’s bruises. One advantage to being a ghost, he reflected. It let him come inches from her face while she remained oblivious.

  The bruises looked recent, no more than a few days old. The bells started clanging. She also had scratches on her wrists, just visible under the edges of her jacket cuffs. Sara’s message said: “The bitch tortured me into telling her everything. She held my- ” Remembering the anger mixing with Sara’s fear, Cole expected she had clawed at the restraining hands.

  He jerked back upright. Damn. He needed another look at that tape.

  Irah’s lack of reaction finally registered on Flaxx. “Is this old news to you?”

  “No.” Her heart slowed. “I’m just not surprised about Benay and Dunavan. I’ve overheard her and her cronies in the break room. A cop is someone she’d go for. I’m disappointed at her lack of company loyalty, though.”

  Flaxx’s eyes narrowed. “So you didn’t know she was shacking up with Dunavan?”

  Hers went wide. “Not until now.”

  Cole frowned down at her. Could he be wrong? If she caught Sara, surely she would have told Flaxx.

  Irah pursed her lips. “It must have been great sex to turn her. Maybe Dunavan has the same staying power in bed as he does for trying to pin burglary and arson on you.”

  Flaxx sucked in an sharp breath…only to release it an exasperated sigh when a corner of her mouth twitched. “Damn it! Why are you always yanking my chain?”

  She shrugged. “A girl’s got to have some fun.”

  “Didn’t you have enough for a lifetime in L.A.?” Flaxx grimaced. “I keep hoping you’ll grow up.”

  What was it Jessie told him about Irah? Mommy wanted to make her a beauty queen like herself, but the trophy daughter ended up with more appearances in juvenile court than pageants. Due to stunts like taking off in Daddy’s Ferrari at age twelve and leading the CHP and assorted other law enforcement agencies on a forty mile chase down Highway 280 at speeds nearing 150 miles an hour. According to Jessie, at sixteen she ran away with a waiter at the country club. Daddy Flaxx finally said to hell with her after he spent a small fortune having private detectives locate and bring her home, only to have her run off again to the boyfriend.

  Now, apparently, the prodigal had returned. Not necessarily as penitent as the Biblical one. Cole wanted to know a lot more about her.

  Her expression went contrite. “I’m trying, Donald…really. Is that all you want with me?”

  “Not quite. I want you to find this bookkeeper. I want to know how much she found out…and just to be safe, how much it will cost to give her amnesia.”

  Irah nodded.

  “And…” Flaxx’s voice turned to a snarl. “…think of a way to get rid of these cops…especially Dunavan. I want him the hell out of my life!”

  Cole turned back to the desk and leaned across it toward him. “Ain’t gonna happen, dogshit. I’m out of my life, but you’re unfinished business, too, so while the first job is finding Sara and putting that situation right, I’ll also keep working on taking you down.”

  “Dunavan may not be a problem anymore,” Irah said. “I hear he’s disappeared.”

  Cole listened for her heartbeat. It remained steady.

  Flaxx blinked. “Heard how?”

  She lounged back in her chair. “It was a big topic Saturday night in my favorite cop bar.”

  Flaxx’s neck reddened. “What the hell were you doing in a cop bar!”

  That interested Cole, too.

  “Spending a…” Her eye brows wiggled. “…stimulating evening checking out the shortarms of the law. It isn’t fair for you to have all the fun screwing the cops.”

  Flaxx closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

  Cole grinned. She knew just how to yank that chain.

  By the time Flaxx opened his eyes again, however, she had wiped her expression clear of amusement and sat straight and sober in the chair. “If Dunavan does show up again, I’ll make sure he’s in too much trouble to bother you. I’ll file an assault complaint against him…pretend to be Benay and say he attacked me.”

  Flaxx perked up. “Will they buy it?”

  “Me as Benay?” She snorted. “No sweat. As for the cops turning up here…you know you don’t have to see them unless they have a warrant. I’ll tell Gina to notify you, no matter who they ask for, and you can decide if they’re welcome.”

  Flaxx considered that for a few moments, then nodded. “Do it.”

  Cole walked out with her and up the hallway to Gina’s desk…where she included herself in the instructions — “Notify both Mr. Flaxx and me.”

  Now where? She headed back down toward Flaxx’s office, but turned at the side hallway leading to the emergency exit. Cole knew where she had to be headed. Now the stepchild office made sense. Flaxx created a job for her and shoe-horned in an office where he could.

  “Where he could,” Cole found on following Irah into Asset Management, looked like a converted storeroom…windowless, steel shelving along one wall, neutral walls, utilitarian carpet, stock office chairs, and a steel-and-laminate desk like those in Bookkeeping. A few certificates and photos hung on the walls. A stepchild office indeed. What did Flaxx expect his asset manager to do in here?

  While Irah sat down at her desk, Cole checked out magazine file boxes and stacks of brochures on the shelving. A buzz ran through him. The visible brochures were all for security systems. One of the magazine files had security equipment catalogs. The rest held six years’ issues of Security Management. Flaxx had her doing something with security. Well, well.

  He glanced toward her. “So I bet you have a key to-”

  Then the magazine dates registered. Six years. He stared around in disbelief. She lived in this cell of an office for six years?

  She might be resigned to it now. There had been no sign of irritation or discontent when she came in. She even smiled as she swivelled to her computer. Ignoring the keyboard, she picked up a game control. A punch of a button resumed a game that Flaxx’s call must have interrupted. She began blasting her way through city streets filled with thugs.

  Maybe she was just happy to have a job, he reflected as he looked over the certificates. She had no high school or college diploma. These were all certifications that Irah Lorraine Carrasco had completed courses in race driving, survival, marksmanship, and self-defense. And, surprisingly, the SFPD’s Citizens’ Police Academy seven years ago.

  Cole grunted. “That must have thrilled big brother.” He glanced back at her. “Is it when you started going to cop bars?”

  She thumbed her controls. “Die, rat breath,” she spat, and grinned at an explosion.

  Or maybe she just wanted a place to play games and, despite what she said to Flaxx, avoid growing up. While he read the certificates, she had been feverishly working the game controls and talking back to threats muttered by the thugs. She must play this game often, enough to know the various villains’ dialog. Her exchanges with them sounded almost like real conversations.

  That never-never-land attitude went with the largest of the photographs. Poster-sized, it showed a teen-age Irah on a beach with a slightly older male…their arms around each other and surf boards, dental floss bikinis showing off beautiful tans, sun-bleached hair blowing
in the wind. Golden children with no cares except perfecting the tan and catching a good wave.

  The male must be her waiter. He had a rules are for suckers look in his eyes that raised Cole’s hackles. If anyone like that came sniffing around Renee he would-

  Cole caught himself and grimaced bitterly. He would do nothing, of course…because he was not going to be there. Don’t think about it, man. Brooding over what could happen without him would just drive him crazy. He had to trust Sherrie to protect the girls. She ought to do fine, since, thank God, she would be seeing their boyfriends through the shadow of Eddie Trask.

  He concentrated on the rest of the photographs to force his mind away from the subject. The line of 8 by 10's all showed Irah at play…bungee jumping, clinging like a spider to a sheer rock face, working a half-pipe on a skate board, riding a bucking bull, showing off a target with the shots all in the ten circle.

  The hair rose on his neck. He stared at the photograph. Not at the target demonstrating her marksmanship but her other hand, the left one. It still held the target pistol, her thin fingers wrapped around the grip in an echo of an image burned into his memory — the shooter with his hand partially backed out of the plastic bag to display his gun.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  An jolt of astonishment and anger spun him toward the desk. Amid that roar, images from the shooting played in his head in machine-gun flashes. He circled the desk, comparing them to Irah. Height and weight looked right. Ditto the hands. The shooter had longer, dark hair, though, and a different voice…male…adolescent. Cole stopped behind the computer to look her in the face. It was amazing how killers, if she were one, rarely looked like monsters. He needed to see her ears. The shooter’s had no lobes. But disk earrings covered Ira’s lobe area. Maybe he could tell something from behind.

  He started around for the other end of the desk…jerking to a halt as the raspy voice he recognized as one of the game character’s came out of her mouth. While he watched, she answered in her own voice, then without a hiccup, went back to the raspy voice.

  Cole mentally kicked himself. The game characters had not been talking; she was. And if you’d been paying attention, numbnuts, instead of getting your back up over the boyfriend and checking out her photos, you’d have figured that out fifteen minutes ago. Being shot in the head had indeed blown his brains out.

  She did voices. The three words reverberated through him to his toes and hands. He raced through the desk to behind Irah’s chair and crouched to peer at the back of her ears. When he called Sara…who answered? Someone who accused Gao of catching her. Someone who begged him to come after her but insisted he wait in the garage rather come up for her.

  The posts coming through her ears barely cleared the lower edge of the cartilage. If she had lobes, they were minimal.

  A jammed tape, it occurred to him, not only prevented a record of when someone left, but how many left…and in what condition.

  Terror hung down in the garage.

  Ice slid along Cole’s spine and surged into his gut in a new, sharper burst of fear for Sara. If he were right about Irah, there was no reason to think she would stop at killing just him. Despair and fury at himself seared him. Was he too late to save Sara from the mess he created? Had he screwed up not just by encouraging her on Monday and by missing her phone calls Wednesday but failed her by now never being able to put things right?

  14

  Cole slammed a fist down on the desk, but the frustration of the silence and marshmallow feel only made him angrier. Shit, shit, shit. He scowled at the back of Irah’s neck. If he was too late to save Sara, he reflected savagely, at least he could make Irah pay. What would happen if he put his hand through her spinal cord? He affected electrical current. Would that short-circuit nerves…stop Irah’s heart?

  The thought jerked him up short. He recoiled from it, appalled at himself. Killing Irah was no answer. Besides being murder, making him as cold-blooded as she was, it denied Sara justice. If he could do nothing else, he owed her that…cleared of being his killer, her own killer arrested-

  Cole caught at himself again. “Hey…whoa, man!” He was letting an emotional rush to judgement trample what brains he had left. “You need to step back and take a breath.”

  Despite his gut feeling and the circumstantial evidence, Sara might not be dead. Alone or accompanied, whatever her general condition, she had to leave the office under her own power. With a good fifteen pounds on Irah, she could not have been carried out. Certainly not carried without attracting attention. She must have been walked out. For the terror in the garage to be hers, she had to reach there alive. And she went home.

  Not necessarily, came a thought. Irah could have been there to make it appear that Sara fled.

  He circled through the desk and around behind her computer. Leaning his forearms on the monitor, he frowned down at her. “Was it you?”

  The voice mail message for Gao made more sense if Irah left it. He did not see absence excuses even occurring to someone running for her life. But…he needed to find out for certain about Sara.

  He was certain Irah shot him. He also knew nothing right now that would make Hamada consider her a suspect. He had zip for motive. That disappeared with the magic words “fruit of the poisoned tree.” Nothing would have come of Sara’s distress call, either, if Irah turned his call into a dismissal…telling him she was all right but fired and anxious to forget ever meeting him. He would have happily forgotten ever meeting Sara Benay.

  One possibility remained to check out. Anyone might kill in overwhelming anger or fear, but stone killers did not come out of the blue. There had to be indications elsewhere in her life of a capacity to kill. More than in target shooting or even her enthusiasm for video carnage.

  Maybe something would turn up running her through the computer.

  “See you in Hell, punk,” Irah said to the computer, and in a voice that sound like some British actor, went on, “Too right, Captain Carrasco. Prepare to clear sector D-9.”

  Her glee made Cole want to spoil her fun. What could he do to a regular computer screen? He spread a hand across it and looked away long enough to sink through the surface. A pleasant buzz ran up from his hand. To his satisfaction, the area within the outline of his hand swirled in chaotic color.

  Irah started. “What the…”

  “Enjoy your game.” Leaning down toward her, he intoned, “I’ll…be…back.”

  Then he pulled his hand back and concentrated on a mental image of Homicide. Could he repeat his ziptrip there?

  Apparently not. After three tries, he still remained in Irah’s office. Well, he could always go to Burglary first.

  That worked. Shaking his head, Cole stumped out into the corridor. Was he ever going to figure this out!

  Wait…including the view out Razor’s window finally made that ziptrip work. Maybe it would work for Homicide, too?

  They had a view of the Bay Bridge. Though just down the hall, he pictured that along with Homicide and gave the ziptrip a try. The corridor morphed into Homicide. Cole knocked on Hamada’s desk for luck. Maybe there was hope for him yet.

  The computer gods smiled anyway. Homicide’s computer sat idle. He hoped it stayed unneeded long enough for him to work.

  Standing up at the keyboard, he struggled through menus to the search program. Though it cost him time and the aggravation of extra effort, he ran Irah first as Irah Flaxx. That came up negative. A disappointment but not really surprising. If she had been using Carrasco since returning to San Francisco, all the records in the Flaxx name were from her juvie days.

  He typed in Carrasco. Only to be disappointed again. She came up clean…local, state, and NCIC. He expected no felony or misdemeanor convictions prior to her Citizens’ Academy course. They would not have accepted her otherwise. Something later pointing to a homicidal personality would have been nice to find, though. There was nothing…not even a speeding ticket. She had passed the firearms safety course required for gun ownership, wh
ich he expected, but of course the permit did not specify what firearms she owned.

  The computer did produce one surprise, a hit on her name as the victim of a felony. Seven years ago…a burglary, ironically. The items lost, an antique string of pearls valued at fifteen thousand dollars and a trophy for an amateur stock car race, marked it as one of the Old Spice Burglar’s jobs.

  Cole always counted himself lucky that Old Spice ignored the Mission. The bastard had been driving Gayle Harris and Stan Fontaine crazy for almost eight years now. Their only description of him aside from his choice of aftershave — a muscular male of below average height — came from a homeowner who lost a brief wrestling match with him. He typically entered Richmond, Pacific Heights, and Seacliff homes at night. The family woke in the morning to find their security systems defeated, home safes open, and valuables laid out in a display of what could have been stolen if the burglar wished. He took only a few of the most valuable articles that could be easily carried — and easily fenced — and one item at the other end of the spectrum, with little or no value. Presumably as a souvenir.

  Rear vision spotted Ellen Bredeson, Homicide’s lone female inspector, heading for the computer. He tracked her progress while working to exit the program, and as it closed, noticed Charlie Dennis across the room beyond her, grinned triumphantly into his phone.

  Dennis jiggled the switch hook and punched in a new number, then leaned back in his chair. “Tex, how’s it going?”

  Cole stepped out of Bredeson’s way and hurried toward Dennis.

  “Shit.” Dennis grimaced. “So maybe it was a lover’s quarrel. You’ll be interested in what I came up with on Benay, then.” He gave Hamada the same information Cole had found on the Narco bust. “But here’s the interesting part. This Tony Novello’s name rang a bell so I ran him, too, and guess what.”

  Cole winced at the satisfaction in Dennis’s voice. He obviously thought that an acquaintance who killed her boyfriend made for a case of Sara doing the same.