Guardian of Lies: A Paul Madriani Novel

by Steve Martini

He held the paper up by the bottom corner and set the torch to the top, then held it as it burned down past the letterhead with the name on it. The flame had raced almost to his fingertips before he released it. The final glowing ember consumed the last trace of Katia’s note to Emerson Pike as it lifted tiny specks of hot ash into the air. Liquida watched as the last of these cooled and fell like dust to the cold concrete floor.

  THIRTEEN

  You say that Pike’s first meeting with you was no accident. You believe he was looking for you. Why?” This morning I am out at Las Colinas in Santee, the women’s detention facility in the county, meeting once more with Katia.

  “It was a feeling,” she says. She sits at a table in the small conference room, running her hands through her hair, which now looks knotted and stringy. The jail comb and the harsh shampoo are taking their toll. She tells me some of the other women are giving her trouble. The Latinas inside are mostly Mexican. Many of them know each other from street gangs. One of them in particular, a big Mexican woman with a scar on her face, is friends with one of Katia’s cell mates. The two of them are giving Katia trouble. Katia’s youth and good looks, the fact that she is from a different culture and has tried to distance herself, have made her the object of the usual jailhouse frictions and jealousies.

  I ask if any of them have threatened her.

  She says, “Only a little.”

  I try to explain to her how it works, the jail pecking order.

  “I don’t know what to do. I am afraid,” she says.

  “I’ll see what I can do. Talk to someone in the sheriff’s jail unit.” This will have to be done carefully, with an eye toward a housing change. Otherwise, the wrong kind of intervention will only make it worse. “But for right now, let’s talk about how you and Emerson Pike met, down in Costa Rica?”

  “I was going to school. I am a student at the university in San José. I did some modeling on the side to make extra money, mostly clothing and makeup. My photographs, a set of them with my name, were on the modeling agency’s website, in their gallery of models. Emerson telephoned the agency. He said he wanted to hire me to do a photo shoot. He said he wanted to do some local advertising for his coin company. That’s what he said.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “Of course. He was willing to pay a lot of money, so I was happy to do it. The ads with my pictures were to appear in newspapers and magazines. But I remember thinking it was a little strange.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Emerson had no idea what he wanted, so the agency set up the pictures. They had me wear a bikini and smile at the camera while I was holding a small stack of gold coins in each hand. I thought it was a funny way to sell to investors. But Emerson didn’t seem to mind, and who was I to judge?” says Katia. “Still, that was the first clue. I should have realized.”

  “Realized what?”

  “Men,” she says. “Sometimes they come to the modeling agencies, mostly Americans ” Then she looks at me. “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right, go on.”

  “They they hire models after they look at the pictures on the website. They pay for photo shoots they never use, just to meet the women.”

  “Pike never used the photographs?”

  “No. And he never did any advertising in Costa Rica. I didn’t know that until later. He seemed very nice. He invited me to dinner. We went out. He was fun to be with and he entertained well.”

  I asked her what she meant by this.

  “The best restaurants and nightclubs,” she says. “This went on for several weeks. I got to know him, at least I thought I did.”

  Katia was comfortable with him. She introduced him to her friends and a cousin who was visiting from Limón at the time, all except her mother, who was away down in Colombia visiting other relatives.

  “Does your mother know you’ve been arrested?”

  “I haven’t been able to talk to her. Your friend Harry, that is his name, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Harry was going to telephone one of my friends and ask her to leave a message at my mother’s house. He tried to call my mother’s cell phone, but there was no answer. She usually leaves the phone behind, turned off, when she goes to Colombia. I assume she has not returned.”

  “Harry mentioned it.”

  “She will want to know what’s happening.”

  “So you think Pike sought you out because he liked your photographs on the modeling agency’s website?”

  “It’s what I thought at first,” she says. “But later I realized that was not it. After he met my family, he kept asking questions. Mostly he wanted to know where my mother was.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It was as if he wanted to meet her. I told him she was away in Colombia. He asked what she was doing down there. I told him she was visiting relatives. He was very interested in this.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “No. Just that he wanted to get to know my family. Whenever I asked him why, this is what he would say—‘Because I want to know your family.’”

  “And you didn’t believe him?”

  “No. All he wanted to know was who the relatives in Colombia were. Strange, no?”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “I told him I didn’t know them. It’s true. They are relatives of my mother but I have never met them. She mentions them once in a while but she tells me that they are distant relatives, that I wouldn’t really like them.”

  “Did she say why you wouldn’t like them?”

  “Not really.”

  “And you never asked?”

  “I assumed there was some problem.”

  “You mean trouble with the law?”

  “Es possible, I suppose. My mother never said anything.”

  “But that’s what you’re thinking?”

  “I don’t know. One of them is old, at least that’s what she says, and she goes down mostly, I think, to take care of him.”

  “So your mother is from Colombia?”

  “No. She was born in Costa Rica, same as me.”

  “And your father?”

  “He’s dead. He died when I was a baby. He was Tico, born in Costa Rica.”

  “How did your mother’s relatives get to Colombia?”

  “I don’t know. As I said, she would never talk about it.”

  “But Emerson kept asking you?”

  “Yes, all the time. And then one night we talked about it and I remembered I had some pictures in my camera that my mother had brought back with her from her trip a few months earlier. He was all excited.”

  “Pike?”

  “Yes. I thought it was funny. I laughed at him. He wanted to see them. I told him it was late. We had just come back from a movie. He said no, no, he wanted to see them, right now. So I got the camera and showed them to him.”

  “Go on.”

  “He kept asking me who they were. We looked at them in the little window in the back of the camera. I told him I didn’t know. I assumed they were my mother’s relatives. She borrowed my camera. She never told me the pictures were there. I found them when I went to use it. But it must be her relatives, no? Who else would it be?”

  “What did Pike do then?”

  “A few days later he told me he was going back to the United States and he wanted me to come with him for a visit. He invited me to come stay at his house near San Diego.”

  “And you wanted to go?”

  “Sure. Why not? But I told him I couldn’t. I had no visa for the United States. He told me no problem. And as I told you before, he got the visa.”

  “Harry is looking into that, how Pike obtained it so quickly,” I tell her.

  “Yes, and there was another problem too. Emerson must have been in a rush,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he insisted on completing the application for me, the application for the visa. He said I would sign it but he would fill it out be cause it would go faster. I didn’t like that. What, he thinks he’s smarter than I am?”

  “So what happened?”

  “I gave him my passport because he need
ed information from it to fill out the form, but he got my name wrong. I didn’t see it. He just had me sign the form. I wanted to look at it, but he said he was in a hurry. He had to go someplace and he took the form with him. Next thing I know he comes back with the visa and my name is not right.”

  “Wait, wait, wait you mean you didn’t go to the U.S. consulate with him when he delivered the application?”

  “No. He said it wasn’t necessary, that he could take care of it. He took my passport and the application and the next thing I know he has the visa.”

  “But the name is wrong. Did he misspell it?”

  “No. He didn’t put down the last part of my name—Nitikin. I always used it, Katia Solaz-Nitikin. Solaz is my father’s name. My mother’s family name is Nitikin. It was on my passport. Emerson knew I used it. It was the name on the modeling agency website. It made me angry because if he’d let me fill out the application, I would have done it correctly. It’s the way he was. He always had to do things, even if it wasn’t his business.”

  “A control freak,” I say.

  “Yeah.” She snaps a finger and points at me. “That’s it.”

  “But in the end the name on the visa wasn’t a problem. I mean, you got into the country all right?”

  “It would have been better if I had not.” She looks around at the dismal surroundings, the concrete floor and the dingy walls of the small room we are in, with a female sheriff’s deputy outside the door.

  “What happened next, between you and Pike?”

  “When we got to his house, everything changed,” she says.

  “Changed how?”

  “Emerson seemed different. Nervous, as if he was watching me all the time. I told you about the money, how he took it away from me. He told me we were going to take trips to see things, but we didn’t. He would buy me clothes, take me to clubs. But I could tell he wasn’t doing this because he liked it. He was doing it to keep me quiet, so I wouldn’t ask to go back to Costa Rica. Then I found out that before we left to come up here, he had copied the pictures from my camera to his computer without telling me. It’s why I forgot to bring my camera. Emerson took it out of my bag where I kept it and he didn’t put it back. So when I took the bag it wasn’t in it.”

  “Where’s the camera now?”

  “At my mother’s house in Costa Rica.”

  “And the pictures from Colombia, they’re still in it?”

  “As far as I know. I asked him that.”

  “Pike?”

  “Yes. I asked if he erased them when he copied them to his computer. He didn’t ask me. He just did it.”

  “What did he say? Did he erase them?”

  “He said no, they were still there.”

  “And you believed him?”

  She shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  “Is there a telephone at your mother’s house, any way that we could call down there?”

  “No. She has a cellular, but she turns it off when she goes to Colombia.”

  I give her a slip of paper and a pen and Katia writes the address of her mother’s house on it. In fact, it is a description of how to get there.

  “Is there anyone in Costa Rica who could retrieve the camera for us, a friend or relative who could get it from the house and ship it to us?”

  She thinks for a moment and shakes her head. “Lorenzo, perhaps.”

  “Who is Lorenzo?”

  “Lorenzo Goudaz. He is a friend of my family, but he has no key to my mother’s house. Besides, he will be angry when he finds out what has happened to me. I introduced him to Emerson in San José but Lorenzo didn’t like him. He told me not to trust him.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He said Emerson was too nosy, asking too many questions. He told me to be careful. I should have listened to him.”

  I take his name and telephone number to put on Harry’s short list of contacts in Costa Rica in hopes that perhaps this Lorenzo can contact Katia’s mother.

  “You say Pike had a computer with him in Costa Rica and he used it to copy the pictures.”

  “Yes, a laptop.”

  “I assume he brought it back to the States with him when he came home?”

  “Of course. That’s how he printed the pictures in his study. The ones the police took from my bag.”

  A cop’s best friend, your own computer, the first thing they seize at any crime scene. Only in this case, it’s gone.

  “Do you know what happened to it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Pike’s computer is missing. The police didn’t find it at his house.”

  “It was on the desk in the study. It’s where he kept it. It was there when I left that night.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. I saw it when I put the note on the desk.”

  According to one of the homicide investigative reports, Pike had a website for his business. A wireless antenna for the Internet and a printer, all in the study. But there was no computer.

  Ordinarily this would be a problem for them, limiting leads. More often than not, the answer to what happened is in the computer, e-mails and the things people research on the Internet, all of which leave tracks. But the police don’t seem to be concerned at all in this case, probably because they have Katia and a seeming mountain of evidence against her. But like the missing cache of coins, they didn’t find Pike’s computer on Katia when they arrested her, and they can’t explain why. All the little unanswered questions.

  According to Katia, it all comes back to the pictures.

  I ask her about her mother and whether she has ever had any problems with the law.

  “I know what you are thinking,” says Katia. “My mother goes to Colombia, so she must be involved in drugs.”

  It’s obvious from the way she gripped this that the same thought has crossed Katia’s mind. “No. It’s not true. She has never had any problems of that kind, and she would never do that. I would know. None of my family has ever had anything to do with drugs. You can check, but you will find nothing. Besides, I don’t think Emerson was looking for drugs. It was something else.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t. It’s just a feeling. But I don’t think so. He was looking for someone or something in those pictures. You should talk to my mother,” she says. “Maybe she knows something.”

  “How do I get in touch with her? Do you have a phone number in Colombia?”

  Katia shakes her head. “She has no cell phone with her. I don’t even know where she stays. Usually she calls home every week or so from a phone in the city.”

  “Where does she call from?”

  “Medellín.”

  FOURTEEN

  For three days after finding the binder and identifying the insignia, Orville Honeycutt nibbled at the edges of the Pike photo assignment. He burned a day of sick leave playing hooky. He had more than a month of leave, and what he didn’t use he would lose when he retired.

  To see what was in Pike’s photos he needed to get at the lab in the basement when no one was there. The opportunity would come tonight. The painter was working downstairs. Nobody was going to stick around with the fumes trapped down below.

  It was late afternoon, four thirty. He went online one more time, checking to see if Pike had responded to his e-mail to provide a method of payment. There was no reply. Honeycutt could send him one more notice and if he didn’t hear back simply close the file, but he didn’t want to.

  He thought for a moment and then picked up the phone. He called a cell number across the river in the District of Columbia.

  Freddy Younger answered.

  “You got a minute?” said Orville.

  Younger recognized the voice immediately. Freddy and Orville had worked together in army intelligence decades earlier when they were both young and stupid. They used to carouse at night before Freddy got married and had kids and Orville got old. They did the same type of work and it kept them in touch over the years, only Freddy’s pension was much better than Orville’s. He worked doing photo forensics at the FBI’s crime lab.

  “What’s up?” said Fr
eddy.

  “Something I want to run past you.”

  “Shoot.” Freddy listened but sounded distracted.

  Orville told him about Emerson Pike and his pictures, about the old man in the military fatigue jacket, and about the insignia on the shoulder patch, the Seventy-ninth Regiment, what Orville had discovered about its history. It wasn’t much, just a few lines on a page in the old denim binder. This was filled with loose-leaf pages, periodically updated by U.S. intelligence agencies and given to their private contractors doing photo work. This was before computers and the digital age. The updates would come periodically by regular mail.

  Intelligence, and particularly the military, always wanted to keep tabs on foreign troops around the world, their numbers and where they were deployed. The material in the binder was decades out of date. This may have been the only reason he found what he was looking for. Inside was a page with a picture of a shoulder patch identical to the one Honeycutt had found on the fatigue jacket.

  “Are you near your computer?” asked Orville.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m shooting you an e-mail. It’s blank, but check out the two attachments.”

  Honeycutt sent him a copy of the enlarged shoulder patch and a second image showing part of the name over the breast pocket on the old fatigue jacket with the Cyrillic letters, only the first two of which were decipherable, H .

  “It just went out. You should have it in a minute.” Orville had Googled the Russian Cyrillic alphabet and knew that the first two letters on the name patch translated to N I in English.

  “Why so important?” said Freddy.

  Orville explained that, according to the information in the binder, the Russians had reorganized all of their rocket brigades in the early 1960s. At that time the Seventy-ninth had only been up and running for a few years. It ceased to exist shortly after the reorganization, sometime between ’63 and ’64.

  “So, somebody’s got an old Russian army jacket,” said Freddy.

  Freddy sounded indifferent until Orville told him about the unit’s last overseas assignment. Then there was a long silence.

  “How old did you say these pictures were?” asked Freddy.

  “I didn’t,” said Orville, “but the same thought crossed my mind. That maybe somebody scanned some old photos into a computer. No, the files are too small and they aren’t TIFFs.” He was talking about Tagged Image File Format, the usual form of a digital image generated by a scanner. “They were all taken four months ago, on the same date,” said Honeycutt. “The man who sent them to me sent the original digital data files, complete, and they don’t lie.”