by Thomas Perry
22
Except for his two months with Catherine Hamilton, Moreland had been away from Southern California for two years. He had lived in a succession of small apartments with women whose closets smelled like stale perfume, and who seemed to be unable to get everything picked up off the floor at one time. Driving up the coast with the car window open let him smell the Pacific air.
He had begun this drive at Holcomb’s ranch in the red rocky badlands north and east of Los Angeles. He had driven farther north and west, and when he reached Valencia, the world had begun to change. Soon he was on the Santa Paula freeway to Ventura and the ocean. He stayed beside the Pacific to Santa Barbara and beyond it, and soon there were big stretches of land without buildings, grassy hillsides above the ocean that had never been ruined by developers.
He wished he could stop the car in Santa Maria or San Luis Obispo or one of the other pleasant cities along the way; buy a small, neat house a half mile from the ocean; and never leave. But he kept going, past Pismo Beach, Cambria, Morro Bay. He kept driving until he was tired, stopped at a restaurant where he could look out the window at the endless blue of water and sky, and then bought gas and got on the road again.
It was evening when he reached Santa Cruz, and he decided it was time to sleep. He was a bit older than college age now, twenty-eight, but he could still rent a room not far from the college and look enough like a student to be unremarkable. He could stay until school let out next spring, but he knew he wouldn’t do it. He checked into a small hotel and slept.
In the morning he got up and lingered, walking to a restaurant for breakfast and reading the newspaper while he ate. Holcomb had taught him to travel the way he lived: “Stick to places where there are lots of people just like you.” He looked young, so he spent as much time as he could in college towns. Boston had been good. The city had a college population of two hundred fifty thousand, and at least that many young people who had graduated or dropped out and stayed.
Holcomb had died before Moreland had invented the method of living with working girls. Since then it had kept him invisible for periods of a month to five months at a time. But now there was a man hunting him, turning up in each place where he stopped. The man had destroyed forever his way of staying invisible. He didn’t dare go near an escort again. He knew that he was going to have to be visible for long enough to deal with the Broker, but as soon as he had his money, he would find a new way to get invisible again.
He drove on to San Mateo and began to search for the right house. He had considered checking into a hotel first, but he had decided to put that off. It was still early in the day. He might be able to finish whatever his business with the Broker might turn out to be, and then drive a distance from here before he stopped for the night.
He found the address and studied the house as he drove past. It was the right sort of house for the Broker. It was a medium-size one-story ranch house in a neighborhood of medium-size one-story ranch houses. It had a black iron fence in front surmounted with spearheads that were ornamental but also sharp. He noticed that the mailbox was at the sidewalk, built into one of the two brick stanchions on the sides of the gate. There was an alarm company’s sign on the lawn, and a beware of dogs sign on the fence.
Moreland parked his car around the corner from the house two hours after dark. As he walked past the houses on the street, he noticed that many of them had windows opened to the mild summer night. He could hear the local newscasters talking in one house and a televised gunfight in another.
He didn’t stop or let himself appear to be studying the area as he walked. Uncertainty and hesitation triggered suspicion. At the Broker’s house he reached in, opened the front gate, went up the walk, and kept going to the back, where he was out of sight from the street. After he got there he sat on the back steps, listening. All he could hear was the air-conditioning unit churning away. If anybody had noticed him and called the police, they would arrive shortly. If the Broker had seen him, he would hear the back door open behind him.
After ten minutes he stood and walked along the back of the house, looking in each window as he passed it. There were no lights on, but in the kitchen he could see the small green light on the refrigerator’s water dispenser and the red clock on the microwave oven’s controls. He stopped by the dining room window, where he could see the control pad for the alarm system. It had a couple of green dots to show the power was on, but the red display said RDY, meaning it was not engaged.
He formed a theory that was a simple preference, a hope. The alarm was off. If a person went out, or to bed, he would turn the alarm on. But if he were wide awake and watching television or reading, he might have left it off. Moreland walked to the kitchen door, turned the knob, and opened it. He stepped in and closed the door behind him.
Something was wrong. The air-conditioning was on too high. He listened without moving. The only sound was the steady hum of the central air-conditioning chilling the house to something like the temperature of a refrigerator. Even though he was wearing a jacket to cover his gun he felt uncomfortable. After a minute the air conditioner stopped blowing. Immediately he noticed that the air had a faint ugly smell, the coppery aftertaste of blood. Something in his line of work had happened here.
He moved to the bottommost kitchen drawer and pulled it wide open. He felt duct tape, a hammer, a screwdriver, a box of nails, a flashlight. He turned the flashlight on. The beam was weak, but the first thing it showed him was a bubble pack of batteries. He replaced the old ones, being careful not to leave prints on the batteries, wiped off the package, and advanced into the house.
In the living room he stopped. The man on the floor was about Holcomb’s age, late forties or fifty, with a shaved head and a tangle of tattoos encircling his right arm like tropical foliage. He’d had a pierced left ear, but whatever he’d had in it had been torn out. Someone had run a straight razor or box cutter from his sternum to his belly and let him bleed out on the floor. Moreland could see that the blood was mostly coagulated around the edges and the surface, but there was still quite a bit of liquid. The man had probably been dead an hour or two.
Moreland moved the flashlight up to the equipment on the row of tables against the wall. There was an open box of prepaid cell phones. There was a pair of old-fashioned landline telephones duct-taped together, mouthpiece to earpiece, so the man could receive a call on one, dial the other, and make his own untraceable connection to a third person. He had computers he probably used as phones, because the built-in cameras had been taped over. It was hard to doubt that this man had been the Broker.
Moreland looked around. There could be information about him in any of these computers, or in the memory of any of the phones. There could be paper records around, bank records, even an address book. He looked down at the Broker and tried to fit the name Daniel Cowper to him. He wasn’t even sure how to pronounce that. The Broker had bruises and abrasions on his face. Moreland shone the light on him and stood beside him, keeping his feet out of the blood that had pooled and turned sticky on the floorboards. He had been tortured—burned, beaten, cut, and finally killed. They had wanted something from him. Information. He should have given them what they wanted right away, and they might have just shot him. Maybe he had known that, but had not been able to relinquish another hour of life, even an hour of pain. Moreland banished the idea from his mind. It didn’t matter.
Moreland thought for a moment. They couldn’t have done this for money. The Broker was a money man. The Broker could have given them money right away and not missed it. This hadn’t been a robbery. Maybe it was somebody who wanted to know about the man who had killed Luis Salazar.
Moreland didn’t touch anything in the room. In here with the air-conditioning system going wild, the air was frigid. Every time the air conditioner stopped running, it started up again in about twenty seconds, so the Broker’s body was like fresh meat in a refrigerator. The blood
smell was strong, but soon all the blood would have dried, and the other smells would take over. But the Broker’s visitors had bought themselves some extra time before anyone came by and smelled the body.
Moreland considered the computers and telephones. He had no prayer of erasing the equipment, let alone any hidden papers or disks. The experts were always pulling information off disks somebody thought were safe. Maybe the Broker had been more careful than that. There was nobody who put less faith in the safety of technology than the technologists. They all knew how easy it was to hack into anything digital.
Moreland kept trying to think of a way forward. He was pretty sure that if he burned the house down, the firemen and cops would be here before everything burned. He would have to pile all the electronics in one spot, pour gasoline on them and around them, and burn them quickly. The authorities would think the fire was to hide the murder, but he couldn’t care less about the murder. First he would have to gather all the electronic devices in here.
He stepped toward the hallway just as two men emerged from it. The first man said, “Hey, Joey. You Joey?” Both men were in their late thirties, and the heavy accent was Hispanic. They were already sidestepping apart.
Moreland didn’t hesitate; he simply pulled out his gun and fired, first at the man who had spoken. He was hit in the chest, so Moreland’s aim moved to the other one, who was reaching under his jacket. Moreland fired four shots rapidly, and the man fell to the floor and remained motionless. Moreland knelt, flipped open the jacket, plucked a Glock 19 compact pistol out of the shoulder holster, and then approached the one who had spoken.
He kept his gun aimed at the man’s face while he moved the man’s jacket to find his gun. It was a Glock 19 too. He tossed it a few feet away, then studied the man. His chest was rising and falling with difficulty. Moreland drew back the gun in his right hand and hit him across the cheekbone with it. The man grunted and opened his eyes.
“Who are you?” Moreland asked.
“Somebody looking for you.”
“Why? I did what you wanted.”
“Not what I wanted. We’re not narcotrafficantes. We’re SSP. Policía Federal. You killed an important prosecutor. A brave, honest man.”
“How do I know you’re police?”
“You’ll find my wallet. It doesn’t matter. I’m dead. But I think you are too. If other Federales don’t get you, the drug men will.”
“Why kill him?”
He smiled. “Resisting arrest.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He told us who you were.”
“Then why kill him?”
“He knew a lot of things. That’s a disadvantage in an interrogation. There’s always more.” He grunted.
“Do the drug dealers know about me?”
“They’ll know what we know. The world is full of informers.” He coughed, and Moreland knew the blood was bubbling in his lungs. They were filling up. He said, not really to Moreland, “We stayed too long.”
Moreland stood up, took two steps back, shot him through the head, and then shot the other man through the head to be sure he was dead too. He searched the dead men for their wallets, which he put into his inner pockets. He went to the door, put an eye to the corner of the small cut-glass window at eye level, and looked outside. The shots didn’t seem to have been heard.
He guessed that if there were cops, or more Federales, they would have come in. He walked through the house looking at the ceilings, trying to find the smoke detectors. He found three, and disconnected them. Then he rolled newspapers and magazines into tubes and stuck them in various places among the computers and telephones. Finally, he went out to the garage with his flashlight. He found charcoal starter, turpentine, and paint thinner. He returned to the living room, doused all of the equipment, and then realized he had no matches. He went to the body of the second policeman, searched his pockets, and found a cigarette lighter.
He started the fire and saw it flash along from table to table, then rise and grow. He went out the front door, set the lock in place, walked to his car, and drove.
23
“Hi, Jack. It’s Alan Rafferty.”
“To what do I owe this pleasure? Does Mullaney want me back in Boston?”
“Not yet. I just called because there have been some odd developments. Vice has had a peripheral involvement in the case, and so I’ve been in on these things.”
“What happened?”
“A couple of the Federales—the cops who came with Luis Salazar’s group from Mexico—have been shot to death in San Mateo. They turned up yesterday.”
“What the hell were they doing in California?”
“We’re not sure. They were found in a house owned by a man named Daniel Cowper. He had been tortured and killed. The two Federales had been shot in the chest and then the head. They were both wearing shoulder rigs that had no guns or ammo in them. And the house was set on fire.”
“Who was Daniel Cowper?”
“I think he was involved in the Salazar assassination somehow. Mexican cops aren’t supposed to be operating in this country except as observers or consultants attached to local police units. But it’s safe to assume that when their boss got turned to hash in Boston, it didn’t sit well with them. I think they wanted the guy who pulled the trigger, the guy who hired him, and whoever the client was.”
“Sounds likely,” said Till. “The Federales must have sources in the United States, just the way the FBI does in other countries. Maybe Cowper was one of them.”
“I don’t know, Jack. Cowper lived there alone, and the place was full of communication equipment that seemed to the investigators to be intended to make his calls hard to trace—prepaid cell phones, computers, a couple of old-fashioned landline phone receivers taped together like they used to do when bosses in prison wanted to call out. When you were here you seemed to think there was a middleman giving the Boyfriend his jobs. Maybe Cowper was him.”
“You said there was a fire. Is there enough left of the computers and things to find out what was on them?”
“Nobody knows yet, but let’s say we’re optimistic. There had been reports of gunshots, so the cops were on the way when the fire started.” He paused. “It really seems odd that foreign cops could find the middleman before we did.”
Till said, “Not necessarily. If they guessed who paid for the hit, they must have ways of finding out who he paid—wiretaps, cell phone records, informers, whatever. Can you give me Cowper’s address?”
“Sure.” Rafferty read the address for him, and Till copied it. “Are you going up there?”
“It’s practically in the neighborhood,” said Till. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”
“I’ll e-mail you the crime scene stuff right away. Bring your computer with you.”
“Thanks.”
As soon as he hung up, his cell phone rang again. “Jack Till.”
“Hi, Dad,” she said. “I almost called on the other line so you would say, ‘Till Investigations.’”
“Hi, Holly,” Till automatically looked at his watch. It was nearly noon. “Is everything okay?” He knew his question was a reflex, the thing that all parents really wondered every time the telephone rang. The conversation could not proceed until that worry was satisfied.
“Everything’s fine. I’m at work. I figured you might be home from Boston by now. Are you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I haven’t been back in town long. And actually, I’m going out of town again today. But it’s just up to San Francisco, and I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“You’re so busy,” said Holly.
“Not too busy for you. What’s on your mind?”
“I got Mrs. Carmody thinking about you. She’s definitely hoping you’ll ask her out.”
“Did I miss somethin
g?” he asked. “Didn’t I say I didn’t want to jeopardize your relationship with your boss or take a chance on souring your job?”
“You did say something like that, but who am I to stand in the way of her social life? She thinks you’re hot.”
“Come on.”
“She does. She wants you. You know she does.”
“Don’t say things like that on the phone. If somebody overheard you they might not realize you’re just teasing me. Mrs. Carmody might hear you and think you’re making fun of her.”
“Okay. Just remember, though. She’s not going to wait forever.”
“All right. I’d better say good-bye now, because I’ve got to get my plane reservation and you’ve got to get to work. I’ll call you when I’m home.”
“Love you.”
“Love you. Bye.”
She hung up. He opened his computer and bought his plane ticket, then closed the office and went home to pack a suitcase.
Till was at Burbank airport two hours later, flew to San Francisco, and rented a car to drive to San Mateo, which was only a couple of miles from the terminal. As he drove, he couldn’t help thinking about Jeanne Carmody. He had always thought of her as attractive, but with Holly playing matchmaker his feelings were more complicated. Holly had tried to fix him up with various divorced women or widows from time to time since she was little. She was always cute about it, and she had a bawdy sense of humor, so even though it was heartbreaking it was funny at the same time. It had always made him sad. She had been trying to supply herself with a mother. The other kids had all had one, but she never had. Now it seemed to him that it was part of her belief that since she had moved out he must be lonely.
He drove to San Mateo and checked into his hotel. He opened his e-mail and studied the crime scene information that Alan Rafferty had sent him, then went out. He left the car in a parking structure attached to a movie theater that was within easy walking distance of Daniel Cowper’s house.