The Killing Lessons

by Saul Black

  He Googled URS.

  We specialise in creative solutions for multiple industries, including food and beverage distributors, food processing, supermarkets and grocery stores, liquor and convenience stores, restaurants, wineries, breweries, florists, bio-techs and laboratories, as well as other specialty projects like ripening rooms and beer caves.

  And freezers to transport corpses in your RV.

  Fuckin’ A.

  But the logo didn’t match. The pocket scrap was white on blue, in caps. The website showed lower case black with a yellow border on a red background. It was on the vans, the trucks, the letterhead, the warehouse.

  He broadened his search. Maybe there were two outfits with similar names? He’d checked several first time around, maybe half a dozen. All he had on the pocket was a definite ‘R’. The other two letters were only partial. The ‘U’ could be a ‘J’, or possibly a ‘W’. The ‘S’ could be… Well, it couldn’t much be anything other than an ‘S’.

  He tried ‘JRS San Francisco’. Got a bunch of stuff, none of which was anything to do with freezers. Ditto ‘WRS San Francisco’. A religious group… A digital radio station… A dance company…

  Fuck. Was he crazy?

  But he knew he’d seen it.

  He called URS.

  No answer. Too early.

  He snatched the photo from the desktop and grabbed his jacket.

  Driving to Oakland Will mentally reran his first visit to the plant. Two industrial units at right angles to each other, an asphalt yard and a fleet of trucks. He’d gone through the warehouse, up two flights of stairs, down at least three corridors, into the manager’s office. The logo had been the same, everywhere. Not the one on the pocket. The manager was Tony Dawson, a paunchy guy in a plaid flannel shirt and chinos. Hair the colour of wet sand and meaty, freckled hands. A little thrilled (and suspicious) to be suddenly dealing with True Crime – not that Will had given anything away. (The press knew Valerie – the public knew Valerie – but the rest of the team was faceless, thank God.) Dawson had taken him into his office (feebly tinselled, here and there, with a bedraggled artificial tree in one corner) and spent thirty minutes going through job histories for the date range. The office wasn’t exactly a mess, but it needed sorting out. One of the filing cabinet’s drawers was broken. Dawson’s golf bag was on the floor, a chipped driver sticking out. There were three desktop computers, for no good reason Will could figure. A cardboard box filled with pink invoice copies. (Paper? Will had thought. Who the fuck still used paper? But the world was like that: never quite as hi-tech as the paranoid version of it you carried around in your head.) In the corner—

  Holy Jesus.

  Will’s hands tightened on the wheel.

  In the midst of the memory was a charge of self-congratulation: Fuck, you’re good. The Machine still works. He was smiling. (While another disinterested part of him thought: This is the job. You smile because you just got a stride closer to some bastard who butchers women. Should you smile? Would the dead women want you to smile? But if there was no smiling, if there was no delight in getting the job done, would the dead women ever have their revenge? And wasn’t that what they wanted? Wasn’t that all that was left to them?)

  In the corner of Dawson’s office there had been a half life-sized cardboard cutout of a bald guy with a very black moustache and very blue eyes, smiling.

  Wearing blue overalls with the URS logo on the pocket.

  The logo they must have changed since.

  The logo in the photograph.

  The logo on the pocket from the dead woman’s hand.

  That? Dawson had said, seeing Will studying the beaming cardboard baldie. That’s Frank Ransome, my predecessor. Got National Manager of the Year back in 2010. I made a dumb-ass joke that I wouldn’t take it out of my office until I’d won it. Yeah. I really need to think before opening my mouth.

  The morning shift was up and running by the time Will pulled into the URS parking lot, but Dawson wasn’t in yet. The warehouse manager, Royle, a short, wiry white guy in his fifties with a small tough, shaved head, was.

  ‘Jesus, yeah,’ Royle said, when Will showed him the photograph of Valerie’s Zoo Guy. ‘I remember him. This guy…’ He paused. ‘What’s the investigation?’

  ‘Homicide.’

  ‘Shit, seriously? He’s dead?’

  ‘No, he’s not dead. Just tell me what you know about him. Let’s start with his name.’

  The reality of who he was talking to and the dark intrigue that spiralled out from it was starting to dawn on Royle. His face was busy with wonderings.

  ‘Jesus, you mean he’s a suspect?’

  ‘He’s just someone we need to talk to. And that’s between you and me, OK?’

  Royle wet his lips with a lizardy flick of his tongue. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Sure, sure.’

  ‘Now can you give me his name?’

  ‘Xander,’ Royle said. ‘Xander King.’

  Will wrote it in his notebook.

  ‘That’s quite a handle,’ he said.

  ‘I know, right? But there you go. You know you should really talk to Lester. Lester worked with him.’

  ‘I will, but can you just take me through what you know? He worked here, so you’ll have his address on file. I need to see it.’

  Royle looked embarrassed. ‘Well, the thing is,’ he said, ‘he was off the books. Cash in hand. We don’t do that any more, but Ransome did. This is three years ago. I don’t know if we had an address. You can get the boss to check, I guess. Or Marcy’ll be in in a minute. She can look for you.’

  ‘What did Xander King do here?’

  ‘He was a… Well, to be honest he was kind of a dogsbody. Did everything from humping boxes to cleaning the toilets. He claimed he knew the freezer business, but Ransome never bought it. Thing was, he couldn’t read or write. I mean not a word. Only totally illiterate person I’ve ever actually met. But Ransome was a little dyslexic himself, and felt sorry for the guy. Personally I never liked him. Matter of fact he gave me the creeps. Even Lester didn’t really know him. He was pretty quiet. I thought he was maybe a little, you know, retarded.’

  Royle left a pause in which was his uncertainty about whether it was OK to use the word ‘retarded’. Will Fraser just nodded. Political correctness was one of the many luxuries being a cop meant you couldn’t afford. Only the information mattered.

  ‘Anyway,’ Royle continued, reassured by Will’s nods, ‘the guy inherited some money from his stepdad or something. Came in one day and told a bunch of people he was pissed at for whatever reason that they could go fuck themselves. Then we never saw him again. Hell of a thing. Hell of a thing – right?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s something,’ Will said. Valerie’s words from the last meeting returned: They could be independently solvent. ‘How much did he come into?’ Will asked.

  ‘No one knows,’ Royle said. ‘Enough for him to quit here, he figured.’

  Enough to finance a three-year killing spree, he figured.

  ‘OK,’ Will said. ‘I need that address check. Who’d you say can do that?’

  ‘Marcy. But she’s not in yet. Shouldn’t be more than ten minutes.’

  ‘What about this guy, Lester? You say he worked with King?’

  Royle’s face betrayed the beginnings of disappointment that his role in the excitement was most likely over now. The police spotlight was already moving away to its next actor. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Let me see if I can find him. Damn. Xander King. Holy moly.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Will said.

  But Lester, it turned out, had called in sick yesterday, and hadn’t shown up yet today either.

  Dawson’s secretary, Marcy, arrived, and while she confirmed there was no address for Xander King, there was one, plus phone number, for Lester Jacobs.

  Will called the number. Three times. Three times got bumped to voicemail.

  FORTY-NINE

  Lousy timing. Captain Deerholt stepped out of his office into the corridor
just as Valerie – with Laura Flynn and Ed Perez – was about to pass. The door was open. Inside, Carla York was standing by the window, arms folded.

  ‘In here, Val, please.’

  ‘Sir, we’ve got him,’ Valerie said. ‘We’re en route right now. There’s no time.’

  ‘What?’ Two seconds for Deerholt to process, recalibrate, know it wasn’t a ruse.

  ‘Agent York goes with you,’ was all he said. ‘And whatever the fuck’s going on between you, stow it. Warrant?’

  ‘Halloran’s gone for it. But we’ve got probable cause anyway. Cap, we have to go right now.’

  ‘OK, go. Agent York?’

  It had taken another thirty-eight Claudia Grey minutes, but they had Leon’s current address. Right here in San Francisco. A fourth-floor walk-up in the Tenderloin. DMV had turned up no match for the picture, but Joy had reported back after following up on the foster parents. Lloyd Conway had sold CoolServ and retired early. But pancreatic cancer meant he got less than two years to enjoy his retirement. His death had shattered his wife, Teresa, who had been in and out of heavily medicated depression ever since. ‘She’s not exactly crazy,’ Joy had told Valerie, ‘but you wouldn’t want to put her on the stand for anything.’ It had taken Joy more than an hour on the phone with her to piece the narrative together. Leon hadn’t lived with the Conways since he was nineteen. They’d had three years of trying to make it work, but – this was Joy reading between the lines – the kid hadn’t settled. He’d worked with Lloyd at CoolServ, learnt a little of the business, but taken off as soon as he’d stashed some money. They didn’t hear from him for months, initially, then years. It had tormented the Conways. In desperation, they’d hired a private detective, who’d spent months tracking him down. There had been a failed reunion. But as far as Teresa Conway knew the address was still good. Valerie had been about to go back to the databases – then, with the common sense being a cop too often buried under hypothetical complexities, she’d checked the San Francisco White Pages. And there it was, the only Leon Ghast in the book: 218 Ellis Street, Apartment 4D. As far as Valerie could determine, he hadn’t been in registered employment for the last five years.

  The detectives and Carla York went in Valerie’s Taurus. Four uniforms in two squad cars behind. Sirens until two blocks away from Ellis.

  There was no rear exit from the building except via the fire escape. Three floors up, Ed Perez took one of the blues and got badge access to it through an apartment inhabited by a pair of sleepy Hispanic retirees. Leon’s apartment was on the fourth floor.

  Outside the door, Valerie turned to the nearest patrol officer, Galbraith, whom she knew. ‘Stay here,’ she said. ‘No one gets in or out. Anyone shows up, give a shout. But keep them here.’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘You too,’ she said to his partner, whose badge said Keely. Not a rookie, but new enough to the business not to be fully armoured against horror. And manifestly readying the story for McLusky’s after work. Keely nodded.

  Laura Flynn was checking the clip in her Smith and Wesson.

  Valerie and Carla hadn’t exchanged a word. The tension between them was a sub-presence in the collective adrenal mass.

  There was modest-volume music coming from beyond the door. Valerie rang the doorbell.

  Pause. The moments. The police moments. The moments when the universe balanced. The dead women gathered in sad silence.

  The music went down. Footsteps.

  The eyehole blacked.

  Pause.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Valerie held up her badge. ‘Police, sir. Open up, please.’

  Incredibly – she was expecting paranoia, drama, resistance, a dialogue – the bolt undrew and the door opened.

  Facing her was a pretty guy who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old. Blond dreads, blue eyes. A nose ring. A white cheesecloth Indian shirt. Battered Levi’s. Purple Converse baseball boots. No smell of hash. Hence the opened door.

  Not Leon.

  ‘Leon Ghast?’ Valerie said, for the record.

  The guy was doing what people did: summoning every gram of innocence. His face was fear and good citizenship. He was racing – as everyone who was nothing more than trivially guilty did – through the mental files of sins and misdemeanours for anything he’d done years ago that could conceivably have come around to bite him in the ass. He looked like a nervous angel. His mouth was open, waiting for his brain to finish self-Googling.

  ‘Er, no,’ he said. ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Is this the residence of Leon Ghast?’

  The kid shifted his weight from left foot to right.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Leon Ghast. Does he live here?’

  ‘No,’ he said, though the admission plainly didn’t make him feel good.

  ‘May we come in?’

  Valerie watched him hesitate. Felt television telling him to ask for a search warrant.

  ‘Let’s step inside, sir,’ Carla said, flipping open the universally recognised initials: FBI. ‘This is an urgent matter.’

  There was still some calculation. But the kid was sufficiently innocent to actually be afraid of the police. It was the veterans of guilt who didn’t scare so easily, who had a vested interest in Knowing Their Rights.

  ‘Uh, OK,’ he said.

  Valerie shot Carla a look. I’ve got this. Back off.

  They followed him inside. Standard Tenderloin one-bedroom, unloved furniture, bent venetian blinds and a TV two generations behind. But surprisingly well kept. An Inuit rug that looked recently dry-cleaned on a polished wooden floor. Steel-framed abstract oil prints hanging straight. Three or four bookcases with titles neatly aligned. Valerie noted at least a third of them were black-spined Penguin Classics. The music was something ambient and lyricless. The first thing he did was reach for the remote and turn it off.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ Valerie said. He’d let them in voluntarily and was manifestly shitting himself, so, since the bedroom door was open, she took a quick look inside. The white-linened bed was made. The same minimalist neat-and-tidy story. By the time she’d finished Laura Flynn had checked the kitchen and nodded her the all-clear. The kid was sitting on the plump, seen-better days green vinyl couch, body tense. The apartment smelled of home-made marinara sauce.

  ‘First things first,’ Valerie said. ‘Could I see your ID?’

  ‘What is this?’ the kid said, forcing a desperate laugh.

  ‘Let’s just see the ID,’ Valerie said.

  The kid reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. Driver’s licence said: Shaun Moore. Date of birth: 04.23.1991. Oakland address three years out of date.

  ‘OK, Mr Moore,’ Valerie said. ‘We’re looking for Leon Ghast. He’s the registered tenant at this property. Do you know him?’

  ‘I’m just staying here temporarily.’

  ‘That wasn’t the question.’

  Valerie had perfect control of the tonal gears.

  The kid looked at the other police in the room. Their eyes all gave him the relevant information: Talk to her, kiddo. There’s no help here.

  ‘Do you know him?’ Valerie repeated.

  ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ the kid said. ‘You must have the wrong address.’

  Valerie waited a couple of beats.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘This isn’t an illegal sub-let enquiry. Tell us the set-up. Seriously. Whatever it is, it’s cool with us. It’s not what we’re interested in.’

  It didn’t take long. The kid was sub-sub-letting. The original sub-let was to a guy named Robert Biden, who’d been living here for just over two years. Valerie pulled out the photo of Leon Ghast. ‘Is this Robert Biden?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m positive. That’s not Rob. I’ve known the dude for years.’

  ‘Who was Rob sub-letting from?’

  ‘I don’t… Some guy named Zan.’

  ‘Zan what?’

  ‘I d
on’t know. I don’t even know if that’s his first name.’

  ‘Look at the photo again. Is this Zan?’

  ‘I’ve never seen the guy. Seriously, I wouldn’t know because I’ve never seen him.’

  ‘Is any of the stuff in here his?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Does any of the furniture here – are there clothes or anything of his still in the apartment?’

  ‘Rob? I don’t know about the furniture. But clothes… All his stuff’s here. But I mean…’

  ‘Anything here belong to Zan?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’d have to check with Rob.’

  Valerie’s cell phone rang. It was Halloran.

  ‘Warrant’s been issued,’ he said. ‘Deerholt called the judge.’

  ‘Where do we find Rob Biden?’ she said to Shaun Moore, after she’d hung up.

  ‘He’s in Europe,’ the kid said. ‘He’s in France… no, wait. He’s in Spain. They were in Spain two days ago.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘He’s with his girlfriend.’

  ‘Do you have contact details for him? A hotel?’

  ‘I don’t know where he’s staying. We just text.’

  ‘How long has he been away?’

  ‘I don’t know. Like, two months?’

  ‘You’re sure he’s in Europe?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure. Well I can’t prove it, but I mean… I got a text from him couple of days ago. That’s his cat right there.’

  A slender black and white cat with big eyes and a small head had appeared on the window ledge outside the cracked-open window. It was regarding them with surprise and affront.

  ‘I’m feeding the cat,’ Shaun Moore said. ‘I mean I’m staying here, taking care of the cat.’

  ‘OK,’ Valerie said. ‘A warrant’s been issued for a search of this address. There’ll be people coming here to go over the apartment shortly. Detective Flynn, call Forensics.’

  ‘Forensics?’ Shaun Moore said. He looked unequivocally terrified now.

  ‘You got a photo of Rob? On your phone?’ Valerie asked. She wasn’t expecting it to be Leon, but she had to remind herself firstly that technically there was no concrete proof that Leon was the killer, and secondly that they were looking for two killers. This kid (instinct was already dismissing it) could be the beta. Nor was there any reason Leon Ghast would be using his real name. Zan? Zan could be the beta. Maybe Zan was the alpha and Leon was the beta? Hell, maybe Shaun Moore was the alpha.