Stamping down her depression, like someone throwing a damp blanket over a fire – she could hear her friend Gretchen Adler’s voice, telling her to ‘get a grip’ – she pulled herself together and opened the door, smiling serenely.
‘Carter. Do come in.’
Carter stood up, revealing heavy bandages on his left leg from the knee down. Looking around him furtively, he grabbed a pair of crutches from the other side of his chair and limped through into Nikki’s office.
‘What happened?’ Nikki asked, as soon as they were alone.
Setting his crutches to one side Carter eased himself down onto Nikki’s couch. His face was white, with beads of sweat glistening on his forehead like tiny pearls, and his legs were shaking uncontrollably. Looking up at Nikki, he said through gritted teeth, ‘I was shot. They shot me.’
‘Oh my God!’ Nikki was suitably horrified. ‘Carter, I’m so sorry. Who shot you? And when did this happen?’
‘I didn’t get a good look at their faces. But it was the same guys, the Mexican gang I’ve been telling you about. I’ve had threats … they broke into my home. I told the police, but they didn’t do anything. They acted like I was making it up.’
A shiver ran down Nikki’s spine at the similarity to her own experience. Mysterious break-ins. Disbelieving police …
‘Whatever,’ Carter said angrily. ‘Screw them. I know the truth. It was the same guys. Last Saturday. I came out of a club downtown around one thirty a.m. They must have followed me there. I was outside, waiting for my car, and this car pulls up, two guys get out, one of them shoots me in the shin and they drive off.’
He finished this monologue in an oddly flat tone. When he was done, Nikki noticed his teeth were chattering. It was as if he were still in shock – as well he might be, if his story was true.
‘Did anyone else see it happen?’
Carter shook his head. ‘No. I was the only customer outside and the valet had already left to pick up my car. By the time he got back I was on the ground, bleeding and barely conscious.’
‘Right,’ said Nikki, her mind whirring. On a human level, she wanted to believe him. He did, after all, appear to have been shot. So if his story wasn’t true, that would imply that he’d deliberately shot himself, in some sort of Munchausenesque bid for what? Attention? She couldn’t believe Carter was that far gone. He was still functioning in his job at the bank, still lucid.
On the other hand, yet again these mysterious ‘Mexicans’ seemed to have struck at a time when there were no witnesses, and left no evidence to corroborate his story.
‘Did you call the police? Or did the valet? He must have been shocked to find you like that?’
Carter’s eyes swiveled wildly around in his sockets. For a moment he looked truly insane. ‘Maybe.’ He dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Or maybe he was in on it. Maybe he tipped these guys off? Did you think of that? They have people everywhere, all over LA, all over the US. They’re like a plague.’
‘Who are “they”, Carter?’ Nikki asked softly. ‘You’ve told me that you believe they’re from Mexico but beyond that—’
‘I don’t believe it. I know it,’ Carter insisted. ‘And I know who they are but I can’t tell you because it would be dangerous for you to know. And dangerous for me if anyone were to find out I’d told you.’ He was speaking at a hundred miles an hour, the words tumbling out in a bizarre, paranoid stream-of-consciousness. ‘They shot me in the leg, but they could have killed me. Right? But they didn’t. So that means they’re sending a warning. They don’t want me dead, they want me quiet.’
‘OK,’ said Nikki.
‘But it’s not OK, because I need to talk about it, Doc! I need to tell someone what happened! I was there. I saw it. I saw them kill her. They made me watch, like it was some kind of show. Oh God!’ Slumping forwards onto his knees, Carter broke down in terrible, wracking sobs.
Nikki moved to sit next to him, wrapping an arm around his shaking shoulders. This was important. Very important. It could be the breakthrough she’d been waiting for.
‘What did they make you watch, Carter?’
He shook his head violently. ‘I can’t!’
‘Yes, you can,’ said Nikki. ‘Close your eyes.’
He did as she asked.
‘Now breathe deeply. And now imagine yourself there. What do you see?’
‘I see trees.’ His voice took on a trance-like quality. ‘I see a clearing in the trees. It’s nighttime. It’s dark but there’s moonlight. It’s hot.’
‘Good, Carter. Very good. What else?’
‘I see the girl. She’s in the clearing.’
‘OK. What does she look like?’ asked Nikki. Guiding clients through these sorts of retrieved memories was notoriously tricky, like walking a tightrope. Not enough prompting and the images could slip away, back into the deep unconscious mind. Too much and the client could become frightened and oppositional. Once the flow was broken it was damn near impossible to get it back.
‘She’s naked,’ said Carter. He frowned. ‘No, not naked. She has panties on. She’s standing there, sort of swaying. And then …’
He stopped, and winced, like a dog running into an invisible electric fence.
‘And then?’ Nikki repeated softly.
Carter’s breath quickened and his hands began worrying at his pant legs. He let out a sharp, frightened cry, like a yelp.
Nikki waited.
‘I hear the guns,’ he said. ‘Like a drum beat. Pop pop pop pop pop! Machine guns. I don’t see them. But I see her, the girl. Jerking. Jumping. It’s awful! The blood, it’s …’ He gasped for breath, clawing wildly at his own legs. ‘Bits of her are coming off! Oh God! I think she’s dead, but she’s still moving …’
He started to sob again. Nikki realized she probably only had seconds left.
‘Do you know the girl, Carter?’
He nodded.
‘What’s her name?’
Opening his eyes with a jerk, he looked directly at Nikki. ‘He made me watch. He made me! He was laughing. There was blood everywhere. Everywhere. The most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. He’s an animal.’
‘What was the girl’s name, Carter?’ Nikki asked. But she already knew she’d lost him.
‘If I told you that, Doc, he’d kill you too.’
‘And who’s “he”?’
Carter smiled then, a weary smile, but sincere. He got to his feet.
‘I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, Dr Roberts. Especially today. I needed to get that out. To say it out loud.’
‘I’m glad you did, Carter,’ said Nikki. ‘Maybe next time we can—’
‘No,’ said Carter. ‘There won’t be a next time. There can’t be, I’m afraid. I can’t escape him.’ He looked at her with tears in his eyes. ‘I thought I could. Start again, you know. But I see now that was never an option. You, though? You can escape. You can still get away. Reinvent yourself. Start again.’
‘I’m not going anywhere, Carter,’ said Nikki firmly.
‘I hope you change your mind,’ he said, shaking her hand with real feeling. ‘Good luck, Dr Roberts. And goodbye.’
Nikki watched him limp out of her office, a strange feeling lodged in her chest. She’d helped him today, more than in all their past sessions combined. That much was clear. Like a doctor lancing an infected boil, it had been painful, but emptying his subconscious mind had brought Carter Berkeley instant and visible relief.
Now whether the story he’d told her was true or not was another matter. The girl might be a real girl. Or an imagined one, representing some aspect of Carter’s own personality, or some figure from his past.
It wasn’t the story itself, but Carter’s last words to Nikki that pressed down heavily on her heart. ‘You can still get away. Reinvent yourself. Start again.’
Could she?
It was certainly an intoxicating thought.
Anne Bateman had called not long ago to cancel their midday session. At the time Nikki
had felt disappointed, but now she was relieved to be alone and done for the day. Leaning back in her chair she felt dizzy all of a sudden and realized she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since breakfast.
As she was scrabbling about in her desk drawer for a protein bar, her cell phone rang. Nikki was about to ignore it, but then saw Derek Williams’ name pop up on her screen.
‘Any news?’ she asked anxiously.
‘I do have news,’ he responded, sounding surprisingly downbeat. ‘Where are you right now? Can you come to my office?’
‘I can,’ Nikki answered cautiously. ‘I’m in Century City. But can’t you tell me over the phone?’
Williams hesitated. ‘I’d rather we met. How about in an hour?’
‘OK,’ said Nikki, her pulse already starting to quicken.
He had news. News too important to tell her over the phone. To her own shame, Nikki found herself praying that it wasn’t about the murders at all, but about the mysterious Lenka.
Please let him have found something, she entreated the God she didn’t believe in.
Please, after all this time, let me find some peace.
Before she could even think about taking Carter Berkeley’s advice and starting again, she needed to know the truth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
‘Please, please, sit down.’
The fat PI made a sweeping, welcome gesture with one arm, while with the other he literally swept piles of old papers off of his fake leather ‘client’ seat.
‘How’s your day been so far, Dr Roberts?’ he asked Nikki cheerfully. After his reticence on the phone earlier, he seemed in a surprisingly ebullient mood.
‘My day? It’s been exhausting, actually,’ Nikki answered truthfully, running a hand through her hair. ‘Two of my clients seem to have totally lost the plot.’ She didn’t know why, but something about Derek Williams made her feel safe, willing to let her guard down in a way she wouldn’t with other people. Certainly not other men. It struck her now that perhaps it was because he didn’t flirt with her. At all. In Nikki’s experience, that was pretty unusual.
‘Only two? I’d call that lucky,’ he quipped, rearranging things so that his own seat and desk were relatively clear before they got started. ‘Pretty much all of my clients have lost the plot. Most of them a very long time ago. Present company excepted, naturally.’
He smiled again and Nikki couldn’t help but smile back.
‘So what’s this news?’ she asked him eagerly. ‘Please tell me it’s about my husband’s mistress.’
Williams spread his fingers wide over his chubby thighs and turned his empty palms over.
‘It is not,’ he informed her. ‘Sorry.’
Nikki’s face fell.
‘It’s early days,’ Williams reminded her. ‘We’ll get to the girl eventually, believe me. And what I do have for you,’ he looked at her proudly, ‘is a pretty awesome start, if I say so myself.’
‘OK,’ Nikki sighed. She could use a shot of awesome right now. ‘Impress me.’
Derek Williams cleared his throat. ‘So I read everything you gave me, all the information. And I decided to start with Trey Raymond.’
He told Nikki about his trip out to Westmont, which began as a simple tail on Detective Johnson. ‘Luckily for me, our favorite racist cop made things real easy for me, throwing his weight around and antagonizing everyone from the Raymond family to the neighborhood dealers he was trying to pump for information. It won’t come as any surprise that no one told him anything. After that, all I had to do was walk in and be civil and the floodgates opened.’
Nikki waited for him to go on.
‘Trey stopped using two years ago, shortly after he met your husband.’
‘That’s right,’ Nikki confirmed. ‘Doug brought him back from the brink.’
‘He did,’ Williams agreed. ‘But things weren’t that simple. Before he got clean, Trey had been dealing to feed his habit. Heroin, mostly. But later, at the end, he was pushing a new kind of desomorphine. It’s codeine-based and it’s incredibly nasty stuff. The street name for it is Krokodil.’
‘I know what it is,’ said Nikki. ‘Doug’s partner, Haddon Defoe, says they’re running into it all the time at the clinic. It’s horrific. He said the Russians introduced it.’
‘That’s right,’ said Williams, impressed. ‘Well, Trey had been working for a Mexican cartel, in competition with the Russians, before he met your husband. The guys he was working for back then, they don’t believe in “fresh starts”. I don’t think they ever had any intention of letting him walk away.’
‘But he did walk away,’ Nikki insisted. ‘Doug took him under his wing and Trey totally changed his life. I gave him a job. Trey came to work in my office every day, always on time, always professional.’
‘That was his day job,’ Williams said bluntly. ‘I don’t doubt your husband was a good man, Nikki, but for someone who worked closely with addicts, I’m afraid he was incredibly naive about the business side of the narcotics world. Trey’s “other” boss was a Mexican drug lord by the name of Carlos de la Rosa.’
He looked up at Nikki, but the name obviously meant nothing to her. She was still in shock at the idea that Trey had been dealing drugs behind everyone’s back.
‘Do you think this man was the one who killed Trey? Or had him killed?’
‘I don’t know for sure. But I’d say it was a fairly safe bet, especially if Trey was trying to walk away, like you said, or had defied him in some way. De la Rosa is a big fish in Westmont,’ Williams explained. ‘But he’s small fry in the world of the cartels. His boss is a far, far more dangerous man. And that’s where this gets really interesting.’
‘Who’s his boss?’ Nikki asked.
‘Believe it or not, Dr Roberts, it’s someone you know. Or at least know of. Luis Domingo Rodriguez.’
Nikki frowned, trying to place the name.
‘Your patient Anne Bateman is his estranged wife,’ said Williams. Turning around his laptop, he showed Nikki a picture on Google Images of a suave, attractive, Latin man with black hair graying at the temples and intense, watchful eyes.
Nikki looked confused. ‘I think you must be mistaken, Mr Williams. Or gotten your wires crossed somehow. Anne’s husband is a real-estate developer.’
‘Please, call me Derek,’ Williams reminded her. ‘And I’m not mistaken. Luis Rodriguez married Anne Bateman in a private ceremony in Costa Rica eight years ago. I can show you a copy of the marriage certificate if you’re interested. I was interested because I’ve run across Luis Rodriguez before on an old case. It was a missing persons case officially, although unofficially everybody knows the girl was murdered. Have you ever heard of Charlotte Clancy?’
Nikki closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. Her conversation with Gretchen a few weeks ago suddenly came back to her. Charlotte Clancy, the au pair? The one Valentina Baden had been looking for? Nikki felt as if she’d somehow slipped into the twilight zone, some bizarre alternate universe where everybody’s lives were joined together by mysterious dark forces in a spider’s web of misery. A world where Trey was a drug dealer, and Anne’s husband was a drug lord. None of it made any sense at all.
‘But … Anne told me her husband worked in real estate,’ she repeated numbly, trying desperately to cling to reality. ‘That’s how he made his fortune.’
‘No,’ said Williams. ‘It’s how he invests his fortune. He made it twenty years ago, flooding Western US cities with cocaine.’
For the next fifteen minutes, Derek filled Nikki in on the case that had turned his life upside down – Charlotte Clancy’s disappearance. He told her how he’d hoped Luis Rodriguez might lead him to Charlotte’s secret, married lover, the Jaguar-driving American who Williams felt sure had had a hand in her disappearance. But how, instead, he’d been abducted by Mexican cops, beaten severely and deported back to the States. He told her how Valentina Baden and her charity had purported to ‘help’ the Clancys, paying for TV adverts about their daug
hter’s disappearance, but had in fact been investigating all along in Mexico City and hiding information from the family. And how once he got back home he’d been visited by the FBI and ‘warned off’ from looking into the Badens or Rodriguez, again and again and again.
‘Rodriguez wasn’t even my main focus at that time,’ he explained to Nikki. ‘I don’t think Luis was directly responsible for Charlie Clancy’s disappearance, only that he might have known the man who was. And Valentina Baden might have known him too. But when everybody’s telling you not to look at someone, not to ask questions … you get curious. At least, I do. So over the years I learned a lot about Luis Rodriguez.’
‘Such as?’ Nikki asked. She’d long been fascinated by the strange, Svengali-like hold Anne’s husband seemed to have over her. Perhaps Williams could fill in the blanks?
‘Well, for one thing, the man is basically two people. A real Jekyll-and-Hyde character. He came up from nothing, which makes him a hero to a lot of the poor over there. They see him as some sort of Robin Hood figure, and in a way he is. He gives away a ton of money, especially to drug-related causes. The whole of Mexico knows the story of his sister’s death from heroin addiction, how it changed his life.’
Nikki cast her mind back to her sessions with Anne, where she’d mentioned something about her husband’s philanthropy and his tragic past.
‘That’s all real,’ said Williams. ‘And his real estate empire is real too. It just happens to be the best cover story ever for a major cocaine producer. Which is what he is.’
Williams explained how Rodriguez had evaded justice both at home and in the US by a skillful directing of his resources towards both the police and the impoverished communities, ravaged by drugs, they purported to serve. ‘He’s everybody’s friend. It’s kind of incredible. Ordinary people don’t know about his cartel, and they wouldn’t believe it if they were told. Meanwhile, those in authority who do know have had it made worth their while to turn a blind eye. We’re talking more than lining the pockets of corrupt officials. That’s Rodriguez’s genius: he’s generous and he’s charming, and he’s embedded himself in every possible aspect of these communities’ infrastructures. So in Mexico he pays for schools and roads and hospitals. Here in the US he funds senatorial races, gives a ton of money to our friends the LAPD. He’s a master manipulator.’
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