“I wish everything in life were this simple.”
“We’ve all been there, Detective. Is there anything else I can help you with? Did you have any interest in hearing about our new …”
She popped the box like a soap bubble. Terri merged the company records with Basement footage, adding one layer of data to the urban still life in front of her. Looking over the rental documentation, she saw a ten-digit number listed in the space where a recipient should have been named. Some companies offered hidden-recipient glove box service—moving dead drops, essentially—although she’d assumed from Concierge’s classy trappings that they were above this sort of thing.
She summoned a map box and restarted time in high speed, Farrukh whooshing off, foot traffic surging around her as she stared down at a colorful chart, feeling like a tourist examining a placard as she followed the car’s progress through the city. The first glove box transfer came on the Ventura freeway. Eight miles west of that there was another, the cars coordinating with each other, passing off their cargo, the pulsing dot that represented Farrukh’s gun moving in a counterclockwise half arc across the city, finally slowing to take the CA-90 spur into Marina Del Ray.
“No. Fucking. Way.”
Switching to the actual street corner where the car came to a rest, she steeled herself for another high-voltage mindfuck. But when Stacy Santos actually did emerge from the early-morning crowd, accepting the Glove box contents with a poker-faced alertness, Terri was disappointed to find herself decidedly un-jazzed, having understood and accepted the new reality of this case at nearly the same moment.
So Farrukh passed Stacy a gun. Presumably the same gun she shot him with, although without a serial number she couldn’t yet prove this part, or the rest of her hunch. The next step was to see what the college girl did with it. Retrieving Concierge’s rental records, she was about to make note of Stacy’s anonymous customer number when she felt the jolt that had eluded her just a minute earlier. The ten-digit number was a drop-down; when she tapped on it, another rental record unfurled. Stacy had passed something to someone else.
“Oh shit shit shit.”
She called Legal Services, reaching the stern Dupe of a middle-aged male attorney in a featureless gray cubicle.
“Yes, Detective.”
“I just obtained a search warrant for rental records on a glove box. On closer inspection, I’m realizing that these records contain additional information, information that wasn’t requested but which is potentially vital to this case. Can I look at these additional records without jeopardy?” She hoped Zack would never see this conversation, the strange formality with which she addressed a duplicado.
“Was the information requested in good faith?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you uncover the extra information in the normal course of your investigation?”
She had to consider this. “Yeah, I suppose I did.”
“Then you’re fine. California vs. Hargrave gives you plenty of legal legroom.”
“Thanks.” She hung up, wondering if there was any way a legal Dupe could be wrong and, if so, if her recording of this brief conversation could somehow protect the case retroactively.
Stacy Santos left the weapon in a different glove box, four hours after killing Farrukh, her own gun-stashing gestures eerily similar to his. Clearly neither had handled a weapon, legal or illegal. Terri watched the car with Stacy’s rented glove box speed east on city streets. Twenty-three minutes later, a man labeled QUINTIGLIO, NUESTRO stooped through a car window and repeated these odd gestures of concealment in reverse, taking the gun and quickly stashing it in the small of his back.
At least this man looked like the villain of popular imagination: tall, gangly, with dark sunken eyes and a bald patch fringed with silver hair tied into a swinging ponytail. He was exactly the kind of creep one would expect to find next to a posh waterfront home, peeping in through a window at the pretty young college girl inside. Terri stopped herself. She’d forgotten this wasn’t her case. In the Basement, she confirmed another part of her hunch. He’d gone into his house almost four days ago and hadn’t come out.
She returned to Zamora, finding him still eating, trapped in the strange existential hell of his office, perhaps doomed to chew at the same Sloppy Joe for all eternity.
“That was quick,” Zamora’s Dupe said.
“I need an arrest warrant with an extension mail warrant.”
“Why the extension?”
“There’s reasonable suspicion that my suspect is dead.”
“So you want an extension, sine qua non a body?”
“That’s what circumstances warrant,” she said, not bothering to search the Latin in the sidebar.
He shrugged. She repeated her footage transfer and swear-in, and the second warrant was hers.
She placed precautionary drones on Quintiglio’s house, not wanting to call foot officers until she was under way. Rushing to get dressed, it occurred to her that she was still the only actual person in this entire process, a piece of meat among the gnashing gears. If she were to keel over from a stroke on her way out the door, what would happen? The various Dupes she’d spoken with would just go about their days. She pictured the two preliminary drones she’d ordered, circling Quintiglio’s house at this very moment. If she never showed up, would they just keep circling?
She zippered through traffic at 160 mph, cars sashaying aside to let her pass, the rush of the road mirroring the rush of the hunt. After sending Babylon and Ruben a courtesy text, Terri pulled up an overview on the property. Quintiglio lived in a Leimert Park backhouse with only one direct approach, through a narrow driveway that let into a little concrete courtyard shared with the main house’s back entrance and a one-car garage with its door open, filled to the rafters with a fire hazard assortment of boxes and chairs. One leafless liquid amber tree obscured a corner of the courtyard. She saw three responding officers already on scene, supported by eight eyes overhead in fifty-foot holding loops, two stun-drones in synchronous circles above that. She frowned at this, large drone patterns likely to get picked up by cop watchers.
His neighborhood was a lone bastion of the proud black working class, struggling to stay afloat but slowly sinking under the glacial pressures of the Slide. The car decelerated, passing dingy food trucks and grubby T-shirt stores and several longstanding retail holdouts that had acquired landmark status through sheer longevity. Although Quintiglio’s street was a grid of neatly trimmed lawns, every window had bars.
She pulled in across the street from the residence, grateful that nothing was parked in the sad, slender driveway leading to the backhouse. A small gaggle of civilians had gathered three houses down, but otherwise there wasn’t any serious onlooker problem. Yet. Two perfect rows of palm trees lined each sidewalk, and she thought of the app that made every palm stalk extend upward into the Heavens, like prison bars for neighborhoods. A young uniformed officer met her out front.
“No one in the front one.”
They set their views to show drone positions, rendering the front house as wireframe, nothing more than the see-through blueprint of a house. Another officer met them on the lawn and the trio rounded the main residence into the backhouse courtyard, guns drawn, unified in motion. A pit bull stuck its snout through the bottom of the neighbor’s gate just far enough to offer a timid bark. Nearby, an antique satellite dish sat tilted skyward and filled with rainwater, an unused birdbath. The bony tree, in a desperate bid to replicate itself, had scattered sharp, round seedpods all over the concrete, and each cop had to mind their step to avoid crunching one.
A third officer pressed himself against the door frame of the front house’s back entrance, making himself perpendicular to the backhouse front door. She did a quick glimpse at each officer’s byline, seeing one snicker and flash the other two a hand sign, splayed fingers with a quick double thumb wag: 5-4-5-4. The officer met her eyes and shrugged sheepishly. She friendly-frowned, dialing up layer 54, channel 54,
whispering, “That’s so stupid.”
Years ago, some cop with far too much free time had gone into PanOpt’s sandbox and set up an audio channel to play Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” 24/7. When she’d been a foot soldier herself, the channel had been strongly disavowed. But over the years the top brass had come to tolerate and eventually embrace the song: it was a hell of a morale boost in situations precisely like this one. 5454 rendered all audio input as visuals, and as she enabled the layer now, her own visual field bloomed with arrows, lines, and reticles, nothing to read, pure action.
Chorus booming, she planted her feet and pointed, blue-and-red battle schematics extending from her fingertips like lasers. Two breachers buzzed over and attached themselves to each hinge on the rust-flecked metal screen door. There was a pop, and the door fell out into the courtyard with a junkyard crash, sliding a few feet, emitting just the faintest wisps of smoke. She’d thought the drones would have died, insects killed in kamikaze, but then there was another pop and the heavier wood door, not hollow-core, fell inward, landing on carpet with a strange softness.
More drones rushed in, thin lines of red-and-green and blue, illuminating the layout as they went, so that the backhouse also dissolved into wireframe, every room visible as an outline. They saw a seated man in the back room. She set a Public Address drone to read out commands as she followed the lead officer, feeling no suspense, stepping through a cramped front room with one couch, then a second room that felt like a dining area until she saw the twin mattress in one corner.
Nuestro was in the back room, hands upright in his lap, clearly dead for days. He’d been shot through the eyebrow, the eye below intact but eightballed with blood. The four stood for a moment, no one sure what to do with all that adrenaline, and finally the first cop she’d met, out front, burst into air drums, everyone laughing, reholstering their weapons. She ran a shotline up through a broken pane of glass, then pulled off her own shades, breaking the spell of the music, although she could still hear it faintly through the other earpieces.
Drones had given her the full layout of the interior, the brightly outlined shapes of Quintiglio’s private sanctum. But they’d done nothing to convey the sheer clutter of the space, every available nook and cranny crammed with piles of books, cardboard boxes, binders, loose papers, photographs. The guy made Carla Morales look like a germaphobe. She was surprised by the sheer volume of notebooks—loose leaf and pocket-sized, dozens or hundreds of each—paper being the least secure medium a reporter could work in.
“From what I understand, this guy was a freelance journalist. Round up all the loose pages and notebooks you can find,” she told the officers. “I want a reader here in five minutes.”
Stepping back outside, she paused to take in the utter bleakness of the courtyard, then walked a few houses down and pulled up the overhead footage. She first checked out the backhouse’s back door, confirming that it led onto a concrete enclosure for recycling bins that was one shade more depressing than the front courtyard, then slowly verifying her suspicions from the initial, aerial footage: between the raised foundation and the narrow, all-blind alley, there was more than enough room for a shooter to sneak over from one block west, or a neighboring yard, or, conceivably, either cross street from north or south. A determined killer would have had a hundred paths through private property.
She returned to the backhouse, surprised to find the reader already parked in Nuestro’s meager living room, a coroner team in the room beyond that. The reader was a newer, upright unit of gray metal, the size and general shape of a Union Station trash can. Two of the officers from the courtyard dutifully fed notes of all sizes and formats down its wide metal gullet, the machine analyzing and distilling information with a soft mechanical clap, digesting entire notebooks in a single zap, then excreting neat piles of paper—Nuestro’s life work—into a metal pan that had to be continually emptied.
Blanco called in audio.
“We got him, Chief. But somebody got him first.”
“Two for two, detective. I’ll go through your report with the assistant, so for now give me an overview.”
Terri stepped outside and walked as she rattled off all the salient bits: Concierge, Palm Desert, the raid itself. By the time she’d gotten to the particulars of the crime scene, she was back inside her car.
“One more thing, and this requires delicacy. I have every reason to believe that ballistics are going to match the gun that killed Nuestro to the one that killed Farrukh. I think we’d tie this gun to Dio Sarin and Stacy Santos as well if either of those shootings had provided a bullet. It’s not my place to do more than point this out.”
“That’s a hell of a detail.”
“I’m still getting my mind around that one, yeah. If I’m right, they’ve been passing it along in a series of dead drops. I don’t have any better explanation at this point. But if you make this detail public, you’re potentially back to exposing Stacy’s role as one of the shooters. Meaning, unless you keep the ballistic report under wraps …”
“Are you suggesting we may have leaks?”
“Uhm.”
“Relax, Detective, I’m with you. I’ll intercept ballistics. Just as long as we’re all on the same page. And do you feel you’ve covered yourself with your partner?”
“Zack, yeah. He doesn’t have a clue about any of this,” she said, feeling shitty about her choice of words.
“Excellent work, Terri. Let’s talk tomorrow.”
A message box softly dinged, and she opened this to see that the reader had sent her a list of possible passwords culled from 17,771 pages of notebooks and loose papers: a lifetime’s opus slimmed down to a little over thirty thousand possible words. Having already done some due diligence on the car ride to Leimert Park, she knew the late Mr. Quintiglio had a professional mail account with Segurança, a service used almost exclusively by journalists. Quintiglio would have set up a backup password to complement his face ID. It was antiquated newshound shit, serving both as a legal backdoor for editors and one more way to thumb one’s nose at the twenty-first century, just like the piles of notebooks themselves.
She dialed Carla Morales, wondering if she should still feel embarrassed for her call the other night.
“Hey, Terri Pastuszka. Looks like I got the shooter on that Stacy Santos thing.”
“Okay,” Carla said with deadpan disinterest, probably the only person in the county who didn’t care about this news, Terri thought.
“Hey, so, um, the guy’s dead. I’ve got an extension warrant for his mail and a list of thirty thousand possible backdoor passwords …”
“Segurança, huh? Journalist?”
“That’s what I’m told. How quickly can you cycle through multiple password possibilities?”
“About as quickly as you can send them to me.”
“Appreciated.”
She hung up and rubbed her eyes, feeling raw and rubbery after the surge of a raid, even one with a nearly foregone conclusion. When she opened her eyes again, Terri saw that a crowd had gathered on the lawn. As she crossed back over to check in, she overheard someone grumble about Sweden and then one of the young uniformed cops say, “Then you’d have to do our job, idiot.”
A heavily accented voice said, “Terri.” She turned, ready to blast a civilian, then realized she was looking at Kofi Agyeman, a freelancer probably working the same general beats as Quintiglio. He was young, Ghanaian, personable but not someone she’d trust with even a sentence of vital information.
“Aw jeez, Kofi, you didn’t know the deceased, did you?”
“I just tracked you here to ask about the Tournament of Roses,” he said, glancing around with genuine puzzlement.
“That? Jesus, why don’t you ever write outside The Loop?”
“I do! I just did a big thing in the LA Weekly.”
“I don’t know that that counts exactly,” she said, looking past him as Babs and Ruben pulled up.
“So, what is this, Terri?”
She smiled, pointing over his shoulder. “You just got the first scoop of the decade and you don’t even know it yet.”
Hours later, blurry from sitting in a car and poring over Nuestro Quintiglio’s correspondence, she pulled up to her apartment building and gazed up at its dull wall of a facade. His mail had conveyed a tireless work schedule, as he’d chased down freelance gigs to the complete exclusion of any kind of personal life. His EyePhones had vanished—just like Farrukh’s and Stacy’s—so perhaps he’d had a robust social schedule kept carefully partitioned from his work world. But his communications were a depressing read, a window into a life as forsaken as hers. From here on out, any mail sent to the late Mr. Quintiglio’s mail account would go straight to her PanOpts; a promise of gloom to come.
She should have gone somewhere, maybe an all-night diner, and just sat by herself to enjoy her fleeting glory. Today’s catch was a career highlight. Instead, she’d let herself get drawn back into this silent space: a career highlight without anyone to share it with. Upstairs, she thought about calling her sister with the news, instead falling into the couch with a moan.
How much of her own loneliness was conveyed by the apartment? Trinh had left at dawn with a wordless hug. They’d see each other around, but both knew the deal without having to say it. Terri couldn’t help but wonder if her guest had soured on the forced slovenliness of the apartment, the clutter that had to be navigated in the dark. When she herself had gotten up an hour later, she’d seen with embarrassment that Trinh had had to search cabinets for toilet paper.
Terri returned to the one scene that seemed to play on a continual loop under all other thoughts. She’d showered. Her hair had been damp. She’d come into the bedroom, where Gabby was, and had been about to complain about something. But what? An object had broken; an unfairness had occurred; something was overpriced; someone in the orbit of their unified life had said something stupid that required comment. It was a question mark she kept returning to. What had she been talking about in the last moment of her marriage?
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