by Sean Black
“So, what do you think? Is there a connection?” Lock asked.
“There’s no evidence of one. Nothing direct anyway. But I don’t care much for coincidences like this.”
* * *
Lock pulled the rental car into the parking area in front of the strip mall on Lincoln. For a moment, he sat there and didn’t move.
Was it really possible that Freya Vaden was involved in Carmen’s kidnapping? Apart from the Servando Guilen case, it was all he had to go on. He glanced at the thick envelope Carl had given him. Maybe Carmen’s abduction was connected to neither. It was more likely that the identity of the kidnappers, or the person they were working for, was in that envelope. A disgruntled client, a victim (or victim’s family member) of someone Carmen had helped to acquit. Attorneys were hardly the most popular people, and that went treble for attorneys involved in what passed for the criminal justice system.
Grabbing the envelope, he swung open the driver’s door, got out, and headed for the side of the building. As he got close to the small rear entrance to Li Zhang’s lair, he stopped. The door, which Li always kept closed and locked, wasn’t just open, it was hanging from its hinges.
His right hand fell automatically to his SIG. He eased it from its holster, and moved toward the wall, the barrel covering the door. He had spoken with Li only a half-hour before.
That was both bad and good news. The bad was that Li was almost certainly inside when whoever it was had shown up. He’d told him that he was there, was going to get something to eat, but was going to wait for him first. But the half-hour window also closed down the possibility that whoever had done this had already left. There was every chance that they were still inside.
He decided to work on the assumption that they were. Instead of calling out, he sidestepped quickly across the door, the SIG punched out, the inner pad of his index finger across the trigger, ready to fire.
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The stub of dark corridor lay in front of him. The lights had been switched off, and the contrast of the gloom to the sunshine outside made it hard to see. Gun in hand, he stepped through the door.
If someone was moving around inside, he couldn’t hear them. He still hadn’t shaken off the ringing in his ears from the gun battle. He needed to get it checked out as soon as he had some free time. But, right now, free time didn’t seem likely. As soon as he felt like he was getting any kind of a foothold with Carmen’s kidnapping, some other element spun off into chaos.
No matter. All he could do was focus on the task in hand. Half blind, and half deaf, he edged slowly down the corridor. The door at the end was open. On the other side lay Li’s main work space.
He passed another door on his right that led into a small kitchen and toilet area. This door was closed. He decided to leave it for now and circle back round once he’d checked the workspace for Li. At the end of the corridor, he placed himself with his back to the corridor wall.
Moving fast, he dropped down, spun round and moved through the door. The room was empty. But it had been trashed. Stools were toppled over. One was upside down, the seat on the floor, the legs in the air. A couple of computer monitors also lay on the floor, their screens smashed in. Keyboards, hard drives, and other hardware were scattered around them, in pieces. Every surface had been swept clear.
The chaos was such that he couldn’t tell if anything was missing. In any case, the only person who would have an answer to that would be Li Zhang, and he was nowhere to be seen.
Blood was spattered across the far wall. His heart sank. He was still clinging to the hope that Li had ducked out to get some water or juice from a nearby store while he waited for Lock to get there.
He crossed to the blood spatter. He was careful not to touch it, even though his and Ty’s DNA was all over the room from previous visits. It was definitely fresh. There was some hair as well, and a dent in the plaster, like someone’s head had been grabbed and shoved hard into the wall.
Backing up, he picked his way across the floor to the door. A chunk of green computer board scraped under his shoe as he headed back out into the corridor.
His heart sank with every step. This didn’t look like a robbery. Behind him, thousands of dollars’ worth of tech equipment that could have been fenced for at least five hundred bucks lay smashed to pieces, worthless. The bloodied dent in the wall wasn’t good either. He couldn’t imagine a lanky kid like Li offering much resistance, so smashing his head into the wall—if it had been his head that had made the dent—came off like overkill.
On the plus side, he hadn’t found him yet. So maybe he’d been taken. It was strange to realize that he was actually hoping he had been. Or that he’d somehow fled to safety.
The door leading into the small kitchen was in front of him. He took a deep breath, flattened himself against the wall and reached for the handle. He pushed it down and went through the door all in one swift movement.
Tracking a quick 180-degree view of the kitchen through the iron sights of his SIG, he was confronted by more blood. A lot more. The tiled floor, walls, even the kitchen cabinets were splattered with it. If it was Li’s, it was a lot to lose and still be breathing.
“Li!”
No response.
The door that led off the kitchen to the small toilet in back was ajar. A foot prodded out, the toes pointed up. Red Chuck Taylor low-tops and a once white, now red, sports sock. He squelched his way through the blood, and pushed the toilet door open.
Li Zhang’s body lay on the floor. His head was jammed between the edge of the toilet bowl and the sink. His eyes stared lifelessly at the ceiling. There was no need to look for a pulse. He was gone. Lock had seen enough of the dead and dying to know when it was too late.
His chest was bare, with a brown-black mosaic of knife puncture wounds and slash marks. Someone had really gone to town. He swallowed hard. Li had likely crawled in here to try to escape the onslaught, or after his attacker or attackers had left, only to bleed out on the floor.
His left arm was stretched out, as if he’d been grabbing for the edge of the sink when he’d collapsed. It was then he caught sight of the mirror above it.
Someone had left a message in a series of smeared-blood letters. He narrowed his eyes to make out what it said.
Tracking goes two ways.
Then, beneath that, numbers: 14/88/18
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The first part of the message was self-evident. Li had helped them trace the email that had been sent. In turn, they had chased him down, then butchered him. If they were white nationalists, as the blood-graffiti suggested, they would have taken additional pleasure in murdering an Asian man.
The numbers below were more mysterious to the untrained eye. Unless you were familiar with the world of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. Each number signified something different: “88” signified the letter H, repeated twice, which stood for “Heil Hitler”; “18” stood for A and H, the initials of the German Führer and the man responsible for the Holocaust that had killed six million people, most of them European Jews.
The “14” was a little more circumspect, more of an insider thing. A number that most members of the public would have no idea about.
It stood not for an initial or initials, but for the so-called Fourteen Words, which had been coined by hero, and martyr, of the white nationalist movement, David Lane. Lane had led an organization called the Order, which had been behind the murder of Jewish-American radio talk-show host Alan Berg. The words were, “We must secure the existence of our people, and a future for white children.” In Lane’s world there was a conspiracy against white Aryan people by a secretive Jewish group they referred to as ZOG or the Zionist Occupation Government.
All of a sudden, Freya Vaden’s possible connection to what was happening with Carmen seemed a lot more likely. Lock backed out of the bathroom, then went along the corridor, through the broken door and out into the light. Looking down, he saw that he’d left a trail of bloody footprints in his wake. He pulled
out his cell phone and made two calls. The first was to 911. The second was to Ty.
The 911 operator told him she would have a unit on scene in under five minutes. In this part of town, he didn’t doubt it, and he guessed there would be a lot more than one in that time. Marina Del Rey was hardly noted for violent crime. A half-mile down the road in Venice Beach, it was a different story but the marina was quiet.
As he stayed on the line with her, he walked around to the front of the strip mall. Sometimes a perp or perps will hang out near the crime scene to take in the aftermath of the mayhem they have created. In this case, he doubted it, but there was always the possibility. Strange people did strange things.
Traffic was busy on Lincoln Boulevard. A homeless man pushing a shopping cart down the sidewalk stared at him. Looking down, he realized he was still tracking blood. He had some on his shirt, too, and, of course, he was carrying a handgun in his holster. Lock called over to the guy, “Hey, were you here ten minutes ago?”
“No, I wasn’t nowhere ten minutes ago.” He took off, pushing his shopping cart so fast it threatened to tip over.
Lights flashed in the distance. He saw them before he heard the scream of sirens. Ty finally picked up his call. “What’s up?”
Lock told him about Li. His partner didn’t say anything. “Ty? You still there?”
“I’m heading over.”
He wasn’t sure an irate six-foot-five-inch retired marine would be a useful addition to the crime scene. “No, hold off. Meet me at my place in an hour. We still need to look at the footage and the papers Carl gave me. Two of us will make it go a lot faster.”
A patrol car breached the entrance to the mall at speed. It swept into a turn and stopped a few feet short of him.
“Ty, I gotta go.”
Two cops got out of the patrol car, weapons drawn. Lock held up his hands.
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Stop! Right there!”
Sidestepping the papers scattered across his living-room floor, Lock grabbed for the remote control, and hit the freeze-frame button. Ty stood next to him, and they studied the CCTV footage from Carmen’s abduction on the wall-mounted television screen.
“Okay, go back,” said Ty.
Lock handed the remote to him. Ty stabbed at a button, putting the images into slow-speed rewind. They moved back a few frames at a time. He tapped another button to freeze the image.
On the screen the taller of the two men was walking across Carmen’s office. He was still masked, and nothing about the footage struck Lock as any more significant than what they had already watched. “What am I looking at here, Tyrone?”
Ty took two long strides toward the screen and stopped so that he was side on. He jabbed a long finger at the man’s arm. The sleeve of his jacket had ridden up. “The ink,” he said.
“What about it?”
“Can we take a closer look?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Lock hurried back to his laptop, which was sending the video footage to his TV. He had some image manipulation software that was capable of sharpening and also of zooming in on a particular section. The only problem was that, since they had begun to rely on Li’s expertise, his skill at using it had gotten a little rusty. He pulled down a few menus before he found what he was looking for.
Ty’s finger jabbed again at the section of the image he wanted to examine more closely. Lock managed to highlight and find the correct command to blow it up.
Ty was right. The guy had a tattoo emblazoned just above his wrist. But he still couldn’t tell why Ty was so excited by this discovery. Tattoos were hardly news. They’d become so commonplace as to be almost invisible to Lock. It looked to him like some kind of cross. He peered at the blown-up section of image. “Ty, we already know they’re almost certainly white supremacists. A swastika doesn’t get us any further forward.”
Ty peered intently at the tattoo. He was clearly seeing something that Lock wasn’t. Finally, he glanced back over his shoulder. “You’re correct. A swastika don’t. But,” he said, tracing the outline of the battlefield cross down to some tiny letters and numbers, “the name of the dude’s infantry company sure as shit does.”
“You can’t possibly read that,” Lock told him.
“No, but when we get that ink blown up, that’s what it’s gonna be.” Ty stuck a massive hand toward him. “I’ll bet my life on it.”
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Rance rolled up his shirt sleeves and plunged his hands into the warm, soapy water in the sink. He rubbed them together, then took them out, rinsed them off under the tap with cold water, and dried them.
He pivoted round to the kitchen table, and picked up the wooden tray he’d already set with coffee, orange juice, toast, a bowl of cereal and milk. Their guest had barely eaten since her arrival, but he figured that had to change. It was important for their mission that she at least gave the appearance of being in good health.
Outside, he could hear Point’s dog, Bito, barking its fool head off, unhappy that it had been left alone in the cab of the truck. He put the tray down, and pushed out through the screen door and over to the vehicle. The dog was sitting on the bench seat, its huge front paws resting on the top of the steering wheel. The inside of the windshield was covered with slobber and condensation.
Rance hauled open the driver’s door, and the dog launched itself out of the cab. Holy fuck, he’d never got over the size of the beast. Even for a Rhodesian Ridgeback, it was a monster. Maybe a hundred twenty pounds, all of it muscle, and almost three foot tall at the shoulders.
Point had named it Benito after Mussolini, but over time that been shortened to Bito. Rance had never cared for the animal. It had a look in its eye he didn’t trust. But it had come in plenty useful, not only as a guard but for other work. It had a good nose, was a relentless hunter, and unforgiving when it came to a kill.
Maybe that was why it set him on edge. He had seen, up close and personal, on more than occasion, the damage it was capable of inflicting.
Rance walked back into the kitchen, careful not to let the dog follow him in. He grabbed a couple of frozen chicken feet from the refrigerator and tossed them outside. That would keep Bito occupied while he gave Carmen breakfast.
He picked up the tray again, and checked himself. His mask. He had forgotten it, not for the first time. He walked through into the living room, retrieved it from the couch, put it on and went back to the kitchen to fetch the tray.
* * *
Carmen startled as the door opened. She had been asleep. Last night one of the men had offered her an Ambien sleeping pill and, exhausted, she had accepted it. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t do what they wanted to her without drugging her. She was completely and utterly at her captors’ mercy.
The shorter of the two men walked in with a tray. The sight of food made her stomach turn over. But she knew she needed to eat. Especially as the nausea she was experiencing was more likely the result of this trauma than anything else.
During the night, her period had arrived, bloodying the sheets and leaving her even more depressed than she already felt. Something she hadn’t imagined was possible.
Her mouth was as dry as cotton as she struggled to lift her head. “I need to use the bathroom,” she told her captor. “And I need some tampons.”
From behind the mask, she saw the man’s eyes dart down to the bloody patch on the sheet. He quickly looked away.
That was the reaction she had been hoping for. As she had drifted in and out of sleep, she had realized that the arrival of her period could be turned to her advantage. Many men were squeamish about such matters, which she could use to gather a few moments of privacy. Privacy could be used as a window to escape.
“Okay,” her captor said. “I have some in the other room. I’ll go get them.”
Her heart sank a little. She’d hoped he would have to go out to get them, leaving her alone. No such luck.
“Can you at least release me so I can get cleaned up? I don’t mind changing the sheets. I would
n’t expect you to . . .”
If she could be free and have him out of the room, even for a few seconds, she would have an opportunity to make a run for it.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Blood doesn’t bother me none.”
The way he said it, his eyes lingering between her legs, his initial embarrassment gone, set her teeth on edge.
He walked out of the room, leaving her prone and vulnerable. She was starting to regret taking the sleeping pill. It had left her mind fuzzy when she needed it to be sharp.
But she’d been so tired.
He reappeared a minute later, clutching a white plastic bag. He dug out a fresh box of tampons and another of sanitary pads and put them next to the tray.
He came over to the bed, and began to free her. “I’m going to take you through to the bathroom. Get cleaned up and do what you need to do. Don’t even think about trying anything. If you do, I’ll hurt you.”
She believed him. But he had said “hurt”, not “kill”. That choice of words gave her some small hope. If they’d wanted her dead, they could have done it easily by now. “I promise,” she said.
His eyes flickered behind the mask, meeting hers. Without being able to see his face, she couldn’t read his intentions.
“Is it okay if I take a shower?” she asked, praying he would say yes. She could use the noise of the running water as cover. Assuming, of course, that he didn’t stand sentry outside the door, or that if he did, there was a window she’d be able to climb out of. She was fairly sure that the house was all on one level, so that was something.
“Sure. But don’t take long about it. Get yourself cleaned up, and out again. Any longer than five minutes and I’ll be coming in, whether you’re decent or not.”
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