“You first,” Detective Quinn said. “I’ll show you the photos after.”
She considered the advantages of possibly being able to identify Calvin’s killer and then told him about Calvin’s crush on Hayley, about her asking Calvin to help her, and his belief that “the watchers” were spying on him. She didn’t tell him about the box or mention Uranus or the High Priest.
“Do you know who was supposedly watching Mr. Rabren and why?”
Aloa told him she didn’t.
“How about Miss Poole’s death? Was it suicide?”
Aloa debated the benefit of having a contact in the police department against going prisoner-of-war and not telling him anything beyond the obvious.
She told him about the tire marks and the sapper tab, which she knew he would find if he looked closely at the photos from Nevada—and he was the kind of detective who would. She also said she believed Hayley had been run into the desert by someone who wanted to harm her, but she didn’t know who or why. She wasn’t ready to mention the book about the African tribe or that Hank Tremblay had been at the campout.
“Why does it feel like you’re not telling me everything you know?”
“Because it’s your job to think the world is full of scumbags and everybody’s lying to you.” She smiled. He did not. “Really, that’s all I can tell you for certain,” she said.
“Journalists,” he said, and shook his head.
“Cops,” she said, and shook hers.
He let out a breath, then handed her a photo of the truck pulling into Calvin’s shop through the bay door. The only thing the photo revealed through the vehicle’s tinted windows was a dark shape behind the wheel. Aloa wasn’t even sure whether it was a man or a woman.
“Are you kidding me?”
“Cops,” he said, and shook his head. This time he smiled.
Aloa headed toward home, reluctantly admiring how smoothly Detective Quinn had gotten the better of her. She was getting rusty.
The night was cool, the sidewalks full of pedestrians. She passed a bar known for its tapas and Spanish wines and ducked inside. She would order some food (she’d had nothing since breakfast), get a glass of wine, and think.
There was a long bar, scattered tables ringed with leather barrel chairs, and wrought iron chandeliers hanging from a high ceiling. She found a table in a corner; ordered a Rioja, a small plate of olives, and one of fried sardines; and pulled her notebook from her pack. The bar was populated with men in dress shirts and women in heels. Some of the customers pecked away at their laptops while they sipped their wine. No time for leisure in this city.
She’d just taken her first bite of the salty-sweet fish when a male voice asked would she mind if he shared her table. She looked up to see a guy of medium height with a straight nose, thick brown hair, and a jaw that was just a little too strong to put him in the handsome category.
“Actually, I do,” she said.
“I won’t bite, I promise,” he said. “I’ve just had a super bad day and really, really need to get off my feet.” He swept his arm out to indicate the bar, which Aloa realized had suddenly filled to overflowing.
“All right,” she said, “but I’ve got work to do.”
“No problem. Thanks.” He settled himself in the chair. “I was in court all day. My wife wants custody of our kid. She ran off last year. With the nanny.” He lifted his eyebrows. “I just got over that humiliation. Now I have to deal with this.”
Aloa didn’t say anything.
“Sorry, it’s just hard to talk about this with the guys, you know.” He smiled. “Eddie,” he said, and stuck out his hand. “Eddie Swafford.”
“Aloa,” she said, and gave his hand a shake.
“Let me buy you a drink,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.”
“Like I said, I’ve got work.”
In the last two years, it was as if Aloa had taken an unintentional vow of chastity with a bit of cloistering thrown in for good measure. Not that she’d been a wild temptress before. Besides losing her virginity to Jason Meyerson (although their fumbling tryst barely qualified as sex), and Michael, there had been a poet, a criminal defense attorney, the photojournalist, and, finally, the homicide detective Colm, although his darkness tended to exacerbate her own issues of self-worth. None of them had lasted, mostly because she put up walls to prevent them from getting too close, and she wasn’t about to start breaking them down now.
She turned back to her notebook, heard Eddie order albondigas, a glass of house red and another of Cava, then blather on with a long story about wanting to move to Seattle but not wanting to leave his kid behind. She shot him a look just as the drinks arrived, and he slid the glass of sparkling Cava in her direction.
Aloa figured she was owed the drink for having to listen to that monologue about how Seattle was so much better than San Francisco and took a sip. The wine was dry, just the way she liked it, which didn’t mean she forgave the guy for being so obnoxious.
“Good, huh?” asked her tablemate.
“It’s fine. But listen, I need you to stop talking. I’ve got to concentrate.” She gestured at her Moleskine.
“What are you working on?” Eddie asked, leaning over her notebook.
“Nothing I want to share.”
“Oh, come on. What is it, the Great American Novel?” he teased.
She fell back in her chair. “Do you follow baseball, Eddie?”
“Sure I do.” He grinned.
“Then you know what happens after strike three?”
Eddie nodded, the smile still on his face.
“Right now, Eddie, you’ve got two strikes.”
“What?”
“Strike one, you kept talking even though I told you I had to work. And strike two, you’re so boring I’m ready to stab myself with this pen just to end the conversation.”
The grin slid from Eddie’s face. He took a sip of wine. “You don’t have to be such a bitch about it,” he said.
“Strike three,” Aloa said, and pointed toward the door. “That’s your cue to leave, Eddie.”
Eddie opened his mouth and Aloa braced herself for an onslaught of male insults. Instead, Eddie suddenly reached over, grabbed her Moleskine, and pushed himself out of his chair.
“What the hell?” Aloa said, reaching for her precious book but missing as Eddie turned from the table.
She jumped from her seat and clawed at him, managing to grab a handful of his shirt as he tried to leave. “Drop the book,” she barked.
But instead of obeying, Eddie pivoted and gave her a hard shove that sent her stumbling back into the table, causing two wineglasses to crash to the floor.
“Crap,” she yelled.
Patrons looked up.
“Stop him,” she hollered, as Eddie, now free of her grasp, pushed his way through the crowd.
A waiter carrying a tray of food yelled something in Spanish as Eddie knocked into him. A woman in beige cried out as Eddie shoved past her, sending most of a glass of red wine onto her chest. Her companion grabbed Eddie’s arm and Eddie turned, giving him a frantic punch to the nose before he was quickly on the move again.
Aloa waded through the now-angry crowd. “Stop him,” she yelled again, but it was too late. Eddie was out the door and running.
The bartender moved in front of her. “Hold up there,” he said.
But whatever journalism gods existed had smiled on Aloa. There on the floor, near where Eddie had punched the defender of the wine-stained woman, was Aloa’s notebook, only slightly damaged by splotches of Cabernet.
“What’s going on?” the bartender demanded as Aloa grabbed the Moleskine.
It took her a few minutes to explain that she’d gone after a guy who tried to pickpocket her but that she’d retrieved what he’d taken and there was no need to call the police. It was another few minutes before she could get back to her table and retrieve her pack, only to discover Eddie-the-asshole’s quick exit had made it so she not only had to pay for the
wine and Cava but for his dinner too.
She strode from the bar, angry at men, angry at herself, and certain that Eddie sitting at her table was not a random choice. Who had sent him, and why?
Tomorrow, she would figure out who Eddie Swafford really was, see what connection Baldy had to Tremblay, and try to uncover why a book about an African tribe might be worth killing for.
CHAPTER 29
He stood in the apartment he’d rented for the assignment and looked out the window at the lights of the Bay Bridge. Behind him, a seventy-inch TV above the marble fireplace showed the baseball game while a dinner of steak and roasted root vegetables—delivered twenty minutes ago from Alexander’s—sat untouched on the mahogany table.
He couldn’t care less about any of it.
He rattled the ice in his scotch and took a sip. He didn’t like what that reporter was doing: sneaking off to visit Ethan’s climbing partner, finding the ex-roommate, meeting with Michael Collins.
It didn’t seem possible that Novo had hired her for a story, but then, a lot of what went on in the world didn’t seem possible until it was.
And the call from the detective? That was not good either. He rubbed a hand over his chin.
Killing that mechanic hadn’t been part of the plan. He’d only meant to scare the guy into telling him if the girl, Hayley, had left anything with him. But instead of being intimidated, the guy had come at him with a big-ass knife and then jumped on the hood of the truck when he tried to leave. He’d had no choice but to ram the pickup into the wall and hope some rookie would catch the case, but instead, it had been given to Quinn. Quinn was good. He took another gulp of scotch, hardly tasting it.
Then, he’d hired his nephew, a decent kid who’d dropped out of law school, to follow the reporter for a day while he flew to Portland to deal with a problem on another case. The kid had done an OK job—until he went rogue and grabbed the reporter’s notebook. It was a gutsy move, and while he would have liked to have seen what Snow knew, the stunt had only served to put her on high alert.
He threw back the rest of the scotch and watched thousands of lights flicker and dance along the cables of the Bay Bridge. He thought of Paris and Shanghai and fine dinners. His clients would give him a .45-caliber lobotomy if he screwed up.
Anger tightened his belly. He sent his mind back through the mission, searching for weaknesses, looking for cracks the reporter and/or the detective might find. Everything had gone according to plan until that idiot mechanic had come after him.
He thought the assignment was still safe, that the walls he’d put up would hold. He would not get rid of the reporter unless he had to.
The bridge lights flowed and ebbed. He tossed his dinner into the garbage and went to pour himself another drink.
CHAPTER 30
Aloa awakened with a groan. Her neck ached from falling through the tree, and now the bruise on her hip was matched with twins on the back of her legs from the previous night’s bar scuffle. If this kept up she could qualify as a fourth member of the Blue Man Group. Make that the Black and Blue Man Group.
She pulled herself from bed and started her coffee in advance of what would probably be a full day on her butt.
Her first task was to figure out who Eddie Swafford was. An hour later, she was no wiser. Every Edward or Edwin or E. Swafford who lived within a hundred-mile radius was either not the right age or the wrong ethnicity. No divorce filings matched his name and the court docket for the week didn’t list anybody with a moniker even close to his. It was obvious he’d been hired to follow her and find out what she knew, but it was impossible to prove that Hank Tremblay had been behind the surveillance and attempted theft. She got up and looked out the front window. She’d stirred up something, but what the hell was it?
Her next task was a call to an entertainment lawyer she knew in LA who told her whatever media came from a sponsored trip was owned by the sponsor—unless the contract spelled things out differently, and that was unlikely.
Which meant Tremblay probably believed the book Ethan was writing belonged to him. But why kill someone over what you could simply sue for? And yet, people with money and lawyers killed all the time. She’d once written about a Hollywood real estate mogul who had killed his wife because she’d been awarded $30,000 a month in alimony, even though the sum was peanuts compared to what he earned.
Greed clouded the eyes of the rich as well as the poor.
She got up once again and walked through the house, letting her mind reboot as she wiped a smudge from the bathroom mirror, smoothed her bedclothes, and hand-washed a few pairs of underwear. Her brain refreshed, she went back to her desk, where, over the next two hours, she discovered Tremblay was part of a group of developers intent on building some kind of upscale senior housing project with a spa, on-call doctors, and high-class chefs, which could explain yesterday’s meeting with Baldy the slimy real estate agent. Still, there had been something about the way Baldy had confronted her at her house that made her wonder if he also served as Hank’s hired muscle. He had the air of a street brawler.
She got back to work, clicking through websites, looking for more information on the status of the senior housing project and Hank’s finances. She phoned Samantha to see if the RedHawk lawyer who had threatened her looked anything like Baldy, but Samantha didn’t pick up. No surprise there.
Finally, she watched a trailer for an earlier documentary the filmmaker Monica Prager had made about a blind climber, and decided to give the director a call. Prager talked like a used car salesman on speed.
“Yes, Jordan and Hayley were very close, in fact there was a moment in the film where the two of them are on a training run and Hayley starts crying and Jordan holds and rocks her, saying women need each other the way a storm needs the wind, which was a beautiful thing to say and why this movie is going to be so friggin’ good because even though we lost Hayley, which was a shock to all of us, there’s still Jordan, who pulled herself up from nothing, training like a beast in her friend’s name, and you know that a story like this, about loss and strength and courage, is going to rip your heart right out of your chest and that’s what making movies is all about even though filmmaking is a bitch that tries to eat your soul while starving you out of home and relationships and every penny in your bank account.”
By the time Aloa hung up, she thought the filmmaker had missed her calling as an auctioneer.
Her muscles tightening and her brain filling with what felt like cotton, Aloa got up from her desk and went to her room to change. Ten minutes later, she was in her running clothes and loping toward the Ferry Terminal, the air fresh against her skin, the HardE app recording her workout. That was not restriction, she told herself. That’s what runners did.
She ran past Washington Square Park, which was neither square nor on Washington Street. Nor did it honor the nation’s first president but instead had a statue of Benjamin Franklin as its focal point. Another of the city’s quirks. She ran past Liguria Bakery, past Lombard Heights Market, past a nanny pushing an expensive stroller inhabited by two fussy charges. She picked up her pace.
One block later, a guy in a ball cap leaned out his car window, slowed, and yelled “nice ass” as he passed. Did he think that was some great pickup line? Some irresistible witticism no woman could resist?
She gave the guy a middle finger.
“Bite me,” he shouted.
“That would be animal abuse,” she yelled back as he sped away.
At the two-mile mark, she U-turned and headed for home. Her breath came hard, her muscles strained against the uphill climbs. It felt good to work, to push against what was trying to hold her back, to test her strength. After, she drank a tall glass of water, showered, and sliced up the last of the cheese and bread. She dabbed on mustard and went out and sat on the front porch, eating slowly, deliberately tasting each bite.
It was a way of eating she’d learned after those years of restriction, years when the seeds of insecurity her mother ha
d so carefully planted bloomed into obsession. Michael’s call had resurrected all the old feelings of not being good enough—he’d left her, after all—but the fact she had work to do made it easier to ignore the urge to prove herself through starvation. Plus, all that running and interviewing and thinking on her feet had made her hungry. And that was good.
Afterward, Aloa went back to her desk and read articles about adventure athletes like Hayley and Ethan. She found stories of the climber Alex Honnold and runner Kilian Jornet, humans who seemed to possess abilities almost beyond comprehension, as if they were the offspring of god and mortal. And yet, there were also stories of athletes whose lives had been snuffed out when they reached too far.
Aloa wondered what the world would be like if everybody embraced the unknown instead of being afraid of it.
CHAPTER 31
May 30—Fifteen miles, Gazos Creek w/JC. 1:43:17. Cold, rainy. Saw two coyotes, a red-tailed hawk. Legs felt good. Stomach OK. RedH’s endurance powder sucks. Tell H.T. Making progress. Cloudrunner on mind. Eight months since lost the tadpole and one month since Ethan gone. He always said, hardship makes it interesting, babe. It’s interesting, that’s for sure.
June 7—Six miles a.m. 42:23; Twelve miles p.m. 1:38:07. Three weeks to Montana. Slower not faster. What wrong? Change diet? Too much protein? Need to focus. What’s more important? I feel like I’m letting everybody down. I don’t know if I should keep doing this. If you’re there, Ethan, send me a sign. Let me know what to do. Everything is against me. I want to quit but won’t.
June 22—7 a.m., double Dipsea, 2:06:01. Iced shins, a little better. Free-radical flush, 64 oz. water, salmon, nuts, egg for rest of week. Must get this done. Will get this done. Finish line still far away but the route is clearer. What is hidden still has power. What others want they will not get. On the move tomorrow. The Hunter will have, the hunted will be safe. Flea.
Aloa rubbed her forehead. Hayley’s journal was still mysterious. She’d gone through it again in hopes that what she’d learned would make Hayley’s notations clearer this time. But they remained a puzzle of quotes and admonitions and coded thoughts with no mention of a book or threats by Hank Tremblay. She sighed. And was Hayley actually talking about a small biting insect or was she just a terrible speller?
See Her Run Page 17