Alien Taste (16 page)

“Max wanted me in the office at seven thirty this morning.” He pulled on his shirt and cast about for his briefs. “We're behind on our cases.”

She moaned. “I've got a debriefing at eight. If I leave now, I can shower at my gym and review the case notes.”

“I'll be surprised if I can think of anything but you today,” Ukiah admitted.

Her eyes held a quiet look of joy. She leaned over and kissed him.

It was 5:50
A
.
M
. when he glanced at his phone again. He walked her to her bike. She looked disheveled but happy when he finally could step away to let her go. She coasted her motorcycle quietly down
the hill and started the engine at the bottom, lessening its deep sudden growl on the silent morning.

His moms were blessedly still asleep. He crept upstairs to his room and showered, unable to stop thinking about her. Indigo. Indigo with the gray eyes. He dressed quickly, glancing at his bedroom clock. She had fifteen minutes on him, but she didn't know the roads like he did, and she had a smaller motorcycle.

He'd picked one of the more powerful bikes because he'd thought, as a private investigator, there might be times he'd have to go like the wind. He'd never thought it would be because he wanted to catch up to his girlfriend. He kept to a reasonable though illegal speed on the winding country roads, but gunned the bike into the hundreds the moment he reached the flat straight I-79. In minutes he was nearing the I-279 merge and saw the taillight of anther bike. He zipped through the thickening morning traffic and then came level with her.

He was so happy to see her that he didn't mind the mirror visor that cloaked her gray eyes. She shook her head and lifted her hand briefly to blow him a kiss. The traffic slowed slightly at the merge, where police often waited for speeders. They wove through the lagging cars, first Indigo leading and then Ukiah. It was a weird, exhilarating feeling to ride beside her, as if they were two hawks flying together. They swooped and twined into the city. Ukiah followed her into downtown, wanting to look at her eyes one last time before heading off to Shadyside. She stopped outside a parking garage in a loading zone and pulled off her helmet.

He stopped beside her, killed his engine, and took off his own helmet. “Hi there.”

A slight tender smile touched her face. “Hi there.”
She touched his damp hair and shook her head. “You must have broken the sound barrier to catch up with me.”

“I wanted to see you again.”

She gazed deep into his eyes and whispered, “You're seeing me.”

He kissed her fingertips, the palm of her hand, and then took her in his arms to kiss her lips until a van beeped at them, wanting into the loading zone.

She reluctantly pulled away. “Let's get together for dinner. Come down to my office and get me at five.”

“I'll see you at five,” he promised, pulled on his helmet, started up his motorcycle, and headed out to Shadyside.

Friday, June 19, 2004
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Ukiah pulled the motorcycle around to the back of the offices, unlocked the fourth garage, pulled up the door, and drove in. He left his helmet on his bike, closed, and locked the door again. His phone read 7:25 as he unlocked the back door and walked into the kitchen. Max was there, dressed for the day, finishing up his breakfast of mushroom and cheese omelet.

“Hi, Max.” He opened the freezer, got out a pair of frozen mini-waffles, and popped them into the toaster.

“Good morning.” Max folded up his newspaper, then tilted his head at Ukiah. “What's that goofy look on your face?”

“Goofy look?” He bent down to look into the toaster's mirrored surface. His reflection wore a broad smile. “You mean the grin?”

“Yes, the grin.”

He shrugged as his waffles popped up. “Guess it's because I'm in love.”

“Love? With who?”

“Indigo.”

“Who the hell is Indigo? The new girl at 7-Eleven? God, Ukiah, she's ugly.”

“Agent Zheng. Indigo Zheng. Isn't it a cool name?” He pulled a plate out of an upper cabinet, dropped the hot waffles on it, and found the maple syrup.

“When did this happen?” Max looked bemused by the news. “You've only seen her, let's see—the morgue, the day you were kidnapped, and yesterday morning—three times.”

“Four.” He covered the waffles in syrup. “She came out to the house last night.”

“She did?” The bemusement vanished, replaced with concern. “How did she find it? How long did she stay? What did you two talk about?”

“She tracked me with the wireless phone system. Ancient FBI secret, apparently.” He tore off one of the mini-waffles with his fingers and stuffed it whole into his mouth. “She stayed all night. We didn't do a whole lot of talking,” he answered honestly, without thinking, then blushed solid, “not as much as I would have liked, not that I didn't like what we were doing.”

Max looked at him a moment, then flipped his newspaper over his shoulder. “You slept with her! I thought you meant ‘puppy dog from a distance I wonder if she would date me' in love, not ‘I had great sex with her last night' in love! Jesus! Well, that explains all the looking—drooling at the candy store window, so to speak.”

“Huh?”

“All her looking at you. I can't believe I didn't see this coming. I forget that to women, you're Mister Joe Studly.”

“Me, studly?”

Max laughed. “Take it from someone who was
geek of the week at your age and could spot the guys who would get the girls. You are serious eye candy. The hair, the eyes, the face, the body, the cool bike, the big gun. God, you're a single, female, FBI agent's wet dream. She did a serious background check on you—didn't she?—then came out to see where, what, and why you were hiding out in the boondocks.”

“Yeah. She knew stuff I didn't know about myself.”

“Like what?”

“That I own half this house. And the cars. And the guns and everything. You never told me.”

“I didn't want to make a big deal about it. Still don't.”

Ukiah ignored the hint. “Are you sure you won't regret it? I mean, what if you find someone, remarry, have kids, but you've given away half of the house you live in, half of the stuff that should go to your kids.”

“Ukiah.” Max's eyes went stern. “I don't regret doing it. I will never regret it. If I ever find someone, it will only be because you kept me alive long enough to find her.” He got up then and carried his dishes to the sink.

“Sorry.”

“You're a good kid, Ukiah.” Max stood at the sink, washing the skillet he used for his omelet. “It's a tribute to your character that you worry about me, but really, this house and the agency stuff, is piddling to what I've got in stocks and bonds. Plus, my wife believed in big life insurance policies. Between what I got in the buyout of my first company and her double indemnity insurance payment—” he shook his head “—I couldn't spend it all even if I tried.”

While they were tap-dancing on mine fields, Ukiah
figured he might as well hit them all. “Mom Lara says you should start dating.”

“I know,” Max acknowledged, and left it at that.

They fell into a comfortable silence as Ukiah finished his waffles, raided the fridge for some orange juice, and took his turn at rinsing off breakfast dishes. Max leaned against the breakfast bar, looking at him. “You slept with Agent Zheng,” he finally muttered, shaking his head in disbelief. “You, um, used protection, didn't you?”

“She had some with her.”

“You sure you can handle this, kid? You're definitely not the first guy she's dated, and you're probably not the first guy she slept with. She could have even lived with a guy for a couple of years at her age.”

Ukiah shrugged, putting his dishes into the drying rack. “I have to have a first love sometime. You told me your first love broke your heart, and you lived through it. If it comes to that, so will I.”

 

The cases they had put on hold for Janet Haze's case were what Max called “bread-and-butter work.” While not what neither he or Max loved to do, the cases kept the agency afloat. The first was a skip, someone disappearing on a debt. The second was a straightforward employee background check. The third was a background check on a new girlfriend of a wealthy man.

The cases were nothing flashy, and except for the skip, not even vaguely dangerous. After the frantic pace of the week, it was good to settle into something slower.

Max handed Ukiah the folder on the background check. “The girl, Marie Tovin, is coming out clean. Dallento wants us to tail her for a while. His last
sexy young thing kept a boyfriend on the side while Dallento paid her bills. This is not a way to start a relationship, in my book, but he's paying the bills.”

Ukiah took the folder, his stomach sinking as he realized that Max's comment could apply to him and Indigo. He didn't mind Indigo checking into his background, but Max might hold it against her. “Do you think it was wrong that Indigo did a background check on me?”

“Kid, you're talking night and day. A woman in the middle of a multiple-kidnapping and murder case has to be careful. She's putting her life on the line. Dallento wants to make sure that if he buys the cow, he's the only one getting the milk. You can't compare the two.”

Ukiah opened the folder to look at Marie Tovin's photo. When he had seen the picture last week, he had vaguely recognized it as sensual. Today he understood the allure of her sleepy eyes, the taunting promise of her hand resting on a slipping waistband, and the sexual act suggested by her tongue toying with the end of a pencil. “How long does Dallento want us to follow her?”

“A full week. He's got money to burn. I'll call Chino and Janey to take up the slack. Go over, make sure she's home, and then keep out of sight until Chino and Janey can take over. I'm going to do some phone calling to see if I can get any kind of a lead on our skip.”

 

There was a security system on Marie Tovin's apartment building. Ukiah glanced at it as he strolled past the main door, trying to hide his interest in it behind an air of casual indifference. He stopped at the corner for the light, using the pause to consider
his options. How could he get in without attracting attention to himself?

A few blocks down, one of Pittsburgh's semipermanent street peddlers was hawking bouquets of flowers. Ukiah wasn't sure where the flowers came from. He had never seen the peddler actually set up in the morning or break down in the evening. The man, a sunburnt blond somewhere in his twenties, just seemed to appear each day, his collection of tall white buckets and cheap Styrofoam containers brim full of fresh flowers. During rush hours, the peddler stood on the curb, flowers in one hand, holding up the fingers of his other hand to indicate how many dollars the bundle cost.

Seeing the peddler, Ukiah recalled a ploy he once read about in a murder mystery. Ukiah bought two large bouquets and returned to the apartment building. He waited before the door, arms full of flowers, until someone kindly held the door open for him.

Marie Tovin lived in apartment 395. Standing in the hallway, he could hear a shower running and the chatter of morning radio. Someone was home and awake.

He slipped out of the building again and reluctantly pitched the flowers. There would be no way to keep them fresh enough to give to his moms or Indigo.

At a McDonald's across the street from the apartment building, Ukiah bought a small mountain of food and sat down with the morning paper. He held the paper up so he looked like he was reading it, glanced at the front page, and gazed over the top of the paper at the front door of Marie's apartment building. As he watched the residents come and go, he reviewed the front page in his mind—oh, the joys of a photographic memory.

Yesterday's fire was the headline story. The
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
photographer had caught Indigo standing with Kraynak before the smoldering building. He smiled at the photo. Taken alone, Indigo looked very aloof and very FBI. Unfortunately, beside the huge police officer, there was something also very doll-like about her. Indigo would probably hate the picture, he decided, but he'd have to clip it. The photo caption read “FBI and City of Pittsburgh Homicide department are working together to solve baffling arson.” The story continued onto the next page, but they never named Indigo as the investigating agent. There was a single line which stated, “Haze was killed in self-defense by a tracking expert from the Bennett Detective Agency.” He was relieved to find he wasn't being publicly touted as her killer.

He flipped slowly through the paper, memorizing a page with a glance and reviewing it mentally. There were several stories on Wil Trace's and Agent Warner's disappearance. His own kidnapping, however, went without notice. Both Mom Lara and Max read the paper every morning, and neither had mentioned a story on him in yesterday's paper. It looked like he'd escaped the media's attention completely, which suited him fine.

 

The day was proving expensive for Mr. Dallento. Not only was he paying for a private investigator to follow his girlfriend around town at a hundred dollars an hour, said girlfriend loved to shop at the more expensive shops in Pittsburgh. Mid-morning she had started at Kaufmann's and was working her way across town. Keeping up with her wasn't a problem. The difficulty came with killing time while she shopped without seeming obvious. Ukiah was
holding down a table at the Fifth Avenue Arcade shops when his phone chirped.

“Oregon.”

“Hey hey hey, Wolf Boy, it's Chinooooo.”

“Hey, Chino!”

“Where are you? Max says I'm to help out following a chickchickchickchickie.”

When Chino had his mouth shut, he could actually blend into the woodwork. It was an amazing thing to see after talking to him.

“Downtown. The Fifth Avenue Building.”

“Hey, I'm almost there. I had to stop at Market Square to meet a friend. I'll have to find a parking place, which could take a while.”

“Try to find one quick. After six floors of Kaufmann's, my face is getting too familiar.”

“I hear you. Keep your head down and I'll be there as soon as possible.”

A testament to parking in Pittsburgh, it was almost a full thirty minutes before he handed Marie Tovin off to Chino and the recently arrived Janey.

Moisha Janey was a tall, black woman with no-nonsense eyes. “I heard through the grapevine,” Janey's voice was so low, Ukiah had to listen close to hear what she said, “that you've been accepted into the Dog Warriors.”

“In a way.”

“I heard that those are some scary dudes not to be messed with.”

“Yeah, they are.”

“I heard that there's a turf war between them and some scarier dudes, dudes so scary they don't have a name.”

“They kind of told me about them.”

“They say that last year a Dog Warrior was drinking in a place uptown. They say that one of the other
gang came in and they fell on each other without a word, without a thought. They say it was bad shit, like they both went instantly rabid. They say it was weird shit, because neither one spoke, just tried their damnest to kill the other. They say they tore the place apart, killed a policeman who came to break up the fight, and when it was done, the winner burned the loser's body right there, burning the place down to cinders.”

Ukiah wet his mouth. “Who won?”

“They don't say.” She turned her dark eyes on him. “I get the impression that after the two killed the policeman, no one stuck around close enough to see the end of the fight, but the place was torched and the fireman found a John Doe inside.” She rapped on his chest with her knuckles. “You be careful.”

She strolled off with the carriage of an African queen.

 

The Federal Building rose on a wedge of land where Liberty and Grant streets merged at a forty-five degree angle. It was a mid-'70s office building, columns of steel and glass and ugly as hell.