Blessed Are Those Who Weep (22 page)

 

Chapter 46

G
O
TIME
.

Lopez calls my cell to let me know he's downstairs. I buzz him in, and when I open my door, he gives a low whistle; I threw on a low-­cut navy velvet dress, my highest black sandals, and long silver earrings that dangle to my shoulders.

“Man, I don't want to have to be the one to tell you this,” Lopez says, “but nobody can see you on the radio.”

“Very funny, C-­Lo.”

Behind him is an older man with a receding hairline and wide smile. He wears jeans and a fleece pullover. I can tell he's packing.

“Detective Werner?” I say, turning toward him. “This is my friend Chris Lopez.”

“Met on the way up,” he says and extends his hand. “Call me Mac.”

“Thanks for coming on short notice, Mac.”

“Amanda was my friend.”

I meet his eyes and nod.

“I made some
pasta fazool
. It's simmering on the stove, and there's a baguette on the table and beer in the fridge. Oh, and there's the remote control. Please make yourself at home. I think we'll be back around ten or so.”

“Oh boy, does that smell good,” he says, smiling and rubbing his hands together. “Dinner, too? This is the best security gig I've ever had.”

“Well, thanks again. I really appreciate it.”

Downstairs, Lopez opens the passenger door to my Toyota Avalon for me. I've asked him to drive. I pull down the visor and attempt to fix my lipstick in the mirror as he swerves through town like he's got a guest spot on
The Streets of San Francisco
TV show.

“This baby handles like a Maserati, man. No shit. Who would've thought,” he says, accelerating through the Stockton Street tunnel and downshifting through a curve.

Satisfied with my makeup, I lean back and close my eyes, replaying what I'm going to say. He won't be able to resist. Joey Martin will be listening to the show. He will know what I mean and he will rise to the bait. I'm certain.

“Do me a favor,” I say as we near Van Ness Boulevard. “Pull over near that mailbox.”

He pulls over, and I lean over and stick a package in the mailbox.

“What was that?”

“The evidence that will convict Joey Martin.”

“Cool, man. Who did you mail it to?”

“The district attorney's office.”

“You think you can trust them?”

“Nicole told me which D.A. was for sure on the up-­and-­up. A young one. Kimberly Fowler. You heard of her?”

“Hell, yes. All the Bay Area photogs call her ‘the Babe D.A.' ”

Fowler may look like she stepped off the cover of
Vogue
magazine, but according to Nicole, she's a shark.

When we pull up, the streets are filled with TV vans, their satellites stretching up into the sky.

“What the fuck are they doing here? Since when do TV stations show up to cover a radio show?” He looks over and squints at me. “That's why you dressed up. You knew this, man, didn't you?”

I give him a smile and raised eyebrow. He fiddles with his radio, plugging in a Beastie Boys CD while we wait until the car clock clicks to 8:45 p.m. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the TV reporters prepping to go live for the nine o'clock broadcast.

“Showtime,” I say, opening the door and swinging my legs to the ground.

“Ms. Giovanni, are you going to reveal who the Mission Massacre killer is on tonight's radio show?”

“Why are you talking to Darkness Radio instead of the cops? Do you think you're above the law?”

“What do you hope to accomplish with this interview tonight?”

I smile and pause, like I'm on the freaking Hollywood Red Carpet. My acting better be up to that standard if what I have planned is going to work.

“I'm sorry, there must have been some confusion about my interview here tonight,” I say. “I'll talk about what I saw that night in the apartment, but I'll let the police reveal who the killer is. There is just one more puzzle piece that needs to be played before that can happen.”

The last sentence is the only true thing I say. A few reporters turn away in disappointment, so I talk fast.

“I have something that specifically names the Mission Massacre killer.”

I pause dramatically and look right into the camera of Channel 5, which is the most-­ watched station in the Bay Area.

“What is it?” a reporter finally asks.

“One of the victims, Maria Martin, kept a detailed journal. In that journal, she names her killer. She describes him in detail.”

“Who is it then?” a reporter asks impatiently.

“Well, here is where it gets really interesting,” I say. “And, also, tragic.”

The silence is only broken up by the sound of a car a street over zooming past.

I wait until they are leaning toward me, then I give them my rehearsed spiel: “The lead detective on the case, Amanda Khoury, was so dedicated to solving this case that she found what all the evidence techs had missed—­Maria's journal.

“As soon as Khoury saw the journal and read it, she knew she had solved the case. Because she lives near Maria Martin, she stopped to walk her dog before she headed into the police station to turn in the journal as evidence. She knew she'd probably be pulling an all-­nighter in preparing arrest warrants for the killer, so she wanted to make sure her dog, Shelby, was fed and walked, because she wasn't sure when she'd be back home again.

“Tragically, when she was walking her dog, she was murdered.

“Here is what the police aren't telling you,” I continue, raising my voice. “Detective Amanda Khoury was murdered because she found the journal. She was not the victim of a random robbery gone bad. She was killed because she had figured out who the killer was.”

There is silence as they wait for me to go on.

“But the killer never found Maria's journal. The good news is that journal is now in my possession—­well, not actually in my possession. I'm not stupid. I have it in a safe, secure place, and I'll turn it over to the police first thing in the morning. I hope you will all be there. Nine a.m. Front steps of the San Francisco Police Department. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a radio interview to do.”

I turn and go through the big glass doors without looking back. I can hear the reporters scrambling to pack up their equipment. Chattering excitedly, they're calling their producers.

And just in case Martin missed the TV news, I go in and meet with Dave Schrader and tell him the exact same thing.

But this time I also talk more about what I saw and how disturbing it was. I owe Dave that for cooperating with me and for pulling out all the stops to make sure all his TV news pals covered my arrival.

It is crucial that Joey Martin come out of hiding to try to get the journal before I turn it over to the police in the morning.

I'll make it easy for him to get it, but it will be a fake journal. I spent some time earlier carefully copying a few passages from Maria's journal into a new black Moleskine. It won't matter if Martin gets the fake, since I've already mailed the original to the Babe D.A.

Strohmayer and another one of his buddies should be somewhere nearby the radio station, waiting to tail Lopez and me back to my apartment. After Lopez drops me off, Mac will move outside the building, and at least two cops will stay on stakeout near my place overnight, waiting in case Martin shows up.

When I leave in the morning, they'll follow me—­or Martin, if he shows. I'll pretend to retrieve the journal from a storage locker at the BART station and put it in my bag. Then, amid the rush-­hour crowd, I'll set my bag down on a table at a sidewalk coffee shop while I go to the counter to get some cream and sugar. If Martin's followed me, he'll grab the journal and run. The cops who've followed us from my place will tail him so they can find where he's keeping Lucy. And then arrest him. Strohmayer said that once Martin is in custody, he's going to bring in the big guns, some buddy in the CIA to help him investigate Khoury's death and figure out what the military is up to.

The detectives will also do their best to find out why the military is giving Martin an alibi. That will be their job. My job is to get Lucy safely away from him. I know the clock is ticking. Martin has had Lucy for five days now. That's a lot of time for a sociopath to have a baby in his care. The darkest side of me wants to scream that it's too late—­that she's dead—­but I can't go there.

I only hope that wherever he is hiding, Joey Martin is someplace where he tuned into the radio or TV and saw me. Otherwise, this whole exercise is a waste of time.

Tricia called me this morning to tell me that Martin said he was leaving the country. When Lucy's caseworker asked him where she could forward some immunization information she'd gotten from the pediatrician, he told her he'd have to get back to her with a forwarding address. When she pressed him on it, he got angry and rude, saying he was going to be out of the country soon and could give a shit about their stupid paperwork. The woman was shocked enough to blab about it in the break room yesterday. If my plan doesn't work, he may disappear with Lucy forever. If she's still alive.

 

Chapter 47

W
HEN
WE
PULL
back into my neighborhood, I glance into every parked car. I wonder if Joey is already out there somewhere. I don't see signs of Strohmayer or his cop friends anywhere. That's good, though. It wouldn't do to have them be obvious.

Lopez drops me off out front and waits for me to enter the building before leaving to hunt down a parking spot on my crowded street. The plan is for me to get a good night's sleep while Lopez and Strohmayer and his buddies keep an eye on my place from below.

Trudging up my stairs, I can't wait to change into a pair of sweatpants and a T-­shirt. My feet hurt from my heels, and my dress is itchy.

I'll thank Mac and get in my pajamas. Thinking this, I step inside my apartment. I automatically close the door behind me, ready to greet the detective. The words are frozen on my lips as fear shoots through me. In the millisecond it takes before cold steel presses against my neck, I take in the scene before me—­my apartment is in shambles, and there are two jean-­clad legs sticking out of my bathroom. Mac.

“Scream and I'll slice your head right off your neck. You've seen what I can do. Understand?” I start to nod, but as soon as I do, I feel the prick of the blade.

“Where are they?” The voice is warm on my neck, and I feel a beefy chest pressed against my back. Joey Martin. He smells like cologne and toothpaste. Like he groomed himself carefully before this attack.

“On the table,” I say, gesturing to the journal I bought today. Why did he say, “Where are
they
?” as if there were more than one?

“Don't fuck with me.” He growls the words in my ear. “That's fake. It's not Maria's handwriting. What do you think, I'm stupid?”

He puts his arm around my waist and lifts me, pulling me back from the door. “Where are they? Give them to me and you won't die.”

Again it is plural.
They. Them
.

I flash back to earlier—­sliding the package in the mailbox on Van Ness Boulevard. I can't give the real journal to him anymore. And he's serious about killing me. In my mind, I can clearly see his father with his throat cut. He'll do it. If he can do that to the ­people he loved, he won't hesitate to kill me.

“It's not here.” My voice is shaky. “It's in a storage locker at the Embarcadero BART station. I was going to get it in the morning. I'm not stupid, either. I'm not keeping something like that at my place.” The pressure on the blade seems to ease slightly. “What you saw was what I copied out of the journal for the story I'm writing for my newspaper. If you tell me where Lucy is I'll tell you exactly where to find it.”

He presses the blade into my neck. “You'll tell me anyway. Where's the key to the storage locker?” I still haven't seen his face. He's staying behind me, holding the blade to my neck. “Empty your bag.”

He prods at my bag on the floor with his foot, and I lean down and empty it onto the floor. Of course, there is no locker key.

“Where is it?” he growls as I stand and he puts the blade on my neck again.

Flashing to all possible spots in my apartment where I can say the key is, I pick one that means he'll have to let me go to reach it. “On top of the kitchen cabinet. Against the wall. If you tell me where Lucy is, I'll tell all the cops to go away. I'll give it all to you myself. Tonight. Just tell me where she is.”

The pressure of the blade is removed, and he shoves me against the wall. I hit it hard and slump down. “You don't seem to understand who is in charge here,” he says and then moves so fast I only feel him pass before the light in my kitchen flicks on. Joey Martin's dark hair is buzzed in a crew cut. His full lips and bushy eyebrows might be attractive on someone whose face isn't ravaged by fury. His body is pure muscle, his chest as wide as a doorway, his neck as thick as a telephone pole. He's probably only a few inches taller than me, but twice as bulky. He wears tan canvas pants and a matching shirt with lots of pockets—­some sort of desert military fatigues. A samurai sword dangles in one arm by his side.

His eyes wander down my body in a way that makes my skin crawl. I eye Mac's legs sticking out of the bathroom, but it's not clear if he's dead or injured.

I try to distract Martin. “Why did you do it? Why did you kill your whole family?” I don't disguise the disgust in my voice.

His dark eyes meet mine without flinching. “Unless you've been over there—­to Iraq—­and seen what I've seen, you can't understand. In Iraq, I saw more ­people I know die than you've met in your entire life. Dead bodies are nothing. Killing someone is the easiest thing to do in the world.”

He taps the sword on my wooden floor, watching me, waiting for me to react to his words.

“Killing is easy? Even your parents? The ­people who raised you?” I'm hoping to jar him, give myself time to figure out a way to escape. I stand, keeping my back against the wall.

“Anyone can raise a kid,” he says, his eyes growing even darker. “Your family isn't the two ­people who fucked and brought you into this world. I didn't choose them, and they didn't choose me. I was a mistake. My mother would have told you that. She never wanted me. They mean nothing to me. I'm a trained and paid killer. The government pays me to kill. I kill to keep ­people like you safe.”

His smirk at these words makes me angry, so I decide not to hold back.

“Don't act so honorable. You didn't kill them defending America. You killed your entire family because you were jealous. It's that simple.”

His eyes narrow and his lip curls up. “I am not jealous.”

“Then you're insecure. You thought Maria cheated on you. But guess what, you were wrong. She never cheated on you. Never. It says so in the journal. Carol Abequero lied to you because she's in love with you.”

He stomps closer to me, eyes blazing in anger. “You think you know so much? Pure little Maria fucked everyone. Abe. My nephew. Even my goddamn sensei. My family covered it up. They all betrayed me. Traitors deserve to die.”

“What happened in Iraq?”

He whips his head to look at me, eyes wide and then narrow.

“I know something bad happened. What was it?”

“It was nothing.” His face grows bland again, expressionless. He flicks the pillows off my couch with his sword as he talks. Caught up in the conversation, it seems like he's momentarily forgotten about the key in the kitchen.

“If it was nothing, why did you try to kill yourself?”

In less than a second, he is before me, and his meaty hands are wrapped around my neck.

“Who told you that?”

“I don't know what happened over there,” I say. “But I know that it was fucked up enough for you to want to die.” I stare into his eyes, looking for any warmth. There is none. His fingernails dig into the flesh on my throat. I can't breathe for a second, and then he eases up. The light in his eyes fades. He lets go, and his eyes grow flat again, dead.

“You don't know. You are fishing. You are a good actress. But I am trained to read ­people. You are lying.”

He's only a few inches from me. I can smell his dinner. Something garlicky.

“Why did you kill Javier?”

He doesn't act surprised that I know this.

“Javier was okay. His only problem was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He saw me come in with blood all over. I couldn't trust him to keep his mouth shut. Sort of like you.” He smiles at his cleverness, then his eyes grow hard and his lips press tightly together, as if he remembers why he is here. “Enough bullshit talk. Give me the goddamn key before I slice your fucking head off your neck.” He breathes the words in a hiss. Instead of his fingernails, the cold steel is pressed up against my throat again. Another prick, like a needle, and he draws the blade away from my neck. He holds it up a few inches from my eyes. A drop of my blood slides down it.

“Up there,” I say and point to the kitchen cabinets. Without turning completely away from me, he eyes the cabinets. “I'll get it if you tell me where Lucy is.”

“You'll get it anyway.” He shoves me toward the kitchen. I need him to make me get up on the counter, if he does and finds there is no key up there, I'm dead.

I hold my breath, waiting for him to make the decision.

“Get up there and get it,” he says. I try to hide my relief. This is my only chance. As I walk, my heel catches in my dress and rips it. I can feel his breathe on the back of my neck as he follows me.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spot Dusty's tail sticking out from behind the couch. It is waving angrily.
Stay put, Dusty
. I don't doubt that Joey Martin will kill a helpless animal.

Grabbing a chair, I put it in front of the sink, giving him as wide a berth as I can in my tiny apartment. He rotates his body so his eyes never leave me. I climb onto the chair and turn my back on him. His hands are on me, moving up my legs to my lower back. “Nice.” The word sends a ripple of terror down my body, and my mouth goes dry.

“One last question,” I say, turning toward him and effectively eluding his grasp. “Do you really think you can get away without anyone knowing you killed your family?” I know if I keep him talking there is a chance Lopez or Strohmayer below might figure out something up here is awry since Mac hasn't come downstairs yet.

“Much bigger issues are at stake than that. They'll leave me alone if I keep quiet.”

“Who are
they
? Keep quiet about what?”

His eyes grow wide. “Son of a bitch. You don't have the right journal. You don't have the original letters, do you? You don't even fucking have anything, do you? I've come here, risking everything, and you don't even have them.” He spits on my wood floor, and my eyes narrow.

“I didn't read the whole thing. Or all the letters,” I add at the last second. He said the “original” letters. He doesn't have the letters under the floorboard? Then who does?

But he's not done talking. “I told them if they leave me the fuck alone, their secret is safe with me. But that means staying low, off the radar. Anyone gets a hold of the originals to those letters, it's all over. You put it in the paper that I killed Maria, they will have to come after me so they can get me before the cops do. They don't trust me not to crack under pressure to the cops. If the cops find me,
they
will find me, and I'm a dead man.”

“Who are
they
? The military? Does this have to do with why they lied about where you were?”

“I was totally going to play it cool and keep their goddamn secret, but they wouldn't give me leave to come see Maria, so I had to take off on my own.”

It's a gamble, but I'll take it. “Why did you tell Maria everything in the letters? And what did you do with the copies you found under the floorboard?”

It pays off.

“It was a mistake.” He spits the words out. I was right—­he got the letters under the floorboard. But they were copies. Where are the originals? He goes on. “I told her before I knew she was a cheating whore. I wanted her to know to never trust the American government. They don't care about anyone. Not Flight 93. Not you. Not me. Nobody. That's why I'm going underground and they'll never see me again.”

“What?” Flight 93 was the plane that crashed in the field on 9/11. When it happened last year, I interviewed the family of one of the victims, because he was from our newspaper coverage area.

“You think the government cares about its ­people?” he says. “It doesn't. Flight 93 is proof of that. The government only cares about itself and its upper echelon. They didn't know I knew everything until I went AWOL. When they threatened to court-­martial me for desertion, I told them what I heard. What I knew. The deal is they will leave me alone if I keep quiet. If the letters get out, I'm a dead man. There will be no place to hide.”

“What do you mean? What about Flight 93?” I shoot a sideways glance at Mac's legs sticking out my bathroom door. Did they twitch, or am I imagining things?

“We shot it down. Our country. We did it.”

“What?” The blood drains from my face. What's he talking about?

“I heard everything in that Blackhawk. They didn't know. I heard it all.”

“I don't understand.”

“That morning on 9/11, they ordered me to get the general to the White House safe and sound,” Martin says, tapping the sword on the counter, the vein in his temple throbbing as he grows angrier telling his story. “They forgot to turn off the headphones. I heard the whole thing. Heard the general give the order to shoot down Flight 93 before it got to the White House. Only ones who heard it was me, the general, and whoever shot the flight down.”

I'm trying to digest what he has said, the revelation he has made. Can it be true? Is he that deranged, or is this why the military lied about his whereabouts? Because despite what he thinks, they don't want him arrested. They want him dead.

The United States government shot down a plane carrying forty Americans. Martin might be one of the few ­people in the world who knows about it, and he thinks they will let him live with this knowledge?

He's a dead man walking.

“What's done is done,” he says when he sees the look of horror on my face. “Now quit stalling. Get up there and get me the key. I got some business in Oakland before I split town. Hurry.”

“Is that where Lucy is? In Oakland? Is she alive?”

“Get up there.”

I step from the chair onto the counter. Leaning forward, I swipe my hand across the top of the cabinet until I find what I'm looking for. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him watching.

He sweeps his sword up and down with a swishing sound. “Is it up there or not? If you're fucking with me . . .” He stands on the chair and rubs the smooth edge of the sword against my bare thigh. Across the room, a loud crash signals that Dusty has tried to escape his hideout behind the couch but has taken down some lamp cords and lamps with him. “What the fuck?” Martin swivels his head toward the living room for a second without taking the sword off my leg.