Falling Down (24 page)

I
flipped open a brand-new cell phone, called Alex.

“Listen,” I said. “Get everybody there you can.”

“What up?” Alex said.

“First, I don't care how you do this. There's a bank account in the Green Valley branch of Bank of America. Under the name Dakota Barbie. I want a complete record of all transactions in that account. Focus mainly on where the deposits come from. Track them back as far as you can.”

“Okay.”

“Next. That online gambling casino. A lot of different kinds of games listed in the menus. Did you look at anything other than the one about cockfights?”

“Not had time. Didn't know it was a priority.”

“You're looking for the same kind of animated thing. Except with dogs.”

“Eeeeeuuuu,” Alex said. “Okay.”

“That's it. You got anything for me?”

“Not yet.”

“Oh. One thing more. Run the name Max Cady through every police database. It's an alias, you'll find he probably uses a lot of names, including Taerbaum. Find anything that connects him with Barbie.”

“Max and the doll, okay. You coming here?”

“Sometime tomorrow.”

“Check. We'll pull an all-nighter, Laura. I hope we're getting paid well.”

 

“You can do that?” Ken said when I disconnected. “Get bank information? Things like that are supposed to be confidential.”

“With all the fake names as cutouts, I'm not sure we'll learn anything. But yes, we can do that. We can do anything, looking for information.”

“It just kinda…floats through the air?”

“Air, telephone lines, TV cables, satellites. I said.

“Don't know yet. Dogs. Doesn't surprise me. Pet dogs in Tucson have disappeared for years, there's now a state law with penalties for dog-napping in Pima County.”

“What happens to the pets? To the dogs?”

“Training bait. You don't want to know any more.”

At three o'clock in the morning, I sat at my workstation computer, Cady's wallet in my trash basket and everything inside the wallet spread under a desk lamp:

I'd phoned Alex with the credit card numbers. She'd sent most of the workers home, put our A team on the Bank of America bank account.

The A Team. The two Sarahs.

Sarah B worked with her head, Sarah C…well, she'd get locked into some endless search routine, no sense of how long it would take to run, Sarah C dreamed herself across the world to places she'd been or not.
Not daydreams,
she'd say,
I am so
not
daydreaming, this is just astral traveling. You're running a computer program,
Sarah B would snap at her.
All
right,
Sarah C would always come right back,
so let's say I'm an astral data traveler
. Of the two sisters, Sarah C usually did the best, most intuitive work, so we let her travel, and if somebody'd notice that her program routines were completed but she'd still be locked off in Asia or Machu Picchu, we'd just rap her gently on top of her head and without complaint she'd come back to us.

With nobody in the office with time to run the credit cards right away, I said I'd do it. I rifled through the business cards, most of them for bars or strip joints. Only one looked promising. A totally blank card except for a handwritten telephone number.

“Laura?” Alex, on my cell. “Bank of America is just a drop box. Money comes in, it's wired out within twenty-four hours. So far, we've chased the transactions over three continents.”

“Keep at it,” I said.

I could see long keyboard hours ahead. You have to treat these random searches with infinite patience, my friend. You shove time off to the side, you remove any clocks from the screens or the desks or the walls. You set a finish point, somewhere out there, you
know
it's out there and you'll finish. What you
don't
really know is whether the finish will produce useful data.

And that's why you learn to master patience. One friend of mine used to whistle toneless tunes, he never even knew he whistled. Another hacker conjugated German verb tenses, this guy's phenomenal memory led back to high school German. He never spoke it, but he could conjugate all tenses of nearly three hundred verbs, and when he got to the end he'd start the process backward.

But tonight,
im
patience was my master, not the other way around. I laid my head on the table at one point, closed my eyes, and leapt up a silent dream of fighting, bloodied cocks.

 

I must have fallen asleep again, without dreaming. My cell went off right next to my ear, but I barely flipped it open before the call switched to voice mail.

“Laura. It's Christopher Kyle.”

Oh, God,
I thought.
Not more bodies
. But that's what it was. A TPD sector car found a body burning in a vacant lot.

“Who?” I mumbled.

“Laura. I heard…everybody's talking down here.”

“About computer hacking?”

“Yes.”

“They've got solid evidence,” I said.

“But you didn't do it.”

“No. But I can't prove that.”

“I'm sorry,” Kyle said. “I'm…I guess I don't know you after all.”

“Christopher,” I said. “Please. Don't give up on me. Trust me, I didn't do this. I need you to believe in me.”

“Why should I?” he said finally.

L
ate morning. Late morning. Beside the pool, Ana Luisa playing with Spider's baby. Sarah Katherine couldn't talk, Ana Luisa only understood Spanish, but they made sounds to each other, that rarity of human communication that extends beyond the normal senses.

Once they returned to the house, feeding time for the baby, lunch for everybody else, I sat on the edge of the pool, legs in the water, arms back and bracing myself, head to the sun. Another blue, high sky over Tucson. More cloud formations south, building toward another monsoon.

What
is
this case about?

Who faked the computer hacking at TPD? Why involve me?

Should I stop being involved?

I suspected everybody, I suspected no one.

Spider came out with a cup of coffee for me, saw I wanted to be alone.

I felt guilt about sex with Ken.

One more guilty phone call to Nathan, but getting only the familiar message that his cell phone was out of service. I called Ken and found his voice mail greeting had changed. An oblique mention of hiking in the Santa Catalina Mountains, getting away with a friend, would his friend please leave a message.

I
am
that friend,
I thought. But I didn't leave a message.

What
is
a friend? How do you tell the difference between a man who's just a friend and a male friend who's maybe something more?

 

David Schultz came at noon. Despite a temperature over one hundred degrees, still dressed in a seersucker suit, white dress shirt buttoned tight, tie a solid pale blue, shoes polished to a glimmer.

I offered coffee or lunch, but he didn't have time.

“I don't know much about
La Bruja,
” Schultz said.

“It's probably not going to help me anyway,” I said.

“Still. You asked. I was curious. At my age, curiosity is a good thing on a sunny day. Especially with the feminine instead of the masculine.
La Bruja
. Not
El Brujo
. I guess, I just assumed it's a woman. Really, I don't know much. But there is such a woman.”

“Here? In Tucson?”

“Oh, no. Somewhere in Mexico. My sources say that people speak of her with respect, but nobody spoke out loud, they'd whisper of her. Lives in a castle, they said. Somewhere way south in Sonora, or maybe Chihuahua. A castle on the side of a mountain, you know, what we call a sky island, just the single mountain rising out of the desert. A valley and lots of water below, a good-size village. Not a town, certainly not a city, but protected, that's what people said of La Bruja. She protected the people.”

“Drug lords in Colombia,” I said. “They protected, so the people would serve.”

“Not the same, Laura.”

“It's drugs and smuggling,” I said.

“And you know this how?”

“A client.”

“Ah,” Schultz said. “A secret client.”

“The woman makes a fortune through drugs, spends money around her own village, keeps the drugs out of those people's hands.”

“There was a movie. Nineteen fifty-three.
La Bruja
.
Here's a color reproduction of the poster.” Handing me an exact duplicate of the card left in Mary's mailbox. “The leading role played by an actress named Marilena. My source in Mexico City says she only used the one word because she was half Austrian. Full name was Marilena Stimpfl.”

“Is she still alive?”

“Nobody knows.”

“And this town, this castle, where is it?”

“Nobody knows. And I've got to run.”

“Thanks, David. Thanks a lot.”

“I don't think I've been of much help.”

“At this point, any information helps.”

 

Staring at the pool, the surface absolutely calm. No ripples, no insects skimming along, no leaves or debris, just a large oval of water, bluer than the sky.

Look into the water
.

The thought so random and unsuspected, like Obi Wan guiding Luke Skywalker near the end of
Star Wars
.

Delilah. The woman I'd met a year ago, on the road near Ruby. A flash flood blocking the road, she pulled my car across with a winch, she took me to Monica's birthday party in Arivaca.

Arivaca Road. Where Mary found Ana Luisa.

Look into the water
.

I remembered why Delilah said that.

You've got to do the work, girl. You've got to see a mirror image of yourself, you've got to mirror yourself and illuminate the anger you see in yourself instead of just figuring what your emotions are toward other people. Flip those emotions so you see them in yourself, then you work on what that's doing to you
.

But instead of working on my anger, I flipped everything I knew about the events of the past days. Starting with the visit from Bob Gates, I turned over all conversations and phone calls and computer data search results, I questioned everything about these events.

What if. That's the process. What's on the flip side of this coin?

After an hour, there were only two pieces of data that might have other explanations. E210. The answer to most everything had to be in E210.

I ran into the house, dressed quickly, packed my shoulder bag, stuck the Beretta underneath a pale yellow jacket I wore with sleeves rolled partway up over a tank top, nothing coordinate, just dressing quickly.

I went looking for Christopher Kyle.

B
ut Kyle had been suspended from active duty, pending…pending something the desk sergeant wouldn't tell me. One of his partners in Homicide finally told me that Kyle just couldn't put in the long hours, his hips burned with pain. I finally found Kyle at a baseball practice batting range, working out his frustration at his failing hips by using the muscular top half of his body.

Stood in the batting cage, punched the button to start feeding him balls. Metal canes at his feet, propping himself with determination to stand unaided. First ball came at him right in the sweet spot, but he swung under it. Adjusted his stance, smacked the next ball just above his hands.
Tink
. From the aluminum bat.

“It was me,” I said. “I caused this.”

Tink
. Solid hit with the barrel of the bat, the ball rising continually until it caught the steel mesh wiring thirty feet away. Two other men started up in the cages beyond Gates, all three ball-feed machines operating at different time intervals.

“Computers don't lie.”

“That
wasn't
me.”

“You're guilty,” he said.

Tink
. Gates swung off-stride, slicing his next ball so it whacked the steel mesh near my face.

“Don't hook your fingers through the wire,” Kyle
said. “I hit any more as bad as the last one, I'll bust a few of your fingers.”

“Is that a threat?” I said.
Tink
. Getting damn tired of these men, swinging a bat like they were just a signed contract away from the bigs.

“Negative.” Not flinching when he stepped too close into the next ball, drove in down off his instep.

“Sure sounded like a threat,” I said. Regripped the mesh, lacing my fingers through the diamond-shaped holes.

“Suit yourself. Busted fingers, can't work a keyboard.”

“What's happened, Christopher?”

“You're poison, Winslow. Worst thing of all, you've poisoned yourself.”

He stepped into another pitch, I saw him turn sideways, deflecting the ball toward me, but too low, it struck the fence around my knees.

“That's definitely a threat,” I said.

Gates stepped away from the next ball, rested the bat on his shoulders. “Negative, Winslow.”

A ball floated past, right in the zone, a home run ball, but he didn't swing.

“Listen to me, listen to me. I believed in you, I trusted you. But no more. You're guilty. And because I spoke up for you, I'm now under suspicion of…they don't even tell me. So. Just leave me alone. We're done here.”

Kyle went to the ball-feed control panel, slid the single switch fully open. Balls streaked at him every fifteen seconds, he swung and connected with almost every pitch, spraying balls everywhere inside the cage until the feed bin emptied.

 

I called Mary's cell. No answer, but my phone rang just after I'd disconnected.

“Laura,” Mary said. “Something really bad's happened to Ken.”

“What?” I said. “What, where is he?”

“St. Mary's Hospital. Intensive care.”

“I'll be right there.”

 

Any ICU is brightly lit, rooms arranged around a central nursing station, patients in most every bed, either recovering or dying, all kinds of continual monitoring of vital signs, breathing, heart machines that beeped steadily, the atmosphere charged with the starkness of these choices. You went to another bed, you got better, you went home. Or you went to the morgue.

Mary sat beside Ken's bed, Ana Luisa asleep in a hard plastic chair, a rosary in Mary's hands, her fingers quiet on the beads. She'd been crying, her face now grim but dry.

“I've kinda forgotten how to say a rosary,” she said. A quick smile, but her face lined with frowns and sadness.

“What happened to him?”

“Getting in his car, right in front of police headquarters. He started to pull out of the parking spot, a garbage truck rammed him sideways, crushed him into his car. Somebody jumped from the garbage truck and ran.”

“Just tell me he'll live.”

“Mostly broken bones. Left ankle, right thigh. Two ribs broken, four more cracked. He's on morphine, he's had surgery, their biggest concern is whether he had a concussion.” Fiddled with her rosary. “I know the sense of what I'm supposed to say, I don't remember the rituals. Hail Mary. Our Father. Dark beads. Red beads. Mostly, I've been praying to Mother Teresa. Praying she'll intercede for me, help Ken's recovery, help keep him alive.”

“It's not your fault,” I said.

“It
is
my fault. I saw that first image on Ken's computer, I got him to contact you, I pulled you and your family into this. I'm guilty of all that.”

“You'll be forgiven,” I said. Unsure what that meant to her.

“But will I forgive myself?”

“I've got to tell you this,” I said finally. “You realize, if this wasn't an accident, if somebody tried to kill him, then you're in danger.”

“Yes. I know that. I still feel guilty I pulled all of you into this.”

My cell rang. Tempted to ignore the call, I glanced at caller ID and saw it was Alex. Held up a finger while I flipped open the cell.

“Laura!” Alex was triumphant. “We've found the woman.”

Finally. A break.

“Her name's Deb Carlin,” Alex said. “Norman Don is parked a block away from her house. She's inside, Norman thinks she's alone.”

“Call our security people.”

“Shouldn't we really call the police?”

“No. Get security to St. Mary's Hospital. Mary's also here.”

“Is she all right?”

“Yes. It's Ken. Somebody tried to kill him, but he's alive. Get security people here, outside the room. Protect Ken, Mary, and Ana Luisa. I'm going to meet Norman. We'll then brace Deb Carlin. This has to end.”

“I'm going with you,” Mary said.

“No.”

“I'm going.”

“No way. This is
my
responsibility.”

Mary opened her purse, showed me what was inside. Ken's .357.

“I started all this,” Mary said. “I want to help finish it.”