Night Eyes (The Detective Temeke Crime Series Book 2) (16 page)

“Between you and me, you don’t happen to know where those diaries are?” Malin asked, barely giving the tape recorder a sneaky glance.

Megan was quiet for a few seconds and then looked Malin directly in the eye.

“In the library,” she said, blowing out a loud breath. “Third shelf down. Between Huckleberry Finn and The Last of the Mohicans.”

Temeke called Judge Matthews’ office and it took almost a minute before somebody answered. He told the secretary he needed a search warrant, told her why. Judge Matthews refused to issue one, said the information was unreliable and that Madam Mayor’s private journal could hardly be connected to a crime. Matthews and the Mayor were as tight as thieves.

Temeke shook his head, struggled to pull his coat on and rushed downstairs to the lobby. Fast fingernails tapped against keyboards, chattering printers and the sudden shriek of a cell phone. Sarge was reading the newspaper with his feet crossed on his desk, eyes red from scanning his computer screen. “You off again?”

Temeke let his gaze swing towards the voice. He gave a nod and shouldered the front door. The smell of fresh air and a cold wind that hadn’t lost its bite, and the afternoon sun covered the mountains in an eerie glow.

Key in hand, he hurried past four police officers, a cluster of uniforms leaning against a unit and who seemed to be sharing a joke. He cleared the snow from the windshield of the Explorer with his jacket sleeve and put on his sun glasses.

The traffic was thin on Coors and so was the sun. He had to take those glass off again to see all the way to the Mayor’s mansion. Looked like someone had scattered confectioner’s sugar all over the driveway. Looked like Christmas all over again.

“Let’s get this bloody farce over with, shall we,” Temeke muttered to himself, rang the bell and glanced up at the front façade.

He felt lightheaded as he showed his badge to a young woman, five feet, two inches tall, hair tied in a bun, unreadable eyes.

“Your name?” he said, staring down at small feet wrapped in gray moccasins.

“Francisca, señor.”

“May I speak to Madam Mayor?”

“She not here, señor. She back at two.”

He was hoping as much. “Can I wait?”

Francisca showed him into the library, left him sitting on an easy chair with a folded newspaper that looked as if it had been ironed. She wouldn’t ask for a search warrant, didn’t know he wanted to take anything.

He lifted his head and squinted out of the window, trying to make out a line of trees beyond a veil of snow. Some of the wild shrubbery on the south wall had been cut back, trees trimmed so that the sounds of Paseo encroached in a way that they hadn’t before.

Temeke scanned the bookshelves and spotted the journals exactly where Megan said they were. Two embossed leather books both fastened with leather straps and locks. He gave the hallway a cursory glance, dark and deserted, illuminated by two windows either side of the front door. The distant moan of a vacuum cleaner drifted from upstairs and he retrieved both books in a one handed grip.

He checked his watch. Quarter past one. The heater hummed gently in the background, air filtering through the air vents, giving him a tentative sense of calm. It had been a long time since he used two paperclips, one fashioned in a straight line as a pick, the other bent into the letter ‘r’ as a tension wrench. It took three tries before he timed it just right and the lock released.

He flicked through the pages and tried to picture each scene. The writing alone could tell him what Raine Oliver was feeling, the neat layout, the thought that went into each entry. There was something sad about them, something he couldn’t put his finger on.

He leafed through a few more pages until he found what he wanted. The dates started as far back as December 1999 before Adam was born.

Sunday 23rd December, 1999: Party at the Oliver’s. You weren’t there. I wanted to tell you the good news.

Monday December 24, 1999: I left a letter for you under the tree. We’ve set a date. If you ever want to know how it all happened. It was just this. He captured me.

Tuesday December 25, 1999: Maybe you just wandered away and can’t find your way home. Is your heart breaking like mine?

Wednesday December 26, 1999: Bill wants to move after the wedding. Colorado or New Mexico. I rather like the idea of New Mexico. A promise is a promise. Middle name. Just as you said.

The last entry was resigned, almost cold. Perhaps the language was different in the late nineties for her, perhaps she was just trying to be brave. If he read between the lines, it was someone who didn’t approve of her marriage to Bill Oliver. Felt like a man. Could have been a woman. And as for the middle name, his guess was as good as anybody’s.

Temeke took a cigarette out of his top pocket, played it between his fingers and then put it back. The sound of the wind tugging at a rose bush outside, thorns scraping against a window pane, made his muscles jump. He looked around the room again, this time settling on another photograph of Adam, a concerned little figure with skinny legs and a model airplane in one hand. The mere thought of the boy being out there with a kidnapper made him shudder and he swallowed hard, laid a flat hand against the pages of the journal.

The vacuuming stopped. Temeke looked towards the hall, listened hard, heard a muffled voice upstairs. Francisca was on the phone, voice raised one minute and low the next. It was likely she wouldn’t have heard a phone over the vacuum cleaner, suggesting she must have made the call herself.

Light seeped in through the library window and arced across the floor. Headlights outside. Temeke realized how dark the afternoon sky had become, recognized the sound of a van. A sudden adrenaline spike seemed to send his brain on overload and he broke out in a sweat. Francisca was likely watching out of a window upstairs, just as he was watching downstairs.

Fed Ex. He relaxed his shoulders and realized he hadn’t taken a breath for nearly a minute, slipped the journals back where he found them and sat very still.

A shadow fell across the window, short and wiry and likely dressed in a brown suit. Temeke heard a scuffling, heard the doorbell and a few seconds later, the  growl of the engine.

Shoes pattered on the staircase and Francisca peered into the library first, eyes scanning the entire room as if there was some filter of doubt. “You want coffee, tea… something to eat, Detective?”

“No thanks, love.” The shrillness of her voice struck a chord that made him clench all the muscles in his face. He needed that search warrant. “Tell Mrs. Oliver I call again.”

Francisca opened the door to retrieve the package, gave him a curt nod as he slipped past her to the driveway. The wind reached him through the trees and so did the smell of traffic fumes. The chill from the icy ground worked its way through the soles of his shoes, snow crunching underfoot.

All the way back to the office, he kept wondering about the Tuesday entry and the one question that scratched away at his subconscious. Whose heart was breaking like hers?

Malin tapped the keyboard and squinted at the computer. He knew she could hear him over those loud frustrated clicks. “What time did Megan leave?” he asked.

“Ten minutes ago.”

If Megan was on her way back to the mansion, he would have just missed her. “How long ago did she try picking the locks on those journals?”

“She said she was alone in the house during the Annual Mayoral Luncheon, so… two weeks ago,” Malin said without looking up. “After everyone left, she went snooping in the library. She was worried about Mrs. Oliver.”

Temeke straightened his chair, scuffed it away from his desk and rocked it back and forth a bit. “And Cesar? Cause he’s not exactly squeaky clean. Imagine two members of staff going through your stuff. Just because they’re worried about you.”

“Apparently, the Mayor shouted at his wife several times, only one time he slapped her. Megan saw it all through the living room door. She was certainly frightened enough.”

Temeke began to imagine two dark silhouettes in front of the fire, one leaning over the other and shouting at the top of his voice. The whole house must have heard them. “Did she say what they were arguing about?”

“A letter. Something to do with a test.”

An afternoon of studying the mayor’s resume and making phone calls of all the references listed had given Malin an appetite. She tore the lid off a microwavable lasagna, inspected a few steaming strings of cheese and took a bite.

“Judge Matthews called yet?” Temeke asked.

Malin shook her head and shaved another slice of lasagna with a plastic fork. She knew he was itching to get back over to Mrs. Oliver’s house to get those journals. “What are you working on?”

Temeke smeared a layer of paste on a thin slice of toast. Gentleman’s Relish, he called it. “Checking with the Chief Administrative Officer to see if any of the mayor’s staff were absent this week. So far, all present and accounted for. The Media Enquiries director had to set up a ‘Mayor Oliver update’ line.”

“That’s a bit impersonal, isn’t it?”

“Not after they received three hundred phone calls in less than an hour. Jammed up the front desk.”

Malin read the Mayor’s tweets out loud, the most recent of which commended Unit Commander Hackett as employee of the week. The rest were return to work bills, donations, youth ambassador promotions and a celebration of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

There was also a picture of the Press Secretary on the Fox News couch giving a brief update on the Mayor’s health, concluding with legislative priorities for the coming year. Malin looked up and realized Temeke had already glazed over, couldn’t care less about Twitter.

Pressing the sticky lid of her lasagna back in place, she threw the remainder in the trash. Temeke opened his desk drawer, pulled out the piggy bank and peeled off a rubber seal from its belly. He shook it a few times until a handful of change clunked onto his desk.

“What?” she said, knowing he was jumpier than a housecat.

“When Mrs. Oliver called the police on Sunday night, she insisted she read the time off her cell phone. That means she had the cell phone in her hand. Yet she chose to call 911 from the landline instead.”

“Maybe she was expecting a call on her cell,” Malin said. It was the only explanation she could think of.

“That’s why she chose to be with the Mayor… in hospital. It wouldn’t have mattered where she was if the kidnapper had her cell phone number.”

“But he called the house. The police were there and so was she.” Malin felt the room spin. There was something in what he said. “I have a list of all her contacts.”

“Call them, will you. Find out if any of them had an appointment to call her on Sunday night.”

Malin found the list, but not before noticing Temeke had something else to say. He was nodding his head vigorously and yawning at the same time.

“I got to thinking, who’s this Andrew Blaine? He’s a sodding PI, that’s what. Said he wouldn’t talk to me when I got through finally. Client attorney privilege, my ass. I asked him why he didn’t call me back the first time and he said he couldn’t understand the accent. Accent? I don’t have a bloody accent.”

“Yes, you do.” A real sexy one, Malin wanted to say and thought better of it.

She called the Berkeley police. Asked them to get a search warrant for Andrew Blaine’s house and then checked her messages for the third time. There was still no call back from Judge Matthews’ office. She didn’t really expect one.

Two more hours of calling Mrs. Oliver’s contacts, most of whom had no scheduled phone appointments with her. Malin checked her watch. It was just after six. The next ten minutes was spent nagging the receptionist of Kim Tzu’s Nail Place for Kim’s home number. Malin’s hands were damp with sweat as she listened to the phone ring, with a sense of foreboding in her stomach. It was the same response she had learned to expect. Kim had not made a phone date with Mrs. Oliver that Sunday night.

Temeke leaned back in that creaky chair, hands behind his head. There was something feral and graceful about him, something otherworldly that made her skin tingle. He cleared his throat a couple of times as if he was about to speak, slipped the pack of cigarettes from his top pocket and flicked open the lid. A match flared and she saw him suck on that cigarette and slowly exhale a lungful of smoke. It always amazed her how he got away with it. The only employee allowed to smoke at work, the only detective Hackett really depended on.

Hackett never told Temeke, of course. He only wrote it in a memo to the Chief of Police that Malin had delivered a few weeks back. Praised Temeke as a tactical thinker, said he’d put up with anything as long as Temeke was given a second chance.

“Who does he look like?” Temeke said.

“Who does who look like?”

“Adam?”

Malin looked up at the cork board and studied the photographs. “Favors his mother. Same build, same coloring. Except in the eyes. Difficult to tell from a picture.”

“You know what bothers me?” Temeke said, fingers pulling at his bottom lip. “How do you think it makes us look if we can’t come up with a single witness? All of them suddenly gone deaf and blind? You go home, love. Get some rest.”

Malin wasn’t about to argue. She grabbed her coat and looked up at the clock. Eight thirty. Not bad for a weekday. She would have called in on Sargent Moran’s wife for a coffee on the way home, but there was an ache in the back of her throat and she had trouble swallowing.

The apartment felt different. Cold, uninviting. The blinds to the patio doors clattered in the wind and she wondered why she would have left the sliding door unlatched. No one could have opened it from the outside without shinning up two storeys and vaulting over the railings. She swatted a drift of blinds and closed the latch.

The laptop took a while to boot up and she noticed WingMan wasn’t in the chat room. No use talking to an imposter. Maybe one last message to vent the anger she now felt.

All singles use Heartfree, you said. All lonely singles, you said. Lonely? Who said anything about lonely? I know who you are.

She tapped
SEND,
heard herself laugh and the sound caught her by surprise. She was thinking about what he would say when he saw that message. He’d be biting his nails that’s for sure, right down to the quick. Probably wondering if she had state-of-the-art surveillance equipment to find him with. Probably scared she was already standing outside his window.

Darn it! She should have typed that.

There was nothing on the TV except Jennifer Danes reporting live outside the University campus. A student had been arrested for spray painting
Professor Reid is a pederast
on the front door of the Law Library. Cyn Wrigley had been nominated for the American Journalist Award for the third time and there was a photo of her getting out of her car, registration plate PMS24-7. And Farmer Capra who had been breeding goats with sheep for four years had finally produced a pair of black and white shoats.    

Malin yawned and glanced at the laptop. “Get a grip,” she whispered, flicking on the switch to the gas fireplace.

Blue flames fluttered between a pile of faux logs and there was a cloud of condensation on the glass. She sat on the couch and stared at it for a moment, wondering why WingMan pretended he was someone else.

It was the whine of a police siren on the television that woke her up at one seventeen in the morning. All the moisture had been sucked out of her tongue and it was stuck on the roof of her mouth. Gulping down a glass of water, she remembered the laptop.

There was an email in her inbox.

The way I see it is this. Your neck’s on the chopping block. A good detective like you telling a complete stranger about the Oliver case? My, my, that’s worth a firing. You say one word to Temeke and I’ll tell him what you told me. If you don’t, I’ll tell you who took Adam Oliver. So sit tight and wait for my next email. You’re really going to love this.