Strong Darkness (23 page)

“Whose idea was it to walk in that direction?”

“Dad…”

“I mean it, son.”

“I insisted on walking her back to where she said she lived. We must've gotten jumped on the way.”

Cort Wesley could feel himself getting angry again. “You mean,
you
got jumped,” he said to Dylan. “Kai must have run off.”

“What was she supposed to do, Dad, stay and get the shit kicked out of her too?”

“She never called the cops, Dylan. The nine-one-one was placed by a neighbor, dialed just before a passing student made the call too. What's that tell you?”

“I don't know. What does it tell me?”

“I hate when you repeat what I say, son.”

“Tough.”

“I ever tell you a man only repeats a question when he doesn't want to face the answer?”

“Could you be any more evasive?”

“Nice word—evasive.”

“Comes with having a kid in the Ivy League, Dad. I think I remember these guys grabbing for her and me intervening, just like you would if somebody did that to Caitlin.”

“She knew who Caitlin was.”

“I tell you that already?”

Cort Wesley nodded. “In the hospital, when you mentioned Kai's interest in you had something to do with a serial killer. Don't you remember?”

“The hospital's kind of a blur. She brought that up when she got to Spats that night. Said she needed to talk to Caitlin. Said there were women being murdered in Texas and she knew who was doing it.”

“You ask her how?”

“Never got the chance. She knew about Caitlin, she knew about you. Not easy stuff to find out by just entering my name in Google. I asked her about that.”

“What she say?”

“Not much. Can I have an aspirin or not?”

“I already told you no.”

“I guess I forgot that too.”

Cort Wesley turned to shoot Dylan a look, making him climb up the bumper of a minivan and necessitating a last-minute stomp on the rental car's brakes. He felt the antilocks engaging with a body-rattling quake, slowing just short of a collision.

“Jesus, Dad, why don't you let me drive?”

“Because the docs said you may still have some lingering effects from the concussion. That it might impair your judgment.”

“Really?” Dylan asked, making a sound stuck somewhere between a snicker and a chuckle. “So what's your excuse? Now, how 'bout that aspirin?”

And Cort Wesley fished in his pocket for the bottle.

 

59

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

Caitlin sat in her SUV for a time after leaving Doc Whatley's office. She hadn't let on in front of him how much such a violation of these young women, when they were barely in their teens, bothered her.

Someone wanted them to have sex and lots of it.

That same someone didn't want to ever worry about them getting pregnant.

And now five of them were dead, murdered in the same way as another string of Chinese females in 1883; those bodies likely buried not far from where the railroads blazed a trail across the country into present day.

Caitlin finally gunned her engine and, as much to distract herself as anything else, flipped on her scanner and ended up tuning in just as something was happening at San Antonio airport. She was already tearing down the road for the nearest ramp to the freeway when her cell phone started chirping.

“You on your way to the airport?” Captain Tepper asked through the Bluetooth.

“How'd you know?”

“Because you've got a sixth sense for this shit, to the point where I'm starting to think you're actually the cause of it all just to give you an excuse to drive me bonkers.”

“Stay away from the Marlboros, D.W.”

“Only if you promise not to shoot anyone today.”

“Depends what I find at San Antonio International. Why don't you give me a hint?”

 

60

N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

“You want me to come
inside
with you?” Dylan asked, not believing what his father had just said.

“I got a plan,” Cort Wesley told him, “and you're a part of what I've got in mind, assuming you're up to it.”

“I'm up to it. So what is this place exactly?”

“Not sure, son. A safe bet would have it that Kai's part of an operation that's headquartered right here.”

They stood on the pedestrian plaza lined with tables on the Broadway side of the wedge-shaped historical icon known as the Flatiron Building at 175 Fifth Avenue. Cort Wesley's eyes continued to gaze up toward where he needed to go: the twenty-third floor, Nicolas Dimitrios had said, just before handing Cort Wesley the black keycard he held in his pocket now.

So just how was it he counted only twenty-two floors from the outside?

“There's something else we need to talk about,” Cort Wesley continued, feeling the words corkscrew in his throat.

“You don't have to say it, Dad.”

“You don't know what I was going to say.”

“Something about me shooting that guy you were fighting with. I don't even remember doing it. I went for that gun and next thing I know it was jerking in my hand. Guess it was the concussion.”

“You took him down with the first shot, son. Not an easy thing to do.”

“That what you wanted to tell me?”

“You … okay with what you did?”

“I told you, I don't remember doing it.”

“You killed a man, Dylan.”

“I've seen people die before, Dad,” the boy said pointedly. “Why do we have to talk about this?”

He could tell Dylan wasn't being evasive; the boy just didn't see the point of belaboring the issue. Cort Wesley figured his apparent detachment from the deed stemmed from a combination of witnessing his own mother's shooting and all the violence to which he'd been exposed since. Then again, maybe it was a genetic thing, handed down from generation to generation. Cort Wesley's dad once told him he'd killed his first man in a prison yard where he'd been stuck as a sixteen-year-old boy, doing time with hardcore criminals after being tried as an adult for armed robbery. It was either that or give himself up to the man in ways he wasn't about to. And, after splitting the guy's skull open with a chunk of concrete that had broken off from the base of the steel fencing, nobody bothered Boone Masters again. Cort Wesley, on the other hand, had killed his first man in self-defense; well, defense of a girl who was attacked while they walked down the street, turning the attacker's own knife against him.

He'd been sixteen at the time too. Paid the matter no more heed than Dylan was now. The boy showed no ill effects, seeming to brush killing a man off with ease. Had he seen and experienced so much of the like to have become immune to its effects and accepting of its necessity as a result?

Goddamn
, he thought,
most parents only have to worry about teaching their kids about the birds and bees.…

Cort Wesley returned his attention to the Flatiron Building and the task at hand. A far more subtle approach than going in with guns blazing was called for in dealing with whoever was distributing high-end call girls through the country from the twenty-third floor that didn't, apparently, exist.

“You ready, son?”

“You haven't told me the plan yet, what I'm supposed to do.”

Cort Wesley grinned. “I think you're gonna like this.…”

*   *   *

Inside the lobby, Cort Wesley nodded at the security guard behind a small counter and flashed the black keycard in front of a scanner. A light glowed green and he pushed his way through a turnstile with Dylan by his side.

There were six elevators and Cort Wesley chose the one farthest down on the right because the cab door was already open. He laid a hand against the door to keep it that way for Dylan to enter and then joined his son inside.

Cort Wesley studied the panel to find, not surprisingly, no floor marked twenty-three. He still had his black keycard in hand and looked for another scanner to wave it before, but none was immediately evident.

“Let me try,” Dylan said.

He snatched the card from his father's grasp and angled it in front of a lens higher up on the panel that Cort Wesley had taken for a security camera. As Dylan held the black access card near it, though, the lens glowed blue and the elevator doors closed. A moment later, the car was in motion, streaking for a floor that shouldn't have existed with the two of them as the only passengers.

“Those jeans are too tight,” Cort Wesley said suddenly, not exactly sure why.

“That's the way they're supposed to fit.”

“Well, son, it looks like you already outgrew them from where I'm standing.” Cort Wesley stole another glance, in spite of Dylan's caustic stare. “I can almost tell the last number you dialed on that throwaway cell phone we grabbed down the street.”

“Oh, man,” the boy muttered, as the elevator continue to zoom upward, making no other stops.

“I saw your credit card statement. How is it they cost so much when there's so little to them?”

“They don't cost that much, Dad.”

“That's because you're not paying.”

Dylan gave his father a long look, as if sizing him up. “You look naked.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You're not carrying a gun.”

The elevator reached the twenty-second floor and kept climbing.

“And you've got no idea what we're going to find up there. What if it's a trap?”

A bell chimed as the elevator stopped on the twenty-third.

Cort Wesley eased Dylan behind him and pressed up against the front of the cab, out of sight from anyone who might be waiting when the door slid open.

“We'll know soon enough, son.”

 

61

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

“Gate Seven, Ranger!” a TSA supervisor called out when Caitlin reached the security checkpoint at San Antonio airport's international terminal.

Two TSA workers escorted her through, bypassing the scanners and X-ray conveyor. The checkpoint had pretty much ground to a halt since the sudden death of a Chinese diplomat farther down the concourse just prior to his boarding a flight back home. Captain Tepper actually wasn't sure he was a diplomat, just that he was Chinese and dead reportedly of natural causes.

Which begged the question why a Texas Ranger was required at the scene.

Caitlin saw the reason as she approached Gate Seven in the imposing form of Consuelo Alonzo, deputy chief of the San Antonio Police Department. Alonzo had risen quickly through the ranks of the department, becoming the youngest woman ever to make captain three years prior to her recent promotion to deputy chief. And she was rumored to be in line for the job of public safety commissioner that came with a plush Austin office, a job that would place her, among other things, as chief overseer of the Texas Rangers. Alonzo had overcome an appearance often referred to as “masculine” by even supporters, and much worse than that by her detractors. Caitlin put little stock in the rumors pertaining to Alonzo's personal life and her own sexual preferences, knowing she'd born the brunt of similarly caustic attacks herself.

This was Texas, after all, where a woman needed to work twice as hard, and be twice as good, in a profession ruggedly and stubbornly perceived to be for men only. Caitlin and Alonzo had had their differences over the years, but had maintained a mutual respect defined by their professionalism and the sense that their own squabbles only further emboldened those who sought their demise.

“Congratulations, Deputy Chief,” Caitlin greeted as she drew closer, having not seen Alonzo since her formal appointment.

“Save the pleasantries, Ranger,” Alonzo snapped in a tone typical of their past dealings. “You're only here so I don't have to explain to anybody why I never called in the Rangers. So make sure you face the media when we let them in.”

“I can see you're really enjoying your new position.”

Alonzo ran a hand through her spiky hair. She was heavyset and had once set the woman's record for the bench press in her weight class. She'd also done some boxing and was reputed to be the best target shooter with a pistol in the entire department. They might never be friends, or even allies really, but Caitlin knew far more made them alike than different professionally.

“Why don't you tell me exactly why I'm here?” Caitlin said, drawing close enough to Alonzo to smell peppermint-scented gum mixing with hair gel that smelled like flowers. She recalled it hadn't smelled that way prior to her promotion.

“Because we're gonna need all the political cover we can get on this one,” Alonzo explained. “The deceased was a high-ranking Chinese official and, apparently, his government had no idea he was even here.”

“This official have a name?” Caitlin asked her.

“General Mengyao Chang.”

*   *   *

General Mengyao Chang had been talking on his cell phone when, according to witnesses, he was shaken by a crushing pain consistent with a heart attack and then collapsed. Efforts to revive him by members of his security detail, as well as by a Chinese doctor who happened to be at the gate, failed. He was pronounced dead by the San Antonio paramedics who'd followed the airport's own emergency personnel to the scene. As far as Caitlin could tell, everything had been handled just as it should have been. The body had not been removed from the scene because General Chang's security contingent refused to release it.

Right now the corpse lay covered on a gurney still enclosed by paramedics determined to protect it from the heated back and forth currently ongoing between members of the general's entourage and Deputy Chief Alonzo herself, who was trying to deal with having three men addressing her in Chinese at the same time. Caitlin had moved off to the side, closer to the covered corpse with Alonzo no longer paying attention to her.