Taking Liberty (22 page)

___________________________

Empty streets rolled by like scene changes in a stage play. Everything two-dimensional. Shuttered stores and dark alleyways, differing only by their location. I spread myself across the backseat of the taxi and dialed the cell number given to me before leaving Alaska.

On the surface, I had plenty to be happy about. Conditionally, I was a free man. My certificate of lunacy had been filed away. Behave myself and it would remain that way. I had a good job with the government: a deputized consultancy position with a Glock and a license to kill. A nice home on a quiet street far away from trouble. A doting daughter on the other side of the country. An old relationship with the promise of a new start and a hopeful future. My wife’s murderer doing life in solitary, on death row, with no hope of parole. Plenty to be cheerful about.

I should have been in a celebratory mood. I wasn’t.

My son was dead and it was all my doing.

Realization kept coming up and punching me in the teeth.

No child should die before their parents. It goes against the natural order of things. Like the sun setting and never rising again.

The number rang for a while, then a tired voice answered a muzzy
hello?

“Locklear, it’s me: Quinn.”

I heard the Kodiak cop pull himself together on the other end of the connection. “Agent Quinn? It’s late. What time is it? Where are you?”

“Forget that. Did you find the body?”

“The body?” I heard his metal cogs grating. “You mean the body from the clinic? Huh, no, I didn’t. Listen, I’m in the middle of something. Can I call you back in the morning?”

“Are you kidding me, Locklear?” I didn’t hide the aggravation in my tone. Locklear’s attitude was borderline blasé. “What did you find at Engel’s place?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Now there was disbelief in the mix.

“I can’t make it up. I went through the whole place room by room. I even checked under the beds. Everything was in order. The doc’s a respected member of our community. He’s a stand-up character. What were you expecting?”

An upright guy with a penchant for S&M. I chewed lip. What had I hoped Locklear would find, aside from my son’s cremated corpse and enough loud speakers to kit out a rock concert?

“If he has nothing to hide, why did he run?”

“Simple. You spooked him and he panicked.”

“Which doesn’t explain why he knocked the wind out of you, Locklear.”

“That was my fault. I tried grabbing his shotgun. He just overreacted. I’m expecting he’ll turn up when he’s calmed down, say he’s sorry and buy me a beer.”

I wasn’t convinced. “What about those outbuildings?”

“Far as I can tell, mostly storage. One housed a generator. Another is being used as a dog kennel. Everything checked out.” I heard Locklear yawn loudly. “Look, do we really have to do this right now? It’s late. I looked everywhere. There was nothing suspicious.”

I held the phone in front of my face and stared at the word
Locklear
on the glowing screen. “Listen to me, Locklear. I need you to go back over that place with a magnifying glass. Take sniffer dogs if you have to. Check every nook and cranny. Look for concealed spaces. Engel stashed that body somewhere. While you’re at it, go through that clinic of his. This is a Bureau emergency. Mess up and the only job you’ll have on the force is cleaning the station house toilets.”

“Okay, okay. Give me a break, agent. I’ll get to it. First thing in the morning.”

“I’m serious, Locklear. This comes all the way from the top. And call me the second he shows up. Get it?”

“I got it, agent. Loud and clear. Message received and understood. Merry Christmas,” he yawned and hung up.

Stone would have called Locklear’s attitude
bloody useless
. I hovered on the side of deliberately difficult.

I spat out the wasp buzzing round in my mouth and jammed the phone back in my pocket.

___________________________

I had a bunch of reasons to go home, but none of them seemed to matter all that much right now.

Difficult times ahead.

I had to call Grace. I needed to tell her the terrible news about her brother. And not just Grace. George had a wife – Kate, my beautiful daughter-in-law – who also had a right to know. He’d disappeared from both their lives, a year ago. I wasn’t on my own. The devastation was far-reaching. How was I going to begin to explain why George had been burned to death in Alaska?

Delay. It was a coward’s tactic, but it was Christmas and I couldn’t bring myself to ruin it for them, forever. Besides, I didn’t have a body. No funeral can be arranged without one.

Maybe when I’d brought George back and Snakeskin to bear.

I was full of bullshit and I hated the smell of it.

Out of habit, I went somewhere other than home first. The taxi dropped me on Main Street in Alhambra, swiftly made a U-turn in the road and then screeched away, back toward LA.

It was almost 2 a.m., Thursday, and my body clock was keeping the wrong time. Like my father used to say
‘Even a broken clock is right twice a day.’

Stone had given me back my gun, with instructions to show up for a case meeting twelve hours from now. With Fillmore gone (and with him his precious information) our group needed to talk new tactics. The nest of vipers Stone had referred to was an ongoing Bureau investigation known as
Operation Freebird
. It was an all-inclusive FBI undertaking, overseen by Washington, DC and run from Stone’s office on Wilshire Boulevard. As part of the deal keeping me out of the courts for the attempted murder of a federal agent, I’d been working on
Operation Freebird
since my involuntary reassignment to Springfield. My part had involved going undercover and drawing information from Trenton Fillmore, to help Stone prosecute his case against a human trafficking ring bringing Russian girls into the country to be used as private sexual slaves. My part had failed. Not sure where that left me. All the same, Stone wanted me onboard – probably to keep an eye on me. The upside of it was, when it came to hunting down Snakeskin, I’d have the full resources of the FBI at my disposal, plus a federal seal of approval to deal with him any which way I liked.

And I liked the thought of doing something really bad.

I came to the 24-hour convenience store with the bar in back. Pushed against the glass door without even noticing the place was drenched in darkness. When the door resisted, I stepped back and scanned the dark frontage.

Winston’s
has been around forever. Okay, maybe not quite prehistoric. But enough time for it to weld itself to the bedrock hereabouts and become something of an institution. The worse-for-wear watering hole isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time, but it serves a purpose – primarily, to give insomniacs someplace to hang out in the wee small hours, where they can imbibe more keep-me-awake caffeine than is advisable to regular folks, with or without sleeping disorders.

I checked my watch with a frown.

The place was in total darkness. No lights on inside. No neon-blue fly zapper bringing down bugs in the window. Even the faded
Winston’s
name sign – which was normally backlit and spotted with dead flies – was out.

A card hung on the inside of the door. I’d never noticed it before. It was a rectangle of beige cardboard rimmed with silver tinsel. Faded red letters saying
Go Home – We Are
.

I frowned, then remembered it was Christmas Day night. So much had happened in the last thirty-six hours, it was no surprise I was distanced from the holiday festivities.

Even Winston Young deserved one day off each year.

I crossed the quiet street and headed off home.

It was a calm winter’s night in Alhambra. Cool by Southern California standards, but not in Alaska’s neighborhood. I had the hooded shirt undone, working up the heat as I marched along Valencia. Even in the dark, the old street looked unchanged since the last time I’d been here. Maybe less fuller foliage on the trees and fewer flowers in the window boxes. But it had the same smell, the same familiar feel I always associated with home.

Home.

The scene of two cold-blooded crimes against two women in my life, both at the hands of
The Maestro
. Could I still think of it as home after all that had happened?

Home is where the heart lies, right? But when the heart lies where is home?

Truth was, since Hope’s death, I’d contemplated selling the house on Valencia, more than once. Not exactly prime real estate, but a nice enough neighborhood. Easy commuting into LA and the greater Metro Area. Maybe get back what I’d paid for it. Move on. Start anew. Lay demons to rest. With a lick of paint and some TLC it would make a fine family home again someday. Suffer a bunch of happy kids running round it. A loving husband and wife making plans and putting down roots. Banking on a place to invest memories. But there was low demand on crime scenes these days. Aside from weirdos or groupies, who wanted to live in the house from
Psycho
?

I moved through cones of yellow street lighting. Followed the undulation of the worn sidewalk. Christmas lights sparkled in garden trees. Illuminated snowmen and snow-women huddling in glowing groups, smiling at me as I passed. Flashing reindeer on rooftops, being chased by portly Santas. All was normal in the suburbs.

But murder was on my mind.

I wondered what Rae was doing right now, and realized I was already missing her. In the space of twenty-four hours she’d had a huge impact on me. Reawakened old feelings, old stirrings I’d thought fossilized. Given me something to live for and perhaps to die for.

George.

Suddenly, hot bile burned at my throat. I came to a stop and leaned against someone’s front fence. Took deep breaths.

Grief hits in waves. It crashes against our emotional shores, dragging us dangerously out of our depth. Sometimes the surge brings fresh insights into what lies beneath, but most of the time it just erodes.

I swallowed down the bile and moved on.

I had half a day to get my head around losing my son for the second time and to find out which stone Snakeskin had slithered under. For now, I was on the Bureau’s payroll. Like it or lump it. Stone had the power to send me back to the Fed Med anytime he saw fit. I didn’t like it. I didn’t have much choice. No one was interested in my sob story. If I wanted to be free to chase Cornsilk my way, I had to show willing.

Besides, I felt obligated to nail the son of a bitch responsible for Fillmore’s murder.

Stay busy. Stay focused. Stay in control.

I could hear a dog barking in a faraway backyard. A warring couple having a heated row in an upstairs bedroom, something about overcooked ham and a dominating mother-in-law.

Welcome home.

My house on Valencia was right where I’d left it. Nothing special. A two-floor dwelling set back from the roadside behind an uneven patch of grass and a weeping cherry tree. I lingered where the crazy-paved front walk greeted the sidewalk, and looked the old place over.

For the most part, I have good neighbors; they know what I do for a living and they stay respectfully out of my business – which doesn’t bode well for the upkeep of my property. Mine isn’t the only overgrown plot on the street, but it’s no excuse. I’d let things get a little out of hand since Hope’s death. Let the grass grow tall and the need for major repairs grow short. More important matters to attend to, I guess. I used to keep on top of things, take pride in pulling up weeds and painting the boards. Didn’t seem much point anymore.

After a long summer of unchecked growth, the property should have looked like an abandoned parcel of land. One of those backwoods ramshackle affairs you see in scary B-movies. It didn’t. Someone had cleaned the place up: the front lawn was trimmed to within an inch of its life; the paintwork was proudly sporting a new winter coat; the cracks in the driveway were smoothed over with a fresh skim of cement. In fact, the whole place looked plumped up – as if it were an inflatable that had been losing air for a long time and somebody had plugged the leak, then breathed new life into it.

Crazily, I glanced up and down the street, wondering if I’d inadvertently stopped at the wrong house. My old jalopy wasn’t on the drive – then I remembered
Agent Melody Seeger had wrecked it when she’d run over Gus Reynolds in the summer.

Curious, I jangled keys out of my pocket and cautiously approached the front door.

No unread junk mail jamming up the mailbox. No muddy work boots growing roots by the stoop. No signs that the mice were at play while this cat was away.

The key fit the lock perfectly. Again, I scanned up and down the street before opening the door, foolishly feeling like an intruder in my own home.

Last time I’d been here the place had smelled of disinfectant and various astringents used by the crime scene clean-up crew – better than a whiff of evil, but only marginally. I’d found my good friend and therapist Eleanor Zimmerman at death’s door in the master bedroom.
The Maestro
had shackled her to the bed with piano wire and left her there to bleed out – in the same way Hope had been left there to die eighteen months earlier. A repeat performance commanding no applause. Now there was a definite trace of baked cookies in the air and maybe even a hint of vanilla from one of those scented candles they sell at department stores.

Had Martha Stewart taken up residence in my absence?

I waited for my eyes to adjust. Everything looked neat and tidy. Windows washed. Wood polished. Carpets vacuumed. The Pearson’s across the street had spare keys. Maybe the housework was nothing more out of the ordinary than a good neighbor doing a good deed.

I dropped keys in the dish on the hall table and shucked off the hooded shirt. Thought about making a coffee, then decided against it. I was pumped all right, but I hadn’t slept properly since Springfield. I had a long day ahead. Two assignments to divide my time and keep me on the streets. Instinctively, I wanted to be proactive, call every phone number on Cornsilk’s tourist map. Get out there and sniff out Snakeskin’s trail while it was still warm. But despite my mental gears whirring away, physically I was beat. Soporific Sanibel had put my insomnia to rest. Reset my Circadian system. I no longer survived on caffeine and catnaps. Bed was the smart move whichever way I looked at it.

I was about to retire when I noticed a pencil-line glow drawn around the basement door.

I halted with my foot hovering over the first stair tread.

The light was on in the basement, I realized.

Somebody was in my house!