The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (79 page)

Cotton chain-smoked the cigarette down to the tip. “Know a lot about police work, do you, John?”

“Do you have a sensible question for me?”

“Got a smart mouth, too.”

“Sorry about that. Low tolerance level for idiots.”

“That’s it, John. Keep giving me attitude. We’re the only people here keeping you from a pair of cuffs and a nice warm cell.”

Milton ignored the threat.

Cotton looked down at his notes. “You said she was frightened?”

“Out of her mind.”

“That’s not what security at the party said.”

“What did they say?”

“Said you barged in and went after her.”

“I heard her screaming.”

“How’d you explain how one of them ended up with a concussion and a broken nose?”

“He got in my way.”

“So you broke his nose and knocked him out?”

“I hit him.”

“It raises the question of that temper of yours again.”

Milton repeated himself patiently. “I heard Madison screaming.”

“So?”

“So I went in to see if she was all right.”

“And?”

“I told her I’d take her home.”

“And?”

“She got around me and ran.”

Cotton got up and started to circle the table. “You mentioned Trip Macklemore. We’ve spoken to him. He said you had Madison’s bag in the back of your taxi.”

“I did. I gave it to him afterwards.”

“What was it doing in your car?”

“She left it there.”

“But you’d already taken her where she needed to go. Why would she have left it?”

“I said I’d wait for her.”

“You didn’t have another job to go to?”

“She was nervous. I didn’t think it was right to leave her there, on her own, with no way to get back to the city.”

“You were going to charge her for that?”

“I hadn’t decided. Probably not.”

“A favour, then? Out of the goodness of your heart?”

“It was the right thing to do.”

“He’s English,” the other man, Webster, offered. “What is it you call it?”

“Chivalry?”

“That’s right, chivalry.”

“Don’t know about that, boss. Doesn’t strike me as all that likely. Taxi drivers aren’t known for their charity.”

“I try to do the right thing,” Milton said.

He looked down at his notes. “You work for Vassily Romanov, too, right? Mr. Freeze—the ice guy?”

“Yes.”

“We spoke to him. He had to have words with you the afternoon she went missing. That right?”

“I dropped some ice.”

“He says you were agitated.”

“Distracted. I knew something was wrong.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I already have.”

Cotton slapped both hands on the table. “Where is she?”

Milton stared at him and spoke calmly and carefully. “I don’t know.”

He drummed the table. “What did you do with her body?”

“It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“Is she on the headland?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let me share a secret with you, John. The D.A. thinks you did it. He thinks you’ve got a big guilty sign around your neck. He wants to throw the book at you.”

“Knock yourself out.” Milton calmly looked from one man to the other. “We can go around the houses on this all day if you want, but I’m telling you now, if anything has happened to Madison, it has absolutely nothing to do with me, and it doesn’t matter how you phrase your questions, it doesn’t matter if you shout and scream, and it doesn’t matter if you threaten me—the answers will always be the same. I didn’t do it. It has nothing to do with me. And I’m not a fool. You can say what you want, but I know you don’t think that I did it.”

“Really? How would you know that, John?”

“Because you would have arrested me already and this interview would be under caution. Look, I’m not a fool. I understand. I know you need to eliminate me. I know that I’m going to be a suspect. It stands to reason. I’ll do whatever you need me to do so that you can be happy that I’m not the man you want. The car I was driving that night is parked outside. Get forensics to have a look at it. You can do it without a warrant—you don’t need one, you have my authorisation. If you want to search my room, you’ve just got to ask.” He reached into his pocket and deposited his keys on the table. “There. Help yourself.”

“You’re awfully confident, John.”

“Because I have nothing to hide.” Webster was fingering the cigarette packet. Milton turned to him. “You’re the ranking officer here, right? I’m not going to tell you your job, but you’ve got to put a lead on your friend here and get off this dead end—right now. You’re wasting time you don’t have. If Madison is still alive, every minute we’re doing this makes it less likely she’ll be alive when you find her.”

Webster cocked an eyebrow. “You like telling us what we should be doing so much, Mr. Smith—what would you be doing?”

“I’d be looking at the footage from that CCTV camera. Maybe you’ll see what happened. And everyone who went to the party that night will have gone through the gate. You should start looking into them.”

“The footage has been wiped,” he said.

“What?”

“There’s nothing from the Friday night.”

“Who wiped it?”

“We don’t know.”

“You need to talk to whoever did that, then. Right?”

“It was three months ago. It’s not unreasonable.”

Cotton took over. “You got anything to tell us, John?”

Milton thought about the two men in the house after the party. He would have told the cops what had happened, what he had overheard, but how could he do that without telling them that he had broken in? Why would he have done something like that? It wasn’t going to be possible. That was a lead that he would have to follow for himself.

“All right, officers. Is there anything else?”

They said nothing.

“I’m going to be on my way. You know where I am, and you’ve got my number. If you want me to stay, you’re going to have to arrest me.”

He pushed the chair away and stood up from the table.

MILTON NEEDED A MEETING. As he drove across town, he felt as if he needed one even more than usual. He wasn’t overly worried—he knew he would be able to run rings around the police—but the interview had still left him angry and frustrated. He had known that the police would treat him as a suspect—he would have done the same, if the roles had been reversed—but they seemed fixated. The longer they wasted on him, the worse it would be for Madison. And also, for a man in his particularly precarious position, there was the overriding need to be careful. More than careful. An arrest, his fingerprints and mugshot taken, metadata passing between anonymous servers, he knew that was all the spooks at GCHQ or the NSA would need to pin him down, and then it would all kick off again. The firestorm that had blazed around him in Juárez would spark back to life. Worse this time. He knew the prudent thing to do would have been to jump town the moment that there had been even a sniff of trouble. The day after Madison had disappeared. Now, though, he couldn’t. The city had closed around him like a fist. If he ran, the police would see it as a sign of guilt. They would have all the evidence they needed to push their suspicions about him up a notch. There would be a manhunt. His name would be in the papers. His picture on the internet.

He might as well telephone Control.

I’m in San Francisco.

Come and get me.

No, he thought, as he drove across town.

He had to stay and see this through until the end.

He gripped the wheel tightly and concentrated on the pattern of his breathing. The rooms had taught him that anger and frustration were two of his most delicate triggers. A good meeting was like meditation, and he knew that it would help him to put the lid back on his temper.

Eva was waiting for him, leaning against the wall by the door. She was wearing a woollen jumper, expensive, long enough to reach well down beyond her waist, a pair of jeans and chunky leather boots. She had a black felt beret on her head. She looked supremely cute.

“Hello, John.”

“You’re early.”

She leaned forward, pressing herself away from the wall. “Thought maybe I’d give you a hand. That all right?”

“Course,” he said.

They worked quickly and quietly: preparing the room, setting up the table with the tea and coffee, washing the crockery. Milton’s thoughts went back to the meeting with the police. He thought about everything he knew. Two escorts found dead on the same stretch of headland. Madison going missing just five miles from the same spot. It looked bad for her. Maybe there was another explanation for what had happened, but then again, maybe there wasn’t. The most obvious explanation was often the right one.

“You all right?” Eva asked him.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Looks like you’re a thousand miles away.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got some stuff on my mind.”

“A problem shared is a problem halved.”

“I know.”

The regulars started to arrive twenty minutes before the meeting was scheduled to start. Milton went behind the table and made their coffees. The room was quickly busy. Eva was waylaid by a young actor who obviously had a thing for her. She rolled her eyes, and as he nudged her towards the room for the start of the meeting, she paused by the table.

“You want to get dinner again?”

“I’m not sure I’ll be the best company tonight.”

“I’ll take the risk.” She looked straight at him and winked.

“Okay.” He smiled. “That’d be great.”

The room emptied out as it got closer to the top of the hour, and Milton quickly poured himself a coffee.

Smulders hijacked him as he was about to go inside. “About time you opened that mouth of yours in a meeting, John.”

“Do I get to say no?”

Smulders looked at him with an intense sincerity. “Man, you need me to remind you? You need me to explain? You’re sick. And the cure for your sickness, the best cure I ever found, is to get involved and participate.” He enunciated that last word carefully, each syllable pronounced slowly, and then pressed a pamphlet into his hands. The title on the pamphlet was THE TWELVE PROMISES. “Here they are, Smith. Read them out when I tell you and think on them when you do. All right?”

“Fine.”

Milton sat down as Smulders brought the gavel down and opened proceedings. He had recruited a speaker from another meeting that he attended, a middle-aged woman with worry-lines carved in deep grooves around her eyes and prematurely grey hair. She started to speak, her share focussed on the relationship with her ex-husband and how he had knocked her around. It was worthy, and she was a powerful speaker, but Milton found his thoughts turning back to the interview and the police. They had already wasted too much time, and now they threatened to waste even more. It was three months already. Milton didn’t know if Madison was still alive, but if she was and if she was in danger, the longer they wasted with him made it less likely that they would be able to help her.

The speaker came to the end of her share, wiping away the tears that had fallen down her cheeks. Smulders thanked her, there was warm applause, and then the arms went up as men and women who had found similarities between the speaker’s story and their own—that was what they were enjoined to look for, not differences—lined up to share their own feelings. Milton listened for ten minutes but couldn’t help zoning out again.

Richie Grimes put his hand up. He had come into the room late, and Milton hadn’t noticed him. He looked now and saw, with shock, that the man’s face was badly bruised. His right eye was swollen and almost completely shut, a bruise that ran from black to deep purple all the way around it. There was a cut on his forehead that had been sutured shut and another beneath his chin. Milton watched as he lowered his arm again; he moved gingerly, pain flickering on his face. Broken ribs.

“My name is Richie, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Richie,” they all said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Look at the fucking state of me, right? It’s like what I was sharing about last time, you know, the trouble I’m in? I guess maybe I was hoping it was all bluster, that it’d go away, but I always knew that was just wishful thinking. So I was coming home from work last night, and—boom—that was it, I got jumped from behind by these two goons with baseball bats. Broken nose, two broken ribs. I got a week to pay back all the money that I owe or they’re coming back. I’d tell the police, but there’s nothing they can do—what are they gonna do, put a man on me twenty-four hours? Nah”—he shook his head—“that ain’t gonna happen. If I can’t find the money, I’m gonna get more of the same, and now, with the ribs and everything, I’m not sure I can even work properly. I gotta tell you, I’m closer to a drink today than I have been for months. I’ve been to two other meetings today already. Kinda feel like I’m hanging on by my fingertips.”

The others nodded their understanding and agreement. The woman next to him rested her hand on his shoulder, and others used his story to bounce off similar experiences of their own. If Richie was looking for advice, he didn’t get any—that was “grandiose,” and not what you came to A.A. to find—but he got sympathy and empathy and examples that he could use as a bulwark against the temptation of getting drunk. Milton listened to the simple tales that were told, his head down and his hands clasped tightly on his lap.

The meeting drew towards a close, and Smulders looked over to him and nodded. It was time. Milton took the pamphlet that his fingers had been fretting with all meeting and cleared his throat.

“‘If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.’” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “‘We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. The feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Are these extravagant promises?’”