The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (90 page)

“Money?”

“Maybe I should sit tight, wait until he’s better known. A story like this, what kind of book deal you reckon I’d get if I waited until later? His inauguration, maybe? The day before the election?”

Crawford felt the familiar, cold knot of anger tightening in his gut. “All right, I get it. I get it. How much do you want?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have to give me a number.”

“Okay. Fifty thousand—that’s what I would’ve earned this year.”

“Fifty.” He felt his temperature rising.

She hesitated uncertainly. “What do we do now?”

“First time you’ve shaken somebody down?” he spat sarcastically.

Her eyes flashed. “You’re angry with me? Maybe you ought to think a little about him, Mr. Crawford.”

He tried to defuse the tension. “Arlen—call me Arlen, please.”

She ignored the attempt at conciliation. “You don’t know how close I was to putting this out there. A man like him, a weak man, how is that good for our country to have him in high office?”

He forced himself to take a breath, to regain a little composure. “No, you’re right. Quite right. I’m sorry, Karly. It’ll take me a little while to sort this out. It’s not quite as straightforward as you think, that much money. It needs to be done quietly. Is that all right?”

“Of course.”

She exhaled.

He had a moment of empathy; it had probably been one of the most difficult conversations she had ever had. She didn’t deserve his anger. It wasn’t her fault. Robinson, on the other hand, did deserve it. His behaviour kept putting him in intolerable situations. He was irresponsible and childish, ignoring his clear instructions that he had to put this behind him and keep it zipped. Cleaning up the mess that he left in his wake was becoming a full-time job. An expensive full-time job.

Crawford told the girl that she just had to be patient, that he would sort it all out for her, and then he showed her to the door of his room. He switched channels on the television, lay back on his bed, and stared at the ball game that was playing on repeat for five minutes, not paying any attention to it, running the situation around in his head and wondering if there was any other way it could be resolved.

He decided that there was not.

He picked up his cellphone from the bedside table and called the usual number.

MILTON WAS HEADED to the Moscone Center when his cellphone buzzed in its cradle. He glanced at the display; Trip Macklemore was calling. He pulled out of the traffic, parked, and called him back.

“Have you heard?” Trip said as soon as he accepted the call.

“Heard what?”

“They’ve found another body—it’s on the news.”

“It isn’t Madison.”

“How do you know that?”

“The police brought me in again.”

“You’re kidding?”

“It’s just routine. It’s nothing.”

“It might not be her now, but it’s just a matter of time, isn’t it? You know that—she’ll be next.”

“We don’t know that.”

“I do.”

Milton thought he could hear traffic on the call. “Where are you?”

“In a taxi. I’m going up there.”

“What for?”

“To see Brady.”

“No, Trip—”

“Yes, Mr. Smith. He did it. It’s fucking obvious. It’s him. We know he’s been lying to us right from the start. What else has he been lying about? I’m gonna make him admit it.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“It’s all right. I’ll take it from here.”

Milton gripped the wheel. “Don’t,” he said. “Turn around and come back. We just need to wait. Getting into an argument up there will make things worse.”

“I’m sick of waiting. Nothing’s happening. They’re not doing shit.”

Milton was about to tell him about Efron and what he had learned, but the call went dead.

He redialled, but there was no answer.

Dammit.

The boy had sounded terrible, wired, his voice straining with stress, as if at his breaking point. Milton had to stop him before he did something stupid, something that would wreck his life. He put the Explorer into gear, pulled out into traffic, and swung around. He drove as fast as he dared. Trip was already on the way. Where was he? The traffic was mercifully light as he accelerated across the Golden Gate Bridge, and it stayed clear all the way to the turning onto Tiburon Boulevard. He swung to the south, still clear, and reached Pine Shore without seeing the boy.

He drove inside the gates. There was an outside broadcast truck parked across the sidewalk and a reporter delivering a piece to a camera. Great, Milton thought. He was hoping the media would all have moved on by now, but the new body had juiced the story again, and with the police still floundering, they were going to focus on the place where the next presumed victim went missing. There was nothing else for them to go on.

An empty San Francisco cab was coming the other way.

Too late?

Milton parked outside Brady’s cottage and hurried up the steps. The door was ajar, and he could hear raised voices from inside.

He made out two bellowed words: “Tell me!”

He pushed the door and quickly followed the corridor through into the living room. Brady was on one side of the room, next to the wide window with the view down to the bay. Trip was opposite him.

“I know she was in here!” Trip said, angrily stabbing a finger at the doctor.

“No, she wasn’t.”

“Don’t fucking lie to me!”

“Get out of my house!”

“I’m not going anywhere. What did you do to her?”

Milton was behind Trip, and it was Brady who noticed him first. “Get this meathead out of here,” he ordered. “You got ten seconds, or I’m calling the cops.”

“Go ahead and call them,” Trip thundered back at him. “Maybe they’ll finally ask you some questions.”

“I’ve told you—I had nothing to do with whatever it was that happened to your girlfriend. You know what? Maybe you want to stop harassing me and start thinking that maybe if you’d done something to stop her from going out hooking, then none of this would have happened.”

That really pushed Trip’s buttons; he surged forward, knocking a chair out of the way. Brady’s face registered stark fear as Trip raised his fist and drilled him in the mouth. The doctor stumbled backwards and, forced to compensate on his prosthetic leg, overbalanced and slammed against the low wooden coffee table, the impact snapping one table leg and tipping a fruit bowl onto the floor.

“Where is she?” Trip yelled.

Brady shuffled away from him on the seat of his pants. “I don’t know,” he stammered, blood dribbling out of the corner of his mouth.

“Trip!” Milton said. “Calm down.”

“Fuck that. What’s that got us so far? Nothing. We need to
do
something.”

“We are doing something.”

“Yeah? What are you doing? I don’t see anything happening. Doing things your way hasn’t got us anywhere, has it? It’s my turn now. I’m telling you, man, this piece of shit is going to tell me what happened to my girl.”

The boy reached down with his right hand, and Milton saw, just in time, the glint of silver that emerged from the darkness of his half-open jacket. He thrust his own arm out, his hand fastening around Trip’s wrist.

“No,” the boy said, struggling, and he was young and strong, but Milton knew all kinds of things that the boy could only dream about, and he slid his index and forefinger around to the inside of his arm, down until it was two fingers up from the crease of his wrist, and squeezed. The pressure point was above the median nerve, and Milton applied just enough torque to buckle the boy’s knees with the unexpected shock.

“Don’t,” Milton said, looking at him with sudden, narrow-eyed aggression.

Trip gritted his teeth through the blare of pain. “He did it.”

Milton kept the pressure on, impelling Trip back towards the hallway. “No, he didn’t.”

He looked at Milton in fuming, helpless entreaty. “Then who did?”

“I have a better idea,” he said.

Confusion broke through the pain on the boy’s face. “Who?”

“You’re going to go outside now,” Milton said in a firm voice that did not brook disobedience. “There’s a reporter out there, down the road, so you need to be calm, like nothing’s going on—we don’t want there to be a scene. Understand?”

“Who is it?”

“I’ll tell you on the way back. But you have to tell me you understand. Do you understand?”

Trip’s eyes were red-raw, scoured and agitated. He looked as if he had gone without sleep. “Fine.”

Milton gave him the keys to the car. “I’ll be right after you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Just go.”

Milton waited until he heard the squeak of the front door as Trip opened it.

He went across the room and offered a hand to Brady. The man took it, and Milton helped him back to his feet.

Brady went to the galley kitchen, picked up a tea cloth, and mopped the blood from his face. “If you think that’s the end of this, you’re out of your mind.”

“It is the end of it,” Milton said.

“You saw—he sucker-punched me!”

“I know, and he’s sorry he did that. So am I. I know you’ve got nothing to do with what happened to Madison.”

“Damn straight I don’t.”

“But I also know that it’s better for you to forget that just happened and move on.”

“You reckon? I don’t think so.”

“I do. A friend of mine works for St Francis. Legal department. You said you used to work down there, so once I found out that you were lying about what happened to your leg, I thought maybe it was worth getting her to have a look into your record, see if it stacked up like you said it did. And it turns out you have a pretty thick personnel file there.”

“How dare you—”

“Here’s what I know: you didn’t choose to leave, you were asked to go. Two sexual harassment cases. The first one was a nurse, right?”

Brady scowled at him, but said nothing.

“And the second one was a technician. She had to be persuaded from going to the police. You had to pay her a lot of money, didn’t you?” Milton was next to the picture of Brady in the desert; he picked it up and made a show of examining it. “It was an interesting read, Dr. Brady. You want me to go on?”

“Get out,” Brady said.

TRIP WAS WAITING IN THE CAR. Milton leant across towards him and used his right hand to reach inside his coat. His fingers touched the butt of a small gun. He pulled it out. It was a small .25 calibre semi-auto, a Saturday Night Special. Milton slipped the gun into his own pocket.

“You’re an idiot,” Milton said. “What were you thinking?”

He stared out of the window. “I had to do something,” he said with a surly inflection that made Milton think how young he really was. “Someone had to do something.”

“And so you were going to threaten him with a gun?”

“You got a better plan?”

“You would’ve gone to prison.”

“I don’t care.”

“Yes, you do. And so do I. And anyway, it would all have been for nothing; he didn’t do it.”

The boy frowned, confused. “How do you know that?”

“Brady is a talker. He likes to be the centre of attention. He has enemies in the neighbourhood, too, and maybe those enemies like other people to believe that he’s up to no good. Victor Leonard and Brady hate each other. If you ask me, Leonard put us onto Brady because he wants to see him in trouble. But he’s got nothing to do with this. If he’s guilty of anything, it’s being a fantasist and a braggart.”

“I don’t buy that,” he said, although Milton could see that he was getting through to him.

“So are you going to let me drive you back into town?”

“You said you had something.”

“I do. I have a very good lead.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think I know what happened to Madison.”

ARLEN CRAWFORD drove around the block three times until he was sure that he was not being followed. It was an abundance of caution, perhaps, but Crawford was an operator, experienced enough to know all the tricks. He knew staffers who had been tailed before, heading to meet a friendly journalist to leak something explosive, only to find that their meeting was photographed and reported, and before they knew it, they were the story and not the leak. There was no way that he was going to let that happen to him. He was too good. And the consequences didn’t bear thinking about.

Not for this.

The guys operated out of a warehouse in Potrero Hill. It was a low-slung building in the centre of a wide compound surrounded by a perimeter of ten-foot-high wire. Floodlights stood on pylons, and there were security cameras all over. The warehouse was owned by a company that distributed beer, and the compound housed three trucks. Empty kegs had been stacked against the wall of the warehouse, and next to that, four big motorcycles had been parked. An old Cadillac Eldorado had been slotted alongside the bikes.

Crawford drew up against the compound gate and sounded his horn. The single black eye of the security camera gleamed down at him, regarding him, and then there was the buzz of a motor and a rusty scrape as the gate slid aside. Crawford put the car into gear and edged inside. He parked next to the Caddy and went into the warehouse. The main room had been fitted with comfortable chairs, a large television and a sound system that was playing stoner rock. The place smelt powerfully of stale beer; it was strong enough that Crawford felt like gagging.

The four men were arranged around the room. Their leader was a tall, skinny man with prison tattoos visible on every inch of exposed skin. There was a swastika etched onto the nape of his neck, just below the line of his scalp. His name was Jack Kerrigan, but they all referred to him as Smokey. Crawford had been introduced to him by Scott Klein, their head of security. He had recommended him and his boys as a solution for problems that could only be solved with the radical measures that they could implement. Strong-arm jobs, pressure that needed exerting to shut people up or to get them to do things they didn’t naturally want to do. The others were cut from the same cloth as Kerrigan: tattoos, lank hair worn long, a lot of greasy denim.