Warrior in the Shadows (8 page)

2.2

Lieutenant Oberstar held out one big hand to Charley, who perched uncomfortably on a too-small chair beside Bobby Lee's desk.

"Simon Oberstar," the lieutenant said. "I raised your friend here from a pup. You probably knew he was a son of a bitch, but he's my son of a bitch and that's the way I like it. You guys were Army together, Airborne, right?"

"That's right," Charley said.

"I did my bit a long time ago," Oberstar said. "Don't miss it one bit. You're too young for the Southeast Asia tour, eh?"

"Yeah, not me," Charley said. "You?"

"Yeah," Oberstar said.

"History," Charley said.

"There it is," Oberstar said, nodding. "So tell me what Australian Aborigines have to do with Madison Simmons?"

"Charley worked out an angle on the crime scene and that leads us to a connection with Australia," Bobby Lee said. "Simmons helped broker a complex series of loans and real estate acquisitions in Minnesota for some Australian companies. He's been known to have frequent visitors from the Australian Economic Development Council and the Australian embassy. I've got people running those leads down. On the surface there's nothing shady about those deals; they were straight-up loans with matching funds from the interested parties for real estate here."

"The Australians're buying us up now?" Charley said in surprise. "Not just the Japanese?"

"They've got lots of interest in what we've got," Bobby Lee said. "Lumber, minerals, high tech, deep-water port up there on Lake Superior… even with the shitty exchange rate we got stuff they want. Some of their big buck operators can play in any major league they want and some of them want Minnesota property."

Oberstar nodded sagely. "Lakeshore cabins, resorts, that sort of thing?"

"There's some of that," Bobby Lee said. "Some speculation on resort properties on the North Shore, but most of it's in the Twin Cities. My guy is getting a breakdown of specifics, but apparently they own some big pieces of downtown."

"Get me that list, Bobby," Oberstar said. "I know some old-timers in the property companies here, I get them on the phone I can save us some time." He paused and rubbed his full belly speculatively. "What's your gut telling you?"

"We're on to something here," Bobby Lee said. "We'll run this Australian thing down, it's the best thing we've got so far, thanks to Charley."

Oberstar arched backward, then slowly forward. "My back is killing me." He nodded to Charley and said, "All right. Keep me in the loop." He walked back to his office and shut the door behind him.

"That's one mean old dog," Charley observed.

"He's a good man," Bobby Lee said. "He's not off the mark when he said he taught me all I know when I was in the bag and on the street. He's had it rough the last couple of years. His wife died, and he's got a couple of kids just into college."

"So what now?"

"Not much. You shoot that homicide Myers is working on the North Side?"

"Got it on the run coming up here. That Myers is a funny son of a bitch."

"I rode with him for a while when I was in Third Precinct," Bobby Lee said. "He's crazy."

"I took good care of him."

"I got nothing else for you, buddy. You want to come by the house tonight for a couple of beers, see Max and Nicky?"

"Hell yeah," Charley said. "Six, six-thirty?"

"I'll tell Max. Don't be bringing Nicky any more presents. You're spoiling that kid and he'll get to be hard to handle."

"You don't need to be a hard-ass with that kid. He's good all through."

"Easy for you to say, you get to hand him back at the end of the night."

Charley laughed. "There is that. I'll see you later."

Charley let himself out of the Major Investigations Unit, holding the keypad secured door open for a couple of uniforms he knew, then went out into the street. His beat-up Camry station wagon was parked in the center median of the street, lined up with the squad cars arrayed for the next shift change. He slid into his car, took the sign that said OFFICIAL POLICE BUSINESS and slid it under the seat, then drove down Hennepin to Calhoun and around to Upton and the Linden Hills neighborhood. He parked his car on Forty-third Street and went in the back way to his apartment. He went up the stairs and let himself into his apartment, setting the camera bag down beside the door. He stood there for a few minutes, looking at the wall where the photograph of the Anurra drawing was tacked up. He'd moved some of his photographs to make room, some of the old black-and-whites he'd taken in his early years as a photographer, the time when he was so enamored of Cartier-Bresson's theory of the decisive moment.

The decisive moment.

Charley sat slowly down in his battered armchair, took a deep breath and let himself relax, watched the room focus become soft with the only thing in sharp focus the photograph of the drawing. There was deliberation in the making of that image, each line the width of a fingertip, time taken in the making and in the deliberate pressing and stroking with that same fingertip. Not drawn from a copy, drawn from memory, a re-creation of an image seared into the memory with life. It was an image imbued with something fierce and magical in its making.

The making of it had been a decisive moment for the maker. Kativa had said it best, "The making of the image, not the image itself, that's the important thing."

Charley understood at the visceral level the decisive moment of making an image. Cartier-Bresson's theory appealed to the warrior that Charley kept concealed inside; the theory of being in tune with your equipment, in tune with your vision of the world, so that you recognized a moment in the moment before it came to be and you were there with the picture already framed as it took place in front of you. That was the shooter's Zen heaven.

Both the world of the gun and the world of the camera called for the same discipline, which was one of the many things about photography that appealed to Charley. Frame the target in your vision, take aim, press the trigger, follow through— even the mechanics were the same. So was the need to keep distance between the shooter and the other, a vital requirement to keep one's sanity in the face of the consequences of action.

Moving his photos and putting up the image of Anurra, that was a decisive moment. Charley stroked his chin, took out a cigarette and lit it up, and stared at the photograph. For no good reason he took out his Glock .45 from the drawer, unloaded it, checked the chamber, then reloaded it and replaced it in his drawer, leaving it uncovered and handy.

Why? He wasn't going after this guy. That wasn't his job anymore, to go after the bad guy, to hunt down evil men. He'd had enough of that, that's what drove him to quit the Special Activities Staff. He'd quit when he could no longer tell the difference between the good men and the evil men. Were bureaucrats evil? Men who sent other men out to do dark things in the name of national security? Men who justified everything from the invasion of privacy to the casual murder of innocents as expedient in the face of a threat to national security? Charley didn't know anymore. What had frightened him was when he found that he didn't care anymore. He was just going through the motions, and that made him dangerous by default, and he could no longer bear being responsible for the young and idealistic operators working for him. He left that part of his life behind and went from being the actor to being the man removed, the man behind the lens, the observer rather than the operator, and until now, that suited him.

But he recognized something about this killer he was documenting; there was something about him that didn't ring criminal, it rang professional, and in the way one professional recognizes another, Charley knew there was someone highly trained doing this for a specific reason or reasons. And if he could just find out what those reasons were, he'd find this man.

So what kind of man would kill someone in this fashion and then draw a picture like this? This was no gangland hit— despite the public's belief in efficient hit men, they were actually few and far between. An organized crime hit would be fast and hard and efficient. They wouldn't have spent as much time on the scene as this.

Charley was reminded of an operation he'd been told about by one of the old-timers in the Special Activities Staff, a deceptive good old boy who'd been around since the seventies. In Beirut, the CIA Chief of Station had been kidnapped and tortured to death by a Hezbollah action cell. Despite the best efforts of the Outfit's operators, they hadn't been able to get William Buckley back. But when the Soviets had one of their own taken, they snatched the son of a Hezbollah higher up. They sent the Hezbollah leader his son's testicles. The Soviet hostage was released.

There was something to speaking in the language people understood.

And there was something to this. If this was to be a message, who was it to? Not the police, not the investigators… someone else who would hear about it, or see it, find out about it in some way. It was front page news and of course lurid descriptions of the crime scene would leak out to reporters.

So who would be getting the message?

Charley picked up his phone and called Bobby Lee.

Bobby Lee answered, "Martaine."

"Bobby, it's me. Did you consider that maybe this was meant to send a message to somebody working with Simmons? I just thought of that. You may want to look at it that way."

"You mean a coworker?"

"Or somebody close to him."

"That's a hell of a message."

"Yeah it is. Look at the people working the Australia deals. I got a feeling there's something to that."

"There's another interesting little twist," Bobby Lee said. "You remember those videotapes, the ones he had so many of?"

"Sure. Porno, right?"

"Of the expensive custom kind. Simmons is in some of them with very young girls."

Charley tapped his nail against the phone he held to his ear and was silent for a moment. "That's a whole other angle," he said. "Maybe the killer is sending a message about the porno. Worth running that down, too."

"You think pretty good for a photographer."

Charley laughed. "You want me to bring anything later?"

"No. Good ideas, buddy. I'll get onto it. See you later."

Charley replaced the phone in the cradle and slid down in his chair so that his head was fully supported.

So Anurra, he thought. Where are you now?

2.3

Alfie and Susan sat in the crowded outside patio of a restaurant that specialized in vegetarian cuisine in the heart of the Lyn-Lake District, one of the most alternative and counterculture neighborhoods in the Twin Cities. He was dressed in his habitual black T-shirt, black sweatshirt, black Levi's, and heavy Doc Marten boots, his black biker jacket draped over the back of his chair. He was catching glances from other patrons, some of whom were almost as extravagantly pierced, for his heavily muscled arms— incongruous in a man of otherwise medium build— the small bone in his nose, as well as the multiple piercings in his ear.

"You don't sleep well," Susan said. She sipped her coffee and looked round at the other tables, where people looked back at her and Alfie with curiosity. "You toss and turn and twitch just like a dreaming dog."

"It's the weight of my past, old dear. Living it over."

Susan paused as though to say something, then said, "Your scars are incredible."

"Can't see them, though, can you?" Alfie said.

"I can see the line of some of them under the sweatshirt around your neck," Susan said. "They're amazing."

"Part of my people's initiation," Alfie said. "We're not allowed to talk to women about it."

"Really? Why?"

Alfie leaned back in his chair, cupped his coffee mug in both hands, and said, "There's a place called Jowalbinna, in tropical North Queensland. That's where I'm from. It's the spiritual center, a holy place, for the Ang-Gnarra tribal group. The people who lived there, well, they're mostly dead. Killed by white settlers or disease or just forced out. But Jowalbinna has always been a holy place, for tens of thousands of years. There's lots of caves there, the sandstone in the hills has fallen and made caves all about. One cave in particular was a place of initiation for the young boys of the tribe.

"For us Aboriginals, there's different kinds of magic. Initiation is about learning from one kind of magic. There's men's magic and then there's women's magic. You can never mix the two because it will kill you. If you're a woman, you're not equipped to deal with men's magic, any more than a man is equipped to deal with women's magic.

"In the initiation cave, the boys crawled through this dark, narrow, twisting cave from one end to the other. And one time, a long time ago, a woman had her son going through initiation. She was afraid for him, so she hid herself near the site to see how he was doing. And one of the shaman, the senior magic man in charge of the ritual, he saw her."

"What happened to her?" Susan said, leaning forward in her seat.

"They killed her, mate," Alfie said. He sipped from his coffee. "That's what happens to people who stick their noses where they don't belong. Stoned her to death, then buried her upside down so that her spirit would never be able to find its way home again. In that initiation cave, there's a drawing of that on the wall. And they tell that story as a warning to all the young boys after they've gone through the first stage of initiation magic. That's when they get circumcised."

He held up one hand as though it held a knife and made a cutting motion.

"I guess that means I shouldn't ask you about those things," Susan said. She flushed a little on her neck. "It's just so interesting, I could listen to you all day."

"Ah, I'm just bending your ear, Suzie gal." He winked at a couple sitting at an adjoining table. "Everybody knows we Aussies like a tall tale, eh?"

The couple laughed and the woman said, nodding at the remains of Alfie's vegetarian omelet, "I notice you don't eat meat. Is that the custom among Aborigines?"

"Not at all, mate," Alfie said. He paused for effect, then said, "I just eat the meat of my enemies."

All of them, the couple, Alfie, and Susan, laughed at that. Alfie turned, grinning, and began to pick at his omelet once again.

"I have to go to work soon," Susan said. "Here's a spare key," she said, handing him a single key tied with a red ribbon.

"Keys to the kingdom," Alfie said. "Can't thank you enough for putting up with me. Hotel living gets stale."

"My pleasure," Susan purred. "You can stay as long as you want. My roommate is out of town for the next month in Colorado on an exchange program."

"Many thanks, mate."

"What are you going to do today?"

"Oh, a little of this, a little of that, a little shopping, have a bit of a look around."

"I won't be back till late tonight."

"I'll wait up," Alfie said, smiling.

"Oh, whatever," Susan said. She was pleased; to hide it, she brushed at her hair with a free hand.

Alfie pulled a wad of bills from his pocket and left a twenty on the table, then they got on his motorcycle and he roared through the side streets to Hennepin and dropped Susan off in front of Calhoun Square.

He waved her good-bye and yelled, "See ya!" as he pulled away into traffic. He only rode a short distance, to Lake Calhoun, where he pulled into a parking lot, dismounted, and went to sit on a bench looking out on the water. He took out a cigarette and lit it with a plastic lighter, then blew the smoke with great contentment into the cool breeze filtering in from the water. He liked Susan, but he wouldn't be staying here much longer. One more job to do and then he had to move on.

He hoped he wouldn't have to kill her.