Black Is Back (Quentin Black Mystery #4) (37 page)

They found a marked up Bible and tools to clean and sharpen a sword––but they couldn’t get any real information on the man who’d lived there. No photographs, of course, and no fingerprints, so Kiko wasn’t sure if any of what they had would help. The name on the apartment lease was an obvious fake, the tenant paid long distance via wire transfers, and no one had ever seen him, even though he’d rented the place for three years.

Kiko and Dex still didn’t know what he looked like, his age, anything about his associations or how often he’d slept there. The guy really was a ghost. He also must have entered his own apartment through the windows or only in the middle of the night, since not one neighbor had any memory of ever seeing him.

I listened to everything she said, and I got the feeling it was the same person, but there was no way to know, of course, not without going down there myself. I told Kiko to send me some of his things if she could, or else bring them up if they were heading back.

She told me she’d overnight the Bible and the sword-sharpening kit, then they had one more potential lead to check out while they were down there. She and Dex would fly up directly after––probably some time tomorrow morning.

Through that whole conversation, as well as the subsequent meetings with the police where I watched and listened from the background, a significant chunk of my attention remained on listening with some part of my mind for news on Black.

My uncle’s medical techs checked in with me first.

They told me they’d worked with the human surgeons to make sure they helped him rather than harmed him. They said the two of them had worked on Black directly, as well.

They also explained why Black had gone out the way he did, saying there was a “shut-down” reflex in seers when they sustained life-threatening injuries, and that Black’s kicked in fast––probably due to the severity of the hit.

Either way, it had been too fast for them to pull him out of it. They said that same reflex more or less induced a coma, which is why I couldn’t feel him. They seemed to think that side of things was perfectly normal, though, and nothing for me to worry about on its own.

They also told me that the biggest danger to him was his lungs and kidneys, which surprised me. Apparently the bullet hadn’t hit his heart at all, which was located in the middle of the chest on a seer, not on the left side, like a human. The kidneys were larger in seers though, and shaped differently. They also slid up under the ribs on both sides of his back. The bullet had apparently torn up part of his left kidney and collapsed his lung.

I didn’t understand a lot of what they told me.

They talked about how the organ walls were different on seers, due to the different placements of the major ones. They talked about how the tissue structure and texture were different too.

They’d had to erase a few of the more bizarre elements of those things from the surgeons’ memories and minds, but there would still be “questions,” according to the head tech among the seers. He let me know that some of my uncle’s people had read the human physicians in Black’s company as well, and were now familiar with the cover story Black had been using all these years. Apparently that same cover story had more or less remained intact, all the way back to when he worked directly for the United States military.

I could tell my uncle wasn’t thrilled about some of this.

“He’s damned lucky no one’s figured out he isn’t human, Miri,” he said to me, during our one and only phonecall after Black got out of the first round of surgeries. “Much less what that really means. Your mate certainly likes taking risks, doesn’t he?”

“No,” I said coldly. “He doesn’t, actually.”

Listening to the silence my words produced, I bit my lip, fighting back a harder anger. I didn’t want to fight with my uncle. Especially now, when I knew I owed him a lot. Maybe even Black’s life, at least in the short term.

“...Look.” I sighed. “This is my fault as much as his. I should have asked him. I should have known what to do in a situation like this. I know Black. He must have something in place... some number to call. People who look out for him. Something.”

“Well, now you have me,” Uncle Charles said, matter-of-fact. “I just hope he hasn’t killed both of you, Miriam, fooling around with this human nonsense.”

But I couldn’t listen to any more.

“I have to go, Uncle Charles.”

“Miriam––”

“I really have to go.”

“Please, Miri. I’m sorry––”

“Thank you. Thank you for this...” I trailed, searching for more to say. The words I used felt inadequate, but I couldn’t think of any others. I couldn’t make myself want to talk to him any longer either, at least not right then.

After a too-long pause, I just clicked the button on the screen to hang up.

I walked back to the small administrative office the police staked out for me as a work space a few seconds later. After standing in the hall while I tried to control my head, I noticed the two uniform cops there watching me, and forced myself to go back inside. I jerked open the door and made my way back to the desk, sitting at the high-backed office chair they’d found for me and un-muting the monitor on the tablet I’d propped up on the desk.

Mozar had taken over the meetings.

I still hadn’t seen Hawking, but I’d confirmed with Nick and Angel that he was running the SWAT team down at the lake. He’d also been running down a different set of leads for the past few days, mostly ex-special forces and potential current players in the gun for hire game. Hawking had done something similar in Los Angeles already, since he had contacts from his military days down there and in Washington. Since he and Mozar arrived in San Francisco, he’d been doing the same thing up here.

Oh, and at the top of that list of suspects?

Quentin Rayne Black, licensed Private Investigator.

Apparently, even before that gruesome dragon sculpture got left at Stow Lake, Black was fast becoming Mozar’s favorite suspect.

That’s what all the weird looks at the lake had been about, when Nick told them the animal art resembled one of Black’s tattoos. Even after Black got shot, Nick told me Mozar floated the idea that Black might be working with a partner and things went south––until he found out from the nursing staff that me and Black were married.

Apparently that information conflicted enough with their F.B.I. profile that he’d more or less crossed Black off the list all over again.

Nick still hadn’t asked me about the marriage thing.

In fact, telling me about Mozar was the only time he’d even mentioned it.

But everything Nick told me about Mozar explained the back and forth see-sawing from the rest of the cops and Mozar himself, and all the weird looks I’d gotten in both directions.

It still didn’t fully explain Hawking to me, however.

When the cops in the debriefing room seemed to be talking in circles again, I found myself going back through the files of known victims, only half-listening as I tried to understand why the Templar had fixated on me and Black. Since I sat alone at that desk in the hospital, in a quiet, unused administrator’s office, I just pulled the files out of the box next to me and began going through them. I kept the tablet’s microphone muted as I scanned pages, so I could listen to them talk without disrupting them while I worked.

Before me and Black, the Templar’s victim pattern had been more random, and yet weirdly more consistent in terms of ideology.

There had been thirteen victims in Los Angeles... thirteen they knew about, anyway. I read through the list again, even though I was familiar with most of them, even just from the news.
 

The first had been a Hollywood mogul type, who’d recently got off on charges of beating his wife. The man was a big name, and there’d been some speculation in the media about jury tampering and paying off witnesses in his case, so that one got a ton of press, even before they realized it would end up being the first in a pattern.

The second was another celebrity-type criminal: a well-known photographer who had an outstanding case still pending at the time of his death, accusing him of raping his teenaged stepdaughter. He’d also been accused of child pornography.

The next two victims had been wealthy defense contractors, living in Malibu. The cops didn’t have anything sex- or crime-related on either of them, but the police figured the Templar didn’t like what they did for a living.

The fifth victim was an investment banker, living in Rancho Palos Verdes. The sixth owned a series of pornographic film studios and had been accused of trafficking. The seventh was a Hollywood agent who also had rumors dogging him about drugs and liberal use of casting-couch type manipulations with young girls. The eighth was a wealthy media mogul who donated billions of dollars to various radical political causes.

The ninth and tenth worked for the Los Angeles’ Mayor’s office. The eleventh was another defense contractor. The twelfth and thirteenth were a husband and wife team of corporate lawyers who lived in a mansion in Beverley Hills.

I went through all of them, one by one, but I couldn’t find any type of real pattern there.

None other than the ideological one Mozar’s people already noted.

The police down there received three different letters from the Templar. All three made mention of “cleansing” and “Light” and implied the Templar saw his work as part of a greater mission. He talked about his victims as “vampires,” “parasites,” “animals,” “snakes.” In one of the letters, he said people like them had ruled the world long enough.

All three letters also contained warnings that he would continue “his work” until God commanded him otherwise, or the people rose up to help him “carry the Light.”

Re-reading each of the letters three times, eventually I had to stop.

None of it brought me any closer to knowing who the guy was, or how to catch him.

Despite my going through the victim and witness files from Los Angeles, I still caught most of the discussion by the cops at the precinct. A handful of the people in that room––including Nick’s Captain, a tall, black, ex-college football star and avid weightlifter with the incongruous name of Littlewhite––now argued that the killer in San Francisco probably wasn’t even the same person they’d called the Templar Killer in Los Angeles.

A lot of them now thought it was probably two different people.

Black being hit by a sniper rifle differed too much in method from the rest of the kills, they argued, and moreover, the Templar killer went after people for ideological reasons and this killer seemed to have some personal connection to me and Black.

I saw and heard Littlewhite arguing with the others that the San Francisco killer probably just copied the thing with the sword for the press attention.

That possibility had crossed my mind, too.

It didn’t feel right though, and I told Nick as much when he picked up the phone to speak to me privately on that very topic, and to get my take on the discussion more generally.

“You still think he’s our guy?” he said about Hawking.

I exhaled, realizing of course Nick would think I thought that, given what I yelled at Mozar in the hospital waiting area. But I wasn’t entirely certain I
did
think Hawking was the Templar. I just knew I didn’t trust him and Mozar anymore, and not only because they’d been investigating Black behind our backs.

“Honestly?” I said. “I don’t know. But the Templar
feels
sort of like him... not exactly like him, but close enough to make me wonder.” Feeling Nick’s puzzlement, I added, “People go into different mental states, Nick... even whole different personalities... depending on what they’re doing. Even normal people do this to an extent. The lawyer isn’t as much of a lawyer when she’s at home being a mother to a toddler. The son isn’t as much of a son when he’s playing father to his own child, or out drinking beer and looking at strippers with his friends. The married person might be totally different while having an affair... and so on. But some people have more profound and disconnected flips from their different roles and partial personalities...”

“So you might not recognize this guy. When he’s not ‘in character,’ you mean... is that it?” Nick said. “He might feel like someone else?”

I sighed, as frustrated as Nick sounded.

“Yes,” I said, anger leeching into my voice. “I might need to keep a line on him––psychically, I mean––until he flips again.”

“You’re watching him now? Hawking?”

My jaw hardened to granite. “Yes,” I said.