Blind Spot (33 page)

“Stop calling me that.” He got up off the edge of her bed and stood straight and stiff.

“Fine.” She went over to the windows and looked outside while sipping.
My late husband,
she thought.
I have to start using that phrase now. He deserved it. Noah deserved it. We had our reasons. They were good reasons.

“God doesn’t like liars,” hissed the man behind her.

She wanted to tell him to get the hell out, but she resisted. “Yeah, well…”

“No man who practices deceit shall dwell in my house; no man who utters lies shall continue in my presence.”

“Give it a rest. Beating the drum for the death penalty, the holy-mission crap—that’s just an excuse. You like killing assholes. Blowing off steam. What a hypocrite you are, Padre.” She emptied her drink in one last gulp and turned to face him. She suddenly noticed how hardened his face had become. Attempting to soften her words, she threw herself in his camp. “But, then, we’re all hypocrites, aren’t we?”

“The words of their mouths are mischief and deceit; they have ceased to act wisely and do good. They plot mischief while on their beds; they are set on a way that is not good; they do not reject evil.”

She didn’t know what he was saying, and it frightened her. He took a step in her direction. Her eyes darted from his face to his leather-clad hands and back to his face. “You’d better leave now.”

He took another step in her direction. “Why?”

She backed away from him. “Cindy’s going to be showing up any minute.”

Another step. “Good. She’s in for a big surprise. Big surprise for the big liar. The big
lover.
”

Her back bumped the wall. “I’ll scream.”

He kept coming. “And alert the police? Is that what you want? Maybe they’ll let you and your lesbian share a cell.”

She hurled the glass at him. He dodged, and the tumbler hit the floor, shattering. He stepped up to her, stood inches from her. She could see the tears streaming down his face, and that terrified her more than anything else he’d done or said. “Why are you crying? Stop crying.” She raised both her palms to try to keep him away. Fend him off.

He brushed her hands away with a sweep of his arm. “Stop talking.” His right hand shot up, and the vise clamped around her throat. “I don’t want to hear you talk.”

Weeping, he dragged her to the center of the room, away from the windows.

Thirty-five

When Garcia and Bernadette couldn’t rouse Quaid by ringing his apartment from the lobby, they used the phone to call the caretaker.

“What?” rasped a male voice.

Bernadette noted the name over the buzzer: “Mr. Lyle. We’re with the FBI. We need to get into a tenant’s place.”

Lyle: “Lemme see some identification.”

She took out her ID wallet and held it up to the surveillance camera. Garcia followed suit. “Okay?” she asked into the phone.

“I can’t see nothin’ with this damn equipment,” Lyle said. “Come back when it’s light out.”

Bernadette: “We need to get in now.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

Bernadette: “Sir. You could be charged with—”

Before hearing what he could be charged with, Lyle interrupted: “Meet me topside.” He hung up and buzzed them in.

Bernadette’s nose wrinkled as she and Garcia hiked up the stairs to the third floor. The place smelled musty and perfumed at the same time. The inside of an old lady’s purse. The stink fit the building’s frumpy look. The stucco exterior of the cube was painted a dated aquamarine, as were the hallway walls and ceilings and radiators.

Lyle was waiting for them, standing barefoot in the middle of the corridor outside his apartment. His bathrobe barely fit around his barrel middle. His gray hair hung in two braids, a red bandana was wrapped around his forehead, and a gold stud dotted his left earlobe. He looked like a fat Willie Nelson. At his side, his fist was wrapped around a baseball bat. The tip was down, but the guy looked prepared to bring it up quick. The two agents stopped short of swinging distance and held up their wallets again. Lyle studied their badges and photos while scratching his stubbly face with his free hand. “Good enough,” he declared. He relaxed his grip and rested the business end of the bat on top of his foot. “So whose tits are caught in Uncle Sam’s wringer?”

Garcia: “We need to check out Damian Quaid.”

“Why?” Lyle asked.

Garcia: “Can’t say.”

The caretaker’s eyes widened. “Is it bad enough that I should be throwing him out on the street come morning?”

Garcia: “Can’t comment on that.”

The guy said to no one in particular: “I knew that geek was up to no good.”

Bernadette: “Sir, we’d like to get in.”

Lyle tucked a stray strand of hair behind his ear. “I suppose I should be asking you for a search warrant or some such thing. Being the feds, I’m sure you’ve got all your ducks in a row on that rigmarole.”

The agents didn’t say anything.

“Not that I’m pals with that individual downstairs. Wouldn’t mind getting rid of him and putting something normal in there.”

Garcia lifted his wrist and checked his watch.

Lyle: “You guys can’t tell me what he did, huh?”

Bernadette shook her head.

“Don’t move,” said the caretaker. He padded into his apartment, closing the door behind him. A minute later, he opened the door and handed Bernadette a key. “Basement efficiency, across the hall from the laundry room.”

“Anyone else living down there?” she asked.

Lyle shook his head. “Just the hermit and the Maytags. His door’s the one with the cross on it. I caught him slapping one of them things on the laundry-room door and I told him to take it down. My washing machines are nondenominational.”

Garcia: “Don’t suppose you know if he’s home.”

The guy shrugged. “Saw him take off earlier. Didn’t notice him come back in, but who knows? Like I said, me and the geek ain’t exactly tight.”

Bernadette: “Could be a while. What should we do with the key when we’re through?”

The caretaker covered his mouth and yawned. “Lock up. Slide the thing under my door.”

“By the way—keep this visit of ours under wraps,” said Garcia. “It’s a matter of…national security.”

“Sure it is,” Lyle said dryly. With his thumb and index finger, he made the zipper sign across his lips. “Mum’s the word.”

Lyle shut the door. The agents heard him dead-bolt it and slide the security chain into place.

Bernadette looked at her boss as the two agents went down the stairs. “I think people are getting jaded. Bored with that particular excuse.”

“National security?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Overused.”

“Come up with another one if you want.”

Their feet touched down in the basement hallway. Bernadette drew her weapon and said in a low voice: “I’m starting to favor that pen slogan of yours.”

“Because we’re the fucking FBI.” Garcia unsnapped his holster and took out his Glock. They headed down the corridor, sticking close to the wall. Their way was dimly lit by a lone lightbulb dangling from a broken ceiling fixture in the middle of the hallway. The air was warm and moist and reeked of fabric softener. The old lady’s purse had morphed into an old lady’s clothes basket. They got to the laundry room. Light peeked out from the bottom of the closed door. Bernadette squatted with her back against the wall on one side of the door, and Garcia did the same on the other side. They listened, heard nothing. Garcia nodded. She pivoted around, put her gloved hand on the knob, and turned. Pushed the door open. The brightly lit room was filled with machines, but empty of people. She gently pulled the door shut.

They moved across the hall and took their places, one on each side of the crucifix door. They saw only a dark band along the threshold. Hunkered down, Bernadette put her ear to the wood but heard no movement on the other side of the door. She knocked twice and held her breath. Silence. She slipped the key in the hole and turned. The click of the dead bolt seemed loud enough to alert the entire building. The agents froze, waiting for a reaction from someone inside the apartment. When no one came to the door, she wrapped her hand around the knob, gently turned, and pushed the door open.

The apartment was a black, lifeless cave—with the exception of one light, one bit of movement coming from a computer monitor tucked into a corner. Three words repeatedly crawled across. Damian Quaid’s screen saver:
Life for life.

While Garcia navigated across the floor by the glow of the hallway light, Bernadette felt the wall alongside the door. She touched a light switch and flipped it up.

Behind her, Garcia gasped. “Take a look at his wallpaper.”

Thirty-six

Bernadette went to Garcia’s side and stood at his shoulder, taking in the newspaper and magazine clippings. She put away her weapon. “Why did I expect to see something like this?”

Garcia holstered his gun. “Let’s do some speed-reading.”

She stepped to one end of the wall, and he went to the other. The two stretched and bent and shuffled their feet, moving toward the middle while they read. “People who paper their walls like this tend to end up on those cable-TV crime shows,” she said.

“What?”

“Never mind. Just repeating something a neighbor said the other day.”

After several minutes, Garcia stood straight and stepped back. “As far as I can tell, these charming felonies have nothing to do with our man—or with each other, for that matter. They’re all unrelated.”

She got on her hands and knees to read a clip that brushed the floor. “They’re all horrible crimes.”

“Beyond that, I don’t see any common denominators. They aren’t even local. They’re from all over the place.”

Bernadette got to her feet and dusted off her knees. She stepped back to take in the whole thing again. A couple of recent high-profile murders were excluded from Quaid’s wallpaper job. Absent were the kidnapping and butchering of a pregnant woman in Texas by her ex-husband, the rape-murder of a teenage girl in Florida by a neighbor, and the California killing of twin toddlers at the hands of their mother. Stories from other states were missing as well. Why collect news from some locales and not from others? What trait did the states on the wall share? It suddenly occurred to her. She pointed to individual clippings in the collage. “Minnesota and Wisconsin. That one tacked way up there, near the ceiling, is from Iowa. The two below it are from Michigan. Alaska. One out of Hawaii. Michigan again. More out of Wisconsin. The states in his collection have one big thing in common.”

“What?”

Bernadette: “They don’t have the death penalty. Nearly every state
without
capital punishment is represented.”

“I don’t see Vermont. And what about—”

She interrupted him: “The missing ones probably haven’t had a juicy murder recently.”

Garcia lifted up the corner of a Detroit triple murder to read what was behind it. “You’re right. Here’s an abduction and murder out of Rhode Island.” He let go of the scrap. “Think he’s got plans to branch out to these other states?”

“Not if we have something to say about it.”