Blood Of Angels (36 page)

'So who is this guy? What's the big deal with the pictures?'

'It's a Straw Men thing. Background.'

'How deep background?'

'The kind of thing you dismiss as weird shit.'

'Okay. In that case I don't want to hear about it.'

The entrance to Julia Gulicks' apartment was up a separate staircase around the side of the building. The door had been sealed with police tape and plastered all over with DO NOT ENTER signs.

'Monroe said they've tossed this already,' I said.

'The local cops went through after she was arrested, yes — but it was only a search for primary evidence. Since yesterday morning priorities have changed.'

I watched the street as Zandt ran a blade down through the tape, then pulled out a ring of slender metal implements. Within a couple of minutes the door was unlocked. We slipped inside and closed the door behind us.

It was not a big apartment. The exterior door gave directly into the largest space, a sitting room with a kitchen area at the far end. Bookcases lined one wall and a large wooden table evidently served for both eating and working. Two doors at the other end led to a bathroom and a bedroom. The last was extremely small, with space only for a narrow walkway around a queen-sized bed. You could barely open the doors of the closets to their full extent. Each room showed signs of organized search.

John and I had taken a first look around the entire place and were back in the sitting room in less than a minute.

'Thoughts?'

'Only that we're not going to learn anything here,' I said. 'The cops have been thorough. Plus according to the coroner the nameless victim lay somewhere for a while before she cut his flesh off. And where are you going to put a body in here?'

'The sitting room floor. Across the dining table or on her bed, with her lying right beside. You can't guess the circumstances under which lunatics lead their lives.'

'Assuming she really did it. Nina didn't think so.'

'Nina was wrong.'

'I'll look forward to seeing you explain that to her.' I walked over to the wall holding the bookcase and rapped it with my knuckle. It made a flat, hollow sound. 'Cheap partitions,' I said. 'I wouldn't want to kill someone in here with sound-proofing that basic. Not that I'm an expert.'

'She drugged Widmar. Probably the other guy too.'

'But she didn't kill Widmar here, did she? Which maybe makes my point. And unless someone's actually out cold there's no telling they won't suddenly cry out — and then you've got neighbours calling the cops and all hell breaking loose. So — assuming she did whack these guys — there's some other location we need to be more concerned with.'

'You know where that is?'

'No.'

'Right. So let's search this place.'

Zandt went into the bedroom. I worked quickly around the kitchen and sitting room. I looked in the drawers and in the cupboards and saw small quantities of decent-quality silverware and canned goods, all within use-by date. I looked on top of and underneath things and found dust and three elastic bands. I moved the furniture and felt inside and discovered nothing of note. I went through the bookcase, opening and shaking every book and upturning every small vase and decorative gewgaw. Four paperclips, seven magazine subscription cards used as bookmarks, the back of a broken brooch. The books were generic: paperback novels, unread success-in-business-and/or-dieting-and/or-life-in-general grimoires with near-identical balding shysters on the front, an idiot's guide to Windows and two expert books on a commercial accounting package. In a lower drawer I found a small wooden box stuffed full of photographs, showing people who looked just like everyone else, with or without Julia amongst them. I took this over to the couch and waited for Zandt to finish in the bathroom.

He came out empty-handed. 'Nothing obvious,' he admitted.

'Of course, we have no idea what the cops have already taken.'

'I haven't seen anything like an address book or journal.'

I shook my head. 'Nearest is this.'

We flicked through the pictures for a couple of minutes. The clearest proof you can get of the fact you are not somebody else is by looking at the images they value. They seemed generic to the point of fake. Red-eyed women with curly hair, shiny-faced guys holding up a beer, random old people looking unsure: everyone offering pro forma grins as if bracing themselves for injury. I lost interest quickly, caught in a bad reverie, wondering if there existed a single photograph of Nina and me together, if we had somehow failed to make even so small a mark in time.

'Look at this.'

I glanced at the picture John was holding. Unusually, there was no one in it. It showed a patch of woods, taken on an overcast day. 'And?'

'Doesn't that look like where the second body was found?'

'In that it's a wood, yeah, kind of. I don't think it's the same place, though. The trees look different.'

'But look at the tones. Either that picture was in sunlight for a long while, or it's older than most of the others in that box.'

He was right. I looked more closely, turned the photo over. 'Can we get a year off these numbers on the paper?'

'It's worth a try.' He stood up. 'We're done here. I'll make some calls on the way.'

'Where are we going?'

'To talk to her again.'

'I thought you said there was no point?'

'Maybe there is now. If this is a photograph of the crime scene it might demonstrate prior motive. If attacking me and her overall weirdness is the groundwork for an insanity defence, then this is going to hurt. It may be enough to rattle her.'

'I don't see this being our magic bullet,' I said. 'I'm still not convinced it's the same place.'

'Doesn't matter. It just has to be possible.' He turned, framed in the open doorway. 'You shoot accurately enough, you can use bullets made of air.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

'She's not here right now,' the cop behind the desk said. He was one of the policemen who'd helped pull Gulicks off Zandt. He looked very defensive.

'Where is she?'

'In the hospital.'

I stared at him. 'Why?'

'Look, guys, I really shouldn't be…'

John interrupted. 'Is this your fault?' He sounded for all the world like he had his own locker in the station and ran the morning roll call.

'Shit, no, sir,' the guy said, hurriedly, and was suddenly all about telling us everything he knew. 'Christ, I told… I did the rota. I checked on her at four and she was sleeping. She was fine.'

'So then what happened?'

The cop breathed out in a rush. 'Sometime after that, she tried to kill herself.'

'How?'

'Stood on her bed,' he said. 'Put her hands behind her back and let herself fall forward. Onto her head. They think she did it three times. Didn't make a sound at any point.'

'Great. Chalk one up for the insanity plea,' Zandt said. He sounded pissed.

'No way,' the cop said, firmly. 'You think you could do something like that? Twice? Three fucking times? I couldn't. She tried to die, man. She tried
hard.
That woman just doesn't want to be here any more.'

'What's her condition?'

'Same as yours or mine would be. Not fucking good.'

He turned to deal with a ringing phone and John and I walked away from the desk. I rubbed my face with my hands as if trying to keep my head on.

'So much for the new plan.
Now
what?'

For once Zandt looked at a loss. 'The hospital, I guess, though I'm now assuming that's where Monroe rushed off to first thing this morning. Which probably means they don't think she's going to be around for long. She may not even be able to talk.'

'She's got to. If she doesn't…' I took a deep breath, started again. 'We're losing this, John. This whole thing is out of control.'

My phone rang. I checked the screen hoping it might be Monroe, but it wasn't.

'It's Unger,' I told John, and answered it. 'What do you want, Carl?'

'Where are you?'

'In Thornton.'

'I'm near town. I'd like to talk to you.'

I was long past the point of wondering if Unger was some kind of Straw Man. If he was, so be it. Either John and I would take him, or he'd take us.

'Fine,' I said. 'I've got to go somewhere first. I'll be back in an hour. Meet me at a bar called the Mayflower. It's on the Owensville road.'

'You got it.'

'One thing,' I said. 'You had better be on the level, Carl, or we're going to kill you there and then. Count on it.'

I closed the phone to see both John and the desk cop staring at me.

I shrugged. 'Just want to make sure everyone knows where they stand.'

They had landed in Huntsville, Alabama, very early in the morning. Walked out of the airport and straight to the parking lot, where three cars were waiting with engines running. The rear door to the first of these opened as they approached, and a guy got out. Early twenties, confident-looking. Lee recognised him from somewhere. Either the first time he'd met Paul, or maybe he'd been one of the guys spread around the food court the previous morning. Lee wasn't sure.

Paul took a seat in the back and Lee sat next to him. The young guy sat opposite, next to another man, older and sleek with sharp blue eyes. This guy nodded at Paul.

'Hey, Lee,' he said. 'Glad you're on board.'

They pulled out of the lot like a motorcade and headed across country in a loose convoy. Not right after one another, of course. Three big cars driving fast and steady in a line could not have helped but attract attention. The drivers made sure there were generally a few cars in between each of them. Lee realised these people didn't seem overly cautious, however: if it had been him, he might have arranged to have different models or colours or something, or headed to wherever they were going from different directions. He got the sense these men basically just didn't give a shit.

They took 231 north into Tennessee and then cut east into craggy hills. Lee looked out of the window. He was tired from the multi-hop journey from LA, not to mention that all the stuff that had happened yesterday seemed to have left him kind of wiped out. Brad was dead, and Lee was sitting next to the guy who had killed him. And Karen, by extension or command. That was a little weird.

The two other guys in their car spent the initial part of the journey having short conversations on mobile phones. These seemed to be conducted in a kind of code. Paul made a single call in which he told someone simply that he was coming. Lee couldn't have worked out what any of them were talking about even if he wanted to, which he didn't, particularly. He was going where they were going. He was doing what they were doing.

It would all become clear, he assumed.

===OO=OOO=OO===

After two hours they took a turn off the highway and headed along a succession of smaller roads. These eventually led to a ramshackle house in the backwoods, the dirt yard in front of it dotted with long grasses and surrounded by rusted-up vehicles from decades past. The cars pulled to a halt side by side. Everybody got out.

There were five people in each of the two other cars. All were dressed in dark suits and coats but moved like soldiers. They, Paul, and the two other guys headed straight into the house — which looked as if someone enterprising but strictly loopy had lashed it together out of stuff they'd found in dumpsters. Lee wandered off into the bushes to take a leak, then walked back and leaned against the car and waited.

Fifteen minutes later everyone came out carrying stuff. Some had wooden boxes, which they carried like short stretchers. Others had heavy-looking shoulder bags. Nothing was labelled and nothing looked like it had arrived in this place by a regular channel. It was loaded into the trunks of the cars, and then everyone got back inside and three engines started at once.

The cars retraced the route back to the main road and were soon spread out over half a mile with cars in between, as before. They kept east for a while and then took a little jag north, into Kentucky. Not far over the state line a similar thing happened, the lead car turning off the main road again, with the vehicles following it into the countryside. This time the house was a lot fancier looking, a colonial pile with two-storey pillars and a quaint little pond in front, secure in the middle of manicured grounds. The cars pulled up and again everybody got out. Lee waited twenty-five minutes this time, watching a pair of young teenage girls on horses as they cantered around the meadow. Long ponytails bobbed up and down in the morning sun. The girls didn't look his way, not once. It was as if the cars weren't even there.

Everybody came out again, carrying bags. Not so many this time, but they were carried carefully. There was one further stop, which involved briefly halting in front of an abandoned gas station. Somebody had left two small, angular bags hidden in back. The difference after this stop was that the two guys from their car got into one of the others instead, leaving Lee and Paul alone in the back. The sun was in the middle of the sky by now.

Not long after that, they entered Virginia.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Paul stared into space like he was meditating or something. He hadn't moved in a half hour, not a muscle, and it was getting freaky. Lee had been well trained in the art of keeping quiet unless spoken to — the Hudeks entertained old-fashioned values — and didn't want to piss the guy off. Plus he remembered a party at the Metzger house one time where he'd met some screenwriter client of Brad's father. The guy was called Nic Golson — he kept dropping his own name, bizarrely, as if he thought that would help you remember it, which evidently it did, now Lee came to think of it. He'd told Lee his theory that when you took the Big Meetings, instead of running your mouth straight away, trying to impress people as friendly and accommodating, you came across better if you kept your mouth shut and sat there looking moody. Anybody can be friendly and accommodating. This way forced people to come to you, pushed you up the pecking order, made you someone to be reckoned with. Or so the guy claimed, though Lee noticed his pockets were stuffed full of food when he left.