Concrete Underground (2010) (16 page)

"What? I didn't even know they dated."

"Dated? They were
engaged
," she squealed. "How did you not know that?"

I shrugged. "So what happened?"

"He was a beast to her. I'm not even sure why he proposed to her in the first place, other than just to torment her. The way I understand it is they had a fling, she got clingy, and he retaliated by stringing her along and slowly breaking her spirit. The amazing thing was that she was willing to put up with his abuse and his cheating, and in the end he still had to be the one to call it off. I was there when it happened. We were at a party, and someone asked if they had set a date for the wedding yet. He just shook his head and said, 'No, I don't think that's happening any more. Marriage just isn't my style.' Lily was standing right next to him; her jaw dropped."

"Fuck that's harsh," I marveled, shaking my head.

Once we got upstairs, we saw that the front door was hanging open with the wood around the knob splintered as if it had been kicked in.

We went inside and saw that the condo had literally been torn apart from top to bottom, the furniture overturned and disassembled, shelves emptied, and even the couch cushions had been hollowed out.

We found more of the same as we made our way through the rest of the rooms. Every kitchen cabinet and drawer had been tossed, every closet emptied. In the bathroom, they had emptied out all the bottles of shampoo, lotion, and all those millions of other unfathomable bottles women have. Inside her bedroom, the mattress had been ripped open and turned inside out. They even tore apart the stitching in her clothes to make sure nothing had been hidden inside the lining.

"Jesus, what happened to this place?" Columbine asked.

"Someone was in here looking for something," I replied.

"It must have been something tiny, like a needle in a haystack. Look," she said, holding up a Zippo lighter that had been siting beside an incense holder. It was taken apart, as if something might have been hidden inside.

"I doubt we'll find any clues as to where she's gone here," I grumbled. "But we might as well give it a shot. You check up here, I'll go look around in the back."

"What, you mean snoop around?" Columbine asked, and I remembered that this must be harder for her since Lily was her friend.

"Look, she could be in danger. We can't pass up any clues that would help us track her down before something bad happens." As soon as I said that, my mind involuntarily flashed to the image of Saint Anthony drenched in blood.

We split up, and I started giving Lily's bedroom a cursory search but wasn't really sure what I was looking for. The most interesting thing I found was her lingerie drawer, which had been yanked out of the dresser and dumped upside-down on the floor. I had to satisfy my male curiosity; she actually had some pretty hot stuff. I picked up a red lace corset, and underneath I found a framed photo of Max and a vibrator. I picked up the latter and opened the battery compartment, but there was no Ariadne Key in there.

"Eww, way too pervo," I heard Columbine say behind me.

I stood up, chuckling. "I'm just trying to be thorough."

She rolled her eyes distastefully. "Well if you're done, I've got something to show you that might actually be important."

She led me out the the bathroom and pointed out a puddle of shampoo on the floor. Someone had stepped in it, leaving a man's footprint with a Burberry imprint stamped from the sole of the shoe.

"Well that's definitely not Lily's," I said, holding my own foot up to the print to compare. "It's a little smaller than mine, so I'd guess a size nine or nine-and-a-half."

We were interrupted by the sound of the front door opening. We ran back out to the living room and found a middle aged man in a cheap suit standing just inside the doorway.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded.

"Fuck you, what are you doing here?" I shot back.

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a police badge. "Detective Isaac Axelrod."

"Oops," Columbine mumbled behind me.

I took Axelrod by the arm and led him outside to the hallway. "Look, we were looking for our friend who lives here," I explained. She didn't show up to work, and she's not answering her phone. The door was busted in when we got here, so we came inside and found all this."

Axelrod nodded, but I got the distinct impression he hadn't listened to a word I said. "You don't know anything about any disturbance here last night, do you?"

I shook my head. "What kind of disturbance?"

"Not too sure. We got some reports from neighbors about some screams, excited voices, that kind of thing. Were you here last night?"

"No," I said.

Axelrod took down my contact information and told us we'd better clear out. I ran back inside to tell Columbine we were going. On my way out I made a detour to the restroom, intending to take a picture of the footprint with my phone. However, when I got there the shampoo puddle had been smeared, erasing the print.

---

As we got back into the Porsche, Lily's phone started ringing again. I looked down at the caller ID and saw it was the same number that tried to call earlier when I first found it.

I tossed the phone to Columbine. "Answer it."

She put it on speaker. "Hello?"

"Is Lily there?" a gruff male voice asked.

She looked at me questioningly. I toyed with the idea of having her impersonate Lily, but Lily had a very distinctive voice, high-pitched and shrill, that would be nearly impossible to duplicate. So instead, I shook my head.

"No, she's indisposed at the moment, but can I take a message?" Columbine chirped cheerfully while flashing me a
what-the-hell
look.

"Just tell her to call me back when she gets a chance," the man replied. "Jeff from the art department. Give her this number that I called from." Then he abruptly hung up.

Columbine handed me back the phone. "What was that about?"

"It's Lily's," I explained. "I found it in her office this morning. Look through her recent calls and see if anything jumps out at you."

"This seems like an invasion of privacy," she protested weakly, but scrolled through the numbers anyways. I watched her from the corner of my eye and noticed her stop scrolling abruptly, a flash of surprise in her eyes. It was gone in an instant, though, and she said, "I don't see anything really; they all look just like work related calls. She didn't exactly have a thriving social life."

I shrugged. "Was worth a shot. So, can I ask you a question?"

"Shoot," she replied with a smile.

"Why did you destroy the footprint?" She deflated visibly, sinking into the seat and turning away from me. I continued, "You know whose shoe that was, don't you?"

"I know someone who wears Burberry shoes in a size nine," she said. "That doesn't necessarily mean anything."

"Who?" I pressed.

"My father," she said.

"Oh," I muttered, practically able to taste the salty rank sweat of my foot in my mouth. "It's a fairly common shoe size, could be a coincidence."

Columbine tried to smile, but the shape her lips ended up in just looked spiteful and sour. She held up the phone for me to see and tapped the screen. "See this number? That's my father's house. She had a dozen calls from there in the past two weeks. You think that's a coincidence?"

A brief but uncomfortable silence passed between us, which Columbine finally broke by saying, "I'm going to go talk to him, ask him what's going on."

"You don't have to do that," I objected.

She nodded her head resolutely. "Look, it's possible he's innocent, but there's got to be a reason he's calling her so much. Maybe he has some idea where she went."

"Fine," I conceded. "Just be careful."

17. Invisible Ink

After dropping off Columbine, I headed over to the Casbah and settled in at the bar to wait for Nick.

"Gotta hit the head, Mags," I said upon entering and dashed straight to the bathroom. "But I expect you to have a double waiting for me when I get out.

A couple minutes later, I was settling in at the bar and tossing back the glass Maggie had left sitting at my usual spot.

"When are you guys gonna get that condom dispenser fixed?" I asked, jerking my thumb back towards the bathrooms as Maggie refilled my glass.

She chuckled. "Like you need to worry about that. You can't get your sock pregnant, honey."

"Ooh, I think I felt that one from all the way over here," Nick called out from the front door. He pretended to wince in pain at Maggie's barb as he walked up to the bar, but the balled fist in front of his mouth didn't do anything to hide how much it made him smile.

He hopped up on the stool beside me and swung his hand like he was going to pat me on the back, but then sharply jerked it up and landed a resounding slap on the back of my head.

"Ow, what the fuck?"

He stuck his index finger right in my face. "Your little performance today got me in a lot of trouble. You need to tone your shit down. Why are you so bent on driving away the few people left who actually still give a shit about you?"

I shrugged. "Look, I know sometimes I can go over the line. And I'm sorry." I grabbed hold of his shirt and buried my head into his shoulder melodramatically, mimicking gentle sobs.

"Piss off," he said, pulling back and grinning. "And another thing, how the fuck did you get Isaac Axelrod so far up your ass?"

"Who?" I asked, momentarily confused before remembering, "Oh, you mean that fucking prick detective?"

Nick nodded. "He's got a crazy hard-on for you, nearly went through the roof when he found out you came by to see me. He's somehow got it into his head that you're involved with some murder, a vagrant who washed up on the riverbank with his throat slit. What's that all about?"

A flash of panic exploded into my head, but I fought to keep my cool. "It's just something related to the story I'm working," I explained, hoping he'd let it drop with as little probing as possible. "Look, I hope you know I had nothing to do with his death."

"Of course, I do," he replied. "And I tried to put in a good word for you, but he wasn't really receptive. The thing is, I know Axelrod, and he's a bulldog. Once he sinks his teeth into you, he doesn't let go. Whatever he thinks you've done, he'll find the proof that you're guilty. Even if it wasn't there before he showed up, you get my drift?"

I nodded. "And I do appreciate the warning and you trying to stand up for me."

"You better because after I did, my lieutenant came in and tore me a new one for trying to interfere with an open investigation. So this is gonna have to be the last favor you ask for, at least for a while."

"Shit," I grumbled. "Tell me you at least have one bit of good news."

"As a matter of fact, I do." He then laid out the three envelopes I had given him. "We found a few fingerprints. One set in particular showed up on all three pieces, clearly identifiable."

"Do you know whose they are?" I asked in disbelief over the luck.

"Sure do," he said. "They're yours, dumbass. Next time you want to lift prints off of something, you should be more careful handling it."

"Okay, okay, I get it," I said, exasperated. "Did you find any others?"

"Well, the prints were a mess, so I asked the boys in the lab to play around with them for a while and see what else they could come up with." He paused momentarily for dramatic effect, then dug a small battery-powered blacklight from his coat pocket, like the kind they use on TV news shows to find the jizz stains on hotel beds.

"Are you familiar with palimpsests?"

"Yeah, it's when one text is printed over another text on the same paper," I answered. "They were common in the middle ages when the church would wash the ink off pre-Christian writings so they could reuse the paper for their liturgical texts. Like what happened to Archimedes. I read an article about how they use UV light and computer imaging to reconstruct the original writing."

Nick nodded. "Damn, I'm impressed. I just stared at the lab guys blankly when they asked me that question."

He switched on the blacklight and held it up to the first letter. Two words appeared on the page, just underneath the original message, handwritten in a large but neat script:
Jacinda Ngo
.

He moved the light away, and the words disappeared, leaving behind no trace on the pristine white paper.

Next he hovered over the second letter with the light, illuminating the words:
Patrick Cobb
.

Finally, he moved onto the third letter and revealed the hidden message:
Lilian Lynch
.

"Weird," I said, lifting my gaze back to Nick. "So someone wrote the names on the paper, then bleached it out, and then typed another message on top of that."

He switched off the light and stuffed it back in his pocket. "Now I know the the first name you think is the dead woman from the ditch. And the second is the vagrant whose throat Axelrod thinks you slit. So who's number three?"

"Someone who may very well soon be dead herself, if she isn't already. All three are related to my story." I paused, taking a moment to process all this, then added, "The thing is, each letter arrived
before
the person named died."

"Jesus," Nick said. "So do you think the person who sent these is the killer?"

I shrugged, "It would stand to reason it's the killer - or at least an accomplice - otherwise how would they know who's next? On the other hand, though, why would the killer tell me who's going to die before it happens and risk me being able to stop them?"

"Maybe they don't consider you a real threat and they're just trying to taunt you, calling their shots like Babe Ruth pointing to the stands over center field," Nick suggested. "But then the next question is why go through all the trouble of creating these palimpsests in the first place?"

I tapped my finger on my busted-up nose, indicating that he had indeed hit upon the crux of the matter.