Concrete Underground (2010) (28 page)

My second thought was:
or maybe I'm just not looking hard enough
.

I shook my head; I was tired and not thinking clearly. I laid down on the decimated mess that could no longer rightly be called my bed, hoping that the solution would become obvious after a little rest.

I laid there for an hour, unable to fall asleep, just staring up at the ceiling and imagining Max watching me and laughing.

This is stupid
, I thought to myself.
I need to get out of this disaster and get some perspective. Maybe some fresh air will help me clear my head.

I went outside and got as far as the front of the building, where I found both the Asterion van and the cops still parked and waiting for me. As soon as I appeared, the Crown Vic fired up its engine, and the driver of the van started talking into a walkie-talkie.

I turned around and went back to my apartment.

On the way in, I noticed a blue envelope sitting on the floor under the front door. I wondered if it just appeared in the brief time I was gone, or if I had somehow missed it before.

Careful not to look at it too long, I quickly stepped all the way inside and shut the door before picking it up. Even then I kept it closed. Finding my light-pen among the rabble around what used to be my desk, I took the envelope into the now-empty coat closet. Keeping the closet light off, I opened the envelope in the dark and used the light from my pen to read the note inside:
Payback is a bitch.

Clearly Max's blackmailers weren't happy that I had stolen their thunder by going public with the dirt they had on him.

Stuffing the paper into my pocket, I realized I had to find a blacklight bulb to see if this one had a hidden message like the others. I couldn't risk the tails following me, though.

I walked back into my bedroom, opened my window, and worked the mesh screen out of its frame. Then I jumped, letting the hedges below do what little they could to cushion my two-story fall. I quickly hopped the back fence behind my building and into the apartment complex on the next street over. I ran out into the middle of the street and looked around. Seeing no sign of the van or the cops, I decided it was safe to proceed.

When I walked into the head shop on Delany Avenue, there were two customers and one clerk inside. Luckily, all three were preoccupied as the clerk was helping the other two pick out a glass pipe. As surreptitiously as possible, I moved over to the blacklight display and held the new note underneath.

Like the others, this one had a hidden message, a single hand-written name:
Natalie McPherson.

I took out my cell and tried calling her again. She still wasn't answering.

31. Good

As soon as Violet opened the front door, my blood began to boil.

"What the hell happened to you?"

She shied away from the doorway, trying to hide the swollen purple bruises on her face. "Don't be dense. What do you think happened?"

"Anthony hit you?" I asked incredulously.

"He heard that the police found me half-naked in your apartment, and then reacted exactly the way you'd expect him to," she explained as she led me into the living room.

The room showed visible signs of a fight. The coffee table was tilted over with one missing leg, the couch was pushed out of place, and one of the bookcases had its shelves smashed, spilling out all the books onto the floor in front of it, as if someone had been thrown into it.

I felt my cheeks grow flush as the anger swelled up inside me like a pressurized canister, ready to explode.

"I am going to kill that son of a bitch," I raged.

"Yeah, right," she scoffed. "What are you doing here, anyways?"

I took a deep breath, trying to refocus my thoughts. "Is Columbine around?"

She shook her head. "I haven't seen her today. In fact, I haven't heard from her since she asked me to pick you up last night. Why?"

I cursed under my breath. "She's in danger. Can you think of anywhere else she might be?"

"She could be with Max."

I didn't want to admit it, but she was right; Max was logically the next person to check with. But that was assuming he'd answer my call.

I found his number in my cell, then held it out to her and instructed, "Call from your land line."

"Why don't you?"

"If he sees my number, he won't pick up."

Reluctantly, she took it and dialed the number on her living room phone. She put the call on speaker so I could hear.

He answered after a couple rings, "Is it done?"

"What?" Violet asked, confused.

There was a pause. "Who is this?"

"Violet. Is this Max?"

"Ah, yes. Sorry, I saw the number and assumed you were Anthony."

"Oh," she replied. "I was just calling to ask if you've seen Columbine recently."

"Not since yesterday morning."

"You don't happen to have any idea were she is, do you?"

"Nope," Max said, trailing off into a brief silence before adding, "How did you get this number, by the way?"

Violet looked at me with a questioning shrug. I tried to silently mouth
hang up
, but she didn't get it.

"Hang up," I whispered as I mimed hanging up the phone.

Max gave his best movie villain laugh, short staccato bursts of sadistic glee. "You better watch out, Violet - I think I just heard a ghost. Dear Anthony won't be too happy to find out his house is haunted."

I reached out to grab the handset and slam it back down, cutting off the call.

The blood had drained from Violet's face. "Well," she said softly, trying to maintain her composure. "I guess I should get out of here. Let me grab a few things, then we'll go look for Col."

"Okay," I replied, not sure what else to say. She disappeared down the hallway, and I paced around awkwardly, still fuming. I started tidying things up, mostly because I didn't know what else to do with myself. I knelt beside the broken bookcase and as I organized the fallen books into stacks, I noticed several were not in English. One was a German Kafka hardcover, another was a thick Bible-sized paperback with a picture of Fyodor Dostoyevsky on the cover along with Cyrillic characters. There were a few others in some other Easter European language I didn't recognize.

Violet returned shortly with a tattered old blue rolling luggage case that had the initials
HGA
stitched onto its face.
She packed fast
, I thought to myself.
I wonder if she already had the case ready to go
.

She glanced down and saw one of the tomes in my hand,
Kritik der reinen Vernunft
.

"Are all these yours? I mean, you speak Russian and German?"

"Yes," she nodded. "I speak several languages. I've preferred to read the classics in their original tongue ever since university."

"Where'd you go to school?"

"Charles University in Prague," she replied. "Briefly. But that doesn't really seem important right now, shouldn't we be looking for Columbine? And you can explain what the hell's happening on the way."

"Of course," I said. "I was just thinking, though, we should probably grab her things, too. I mean, we probably don't want to have to make a second trip here."

Violet nodded in agreement, and the two of us went to Columbine's room.

Her clothes were scattered haphazardly across the room along with a few other personal items, like toiletries, a make up case, a few magazines, and an MP3 player. After hunting around a little bit, I found a case in the closet, similar to Violet's but smaller.

"I'm going to leave a note in case she comes back before we find her," she said, walking over the vanity.

"It's a good thought," I said, "but if Anthony sees it he'll know where to find us."

"No he won't," she replied and picked up a stray tube of lipstick, which she used to write on the mirror.

I packed as much of Columbine's stuff as I could into the case and had just managed to force the zipper shut when Violet finished her note:
Meet me where we buried the Queen - V.

---

We spent the next couple hours checking all of Columbine's regular haunts for any sign of her - a steady stream of coffeehouses, vintage clothing stores, art galleries, public parks, and music stores. Violet drove while I explained about Max's blackmailers and the notes I had been receiving with hidden messages that seemed to indicate who would be the next person to die.

"I'm assuming the notes are coming from the blackmailers. The first few seemed designed to draw me in deeper into the investigation of Patrick Cobb and Jacinda Ngo so that they could use me as a pawn to recover the information that Cobb stole from them. Of course, that plan backfired, and their last note was obviously intended to signal their displeasure.

"Which all makes sense on the face of it, until you consider the hidden messages. Why would the blackmailers want me to know the identity of their next target?"

Violet thought about this for a moment, furrowing her brow, then said, "You're assuming that the blackmailers know about the hidden messages, but what if there are two different people responsible for the different messages?"

"I don't follow," I said.

"Say there was one person, one of your blackmailers, who dictated the message to a second person who actually made and delivered them. They needed someone who could make the paper and do the printing by hand in case you went to the police, so they couldn't be traced. Now let's say this second person wasn't completely on board with the blackmailers' intentions and wanted to help you, so she devised a way to warn you about their next target without arousing their suspicion."

"I hadn't considered that," I said meekly as my mouth hung open and my brain tried to process what she was telling me. "I suppose it would be fairly easy for this second person to accomplish, assuming she had a workshop set up with the necessary tools and materials."

Violet nodded her head and conceded, "It wouldn't be that hard at all."

"Of course," I added, "you would wonder why she wouldn't just reveal the blackmailers' identities to me, save me some hassle."

Violet smiled and shrugged. "She probably doesn't know them, or else she would have. She probably only has one single point of contact with them, someone very close who trusted her with the task, and someone she's afraid of enough that she would take such pains to hide the help she's been giving you."

"Like her husband?" I ventured.

"Like her husband," she agreed.

Eventually we exhausted the list of places we could think to look for Columbine.

"Where to next?" I asked.

"Well, there is one more place we could check. In a way it's the last place I'd expect to find her. But in another way, it should have been an obvious place to start."

"Her father's house?"

Violet nodded.

---

We rang the bell at McPherson's twice, but there was no answer, so I tried the door and found it was unlocked. Inside, loud music echoed throughout the house - Bessie Smith's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
.

We followed the sound down one of the hallways and into McPherson's study, where we found the old man sitting slumped forward over his desk, his head twisted around so that it was facing up even though the rest of him was facing down.

I moved closer to the desk, staring in morbid fascination at the way his neck bones poked out against his skin. The skin was pulled taught and creased around the protruding bone, looking pallid and plastic, almost synthetic. Then I noticed his left hand was clutching something. Kneeling down, I pried open his fingers and found Jacinda's ruby necklace engraved with the crown and globe sigil. I felt my skin crawl as a sense of
deja vu
washed over me and filled me with the irrational conviction that there was a theaterful of people watching over my shoulder.

Suddenly, the music stopped. I bounced back up and saw Violet standing next to the stereo with her finger on a button, looking at me apologetically.

"We've got to get out of here," I said.

"Shouldn't we call the police?"

I shook my head. "The cops already suspect me of Lily's murder - probably Cobb and Jacinda, too. And I'm pretty sure they've got you pegged as an accomplice. If they find us here with a corpse, it'll be all over."

We tried as best we could to leave everything the way we found it and wipe away any fingerprints. As we got back into the Volvo and Violet started the engine, she said, "So I guess the note was wrong. Columbine wasn't the next one to die after all."

"No, the blackmailers didn't have anything to do with this," I replied. "Max was the one who ended up with the necklace, and I'm pretty sure this is what he was talking about when he asked you if 'it' was done."

As we drove out through McPherson's front gate, I noticed the surveillance camera perched above it.

"Where to next?" I asked.

"San Hermes River Park."

"Why there?"

"Because that's where my note to Col said to meet us," she explained.

---

Violet parked the Volvo in one of the lots near Millennial Bridge, and we began to trek down a particularly steep and uneven hiking trail. About halfway to the river bank, we realized that the trail wasn't actually a real trail, and we were in fact trying to navigate a shortcut through the undergrowth in the dark of night.

I was the first one to bite it, sticking my foot into a gopher hole and face-planting into the ground. When I came back up, my face was encrusted with dead leaves and dirt. Seeing me covered in shit somehow cut through the tension of the rest of the evening, and Violet broke out into hysterical laughter. She laughed so hard, in fact, that she didn't notice the watermelon sized boulder in front of her, and she went down too.

From that moment, we laughed the rest of the hike down, getting louder each time one of us stumbled or lost our footing. Coming down the last stretch, I wrapped my arm around her waist so we could lean against each other for support.