Crosscut (33 page)

“That’s abrupt of you.”

“Listen.” She swiped her hair back from her face. “It’s getting harder and harder. Back when Tully’s office ran on paper records, it was easy to slip the information to you. Now that everything’s computerized, things have tightened up. Only a few people have access to his system, and even fewer have his pass code to get past the firewall. If the police start looking, it won’t take them long to come looking for me.”

“And if I remind you that this is a matter of national security?”

“Baloney. The exposees are part of some experiment, and you’re harvesting information so you can control them. This is a matter of power.”

But Toni Cantwell liked power. She liked excitement. That was why she had agreed to their cloak-and-dagger act all those years ago. And she liked money, enough for her to wangle Little Mr. Faggot a temporary job in her classroom as a student teacher after the explosion, so that he could keep tabs on the exposees. She liked it enough to betray her husband by providing the man she knew as Robin Klijsters with unlimited access to the exposees’ medical records.

If she still thought he was working for the government, then he would leave her illusions intact.

“I see. How much were you thinking?” he said.

“Two thousand. And I’m in a hurry. Tully’s coming to pick me up. He’ll be here any minute, and I don’t want him to find you here.”

“He still knows nothing about our arrangement, right? He wouldn’t recognize me, or even my name.”

“Of course not.”

He smiled. “You can’t honestly think he’d be jealous of a queeny little thing like me.”

She looked at him at last, with distant curiosity. “One question, Robin. All these years you’ve been working for Uncle Sam, didn’t they ever complain about a flaming gay in their midst? Or in your department is it Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?”

“In my department, such a question might be the last one you ever asked.”

“Right.” She zipped up the duffel. “You don’t know who it is, do you?”

“Who?”

“Coyote.” She looked at him. “I don’t want to sound paranoid, but I have to wonder if the government knows who he is but doesn’t want it to get out.”

“No, Toni, I have no idea who Coyote really is.”

“If you knew, you’d tell me, right?”

“You would find out immediately.”

She nodded, reassured, and held out her hand for the money.

“One question of my own,” he said. “The day of the explosion. You were in sole charge of the children, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So the four who ran off and wandered into range of the explosion were your responsibility.”

“I was leading the discovery of the petroglyphs. I didn’t see them run off.”

Her hand was open, palm up. He unzipped his fanny pack and reached inside.

“Did it never occur to you that insufficient security could lead to unforeseen consequences?” he said.

Toni frowned. “They were thirteen, fourteen years old. Their lives were nothing but a series of unforeseen consequences.”

“Their lives are irrelevant. I’m talking about my life.”

“What?”

He pulled the Taser from his pack and fired. The darts hit her in the chest. Her head snapped back and her earrings flickered in the light. So did the knife.

I slumped in the backseat of Dad’s rental car. We barreled along the road behind Tommy and McCracken, heading for the police station. Dad gripped the wheel, talking low and fast at Mom as though giving her a mission briefing.

“South Star got out of control. The pain vaccine proved to be an infectious agent and they had to shut down the project.”

“By blowing up the lab?” she said.

“We’ll never find any paperwork confirming it, but you bet your butt.”

“Wasn’t that overkill?”

“They must have needed to sanitize the site.”

“Didn’t it occur to them that an explosion would spread the vaccine agent into the air and contaminate anybody who came in contact with it? Jesus, who was running that project, the Three Stooges?”

“We can assume it was a controlled explosion that didn’t go as planned. I imagine they needed extreme heat to destroy the South Star agent. They couldn’t just put a flamethrower to the place. And remember when this happened.” He glanced at me in the mirror. “Kit, Russian satellites overfly the base. If Moscow had downlinked photos showing hazmat teams and flamethrowers dismantling the lab brick by brick, it would have raised their suspicions. Whereas a building out in the back ranges at China Lake blowing up, that’s just SOP.”

Standard operating procedure. I looked out the window at the ragged desert. Jets howled overhead, shredding blue sky. Dad was trying to bury our argument by putting the discussion on crisis footing, and I wasn’t having it. I took out my phone and tried again to reach Jesse. I couldn’t.

Dad forged onward. “For whatever reason, the explosion didn’t go to plan and your class was exposed to the vaccine. And Sway was wrong. South Star was effective. It worked.”

Mom crossed her arms. “Corrosive fuel additives, my ass. I told you Swayze was a stone liar.”

“It was a classified project, Angie.”

“I know. So you lie about it. SOP.” She tightened her arms against her chest. “Swayze’s still lying about it. She told you Coyote couldn’t have been infected and that South Star couldn’t possibly be making people sick.”

“She may actually believe that.”

“Phil, do you think my bullshit detector has gone offline? The explosion turned Evan’s class into guinea pigs. And it took twenty years, but now the test results are coming in, and somebody’s decided to shut down South Star all over again.” She ran a hand over her spiky hair. “I goddamn wish Coyote had shut Swayze down all those years ago.”

“Can it, Angie.”

She smiled. It was an acid smile, lips drawn back, eyes corrosive. My brother and I can do it to perfection. It’s called the Delaney Fuck You.

“Yeah, she’s Albert fricking Schweitzer nowadays. Too bad her defense research created a monster who’s killing mothers and children.”

“Coyote’s stalking Maureen, so bite your tongue. If anything happens to her, you’ll feel pretty damn lousy.”

I raised my hands. “Shut the hell up, both of you.”

Dad glanced at me again in the mirror. Mom stared out the window. The town rushed by.

At the Civic Center, a van with the call letters of a Los Angeles TV channel was parked outside the police station. The reporter sat inside freshening her makeup. By the time we pulled up, Tommy and McCracken had already gone inside. When Dad parked, I jumped out and headed for the door without speaking to either of my parents.

“Kit, wait.”

I kept walking. Dad caught me by the arm and I pulled free.

“Leave me alone.”

He stepped in front of me. “I know you’re angry.”

“Angry? You think this is as simple as anger?” I shoved my hair out of my face. “Yesterday, did you come by my place planning to tell me to have an abortion?”

“I meant to broach the subject. But damn, Kit . . .” He looked like scoured wood, eroded by time and care. “Look, I knew this would happen. You would turn into a wall. I knew the only possible way to get you to understand would be for Jesse to talk to you. It was a tactical decision.”

I stepped back from him. “No, Dad. It was cowardice.”

I might have taken an ax to his chest. His shoulders drooped. I pushed through the door into the station.

Mom hurried after me. “Wait.”

I kept walking across the foyer. She caught up.

“We should never have gone behind your back. We’re just damned scared, and we panicked. I’m sorry, Evan. I’m an ass.”

I turned to her. I was so furious, I thought my hair might ignite.

“Did Dad have an affair with Maureen Swayze?”

“What?”

“Adultery. It’s like flirting, only immoral.”

She stiffened. “Did somebody tell you that?”

“Nobody had to tell me anything. All I have to do is listen to you and Dad snipe at each other.”

Her cheeks reddened. “For Christ’s sake, no. It’s bad enough they were friends. That’s sufficient to piss me off.”

A watery sensation washed over me, relief splashing my anger. “It’s revealing that you presume somebody told me so. China Lake’s like a bowl of carnivorous fish. Falsehoods as SOP, rumors wafting like perfume. Is this where you and Dad learned to plot behind people’s backs?”

“Evan, please.”

“Lie and manipulate and put the screws to Jesse and hope he’d cave in?”

“Can we save this for later? What’s going on now is about keeping you alive and well.”

She put a hand on my elbow. I shied away. My head was pounding.

“No. You think if we stop talking about it you’ll get absolution. You won’t.”

Dad walked up, looking deflated. Across the station, Tommy stuck his head out of an office and waved us back. I walked ahead of my parents, unwilling to see their faces, and tried once again to call Jesse. No luck. Where the hell was he?

 
In the parking garage below Argent Tower, security lights eradicated the shadows. CCTV scanned the exit ramp and the elevator. “Paint It Black” was pounding from the truck stereo.

Jesse drove along empty acres of concrete, hunting for the car. The garage was nearly as vacant as the office building. He had no luck on the first two levels and cruised down the ramp to level three.

“Gotcha.”

Of course Maureen Swayze would park her silver BMW 540i as far from other vehicles as possible. She didn’t want such a beautiful car to get dinged. It and a Range Rover were the only cars on this level. He stopped next to it, double-checking. Yeah, it was the car he’d seen the other day outside Eller’s Diner in Westwood when Swayze went to talk to Phil and Evan, with the Argent Tower parking sticker in the window. It had to be hers.

He circled back to the elevator and parked. The security camera was bolted to the wall above the elevator door. Ten feet high, he estimated. He got his crutches from the backseat.

He got the chair out, set the crutches between his knees, and wheeled over. Make the camera eleven feet. He was six-one. When he stood up he would have to stretch, and stretching wasn’t his strong point.

Stopping beneath the camera, he listened for cars or the elevator approaching, but heard only the building’s ventilation system. Taking a breath, he stood up. He leaned against the wall to brace himself and reached up with one of the crutches. Not far enough. He checked his balance, reached up a bit more, and shoved it against the bottom of the camera. It swung toward the ceiling. Yes.

He threw the crutches back in the truck. It might be only a minute before the guards noticed that the camera was screwy. Even that sluggish Archie up at the desk might spot it and jump. He wheeled to Swayze’s BMW. He hoped the prissy German alarm would squeal at the slightest twitch. He didn’t want to smash the window.

He slid the end of the tire iron between the window and the door frame and he muscled the glass, just half an inch. The car’s lights flashed and the alarm shrieked like a cheerleader.

Yanking the tire iron free, he spun and made for the Range Rover parked farther down the garage. The pillars supporting the roof were too narrow to hide behind, but an SUV would work fine.

Two minutes later a uniformed guard ambled out of the elevator, fingers in his ears. He walked around the BMW and took note of the license number. He radioed upstairs and headed back to the elevator.

Jesse pressed his hands over his ears. This would work or it wouldn’t. If it didn’t, he would end up under arrest. But screw it, he was in all the way. He could show Evan and the kid his mug shot. But he had to have Evan and the kid to show it to.

Four minutes later, Maureen Swayze came hurrying out of the elevator, keys in hand, a scowl on her face. She was wearing a white lab coat and a disheveled ponytail. Her little glasses glittered under the fluorescent lights. She clipped over to the BMW, pressed the key fob, and disarmed the alarm. In the sudden, blessed silence she stopped cold.

“Remember me?” Jesse said.

She didn’t answer. She simply stared at the Glock resting in his hand.

 
Tommy waved a printout. “The fingerprint hit on your dude’s shirt. It was a partial that LAPD matched to a complete print they pulled off the revolving door at that office tower.”

“Is it Kai Torrance?” I said.

“Robin Klijsters.”

He led us into Captain McCracken’s office overlooking the parking lot. McCracken was weighing down his desk chair, talking on the phone.

It took a second for the name to match the memory. “You’re joking.”

“No, that’s the name. Robin Klijsters. LAPD got the print from state records. An old file, years back.”

McCracken hung up the phone. “They get an address?”

Tommy handed him the printout. “Here. House on the west side, out past China Lake Boulevard. I have two units checking it out, but the records file is almost twenty years old.”

He didn’t recognize the name. “Tommy, don’t you know who Robin Klijsters is?”

“Who?”

“Our old student teacher.”

He stopped dead. “Holy shit.”

We gaped at each other.

“That makes no sense,” I said.

But holding his brown-eyed gaze, I knew it all made sense somehow. We just weren’t seeing the connection.

“Klijsters was our student teacher in art class,” I said. “The skanky little weasel who told Ms. Shepard I was imagining things when Valerie stole my journal.”

McCracken’s chair creaked. “Klijsters worked at Bassett?”

“With Antonia Shepard. Shepard-Cantwell. She’s still there.”

McCracken pointed at Tommy. “Call the high school and get the art teacher on the phone. And contact the school district about records. Get all the background you can on Klijsters.”