The Bad Place (33 page)

Poached eggs.

Thomas shook his head, and when his laughter finished he turned from the mirror.

To Derek the most worst bad thing he could think of was poached eggs and no sticky buns, which was very funny ha-ha. You try to tell Derek about walking dead people and scissors sticking out of bellies and something that eats little live animals, and old Derek would look at you and smile and nod and not get it at all.

For as long as he could remember, Thomas had wished he was a normal person, not dumb, and many times he thanked God for at least making him not as dumb as poor Derek. But now he half wished he was dumber, so he could get those ugly-nasty vision-pictures out of his mind, so he could forget about Derek going to die and the Bad Thing coming and Julie being in danger, so he’d have nothing to worry about except poached eggs, which wouldn’t be much of a worry at all, since he sort of
liked
poached eggs.

WHEN CLINT Karaghiosis arrived at Dakota & Dakota shortly before nine o’clock, Bobby took him by the shoulder, turned him around, and went back to the elevators with him. “You drive, and I’ll fill you in on what’s happened during the night. I know you’ve got other cases to tend to, but the Pollard thing is getting hotter by the minute.”

“Where’re we going?”

“First, Palomar Labs. They called. Test results are ready.”

Only a few clouds remained in the sky, and they were all far off toward the mountains, moving away like the billowing sails of great galleons on an eastward journey. It was a quintessential southern California day: blue, pleasantly warm, everything green and fresh, and rush-hour traffic so hideously snarled that it could transform an ordinary citizen into a foaming-at-the-mouth sociopath with a yearning to pull the trigger of a semiautomatic weapon.

Clint avoided freeways, but even surface streets were clogged. By the time Bobby recounted everything that had transpired since they had seen each other yesterday afternoon, they were still ten minutes from Palomar in spite of the questions occasioned by Clint’s amazement—subdued like all of his reactions, but amazement nonetheless—over the discovery that Frank was evidently able to teleport himself.

Finally Bobby changed the subject because talking too much about psychic phenomena to a phlegmatic guy like Clint made him feel like an airhead, as if he had lost his grip on reality. While they inched along Bristol Avenue, he said, “I can remember when you could go anywhere in Orange County and never get caught in traffic.”

“Not so long ago.”

“I remember when you didn’t have to sign a developer’s waiting list to buy a house. Demand wasn’t five times supply.”

“Yeah.”

“And I remember when orange groves were all over Orange County.”

“Me too.”

Bobby sighed. “Hell, listen to me, like an old geezer, babbling about the good old days. Pretty soon, I’ll be talking about how nice it was when there were still dinosaurs around.”

“Dreams,” Clint said. “Everyone’s got a dream, and the one more people have than any other is the California dream, so they never stop coming, even though so many have come now that the dream isn’t really quite attainable any more, not the original dream that started it all. Of course, maybe a dream should be unattainable, or at least at the outer limits of your reach. If it’s too easy, it’s meaningless.”

Bobby was surprised by the long burst of words from Clint, but more surprised to hear the man talking about something as intangible as dreams. “You’re already a Californian, so what’s your dream?”

After a brief hesitation, Clint said, “That Felina will be able to hear someday. There’re so many medical advancements these days, new discoveries and treatments and techniques all the time.”

As Clint turned left off Bristol, onto the side street where Palomar Laboratories stood, Bobby decided that was a good dream, a damned fine dream, maybe even better than his and Julie’s dream about buying time and getting a chance to bring Thomas out of Cielo Vista and into a remade family.

They parked in the lot beside the huge concrete-block building in which Palomar Laboratories was housed. As they were walking toward the front door, Clint said, “Oh, by the way, the receptionist here thinks I’m gay, which is fine with me.”

“What?”

Clint went inside without saying more, and Bobby followed him to the reception window. An attractive blonde sat at the counter.

“Hi, Lisa,” Clint said.

“Hi!” She punctuated her response by cracking her chewing
gum.

“Dakota and Dakota,”

“I remember,” she said. “Your stuff’s ready. I’ll get it.”

She glanced at Bobby and smiled, and he smiled, too, though her expression seemed a little peculiar to him.

When she returned with two large, sealed manila envelopes-one labeled SAMPLES, the other ANALYSES—Clint handed the second one to Bobby. They stepped to one side of the lounge, away from the counter.

Bobby tore open the envelope and skimmed the documents inside. “Cat’s blood.”

“You serious?”

“Yeah. When Frank woke up in that motel, he was covered with cat’s blood.”

“I knew he was no killer.”

Bobby said, “The cat may have an opinion about that.”

“The other stuff is?”

“Well... bunch of technical terms here ... but what it comes down to is that it’s what it looks like. Black sand.”

Stepping back to the reception counter, Clint said, “Lisa, you remember we talked about a black-sand beach in Hawaii?”

“Kaimu,” she said. “It’s a dynamite place.”

“Yeah, Kaimu. Is it the only one?”

“Black-sand beach, you mean? No. There’s Punaluu, which is a real sweet place too. Those are on the big island. I guess there must be more on the other islands, ’cause there’s volcanoes all over the place, aren’t there?”

Bobby joined them at the counter. “What do volcanoes have to do with it?”

Lisa took her chewing gum out of her mouth and put it aside on a piece of paper. “Well, the way I heard it, really hot lava flows into the sea, and when it meets the water, there’re these huge explosions, which throw off zillions and zillions of these really teeny-tiny beads of black glass, and then over a long period of time the waves rub all the beads together until they’re ground down into sand.”

“They have these beaches anywhere but Hawaii?” Bobby wondered.

She shrugged. “Probably. Clint, is this fella your... friend?”

“Yeah,” Clint said.

“I mean, you know, your
good
friend?”

“Yeah,” Clint said, without looking at Bobby.

Lisa winked at Bobby. “Listen, you make Clint take you to Kaimu, ’cause I’ll tell you something—it’s really terrific to go out on a black beach at night, make love under the stars, because it’s soft, for one thing, but mainly because black sand doesn’t reflect moonlight like regular sand. It seems like you’re floating in space, darkness all around, it really sharpens your senses, if you know what I mean.”

“Sounds terrific,” Clint said. “Take care, Lisa.” He headed for the door.

As Bobby turned to follow Clint, Lisa said, “You make him take you to Kaimu, you hear? You’ll have a good time.”

Outside, Bobby said, “Clint, you’ve got some explaining to do.”

“Didn’t you hear her? These little beads of black glass—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. Hey, look at you, you’re grinning. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you grinning. I don’t think I
like
you grinning.”

BY NINE o’clock, Lee Chen had arrived at the offices, opened a bottle of orange-flavored seltzer, and settled in the computer room midst his beloved hardware, where Julie was waiting for him. He was five six, slender but wiry, with a warm brass complexion and jet-black hair that bristled in a modified punk style. He wore red tennis shoes and socks, baggy black cotton pants with a white belt, a black and charcoal-gray shirt with a subtle leaf pattern, and a black jacket with narrow lapels and big shoulder pads. He was the most stylishly dressed employee at Dakota & Dakota, even compared to Cassie Hanley, their receptionist, who was an unashamed clotheshorse.

While Lee sat in front of his computers, sipping seltzer, Julie filled him in on what had happened at the hospital and showed him the printouts of the information Bobby had acquired earlier that morning. Frank Pollard sat with them, in the third chair, where Julie could keep an eye on him. Throughout their conversation, Lee exhibited no surprise at what he was being told, as if his computers had bestowed on him such enormous wisdom and foresight that nothing—not even a man capable of teleportation—could surprise him. Julie knew that Lee, as well as everyone else in the Dakota & Dakota family, would never leak a word of any client’s business to anyone; but she didn’t know how much of his supercool demeanor was real and how much was a conscious image that he put on every morning with his ultra-voguish clothes.

Though his unshakable nonchalance might be partly feigned, his talent for computers was unquestionably real. When Julie had finished her condensed version of recent events, Lee said, “Okay, what do you need from me now?” There was no doubt on either his part or hers that eventually he could provide whatever she required.

She gave him a steno pad. Double rows of currency serial numbers filled the first ten pages. “Those are random samplings of the bills in each of the bags of cash we’re holding for Frank. Can you find out if it’s hot money—stolen, maybe an extortion or ransom payment?”

Lee quickly paged through the lists. “No consecutive numbers? That makes it harder. Usually cops don’t have a record of the serial numbers of stolen money unless it was brand-new bills, which are still bound in packets, consecutively numbered, right off the press.”

“Most of this cash is fairly well circulated.”

“There’s an outside chance it might still be from a ransom or extortion payoff, like you said. The cops would’ve taken down all the numbers before they let the victim make the drop, just in case the perp made a clean getaway. It looks bleak, but I’ll try. What else?”

Julie said, “An entire family in Garden Grove, last name Farris, was murdered last year.”

“Because of me,” Frank said.

Lee propped his elbows on the arms of his chair, leaned back, and steepled his fingers. He looked like a wise Zen master who had been forced to don the clothes of an avant-garde artist after getting the wrong suitcase at the airport. “No one really dies, Mr. Pollard. They just go on from here. Grief is good, but guilt is pointless.”

Though she knew too few computer fanatics to be certain, Julie suspected that not many found a way to combine the hard realities of science and technology with religion. But in fact, Lee had arrived at a belief in God through his work with computers and his interest in modern physics. He once explained to her why a profound understanding of the dimensionless space inside a computer network, combined with a modern physicist’s view of the universe, led inevitably to faith in a Creator, but she hadn’t followed a thing he’d said.

She gave Lee Chen the dates and details of the Farris and Roman murders. “We think they were all killed by the same man. I haven’t got a clue to his real name, so I call him Mr. Blue. Considering the savagery of the murders, we suspect he’s a serial killer with a long list of victims. If we’re right, the murders have been so widely spread or Mr. Blue has covered his tracks so well that the press has never made connections between the crimes.”

“Otherwise,” Frank said, “they’d have sensationalized it on their front pages. Especially if this guy regularly bites his victims.”

“But since most police agencies are computer-linked these days,” Julie said, “they might’ve made connections across jurisdictions, saw what the press didn’t. There might be one or more quiet, ongoing investigations between local, state, and federal authorities. We need to know if any police in California—or the FBI nationally-are on to Mr. Blue, and we need to know anything they’ve learned about him, no matter how trivial.”

Lee smiled. In the middle of his brass-hued face, his teeth were like pegs of highly polished ivory. “That means going past the public-access files in their computers. I’ll have to break their security, one agency after another, all the way into the FBI.”

“Difficult?”

“Very. But I’m not without experience.” He pushed his jacket sleeves farther up on his arms, flexed his fingers, and turned to the terminal keyboard as if he were a concert pianist about to interpret Mozart. He hesitated and glanced sideways at Julie. “I’ll work into their systems indirectly to discourage tracebacks. I won’t damage any data or breach national security, so I probably won’t even be noticed. But if someone spots me snooping and puts a tracer on me that I don’t see or can’t shake, they might pull your PI license for this.”

“I’ll sacrifice myself, take the blame. Bobby’s license won’t be pulled, too, so the agency won’t go down. How long will this take?”

“Four or five hours, maybe more, maybe a lot more. Can somebody bring me lunch at noon? I’d rather eat here and not take a break.”

“Sure. What would you like?”

“Big Mac, double order of fries, vanilla shake.”

Julie grimaced. “How come a high-tech guy like you never heard of cholesterol?”

“Heard of it. Don’t care. If we never really die, cholesterol can’t kill me. It can only move me out of this life a little sooner.”

ARCHER VAN CORVAIRE cracked open the Levolor blind and peered through the thick bulletproof glass in the front door of his Newport Beach shop. He squinted suspiciously at Bobby and Clint, though he knew and expected them. At last he unlocked the door and let them in.

Van Corvaire was about fifty-five but invested a lot of time and money in the maintenance of a youthful appearance. To thwart time, he’d undergone dermabrasion, face-lifts, and liposuction ; to improve on nature, he’d had a nose job, cheek implants, and chin restructuring. He wore a toupee of such exquisite craftsmanship, it would have passed for his own dyed-black hair—except that he sabotaged the illusion by insisting on not merely a replacement but a lush, unnatural pompadour. If he ever got into a swimming pool wearing that toupee, it would look like the conning tower of a submarine.