The Library at Mount Char (14 page)

“I guess I do. Deny it, I mean.”

“You
guess
?” Dorn said, incredulous.

Steve shrugged. “Like I said, I don't remember. The last clear memory I have, he was alive. When I came to the next morning he was dead. I had no grudge against the guy.” He sighed. “I really wish I'd just gone home and gone to bed. Dunno if it would've helped
him
much, but I'd probably be at home with my dog.”

“You think she'd have killed him anyway?”

“Dude,” Steve said with truly epic sincerity, “I've got no fucking idea.”

Erwin waited for more, but that was it.
He's empty
. He considered. “OK,” he said after a moment. “I think you've been pretty straight with me. I appreciate that. A lot of the guys I talk to, they lie just 'cause they like the sound of it. So I'm going to spare you my dance moves. I got some information about this woman—not much, but some—that might be of use in your case. Maybe.”

Steve blinked. “Go on.”

Dorn looked up from his papers.

“I'm fairly sure that the woman you met is named Carolyn Sopaski. And what you said dovetails with the little bit we know about her.”

Steve looked attentive, maybe even hopeful. He didn't speak.

“I'm listening,” Dorn said.

“Like I said, I work for Homeland Security. I'm a special agent. It's kind of like an FBI special agent, except we ain't gotta wear a suit if we don't want to.” Today he was in a gray T-shirt and a navy-blue zip-up hoodie. The jeans he had on were the same size as the ones he wore to his high school graduation thirty years ago.

“So what do you do, exactly?”

“It depends. A lot of times I just follow up on interesting coincidences.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, these days Homeland Security is tied into pretty much everything. You know that, right? Phone records, Internet searches, library books, bank stuff…everything. All that goes into this big air-conditioned room that they got up in Utah. What comes out the other end is a pile of weird coincidences that might be of interest to guys like me. So, like, if the same dude buys one bag of fertilizer at fifteen or twenty different Home Depots, this system might notice that. You follow?”

“I guess.”

“Or, like in this case, say a cop writes a report. They're forever writing reports, poor fucks. In addition to all the normal shit that happens with it—prosecutors and lawyers and dust-gathering—there's also a copy that goes in to these machines in Virginia. And on the last run one of the cases that popped out was—”

“Mine?” said Steve, suddenly eager. “You found something that clears me?”

“Nope. Yours didn't get picked up. Nothing unexplained there. The connection that ended up on my desk had to do with a bank robbery. A really fucking weird bank robbery.”

“Weird how?”

“Part of it was the size of the haul,” Erwin said. “Most robberies, the guy gets ten, maybe fifteen thousand. A lot of times it's not even that much. But this one was more like three hundred thousand.”

“Three hundred twenty-seven thousand,” Steve said, “-ish?” Quoting the amount his mystery woman had said was in the blue duffel bag.

Erwin nodded. “Actually, yeah. Same thought crossed my mind. Anyway, that's a pretty successful robbery. A lot more successful than most of them. It's unusual. So the computer took an interest, kicked it up to me. One thing that might have explained it was if the people who did it were trained.”

Steve wrinkled his forehead. “Trained? You mean, like, government trained?”

“Believe it or not, yeah. KGB ran a course on that very thing back in the '70s. Insurgent training or some shit. We did too, as part of the Green Beret Q Course. Not anymore, but a lot of the know-how is still floating around. Anyway, that's why I got called in. We get one like this every couple of months. Usually it turns out to be nothing.

“That's true here as well, at least in that we don't have any reason to think Ms. Sopaski is into any kind of terrorist shit. What's less clear is what exactly she
is
involved in. I mean, the bank tellers
helped
her do the fuckin' robbery. What's up with that?”

“What do you mean?” Dorn asked.

Erwin shrugged. “Just what I said. At around three p.m., Ms. Sopaski—your Carolyn—and another chick, identity unconfirmed, walked into the Oak Street branch of Midwest Regional in downtown Chicago. We got 'em on the lobby camera. They waited in line like good little customers for just over three minutes. When their turn came the two of them approached the teller, a Miz”—Erwin squinted at his notes—“Amrita Krishnamurti. The unidentified woman spoke with
her calmly for thirty-seven seconds. Then—well, never mind. Watch it yourself.”

Erwin fired up his laptop. He punched up Microsoft something-or-other, spent a couple of seconds closing out porn, then pressed Play. “Security-camera footage,” he said. “From the bank.”

Steve set the laptop on one of the concrete benches. Dorn watched over his shoulder.

“Why is she dressed like that?” Dorn asked. Carolyn looked more or less reasonable, if a bit dated—jeans and a man's button-down, barefoot—but the other woman was in a bathrobe and cowboy hat.

“I ain't got a fuckin' clue,” Erwin said. “My first thought was meth, but I don't think that's it. She looks too sleepy.”

“Plus she still has all her teeth,” Dorn agreed. “Could be LSD, though.”

Erwin and Steve looked at him.

Dorn shrugged. “About half the people who get booked tripping on acid are wearing bathrobes. It's, like, a thing.”

They considered this for a few moments, then Erwin nodded back at the laptop. “It's about to get good.” The woman in the bathrobe was speaking to Amrita Krishnamurti. Carolyn handed her a blue duffel bag, like one you'd use to take stuff to the gym. Ms. Krishnamurti motioned to the other two tellers and they gathered round to listen. The bathrobe woman spoke for a few more seconds, then touched each of them on the cheek.

Then the tellers split up and started filling bags of money. They worked quickly, slowing only to toss out dye packs and the occasional bill.

“Are those the marked bills?” Dorn asked.

Erwin nodded.

The video ran for just under three minutes. When it was over Steve handed the computer back.

“They all helped,” Dorn said.

“Yeah.” Erwin bit back the urge to salute Captain Obvious. He needed Dorn. “They did. That Krishnamurti lady was the, whatchacallit, branch manager. She worked there about twelve years. The other two had been
there about a year each. None of them was fixing to go bankrupt or any shit like that. And they couldn't have got the job in the first place if they had criminal records. But they was just
awful
eager to fill up that bag, don't you think?”

Dorn nodded. “It's weird.”

Erwin thought, but did not say,
Maybe a little bit like a guy who'd kept his nose clean for ten years all of a sudden deciding to commit burglary and kill a cop?
Or maybe not. But he'd bring that up later. “Yeah, I thought so too. So I went and talked to them a little bit. They seemed nice enough. They all remembered where the alarm buttons were, didn't panic or anything like that, but not a one of them pushed one.”

“Did they say why?”

“Not at first. They lawyered up. But once I convinced them they weren't going to jail, one of the younger ones talked to me. She said she didn't set off any of the alarms ‘because I was just too busy hunting for dye packs and radio transmitters.' Real matter-of-fact, see? I asked her why she'd do such a thing, and she said she had no idea. I'm pretty sure I believe her.” Erwin gave a wry smile. “I'll be honest, I'm fucking stumped. That's why I came here.”

“How do you mean?” Steve asked.

“I was hoping you might have some bright ideas.”

“Me?”

Erwin nodded. “You spent more time with her than anybody. Anything about that video jump out at you? Jog your memory, like?” Erwin gave him a minute to think about it. His eye drifted once again to that fucked-up painting.
The shapes in the darkness were black on black, but you could almost
—

“You don't think the tellers are in on it?”

“Nah,” Erwin said. “I don't. I did what I could for them. They lost their jobs, but I don't think there's going to be a trial.”

“And you're sure the woman in the video was Carolyn?”

“The prints match.”

“How did you get her name? Matching prints would give you a connection between the two cases, but for the name you'd need something else.”

Smart kid
. “Birth records,” Erwin said. “Hospital.”

Dorn's eyes narrowed. “I didn't know that was technically possible.”

Erwin shrugged. “Learn something every day, dontcha? I'm Big Brother, more or less. I've got access to all sorts of shit you wouldn't think. We couldn't find much on her, though, and our computer guys are pretty good. Whadda they call it, data mining?” Erwin said, playing dumb. He'd published papers on data mining.

“I've heard of it,” Dorn said. Erwin was pretty sure he was lying.

“Whatever. Point is, them nerds just about always come back with
something
. Not this time, though. I'm about convinced they came up dry because past a certain age there's just nothing out there to find on Miz Sopaski.”

“What do you mean, ‘past a certain age'?” Steve asked.

“Well, up until she turned eight or so, she shows up in the record about like any other kid. Birth records, shots, school…” He rummaged around in his folder and dug out an 8×10, slid it across the table. “That's Mrs. Gillespie's second-grade class. Carolyn's on the back row.”

Steve examined the picture.

Erwin waited for a lightbulb to go on, but it didn't. “You notice anything else in that picture?”

“Should I?”

“Maybe not. I've had a lot longer to look at it than you. And I might be seeing things. But take a look at the girl in the second row, third from the right. She remind you of anybody?”

It took Steve another couple of seconds. “Is it…the kid looks like the other lady from the bank robbery. The one who did all the talking. Same nose, same shape of her face…”

“Yeah,” Erwin said. “I thought so too. The kid's name is Lisa Garza. We're trying to find out what she's been up to for the last quarter century or so.” He gave them a level gaze. “Haven't found anything on her, either. Ab-so-lutely nothing.”

Dorn let out a low whistle.

Seeing that they were ready, Erwin dug out the pièce de résistance. It was a photograph from a newspaper. The caption underneath it said
“Beating the Summer Heat! Carolyn Sopaski, 7, takes her turn on the water slide.” A grinning girl with a missing front tooth was sliding down a long piece of plastic, haloed by a sparkling spray of water. In the background a small crowd of kids milled around, waiting their turn.

“What about that one?” he asked. “You notice anything—” He broke off. He sniffed the air. He couldn't identify the smell at first, and then he could.
Blood
. All of a sudden he was back in Afghanistan. He reached out for an M16 that wasn't there.

In the distance he heard a woman scream, then a gunshot. Then two more gunshots and a deep, booming laugh.

Then, screaming.

T
hirty seconds later Erwin heard keys clattering in the lock. “Aw fuck.”

The door swung open on Sergeant Rogers's brother kneeling on the floor, head hung low, cheeks streaked with tears. He pointed at Steve with his left hand. His right, Erwin saw, was broken in at least two places. “That's him,” he said. “Please. I got a baby…”

Erwin just had time to register the words when Rogers's head exploded. He crumpled the rest of the way to the floor, his short, dumb life mercifully over. Then the craziest looking asshole Erwin had ever seen stepped over the body into the chapel.

He was a white guy, tall and muscular, a “healthy specimen” as they had said back in the day. Erwin's first thought was that the guy had done himself up in red body paint like one of those tribes in Colombia.
No. Not body paint. Blood
. He was covered in blood from head to toe. Here and there bits of meat were stuck to him as well. A couple of feet of someone's small intestine dangled from his shoulder.

The big guy was spinning a pyramid-shaped weight on the end of a long chain. At the other end of the chain was a machete-sized knife mounted on a yellow metal shaft.
Is that bronze?
Also
—What the fuck?
At
first Erwin refused to believe what his eyes were telling him, but the guy was, in fact, wearing a tutu.
Hmm
, Erwin thought.
There's something you don't see every day
.

“Eshteeeeve?” the big guy said. His eyes tracked back and forth between Erwin, Steve, and Dorn, reminding Erwin of the forward-mounted gun on an Apache. He had a strange accent, one Erwin couldn't place. The
s
sounded more like “esh” and he dragged his
e
out too long.

“Uh…Steve?” said Dorn. “You're looking for Steve?”

“Don't, Counselor,” Erwin said.

The big guy's eyes locked onto Dorn. “Eshteeve?”

“That's him!” Dorn said, pointing at Steve.

The guy gave Dorn a big smile. His teeth were brown. “Eshteeeve?”

Dorn nodded his head with comical enthusiasm, looking for a moment more like a headbanger than an attorney. “Yeah,” he said, jabbing his finger into the air in Steve's direction, “that's him!”

“Counselor, I don't think—”

Quick as a panther, the big guy was at Steve's side. He put an arm around him, stroked his cheek with the blade of the knife. Erwin's professional eye noted that the blade was hand-forged.
Don't see that much either
. It looked very sharp.