The Rook (2 page)
Authors: Steven James
hree months later
Monday, February 16, 2009
San Diego, California
5:46 p.m.
I stared at the array of silverware surrounding my plate. “I can never remember which fork to use for the salad.”
My stepdaughter Tessa pointed. “The outside one, Patrick. You start there and work your way in.”
“You sure?”
She picked up my forks one at a time, a family of leather bracelets riding up and down her wrist, over the four rubber bands she wore beneath them. “Salad, main dish, then dessert.”
As she set down my dessert fork, I realized how much we both stuck out at this restaurant. Everyone else wore a dinner jacket or an evening gown; we both had on Tshirts—mine, a faded athletic shirt from Marquette University, hers, a black, long-sleeve DeathNail 13 tee with the band’s logo of an eyeball with a nail stuck through it.
Beside the picture she wore a small pin: Save Darfur. Now.
Tessa had chosen light pink lipstick tonight, but black fingernail polish and black eye shadow to match her raven-black hair. I hadn’t been too thrilled about the eyebrow ring and pierced nose she’d gotten last month without my permission, but I had to admit they were cute. And with her three-quarter-length black tights under a crinkly fabric skirt, she looked slightly Goth, a little edgy and dark, yet still girlish and innocent at seventeen.
“So, how do you know so much about table settings?” I asked.
“I worked at La Saritas, remember? Before Mom died.”
Her comment blindsided me, took me back to Christie’s funeral. I glanced out the window. The wind had been kicking up all afternoon, and now, just after dusk, the ocean looked ragged and gray. The remaining sunlight drained slowly into the sea as a few gulls meandered beneath the clouds, occasionally diving to retrieve a fish that had wandered too close to the water’s rough, leathery surface. “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I guess I forgot. How long did you work there again?”
“Two days. The manager said I didn’t have a ‘team-oriented attitude.’” She took a sip of her ice water. “Jerk.”
I’d chosen a table in the back of the restaurant, my back to the wall. Force of habit. For a moment I watched the servers maneuver through the maze of tables, observing the routes they took, the choices they made. Habit again.
A few minutes earlier, the girl who’d seated us had placed a platter of crusty bread in front of me. She’d set a bowl of some kind of oil next to it, and the people at the tables all around us were dipping their bread into the sour-yellow lubricant and then eating it. I decided to pass.
Our server, a slim-boned man with a beak for a nose, arrived to take our order. “Sir,” he said. Then he faced Tessa. “Mademoiselle.
Would you like to hear the specials? Tonight we are offering a lovely pork tenderloin finished off with a mango and pineapple reduction—”
Tessa gave him an iron stare. “Do you have any idea what kind of conditions those pigs are forced to live in before being shipped to the slaughterhouses? Wire cages. Tiny wire cages—”
“Tessa,” I said.
“Where they’re force-fed, drugged with growth hormones until they’re too fat to stand—”
“Tessa Bernice Ellis.”
“I’m just saying—”
I gave her my best, be-quiet-right-now-or-we’re-going-to-Burger-King look. Our eyes wrestled for a moment, and at last she gave in. “OK, OK. I want a house salad.” She pointed to the menu. “And no apple-wood smoked bacon.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He turned to me, tilted his head, offered a fabricated smile. He might have been a robot. “And you, sir?”
I noticed Tessa glaring at me. “I guess I’ll have a salad too,” I said. “But I’m hungry though. Make it a double.”
“A double, sir? I’m afraid our dinner salad only comes in one size, but I assure you it’s a most generous portion.”
I’d seen some of those “generous portions” when Tessa and I had walked to our booth. “Well, I’ll take two of those, then. Just dump them into one great big bowl. That’ll work.”
He scribbled something on his notepad, although I didn’t think our order had been all that complex. Tessa cleared her throat.
“Patrick, seriously, you can order the pork tenderloin if you want, and I promise I won’t say anything about how the pigs are crammed into feces-ridden crates where they can’t even turn around, taken to a slaughterhouse where they’re hit with a stun gun that leaves them alive and squealing and bleeding to death while they’re dropped alive into the scalding water that’s supposed to remove their hair and soften up the meat so that restaurants like this can glaze them with mangos and serve them to their patrons. I promise not to say a word.”
The woman at the table beside us slowly lowered her main-dish fork to the table.
“How thoughtful of you, Tessa,” I said.
Slaughterhouses. Great.
Just the thing I need to be thinking about right now.
I noticed that our server’s face had turned pasty white. “Just bring me those two salads in one big bowl and a cup of coffee—wait. What kind of coffee do you have?”
He tried to compose himself. “We serve a variety of fine espressos and cappuccinos as well as both regular and decaffeinated—”
“No, no, no. I mean like a Ruiru 11 blend from Kenya, or Costa Rican La Magnolia, or something from the Cerrado region of Brazil.
What kind of coffee? What country is it from?”
“I believe we buy it here in America—”
Oh boy. “When you get the coffee from the store, does it come in a great big metal can?”
He beamed. “Absolutely.”
That was all I needed to hear. “Tea. A cup of tea.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I glanced at the bowl of oil. “And some butter too.”
“Tea …” He mouthed the words as he wrote them on his pad.
“And butter.” Then he turned hesitantly toward Tessa. “And your drink, ma’am?”
“Root beer. And don’t put any cheese in my salad, anything like that.”
He gave her a small nod.
“Or ranch dressing. Ranch is disgusting.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Or eggs.”
One more brisk nod, and then he disappeared.
“Well,” I said. “Nothing like visiting a fancy restaurant. We should do this more often.”
“Yup,” she said, dipping a piece of bread into the oil and holding it up to the light. Globs of vomit-colored oil plopped onto her plate. “Nothing like it.”
I tried to relax and just enjoy the next few minutes. Tried to engage in a coherent conversation, tried to listen to her talk about a club she’d heard about that she wanted to visit but that I would never let her go to anyway, tried to think of clever things to say about the birdlike Tried to, but couldn’t. The image of a slaughterhouse had landed in my mind and refused to leave.
I could hear squealing coming from the inside. Sharp desperate cries. But neither this slaughterhouse nor the squealing had anything to do with pigs.
The last three months had been good ones for Creighton Melice, now known as Neville Lewis. He liked San Diego weather, and he especially liked living in a city with hundreds of thousands of undocumented, untraceable, easily misplaced people.
And so many of them women.
Lovely Hispanic women.
Potential girlfriends.
Creighton glanced around the warehouse office, and his eyes took in the dusty file cabinet in the corner piled high with a stack of manila folders, the swimsuit calendar that was still flipped to May 2007 pinned to the wall, and, of course, the large gray desk with his high-definition computer screen on top of it. Beside the keyboard was a stack of DVD cases.
He stepped onto a swivel chair and repositioned the right-hand camcorder centering it in the hole in the wall so he could get a clearer view of his next girlfriend when it happened. Over the years he’d found that the videos were much more satisfying when he got the camera angles just right.
And, of course, a lot depended on the quality of your equipment.
And whoever the guy was who’d shot the bottle from his hand that day in DC knew his stuff: the two professional-grade camcorders were the kind a news crew might use for a remote.
The warehouse had already been prepared for Creighton when he arrived in November. Everything was all set. Just waiting for him.
As he sat down at the desk, a large spider, ripe with babies, lowered itself onto his arm, but Creighton didn’t mind, didn’t brush it away. He’d always had an affinity for spiders.
He tapped at the keyboard to test the remote zoom capabilities.
The spider skittered up his arm and across the back of his neck. A few more keystrokes.
Yes.
Excellent.
Now, for the second camera.
The server arrived with our order. He laid a large metal bowl beside me containing my two meagerly generous servings of salad.
Then he placed Tessa’s salad in front of her and quickly stepped back. “Anything else?”
“No,” I said. “We’re good. Thanks.”
Tessa inspected her salad, probably looking for stray pieces of meat that might have fallen into it. “It looks OK.”
As our server hurried off and we began to eat, I glanced at the routes of the two dozen servers again. Made note of which tables each person was serving, who yielded to whom as they approached the kitchen. Then, in between mouthfuls of lettuce, spinach, green peppers, and black olives, Tessa and I talked about how her junior year of high school was going, the colleges she was considering, the things we were both hoping to do in San Diego, and some bands I’d never heard of who were apparently amazingly sick—meaning good. But all the while, in the back of my mind, I was still thinking about the slaughterhouse.
Then, with a big bite of salad in her mouth, Tessa asked, “So, it feels good, doesn’t it?”
A shiver squirmed through my gut.
I paused with my salad fork halfway to my mouth. “What did you just say?”
My tone must have been as harsh as the images climbing through my mind, because she blinked, and when she replied, she seemed almost intimidated. “I just mean, being in the middle of a case like this. Trying to catch this arsonist guy. It feels good. It’s what you do. It’s what you like, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. It’s what I do. It’s what I like.” My words were blunt.
Unnecessary hammer blows. I didn’t want to go where this conversation or my thoughts were taking me, so I changed the subject.
“But being here with you, I like this more.” I set down my fork.
She gave me a tired, you-can’t-possibly-be-for-real teenager look, but I caught the hint of a smile. “Yeah. Whatever.”
“I mean it.”
“Thanks.” She looked down at the table. Slightly embarrassed.
It was nice to see.
Over the past couple years we’d both been through a lot. Tessa had been fifteen when her mother and I met, dated, and then married—sixteen when Christie died tragically of breast cancer.
Christie’s parents had passed away years before, and Tessa didn’t know who her real father was, so that left the two of us to try and work through Christie’s death and form a family together. It hadn’t gone too well. Nearly a year had passed since Christie’s death, and it felt like Tessa and I were still at the starting line. But at least we were there together. And that was something.
I picked up my outside fork and aimed it at a miniature tomato in my salad. “So, four days in San Diego, huh?”
“Yeah. This is one time I’m actually glad Denver has year-round schools. All their screwy breaks.”
“I thought maybe while we’re here I could take you to the Sherrod Aquarium.”
“An aquarium.” She spoke with her mouth full. “Wow. How fun is that.”
“It’s supposed to be one of the best in the world.”
She sighed with her eyeballs.
“They have sharks,” I said. “Lots and lots of sharks.”
She seemed to consider that for a moment. “Sharks are cool.”
“Now,” I said, “you know that I have—”
“A little work to do while we’re here. I know, I know. The arsonist.”
“Sometimes you may need to stay at the hotel by yourself—”
A slight pause. “I didn’t come here to sit at some stupid hotel.
I’m OK on my own, you know.”
“It’s just that we’re not in Denver, this is a different city.”
“In a few months I’ll be old enough to live on my own.”
“Eight months.”
“Like I said.”
I took a gulp of tea. “Anyway, I’ll spend as much time with you as I can.”
“We’ve been over all this already. It’s no big deal.” And then,
“You don’t have to babysit me.”
Big issue. Deal with that later.
“OK.”
Tessa always begs to come along when I travel but likes her space too. Since I’m an FBI criminologist who tracks serial offenders, I can’t usually bring her with me.
This time, though, Special Agent Lien-hua Jiang, one of my team members at the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, as well as one of the Bureau’s top profilers, had called me in. We were consulting with the San Diego Police Department on a series of fires that had been started in abandoned homes over the last ten months. No fatalities so far, just property damage.
The Bureau wants to encourage strong family relationships, and since this wasn’t a case that would put Tessa in danger, and I wasn’t the lead investigator, and I was willing to foot the bill for her trip, they had no problems with her coming along. So, all things taken into account, this seemed like a good chance for us to spend some time together, especially since she was on break from school.
“So,” I said, changing the subject, “this is your first time visiting the Pacific Ocean, right?”
“I’ve seen the ocean before, Patrick. You know that. When we lived in New York.”
“But that’s the Atlantic.”
“There’s only one ocean.”
I wondered if this was a joke and I was missing the punch line.
“Last I checked there was the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, Indian—”
“Well, last
I
checked all the oceans were connected. One big body of water. One world, one ocean.”
I peered out the window. Watched the black water lick at the shore in the rising moonlight. “I guess I never thought of it like that before.”
“They do the same thing with land. Seven continents? Yeah, right. Only if you divide up Europe and Asia and split up North and South America and count the man-made Suez Canal.”
I’d never thought of that either. “So why do you think we do that, divide things up like that?”
She shrugged. Took a bite of salad. “How should I know, I’m just a kid. Different cultures, maybe. Territorialism. Ethnocentrism.
I don’t know. It just seems dumb, though.”
Ethnocentrism. That’s just great.
Creighton pressed “record,” swiveled the camera, took twenty seconds of footage.
Since visiting the Blue Lizard Lounge in November, he’d tried to uncover Shade’s real identity, but so far none of his contacts had been able to dig up anything specific, and since Creighton had skipped town, his former lawyer Jacob Weldon wouldn’t even return his calls. So Creighton hadn’t discovered anything about his mysterious new friend, and, although he would never have admitted it to anyone, that troubled him somewhat.
All of their communications had been through voice-altered phone calls, text messages, and dead-letter message drops. All very cloak-and-dagger, which made Creighton think that he—or she or whoever—was probably a spy wannabe.
But maybe not a wannabe.
Maybe the real thing.
Anything was possible.
Creighton pressed “pause,” then rewound the video. Played it through to the end. Adjusted the focus, then pressed “record”
once again.
For the first few weeks, it had remained a complete mystery to him why Shade had chosen him for this specific job. But when Shade finally explained the grand scheme to him and then started naming names, he’d seen the beauty and irony of it all. Yes, he was the perfect person to do it.
Really, the only person.
He pressed “pause.”
There.
That was it.
Yes, just a slight glint off the glass, but he could take care of that, just like he’d done in the previous videos.
The camera was set.
He put the ropes in the trunk.
It was time to go find a woman interested in spending the evening with a handsome, slightly devilish male companion.
