The woman on the boat turned as a man ran toward her. She raised her palm in a high five. He slapped hers with his, then they both jumped in place like delirious football fans after a winning touchdown.
“I’ve never understood how anyone can celebrate death,” Tabari said. “Any death.”
Tabari ran his fingers along a rosemary branch, then raised them to his nose. He breathed in the scented resin and said, “This, not death, is worth celebrating.”
“You sound like your uncle,” Gage said.
Tabari smiled. “And every day he sounds more like my father than he lets on.” His smiled faded. “Except angrier. A kind of Old Testament, Moses anger.”
“I noticed that at the airport,” Gage said. “Why the change?”
“His world has gotten larger since he retired, or at least he’s being confronted by more of it. The narrow, focused gaze that he moved from case to case when he was a detective is now like a searchlight that moves from country to country, from disaster to disaster, from crime to crime, illuminating one evil after another that he feels helpless to stop.” Tabari stared down at the boat, then looked over at Gage and said, “That’s what his platinum smuggling investigation is really about.”
“You mean it’s not as serious as he makes it out to be?”
“No. I suspect that he’s right about that. But it’ll continue whether he gets killed trying to stop it or not.”
“Why are you convinced it’s that dangerous?”
“Not because I have inside information, but because the breadth of the thing, the size of the organization, the length of the chain and the amount of money involved. It doesn’t make sense for whoever these people are to engage in this wide of a conspiracy unless there are not just millions, but billions at stake. Whoever is behind it has developed the means to control mines and power plants and banks. They can make airplanes appear before the world’s eyes like fireflies in the night and then disappear again. They can make tons of precious metals jump from place to place like they’re subatomic particles-”
“And you don’t think your uncle gets it.”
“Worse. To them, he’s just a piece of lint to be flicked off their lapels.”
Gage understood conceptually why Tabari was worried, but he didn’t have enough facts to know whether they supported the theory. After all, Tabari’s fear could be just the mirror image of his uncle’s misunderstanding of what had been going on, but he’d need time to figure it out.
“If you want,” Gage said, “I can talk to the people at Transparency Watch. Ask them to pull him off of it or assign him to something else for a while.”
Tabari shook his head. “That would just humiliate him. He might become even more reckless and try to pursue it on his own.”
They stood in silence for a few moments, then Gage said, “Let me think about it. I’ll come up with something.”
“Just don’t get sucked into it, too. You don’t show it, but I know you scan the darkness of the world using the same searchlight as my uncle does. That’s why you and he are friends.”
Gage didn’t respond. It wasn’t the same searchlight, or if it was, it had never left him feeling helpless. Would it someday? He didn’t know. His father, who’d run his family medical practice into his late eighties, had never felt helpless, perhaps because he’d come to accept the contingencies of life and didn’t fear death. But Batkoun Benaroun seemed to accept neither.
Gage turned and led the way along the trail. Soon they were midway through the section they’d seen from the opposite side.
Emerging from a tunnel formed of dense juniper and overhanging oak trees, Gage again spotted the outcropping from which Hennessy had gone down. They walked another hundred yards, then Tabari stopped and pointed down.
“This is it,” Tabari said.
Gage held on to a pine trunk and leaned out. Tabari braced himself against the tree, then grabbed the back of Gage’s jacket as insurance against him falling.
Looking down, Gage imagined Hennessy’s body tumbling and flailing like the seagull, thudding into the first ledge fifteen feet down before tumbling down onto the two ledges below, each one angled out like stair steps, each ten feet tall, until a final, hundred-foot drop to the rocks along the water’s edge.
Gage reached for his binoculars again and inspected the porous limestone below for blood spatter that might’ve been absorbed into the rock, and therefore might not have been washed away during the storms that passed through on the days following Hennessy’s death.
“Looking for blood?” Tabari asked.
Gage nodded.
“There was some, but not much. I suspect that he died on impact.”
Gage straightened up and Tabari released his grip.
It didn’t make sense. A suicide wants it to be over in an instant, a straight drop into oblivion, not a bouncing journey down a flesh and bone grater.
Except maybe as self-punishment for sins Gage couldn’t yet imagine.
When Gage looked over, he saw that Tabari was staring at him, a smile on his face. Gage knew that Tabari had guessed what he was thinking.
“He went over at night,” Tabari said. “He couldn’t have seen that it wasn’t a freefall to the bottom. He might’ve done what you just did. Found an outcropping. Found the place closest to the edge, held on to the tree to position himself, and then pushed off.”
Gage shook his head. “His eyes would’ve adjusted to the darkness. Even on a cloudy night-”
“Which it was.”
“The ledges down there would’ve glowed.”
Tabari knelt down and picked at specks in the dirt that looked like mica. He wet his finger, pressed it against one of them, and held it up toward Gage.
“Water white glass,” Tabari said, “with an antireflective coating.” He wiped it off against his pants. “Flashlight glass.”
“And you recovered the flashlight?”
Tabari nodded. “The officers who searched the area. Not me personally.”
“That’s all the more reason why he wouldn’t have jumped here.”
“The detective who handled the case theorized that Hennessy did what you did, but lost his balance and committed suicide a little sooner than he planned and in a less advisable place than he would’ve wanted.”
“In which case it’s an accident and not a suicide since he still could’ve changed his mind.”
Tabari shrugged. “But nonetheless, not a crime.”
Gage thought back on the suicides that he’d investigated when he was a homicide detective and on the training he’d received. He couldn’t think of an instance in which a suicide released his grip on whatever was in his hand. A Bible. A cross. A love letter. The instinct was to hold on. He couldn’t imagine Hennessy dropping the flashlight as he jumped or tossing it behind him.
But Tabari could still be right. It could’ve been an accidental suicide.
“Of course,” Tabari said, raising his eyebrows, “this is all conjecture.”
Gage flashed on an image of the trailhead and the stolen car. “And whether it’s correct depends on the means of transportation he used to travel out here.”
“And maybe also on what we know about what he couldn’t have used to travel out here.”
“And when will I get that answer?” Gage asked.
“Tomorrow. I think tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 34
The tyranny of history and the force of its contradictions weighed on Faith as she sat in a corner watching Ayi Zhao, her son, her daughter-in-law, and Jian-jun confronting one another at the metal table in the center of the
