Satisfied, he typed in the address and hit SEND. It was gone in an instant, headed to Mogadishu.
He logged off, and the clerk didn’t even look up from her LCD as he exited the cafe. A cold blast of wind hit him as soon as the door opened. His flat was just a block away, but even so, he was tempted to go back inside and wait for the weather to improve.
Which could be June.
He popped open his umbrella and headed out into the night, walking with purpose. There was one more thing to accomplish tonight. He rounded the corner, passed the street entrance to his flat, and walked down the alley to the cellar door.
The international call from the pay phone had pissed him off in a big way. It was her first offense, and a very foolish one at that. Did she think she could buy a calling card without his finding out about it? Did she think she could do anything without his knowledge? He turned the key and shook his head with amusement as he unlocked the door. There was no doubt in his mind that she would tell him who she had called, why she had called him, and what she had said. If she lied, he would not be fooled-because he already knew everything there was to know about that call. He just wanted to hear her say that she was sorry for what she had done.
Oh, so sorry.
He entered, closed the door behind him, and climbed down the steep stairs. The cellar had just one small window at street level, which had been made translucent with a streaky coat of paint on the outside. The streetlight glowed behind it, and the shadow of iron bars cast a zebra pattern across the floor.
He watched her sleeping on a mattress in the corner. Finally, she seemed to sense his presence.
“Who’s there?” she said, only half awake.
He didn’t answer. She reached for the lamp switch.
“Leave the light off,” he said, and his command halted her.
“You’re back,” she said.
It was that frightened and timid voice that had lured him into complacency. The one that had led him to believe that, after almost six trouble-free months, she could be trusted with a modicum of supervised free time. The one that had made it almost inconceivable that she would find the courage to venture out to a pay phone.
He grabbed the covers at the foot of the bed and peeled them back. She jerked away, but he grabbed her by the ankle. The monitor was still in place.
“I never really left,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-five
Douglas Road,” the driver said as the Metro-Dade bus squeaked to a stop.
Vince rose and offered a sincere “Thank you” on his way out; bus drivers were supposed to call out stops for the blind, but not all of them did. The smell of diesel fumes engulfed him as the bus pulled away, and Vince could hear the click-clack of Sam’s nails on the sidewalk as his four-legged friend led him to the crosswalk.
“Time for a doggy pedicure, buddy.”
Vince stopped at the crosswalk, checked his GPS navigator, and waited for the familiar female robotic voice: “Go one hundred yards, and your destination is on the right.” The traffic light changed with an audible click, and Sam led the way across the street.
Vince had visited MLFC headquarters before, but his mental image of it was sketchy. Although he had received a full tour, Chuck Mays’ idea of being descriptive for the benefit of his blind friend was simply to add his all-purpose adverb to everything. The offices weren’t big; they were f-ing big. The computers weren’t superfast; they were super f-ing fast.
“You have arrived,” announced the navigation system. Sam stopped, and by Vince’s calculation, they were directly in front of Chuck’s building.
“Over here, Paulo,” said Chuck. “What are you, fucking blind?”
The guy had a way with words.
“Too nice of a day to sit in the office,” said Chuck. “Thought we’d walk down to the pond and feed the ducks.”
Vince hesitated. No matter where they were, whenever Chuck said something about a walk down to the pond to feed the ducks, Vince detected the distinct odor of marijuana in the air. Some guys just seemed to get a rush flouting the law under a cop’s nose, even if the cop was blind.
“There’s no pond here,” said Vince, “and probably no ducks, either.”
“Busted. Guess I’ll settle for a cigarette.”
They found a bench in the shade on the other side of the building, away from traffic noises. A light breeze felt good on Vince’s face. He opened his backpack and emptied a water bottle into a travel-size bowl for Sam. Chuck was wired on caffeine overload and dominated the small talk-everything from his new receptionist’s great set of tits to the latest stupid bureaucrat at the Division of Motor Vehicles to hand over twenty thousand driver’s license numbers to hackers in the Ukraine by clicking on a bogus link for free porn. Finally, Chuck took a breath, and Vince got straight to the point of his visit.
“This isn’t easy for me to talk about,” said Vince, “but sometimes I can’t remember what McKenna looked like.”
It was a rare occurrence, but Chuck was actually silenced. Vince heard only the breeze stirring the palm fronds overhead.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Chuck, clearly not knowing how to respond.
Vince sensed his uneasiness-“a guy thing”-but there was something he needed to say. “It’s strange. My grandmother, who has been dead for over two decades, I can picture perfectly in my mind. But with my brother, who I see every week, it’s now almost impossible for me to attach a face to his voice.”
Chuck lit up another cigarette. “What about me? How can you forget my ugly mug?”
Vince stayed on a serious track. “The way I described this to Alicia is to imagine that there is a big photo album in my mind. If people are part of my past, they stay there forever, just as they were. But if I make them a part of my new life, their image fades. The more contact I have with them, the more they are defined by things that don’t depend on sight.”
“Well, if that’s the case, shouldn’t you remember McKenna?”
“She’s the exception. When I think of that night, I don’t see McKenna the young woman anymore. I see McKenna the five-year-old girl who used to jump into my arms when I came to visit. It’s getting so that my memory of that day-that horrible day-is one of a five-year-old girl.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“On the surface, you’re right. But she wasn’t five when she was murdered. And no matter how much evidence we concealed, we weren’t going to make her five.”
“Nobody hid any evidence, Vince.”
“I’m talking about the text message from her cell phone. FMLTWIA.”
“I know what you’re talking about. Hacking into her provider’s network and zapping it from her cellular records was my version of child’s play.”
“And I never told anyone a thing about it.”
“There was no reason for anyone to know.”
Vince shifted uneasily. He hated moments like these, when people could see the angst on his face and he could see nothing on theirs.
“Look, at the time, we were of one mind,” said Vince. “The last thing we wanted was a rag-sheet reporter dragging McKenna’s reputation through the mud. But without that text message, the only evidence we had was the recording of her dying declaration-which I screwed up. The text would have put Jamal Wakefield at the scene of the crime. What nineteen-year-old guy wouldn’t have come running in response to a message like that?”
“It’s hard to run from a secret detention facility.”
“You don’t really believe that line Swyteck has been selling, do you?”
Chuck took a long drag from his cigarette. “Jamal didn’t kill McKenna.”
“Don’t patronize me. If I had stayed on the line with the nine-one-one operator and let McKenna talk to her,
