And knocks out a pane of glass.
The storage bay is an icebox. He had waited for the glass repair company to arrive and replace the pane, paying the man in cash, then had retrieved the key from the corkboard in Dolores’s kitchen. He is once again standing in front of Michael Ryan’s desk in bay number 202, not really certain as to why, not really comfortable with the desperation that had settled over him of late.
He finds a suitable rag and cleans off the dust-covered dial on the small floor safe.
Then, in the dim light of the single overhead bulb, he looks at Demetrius Salters’s scrawlings on the Time magazine, even though the page numbers had stalked the edge of his conscious thought for so long he knows them by heart.
15,28,35.
It had occurred to him somewhere in the middle of a daydream. Carla’s creepy crawler. The one who used to carve numbers into the foreheads of his victims.
Combinations are six numbers.
Before he can talk himself out of it, he hunkers down, spins the dial.
Fifteen, right.
Once around. Twenty-eight left.
Thirty-five right.
Paris takes a deep breath, grabs the cold iron handle on the door to the safe, absolutely certain the door will not open, thoroughly convinced that a sequence of numbers circled in a cable TV guide by a retired cop with Alzheimer’s could not possibly be the combination to a safe that has been sitting in The door swings open.
Paris’s stomach flutters as he looks inside and sees two dog-eared manila folders. He removes them. The first one contains an old charcoal police-artist sketch of a teenaged boy. High cheekbones, long dark hair, wraparound sunglasses. Paris flips it over. On the back is glued a one-paragraph newspaper article from the San Diego Union-Tribune: HILLSDALE GIRL, 4, VICTIM OF HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER. The article is about Carrie Ryan’s accident.
Paris looks at the sketch again.
The hit-and-run suspect?
He opens the other folder. This one contains an old police file. On top is an aggravated assault complaint by a woman named Lydia del Blanco sworn out against her former spouse, Anthony C. del Blanco. Paris notices that it is a photocopy, not the original.
But that’s not what makes his mind spin. That dizzying feeling is courtesy of the fact that Anthony del Blanco lived at 4008 Central Avenue. Anthony del Blanco lived in one of the rooms in the Reginald Building, not more than fifteen feet from where Fayette Martin’s body was found.
The arresting officer that day was Michael P. Ryan, then a rookie patrolman. And Paris sees the mistake right away. The wrong address is on the search warrant. Michael had typed in 4006 Central Avenue. The room next to Anthony del Blanco’s room. And it was in 4008 that the investigating officers found Anthony’s clothes, covered with his ex-wife’s blood, the evidence needed to prosecute him.
Also in the safe is a news clipping, a small Cleveland Press article about how Anthony del Blanco was released from prison after spending only ten months in jail on a ten-year stretch, having been sprung on a technicality.
The body in the parking lot, Paris thinks.
The mutilated man with the barbwire crown.
Paris looks again at the bottom of the arrest report. He is not surprised to find that Mike Ryan’s partner that day was Demetrius Salters.
He flips a page, reads on. Lydia del Blanco had two children: a boy and a girl. There are two photos. One, taken of the crime scene where Lydia del Blanco was beaten, tells one story. The woman is not in the photo, just the huge Rorschach of her blood. There is also a book lying on the kitchen floor, near the refrigerator.
The Secret Garden.
The old man’s mantra.
The other photo is one from happier times, a color-faded photo of the woman and her two children at Euclid Beach. Pretty woman, white-rimmed sunglasses, white dress. Her daughter, sitting on her lap, is maybe six or so; the little boy a toddler.
Is this little girl Sarah Weiss? Paris thinks.
And what about the little boy?
Evil is a breed, Fingers.
Paris is no linguist, but he knows enough German and Spanish to know that Weiss equals White. And that White equals Blanco.
Mike Ryan’s murder had nothing to do with a deal gone bad, Paris thinks, his hands trembling slightly with the knowledge. Nothing at all.
Mike Ryan was executed.
54
She stands in the lobby of the Wyndham Hotel, the box under her left arm. She is wearing a short platinum wig, tinted glasses, a Givenchy suit. She looks at her watch for the hundredth time in the past ten minutes, cocks her right foot out of her shoe for a moment, giving her toes a break. Her gray pumps are a half-size too small.
At three-ten, the young man in the Ace Courier jacket enters the lobby, looks left and right. He sees her-his eyes giving her body a quick twice-over, once he realizes that the silver hair is attached to a shapely young woman-then approaches, smiling, clipboard in hand.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hello,” she replies.
“Are you Miss O’Malley?”
“Yes, I am,” she says. “I’d like to have a package delivered.”
55
Five O’clock. Paris checks the White Pages. Zero. He runs a computer check on del Blanco. Nothing. He runs an Internet search for Ohio and gets nothing. Not a single del Blanco in Ohio.
Shit.
At five-ten, Paris learns that two agents from the Cleveland field office of the FBI are meeting with all unit commanders. Paris had expected it, although it means he will soon be a back-bencher on this case. There is evidence of serial murder here, plus a lot of forensic material with which the lab at the Justice Center is ill equipped to deal.
And what to do with what he found in Mike Ryan’s safe? Was Mike Ryan killed for messing up a search warrant? Is this enough to activate the investigation into Mike’s murder? And wouldn’t producing a stolen police report that was in Mike Ryan’s possession just smear his name further?
On the other hand, how could the fact that Anthony del Blanco once lived in the Reginald Building be coincidence?
Five-thirty. The photographs of the victims, along with all the other players, and potential players, are in a loose square on the floor in Paris’s office. As are all of the sketches. Furniture has been pushed to the walls. Paris circles the pictures, stalking the clue hidden there.
A grim spectacle stares up at him. Faces of the dead.
Sarah Weiss. Burned to death in a car.
Michael Ryan. Shot in the head.
Willis Walker. Bludgeoned and castrated.
