to thro me to Haight.'
Grace sighed impetuously. 'I still don't think she'll help
Wald turned to look at Grace, who was now leaning back on her hands, legs still lolling off the edge of the desktop. 'You think more like your mother every day.'
'I'm sure that sits fine with you.'
'You are both very bright women.'
He turned to me.
'Russell,' he finally said, slipping his glasses back into the drawer, 'let's set up a little sling, then get Martin Parish’s ass into it.'
He offered me his hand. I shook it. 'Thank you,' I said absently, smiling with a similar absence. My mind, in fact, was reeling.
Wald stood. 'I actually think this may go rather smooth! I'll have that oaf after Amber like a trout on a fly. I look forward to seeing the look on his face when we take him down for. well… what shall we shoot for? Burglary? Attempted murder? Russell, one hour from now, you and I will both be sitting in the same room with him, trying to figure how to play the Midnight Eye right. My guess is that Martin Parish will do everything he can to keep the Eye on the street until he can do Amber once and for all. He'll use the Eye's MO, like he tried to originally.'
'I think you're right,' I said.
'Thanks, Waldie,' said Grace. She lurched off the desk and came to Erik, planted a polite kiss on his cheek, then shook his hand. 'It means a lot to have a friend.'
'You can count on me for that, Grace.'
He was smiling broadly at her now, his blue eyes lighted with something like fascination, and something like mischief.
I used his phone to call the Medical Center. Isabella was awake and feeling well. I asked them to tell her I'd be there as soon as I possibly could.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
One hour later, we were, in fact, seated in Dan Winters's office, gathered to devise our strategy regarding the Midnight Eye. I found myself unable to look at either Wald or Parish with fearing that my suspicions were written on my face as clearly as a headline. It was no easier to focus on Winters, whose penetrating black eyes seemed, as always, to find their way straight into the weakness behind my own facade. Why did he bother to include me here, with an indictment from the DA on its way? Was he simply keeping his enemies close? Or- outlandish as it would have been-had Parish bypassed his boss? Was it even possible that the indictment was nothing more than a terror tactic from Parish, that he had no intention arresting me for a murder he himself had committed? Karen would hardly look at me, so compromised did she feel at having tipped me to Martin's plans. The thought crossed my mine he may have used her. The thought also crossed my mine she was willing to be used. Suspicions of betrayal and treachery piled so high inside me, I could hardly hear myself think. I concentrated on the notepad in front of me, on the pen in my hand, and on the question that had been bothering me as much as it had been bothering John Carfax. How had the Eye managed to bypass the intercepts? We knew he had electronic know-how, this from the testimony of Mary Ing. We knew that there were commercially available products for scrambling, encoding, and decoding, for testing whether a line was 'transparent' or not. With some experimentation and a little brains, the Eye might have found the application he was looking for-namely, making calls on a line with no number. But how could he get access to the lines?
In contrast to my silent deliberations, both Parish and Wald argued heatedly about how to handle the Midnight Eye. Their voices seemed to cascade over me like the roar of a waterfall behind which I was standing. How did the Eye get access to the lines?
The key question for Parish and Wald was whether to reveal him as Ing or not. He had threatened massive violence if we did, but, as Parish pointed out, keeping Ing active was the key to finding him. Wald took the opposite view, that to enrage Ing was to endanger the county, and that any time we could purchase with mollification was time we badly needed. At one point, Wald and Parish were yelling and Winters had to shout them both down.
'What's your call, Russell?' he asked me.
'ID him,' I said absently. 'Make him feel the pressure. I'm with Martin. Smoke him out.'
Wald looked at Winters, visibly aghast. 'It's going to backfire,' he said.
'First decent idea Monroe's had in a week,' said Parish.
'Thanks. Here's another one. Ing works around phone lines. He knows how to work them, like taking apart the phone when he was a kid. That's why he can place the calls around the intercepts.'
'We've already talked to everyone we could think of said Winters. 'Right, Martin?'
'Right. The linemen at the phone company, the utilities people, the city maintenance crews. Everyone.'
'What about the phone company? Not the field crew but right there at the hub, in Laguna?'
'Wald covered it,' said Parish.
'You covered it,' said Wald.
An utter grayness descended over Martin's face. 'I haven’t screened the hub people-that was Wald's damned Citizen Task Force's job. He asked for it.'
'Bullshit,' said Wald. 'You said your people were handling it.'
'Oh no,' said Winters. 'I can't believe what I'm hearing. You mean nobody's been out there to the goddamned phone company with that picture?'
The silence that reigned again seemed, logically, to focus upon Martin Parish. 'No.'
'Enough of this shit!' bellowed Winters, hurtling up from his desk and backhanding a pile of files to the floor. 'This is what we do! No more games. No more crap between you people I'll fire all of you motherfuckers if I have to. Now you will listen and you will obey. One, Monroe, file the article about Mrs. Ing' identification. File the one on Ing's childhood. See if the Journal will run the graphic without the damned beard. Karen, give them one of Mrs. Ing's snapshots of this bastard. Parish, get out to the phone company right now. Wald, either get those citizens to come up with something or get them the hell out of this building. They're using up my air conditioning. Now get out of my sight and do it!'
I gathered my notebook and left the room. Behind me came the sound of Wald and Parish yelling again, the same accusations and warnings.
In the pressroom, I used a fax machine to file my story suggesting that the Midnight Eye was William Fredrick Ing. I talked to Carla Dance about the photographs and she was only too willing to run another picture of the suspect. She thanked me again for the best series of scoops she could remember printing.
'Gosh, I hope this doesn't come back to haunt us,' she said.
'Carla, I don't know what else we can do. And, by the way, can you hurry along those checks? I'm broke.'
'I'll talk with Accounting.'
Then I went out to my car and drove back down the freeway toward Erik Wald's house in the Tustin hills. I wanted to have a conversation with the walls of his home, and then I wanted, very badly, to see my Isabella.
The same overpowering heat that was allowing the Midnight Eye into the homes of innocents also gave me easy entry into Wald's study. I pried off the screen of an opened window in the rear, slid up the glass, and climbed in, well concealed beneath the towering eucalyptus and oak that ran down Wald's property line to the east.
I went to the desk, opened the drawer, and took out Wald's glasses. From the pen in my pocket, I removed the screw I'd found in Amber's room. Working under the light of Wald's desk lamp, I placed the screw into the empty temple hole and twisted it in. The fit was perfect. It had the same coppery finish that the metal of the frames did. I tilted the glasses over, wiggled them gently, and watched the screw fall to the blotter. Stripped, I thought, exactly what had allowed it to fall out in the first place. I could feel my heart pounding in my fingertips as I gathered up the little part and replaced it in my pen.
I left the study and broke into the house with an old set of lock-picking tools I'd used during my deputy days.
I stood in the darkened hacienda-style living room and wondered what I was looking for and where to start.
