recognized from the hall outside Opaque. The Voice in the Dark, tight with restaurant management as I'd thought; the smug Swiss host had made clear his unwillingness to give up anything, and the waitstaff could hardly play eyewitness. I wondered if there was some connection between Charlie and Kim Kendall, the other art photographer in the mix.
'I checked the Web page's source,' Induma was saying. 'The page elements are stored in date-sorted directories. He used to add docs from the server every few days, but he hasn't added a new one since June.'
'Which in English means…?'
'This site hasn't been updated in three months. Not much of a way to run a business. He went off the grid. No new leases, no new jobs, no forwarding information.'
'Money trouble,' I said. 'Hiding from whoever he owed. Then his dad swooped in to save the day.'
Induma tapped the laptop with a thumb. 'I couldn't source that pager number you got off that girl. I obviously don't have clearances for all the law-enforcement databases, but still. Whoever set up that pager knows what he's doing. How to not be seen, not leave trails.' She folded her laptop and stood. 'When's Mack contacting you? To give you the other key?'
'I don't know. But not soon enough.' I jotted my cell-phone number on a piece of paper, and she tucked it into a pocket. I took her arm. 'Thank you.' The cashmere was soft against my fingers. I rolled my thumb across the fabric. 'You were wearing this when I met you.'
'You remember?'
'With dark blue jeans and open-toed sandals. Your toenails were painted a deeper shade of orange, and your hair was pulled back in a tortoise-shell clasp.'
She stopped, laptop against her thigh. I watched her chest swell and settle beneath the sweater.
I said, 'I'm sorry I didn't tell you everything then.'
Behind her, around us, people jostled and scraped by and sipped on the go. Her lips twitched-a bittersweet smile-and then she turned and disappeared through the door.
Chapter 29
Dripping with sweat, I sat on the bench before my locker. I'd hit the weights, jumped rope for twenty minutes, then run myself to exhaustion on the treadmill. The workout should've cleared my head, but instead I felt jumpy, antsy to get home to see if DHL had dropped off a transparent cell phone at my government-issued front door.
I tugged open the locker. Through the curtains of my hanging clothes, my money clip sat on the thin metal shelf. Still fat with cash-I'd stopped at an ATM-but something was different. A piece of paper was tucked beneath the clip, parallel with the top bill. I withdrew the fold of cash, pulled the silver clip free, and stared down at a familiar film-processing slip.
One roll, ready for pickup.
The photograph looked like shit, but it did its job. Pronounced against a blur of yellow stucco were five large painted numbers. The picture had been taken at a slant, encompassing the corner street sign. All the info, in one neat little snapshot.
I lowered the photograph and stared at the real thing. Precise angle, precise distance. I was standing where the photographer had been when he'd snapped the shot-across the street on an apartment-complex driveway leading sharply down into an underground garage. As I leaned against the retaining wall, my head was just above street level. An inconspicuous spot. Which was good, given the dark sedan pulled to the curb in front of the neighboring building.
The picture was one of only two that were exposed in the roll, waiting for me at the photomat I'd visited last time. Logic dictated that Mack was the guy who'd taken them. After all, he'd left me the first film-processing slip. But two things bothered me: The quality of the picture was poor by the standards of a professional photographer. And the film was a standard 35mm, not the high-end Ektachrome he'd used before.
I slid the second photo out from behind the first. A head-on of an apartment door. Above the peephole, in tarnished brass-2G. Anyone or anything could be behind that door, and anyone or anything could have been leading me there. But I had to go.
I glanced back up the road at the dark sedan. Tinted windows. Engine off. But I knew that the car wasn't unoccupied. The mole Wydell had warned me about?
Bracing myself, I stepped out from cover and walked briskly up the sidewalk, heading away from the sedan, hugging the buildings. The glut of apartments here, south of Pico near Lincoln, had been untouched by the Westside richification. Peeling paint, crumbling stucco. Tree roots had buckled the concrete in several places. I was sweating, desperate to look over my shoulder. I tried to hurry, then tried to slow down. No car door opened behind me; no engine roared.
Turning the corner, I passed my parked truck and looped back behind the complex. I hopped over a locked gate onto the pool patio. The door from the courtyard into the building was unlocked. I took the stairs, easing out onto the second floor. A damp hall, carpet still holding on from the seventies. Down the length, past a laundry room, through a fire door, and there it was. 2G.
The door was slightly ajar, the latch resting against the plate.
I stood and listened. Nothing.
I didn't like that unsecured door one bit. Before I went through it, I wanted to check out the rest of the floor, scout some exits, make Liffman proud.
I reversed down the hall to an emergency stairwell that dumped out into a side alley. On my way back to 2G, I ducked into the laundry room. Dry heat. Shoving the window open, I glanced down. Six feet below was a pool shed.
Cautiously I made my way back up the hall. Through that open sliver in the doorway of 2G came a sharp odor. I knocked, and the door wobbled open a few inches. No answer.
I stepped inside. The reek of gasoline. The sun was low and fat in the street-facing window, making me squint. A figure in a chair, head bowed. Newspaper spread on the floor under and around him.
The place was torn apart. Drawers emptied. Couch cushions slashed. Chairs flipped over. A familiar tableau. The big window was open, a faint breeze lending body to a limp, shoved-back curtain.
'Mack?' I eased forward. The front of the man's shirt was stained. A crimson bib.
My shoes padded on the moist newspaper. The print wadded and blurred, soaked in gasoline. The man was bound to the chair, cloth strips tying his wrists and ankles. Wild blond hair, just like Charlie's.
My breath came back to me as an echo, as if off the walls of a cavern. I reached out an unsteady hand, gripped the hair, and raised the head. The resemblance was shocking. Not just the Mick Jagger mouth but also the wide brow and intense, neurotic eyes. The Voice in the Dark, a dead ringer for his father as a younger man. The major difference being the second smile etched across his throat.
Stunned, I let go of Mack's head, and it flopped forward again, chin to chest. Mindful of the window, I dropped to the floor. His bare foot was inches from my head. I fought my stomach back into place. I hadn't seen a dead body since Frank's, and the smell alone about undid me.
The abraded flesh, the restraints, the gasoline dousing-no question he'd been persuaded to talk. Which meant he'd talked about me. And likely revealed his photo-slip gimmick, which they'd imitated with a lousy picture shot on cheap film.
I'd either sneaked in past whoever was watching or walked into their setup. Despite the open window, the gasoline fumes were starting to get to me. I crawled over to the window and peered down at the street. The sedan was still parked in its spot, the impervious black windshield throwing off a glare.
I turned, my back to the wall beneath the window, regarding the tossed apartment. Mack's killer or killers looking for whatever Charlie had been trying to sell. Or for the banded hundreds, still crammed into the pasta pot beneath my kitchen counter, where even Mack didn't know they were. Mack had told me he had a second key from Charlie. I assumed he kept it hidden-but where? Probably close, where he could access it in an emergency. I thought about Charlie's sleeping on top of that floor safe every night. Maybe he'd taught his son where to conceal things, as Frank had taught me. Frank and Charlie, platoonmates and colleagues, had a few tricks in common. Had
