“‘Burn down a building and you get Cassandra back.’ Sounds like ransom to me.”
“Yes,” said Lien-hua thoughtfully. “But if he started other fires before, why not just ask him to start this one…” Once again she was doing what she did best: diving into people’s motives, thinking like they think. Reasoning like they reason. “Wait. Maybe this is a building he wouldn’t normally agree to burn down. He’s always been careful to set the fires so that they burn out quickly. No fatalities. No injuries.”
Uh-oh.
“You think maybe a building filled with people?” asked one of the agents nervously, mirroring my thoughts.
“We can’t count it out,” Lien-hua said. “Like Ralph said before, if you threaten to take away the one thing that matters most, a person will abandon his values, everything he holds dear.”
In the icy silence that followed her statement, I decided what angle I had to pursue. I stood up. “I’ll follow up on the videos from the aquarium, see if we got any footage of the abductor. Also, Cassandra was working on some kind of grant from the government. I want to know exactly what it involved. I’ll fly through some of her files, see if I can figure out why she went to the aquarium this morning. Maybe that’ll tell us what the people who took her are after.”
“I’m going to watch the video of her again,” said Lien-hua. “Try to climb into our kidnapper’s head.”
“All right,” said Ralph. “And the SDPD is sending a dozen cops to comb the warehouses by the shipyard.”
“A dozen?” Lien-hua said. “That’s it?”
“All they could spare.” And then he said, “Everyone’s got a job to do. Let’s do it.”
Without another word we stood and went our separate ways.
I looked at my watch. We had less than four hours to find Cassandra Lillo before she died in the tank.
44
Creighton stared calmly down the gun barrel at the head of the cop standing beside Randi. The door was cracked open just enough for him to watch them, and to kill them if necessary. All he needed was a good reason to pull the trigger.
Both Randi and the cop were about sixty feet away, easily within range, and Creighton could hear them talking.
“I don’t know,” Randi said. “I think this looks familiar. But it’s hard to tell for sure. It was dark.”
“This is the sixth warehouse we’ve been to.” The cop sounded exasperated. “Look. I gotta go. They need us to sweep through this area for another case and I’m already late. I’ll drop you off at the station.”
“No, I think this might be the one. I’m pretty sure.”
“You think it might be; you’re pretty sure. That’s what you said about the last one. Look, there’s no car here. No phone. Go to the mall, buy yourself a new phone, and just be thankful nothing worse happened to you last night.”
Randi protested one more time, but the cop had already started walking back to his car. She took one final look around the parking lot and then followed him.
Well, it was probably better this way.
But not nearly as much fun.
Just before they climbed into the squad car, Creighton heard the cop say into his radio, “Yeah, this is Officer Brandeiss here.
There’s nothing at the old Lardner Manufacturing place. It checks out. We’re good to go.”
Creighton waited by the door until the two of them had driven away.
So, for whatever reason, the cops were looking into the warehouse district. A tip? Who knows. But now it didn’t matter. Officer Brandeiss had just reported the area clear.
Thanks, Randi, thought Creighton as he went back to see how high the water had risen in the tank. Now no one else will disturb Cassandra and me for the rest of the day
45
The grammatically incorrect and utterly moronic sign outside Dragon’s Tail Tattooing read, “Tattoo’s! Done while you wait.” Tessa just shook her head. She stood for a moment trying to decide if she really wanted to go through with this. Especially here.
Tangy smoke met her at the door. She recognized the smell, and it didn’t come from a cigarette. Harsh, driving music pulsed toward her from inside the studio. One of her favorite bands. DeathNail 13. At least that was cool.
Lien-hua’s words from earlier in the day came back to her: We do what we have to do.
She stepped inside, and a looming greasy-haired guy behind the counter turned down the music and snuffed out what he’d been smoking. He wore a T-shirt that read: “Drunk chicks dig me.” Tessa could hardly believe she was going to trust her arm to someone like this, especially when she saw his eyes crawl across her body, lingering in all the places she would’ve expected a guy wearing his T-shirt to stare.
“Should I buy you a camera?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“To take a picture. That what you want?” She gave him the finger.
“Take a picture of this, jerk.”
Someone shrouded in a pool of shadows in the left-hand corner of the room laughed. She couldn’t make out his face but saw that he was wearing shorts and flip-flops. He lit up a cigarette.
She surveyed the place. Stenciled pictures of tattoo artwork covered every spare inch of the walls. On the right, two open doorways led to the tattoo rooms. Inside each of them, she could see a sink, countertop, needles, and a tattoo machine waiting in the corner.
“So, then,” grumbled the guy behind the counter. “What can I do for you?”
“This is a tattoo parlor, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid you’re going to need your parents’ permission. Did you bring your mommy with you?”
“My mom is dead.”
A flat silence. “Oh. Sorry.”
“Yeah, right.”
Enough with this guy.
She looked around the dingy, smoky room and saw that the guy in the corner had leaned forward. He looked like he was in his early twenties. Curly, blond, surfer hair. A little soul patch.
Glistening blue eyes.
“The music from before,” she said. “When I came in. Is that what you like? DeathNail 13?”
“Yeah. Their last CD rocked.” He had a cool, breezy, memorable voice.
“Which track did you like best: ‘Terrible Plight’ or ‘Don’t Open Your Eyes’?”
He took a drag from his cigarette. “‘Terrible Plight.’”
“Me too,” she said, then continued by quoting the song’s lyrics,
“‘Currents of pain beneath the golden sky. Just can’t seem to find solid ground.’”
“‘I’m always looking for a place to stand,’” he said. “‘Never finding the promiseland.’ Yeah. That song rocks.”
She tore her eyes off him. It wasn’t easy. “So,” she said to the greasy-haired guy who looked good to drunk girls. “Can you give me a tattoo, or do I have to go somewhere else. I have money.”
“Let’s see it.”
She laid the stack of twenties on the table. He plucked them up, flipped through them.
“Satisfied?”
