15th Affair (20 page)

There was a pause.

“The blue Civic. Front row. OK.”

Cindy clicked off.

“Our date with destiny,” said my friend. “He’s on the way.”

AN OLD BLACK
Lincoln with a noisy muffler took the looping turn off the Embarcadero, crossed the wide roadway, and nosed into the parking lot where Cindy and I sat waiting.

The Lincoln’s driver braked at the back of the asphalt, plates up against the chain-link fencing and partially hidden from our view by a staggered row of parked vehicles.

I watched over my shoulder as he got out of his Town Car and headed toward us. The tipster was overweight. He wore a thin, gray knee-length coat and carried a nylon computer bag in his right hand. He came up behind us and knocked on Cindy’s window, which she buzzed down.

Cindy said hello and introduced me as “Lindsay, my partner on the crime desk.”

Jad took off his gloves, put them in his pocket, and said to me, “Pleased to meet you. Let’s sit in the back.”

Cindy and I disembarked from the front seat and arranged ourselves in back so that the big man was sitting between us. When I got a closer look at him, I saw that he was young, early to midtwenties, with pale hands and brown eyes that couldn’t quite meet mine.

I quashed a nervous impulse to laugh. Sitting in the shadows next to this stranger who was passing secret information made me feel like I was inside an old comedic spy movie. Was this improbable spy the real deal? Had he caught a professional killer on video and in the act?

I tuned back into the moment as Jad was saying, “I told my bosses that the equipment didn’t work. You know, shit happens. So, this is video, here. I’ve seen it and you’re going to see it, and then I’m gonna destroy it. This footage is never coming to a theater near you.”

Cindy said, “How am I going to report this if I don’t have the footage to back me up?”

Jad opened a very thin laptop and it lit up the backseat. He said, “Cindy, that’s your problem. I agreed to meet with you conditionally. After you see the video, you’re either going to get independent corroboration or you’re not. This is as far as I go.”

Jad tapped at his keyboard and said, “On your mark, get set.” And then he pressed Play.

I instantly recognized the image on the screen as room 1420 of the Four Seasons Hotel. Michael Chan was sitting at the end of the bed, flipping channels on the television. A doorbell sounded and Chan turned off the TV and walked toward the door, out of camera range. A moment later, I heard Chan saying, “You’re late.” And the door closed hard.

Chan and Muller entered the frame. Muller’s legs were clasped around Chan’s waist and he was holding her tightly as he walked her toward the bed. Her glasses were gone and I could almost see her eyes beneath the curtain of bangs.

They laughed and kissed deeply, and then Chan laid Muller down on the bed facing him. He removed her boots and tossed them aside, all of his movements confident as though he’d been through this ritual before.

I caught bits of their game play. Chan said that he was the Prince of Gorgonzola. She said her name was Renata and that he had paid her for sex once before in Rome.

The teasing continued as Chan unbuttoned and peeled off Muller’s clothes, then stripped off his own. She moved under his hands, and if she didn’t just love the hell out of how he was turning and touching her, she could have won the golden statue for best actress.

The two were nearly naked on the bed, their heavy breathing sucking in all the air in the room, when the computer screen went black. Dead black.

Cindy said, “
Hey.
What happened?”

Jad said, “Yeah, that’s a bitch, right? I thought it was my equipment that lost the connection. Well, that wasn’t it. The Wi-Fi in and around the hotel was blocked.

“Stay tuned,” said Jad. “There’s more.”

JAD WAS CUEING
up another video.

He clicked the arrow and the video rolled.

I recognized 1418, the room next to Chan’s. There were two single beds, a sofa, a desk, and a coffee table, and the two young people, a black male in cords and a sweater, and a white female in jeans and a pastel plaid shirt. They were sitting at their ad hoc computer stations, looking at their screens.

Jad said, “Nothing happens in here for a couple of hours.” He fast-forwarded the video and the time stamp sped from 4:30 to 6:20.

As Jad had said, there wasn’t much happening in 1418.

The boy sat at the desk, the girl hunched over the coffee table, both gravely watching their computer screens, which were turned away from the camera. I couldn’t see what they were watching, but presumably, it was Chan and Muller in the room next door.

They ate sandwiches, chugged from their water bottles, and wheeled the room service cart outside the room, all without incident. At the 6:20 marker, Jad slowed the film and said, “Don’t look away. Don’t even blink.”

The young man in the video poked a key on his laptop and spoke to someone on his screen.

“Hey, Joe. You on the way up?”

A voice came over the computer’s speakers.

“Bud, where’s Chrissy?”

I felt a shocking chill and a sensation of falling. I gripped the armrest and tried not to move or speak or cry out. That was Joe’s voice. I couldn’t be mistaken.
My
Joe.

“I’m here, Chief,” said the girl at the coffee table. She got up from her chair, leaned over her colleague’s shoulder, and waved her hand at his computer screen.

“OK. Good. I’m still in the lobby,” said the voice of the man I’d loved for years, the man who’d promised to love me through sickness and health, the father of my baby. He said, “What’s going on?”

“They’re both in there. We’ve got action,” said Bud.

“Any talk about that plane from Beijing?” Joe asked.

The girl said, “Nothing yet. They’re all about each other, Chief.”

“OK. I’m coming up.”

“Copy,” said Bud.

And then, at 6:23 on the nose, Jad’s picture dissolved into static.

I was falling again, but my mind stayed in gear.

Sometime between the time the Internet feed went down and when Liam Dugan, the head of hotel security, showed us the dead housekeeper in the closet, a total of four people had been murdered.

Jad was saying to Cindy, “The two dead kids. Bud and Chrissy could be their real nicknames. If you run their pictures again with those names, maybe someone will come forward. You heard ‘Joe’ ask about an airplane from Beijing?

“Three days later, an airplane from China was blown to hell over Route 101. Maybe Bud and Chrissy were killed because they knew about the plane. I wish I didn’t, but I know it, too. And now so do you,” Jad said.

He said to Cindy, “Someone should put it out there that there was foreknowledge of that plane crash, don’t you think? But it can’t be me.

“And now say good-bye to the video.”

“
Wait,
” Cindy said. “Play the last minute again.”

Jad sighed, then reversed the footage and ran it forward. I heard Joe ask about an airplane from Beijing. Joe knew about that plane.
Joe knew
.

Jad closed down the video and dragged the file to an icon labeled
DESTROY
. Software flames consumed the files.

The videos might be permanently destroyed, but they were part of me now.

I couldn’t forget them if I tried.

THE WIND HAD
picked up during our fifteen-minute meeting in the parking lot, whipping the young trees standing in their concrete planters on the sidewalk as traffic illuminated the six-lane Embarcadero.

It looked like any normal summer evening in San Francisco, but nothing would ever be normal for me again.

Joe had prior knowledge of a plane crash that was shaping up to be one of the worst air disasters on record.

Cindy and I got out of the backseat of her car. Jad told Cindy that his phone number was now a nonworking number, and that no offense, he would stand there and watch us leave so that we couldn’t follow him.

We all shook hands, and Cindy wished Jad good luck. I wondered if Jad’s superiors actually believed his recording equipment had failed. Or if they were following him even now, watching Cindy and me as we climbed back into her car.

Cindy was practically bug-eyed as she drove us away from the parking lot.

“Check me on this,” she said to me. “The dead kids were taping Chan and Muller. They were told to hit the kill switch, and they did. During the blackout, someone came in and shot them and maybe killed Chan, too, right? That guy talking to them…?”

“That was Joe.”

“I
know
his name was Joe,” Cindy said. “Wait. Lindsay.” She turned to look at me. “You don’t mean that was
your
Joe?”

“Off the record. That was him.”

“Oh, no. Please don’t tell me that.”

“
Cindy
. Watch the
road
. Yes. That was Joe Molinari.”

“But what does Joe have to do with those people, Lindsay? I don’t get this at all.”

“I’m thinking,” I said.

My thoughts were scrambling for cover, but they couldn’t hide.

What role
had
he played in the lives and deaths of Bud, Chrissy, Chan, and Maria Silva? Had he killed them? Were he and Muller working this operation together? And I had to know—what had Joe known about flight WW 888? And what, if anything, had he done with that information?

I couldn’t share these thoughts with Cindy, not yet.

“Lindsay, are you thinking Joe is the
killer
?” Cindy was staring at me again, her eyes as big as headlights.

I said, “No—look, no. Joe’s a freelancer. It’s more like he was hired to monitor the action in Chan’s room. So what if, as Joe was going up to supervise those kids, someone heard him say he was going upstairs and sent a ‘go’ signal to the killer?”

I was winging it, but I was imagining it, too. I kept talking. “And so the kids were expecting Joe, but the killer knocked on the door and they let him in.”

Cindy said, “Yeah. Yeah. I’m following you. The killer shoots them, shoots Chan—and Joe got there
after
the shootings?”

“It’s a good theory,” I said, while wondering,
Is it?

“What happened to Joe? And what happened to Ali Muller?”

“I wish I knew,” I said sincerely.

“According to my calculations,” Cindy said, “the plane went down about sixty-two hours later. Right?”

I nodded, remembering the run-up to that crash vividly.

I’d worked the hotel crime scene with Conklin, Clapper, and Claire, and that night, Joe had come home very early on Tuesday morning, two days before the crash. We’d made love and had breakfast together and I’d told him about the hits at the hotel.
We talked about it
.

Then I’d gone to work.

That day, we got an ID on Michael Chan. Conklin and I had driven out to Palo Alto and notified Shirley Chan that her husband was dead.

And except for the recording of Joe watching us at the Chan house, I hadn’t seen him again. As Cindy had said, two and a half days after the shootings in the hotel, WW 888 had blown apart.

Cindy was doing her best to drive and process everything we had just seen on Jad’s fifteen-inch laptop.

She said to me, “Look, I have a problem writing this story. Joe is
pivotal
. He talked about the plane from Beijing. That information, if it had been used properly, might have saved a few hundred lives. So how do I write about that? I have no fricking
evidence
. I can’t print this as a
rumor
.”

“Can you sit on this for a day?” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I have to get some answers.”

“From whom?”

“I’ll tell you as soon as I can tell you.”

“
Lindsay.
”

“You don’t have to say it, Cindy. I promise. You get the exclusive. If I find out anything at all.”

WHEN I WALKED
through the front door to the apartment I once shared with my husband, the wonderful Mrs. Rose said to me, “Lindsay, I have to go. My son is waiting for me at Tommy’s and I have to dress. You’ll find some pasta salad in the fridge. Oh, Martha has to go for a walk and the baby hasn’t eaten or had her bath. She just wouldn’t play ball with me. Sorry, dear.”

I told Mrs. Rose thanks for everything and have a good time and stood at the open door until she was gone. Then I closed the door and leaned against it, exhausted by the meeting with Cindy and Jad, thinking,
No more. Please, I can’t take any more
.

I was a mess.

I was the primary investigator on a quadruple homicide without witnesses or forensic evidence, and it was further compounded by a tangle of international players, a terrorist attack, and intelligence agencies working on the sly.

My husband was party to some or all of this, and he’d sucker-punched me, kneecapped me, and left me alone in a blind alley.

I was grateful to Cindy for including me in her meeting with Jad, and also thankful that she had agreed to sit on the story until I had answers.

But she wouldn’t sit on it forever.

I’d fed her the only theory of the murders I could think of, which presumed that Joe was not guilty of murder.

But he might well have had foreknowledge, if not his actual hand on a trigger. And for all I knew, he was a killer, many times over.

I became aware of Martha, who was whining and pushing at my legs. I said, “OK, OK, I hear you.”

We went to Julie’s room. I woke my daughter up very gently, and of course, she started to cry. I talked nonsense while dressing her in fleece and a hat. Then I awkwardly opened her stroller and strapped her in.

Martha was ebullient, and I hated to disappoint, but this was going to be a short, short walk.