Alien Heat (23 page)

Brevitt nodded.

“Which means Tatewood,” David said.

Peterson leaned back in his chair. “We've been after Mr. Tatewood for longer than I want to count. Same MO every single damn time. Dresses up like a clown, delivers balloons full of sulfuric acid and fire fudge. Calls in a bomb threat to tie up the grids, so the fire fighters can't get there, and the place burns to the ground.”

David looked at him. “You could have stepped in a whole lot sooner, Mr. Peterson. Maybe kept the second place from going up.”

“Yeah, I got the same line from Ted here, Silver, but
you
know how it works, even if she doesn't.”

“Why bring us in now?”

“Hell, you're one step ahead anyhow, and Tatewood is a great big prize.”

“And ATF is breathing down his neck,” Teddy said. “They been after Tatewood for years. Grey's just decided he's got a better chance of bringing Tatewood down, with you and Burnett at his back.”

It made sense, David thought—the acid burn of interdepartmental rivalry, with the local guys caught in the middle, taking the risks but left out of the glory. At least he knew where he stood.

“I don't care what you want with Tatewood, so long as we get him and get him good. He's my killer, isn't he, Peterson? He strangled Theresa Jenks?”

“He's your man, Silver. Don't know why he killed her, but she was obviously some kind of threat. And it's the mistake we've been waiting for. I'm hoping it's the one that'll bring him down.”

“We have his DNA from the crime scene. Got it off the tooth of a dog that bit him.”

Peterson grinned and shook his head. “No match in your records, right? That's an old one, he's pulled it before. Up in Oakland, and other places. Likes to plant DNA that belongs to some hapless John Q. Tatewood's smart, Silver. He's nasty, and he enjoys his work. Playing mind games with the cops is just part of the fun.”

String tilted back on his fringe. “Is very Elaki, these Kahaners. The circle within the circle. Study human at Mind Institute. Read his secrets and take him money, for use to kill the mixers.”

Teddy looked at Peterson. “We already made up our minds on this, Grey. Quit dragging it out.”

Peterson put a slab of butter in the center of a stack of pancakes, then dribbled syrup down the sides. “Let John tell it, I'm eating.”

Brevitt smiled and shredded the corner off a napkin. His manner was low-key; he was the kind of man who stayed calm in a crisis.

“Gentlemen, let me start at the beginning.”

The victims all had the usual thing in common—money. Family money, like Theresa Jenks; lottery money; one woman who'd hit it big in Vegas.

Brevitt leaned across the table. “What is it that makes a man walk away from a good job, a happy marriage and two babies, in search of a lost love he supposedly knew from a prior life?”

“Mid-life crisis?” Mel said.

David shook his head. “Not when there's money involved.”

Brevitt gave him a smile and a wink, and David felt like a prize pupil. He thought of Theresa Jenks, and the Eight Ball. Of Martin, and of Markus, who had hidden in a closet and died in a fire, thanks to his parents' greed and Theresa Jenks's obsession.

And what of Arthur? What made Theresa Jenks leave a living, needy, and rather delightful boy, to look for the ghost of another child whose death she would not accept? What had made her so desperate and so vulnerable, that she turned to a child's toy for guidance?

In his mind's eye, David saw himself and Mel, asking the Eight Ball questions of the lovelorn.

David remembered the women he'd talked to on the phone, the clients of the Mind Institute. “This man, the one who left the wife and two babies. His name wouldn't be Jefferson Ford?”

Brevitt nodded. “Put a gun in his mouth and blew out the back of his head. Wife found him on the floor of their bedroom closet.”

Peterson set his fork down, wiped his mouth. “Bullet went right through the wall, lodged in a quilted bunny rabbit, hanging over his daughter's crib.”

“That's one that went wrong,” Brevitt said. “You have to understand, this man actually had a pretty good marriage, and all the evidence showed he was a devoted father. Business stress is what sent him to the Mind Institute, as far as we can tell. He'd been getting mailings; his wife confirms it. We think they did something to him—drugs, hypnotism, something.”

Mel shook his head. “Hypnotism alone won't do it, Brevitt. Can't make somebody go against the grain.”

“Granted, Burnett, we're hazy on the mechanism, but rest assured there is one.”

“Elaki very good with the tailor drugs,” String said.

Mel wadded a napkin. “He means tailor-made. And he's right. You okay over there, String? Need another wheat biscuit?”

String hung his head, leaning hard on the podium.

“This guy ought to be home in bed,” Peterson said.

“Elaki do not have the bed, is human thing. And may as well be miserable getting on with job as soon as molting at home perch.”

Mel leaned back in his chair. “Hate to say it, guys, but unless you got evidence of drugs here, you don't have a crime to go after. Nothing that'll hold up, anyways.”

String hissed. “Would not need such carefully catfooting about, if could work in Elaki Izicho police methodology.”

“Yeah, we could send you and Wart to cho-off all the psychics, guilty or not, which might make David happy—”

Teddy gave David a sharp look.

“But,” Mel continued. “Is kind of beside the point.”

Peterson rubbed his jaw. “We want to send Teddy in. Set her up as some big lottery winner or something, dangle her out there as bait.” He gave her a grin, and she rolled her eyes. “I personally think she'd be good at it, but she says it'll never work.”

Teddy pushed hair out of her eyes. She was wearing the khaki pants again, the white blouse. Her hair was coming out of the braid, as usual. It struck David that the objectivity he had gained with Rose was lost with Teddy. He was too close to her now and could not see her as others did.

She sounded tired. “It wouldn't work, Peterson, we've gone over this before.”

“But, Ted, you'd be just the one to spot them. You're the expert, aren't you? You're the one who can say if they're real or not. You're the one who can spot the scams.”

“Takes one to know one,” Mel said.

“That's it exactly, Burnett. And when I spot them, they'll spot me. Then the whole thing'll be blown, and they'll be warned, and you'll never get that close again.”

“She's right,” Mel said. “Send somebody else.”

“You volunteering, Burnett? You don't think they'd be a little suspicious of a cop?”

Mel pursed his lips, looked at David. Frowned. “Not me. But my partner here would be perfect.”

Teddy folded her arms. “Why? He's not a cop?”

“He's a cop with a history. Cops go to psychics, right? And David here—” Mel stopped. “You want me to shut up, David, I'll shut up. But you see what I'm saying?”

“I see.”

“I don't.” Peterson sounded polite, but his eyebrows were raised and he was jiggling his knee so hard the table shook.

Mel waved a hand. “Thing is, David's already been to psychics. His father … you sure this is okay, David? His father disappeared, see, when David was a boy, and David's been kind of looking for him ever since.”

“My father is dead,” David said.

Mel nodded. “But you
did
look for him, right, David? You did pay that guy, that Candy Andy, and you got took for some serious money before you got your head straight. So what I'm saying is, you guys set it up to look like David comes into some big money. Something that makes headlines. And David takes some time off, now he can afford it, to settle this business of his father once and for all.”

Brevitt looked at Peterson. Picked away at his chin. “I like it.”

“Works for me,” Peterson said.

Teddy bit a fingernail. “It doesn't work for me, it's a terrible idea. For one thing, it's way too obvious. And you don't know for sure what they
do
to people.” She looked at David. “Don't you see what you could be getting into here? Just because these people are bad news, it doesn't mean they're not good psychics.”

“You can coach me.”

Mel looked at him. “You sure about this, partner?”

David thought of little Martin, drowned at four, and Arthur, left behind with a man too cold to admit to fatherhood. Had Theresa Jenks finally come to her senses? Was that why she called Arthur? She had said she was coming home, but it was going to be a day or two. What did she have to do? Was she going to blow the scam?

Of course he'd do it. Nobody knew better than he did, the kind of pain these people could inflict.

He nodded at Peterson. “Put the bill on your expense account, and let's get started.”

Teddy frowned and folded her arms. “You know what I'm thinking, Grey? I'm thinking it's a good thing you brought them in on this, or before long, you'd be eating their dust.”

That was when David knew for sure that he loved her.

THIRTY-NINE

David had never seen Rose so nervous. She brushed Mattie's hair, pulled it up on the sides, and fastened it loosely with a wide yellow bow. She straightened David's tie, though it didn't need it, surprising him. She rarely touched him these days.

“Go get ready, Rose. The girls are perfect.”

She looked over her shoulder at her daughters. “They are, aren't they?”

They had not stinted, he and Rose, with their orgy of spending at the expense of the FBI. David looked through the window at Kendra, sitting alone on the porch swing, wearing her first low heels and stockings. His baby. Lisa, wearing a pretty dress instead of the usual jeans, leaned against the kitchen table, elfin face clean, for once. It went against the grain, involving the children. But when it meant new shoes, new dresses, new hair bows and ruffled slips, and, he suspected, new lace panties … when it meant not looking at price tags, just this once, and indulging their every whim, it was impossible to resist.

Anyone paying attention would be convinced that the Silvers had come into money.

He did not know who had originally been slated to win this year's Racial Harmony Award given by the Elaki Benevolent Association, but whoever it was had run into bad luck. The EBA, brought around by the promise of a large donation and their own inclination to see a hate killer brought to justice, agreed that if making Detective David Silver a very public cash award would accomplish both of these things, it was an arrangement that made perfect sense. If it also won them friends and future favor with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, so much the better.

Elaki, David thought, favored obscure and manipulative goings-on anyway.

The EBA had been intrigued, of course, as to how that much money deposited to the account of a local homicide cop could have any bearing on a maniac who torched supper clubs, but the Mind Institute had not been mentioned. Agent Peterson had somehow made it clear that details would not only not be revealed, but that any kind of leak could easily be traced.

“I hate having my picture taken,” Rose said.

“Why do they want a picture of us while we eat?” Mattie asked.

“It's a celebration,” David told her.

“Of the award?”

Lisa touched her brand-new sparkley tights, and David was uncomfortably reminded of Markus with his new scooter. “Mama says you might even be on TV.”

“Maybe. Nothing major.”

“The Comedy Channel?”

“Funny girl. No, the Elaki Channel.”

“Good. None of my friends watch that one, it's boring. So what is this EBA anyway?”

David stuck his hands in his pockets. “An Elaki charitable group. Promoting racial harmony.”

“So basically, they pay people who hang out with Elaki and get along?”

“Something like that.”

“And they give you money, just like that? How come String doesn't get any? Or Uncle Mel?”

“That's just the way it works. Every year, fifty people get the award. One from every state.” David hoped the Kahaners would not be as hard to convince as his children.

Mattie touched her hair bow carefully. “Where are we eating again, Daddy?”

“We're eating at Pierre's.”

“That costs lots of money.”

“It'll be okay.”

“'Cause we got lots of money, right?”

“For now we do.”

“Forever, or for now?”

He looked into his daughter's face, wondering how to be straight, but not compromise the investigation. He picked her up, the frills of her dress bunching at the waist.

“Nothing is forever, Mattie-girl.”

The phone rang. He put Mattie down, warned her not to play with the dog. Could it possibly be Teddy calling? She had told him in a whisper that they needed to talk, but the opportunity had never come.

“David? Mel. Just touching base. Miriam and I will meet you at Pierre's. If we get there first, we'll be at the table.”

“Made up, huh?”

“Ain't it wonderful?”

“I'm happy for you, Mel.”

“David, it's just a dinner date, okay? My nieces all fluffed up and ready to go? Rose ready?”

“She's still getting dressed.”

“I'm right here.” The voice came from the hallway. David looked over his shoulder. Rose.

“See you, Mel.” He hung up, pulled the cuffs down on his shirt. Told Rose she was beautiful and wished that he cared, thinking life would be simpler that way. “Shall we go?”

“David.” She touched his arm and spoke softly. “I know things are as bad between us as they ever have been. For the first time since I've known you, I really think we might not make things work, no matter how hard we try.”