Critical Space (8 page)

There was a slight crackle from the speakerphone as Moore, across the Atlantic, considered what Natalie and I had been telling him. It was the middle of a Sunday afternoon, the day before Lady Ainsley-Hunter would arrive, and Natalie and I were spending it in the office making certain our end of things was in order. In Queens, Dale and Corry were giving the vehicles their final once-overs, and checking that the rest of our gear was ready for action.

"I thought the FBI was assisting with this," Moore said. "Can't they find him?"

"They're looking."

"And?"

"And they're looking, Robert," I said. "Bridgett Logan and Scott Fowler went to Hartford. They found his apartment, but he wasn't there, and so far the word is that he hasn't been back."

"Christ."

There was another silence. I reached for my coffee cup and found the contents ice cold. I drank it anyway.

"All right," Moore said. "I have to ask, are we just being paranoid?"

"Hard to say," Natalie said. "Logan did some interviews with the neighbors. Keith was at his residence until sometime early last week. Bridgett went to his place of employment -- he worked for a temp agency, white-collar, secretarial -- and they told her Keith picked up his last check the Friday before last, at which point he told the service he'd be out of town for a couple of weeks."

"Christ," Moore said again. "Next you'll tell me he owns a rifle."

"If he does, it's an illegally acquired weapon," I said. "According to the FBI, Keith doesn't own a firearm."

"Good news, I suppose. There more?"

"Yeah, but you're not going to like it. Bridgett got a look at his apartment..."

"Legally?"

"I'm sketchy on the details. He had a lot of literature on Together Now and Her Ladyship. Not a shrine, Bridgett was very clear on that, but a substantial collection."

"Like what?"

Natalie consulted her notepad. "Pictures, magazine articles, clippings. Copies of articles written by Lady Ainsley-Hunter. Some of it was recent, including the press release about her appointment from the United Nations."

The groan that floated from the speakerphone made Moore sound like a disgruntled ghost. "How is that not a shrine?"

"No incense," I said.

Natalie gave me a proxy of what Moore's glare must have looked like.

"Bridgett got a picture of Joseph Keith," I said. "Confirmed it with the neighbors. We've had copies made and the FBI is handling distribution to the local authorities."

"Is that all?"

"There's not much more that can be done. Keith hasn't committed a crime, and until he does we can't get a full law enforcement press. Bridgett's been chasing down background on him, but she hasn't found anything in her interviews that sheds more light on what he's up to. We have to work with what we have."

"You trust Logan?"

"If there's something to find, I trust her to find it, Robert."

There was another pause, this one so long that I wondered if we hadn't been cut off.

"Right, then," Moore said softly. "Professional opinions, if you please. Do we cancel?"

Natalie's look was pained, and I nodded slightly in agreement. We didn't need to talk about it; each of us knew the other's mind on the subject.

"Will Her Ladyship accept a recommendation to cancel?" Natalie asked Moore.

"Not unless we're absolutely certain. Unless we tell her we have definite fears for her safety, she'll insist it's still on. I can pass on our concerns, but all that will serve to do is make her nervous, if not outright frightened. It won't keep her from making the trip."

"So this is going to be our decision?" I asked.

"No, for this one, I'm being a bastard," Moore replied. "It's your decision, the two of you. I'm asking you: What's your gut saying?"

What my gut was saying was that I shouldn't have finished the cold coffee, and I felt myself getting cranky. Whoever the hell Joseph Keith was, he suddenly had the power to dictate not only the lives of me and my colleagues, but of the people who had hired us. I'd wanted this job, wanted to do it and to do it well, and now we were looking at leaving it half-finished all because a possibly crazy man had a crush on a young woman he'd never met, and that maybe that possibly crazy man now wanted to do that same woman harm for reasons known only to him and whatever demons had taken up residence in his brain. We had a handful of circumstantial evidence hinting that Keith was up to something, nothing more than that.

Natalie was waiting for my answer.

"We'll see Her Ladyship tomorrow," I said.

From the phone came the sound of Moore's low chuckle. "She'll be happy to hear it."

"Are you going to tell her?" I asked.

"It would be an unnecessary burden at this point," Moore said. "Wish us a safe trip, mate."

Moore cut the connection on his end and I reached over and switched the speaker off. Natalie finished jotting her last notes on her pad, then set both pen and pad down and stretched in her chair, twisting her torso once to each side with her arms extended high over her head, and finally settling back with a sigh.

"For a moment, I thought you were going to tell him to bag it," she said.

"For a moment, I was."

"And then?"

"And then I remembered that this is what we're paid to do. If Lady Antonia Ainsley-Hunter wants to come to the Big Apple and see the sights and do good works, our job is to allow her to do that with the least risk possible."

"It'd be so much easier if the principal would just pay us to lock them in a room and guard them twenty-four hours a day."

"I favor encasing them in Lucite."

"Then the principal would suffocate," Natalie pointed out as the phone on my desk started ringing.

"Yes, but they'd be perfectly preserved." I picked up the phone. "Who is this and why are you calling my office on a Sunday afternoon?"

Scott Fowler said, "I'm at your door. It is locked. Please unlock it and step outside."

"And why should I do such a thing?"

"Your presence has been requested downtown."

Natalie arched an eyebrow. I told Fowler, "I'm kind of busy."

"I appreciate that. This is urgent."

"Urgent how?"

"Urgent enough that I'm not going to say anything more to you while I talk on a cellular phone, Atticus," Scott said, and his tone had altered, and I heard the change, and suddenly I was really regretting having finished the cold coffee.

"I'll be right there," I said.

The lights in the conference room had already been dimmed, and at the head of the table, in the acid glow of a laptop's screen, I could see the shapes of two men. The laptop rested beside a small LCD projector, and as we entered, the image of a blue sky with white cumulus clouds appeared on the wall to my side.

The man working the laptop and projector said, "Mr. Kodiak, please take a seat." His voice was soft but rushed, nearly breathless.

"What's going on?"

"You'll figure it out," the other one said. His voice was louder and deeper. "Take a seat."

I looked at Scott, saw the reflection of the clouds flaring from the lenses of his glasses. He motioned me forward with an almost apologetic look, and I could see from his expression he hadn't expected this treatment, and that he didn't much care for it either. We made for the chairs midway down the conference table and I was pulling out mine when the first voice piped up again.

"Thank you, Agent Fowler. Please wait outside."

Scott stopped, wincing into the light, and the shadow from his frown made it appear even deeper. "I'm under orders to baby-sit Kodiak whenever he's in these offices," he said.

"Please wait outside, Agent Fowler," the second voice said. When he said Scott's last name I caught the edge of a Boston accent. "You're not cleared for this briefing."

For a second longer Scott seemed willing to argue, then he shook his head slightly and patted my shoulder once. "I'll be outside."

I stayed standing until he had left and the door was shut.

"Take a seat, Mr. Kodiak," the second voice said.

"This is very Tom Clancy," I said. "I'm impressed. Why don't you turn on the lights?"

"Not yet," the first voice said. "Sit."

I contemplated staging a minor protest, a stand-in, then realized that would accomplish nothing other than to eventually hurt my feet, and so I finished pulling out the chair and did as ordered. As soon as I was down, there was a soft chirp from the laptop and the clouds and sky disappeared, replaced with a crisp color image of what appeared to be the exterior of some sort of storage facility. The containers were large, painted dark orange, in some sort of compound. The center container had its doors open, and a lot of bright light was shining on the entrance. In the background, above the line of tops of the containers, the sky was the color of an overripe plum.

"This was taken last night in Dallas," the first voice said. "A rental company called Total Storage. The photograph was taken by the Dallas Police Department."

There was another chirp; the exterior photograph was replaced by an interior of the container. The colors were vivid but dark, in the way that all crime scene photographs seem under- and overexposed at the same time. The container was large, filled to perhaps half capacity with boxes and crates of varying size. On some of the boxes were brand names I recognized -- Toshiba, Sony, Zenith -- but most were unlabeled. It didn't matter. The boxes weren't the focus of the photograph.

The bodies were.

There were three of them, men. They looked to be roughly in the same age group, between late twenties and mid-thirties, and all were similarly dressed in the Texas casual I'd seen so much of when I'd been in El Paso. Cowboy boots, jeans, T-shirts. One of them wore a denim jacket. All had been shot.

The floor was raked slightly on all sides surrounding a small drain set at the center of the container, designed to keep any water that might leak in from pooling near stored objects. The lights shining on the scene made the blood that had flowed to the drain look like tar.

From behind the projector one of the two coughed, and the laptop chirped again, and the projector put up a new picture, a close-up of a Hispanic man. He had been shot in the head, from the side, and most of the top of his scalp was missing. It looked like he'd taken the bullet at close range, perhaps even point-blank.

"Joaquin Esteban Alesandro," the second voice said.

Another chirp, and the Caucasian man was now painted on the wall. Best as I could tell, he'd been shot four times, a tracking line that ran from the sternum up to the center of the face. The grayish white of bone was visible where a couple of rounds had stripped flesh and gore away. A discarded revolver was on the ground near his right hand.

"Richard Montrose," the second voice said. "And no, he didn't get a shot off."

The image changed; the last victim appeared on the wall. Unlike the other two, he lay facedown. The exposure was a little dark, but it appeared he had taken a bullet to the base of his skull. Probably while he had been on his knees.

"Michael Ortez," the second voice said.

The laptop chirped; the image dissolved into the Hallmark blue sky and white clouds once again.

"Never heard of any of them," I said.

"We doubted you had," the first voice said. Each time he spoke it sounded like he'd just run up a flight of stairs. "The murder weapon was recovered at the scene. A Smith and Wesson Model ninety-nine, nine millimeter. No prints."

"All three men were suspected by the Dallas PD in a string of burglaries over the last couple of years," the second voice said. "Electronics, vehicles, jewelry, guns -- anything they could sell, but no narcotics, no drugs. Nonviolent offenders, as far as that goes. You following?"

"I'm following," I said. Funny how the mind works. They show me three photographs, two of explicit violence, and the one that's going to stay with me is the one where I couldn't really see the victim lying in his own brain.

"In doing the inventory, DPD has recovered a number of items that have been reported stolen." The first voice, again. "There are significant gaps in the collection, however. Presumably those items that had been sold off prior to the murders last night."

"No guns," I said. "No ammo."

"Correct. No weapons were found in the facility. There are several possible explanations for this. They could have been stored elsewhere. They could have been sold. Or they could have been removed by the killer after the crime. Each of these, or a combination of any of them, is entirely plausible."

"Didn't this place have security of some sort?" I asked.

"The gate requires a key code, but that's hardly a deterrent," the second voice replied. "Static cameras are placed at the office in the front, at the gate, and along each row of containers. Unfortunately, the cameras outside this particular container had been disabled."

"But," I said.

"But," the first voice answered, "DPD recovered the following image from the camera at the gate."

The laptop made its bird call, and a black-and-white picture, presumably pulled from the surveillance tape, appeared. It showed a large GMC truck moving out of shot, followed by a sedan, what looked like a Ford Taurus. The time stamp on the tape read the previous night, 23:49 hours. The camera had been placed on the right-hand side of the gate as one entered, and none of the drivers were visible.

"Entry," the first voice said. "We tried to augment the image, but we couldn't pull anything usable."

"But," I repeated, this time more to myself. I knew what was coming; I had known the moment Scott had picked me up at my office on a Sunday afternoon.

"But we were able to do something with the exit shot."

Chirp, and the Taurus was leaving alone. The time stamp read 00:08 this morning. The driver's window was down and a figure was partially visible, but only a portion, as if the driver was trying to stay out of the camera's line of sight.

Then the picture was replaced with an enlargement, pixilated and fuzzy at the edges.

"Is that her?" the second voice asked.