Dangerous Games (3 page)

Another splash, closer than before.

She tried to estimate the odds that the stranger was somebody genuinely dangerous, somebody like the man they were after. On the one hand, Crandall had been right in saying that the drainage system was huge. There was little chance of encountering the killer by accident. On the other hand, serial offenders were known to return to the scene of the crime. Hearing that Angela Morris had been recovered nearby, the killer might have come here to retrace the route her body had taken.

Or it could be just a Department of Water and Power maintenance man. But she didn’t think so. A maintenance worker would have carried a flashlight. He wouldn’t be sloshing around in the dark.

Tess raised her penlight, holding it away from herself and Crandall. If the beam drew fire, she wanted the shots to go wide.

“FBI!” she called out. “Identify yourself.”

No answer. No further splashing. Silence.

“Identify yourself!” she shouted again, the command coming back to her in a flurry of echoes.

“I’m Manny,” a voice said.

She and Crandall aimed their flashlights at the source of the voice. The two beams played like miniature searchlights over a small, lumpy figure in a shapeless black coat.

“Get your hands up. Up!”

Pale hands lifted toward the tunnel’s low ceiling.

“Cover me,” Tess told Crandall. She stepped into the larger passageway, her shoes sinking into a stream of filthy water. She approached the man, keeping her flashlight pinned on his upper body—his face, his hands. It was something they taught at the academy. The hands were critical because they could hurt you. The face was next in importance. Read his eyes and you could tell what he was thinking.

But these eyes told her nothing. They were smooth and white and pupilless, like eggshells. Cataracts, cloudy and thick.

Not the killer, then. Not anybody.

She pocketed her gun and patted him down out of habit, finding nothing inside the soiled coat except a thin, malnourished body that had gone unwashed for months or years.

“Okay,” she said, “you can lower your hands.”

He obeyed, blinking.

“What are you doing here, Manny?”

“Public property.” He was defensive. “Can’t stop me from living on public property.”

“You
live
down here? What about when it rains?”

“Oh, you can’t be here when it rains.”

“No, you can’t. It’s dangerous. You could be caught in a flash flood.”

He shook his head, his white eyes staring past her. “Won’t get caught. Always know when there’s rain coming. Can smell it.”

“There are shelters. Places where people can help you.”

“Not going to no shelter.” He cringed. “You won’t take Manny to no shelter, please. Don’t want to go there.”

She ought to take him. He wasn’t competent to look after himself. But a shelter couldn’t keep him against his will, and he was probably too lucid to be detained on a psychiatric hold.

“We’re not taking you anyplace.” An idea occurred to her. “Have you seen anyone else in these tunnels?”

Too late, she realized that
seen
was a poor choice of words. But Manny didn’t notice. “There are worker guys, sometimes,” he said.

“DWP. Anyone else?”

“No.”

“Hear anything? Voices?”

He cringed again. “Don’t hear no voices. Not no more.” Voices in his head, he must mean. He probably did still hear them, but he’d learned not to admit it.

“Not those voices,” she said. “New ones. A woman, crying or shouting for help?” The victims’ mouths had been duct-taped at some point, but they might have been able to cry out before they were gagged.

Manny gave it some thought. “You’re a woman,” he offered.

“Well, yes.”

He smiled, showing black teeth. “You got a nice voice.”

“Thank you.” She wasn’t going to make any progress here. It had been a long shot, at best. “You sure you’ll be all right alone like this?”

“Always alone. Like it that way.”

She removed some bills from her jacket pocket and thrust them into his hand. “Buy food. Hot food.”

He stood there blinking, the money captured in a small, scabby fist. She hoped he understood.

Crandall had joined her sometime during the interrogation. His gun, she noticed, was still drawn. He seemed to have forgotten his claustrophobia.

“Let’s go, Crandall,” she said. “Manny can’t be of any assistance to us at this time.”

She retreated toward the smaller tunnel, following Crandall. Once, she looked back and saw Manny, a small, lost figure in the enfolding darkness.

A whole other world down here. A world she had never suspected, and one she wished she had never found.

2

She and Crandall didn’t speak again until they had reached the daylight outside the tunnel. Crandall was obviously embarrassed by his admission of claustrophobia. Tess tried to take the edge off.

“Do I smell as bad as you do?” she asked as they climbed the embankment.

“No.” He smiled. “You smell worse.”

They walked back to Crandall’s Crown Victoria. The sedan bore no FBI markings, but its color was the traditional Hoover blue of Bureau cars. Tess slipped into the passenger seat. Crandall keyed the ignition and drove back to Santa Fe Avenue, then accelerated toward the downtown skyline, bright against the dimming sky. It was only four thirty, but dusk came early on an overcast evening in January.

“No rain till tomorrow night,” Crandall said. “Buys us a little time.”

“Very little.” Tess sighed. “Sunny California.”

“It’s a lot less sunny here than people realize.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

She stared out the window at the city blurring past in a smear of palm trees and stucco haciendas. There ought to be something exotic about LA’s amalgam of desert and coastline, tropical verdure and urban grit, but to her there was no glamour here. LA was a city out of control, overcrowded, underfunded, its tax base eroding, its social services disappearing, the police outnumbered and outgunned, the citizens harassed by wandering mental patients and roving packs of gangbangers, the walls and fences and even the trees befouled by graffiti, and underneath it all, the ticking clock of the next earthquake, the one that might bring the steel-and-glass towers crashing down.

There were earthquakes in Colorado, she reminded herself. In many ways LA was similar to Denver—mountains, sprawl, traffic. But Denver felt solid, stable. LA was balanced on a knife edge.

She smelled aftershave, wafted by the sedan’s air-conditioning. Rick Crandall’s scent. She took a closer look at him. His face was smooth and round, an innocent face. He did not look like a special agent of the FBI, though he was dressed for the part in his blue blazer and white, stiff-collared shirt. She studied his hands on the steering wheel and noticed cuff links. He might be the only agent under forty who wore French cuffs.

“You’re quite the natty dresser, Crandall.”

“Maybe I got a little extra dressed up.”

“For an airport pickup?”

“Not just any pickup. You’re something of a legend around here, Agent McCallum.”

She didn’t want to hear any praise. “I doubt your boss thinks of me that way.”

“I don’t know how he thinks of you.” Crandall chose his words with care.

“Sure you don’t.”

She wondered how old Crandall was. Twenty-seven, she guessed—ten years her junior. Despite that remark about her status, he didn’t appear to be intimidated, and she didn’t think he was brown-nosing. He seemed very sure of himself. She wondered where his assurance came from.

“Been in the Bureau long?” she asked.

“All my life.”

“That’s somewhat cryptic.”

“I’m a Bureau brat, you could say. My father…”

She understood. “Ralston Crandall?” she said, naming one of the top figures in the DC office.

“The one and only.” He smiled self-consciously. “Hope you don’t disapprove of a little harmless nepotism.”

“Nepotism in the FBI? The Bureau is a meritocracy, Crandall. Didn’t they tell you that in the academy?”

“They told me. Kept a straight face, too. Then they sent me straight to the LA office after graduation. Kind of a plum assignment for a new recruit, don’t you think?”

“How long have you been here?”

“Six months. Still got my training wheels.”

“What were you doing before this? Law school?” A lot of agents had legal training.

“Two years in business school and three years proving I couldn’t run an actual business. My last start-up was a Web-based retail outfit.”

“What did you sell?”

“Salmon. Flash-frozen, packed in dry ice and shipped to your door. The plan was to start with salmon, expand into other seafood, then beef and poultry, and before long we’d corner the market on Internet grocery shopping.”

“How long did that last?”

“Eight months. After which, I surrendered to the inevitable and decided to follow in my father’s footsteps.”

“They’re good footsteps.”

“So he’s been telling me since I was six years old. He used to call me his junior G-man.” He winced. “Don’t tell anybody I said that, okay?”

“My lips are sealed. I wouldn’t knock having family connections. Take advantage of your…advantages. If being Ralston Crandall’s son helps get you where the action is, so be it.”

“I just want to earn it, you know? The way
you
did.”

Pray you don’t have to
, Tess thought.

The car hooked onto Main Street, drawing close to downtown. Tess didn’t like seeing the skyline. It reminded her of the last case that brought her to LA.

Back then, she had been simply Special Agent McCallum of the Denver office. Now she was Denver’s special agent in charge, the head honcho. To be an SAC at the age of thirty-seven was an accomplishment for anyone—doubly so for a female agent. The Mobius case had gotten her there. Single-handedly stopping a serial killer who’d gotten hold of a canister of nerve gas would enhance anybody’s résumé.

She had parlayed her celebrity status into the Denver ASAC job—assistant special agent in charge. Six months ago, when the Denver SAC was reassigned to Chicago, Tess had replaced him. She’d expected to be happy. The money was good, Denver was her favorite city, and there were no more than the usual ego clashes and prima-donna antics among her staff.

But she had discovered the truth in the platitude about being careful what you wish for. The top management job consisted mostly of politics and paperwork. She didn’t like wasting her time on either. In her new position there was no fieldwork. Suddenly she had joined the rubber-gun squad, the desk jockeys she’d always despised.

Then the Greco case had come along, with its terrible resolution. And she had discovered that there was something worse than boredom. There was guilt.

Whenever she closed her eyes, she could see Danny Lopez. Whenever she tried to sleep…

All in all, things had been tough. The emotional rewards of her job were gone. She had only the drudgery of managerial responsibilities by day and the torment of bad dreams at night.

Until this morning, when she’d been called to LA to join the STORMKIL investigation. She had no idea why she was needed, whether there was an unannounced connection between this case and Mobius, or a lead to another of the two hundred cases she’d cleared during her career. It didn’t matter. The call had pulled her back into the field, given her a chance to rediscover the purpose and meaning of her work.

And maybe something more. A chance at redemption—if that was possible.

Crandall glanced at the dashboard clock. “I really hope we’re not late. I’ll catch hell for it.”

“You can say my flight was delayed. I’ll back you up.”

“Thanks, but they already know it landed on time. They’re monitoring the airline’s Web site.”

“Really? Why?”

“Well…it’s an important meeting.”

“Is something going on here that I should know about?”

“Agent McCallum, I’m just doing my job. And my job is to get you downtown by five P.M.”

She was sure he knew more than he was telling, but she didn’t press the issue. “You get any music on this radio?” she asked.

He switched on an AM station. The song that emerged from the speakers surprised her. Sinatra, “All the Way.”

Tess smiled. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a Rat Packer.”

“Never used to be. I just got turned on to this stuff. Now I can’t get enough.”

“You’re an old-fashioned guy.”

“What can I say? I appreciate the classics.”

He drove into the garage below City Hall East. When the Crown Vic was parked and Sinatra had been silenced, he led Tess to an elevator, which had taken her, last time, into the subterranean bunker used for coordinating the city’s response to a terrorist attack. This time it lifted her and Crandall to the third floor.

A short walk down well-lit corridors brought them to the pedestrian bridge that linked City Hall East with the original City Hall. Night had dropped over the city, and the building’s terra-cotta tower was lit up, bright white against the darkness. Tess looked skyward as she and Crandall crossed the bridge in the open air. There must be stars, but they were hidden by cloud cover. Beside her, Crandall whistled “All the Way.”

She envied Crandall. He was young and enthusiastic. Maybe he even had a girlfriend. She hadn’t had much of a personal life in recent years. One semiserious relationship that ended after a few months. Occasional dates that only left her feeling tired. Men outside law enforcement were intimidated by her—they made dumb jokes about her job, asked if she was carrying a gun, or maybe handcuffs, ha, ha—while the men she worked with in the Bureau were her subordinates, off-limits for intimacy. She was wary of the media people she encountered, and turned off by the community activists she’d met, most of whom knew nothing about law enforcement except what they saw on TV.

“They’ve booked you into a nice hotel,” Crandall said. “The MiraMist in Santa Monica.”

“I’m familiar with it.” Her voice was flat.

“You’ve stayed there before?”

“No. Mobius killed a woman there. In room 1625, as I recall.”