Tell No Lies (15 page)

lyle kane

316 bay st

san fransico

Back to Fang’s paper.

Tobay.

To
d
ay.

Bay St

D
ay St

The phone line gave a staticky silence—Sue’s recorded message must have beeped already. Numbly, he hung up. The home screen on his iPhone showed 11:37.

Twenty-three minutes.

Jamming his thumb at virtual buttons, he called Dooley.

She picked up her office line on one ring. “Yes, I’m here. Yes, I’m aware that we’re down to twenty-three minutes.”

“The killer’s dyslexic.” Daniel tried to slow his words, to little avail. “He flipped a letter. Substitute
Day Street
for
Bay Street
.”

He closed his eyes, listened to Dooley type. Time seemed to stretch out with a dreamlike intensity.

“Nope,” she said. “There’s no Lyle Kane at 316 Day Street.”

Disappointment blew through him. He fought it away, refocusing. What
other
mistakes might a dyslexic make? The errors could be inconsistent depending on the writer’s concentration, speed, stress. Closing his eyes again, he pictured that cramped little address. “Turn the
six
upside down. Try
319
Day Street. Is there a Lyle Kane there?”

He heard her hammering again at her keyboard. His breaths came fast and shallow, making him light-headed. The delay lasted an eternity, and then Theresa said, “Nope—”

He bowed his head.

“—but there’s a Kyle Lane.”

Daniel leapt up, the chair banging over behind him, clattering on the floor. He pulled the iPhone from his face to check the time—down to twenty-
one
minutes—but he could still hear Dooley’s voice issuing from the slit of the receiver: “Meet me there, Brasher.”

He barged out the door and sprinted down the empty corridors, his footsteps pounding almost as loud as his heartbeat.

Chapter 21

The unattached house pinned down a modest square of grass on an unremarkable block of Noe Valley. When Daniel screeched around the corner in the ridiculous smart car, he spotted an ambulance and four cruisers at the curb ahead, lights strobing. An elderly neighbor stood on his porch in boxers and an unsashed bathrobe, gesticulating into a cell phone, and a cluster of others were being herded away from the curb by a patrolman. The dashboard clock showed 12:03—late again—but the cops had clearly been here for at least a few minutes.

A paramedic smoked a cigarette before the laid-open rear doors of the ambulance, and Daniel made out the gurney still inside, undeployed. Which meant
what
? His gaze jerked to the porch. No body bag in sight, but a fall of light announced the front door as open.

He did a drive-by. The front door sagged crookedly, and even from this distance he could make out a splintered panel from where it had been kicked in. Rolling past, he spotted a couple of uniformed cops convening in the foyer, one holding a clipboard, the other speaking animatedly to someone just out of sight.

Lowering his window, Daniel braked before the patrolman. “Did you get here in time?”

“We don’t look busy?” the guy said. “We’re out here at midnight just standing around, hoping to answer questions from rubberneckers—”

“I’m here to see Inspector Dooley. I’m the one who—”

“Get out of here so Inspector Dooley can do her job. Move it. And buy a real car.”

“He’s fine!” Dooley appeared in the open doorway, shouting down the front walk. She beckoned Daniel with a flick of two fingers, a woman used to having her commands obeyed.

The patrolman grimaced and stepped aside to let Daniel park. An angry wind caught him in the face as he climbed out, and he hunched into it as he made his way up the walk.

Dooley waited for him on the porch beneath an elaborate set of wind chimes, looking displeased.

“How’s Kyle Lane?” Daniel asked.

“Not here, that’s how he is.” They paused by the shattered front door. “Not that that stopped this probe here from going all Vin Diesel on the front door.”

A young officer ducked his head sheepishly and slapped a clipboard into her waiting hand. She shoved it at Daniel. “Sign the crime-scene log. And follow me.”

A grizzled patrolwoman reached over and took the clipboard from Daniel. She cast a wary look at Dooley. “Hang on, now. The lieutenant—
your
lieutenant—told me to keep the scene airtight. You know damn well the press is warming up to this one, Dooley. And now you’re marching in a
witness
?”

“He’s not just a witness,” Dooley said. “He is
inside
this case. Which means he has a vantage no one else does. I need his eyes and I need his expertise, and if adding one more name to the log’s gonna get me an inch closer to the Tearmaker”—Dooley lifted the clipboard from the woman’s thick hands—“then I’m adding one more name to the log.”

She shoved it at Daniel, who signed, then returned it apologetically to the peeved patrolwoman. Dooley took his arm and pulled him inside. The house’s bland exterior did not prepare him for the elaborate furnishings. Red velvet flocked wallpaper darkened the living room, and a few bordello lamps, capped with fringed shades, cast a guttering glow across an antique coffee table stacked with art books about Tuscany. An ornate china hutch displayed kitschy Lladró figurines and a menagerie of wineglasses suited to any varietal. On the closed lid of a baby grand, a carapace of framed photos captured different groups of men in various settings—sunning on a beach-house deck, posing beneath the high barrel-vaulted and coffered ceiling of the grand opera house’s lobby, mugging for the camera outside a Castro bar.

Theresa watched him peruse the photos. “Yep,” she said. “Gayer than a Christmas tablecloth.”

One face recurred in each picture, a dark-eyed man in his mid-forties with a wispy ponytail and a receding chin. Kyle Lane.

“Recognize him?” she asked. “From anywhere?”

“No. I’ve never seen him before.”

Through the walls, the wind chimes came faintly audible, the kiss of metal on metal.

“Look at the rest of these pictures.” She dropped heavily into the chenille couch and plunked her heels on the coffee table, jangling loose change in a black Wedgwood dish parked on an art book. “Do you recognize
anyone
in those photos? Anyone from Metro South?”

He took his time looking. The sweet, dusty smell of potpourri rose from a bowl on the windowsill. Behind him the patrolmen creaked the floors, bursts of static issuing from the radios strapped over their shoulders. He turned back to Dooley, shook his head, and sank into an opposing studded leather armchair. They looked at each other, frustrated.

“Any idea where Kyle Lane
is
?” Daniel asked.

“No. One of the neighbors he’s friendly with said he’s never out this late on a school night.”

“You think he was taken?”

“No signs of forced entry.”

“There was no sign of forced entry at Marisol Vargas’s,” Daniel said.

“Or at Jack Holley’s.” Dooley clicked her teeth, a tic of frustration. “Kidnapping’s a whole other animal, but we can’t take anything off the boards.”

“Maybe Lane’s just out of town?”

“He was at work today,” Dooley said. “Left at his usual time.”

“Where’s he work?” Daniel asked.

“CFO of a health-food company. Bars with psyllium husk and flaxseed oil, that kind of crap.”

“He from the city?”

“Appleton, Wisconsin. Came out here to get his M.B.A. at Berkeley. No criminal record. No connection with the other victims that we can establish. We’ve been busting ass, looking at
everything.
No leads on what Lane ‘did’ to the killer—what
any
of the suspects ‘did.’ From out here? It all looks random.”

Daniel laced his hands together, a gesture meant to be calming. But he sensed the sweat on his palms. “If you don’t think Lane was kidnapped and he’s not out of town, where the hell is he?”

“That’s what we in the trade refer to as a ‘key investigative question.’” She even threw in air quotes.

A plainclothes officer entered, covering the receiver of his cell phone with the heel of his hand. “Lieutenant wants to know how you plan to handle the broken door.”

She heaved a sigh, seemed to sink further into the couch. Then she unfurled her hand. As she received the phone, she said to Daniel, “There are more pictures in the bedroom up the hall. Take a look.”

Beat cops still crowded the foyer, so Daniel looped through the galley kitchen. With its bare counters, IKEA cupboards, and Kenmore refrigerator, it was designed for function over form, striking a contrast with the living room. When he stepped out into the brief hall, the ambience resumed—wall sconces, Campari posters, even an Aztec rug adding a flare of color to the white shag carpet. The wind picked up outside, moaning through the eaves, the music of the porch chimes growing more insistent—
ting, ting.

Faux-antique wood furniture dominated the bedroom at the end of the hall. A jolly sleigh bed, neatly made and overlaid with a dozen or so decorative pillows. The full-length cheval mirror in the corner reflected back the big window across from it and its claustrophobic view of the neighbor’s gray stucco wall, maybe two feet from the sill. Leaning against the high mattress, Daniel examined the scattering of framed photos on the nightstand.

A lot of faces, none he recognized.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, frustration cramping his temples. Then he pushed off the bed, his movement captured by the freestanding tilt mirror. Evelyn kept an authentic version in her dressing room, and he paused to take in the familiar design—the classic oval adjusted to a faint recline in its appliqué-embellished wooden frame.

The reflection staring back was an unflattering one. Pale skin, drawn face, his eyes hollow from stress and lack of sleep. In the two days since he’d accidentally received the threatening letter, he’d been sucked down the rabbit hole, and he was quickly losing sight of the way back. He needed to get home to his wife, grab a good night’s sleep, and reenter his life.

“What are you even doing here?” he asked himself.

As he turned to leave, his reflected feet remained in place, dislocated from his body. An optical illusion? Puzzled, he halted. Stepped back.

His legs continued, he realized, beyond the tilted bottom frame of the mirror. The twinning bands of his ankles and—yes, there, his feet. But they weren’t wearing his shoes.

They were wearing black work boots.

Chapter 22

Daniel’s mind lurched, snagging on the reality, grabbing sudden traction, a blaze of white-hot alarm lighting his insides.

Before he could react, the man vaulted out from behind the mirror, that blank-masked face blurring into view. A muscular arm raked the top-heavy mirror forward on its pegs, sending it into violent rotation. Daniel barely managed to lift his arms before the impact knocked him to the floor. Shattered glass cascaded down around him, raining over the back of his head and his shoulders. The mirror, flung horizontally over him, wiped the room and his attacker from view. He saw only the floorboards and pebbled bits of the mirror, spinning and bouncing, a confusion of reflections.

There were two hard footsteps and then another crashing sound from across the room. The window?

Daniel rolled free, his torso grinding glass, the smashed window reeling into view upside down, then right side up. Already the man was gone—he must have bounded straight through the pane.

The cops’ shouts issued from deep in the house, and a single clear thought impressed itself on Daniel’s brain:
Wait for them.

He stood. Stared at that glass-fanged window. Judging by the pounding footsteps, the cops had only just reached the mouth of the hall. Precious seconds trickling away.

Don’t go through that window.

But already he was sprinting, the broken frame tilting with each jarring step. He leapt through, hanging shards snapping off against his shoulder blades, the sound like breaking fingers. A half second of flight until his shoulder’s impact with the neighboring wall knocked the breath from his lungs. He slotted down neatly into the skinny alley. The walls squeezed him at the shoulders, forcing him to blade sideways.

Ahead, the intruder flew toward the backyard. The black sweats, gloves, and smooth neoprene curve of the head turned him into nothing more than a dark outline, a shadow unhooked from its human. A barred gate at the alley’s end rose to an arch connecting the low-dropping eaves of the side-by-side houses. From the gate’s hasp swung a rusting padlock. The man was trapped in this stretch of alley.

And Daniel trapped here with him.

His peripheral vision caught the cops spilling into the bedroom, framed by the fractured window, and he shouted, “Here—he’s out here!”

Accelerating toward the rear gate, the intruder pounced and grabbed the bars halfway up with a resonant clang. He scaled quickly, like a clawed creature. Between the gate and the crowning arch, a gap came evident. Just big enough for a man to wiggle through.

Daniel took off in pursuit, yelling, “He’s heading to the backyard!”

As the man reached the top and wormed his torso through the gap, Daniel hurtled up the alley, his shoulders scraping both walls, dry paint flaking off in his wake. The space smelled of tar and reprocessed air, exhaled through a heating vent. Just ahead, the man hauled himself through the gap, stomach, waist, hips vanishing.

Daniel got there and leapt for the gate, but his shoulder clipped the wall and he hit the bars unevenly, sweat-slick hands scrabbling for purchase. The ground swirled below, off kilter. Clinging, he heard from above the yielding purr of tearing fabric, the ring of metal striking ground. Firming his grip, Daniel tugged himself up. He lifted his head to the gap at the top of the gate just in time to see the heavy, drawn-back boot unload like a piston into his face.

The sense of weightlessness lasted longer than seemed possible. The bolt of lightning across his temple dimmed in slow motion, darkness catching him before he struck bottom.