Upside Down (21 page)

48

John Adams pulled up to the curb near the Monteleone Hotel, just inside the French Quarter.

“I'll be back with the radios in two minutes. Think you can keep the car from being stolen?” he said to Nicky before he climbed out.

“I reckon I can manage it,” he replied. “If you get lost in there, just fire that Glock three times in the air and I'll come get you.”

Nicky Green watched the FBI agent worm his way through the weekenders cluttering the sidewalk and vanish through the doors. The agent moved with a fluidity that added to Nicky's doubts that Adams was what he claimed to be. Nicky was sure that whatever Adams's purpose was, it wasn't what he had claimed. Adams had the eyes of a predator, not a cop. If Massey was as good as Nicky thought he was, he didn't believe Adams's story either. How had Adams gotten to town so fast, located them, and bugged the car?

Nicky decided that he needed to learn more about the man. After Adams had been gone for thirty seconds, Nicky climbed out, made his way into the hotel, and strolled to the bell captain's kiosk. The bell captain was middle-aged, dressed in a navy sport jacket with the hotel's logo over the pocket, starched white shirt, and striped tie. Telephone to his ear, he was jotting down notes. Nicky placed his hand on the desk and parted his fingers to reveal a one-hundred-dollar bill. The bell captain saw the bill but didn't acknowledge its presence.

“How may I help you, sir?” he said, hanging up the phone.

“A minute ago, a man named John Everett Adams came in here. You might have seen him. Gray suit. Five-ten, one-sixty-five. Crew cut.”

“I don't know the gentleman by sight, sir,” the bell captain said.

“Well, see, I'm hoping he's registered under John E. Adams.”

“He might be. And?”

A couple approached.

Nicky stepped aside.

The bell captain listened to their question about jazz clubs on Bourbon Street, which he answered by scribbling down the names of three he told them had good Dixieland. They left five dollars lighter.

Nicky returned to front and center. “Adams isn't exactly what he seems,” Nicky said.

“Is that so?”

“He is a married NASCAR driver. He is meeting with an actress whose name is a household word. I just need to know what room he's in so I can see if it is possible to set up a camera to see in the window.”

The bell captain inhaled deeply. Then he turned his sad gray eyes on Nicky. “You want to give me a hundred dollars for the room number of a guest so you can photograph him from a nearby rooftop while he's in bed with an actress?”

“That's about the size of it,” Nicky said, holding the man's gaze. “A tasteful picture of her at the window with him would do.”

“Private investigator?”

“Did I say that?”

“I should ask you to leave the hotel.” He cut his eyes at the front desk, sniffed, put his fingers between Nicky's, and slid the bill out. Sighing, he flipped open a book and at the same time slipped the bill into his pocket. He ran a finger down a list, then snapped the book closed.

“I would be fired if I gave you information on this John Everett Adams. It's against hotel policy. At any rate I cannot help you because, even if I told you he was in room four-sixteen, there is no place from which you could see into that room unless you get on our window-washing platform, which isn't available for that sort of tomfoolery.”

“Damn it!” Nicky frowned like he was disappointed, then turned and walked away. Greed was so predictable. Nicky crossed the lobby to the front doors, passing by a ten-foot-tall grandfather clock as he went.

He got back to the car less than a minute before Adams appeared carrying a small leather satchel.

Nicky pulled down the bill of his cap to make it appear that he had been napping. Adams opened the driver's door and, tossing the case into the backseat, climbed in behind the wheel, cranked the car, and swung it easily into a gap in the traffic.

Nicky lifted the cap. “I see you didn't lose your way.”

“Breadcrumbs,” Adams replied,

49

The lock on Kimberly and Faith Ann's back door was a deadbolt, so it took Winter, not exactly a Houdini, over a minute to pick it and enter the utility room, which was open into the den. He found nothing there but saw where the computer had been, an empty space next to the printer and scanner. As he moved up the hall, Winter was appalled by the senseless mess the cops had made in the master bedroom, that small private bath. What could have been the point of the destructive behavior of the searchers? Faith Ann's bedroom was upside down. There had been both aquarium and Audubon Zoo posters on the bedroom wall, now torn up and scattered over the floor. A shattered boom box, ripped-up stuffed animals, glass shards . . .

It struck him that the men must have done this so they could say that Faith Ann had done the vandalism herself, the girl running amok while still in a fit of rage after murdering her own mother. It made sense to stack up as many pieces of evidence against her as possible. Framing someone was like painting a canvas—only talented artists knew precisely when to put the brush aside, before one more stroke diminished the painting. Tinnerino and his partner were certainly not artists.

In the hallway bathroom he surveyed the chaos and spotted the dog clippers. There was something else—something very interesting. On the floor beside the counter, on one of the white towels, were several long hairs. He pulled one of them off to inspect it.
Smart kid.
He folded the hairs into a towel and placed it in the cabinet under the sink. He inspected the plastic gap on the clippers and judged the length of her hair. He wondered if the other searchers had made the same discovery and prayed they hadn't. If he was right, the pictures of Faith Ann would not accurately reflect the child who was now running from them. It was a small thing, but it was an edge—it meant she was thinking like a survivor.

He took a quick look around the kitchen, dining and living rooms but found nothing useful. Winter went back out, locking the deadbolt behind him. Locking it took forty seconds. He wanted to see why the woman had gone under there.

Upon turning the corner, he spotted the movable wood lattice panel because it hadn't fully closed. Winter went the length of the house and found the concrete porch with its square opening. It was pitch-black inside, so he took out a disposable cigarette lighter he always carried in his pocket, thanks to not having one a year before when he had needed a source of light. He flicked it to life and, holding it inside, spotted the yellow poncho. Bracing himself, he slid inside the cool damp enclosure.

In the flickering light he saw there was something under the plastic. His heart fell, thinking Faith Ann's curled-up body might be concealed beneath it. He lifted the edge of the poncho and discovered a pillow. He studied the plastic shell that had contained a Walkman, looked at the shears and the pair of batteries remaining in the packaging. He thought about the empty cassette recorder in Kimberly Porter's office Manseur had mentioned to him.
There was a tape . . . and Faith Ann has it.

He put the pillow to his face, caught the distinctive odor of stale perspiration, and thought he detected moisture. She had been there since Nicky saw her the night before, and he was sure she had cut her hair and flushed the toilet during the night and taken the pillow then. The woman who'd been under there hadn't found Faith Ann, because Clara Hughes would have noticed her being taken away. He didn't think Faith Ann would come back here. It saddened him to imagine the frightened child lying in the dark space listening to the tape recording of her mother's murder. Reliving it, because if Manseur was right she had witnessed it. He felt a heightened sense of urgency in finding her.

He was behind the other searchers—hundreds of cops and perhaps the killer, or killers. Perhaps one of those cops was also the killer. He was afraid that if the cops got to her before he did, she wouldn't be alive long enough for him to save her. Shaking something loose by the selective use of a heavy hand was his only hope to get ahead of the others, cutting down the timeline. He would talk to Jerry Bennett. If the cops learned that he was on their tails,
maybe
they'd make a mistake, and just
maybe
they'd think twice before harming Faith Ann. He didn't know what else he could do.

Only once before in his professional career had he been looking for someone in order to save her—Sean. He had succeeded, and against insurmountable odds. And the odds of success had certainly been a lot slimmer then.
I will find Faith Ann,
he vowed.
And God help the bastard that harms one hair on her head.

50

Marta and Arturo sat in Jerry Bennett's office, waiting for him to join them. She wondered what the idiot thought he was accomplishing by making them wait—wasting their time when they were all that stood between him and a death sentence. He acted like it was just a day like any other. Marta didn't know whether he was in some fog of denial or just couldn't alter his normal patterns for fear that he would trigger some avalanche that would bury him. She was thinking about something she'd seen in a movie. She thought she would enjoy cutting him into small pieces, starting with his toes. She'd feed them to hungry pigs while he watched—his stupid eyes lit with fear and pain.

Marta studied Arturo's profile as he chewed his fingernails. She felt the familiar desire, the need to protect him—to cradle him to her breast and comfort him. She knew him as well as she knew herself, knew that he depended on her, perhaps even loved her as she loved him. Men were a different sort of creature—another species entirely.

She had taught him English. She had taught him her trade, but he didn't understand the nuances that would elevate him beyond being a plain-Jane killer. Arturo liked killing—almost too much, which wasn't the same thing as using it as a tool, a means to an end. She didn't know how she could teach him judgment, patience, or any of the thousand things that he needed to understand and be able to call upon to rise to the level she was on. He was loyal and as fierce as a jaguar, but he lacked the necessary instincts and the ability to see a much larger picture. He thought strategically, but only in the limited sense of a predator. For Arturo, the future was no further away than tomorrow. He was concerned with comfort, with showing off, with satisfying his passions. Unlike Marta, there was no fire burning in his soul that demanded feeding. He was beautiful and he was all hers.

The door swung open soundlessly and Jerry Bennett entered. He reminded Marta of a clown. The pancake makeup that she supposed he wore to give himself a tanned appearance had stained the collar of his shirt. He wasn't feminine, but he still made Marta think of an old whore who was dependent for her livelihood on the filtering effects of liquor, poor lighting, and makeup to keep her viable. At what must have been a young age, Marta's own mother had also resorted to those tricks to camouflage the effects of a hard life, abusive men, constant worry, and childbearing. She shuddered at the sudden memory of her mother lying dead on a dirt floor with a pool of her blood swelling out from under her head, her neck laid open by a man the law had not bothered to punish. She remembered the small bloody footprints where a frantic child, barely out of diapers, had paced around the room for hours before people had come in.

Before that day, her own life must have been hard, but she didn't remember it that way, because the orphan's dance that came after that had been so horrible.

“Well,” Bennett said, exhaling loudly, “where are we at, people?”

“We are at your office,” Marta said. “What I cannot tell you is why.”

The fire in Arturo's eyes burned her, almost as intensely as did Bennett's.

“
Why
is because Mr. Estrada here made a mess of an assignment so uncomplicated that a retarded chimpanzee could have pulled it off. I want to ask you why you two
professionals,
if I can use that word with a straight face, haven't been able to locate one frightened child and retrieve my property.”

“We will find her,” Arturo said quickly. “Soon.”

“Mr. Bennett,” Marta said calmly, “if you have other
professionals
you can summon, perhaps you would like to do that before we go any further in this
mess
. It seems to me that if you had bothered to tell either of us that in the envelope we were to bring you, there were—besides the eight pictures you mentioned—negatives, Arturo would have checked to see that they were there. And Amber Lee would have come up with them. Since
you
failed to mention their existence, I don't think you should speak to Arturo so disrespectfully. I think you should be more considerate of the only people who can remedy your predicament. We will fix this problem, but insulting us is not acceptable. If I were you, I wouldn't do it again.” The icy quality in her tone was as infused with warning as the buzz from a rattlesnake.

“I may have . . . I believe I misspoke. It's just that I'm under so much pressure. Of course you are doing the best you can. The best anybody on earth could do. And I failed to mention the negatives because I wasn't thinking about them. I assumed they would be with the prints. Well, there it is,” he said, trying to smile. “So I am sorry if I insulted either of you, because that wasn't my intent. I mean, if you can't succeed, who can? The cops don't seem to be getting anywhere, and they're the cops, for Christ's sake. . . .”

The ringing phone in Arturo's pocket ended Bennett's stammering. He opened it, stared at the caller I.D., and put it to his ear. “Go.”

As Arturo listened to what the caller was saying a smile appeared and started to grow. “Right now?” He turned his free thumb up and nodded. “Where? Just four or five minutes away.” He stood and pocketed the phone. “The kid's using the cell phone. The aquarium just down the river.”

“Remember my negatives!” Bennett called cheerfully, clapping his sweaty hands.