Watch Me (16 page)

‘So how did he do it?’

‘He pretended to be a drug dealer.’

‘Wouldn’t people be suspicious if a new dealer suddenly turned up?’

‘But this unsub’s a cop‚ remember. How difficult would it be for him to get the names of dealers who have been arrested around here? He drops a few names and people are going to be a lot less suspicious. Also, these are junkies we’re talking about. At the end of the day they want their next fix‚ they don’t really care where it comes from.’

Taylor thought this through, then nodded to himself. ‘Yeah, I guess that could work. Okay, what now?’

‘Do you know the way to the Shreveport Police Department’s headquarters?’

28

Missing Persons was located in a small windowless basement office. The clock said twenty to ten, but without any sky to provide a reference point it could have been a.m. or p.m. This was one of those places that was permanently trapped in the Twilight Zone. The room smelled of scrubbed linoleum and unscrubbed people. It smelled stale. The striplights were dulled by dirty covers, dead insects dotting the plastic.

A wooden counter split the room in two. One third was on the public side, two-thirds on the business side. The woman behind the counter was Hispanic and in her late forties. Her shoulders were hunched, as though life had compressed her into submission, just squashed her right down and kept on squashing. Her name patch said Gomez, and she had sergeant’s stripes, but considering her role and attitude it was unlikely that she was going to climb any higher.

We walked over to the desk and Taylor flashed his ID. Gomez glanced at it, then looked at us, eyes narrowed, giving us the once-over. She lingered on my white hair and the dead rock-star T-shirt.

‘How can I help you gentlemen?’ Her voice was harsh and grating, nicotine rough.

‘I’m looking for someone.’

She gave me a wry smile. Her top teeth were too straight and white to be natural, and her bottom teeth were too crooked to be anything else. ‘Take a ticket and join the back of the queue.’

‘White male,’ I went on. ‘Thirty to forty, around five feet nine. He went missing sometime during the last forty-eight hours.’

‘Anything else you can tell me? Name? Last known whereabouts? Star sign? Anything?’

‘He’s homeless.’

Gomez laughed and shook her head. ‘Yeah, that really helps.’ She nodded to the ranks of tall grey filing cabinets behind her. ‘The number of homeless men back there that match your criteria, I can maybe count on two hands if you’re lucky, and that’s going back years. Homeless teenage girls I’ve got more of, but that’s because they have family that comes looking.’ She shook her head. ‘A homeless white male in his thirties, you might as well be chasing the Invisible Man. Yeah, they might have family out there, but by the time they’ve got this far down the road, they’re just a memory in a photograph. Occasionally someone will come looking, a brother or sister, sometimes a parent. But that’s the exception rather than the rule.’

‘Can I see all the missing person reports filed in the last seventy-two hours?’

‘Sure. But I’m telling you now, your guy’s not in there.’

Gomez pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet positioned nearest the counter. This cabinet would contain all the active cases, the ones they needed to get their hands on quickly. She reached into the drawer and pulled out a wad of brown Manila folders, brought them back over and dumped them down. They made a satisfying slapping sound when they hit the counter. The top folder had
MISSING PERSONS
and the Shreveport PD logo printed onto the cover.

‘This got anything to do with that lawyer who got burnt alive in Eagle Creek?’ She shook her head and made the sign of the cross. ‘That was a bad business. I’ve got a cousin over there, in the police department. He told me there was a film, some sort of snuff movie. He hadn’t seen it, but he knows someone who had. It was pretty nasty by all accounts.’

‘We’re working a different case.’

‘And you expect me to believe that? Nothing ever happens in Eagle Creek, so when something does happen everyone’s going to jump to it. There’s no way you’re going to be out looking for some homeless guy unless that guy has something to do with the case.’

Gomez had her right hand placed protectively on the folders. She wanted information, and I wanted a look at those folders. It was a negotiation, plain and simple. Everything in life was a negotiation.

‘Can you keep a secret?’

Gomez nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘I don’t work for the Dayton Sheriff’s Department, I’m with the CIA.’

She grinned. ‘I knew you weren’t a cop.’

‘The lawyer who died, he was working for a Colombian drug cartel that we’ve been chasing down for years. He tried to rip them off and, like we both know, our Colombian friends do not take too kindly to that sort of thing.’

‘And the homeless guy?’ Gomez’s eyes were wide with childlike wonder. She was hanging on my every word.

‘He was the lawyer’s partner. He got wind that the Colombians were after them and did a runner. Last we heard, he was hiding out on the streets.’

I nodded to the folders and Gomez followed my gaze. For a second she looked at her hand like she’d never seen it before, then her brain caught up and she jerked it away from the folders.

There were seven files in total. Four females and three males. Like Gomez had said, none of the males came close to being a match for our firestarter. There was one guy in his fifties who’d been married for almost thirty years. He’d told his wife he was taking the dog for a walk, and had never returned. He’d left the house with the dog one evening and just kept on walking, out of one life and into another. His disappearance had coincided with their youngest child going to college, and my guess was that it was motivated by a reluctance to pay alimony.

One guy was the right height and build. The problem was that he was Asian. The unsub had been careful to make sure the firestarter didn’t show his face, but he hadn’t been wearing gloves. The hand that had carried the jerry can had been as white as mine.

I pushed the folders back across the desk, waited until Gomez met my eyes, then mimed a zipper closing my lips shut tight.

‘Not a word,’ she promised.

‘Thanks for your time.’ I headed for the door. According to the clock on the wall it was just after ten to ten.

29

‘The CIA?’ Taylor gave an indulgent chuckle, like he was the parent and I was a kid who’d just done something unexpected and kind of cool. We were back in the car, bouncing out of the police department’s parking lot.

‘You know how fast gossip spreads through your offices. That’s true for every station house. And I’m talking the whole world here. Wildfire can’t touch it.’

‘That still doesn’t explain the story you just told Gomez.’

‘Her career has stalled at sergeant, and she probably got that position based on years served rather than ability. So she’s stuck there in Missing Persons and a couple of Eagle Creek cops come in asking about some homeless guy. It took her a millisecond to work out that this has something to do with Sam Galloway. So she’s now got some gossip, you think she’s going to keep her mouth shut?’

I stopped at a red light and took out my cigarettes. Taylor shot me a disapproving look from the racked-back passenger seat. The squashed pack got shoved back in my pocket, but the Zippo I kept in my hand. The brass was pitted, rough against my skin. The lighter was older than me. It dated back to the sixties, and it worked as well today as when it was first bought. I flicked up a flame, stared at it for a second, then snapped the lid shut and put the lighter away.

‘You’re no fun, do you know that, Taylor? You need to loosen up. Let your hair down. And before you say anything. Yes, I know you’re bald.’

‘This has nothing to do with spoiling your fun, and everything to do with not wanting to die of lung cancer. I know how to have fun.’

I raised an eyebrow.

‘I know how to have fun, Winter.’

‘
Carpe diem
. Seize the day, Milhouse.’

‘My name is not Milhouse. Not now, not ever.’

The light turned green and I put the car into gear.

‘Gomez’s credibility is hovering around zero. Let’s face it, Missing Persons isn’t exactly a prime assignment. She’s stuck there until she retires. She knows that, and so does everyone else. Anything that can raise her status, she’s going to use. A story about a couple of cops from Eagle Creek sniffing around, now that’s believable, right? And it would be good for her credibility. That’s going to raise her stock price by a few cents, right? Okay, so what happens if she starts going on about drug cartels, and conspiracies, and CIA agents, one with bright white hair and the other a bald black giant? What do you think the reaction to that’s going to be?’

‘Nobody’s going to take her seriously.’

‘Exactly. There’ll be a lot of eye rolling and whispers about how Gomez has really lost it this time, but nothing that’ll get back to Eagle Creek.’

I put my foot to the floor when we reached the interstate, turned on the roof lights. The road was empty and it felt good to have the highway disappearing so fast into the distance. I drove and thought about white numbers on a black background heading relentlessly towards zero. Most of all, I thought about how much organisation it would take to murder someone so publicly, and to such a precise timescale.

A couple of miles later I was thinking myself around in circles and getting nowhere. I found my cellphone and Shepherd answered on the first ring this time, which meant his cell was actually in his hand for once. He said a curt hello and there was tension in every syllable. Understandable. The clock was ticking and he was running out of options. Running out of time.

The downside of having your name in fancy gold letters on your office door was that they marked the place where the buck stopped. Sheriff Fortier and Mayor Morgan would be looking to him for answers, and making his life hell because he didn’t have any.

‘Have you found the crime scene?’ I asked him.

‘Still looking.’

‘You mentioned the old refinery earlier. That was a bust too?’

‘We turned the place upside down, Winter. Nothing.’ There was a short pause, the sandpaper scratch of a moustache being stroked. ‘I thought you were coming back here.’

‘We are. We just needed to check something out.’

‘Anything worthwhile?’ The pitch of his voice had risen by a semitone. A spark of hope? Desperation, maybe.

‘No. It was a long shot. You’ve got to keep looking for that crime scene, Shepherd.’

‘Why are you so fixated on that?’

‘Because that’s what’s going to help us catch this guy.’

I killed the call and put my cell away. Taylor was squashed into the passenger seat, lost in thoughts of his own. An aura of dejection surrounded him, like the world had ended and it was all his fault.

‘Penny for them,’ I asked.

‘We’re not going to be able to stop this guy killing again, are we?’

‘I could lie, if that’ll make you feel better.’

He made a noise that could have been a laugh, or a sigh. He might have been a giant on the outside, but inside he was still enough of a kid to consider his teenage years to be the best years of his life.

‘You can’t save them all, Taylor. It would be crazy to think otherwise. Some days the good guy scores that home run at the bottom of the ninth to steal the game. Some days it’s the bad guy.’

‘So why do we bother? Why do
you
bother?’

‘Because someone’s got to. What would have happened if our grandparents had taken that view and the Nazis had won the war? Do you think Hitler would have shut down all the death camps? Not a chance. New camps would have sprung up all over the place. Six million dead would have ended up looking like nothing.’

‘Yeah, I get that, but the problem is that you’re hiding behind abstract concepts rather than dealing with specifics. The fact is that in less than two hours someone else is going to die.’

‘You can’t let that darkness wear you down, Taylor. Let it into your soul and it will destroy you. You’ve got to keep fighting it all the way to your final breath.’

‘Easy to say, Winter, but how do you do that?’

‘For me, it’s music. When I listen to Mozart’s Prague Symphony, I’m not in LA any more, or London, or Tokyo, or Eagle Creek, Louisiana. I’m right there in Prague and it’s January 1787, and it’s snowing outside, and the orchestra is tuning up and the world is about to hear this incredible piece of music for the very first time.’

‘And what if you don’t have music?’

‘Then you have to find your own happy thoughts. Okay, shut your eyes and think about the most amazing thing that ever happened to you. It could be the time your team won the title, or it could be your first kiss with the first girl you ever loved. I don’t need to know what it is. I don’t want to know.’

Taylor gave me a sceptical look, then shut his eyes. To start with his face was tight, lips pursed, but gradually his features softened as a memory took hold. A small smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He was no longer in a cop car speeding along I-20, he was holding up the trophy, or he was lost in that moment of eternal anticipation, wondering if he should kiss the girl or not. Or maybe he was lost in another memory altogether. It didn’t really matter where he was, so long as he wasn’t in a place filled with the stench of gasoline and burning flesh and the screams of the dying.

‘Lose yourself in the memory,’ I said quietly. ‘Give yourself into it. What can you smell? What can you hear? What can you feel?’

Taylor’s smile widened to show the tips of his teeth.

‘Now imagine everything bathed in a bright white light. Paint everything golden.’

I let a mile of blacktop roll off into the distance then told him to open his eyes.

‘There you go. Your first Happy Thought. If things start getting on top of you, that’s where you go.’

Taylor stared through the windshield for a moment then turned to look at me. ‘Does this really work?’

‘It works for me.’