Forests of the Night (10 page)

“Thank you, Diana. I'll work on it. I'll try to love her better.”

And though she meant to keep the words free of irony, some of it must have seeped through, for Diana gave her a prim smile and nod, the way you might reply to a servant who has failed for the umpteenth time to perform the simplest of tasks.

“You're not concentrating, officer Monroe.”

It was four-thirty and she'd been staring at faces for four hours. Mainly men. Small variations. Getting another lesson in the basic units of facial coding. She was supposed to master Dr. Fedderman's jargon so she could communicate to him exactly what she saw and why she was anticipating the outcomes of the videos so accurately. He had a very precise set of terminology and her impressionistic shorthand was no help to him.

“There's a flicker in his smile,” she said. “It's there for a half-second and then it goes away like a smoke signal.”

“That's another microexpression,” Fedderman said. “Now watch it in slow motion and tell me what you see anatomically. Use the right words, so later on you and I can communicate accurately.”

Like that all afternoon. Learning the first few phrases of a foreign language, one that seemed hopelessly simplistic. Inner brow raiser. Outer brow raiser. Upper lid raiser. Lip tightener. Nose wrinkler. Dimpler. Lid droop. Fedderman gave her some of the physiological terms for the muscular actions but passed over them quickly. First things first. Layman's terms, then the muscular transactions behind those terms. Forty-four different
muscles in the face. Using just five of those forty-four muscles, a person could produce ten thousand discrete facial configurations. Some were meaningless, but most communicated some subtle emotional message.

“Later on? Don't get ahead of yourself, Doc. I haven't decided yet if there's going to be a later on.”

Fedderman did a lip stretcher. Not quite a smile, not quite a frown.

“I understood the offer had been made and accepted.”

“Made, not accepted.”

“Well, we're all hoping you choose the right path.”

“Let me ask you something, Doc.”

“Yes?”

“I've got this natural ability, right? This instinctive skill.”

He waited in silence.

“What if all this jargon and study makes me so self-conscious, distorts things in my mind so much, it actually interferes with what I can do naturally? You ever thought about that?”

“Doesn't work that way,” Fedderman said.

“You're sure?”

“The more you know, the more you see.”

“It's that simple, is it?”

“It's that simple.”

Charlotte gave it fifteen more minutes, then pled a migraine. Fedderman told her they were almost to the end of the first cycle. Twenty more minutes.

Charlotte rose and headed for the door. Behind her, Fedderman remained coldly silent.

She marched directly to Rodriguez's office. But according to his secretary, Marie Salzedo, the lieutenant was hashing out budgetary shortfalls with the mayor and couldn't be disturbed.

“Did the FBI guy find you?”

“What FBI guy?”

“The cute one with the tan. Body of a twenty-year-old.”

“Sheffield?”

“Yeah, Frank. Boy, oh, boy.”

“Sheffield was looking for me?”

“I told him you'd be out soon. I think he's down in the Iobby.”

She gave Charlotte a swoony smile.

“He stays in shape, that one. Sensitive eyes, too.”

“He's married, Marie.”

“Oh, I know. That writer, Hannah Keller. Yeah, I've read her books. They're kind of slow for my taste. Anyway, a man like Frank, he looks like he might need more than one woman. A whole harem, probably.”

“A little heads-up, Marie. You might want to cut back on the romance novels. Rodriguez hears you salivating over FBI agents, you'll be in the warehouse alphabetizing cold-case files the rest of your twenty.”

“Oh, don't be that way, Charlotte. A girl can fantasize, can't she?”

When the elevator doors opened in the lobby, Frank was leaning against the water fountain near the front door talking to a couple of detectives. She'd intended to hit up Romero for another ride home. But she guessed it was going to be Frank.

When he saw her, he broke away from the guys and held open the door.

“Need a lift?”

“Matter of fact.”

He led her outside to a black Porsche parked next to a fire hydrant.

“Borrowed it from my wife,” he said. “Little effeminate for my tastes, but my pickup had a flat.”

She got in and he drove down the tree-lined section of the central Gables, then swung in at Alhambra and cut over to the Venetian Pool and parked in the shade of an oak, angling his car so they had a view through the fence of kids jumping from the coral boulders into the giant lagoon.

With its caves and overhangs and dozens of nooks, the Venetian was a dream pool for kids and paddlers who wanted to dawdle in the shadows rather than swim laps. Gracey had once loved that pool, playing princess and dragon among those watery lairs, but now she could barely be coaxed outside into the sunshine. Swimming, like most things she'd once enjoyed, was for silly juveniles.

“What's on your mind, Frank?”

She watched a small boy in blue trunks climb the tallest boulder at the pool and wait his turn behind the bigger boys, a bunch of rowdies who were cannonballing some late-afternoon sunbathers.

“Got an intriguing phone call this afternoon.”

“Collection agency pestering you again?”

“Caller made some pretty startling claims. I would've tossed it in the kook pile except for who it was, which gave the claims a little more credibility.”

“Come on, Sheffield, you got something, just blurt it out.”

“Now if a lawyer, especially one known for his genius in getting scum-suckers out of jail, if he were to withhold evidence in a criminal investigation, it might give us pause. Do we want to go after a guy who's into fancy legal footwork and probably has some tricky explanation for why the fuck he withheld evidence? Guy like that could turn it all around and find some way to sue us for upholding the law. No, I think we'd probably think twice about that guy.”

He polished his hand across the gleaming walnut shift knob.

“But a sworn officer of the law,” he said, “now that's another story.”

Charlotte watched a heavy older woman in a skirted bathing suit from the last century pick her way up the boulder and join the teens on their perch.

“Gracey called you, didn't she?”

“Yep, your daughter. Turned in her own mom. Did it reluctantly, she said, though she didn't sound all that reluctant to me.”

“I was tired last night, Frank. Confused. That's no excuse, I know.”

“No, it's not.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“First, I need to know if it's true. Is Panther related to Parker Monroe?”

She nodded.

“Parker thinks so, yes.”

“Well, then it's a terrible plight I find myself in. I like you, Monroe. I even like your slimeball husband. But the law's the law. Withholding evidence, that's a hard one to just turn the other cheek on. Fugitive from justice, Top Ten Most Wanted, he's your own stepson, and that didn't strike you as potentially relevant?”

“So go ahead. Whatever I got coming, I'll deal with.”

“I guess I had the mistaken impression you loved your work.”

“Maybe
love
's, a little strong. But yeah, I like what I do.”

“Well, there's the rub. Because a little problem like withholding evidence on a Top Ten guy, if that got out, now that would just about blow your career all to shit. There's no coming back from that into police work. You'd be done.”

“Am I smelling a deal here?”

“When did you first learn your husband was the father of Jacob Panther? Like where was the big hand and the little hand?”

“Five minutes before you threw me in the back of your car last night.”

“That's the truth?”

“Why don't you ask Parker?”

“Against the advice of my inner voice, I'm going to respect your privacy. For one thing, I'd hate like hell to see how the papers would play it. The snarky headlines. Dragging the two of you through all that.”

“You're a saint, Frank.” She watched the old woman pinch her nose and throw her body off the ten-foot rock. A bigger splash than any of the teenage cannonballs. “Now what's the game?”

“Excuse me.” He reached across her and popped open the glove box and took out a small black felt pouch and shook free a rectangular gadget. Aerial on one end, buttons on the other.

“I'm not wearing a wire, Frank. Forget it.”

“Not a wire. This is cutting-edge James Bond stuff, straight from geekville. Your tax dollars working overtime.”

He held it up for her to inspect.

“I already got a cell phone.”

“Not this kind, you don't. This is next generation walkie-talkie. Pull up the aerial, press this button for two, three seconds, it speed-dials your friendly federal agent. Just talk into the receiver like you're ordering a pizza, and about twenty of my colleagues from here to Los Angeles and everywhere in between will be listening with bated breath. Sends your GPS location and everything.”

“What the hell is it?”

“Microwave beeper, I think. Hell, I can never remember that gobbledy-gook. Point is, you're a button-push away. Thing's got unlimited range. Works off cell towers, satellites, roams to fetch whatever's out there. Press, bing, we know where you are, we mobilize. It could work anywhere on the
planet, the Sahara, or smack in the middle of five hundred thousand acres of forest wilderness in western North Carolina. Which might come in handy, seeing how that's where Panther is from and exactly where we suspect he's been hiding this last year. Not many cell towers out in the middle of that national forest, but this gadget will still get through.”

“I'm not spying on my husband.”

“Not spy, hell no. He'd catch on to that. You try to wheedle something out of him, he'd snap shut like a giant clamshell, we'd never get another word.”

“What word are you looking for?”

“From what you told us last night, during that highly unhelpful interrogation, it appears that earlier in the evening, when you and I were speaking on the phone, your hubby and Mr. Most Wanted were having a dialogue on the patio, right? And you weren't privy to that conversation, but your daughter apparently was.”

“She's not reliable, Frank. Whatever she told you, ten grains of salt. The whole shaker.”

“At this point, I don't think anybody in your fucking family is reliable. Reliable isn't the issue. I'm grasping for whatever I can get, so the white-hot poker that was inserted in my rectum last night doesn't get hammered any deeper. If you'll pardon the metaphor.”

“Your passion for your work is touching.”

Frank drew the aerial out and dabbed it back down.

“I think your husband knows where Panther is. And if I'm not mistaken, he's spent most of his professional life extricating dirtballs from their legal distress. So how I reason it is like this. He's going to meet his dirtball son somewhere and they're going to do the lawyer-client thing face-to-face and when they do there's a good chance you'll be in the vicinity. You can work that how you want. Push hard, push soft. Up to you. I trust your instincts.”

“I'm honored.”

“So you get a second chance, Monroe. I don't have to write your script, you know this guy—what works, what doesn't. You obviously landed him successfully in the first place, kept him happy all these years. Despite you coming from slightly different backgrounds.”

“And what's that supposed to mean?”

Frank looked off at the swimming pool, choosing his words.

“Apparently you didn't realize, Monroe, when court documents are expunged, they're never wiped completely clean. That's another thing in this equation. Way back at the dawn of time, you kind of fudged your employment application. Never arrested for a crime? Well, not convicted, maybe. But arrested—well, we both know that ain't true.”

She took the device from his hand.

“This is how you guys work? Blackmail, threats, intimidation.”

“To name a few.”

“Fuck you, Frank.”

“Can I take that as a yes?”

She watched the heavy woman climbing the rock again. All that work for three seconds of free fall and the watery explosion at the end. In that instant of flight her weight must evaporate, the woman turning to air. Some bright blossoming of joy as she plunged.

“Is this thing for real, Frank, this gadget? You're not conning me, are you?”

He gave her a full-on look, a disappointed smile. She held his eyes for several seconds, probing, but she saw not even a shadow of deceit. Waiting for the dodge of eyes, the deep swallow, or his hand rising to touch his face. All signs of perjury. But his frustrated smile held firm.

“You're a shit. A real shit, Frank.”

“So you're not going to run for president of my fan club. I regret that. But this is the deal. Brass ring is coming around, you got one shot, then I go dump what I know on Rodriguez's desk and let nature take its course.”

She closed her eyes, hearing the happy cries from the pool.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “I'll be your snitch.”

“Yeah? And why am I waiting for a punchline?”

“One condition.”

“Oh, boy. Here we go, the counselor's wife cutting a deal.”

“I want the files on Panther. I want to know everything. What we're dealing with. If I agree to do this, I'm not going in blind.”

“Oh, man. No way. No way in hell does that happen.”

“I'm serious, Frank. No files, no James Bond.”

“That's a serious, class-A violation of procedure. You got no clearance.
I'd be courting major disaster. Even a guy like me, a highly valued member of the law-enforcement society, if anybody sniffed that out, man, it'd be Frank Sheffield day at the gallows.”

“Every page. No edits. No blackouts. Everything you have.”

“What, so you can leak it to your old man? Get a jump start on Panther's defense? Yeah, like I'm going to do that.”