Phantom Instinct (9780698157132) (8 page)

“Excuse me,” she said. “Please curb that thing. He's frightening Gigi.”

The MINI raced away around a long curve. The man watched it go.

“I said your animal is behaving aggressively.”

The man half turned his head, with the speed of a spring snapping. “So get yourself a dog instead of a piece of Kleenex on a leash.”

He stood up. The brindle did, too. It lowered its head and padded forward. One step, two. She scooped the Chihuahua into her arms and backed up.

The man simply stood with his back to her. His T-shirt had a grotesque drawing on the back: a man with half a face, half a bloody skull. Beneath the image, it said,
GUS FRING: CLASS
Y TO THE END.
She backed up some more. The Chihuahua squirmed and began to yap at the red dog.

The bus pulled up, wheezing to a stop. The door sighed open. The man picked up the leash. “Heel.” He and the dog climbed aboard.

T
he next afternoon, Aiden pulled into the carport and turned off the truck. He listened to the F-150's engine tick, listened to himself breathe, listened to nothing. Sunshine glared off the hood, white against black.

Another flash of glass reflected in the mirror: Sorenstam's Accord pulling into the driveway behind him.

Twenty-four hours,
he thought. She'd waited a full day to come calling.

She wore sunglasses, a vision of Swedish Californian cool, watching him. The perfect cop, waiting for the guy in her sights to make a move.

He pulled the keys from the ignition and got out. The wood-frame house was crammed under heavy oaks and bottlebrush trees on Foothill Road, near Mission Canyon. He rented it from his uncle. A gnarl of bougainvillea climbed the wall by the carport and spilled across its roof, papery red leaves shaking in the afternoon wind with the force of a rattler's tail.

Sorenstam climbed out. Aiden reached back into the cab of the F-150 for the SIG Sauer and the Heckler & Koch.

She walked up the drive. “Firing range?”

“You really are a detective.”

He flicked the remote to lock the truck and headed for the house. He was limping and couldn't hide it. After fishing with Kieran, he had gone running, two miles up Foothill and the brutal rises along Mountain Drive. And back down. That's what had killed his leg, the downhills.

Downhill, that's what was killing his life.

After the run, he still felt wired and useless, like a spinning top that was beginning to wobble. He had needed something to straighten him out, something he could aim at in a direct line. The firing range, in the mountains up San Marcos Pass, was where he'd spent many Saturday mornings with his dad and Kieran in high school, and where he'd practiced after college, when he was getting it into his head that the Army and a career in law enforcement were the things that would set his heart pounding and swelling with righteousness.

He unlocked the kitchen door. “Keeping my skills up. An hour running the roads, an hour at the range.”

The burglar alarm beeped. He silenced it. Checked the house for strange shadows, papers out of place, the sound of intruders breathing from their hiding places.

Sorenstam followed him in. The house was warm. The main windows faced west, and all the red energy of the day gathered itself and permeated the kitchen and living room. He took a lockbox from a cupboard shelf and let Sorenstam watch him safe both handguns, ejecting the clips and checking the chamber before setting them inside.

She worried, he knew. She wondered what would happen to him if his brain glitched while he was at the range and tricked him into thinking that the Xenon gunman was standing next to him disguised as another sports shooter.

“Beer's in the fridge.”

He walked to the living room, opened the patio door, and whistled. The dog came bounding from the trees and leaped up the steps, a black blur. Cobey was a Labrador/flat-coat mix. Aiden scratched him behind the ears. Back in the kitchen, he poured the dog fresh water. Sorenstam hadn't moved from the door.

“Is this surveillance?” he said.

He walked to the sofa. It was covered with a red-and-black Navajo rug. He sat heavily and propped his leg up, hoping she wouldn't notice, wondering why he cared. They weren't partners any longer. They wouldn't be again.

“We've been through this already, Erika,” he said.

She bypassed the beer and walked around in front of the sofa. “I'm not here to put the same old song on repeat.”

“Then what?” He draped an arm across the back of the sofa. His shoulder ached. His arm and ribs ached. It started deep and seemed to moan from within the bones that had been broken. He didn't tell her that his hour on the roads had covered only four miles.

He stared at her. “You played Flynn my greatest-hits reel, didn't you?”

She crossed her arms. “I drove an hour out of my way to come here, and my workday is only half over. How about you grant me the courtesy of listening to what I have to tell you?”

Right then, he wanted quiet. Instead, he had Erika, planted three feet away. If not a lecture or a warning, what was it?

“Please,” he said.

“What do you know about Harper Flynn?”

He shrugged. “Bartender at Xenon. Before that, she was Navy enlisted. She's finishing college on the G.I. Bill.”

She took a second. She always took a second. She liked the suspense. It was a good cop trick. After a while, on a personal level, it became less amusing.

“Erika. What?”

She brushed her pale hair over her shoulder. “I know you believe in the escaped shooter theory with all your heart. But you're wrong.”

“You didn't drive all this way to reiterate that.”

“And worse, you're being played. Harper Flynn is not who she claims to be.”

“What?”

Sorenstam looked implacable under the sharp sunlight. “Bartender, veteran, student—yeah. Add convicted felon.”

Something seemed to fray deep inside him. Some wire that kept him moored. He didn't move, but he felt as though he had begun to slide across the room.

“Prove it,” he said.

“She's only walking free because she committed her crimes as a juvenile.”

“Who told you this?”

“Flynn admitted she went to high school with Eddie Azerov. She left out that when she was fifteen, she and Azerov were part of a crew of thieves.”

Aiden lowered his sore leg to the floor and hung his hands off his knees.

“They had a modern Fagin's gang up in China Lake. Tenth graders working for an adult boss. Shoplifting. Pickpocketing. Home burglary. They worked eastern Kern County and the Antelope Valley.”

She crossed her arms. “It didn't stop there. She wrecked a car, driving underage without a license. With two bricks of marijuana in the trunk. She's also suspected of being a money mule—a heist where hackers stole credit card data and sent out a cash crew to withdraw as much as they could from ATMs. The guys running the operation didn't even have to launder that cash. It came out clean.”

He looked at the floor.

She paused, until he looked up. “Eventually, she drove the getaway car for an armed robbery.”

He stood and walked to the window. Sorenstam followed.

“They robbed a jewelry store in China Lake. Eddie Azerov and another youth from their after-school crime club went in with sledgehammers. Harper waited at the curb. Somebody called 9-1-1. Harper and the boys fled, but she managed to drive directly into an oncoming police car and get them all captured.”

Aiden stared at the square of sunlight angling across the floor near the window. “Sure you don't want that beer?”

“Aiden?”

“Because it's your last chance. Otherwise, I'll drink for both of us.”

He walked to the kitchen, his leg throbbing. He took out two beer bottles, wedged the edge of one cap under the other, and popped it open.

He turned back to Sorenstam. “How'd you uncover information that should have been sealed?”

“Small-town cops have excellent memories. The China Lake PD really hated the people involved in this racket. They took pride in busting it. And in reliving the bust.” She walked into the kitchen. “I'm sorry, Aiden.”

He spoke quietly. “Why did you tell me this?”

I don't want you to save me,
he meant.

“You deserve to know. Letting Flynn run over you would be a piss-poor thing for a former partner to do.”

“That's it?”

She ran her gaze up and down him. “She wasn't just playing you. She's still working an angle.”

“You think she came to me in an effort to get to you? That she wanted to use me as a front, so the department would believe what she was saying?”

“Maybe.”

“Then she's hardly the criminal genius you're making her out to be. Only an idiot would think Aiden Garrison is her ticket to believability.”

She blinked as though he'd spit at her. “I assume she figured she could use you, and thereby use me. She needed an introduction, and you provided it.”

“Why does she want to use you?” he said.

“Did she tell you what she did in the Navy?”

He shook his head.

“She was a translator.”

“So?”

“Russian,” Sorenstam said. “They sent her to the Defense Language Institute at Monterey. You know why the Navy does that, right? It's not so they can train swabbies to interpret chit-chat at diplomatic dinners.”

“Intelligence?” he said.

“Cryptologic technician. She worked with the spooks,” Sorenstam said. “And now she's finishing a college degree in linguistics. She's going to apply for jobs in security. She has clearance, for God's sake.”

He leaned his hands on the counter, trying to slot the information into comprehensible compartments. “So what? Why would she draw attention to herself now?”

“Did she tell you about her employee swipe card from Xenon?”

“What about it?”

She took that as a
no,
which it was. “She gave it to me. Asked me to check it out. She suggested I try to pull evidence off of it. She didn't mean fingerprints.”

“Do you know whether it's actually her card?”

Her eyes glinted. He'd exposed himself, revealed his still-living sense of himself as a detective, and shown that he doubted Harper's truthfulness.

Sorenstam said, “I have no idea whether it's actually her card. She asked me to find out whether it was used as a key.”

“Key to Xenon?”

She raised an eyebrow. “She certainly wasn't implicating herself. I took her to mean that somebody else used it to grant the shooters access. She left it to me to figure out who she was pointing at.”

“What do you make of it?” he said.

“If you decipher it, tell me.” Her gaze lingered for a moment. “You take care.” She headed to the door. Hand on the knob, she paused. “Ask her what happened to Susannah.”

She left. When he heard her car back out of the driveway, he tilted the beer bottle to his lips. It was cold, but not as cold as he felt.

Harper Flynn. For the last twelve months, he had seen her as a hero. Hell, he had
watched
her leap over the bar into withering gunfire, in a manic bid to pull Drew Westerman to safety. Harper hadn't just seemed heroic during the attack. She had been heroic. Unquestionably.

Convicted felon.

He looked out the window. The swipe card. It would record a bartender's transactions across a work shift, plus entry and exit. Harper, he guessed, had asked Sorenstam to check whether the card had been used to access the back door.

He then understood Sorenstam's implication: Harper had turned in the swipe card in an attempt to pin the blame on somebody. But she had lied. If somebody gave the bad guys an access card, it wasn't another employee, or the boss, or a friend to whom she'd lent it—who would almost certainly have been Drew Westerman. No. If Harper was playing Sorenstam—and him—the person who swiped the door open for the shooters was Harper herself.

Through the living room window, the sun poured over him. The sharp light felt like a knife.

If Harper had let the bad guys in, she was the person who got Drew killed.

Then why hand over the card? It implied that she was on the verge of exposure, and trying to weave and dodge and deflect the blame onto the dead guy.

He had another thought, a worse one. If Harper was working with the bad guys, then her valor was smoke and mirrors. Because she would have known they weren't actually shooting at her. The heroic leap over the bar was nothing dangerous. She knew she wasn't a target. She was protected.

He picked up the beer bottle and threw it against the wall. It shattered in a starburst of glass and foam.

“Son of a bitch.”

If Sorenstam was right, he was a tool, nothing but a toy being wound up and set loose to totter across the floor and knock down the Tinkertoy castle.

He stared at the walls, and at the photos on his bookshelf. His mom and dad, his brother and sister. At least those photos didn't lie to him. Those images didn't suddenly seem false, concealing a shadowy figure with a silver pistol in his hand.

Screw it all. No matter what Sorenstam said, or whether Harper Flynn was lying, he knew one thing. He had seen the third shooter that night.

The man was real. He was still out there. And now, Aiden had to think, the shooter might be working with Harper. Working on
him
.

He grabbed the keys to his truck. Whistling for the dog, he stormed outside.