Spook Squad (7 page)

Most of my Spanish vocabulary consists of phrases like
I didn’t know that car was stolen
, or
I was home watching TV during the shooting
, or
That’s not blood, it’s molé sauce
. Given her tone, I was pretty confident Lisa wasn’t in the midst of that type of discussion. I stood for just a moment and let the lilt and cadence sink in, and enjoyed the fact that she sounded happy. Really happy.

I imagined a Hispanic guy on the other end of that phone call. Maybe thirty-ish. Earnest looking. Good hair. Someone her family would approve of—hell, someone I would approve of. Maybe a cop. Or maybe something less brutal, like a teacher, or a social worker, or a fireman. My question could wait, I decided. It had gone unanswered since February, after all. I was just about to turn and head back upstairs when Jacob came thundering down after me, so loud he couldn’t have made more noise if he’d been trying.
 

Lisa’s silhouette stood and unzipped the tent flap, and then the nylon peeled down and she wasn’t a silhouette anymore. Her fight-or-flight response is just as well tuned as mine is, and Jacob’s “herd of buffalo” impression on the stairs had triggered her alarm. “Hold on,” she said into her phone. Then, to me, “What?”

Jacob wobbled to a stop behind me, taking in the tent flap, the phone, Lisa. He’s as skittish as I am about her leaving, and while they’re obviously close, there’s more awkwardness between the two of them than there is between Lisa and me. Once you get to know me, I’m pretty predictable. Not Jacob. For years Jacob has lived by the adage, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all…and if you’ve gotta lie, do it by omission. But thanks to the sí-no, he can’t even think a dissenting thought without Lisa knowing about it by asking herself a few quick questions. He walks on eggshells around her now. Not that it really helps. “It can wait,” he said. “We didn’t mean to…it can wait.”

Lisa looked us both over, then said, “I gotta go,” into the phone. A small pause, then, “
No, llegarás a mañana
.” I knew
mañana
meant tomorrow, but had no context for the rest of the phrase. Probably something mundane, like “see ya.” I considered looking it up later in my Spanish-English dictionary, but knew my chances of remembering it more than thirty seconds without writing it down were slim. She disconnected, then said in a voice more exasperated than curious, “It’s no big deal. What?”

Jacob said, “When Roger Burke was shot in front of the prison, Vic says he saw Laura Kim—”

Lisa looked startled. “He did.”

“I already said that.” Why was this such a difficult concept for Jacob to grasp? I recognized Laura, and I’d seen her there. “Laura Kim was in a bus shelter across the street. She talked to me, told me I shouldn’t be there. I got away from her, and then I heard the shot. I wouldn’t have pegged her right away—I figured she was just a secretary, you know? And with all the skyscrapers, you couldn’t tell where the noise had come from, it was like an echo chamber. But once he was dead, Roger indicated she was the shooter.” I don’t use the word “indicate” in common conversation, but I was fresh from reading all those carefully worded reports. Indicating, noting. Careful words for when reality sounds completely whacked.

Lisa’s eyes tracked back and forth like she was watching a tennis game play on the front of my shirt. After the first second or two, I realized that she hadn’t said yes.

And she hadn’t said no, either.

I held my breath. Jacob held his. The distant sound of a motorcycle engine peaked and ebbed. The radiators hissed. The refrigerator motor kicked in and settled into a low hum. “Vic saw her,” Lisa repeated, puzzled. “But it won’t tell me if she shot him.”

“See?” I said. “She was there.”

Lisa looked troubled. “Actually…I don’t know about that. Only that you saw her.”

“Okay,” Jacob said, “that’s fine, that’s good—it’s something to work with.” He grabbed a pen off the coffee table and started pawing around for something to write on. “All we need to do is narrow down a better question.”

He was looking so hard for a piece of paper that he didn’t see the look on Lisa’s face, or the fact that she was shaking her head. But I did. “I’m not helping you investigate Laura Kim,” she said.

Jacob paused his search for paper. “Why not?”

“Don’t you know? She’s Constantine’s ex-wife.” Holy shit…Laura was
way
out of that weirdo’s league. “It wouldn’t make any sense for Laura to do it. Maybe they’re not married, but they’re still close—they trust each other with everything. If she was the shooter, either she went behind Con’s back and…” she shook her head. “No. Or Con knew and…no, he didn’t know.”

Jacob said, “That’s good, it means he didn’t put me on the case just to keep me busy.”
 

“No…and that’s it, I’m done. That’s all I’m going to look at. We’ve been through it back and forth, up and down.”

Jacob said, “But not with Laura—”
 

“It’s like one of those Magic Eye pictures where you’re supposed to see something else in the pattern. If I don’t see it, and I try to force myself, it’s not going to come. Especially not if I’m upset about it. The sí-no won’t show me the main thing you want to know, and the harder I try to see it, the more you grill me about it, the muddier it gets.”

Jacob looked startled. “Why are you upset? I’m not grilling you.”

“What does it matter to you if she used to be Mrs. Dreyfuss?” I asked. “Since when do you care what either of them think?”

“You two weren’t the only ones who came out to Santa Barbara to help me when I was in a bind. Con was there too.”

“Oh sure,” I scoffed, “out of the kindness of his heart.”

Lisa gave me a warning look. “I’ll ruin my own credibility if I go around accusing people that close to him, especially if the sí-no isn’t clear and I could be completely wrong.”
 

She zipped up her tent while Jacob stared at her like a drunk who’d missed last call by ten seconds. I took him by the elbow and steered him toward the stairs. Lisa might be unwilling to play the psychic game tonight, at least not with us. Still, I had no doubt she was sí-noing herself to sleep, whether she would admit it to Jacob or not. As someone who’s accustomed to having a handle on things, she must’ve been irked by her talent’s non-responsiveness. I was sure she’d keep picking at it. And when she came up with something definitive, we’d be the first ones to know.

Chapter 7

The bundle of twigs that hung above our front door was stale and cobwebby, since Crash’s monthly cleansing ritual was coming up any day now. Even so, Jacob and I bent together, whispering a few last minute plans beneath it. He put two fingers to my forearm—a little reminder we’d developed to keep one another from getting carried away when talking plainly wasn’t safe—but that was fine. I’d be able to get my point across while keeping what I said uselessly vague. “Don’t worry. I can do this.”

He pressed his forehead into my temple. “Just…be careful.”

“Believe me, I know how to bullshit. I’ve been practicing my whole life.” With the sí-no holding out on us, somebody needed to start scrutinizing Laura Kim. Since I didn’t really know her, it would sound less fishy if I was the one to ask the questions…even though it was killing Jacob to turn over this critical piece of his investigation to anyone else. Even me. In my fantasies, I would come up with a question that bowled her over to the point where she readily admitted exactly what she’d been doing that day, then signed an affidavit to seal the deal. But since Laura was no slouch in the brains department, it was doubtful I’d stun her with my clever interrogation skills.

We’d cooked up a plan that had seemed plausible when it was whispered beneath the comforter in the dead of night. Now, though, I was getting cold feet. Jacob climbed into the big black Crown Vic and pulled away, and there was nothing else I could do other than follow through.

I took my own car, once I’d smeared off the words WASH ME with a handful of gray snow. My unimpressive compact was a critical part of our plan. I fidgeted in my seat all the way there, and followed Jacob into the underground parking garage with a death-grip on my steering wheel. He pulled into a numbered spot, and I slotted my car into visitor parking and cut the engine.
 

Pulling the keys from the ignition was so automatic for me, I did so despite the fact that I’d been planning to deliberately lock them in. As I put them back, I tried to recall ever having locked my keys anywhere and came up blank. Maybe the part of my brain that’s responsible for lock awareness was more highly developed than your average Joe’s. Probably so—the sight of the keyring dangling from the ignition made me uneasy. But according to Jacob, this would be the best way for me to get Laura Kim alone. So I opened my door, powered the locks down, made a silent apology to my keys, and slammed the door shut behind me.

Jacob and I got on the elevator, and I said, “Shit, I left my keys behind.” I thought it sounded reasonably natural.

“Check your pockets,” Jacob said, which we hadn’t planned, and damn if it didn’t sound even twice as natural as my remark. He was good.

I patted them all down, locating a couple of aspirin, a few packets of salt, a small flashlight, and a breath spray container Zigler had refilled with Florida Water. “Not here.”

The elevator sighed open and we strolled out into the classy FPMP lobby. “Vic locked his keys in his car,” Jacob announced to Laura—again deviating from the script. It was supposed to have been me admitting my negligence, but somehow, this flowed. “Can you pop the door?”

“Onboard navigation will open it for you,” she said. “I can make a call.”

“It’s an older car,” I said.

“Is there a car alarm?”

“No.” I’d figured my Fraternal Order of Police window decal was deterrent enough. So far I’d been correct. Either that or it was obvious there was nothing in there worth stealing. “As cars go, it’s pretty low-tech.”

“I can take a look, but if it’s not the right kind of lock, it won’t work.” Laura took off her headset, routed her multi-line phone somewhere else, then opened up a desk drawer and fished out a long piece of metal.
 

Jacob caught my eye and held it for a fraction of a beat, then said, “Call me if you need anything,” before he keycarded himself away.

And then it was just Laura and me and the slim jim. And the awkwardness. Yeah. That was pretty present, too. Riffing with Jacob had felt pretty good. But now I was alone, and I realized that I actually had no desire to be there, and the thought of being alone with Laura wasn’t exactly heartening. Without my sympathetic Jacob audience to play to, I realized I was actually fairly rusty at bullshitting.

The elevator doors were a dull, brushed metal that only reflected us back as fuzzy blobs of light and dark, but I was probably a head taller than her. We were both wearing black, with black hair and pale skin. I could make out her glasses frames as a dark smear. My reflection had a spot of red where the knot of my tie was. We rode down without a word, unless you counted the screaming in my head that said,
Make conversation! Say something! Anything!
“So. You’re the resident locksmith?”

“I guess I’m pretty handy.”

As I wondered whether that was supposed to have a double meaning, the doors opened onto the garage level. I then began to doubt the intelligence of placing myself with someone I suspected to be an assassin in a deserted underground parking facility. It hadn’t struck me as particularly creepy when I’d convinced Jacob to let me try it—but that was then. And Jacob was upstairs somewhere now. When Laura left the elevator ahead of me, I unbuttoned my overcoat and my jacket, and shrugged back the right side. Given her training, Laura could probably shoot circles around me, even if she didn’t practice on human-shaped targets. Still, I felt better knowing I could draw if I had to.

There were no windows, just wall-mounted lights every few yards. The concrete looked white and fresh, and the framing was painted yellow. Still, there was an underground oppressiveness to the garage that no amount of lighting and paint could illuminate, and a chill that settled on my skin where sweat prickled at the back of my neck. I cuffed it away and followed my subject, only slightly behind, so it didn’t seem too obvious. Either she didn’t notice, or didn’t care. Probably she was just trying to make sure I knew she was on to me by deliberately ignoring my tension.

She paused a few steps away from the elevator and said, “Where’s your…oh.” The other vehicles were sedans and SUVs. Mine was a compact. The others were garage-kept, and they’d seen the inside of a car wash within the past week. While I’d managed to rub Richie’s message off my trunk, there was still a salt coating that speckled my car without obscuring the shopping cart dent on the rear passenger door. My little Ford stood out like a sore thumb…a cheap thumb covered in salt. “I should be able to pop it,” she said.

She moved to a rear door, the dented door, then said, “Are you sure you don’t want to call a locksmith? A car door’s got all kinds of wires in it, and there’s always a chance to mess up—”

“You’ve done this before, though?”

“More times than I can count.”

What was the encore, hiding in the back seat and introducing a well-placed bullet to the unsuspecting driver? I stood several steps away while she peeled back the weather stripping and slid the tool in. “You’ve gotta take your time,” she said. “When you finally do grab the lock, you can tell by the way it feels.” I checked her side. Was she packing? It didn’t look like it, not unless she had a really, really small firearm under her fitted suit.
 

“Sorry to pull you away from your…” I let it hang, hoping she’d fill in the blank with her job title.

“No problem. I don’t mind.”

I so sucked at covert questioning. I gathered myself for another try. “When you’re not popping locks, what is it you do?”

She laughed. It sounded a bit self-conscious. Maybe I made her as nervous as she made me, which was never a good sign. That’s what they always say about things like bees and stray dogs, right before you end up in a world of pain. “Agent Dreyfuss calls me The Fixer. Because I can fix just about anything.”