Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

  The fire was out, and the ground around the shed was covered in white foam.

  “What about the others?”

  “The women are being treated in the house. The babies already left in a different ambulance,” he said. “They’re no worse off than you. Except the babies—”

  “You saw the wounds?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I saw them. After the firefighters brought you out, I asked them to leave you here. So I could talk to you alone.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your phone rang. I took it out of your pocket and answered it. It was Director Reese, at NorCal TRACON. He said they picked up the helicopter on their screens, forty-five minutes ago. It took off and went west.”

  “Out to sea?”

  “Until it disappeared,” Inspector Chang said.

  “You mean it crashed?”

  “That’s what I asked. But Reese didn’t know. It could have run out of fuel and gone down. It could have landed on a ship. Or it could have passed out of radar range and then gone north or south.”

  “But he doesn’t know.”

  “He doesn’t,” he said. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “On one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When I’m done, if you don’t arrest me—you’ll let me take Madeleine and go.”

  “Madeleine’s the blonde? The Claire Gravesend look-alike?”

  I nodded.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “And don’t leave anything out.”

  An hour after sunrise, I was driving again. Madeleine was sitting next to me. We were going forty-five miles an hour on Highway 1, headed north. If I went any faster, the Jaguar began to shimmy and fishtail. Which was my fault. I had left it parked in front of the gate. Chang had arrived when the flames were still five stories high. He’d called the fire department in Cambria, fifteen miles away. So now the Jaguar’s rear end was badly dented and the wheels were out of alignment, having been shoved aside by the first engine to arrive on the scene.

  We were halfway to Carmel before Madeleine said anything.

  “He never planned to throw her out,” she said. “They were going to bring her to that place, but she figured it out, in the air. She knew what they were going to do to her, and she fought. That’s why they tossed her out.”

  “He told you?”

  “One of them did,” she said. “They all looked the same. They were all the same.”

  I didn’t answer. I drove us through the morning mist, taking the curves carefully. The land sloped sharply to the ocean, everything either green or blue or gray. Lichen-covered rocks and wind-sculpted cypress trees. The ocean met the sky with no discernable horizon.

  “When we started, we thought we were going to find out who we were,” Madeleine said.

  “Didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t worth it. I don’t want to know all this. I don’t want to be this.”

  “You’re whoever you want to be.”

  “Is that true?” she asked. “Is that true for anyone? For you? Can you just be the person you want to be?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I hope so.”

  And we left it at that.

  At nine o’clock, I turned into Olivia Gravesend’s driveway. Mr. Richards opened the gate, and I drove up to the house. Madeleine stayed in the car, and I went inside and met Olivia in the gun room.

  She hadn’t slept, but I’m certain she looked better than I did.

  “You’ve got blood on you, Crowe.”

  “None of it’s mine.”

  “And?”

  “And I have answers for you. The whole story. As well as something else—someone else.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You must have known from the beginning that Claire wasn’t like other people. That she was special.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which was truer than you think, and also untrue. By which I mean that there’s one person who’s almost exactly like her.”

  Olivia frowned at me. She was holding a porcelain teacup, and set it down on the little table next to her straight-backed chair. The only other item on the table was an antique Colt pistol. I supposed she had armed herself with it in light of the fact that she had a prisoner locked in her panic room.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m not making sense. What I’m trying to do is warn you. I’m going to have Mr. Richards bring someone in. And you’re going to want to believe that she’s someone she’s not. You’ll know things in your heart and in your head, and you’ll be right and wrong. And you and she will have to sort it out.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I opened the door and nodded to Mr. Richards, who was waiting outside. He went away through the cavernous house. I closed the door and came back to the fireplace.

  “I could explain all sorts of things to you, Olivia, but you’re not going to believe me until you see it for yourself. Claire wasn’t just a baby who’d been abused by her birth parents. In fact, strictly speaking, she had no birth parents. Or if she did, they must have died fifty or sixty years before she was born. But she had a family.”

  “I’m her family.”

  “It’s true,” I said. There was a knock on the door, and I went and put my hand on the knob, but didn’t open it. “But there was someone else she loved too.”

  I opened the door and looked out. Madeleine was wearing her hospital gown underneath a wool blanket courtesy of the Cambria Fire Department. Standing next to her, Mr. Richards looked as though his legs might fall out from underneath him.

  Madeleine stepped into the gun room.

  “This is Madeleine Adair,” I said. “She’s—”

  But Olivia had already crossed the room, had already taken Madeleine into her arms. She was sobbing against Madeleine’s shoulder, gripping her tightly.

  I went out and shut the door behind me. I walked away before I could hear any of their conversation. I could imagine what they might be saying to each other, but even that felt like a trespass. I brushed past Mr. Richards and headed for the front entrance, for the sunlight outside.

  38

  I wasn’t done for the day, though. I still had to drive a sullen and silent Jim Gardner back to his house. I let him sit up front, in the passenger seat of the A-Star Appliance van, which was a far more comfortable arrangement than he’d had coming down.

  I let him out at his damaged gate.

  “My gun?” he said.

  As far as I knew, it was sitting outside the nursery’s steel door in the burned-out shell of Larsen’s cave.

  “If the police ever come and ask you about it, say it was stolen.”

  “And my files?”

  “I’ll give them back. Your Porsche, too.”

  “Are you keeping copies?”

  “What do you think?”

  He thought about it, and nodded.

  “What about us?” he asked.

  “What’s there to ask about?” I answered. “I’ll still take jobs if you’ve got them. Starting tomorrow, I’ve got a clean plate.”

  He closed the door, and I drove off. Up Skyline Boulevard and back to my city. I had no keys to my apartment, but I had just enough of Juliette’s cash left to pay a locksmith. There was even enough change left over to get a Tsingtao from the restaurant downstairs, which I carried up and brought with me to the shower.

  A week later, I had mostly put my life back together. I had keys to my house and my office. I had a new wallet, with new bank cards to go in it. A towing service brought the Beast down from the forest service road in Mendocino County, and once I dug the spare key out of a kitchen drawer, I even had a car again. I found Larsen’s planted cameras and tossed them in the street, so I had my privacy, too.

  But what I didn’t have was anything to do.

  I cleaned up my office, putting my files and furniture back together. I bought a new computer, and a new safe, and a new gun. And then I sat there, behind my too-big desk, with my empty reception room out front. I
went to the window and pulled the blinds apart to check across the street. I did it three times before I admitted I was looking for something in particular.

  I was hoping to see a black Bentley. A car so dark it blended into the night. I wanted her to be there, but she wasn’t. Not that night, or the next, or the one after. I hadn’t heard from Madeleine, or from Inspector Chang. Elijah was back to work at 850 Bryant Street. Olivia had sent a check, but nothing else. But maybe it didn’t matter. Talking to any of them would have dampened my loneliness but couldn’t extinguish it.

  Finally, on the fourth night, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  Drop by sometime, she’d said. Anytime.

  The moon was out, and I still had the blanket in the trunk.

  At two in the morning, His Honor’s car was in the VIP slot outside the courthouse. Which meant that she was at home, awake. Waiting for the sound of his key in the lock so she could pretend to be asleep.

  Of course I knew the way. I used to live there. Driving up, I felt light in my stomach. A fine balance point between excitement and fear. I was remembering the way she smelled, the way her body felt against mine. The way we were together in the beginning, before everything came apart. My hands were damp on the steering wheel.

  I pulled up across the street from her house. I had the windows down and could hear the wind in the eucalyptus trees. And when she opened the front door, I thought it was because she’d seen me. Her perfume made a river through the air. Maybe it was just my imagination, a memory sparked by her profile in the open doorway. But it was real enough that it filled up the car and left me breathless.

  I watched her come down the walk, and through the gate. A car pulled up just as she reached the sidewalk. A man got out and came around to her. They embraced, and then she turned her face up to him. The kiss that followed was long and slow. He opened the door for her and she slid inside. I turned off my headlights and put my forehead against the wheel. I didn’t want them to see me when they drove past. I didn’t want anyone to see me.

  I waited until the car was gone, and then a long time after that.

  Maybe Larsen had it right after all. Maybe there was no point in holding on to anything from the past. All it can do is hurt you.

  39

  In the end, the past had too much momentum. My old habits had gathered too much weight. Which meant that three days after I saw my ex-wife wrap herself around a stranger and ride off in his car, and ten hours after Jim’s last check cleared my bank account, I was at the end of Baja California Sur, in La Paz. I checked into the Hotel Miguel Hidalgo and got my old room. I had two windows with rusted screens and no glass. They overlooked Paseo Alvaro Obregon, then a thin strip of beach, and then the Sea of Cortez. If the wind got to be too much, I could close the slatted wooden shutters, turned silver by the sun.

  There was a ceiling fan, and a cast-iron bed with springs that creaked every time I rolled over. There was a bar downstairs, and a restaurant next door. I remembered it from last time too. There were the same block letters painted on a pastel wall.

  MARISCOS, the wall said.

  I didn’t cut myself off as much as I wanted to. I had a new phone, and I made a point of checking it. I’d sit at the bar at ten in the morning, with a sweaty bottle of Pacifico next to me, and read the news.

  The Coast Guard had long since given up any search for Larsen’s helicopter. They’d never spotted any debris at sea. No one saw a fuel slick riding on the waves. If they’d doubled back and returned to the coast, they’d come in low, with the transponder turned off. There was no way to know what they’d done. They could have landed at the bottom of the ocean, or on a ship. Without refueling, they could have reached any spot on the coast from Mexico to Oregon.

  By now, they could be anywhere. Their bank accounts were untraceable and thus intact. They’d have other homes, and other aircraft. There could be more labs. They could regroup, assess the damages, and then think about next steps.

  Which meant that even in La Paz, I didn’t feel safe.

  I’d come by air, so I’d left my new gun in a new safe. On my first night in town, I talked to my bartender. He remembered me from six years ago, and told me to wait in my room. Sometime before sunrise, there was a knock on my door. I handed the man three hundred U.S. dollars and he passed me a rusted snub-nosed revolver. Its wooden grips were held together with electrical tape. I opened the cylinder and dumped six bullets into my palm. The brass cartridges had green pits of corrosion. The lead was powdered with oxide.

  So long as it didn’t blow up in my hand, I’d be fine.

  On the fourth day, I came downstairs and ordered a beer. There was no wind, and it was already ninety degrees. I sat at the bar and looked at the news on my phone. There was a new report about the fire in Larsen’s lab. Most of it was flat-out wrong. The rest was missing so much information, it meant nothing. The reporter didn’t mention the holding cells, or the nature of the lab equipment, or the contents of the nursery. But he quoted Frank Chang, who said that investigators had finished searching the debris. They’d found no human remains. Which was something I was willing to hang on to, and take as true. There were rooms I’d never searched. If there had been other screams during the fire, I would never have heard them.

  I looked up from my phone. The bartender was waiting across from me, both hands on the wooden plank.

  “Yeah?”

  “There was a woman,” he said. “This morning.”

  “A woman.”

  “She asked about you.”

  “By name?”

  “She asked for Lee Crowe. She asked if you’re staying here.”

  “And what’d you say?”

  “I said I wasn’t sure,” he said. “I said maybe she could come back later and I’d let her know.”

  “And then she left?”

  He nodded toward the door with his chin.

  “She’ll be back.”

  “Describe her.”

  He held his hand five and a half feet off the floor.

  “This high,” he said. “American. Young.”

  “Blond?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t know. She had her hair under a baseball cap. And she had big glasses. Sunglasses.”

  “You didn’t get her name?”

  “No.”

  I finished my beer and paid my tab. I already had everything I needed in my pockets. My wallet and passport. My phone and my gun. I could lose everything upstairs and it wouldn’t matter. I left the hotel and went to the restaurant. It wasn’t open, but I sat at one of the tables on the patio and waited until it was.

  Then I ordered lunch, and bottled water, and I passed the time looking at the entrance to the Hotel Miguel Hidalgo. I couldn’t think of any woman I wanted to see who’d know to look for me in La Paz. I thought about hailing a cab and going to the airport, or the bus station. I could charter a boat and go to Cabo. I could do anything I wanted. There was nowhere I needed to be.

  So I stayed, and watched the hotel’s entrance.

  At a quarter past six, I saw an American woman in a black baseball cap and tortoiseshell sunglasses. She had pale skin, and was dressed like she’d planned a safari on Rodeo Drive. Light khaki pants, a thin silk blouse cut to look like a jacket. Low heels. I couldn’t see if she had any scars. Her hair wasn’t blond, but with dye for sale in every drugstore, that meant nothing.

  She went into the hotel. I put cash on the table and left the restaurant. I walked back to the hotel and leaned against the stucco wall next to the door. I was in the building’s long shadow, but the wall was still hot from the day’s sun.

  I waited five minutes, and then the woman came out. She walked past without seeing me. When she had a good enough lead, I followed her. I was wearing shorts, and an untucked guayabera shirt. The gun was in my waistband, at the small of my back. It’d be easy to grab it and bring it to bear.

  She didn’t stay on the streets for long. She was drawing stares, and low catcalls. After two
blocks, I wasn’t the only man following her. She hailed a taxi, whistling with two fingers in her mouth. She stepped in, and I watched the red and blue station wagon limp off. I caught the next one and asked the driver to follow hers.

  “Disculpe?”

  “Sigue ese auto,” I said.

  The driver looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Mi novia,” I said.

  Now he nodded. That was a perfectly legitimate reason to follow another car. We went along the waterfront. The sea was calm enough that I could spot coral heads half a mile offshore, dark shadows over patches of white sand. By then I’d had time to think. I hadn’t really seen her face, but I’d followed her from behind for nearly a minute. So I knew how she moved, and I knew the shape of her body beneath her clothes. I would have bet all the money in my bank account that I knew who she was.

  She was two cars ahead of us.

  The driver kept pace without being obvious. There was plenty of traffic. Cars and microbuses, and men on three-wheeled bikes hawking hats and ice cream. Her cab took a right, into a marina. The sun was bright enough to blister new paint. I held my hand over my eyebrows to block the glare. There was a pink hotel down where the marina’s breakwater began. My driver looked at me. To turn, or not to turn?

  I nodded.

  He veered in, but before we reached the hotel’s roundabout, I tapped his shoulder, handed him a bill, and got out. I caught up to the woman as the doorman was letting her into the lobby. I came in right behind her and put my hand on her shoulder.

  “You were looking for me?”

  She turned. Her mouth tightened in anger before relaxing in recognition. She took off her hat and shook out her light brown hair. Then she took off her sunglasses. I’d had my right hand close to the gun’s taped-up handle, but I relaxed it.

  “Lee Crowe,” she said.

  “Last time, you said we wouldn’t see each other again.”

  “So I was wrong,” she said. She glanced toward the lobby bar. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  I didn’t move.

  “How’d you find me?”