Black In White

by J. C. Andrijeski

  After the third blow, he stopped moving for real.

  By then, he’d crumpled to the carpet. There was blood on my hands, and on my face and neck. I stared down at him, my chest heaving, feeling sick.

  I had no idea if I’d killed him. I guessed I probably had.

  I was still standing there, trying to decide what to do next, whether I should go knock on my neighbor’s door, borrow a phone to call Nick or Angel or Black or maybe all three of them...

  When the door to my apartment slammed open.

  I looked up, still holding the neck of the bloody wine bottle in my hand.

  I’d forgotten about my arm, which had been sliced up by the window.

  “Jesus, Miri...” Nick stood there, holding up his gun.

  He lowered it slowly as he took in my appearance, then he was staring at the body crumpled at my feet, his eyes wide. I’d never seen him look like that before.

  “Jesus Christ,” he repeated. “...Miri. What the hell happened? What did you do?”

  Staring at him, I let out an involuntary laugh.

  Somewhere in the middle of it, it turned into a sob.

  Fourteen

  A NEW DAY

  “IS HE DEAD?” I said dully, accepting the coffee cup from Angel as I studied her face. “I killed him, didn’t I? Ian?”

  Angel hesitated, her full lips poised as if she was flipping through possible things she could say. Then she seemed to make up her mind. From her expression, I got the sense she’d decided not to soft-pedal things, which I appreciated. Sort of.

  Sinking into the padded office chair next to mine, she met my gaze seriously.

  We were in a conference room inside the main police station downtown, in the South Mission area... so not the smaller station on Fillmore that Angel and Nick normally worked out of, and where I’d been questioned the night before. They’d brought me downtown instead, partly as a security precaution, Angel told me... but mainly, I suspected, because between the bombing and who Ian was, a lot more departments were involved and vying over jurisdiction.

  A lot of those departments would be Federal by now, I knew.

  “You didn’t kill him, Miri,” Angel assured me, laying a hand on my thigh.

  She removed it when I winced.

  I didn’t blame her for forgetting––the new bandage was thinner than the last one had been, and didn’t bulge as much under the hospital pants I wore, after being stripped naked yet again while the forensics team picked over me with tweezers and microscopes and cotton swabs and plastic gloves. That whole process seemed to take hours... so long I had no idea what time it was now, or how long I’d been here.

  Angel leaned closer, exuding concern, possibly from something she saw in my face.

  Gripping my arm firmly but gently, she held my gaze.

  “Miri,” she said. “You didn’t kill him.” Hesitating a bare breath, she quirked her full lips in an apologetic but grim smile. “Truthfully? You might wish you had when I tell you the next part. I know I do.”

  I gave her a wary look. “What does that mean?”

  “Fucker’s gone. Poof. Vanished.”

  “Gone? Ian?” I stared at her blankly, even as I’d been about to take a sip of the coffee. Lowering my cup, I fought with the impulse to read her, which seemed to be happening to me far too often lately when it came to the people in my life.

  “What do you mean... gone?” I said instead.

  Exhaling in what might have been embarrassment, she leaned back in the gray-upholstered, conference-room-standard chair, smoothing her braids back from her forehead.

  “I honestly don’t know, Miri,” she confessed. “I wasn’t there. Neither was Nick. We’d gone to Ian’s house by then with a warrant.” She met my gaze. “Somehow, Ian never made it to the hospital. They loaded him into the ambulance, but he never got there.”

  “Did they find the ambulance?” I said, alarm touching my voice.

  She gave a weary nod. “In the short term parking lot at the airport.” She laid her hand on my arm again when I tensed. I felt myself calm slightly under the soothing I felt through her touch. I don’t think I realized the depth of my panic until she spoke.

  “Miri,” she said seriously. “You’re safe. I mean it. Ian’s gone... for good, I suspect, which I guess is the good news and the bad news. They pieced together surveillance. He hopped a flight to Asia with two other men and a woman. All of them wearing suits. All but Ian were Asian. The F.B.I. and the D.O.D. and Homeland Security and maybe the C.I.A. by now are all talking to authorities on the other end of the flight, but so far, it’s looking like whoever is meeting him there has no intention of sending him back.”

  When I gave her an incredulous look, Angel shrugged.

  “Apparently he has pretty powerful contacts there... and here.” Angel’s expression noticeably hardened as she stared out over the empty conference room, as if remembering a conversation she’d either been a part of or overheard. “Either way, Nick and I are both out. We were basically told it was ‘above our pay-grade.’” She gave me a wry smile, but her eyes still reflected that anger. “Nick was livid. I practically had to drag him out of there.”

  “So you think the government disappeared him?” I said. “For real?”

  “Which one?” Angel said dryly.

  At my silence, Angel shrugged, leaning her elbows on the table in front of us.

  “I honestly don’t know, doc. It could be our own government protecting him from prosecution because of his value to them. Or it could be that they don’t want us talking to anyone with that level of security clearance, so they decided to handle it in-house.”

  Angel let out a snort, her first undisguised expression of fury.

  “Hell, for all we know, they’ll give him a shiny new identity and simply wipe the slate clean. Put him back to work... only out of Jakarta this time. Or Beijing. Somewhere the locals won’t care as much if women start showing up dead.”

  I nodded, feeling my own jaw tighten.

  I knew she was right.

  I’d been military myself, not so very long ago––inside intelligence even––and I had no idea what they would do with someone like Ian, given the work he did. I didn’t even know what that work was exactly. I knew Ian was brilliant. I knew they wouldn’t want to lose him as a resource. I’d seen my own military commanders jump through hoops to keep dangerous assets on the payroll in the past. To them, it made sense under certain circumstances, if they thought they had enough security reasons for doing so.

  And if they thought they could get away with it.

  They probably would try to “rehabilitate” Ian in some way.

  The thought made me angry... and vaguely sick. Even so, I knew some part of me found comfort in the narrative. After all, the story of corruption and compromise related to government military secrets was one I knew. It was a story that didn’t threaten my own reality in any way.

  I also knew that was only one side of my brain talking.

  The sane part, Nick would have said.

  Nick might have been right, but I didn’t really believe it.

  Rather, I strongly suspected this had a lot more to do with that crazy race stuff Black had been spouting to me ever since I’d met him. The same crazy race stuff Ian hissed at me as he tried to choke the life out of me with his bare hands. Even if the government was involved in some way, I suspected the real issue had more to do with what Black and Ian were.

  Truthfully, I wondered if this was only the beginning.

  A new day, as it were... from my perspective at least.

  Pushing Black from my mind with an effort, I took a sip of coffee and restrained myself from asking when the hell they intended to let me go.

  I was doing my best to cooperate, given that Nick walked into my apartment while I was in the midst of braining my ex-fiancé with a wine bottle. Luckily, all of the forensics evidence so far matched my story perfectly.

  Also, when Nick and his pals broke into Ian’s house in China
Beach, they’d found enough to get him on the Legion of Honor bombing and murder at least.

  They’d also found the silver-handled tool used to cut the spirals into the victims’ chests. Moreover, the DNA evidence on that tool had matched at least two of the suspects.

  Nick alluded that they’d also found things about me... in Ian’s house. Things Nick didn’t seem to be overly anxious to share with me.

  I didn’t ask.

  Whatever those things were, they definitely connected me to the wedding killings in terms of motive. Nick’s working theory now was that Ian cracked under the strain of our impending marriage, which caused his true nature to come out. Nick thought maybe Ian started killing other women in part to avoid killing me.

  I had my doubts that was it... exactly.

  I suspected Nick was right in terms of the basics.

  Where I had my doubts was that Ian killed those other women out of any desire to protect me. Based on what Ian himself had said––at least while he had his hands around my throat––he’d been under orders of some kind not to harm me. I suspected he’d killed those women more because he felt he couldn’t kill me. Not because he didn’t want to.

  Where he’d cracked was in my apartment, when he’d decided he didn’t care about those orders anymore. I didn’t really want to think about what caused him to change his mind.

  Nick did show me one thing.

  It was a picture they’d found among Ian’s things, of me dancing on Ocean Beach just below the Cliff House when I’d been about eight years old. In it, I was in the exact same pose as the dead girls, my arms up in a graceful ballerina’s loop high above my head, my legs kicked up and out identically as I leapt through the air. My head had been thrown back in laughter. I didn’t remember the picture really. I have no idea how Ian got it.

  It made it worse, somehow, how happy I’d looked in it.

  Truthfully, looking at it made me feel sick, and horribly guilty.

  Black had been involved in all of that, too, Nick told me.

  Meaning the search of Ian’s place.

  Black had been involved in a lot of things, I learned, once Angel and Nick started talking to me while I endured being poked and swabbed and tweezered inside that forensics clean room. He’d been the one to find Ian’s secret room, built into the side of the cliff under his master bedroom. Black discovered the entrance at the back end of Ian’s walk-in clothes closet, where a staircase lived behind a hidden panel, just like something out of a spy movie––or one about psychopathic serial killers. That staircase led to an underground room.

  Apparently, most of the evidence against Ian had been found there.

  The photo of me dancing on the beach had been found there, too.

  The funny thing is, Ian always joked that he had a “panic room” built for him underground. I never believed him, since he always acted like it was all a big joke. He teased me he couldn’t show it to me because of “state secrets” and he’d have to kill me afterwards... so I never took his claim seriously. But the room existed, even if it was a stretch to call it a “panic” room.

  Apparently Ian’s secret hideaway was more of a trophy, bomb-building and creepy religious artifact room, according to Nick.

  Nick hadn’t wanted Black along for any of that, of course.

  From what Angel told me, Nick felt like he didn’t have much choice.

  Black had already been there––at Ian’s––when Nick’s people arrived to search the house. Since Black had been the one to call Nick about me, to warn Nick that I was in danger, Nick felt obligated not to arrest Black on the spot when he found him inside Ian’s house.

  When questioned as to why he was there, Black told Nick that the door had been open. He claimed he’d merely wandered inside looking for Ian, that he’d wanted to talk to Ian for the same reason he’d called Nick––to ensure my safety. He also claimed he’d been worried about Ian himself when he saw the front door left wide open.

  Nick didn’t believe Black’s story, of course.

  For that matter, neither did I.

  But Nick hadn’t arrested him, or even kicked him out. Angel told me that Nick felt like he had no choice but to pretend to believe him. Apparently Black called Nick not long after I left his apartment, telling Nick to send someone over to check on me right away... then calling him again when he claimed to get an emergency call from me.

  Nick admitted to me grudgingly that he felt like he owed him.

  Of course, he told me immediately afterwards that he still thought Black was a psychopath, even if he hadn’t been the one conducting the wedding killings.

  The supposed phone call from me was relatively easy for me to figure out, although I wondered if Nick would ever put together that I hadn’t had an actual phone in my apartment when he found me. How Black explained finding that secret room in Ian’s place was a bit fuzzier. Apparently he was already inside Ian’s serial killer lair when Nick and his forensics team showed up at the front door.

  Honestly though? I didn’t ask for much more than they gave me. I figured the rest of those details belonged in a conversation over a lot of wine––or possibly multiple shots––and after I’d slept at least forty-eight hours straight, if not longer.

  For now, I just tried not to think about it.

  I also tried not to think about how many nights I’d spent in the bedroom that lived directly over Ian’s creepy shrine and murder room... or what Ian had said to me about how much he’d hated every second of our time together.

  It occurred to me that Angel and I had been sitting in silence for minutes now.

  It also occurred to me that I was staring into space, clutching my coffee in front of me like it was a life preserver. In my other hand, I gripped the collected folds of a dark blue blanket someone had put around me after the forensics exam. I glanced at Angel to find her watching me carefully, worry and scrutiny shining clearly in her light brown eyes.

  “You okay, doc?” she said softly.

  I smiled at that, I couldn’t help it. Raising the coffee cup to my lips, I took a long drink. Then, thinking about her question, I nodded.

  “I am, actually,” I said, some surprise in my voice. “More or less.”

  “More or less?”

  When I glanced up, Angel looked skeptical.

  After watching me a few seconds longer, she only nodded, though, and somehow, I got the sense I’d reassured her in some way. Leaning her elbows on the table, she let out a longer-sounding sigh.

  “I could sleep for a week myself,” she said, almost like she heard my thoughts. She sighed again, smoothing her braids. “But I’m not sure I could sleep at all right now, either.”

  “Yeah.” I shifted my weight around slightly on the gray chair, tugging the blanket tighter around me. “Me too.”

  Another silence fell between us. Then Angel looked back at me, her eyes holding a denser scrutiny.

  “He’s waiting, you know. He hasn’t left.”

  “Who?” I said, puzzled.

  She let out a snort, rolling her eyes. “Who do you think, girlfriend?”

  My mind remained totally blank.

  “Black,” Angel said, shaking her head, her eyes bemused. “Quentin Black. He’s waiting for you. Or he was when I last saw.”

  I looked around in surprise at the empty conference room. “So?” I said. “Why isn’t he here then?”

  “Nick made him wait outside,” Angel said, smiling faintly. “He said he couldn’t see you for ‘medical’ reasons... and because you’re no longer any kind of suspect, Black couldn’t bully us with his lawyers. I think Nick’s just being petty.”

  I shook my head, setting down the coffee cup and folding my arms, hugging the blanket to my chest. Even so, I let out an involuntary laugh.

  “Men,” I said, my bleak humor bleeding into weariness. “I’m beginning to think Nick and Black just need to find a private room somewhere to compare their Jack Johnson’s... see who has the biggest and prettiest one and just get i
t over with.”

  Angel laughed aloud at that.

  I was heartened to hear it, especially since it was a real laugh.

  When I glanced over at her, she grinned at me.

  “Agreed,” she said. “Maybe we could have a betting pool?”

  “Maybe,” I grunted. Feeling another wave of tiredness wash over me, I sunk lower in my chair, wincing when I jarred my leg. “Can I go home, Angel? Please?”

  Angel let out a sigh. “It’s still a crime scene, Miri. You might need to get a hotel.” She hesitated, studying my eyes. “Or you could come stay with me.”

  Seeing the sincerity there, and feeling a faint whisper of guilt off her, it occurred to me that she was afraid I wouldn’t want to stay with her. Not after she and Nick accused me of being involved in the bombing the night before, and peripherally at least, the murders. She felt guilty for dragging me in here like a regular suspect.

  More than that, she felt guilty for doubting me.

  Looking at her, I wanted to reassure her, but I wasn’t sure how to do it right. That conversation might have to wait until I’d gotten some real sleep too.

  I laid a hand on her arm though, smiling at her.

  “I really think I need a hotel this time,” I told her. “I need about a week of being a hermit... and I know if I go to your place, we’ll be up all night with a bottle of tequila. Or two. I’m thinking we should raincheck the heavy drinking and girl-talk part of my recovery until after I’ve pulled my brain off the floor and stuck it partway back in my head...”

  Angel let out an involuntary laugh, but she nodded.

  I felt relief on her, too, enough that I knew she sensed the subtext of what I was trying to tell her. Meaning that she and I were all right.

  And we were all right, I realized.

  “Too true, doc,” she smiled, giving me a rueful look. Nodding towards the door to the conference room then, she grinned wider. “All right. Well, in that case, I’ll let you field any other offers you might have. Concerning places to stay.”