15th Affair

by James Patterson

  I booted up the disc we’d already seen a few dozen times, but now we had a new focus. Only a few minutes in, I saw the shadowy male who maneuvered around the surveillance cameras with the dexterity of a rodeo quarter horse. He disappeared into a crowd, reappearing a frame or two later as a charcoal-gray smudge on the move. Then we lost him again, this time for good.

  The time stamp read 4:20 when Mr. “Wang” entered the lobby. An hour and twenty-five minutes later, at 5:45, the glamorous blonde made her dramatic entrance.

  I knew this part of the footage by heart.

  I made screen shots of Wang, the blonde, and the partial angle on the mystery man’s back and printed them out. I was thanking Samuels and Lemke for their help when my desk phone rang. It was Brady.

  “Valet parking came up with the murdered man’s car,” said the boss.

  “No kidding.”

  “Subaru Outback registered to a Michael M. Chan. The DMV photo matches his height, weight, eye color. He didn’t have a record. He was thirty-two, lived in Palo Alto with his wife, Shirley, and two young kids. Both teach at Stanford. He taught Chinese history. She teaches Mandarin. That’s all I’ve got. I’m texting you the coordinates.”

  I thanked Brady and told my partner we had a lead. The solid kind.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Richie.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE SOFT AFTERNOON sun was lighting the beautiful old homes in the Professorville section of Palo Alto. We took a left turn off University Avenue, and a couple of blocks later, we were on Waverley Street, a lush, tree-lined block in this picture-perfect town.

  The Chan residence was on the south side of the street, middle of the block: a sage-green two-story Craftsman home, with a wide shed dormer facing the street and a flower garden bracketing the front walk.

  Our well-worn surveillance vehicle, disguised as a suburban minivan with stick-family decals and a GO GIANTS bumper sticker, was positioned directly across the street.

  We parked the squad car in the Chans’ driveway behind a new Chevy wagon and I called Brady, letting him know we were on the scene. Then Conklin and I took the garden path and the brick steps up to the front door. I rang the bell, and it was opened by an early-thirtyish Asian woman wearing gray sweat pants, a pink Life Is Good T-shirt, a gold cross on a chain around her neck, and designer glasses with purple frames.

  I flapped open my jacket to show her my badge and introduced my partner and myself, asking if she was Shirley Chan and if we could come in to speak with her. Fear sparked in her eyes like small black flames. She already knew we weren’t selling raffle tickets for the PBA.

  “Is this about Michael?” she asked, her hand going to her collarbones. “Is he all right? Please tell me he’s all right.”

  Neither Conklin nor I answered, and in that brief silence, Mrs. Chan switched her focus to Conklin’s eyes, back to mine, and back to Conklin.

  My partner has magnetic good looks and the nicest way with women of all kinds: meth heads, serial killers, party girls, old ladies lost in parking garages, and in this case, a woman about to learn that her husband had been killed after private time with an attractive, still unidentified bombshell.

  Mrs. Chan stepped back into her house, leaving the door open.

  We followed her through the foyer and into the many-windowed living room furnished in washed pine and khaki-upholstered love seats, presided over by a fifty-two-inch TV above a fireplace.

  Two young children, who looked to be about seven and five, stared up at us. They instantly saw the distress on their mother’s face. The little girl clambered up from the floor and, asking, “What’s wrong, Mommy?” grabbed her mother around the waist. Mrs. Chan’s hands shook and her voice faltered when she told the kids to go to their rooms. They wailed and argued with her until she screamed, “Haley. Brett. Do what I say.”

  They fled.

  We three stood in the homey room, Shirley Chan with her hand over her mouth, refusing to sit down. I pulled out the DMV photo of Michael Chan and showed it to her.

  “Is this your husband?” I asked her.

  “Oh, my God. Was there a car accident?”

  Conklin asked her kindly, “When was the last time you saw Michael, Mrs. Chan?”

  “Yesterday morning. He called me in the afternoon But he didn’t come home last night. That’s not like him at all. Where is he? Where is Michael? What happened to him?”

  My partner said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, ma’am. Your husband has been shot. He was killed.”

  CHAPTER 13

  CONKLIN WAS AT the wheel of the squad car as we headed back to the city in the dark. Mrs. Chan was crumpled up in the backseat, talking on the phone to her sister in Seattle. Brady called to say that the mayor had threatened to bring in the FBI if we didn’t crack the case pronto. The press had gotten tipped and had whipped the story into a frenzy, spraying the stink of fear onto all the hotels in San Francisco. “Tourism dollars are at stake.” That was what he told me.

  I snapped, “How long is pronto, Brady? Because there are only twenty-four hours in the day, and you know what? We’re working twenty-five of them. By ourselves.”

  “I’ll get you some help,” he said.

  After I hung up, Conklin said to me, “We’re going to get our break when Mrs. Chan sees the videotape.”

  Sure, it was possible. If Mrs. Chan recognized someone who knew her husband walking through the hotel lobby, that might pry open the lid of this big bloody box of I don’t know what.

  As Conklin took the 101 on-ramp from University Avenue, I listened to the radio: dispatch calling for cars to a drive-by shooting out by the zoo, a bar fight in the Haight, a domestic stabbing in Diamond Heights, all straight-up, call-911 incidents—unlike this.

  And then my phone buzzed. It was Joe.

  He said, “Hon, I’m stuck out at the airport. I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Wait. Joe, I’m stuck, too. This is not good.”

  “I know, Linds. In twenty years, Julie’s going to tell her shrink how we neglected her—”

  I wasn’t amused. I cut him off.

  “Did you call Mrs. Rose?”

  “Yes. She’s already at our place. Fringe marathon tonight. She likes our TV.”

  “Well, that’s all right then,” I snapped before clicking off.

  I was mad at Brady for passing on the mayor’s threat and mad at Joe for saying he didn’t know when he would be home. I turned to look at Michael Chan’s widow. She was leaning against the backseat, staring out the side window at the black of nothing, apparently drowning in the loss of her husband, and the probable devastation of her world.

  I was ashamed of myself for snapping at Joe, really ashamed.

  I would’ve called him back to apologize, but Mrs. Chan swung her sad eyes toward me and locked in.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Then she asked me a lot of questions. Good ones.

  How had I identified her husband’s body? Was he alone when he was found? What was he wearing? Had we recovered Michael’s phone? Had he suffered before he died? Did we have any idea who had killed him? Did we have any idea why?

  I answered as well as I could, but none of my answers were comforting. I reached for her hand, but it was awkward, and soon she was staring out the window again.

  A half hour later, Shirley Chan was sitting in a metal chair in Interview 2, sandwiched between Conklin and me, a laptop computer open in front of us.

  I said, “Let us know if you recognize anyone.”

  I pressed Play and the video began showing an overhead view of the Four Seasons’ lobby with yesterday’s date and the time, 4:10 p.m.

  Ten minutes into the tape, Mrs. Chan’s eyes got big as she watched her husband enter the hotel, cross the marble floors as if he was on a mission, and head toward the reception desk.

  Mrs. Chan shouted, “There he is. That’s him. Michael, what are you doing there?”

  Conklin and I look
ed at each other over Mrs. Chan’s head as the image of Mr. Chan went toward the elevators. I fast-forwarded the lobby footage until a blonde-haired woman with wraparound shades and a swingy leather coat entered the scene.

  I hit Pause and turned to the grieving woman beside me.

  “Mrs. Chan, do you recognize this woman?”

  Her eyes were fixed on the blonde.

  “Who is she?” Mrs. Chan asked. Her voice was cold. Resigned.

  “We don’t know,” I said. “But she may have been the last person to see your husband alive.”

  CHAPTER 14

  WE ALL STARED at the image of the blonde-haired woman I had stopped in midstride by pressing a key.

  We didn’t know her name or her occupation, if she was Chan’s date-by-the-hour, manicurist, longtime lover, drug dealer, financial planner, or personal banker. We didn’t know if she was dead or alive, if she had killed Michael Chan, had set up the hit, or had gotten out before he was shot and didn’t know he was dead. She was unknown subject zero.

  Conklin’s prediction that when Mrs. Chan saw the video we would have answers seemed unlikely to come true.

  I said to Mrs. Chan, “I’ll show you another view of her.”

  I shuffled the discs, found the footage from the camera on the fourteenth floor, and booted it up. I let the footage run as the blond woman stepped out of the elevator and walked away from the camera, down the hall to Chan’s room.

  I hit Pause after she had knocked and Chan had opened the door. He wasn’t on camera. We only saw the frozen profile of the striking blonde and the long shadow in the doorway.

  Mrs. Chan asked, “Michael was in that room?”

  “Yes. He was.”

  “Did she shoot him?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “I want to see what she looked like when she left there.”

  I said, “We don’t have anything else. Not long after she entered the suite, the video was corrupted. All we have is two hours of static. If she left through the lobby, she was disguised. We didn’t see her again.”

  “She couldn’t just disappear,” said Mrs. Chan.

  “The hotel is on floors five through twenty-one of a forty-story building. She may have left through the fire exit. Here’s something else. The room may have been under surveillance.”

  I showed Mrs. Chan morgue shots of the two young probable snoops who might have recorded Michael Chan’s last moments. Mrs. Chan didn’t recognize them.

  “They might have been students,” I said.

  She shook her head, and I made a mental note to screen student ID photos from the university, all four thousand of them. I asked Mrs. Chan for names of her husband’s close friends both on and off campus, and when Richie went for coffee, I asked her personal questions about her marriage.

  She got angry.

  “I trust Michael. He was faithful to me. Just because that woman looks like that, it doesn’t mean they were having an affair.”

  “We’re only concerned with the nature of their connection. We have to find her. For all we know, she’s also a victim.”

  I had plenty of questions, and I laid them on Shirley Chan one at a time. Why would Michael use a fake ID? Why did he lie about his whereabouts? Had he lied to her before? Had she ever been suspicious of his movements?

  She answered “I don’t know” and “No, no, no,” and then she put her head down on the scarred gray table and cried. By the time Conklin returned with the coffee, Shirley Chan was no longer talking to us. The interview was done.

  I called the desk sergeant and arranged a ride home for Mrs. Chan with a uniformed officer, and Conklin walked her out to the street. I wanted to compare notes with my partner before we both went home. So I used this brief alone time to download the surveillance video our van had shot today on Waverley Street.

  I pulled it up and watched images of me and my partner going up the walk to the Chan house, Mrs. Chan answering the door. And then I watched the light traffic running between the van and the Chans’ sweet old house.

  At time stamp 5:24, the Chans’ next-door neighbor backed a silver sedan out of his driveway, interrupting the progress of a black Mercedes that had been coming up the street. The Mercedes was forced to wait for the sedan to maneuver, and for a long moment the Mercedes was stationary and parallel with our cameras.

  Even though the Mercedes’ windows were tinted and it was dark outside, I almost recognized the shape of the driver’s head, the angle of the chin. My heart took off at a gallop before my mind knew what was scaring me.

  I watched intently as the driver of the Mercedes turned to look at the minivan. I paused the action and refined the image of the driver, who was looking directly into the camera.

  My mind reeled, did cartwheels, and nearly stroked out.

  My God. It was Joe. Joe was driving that car.

  He’d been caught on tape driving past the home of a dead man named Michael Chan, thirty miles from San Francisco.

  Even though my heart and brain had left me for dead, my fingers moved and my eyes took everything in. As I stared at the image of my dear husband, my baby’s daddy, my closest friend and lover, who would never go behind my back, I fought hard to find a believable explanation.

  Had Joe been looking for me? Had Brady told him where I was? If so, why, when the neighbor’s car took off up the street, had Joe kept going? Why hadn’t he called me?

  There had to be a good reason. But I couldn’t come up with a thing.

  CHAPTER 15

  I’VE NEVER THOUGHT of myself as a coward, but I could not show this footage of my husband driving past the Chan house to my partner until I spoke to Joe.

  I texted Richie, said I was going home now and that I would see him in the morning. I took the stairs down to the lobby. I left by the back door, fled along the breezeway out to Harriet Street, and found my car standing alone in the lot under the overpass.

  I drove home on autopilot. The inside of my head felt like a pileup on a Minnesota highway at the height of a blizzard. I didn’t know which way was up or down, or when I would get slammed again.

  At just before 11 p.m., I stood outside my front door with my key in hand.

  If Joe was home, I would have to confront him. If he wasn’t home, that would only prolong the agony until he arrived. He had told me he was at the airport.

  He told me that. And that was a lie.

  I pushed the key into the lock. Martha woofed, and as I opened the door, she tore around the corner from the living room into the foyer and hurled herself at me, nailing me in the solar plexus.

  I bent down, gave my doggy a pat and a kiss, and then went into the living room, expecting my lying son-of-a-bitch husband to get up from his chair.

  But the chair was occupied by our sweet, gray-haired neighbor with the big heart.

  I’m sure my face was rigid, but I greeted her and apologized for being so late. I asked after Julie and if Mrs. Rose could hang in for another minute so I could walk Martha.

  She said, “Of course. Are you hungry, Lindsay?”

  I hadn’t thought of food for hours, but the idea that something warm could be waiting for me made my stomach growl. I walked Martha in a tight rectangle on Lake Street, down to Tenth, across the street, and back up to Twelfth, and after Martha did her business, we went home.

  A plate of meat loaf and mashed potatoes was waiting for me on the kitchen bar, along with a glass of wine. I thanked Mrs. Rose, hugged her, and asked about the Fringe marathon. I didn’t hear anything she said about her show. How could I? The whiteout whirled in my mind and the warm food went down without my tasting it.

  I came back to the present when Mrs. Rose said she’d just changed Julie, the new box of diapers were in her room, and she’d see me in the morning.

  We said good night and I went to my daughter’s room.

  Julie has Joe’s dark hair and long lashes, and looking at her made me think of the Chan children, who wouldn’t be sleeping tight for years to come. I kissed my
fingers and touched them to Julie’s cheek. My precious girl.

  As I cleaned up the kitchen, I thought about Shirley Chan trying to make sense of her late husband’s behavior, wondering what he had done and why he had done it, and what would become of her family now.

  I was having some of those feelings, but my husband was alive. He could speak to me. And he would.

  While the dishwasher did the dirty work, I booted up my laptop and downloaded the camera van’s street view to my PC. I had to see Joe staring into the camera’s eye again.

  And there he was.

  Big, handsome, looking into the lens like he was a movie star and this was his close-up. After he moved on, I sped through the rest of the footage and saw nothing out of the ordinary. No one slunk through the bushes. Apart from Joe’s Mercedes, no one slowed down in front of the Chan house or sped past it. Not even a stray cat raced across the road.

  I calmed myself, and then I called Joe. I imagined his voice nearly drowned out by the sounds of an airliner taking off behind him, and my tremendous relief that I’d been wrong.

  But no. I got a digital voice saying that Joe’s mailbox was full, good-bye.

  I took a therapeutic shower, toweled off hard, and slipped into a nightgown. I went to Julie’s room. Her diaper was dry and she was sleeping soundly, so I sat in the rocker and stared out the window onto Lake Street.

  When I next saw Joe, I would just ask him, Why were you in Palo Alto? Why did you lie to me?

  I went to bed, and when Julie’s cries woke me, it was 6:15. I turned my head, absolutely sure that Joe would be sleeping next to me.

  But the spot on my left was empty and cold.

  I touched that empty place anyway and felt my resolve shatter and tears leap out of my eyes.

  Where was Joe?

  Why wasn’t he home?

  CHAPTER 16

  MRS. ROSE ARRIVED at 7 a.m., cheerful and rosy.

  While I made breakfast for Julie and fed her, Mrs. Rose scrambled some eggs for me. She talked about her grandchildren in North Carolina while I combed Julie’s hair and played patty-cake with her, and once the baby was laughing, I handed her off, strapped on my gun, pulled on my Windbreaker, and said good-bye.