by Tim Weaver
‘What you got for me, Larry?’
‘First,’ he said, ‘let’s establish some ground rules.’
‘We already did that on the phone two hours ago.’
He shook his head, as if the conversation she’d had with him this morning hadn’t ever taken place, and then laid a hand over the tape slot.
‘If, and when, you get this guy,’ O’Hara said, ‘you give me what I want.’
She frowned. ‘Is there an echo in here? I already told you that.’
‘Don’t screw me over, Jo.’
‘Have I ever screwed you over before?’
He didn’t respond, because the answer was no.
‘Did you see the story?’ he asked.
She nodded. It had been in yesterday’s Times, on page four: an update on the suicide of Donald Klein, looping in his connection to the Star Inn, the body in the tub, the acid, the red station wagon and the fact that the victim at the motel still hadn’t been ID’d. The moment she’d stormed out of the squad room two days ago, slighted, boiling with rage, she’d got on the phone to O’Hara and set the wheels in motion. The story he’d written was, in truth, a zombie, full of no new information, but it served a purpose for both of them: first, Klein was an LAPD case, so Jo had an insurance policy if Hayesfield ever came knocking as she could claim that – because the story had led with Klein – it had come from the LAPD, not from her; second, it got the details of the motel murder fully out into the open, where it would get seen by the public and, in turn, by potential witnesses to whatever had happened on the night of the killings; and, third, it was a bridge to carry O’Hara to what he ultimately wanted.
Not answers to the motel murder. He didn’t care about that.
What he wanted was the Night Stalker.
Jo had told him that she wasn’t working on the task force, but he didn’t care: he wanted colour, not details. He already had another source who was on one of the teams – Jo suspected at Glendale PD – and so what O’Hara needed from Jo was the soap opera: how the task force looked, the stress levels, the kind of hours they were pulling, dominant personalities, arguments, all the bullshit that would add shade to what his insider gave him about the actual Stalker murders themselves.
Jo hated having to do it, because the Stalker was no game.
But the real killer of Gabriel Wilzon was still out there.
O’Hara pushed the personal stereo towards Jo, handed her a pair of headphones and pressed Play.
In Jo’s ears, the tape whirred into life.
‘Sorry about that. I just wanted to move somewhere quiet.’ It was O’Hara, and he was feeding the caller some bullshit; he’d put whoever had phoned on hold because he was setting up a recording device.
‘So you’re the dude that wrote that article about the bathtub case?’
It was a woman, maybe Hispanic.
‘Yeah, that was me.’
‘What’s the name of the cop that’s dealing with it?’
‘Why, do you know something about it?’
‘You got the name of the cop or not?’
‘Joline Kader,’ O’Hara said, and read out her number.
‘You said a witness saw a red station wagon?’ the woman asked.
‘That’s right. Do you –’
But the woman hung up.
Jo looked across the table at O’Hara. ‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘You made me come all the way down here and eat these shitty eggs for this?’ She took off the headphones and tossed them at O’Hara. ‘If she actually calls me, we might be in business, otherwise this is worth less than nothing, Larry, you know that.’
‘Just see if she calls.’
‘If she doesn’t, our deal is off.’
‘Just see if she calls first,’ O’Hara repeated.
‘Yeah, well, she’s had my name since 2 p.m. yesterday.’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe she’s waiting for the right moment.’
The right moment came just before 7 p.m., as Jo was leaving the office.
‘Kader,’ she said, picking up her phone and putting on her jacket.
‘Uh, are you the one looking into that motel thing?’
She quickly sat down again. ‘Yeah, that’s me.’
‘I read that a witness at the motel saw a red station wagon. That right?’
‘That’s correct.’
Jo grabbed a pen and her notebook and looked in the direction of Hayesfield’s office. She could make him out behind the slats of the blind.
‘Hello?’ the woman said. ‘You still there?’
‘Yeah, I’m here.’
‘And this guy who blew his brains out up at Runyon Canyon Park – this Klein guy – you think he was the same dude who did all that shit with the acid and stuff?’
‘Can I get your name, ma’am?’
‘No. No, you can’t get no name.’
‘I need your name to –’
‘Do you think he did it or not?’
She felt her pulse quicken as she said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, I think you got it wrong.’
‘Got it wrong how?’
There was no response this time.
‘Ma’am?’
More silence.
‘Ma’am, are you there –’
‘I think someone else did it.’
Jo tried to still her emotions.
‘Why would you say that, ma’am?’
Jo could hear the hesitancy in the woman now, like a series of staccato breaths.
‘Ma’am, it’s okay,’ Jo said.
‘Maybe this was a mistake.’
‘It’s not. You’re not making a mistake.’
‘All this Night Stalker stuff,’ the woman said, and for the first time there was a tremor in her voice, ‘I know it’s bad. I got eyes. I can read. I can see how messed up it is. And, I don’t know, maybe he ain’t as loco as this Stalker nut, but he’s still … he’s …’ Her sentence trailed off.
‘Who are we talking about here, ma’am?’
Silence.
‘Ma’am?’
‘I used to see him driving around in that red station wagon sometimes.’
Jo’s adrenalin spiked. Shit. I might actually have found him. She grabbed the printout from her in-tray with the list of all the employees Paolo Caraca had hired since 1982, and pushed the woman again: ‘Who did you see driving around, ma’am?’
Nothing.
‘Ma’am? What was the name of –’
‘Adrian.’
Jo checked the list: there was an Adrian on it.
‘Adrian Vale, that’s who you need to look into,’ the woman said, more quietly this time, as if his full name had spooked her. ‘He’s a total fucking monster.’
35
Isaac Mills emerged from the shadows.
He held the shotgun across his front, the barrel tilted towards the floor, his fingers fixed to the fore-end. Around his neck hung the night-vision goggles. He watched me for a second before he edged forward, still shadowed by the angle of the stairs.
‘Close the door,’ he ordered.
He used the barrel of the gun to gesture towards it and, once I’d shut the door, he pulled out a chair for me and backed away, the two of us standing either side of the table.
‘Sit down,’ he said sharply, the shotgun turning in my direction as he used it to point to the chair. I sat, watching him closely, and as he came further into the light I saw mud and manure caked around his boots and then something else on the hem of his sleeves. It was dotted across both of his hands too.
Blood.
He stopped at the other side of the table, leaning against the wall, adjacent to the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the living room, and then his eyes shifted to the space on which I’d mounted the casework, and he said, ‘It’s a real shame about your wall, there.’ He said it flatly, without any expression or emphasis at all, and when he returned his gaze to me, it was equally neutral. I thought of t
he man who’d come to Black Gale the day before, evasive and opaque, asking questions he already knew the answers to and lying about his reason for being there; and then I pictured the other Isaac Mills, the one who’d been so warm with the woman and her two kids, who’d stopped an armed robbery and had stood there for photographs afterwards, smiling and benign, before going on to collect a bravery award. I couldn’t get a read on him then, I couldn’t get a read on him now either – and if I didn’t know who he was, I couldn’t anticipate him. He was unknown and unpredictable.
And both of those things scared me.
For the first time, he dropped his hand away from the fore-end of the shotgun and went to the pocket of his coat. Initially, inside his closed fist, it was hard to make out what he’d removed. But then I saw a headphone jack at one end.
He placed the mobile phone down on the table and, as I looked at it, confused, he reached forward and pressed something on the screen. The Speaker icon. Someone was listening to us at the other end. I tried to get a look at the number he’d dialled but it simply said PRIVATE. Mills glanced at me and shrugged, an almost imperceptible movement, but one that left something behind in his face: it took me a second to work out what it was, not only because he was difficult to read but because I thought, to start with, I was mistaken.
Was it regret?
‘You need to stop,’ he said, and when he took hold of the fore-end again with his spare hand, he stared at me and anything conciliatory was gone, like it hadn’t ever been there. ‘You need to stop what you’re doing.’
‘What am I doing?’
He smiled. ‘That’s cute.’
I glanced at the empty wall again, and then to the laptop lead on the floor. ‘I’d say you’ve done a pretty bang-up job of stopping me already.’ I pointed towards the mobile phone. ‘You and whoever you came here with.’
He smiled again, but it was different this time.
And then the smile faded, he cleared his throat and he said, ‘Look at you: still playing detective, even now; even as you sit there with a shotgun aimed at your face.’
Except he wasn’t aiming the shotgun at my face.
He was pointing it at the floor.
I glanced at the phone again, saw the minutes still ticking over on the display, and then back to Mills. He was staring at me, his head tilted slightly, eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to work me out – or waiting for me to catch up.
‘Stay the fuck away from Black Gale.’
He delivered the words with such ferocity, it almost felt as if they’d come from someone else. I looked him in the eyes, lingering on their stillness.
‘Or don’t,’ he said. ‘But that wouldn’t be a good idea.’
I felt myself push away from him, my back pressing hard against the chair, the weight of his words – his articulation of the threat – like a physical force. He watched me for a moment longer, and all I felt was disconcerted: it was like he really was two different people, the aggression in his voice not matching the expression on his face. That was just a blank.
Mills came forward, disrupting my train of thought.
I shifted around in my chair, following his movement, still trying to work out what was going on and who he was. Was this all a game to him?
Or was this imbalance in his personality a sickness?
He stopped a couple of feet short of me.
‘I imagine you’ve been in this situation before,’ he said, his voice small, quieter now. ‘A man like you, the job you do. You kick enough hornets’ nests, you expect to get stung, right?’ He glanced again at the empty wall, clearly not expecting an answer from me. ‘You’ve developed a tough hide. I mean, you have to. The kind of cases you take on …’ He trailed off. ‘You’ve clearly already gone digging, so you know I used to be a cop, and let me tell you, Raker: people like you, they’re a cop’s worst nightmare.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Someone with determination,’ he said, ‘someone who can dig around and not worry about getting dirty – worse, someone who can pick up failed cases and unlock them … No police force in the land is going to like that. They’re frightened of you, you know that? And probably with good reason. You make people nervous. It’s a quality.’
I watched him, but he really seemed to mean it.
‘I’m glad you think so,’ I said. ‘Is that why you’ve brought a shotgun with you?’
It came out of nowhere, a movement so fast I barely even registered it, nerves exploding in my face as he jammed the heel of the weapon into my cheek. He used it like a battering ram, pain exploding in the right side of my face, in my eye socket, sparks of the same fire flaring in my ear and jaw. The force of the strike sent the chair rocking back on its legs, the whole thing tilting and then falling; I went with it, slamming against the wooden floorboards, the whole room seeming to pitch. Dazed, I instinctively put a hand up to protect myself from another attack.
But there wasn’t one.
He just stayed where he was.
I shuffled away from him on my hands and feet, like a spider scuttling for the shadows. But again he didn’t move, just watched me, the shotgun back in position.
‘I could kill you here,’ he said, looking from me to the weapon. ‘I could put a hole in your chest the size of a dinner plate, but that’s problematic when you’ve got a journalist sniffing around.’ He meant Connor McCaskell from the Tribune, the man Healy and I had talked about – and been recorded discussing – at the farmhouse. Mills stopped, running a tongue along his teeth, like something sour was in his mouth. ‘If I kill you here, or make you disappear, it means questions, and journalists are like bacteria. Questions are what they feed on. You can try to stop the spread, try to cut off a food source, but they just keep coming. This arsehole looking into you is a case in point.’ He paused and let out a frustrated breath. ‘No, men like you, you need to be brought to heel in other ways.’
This time, he took a couple of steps closer to me, kicking aside the chair I’d been sitting on. I scrambled to my feet, looking around for something I could use as a weapon, something I could fight back with. But how could I beat a shotgun?
‘How I get to someone like you is I use your pressure points,’ Mills said, and stopped adjacent to the sofa, eight feet from me, his voice unsettlingly even, as calm as a lake without wind. It was as if nothing had interrupted him, as if he’d never attacked me with the shotgun and split my face. ‘We’ve all got pressure points. When you do all these heroic things for families, when you get confident, when you follow people around and they never see you watching’ – he flashed me a look and it was obvious why: he knew it was me who’d talked to his girlfriend at the petrol station – ‘you start to think you’re absolutely invincible. But you’re not. You’re still vulnerable. You’ve got a daughter, right?’
A butterfly escaped in my chest.
‘Stay away from her,’ I said, my voice groggy.
He nodded, but not because he was agreeing to; it looked like he’d been expecting the exact response that I’d given him. His face had changed again and I realized I was even further away from understanding him than when he’d first walked in here. He looked at me like he felt some semblance of compassion – but he’d attacked me with the end of a gun, opened up a cut under my eye, talked about murdering me.
‘Your daughter is a pressure point,’ he said, ‘we both know that. But what would I achieve by kidnapping her, or threatening her, or killing her? It would crush you. It would rip your whole life apart, all over again.’ He stared at me, letting me know that he’d read up about my history and knew all about Derryn. I’d got to my feet already, forcing myself to face him down. ‘But, if I hurt Annabel,’ he went on, using her name now, his voice exactly the same pitch, tone, volume, ‘you’d get really fucking angry, and that determination I talked about earlier, that ability and willingness you have to play dirty, that would probably come back to haunt me. Maybe you’d end up in a shallow grave somewhere because you’d be so mess
ed up with grief and rage and revenge that you’d be sloppy and easy to handle. Or maybe your rage would be the fuel that keeps you sharp, the fuel that means you come for me and kill me, you come for everyone I work with; and this thing we don’t want you to unravel gets unravelled, and getting rid of your daughter turns out to be the worst decision in human history.’
His eyes flicked to the kitchen door he’d emerged from.
‘So you know what your real pressure point is, Raker?’
I stood motionless, trying to figure out where this was going.
‘It’s freedom,’ he said. ‘It’s the independence your job gives you, the latitude it has, the way finding these missing people fixes you and repairs you, filling the gaps left behind by your wife. I get it, I do. Closing cases, getting people answers, it’s liberating. It gives you a sense of immunity; nothing touches it.’
He rocked forward again, as if he was about to come towards me, but instead he turned on his heel and retreated, heading past the sofa, towards the kitchen door.
What the hell is he doing?
He stopped there, in the shadows of the stairs.
‘Your real pressure point,’ he said quietly, ‘it’s not your daughter, much as I’m sure you must love her. I’m not even certain it’s the idea of losing your life. I look at the things you’ve done in the past, and I believe you made your peace with death a long time ago. I’m not saying you aren’t frightened by it – we all are at the end, especially when we actually have to face it down – but sticking a gun in your mouth, threatening to pull the trigger, that’s never going to work, is it? If that was a viable option, you’d have stopped looking for missing people a long time ago, because – from what I’ve read – you’ve had plenty of guns pointed at you plenty of times.’
He looked into the blackness of the kitchen.
‘No, it’s the thought of being contained, that’s what you’re truly frightened of. It’s the thought of all of this coming to an end, of never feeling that immunity again.’
He eyed me, feeding on my confusion.
And then he vanished into the kitchen.
Immediately, I came around the sofa to the table, slowing my footsteps in case it was a trick. The closer I got, the more I could hear: a back door opening and shutting, movement, furniture shifting around.
