by Tim Weaver
‘I’m sorry, Raker.’
I looked down at Healy again.
He blinked up at me, struggling to focus.
‘Just rest,’ I said to him.
‘This is my fault.’ His voice was weak, strained.
I got to my feet, thinking again about Mills, about why he’d tried to sound authentic to whoever was listening, but I couldn’t work out whether he’d genuinely betrayed his employers – and why he’d ever do such a thing – or whether this was another component in some ornate trick I couldn’t see properly. Uncertain, I glanced at the table again, to the place in which the mobile phone had sat, recording us both.
And I realized I’d missed something.
An envelope.
I hurried across to the table and, as I did, remembered a moment, just before Mills had exited the cottage, when he’d picked up the phone. At the same time as he’d done that, I’d looked down at Healy, lying still, blood on his face, and had wondered what was going on, why Mills wouldn’t admit that he knew who Healy was.
I’d looked away for a second.
I stopped next to the table, staring at what Mills had left behind. There was no writing on the front of the envelope and, when I turned it over, I could see that it had been properly sealed. I glanced at Healy, asleep again now, unaware of any of this, and then scanned the rest of the living room, shadows still clinging to every surface. Was this legitimate? Or was it all part of the same trick?
As soon as I scooped up the envelope, I could feel something solid shifting inside, sliding from one end to the other, and knew straight away what it was.
A key.
I ripped open the seal.
The key’s design was unusual: it had the familiar lines on the blade but was moulded entirely from hard plastic. It was also extremely thin – perhaps only two millimetres in width – and had a tiny magnetic square at the point of the key. Whatever door it opened, the lock on that door was using a mixture of technologies – part tumbler, part electronic reader.
There was something else in the envelope too.
A folded piece of paper.
It was headed, crowned with a now familiar company logo and an address in York. Below that, handwritten in the middle of the page, were six numbers: 459822. I looked from those to the key – and a dizzying surge of adrenalin hit me.
The key was for Seiger and Sten’s office.
The numbers were their alarm code.
Martina: Part 1
1985
Los Angeles | Monday 5 August
The property was a single-family tan stucco with a raised porch, a bay tree in the yard and a rust-eaten fence between the sidewalk and the lawn. A brick driveway ran along one side of the building to a garage.
As soon as Jo pulled up outside, she could hear the low drone of the freeway; a slanted bank opposite the house, and a high concrete wall – its surface peppered with the ghosts of old graffiti – were the only things lying between the houses and the lanes of the 710. The moment she switched off the ignition, it got even louder, a perpetual wall of vehicle noise from which there would never be an escape, even in the dead of night.
She sat there for a moment looking at the house, the white bars at the front window, the terracotta pots in a line on the porch, wondering whether she was doing the right thing in making this detour. She’d spent the afternoon in Monterey Park, talking again to the family of the guy who was murdered on State Route 39, and now had a couple of solid leads that she knew she should be chasing down and reporting back to Hayesfield on. Instead, she was here. Hayesfield had already hauled her into his office and asked her if she’d had anything to do with the Larry O’Hara story in the Times, so Jo knew that he’d go nuts if he found out she was still pushing the idea that Donald Klein wasn’t the real killer. Yet here she was, off the back of a tip from a woman who refused even to ID herself, a woman who made her call from a phone booth so she’d be impossible to locate, and whose accusations, about a man called Adrian Vale, Jo had failed to find one shred of evidence for in the three days since. He’d worked at Caraca BuildIt, which was why he’d sometimes driven their maroon VW Quantum in the past, but as he hadn’t been employed there for two years, she had no idea if Vale was genuinely a monster or just some asshole the caller had a problem with.
She locked the car, opened up the gate and headed along an uneven stone path towards the porch. There was a table on it with a drying rack next to that, damp laundry hanging from it, positioned so that it was in the full glare of the late-afternoon sun. Even now, a couple of hours before sunset, the city was still like a furnace: she could feel sweat, frozen to her body by the a/c in the car, now beginning to thaw, the heat a constant, irritable prickle in her skin. She brushed a finger across her brow and knocked a couple of times on the metal screen door: it was secured, and padlocked for good measure, but the front door beyond it was ajar.
Birds squawked on a nearby utility pole. A siren faded in and out again on the freeway.
‘Can I help you?’
Jo turned to find a Hispanic woman in her mid to late fifties standing behind the grey bars of the security door. She was short and plump, her black hair scraped back into a messy ponytail, her face etched by tiny brown sunspots and fine age lines.
‘Mrs Vale?’
‘Si,’ the woman replied.
‘We spoke on the telephone earlier.’ Jo removed her ID wallet from the pocket of her pants and flipped it open. ‘I’m Detective Kader from the Sheriff’s Department.’
‘Ah, si. Yes. Of course.’
Mrs Vale began unlocking the security door.
‘Adrian, he isn’t home yet,’ she said in lightly accented English.
Jo had found out as much about Adrian Vale as she could, which wasn’t a lot, but she knew that his parents had emigrated from Honduras in 1959, and Vale’s father had died when he was only fifteen, having drunk himself into oblivion. She knew that Valeria Vale had brought up her son alone for the last five years, that she cleaned rooms at a downtown hotel, and that Adrian was currently at Stanford on a fully paid scholarship. Right now, however, he was back in LA for the summer break.
‘Do you know where he is, Mrs Vale?’
‘He called to say he was running late ten minutes late and would be home at six,’ she said, unlocking the security door. ‘He has a summer placement at a law firm in Pico Rivera.’ She smiled, nodded, as if she were telling Jo that, no, she hadn’t misheard: he really did have a summer placement at a law firm. Jo returned the smile, not wanting to destroy the pride that Valeria Vale clearly had for her son. The security door swung gently out. ‘Please,’ Valeria said, using an arm to invite Jo inside. ‘Please come in and wait.’
The living room was small, the furniture old, the carpets thinning, but it had a cared-for, comfortable feel. On a mantel were photographs of Adrian Vale as a boy, his father, the three of them together, and then other, extended family members. Jo could see ornaments and trinkets elsewhere, books in Spanish and English, and on a wall above the mantel a walnut cross, rosary beads hanging from the horizontal limb.
‘Can I get you something to drink?’
‘Just some water,’ Jo replied. ‘Thank you.’
After Valeria went through to the kitchen, Jo moved across to the mantel. She hadn’t been able to find any decent photographs of Adrian Vale. He didn’t have a record, so had never been arrested, which meant his picture wasn’t on file at the LASD or LAPD, and it wasn’t in the system upstate either. From home the previous night, she’d made calls to the Sheriff’s departments in Santa Clara County – where Stanford University was located – Santa Cruz County, San Mateo County and to the San Francisco Police Department and he’d never got into trouble anywhere in that part of California in the three years he’d been living there. He had no passport, because he’d never travelled abroad, and the photo on his driver’s licence was three years old and poor quality, so a DMV search hadn’t been much help either.
Until now, Jo had barely
even known what he’d looked like.
She picked up one of the pictures closest to her. In it, Adrian Vale was about eighteen or nineteen, and sitting on the front porch of his mother’s home, a glass of water perched next to him, a book open and face down on the wall that hemmed the porch in. He was smiling. Expressions in photographs were so often faked, but the lie in this, if it existed, was hard to pick: the smile reached from Vale’s mouth to his eyes, out into the rest of his face. He was a handsome kid, dark-haired and well built.
‘That was the summer before he went to Stanford.’
Jo turned and found Valeria standing next to her. She smiled again, the swell of joy she had for her son and his academic achievements so obvious, it seemed to inflate her somehow. Jo put the picture back down and looked at some of the others: Vale as a child, being led across a strip of white sand by what must have been his father; him with his mother, the portrait two or three years old, the two of them in a park, the sun going down behind them; and then Vale in his early teens, in a high school photograph, smiling for the camera.
They sat, Jo taking the water.
The house was warm, a fan going in the corner of the room, clicking very softly every time it hit the limit of its arc. Valeria had left the windows open, the back door too, but the windows were all protected by bars and the rear entrance had the same security door as the front. As she’d driven past, Jo had noticed that a lot of the other houses on the block were the same, a necessary measure in an area with a high crime rate. A year ago, having to put metal bars at your windows and steel doors front and back would have been viewed as undesirable and ugly. It would have been the antithesis of a home, a confirmation of where not to own a house if you could afford it. But, then, a year ago, the Night Stalker wasn’t killing people in their sleep. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Jo, as it probably wasn’t lost on Valeria and her neighbours: if you gave people the choice now, most of LA would have preferred to be in a house like this.
‘I hope Adrian isn’t in any kind of trouble,’ Valeria said.
Jo returned her attention to Vale’s mother and could see the worry already forming in her face, stark as neon. ‘I have a case,’ Jo said softly, trying not to set off any alarms before Vale had even got here, ‘and it might be one that Adrian can help me with. That’s all.’ She smiled at Valeria reassuringly and, in the silence that followed, Jo thought of the phone call she’d had with the anonymous woman three days ago.
‘Why would you call Vale a “monster”?’
‘Because that’s what he is. The thing is, though, not many people have seen that side of him. In high school, mostly he was just this quiet, book-nerd loner.’
‘You were in high school with him?’
‘Yeah, but I didn’t know him. I didn’t know him at all. That’s the point. No one did. He was good-looking, crazy smart, but he’d always just go about by himself, listening to music, reading, all that sort of shit. He was polite, would always talk to you if you talked to him, but he never had any friends, far as I could tell. He was never at any of the parties we went to. I never saw him out at all, ever. I bet no one he went to school with could tell you a damn thing about him – except for Martina.’
‘Who’s Martina?’
‘She’s the girl whose life he destroyed.’
Valeria Vale moved in her armchair, coming forward to the table where she’d left a glass of water for herself. She looked at Jo. ‘Is it something to do with the law?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Is Adrian going to help with your case?’
Jo was touched by the woman’s naivety, the absolute faith she had in her son, the love she carried for him, and felt distressed at the thought of having to crush it in her home.
‘I think it’s easier if I just talk to Adrian, Mrs Vale.’
‘Si,’ she said. ‘Of course. I’m sorry.’
‘Not a problem.’
‘I’m so proud of him, that’s all.’ She paused, looking at Jo, a flicker of emotion in her face. ‘He’s never had it easy. He’s had to fight for everything. His father and I, we never had any money. We arrived in this country with just the clothes on our backs. We never took Adrian on vacation … It was hard.’ She blinked, let out a breath. ‘Adrian’s father, he was …’ She stopped again. An alcoholic.
Jo nodded. ‘He died in 1979, is that correct?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And he worked for a building supplies company?’
‘Si. The same one, for ten years.’
Valeria didn’t ask how Jo knew about Lautaro Vale, his death, and the way in which he’d died, or about why Jo might have gone digging around for information on the Vale family. Maybe she just assumed that that was what a detective did before they turned up at someone’s house.
But the truth was a lot more complicated.
‘Adrian had a part-time job,’ the caller had told Jo. ‘Martina said that he worked where his old man used to work. It’s this building supplies company somewhere over in Industry. But his old man got him in there when he was, like, fourteen or fifteen, working on weekends and over the holidays, and Adrian stayed on there – even after his old man died – until he went to Stanford.’
In theory, when Vale had returned to LA two months ago for the summer break, he might not have been working for Caraca BuildIt any more – as it became known in 1982 – but he would have known where to find enough acid to dissolve a body: as much as six hundred gallons of it. In theory, that might also explain why the company that first Lautaro and then Adrian Vale had worked for might not have immediately noticed if ten one-gallon containers were missing from their vast stock. In theory. Jo was still waiting for Paolo Caraca to get back to her about whether any containers were missing from the yard, the whole thing protracted by the fact that Caraca himself had been admitted to the ER two days ago with pneumonia, so the request had been pushed down the line to his deputy. Jo had called him, and he promised he’d get it over as soon as possible.
‘The drinking was hard.’
Jo looked at Valeria, back in the present.
‘Not for me. It wasn’t hard for me. I got used to seeing Lautaro like that years ago. What I mean is, it was hard for Adrian. Having to watch your father like that – unable to stand; angry, or passed out; missing all these things that Adrian was doing at school – that’s hard for a boy growing up. A boy shouldn’t have to see his father like that. He shouldn’t have to bury his father at fifteen.’ Valeria blinked, tears in her eyes. ‘It made him quiet. He found it hard to make friends. He wasn’t unsociable, I just don’t think he could find anyone he related to, or anyone who understood him. I mean, which other father drank himself to death in their child’s first year of high school? So he just studied hard and immersed himself in his school work.’
Jo looked at the mantel.
The photo of Adrian Vale looked back at her.
‘So how did Vale destroy Martina’s life?’
‘I don’t know the exact details. I mean, I never really knew Martina at school – she always hung out with different people to me – but we both dropped out in ’81 and ended up working in the same Kmart up in Temple City the year after. Total coincidence. Anyway, then we started talking sometimes, lunch breaks, on the way out at the end of our shift, and sometime after that she started telling me things …’
‘About Adrian Vale?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What about him?’
‘She started off by asking me if I remembered him from school, and I said I did, just about. She said they met again, end of ’81; bumped into each other at some drugstore down in East LA and then went out for a while after that. Like I say, we weren’t buddies – we didn’t know each other that well – but even I could tell she wanted to talk about it. She obviously wanted to get it out. Like, what’s that word? Articulate. She wanted to articulate it. I guess maybe it was easier doing it in front of someone like me that she didn’t know; basically, a stranger. Or maybe
she was like Adrian used to be: quiet, lonely, didn’t have many friends. Maybe that was why those two ended up together in the first place. Whatever. I don’t know. All I know is she wanted it out.’
‘Out?’
‘She wanted to exorcize that shit.’
‘And what shit was that?’
‘The shit he pulled on her up at the lake.’
‘Are you a mom, Detective?’
Jo glanced at Valeria.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Are you a mom?’
She was looking at Jo’s wedding band.
‘I am, yes.’
‘I thought so. I admire what you’re doing.’
‘What I’m doing?’
‘This job. It must be a difficult job when you have a child.’
Jo shrugged. ‘Every job is hard when you’re a mom.’
‘You know, you can always tell.’
‘Tell what?’
‘You can tell a mom, just from the way she looks.’
‘Yeah?’ Jo frowned. ‘How’s that?’
‘We can never quite let go of the worry.’
Valeria smiled, her expression changing, making it difficult for Jo to interpret that comment. Was it just a general remark? Or was it some sort of coded message?
Just then, they both heard a car pulling on to the driveway, the rumble of old, loose bricks under its tyres, the tick of its engine. Valeria shuffled to the edge of her armchair and hauled herself out of it. ‘That’ll be Adrian,’ she said, going to the security door. Jo stood, watching from the living room, as a rust-speckled minivan pulled in.
‘What lake was this?’
‘Big Bear.’
‘Okay. So what happened?’
‘Martina, she said he drove them up there one weekend in the spring. They’re just chilling out next to the water when, suddenly, late in the afternoon, Adrian tells her they should go hike one of the trails so they can watch the sunset from the top. She thinks he’s being romantic, so she agrees, and follows him all the way up this trail to the top. They watch the sun go down, just like he says, and then he tells her he needs to piss, so he leaves her there, in the pitch black at the top of this damn mountain, surrounded by bears and bobcats, coyotes, rattlesnakes – who the hell knows what else? – as he goes off to find a spot. Except he never came back again.’
