by Mark Wheaton
“We checked the stove,” Officer Lamott said. “Gas line’s intact.”
“That’s good,” Gennady said absently.
They moved to the bedrooms upstairs. In the baby’s room every stuffed animal and blanket had been shredded. In Nina’s room it was the same. Her bedclothes were scattered and ripped, her own beloved stuffed animals torn to pieces, and her collection of ceramic horses and cupcakes she’d painted with her mother were in pieces on the floor as well. The master bedroom was tame by comparison—torn sheets and stabbed pillows, the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall dashed to the ground, but that was it.
Fearful of what he might find, Gennady was nervous entering his office, only to see it had been left relatively unscathed. A large glass cabinet in which Gennady kept various family keepsakes and even the framed pictures on the wall were intact, unlike almost every other bit of glass in the house.
“Our theory, based on the security footage we’ve watched on your neighbor’s tablet, is that they hit this room last and were interrupted by our sirens.” Officer Lamott paused here, puffing his chest and putting his hands on his hips in a gesture of pride. “Judging by the footage taken by your neighbor’s cameras, they were inside for about three minutes total. There were four of them, but their faces were covered.”
Technology, Gennady thought, and nodded.
He looked around his office. He checked the closet and found the six laptops he kept there—mostly broken ones that he thought might one day be salvaged—missing. Also gone from his desk and its drawers were his numerous backup drives. His current laptop, which he slid under the desk when he wasn’t using it to keep it from Nina, was also gone.
“I know it’s a mess right now, but can you tell us offhand if anything’s missing?” Officer Lamott asked.
Gennady knew he had to be careful with his answers.
“We had a MacBook we mostly used for photos.” Gennady had noted that among the missing. “Other than that we had our phones and our iPad on the boat.”
“Lucky break,” the officer said. “We have our print guy on the way to take fingerprints, so stick around so we can print you and your family to make exclusions. Anyone else have routine access to your home?”
“Our cleaning lady, but she’s only here on Tuesdays.”
Officer Lamott nodded.
“Mr. Archipenko, do you know of anyone who would want to harm your family?” Officer Lamott asked.
“Not at all. We don’t even know that many people.”
The officer told Gennady to take another look around, then headed out. Gennady waited a beat, then returned to the master bedroom. Two of the shredded pillows still on the bed were from Nina’s room. He didn’t think their placement was by accident. He pulled them aside and found the knives from his knife block arranged underneath them in a fanlike pattern.
It was a good cover, coming in like vandals, then stealing all his computer equipment while threatening the lives of his family. Just the kind of thing the police wouldn’t catch if they’d already been handed a motive.
Three minutes.
It suggested they weren’t only professionals, they also likely knew the layout of his house ahead of time.
He jogged downstairs and went to Mrs. Pamatmat’s house to confer with Yelena. They decided he’d wait with the kids as she packed a couple of bags to take to Mara’s house. They spoke little but communicated plenty through eye contact. He didn’t want to scare her, but she needed to know how serious it was. Gennady also had a quick chat with Nina, telling her she had to listen to her mother. She didn’t say much, confirming she also understood the gravity of what was going on, if not the specifics.
“Will we be coming home?” she asked.
“When the four of us are together, that’s our home wherever we are,” Gennady said. “You understand?”
Nina nodded, but Gennady could see tears beginning to form. He gave her a hug as Yelena returned. She’d seen the damage, though Gennady had removed the knives.
“Do you know who?” she asked him as they loaded the SUV.
“No,” Gennady said. “Not sure it matters.”
She nodded, kissed him, then got behind the wheel and drove away. Gennady was happy for once to see his family disappearing into the distance. They wouldn’t be safe at the house, he’d decided. Those who took his drives and computers would come to discover they each had a kill program installed that would render them useless. They’d come back.
But they’d made a mistake. They thought he could be scared away by property damage. They had obviously never messed with a Russian.
Though he was meant to celebrate an evening Mass after returning to St. Augustine’s from Bishop Osorio’s, Luis found himself at Children’s Hospital for the third time that week. Without his having meant it to, a small miracle was being attributed to him that he had to deal with. A baby had been born to the Gualberto family that few thought would make it to term. When Mrs. Gualberto—Amy—went into labor two months early, the doctors told her and her husband that the baby, who suffered from a transposition of arteries within the heart, wasn’t likely to live more than a few hours.
In what he thought was among the cruelest things he’d ever witnessed, Luis overheard a doctor telling a nurse, “At least they still have the other two,” meaning the Gualbertos’ older children.
Luis went in to baptize the child, named Cynthia, before she died. He’d become accustomed to this part of his vocation much faster than he’d believed himself capable when he’d first discovered how often he’d be called to do it. But life was most fragile at its beginning and end points, he had learned, and thereby the closest to God.
He’d blessed baby Cynthia as well and comforted the family. The mother and father, however, were less upset than he thought they’d be. They firmly believed the child would live, and no doctor could dissuade them from this. Mrs. Gualberto’s brother, on the other hand, had taken Luis aside in the hallway and asked about funeral arrangements.
Two days later Cynthia was still alive. Luis came back in and blessed her again, as the hospital had decided to operate on her tiny heart. Though very dangerous, they were utilizing a new technological process by which a 3-D model of Cynthia’s tiny heart was created from an MRI scan that the surgeon could practice on beforehand. As this removed the exploratory period, it cut the surgery time in half, and lo and behold Cynthia survived, her birth defect repaired.
Luis was immediately hailed by the Gualbertos as a cura milagroso. Priest of miracles.
Of course, he believed the real hombre de los milagros was whoever came up with the 3-D printer technology but dutifully returned to Children’s Hospital to check on the family that Sunday night.
“We will encourage her to a life of service to the church,” Mrs. Gualberto said.
“If that is her vocation, the church will be very blessed to have her,” Luis replied.
Mrs. Gualberto smiled, and Luis went to the bed where Cynthia lay in a nest of wires and tubes. He stared into her face and waited for this miracle to spark something within him, reopen the connection with the divine. Wasn’t this evidence of his good work? Weren’t all things?
But as it had been all week, he saw flesh and machines and a soul peering out from behind two dark eyes.
Where is God? he wanted to ask her. If he is guiding you through this, please lead him back to my heart.
He turned to the Gualberto family. Cynthia’s survival had cemented their faith. There was a nurse who’d be on shift a few times when he’d visited who seemed similarly uplifted.
So why couldn’t he be? It made him envious to be forced to look in from outside. Another sin.
Luis did his best to push the feeling aside and prayed with the family for a while longer, then blessed the child a third time. When he stepped out, he was told that someone had been brought in to the emergency room, a derelict who’d been struck by a Metro Rail train and who was likely to die. Luis went to the person, a woman of indeterminate age, and
pronounced the last rites. She was still murmuring the names of what he took to be long-absent relations when he exited.
Once out in the parking lot, Luis made it all the way to his car before practically collapsing to his knees in prayer. Anger and resentment came instead of wisdom. He clenched his hands together until his knuckles were white and sweat beaded from his forehead.
“Hey, Padre, sorry to interrupt you, but do you know if you can exorcise a chicken? Mine’s got all these crazy demons, and I need the eggs, not the drama. Can it be done?”
Luis shut his eyes again, muttered an amen, then got to his feet. Oscar was leaning against Luis’s parish car, taking a drag on a cigarette. He wondered if his old friend had sensed the depths of his suffering. If he had, the expression on his face revealed nothing. Oscar proffered the cigarette to Luis, who shook his head. He produced a half-empty bottle of beer from behind his back and offered this as well. Luis shook his head again but cracked a smile.
Oscar shrugged and shot the rest in one swig before throwing the bottle as far as he could down an alley across the street. When it shattered into hundreds of pieces, Oscar turned a satisfied smile toward Luis.
“Hey, Padre.”
“Did you follow me here or something?” Luis asked.
“Called St. Augustine’s. Guy who answered said you’d be here. You don’t answer your cell anymore?”
“Barely,” Luis replied. “Sorry.”
“I wouldn’t either if I had a choice,” Oscar admitted. “Going to buy you a meal now, as you need to listen to what I have to say.”
“I’m sorry, Oscar,” Luis said. “I’m not in the mood for conversation.”
“Not what I said,” Oscar retorted sternly.
Luis realized his old friend wasn’t going to let him off the hook.
Oscar pointed down the street. “You eaten yet?”
After a short walk down Sunset, they ended up at a chicken and waffle joint. Though there was a waiting list, Oscar nodded to the hostess, who ushered them right in. They sat, and Oscar ordered for the both of them. Once the waitress had gone, Oscar slid a cell phone to Luis.
“Play the first voice mail.”
Luis did so. It was Michael Story.
“Saturday night, Sat-ur-day night,” Michael said, slurring his words. “Here. Echo Park. Silver Lake exit. Right off the bridge. Cameras got nothing, or they’re just telling me that. I don’t know. But you’re the boss, right? The big boss? If it happens in your neighborhood, you have to sanction it if it’s murder, right? If it’s murder. It’s murder.”
Michael continued to ramble. Oscar took the phone back. “It’s two more minutes of that.”
“What’s he talking about?” Luis asked.
“His girlfriend was in a car accident. Went off the 101 freeway. Thing is they’d had a couple of drinks. They’re not telling the papers, but when I checked into it, she was just over the legal limit. Sounds like she’d been burning the candle at both ends. That plus alcohol equals a smashup.”
“Yet there’s a deputy district attorney on your voice mail accusing you of being an accomplice to murder.”
“Right?” Oscar said, clapping his hands. “I knew you’d get it. I know he’s your friend and all, but if he’d said that to my face, I’d be stomping his ribs in.”
“He’s not my friend,” Luis shot back. He was sorry that he’d lost someone close to him, but found the chief deputy DA opportunistic at best, corrupt as all hell at worst. “Not at all.”
“Okay, fine. But you want him to live and me to stay out of jail, right?” Oscar asked. “Don’t answer that. I need you to have a word with him.”
“With Story? And say what?”
“Come on. How many favors do I ask you versus how many do you ask me?”
Luis seethed but knew Oscar was right. Besides, it wasn’t Michael’s fault that his girlfriend had died. He should be more charitable in that respect. “Fair enough. Is there any chance in the world he’s right?”
Oscar shook his head. “He was right about one thing. If it was a hit, I’d know about it. I don’t but am a paranoid person. So I talked to people who worked the crime scene and then the guys who towed the car away. There’s nothing. It’s completely clean. No marks on it whatsoever. Tire tracks on the highway are consistent with somebody drifting, then losing control when they tried to right themselves. I know Michael thinks it’s something else, but it’s a car accident. It sucks, but there it is.”
“I’ll give him a call,” Luis said, rising. “Thanks for the food.”
“No, no,” Oscar said, taking Luis’s wrist. “One other thing.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Come on, Father. Don’t make me be a jerk to a priest in front of all these people.”
Luis sat back down and shrugged. “What?”
“Your dad.”
Luis was surprised. He knew he hadn’t put his father in the rearview forever when he’d driven away from Bishop Osorio’s place. He just hadn’t expected it to come back around so quickly. And particularly from Oscar.
“Since when are you the bishop’s errand boy?” Luis asked.
“Since he cast around for the one person he thought you might listen to,” Oscar said. “He knows you’re going through a bunch of stuff right now.”
“How does he know that?” Luis interjected.
“Word gets around,” Oscar said pointedly. “And you’re hardly that difficult to read. Even I know you’re not yourself. But as to your father, Bishop Osorio is way too old to be dealing with this. Sebastian coming around, making a fuss, asking questions.”
“About what?”
“About your dead brother. He’s obsessed with that night. He’s like Michael. He’s convinced that an accident is really a murder.”
The version of his father Bishop Osorio had described had sounded downright normal. Oscar’s version of him as something between an annoyance and a lunatic was much more in keeping with the man he remembered.
“It’s guilt,” Luis said. “He wasn’t even in our lives by then. What would you even have me do?”
“I want you to take over. Relieve some of the bishop’s burden here. It takes a lot out of him. I can’t tell you how to be more present, but you need to be the priest your father comes to instead of Osorio.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to find him,” Luis said lamely.
“Allow me to hook you up. He’s off MacArthur Park in a one-bedroom shack. You want the address?”
When Luis left a few minutes later, Oscar remained in his chair. He ordered a beer and then another one. Everything he’d told the priest about Naomi’s accident was true. Almost.
The call from Michael Story had bothered him, and that much he had told Luis. Something had happened on his turf without his knowledge. Oscar was not accustomed to people knowing more about his business than he did and he’d wanted answers. It was true that he’d been out to the scene, both on the side of the highway and then where her car landed. He’d also seen the vehicle itself in the impound yard. Or at least what was left of it.
But two things he hadn’t told the priest lingered in his mind.
First, though there were no marks on the car that suggested it had been hit, the engine told a different story. It appeared as if something had been installed, an after-market modification, that was then removed after the fact. It wasn’t something someone would notice unless they knew what to look for. But Oscar wasn’t your average someone. He could see the tooling done to put various pieces of equipment in place, and the way the metal housing had been bent confirmed they had definitely been removed following the accident.
The only time he’d seen anything that connected to an engine that way—to the car’s guidance system, axles, and brakes—had been when he’d first looked over the schematics of one of those retrofitted self-driving cars. The kind the tech gurus and taxicab companies were hoping would be the norm on LA streets within the next decade.
The second thing wa
s in a single frame of security video taken by a camera mounted on a gas station canopy a few exits up the highway. The vehicle in the shot was a nondescript SUV that Oscar later learned had been stolen the day before down in San Diego. What caught his eye, however, was the face of the man behind the wheel. Though he hadn’t seen this person in several years, he recognized him all the same. He looked older now but still had the dull-eyed stare of the monster Oscar knew him to be. He was accompanied in the vehicle by four other men, but Oscar couldn’t make their faces out.
It didn’t matter.
It had confirmed beyond all doubt: Naomi Okpewho’s death wasn’t an accident. And the devil himself was back in Los Angeles.
Oscar had set the hard drive containing the security footage ablaze. As the flames burned green, twisting the metal and scorching the board, he prayed that if the man in the image ever found out he’d been seen, he would accept Oscar’s fiery tribute as reason enough to let him stay alive.
Oscar feared it wouldn’t be enough. Not even close.
V
For Michael, Sunday was a blur. He hadn’t known if Monday would be any better, but it turned out to be worse. He’d had one job. Pick up Naomi’s parents from the airport and drive them to the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office to formally identify their daughter. He’d been sober enough when he picked them up but had no idea what to say. He became so flustered on the drive that he talked about anything that popped into his head to avoid the reality of what they were doing.
He’d seen dead bodies before. Most horribly, he’d had to identify the murdered body of a former whistleblower who’d become his lover the previous year. The image had never left him. He didn’t want Naomi’s corpse to haunt his memories of her from there on out and refused to see her, leaving the grisly task of identifying her to her parents.
