Cross Cut

by Rivers, Mal

  “Saved—as in, your life?” I asked, curiously.

  She turned her head back. “No—I mean, sort of. But no one can save me from myself.” A half grin turned to a tremor. “He knew that ever since—”

  I waited. She stopped and tilted her head toward the sidewalk. Dust blew in a sudden breeze and caught her face.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, one hand protecting her face from the wind.

  “The break-up he helped you through?”

  She groaned. “Robyn told you. Yes, but it was a long time ago. And look what happened—”

  I looked at her. She looked even more vacant than she was at Ryder’s office. Her voice was weak and she looked distracted, like her thoughts were entering in and out of her head.

  “I don’t know anymore. I don’t want to know. He can do what he wants.” She turned. “I hope you catch who did it. For my sake.”

  I was about to press for more information, but she took off at a formidable pace.

  “See you, Ader,” she said in a low voice.

  I watched her walk away with those thin and pale legs. Just like a wind up doll walking with uniform precision.

  25

  At 8PM we moved to the office after dinner. It was a quick performance, more so than usual. Ryder hadn’t had the time to prepare anything substantial. I pulled the shades down and turned on the lamps. Sully was sitting in the black leather chair this time. He and Ryder were drinking beer, while I had a half bottle of rye on my desk. It didn’t feel right that Melissa was missing, so the first thing we considered was paying her a visit before the stakeout at the Gillham and Mane factory. When that was decided, we got to sharing information.

  Ryder was reclining at her chair. When the day grows older, she becomes somewhat more casual on the outside. I won’t say she completely lets her hair down, but she is infinitely more amiable than business hours Ryder. Sully being there was an additional encouragement to her. They would discuss baseball of all things. She would even start to chuckle and make jokes, or at least try to.

  She was drinking from a British pint glass, something I had introduced to her. When she finished a gulp, she looked at me and asked for a word for word account of my afternoon. I gave her it without missing a beat. When I’d finished, so was her glass of beer. She nodded and then asked Sully the same thing.

  “It’s more than likely Guy Lynch was in witness protection,” he said.

  “How did you find that out?” I asked.

  “I thought it likely before I’d even started, what with the limited family history. It’s a popular, but somewhat unoriginal and lazy tactic used in the WITSEC program. Give the identity no family, foster parents that otherwise don’t exist, in this case, deceased.”

  “You said more than likely,” Ryder said casually. “You can’t be completely sure, then?”

  “I couldn’t confirm it officially. I mean, I only had a few hours, so I phoned around and got what favors I could. Obviously, the initiation of witness protection is sealed, but you can tell by some patterns. And, in this case, there’s quite a curious side issue—Guy Lynch changed his name some five years ago. From Guy Davenport, to Guy Lynch.”

  “So he went into witness protection five years ago?” I said.

  Sully shook his head. “No, you misunderstand. You can’t find when the witness changed his name at the start of the program. Not without hacking into where the sealed files are kept. No—Guy Lynch was in the program for far longer, yet, he changed his name again, back to what it originally was.”

  I couldn’t grasp why someone would do that, but before I could inquire, I found Ryder nodding, as if she had understood it right away.

  “Could you find out when he started in the program?” Ryder asked.

  Sully nodded. “At least ten years ago, give or take a few. People in the program sometimes receive money as part of it, and there were numerous payments throughout 2002 and 2003, all the same figures, and too large to be a normal paycheck. Normally after whatever action they were protected for in the first place, they have to assimilate into their new identity. But, five years ago, Guy Davenport became Guy Lynch again. I can only fathom two reasons for that—either he reverted from his new identity, and went back to his old one, because the danger was nonexistent. Or maybe he was running from something he’d done as Davenport, except this time he didn’t go through the WITSEC procedure.”

  “If he started the program ten years ago—” I said with doubt clear in my voice. “Then he waited a full five years to change back. Why? Sounds too long for a change of heart.” I looked at Ryder. “We all know what we like as a theory, and that is that Guy Lynch was somehow related to Lee Lynch. That seems more likely now we realize why he initially had no apparent link, because his history had been erased. But, even so, why would Lynch be in protection?”

  Ryder pursed her lips for a second and moved her head forward. A strand of her fringe had moved over her eye and she didn’t correct it. It looked like a raven’s claw digging into her cheek.

  “Think, Ader, why do people usually enter protection?” she said.

  “Because they’re in trouble,” I said.

  “From whom—and why?” she said invitingly.

  “From people they’re testifying against—Lynch was testifying against someone.”

  Sully nodded, almost sympathetically. Ryder bent down under her desk to her drawer and took out the printouts of the army records I had photographed back at Quantico. She turned the papers around and displayed them to Sully and myself.

  “I had suspected as much. Remember, Ader, when you were pointing out the redacted text to me, and you suggested an unknown name kept recurring, because the black line was the same length each time? Well, that blacked out line was constant in the file, especially in the trial hearing. Now, there was obviously no way to find out the name, but there was a good way to surmise.”

  She put forward a page and pointed her finger at the top, to a section of text which stated Lee Lynch’s name, not redacted.

  “Lee Lynch’s name was not redacted. But what if it was?” She began to type at her laptop. Seconds later, the printer beneath her desk was spitting out a piece of paper. She took it, and showed it to us. On the top line, ‘Lee Lynch’ was printed. Directly below it, was a black line, the same length of ‘Lee Lynch’ on the top line.

  “So what—that’s Lee Lynch’s name redacted. I don’t get your point.”

  “The point is, Ader, we’re in the age of computers. One of their positives, if you could call it so, is they don’t possess whim. You can count on them for precision. And precision leaves a trail. These records are relatively modern, and were created on a word processor. As such, the tool used to redact these names was a modified strike-through. Actually, that’s not quite true. All you have to do is select the text and change the highlighting to black. It leaves the exact length every time for the same portion of text.”

  “Since when did you speak computers? Have you spent your time on a crash course?” I snickered. She ignored it and I continued, saying, “How does that help us find a name, though?”

  “Because if we already know the name we’re looking for, and know the exact typesetting; font and size, we can reliably replicate it.”

  Sully smiled and chuckled. “So what you’re saying is; if we print out ‘Guy Lynch’ with the same settings—it will match that constantly recurring name?”

  Before Ryder could even manage a nod, I intervened. “Hold on a minute,” I said objectively. “You’re going off a picture of the file. Even though I took it relatively close—it’s not accurate enough to replicate.”

  Ryder gave a half smile and shook her head. “Quite true, Ader, however, I’m not going by the printout of the picture you took.” She ducked into her drawer again, and then pulled out two pieces of paper. I looked at them and my eyes lifted when I saw they were replicas of one of the pages in the army records; one with black lines, the other with black lines, with the excepti
on of Guy Lynch’s name being filled in. Every single word in its right place with relation to the original document, or so it appeared.

  Ryder went on, “It took me the best part of an hour to construct it. The font is simple enough. Times New Roman is easily recognizable. And leaving the standard settings for font size, which is 11, and spacing was a reasonable assumption. The only problem I encountered was the change of the borders. After a few calculations from the printout, I determined the border change. Before all that, of course, I inserted ‘Guy Lynch’ in place of the recurring redacted name. And everything matched up and was in the same shape as the official document.”

  Sully and I continued to look at Ryder’s sheet of paper. It was very unlike her, and I sure wouldn’t have expected her to conduct such an experiment. But, there’s no limit to creativity, no matter who you are. Ryder had often said something along those lines.

  I got out a ruler from my desk and measured up some of the black lines from one of the sheets, and compared it to the other with Guy Lynch’s name filled in. Sure enough, the same length, even with the black line; 0.69 inches.

  The majority of the black lines on this particular sheet were mostly Guy Lynch’s, as he gave his witness testimony. The only other black lines belonged to a female witness; 0.81 inches in length, the prosecutor; 0.56 inches long, a reference to the second victim; 0.60 inches long, and finally, the final victim; 0.86 inches long.

  I re-read the file, and gave it the context it deserved, with Guy Lynch’s name now in the correct places. If our hunch was correct, then Guy Lynch had pretty much sealed Lee Lynch’s fate at the trial.

  “So Guy Lynch was there, and this is the proof,” Sully said.

  Ryder shook her head. “It may be enough for us, but it’s hardly proof. This little test of mine was relatively academic. There are probably many name variations that would lead to the same strike-through size. It’s worth noting that Lee Lynch is essentially the same size as Guy Lynch in Times New Roman. It was thinking as such that set the spark to this meager discovery.”

  I rubbed the back of my head and put the sheet of paper back on her desk. “Why’d you bother going through all the trouble, then?”

  She shrugged slightly. With her, it was usually a half shrug. She’d lift her shoulders and never bother lowering them. “Sometimes the small discoveries are the most potent. In either case, we now have a basis for a hypothesis. I invite comment from either of you.”

  I chipped in first, because the question had been on my lips for a while. “I suppose the first question is: what relation was he? I suppose brother is a good bet, but, above all that, why didn’t you know about him? I mean, weren’t you there?”

  Ryder shook her head. “After discovering Lee Lynch, I was pulled from the case. I didn’t even attend the trial, I was sent home. For clarity, I wasn’t in the army unit, Ader, I was in the CID, investigating the army units. Perhaps I may have come across him at a glance, without being aware of it. But in my own mind, I had no more knowledge of Guy Lynch’s identity than I do now, after hearing about his death on Monday morning.”

  Sully sat back in the black leather chair and opened out his right hand. “The question I want to know is, if he was family, why’d he testify against him? Also, how could he testify? Was he also army, in the same unit? Did he know what Lee Lynch was doing before his arrest? Seen as you obviously didn’t see him when you arrested his, let’s, for argument’s sake say, brother. Also, why the witness protection? Was he afraid of more than Lee Lynch?”

  Ryder leaned back a little and looked up, and rubbed her chin with her thumb and forefinger, considering it all. “Yes, those are some good points. The witness protection particularly. There was, perhaps, a secondary threat to Guy Lynch.”

  “Or he just wanted out of that life,” I said. “What’s the scope of witness protection, Sully? Would they give a guy like that a fresh start?”

  Sully mumbled to himself as he considered the question. He shook his head, noncommittally. “No—maybe—with the special circumstances. It’s hard to see what could have posed a threat to him, unless, as Kendra says, there’s more to it than that. If he thought he was in danger from someone, protection could have been the trade for his testimony.”

  Ryder poured Sully a fresh glass of beer from the two remaining bottles, and then refilled her own. She took a small sip and did the hand gesture she made when wanting to change the direction of conversation.

  “We can revisit Guy Lynch,” she said. “Clearly, it is possible there was more to his death than just the goings on at Gillham and Mane. What we need to do is bring these two separate events and overlap them. How far did you get with the other victims, Sully? And Zeus Higgings?”

  “Not very,” he said. “I made a call to Leavenworth. He doesn’t work there anymore, but I found out he lives in Wichita now. After that, I found an address and a number, but nobody answers. As for the others, I didn’t have time. What are we looking for, exactly?”

  Ryder smiled and looked at us both in turn. “Well, that is obvious, surely: the secondary threat. We know Guy Lynch was involved with Lee Lynch twelve years ago. Something clearly bothered him throughout. And before he was killed, there were seven murders with a similar design as Lee Lynch’s. Something is hidden within those seven murders, and we need to find it.”

  I regarded her for a while, and, for a moment, lost my head. But, after running her words through my brain again, it seemed she had had a change of view since yesterday.

  I cleared my throat and said, “That sounds to me as if you don’t think Lynch’s murder had anything to do with Cristescu or Gillham and Mane. What about Melissa?”

  She nodded, but held out a palm. “On the contrary, I think it had everything to do with Gillham and Mane. But I also believe such events are a mere side issue to what has been going on for the last three years.”

  “You can’t just call Melissa a side issue,” I said. “Side issue or not, what the hell does this all have to do with what happened twelve years ago?”

  Ryder rose from her chair and made her way over to the aquariums. One of the automatic feeding systems had jarred. She frowned at it, and then turned to us. She avoided the central question without flinching.

  “That’s enough questions for tonight, I feel. It is unfortunate we have had so many interruptions that we keep avoiding the important tasks. Tomorrow, we will get to the bottom of the murders.”

  “What about Melissa, are you coming with us?” Sully asked.

  “No—I, have to wait in. I’m expecting a phone call.”

  I got up from the sofa and gave a childish snort. “Don’t strain your ass too long waiting in for it.”

  She frowned while Sully tried hard not to laugh.

  “Pah!” she said. “It is too late to do anything worthwhile. And I do not wish to spend all night in Westminster stalking a dirty factory.”

  “I think the phrase is stakeout,” I said sarcastically.

  “Pah. Goodnight. You too, Sully.”

  Two pahs in one minute, I was on form. She deserved it, and so did I.

  She turned her head and gave her attention to the rightmost aquarium, and the feeder. Sully and I nodded to each other and attempted to leave the room.

  “Oh, Ader—” she said.

  “Yeah, I know, lock the door.”

  26

  We stopped at the local store for supplies. We had no idea how long the night would turn out to be, and Sully always required a snack or two. He wanted to bring along beer, but I didn’t waste time explaining how idiotic that would be.

  Before we headed over to the address Doreen Sharp had given me, we drove east to Irvine Lake. In retrospect, it would have made more sense to have given Melissa a disposable cell phone, however, you may recall I didn’t have one on hand at the time.

  I drove up to Sully’s cabin and parked the Lexus some fifty yards away. We got out and made our way toward it. Sully was already helping himself to the chips we bought.

&nb
sp; “You know, that Lexus of yours will stick out like a sore thumb. Sure ain’t no stakeout car,” Sully said.

  “Who cares, it’ll be dark. Stop eating those chips and wait out here a sec.”

  I left him behind while I knocked on the door of the cabin. I got no answer, so I knocked again and called her name. Still no answer. I tried the door knob and the door opened. Inside, the place was as empty as it was last night when we brought her here. None of the lights were on, and the fire hadn’t been lit.

  “Sully, get over here,” I called out.

  We looked around, inside and out, and didn’t find a thing.

  “The hell is she?” I said.

  Sully was poking the fire. He returned the poker and moved into a small, closet-like room in the corner. He came back out and shook his head. “The fire hasn’t been used, and, it doesn’t look like any power from the generator has been used either.”

  I didn’t move for a while. The natural reaction in a situation like this would be to cry missing person to everyone you knew. Clearly not an option in our case, seen as Melissa was, for the time being, a fugitive. While I stood about vacantly, Sully had moved outside. He was walking across the dirt track that leads away from the cabin. It was dark and only the headlights from my Lexus allowed us to see the cabin without difficulty. Trees nearby rustled in a slight breeze. I was comfortable when I'd arrived, now I was unsettled.

  “Did you tell anyone else to come here?” Sully said.

  “No, why?”

  “Because, there’s a third set of tire tracks.”

  I walked over to Sully, who pointed them out. Sure enough, a foreign set of tracks, different to the ones I had made presently and the night before.

  Sully’s legs creaked as he bent down to take a better look. “They’re not yours, that’s for sure. Someone else came here in the last twenty four hours.”