by D. F. Bailey
※
As Will clicked off his phone, Eve walked through the door to his condo.
“That was Wally.” Finch said. “They’ve found Fiona. Turns out she escaped.”
“Escaped?”
“Yeah. She had this horrible chase into the Van Ness Metro. And get this” — he pulled both hands through his hair with a look of disbelief — “Justin Whitelaw is dead.”
“Dead? What are you talking about?”
“It’s unbelievable.” He sat down and dropped his hands in his lap. “He was hit by a subway train rolling into the station. Fiona was right there.” He looked at Eve, his face a knot of confusion and relief.
“Is she all right?” She sat beside him, set a hand on his knee.
“I don’t know. She’s in the hospital. Wally wants me to see her.” He pointed to his phone as if Wally might inhabit the inner wiring. “He wants me to get her story.”
“Now?” Eve shook her head. “You guys are ruthless. Almost as bad as some cops I know. What’s she in the hospital for?”
“Psychiatric assessment. Apparently she collapsed. A full-blown melt down.” His shoulders sank as the weight of Fiona’s catastrophe fell through him. “I can’t believe it.”
“I’m sorry, Will.”
A weary exhalation slipped from his mouth. “At least she’s alive.”
A moment of silence drifted between them. Eve opened the shopping bag Leanne had returned to her. “So I’ve got some news,” she said in a brighter voice.
“Uh-huh.” Finch stared into his hands, gazed at the desolation slipping through his life. He could almost see it: the vague outline of emptiness.
“From Leanne.” She waited for him to look at her. “She finished her analysis.”
He raised his head, just now recalling that Eve had arranged an assessment of the materials they’d collected from Justin Whitelaw’s hideaway and Fiona’s cubicle at the eXpress. “What did she tell you?”
“Not much.” She shrugged. “Except for one thing.”
Finch sat up now, his mood shifting to curiosity. “Okay. So tell all.”
“First, as suspected, this is Rohypnol. And this is a mix of semen and vaginal fluid, unidentified.” One by one, Eve lifted the items from the bag and set them on the teak table. “Leanne correctly matched the DNA from Fiona’s hair to the Lypsyl. But the fingerprints on the mug don’t match either of the prints on the brandy glasses.”
Finch considered the implications. “So there’s no evidence that Fiona was ever in Justin’s apartment.”
“Not based on what we have.”
“No surprise, I guess. Turns out she was imprisoned miles away.” He gazed at the ceiling, tried to fit the pieces together. “And none of the DNA or fingerprints identify anyone?”
“Well,” she hesitated. “That’s where the exception comes in.”
“And?”
“The second glass. Guess whose prints are on the second glass.”
“I give up.”
When she didn’t respond, he examined her face, sure that she was enjoying some pleasure in withholding a piece of evidence. “Okay. The flippin’ Queen of Prussia?”
“Damian Witowsky.”
“Witowsky?”
She nodded.
“Which means … what?”
“I was thinking about that on the way over here. Obviously, Justin Whitelaw knew Witowsky — well enough to invite him to his hideaway for a brandy. Naturally, Witowsky had to interview him about Fiona’s disappearance. But why meet Witowsky there? Would Justin bring him into his secret world if Witowsky didn’t know it already existed? In other words, they must have a previous relationship.”
Finch gazed through the window and nodded.
“And think about how Witowsky delayed interviewing you after Fiona’s abduction.”
“Over a week later.”
“But in that same time, he was socializing with her kidnapper.”
Socializing? Not very likely. Finch struggled to make sense of it. “Maybe he was protecting Justin. Maybe even orchestrating some of this mess.”
“It’s possible. Leanne says there’s a rumor that IAD is watching Witowsky.”
“Internal Affairs? That’s serious stuff.”
She nodded.
“Combined with what we have, can’t we report him?”
“It’s a snake pit. Move too fast, and they’ll bite your throat. Remember, Witowsky had legitimate cause. In fact, he was required to interview Justin Whitelaw.”
“Interview, yes. But drink with him?”
She shrugged off the implication of a misdemeanor. “So yes, it’s against protocol. But think a minute. That’s all we could bust him for. No, we have to wait for another shoe to drop.”
Finch felt another wave of inertia wash through him. “All right. In the meantime, I’ve got to see Fiona.”
He stood up, slipped his phone into his pocket and hoisted his courier bag over his shoulder. He struggled to adjust the strap. Get on with it, he told himself. Go deal with the horror that has gripped Fiona’s life. And take your share of responsibility for it.
“I could be several hours,” he said. “If they let me see her. There’s some Thai food in the fridge. Wait for me here?”
She stood beside him. “Of course.”
They kissed.
“You’re a hard one to part with, you know.”
“Go.” She pushed his arm toward the door. “I’m going to sleep for a day. And when I wake up, I’m going to take a nap.”
※
When Finch arrived at the Trauma Center at the San Francisco General Hospital, the ward nurse told him that the medications that the psychiatrist had prescribed for Fiona were finally taking effect. Her blood pressure continued to drop and would soon approach the normal range. Most important, in the last six hours her emotional stability had leveled off and she could answer routine questions coherently.
“What’s a routine question?” Finch asked.
“What would you like for lunch. Would you like to go for a walk.”
Finch nodded, wondered if his sudden appearance could trigger an emotional outburst. “So it’s okay if I see her.”
“She’s been asking for you. You can visit for ten minutes,” Boveri told him. “Just let her know you care. That you’re glad to see her and you’ll be back soon. But don’t ask her about the kidnapping. Understood?”
“Of course.”
“She’ll be in the acute psyche ward for at least a week while we assess her.”
“What happens after that?”
“Depends on how far she comes along.”
Finch considered the possibilities. “And what if she’s not so far along?”
“Depends. Maybe extended care. If she can’t recover, she may have to be committed.” He shrugged. “We’ll cross that bridge later, okay?” Boveri turned his attention back to the computer monitor on the nursing station desk.
As Finch followed Boveri’s directions down the corridor he reminded himself that Toby Squire lay comatose in a secured room in the hospital brain injury ward. Wally had emailed him the news: two days earlier Squire had been transferred here from the Mount Zion Medical Center. A shiver ran though him as he recalled the brutal attack he’d inflicted on Eve — and chasing him in the dark across the lawn of Dean Whitelaw’s Sausalito estate. Madness!
Eventually he found Fiona standing near a bench overlooking a courtyard garden. He imagined that the scene outside — serene, vacant, synthetically bucolic — provided an antidote to the horror that she’d endured. Hoping not to surprise her, he called from a short distance. “Fiona. Hi.”
When she turned, he noticed the suture on her cheek. A tidy job, knitted softly in the center of a fading bruise.
“Glad I found you,” he began.
The skin of her forehead furled. Her nose snuffled as if she was about to sneeze, and then she burst into tears and covered her face with her hands. Finch sat beside her and brought her into his arm
s. He felt the tears dampen his neck.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I can’t tell you how horrible I’ve felt.”
“I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” she said and broke into a new round of weeping. “Jeez, look at me. I’m a complete mess, Will.”
“No, you’re not. You’re wonderful is what you are.” He held her at arm’s length and looked into her eyes. “More important, you’re alive.”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “At least I made it.”
“Thank God for that.” He held her so that he could examine her. The whites of her eyes appeared to be wired with microscopic red filaments, her eyelashes clotted with tears ready to fall. Her lips, quivering, were chapped and split at the corners.
“I’ll bring you a Lypsyl next time I come.”
She managed a brief laugh. “Would you? I’m addicted to the stuff.”
“Tomorrow. I promise.”
Another tear jumped from her lashes directly to her chin. She looked into his eyes, held him there and then glanced away. “I can’t talk about it, Will.”
He nodded.
“I don’t want to. I mean, I don’t think I can.”
“I know.”
“Wally will want you to interview me.”
Finch frowned and glanced away.
“Hell, he’s already asked you, hasn’t he?”
“Do you think he’s that callous?”
She narrowed her eyes with a look of uncertainty. Her breathing steadied and she drew herself aside. “I don’t know if I can go back.”
“Back to what?”
“To work. To the eXpress.”
Finch took two steps and stood in front of the window. A child and his mother sauntered up the concrete stepping stones through the garden below. “Have you seen Alexander?”
“Once. My sister said she’ll bring him around again this evening.”
“Good.” He turned around to face her. “Fiona, the head nurse told me not to ask you about what happened. And I’m not going to.” He held up a hand, a crossing-guard stopping a line of traffic. “That’s all in the past and if you never say a word to me about it, that’s fine. In fact, don’t ever talk to me about it, unless you really do want to confide in someone. And if you do, you’ll have me — all my attention. And in complete confidence.” He paused, thought a moment, and continued.
“But there’s something more important than all that, Fiona. It’s about tomorrow and the next few days. The nurse also told me they’re going to assess you over the next week. It’s like a test. One you really have to pass.”
“What test?” Her eyes focused on him without blinking.
“They want to see if you can come back. Go back to Alexander. To be a mom, earn a living. Provide.”
Her chest deflated and she gazed at the floor tiles. Down the corridor the drone of a floor polisher hummed in the air as a maintenance worker swept the machine from side to side in long, heavy arcs.
“That means going back to work,” he continued. “To the one thing you do so well.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, Will.”
“Well … that’s the test. That’s the one you have to pass.”
She considered this a moment. “Okay.”
“Good.”
“And you’ll visit again?”
“Absolutely. With a six-pack of Lypsyl.”
“Okay.” She smiled. “Can you bring me the Honeyberry flavor?”
He laughed, pleased that he could leave her enjoying a moment of reassurance. Somehow it relieved his feeling of guilt.
※
From the hospital, Finch drove downtown to the eXpress office. He settled into his cubicle and in twenty minutes wrote a brief summary of Fiona’s abduction and escape. Next he pieced together an account of Justin Whitelaw’s death in the Van Ness Metro Station. Since Fiona refused to discuss her experience, both stories contained nothing but the facts. The story was still fresh, and no one would expect much more at this point. Finch advised the eXpress webmaster to position the stories side-by-side and link them with a block headline above both articles: “Senator’s Son, eXpress Reporter in Subway Tragedy.” An intern would add photos of Fiona and Whitelaw to complete the page composition.
Ten minutes after he’d finished the reports, his desk phone rang.
“I just read the stories.” Wally’s voice contained a breath of compassion. “Fiona wouldn’t give you any more?”
“She’s still struggling, Wally.”
A pause. “That bad, huh?”
“Yes and no. She had the grit to stab Justin and break out of there. But they’re doing a psyche assessment and if she doesn’t get her life back on track she could be in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Nobody’s saying. But she’s not sure she can come back to work. So then it’s like falling dominoes: no job, no money. No money, no rent. It could end up with her losing custody of her son Alexander to her OCD ex-husband. Crazy stuff like that.”
“You can tell her for me there’s no chance of her losing her job.” Wally’s voice rose with determined certainty. “I’ll tell her myself in the next day or two.”
“Maybe we should all visit her. Everyone in the office. One at a time.”
Another pause. “Good idea. I’ll ask Dixie to put together a staff roster of some kind. Get one or two people in there every day. Listen,” his tone dropped a note, “what’s the hard evidence linking Justin Whitelaw to Fiona’s kidnapping at this point?”
“You mean apart from Fiona’s sworn accusations?” He shook his head, still incredulous that her case had ground to a halt. “Okay, so I checked the SFPD half an hour ago and they aren’t saying anything yet. Apparently they haven’t been able to locate the cell where Justin held her. And Fiona was so dosed up on Rohypnol she can’t point the way either. Therefore no physical evidence. Shirley Yates in SFPD media relations said they’ll have a press conference tomorrow.”
“You’ll be there for that?”
“Yes.” Finch nodded as he gazed at his computer screen. “You know there’s something else about this story that’s bothering me.”
“What’s that?”
“Damian Witowsky.”
“The cop investigating the kidnapping?”
“Yeah. The same cop assigned to handle Dean Whitelaw’s murder.”
“A coincidence?”
“Maybe.” Finch shifted the phone from his right ear to his left. “But when I was trying to track down Fiona, I came across some evidence that Witowsky and Justin Whitelaw were drinking together.”
“What? Where?”
“Fingerprints on a brandy snifter with a ninety-nine percent match to Witowsky. In a shag-pad Whitelaw kept on Claude Lane in the French Quarter.”
“And you know this, how?” Wally’s voice contained a blend of doubt and admiration.
Finch shrugged. “The usual.”
Wally let out a brief chortle and continued. “So … Witowsky is friends with Fiona’s kidnapper. The same jerk he was supposedly tracking for over a week.”
“And get this. Seems he might be the subject of an IAD investigation.”
“Really?”
Finch winced, hardly able to believe it himself.
“Okay. Keep him on your radar.”
“All right.”
“Is there anything you think I should take to Fiona?”
“There is.” Finch smiled as he continued. “Take her a stick of Lypsyl. In fact, tell everyone in the office they have to give her a tube of Lypsyl. Everyone, no exceptions.” He had a vision of boxes of Lypsyl lining her cubicle. “She fought like hell to get out of that freak-house. A lifetime supply of Lypsyl will give her a laugh.”
※
Finch returned to his condo a little after eight that evening. When he opened the door he found Eve and Sochi engaged in a solemn discussion over the kitchen table.
“I don’t know,” Sochi said as he fingered the beads in his beard. The l
ook on his face suggested that he was pondering a dilemma.
“It’s time to move forward, Sochi,” Eve said and waved Finch over to the table. “Not to hesitate. The three of us can handle this on our own.”
“Who’s ‘us’?” Finch asked. He leaned over and kissed Eve’s forehead and sat beside her.
“You, me, and Sochi. He got a response from the mysterious link on the data drive. From the dark web.” She arched a brow in mock disdain.
“They’re Russians. Likely mafia. And if they are, they don’t play nice.” Sochi tried to sip some tea from his mug, realized it was empty and poured a fresh cup from the teapot.
“Fill me in.” Finch stretched his legs under the table and attempted to make himself comfortable in the teak chair, a near impossibility. “And give me a shot of that brew, whatever it is you’re drinking.”
“It’s called Paris Afternoon,” Sochi said. “My new favorite.”
Eve took a mug from the cupboard and Sochi poured the tea.
“All right. So while Rasputin is busy cracking the code on the password manager on the data drive,” Sochi continued, “I decided to find out what’s on the other side of the link. It took me to a website asking for my public encryption key, which I sent.”
“Your what?” Finch heeled off his shoes and pushed them under the table.
“Public encryption key.” Eve pointed to a drawing on the table that Sochi had sketched out, a venn diagram illustrating the connections between private and public keys that enable secure communication over the internet. “Basically it allows Sochi to send and receive files in complete secrecy.”
“Okay, enough you two. I’ve just had the longest day — in a very long week. Somebody just give me the Coles Notes version.” Finch realized that he was beginning to sound like Wally; after all these years perhaps the old man’s cocky superiority had become infectious.
Sochi offered a sympathetic nod and went on. “All right. Even though he tried to mask it, I discovered that the other guy is in Moscow. No idea who he is, so I named him Chekov.”
“The short story writer.” Finch sipped his tea.
“No, the navigator of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. So Chekov plans to meet us next week in Honolulu. What he wants is the GIGcoin software. And the reason he wants it? He holds one of two keys required to launch the program.”
