Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  The boy blew a long strand of sand-colored hair away from his mouth, exposing the beauty mark once again. Raszer recalled that Scotty’s mother, the former ballet dancer, had an identical mark.

  “This isn’t part of the plan,” the boy said. “I should wait for the helicopter. I should complete my mission.”

  “That was your last move, Maimonides. This is a new one. Did you forget how to riff?”

  Raszer knew that every second was putting Borges farther out on the limb. Neither did Layla Faj-Ta’wil look like she had a great reservoir of patience.

  “I’m going to step out first,” said Raszer. “I’m going to put my hands at my sides so they can see I’m not afraid. I’ll circle back over to the center of the roof, just beyond that skylight. You stay under the canopy, release the girl, and then kick me the gun.”

  Raszer did not wait for assent, but backed out into the hard blue light, lifting the bullhorn once more to his mouth. “We’re okay here, Lieutenant,” he said, and his voice echoed down from the chopper above, causing a shriek of feedback. “Turn off the top speaker,” he called. “He’s giving me the girl.”

  But Scotty did not give Raszer the girl. Instead, once Raszer had reached the far side of the skylight, Scotty nudged her out from under the awning, still holding her neck in a vice grip and keeping the gun under her chin.

  Shit, Raszer thought. What is this?

  “I want diplomatic immunity,” said Scotty, walking Layla forward. “I want the--the Syrian ambassador. I want you—” Thoughtlessly, like the gamer he still was, Scotty punctuated the word you by taking the gun from beneath Layla’s jaw and pointing it at Raszer. At the same time, the chopper dipped and another blast of feedback screamed from its speaker. Scotty flinched, and Layla needed only that lapse to snap the gun from his hand, step back into his center of gravity and, with just one hand on his forearm, execute a flip that sent him flying three feet into the air.

  It happened faster than the response time of an LAPD sharpshooter, but that wasn’t the oddest thing. Just before Scotty crashed through the skylight, he spread his arms, opening the folds of his nylon caftan to catch the updraft, and appeared to hover in midair for a second or two. Then it was all shattering glass and brutal impact, and Scotty was down.

  Three bullets zinged across the rooftop. Raszer leapt across the shattered skylight and took Layla down. Idiots, he thought. He heard the lieutenant’s voice from below: “Hold your fire, goddamnit! Raszer? Are you all right up there?”

  Raszer depressed the bullhorn’s talk button. “We’re good. Nobody shot . . . yet. I’ve got the girl. Suspect went through the skylight. He’s in the building. Unarmed.”

  When the message had been delivered and the air was still, Raszer looked at Layla, who lay beneath him, smoldering on the tar and gravel roof, the saffron robe hiked up around her naked hips. “Why did you do that?” he asked her.

  “Do what?” she said.

  “Flip him,” Raszer replied. “Why’d you flip him?”

  “He was getting nervous,” she answered tartly. “Nervous men with guns annoy me.” Her belly rose and fell with her breath like a bird’s, and as she exhaled, he became aware again of the wintergreen scent that he’d caught a trace of the night before.

  “I’ll try to remember that,” he said, and smoothed the robe down to cover her midsection. He sat back and held his hand out. “May I have the gun, please?”

  She scooted herself a few inches away. “It’s my gun,” she protested.

  Her finger was on the trigger. A shadow of consternation passed over her face. For a moment, Raszer was not sure she wasn’t going to shoot him. Then he realized that her eyes were on a spot three feet to his right. Henry’s black rock had been dislodged from his pocket in the melee and lay on the roof, its dimple reflecting the L.A. sky.

  “Where did you get that?” she asked.

  “It’s on loan from a friend,” he answered. He rose to his knees and peered into the jagged hole left in the skylight, down through the column of sunlight and whirling dust. There were shards of glass on the carpet, but no Scotty. He turned back to Layla.

  “I think I’d better—” His cell phone bleeped and he fished it out of his pocket.

  “We’ve got him,” said Borges. “He tried to fly out the second-floor window.”

  “He tried to what?” Raszer called back. “Is he hurt?” He quickly retrieved the rock and dropped it back in his pocket.

  “No, amazingly. My men are talking him downtown. I think you’d better—”

  “Can you meet me in room 411?” said Raszer. “I need for you and me to see the victim before anything changes. I’m bringing the girl down.” He hesitated. “Borges?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sorry to put you on the spot.”

  “All’s well that ends well,” said Borges. “I’ll see you in 411.”

  Harry Wolfe’s eyes were open. Strangely enough, his mouth was closed and his features were not contorted, almost as if the killer had taken the time to compose his victim’s flesh in death. The bedspread was saturated with blood, staining its mustard-hued cotton a muddy brown. Light from the hall glinted off the silver-handled daggers like the flames of sacramental tapers. A police photographer took a round of digital pictures before Borges motioned him off to the side. In an alcove, a pair from the CSI unit pulled on plastic gloves and awaited Borges’s clearance, while behind him, the aging Asian medical examiner slipped in almost unnoticed. Borges wrapped his fingers around the bedstead, sniffed the air, and turned to Raszer.

  “What do you smell in here?” he asked.

  “Blood, urine, and incense,” Raszer replied.

  “Nothing else?”

  Raszer cocked his head. “I smell a death and a woman, but we knew that.”

  “I smell sex,” said Borges. “Recent sex. C’mon, amigo, you’ve got a nose for it.” He inhaled deeply, his wide nostrils flaring. “It’s all over everything. Do you suppose they were screwing before she went in to take her shower?”

  “It didn’t occur to me to ask,” said Raszer.

  He was glad Layla wasn’t present to hear him finesse the matter of their congress. She was down on the street, being examined by the paramedics and attended to by two female officers, who’d brought her something to wear from her closet. At Layla’s bidding, it was a yellow dress with matching shoes and scarf. Evidently, she wanted to look good for her trip downtown.

  “Frankly, Raszer, the girl doesn’t seem all that broken up,” said Borges, his eyes on Harry’s corpse.

  “She’s hard to read,” said Raszer. “But I know what you mean.”

  “How long were you here last night?”

  “Long enough to get their story,” Raszer replied.

  “And that they were scared of these . . . ‘operatives.’ These men she’d been running with who are tied up in your murder-kidnapping.” Borges grunted and lowered his head. “So, let me get this: She’s living here unmolested for a year, you pay her a visit, and the next day, her boyfriend’s dead and she’s a hostage.”

  “I can’t deny the chain of causation,” Raszer said. “I violated their sanctuary, opened the wound. I just can’t figure how—”

  “How the bad guys got wise so fast?”

  “Right.”

  “A dozen ways. Maybe they had the room bugged. Maybe the girl is dirty. If what you say is true, I can see why they might want to get their merchandise back. But why him?” Borges nodded toward Harry. “Why kill the DJ?”

  “I don’t know. It fits a certain kind of ancient gangster MO. A pure terror killing. A warning for all concerned to keep their heads down.”

  “You think maybe he was playing both sides?”

  “Not at the moment, I don’t,” said Raszer. “He seemed square to me. But like you said, I’d only just met them. Maybe they were both working an angle.”

  “We’re going to have to grill her.”

  “Right.”

  Borges extended his arm and tra
ced the cruciform pattern constellated by the knives. “You know fanatics, Raszer. Give me your take. Hired killers don’t usually leave their weapons behind . . . especially not that kind of cutlery. Those look like they belong in a museum. Who still kills this way, outside of Palermo?”

  “Only devotees of the art. Based on a little knowledge and a lot of conjecture, I’ll say the hardware is Syrian. My knife instructor used to drill me on this stuff. These are reproductions of a tenthor eleventh-century design, but good ones. They’d have left them only if they were scared off—unlikely—or if leaving them has a ritual purpose.”

  “You say they,” Borges observed. “You don’t think your boy was up to the task?”

  “I can’t see it. Can’t put it together. Not by himself. For one thing, the physical strength needed to drive steel through muscle and into the mattress. For another—”

  “No struggle,” said Borges. “The bed isn’t even rumpled.”

  “Right. It’s almost as if one chloroformed him while a couple others did the wet work. The boy’s duty may have been standing guard. He may be a patsy. He’s obviously had his head scrambled, but this kind of work takes a special breed of apostle.”

  “Not being sentimental about your little lost sheep, are you?”

  “Always a possibility.”

  “So, who dresses in white caftans with red sashes? Some new Islamist group?”

  “Nothing new about it. Have you ever heard of the cult of the Assassins?”

  “I might have,” said Borges. “Refresh my memory.”

  “A radical Shiite sect—the Ismailis—spawned a splinter group called the Nizaris, formed in the eleventh century by a talented upstart named Hassan-i-Sabbah, who preached a kind of mystical terrorism and held a mountaintop fort in Persia. His group became known as the Hashshashin. They also had a Syrian branch, with a headman known as the Old Man of the Mountain. This was all during the last crusade the West made against Islam. Now we’re over there—”

  “Everything old is new again,” said Borges dryly. “Hashshashin. Anything to do with hashish?”

  “So they say,” Raszer replied. “Used as an inducement, and allegedly as part of a mind-control program. It’s where we get the word assassin. Their MO was planting sleeper agents—fidais—among their enemies and killing up close on prearranged cue . . . with daggers. In the ’50s, the CIA even based its own assassination manual on their technique. The fidais were almost always killed, but it didn’t matter . . . they’d been promised paradise and a harem of black-eyed virgins. They were the first suicide bombers.”

  “Jesus,” Borges whispered. “It sounds just like—”

  “I know,” said Raszer. “The feds will go nuts with this. They’ll have the threat level up to purple. I’ll tell you what I think. It’s not unusual for gangsters or cultists with nonpolitical agendas to borrow the name, legacy, or methods of some powerful military order for their own purposes. In this case, what I have so far points to a criminal syndicate more interested in international drug and sex traffic than in jihad.”

  “As I recall, the FBI was pretty sure that your boy Scotty had gone the way of that other kid—I forget his name now—the ‘American Taliban.’”

  “That kid,” said Raszer. “Lindh is his name. As mixed up as he was, he actually spent time in an Al Qaeda training camp. Scotty was playing a fucking game.”

  “What’s the difference if it ends up this way? Anyway, I’ll have to brief our counterterrorism unit, and that will probably flag both the FBI and the NCTC.”

  “That’s all right,” said Raszer. “There’s a field agent I’ve been wanting to meet.”

  “Well, you’re in it now, so you’ll stay in until they chase you out. We’ll interrogate the boy together. You seem to speak his language: Hazid sent me. Ha! Liked the turban, too.”

  Raszer winced. “How’d you hear that bit?”

  “That audio system works both ways.” Borges grinned and draped an arm around Raszer’s shoulder. “I had you on mic the whole time. Seems to me you speak the girl’s language, too. She didn’t look all that bothered to have you between her legs.”

  “You had to be there, Luis,” said Raszer.

  “I’ll bet,” said Borges, and turned to wave in the medical examiner and the CSI team. “All right, folks. Let’s go to work. I want every hair—pubic or otherwise—in the room. And toxins—check for evidence of a knockout drug. This bed is way too neat.”

  “One thought,” said Raszer, who was calculating the odds that a strand of his own hair—pubic or otherwise—might be found on the sheets.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “The historical Assassins used poison-tipped daggers. Guaranteed to kill even if they missed their mark.” Raszer aimed his finger at the knife rooted in Harry Wolfe’s heart. “If that one was the first blow, and it delivered the medicine, he wouldn’t have moved a muscle afterwards.”

  “A paralytic?” Borges asked.

  “Something like that,” said Raszer, who’d had some experience with them.

  “We’ll have the lab check it. You still carry those little needles around?”

  “Only when I expect to use them.”

  “Still no gun? Not even after what you’ve been through?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  During the exchange of words, Raszer’s eyes had locked on Harry Wolfe’s serenely closed mouth. It bothered him. There was artifice there.

  “Doctor Cho,” he said to the ME, who’d just removed Harry’s boots.

  “Would you mind taking a look inside the decedent’s mouth?”

  The examiner looked to Borges for approval and received a nod.

  Cho shuffled to the head of the bed and inserted a forefinger from each of his gloved hands between Harry’s lips, finding the teeth, gently releasing the jaw. The dead man’s mouth fell open. Raszer moved in closer. At first glance, it looked like the petals of a crimson rose. The examiner removed a small, wadded rag, saturated with blood, and stepped back. “Oh, my, my, my,” he said, shaking his gray head.

  Poor Harry Wolfe had lost his tongue.

  Lieutenant Borges shook his head. “Jesus. It’s just like Nogales. They’d sneak up on you while you sleep and pinch your nose, and when you’d open your mouth to breathe, they’d grab hold of your tongue and—ssssst—one slice.”

  “It seems to be a trademark,” said Raszer. “Let’s talk in the car.”

  At the threshold, Raszer turned and said, “Motherfuckers. Why’d they have to make him suffer?” He shook his head. “I hope to God he was dead already.”

  Harry Wolfe, aka MC Hakim, knight-protector of Layla Faj-Ta’wil, lay still on his bier, his soul on its way to Avalon—or someplace far from the the Lake District, at any rate. Finding Katy Endicott alive had just become a decidedly longer shot.

  “I need to make a call,” said Raszer, as they emerged into the lacerating sunlight. “Two calls, actually.”

  The first was to Detective Aquino, towhom he owed an update.

  The second was to his daughter. Whenever evil showed its face, Raszer felt the need to check on Brigit, and the feeling was never without its measure of remorse.

  TWELVE

  The interrogation room was one of five in the sub-basement: small, stark, and one of the last public places in L.A. where smoking was still permitted. Scotty was seated at the far end of the shiny white table, his wrists cuffed and his ankles in irons, back against the wall. At the moment, he seemed far more interested in who might be on the other side of the two-way mirror than in the men gathered to hear his tale.

  Raszer sat on Scotty’s left, the wrinkled linen shirt restored to his back. Borges was on the right, his tie still squared, his suit jacket on. Hovering over the table, his breath on Raszer’s shoulder, was Bernard Djapper of the FBI, deputy to the special agent in charge of the L.A. field office, the man whom Aquino had described as having the face of a Pekinese. He was pear-shaped and baggy-fleshed, but groomed and tailored like a Lond
on banker, as if to compensate for nature’s sloppiness. He wore a pin-striped vest with a watch pocket, from which he occasionally drew and pointed what appeared to be a solid-gold toothpick. He was agitated, and paced the room like a D.A. working the jury box. Everything about his bearing said by the book, yet his dress and affectation made him something of an eccentric.

  Lending a very different presence to the proceedings was the man from National Counterterrorism, Douglas Picot. Had this been Sioux City, or even Sacramento, the NCTC might not have had a deputy on hand, but L.A. was a state unto itself. His carefully chosen and perfectly enunciated words issued from the round mouth and outcurled lips of a child rooted in the oral stage, and his fingers were as smooth and small as a porcelain doll’s. Somehow, he’d survived the regime changein Washington. His “expertise,” Raszer learned, was profiling sleepers in local Muslim communities.