Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “What are you going to do, mister? Follow her scent like a dog?” Estevez chortled, the phlegm shaking in his throat like a snake’s rattle.

  “Maybe,” said Raszer, pulling Layla’s scarf free of the window.

  “Shouldn’t be too tough to sniff her out,” said Estevez with a grin. “I couldn’t help but notice when she got out of the backseat . . . she wasn’t wearing any panties.”

  Raszer got back into his car, hung the scarf around his neck, and drove straight back across the broad intersection to the tortilla stand. He hadn’t stopped thinking about food since his first whiff.

  As he stood watching the old man drizzle sauce on his taco, Raszer considered how starkly the events of the past eight hours had altered his own gameboard. What’s more, the stakes had been raised again: another homicide, another captive, and now the prospective involvement of the federal counterterrorism sector. Whatever tale Scotty Darrell did have to tell was probably not the one they wanted to hear or, in any event, made public. Far more convenient to label him an “enemy combatant” and ship him off to some Eurasian gulag, where our side could reshape the wet clay of his mind as effectively as the bad guys had.

  A vague, backlit outline of the beast was beginning to emerge: some massive, transnational human-trafficking operation that snatched errant souls and then sent them—retooled—back out into society to do its bidding.

  But to what larger purpose?

  Raszer didn’t sniff a conventional Islamist agenda, though there were superficial resemblances to that family of zealots spawned by the Islamic Brotherhood. The modus operandi of the Takfiri sect, the hardcore of the hardcore of Islamist extremists, appeared to be in play. These were the men who drank beer at barbecues and patronized lap dancers, whose children might go to school with yours, whose backyards might border yours, but who could toss it all aside on a single whispered command, climb into the cockpit of a DC-10, and steer it straight into oblivion.

  Al Takfir Wal-Hijira—Anathema and Exile—practiced the most confounding form of Oriental subterfuge, the art of taqiyya, the absolute concealment of one’s true belief and purpose, even to the point of denying one’s God. A thousand years before Al Qaeda had found this practice useful in breaching Western defenses, the Order of the Assassins and its mythical chief, the Old Man of the Mountain, had embraced it.

  Raszer hadn’t yet had the time to brief Monica. Without her in the loop, he felt like the sole carrier of both a lethal virus and its antidote. He decided he’d call her as soon as he had eaten. Food was paramount. Food, and a moment’s rest in the purple twilight of Mariachi Square, where the children in white still danced and a man with a big guitar played “Malaguena.” Life and joy abided here, and music summoned better angels, no matter how sinister the backdrop. This, he had to remind himself of. He found a bench, maneuvered the soft, dripping taco into position, and opened his mouth. Then the cell phone burped.

  He set the taco down on the bench in its wet wrapping of wax tissue.

  “Borges?” he answered, without looking at the display.

  “Daddy?” replied his daughter.

  “Oh, hey, baby. Yeah, it’s me.” He recalled that he had left Brigit a message before leaving the crime scene in Silver Lake. “I wanted to make sure you settled back in out there. How are you?”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “It’s always a little weird coming from you to Mommy. You guys are so totally different. Are you okay? You sound funny.”

  “Yeah, muffin, I’m all right. I’m on a case, that’s all.”

  “That missing girl? Katy?”

  “Right. Only it’s gotten a little more mysterious than that.”

  “It always does with you, Daddy. You’ll probably wind up in some place with snake charmers and magic lamps.”

  Raszer paused, smiled to himself. “Have you been dreaming again?”

  “Yeah,” she said softly. “You were with a girl. Not Katy, though.”

  “Do you still have that big map of the world on your bedroom wall?”

  “Uh-huh. With blue tacks in every place you’ve been.”

  “And colored yarn stretched between them, right?”

  “Yep,” she said.

  “Let your eyes go lazy and tell me if the yarn makes any kind of design.”

  She thought for a moment. “It’s kind of like a bicycle wheel. Or a spider’s web. ’Cause everything always connects back to L.A.”

  “So, draw out the next spoke in the wheel, in your mind. Where does it go?”

  “I dunno, exactly. One of those weird countries with -stan at the end of it?”

  “Your radar’s pretty sharp, kiddo. I don’t know where I’ll wind up, but that part of the world sounds like as good a bet as any. Wanna help me?”

  “Sure.”

  “How do you think bad people get good people to do bad things?”

  “Umm.” The receiver went quiet as she thought. “Maybe by scaring them. Or by switching bad and good around so you can’t tell the difference.”

  “Like how?”

  “Well, one time this girl Jordan asked me to lie for her. I said lying was wrong, and she was like, ‘No, lying is okay when the person you’re lying to is a liar.’ It kinda made sense, and for a few days, I was all upside-down about it. Then one day my friend Kirsten came up to me and said, ‘Why did you tell that lie? Now I’m in trouble.’ My one little lie grew into this big lie, and then I remembered why it was wrong.”

  “And why is that, baby?”

  “’Cause if you see the world through a lie, it’s not the real world. And pretty soon, you don’t know what’s true anymore. You start to believe in the fake.”

  Raszer smiled and parked the cell phone against his shoulder. With his hands free, he reached carefully for the dripping taco. He had it within three inches of his lips again when a call-waiting signal bleeped in his ear.

  “Hang on a sec, honey,” he said, setting the taco back on the bench. “I’ve got another call. It may be the police.”

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  He pressed the Receive button, leaving a greasy imprint, and answered, “Raszer.”

  “Raszer . . . it’s Detective Aquino. Up in Azusa.”

  “Oh, Detective . . . good. Did you get my message? I wanted to tell—”

  “Right,” said Aquino. “I saw it on the news. How fast can you get up here?”

  Raszer’s mouth went dry. “Is it Emmett?”

  “No. I need an ID. Can you meet me at the Malthus Mortuary on Foothill?”

  “Who’s dead?” said Raszer. “Hang on . . . I’ve got my daughter on the other line.”

  “I’ll see you there,” said Aquino, and clicked off, leaving Raszer in the dark.

  “Brigit, honey,” he said, knowing how oddly disconnected he must sound to her. “I guess I’ve gotta go.”

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?” she asked. “Now you sound even weirder.”

  “Everything’s okay, sweetheart,” he said, though he knew she would not be reassured until she heard his voice in the familiar register again. “It’s just work.”

  “Be careful, Daddy,” she said. “Please.”

  “I will,” he said. “I promise. Bye, baby.”

  He flipped the phone shut and muttered, “Damn,” under his breath. He hated leaving her with worries, and hated mortuaries almost as much. Whose corpse could it be? He took one last look at the taco. Its corner had drooped over the edge of the bench, leaking chile verde sauce onto the ground. His mouth watered. He reached for it, hoping for one bite before leaving. The phone rang again. “Damn!” he repeated.

  “Raszer, it’s Borges,” said the Lieutenant. “I got your page. Sorry for the delay. I’ve got federal agents crawling all over me. Have you got the girl?”

  “I’m the one who’s sorry, Luis,” Raszer replied. “They got to her first.”

  “Who got to her?”

  “The bad guys. In the limo. I don’t know how, but they caught her just as she was leaving the buildin
g. I couldn’t get around the block fast enough. Goddamn one-way street. I tailed them as far as a fleet-service lot in Boyle Heights, but they had a second car waiting. She’s gone . . . at least for now.”

  Raszer left his dinner on the bench and made for his car, stomach rumbling.

  “This doesn’t sound right,” said Borges. “She had to be in on it. How else could they get the timing so right?”

  Raszer pulled open the car door, dropped into the worn leather bucket, and started the car. “Right . . . or else they had an inside man.”

  “What’s that mystic eye of yours tell you, Raszer? Is she square?”

  Raszer threaded his way up Cesar Chavez Avenue and ramped onto the I-5 North, headed for the Pasadena Freeway. “I wouldn’t call her square.”

  “What about the fleet service. Did you get anything on the car?”

  “Not on the pickup car,” said Raszer. “Except that it was another Lincoln. But on the drop-off, yeah. It had phony diplomatic plates and was rented by something called Southeastern Supply Corp., Sofia, Bulgaria. Renter was an ‘A. Bacus.’ Honduran license. You’re going to want to talk to the fleet manager, Estevez. Greasy character.”

  “Estevez,” Borges repeated. “I know him. Everybody in Boyle Heights knows him. Greasy doesn’t begin to describe what he’s into. Spell the name of the renter . . . ”

  “What?”

  “A. Bacus,” said Borges. “Spell it out.”

  “A-b-a-c-u-s.”

  “Abacus,” said Borges.

  “Christ,” said Raszer. “I need to get my blood sugar back up.”

  He shot through the tunnel and onto Highway 2 North, going eighty-five.

  “And some sleep,” Borges said. “I’m gonna need your help with Scotty. We may not have him long. The feds want custody. They’re already singing ‘national security.’ You know, when they put the FBI and the CIA under the same tent, I thought it was a good idea. It just turned out to be a better way to keep us all out of the circus.”

  “I phoned Scotty’s parents,” said Raszer. “Did you hear from them?”

  “Yeah. They’ll be here tomorrow. The mother . . . she was pretty upset, no?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Raszer. “How do you make sense of shit like this? Listen . . . ” Raszer took a cigarette from his pack and parked it between his lips. “If you get some time with Scotty before they take him away, see if you can find out any more about how these guys got to him. He was out there playing this crazy game, with no compass, no direction home. He was looking for God—”

  “And found the Devil instead,” said Borges.

  “Right,” said Raszer. “Or the Devil found him.”

  Raszer flipped off the phone and tossed it on the passenger seat. He lit the cigarette and sped east on the Foothill Freeway. As he searched his mental photo files, he realized—with a perverse sense of relief—there was probably only one body anonymous enough to require his identification.

  FOURTEEN

  “That’s him,” Raszer said with a nod. “The old-timer up at the Follows Camp said his name was J.Z. J.Z. what, I couldn’t tell you.”

  “John Zimmerman,” said Detective Aquino. “We actually found an old unemployment comp stub in his underwear—which he obviously hadn’t changed for a while. It was his only ID. He probably kept it in case he forgot who he was. He must’ve been living up there, in that shed, for almost forty years. How does a man—”

  “I don’t know,” said Raszer, scrolling his eyes across the old squatter’s pale, wasted form. The skin stretched over his rib cage was so thin that there hardly seemed to be blood in it. “Jesus, there wasn’t much of him, was there, under all those rags?”

  “Ninety-one pounds naked,” said Aquino. “The clothes on his back weighed almost as much. He had to have been living off his own muscle tissue. When there wasn’t any more to metabolize, he just stopped living.” The detective cocked his chin in the direction of a tall, lab-coated man in the corner whose hair was styled in a monk’s tonsure. “Isn’t that right, Isadore?”

  “Yes,” said the man. “His stomach was empty. He was consuming himself.”

  Raszer peered into the shadows. He hadn’t even noticed the mortician on entering, but now he was impossible to miss. He gave a nod.

  “Isadore handles all my autopsies,” said Aquino. “He does better bodywork than all the guys in L.A., only the funeral trade pays better than the county.”

  “I guess he’s a good man to know, then,” said Raszer. “Where’d you find him?”

  “Isadore?”

  “No,” Raszer said with a chuckle, then indicated the corpse.

  “In the shed. About three o’clock this afternoon. God, what a smell. I got to thinking—after you ran off—about that little blue sack you brought me last night. That if the old guy was a scavenger, he might have picked up something the killers left behind. Or been able to give me something, anything, to corroborate Emmett’s story.”

  Raszer aimed an index finger at J.Z.’s thin blue line of a mouth. The upper lip had already molded itself against the toothless gums behind. “He wasn’t about to say much. Our killers made sure of that.”

  “Yeah,” Aquino said under his breath. “Mostly I just wanted to see for myself. I don’t know how we missed him the first time. We went through those sheds.”

  “He probably cleared out when he saw you coming. Or maybe the killers scared him into the woods. I’d find a cave to hide in if somebody cut out my tongue.” Raszer considered his next words. “The man who was killed today in Silver Lake—he was the DJ at the rave that night. I found one of his business cards up at the Coronado . . . ”

  “You’re finding all sorts of things we missed,” said Aquino, rubbing the black stubble on his chin. “Maybe you are a ‘psychic detective.’”

  “I got lucky,” Raszer said. “I pick a thread and follow it. Sometimes it gets pretty tangled, but eventually—”

  “You find your way.”

  “Right. But anyhow, that’s not my point.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “The DJ . . . they cut out his tongue, too. Just for show.”

  “So you think it’s some kind of autograph?”

  “Maybe,” said Raszer. “From what I’ve been able to learn, these guys practice their own version of omerta. That’s probably how they manage to blend in—to come and go without a trace. What I picture is four guys who look like chauffeurs. Mannequins. Identical black suits. Identical haircuts. And they go from one rented Lincoln Town Car to another, never saying a word more than is absolutely necessary.” He shot a glance at the body, then one at the mortician, and then asked Aquino, “Can we get out of here?”

  “Sure,” said the cop. “Let’s do that. Have you eaten?”

  “Only my own muscle tissue,” said Raszer.

  At that moment, Aquino’s young deputy strode in holding a dry cleaner’s garment bag. His heels clicked on the tiled floor. The echo made the place feel colder.

  “Just in time,” said Aquino, taking the bag and discharging the deputy. “The old guy was wearing this when he died. Looked pretty stylish for a vagrant. I thought you might like to have it back.”

  “My duster?” said Raszer.

  “Didn’t think you’d see it again, did you?” Aquino replied, handing Raszer the garment bag. “We had it cleaned for you. Super rush job. The smell should be out of it.”

  “Let’s hope,” said Raszer.

  “We’re going to drop in unexpectedly on the Lee family. Henry’s mom. Sometimes that’s best. Then I’ll take you over to the Falls for a steak, and you can tell me all about what happened in the city today.”

  “I’ll tell you whatever I can, Detective. A steak buys a lot from a hungry man.”

  Aquino made a U-turn on the dark side street and grunted. “I always miss this turn at night. The Lees are on the one street that doesn’t have streetlights. I think they like it that way. As you’re about to see, they don’t welcome visitors.”

>   “Are they still welcome down at the Kingdom Hall?” Raszer asked.

  “Even more since that night,” Aquino replied. “It was like the church threw a tent over the house. Silas Endicott kept them in the flock. Paid regular visits. My guess is, he kept hoping he’d learn something about how Katy went so wrong.”