Time of Death rb-2

by Alex Barclay

  Imagine the crush injuries you’d get from that, Luke Sarvas. You lying son-of-a-bitch.

  Ren called Hunt Memorial Hospital and asked to be put through to Luke Sarvas’ room.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Catherine?’ said Ren. ‘It’s Ren Bryce here. Is Luke there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Catherine. ‘But I told you—’

  ‘Catherine, put him on the phone to me right now or within a half-hour that room is going to be swarming with FBI agents who give less of a shit about you and Luke than I do.’

  Catherine let out a slow breath. ‘He can’t hold the phone.’

  ‘Hold it up to his ear! For God’s sake, Catherine. This is important.’

  Ren heard the phone move and a change of breathing as Luke Sarvas came on the line.

  ‘Luke, it’s Ren Bryce. How did the support beam fall?’

  Silence.

  ‘Luke, answer me. How did it fall?’

  His voice cracked. ‘Because I knew exactly how to make it fall.’

  Oh my God. ‘You did it?’

  ‘Yes…we were…forced to…they told us we would be killed if we didn’t do it. I…I…wanted to get out,’ he sobbed. ‘I had to get out. I wanted to see my mom.’

  Cliff’s words rang in Ren’s ears: he’s a seventeen-year-old kid. Kids seemed so advanced, but really, there was only so far their coping skills could stretch at that age.

  ‘What happened to you?’ said Ren. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I can’t…I can’t…’ He was sobbing louder.

  ‘Luke, can you tell me – have you heard of the Puentes? Or of a man called El Coyote Panzón? Is that the man who made you do this? El Coyote Panzón.’

  There was complete silence at the other end of the phone.

  ‘Luke? Luke?’ said Ren. ‘You can talk to me. You’re safe now.’

  Still Luke said nothing.

  ‘You’re safe,’ said Ren again.

  Luke lowered his voice. ‘You’re not.’

  The line went dead.

  What the hell? Ren called Catherine Sarvas’ cell phone. It was diverted. She tried the hospital again. The line to Luke Sarvas’ room was busy.

  Why would I not be safe? And how could Luke Sarvas know that? And if he does have that kind of information, he is not safe. Neither is his mother. And neither is Michael. And where is Michael Sarvas?

  Ren picked up her office phone and dialed the number for El Paso PD. As she was waiting to be connected, her cell phone rang. Caller ID showed the hospital number. She hung up and took the cell phone call.

  It was Catherine Sarvas. ‘Ren, I’ve sneaked into another patient’s room. Luke says you’ve got to back off from all of this. Don’t get the police involved. Don’t get your bosses involved. And he told me to tell you that El Coyote Panzón is dead.’

  She hung up. Ren’s heart pounded.

  What is going on?

  Ren’s cell phone rang again. ‘This is Mannering Security Systems. Could I speak with Annie Lowell?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Ren. ‘My name is Ren Bryce. Is this about Annie’s place? I’m the house-sitter.’

  ‘Do you have the code word?’ said the man.

  ‘Edward,’ said Ren.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. We have a report of an alarm going off—’

  Shit. ‘Sir, I’m an FBI agent, please do not send any of your men to the property. I will take care of it.’

  He paused. ‘It’s our policy to—’

  ‘Sir, forget your policy. I’m with Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force and I am not in the habit of putting people’s lives at risk. So, please, let me take care of the house. And you can keep your employees safe. I’m going to give you my boss’s direct line. His name is Gary Dettling. You can call him right away to verify my details. Thank you for the call.’

  Ren grabbed her purse and ran. She shouted in to Gary to expect the call and that she would take care of the break-in herself. Or the strong wind. Or the stray cat.

  When she pulled up outside Annie’s, it looked the same as it had when she left that morning. There were no windows open, the front door was locked. She opened it and walked inside. She called Misty’s name. There was no answer. She called again, still no answer. She ran up the stairs to her bedroom. Misty wasn’t there. Her heart started pounding. Why is this house so fucking big? She ran down the stairs and into the living room, the dining room, the kitchen. She heard a noise out the back. Oh shit. It was an enclosed yard. There was only one way in and out. She started to slide her gun from her inside jacket pocket, caught sight of a whirl of black and white through the glass.

  Misty! Sweet Jesus. She pushed the gun back into its holster. And pulled the door open. Misty threw herself against her. Ren almost cried.

  ‘If anything ever happened to you, Misty Bryce,’ she said. She sat on the step and held Misty to her chest, rubbing her head, tickling her belly.

  ‘Who let you out here?’ she said.

  Ren brought her back into the house. She went into the living room. A chill swept over her. Someone had been there. And they had left her a gift.

  Unlike whoever had broken in the first time.

  It was a DVD with a nice neat sticker that had her name on it. She put it into the player.

  ‘Loading’ flashed for too long on the top left corner of the screen before it went black. Stay black. Please stay black. Black has to be better than whatever I’m about to watch.

  Ren had no idea what movie was going to light up her screen, what sound was going to fill the living room. She pulled Misty up beside her on the sofa and wrapped her arms around her. A face she knew filled the screen – an ugly face, an ugly man – number four on Denver’s Most Wanted. Javier Luis: a man whose rap sheet included first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, aggravated robbery; drugs; rape, assault on a minor…

  In the mug shot on the wall at Safe Streets, Luis looked bad. On screen, he looked worse. And the picture was razor-sharp. He looked sixty years old. Meth.

  Luis opened his mouth and flashed black and broken teeth. ‘From 1996 through 1998, I worked for Augusto Val Pando at his compound in New Mexico.’

  So Augusto is being set up to take the fall.

  Luis’ eyes shifted back and forth. ‘Towards the end,’ he said, ‘I was not happy with my position and I wanted to leave. But I was infectively incarcerated.’

  Infectively – I love it. You were all infectively incarcerated, you fuckwit.

  ‘I wanted out,’ said Luis, ‘but I had no way of escaping.’

  No shit.

  ‘What happened was, during this time, a woman who I thought to be a nanny to the Val Pandos’ son, her name was Remy Torres—’

  Why is he talking about me? What the FUCK?

  He continued. ‘Well, I was unaware at that time that Remy Torres was, in fact, FBI Special Agent Ren Bryce who currently works with the Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force in Denver.’

  What the FUCK IS THIS?

  ‘On the evening of December twenty-eighth, 1998—’

  Ren hit Pause. December 28th? She stared at the screen. Oh God, no. She raised the remote control slowly and hit Play. It was as if she had also hit mute; all sound seemed to be sucked out of the air as the camera panned to the man on his right. Her eyes shot wide.

  Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.

  44

  Ren dropped the remote control. She ran to the bathroom and threw up. Until there was nothing left in her stomach. As she was walking back to the living room, pale and weak, she heard her cell phone ring. She couldn’t remember where she’d left it. It stopped ringing. The sound seemed to have come from the kitchen. The ringing started again, stopped, started again. Shit. She went in to get it. It was Colin.

  ‘Ren, where are you?’

  ‘Home. Why?’

  ‘Is everything OK at the house? Gary said you had to go—’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes. Yes. It must have been a stray cat…’

  ‘OK, cool.
I’m just pulling up outside. Have you eaten?’

  ‘Whoa, whoa,’ said Ren. ‘What? I can’t go out…I…’

  ‘Oh, I’m not asking you to dinner,’ said Colin. ‘I’m taking you to a crime scene. And, apparently, it’s not very pretty at all.’

  Shit. Shit. Shit. ‘Yeah, well don’t worry about me throwing up.’

  She heard the horn beep outside and down the phone line. ‘Give me two minutes,’ she said and hung up. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. She ran into the living room and turned off the TV and DVD player. She ran up the stairs and changed and brushed her teeth. She looked at herself in the mirror. She took a deep breath.

  And for my next performance…

  Colin’s car was moving as fast as it could along the icy streets. The wipers were shifting the heavy-falling snow across the windscreen, stopping briefly every couple of minutes, then jerking back to work. Excruciating. Ren felt suddenly trapped, walled in by the car, the sound of the wipers, the DVD, the irrational sensation of being taken from her home against her will. She slammed her hand down on the button to open the window. Flakes of snow started drifting into the car. Colin looked her way, but said nothing.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ren. ‘I’m…hot.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  Colin had brought coffee the way she liked it: no additives. A kind gesture. She glanced at him. Strangely, alone with Colin Grabien, she was the least likely to fake good humor. He didn’t need a performance. She’d work up the energy to do that for the others.

  They pulled up at the entrance to a warehouse in downtown Denver. Denver PD cruisers were scattered out front, alongside detectives’ and Safe Streets’ vehicles. Ren walked toward the building ahead of Colin, flashed her badge and walked into an almost-empty space, flooded with harsh light.

  ‘Take the second last door,’ said the uniform.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Her heels were louder than she would have liked, echoing across the bare concrete, drawing attention she did not want. She kept her head down until she got to the door. The smell was already foul and she hadn’t even gone down the hallway where she could see the officers silhouetted in the fluorescent light from the crime scene.

  ‘Any ID yet?’ she said to the first uniform she met.

  ‘Does faceless dead man count?’

  ‘In some jurisdictions, possibly.’ Ren smiled grimly as she stepped past him. She nodded when she saw Gary and Cliff in the far corner. As she walked past more officers, a strange feeling started to crawl over her. To her left, she saw Glenn Buddy directing a group of his colleagues, but the feeling had nothing to do with him. It was an ominous sense of familiarity, something in the walls – a terrible color of watered-down yellow, a huge blank spot of pale green where a bank of cabinets had been ripped from a wall. And it was in the area that held most of the blood and bone and brain matter and scalp and hair and teeth and flesh of the victim.

  Gary and Cliff were saying hello, but Ren wasn’t registering it. Her head was swimming. She finally reached them and looked down at the leftover face of a man who had obviously been shot at close range with a high-caliber rifle. The leftovers were scraps of scorched skin, a partial jawbone, a creepy skeleton half-smile, made more grotesque by the few ragged teeth.

  ‘No ID,’ Cliff was telling her.

  ‘Really?’ said Ren. ‘How come we’re here?’

  ‘The call came into me,’ said Gary. ‘Anonymous. Just “get to blah warehouse”. Nothing more dramatic than that. I called Denver PD when I got here.’

  Ren’s heart felt like it would explode out of her chest. ‘Well, blah warehouse certainly gave up the goods.’

  ‘I was at that concert,’ said Gary, pointing down at the blood-soaked AC/DC T-shirt.

  I bet the dead guy wasn’t.

  Ren glanced down again at the body of the man she had just been watching in a different kind of Technicolor.

  Denver’s Most Wanted number four: Javier Luis, DOB 1973, 5’ 2”, 160 lbs.

  Ren got back to Annie’s as quick as she could after the scene was processed. She rushed in the door and grabbed the remote control. She hit Rewind, then Play.

  Javier Luis’ voice seemed louder. He continued: ‘On the evening of December twenty-eighth, 1998…’

  As he spoke, Ren could not take her eyes off the man beside him. It was James Laker, Gavino Val Pando’s biological father. Laker was blond and rugged, a regular guy in a button-down shirt and jeans. His eyes were warm, clear blue, his eyebrows heavy.

  Luis was smiling up at Laker, goading him into the revelation that Ren knew was coming. Her heart pounded.

  Ren heard a voice off-camera shout, ‘We don’t have fucking time for this shit. Laker, tell your fucking story and we’re out of here.’ Fear flashed in Laker’s eyes. He shifted in his chair. When he finally spoke, his voice, the one she remembered, had none of its old warmth. He stared at the floor.

  ‘My name is James Laker. I worked for Augusto Val Pando from 1990 through 1998. Up to that point, I had been a Chief Investment Officer for a proprietary hedge fund—’

  ‘We don’t need your fucking resumé,’ said Luis.

  Laker’s eyes flared with anger. He continued. ‘Personal problems led me to work for Augusto Val Pando…’ He stared up at the ceiling. ‘My addiction in the late eighties to cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine. I had defrauded the company I worked for out of millions of dollars, all of which was repaid to them by Augusto Val Pando. In return, I went to work for him. He gave me unlimited access to the drugs I so desperately required. But by October 1998, I wanted out. I befriended Remy Torres, who was, in fact, FBI Special Agent Ren Bryce—’

  Oh, James. What are you doing?

  ‘I told FBI Special Agent Ren Bryce of my desire to enter a rehabilitation facility so I could return to regular employment and build a life for myself outside the criminal world. I begged for her help in doing so. The compound was heavily guarded and FBI Special Agent Ren Bryce—’

  Stop calling me that. Stop.

  ‘—appeared to be trusted by the Val Pandos.’ Laker turned to whoever was behind the camera. ‘It’s too long, calling her that name. I’m just going to call her Remy – I’ll tell the story quicker.’ He stared ahead. ‘Remy came to me late on Christmas Day and told me that she would find me a way out of the compound, but that it would have to happen within four days. She appeared to be intimately acquainted with the security systems, the staff’s shifts and the safest routes to take to avoid detection and to reach the perimeter without difficulty. I can see now that this was due to her own situation, preparation and training as an FBI agent, something of which I was unaware at that time. I believe that because of my sexual relationship with Remy—’

  Ren screamed at the screen, ‘What are you DOING?’

  ‘—she had developed an attachment to me,’ said Laker, ‘that led her to defy her superiors and aid my release.’

  The camera panned down to the table where a dirty piece of folded paper lay. He held it up to the camera. ‘Here you can see the plan drawn up for me by Remy, which includes all the details I mentioned above. Although, for obvious reasons, this plan was not signed, I’m sure a graphologist could confirm the writing as Special Agent Ren Bryce’s.’

  Yes, they could.

  Luis laughed. ‘And for how long did you attend rehabilitation when you left Augusto Val Pando’s employ?’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ said Laker.

  Luis froze. His face was half-smile, full fear. The camera zoomed suddenly, blurring the picture, then it slowly came into sharp focus, so that all Ren could see was Javier Luis’ face. It had a puzzled tilt. Ren would have closed her eyes, but she wanted to watch. She could not take her eyes off him.

  It wasn’t what she expected. The first bullet was off-target. It grazed the side of Luis’ neck, stunning him, but giving him a chance to turn in his chair to get away. So Ren didn’t see the next bullet rip through his face. Instead, she saw the back of his skull explod
e and a flap of scalp and hair shoot up in the air and land back down as Luis hit the floor, spattering the marble tiles with blood and brain.

  Two more bullets were fired off-camera and she heard James Laker cry out. But it was the sound of his words that echoed louder.

  Sexual relationship? You lying, motherfucking, son-of-a-bitch. You convincing lying, motherfucking, son-of-a-bitch.

  45

  There was not one person in the world who could see this DVD. Because her career would be over.

  For one year, Ren had lived in a world stripped of humanity. It had been that way long before she ever showed up, it was that way after she left. It wouldn’t end with the dismantling of the organization. It would travel with the people who had created it, wherever they went. It would fester in prisons, in homes, it would multiply.

  After all, Pando is Latin for ‘I spread’.

  Mission number one: leave Ren Bryce behind. Mission number two: seduce Domenica Val Pando into believing that there was a woman called Remy Torres, who was twenty-six years old and who had just suffered the harrowing experience of losing her four-month old baby. Mission number three: seduce Domenica Val Pando into trusting Remy Torres. Mission number four: use that trust to find out everything there is to know about Domenica Val Pando.

  And, oh, how she trusted.

  Part of Ren wanted to stand by what she had done. She understood why she had done it. When she got to know James Laker – she thought he was kind, she thought he saw the world like she did – she latched on to what was the closest thing to normal she had found in the compound. She wanted to help him and she wanted to help his seven-yearold son. Javier Luis had not been part of the bargain. And, until Laker had been forced to do otherwise, Javier Luis had not been part of the bargain in his eyes either.

  Whatever Erubiel Diaz did was out of Ren’s control. But she felt responsible for Luis. She knew now that in releasing James Laker, she had released Javier Luis to rape and kill.