by Meg Gardiner
“Kit, wait.”
I kept walking. Dad caught me by the arm and I pulled free.
“Leave me alone.”
He stepped in front of me. “I know you’re angry.”
“Angry? You think this is as simple as anger?” I shoved my hair out of my face. “Yesterday, did you come by my place planning to tell me to have an abortion?”
“I meant to broach the subject. But damn, Kit . . .” He looked like scoured wood, eroded by time and care. “Look, I knew this would happen. You would turn into a wall. I knew the only possible way to get you to understand would be for Jesse to talk to you. It was a tactical decision.”
I stepped back from him. “No, Dad. It was cowardice.”
I might have taken an ax to his chest. His shoulders drooped. I pushed through the door into the station.
Mom hurried after me. “Wait.”
I kept walking across the foyer. She caught up.
“We should never have gone behind your back. We’re just damned scared, and we panicked. I’m sorry, Evan. I’m an ass.”
I turned to her. I was so furious, I thought my hair might ignite.
“Did Dad have an affair with Maureen Swayze?”
“What?”
“Adultery. It’s like flirting, only immoral.”
She stiffened. “Did somebody tell you that?”
“Nobody had to tell me anything. All I have to do is listen to you and Dad snipe at each other.”
Her cheeks reddened. “For Christ’s sake, no. It’s bad enough they were friends. That’s sufficient to piss me off.”
A watery sensation washed over me, relief splashing my anger. “It’s revealing that you presume somebody told me so. China Lake’s like a bowl of carnivorous fish. Falsehoods as SOP, rumors wafting like perfume. Is this where you and Dad learned to plot behind people’s backs?”
“Evan, please.”
“Lie and manipulate and put the screws to Jesse and hope he’d cave in?”
“Can we save this for later? What’s going on now is about keeping you alive and well.”
She put a hand on my elbow. I shied away. My head was pounding.
“No. You think if we stop talking about it you’ll get absolution. You won’t.”
Dad walked up, looking deflated. Across the station, Tommy stuck his head out of an office and waved us back. I walked ahead of my parents, unwilling to see their faces, and tried once again to call Jesse. No luck. Where the hell was he?
In the parking garage below Argent Tower, security lights eradicated the shadows. CCTV scanned the exit ramp and the elevator. “Paint It Black” was pounding from the truck stereo.
Jesse drove along empty acres of concrete, hunting for the car. The garage was nearly as vacant as the office building. He had no luck on the first two levels and cruised down the ramp to level three.
“Gotcha.”
Of course Maureen Swayze would park her silver BMW 540i as far from other vehicles as possible. She didn’t want such a beautiful car to get dinged. It and a Range Rover were the only cars on this level. He stopped next to it, double-checking. Yeah, it was the car he’d seen the other day outside Eller’s Diner in Westwood when Swayze went to talk to Phil and Evan, with the Argent Tower parking sticker in the window. It had to be hers.
He circled back to the elevator and parked. The security camera was bolted to the wall above the elevator door. Ten feet high, he estimated. He got his crutches from the backseat.
He got the chair out, set the crutches between his knees, and wheeled over. Make the camera eleven feet. He was six-one. When he stood up he would have to stretch, and stretching wasn’t his strong point.
Stopping beneath the camera, he listened for cars or the elevator approaching, but heard only the building’s ventilation system. Taking a breath, he stood up. He leaned against the wall to brace himself and reached up with one of the crutches. Not far enough. He checked his balance, reached up a bit more, and shoved it against the bottom of the camera. It swung toward the ceiling. Yes.
He threw the crutches back in the truck. It might be only a minute before the guards noticed that the camera was screwy. Even that sluggish Archie up at the desk might spot it and jump. He wheeled to Swayze’s BMW. He hoped the prissy German alarm would squeal at the slightest twitch. He didn’t want to smash the window.
He slid the end of the tire iron between the window and the door frame and he muscled the glass, just half an inch. The car’s lights flashed and the alarm shrieked like a cheerleader.
Yanking the tire iron free, he spun and made for the Range Rover parked farther down the garage. The pillars supporting the roof were too narrow to hide behind, but an SUV would work fine.
Two minutes later a uniformed guard ambled out of the elevator, fingers in his ears. He walked around the BMW and took note of the license number. He radioed upstairs and headed back to the elevator.
Jesse pressed his hands over his ears. This would work or it wouldn’t. If it didn’t, he would end up under arrest. But screw it, he was in all the way. He could show Evan and the kid his mug shot. But he had to have Evan and the kid to show it to.
Four minutes later, Maureen Swayze came hurrying out of the elevator, keys in hand, a scowl on her face. She was wearing a white lab coat and a disheveled ponytail. Her little glasses glittered under the fluorescent lights. She clipped over to the BMW, pressed the key fob, and disarmed the alarm. In the sudden, blessed silence she stopped cold.
“Remember me?” Jesse said.
She didn’t answer. She simply stared at the Glock resting in his hand.
Tommy waved a printout. “The fingerprint hit on your dude’s shirt. It was a partial that LAPD matched to a complete print they pulled off the revolving door at that office tower.”
“Is it Kai Torrance?” I said.
“Robin Klijsters.”
He led us into Captain McCracken’s office overlooking the parking lot. McCracken was weighing down his desk chair, talking on the phone.
It took a second for the name to match the memory. “You’re joking.”
“No, that’s the name. Robin Klijsters. LAPD got the print from state records. An old file, years back.”
McCracken hung up the phone. “They get an address?”
Tommy handed him the printout. “Here. House on the west side, out past China Lake Boulevard. I have two units checking it out, but the records file is almost twenty years old.”
He didn’t recognize the name. “Tommy, don’t you know who Robin Klijsters is?”
“Who?”
“Our old student teacher.”
He stopped dead. “Holy shit.”
We gaped at each other.
“That makes no sense,” I said.
But holding his brown-eyed gaze, I knew it all made sense somehow. We just weren’t seeing the connection.
“Klijsters was our student teacher in art class,” I said. “The skanky little weasel who told Ms. Shepard I was imagining things when Valerie stole my journal.”
McCracken’s chair creaked. “Klijsters worked at Bassett?”
“With Antonia Shepard. Shepard-Cantwell. She’s still there.”
McCracken pointed at Tommy. “Call the high school and get the art teacher on the phone. And contact the school district about records. Get all the background you can on Klijsters.”
I looked at Mom. “Oh, God. Ms. Shepard.”
Tommy shot toward the door. I grabbed him.
“Ms. Shepard. Could she be the one who’s been funneling information to Coyote?”
He held in the doorway, wound like a top. “She could have accessed all Dr. C’s records. Shit, if she got his password she could have used his computer system to get past the firewall at China Lake Hospital.” He looked like he wanted to smack himself in the head. “We blew it with Cantwell. It may not be him, but his wife.”
McCracken leaned forward. “Detective?”
Tommy explained. I listened, running it all over in my head. Aga
in I looked at Tommy.
“This still doesn’t scan. Klijsters wasn’t a supersoldier; he was . . .”
“Boy George. I know.”
The springs on McCracken’s chair wailed. He stood, raising his huge hands in the air. “Hold your horses right there. What do you mean, he was Boy George?”
Tommy shrugged, working out how to phrase it. “More effeminate than the homecoming queen.”
“Hey,” I said.
He gave me a winsome look, contrite. “No, Rocky, you were a real princess. I mean that he was—”
McCracken waved a sheet of paper at him. “I’m talking about this. We got the report from the county crime lab. That dental implement we recovered near Wally Hankins’s office.” He handed the sheet to Tommy. “The scaler.”
Tommy read. “Prion contamination.”
“From Coyote?” I said.
McCracken said, “Keep reading.”
“They recovered blood evidence and DNA. It didn’t belong to Ceci Lezak. It’s an unsub.” Tommy looked up. “Then it must be Coyote’s. If we can match it to Klijsters, we have him.”
McCracken took off his scratched glasses. “You don’t have him. Klijsters isn’t a him at all.”
Tommy read further, and looked up in shock. “What the hell?” He looked at me. “The blood on that dental implement came from a woman.”
27
Breathless, Coyote swung the knife in the close confines of the kitchen. The teacher was fighting.
She clawed at him. “Bastard! Stop it!”
He pinned her left leg and slashed the Achilles tendon. She screamed. The decibel level indicated that she was experiencing hideous pain. He cut the hamstring tendons in her left leg as well, disconnecting the muscles from the bones.
Flipping her onto her back, he dove on top of her. She windmilled her arms and scratched his face. Her teeth were bared.
A tremendous thrill shot through him. She was magnificent. Why had none of her students been inculcated with her spirit? She smacked him in the face. If only he had been able to embrace the pain. He grabbed her wrist. She saw the knife, seven inches long, serrated, forged with a channel along the blade that let blood sluice from penetrative wounds in a clean, quiet run. She didn’t flinch; she didn’t freeze or withdraw mentally. She was engaged in the battle, flesh and soul.
In legend, Coyote and Woman fought, trying to outwit each other. Was this Woman, at last?
He changed tactics. Forcing her into mechanical compliance by severing tendons or nerve groups was not as challenging as forcing her into pain compliance. He lay atop her, pinned one of her hands to the floor, pried her fingers open, and sliced her palm. She screamed.
“Bastard. Fucker!”
He lowered his face, his mouth inches from hers. “New information. I need it right now.”
She spit at him. He wrestled the knife around and pushed the tip against her cheek.
“New information.”
She stared straight back at him, willing to brave his gaze. At last, a superb animal, embracing the dynamic of hunter and hunted. Unwilling to concede.
“I can blind you and peel your face off. I can flay you and leave you spread across this floor like pig slop spilled out of a bucket. And I’ll save your tongue until the end, so you can give me the information.”
Still she held his gaze. He hovered close above her like a lover.
She moved her lips. “Chang and Delaney.”
“Yes?”
Her breath hissed out and in. “They know about the others. The pregnancies. Evan was frightened.”
“Frightened. Of course.” He lowered his lips closer to hers, beginning to see. “Pregnancy?”
“I think so.”
“Think harder.” He took her lower lip between his teeth and began to bite.
Reaching up, she grabbed the handle on the oven door and slammed it down, hitting him in the back of the head with it.
The blow knocked his head down hard on hers, and the back of her skull hit the linoleum. He bit through her lip and the pain finally broke her. She fell limp in agony. He roared and lunged up, ripping her bottom lip in half.
The knife was lodged in her cheek. He pulled it free and sliced her across the face, drawing claw marks.
She raised her functioning hand, trying to protect her face. He knew he’d found her fatal flaw. She was an artist, concerned with appearance. Vanity: a woman’s weakness.
She grabbed his hair.
The wig was on securely, but she clawed her fingers into it and pulled. Perhaps she thought doing so would hurt him. Then, using her good leg, she brought her knee up under him, hoping to get him in the balls. No way was that going to happen. He held stiff and took the blow.
In her eyes shock and knowledge fought with the intense pain she must be experiencing. She was drenched in blood, and the floor was becoming slippery. It was time to finish this, but he wanted to observe how she faced the certainty of her taking. A worthy opponent deserved that.
At the front of the house came the sound of a door opening. “Antonia.”
The teacher roared an animal wail. With one last effort she swung her arm and smacked him in the face. He blinked, grabbing his face, feeling the contact lens slide off his eye.
Footsteps came running, and a man cried out, “Toni?”
Coyote drove the knife into her trachea. He bore down with both hands while the blade sank through her throat, pushing until it hit the bones of her spinal column. She became silent and still.
She had pulled the wig off. He disentangled it from her dead fingers.
The noise came from behind him: shoes scuffing on tile. He turned and saw the man fleeing for the front door. Coat lapels flapping, baldhead trailing strands of hair from a combover. The doctor.
Coyote pulled the knife from Toni Cantwell’s throat. The doctor was a coward, leaving his wife to the dogs. He would die a coward’s death.
I looked at McCracken, taken aback. “The killer is female?”
Behind his scratched eyeglasses, he appeared equally perplexed. “Yes. Are you telling me Klijsters isn’t female? Robin, I was presuming it was a woman’s name.”
“No, he was a man.” I glanced at Tommy. “At least, I thought he was.”
McCracken took off his glasses to reread the results from the crime lab. His beefy features were flushed.
“The crime lab definitely found two X chromosomes. Whoever got stabbed with that dental pick is female.”
I thought back to the moment at Argent Tower when Coyote passed me in the revolving door. Short blond hair and a baseball cap and men’s clothing. Jesse had seen a man go by too.
No, we’d seen the back of a head.
Jax’s and Tim’s depictions came back to me—the perplexing change in Coyote’s demeanor as the years passed; the fascination with transvestites and gays; the castration and murder of the male prostitute in Bangkok. The sexual fluidity and love of disguise. And the rest: Robin Klijsters, the simpering, theatrically camp student teacher working in Ms. Shepard’s classroom.
“Christ, Tommy. He treated our school classroom like an animal lab.” And I cleared my head. “She did. She’s had us in her sights ever since.”
Though the Glock was aimed at the ground, Swayze went rigid when she saw it.
“Walk around the far side of that Range Rover,” Jesse said.
She stood immobile. “Have you lost your mind?”
“I’m batshit crazy and prone to spasms. So don’t make me angry, because if I lose it, we’re going to get hurt.”
She blinked.
“Don’t expect the guards to come charging down, either. I put the security camera out of commission.”
She looked up at it. The surprise on her face said, How the hell? Her resolve seemed to slip.
“And if I have to go to jail for this, I will. So you’re shit out of arguments. Walk.”
She walked.
“My colleagues are going to notice that I’m gone.”
; “You don’t want your colleagues to hear this. Give me your lab coat and car keys.”
She did so with a sneer. He took the keys, patted down the white coat, removed a cell phone from the pocket, and tossed the coat back.
“Sit down with your back against the wall.”
She settled herself on the concrete, squinting at him as though considering the best way to gouge his eyes out. He kept back. Phil trusted Swayze’s motives, but Jesse wondered if his warning about Coyote applied to this woman, too: You cannot imagine how little ordinary morality affects these people, or how far they’ll go.
“What do you want?” she said.
“You’re going to help bring Coyote in.”
“Coyote? I have been helping. For heaven’s sake, I’m the one who gave a name and description to the FBI.”
“No, you’ve been lying for twenty years. You lied to the parents after the explosion, and you lied to Phil and Evan the other day. That means you damn well lied to the FBI too.”
She shook her head.
“You knew from the beginning that the pain vaccine was lethal. You know that it’s killing Evan’s classmates and their children. You know that anybody South Star doesn’t kill, Coyote will, because South Star spawned Coyote.” He leaned forward. “And you like it that way.”
Her glasses shone at him. “You’re off your lithium. Let me call your shrink.”
“You want South Star and its aftermath to go away for good. By your lights, Coyote’s cleaning up your mess.”
“You did black out the other day, didn’t you? Coyote was here, casing the building.”
“Maybe you’re betting on him leaving you for last. Once he kills all the exposees and their kids, then you’ll call the police with new information you’ve suddenly remembered. Because I think you know much more about who he is and how to find him than you’ve told anybody.”
He took a breath. “But you’re going to tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“When you lied to Evan and Phil, they didn’t try to force the truth from you. They drew a line. I won’t.”
