9:31 A.M. PST
Sean McMullan ran through the door of the Strip Club with his pistol drawn. At first, the restaurant looked abandoned. Confused, McMullan glanced from side to side. And then he saw them.
Jutting out from behind the bar was pair of legs. He recognized the loose, blue pants that enveloped them.
Katrina was unconscious, but alive, lying on top of a pile of broken glass. Her cuts from the bar glasses she had fallen onto appeared to be superficial. McMullan lightly tapped the sides of her face. Katrina’s eyes rolled, and then slowly opened. For a moment, she only looked at him, appearing dazed. Then her eyes widened and she struggled to stand up.
“Stay still,” he said authoritatively. But when a woman’s shriek rang out from the back of the bar, Katrina jerked past him to a standing position.
Together, they followed the sound. As they reached the narrow back hallway, the door of the women’s restroom swung open, and the bar’s waitress emerged. She was crying, and a small trickle of vomit was still on her chin. “I think you need to see this,” she said and led them into the bathroom.
It was clear which stall the waitress had just lost her breakfast in. But McMullan wondered why he needed to see it, until the waitress pointed to the door of the adjacent stall. Its lock, a jutting sliver of metal, was covered in blood.
Katrina pushed past McMullan and reached for the door, looking it up and down, and then quickly opened it.
Her daughter’s message was scrawled in blood on the wall tile near the toilet: “Yuppie Ant Farm.”
Alexis shoved tourists aside as she ran up Fifth Avenue, gripping the bleeding arm that had been grazed by a bullet. Occasionally, she looked over her shoulder to confirm that she was still being chased. When another shot rang out from behind her and through the crowded street, Alexis knew that the Doctor would now stop at nothing to kill her.
A police cruiser pulled away from its post at the biotechnology convention to respond to the frantic 911 call of a waitress. To clear the crowd from the streets before them, the officers inside the cruiser activated their lights and sirens. And as the black and white car pulled off Harbor Drive and onto Fifth Avenue, several news vans followed.
10:11 A.M. PST
Roger Gilman opened a door and entered a small closet-like room at San Quentin. A brief glance around the room revealed three walls lined with video monitors, each projecting its own scene from within the prison. On the fourth wall was a built-in bookshelf containing rows upon rows of videodiscs.
Two boys who looked no older than eighteen were at a table playing checkers. They looked up, startled, when Gilman entered without knocking. One reached for a gun.
“Agent Roger Gilman, FBI,” Gilman said, preemptively, and flashed his badge. The youth’s hand fell away from the pistol at his side. “You scared the crap out of me,” he said. “Thanks for knocking. What can we do for you?”
“I need to see all of the surveillance you have that pertains to the visitation of one of your minimum-security prisoners. His name is Oscar Morales.”
The two boys exchanged a glance. One of them shrugged. “What are the dates you want? All of our visitation videos are dated, but they’re not catalogued by name of the prisoner. You should be able to get records of when each prisoner had visitors though. That’ll be logged elsewhere. We just do the AV stuff.”
“I see,” Gilman said. “Then I’ll be back shortly.”
Fifteen minutes later, Gilman returned with a list of dates and times and a borrowed wall calendar. He was surprised to have learned that for months, Oscar Morales had been visited every Sunday morning like clockwork.
When he stepped into the AV room for the second time, only one of the teenagers was in the room. The boy looked up at Gilman and slammed shut a Penthouse magazine, then dropped the magazine into a drawer.
“Where’s your partner?” Gilman asked.
“He had to take a piss.”
Gilman shook his head and sat at the table across from the boy, shoving aside the forgotten game of checkers. He handed the list to the boy and said, “These are the dates and times I need to see the visitation videos for.”
The boy scanned the list. “I can get you the later ones right now, but the ones that are more than three months old are in the archives. You’ll have to fill out a request form and it takes a week or so to get those out.”
“I don’t have a week,” Gilman said. “Show me what you can.”
The boy picked up the list. “We’ll start with the most recent then,” he said, and selected a disc from the wall. As he popped the disc into a player and cued up the appropriate time, Gilman leaned in to scrutinize the monitor. He let his breath out quickly when he realized he had been holding it. The disc began to play. There was no sound.
“Don’t you have sound on these things?” Gilman asked.
“No, these are visual only.”
Gilman did not recognize the prisoner that was in the field of view. In frustration, he reached for the control pad and began a fast forward scan. Then he located Oscar Morales. And across from him, Katrina Stone.
Gilman quickly flipped the wall calendar to look at the date. It was the day he and McMullan had found her schedule on her computer and her daughter having sex on the kitchen table. The day he already knew she had been here. This information was redundant.
“Do you remember seeing this woman?” he asked the guard.
The boy started to laugh. “Actually, I don’t know the woman, but now that I see the video I totally know the dude. For months he had the same chick come visit him every single weekend. Not the chick you’re looking at, though. The other chick was a scary ass bitch! Looked about like a bag full of smashed assholes! My partner and I used to sit there and crack up when we saw them talking. Even the prisoner looked a little grossed out.
“Then one day, he starts getting visits by a twin brother. We freaked out at first because we saw the brother coming in and thought it was the same guy. We thought he’d gotten paroled or something, till we saw them together and figured out it was twins. And then, out of nowhere, this chick.” He pointed to the monitor and shrugged. “I guess he finally dumped the ugly chick when he got a hotter one.”
Gilman was shocked. If the boy’s memory was correct, he had just corroborated Chuck Morales’ story verbatim. “I’m going to need a written statement from you reiterating exactly what you just said,” Gilman said. “But first, I need to see one of the earlier videos. One of the ones with the other woman. Do you have some of them here, or are they too old?”
The boy squinted and looked past Gilman, as if searching his memory. “Um, no, I think she was here pretty recently. Let me try to find one of the CDs.” Consulting the list of dates again, he selected another disc from the wall and popped it in. He scanned until he located Oscar. The visitor in the video was Chuck. “Nope,” he said, and pulled the disc out to search another.
It took several tries to locate a disc with the visitor of interest. And when they did, Gilman became even more confused. And even more frustrated.
He couldn’t see the woman’s face. Thick, black ropes of hair hung along both sides, blocking her countenance. And her face was carefully positioned at all times. She avoided eye contact with the guards. She avoided looking toward the cameras. She looked sideways. She looked down. She hid her face carefully at all times.
Moreover, Gilman couldn’t make out much of her body. A chunky, shapeless, turtleneck sweater pulled over an ankle-length skirt covered any trace of a form. But she was tall. Taller than Oscar.
As Gilman watched, she reached forward and placed her hand across the visiting room table. Oscar reached forward and brought his hand up to meet hers. Then the woman pulled away.
“Wait! Go back!” Gilman shouted excitedly, already reaching forward to rewind the video. As he played it back a second time, he paused when the woman pulled her hand away from Oscar’s. Oscar’s hand remained for just a moment longer. And there was something in it. It might
have been money. “Do you see that?” Gilman asked accusingly.
“Yeah,” said the guard. “I guess I never noticed before.”
“You must have been too busy monitoring Oscar’s love life instead of doing your job!” Gilman snapped. “How did she get in here with something to give him? Don’t you guys frisk visitors?”
“We frisk them but we don’t strip search them,” the boy said, a bit defensively. “And we don’t do cavity searches on visitors, for God’s sake. They could hide something small in their—well, lots of places.”
Gilman’s mind was racing. “Let me see the video from the week before!”
The boy produced it. When they got to the segment showing Oscar and his visitor, Gilman was not surprised. Same woman. Same procedure. Gilman quickly looked at a third disc, and then a fourth. All four videos showed an identical pattern. This woman had been paying Oscar every weekend for months.
Gilman looked again at the printout of Oscar’s visitation dates. They had begun before the death row attack and continued ever since. Without stopping the fourth video, Gilman stood to leave the room. In his distraction, he almost did not see the movement of the woman on the screen. But it was enough to catch his eye.
“There!” he said, and sat back down on his thin chair hard enough to hear a cracking sound from beneath him. He quickly rewound the disc again, and then watched eagerly as the scene replayed. At the precise moment of interest, he paused the disc.
There was just a moment. Just a partial view. But the woman’s face was showing, at least, most of it. The angle afforded a three-quarter view, and a lock of hair in front of her shoulder obscured her from the mouth down. But it was enough. Gilman squinted to make out the image in front of him. I know that face.
His mind scanned through vision after vision of the female suspects in Operation Death Row like a video montage—the women he had been obsessing about for months. Their faces were all blending together. Katrina Stone. Her daughter, Alexis Stone. Her ex-husband’s new wife, Kimberly Stone. Oxana Kosova, Stone’s Russian student. Li Fung, Stone’s Chinese student.
The guard’s laughter interrupted Gilman’s thoughts. “See, I told you!” he said. “Uglier ‘n homemade soup, that chick!”
Gilman paid no attention as he continued to think. Angela Fischer, Jason Fischer’s ex-wife. Lisa Goldstein, his vapid, violent groupie. Gilman shook his head, blinked his eyes, and looked again. And then he felt the color drain from his face as he realized who he was looking at. He turned to face the boy before leaving the room. “It’s not a chick,” he said.
10:34 A.M. PST
Katrina and McMullan ran quickly and steadily up Fifth Avenue toward Horton Plaza. Neither spoke. Except for their clothing—Katrina in a blue prison uniform with a much-too-large sweatshirt and carrying a purse, McMullan in a navy blue suit—they might have been a couple out for a mid-morning jog. A couple out for a mid-morning jog with several news vans intently tracking their workout.
When Katrina reached into her purse and retrieved her cell phone, McMullan asked in a husky, slightly winded voice, “Who on earth… would you possibly… be calling right now?”
“My ex… ” Katrina panted. “He deserves… to know… what’s going on… with his daughter.”
When Tom answered his phone, Katrina realized she had neither the time nor the energy to sugar coat what she had to say. And she could not afford to waste the breath. “Lexi… has been kidnapped… ” she said. “She’s somewhere… at Horton Plaza… ”
“What?” Tom shouted.
“Can’t talk… ” Katrina said and hung up her phone. The phone began to ring, and she tucked it back into her purse without shutting it off.
McMullan looked at her in disbelief and she shrugged. “I told him… ” Katrina began to run faster, and McMullan sped up to keep pace with her.
“Horton… Plaza?” McMullan asked.
“It… was brilliant… ” Katrina said. “She knows… the place… like the back of her hand… and it’s otherwise… impossible to navigate… she was leveling… the playing field… ”
When they reached the corner of Fifth Avenue and E Street, they turned left and followed E to the dead end at Horton Plaza. A large escalator ran upward from the street. Without slowing, Katrina began trotting up the escalator stairs two at a time, absently pushing people out of her way as she ran.
They reached the top of the escalator and Katrina bolted forward across a narrow catwalk. McMullan followed, gaping with exasperation at the architecture in front of him. This place, at this moment, was his worst nightmare. He finally understood Alexis’ joke.
Stepping into Horton Plaza really was like entering a giant human ant farm. Or an M.C. Escher print.
To McMullan’s right, the balcony overlooked a large traffic circle at street level, three floors below. To his left loomed the most bizarre construction he had ever seen.
In his field of vision were several additional catwalks crossing an open center, around which various levels of the mall layered across each other. Staircases of varying lengths and heights interrupted the walkways and broke each floor up into multiple elevations. He could make out a few more escalators, jutting forward at angles that appeared totally random. The escalators had no counterparts moving in the opposite direction, so the flow of traffic between floors was restricted in a way that seemed totally without reason. In the open center of the building was a ponderous, pale blue stucco structure stretching across the mall in several stepwise fragments. As shoppers passed between its cylindrical support poles and walls into small openings between them, they became visible, then obstructed, and then visible again, sometimes on another level.
We might never find her here, McMullan thought, and even if we do, we might never get to her.
Katrina leaned out over the railing and scanned the crowd. McMullan joined her, his eyes sifting through couples holding hands, families, and groups of women or teenagers giggling and clutching bags from the various retailers. There was no sign of Alexis.
Abandoning their present vantage point, McMullan and Katrina stepped away from the railing and ran forward on the catwalk, passing the large, blue structure that linked the two sides of the mall. As they passed, McMullan looked down the corridor within it.
Inside were two staircases separated by a foot-thick wall. The staircase on the left led downward from where they were standing, and the one on the right upward. Neither was steep enough to actually provide access to a different level of the mall. McMullan could not tell what they connected to or where. What a zoo.
Katrina was now leaning over another balcony. In front of her was a threatening triangular structure, painted an odd, geometric pattern of black, white and red. An escalator disappeared upward into it from ground level. There was no corresponding down escalator at the same level, but McMullan could make out one at a distance. It did not, however, connect the same two floors.
The triangular structure was punctuated with arches through which McMullan could see more shoppers as they passed, and others that appeared to be sitting or standing still. Two more catwalks connected the structure to the floor McMullan and Katrina were on, or so he thought.
Next to McMullan and Katrina, a booth attendant talked boisterously on the phone. A siren approached, momentarily drowning out the constant hum of multiple conversations surrounding them, and then faded. A shriek cut through the din.
“Mom!”
McMullan and Katrina looked in unison toward the source of the sound and saw Alexis through an arch in the triangular structure looming before them. She was on a level not quite an entire floor above them. McMullan raced to the nearest catwalk that appeared to connect with the triangle. As he crossed it, he realized he had taken the wrong path. The catwalk led to a staircase heading to a lower level.
He turned back around to see two gently graded wheelchair ramps, one leading up and the other down, both leading toward unknown and different destinations. There was also an escalator between the floo
r he was on and the one where he thought Alexis had been. It ran in the wrong direction.
Katrina had already disregarded the intended direction of the escalator and leaped onto it, running against its flow and past surprised tourists. Slowly and laboriously, she began to overtake its movement. McMullan followed.
The path led to a food court stretching along one side of the mall. The mixed scents of international cuisines blended with the unmistakable aromas of hot dogs, popcorn, and cinnamon. Extending into the triangular structure they had seen from the other side was a small, shaded outdoor café, where patrons of the various eateries sat at tables enjoying their meals. Some of them looked a bit startled. Alexis was gone.
“Lexi, where are you?!” Katrina shouted into the crowd as McMullan caught up to her in the food court. When he stopped running, he felt a light tug at his pant leg and looked down.
A small boy of perhaps four years was looking up at him. “She went through there, mister,” the child said softly and pointed to another staircase heading upward.
McMullan smiled kindly and thanked the boy, then ran up the stairs with Katrina at his side. Another catwalk came to a T on the opposite side of the mall, one floor—a true floor—above the spot they had started from.
“Which way!?” Katrina shouted rhetorically, glancing feverishly to her left and right. To the right was a long, shaded corridor. To the left, a shorter one extended through a sunny patch into another triangle. Alexis answered the question.
“Mom!” she shouted again, and McMullan and Katrina followed the sound.
The Death Row Complex (The Katrina Stone Novels Book 2) Page 24
