“You heard of it?” he asked her. “The ball?”
“I wouldn’t hear about something like that.”
“Why not?”
“I try not to go out much,” she whispered. “I keep to myself.”
Carver started to answer, then stopped. She didn’t look like a shut-in. If she wanted, she could go to a black-and-white ball, a Black Aria Ball, and blind everyone she met. But thinking back, he’d mostly seen her in their building’s mail room. Or near the front doors, where sometimes she’d hide in the shadow of a potted palm, waiting for a deliveryman. Before tonight, he’d never seen her dressed to go outdoors in the rain. Because the California current had collapsed along with the rest of the Pacific, it had been raining the entire time she’d lived in San Francisco.
“Looks like she found the pictures,” Mia said.
Carver glanced up and saw the concierge coming around the registration desk with a manila envelope in her hand. After she sat, she slid the envelope across the desk.
“That was fast.”
“Press handouts,” she said. “We had a few left over.”
Carver held the envelope open with his thumb and forefinger and looked at the first print. He nodded his thanks at the concierge and then turned to Mia.
“Let’s go.”
It was a quarter of five when he parked in his stall again. He and Mia retraced their path through the stairwell and the alley, then across Grant Avenue to the front door of their building.
“Go ahead,” Carver said. “I need a word with somebody.”
“Knock, later, if you want some tea,” she said.
She had to understand he was sending her away, that he didn’t want her around for this conversation. He wanted to have a private word with the security guard, but he was just as interested to see how she would handle a dismissal. She started for the door, then turned back to him and took his wrist.
“I could make you eggs and toast. Or if you’d rather have dinner, I could heat up a cassoulet.”
“Seriously, Mia—do you ever sleep?”
“I keep my own hours.”
She squeezed his wrist once more and then went through the door. She stood with her back to him, waiting for the elevator. When she was gone, he went in and checked his mail. A bundle of junk, the size of a brick, was waiting for him. He remembered nights standing here, shoulder to shoulder with his neighbors, each of them looking through the day’s offerings: stacks of postcard-sized disposable screens, images lighting up and soft music playing at the touch of human fingers. Gemstones and real silk. Scotch whiskey casked a hundred years ago. A subscription service that could send cuts of meat, the bones still in to prove it was real. Tap the screen to your wallet and enter your PIN code, and if you had money left to spend, any of it could come to your bedroom window by drone. More than once, he’d looked up to see trembling hands beside him. Tears on his neighbors’ cheeks; his own vision hot and blurred. But today he didn’t have time for it, as if all desire had been scorched out of him.
He took the ads and dropped them in the empty recycling bin.
The guard put down his newspaper when Carver came out of the mail room. He stood up, taking off his reading glasses as he rose from his chair.
“What’s up, Glenn?” Carver said.
“Mr. Inspector Carver,” the guard said. “Where you been?”
“Flu,” Carver said.
“You still got it?”
“I’m better.”
“Not so you could tell,” Glenn said. “What’s going on?”
“Morning I got sick, I came home somehow. But I don’t know how, and I need to know.”
“Must’ve had it bad.”
“You see me come in?” Carver asked. “I’m talking Friday, around seven.”
“I was here—Friday, I was here. But I don’t remember you coming through.”
“I’ll owe you, if you do a couple things.”
“Say it.”
Carver pointed at the ceiling, to the glazed-glass dome covering a security camera.
“The feed on that—it stores on a hard drive somewhere?”
“Off-site.” Glenn nodded. “But I can access it from here. Every hour, it makes a new file.”
“Can you email me a couple hours’ worth?” Carver asked. “Six in the morning Friday, till about eight?”
“Easy,” Glenn said. “Done.”
He pulled a notepad from his breast pocket and started patting his other pockets for a pen. Carver leaned over the desk and took the notepad.
“You don’t need to write it down.”
“Okay,” he said. “That’s fine—I’ll remember.”
Carver handed the notepad back and the man put it in his pocket again.
“There was something else?”
“The woman I was just with,” Carver said. “Mia. You know her?”
Now Glenn sat in his chair, its springs creaking alarmingly as he leaned back.
“I figure, that makes you the last.”
“The last what?”
“Last man in this building, married or single, to ask what I know about her.”
“They ask because you know, or they just, like, to ask?”
“I know a little.”
“Then fill me in.”
“She keeps to herself,” he said. He was whispering now. “She talks to me, but it’s just to ask favors.”
“What favors?”
“I look things up for her sometimes—online? And I order things. She pays me back with cash. She doesn’t like computers. Doesn’t have a credit card.”
“You’re buying her what, exactly?”
“Groceries, mostly,” the guard said. “I don’t think she even has a phone.”
“She asks you to make calls?”
“Takeout places, things like that. A repairman, once.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. Listen, I didn’t tell you this, all right? She trusts me, as far as that goes. But she’s wary.”
“Wary?”
“I’m serious, Ross. You can’t tell her.”
“You didn’t tell me anything,” Carver said. “And I didn’t even ask. But you’ll send me those files?”
“Before you get upstairs.”
“Thanks.”
He took the elevator to seven, then came down one flight of the fire stairs to his own floor, so that the elevator wouldn’t chime in his hallway. There was still a light on under Mia’s door, but she didn’t come out. He knew he’d see her later, and that was fine. He’d surely have more questions for her, after he watched the videos. So far, nothing he’d learned proved that she was lying. How long that would last, he couldn’t guess.
6
CARVER WAS IN the old study overlooking Bush Street, in the chair that had belonged to his father. He was tapping his fingers against the armrests, staring at a computer monitor marked along its bottom edge Property of the SFPD.
He scrolled the video backwards, to the spot he’d marked, and started it again. He saw the lobby, the security camera’s fisheye lens getting most of it in the frame. Glenn sat off to the right, head down as he read something. The digital time stamp at the bottom of the image showed 7:03:58. Carver watched the front door. It opened at 7:04:01, and the woman in the blue jacket came in. She was holding a cellphone to her ear with one hand, and was using the other hand to shield the mouthpiece. When she came to the middle of the lobby she stopped and seemed to listen. Then she looked up for the first time and scanned the room quickly, but Carver couldn’t see her eyes; she was wearing sunglasses.
Between the dark lenses and the way she was using her hands to cup her phone to her face, Carver couldn’t make out any of her features. And that was surely the point. He froze the screen when she was staring directly into the camera. He’d watched the whole thing already, so he understood what she was doing. She’d needed to know where the camera was. She had to figure the angles.
He started the video again. The woman l
ooked away from the camera, and then crossed the lobby toward Glenn. Now her back was to the camera and she was holding the cell phone in her right hand, beneath the level of the security desk. Seven seconds into their conversation, Glenn began gesturing. He pointed toward the door, then counted along the fingers of his left hand with his right index finger. One, two, three. Both hands went into the air, palms down. Giving her directions, maybe. The image quality was too poor to read Glenn’s lips.
Carver paused the video.
Of course it had no sound, but he thought an audio feed wouldn’t have made any difference this time. She wouldn’t have said anything worthwhile to Glenn. She was just distracting him. He looked at her right hand. She’d changed her grip on the phone, was holding it like a flashlight. Its thin edge was pointed directly at the camera’s lens. He wasn’t exactly sure what kind of phone it was, or pretended to be. It had to be linked with the sunglasses, though, and the laser inside it must have been powerful. A camera on the phone, feeding to a heads-up display in the sunglasses. It was the only way to explain what she did next.
He’d talked to inspectors who’d worked art burglaries, to FBI agents who ran counterintelligence. They had stories. The tech firms in San Jose and Palo Alto might have run out of ideas a decade ago, content to repackage the same goods in brighter boxes. But somewhere there were still active research labs. They just didn’t make anything for the public. If you could believe the rumors coming out of the FBI, there were little autonomous bugs that could crawl through a building’s air ducts and into its secure servers, rewiring and reprogramming them. There were drugs that could make a man talk and then forget what he’d said. A camera-killing laser disguised as a cell phone wasn’t that hard to swallow.
He toggled the slide bar at the bottom of the screen to adjust the playback speed, dragging it all the way back. Then he hit play again, and watched her. The video crawled frame by frame. She never turned her head, never looked away from Glenn. But with her right hand, she was fine-tuning her aim. Once she had it locked in, she didn’t move a finger. She must have triggered the laser with her eyes, selecting the switch with a glance on the heads-up display, pushing the button with a practiced blink behind her dark lenses.
Glenn wouldn’t have seen anything.
And after she switched on the laser, Carver couldn’t see anything either. In the last visible frame, she was leaning against the desk, talking to Glenn. The next frame was pure white. The camera’s photosensor was about to burn out.
Carver backed up the video and replayed the second before she turned on the beam. This time, he didn’t focus on her hand, didn’t try to read Glenn’s lips or make sense of his gestures. He watched the brass door. In the two frames before everything washed away to white, he saw that it was opening, saw the shadow gathering at the threshold.
Then the screen went white, and it stayed that way for twenty-nine seconds, which was just long enough. Three men could have dragged Carver across the lobby, hit the elevator button, and stepped into the car. There weren’t any cameras in the elevator. At the security desk, the woman had Glenn’s full attention.
Carver sat and watched the white screen, watched the seconds tick past. When the colors came back, the woman still faced away from the camera. She was leaning on the security desk, talking to Glenn. She must have made a joke, because Glenn started to laugh. Then she turned, bringing her cell phone back to her ear, covering half her face again as she pretended to shield the microphone with her hand. She crossed to the elevator without looking at the camera, and twenty-five seconds later, the doors opened and she stepped out of view.
Carver scrolled to the beginning and watched it again.
He woke at eight o’clock in the evening, still in his father’s chair. He couldn’t remember falling asleep, but now that he was awake again, he understood what he had to do. The lost days clung to him, as persistent as the smell of hot iron seeping from his pores. Maybe that was why he’d been moving so slowly: the poison hadn’t fully left his system. But he couldn’t wait any longer. He needed to go in. The only way out of the dark was to talk to Jenner and Hernandez and then follow it from there. There’d been a crime and a cover-up. It wasn’t so different from what he saw any other day, except that this time, it had happened to him.
7
WHILE PULLING OUT of his narrow parking space, Carver’s hand bumped something between the seats. He hit the brakes, then shifted the transmission to park. Before he even looked, he knew what he’d touched. It shouldn’t have been there. He unclipped the thermal scope from its mount and turned it around to examine it. After a moment, he switched it on and put it to his eye, scanning around the garage.
The concrete walls were too thick to get a read-through, but he could tell a handful of the cars had been driven recently from the glow of fading warmth radiating from their electric motors. The scope worked, and that was all he needed to know it wasn’t his. He didn’t need to check the serial number. He’d shattered his on Wednesday night, diving for the asphalt, the kid’s bullets ricocheting off the pavement and whining into the dark like bees. The last thing he’d done that night was drop the pieces off with Equipment and fill out the paperwork for a replacement. So this couldn’t be his. But when he brought it back up and smelled the textured metal grip, he knew it must have been with him on Thursday night.
It was cool to the touch, but it smelled like an iron skillet hot enough to smoke. It didn’t make any sense at all, but at least it fit the building pattern.
At the Bryant Street headquarters, Carver made it through the first floor and to the elevators without talking to anyone but the Ønske Corporation guard the commissioner had contracted to run the backscatter x-ray. The man set down his magazine long enough to check Carver’s badge and wave him through. As soon as he got to the Homicide Detail’s corner on the fifth floor, he knew Jenner was in. There was a light behind the frosted glass window of their shared office. As he came closer, he caught the murmur of a radio. A throaty torch singer, the kind of stuff Jenner liked to see at the club on his nights off. Carver turned the knob and put his shoulder to the door—it hadn’t fit properly in its frame since last year’s earthquake—and stepped inside. Jenner looked at him, then glanced sideways at the three-foot stack of files leaning from Carver’s chair.
“I’ll clear that.”
“I can stand,” Carver said.
“Sure,” Jenner said. He switched off his radio. “But you’d better sit.”
Jenner came around his desk and put the files on the floor. He wheeled the chair across the office and didn’t speak until Carver was sitting.
“Sorry for that.”
“For what?” Carver asked. “Carrying my weight the last three days?”
“I don’t know,” Jenner said. “I don’t know how much I carried. You remember what I said about Patrick Wong?”
Carver nodded. His neck was still stiff. He twisted his chin left, then right.
“You got a sit-down with Patrick,” Carver said. “Had a talk about his uncle.”
“Last night, when we talked—when you and I talked—I remembered it clear as anything.”
“But now?”
Jenner tapped his fingertips against his temples.
“Now I got nothing. And I can’t find my notes.”
“That’s what this is?” Carver asked, pointing around the office. “You’re tossing the place, looking for the notes?”
There were stacked binders on both desks, and leaning columns of folders along the walls. The drawers to the filing cabinets were open and empty.
“Any interview, I always take notes,” Jenner said. “During and after.”
“You remember taking them?”
“Taking them, sure. We were sitting in the lounge. That booth in the back, by the fish tank?” Jenner looked up, waiting for Carver to nod before he went on. “I had the notepad on the table. Took a napkin, swiped the table before I put the pad down, so it wouldn’t get grease spots. But what I wrote? I
can’t remember that at all.”
“That ever happened before?”
“Not like this,” Jenner said.
“You think someone came in, took your notes?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t remember what he said?”
Jenner shook his head.
“Ross—it’s not just that. I don’t even remember what I asked him. But I know I talked to him,” Jenner said. “Me and Patrick, in the lounge. After closing. I talked to him.”
Carver tried to understand. He’d never seen his partner’s eyes turn to the floor to avoid a glance, had never seen him rub his fingertips into his scalp as if searching for the hair that had abandoned him a decade ago. If Jenner had been on the other side of the table in the interrogation room, Carver would have known what to do. When his suspect started acting like that, it was time for the kill.
But this was Jenner, so Carver stepped back and gave him space to breathe. Besides, Carver knew something about this kind of memory, lost thoughts that slipped out of reach like an animal in the underbrush.
“The lieutenant in?” he asked.
“Left already,” Jenner said. “Dinner with the commissioner.”
“That’s what they do now? Have dinner?”
“Between soup and dessert, maybe they’ll come up with a way to privatize everything else in the building. Why stop with security? We could have coin-operated elevators, corporate sponsors for the urinals.”
“You tell her about Patrick?”
“As soon as I got in, the next evening—Friday night.”
“A written report?”
Jenner shook his head.
“Just the two of us talking, either side of a desk. Then she tells me to partner up with Bodecker until you’re back on your feet.”
“After you talked to Patrick, then what?”
Jenner was massaging the bridge of his nose with his thumb and two fingers.
“It was late. I went around for dinner, then home.”
“Dinner at that place of yours?”
“Nothing like that. I didn’t get drunk, if that’s what you’re asking.”
The Night Market Page 6
