by SL Huang
“Nobody at work talks about her,” murmured Pilar. “I assumed it was ’cause of the lawsuit, you know, like she’s frowned on there now because she’s suing them—I mean, it’s her husband’s name on the suit, but I had figured he was doing it on her behalf or something if she was sick, and…I don’t know. It makes more sense now, I guess.” She hugged her arms around herself. “What does the company have to do with their daughter? I mean, if Denise…passed, shouldn’t her husband already…I mean…”
Apparently Pilar had somehow missed Warren’s very loud, very public, and very insistent allegations. “Warren insists Arkacite kidnapped her.”
Pilar’s eyes got huge again. “What! Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, they’re a soul-crushing company to work for, but kidnapping? Besides, why would they want to?”
“I don’t know,” I said again.
“I don’t even want to go back tomorrow now,” said Pilar. “If I didn’t have student loans and my car payment and rent and credit card bills, I wouldn’t.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, either.
“You know,” said Pilar, “I could look around for you, if you like. I mean, not a whole lot—they’re always nosing after us for people leaking tech secrets, so I can’t poke around too much—but I can at least check the computer system, see if any files seem funny. I mean, if you want me to? Is there a number I can reach you at?”
“Uh, yeah, sure.” I fished around for a pen but didn’t have one; Pilar pulled one out of her purse and offered me a leftover napkin from her fast food dinner to write on.
“And here’s mine,” she said, scribbling her name and number on another napkin in wide, round lettering. “Just, you know. In case.”
I regarded the phone number with growing suspicion. “I don’t get it. Why offer to help me?”
She looked scandalized. “You just told me the company I work for kidnapped a little girl!”
“You pointed out Lau to me from the beginning, though,” I said. “Why get involved?” And why take the extra step to come talk to me?
Pilar’s lips pursed self-consciously. “I don’t know. Maybe ’cause I get so bored there. Or maybe ’cause I always felt bad for Mr. Warren. I really liked Denise, you know. Or maybe ’cause Mr. Lau grabbed my bottom at the copier once and now I want to get back at him. Sometimes I—”
“Wait, what? Did Lau really do that? Aren’t there laws against that or something?”
Pilar blinked at me. “Come on. You’re a woman.”
“So?”
“So, you know how it is.”
“No,” I said. “I really, really don’t.”
“Oh.” She scrunched up her face, her voice getting smaller. “I think I want to live in your world, then.”
I wasn’t sure she was right about that, but I let it pass. I thought of Mama Lorenzo again, and her fierce protection of her niece, and had a brief urge to go live on a deserted island somewhere where I didn’t have to interact with people or deal with any of the resultant complications.
CHAPTER 7
I’D FORGOTTEN I’d turned my phone off. As I trudged back up the beach I reinserted the battery and hit the power button; it came on to show eight missed calls—two from numbers I didn’t recognize and six from Checker.
Shit.
I dialed Checker back right away, not bothering to check my voicemail, visions of Mama Lorenzo and her enforcers flitting through my brain.
“There you are,” said Checker. I hadn’t even heard the phone ring once. “I was getting worried.”
He was worried? “I turned my phone off,” I said. He didn’t sound like he was dead or being tortured. “Everything all right?”
“What? Yeah, fine.” He sneezed. “Except that I’m allergic to cats. I don’t suppose I can go back to the Hole yet?”
Not a chance. “It’s still not quite sorted, but I’m on it. I’ll let you know.”
“Okay, well, get on it. By which I mean thank you, you know. What did you find out at Arkacite?”
“Well, I finally found someone who’s seen Liliana.” Which meant I had a case. I wasn’t sure whether to be happy about that or not.
“You did! Who?” cried Checker.
“Pilar Velasquez. She works as a receptionist at the company.”
Checker’s voice took on the absent quality he had when he was simultaneously concentrating on his computer. “Administrative assistant, it looks like, as a temp, but she’s permanent enough that she has her own company email address. Oh, she’s a hottie,” he added, apparently having just found a picture.
“Move along, hot shot.”
“Oh, all right. Let’s see, she started at Arkacite about a year and a half before Constance Rayal left. Did you get my voicemail about Rayal, by the way?”
“It’s ‘Rayal,’” I said, correcting his pronunciation. “And no. Tell me.”
“She’s not dead.”
“What?” Why did Noah Warren keep talking like she was, then? “She’s not?”
“Nope. She’s renting a house out in Altadena.”
“Wait, then why did she leave Arkacite? Was she even sick?”
“Uh, yeah, but probably not the way you think. Right after resigning she signed herself into an inpatient psychiatric ward.”
Holy crap. “How long was she there for?”
“Only a few days. They moved her to outpatient treatment pretty fast.”
This had to be connected. “I need her psych file. Can you get it for me?”
“I can,” said Checker slowly. “I won’t.”
“Uh—why not?”
He was a moment in answering. “Because I’m not going to hack someone’s personal psychiatric records.”
“You decide to respect boundaries now? You?”
“Some things are private,” he said. “I’ve got lines.”
“So cross them,” I snapped. “This could be important.”
“No.”
“What the hell—why not?”
“Cas, you aren’t going to sway me on this.”
“Stop being stupid!” My hand tightened on the phone. “You’ve got no problem breaking into arrest records, and financials, and medical information—Jesus, you get me private emails all the time. And what, a psychiatric stay is off limits?”
“Yes,” he said.
“That’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I’m not changing my mind.”
“I’m doing you a huge goddamn favor on this Lorenzo thing, you know,” I said.
Checker sighed. “Are you really trying to guilt me into giving you someone’s private psychiatric history?”
“Yes! If that’s what it takes. I need that information!”
“Then go talk to Rayal yourself,” he said. “I’ll text you her address. Do you need anything else?” The change of subject was very loud in his voice.
“Send me Lau’s address, too. He knows something.”
“Done. Wait, he’s not going to end up a smear on the sidewalk, is he?”
“What, you’re telling me how to do my job now?” I asked snidely.
He took a deep breath. “For God’s sake, it’s one thing I refuse to look up for you—”
I hung up on him. He tried to ring me back, but I let it go to voicemail. I deleted the new message and the other six he’d left without listening to them.
I checked the other two voicemails. The first was Benito Lorenzo, who sounded somewhere on the border between nervous and terrified. He said he was sure my “disagreement” with Mama Lorenzo was all a misunderstanding and pleaded with me to come in and talk about it with them. I deleted it. The final message, for once, was unrelated to the rest of the mess my life had become; what sounded like a male voice said he would like to meet as soon as possible to discuss a job. He said he’d been referred by Ari Tegan, a recurring client of mine—not to mention the best forger I knew.
My thumb hovered over the callback button.
I now knew Warren’s daughter existed, but it was looking less and less likely he would be able to pay me. It wouldn’t hurt to have another job pending on the off chance this one fizzled. Just in case I needed it.
Of course, this guy might be working for Mama Lorenzo and planning a setup. Benito had my number, so—
I stopped in my tracks. Benito had my number. Little Dino Palermo hadn’t followed a signal on my car; Mama Lorenzo’s people had tracked my phone. Checker wasn’t the only one who could trace a cell location once he had the number.
What was I, a fucking amateur? I should be dead.
Fuck.
I’d have to pick up a new phone as soon as possible. Before disabling this one, I tried calling Tegan to see if he’d referred someone to me, but the phone rang out to a generic voicemail recording. I told him to call me the instant he checked it and hung up.
Well, if this was an ambush…I tapped the phone against my palm, thinking.
I dialed back the man who’d asked to hire me and left a message suggesting a meeting at eleven that night at Grealy’s, an oyster bar—emphasis on bar—famous in the LA underground for…I suppose the kind term would be discretion. It was a dim, smoky hole-in-the-wall where they had terrible food and worse drinks, mopped the floors every month or so, and made sure everyone minded his own business or got kicked out. I loved the place.
More importantly for tonight, it was well-known enough as a locus for shady dealings not to arouse suspicion in my new potential client—or fake potential client—and I knew the surroundings well enough already to have a few ideas for how to set up my own counter-ambush there.
I called Warren and left a message for him, too, telling him I’d confirmed he probably had a case and we therefore needed to discuss my fee. He was lucky I had principles about children, otherwise I would’ve been dropping his investigation like it was diseased until that good ol’ cash-in-hand moment—but Liliana deserved someone figuring out exactly what was going on here. Then I turned off the damn cell phone, pulled the battery again, and hoofed it away from Venice Beach while I churned through the options on my Mafia problem.
Maybe Dino had hared off on his own, or maybe Mama Lorenzo had been testing me, but one thing was certain: the people after me from now on wouldn’t be inexperienced kids. I’d be dealing with Lorenzo family hitmen.
Well, what did you expect when you deliberately made yourself a target? I’d bought myself little bit of time and had my one lucky break—I needed to come up with a better way out now.
What I needed was some sort of leverage. Mama Lorenzo hadn’t gone for bribery, which left blackmail, threats, or maybe my own plan of outright violence.
I could flip onto the offense and just start killing members of her family until she gave in. But that would mean I’d have to tell Arthur I’d broken my streak and restart my count, and something about that felt twitchy and unsatisfying, even though I didn’t have a moral problem with capping Lorenzos. Besides, there were an awful lot of them, and starting to take out their ranks might lead to the same problem I’d have if I assassinated Gabrielle Lorenzo herself—escalating this into a war with me as the sole target, with no way out and no going back. Right now, I still had the option of finding a better solution, but that wouldn’t be the case if the Family went mad with blood and vengeance.
Violence might not be such a good idea after all. Who knew Arthur had a point about these things?
I filed “Lorenzo assassination spree” under Plan B. Threats were hard to make work if I wasn’t planning to back them up, which left blackmail.
I would have put money on Mama Lorenzo herself having a spotless record—she was the type who demanded just as much out of her own leadership as she did from her family. But were all the people around her so squeaky clean? If I could gather enough dirt on the Lorenzos’ activities…find a handful of good tidbits valuable enough to trade silence for our lives…
Checker usually would have been my first resource on such fact-finding, but I was still pissed at him, and more importantly, I didn’t want him knowing how far I was from finishing off his Mob problem. I’d gather some intel on my own, hopefully starting with tonight. And if the meet happened to be a legitimate client, well, I’d just have to put “break into Lorenzo estate” on my to-do list for afterward. In fact, I’d do that anyway.
Blackmail it was, then. Damn, having a plan in place was a relief.
And since I couldn’t do anything on that plan till dark, I’d use the remaining daylight to conduct a civilized visit. Swearing colorful curses at Checker and his refusal to violate Denise Rayal’s privacy, I boosted another car and started for her house in Altadena.
Going west to east across LA during rush hour is the seventh circle of hell. It took me over two hours to traverse the city, and I might have left more than a few pissed-off drivers in my wake.
I pulled up outside the address Checker had given me just as the sun was setting. Denise Rayal was renting a pleasant-looking, ivy-covered clapboard cottage on a little spot of land nestled at the foot of the mountains. I parked in the driveway, climbed the steps onto the porch, and rang the bell.
No one answered.
Well, hell, I’d fought rush hour traffic to get here; there was no reason to waste the trip. I thought about kicking the door in, decided that was slightly rude, and went around to the back, wishing I’d brought something to pick the locks with.
A window air conditioner sticking out of the side of the house caught my eye. Perfect. I took a running start and vaulted on top of it. My feet balanced on the fulcrum as I slid the window up, and I slipped inside, equalizing my mass so the unit barely wobbled before I let the pane slam back down.
Rayal’s home was simple but comfortable. I wandered from room to room, wondering what I was looking for.
She had a number of photographs around, on end tables and hanging on walls and a few on the mantle. I figured out who she was from the pictures: a woman who looked her age but did it gracefully, her features a shade too wide to be beautiful but a broad smile that might get her categorized as handsome. Her skin tone was lighter than her husband’s—I wasn’t sure if she was light-skinned African-American or mixed—and in all the photographs her eyes were her best feature: large, bright, and lively. I saw pictures with a group of people who were obviously her family; with someone who looked like a sister, both of them bundled up in front of a ski slope; of her shaking hands with someone on a dais, everyone in business suits.
And there were quite a few pictures of a younger Denise with a small boy, a boy with a darker skin tone than she had and unruly black hair. In all of them, Rayal was laughing or smiling as she played with him or embraced him. There were also pictures of the boy alone, portraits they’d probably had taken, and one of him on Santa’s knee at a mall, and one of him playing with a large orange plastic truck.
I picked up a picture of Rayal tackling him while he appeared to be trying to run out of frame, squealing in glee. This was clearly her son, the one she and Warren had lost years before.
There were no pictures of a daughter.
What the hell was going on here?
The house wasn’t big. I found a neat but lived-in bedroom that showed me nothing but another picture of her son on a nightstand. The bathroom was unremarkable save for the prescription bottles of what I could only assume were psychiatric medication. I’d burned my phone, but Rayal had a fancy camera sitting on a tripod in her bedroom, and I swiped it to take pictures of the pill labels. Screw Checker, I could do a search on the drugs and find out what had happened to her myself.
The other bedroom had been turned into a study. Books overflowed the shelves and were stacked haphazardly on the chairs and desk, the towers threatening to tumble into her desktop computer. I scanned the titles; they all appeared to be related to her work—software engineering, machine learning, control theory, natural language processing. Books on programming languages I’d never heard of. She had lots of academic papers heaped around as wel
l, loose or in large binders.
Whatever Rayal’s reason for leaving Arkacite, she hadn’t given up her work.
I tried turning on the computer—I knew how to get by rudimentary OS passwords—but Rayal had a touch more security and the machine stymied my elementary cracking. So instead I used a paperclip to pick the locks on the file cabinet. Aside from a plethora of paperwork connected to medical insurance claims—I gathered they related to her hospital stay and continued psychotherapy—I found a library’s worth of contracts and nondisclosure agreements from Arkacite, folders and folders of them, each inches thick.
I skimmed the pages. It looked like all the work she had done for the company had stayed with them, and that she was not permitted to work in the same line of research upon the termination of her employment or even discuss that research outside of the company. The convoluted legal language was downright frightening, if I was reading it correctly.
Jesus. What had she been working on?
Or was Arkacite just so worried about corporate leaks that they were desperate to cover themselves?
Scraps of paper and spiral notebooks around the office showed some electrical engineering sketches, but they didn’t seem complete, and after looking at her contracts I doubted they were related to her work for Arkacite. I snapped a few pictures of her notes anyway, on the off chance Checker could give me more insight once I decided to speak to him again.
Then, after a moment’s internal debate, I unscrewed and slid out her hard drive. With enough time to work at it I’d be able to get in without Checker’s help, and if I came back to talk to Rayal, she wouldn’t know I was the thief, so no harm done. Given what I’d seen in her file cabinet, she’d probably assume it was cat burglars in ski masks hired by Arkacite.
I turned to let myself out—it was getting late, and I had a meeting with a man who would probably try to kill me—but one more picture caught my eye. The photo was in a printout of an email tacked to Rayal’s bulletin board, and showed a posed group of eight people on the plaza in front of Arkacite’s headquarters, with Denise on one end. Next to her, a wiry Indian guy sporting a cheeky grin held up a device behind the head of the pudgy Asian man on his other side, and whatever it was he held had flashed two clever little forks of lightning at the camera as it went off—electronic bunny ears.
