by D. F. Bailey
He set his cellphone on the floor, raised his foot and crushed the plastic under the heel of his boot. The phone crunched into a dozen pieces and scattered across the linoleum flooring. He gathered them up, staggered over to the bathroom and dropped the broken fragments into the toilet bowl. He flushed the water and watched them disappear. Then he pulled the ID and credits cards from his wallet, cut each one in half with a pair of scissors, released them into the bowl and washed them away.
He drew a deep breath, walked over to the double-hung window looking onto Dolores Street and raised the lower section that led onto the fire escape. Although he had to climb only one story, he knew he had to steel himself for the ascent. He clutched the Biblical passage in his left hand and stepped onto the metal grate. As he stood there considering his situation, he pulled his watch from his wrist and threw it across the street towards the far sidewalk. He listened to the metallic rattle and clack as it hit the pavement, skipped over the curb and disappeared behind a garbage can.
He turned to the ladder, put a foot onto the first rung and then decided that he needed both hands free in order to clamber up to the flat roof of the apartment building. He folded the page from Revelations and tucked it into his shirt pocket. Then he grabbed the rung above his head, set his foot on the lowest bar and began to climb. As he pulled himself up to the roof he found himself silently repeating the line that foretold his death. And they were cast upon the earth. And they were cast upon the earth. And they were cast upon the earth.
The words had a hypnotic effect and when he stood on the precipice and peered down onto Delores Street his trance was complete. All the questions about life that had so perplexed him now evaporated. He no longer knew what they were. In fact, all thoughts dissolved into nothingness. All that existed was this single moment in time and his penetrating awareness of it. As he dove head-first toward the earth, he felt the wings of angels brushing the hair against the nape of his neck. There was that, and then nothing.
※ — SEVENTEEN — ※
THE LIGHT SPRINKLE began to intensify as Eve Noon turned from Montgomery Street onto Vallejo. She didn’t mind the rain. Like everyone else in the Bay Area, she’d been hoping for a break in the four-year drought and she knew it would take more than a few days of scattered showers to ease the mounting anxiety everyone felt.
Today especially, the drizzle reinforced her mood, the dreary funk that she’d slipped into since Will had left town for New York, and now, Paris. She knew he had to leave, knew that his pursuit of the killers was his way of confronting the threat before it destroyed him.
“The best defense is a good offense,” he’d chuckled on their last day together. An old cliché, but they’d both embraced its bleak wisdom. And despite the odds against him, she couldn’t dispute the logic. She knew it was his way of trying to protect her from becoming collateral damage in the escalating terror. But his absence had already become painful. It was an ache that throbbed just below her heart, a weakness in her gut where part of her body had been cut out and discarded.
Since she’d come into her astonishing fortune Eve had tried to establish a new balance in her life. The twin inheritance from the estates of Gianna Whitelaw and her fiancé Raymond Toeplitz—including the millions in his bitcoin wallet—provided a blessing and a curse.
On one hand, the money bestowed an invisible safety net. Which she needed. As a single woman working independently as a private investigator with a female-only clientele, she knew her prospects were limited.
On the other hand, it had a not-so-subtle way of changing the course of her life. She wanted something better not only for her clients, but for herself, too. After months of indecision she finally broke through her ambivalence, sold her condo on Geary Boulevard and purchased the renovated cottage on Telegraph Hill. Meanwhile, Will had taken a leave of absence from his job to write his book. Since he had no monthly paycheck coming in, she invited him to move in with her. She told him he could use the little office on the second floor. There he could write his book, Who Shot The Sheriff? And share her bed.
She remembered the look on his face when she made this proposal. The bewildered laugh he gave in return. She knew that he loved her—or something very close to it—but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words. His past got in the way. The unresolved relationships with his parents and their separate, solitary deaths. The tangled feelings about his previous wife’s cancer. The personal tragedy he suffered when his son Buddy died while in the car with his drunk girlfriend. And then there was the unrevealed mystery of whatever had happened to him in Abu Ghraib during his three years with military intelligence in Iraq. All of it led to his irrational belief that whatever he loved would die.
The insane part of all this, or at least the part that drove her half crazy, was that the more he demurred, the more determined she was to love and nourish him. Besides, she told herself, their sex life was perfect. Perfect. So even though the scales weren’t ideally balanced regarding her emotional life, just like the Tony Bennett song said, she still loved him body and soul.
The money also bought power. Since she’d purchased ten percent of the eXpress, she realized how true that old cliché was, too. Now she had an opportunity—a responsibility—to bring her cause into the broad public debate. There were only two conditions she’d set out with her purchase agreement. One, that the eXpress would shift its focus to expose criminal government and corporate corruption. Two, that within a year she had an option to increase her share of the company to fifty-one percent. Above all she wanted a purpose that she could call her own, an engine for social change.
As she considered all this the rain began to fall in sheets across the road and roll off the storefront awnings along Vallejo. Down the hill, two blocks ahead of her near Grant Street, Eve could see Leanne Spratz as she entered Caffe Trieste.
Eve pushed open the door to the Trieste and saw Leanne carrying a cup of espresso to the corner table set next to the back wall. Good, she thought to herself. We’ll need the privacy to discuss Jacob Bell and why he’d landed face-first on Dolores Street.
※
Leanne bore a worried look. She held her open palms against the sides of her temples as if she was sheltering her head from an impending migraine. “The lockdown on this case is tighter than I’ve ever seen before. Hey, we’ve both seen how the feds like to grab the ball, close down the game and move to their own baseball diamond. But this thing with Jacob Bell has gone to a whole new level.”
Eve nodded in sympathy. When she heard that Jacob Bell had been found dead on the sidewalk following his dive onto the sidewalk below his apartment building, she assumed the FBI would snatch the file out of the hands of the SFPD while his body was still oozing. After all, the local police still maintained that Toby Squire had murdered Martin Fast. But once Will identified Jacob Bell in the video with Squire and Raymond Guzman, finding Bell became the new priority. And now that he’d surfaced—literally—the feds would do their best to uncover Bell’s hidden world and the links to Fast, Waterston, and the other victims on the kill list.
“Can’t say I’m surprised,” Eve offered. “But there must be a few leads that slipped from the FBI into the SFPD’s fingers.”
“A few. Fortunately, Jill DeRosa was the first responder after Bell’s face plant. The same cop who Finch called when he spotted Toby in the T-Loin.”
Eve nodded. The T-Loin meant the Tenderloin district. “And?”
“And so I was talking to her.” She dipped her shoulder to suggest that DeRosa had let a detail or two slip out. “Jacob Bell had nothing on him. No watch, no rings, no wallet, no cellphone. Nothing. Or in his apartment. He was living like a ghost.”
“So. He intentionally stripped himself of his own identity. Either that or he was killed for it. Could be murder or suicide.”
“Fifty-fifty,” she conceded and continued. “All that was left were his fingerprints.”
Eve let the black humor pass without a smile. “So how many priors did he
have?”
“Just one. Fraud, 2013.”
“Yeah? Who was his victim?”
Leanne frowned, a look that revealed she’d seen it all too many times before. “His wife. Served two months, then got sprung on appeal.”
“So he had the smarts to get a good lawyer.”
“I guess.”
Eve studied Leanne’s face and waited. She knew more details would follow. Despite the FBI’s information embargo, Leanne had more juice to squeeze out, and she always saved the last few drops for a guessing game to taunt Eve.
“It turns out that Bell was a card player. Loved the casinos in Reno. Specialized in classic five-card draw poker.”
“No imagination, obviously.”
Leanne laughed at this. “Gotta miss you, Eve. Anyway, after he’s released on the fraud conviction he virtually disappears. On paper, that is. Until yesterday.”
Eve grimaced and glanced away. “So that’s all you’ve got?”
Leanne rolled her shoulders from side to side. “Well, there is one more thing.”
“From DeRosa?”
She shook her head as if she didn’t want to confirm the source. “A page from the Bible was found in his shirt pocket. A page from Revelations. Someone had highlighted a verse with a yellow marker.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Top secret, apparently. The feds have it locked down. You know how they get.”
Eve paused to consider this. The FBI loved enigmatic crimes. Passages from the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer—it didn’t really matter what the source might be. Anything that resembled part of a puzzle was turned over to their teams of cryptologists, profilers and analysts. She guessed that Jacob Bell’s death had been elevated from a probable suicide to part of a national murder conspiracy. Maybe they were right. In which case Will’s theory that Bell was tied to Kali Rood made more sense.
Her fingers tapped at the side of her head. “Leanne, what if the feds have this right? That Bell is tied to something bigger.”
“Like?”
“Like Kali Rood. Will saw him working for her when she was here in San Francisco.”
“Okay, but like I said, the feds have officially moved all this into a different ball park. The trail is cold.” She shrugged and held her hands up in a gesture of capitulation. “So what can you do?”
Eve set her elbows on the coffee table and leaned forward. “Last time we met, didn’t you say you had a friend who went to the same high school as Kali Rood? In Philadelphia, right?”
“A friend of my cousin. In Malvern, just outside the city.”
“Right.” Eve pressed her lips together and focussed on Leanne with a steady gaze. “So. Now I need to speak to your cousin.”
※
As Eve walked into the eXpress office, Wally caught her eye and flagged his left arm in the air. She’d known him for less than a year, but today he looked a decade older.
“Can I have ten minutes with you?” He smiled with a benign grin, a welcome look undermined by the burden of fatigue.
“Of course, Wally.”
She entered his office and noticed Fiona sitting in one of the chairs in front of his desk. Eve sat beside her as Wally closed the door. The latch closed with a quiet click and he sat facing them.
“Something’s come up, I’m afraid.” He tapped two fingers against his lips as if he hoped to stop himself from saying more. “Eve, I was just bringing Fiona up to date, and you need to know this, too.”
“All right.” Eve glanced at Fiona and settled her hands onto the arm rests. “How can I help?”
“Thanks, but I doubt that you can. Let me just say this straight up. It’s about my wife, Ginny.” He tented his fingers over his mouth. “We got the diagnosis six months ago. She has pancreatic cancer. Now they’re saying we’ve only got three to six weeks left.”
Unsure how to respond, Eve looked away. She covered her mouth with a hand and then turned back to him. “Wally, I’m sorry. That’s terrible news.”
“Yeah.” His lips sputtered slightly as he held back a sob. Then he drew himself up in his chair and leaned forward. “I’ve talked to the Parson brothers and they’re giving me a part-time leave. I’ll be in when I can, and available by phone when I’m needed. Anyway, things should continue on here without any hiccups. Fiona’s been appointed Interim Managing Editor and taking on my responsibilities until Ginny and I get through this.” He paused as if he were imagining what that might mean. “I want you to know that the Parsons and I, and all the staff here, have complete confidence that Fiona will do a fantastic job”—he swept a hand toward her with a genuine smile—“especially as we sharpen our focus on criminal corruption.”
“Thanks, Wally.” Fiona nodded with a smile of appreciation and turned to Eve. “I just want to make sure you’re comfortable with this.”
“Of course.” For a moment Eve felt as if she’d been ambushed. Even as a minority shareholder, shouldn’t she have been included in any personnel decisions? She considered the situation and decided to take the high road. “Wally, as far as I’m concerned you should take as much time as you need. I can only imagine what this is like for you and Ginny. So. No question—go home and tend to your wife. And yourself.”
She turned to Fiona. “And you’ve got my complete support. More than. We’re all going to be leaning on you, especially Will. And I’m going to dig in on this, too. I’ve got some contacts in the SFPD I’m working with. This morning I spoke to a source about Jacob Bell.”
“Did they confirm it’s a suicide?”
“Could go either way, but as you know, the case has been picked up by the FBI. Which makes me certain that they’ve tied him to the other murders on Will’s list. If that’s the case, then they’ve found a conspiracy at play, which Will believes is tied to Kali Rood.”
“I’ve been thinking the same,” Wally said.
“I have a lead,” Eve continued, “to someone who once knew her when she was in high school. I was just about to track it down.”
“All right.” Fiona glanced at Wally, then turned her chair to face Eve. “This is what I want you to do. Dig up whatever you can on her. If you need to get into online databases or internet research ask Gabe Finkleman to help you. He’s our research ninja. Once you have enough info to profile her, pass it on to Brian Stutz in the bog. He’ll write the story and I’ll sign it off when I’m ready to break Rood’s part of the story.” She paused to consider something. “Are you in contact with Will?”
Eve nodded. “Only once so far. He’s just gone to Paris to track down what happened to the latest victim. Looks like he’s still alive.”
“Edmund Austen.”
“Right, the Anglican minister.”
Fiona nodded. “Okay. Next time you’re in touch, tell him to file a story whenever he can. We got his profile on Jayne Waterston but we need more. Once a day if possible.”
Fiona turned to Wally with a look that revealed she’d now taken control of the newsroom. He smiled and gave her a nod of encouragement.
“You probably know this better than anyone,” Fiona continued, “but the FBI will try to shut us down every step of the way. However, the longer we can keep the story on the front burner, the sooner the whole case is likely to break open. It’s all about momentum. Once we start we don’t let go until we win.”
Eve felt the rush of the story building. So this is what it’s like. The drug that drew Will into this intoxicating addiction. No wonder she couldn’t stop him.
“All right. Anything else?” Fiona looked from Eve to Wally.
“Yeah, one more thing,” Wally said with a sheepish look. “With all that’s gone on at home, I neglected to tell you. That license plate that Will asked us to trace. I got something on it this morning from the New York Department of Motor Vehicles.” He paused to search through his iPad. “The car is registered to someone named Deacon Salter. I’ll forward the details to you.”
“Deacon Salter.” Fiona made a not
e on her pad and arched her eyebrows with a look of surprise. “So tell us. How exactly did you get into New York State DMV files?”
“Old dog, old tricks.” Wally smiled his marvelous cheshire cat grin. For a moment he seemed to have forgotten his wife’s cancer. “You know, I think you kids are going to miss having me here to boss you around.”
※ — EIGHTEEN — ※
WILL FINCH CLAMBERED up the stone steps to the Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu and found his way to the nursing station in the intensive care ward. The desk hummed with activity as several nurses and physicians clustered in groups of twos and threes, all of them speaking in rapid exchanges that Finch could barely grasp.
In his early teens Finch’s French speaking skills had been passable. In the first year of the 1990s recession Will’s maternal grandfather hired Will’s dad as a sales manager in his jewelry store in Montreal. On short notice his mother, father and Will moved from New Jersey to the Montreal suburb of St. Laurent where they lived until his mother’s death in 1997, the year he graduated from high school and returned with his father to New Jersey. In those five years Finch learned to speak French well enough to navigate most pedestrian conversations. But when it came to religion, politics—or a technical subject like emergency medicine—he fell out of his comfort zone. Not only did he fail to comprehend the specialized vocabulary, he couldn’t grasp the colloquial jargon and acronyms.
“Pardonnez-moi,” he said in a loud voice.
When no one responded, he slapped his hand on the countertop and tried again. He caught the eye of a nurse who had been studying a file on her computer.
“Excuse me,” he said in French. “I’m looking for Edmund Austen. Can you help me?”
“And you are who?” The nurse spoke with a heavy accent. Her face was fixed with a stoic cast, as if she needed a stern demeanor to fend off the constant interruptions.
“You speak English. Thank you,” Will began. “I’m here to see Edmund Austen. I understand he came into the hospital yesterday. A stabbing victim.”
