The Rook pbf-2

by Steven James

  I could only hope that the video of Cassandra hadn’t been posted yet.

  In 2006, after the death of the “Crocodile Hunter,” Steve Irwin, the footage of him being killed by the stingray was stolen from the police storage facility in Queensland, Australia, and posted on the web. Within hours, it shot to the top of all the major video viewing sites and stayed there for months. Even now, two and a half years later, it still receives thousands of views every day.

  I remember Ralph talking to me about all this a few months ago.

  “Twenty-first-century rubbernecking,” he said with a profound sadness. “Everyone wants to peek over the yellow crime scene tape, see if there’s a body in the wreck on the other side of the road. It used to be just from your car. Now, it’s from your laptop computer, your cubicle, your cell phone.”

  I shook my head. “Isn’t there enough pain in the world already?

  Enough death to satisfy people?”

  “I guess not,” he said.

  Nope.

  I guess there isn’t.

  Maybe Tessa was right. Maybe humans do find pain interesting. Maybe there is something in us that wants to see other people suffer. I hoped not, but the evidence from real life made me think she might be right.

  Creighton Melice caught sight of movement in the video monitor of the camera he’d set up outside the warehouse’s south side entrance.

  A police car.

  He grabbed his gun and watched as the car pulled to a stop in the warehouse’s parking lot.

  An officer stepped out of the car, and then, so did someone else.

  Randi.

  The warehouse only had a few doors and most of them were chained shut from the inside.

  But one of the doors was not chained.

  That’s the door Creighton headed toward. If Randi and the cop decided they wanted to visit him, he would give them a little welcoming present.

  A team of seven agents followed Ralph into the conference room, and we all watched the video together.

  Then Ralph rose and began to pace. “As of right now, this is a joint investigation with the San Diego police. Blair, I want you to work with ‘em. Look into Cassandra’s background. Family, ex-boyfriends, colleagues, the whole deal.” One of the agents acknowledged Ralph with a nod. “Hernandez, find out which companies nationwide could manufacture a tank like that, and if any have been shipped to this region.” I wasn’t surprised Ralph had learned the agents’ names when they joined us during the break. He was cut out for leadership. A natural.

  He threw me a glance. “What do you think, Pat, start with the last six months and work backward? Look for companies in Southern California first, then spread out?” Even though he was officially in charge, we’d worked together on so many cases that it felt routine for him to consult with me.

  “Yes,” I said. “Good call.”

  Blair and Hernandez nodded. Rose. Left.

  Lien-hua walked to the whiteboard. “Let’s not miss the big picture here. When I was a girl, my parents once took my family to Yosemite. I sat behind my father, who was driving. When cars or trucks would pass us, they’d go right past my window.”

  The newly assigned agents listened intently. I didn’t know where Lien-hua was going with this, and it didn’t look like they did either.

  “Whenever a semi would pass our car and I’d look out my window, since all I could see was the truck, it didn’t look like our car was traveling at fifty-five or sixty miles per hour, but rather it looked like the truck was standing still-”

  “And your car was going backward,” exclaimed Ralph.

  “Right.”

  “So,” I said, finally tracking with her. “Point of reference. Things are not always what they appear.”

  “Right. The perspective you use to address a problem. It affects how you view the situation.”

  “OK.” Ralph rapped his knuckles against the table. “Maybe we need to step out of the car and look at this from the side of the road.”

  “Yes,” Lien-hua said. “Or climb into the cab of the truck.”

  She picked up a dry-erase marker. “Let’s imagine we abducted Cassandra.” She looked around the room. “Why? What possible motive could we have?”

  One of the agents to my right called out, “Ransom.”

  Lien-hua nodded, wrote it on the board. Ralph had let her take control of the meeting without any objection. He’s not the kind of guy to feel intimidated by someone else’s competence.

  “What else?” Lien-hua asked.

  “To kill them,” a female agent said grimly. “Or to abuse, or torture, or rape them.”

  Lien-hua wrote the word harm on the board. “I think you’re right,” she said. “So. Two categories so far: to harm the victim or benefit from the abduction.”

  “Or both,” I added. “In this case, it appears Cassandra’s abductor wants to torture her, but he also gave a time and a choice: ‘Freedom or pain? You decide.’ It seems that if something happens before the deadline, it could buy Cassandra’s freedom.”

  Lien-hua wrote both on the board. “Any other thoughts?”

  I didn’t want to stand on my soapbox, but I did want to make sure we stayed focused. “People want lots of things out of life,”

  I said. “Money, love, power, sex, respect, fame, whatever. The list goes on. We want to be happy, comfortable. We want meaning and adventure, as well as some sense of security or safety. Sometimes we want all of them at the same time. Trying to decipher someone’s motives is like trying to follow the roots of a tree. They all inter-mingle beneath the surface. You can’t pull one up without uprooting many others as well.”

  Lien-hua set down the dry-erase marker. “But Pat, everyone has something that matters to him more than anything else. That one thing that he would die for, or risk everything for.”

  Ralph leaned both of his mighty arms on the table. “It’s one way to control people,” he said. “If you can find the thing that matters most to someone and either promise to help him get it or threaten to take it away, he’ll do almost anything for you-go against his values, his morals, his religion. Find that one thing and you own him.” He rapped the table with his fist. “Army Ranger Interrogation Techniques 101."

  Lien-hua gave us a decisive nod. “So. The email was sent to Hunter. Someone is trying to control him. So what does Austin Hunter want?”

  “Cassandra,” I said. Nods from the people in the room. We were on the same page. “But,” I added, “if Hunter is our arsonist, what did he want when he started the other fires?”

  Lien-hua looked at me with a light grin. “It sounds like you’re trying to decipher motives, Dr. Bowers.”

  “Just trying to be cooperative.”

  Ralph was taking notes on a scrap of paper, figuring out all the threads of the investigation we needed to pursue. He nodded to one of the men in the room. “Peterson, check Hunter’s bank accounts, see if our guy made any sizable deposits around the time of the fires.

  Graham, Castillo, have Lieutenant Mendez take you back through Hunter’s apartment, see if there’s anything there that might lead us to him. Solomon, you’re all over that dart. Find us a brand name, manufacturer, distributor. And Mueller, go through Hunter’s personnel records and start following up with the other guys on his SEAL team. Maybe there’s a connection we missed. I’ll work with Lieutenant Graysmith, have him send a team to Cassandra’s place.”

  I could feel a growing urgency in every word he spoke.

  “But,” Lien-hua said, “the big question we still need to answer is: if eight o’clock really is the deadline, what determines whether or not Cassandra gets set free? What does Hunter bring to the table?”

  “He specializes in starting fires,” I said.

  “What do you think?” Ralph was addressing the whole team.

  “‘Burn down a building and you get Cassandra back.’ Sounds like ransom to me.”

  “Yes,” said Lien-hua thoughtfully. “But if he started other fires before, why not j
ust ask him to start this one…” Once again she was doing what she did best: diving into people’s motives, thinking like they think. Reasoning like they reason. “Wait. Maybe this is a building he wouldn’t normally agree to burn down. He’s always been careful to set the fires so that they burn out quickly. No fatalities. No injuries.”

  Uh-oh.

  “You think maybe a building filled with people?” asked one of the agents nervously, mirroring my thoughts.

  “We can’t count it out,” Lien-hua said. “Like Ralph said before, if you threaten to take away the one thing that matters most, a person will abandon his values, everything he holds dear.”

  In the icy silence that followed her statement, I decided what angle I had to pursue. I stood up. “I’ll follow up on the videos from the aquarium, see if we got any footage of the abductor. Also, Cassandra was working on some kind of grant from the government. I want to know exactly what it involved. I’ll fly through some of her files, see if I can figure out why she went to the aquarium this morning. Maybe that’ll tell us what the people who took her are after.”

  “I’m going to watch the video of her again,” said Lien-hua. “Try to climb into our kidnapper’s head.”

  “All right,” said Ralph. “And the SDPD is sending a dozen cops to comb the warehouses by the shipyard.”

  “A dozen?” Lien-hua said. “That’s it?”

  “All they could spare.” And then he said, “Everyone’s got a job to do. Let’s do it.”

  Without another word we stood and went our separate ways.

  I looked at my watch. We had less than four hours to find Cassandra Lillo before she died in the tank.

  44

  Creighton stared calmly down the gun barrel at the head of the cop standing beside Randi. The door was cracked open just enough for him to watch them, and to kill them if necessary. All he needed was a good reason to pull the trigger.

  Both Randi and the cop were about sixty feet away, easily within range, and Creighton could hear them talking.

  “I don’t know,” Randi said. “I think this looks familiar. But it’s hard to tell for sure. It was dark.”

  “This is the sixth warehouse we’ve been to.” The cop sounded exasperated. “Look. I gotta go. They need us to sweep through this area for another case and I’m already late. I’ll drop you off at the station.”

  “No, I think this might be the one. I’m pretty sure.”

  “You think it might be; you’re pretty sure. That’s what you said about the last one. Look, there’s no car here. No phone. Go to the mall, buy yourself a new phone, and just be thankful nothing worse happened to you last night.”

  Randi protested one more time, but the cop had already started walking back to his car. She took one final look around the parking lot and then followed him.

  Well, it was probably better this way.

  But not nearly as much fun.

  Just before they climbed into the squad car, Creighton heard the cop say into his radio, “Yeah, this is Officer Brandeiss here.

  There’s nothing at the old Lardner Manufacturing place. It checks out. We’re good to go.”

  Creighton waited by the door until the two of them had driven away.

  So, for whatever reason, the cops were looking into the warehouse district. A tip? Who knows. But now it didn’t matter. Officer Brandeiss had just reported the area clear.

  Thanks, Randi, thought Creighton as he went back to see how high the water had risen in the tank. Now no one else will disturb Cassandra and me for the rest of the day

  45

  The grammatically incorrect and utterly moronic sign outside Dragon’s Tail Tattooing read, “Tattoo’s! Done while you wait.” Tessa just shook her head. She stood for a moment trying to decide if she really wanted to go through with this. Especially here.

  Tangy smoke met her at the door. She recognized the smell, and it didn’t come from a cigarette. Harsh, driving music pulsed toward her from inside the studio. One of her favorite bands. DeathNail 13. At least that was cool.

  Lien-hua’s words from earlier in the day came back to her: We do what we have to do.

  She stepped inside, and a looming greasy-haired guy behind the counter turned down the music and snuffed out what he’d been smoking. He wore a T-shirt that read: “Drunk chicks dig me.” Tessa could hardly believe she was going to trust her arm to someone like this, especially when she saw his eyes crawl across her body, lingering in all the places she would’ve expected a guy wearing his T-shirt to stare.

  “Should I buy you a camera?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “To take a picture. That what you want?” She gave him the finger.

  “Take a picture of this, jerk.”

  Someone shrouded in a pool of shadows in the left-hand corner of the room laughed. She couldn’t make out his face but saw that he was wearing shorts and flip-flops. He lit up a cigarette.

  She surveyed the place. Stenciled pictures of tattoo artwork covered every spare inch of the walls. On the right, two open doorways led to the tattoo rooms. Inside each of them, she could see a sink, countertop, needles, and a tattoo machine waiting in the corner.

  “So, then,” grumbled the guy behind the counter. “What can I do for you?”

  “This is a tattoo parlor, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to need your parents’ permission. Did you bring your mommy with you?”

  “My mom is dead.”

  A flat silence. “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Enough with this guy.

  She looked around the dingy, smoky room and saw that the guy in the corner had leaned forward. He looked like he was in his early twenties. Curly, blond, surfer hair. A little soul patch.

  Glistening blue eyes.

  “The music from before,” she said. “When I came in. Is that what you like? DeathNail 13?”

  “Yeah. Their last CD rocked.” He had a cool, breezy, memorable voice.

  “Which track did you like best: ‘Terrible Plight’ or ‘Don’t Open Your Eyes’?”

  He took a drag from his cigarette. “‘Terrible Plight.’”

  “Me too,” she said, then continued by quoting the song’s lyrics,

  “‘Currents of pain beneath the golden sky. Just can’t seem to find solid ground.’”

  “‘I’m always looking for a place to stand,’” he said. “‘Never finding the promiseland.’ Yeah. That song rocks.”

  She tore her eyes off him. It wasn’t easy. “So,” she said to the greasy-haired guy who looked good to drunk girls. “Can you give me a tattoo, or do I have to go somewhere else. I have money.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  She laid the stack of twenties on the table. He plucked them up, flipped through them.

  “Satisfied?”

  “Lachlan,” said the surfer guy. “Give the girl a tattoo.”

  “I don’t know if it’s enough money. Depends on what she wants.”

  “It’s enough.” He took another slow drag. “Give her whatever she wants. You work for me, and I’m tired of paying you to just stand around there doing nothing.”

  Lachlan mumbled something in Spanish, reached below the counter, and pulled out a beat-up clipboard with a blank form on it. “So,” he said. “You’re eighteen or older, right? Just say ‘right.’”

  “Right.”

  “Good.”

  “Sign this. It says that if you die from infection you can’t sue us.”

  “Oh,” said Tessa. “And does that happen often, then? Dead people suing you?”

  The guy in the corner laughed his easy free laugh, and Tessa tossed him a smile. He tipped his cigarette to her, sending a curl of smoke in her direction.

  “Just sign it,” said Lachlan.

  She jotted down the day’s date, her contact info, and then scribbled an indecipherable name across the bottom of the form. Slid it back to him. Without even looking at it, Lachlan yanked the paper off the clipboard, p
ulled open a file drawer, and stuffed it inside.

  She glanced at the blond guy in the corner. “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “Letting me have whatever I want.”

  He seemed to consider her words for a moment. “Don’t mention it. I’m Riker.”

  “That your first name or your last name?”

  “It’s what people call me. What do they call you?”

  She thought fast. She didn’t want to give him her real name.

  “Raven.” It felt like a slight betrayal to say it, but she covered her discomfort with a smile. “I like Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Cool. Well, pleasure to meet you, Raven.”

  Oh, he was so cute. And twenty at least. And he was flirting with her. She felt a flutter of excitement ride through her and tried to keep it out of her reply. “Pleasure to meet you too, Riker.”

  Then he leaned his chair against the wall again.

  Lachlan stepped into the first tattoo room and twisted the chair beside the tattoo machine so that it faced Tessa. “So, where do you want it? Let me guess, your ankle? Back? Lotta girls are doing feet these days-”

  “My arm.” She rolled up her sleeve.

  He stepped to her and pinched her bicep loosely, gazing at it like a farmer might look into the mouth of a horse. “Here, on the bottom of the arm,” he said, “it’s one of the most painful places to get one. One of the most sensitive places on your body.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  His eyes paused on her scar. “That looks pretty recent.”

  “Couple months ago.”

  “Still hurt?”

  “Naw. It’s OK. That’s where I want it.” He was still feeling the skin on her arm. It was starting to creep her out.