I paused in the doorway and turned back to face her. “I lost my job, too,” I said. “Teaching. I never realized how much it meant to me until it was gone. And you know what’s funny? It was always just a backup job to me, a consolation prize, but it feels worse losing it than it did getting booted off my own movie.” I realized I was rambling, and I cut myself off. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m really sorry you got fired from something that meant that much to you.”
“Fired?” she said. “I didn’t get fired. The whole production shut down.” She sank into herself, her shoulders bowing. “The first day of shooting was gonna be Monday. Three days away. So fucking close.”
The wind blew through my shirt, but my skin had already gone taut. “The financing fell apart?”
“Of course,” she said. “Environmental documentaries can’t get a real release unless there’s an Al Gore or a Keith Conner driving them.”
My mouth was suddenly dry. My gaze pulled back to those glossy photos on Trista’s bed. Beached whales. Exploded eardrums. Ruptured brains.
Sonar.
Keith had talked about high-intensity sonar wreaking havoc with whales, blowing out their organs, giving them emboli, driving them onto shores.
All those bits and pieces, sliding into alignment.
I felt a quickening of the blood, a predatory thrill at breaking through to the heart of the matter.
She was talking. “If anything goes wrong—a recession, a Senate vote, a new development—the environment is always first to suffer.” A wry chuckle. “Well, I guess Keith was the first this time.”
I heard myself ask, “You can’t find another star and get funding again?”
“It won’t matter.” She tucked a fall of hair back behind an ear. “We had a limited window to make this thing happen. The money’s gone.”
I pictured him the last time I’d seen him alive, reclining on that teak deck chair, smoking his cloves and trying on earnestness. It’s a race against time, man.
What had Jerry said? The idiot’s doing some bullshit environmental documentary next. Mickelson tried to get him to wait until he had another hit under his belt, but it had to be now.
“What window?” My voice sounded far away.
At my tone she glanced up. “Excuse me?”
“You said you had a limited window to make the movie happen. Some big rush. Why?”
“Because we needed it to hit theaters before the Senate vote.”
My heartbeat, a vibration in my ears. “Wait a minute,” I said weakly. “Senate?”
“Yeah. The proposal to lower limits on the decibel levels of naval sonar. To protect the whales. It’s calendared for October. Which means we needed to be in production, like, now.” She frowned, checked her empty glass. “Why are you being so weird?”
“If The Deep End comes out before October, saving the whales from sonar becomes a popular cause. Certain senators who vote a certain way wind up with egg on their face. It’s an election year.”
“That is how the game is played,” she said. “What are you, fresh out of Cub Scouts?”
“They’d feel pressure to vote to impose limits on sonar.”
“Yes, Patrick. That was the hope.”
“Unless the movie doesn’t get made.”
“Right.”
“And the only thing that can shut down a production once you get a green light is . . .”
She set down her glass. “Oh, come on, Patrick.”
“. . . the death of the star.”
For the first time, her face held fear. She got it. I’d found a new ally, someone already in the battle on a different front. A resource.
But her gaze ticked to the rear door, then back to me, and I realized with crushing chagrin that she was afraid not because she believed me and saw what I—what we were up against but because she was afraid of me. In my eagerness I’d made a mistake in rushing in, in not debriefing her. She had a limited vantage into the whole sordid mess, and so, given my wild claims, she could only think I was as paranoid and unhinged as I’d been billed in the media.
I held up a hand, desperate, pressured, trying to circumvent the argument she’d started with herself. “You said you knew I wasn’t a killer.”
“I want you to leave now.”
“It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Please, just let me lay out for you what—” I took a step in from the doorway, and she lunged to her feet, breathing hard. For a loaded moment, we faced each other across the room, terror coming off her like a heat signature.
Showing her my palms, I backed away and closed the door quietly behind me.
CHAPTER 45
“All this time I’ve been asking the wrong question.” I was so agitated I was nearly shouting into the phone. “I was asking myself who stands to benefit from Keith Conner’s death.”
“Okay . . .” Julianne said. I’d reached her at the office, and she’d been appropriately oblique as I’d filled her in on my talk with Trista. “And the right question would be?”
Accelerating up the hill, I veered into the opposing lane to dodge a cable-repair van. “Who stands to benefit from the movie’s being killed.”
“I’m with a student right now, so maybe you could . . .”
“Talk. Sure.”
But of course she didn’t let me. “Did the ingenue have any answers? To that question?”
“Trista? No. But the list is obvious. Any advocates of that sonar system. Select senators. The Department of Defense. NSA. Defense contractors.”
“Well, that narrows it down nicely. But given her role, can’t she specify—”
“She thinks I’m fucking crazy—”
“Mm-hmm.”
“—threw me out.”
“Which leaves . . . ?”
“Can you look into the naval sonar and this Senate proposal?”
“I thought that might be where you were—”
“I mean specifics,” I said. “Names, programs, how the funding works. Whoever this is, they’re obviously powerful. I mean, if this is the Department of Defense or NSA? Think of their resources. The gear, the reach. People everywhere. Clearly they flipped someone in LAPD. How do you go up against a monolith like that?”
“You don’t,” she said. “And let’s not get dramatic. Something like this? It’s not a sanctioned deal across, you know, a whole . . .”
“Agency?”
“Exactly. You have to figure out which corrupt piece of the whole is relevant to your . . . situation.”
“Can you help me with this? Or is it too far out of your field?”
A sigh. “The Wash Post. And The Journal. Former classmates, you know. Investigative. Plus, I’m no slouch.”
I wasn’t sure whether her choppy sentences and inverted answers were any more veiled than normal speech, but I was too grateful to take issue. I gave her the Studio City address for Ridgeline, Inc., and asked her to dig up whatever she could on them and how they might hook into all this. She uh-huhed a few times and signed off without uttering my name. I pounded the steering wheel in triumph. Finally, traction.
I debated trying Ariana once more—I’d run through her numbers yet again before calling Julianne—but I was almost home. On our block, news vans waited at the curb, so I pulled a sharp right and parked behind our back fence. The minute I climbed over, I knew there was a problem. Setting one foot on the greenhouse roof, I looked down through the pane to see the shelves yanked off the walls, the pots shattered, the tulips loose in scatterings of dirt. My foot slid out from under me, and I hit the slope, hard, and was deposited on my back in the dirt.
From this angle the greenhouse looked worse. Everything had been not just broken but overturned.
Searched.
It was past four o’clock. Ariana could well have been here when they’d come. I rolled my aching head toward the house.
The back door had been left ajar.
I was on my feet instantly, running. The house looked no more ransacked than I’d left i
t; we’d never put it back together all the way after the cops had gotten through with it. The living room—also empty. Our framed wedding picture, leaning against the wall, peered back at me, the crack zigging the glass across our beaming faces. Calling Ari’s name, I ran upstairs. She wasn’t in the bedroom. I flew into my office, yanked open the desk drawer.
The FedEx envelope I’d stolen from Ridgeline was gone.
The spindle of blank DVDs remained on the shelf. I ran over, tore off the cap, and dumped the discs on the floor. All matching. They’d taken the CD, too.
I fumbled the phone out of my pocket and called Ariana. Voice mail and voice mail. Running downstairs, I threw open the door to the garage—no white pickup. That was good. Maybe she hadn’t made it home yet. Maybe she’d just gotten hung up at the meeting and—
Panic rose, sweeping away the fantasy. She should’ve been home a half hour ago. I ripped through Ariana’s address book, called her assistant.
“Patrick, what? As far as I know, her meeting wrapped up a while ag—”
Hanging up, I jogged out into the street. A few photographers had resumed their stakeouts. They half emerged from their cars and vans, puzzled and amused.
“Hi, listen, did you see . . . Did you see anyone breaking into this house? Leaving this house? My wife?”
They were snapping pictures of me.
“You’ve been camped out here how long? How long?” Nothing. My temper rose, broke like a wave. “Did you fucking see anything?”
I spun around. The neighbors in the apartments across the street were at their sliding doors, a face or two on every floor. Next door, Martinique shivered on her doorstep, Don draping an arm across her shoulders. “Were you home?” I shouted to them. “Have you been home? Have you seen Ari? Did she—”
Don turned, steering his wife inside.
I wheeled back. Cameras covering faces, clicking.
“I don’t know, I don’t fucking know where she is,” I pleaded with them. Two snickered, and the third nodded apologetically, backing away.
Through the open front door, I heard the telephone ring.
Thank God.
I ran inside, snatched it up. “Ari?”
“I had hoped that the last time we spoke would be our last.”
That electronic voice, stiffening the hair at the back of my neck.
“But you’re a bit more resilient than we’d anticipated.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“We can’t kill you. Too suspicious.” A measured silence. “But,” he said, “your wife . . .”
My mouth was open, but no sound was coming out.
“You’re a pretty troubled guy. Maybe you’d hurt her, too.”
“No,” I managed. “Listen—”
“The disc.”
“No, I . . . no. I don’t have it. I don’t have any disc.”
“Bring us the CD. Or we will send your wife’s heart to you in a FedEx package not unlike the one you stole from us.”
I put a hand on the kitchen counter to keep from collapsing. “I swear to God, someone took it from me.”
“Drive to Keith Conner’s house. Enter through the service gate. The code is 1509. Park within two feet of the cactus planter next to the guest house. Stay seated. Keep your windows rolled up. Do not change position when we approach. If you talk to the cops, she dies. If you fail to deliver the disc, she dies. If you’re not here at five o’clock sharp, she dies.”
“No, wait! Listen, I can’t—”
He’d hung up.
My thoughts spun without orientation. If that was Ridgeline, clearly they hadn’t broken in and reclaimed the disc. Then who had? The cops, for evidence? Dirty cops, for blackmail? NSA, the Defense Department, a senator’s henchmen? Where was I in this thing? Clearly the CD wasn’t blank as I’d thought, so what the hell did it have hidden on it?
Five o’clock—that was in thirty-seven minutes. Barely enough time to drive over, let alone figure anything out.
How could I track down a disc if I had no idea who had it?
Thirty-six minutes.
I grabbed the phone to call Detective Gable to see if he’d seized it. But the time. Even if he had, there was no way I could resolve anything with him and get over to Keith’s in the next thirty-five minutes. I smashed the receiver against the base, hitting, missing, crushing my knuckles.
Was she okay? Had they hurt her? Yet?
I pulled at my hair, shoved tears off my cheeks.
A disc! I could pass off one of my unused blank CDs. I’d tell them I tried to copy it and everything had autoerased, just like with the DVDs. A flawed plan, sure, but it was something, and maybe it would buy me a few more minutes to figure out where Ariana was and make another play. I ran upstairs, grabbed a generic CD from one of my drawers, and rammed it into Ari’s laptop to double-check that it was in fact blank.
Thirty-three minutes.
Downstairs again, running, halfway to the fence, sweating through my shirt. I stopped abruptly in the middle of our lawn. Then I came back and grabbed the biggest blade from the block on the kitchen counter.
Navigating a hairpin turn, I gripped the steering wheel hard and did my best not to slide in the driver’s seat. If the butcher knife tucked beneath the back of my thigh shifted, it would open up my leg. The blade was angled in, the handle sticking out toward the console, within easy reach. The acrid smell of burning rubber leaked in through the dashboard vents. I resisted the urge to flatten the gas pedal again; I couldn’t risk getting pulled over, not given the deadline.
I flew up the narrow street, my hands slick on the wheel, my heart pumping so much fear and adrenaline through me that I couldn’t catch my breath. I checked the clock, checked the road, checked the clock again. When I was only a few blocks away, I pulled the car to the curb, tires screeching. I shoved open my door just in time. As I retched into the gutter, a gardener watched me from behind a throttling lawn mower, his face unreadable.
I rocked back into place, wiped my mouth, and continued more slowly up the steep grade. I turned down the service road as directed, and within seconds the stone wall came into sight, then the iron gates that matched the familiar ones in front. I hopped out and punched in the code. The gates shuddered and sucked inward. Hemmed in by jacaranda, the paved drive led straight back along the rear of the property. At last the guest quarters came into view. White stucco walls, low-pitched clay-tile roof, elevated porch—the guest house was bigger than most regular houses on our street.
I pulled up beside the cactus planter at the base of the stairs, tight to the building. Setting my hands on the steering wheel, I did my best to breathe. There were no signs of life. Way across the property, barely visible through a netting of branches, the main house sat dark and silent. Sweat stung my eyes. The stairs just outside the driver’s-side window were steep enough that I couldn’t see up onto the porch. I couldn’t see much of anything but the risers. I supposed that was the point.
I waited. And listened.
Finally I heard the creak of a door opening above. A footstep. Then another. Then a man’s boot set down on the uppermost step in my range of vision. The right foot followed. His knees came visible, then his thighs, then waist. He was wearing scuffed worker jeans, a nondescript black belt, maybe a gray T-shirt.
I slid my right hand down to the hilt of the butcher knife and squeezed it so hard that my palm tingled. Warmth leaked into my mouth; I’d bitten my cheek.
He stopped on the bottom step, a foot from my window, the line of my car roof severing him at the midsection. I wanted to duck down so I could see his face, but I’d been warned not to. He was too close anyway.
His knuckle rose, tapped the glass once.
I pushed the button with my left hand. The window started to whir down. The knife blade felt cool hidden beneath my thigh. I picked out a spot on his chest, just below his ribs. But first I had to find out what I needed to know.
His other hand came swiftly into view and popped something fist-sized
in through the open gap of the still-lowering window. Hitting my lap, it was surprisingly heavy.
I looked down.
A hand grenade.
I choked on my breath. I reached to grab it.
Before my splayed fingers could get there, it detonated.
CHAPTER 46
My eyelids were made of concrete. They lifted slightly, then clanked shut against the burn of the overhead lights. My ribs ached. My ears rang. My right cheek and the edge of my lips felt like they were missing skin. I went to raise a hand to my throbbing head, but for some reason it couldn’t get there.
It was a slow process, but I finally pried my eyes open. The fluorescents seemed to bleach my surroundings, but after a few more blinks I realized that the room was plenty bright in its own right—white tile, white walls, large mirror doubling the glare. Empty, aside from a chair pushed into the far corner. For a moment I entertained the notion that I was in a divine waiting room, but then, through a sliver of open door across from me, I spotted the LAPD poster tacked up behind a desk.
An interrogation room.
I’d wound up in custody?
I was lying on a metal bench, a handcuff connecting my right wrist to a security bar bolted to the wall. I’d been too groggy to figure out that’s why I couldn’t raise my arm.
The thought of Ariana jerked me to a sitting position, and my head nearly exploded. My right arm was pins and needles. I tugged up my T-shirt and held it with my chin. The skin on my chest was raw. Standing, I tried to stretch far enough from the bench to look in the two-way mirror and assess the damage to my face, but the cuff kept me inches shy of the mark.
My throat was too dry to allow words through, but I rasped for help. No one came.
I took stock of the room. Thick metal door with a dead bolt just out of reach on the same wall to which I was shackled. The white noise wasn’t only in my head; the air conditioner was working double-time, recycling room-temperature air. In the adjoining room, a clock by the LAPD poster showed seven o’clock—A.M.? P.M.?—and a clear plastic tub next to an overstuffed in-box held my wallet, keys, and disposable phone. One of my pockets was inside out.
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