When Luke hung up the phone, Ben asked, “What was that about?”
Luke shook his head. “Take a guess.”
“The Erickson thing?” It didn’t come out sounding like a question. “I’ve been meaning to ask you — how is it that you sliced through that big ol’ boy like he was warm butter? I hear that that bubba was enormous.”
Changing the subject, Luke asked, “Do you think the coroner would talk to you about this case?”
Ben placed Charlotte back in the tank. “Yeah. Why?”
“Seems like someone with a lot of juice stepped in. I’d like to know who that was, and why they pushed everyone to move so quickly.”
“You thinking there’s a conspiracy here?” Ben asked. “Tell me — where do you stand on that grassy knoll thing?”
“Henry signing the death certificate, the consulate getting involved…I think there’s something we haven’t been told.”
“Ya wanna know what I think? I think the biggest troublemaker in your life watches you shave in the mirror every morning. That’s what I think.”
“That’ll be my thought for the day.”
“Ya know what else I think?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“I think you got far too much time on your hands,” Ben added, “and I’m being made to suffer for it.”
Luke got up to leave. “Humor me.”
He was almost to the door when Ben said, “You hear about Kate Tartaglia getting shot in that robbery?”
“Yeah, I know about it.”
“Strange the way life is. I mean, we’re sitting here talking about her the night before last, then”—he snapped his fingers—“just like that, she’s dead.”
Luke turned to leave. “Yeah, strange, isn’t it?”
15
Luke was thinking about death as he sat in the crescent-shaped corner booth at Kolter’s Deli and waited for his father to walk through the entrance.
The incongruities of Josue Chaca’s death plucked at him. If, as Adam Smith had explained, the boy’s bone marrow provided a clear-cut diagnosis of leukemia, then why had they not found any blasts in the boy’s blood samples? Why hadn’t the chest X-ray revealed any signs of the respiratory failure that were so evident on the boy’s exam? And how had a family of meager means marshaled the forces of their consulate so quickly, and over a weekend?
Luke had seen death often enough to recognize its methods. It operated with a certain logic and natural order that were missing from this case. There was no pattern here, no fulcrum that would yield to reason.
The same elements were missing from Kate’s death. It wasn’t the violent method of her murder that resisted logic — this was Los Angeles, after all. It was the dissonant quality of her final hours that churned in his mind. Zenavax’s IPO and her imminent wealth should have been cause for heady exuberance, not the trepidation he had heard in her voice. She should have been popping the cork on a champagne bottle, not rushing out to a hastily arranged late night meeting with someone she hadn’t seen in four years.
A disquiet that felt out of proportion to his questions gnawed at him. Something was pulling at him, something he couldn’t see or hear.
But he could feel its pulsating rhythm. What was it?
“Dr. Luke, you want I pour you some more coffee?”
Luke turned and nodded at Antonio, the deli’s owner, who was resting a coffee carafe on the slope of his thick Italian midsection.
Antonio and his wife, Bianca, were Sicilian-born immigrants who seemed content to follow Kolter’s mixed ethnic tradition. Depending on the time of day, one of three distinctly different personalities seized control of the deli. Breakfast had a quiet energy about it, patrons taking in the blended aromas of freshly baked pastries and strong coffee. By lunchtime its origins as a delicatessen dominated, with long lines of customers shouting their orders across the take-out counter. At sunset, Kolter’s transformed itself into an English pub, its stingy antique wall sconces barely illuminating the dark wood paneling and burgundy leather seats.
After filling Luke’s mug, Antonio stood back and smiled at the front window. “Ah, another beautifuls sunrise for the childrens.”
Across the street, a small trickle of early birds had grown to a steady flow as hospital staff arrived for the 7:00 A.M. shift change. Few showed any interest in the TV news crews standing near the hospital entrance, the same crews that Luke had skirted by leaving from the rear loading dock.
A bell on the front door tinkled and the second customer of the day, an Asian man, walked through the front door.
He was followed almost immediately by a disheveled man with unruly white hair who was wearing a lab coat that was creased in a dozen places it shouldn’t be.
Luke waved his father over to the table. Ever since Luke’s mother had died in an accident twelve years ago, breakfast at Kolter’s was an everyday event for Elmer.
Just as poker with the residents was an every-Saturday-night event.
The dark circles under his father’s eyes told Luke that last night had been no exception. The venue for Elmer’s card games changed from time to time, depending on the schedule and whereabouts of certain hospital administrators. Management had made it clear: Poker was not an activity for which their hospital had been licensed, and though many of the residents might not be able to control their illicit urges, the senior faculty should know better than to participate in an unlawful pastime.
Luke was certain that his father didn’t know better — after all, Elmer organized most of the poker sessions — but by moving the location of the games around the hospital campus, sometimes on short notice, his father probably thought he was showing proper respect, much like the mouse pays to the cat.
The elder McKenna slid into the booth. “Help me fatten up my son, Antonio. He’s too skinny.”
“You want I make-a you a nice omelet, Dr. Luke?”
Luke lifted his cup. “This’ll do.”
As soon as his father ordered and Antonio left their table, Luke said, “I take it you haven’t heard about Kate Tartaglia.”
Elmer cocked his head.
“She was murdered Friday night.” Luke threw a thumb over his shoulder. “It happened just down the street.”
“Oh, my Lord.”
Luke wasn’t surprised that his father hadn’t heard the news. Elmer had gotten to the point in his career that he rarely worked weekends anymore, and a stranger’s murder wasn’t likely to work its way into a poker conversation among residents inured to the more-than-occasional gunshot and knifing victims who showed up in their E.R.
“She was coming here to meet with me,” Luke said. “I think the police figure some punk robbed, then killed her.”
Elmer brought a hand to the side of his face.
“Kate called me late Friday,” Luke continued. “Out of the blue. I don’t know what she wanted, but she seemed upset.” He took a swallow of coffee. “Have you talked to her recently?”
Elmer shook his head slowly, as though half lost in a private thought. “Kate was so young, so…”
Luke couldn’t remember his father ever expressing an angry thought about Kate. Ironically, Elmer seemed to be the only person who hadn’t held a grudge.
“Dad, would you check to see if you received an e-mail from Kate?”
“An e-mail?” Elmer’s eyes suddenly came back into focus. “Why?”
“She sent me something, but I never got it. Maybe she addressed it to you by mistake.”
“Knowing Kate, that’s not likely, but I’ll check.”
Luke reached for a spoon and started playing with it. “There’s something else you need to know about.” He recounted his discussion with Barnesdale and the attorney.
“He what?” Elmer said. “How could Henry suspend you? As far as I’m concerned, that Erickson fellow finally got his comeuppance. It’s as simple as that.” He dipped his chin to put an exclamation point on his opinion.
“No, it’s not as simple as that. I had a c
hoice. I could’ve tried to defuse the situation,” Luke said. “Instead, I let loose on the guy.”
“Uh-oh. I can hear all those gears cranking away in your head. Ya know, sometimes you have a way of overthinking things.”
Luke gave a tired roll of his eyes.
Antonio’s wife, Bianca, marched over and laid a plate in front of Elmer. She was a matronly woman who looked uncomfortable when she tried to smile, so rarely did.
Elmer seemed to be studying him. “Do you remember Jimmy Yazzie?”
Luke’s eyebrows rose in a question. Jimmy was his best friend in the first grade. In addition to reading and arithmetic, Luke learned about child abuse during that year. Jimmy had slept at their home more often than his own for reasons that Luke understood only after witnessing a beating he wasn’t supposed to see.
“What does Jimmy Yazzie have to do with any of this?”
“A lot, I think. What you learned about Jimmy’s home had a profound effect on you. Remember your nightmares? They went on for months.”
“Dad, why don’t we talk about this another time?” He started to slide out of the booth.
“Sit still and let me finish.” Elmer showed his son an uncharacteristically somber face.
After a few seconds, his father continued, “The choices you’ve made in your life — going to Annapolis, becoming a SEAL, your decision to become a pediatrician — all of it. From a young age, you seemed to have a need to protect the innocents of the world. That’s not such a bad thing, Luke.”
A pair of men walked into the restaurant and handed Antonio their business cards. Luke recognized one of them: Detective O’Reilly. The three of them stood by the cash register near the front door and launched into a conversation.
“Let’s change the subject,” Luke said.
“Okay, then. How’s Megan doing these days?”
Luke continued to look past his father at the detectives, trying to hide his annoyance at the question. “She’s doing better, I think. She’s strong.”
“She’s more than that.”
Luke looked from the detectives to his father.
Elmer made a show of lifting his crumb roll and examining it from various angles. “You know, Luke, some things in life are just too good to do without.”
His father’s expression betrayed nothing other than a keen interest in his pastry.
The detectives turned and swept the room with their eyes.
O’Reilly locked on Luke. A minute later he was standing next to their booth. “Dr. McKenna, sorry for the intrusion. We’re here tying up some loose ends and I have a few more questions for you. Would you mind stepping outside for a minute?”
The other detective, if that’s what he was, eyed Elmer. The man’s scrutiny irritated Luke.
“This is my father,” Luke said. “He knew Kate. You can ask your questions in front of him.”
O’Reilly seemed to weigh the issue for a moment before saying, “When we spoke, you said you didn’t see Dr. Tartaglia the night she was murdered. Is that right?”
“Right.”
The morning sun climbed over the heliport atop the hospital. Luke squinted as a blinding glare cascaded down the window.
“You sure you never saw her that evening, even for a moment?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“You find that e-mail message?”
Luke shook his head.
“But you still have the phone message from Dr. Tartaglia, the one you told me about?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Would you allow us to make a copy of it?”
Luke shrugged. “Sure.”
“I’ll give you a call. We’d like to do that sometime today.”
* * *
Inside the green van parked across the street from Kolter’s Deli, Calderon adjusted his headphones and listened through the static while studying McKenna from a side porthole window.
“Dad, would you check to see if you received an e-mail from Kate?”
“An e-mail? Why?”
“She sent me something, but I never got it. Maybe she addressed it to you by mistake.”
Calderon swung his tripod-mounted spotting scope toward the booth along the restaurant’s rear wall where Mr. Kong was sitting. The man was bent over his plate, shoveling eggs into his mouth. Why did Chinese people eat that way?
Even though he was right-handed, Kong held the fork in his left hand. Cupped in his right hand was a miniaturized directional microphone, pointed at McKenna’s table.
Calderon had spent most of the previous day acquiring the surveillance equipment. He didn’t like doing things this way — it was too rushed — but his client’s carelessness had left him no choice. Fortunately, he had done several jobs in L.A. He knew the town and its sources, and had used Kong as an intermediary for the purchases. He wanted his trip to Los Angeles to remain dark, untraceable.
He clicked back the magnification and took in the two detectives talking to a man at the cash register. Calderon recognized one of the cops from the woman’s house.
Eventually, the detectives turned and started walking toward McKenna’s table.
With any luck, Calderon thought, he’d be back in Guatemala in two days. He hadn’t planned on being away from the project site this long.
Calderon was fiddling with a knob on the radio receiver when he heard:
“But you still have the phone message from Dr. Tartaglia, the one you told me about?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Would you allow us to make a copy of it?”
Calderon slammed the side of the van with the base of his fist, then grabbed the cell phone and called his client.
16
When Luke arrived home thirty minutes later, there was a voicemail from O’Reilly. The detective left his number and said he’d stop by that evening to retrieve Kate’s phone message.
Luke pressed SAVED MESSAGES and replayed Kate’s voicemail.
Again, the trepidation in her voice swirled around him like unsettled air.
Outside his front window the morning mist had burned away and it was a perfectly crisp January day, so he did what he had always done to untangle his mind. He changed into baggy navy-blue shorts and a loose-fitting gray sweatshirt, and went for a run.
Griffith Park was his backyard, over four thousand acres of hilly terrain covered with California live oak, sagebrush, and chaparral. The hills were speckled with bare spots, and from a distance they had a moth-eaten appearance. The craggy park was the botanical equivalent of a mutt.
But it was his mutt, and his haven. After years of almost daily eight-to-ten mile runs, he knew virtually every rut in the fifty miles of crisscrossing dirt trails. He let his thoughts drift as he climbed to the summit of Mount Hollywood and then ran down the backside of the mountain.
As the sweat started to flow from his pores, so did an undercurrent of feelings he’d been holding at a distance.
The memory of Kate’s life filled him with a poignant sadness for what her life might have been. But the deep ache he felt was for Megan.
He had soaked up her affection, laid claim to her trust, and then shattered them in a stupendously self-destructive impulse. His self-indulgent need to punish Megan’s predator had ruined any hope of a future with her.
He didn’t deserve her, he knew, but that didn’t stop him from wanting her.
Luke tried to empty his mind on the return leg of his run. He slowed to a jog as he ran along Griffith Park Drive, then accelerated as he came up the hill on Los Feliz Boulevard. By the time he turned north onto Commonwealth Avenue, his hair was soaked through with sweat.
He was three blocks from his home when the Lexus coupe that had been following him for the past mile pulled up alongside him.
“How’s it hanging, Flash?”
For reasons that Luke couldn’t decipher, people seemed to have an inexplicable need to tag him with nicknames, but only one person had ever called him “Flash.”
When Luke looked inside the ca
r, there he was. Sammy Wilkes.
Sammy’s coal-black skin was a little less tightly drawn around the jaw than when their lives had first crossed fifteen years earlier, but his smile was as big as ever. His overly large teeth had a way of taking over his face when he grinned, which was often.
Luke leaned onto the passenger-side window frame.
“Yo, Flash. Don’t ju be leanin’ against my wheels with yo’ sweaty ass.”
“You can cut the cornball ghetto talk,” Luke said. “I know you, remember?”
Sammy Wilkes was as much a part of the black ghetto experience as the Prince of Wales. Educated at Cornell with a degree in electrical engineering, he had grown up in an upper-class neighborhood on Chicago’s north side, the son of an investment banker.
Wilkes had been the only member of Proteus without a military background. They had found him at the National Security Agency, where he’d cultivated a unique portfolio of electronic surveillance skills.
“By the way,” Wilkes said, “things are fine with me. Thanks for asking.”
“What’s it been, Sammy, five years?” Luke looked down the street. “Do I have to guess, or are you going to tell me why you’ve been following me?”
It wasn’t just Sammy’s background that distinguished him from his fellow Proteus members. He didn’t have the same pensive and brooding nature that others had worn like an overworked habit. Sammy and his pearly white teeth smiled mischievously at life. He’d been a cocky and talkative kid who glided past the questions that had tormented Luke. Covert operations that had played out as lopsided massacres, killings made to look like they were done by other groups — for Sammy, it all had seemed as inconsequential as an insect under his boot.
Sammy had had other things on his mind. He’d always talked about how he would turn his talents into something big. In fact, he had, parlaying his specialized skills into a thriving corporate security and surveillance business that operated at the furthest edges of legality, and sometimes, Luke suspected, beyond.
Stigma Page 10
