Warrior in the Shadows

by Marcus Wynne

  His boss would be working his extensive connections, including the one he had in the police department here, to make sure that Alfie's back trail would be covered. If there was a problem, he'd sweep it up himself to be sure.

  But one thing nagged at him: the strange synchronicity of the woman in the bar and the sense that something else was moving in the Dreamtime with him. He needed to spend some time alone and work on his ritual, tap into the special seeing that came with his private ritual to see what was happening in the Dream around him. He'd need someplace private; he didn't want Susan to stumble across him. A hotel might be in order, a nice clean hotel room with a DO NOT DISTURB sign would suit him just fine. He wondered what the woman he'd seen in the bar would think if she saw him doing the ritual. He'd seen her for a reason and the spirit ancestors were great tricksters… who knew what part she was going to play?

  He tapped out a short response to the E-mail, his stubby fingers slow on the small keyboard: "Will sweep up once you let me know where to clean. Then home on the next plane. Ta, Alfie."

  He sent the message, logged off, and went to the counter to pay his two dollars.

  "Here you go, mate," he said to the girl at the counter.

  He went back outside and got back on his bike. He'd hate to abandon it when he left, but it didn't fit in with his life at home; besides, he could always buy another one if he wanted to. He grinned at the thought of trying to ride a crotch rocket on the rutted dirt roads where he lived as an Aborigine in Laura. No room for a motorbike in his cave there.

  He cranked up his bike and took off for a ride around Lake Calhoun. Jowalbinna and the shaman cave were his other life; this was a dreaming for him, and he wanted to take the time to enjoy it.

  2.9

  Deep in a closed-off conference room in Police Headquarters, Bobby Lee stood in silence before a white board covered with notes detailing what they knew about the killer. A KEEP OUT sign on the door didn't slow the steady traffic of detectives coming in and out to report to him, but Bobby Lee kept himself focused with long practiced concentration. The only person that would take him out of his self-imposed trance would be Oberstar, and he knew to leave him alone; Obi knew that you got nothing worthwhile from pushing a man who was already working as hard as he could. Bobby Lee had learned that it was best for him to let things sit and collect until there was a certain critical tipping point in his unconscious mind, a time and place where everything suddenly jelled and became clear to him. Oberstar had been the one to teach him to listen for the one small true voice in the cacophony of competing voices that came up in the course of an investigation, the true inner voice that did all the real work in the back of his mind and then pushed forward exactly the right solution when it was time— and no sooner.

  But then Oberstar stuck his head in the conference room, looked Bobby over, and said, "You need anything? Coffee, doughnuts, blow job?"

  "You got cannibal boy's home address and photo lying around?"

  "I'd have a bullet into that son of a bitch already if that was the case."

  "Plenty of people to help you do that."

  "How's Max and Nicky doing with you gone so much?"

  "Max is Max, you know. Nicky, he's just fascinated, wants to know all about what this guy does… typical eight-year-old. Keeps asking Charley for some photos, Charley got him started on taking pictures."

  "This Charley, he's okay? I only talked to him a couple of times."

  "Charley is as good as it gets, Obi. Me and him got history."

  "All that Airborne shit during the Gulf."

  "He was solid then and he's solid now."

  "He do that photography stuff after?"

  "More than that, Obi-Wan. He did some kind of hush-hush super-secret squirrel stuff for the CIA for a couple of years after the war."

  "CIA? No shit?"

  "He don't talk about it, but he got fed up with them after a couple of years, pulled the plug."

  "He wasn't in long enough to get any retirement, then."

  "No retirement for Charley Payne," Bobby Lee said. "That boy is a natural-born gypsy. He's happy living in his little apartment down there in Linden Hills and taking photographs… he's pretty damn good, won some prizes, sells a lot to magazines, mostly nature stuff. He does great candid portraits, we've got a bunch of them at the house. He took the best picture of Max and Nick I've ever seen. Damn sight better than what they do at the mall."

  "He's pretty sharp, though?"

  "He came up with the info about the pictures this freak draws on the walls."

  "What about the Bureau's guy? Any use of him?"

  "Some. They agree the guy is highly organized, he's older and been doing this for a long time. They're just as puzzled about the victim selection as we are, 'cause these aren't your usual serial killer vics. It's that connection that will give us something. With what Charley added to the mix, they think the guy is highly intelligent, might be a native Australian, has technical training to bypass alarms which makes him smart with experience, military, police, or private security. We've got a decent profile going, but no significant trace evidence other than the paints. If we could get a hair or something we might be able to pin his race down. He's strong and knows how to open a body and skilled with killing with that damn club; he hits home runs like a champ with that thing."

  "Why kill them with a club when he's got the knife and he's going to cut them up anyway?"

  "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Not me, Obi-Wan. Now get out of here so I can work."

  Oberstar gave Bobby Lee a long, thoughtful look, then shrugged and said over his shoulder as he left the room, "Talk to me later, Bobby Lee. I want to hear something good."

  Didn't they all, Bobby Lee thought.

  2.10

  Charley sat in his apartment and drummed his fingers again and again on the worn arm of his recliner. After a while, he went to the old wooden tool stand he'd turned into a rack of flat shelves for his prints that weren't hung up on the wall. His precious negatives were enclosed in plastic sleeves and stored in binders that took up shelf after shelf in the corner of the room. The flat drawers held prints that he hadn't yet mounted, or old ones he took down to rotate up when he had new favorites.

  He found an old self-portrait he'd done not long after he quit his contract with the CIA and just before the call that brought him out to Minnesota. He'd set his camera on a tripod, then sat before it with a dark curtain behind him. He'd worn a dark turtleneck that made him seem a dim, dark outline against the dark backdrop, his pale face painfully prominent, leaping from the background. He'd scanned the resulting photo on a friend's computer, then split the image down the middle, then cloned each side to make two distinct images that he then printed side by side.

  It was an eerie photograph. The bilateral asymmetry that had grown in his face over the years yielded two completely different faces side by side. It was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but real. He'd seen similar images and learned the technique from another photographer who was fond of New Age enthusiasms and explained it as the predominance of the two different hemispheres of the brain, each of which controlled the opposite half of the body. The image cloned from the left side of his face had a drooping set of eyelids, a pronounced downward turn of the mouth, a squint in the eye; the image cloned from the right showed a thin line to the lips, eyes slightly narrowed but somehow softer than the other image.

  We all carry our doubles around with us, Charley thought. He held the picture in his hand, then sat back down with it, looked up at the image of Anurra, then back at the image in his hand, the image of his two-faced self. Anurra would be a two-faced man as well. He would be smart, and keep that dark side hidden away. The only people likely to see it would be those who saw it last among the things they saw before they died. So where would he be? What would the other images of his self show? And where would he stay?

  He's still here, Charley thought, even though the smart thing to do would be to get away. He's not throu
gh yet.

  Charley got up and put his self-portrait down. He was restless, with that vague nagging feeling he often got while his brain puzzled over some problem that needed solving. He went to the plastic storage tub he kept beneath his bed and took out his Gatco knife-sharpening kit. Unclipping the Emerson CQC-7 from his pants pocket, he tested the already razor-sharp edge with his thumb, then set up the fine edge diamond hone and touched up the knife till it had the requisite "snag-ability" that marked the perfect edge. Then he put the knife-sharpening kit away and took out his gun-cleaning kit, broke down his Glock and wiped and oiled the spotless weapon, then inspected each individual round before reloading them back into fresh magazines he rotated from a stock in the plastic storage tub.

  He caught himself thinking dark thoughts and laughed. Old rituals are the best rituals. The old pleasing routine of making sure his weapons were in a high state of readiness, that everything was prepared— that was a useful mechanism he carried over into his life as a photographer. He looked at the Domke bag that held his cameras. It was interesting to him that he chose to work with one set of life tools to relax even though he was actually working with the other set.

  He thought about the self-portrait and laughed. What are you getting ready for? He guessed that he'd know when it got to be time. Or maybe only after the fact.

  But he'd be ready for whatever happened.

  He wondered how Bobby Lee was doing with all this. They hadn't talked about it much when he'd dropped by the house to visit, preferring instead to keep their talk light and to play with Nicky. He loved Bobby Lee and knew his mind, but the world of police puzzled him. He recognized and respected their clannishness, the sticking together in the face of the opposition that their mere presence often fostered in the world. But he found too often that the police investigators he met had too narrow a world view, one that limited their effectiveness in seeing all the complexities the world could bring to a bad guy problem. That was one thing he was grateful to his CIA experience for: it left him no illusions about the pettiness of humans, about evil with a capital E as well as the banality of evil with a small e.

  Charley had no illusions about his true nature; he was at home and comfortable with his restless self. Or so he told himself as he looked around his barren apartment. He lived as he chose and he was happy with his friends and his women. Woman. He laughed out loud in the empty apartment at that slip of his tongue and thought about his lunch with Kativa Patel. What a delightful woman she was. That was the difference between her and Mara. Mara, for all her individual delights, was a girl, a woman-girl, but Kativa was a woman. Much woman. He looked forward to seeing her again. He stroked the edge of his self-portrait and wondered what she would make of that. He wondered if she was comfortable with duality.

  2.11

  It was the beginning of summer in Australia and the seaside city of Cairns, gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, was bustling with foreign tourists and vacationing Australians, sunburned and loud in flip-flop sandals and open cotton shirts over brown beer bellies. Jay Burrell studied the water from his deck with the experienced eye of a long-time surfer and thought about getting out into the water again later today. He'd already been out once, early in the morning, as he had every morning since the DEA had chased him out of California and the focus of his narcotics empire shifted from Mexico and Colombia to Thailand, Burma, and the Golden Triangle. Heroin was making a comeback and business was good.

  Despite the Australian government's rigid and harsh laws on narcotics trafficking, Jay found it easy to blend into a low-profile cover as an expatriate American surfing enthusiast. He didn't live large in Cairns; his bungalow-style house looked modest from the outside and belied the roomy interior that looked out over the ocean; it was a good distance away from the pricier real estate closer to town and the resort beaches. It had cost more than it looked and its security measures were as discreet as money could buy. He did have a good boat, a cigarette runner, that raised the Marine Police eyebrows, but that was more a case of serious boat envy than anything else.

  Jay Burrell had no criminal record of any kind with the Australian police, or for that matter with the DEA or any American agency he knew of. Jay Burrell had actually died shortly after birth and the birth certificate had never been cross-referenced with the death certificate as it should have been. The man who had been someone else before he was Jay Burrell had paid a good price for that. He believed in paying for the best when it came to business and he kept his people loyal with large infusions of cash.

  And for those who couldn't be loyal, or fell prey to the temptations that came with dealing with the large amounts of cash in his business, he had his mate Alfie. Jay leaned back in his deck chair and kicked his salt-encrusted feet up on the deck railing. He sipped his strong black Sumatran coffee and thought about the phone call he was expecting from Minneapolis today. Minneapolis. He loathed that town, having only been there during the winter, when the biting cold had left him a shivering wreck even under two layers of clothing and the best down jacket North Face made.

  Inside, the phone rang.

  Jay looked at his battered stainless-steel Rolex Submariner and noted with satisfaction that the caller was right on time. He walked slowly inside to the telephone he reserved for business calls and answered it.

  "Hello?"

  "This isn't the way to do things."

  The drawn-out ooo of the northern Minnesota accent made Jay smile; it reminded him of that movie, the funny one with the pregnant woman cop in it.

  "How are things there?" Jay said.

  "Not good."

  "Some people needed an example."

  "You could have made it a private example. That wouldn't have raised all this heat."

  "That's not your decision, now is it?"

  "The cop that's working on this is good. He's getting the Australian connection."

  "How would he get that?"

  "We're not dumb asses out here, you know."

  "I wasn't thinking that," said Jay, who had been thinking that exact thought. "Can you manage things?"

  "What do you mean manage?"

  "Keep us informed, expedite things if necessary…"

  "Yes. Is this through?"

  "For the most part," Jay said. "I need the confirmation on the final closing of the real estate… that's not a problem for you, is it? Getting those records?"

  "With enough money there's no such thing as a problem. But we don't need any more of the other. That just raises the heat and brings people looking where they shouldn't be looking. We don't need that at all."

  "I'll take that under consideration and get back to you. Anything else?"

  "I think I should meet who you've got out here working that end of the business."

  Jay thought for a moment, then said, "That's not possible. My associate prefers to work alone."

  "Your associate is raising a profile that isn't going to go away."

  "He'll never be in Minneapolis again."

  "I don't think…"

  "How are your needs?" Jay interrupted smoothly. "Are they all being met? Everything work out, money show up in your account as we agreed?"

  "Yes, but…"

  "That's all we have to talk about, then," Jay said. "Let's talk again, day after tomorrow, same time."

  "I… all right, but…"

  "Thank you. Check your account this time tomorrow for another installment."

  Jay hung up the phone and stared at it for a long moment, his fingers resting on the handset. He tapped the phone lightly, then went to his desk and sat down in front of an expensive Apple Macintosh computer with a large flat panel display. He powered up the machine, then clicked on the America Online icon and opened his e-mail account. He thought for a moment, then tapped out a short message for NullaNulla@hotmail.com. It only took a few minutes for him to outline what he wanted done, and where Alfie would find the information he needed to finish up. He sent the message, shut down the machine, and looked critically at the su
rf. So much for today's business. Let Alfie deal with it. He was going surfing.

  2.12

  Bobby Lee sat in his front room at home, reclined in his easy chair and surrounded by neat stacks of investigator reports. One of them he looked at, put down, and then picked up again to reread it for the third time. It was from the cybercops in the Computer and Financial Crime Unit, who'd been busily working on the files from Madison Simmons's and Harold Nyquist's home and office computers.

  Simmons and Nyquist were way dirty.

  Simmons had been cautiously maneuvering large sums of money wired from various Southeast Asian banks— Singapore, Malaysia, Australia— and running it through a series of real estate transactions, effectively laundering them. He'd been skimming off some of the margin between currency exchange rates as well as a percentage off each transaction.

  Nyquist was the real estate man, and he'd been getting his share of the skim as well. He'd created a series of front companies that were headquartered in Aruba, Venezuela, and the Isle of Man, and used the fronts to buy interest in various going concerns in Minneapolis: bars and restaurants, body shops, and one strip club— The Gentlemen Only. All the businesses had one thing in common: there was lots of cash going in and out of them, which provided plenty of opportunity for creative bookkeeping to launder money.

  This was the tip of an iceberg called big-time narcotics.

  There wasn't any overt connection, at least not yet, to any of the major narcotics operations in the Twin Cities, but it looked like and smelled like high-level narcotics. That was the only illicit activity that generated that kind of cash flow. Bobby Lee penciled a note on a Post-it and stuck it on the page, a reminder to touch base again with DEA and see if they had anything somewhere on Simmons or Nyquist. Those two weren't low-level mopes and they had no criminal history to speak of, which made them perfect for this kind of laundering operation.