Headcase, p.18
Headcase, page 18
Intelligence work wasn’t just about knowing things—it was about making sure no one else knew you knew them.
‘Got that licence plate yet?’ I asked.
Zara checked her phone. ‘No. But how many blue Ford Explorers can there be?’
‘Five.’ I pointed them out. ‘And that’s assuming Anders was right about the model. He didn’t strike me as a car person.’
‘What, you don’t think nerds like cars?’
‘None of them are damaged,’ I said, looking around. ‘Not just the Explorers—any of the vehicles.’
‘So NASA scientists are careful drivers.’ Zara shrugged. ‘Makes sense. Imagine trying to land on the moon. Reverse parallel parking is hard enough.’
I reached into my pocket and dug out the broken shard of headlight. ‘But where’s the car that rammed the museum window?’
Zara squinted into the sunshine. ‘Fixed already, maybe?’
I shook my head. ‘Even if you could find a body shop to fix your car that fast, it would be a dumb move. You don’t take your damaged car to the shop right after a ram raid. You wait for the heat to die down first. Leave it in your garage, take the bus for a week or two.’
‘Okay, so that’s what the killer is doing,’ Zara said. ‘If you’re right, and there is a killer. So what?’
‘We can identify them. The car that isn’t here must belong to the perp.’
‘Great. You gonna memorise a few hundred licence plates?’ I could, but it would take hours. ‘Let’s check the log at the gate.’
We got in Zara’s pick-up and drove towards the exit. I kept the window down, despite the cold. Still needing air, after the terror of the chamber.
Zara’s phone dinged. She glanced at the screen. ‘Cho drives a blue Ford Explorer, registration TCC-4GH.’
‘Drove.’ I drummed my fingers on my thigh, thinking of the five Explorers in the parking lot. None of them had matching plates. So where was Cho’s car?
When we reached the gate, Zara asked for the log. The guard with the crow’s-feet gave it to us without complaint.
‘I’ve been instructed to assist you in any way I can,’ she said, giving us a suspicious look.
Zara didn’t offer an explanation. ‘Thank you, sergeant.’
I was already scanning the sheets. There were licence plates next to names, addresses and phone numbers. I wasn’t interested in them. I wanted the vehicle that was missing.
My gaze fell on a name. Someone who had arrived without a car every day since Cho’s death. My breath caught in my throat. I’d gotten this all wrong.
‘Well?’ Zara said.
‘Cho wasn’t the target,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sam Garcia was supposed to check the decompression chamber,’ I said. ‘But he delegated the job to Cho at the last minute. Someone tried to kill Garcia, but got Cho instead.’
‘Who?’
I pointed at the name, and the address next to it. ‘Let’s go.’
CHAPTER 23
One of me reveals the future. Two of me obscures the present. What am I?
Lilah Parget walked in the front door carrying two bags of groceries and nudged it closed with her hip. The lock clicked behind her. The apartment had a galley kitchen, both benches covered in dirty chopping boards and oven trays. There was a stale toast smell in the air. She left the blinds closed, knowing her way around the semi-darkness, and dumped the bags on top of the mess. She opened the fridge, which was already close to overflowing, and searched for somewhere to squeeze in her groceries.
She frowned, perhaps looking for the leftover ham she’d wrapped in foil.
‘Hi,’ I said.
She whirled around and saw me lounging on a dining chair, my feet on her glass-topped table. ‘What the hell?’
‘Didn’t mean to startle you,’ I said, though that was exactly what I’d intended. She’d been so controlled when I last spoke to her. I would only get the truth by rattling her. ‘Just wanted to ask you some follow-up questions.’
One of Parget’s carving knives was on the coffee table next to my shoe. Not far from my good hand. Her eyes widened as she noticed it.
‘How did you get in here?’ She kept her distance, her butt pressed against the kitchen bench.
I took another bite of the ham. ‘Door was unlocked.’
‘It wasn’t.’
‘You sure?’
‘Get out,’ she said. ‘Before I call the police.’
‘Go ahead. That’s what an innocent woman would do.’
As expected, she didn’t reach for her phone. ‘I told Dr Laurie I thought it was too risky to begin human trials, and she blew up at me. My internship has been cut short. So whatever you want from Space City, I can’t get it for you.’
‘I’ve been wondering why you would write those letters,’ I said. ‘To the judge, and the parole board. Begging them for leniency.’
I recognised the emotion on her face. I’d felt it many times: fear of getting caught. The longer you got away with it—whatever it was—the worse the fear became.
‘Garcia kidnapped you,’ I continued. ‘Why would you want him released early? Surely you’d want him to be put away for as long as possible. So you felt safe. And on top of that, why would you seek out an internship in the same building as him?’
She was edging sideways along the bench. ‘I have a gun.’
‘Obviously. This is Texas.’
‘I’m asking you to leave.’
‘Or you’ll shoot me?’ I chewed some more ham. ‘That’s a nice, straightforward way of killing someone. Sure beats a hypobaric chamber. At least you’ll know you got the right guy.’
My stomach growled, unsatisfied with pig meat. Parget was thin, but she was available. By changing her name, she’d cut herself off from everyone she knew. That had been the point. But she hadn’t been Rachel long enough to put down strong roots. Would anyone come looking if she disappeared?
First, prove she’s the killer, I told myself.
She looked at me for a long moment. I returned her stare. My theory fit all the facts, but I didn’t have any hard evidence. I needed her to confess. Loud enough so the phone in my pocket could hear.
‘You didn’t want Garcia in prison,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t feel safe until he was dead. You’ve been at Space City for months, waiting for your chance. Finally it came—he was scheduled to visit the museum and do a safety check on the communications systems for the hypobaric chamber. It was perfect. Not just a death, but an agonising one. So you go into the chamber and disconnect the emergency shutdown button. Then you hang around nearby, keeping out of sight, until you hear him arrive. When he goes inside you drag something heavy in front of the door, so it can’t be opened, and hang an out-of-order sign over the window. That way if anyone interrupts you, they won’t see him through the glass. The chamber is soundproof. He can scream all he likes, and no one will come. You push the button to decompress the chamber and wait. But when you finally take the sign down and look through the window, you realise you’ve made a mistake. Garcia delegated the job to Rob Cho at the last minute. You’ve suffocated the wrong guy.’
Parget’s eyes narrowed when she heard Rob Cho’s name, but she admitted nothing.
‘So now what do you do?’ I went on. ‘The police will have a limited suspect pool. They’ll only be looking at people who were in the building at the time. It won’t take them long to find you—unless you make it look like the accident happened somewhere else. You’re already in the museum, where there are spacesuits available. You grab one and put it on Cho’s corpse. You use his car to take him to the rock yard, then drag him to Mars. You use a blanket to obscure any tracks, but you’ve pulled some big shoes over your own in case you missed any. Where’d you get them, by the way?’
Parget still said nothing. Maybe she suspected I was recording the conversation.
I shrugged, as though it was of no consequence. ‘Whatever. You use Cho’s car again to ram the museum window. That way, if the cops realise the suit was stolen or work out where Cho died, they’ll assume the killer is someone who hadn’t used their swipe card to access the building. You come back early the following day, by bus, to clean up the mess.’ I leaned back in my chair. ‘Obviously you know the ruse won’t hold up for long. But you’ve created just enough confusion to slip away. Here’s my question, though: why didn’t you?’
She just stared.
‘You stayed,’ I said. ‘Even after the cops showed up. Even after you recognised me, a former FBI guy, outside Sam Garcia’s office. You’re an unpaid intern—you could easily have vanished into thin air. Changed your name again. No one would have found you.’
Parget released her grip on the kitchen bench and started walking towards me.
‘Why didn’t you run, Lilah?’ I asked.
She whirled and slammed her fist into the side of my head. A bomb went off inside my skull, and I toppled off the chair. As I hit the floor face-first, the ham flew from my mouth.
‘I would never hurt Sam!’ Lilah screamed.
My ears were ringing. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.
‘He’s everything to me!’ She kicked my chest, the toe of her boot sinking deep into my diaphragm, crushing all the air out of my lungs.
Parget kept shouting, but I couldn’t decode the words. I was outside myself, watching Timothy Blake take a beating on a dirty laminate floor. I got the feeling this wasn’t going how he’d expected.
Soon I couldn’t see him anymore. He was replaced by a vision—Jeb Parget, driving out of the shopping mall parking lot seven years ago. The boom gate camera watched him go. Lilah Parget was hiding behind the trash cans, twelve years old, smoking a cigarette from the packet an older man had given her. Nervous. Excited. When it burned down to the filter, she stubbed it out and lit another.
Finally a car pulled up, Sam Garcia behind the wheel. Lilah leapt to her feet, tossed one last cigarette onto the pile and ran over. She got in the passenger seat, not the trunk. She was smiling.
Was I seeing the past, or only imagining it? Had Lilah known Garcia already? Had she gone with him willingly, to escape from her father? Garcia might have taken her somewhere and promised to pick her up later. But he never came back, because Richmond and I arrested him. No wonder Lilah hadn’t gone home. No wonder she’d been crying when I found her, abandoned in the homeless camp. No wonder she’d never thanked me for rescuing her.
Now, as twenty-year-old Parget pounded me into the floorboards, I wanted to tell her that Garcia was a bad man. He’d had rope, a ski mask and a gun in his trunk. If he’d come back for her, she’d be dead now, or enslaved. But I couldn’t breathe, much less speak, and a tidal wave of darkness was rushing in.
•
When I regained consciousness, there was something cold and hard pressed against my skull. I squirmed, trying to push it off.
‘Hold still.’ Zara’s voice. I was surprised how relieved I was to hear it. I let her adjust the icepack against my scalp.
I had double vision, and the world was still spinning, but at least it was slowing down. I was in the stairwell outside Lilah’s apartment. Concrete beneath me, an Edison light flickering above.
Edison campaigned to have people executed using direct current, I thought. Because he owned the patent on it.
‘You’re talking nonsense,’ Zara said, and I realised I must have been speaking aloud. ‘You know your name?’
My mouth was dry. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘You got KO’d by a hundred-pound girl, that’s what.’
‘Where the hell were you?’
‘Hey, I got to you five seconds after the first punch.’
Unease prickled down my neck. ‘What did you do to Lilah?’
‘Nothing,’ Zara said. ‘When I burst in, she fled to another room. So I dragged you out here and shut the door.’
‘You didn’t chase her?’ I was oddly touched. I would have expected Zara to step right over my body and pursue her target.
Zara avoided my gaze. ‘Come on. We have to go.’
She was right. For all we knew, neighbours had overheard the yelling and called the police.
Zara held my good arm as I staggered down the stairs towards the car. On the way down, I saw an electric bicycle. Presumably the one Lilah used to get to work instead of a car. I should have checked the logs for the week before. I’d been rushing, because of the hunger.
I stumbled. Zara wrapped her arm around my waist, pulling me closer to her. Our hips bumped as we walked.
‘Sounds like you were wrong,’ she said.
She would have heard the whole conversation, thanks to the phone in my pocket. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to clear my head. I thought of the disassembled shutdown button, the out-of-order sign, Cho’s car missing from the lot.
‘I’m right about what happened,’ I said. ‘I was wrong about who did it, that’s all.’
Zara opened the passenger door of her pick-up and helped me clamber in, like I was an old man.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘Virginia.’
I shook my head and regretted it. My vision swam, and there was a sharp pain behind my eyeballs. ‘I’m this close to figuring the whole thing out.’ I tried to hold my thumb and forefinger a quarter inch apart, but the thumb wasn’t there. ‘I need more time.’
‘We don’t have more time. The Houston PD thinks you’re the Reaper, remember? We have to get you out of Houston. Otherwise you’ll end up on death row.’
‘But I didn’t do it.’
‘No one gives a shit. This is Texas,’ Zara said.
I closed my eyes. There was heat at the base of my skull where it had hit the floor. A bruise was forming—but so was an idea.
‘Fine. Take me to Hedwig Village. 251 Wendover Lane,’ I said. It was one of the addresses I’d seen on the FBI whiteboard.
Zara glanced sharply at me. ‘Why?’
‘We’re going to catch the Reaper.’
CHAPTER 24
Where do ravens go to drink?
The front porch had a wicker chair, some wind chimes and fig ivy creeping up the walls. The plant looked like it had only recently started to wilt, probably when the person who used to water it got strangled. Crime scene tape was still crisscrossed over the front door, which bore a dent where somebody had used a crowbar to get it open. Someone else had patched up the damage, but not well enough to hide it. There was an old-fashioned bell on a hook in lieu of a button, and a big brass knocker for those who preferred percussion to melody. A peephole above it. I turned around to face the neighbours opposite, but hedges screened their windows from view.
Zara kicked a scuffed corner of the welcome mat. ‘Are we going in, or what?’
It was late afternoon. We’d made two stops on our way—one to drop the USB modem in a trash can, then another to mark a traffic pole, letting Wilcox know the modem was ready to be picked up. Zara had scraped a Rolaid across the pole, because Rolaids were less suspicious in a handbag than chalk. Why we couldn’t just take the modem on the plane, I didn’t know.
‘Imagine you’re the Texas Reaper,’ I said.
Zara sighed. ‘Do I have to?’
‘You know a middle-aged woman lives here on her own. You know her name from IRS records—Ethel Braidwyn. You’ve clearly scoped the place out. You know there are no cameras, but you also know she has a peephole, and she’ll see you when you knock. How do you get her to open the door?’ ‘I don’t know. You tell her someone’s after you, and you need help?’
Zara had made the same assumption as me—that the killer was a featherweight. A big guy like Garcia would have just barged the door open. But this killer used a taser and a garrotte rather than their hands. We were looking for a woman, a teenager or a small man.
‘Or you’d dress as a delivery driver,’ I said. ‘Hold up a package and say you need her to sign for it.’
‘Okay, sure. So what?’
I stepped back. ‘Open the door.’
Zara didn’t. ‘I’m not leaving my prints and DNA all over a crime scene.’
‘Forensics have been and gone,’ I said. ‘And we won’t touch anything.’
Zara sighed and produced her lock-release gun. There was a whir, a click and a creak as the door opened, revealing a dark hallway.
I stepped across the threshold, looking around. The walls were mint green. A big photo of two young men had been printed on canvas, stretched across a frame and mounted on one wall. Braidwyn’s two sons, I guessed. The ones who hadn’t visited until her corpse had been rotting for a week. A little Jesus statue stood on a shelf between two candles. A shrine like that typically went on the east wall, but this was on the south. This could have meant the victim belonged to a denomination I didn’t know much about, or was more iconoclastic than ecclesiastic. Maybe it meant nothing.
There was a dark stain just inside the doorway. I crouched. Blood had seeped into the floorboards before the trauma cleaners wiped it away. But it hadn’t pooled—it made a ring shape, the kind left behind by a coffee mug.
‘The killer held her down,’ I said. ‘To watch her die, face to face.’
‘How do you know?’
I wasn’t sure—I could just picture it so vividly. I walked deeper into the house, turning a corner to a kitchen. There was a large wall calendar. Nothing on it except for birthdays and the letter C, written in red, every Wednesday. No—not every Wednesday. I turned the page, using my silicone hand so as not to leave prints. Three weeks on, three weeks off, going back to January.
‘If the murder happened right here, you don’t need to search the whole house,’ Zara objected from the hallway.
I was examining a can of herbal tea bags, which claimed to have ‘immuno-boosting’ properties. ‘I’m not looking for the killer, I’m trying to understand the victim.’
‘Why?’ Zara sounded honestly confused, and I didn’t blame her. It seemed unlikely that a cannibal would have much respect for the dead. But this was why I’d bristled in that theatre when Ariel Wilcox implied that I was a serial killer. Sure, I didn’t like to see someone’s body go to waste after they were done with it, but that didn’t mean I was indifferent to the person they had been.
