Headcase, p.19
Headcase, page 19
From here, I could see into a living area, where floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were filled with a mixture of science fiction and science fact. Braidwyn had been interested in a variety of things, from the recent past to the distant future. All the paperbacks had broken spines. She’d read all these books, and probably had interesting opinions about them, opinions that were now lost beyond the event horizon of death.
I made my way counterclockwise around the living area. There was an old sofa, a coffee table and an art desk. On the desk were a vase of dead flowers and a half-finished watercolour depicting them.
I made my way back to the kitchen. From this angle I could see a pill organiser half-hidden behind the kettle. The medications were labelled like seedlings. I read the labels through the transparent plastic. Various painkillers, plus Nolvadex and Evista. Estrogen modulators.
‘She had breast cancer,’ I said.
‘Oh?’ Zara didn’t sound impressed, or even surprised.
I thought about what Ruciani had said before glancing down at his cigarette. They all had …
‘All the victims had cancer,’ I realised. ‘But the feds are keeping it quiet.’
‘Maybe they haven’t made the connection.’
‘They have—Ruciani suspected the killer worked for a health insurance company, or at least had access to the records of one.’
‘Does he?’ Zara looked interested now. ‘They might be hushing it up to hold on to media interest. The public wouldn’t care so much if they knew these women had been dying anyway.’
I doubted that—the media loves a tragedy. ‘Braidwyn thought her own life was worth fighting for,’ I said, looking at the chemo calendar, the estrogen modulators, the immuno-boosting teas.
Zara stuck her hands in the pockets of her silk jacket. ‘Are you done?’
‘Yeah.’ I hadn’t spotted the smoking gun I was hoping for—the only deduction I’d made, the FBI already knew. But it made me wonder what I might learn by visiting Rob Cho’s house. ‘Let’s go to Friendswood.’
Zara checked her watch. ‘We fly to Dulles Airport in three hours.’
‘Great. We have time.’
She threw up her hands. ‘Fine.’
As she followed me to the front door, Zara spotted something on the floor. She crouched next to a skirting board.
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘A hair. But don’t get excited.’ She scraped it up with a nail. ‘It’s mine.’ She held it up next to her own hair, showing me that the colour was a similar maple brown.
‘This is why I didn’t want us visiting crime scenes,’ she said. ‘You might have left something behind as well.’
I wasn’t sure the hair was Zara’s—it was hard to imagine how it could have landed in that spot. ‘Can I keep it?’
She smirked. ‘Sure, weirdo.’
CHAPTER 25
I parked my car in Georgia, then got mad. What am I?
It was late afternoon by the time we reached Rob Cho’s house, a two-storey blond brick thing, with arched windows and a yard full of crabgrass. It was in Pearland, not Friendswood, so Anders had been wrong, but only by four miles. The driveway was blacktop, covered by a shade sail. No car on it.
‘Maybe he keeps it in the garage,’ Zara suggested.
This seemed unlikely. Most Texans keep only junk locked in the garage and leave their thirty-thousand-dollar cars out in the driveway. Strange, but true.
‘Maybe the killer still has it,’ I said. ‘If they used it for the ram raid at the museum.’
Zara opened her mouth, then closed it again.
The front door was on the second level—I had to limp up some stone steps to get to it. My ribs still felt tight after the beating I’d taken. Zara knocked instead of ringing the bell, just in case the bell was wired to activate a hidden security camera. Common these days.
‘Are we going in?’ I asked, after a minute of silence.
Zara looked around. It was more exposed than Braidwyn’s house had been. Risky. But I knew she loved risky.
‘Yeah,’ she said, and dug the lock-release gun out of her purse.
There was a mesh security door and then a regular door. Ironically, the security door was unlocked. Zara’s lockrelease gun made short work of the regular door.
Once it was open, I poked my head in, looking for signs of an alarm. There was no keypad near the door, and no motion sensor in the corner of the room. It looked like we were okay. We entered, and Zara locked the door behind us.
The living room had a Samsung TV mounted on the wall, a leather couch opposite and a tall mirror that made the space feel bigger than it was. Built-in shelves were stocked with recipe books and country CDs. The adjacent kitchen had a bowl of fruit on the island bench, black spots spreading across the bananas like melanoma. But the apples weren’t withering yet, and the tomatoes were still firm. If I had to guess, I’d say the fruit had been here about four days.
There was a dirty bowl in the sink. The gunk on it was solid, but not yet mouldy. Two to three days. I opened the dishwasher. It was full, but the plates inside were clean, beads of water still clinging to the rims. The moisture had been sealed in for too long, and smelled off.
‘What do you think?’ Zara was looking at a framed photo on the wall. A man at some kind of celebratory dinner, maybe a family reunion. His arms were wrapped around a woman with a cautious smile. A candid shot.
I closed my eyes, thinking of the dead body. Then I opened them and examined the man’s face. ‘That’s him.’
Zara peered closer. ‘How can you be sure?’
It was difficult to explain. The man’s face was partly hidden by the woman’s hair, so the mole under his eye wasn’t visible. There were no other distinctive features I could point to, like a scar, a tattoo or a bent nose. The hair in the picture was longer, the skin less purple, the eyes darker without the milky haze of death. But my subconscious must have noted hundreds of more subtle details, like the width of the chin, the shape of the teeth, the distance between the nostrils, the height of the widow’s peak.
‘I just am,’ I said.
‘Who’s the woman? Wife, girlfriend?’
‘Sister.’ They had similar faces, and the embrace looked familial rather than romantic. Anyway, this was the house of a lone person—small portions in the fridge, only one genre of music and one kind of book on the shelves, only men’s shoes on the rack by the door. It was possible that Cho had a girlfriend who didn’t live with him, but if so, she would have reported him missing by now.
A masters degree in computer science from Texas A&M hung near the photo. Same college as Garcia—same year, too. That was probably where they’d met. It still seemed incredible that Cho had unflagged Garcia’s application to work at NASA, knowing what he’d done.
I walked into the bathroom to check how many toothbrushes were on the vanity. None. That was interesting.
‘Why hasn’t the sister reported him missing?’ Zara asked.
‘Garcia said she was in hospital. Can you find out which one?’
‘Of course.’ She sounded offended.
Some stairs led down to the garage. There was a pingpong table, and a bicycle. No car, and nothing else of interest.
I went back up the stairs and moved towards the bedroom. There was an external door in the hallway, leading to a small backyard surrounded by hedges. The house was built on a slope, so even though we’d climbed stairs to get in, the back rooms were at ground level. I passed the door and entered the master bedroom. The closet held only men’s clothes, and not many of them. One suit and two casual outfits. The rest was office wear—polo shirts and chinos.
Zara spoke from right behind me, making me jump. ‘Maybe Cho himself is a Chinese spy,’ she said. ‘Would that fit?’
‘Unlikely. He was Korean,’ I said.
‘How do you know?’
‘Kimchi in the fridge. Plus …’ I pointed to a framed photo on the wall. A wedding, full of shoulder pads and eighties hairstyles. Cho’s parents. The groom was giving the bride a piggyback. ‘That’s a Korean tradition.’
I could see Zara was wondering where I’d heard this, but wasn’t willing to ask three questions in a row. She hated admitting ignorance. I didn’t know if that was a CIA thing, or just a Zara thing.
‘There aren’t many clothes here,’ she said instead.
I shrugged. ‘Men don’t care about clothes.’
‘Or …’ Zara pointed to an empty space at the top of the closet. It was exactly where you would expect a suitcase to be.
I peered under the bed. Nothing, not even dust. ‘We were both right.’
‘Explain.’
‘When we were talking about the best way to dispose of a body. I said the killer stole a spacesuit and dragged the body into the middle of a field. You said they would have taken the victim’s car to his home and packed a suitcase to make it look like he left town. We were both right. The killer did both—’
I stopped.
‘What?’ Zara said.
I shushed her, and then she heard it, too.
The security door creaking open.
CHAPTER 26
I’m quick, then I’m big. I’m bright, then I’m loud. What am I?
Zara and I looked at each other for a second.
There was a soft click as someone tried the handle of the front door. Zara had locked it behind her, so it rattled but didn’t open.
It couldn’t be a coincidence that the visitor had arrived so soon after us. My best guess was that the Houston PD or the FBI had staked out Braidwyn’s home, and had followed us here. They must have decided this was their best chance to make a play. I wondered if they’d try to catch me alive.
I pointed silently, through the open bedroom door to the hallway, where the sliding glass door led to the yard.
We crept to the door, but it was locked. Zara fumbled for her lock-release gun. ‘Wait,’ I whispered. I could hear keys in the front door. If the new arrivals had keys, they would reach us long before Zara could get us out the back.
I grabbed Zara’s arm and pulled her into the kitchen. We both ducked down behind the island bench as my brain went into overdrive. The police or the FBI wouldn’t have a key to Cho’s house. There had been no keys on his body. But his killer would.
The hinges creaked. Cautious footsteps shuffled in.
I leaned slowly sideways, so I could see the living room mirror, and a reflection of the front door.
Two men entered. Both wore white T-shirts and cargo shorts. One had a running jacket and looked like he was in his late twenties. The other wore a baseball cap and seemed to be early forties. Despite the casual clothes, they moved like soldiers. Walking in a combat crouch, checking corners, keeping their heads low.
Both were Asian, and both carried compact semiautomatic pistols.
Zara’s eyes were wide. She mouthed ‘MSS’ at me, like I hadn’t already worked that out.
Except it didn’t make any sense for the MSS to be here. There had never been any Chinese fighter pilot—it was just Rob Cho, in a space suit stolen from a museum. So who the hell were these guys?
The guy with the cap made some complicated hand signals at the guy with the jacket, who nodded and started to creep deeper into the house, towards the bedroom. Ball Cap softly closed the door behind him as he swept his gaze across the living room. I shifted back behind the bench before he could see my reflection in the mirror.
If he followed Jacket down the hall, Zara and I could sneak around the other side of the kitchen bench and go down the steps to the garage. Presumably we could open the garage door from inside. It would be loud, but we’d be able to escape under it before the two men came running down the stairs. Even if they were willing to shoot, there were plenty of parked cars out there. Lots of cover. We’d be able to get to Zara’s pick-up.
I tried to indicate all of this to Zara, but with only four fingers, I wasn’t as good at hand signals as Ball Cap was. And anyway, Zara had her own plan.
She stood up and shot Ball Cap in the head.
The crack of the gunshot was loud enough to make my head spin. I scrambled sideways in time to see Ball Cap hit the floor, twitching, a hole where his nose was supposed to be. A puddle of blood grew under him.
Zara had already swivelled to face the hall. Jacket would either try to escape out the back door or return to support his buddy. If he returned, she was ready to shoot.
I reached up and wrapped my fingers around the handle of a carving knife, wedged into a bamboo block on the bench. I wrestled it free. The knife was a single piece of steel, moulded into a handle shape at one end, with a gooseflesh texture for better grip. My heart hammered. The propellant from Zara’s gunshot hung in the air, scorching my nostrils.
Footsteps thudded towards us. Jacket was coming back.
Zara stood still, waiting for him to come into view. Ball Cap’s blood was going to waste as it leaked out onto the floor. All that muscle and fat was getting colder and less tasty by the second. I found myself crawling towards it.
Something bounced into the kitchen—a black cylinder with a yellow band around it. Jacket had been smart enough not to walk into Zara’s trap and had thrown a flashbang instead.
I dropped the knife, plugged my ears and turned my head away, just as there was a tremendous blam! For a split second, I saw my shadow in colour on the far wall, while the rest of the world turned white. My left eardrum whined. From my right ear, which I’d plugged with a silicone finger, I could hear nothing at all.
I tried to pick up the knife again, but my clumsy fingers just knocked it sideways, the blade spinning. The noise had made me dizzy. It felt like the floor was at an angle under me. I collapsed, narrowly avoiding the blade.
The front door opened again, revealing a third guy, taller than the other two, with sunglasses and a short beard. He must have been guarding the door. He saw me and raised his gun.
I managed to grip the handle of the knife and lifted it as though it could deflect a bullet. As though it wouldn’t fall out of my thumbless hand as soon as I tried to stab anything. ‘Get back,’ I yelled, but I couldn’t hear my own voice. Sunglasses looked like he was shouting, too, but I couldn’t tell what. Probably something like Put down the knife. His gun was pointed right at my head.
I kept waving the blade around like a crazy person, wondering where Zara and Jacket were, or if they’d killed each other. Sunglasses approached, holding the gun one-handed, like he intended to grab me with the other.
Without a thumb, it was hard for me to hold the blade. If he put enough pressure on the tendons in my wrist, I’d drop it. I slashed the air, still yelling at him to stay back.
With his eyes on me, Sunglasses stepped into the blood puddle. His foot slipped backwards like he was on ice skates, and he accidentally fired the gun. I felt the bullet whiz past my ear like a hornet. It left a ricochet scar on the fridge behind me. Sunglasses tried to regain his balance but overcorrected, tumbling forwards now, arms windmilling. He crashed down on top of me, knocking all the air out of my lungs—and impaling his chest on the knife.
Sunglasses screamed, thrashing around above me. Blood rained down, hot and sticky, drenching my shirt and my neck. It was like someone had up-ended a saucepan of passata onto me. The sunglasses fell off the man’s face and I saw his terrified brown eyes. His cheeks went grey. He retched, like he was vomiting up his soul. I tried to get out from under him but couldn’t.
A moment later the guy sagged, which somehow made him feel even heavier. I squirmed until he toppled off me, hitting the ground like a sack of flour.
I looked around. Two dead men. No sign of Zara or Jacket. The door was open. I should have run, but instead I started sawing at the guy’s armpit with the knife. I knew I couldn’t take both bodies, but at least I could take part of one.
Sweat poured down my face as I worked. It was a carving knife, not a hacksaw, so getting through the shoulder joint would be tough. The arm kept flopping around. I pinned it down with one foot and kept going.
Someone grabbed the back of my shirt collar.
I screamed and twisted, trying to slash with the knife, but it was only Zara. She grabbed my wrist, just like Sunglasses had tried to, and dug her thumb in so my fingers jerked apart. The blade clattered to the floor.
‘We have to go,’ she shouted, her voice muffled, distant.
I could see Jacket on the floor in the hall, his back a mess of exit wounds. I hadn’t even heard the shots.
‘Not yet,’ I said, reaching for the knife again.
She ignored me, grabbing my arm and dragging me towards the door, away from the bodies.
‘No!’ I screamed. But she was too strong, and I was still dizzy from the flash grenade.
She pulled me out onto the front porch. I tried to get back up the stairs as Zara hauled me down them, my shoes leaving bloody prints all over the place. My shirt was glued to me by sweat and gore.
Curtains twitched in the neighbour’s house.
I hadn’t gotten a single bite. If only I’d just started eating, instead of getting greedy and trying to take the arm with me. It was the same mistake I’d made with the dead man in the river, the one Luzhin hadn’t let me investigate seven years ago, the day Parget disappeared. The confusion crawled in, like I was coming unstuck from time.
The pick-up was twenty yards away. I couldn’t hear any sirens, but I could tell from the urgency of Zara’s gait that she could.
She threw me into the car. I tried to climb right out again, but she activated the child locks. She started the engine and swerved out onto the road. The air-conditioning blasted my wet shirt and pants, making me shiver.
We made a right turn out of the street just as a police car made a right turn into it. The cop in the passenger seat looked at me but didn’t seem to register anything suspicious. Perhaps, driving fast in the twilight, he mistook the blood on my face for a beard.
Zara kept her eyes on the rear-view mirror as we drove, looking for signs of pursuit. I stared at the road ahead without seeing it. I’d read somewhere that the brain of an addict is chemically different to that of a sober person. Addicts want what they want so badly—whether it is drugs, alcohol, slot machines or social media—that dopamine threatens to overwhelm the brain. To protect itself, the brain kills off some of its dopamine receptors. This is why addicts get so little pleasure from anything else in life. They don’t care about fresh fruit, or music, or the beauty of nature. And it’s why they need more and more of the addictive substance to get the same fix.
