Authors: James Patterson
“Gotcha,” I said, watching the blank screen expectantly.
“Here she is leaving her office at four-thirty,” Downey said. “She drove straight to the Four Seasons.”
I watched Ali Muller leave the office building with the Aptec logo over the door. She was wearing the Gucci glasses, the swingy black leather coat, and her spike-heeled boots. She was speaking on her phone as she walked to her car in the underground garage.
Once she was in her car, Downey clicked on the icon for the next video in the playlist. When I saw the opening frames, it appeared to me that it had been shot by a dash cam in a car following Muller’s, which was exiting the garage.
Downey said, “Now, here comes one hour and ten minutes of drive time.”
“Go ahead and fast-forward,” I said.
From my seat in the interrogation room, I watched Muller’s BMW negotiate traffic from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, where she got out of the car on Stevenson, a small alley parallel to Market Street.
She gave the valet several bills, and although Jad’s camera was out of audio range, I knew she was saying something like “Don’t bury my car. I’m going to need it fast.”
The video ended—no doubt Downey shutting it down in order to park his own vehicle. As we already knew, bugs had been planted in Chan’s room prior to his planned assignation with Muller.
Downey said to me, “That’s all. You saw the video from fourteen-twenty. Muller gets naked with Chan and the network goes down. End of story.”
“You mind making me a copy of that footage?”
Downey grabbed the laptop away from me and closed the lid.
“Look. I showed you what you asked for. I’ve put my life in danger for this bullshit. I haven’t committed a crime. Now, let me out of here, or I’m getting a serious, no-shit lawyer to sue you in federal court for violating my constitutional rights. Why don’t
you
think about
that
?”
There it was. The man had said “lawyer.”
“Thanks for your help, Mr. Downey. You’re free to go. I’ll walk you out.”
BACK AT MY
desk, I contacted Monterey PD and spoke with the squad commander, asking if he had new information on Muller. I said, “I’m hoping she’s been seen.”
“No sightings and not a clue,” he said. “The husband calls every day, and every day we have to tell him we’ve got nothing.”
I relayed this subzero news to Brady, who told me that a guy from the forensics lab would be at my apartment at eight the next morning to sweep it for bugs.
I said, “Could you get him to come tonight?”
As usual, our lab was overworked and overwhelmed. And now I was pleading for a tech to check my apartment for spy cams. It was just too freaking sad.
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Brady.
At the end of the day, Conklin drove me home and stood watch as I went inside the building. Mrs. Rose brought me up to the last burp in Julie’s day, and after she’d gone home to her apartment across the hall, I ate dinner in front of the TV and had some quality time with my little family.
In the relative quiet, now that I had time to think, something about Jad’s recordings of the action in the hotel rooms started to bother me.
What was wrong with those pictures?
Was it something I’d seen or heard? Or was it something I’d missed? I thought about the two tech kids. I thought about Chan and Muller playing on the hotel sheets. I tried to home in on the nagging feeling and get it to come to Mama.
And then, just as
America’s Got Talent
was starting, the intercom buzzed and I let Dale Culver, our lab’s top bug-buster, into the apartment.
Julie and I sat in Joe’s big chair while Dale dismantled my phones and passed wands over the light fixtures and under the furniture. When he had finished and packed away his gear, he said, “Sergeant, you are certifiably bug-free.” I thanked the earnest young man for working overtime and put the baby to bed.
I was vigorously scrubbing a pot when my cell phone rang. I stripped off my wet rubber gloves and snatched up the phone without checking the caller ID. I wouldn’t have recognized the number anyway.
I just barely recognized the voice that said, “Lindsay. It’s me.”
“Lindsay’s not here,” I said.
I jabbed the Decline button and tossed my phone onto the counter, where it bounced and clattered. It rang again. After three rings, just before the call went to voice mail, I grabbed the phone and said, “What do you want?”
“I want you to listen to me. Please.”
I walked to the sink and turned off the faucet. “I’m listening,” I said with all the warmth of a frozen bag of peas.
“I found Muller. She’s hiding out north of Vancouver,” Joe said. “I’m flying up there tonight. You should come with me.”
“Why, Joe? Why should I do that?”
He said, “We’ve always worked well together. And I know how much the hotel case means to you.”
“I see,” I said.
“I thought you’d like to be there.”
I called Mrs. Rose. I showered and dressed. I didn’t fully understand what I was doing or why, but surely curiosity was prodding me on. Curiosity is both a strength and a weakness.
Same could be said for loving Joe.
A BLACK SEDAN
was idling at the curb downstairs. Joe got out of the driver’s seat and said, “Lindsay. Hi. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a quick look in on Julie.”
I said, “No, Joe. Just—no.”
He said, “OK, OK. I understand.”
He opened the passenger-side door for me and I got in.
When he was in the driver’s seat, I asked again, “Why, Joe? Why do you want me to come with you?”
Joe put the car in gear and said, “I don’t want things to be this way between us.”
I scrutinized Joe as he made filler talk about traffic and weather conditions. He had shaved and was wearing new jeans and a new shirt. He didn’t avoid my gaze. But he did seem removed. Was he remorseful? Ashamed? When he asked me questions, I answered with a similar degree of formality.
Julie is fine. Mrs. Rose is a miracle. We’re working some leads on the case, but we’re still scratching away at the surface.
Then I turned on the radio.
We arrived at San Rafael Airport in Marin County, where a Gulfstream jet was warmed up and ready to go. We boarded the plane at just about eleven.
Our seats were separated by an aisle, which seemed appropriate. Joe and I were like strangers. How had such a wide chasm opened between us in only two weeks? I saw him in my mind, having breakfast with Julie. Now I wondered if that sweet domestic scene might have been a little show he’d put on just for me. I slammed the door on the memory.
The pilot made an announcement. An attendant checked our seat belts and overhead compartments. Jets roared, and we were thrown back in our seats as the plane lifted off.
Once we leveled out, I sipped Perrier and watched beads of moisture sliding off the edge of my window. Then I put on a headset, dialed up some jazz, and reclined my seat.
Questions flew up behind my closed eyelids like shorebirds on the beach.
I thought about Joe sitting across the aisle from me, a virtual stranger who had, by the way, shared a significant part of my life. I wondered if a few months from now we’d be divorced and I’d be living in a new place, or if it would be me and Julie in Joe’s apartment, surrounded by the memories of happier times.
I thought about Ali Muller: her marriage, her children, her still-undefined role in the hotel murders; and I revisited the images of her with Michael Chan—and that was when those pictures in my mind collided with my experience at the actual crime scene. Something didn’t jibe.
And then I grabbed that nagging notion by the toe and didn’t let go until it took form.
Michael Chan was shot in the face and chest and he dropped with his feet facing the door.
How could Ali Muller have shot him from the doorway when she was behind him in the room?
Had she been working with an accomplice? Had someone else shot the housekeeper, knocked on the door, and shot Chan? Had this unknown killer then shot the two techs in the room next door?
I knew for sure that Joe had told Bud he was coming upstairs. The murders had gone down after that.
Had Joe shot the two kids who’d been expecting him to knock on the door? Was he Alison Muller’s partner in these gruesome crimes? After the killings, had it been Joe who had gotten her out of the hotel unseen?
But why? If Joe was partnered with Muller, why would he ask me to come with him to bring her in?
Was I walking into a trap?
My eyelids flew open as my mind violently rejected this idea. No, no, Joe wouldn’t, couldn’t, set me up in order to kill me. Could he? I turned to look at my husband, who was five feet away, sleeping like a lamb. Who was the real Joe?
It was a short flight. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. When the
FASTEN SEAT BELTS
light flickered on, I gripped the armrests and braced myself for violence.
The landing was smooth.
I walked shakily down a flight of metal steps, and Joe took my arm as, with our heads lowered, we crossed the chilly, breeze-whipped tarmac at Vancouver International.
I liked the feel of his hand enclosing my upper arm. Tears slipped out of the corners of my eyes. They were from the wind and so slight that I didn’t even have to wipe them away.
We waited inside Avis for the paperwork to chug out of the printer. I tapped my fingers on the counter.
Joe said, “Lindsay. I can’t prove it, but I believe that Ali Muller killed those four people in the hotel, and if she did, I have to take her down.
“If you aren’t up for this, tell me now, and I’ll leave you at a hotel. I don’t want you to get hurt again.”
“I want to catch her as much as you do,” I said, keeping my expression and my tone neutral. Actually, I was telling the truth. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I can take care of myself. I’m a cop. Job first.”
JOE TOLD ME
that our route from the airport would take us up the Sea to Sky Highway to Brackendale, about an hour-and-twenty-minute drive.
I strapped in and watched as the lighted roadways took us north through Vancouver’s downtown, over the fork of the Fraser River, and north along Granville Street, where the beautifully lit glass skyline unfurled before our car as we crossed the bridge to downtown Vancouver.
We turned left onto Georgia Street and into the tree-lined Stanley Park, and about then, my eyes closed. When I woke up, the dazzling nighttime cityscape was gone and we were driving through the darkest night.
Joe said, “Everything’s OK.”
He used to say that when I bolted awake, startled by a terrible dream.
“How much longer?” I asked him.
“A while yet,” Joe said, and then, as if he’d been bracing himself for whatever would happen next, he inhaled and exhaled loudly. Then he said, “Lindsay, I couldn’t tell you where I was or what I was doing. I shouldn’t tell you now.”
It was a heavy preamble, and although I wanted to know everything, I was afraid of what he was going to say: that he was in love with Alison Muller, that he had never loved me, that his move to San Francisco was an assignment, that our marriage was a cover story and a sham.
I said, “Look. Don’t tell me anything out of obligation.”
“I want you to know because you’re my wife.”
I said, “OK.”
Joe said, “I joined the CIA right out of school.”
“June Freundorfer told me.”
He looked surprised, but after a moment, he said, “I served in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t talk about that with anyone. It was an omission, Lindsay, but talking about what I did during those wars wouldn’t have done either of us any good.”
And then Joe began to stitch the pieces of his past together. He talked about working at the FBI, touched on the case we had worked across agency lines three years ago, the intensity of that time we’d spent together having thrown us into crazy-hot feelings and falling in love.
He talked about moving to San Francisco so that we could be together for real. And then he said, “The part I didn’t tell you, couldn’t tell you, is that around the time Julie was born, the CIA asked me to come back on an ‘as-needed basis.’ I didn’t know they would need me so soon.”
We were driving north in the pitch bloody dark. Joe was telling me about his life as if we were on a date. Oh, my God. We’d had so many years between us, a full life, or so I thought. I was struck with memories of the night I gave birth to Julie. Joe was away on “business,” a consulting gig, he’d told me.
A ferocious storm had been beating the hell out of San Francisco when major contractions came on in force. From my bedroom windows, I could see trees and electric lines down on the roads. Cars had been wrecked and abandoned; 911 operators told me emergency responders were working without pause, and at last, the fire department answered my call for help. A gang of firefighters in full turnout gear had stood in a semicircle around my bed, telling me to breathe and push. That was the setting for Julie’s entrance into the world.
Where had Joe
really
been that night?
“Lindsay?”
“I’m listening. And I want to say that hearing about your secret life makes me feel like a complete idiot.”
“I know. I’m sorry. And I still haven’t told you everything.”
The tension in the car sparked like a downed electric line in the rain. I wanted to grab him and shake him and say,
Come on Joe, cut the crap. It’s me. This is
US.
If only.
If only he hadn’t kept so much from me.
I looked at him really hard. I wanted to see through the deep lies and casual disinformation. How could I know who he was? The man was a
spy
. Triple threat. Hard-core.
How could I believe anything he told me?
Still, the unasked question shot out of my mouth.