22
We had holed up in the Morisa, a hunk of faded grandeur near the centre of Fresno. The hotel looked like it had been built to withstand sustained bombing. We liked that about it. We arrived in town late the previous night and decided not to drive any further. Until we had a plan, and somewhere in particular to go, we could be heading in one of many wrong directions. We went to the desk separately and booked rooms on different floors and went upstairs and went to sleep. Early next day we walked out into the downtown. We walked and we walked but couldn't work out where to go or what to do. There's something very alienating about stores when you have no interest in shopping. Who are these people? What are they buying, and why? They seem no less weird and irrelevant than the boarded-up fronts or the graffiti-strewn alleyways between abandoned warehouses. Weirdly, I thought I saw some letters I recognized on a door down one of these, but closer inspection showed the second letter was a 'B', not an 'R'. I think. I'm not sure. I was feeling pretty paranoid.
Late morning had found us back in my hotel room. The room was not large and had not been decorated recently. I sat in the chair. She sat on the bed. We drank the coffee when it arrived.
Nina was regretting leaving LA. She wanted to go back. I wouldn't let her. I understood that it felt like running away — it
was
running away. She had a job, too, even if she'd currently been asked not to do it. For her to be in this position because of a relationship to a man (and a relationship that was finished, moreover) was the kind of thing that would piss any woman off. Nina wasn't just any woman, either. She had ire in depth. She was so furious at Zandt having lied to her that she wouldn't turn her phone back on. I tried calling him, a few times, but never got anything more than the same old robotic voice telling me the phone was off. He could be anywhere in the country, doing God knows what — or in serious trouble. For all we knew, he could be dead.
It wasn't that either of us thought it was impossible that Zandt had killed Ferillo. We both knew that, during the initial search for his daughter, when he had still been on the force, he had privately cornered and killed the man he was convinced was responsible. The problem was that a further abduction had taken place after this event. We now had a name for that person — Stephen DeLong — and already knew he had been only one of several people abducting to order for the Straw Men, my brother being chief amongst them. The sudden arrival of a video file nailing John for DeLong's murder — and which had evidently been held in reserve for a long time — proved they were after him, and willing to do a great deal to send bigtime trouble his way. The question was whether the death of Ferillo was an example of this, or part of the cause.
Nina had made two calls from the room's landline. These had established that Ferillo had a restaurant called the Dining Room on Stark Street in Portland. Four years previously he had been arrested as part of a racketeering investigation down in LA, and had been close to going away for a long time. He'd walked, and got himself from there into the position of owning a vaunted eatery patronized by the great and the good of northeast Oregon. From minor mob to wealthy restaurateur was a mighty bound, but said nothing about why Zandt might have decided to explode into his life — or why someone might choose to make it look that way.
After the calls we sat in silence for a while. The coffee got slowly colder, but we kept drinking it anyway, until my stomach felt bitter and curdled. I had the window open wide and was staring out over battered buildings as an angry sky dropped persistent rain. It felt absurd not to be doing something, but I couldn't think what it might be. We had no way of finding John, and no way of getting closer to the Ferillo investigation.
Then suddenly a very dim light went off in my head. It flickered, sputtered out for a second, then came back a little stronger.
'Call Monroe,' I said, slowly.
'No way.'
'See it from his point of view. He's not an idiot. He knows something major happened to you at the end of last year. You get shot, and Sarah Becker is back with her parents. But you tell him nothing, and now someone you're intimately tied to is going around doing very bad things.'
'Or looks like they are.'
'Whatever. Even if Monroe didn't have someone pushing him from behind, you'd be standing at the end of a long plank right now.'
'What are you not saying?'
'What do you mean?'
She looked at me squarely. 'What I mean is that there's something in your voice that I don't understand.'
'Tell me again about what happened when you went to The Knights motel. The day Jessica's body was found.'
'Ward
'Just tell me.'
'I got a call from Charles. On my cell. He said someone had just taken out a cop in a patrol car and then disappeared.'
'And then what?'
'Nothing. He told me where it was and said he wanted me down there.'
'For a cop-killing.'
She hesitated. 'Yes.'
'Which is nothing to do with the FBI, and of no interest to him. Unless…'
She was silent for a full twenty seconds while she thought it through. 'Oh Christ.'
'Yeah. Maybe.'
She blinked, rapidly. 'So why on earth would we talk to him?'
'Because we don't have anyone else. And because then you get to ask him this question and see what he says, and if he has no good answer, then… either we're in worse trouble than we thought, or we have something to work with.'
She'd evidently made the decision before I spoke. She got off the bed and pulled her phone from her bag, turning it on. Within a couple of seconds it chirped several times.
'Messages,' she said. She listened. Then pulled the phone from her ear and stood with a strange expression on her face.
'John?'
She shook her head. 'Monroe. Four times. No message, just 'call me.'
'So call him. Not his office number. Call his cell.'
'But if he does a point-of-origin he'll know where we are.'
'He'll know where we
were.
Come on, do it.'
She dialled. Listened to it ring, with her eyes on me.
Then: 'Charles, it's Nina.'
From six feet away I could hear the immediate torrent of speech. Nina listened for a moment.
'What are you… Oh Jesus. Charles, I'll call you back.'
She cut the connection. Seemed for a moment actually speechless.
'What? Nina — what?'
'They've found another woman with a hard disk.'
—«»—«»—«»—
At half past five it was getting dark and we were sitting in the car fifty yards back from a place called the Daley Bread. We were there because it was a place I'd noticed on the way in the night before, big and anonymous, and we'd chosen it because it was on a big street, four turns off 99 and the open road north or south. Easy to find, easy to drive quickly away from. We were there early because we wanted to see if anyone was going to be put into position, whether calls might have been made to the local cops or field office, or… anyone else. Whether Monroe could be trusted even a little, in other words.
In half an hour we saw no one except a handful of bedraggled citizens shuffling past with tattered blankets around their shoulders, interspersed with small knots of the young and well-heeled. The two appeared utterly unrelated, and it was hard to understand how they inhabited parts of the same space, as if they were two separate species that just happened to look a little like each other. We watched each group approach and then walk away. Some peered into the car and doubtless wondered why a couple of people might be sitting there on a cold, dark evening. We stared back. We were about as paranoid as we could be. When no one was around we just watched the street in both directions.
At quarter past six, fifteen minutes ahead of the appointed meeting, I opened my door and got out.
'Be careful,' she said.
'I'll be fine. He doesn't know what I look like.'
'No. But other people do.'
I walked up the road at a moderate pace, trying to place myself somewhere between the derelicts and the young and cool. I waited a beat on the opposite side of the road to the diner, saw no one who looked like law enforcement outside, and very few people within.
As I walked across the road I realized that anyone with half a brain would have held the location of the meeting back until Monroe was actually in town, to make it harder for him to mobilize local agents, if he had a mind. More than ever before I wished Bobby was around. Or my mother. Without either, I knew there was some part of my back which was always going to feel uncovered.
I asked a question, quietly and without moving my lips.
'Is this a stupid idea?' There was no reply.
Inside the restaurant it was warmer and a little stuffy. A tired-looking girl in a uniform came straight over with a menu in her hand. 'I'm Britnee,' she said, unnecessarily. She had a badge the size of a plate. 'Will you be dining alone tonight?'
I said I would, and that I had my eye on one of the booths that ran either side of the central partition of the room. As there were only two other couples present in the entire place, she had no real choice but to sit me where I'd asked.
I ordered a chilli without looking at the menu. When she went off to wake up the cook, I got myself into the position Nina and I had agreed upon. I sat close up against the right-hand side of the booth, with my back to the low wall which separated it from its twin on the other side. Neither table could be seen from the other side, but I should be able to hear.
I pulled out a free magazine that I'd picked up in the foyer of the hotel, got my head down, and started reading.
Five minutes later I heard the door of the restaurant open. A quick glance showed Nina entering. Britnee tried to send her to one of the window tables, presumably because of their fabulous view of the cold, wet street outside, but Nina insisted. I lost sight of her as the waitress led her around the other side, but a minute later heard the settling sound of someone sitting on old Naugahyde, the other side of the partition wall.
We sat in silence for a while. I heard another waitress shuffle over to Nina and ask if she wanted a drink, and I heard Nina's reply. Soundwise, it was going to work fine.
I kept running my eyes over advertisements for local stores I had no interest in, and for deeply historic, family-run restaurants which looked identical to what you'd find in any town in the country. It felt strange knowing that Nina was the other side of the divide, doing the same thing. Every now and then I watched the street outside for a while. Nothing happened.
Then finally I heard Nina's voice, quietly.
'He's here,' she said.
I glanced quickly at the door again and saw an athletically built man in his late forties. He was wearing a suit and a long buff overcoat. He came into the restaurant walking quickly, and was past Britnee before she could even suggest a nice seat out on the terrace. He'd evidently clocked Nina's position from the outside.
'Hello Charles,' I overheard, a moment later.
There was the sound of someone sitting down. 'Why couldn't we meet at your hotel?'
'How do you know I'm at a hotel?'
'Where else are you going to be?'
There was a long pause, and then Nina said: 'Charles — are you okay?'
'No,' he said. 'And neither are you. The video's been checked. It's John, and it's not faked. His thumbprint on the bottle opener in Portland isn't fake either, and there's now an eyewitness who saw a man leaving the building half carrying a woman. This man told the witness the girl was drunk and he was taking her home. The photo fit looks so like Zandt it's untrue, and the girl confirms the likeness. I also talked to Olbrich and I know what he found out for you. John was in Portland that night.'
'Thanks, Doug.'
'He's a policeman, not your personal fucking information service. Zandt killed Ferillo, Nina. Accept it. He also hit the girl hard enough to give her concussion. I don't know what the hell is going on in his head but protecting him is going to do you no good at all.'
'Going after him is not going to help you either. You're committed.'
'What do you mean?'
At that moment two things happened. The first was that the waitress arrived with my chilli and took about as long setting it down, and made about as much noise, as you would have believed possible. She also wanted to ask me a lot of questions. Where I was staying, how much I was enjoying being right here in historic Fresno, if I was sure I didn't want a side of onion rings, she could go back and rustle them right up? I answered these as quickly and monosyllabically as I could.
The second was that Nina dried.
I didn't have to see her to know she was staring down at the table, unable to take the next step. So I made a decision. It was a mistake. I stood up, left my food, and walked around the partition.
I pulled a chair over to the end of the booth where Nina and Monroe sat opposite each other with untouched sodas.
Monroe stared at me. 'Can I help you?'
'I hope so,' I said. 'I'm a friend of Nina's. I'm going to ask you the question she doesn't want to ask.'
'Nina, do you know this guy?'
'Yes.'
'Your name is Charles Monroe. My name is Ward Hopkins. I'm one of only two people who can back up what Nina's eventually going to tell you. Probably the only one you're going to listen to, as you're unlikely to take John Zandt's word for much.'
'I've no intention of listening to you either, whoever the hell you may be. Nina…'
'You will listen,' I said. 'After you've explained to us how you knew there was a body to be found in The Knights.'
He wasn't expecting that. He tried to stare me down, but it's a funny thing: since my parents died, it's a lot harder to scare me. It was never that easy, and now it's pretty hard. It's like a part of me, right deep down, doesn't really give a shit any more.
Nina was watching him carefully. 'Are you going to answer him?'
He didn't say anything, and I saw the change in Nina's face, and realized she suddenly believed what I'd suggested.