Guardian of Lies (11 page)

Every couple of minutes he dropped a few more coins into the brew. Six shiny small ingots lay steaming in their little molds, cooling on a table a few feet away.

He looked at them admiringly, as if they were freshly baked pies on a windowsill. At the same time he was beginning to understand the saying that being rich doesn’t mean you’re happy.

He goosed the acetylene one more time and tried to digest the latest veiled e-mail from his masters down south. He’d decoded it on the small computer earlier that day. They were beginning to drive him crazy. The latest was another frantic message, this time with another job, more pressing than the last. Of course there would be more money. They gave him a name and an address and again instructions on things to look for after the wet work was done. They had found something on Pike’s laptop, the one Liquida had grabbed that night and sent south in a box filled with plastic packing peanuts, along with the photo from the desk and the woman’s camera.

Liquida informed them that he had not yet had time to cut the head off the serpent. He wished they would make up their minds. They told him the serpent could wait and sent him scurrying to Travelocity for an airplane ticket.

As if this wasn’t enough, Liquida was discovering that killing the woman now locked away inside the female section of the county jail was like dealing with affirmative action, ladies only. If you were a man trying to do the deed, you had to go to the back of the line and wait.

If she were in the men’s side of the jail, she would have been dead four times by now. A single phone call to a number in Tijuana by nine in the morning and she would have been suicided all alone in her cell before noon.

But the women’s jail was something else. This would require him to make his own arrangements directly with some angel of suicides at the jail, and Liquida drew the line at this. It was one thing to kill people for a living; it was another to talk directly with some idiot inside a jail about having it done, especially a woman.

If she was facing serious time, she might give Liquida up just to get a little slack on her term. And if she tried to choke the snake and screwed it up, she would roll over on him in a Mexican minute. Liquida would go down for something that he didn’t even dirty his own hands on. This was against his religion.

No, it would have to be done outside the jail, between there and the courthouse.

Fortunately, there was only one jail that took women in San Diego County and it was located almost twenty miles from the courthouse. She could die of old age just getting there on the sheriff’s bus, unless the bus was hit by a train or a spaceship on the way.

Liquida was beginning to wish that he hadn’t stopped to wash the knife that night. If he had followed her directly up the stairs right after seeing her, the woman would be feasting with her ancestors by now. And instead of sweating in some security line at TSA and doing the morning cattle call on the Jetway, he would be down in Cancun with a calculator and a scale trying to time the next spike in the price of gold.

Liquida remembered something. He walked a couple of steps to his jacket, hanging from a nail on the wall. Liquida reached into the inside pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.

Using just the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, he slid the pieces of the folded paper against each other until it opened up. He looked at it, slowly weighing all the options, whether at some point in the future he might have a use for it, an opportunity to turn it to his own advantage. But he could think of none.

He held the paper up by the bottom corner and set the torch to the top, then held it as it burned down past the letterhead with the name on it. The flame had raced almost to his fingertips before he released it. The final glowing ember consumed the last trace of Katia’s note to Emerson Pike as it lifted tiny specks of hot ash into the air. Liquida watched as the last of these cooled and fell like dust to the cold concrete floor.

You say that Pike’s first meeting with you was no accident. You believe he was looking for you. Why?” This morning I am out at Las Colinas in Santee, the women’s detention facility in the county, meeting once more with Katia.

“It was a feeling,” she says. She sits at a table in the small conference room, running her hands through her hair, which now looks knotted and stringy. The jail comb and the harsh shampoo are taking their toll. She tells me some of the other women are giving her trouble. The Latinas inside are mostly Mexican. Many of them know each other from street gangs. One of them in particular, a big Mexican woman with a scar on her face, is friends with one of Katia’s cell mates. The two of them are giving Katia trouble. Katia’s youth and good looks, the fact that she is from a different culture and has tried to distance herself, have made her the object of the usual jailhouse frictions and jealousies.

I ask if any of them have threatened her.

She says, “Only a little.”

I try to explain to her how it works, the jail pecking order.

“I don’t know what to do. I am afraid,” she says.

“I’ll see what I can do. Talk to someone in the sheriff’s jail unit.” This will have to be done carefully, with an eye toward a housing change. Otherwise, the wrong kind of intervention will only make it worse. “But for right now, let’s talk about how you and Emerson Pike met, down in Costa Rica?”

“I was going to school. I am a student at the university in San José. I did some modeling on the side to make extra money, mostly clothing and makeup. My photographs, a set of them with my name, were on the modeling agency’s website, in their gallery of models. Emerson telephoned the agency. He said he wanted to hire me to do a photo shoot. He said he wanted to do some local advertising for his coin company. That’s what he said.”

“Did you do it?”

“Of course. He was willing to pay a lot of money, so I was happy to do it. The ads with my pictures were to appear in newspapers and magazines. But I remember thinking it was a little strange.”

“Why was that?”

“Emerson had no idea what he wanted, so the agency set up the pictures. They had me wear a bikini and smile at the camera while I was holding a small stack of gold coins in each hand. I thought it was a funny way to sell to investors. But Emerson didn’t seem to mind, and who was I to judge?” says Katia. “Still, that was the first clue. I should have realized.”

“Realized what?”

“Men,” she says. “Sometimes they come to the modeling agencies, mostly Americans…” Then she looks at me. “Sorry.”

“That’s all right, go on.”

“They…they hire models after they look at the pictures on the website. They pay for photo shoots they never use, just to meet the women.”

“Pike never used the photographs?”

“No. And he never did any advertising in Costa Rica. I didn’t know that until later. He seemed very nice. He invited me to dinner. We went out. He was fun to be with and he entertained well.”

I asked her what she meant by this.

“The best restaurants and nightclubs,” she says. “This went on for several weeks. I got to know him, at least I thought I did.”

Katia was comfortable with him. She introduced him to her friends and a cousin who was visiting from Limón at the time, all except her mother, who was away down in Colombia visiting other relatives.

“Does your mother know you’ve been arrested?”

“I haven’t been able to talk to her. Your friend Harry, that is his name, correct?”

“That’s right.”

“Harry was going to telephone one of my friends and ask her to leave a message at my mother’s house. He tried to call my mother’s cell phone, but there was no answer. She usually leaves the phone behind, turned off, when she goes to Colombia. I assume she has not returned.”

“Harry mentioned it.”

“She will want to know what’s happening.”

“So you think Pike sought you out because he liked your photographs on the modeling agency’s website?”

“It’s what I thought at first,” she says. “But later I realized that was not it. After he met my family, he kept asking questions. Mostly he wanted to know where my mother was.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It was as if he wanted to meet her. I told him she was away in Colombia. He asked what she was doing down there. I told him she was visiting relatives. He was very interested in this.”

“Did he say why?”

“No. Just that he wanted to get to know my family. Whenever I asked him why, this is what he would say—‘Because I want to know your family.’”

“And you didn’t believe him?”

“No. All he wanted to know was who the relatives in Colombia were. Strange, no?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“I told him I didn’t know them. It’s true. They are relatives of my mother but I have never met them. She mentions them once in a while but she tells me that they are distant relatives, that I wouldn’t really like them.”

“Did she say why you wouldn’t like them?”

“Not really.”

“And you never asked?”

“I assumed there was some problem.”

“You mean trouble with the law?”

“Es possible, I suppose. My mother never said anything.”

“But that’s what you’re thinking?”

“I don’t know. One of them is old, at least that’s what she says, and she goes down mostly, I think, to take care of him.”

“So your mother is from Colombia?”

“No. She was born in Costa Rica, same as me.”

“And your father?”

“He’s dead. He died when I was a baby. He was Tico, born in Costa Rica.”

“How did your mother’s relatives get to Colombia?”

“I don’t know. As I said, she would never talk about it.”

“But Emerson kept asking you?”

“Yes, all the time. And then one night we talked about it and I remembered I had some pictures in my camera that my mother had brought back with her from her trip a few months earlier. He was all excited.”

“Pike?”

“Yes. I thought it was funny. I laughed at him. He wanted to see them. I told him it was late. We had just come back from a movie. He said no, no, he wanted to see them, right now. So I got the camera and showed them to him.”

“Go on.”

“He kept asking me who they were. We looked at them in the little window in the back of the camera. I told him I didn’t know. I assumed they were my mother’s relatives. She borrowed my camera. She never told me the pictures were there. I found them when I went to use it. But it must be her relatives, no? Who else would it be?”

“What did Pike do then?”

“A few days later he told me he was going back to the United States and he wanted me to come with him for a visit. He invited me to come stay at his house near San Diego.”

“And you wanted to go?”

“Sure. Why not? But I told him I couldn’t. I had no visa for the United States. He told me no problem. And as I told you before, he got the visa.”

“Harry is looking into that, how Pike obtained it so quickly,” I tell her.

“Yes, and there was another problem too. Emerson must have been in a rush,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he insisted on completing the application for me, the application for the visa. He said I would sign it but he would fill it out because it would go faster. I didn’t like that. What, he thinks he’s smarter than I am?”

“So what happened?”

“I gave him my passport because he needed information from it to fill out the form, but he got my name wrong. I didn’t see it. He just had me sign the form. I wanted to look at it, but he said he was in a hurry. He had to go someplace and he took the form with him. Next thing I know he comes back with the visa and my name is not right.”

“Wait, wait, wait…you mean you didn’t go to the U.S. consulate with him when he delivered the application?”

“No. He said it wasn’t necessary, that he could take care of it. He took my passport and the application and the next thing I know he has the visa.”

“But the name is wrong. Did he misspell it?”

“No. He didn’t put down the last part of my name—Nitikin. I always used it, Katia Solaz-Nitikin. Solaz is my father’s name. My mother’s family name is Nitikin. It was on my passport. Emerson knew I used it. It was the name on the modeling agency website. It made me angry because if he’d let me fill out the application, I would have done it correctly. It’s the way he was. He always had to do things, even if it wasn’t his business.”

“A control freak,” I say.

“Yeah.” She snaps a finger and points at me. “That’s it.”

“But in the end the name on the visa wasn’t a problem. I mean, you got into the country all right?”

“It would have been better if I had not.” She looks around at the dismal surroundings, the concrete floor and the dingy walls of the small room we are in, with a female sheriff’s deputy outside the door.

“What happened next, between you and Pike?”

“When we got to his house, everything changed,” she says.

“Changed how?”

“Emerson seemed different. Nervous, as if he was watching me all the time. I told you about the money, how he took it away from me. He told me we were going to take trips to see things, but we didn’t. He would buy me clothes, take me to clubs. But I could tell he wasn’t doing this because he liked it. He was doing it to keep me quiet, so I wouldn’t ask to go back to Costa Rica. Then I found out that before we left to come up here, he had copied the pictures from my camera to his computer without telling me. It’s why I forgot to bring my camera. Emerson took it out of my bag where I kept it and he didn’t put it back. So when I took the bag it wasn’t in it.”

“Where’s the camera now?”

“At my mother’s house in Costa Rica.”

“And the pictures from Colombia, they’re still in it?”

“As far as I know. I asked him that.”

“Pike?”

“Yes. I asked if he erased them when he copied them to his computer. He didn’t ask me. He just did it.”

“What did he say? Did he erase them?”

“He said no, they were still there.”

“And you believed him?”

She shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“Is there a telephone at your mother’s house, any way that we could call down there?”