Betrayal (16 page)

“I’m not trying to find a girl, Fred.”

Spinoza nodded. “Of course you’re not. Perish the thought. I just thought, on the off chance that you were, that I’d point out to you the department’s policy. So whose address are you looking for, then?”

“Just this guy.”

Spinoza raised his eyebrows. “Same rules go for cute guys,” he said. “I know we’re not supposed to ask about sexual orientation, but—”

“I’m not gay, Fred. Some of my DARE kids say this guy’s selling dope.”

“So why don’t you just kick it over to vice?”

“’Cause they’d just put it on a back burner, and if I find out this guy is really selling drugs to my kids, I’m going to hunt him down and kill him.”

“That’s different, then. Why didn’t you just say so?” Spinoza moved in closer to the keyboard. “So you got a plate number?”

F
OR THE FIRST TIME
since he’d left Walter Reed, Evan felt he needed to talk to his therapist, Stephan Ray. He didn’t know if there was a technical term for what he was experiencing, but subjectively it felt somewhat similar to his inability to recall the names for things in the first months after his surgery. Except that now, and several other times in the past few days, he had found himself in the middle of some activity, or in the grip of some emotional reaction, and didn’t seem to have a memory of how he’d come to be there. Or any control over his actions.

Earlier tonight by the Corvette with the gun, for example.

What did he think he was going to do with the gun? What did he
want
to do with the gun? He didn’t know, didn’t recall any moment of actual decision. First he was sitting in his car, waiting for Tara to come home so he could have a reasonable discussion with her. And the next thing he knew—the next thing he
remembered
—he was standing by the Corvette in the parking lot with his gun in his hand.
Wondering
why his gun was in his hand.

Surely he wasn’t planning to shoot Nolan. Or Tara. Or, God forbid, both of them. Maybe he’d decided to shoot out one or more of Nolan’s fancy-rimmed tires. In the dim light of early evening, that at least seemed like a semibaked idea. But his sentient mind realized that this would produce a loud noise and the very likely possibility that he’d at least be seen and possibly be recognized. It would also—perhaps—announce himself as interested in Nolan’s activities in a way that he’d rather keep to himself, until he made some rational decisions about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

With Tara.

The stop at the police station had been a rational decision. He knew what he wanted there, though he wasn’t sure
why
he wanted it, and he knew how to get it.

But now, having learned where Nolan lived and having driven up there, he found himself sitting in his car, parked curbside, again with his gun in his hand. If Nolan came home alone, it wouldn’t be the same situation at all as it had been when Tara was with him. This was a quiet street, far less traveled than Tara’s, lined with mature trees.

The address was a nice-looking, stand-alone townhome with attached garage amid a cluster of similar units. Separate, yet somewhat isolated. Perfect for…

For what? he asked himself.

And suddenly, again, the awareness of where he was, of what he was doing, flooded back. He was doing something here—figuratively staring at a drawing of a reindeer and wondering what the name of it was—but the exact nature of what he hoped to accomplish continued to elude him.

Looking down at the gun, he reached over and placed it back into the still-open glove compartment, then closed the door behind it, turned the key to lock it up. Then, the keys in his hand, he realized that he had to get out of here before he did something stupid. Something that he couldn’t even explain to himself.

So he hit the ignition. The dashboard clock read ten forty-two.

Putting the car into gear, he pulled out from the curb and hadn’t gone twenty feet when he jammed his foot on the brakes enough to make the tires squeal. His windows were down, he hadn’t turned his headlights on, and running dark with a warm breeze over him sparked a jolt of familiarity.

In the months since he’d been injured, it had left the forefront of his memory, but now, suddenly, all the elements of this night rekindled a vision of the episode with Nolan when they’d raided the insurgents’ lair in the neighborhood close to BIAP. The bright light and the terrific explosion blowing out the windows; the flames licking into the night as gunfire erupted behind him.

A mercenary mission to kill.

An explosion and then a fire.

A dog barked somewhere in the neighborhood.

Evan let out the breath he’d been holding, turned on his headlights, and eased his foot off the brake.

“W
ELL, MY SON,
the latest theory, which might still be wrong,” Spinoza said, “is that it was a thing called a fragmentation grenade. You ought to know about them. They’re evidently using ’em in Iraq right now. Blow the shit out of everything so you need a snow shovel to pick up the pieces. Which pretty much fits what happened here, by the way.” He sat back in his chair and picked up his sandwich. Putting his feet up on the desk, he took a bite. “So why do you want to know? You teaching execution techniques in DARE to the little fuckers?”

“No reason, really,” Evan said. “I just thought it was interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of somebody being killed that way. At least not here in the States.”

“Yeah, well.” The lieutenant chewed thoughtfully. “It’s not the norm, I’ll give you that. Somebody wanted these people completely dead, in a big loud way. It wasn’t some gangbanger taking potshots at a residence and hoping somebody gets hit.”

“Could the guy, the victim, have done it himself?”

Spinoza shrugged. “Not impossible, I guess. There’s no evidence pointing to anybody else. But also there’s absolutely no sign so far of why Mr. Khalil would want to do that. The businesses were going great. He apparently loved the wife. No health problems. At least that’s what we got from the rest of the family. And, believe me, there’s a lot of the rest of the family. So I’m betting against murder/suicide, which leaves a pro. ’Cause I’ll tell you one thing. Whoever did this did it right. At this moment, the only evidence we’ve got is—maybe—the bits of the frag grenade. And just between you and me, I’m kind of hoping we don’t have that.”

“Why not?”

“Because as we stand now, we’ve got a local murder of a businessman. At least we can get away with calling it that, since Ibrahim was a naturalized citizen.”

“Where’d he come from?”

“I thought I told you that last night. Iraq. Half his family, evidently, still lives there. The other half has the 7-Eleven concession for the Bay Area wrapped up here.”

“So what’s the issue if you’ve got a frag grenade?”

“You can’t own a frag grenade. It’s a federal offense. Which means the ATF’s involved. Which, in turn, sucks.”

“So how do you find out if it was a frag grenade?”

Spinoza came down in his chair, brought his feet to the floor. “Fear not, my son. The ATF has already picked up samples from the scene. They’ll have it analyzed by tonight and soon we’ll all know for sure. If it is what it is, the FBI’s in before morning. The preliminary call is yep, frags. So it’s gonna be their case.”

“Why’s that so bad, Fred? Don’t they have a lot more resources than we do?”

“Oh, no question,” Spinoza said. “More resources, more money, more access to data, the whole nine yards. The thing is, though—they don’t share. So we wind up spending a week finding stuff they already have. It’s kind of a race to see who can get there fastest, but we’ve got one leg tied behind our backs.”

“I don’t think that’s exactly the expression.”

“No?” Spinoza popped his last bite of sandwich. “Well, that’s what it feels like.”

H
E KNEW THE LOCKSMITH
from Ace Hardware both from his high school class and from his men’s softball team. Now, at a few minutes before two o’clock on an afternoon after Evan had told
his
lieutenant, James Lochland, that he was suffering from a migraine and needed to go lie down in his dark bedroom, Dave Saldar pulled up outside of Nolan’s townhouse and parked in back of Evan’s CR-V.

Evan, in his police uniform to reinforce his legitimacy, got out of his car and they high-fived each other on the sidewalk. After a couple of minutes of catching up—Saldar had heard some of Evan’s story from guys on the team—they got around to what Evan had called Dave up here for.

“You didn’t hide a spare under a rock or something?” Saldar asked.

“No. I didn’t think I’d ever forget my keys. Who forgets their keys?”

“My wife does every time she leaves the house.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t. I never have before.”

“I would love one thin dime for every time I’d heard those exact words. Why do you think the world invented locksmiths?”

“I never could figure that out.”

“Well, now you know.” Saldar inclined his head toward the town-homes. “Okay, which one’s yours?”

They went down to Nolan’s doorway, partially enclosed and blocked from the street by an L-shaped, glass-block privacy screen. Saldar got out his tools and went to work. Evan found that his legs were weak enough that he had to lean against the screen for support. With each passing second, the enormity of the implications of what he was doing worked on his system. He felt as lightheaded as he’d been on Nolan’s night raid outside of BIAP. A jackhammer pulse pounded where they’d cut open his skull. The migraine he’d invented for Lieutenant Lochland threatened to become a reality—pinpoints of light exploded at the outer edges of his vision. He kept looking to the street, nearly passing out when a yellow Miata convertible crested the incline and drove by.

Saldar, noticing something in his reaction, glanced up at him. “You all right?”

“Good,” he said. In fact, he could feel the sweat breaking on his forehead. Summoning all the control he could muster, he brought his hand up and dragged it across his brow.

At last, Saldar turned the knob and pushed the door open. “There you go, a minute and fifteen seconds. This could be a new record.”

“I’m sure it is, Dave. That’s awesome.”

Saldar was holding open the front door. “Hey, are you okay, Ev? You really don’t look so good.”

“I’m all right. The head’s acting up a little, that’s all.” He reached back for his wallet, thinking,
I’ve got to get him out of here! What if Nolan shows up?
But keeping it casual, he said, “So what’s the damage?”

“Let’s call it thirty, since we’re friends. You want, you can go grab your set of keys and I can make you a couple of quick copies right out of the truck, five bucks each.”

“That’s all right.” Evan fished out two twenties. “I know I’ve got some dupes inside. I’ve just got to remember to put ’em out here somewhere for next time. But right now I think I’d better get in there and lie down a minute.”

“Sure, okay. But let me run and get you your change.”

“No, keep it.”

“I can’t take tips from teammates, Ev. It’s one of my rules. I’ve got some cash back in the truck. Won’t take me thirty seconds.”

He put a firm hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Dave, really, I’m hurting a little here. Thanks for your help, but I’ve got to get horizontal pretty quick or I’m going to get sick. Seriously. Take care of yourself. I’ll see you around.”

“You need a doctor?”

The effort for even half a smile was almost too much to bear. “You don’t let me get inside pretty quick, you’re gonna need a doctor. You hear me?”

“All right, all right. But stop by the field sometime. We’re still playing Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“I will. Promise.”

“I’ll buy you some beers with your tip money.”

“Deal,” Evan said, stepping inside the door. “Later.”

H
E STOOD IN THE LIVING ROOM.
Part of him had a hard time believing that he was truly here, illegally inside another man’s home. It felt surreal. This wasn’t who he was. It wasn’t the kind of thing he’d ever done, or even thought about doing.

But now, once inside, he couldn’t let those considerations slow him down. There was no telling when Nolan might return. Evan had no idea what hours he worked, or what he did on a day-to-day basis, or even if he had any regular schedule at all. If there was something incriminating to be found in this place, and Evan’s guts told him there was, he had to find it and then get out fast. It wasn’t a matter of finding evidence that could be used in court—he simply wanted the knowledge.

Or at least that’s what he let himself believe. He would decide then how to use what he knew at his leisure.

The room he was in was Spartan, furnished with a leather couch and matching twin leather chairs in front of built-in, mostly empty, bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. A large mirror over the mantel gave an impression of space, but the room probably wasn’t more than ten feet wide. Half of the back wall was a glass doorway that opened onto a small brick patio, shaded by large oak trees. A potted plant squatted in the corner. The first glance told him that there would be nothing of interest here, but he forced himself to slow down and make sure.

When he was done, he parted the blinds in the front window, saw nothing out in the street, and crossed the tiled entry area that led into the kitchen, which didn’t have much more personality than the living room. It was, however, quite a bit more exposed, since the double-wide window over the sink looked out over the small lawn to the street beyond.

It didn’t appear that Nolan did a lot of cooking for himself—the refrigerator had eggs, beer, a pack of American cheese, and milk, with tomatoes and lettuce in the vegetable bin, and some condiments, while the freezer held three boxes of frozen spinach, a carton of ice cream, and a few packages of chicken breasts and ground beef.

A door next to the refrigerator led out to the small single-car garage, where Nolan had hung his empty duffel bag and two empty backpacks on hooks on the far wall. An uncluttered workbench obviously hadn’t seen much use, and neither had the drawers under it.

Back in the kitchen, Evan finally got his nerves under control as he scoped out the street again and then ducked under the window passing through. Just off the living room in the back of the house, he entered a decent-sized den with a desk and a computer. The wall featured a tacked-up map of Iraq with several color-coded pins stuck in various spots—Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk, Abu Ghraib, Anaconda. Evan tried the mouse first to see if the monitor screen came on, and when it didn’t, he hit the button on the CPU. While it booted up, he went through the next door into the bedroom and stopped in his tracks.

Drawing a heavy breath, he crossed over to the bureau next to his enemy’s perfectly made bed and picked up the photograph of Nolan and Tara in a heavy silver frame. They were hugging each other for the picture, obviously from the deck of a boat out on the Bay, both smiling out at him on a lovely day. He held the picture long enough that the urge to smash it against the wall came and went. Then, replacing it carefully in its original position, he went back to his searching in earnest. Dresser drawers, bathroom drawers, cupboards, and closets.

The headboard of the bed yielded up the first weapon, another M9 Beretta, the same weapon that Evan had carried in Iraq. He smelled the barrel and picked up no odor, then removed the clip and verified that it was full. But a pro like Nolan, if he had used the gun, would have cleaned it and reloaded immediately afterward.

The bedroom closet, neat like the rest of the house, contained another backpack on the top shelf. This one he emptied out on the bed piece by piece. It held another Beretta 9mm, ten clips of ammunition, and six hand grenades. Evan didn’t know for sure if they were fragmentation grenades or the so-called flash/bangs, which were nowhere near as lethal. But either way, he was willing to bet that they were illegal in the hands of private citizens. Evan was sure that they would be of interest to the police, once he figured out a way to get some law enforcement person interested in Nolan as a suspect in the Khalil murders.

Replacing the backpack, he went back into the den and sat in front of the computer. Clicking on the icon labeled “Allstrong,” he scanned through a few documents—mostly what appeared to be copies of or amendments to government contracts or work orders that the company had secured overseas. There were also a significant number of e-mail files, and several résumés of people who had served in the military, which attested to the kind of work Nolan was probably doing over here Stateside. Evan entered a few more of the documents and searched for the name Khalil, but came up empty.

Lacking a password, though he tried several obvious ones, he couldn’t get into Nolan’s regular e-mail file. The icon named “My Pictures,” by contrast, came right up. Immobilized by what he feared he might see there—more photos of Nolan and Tara in much more intimate settings than the deck of a boat—he finally clicked on the first folder and, finding not even one picture of Tara, sighed in relief.

These appeared to be shots Nolan might have taken when he was shopping for a house. Here was a tree-lined street just like the one he lived on, cars parked along the curb. Then different angles, in different lights, on another house, large and grandiose. In fact, on closer inspection, on the clearest picture from directly in front of the building, the place was actually a pink-hued monstrosity. What in the world, Evan wondered, could Nolan have seen in the place that would have prompted such a detailed study?

Suddenly recognition straightened him upright. In the paper that morning, Evan had seen a black-and-white picture of the remains of Mr. Khalil’s house, which of course no longer looked very much like the residence in this picture. But in the article, hadn’t he read something about the house being pink?

Hurriedly he started pulling open the drawers to the desk. There was a digital camera in the middle drawer and for a second he considered looking at what it contained. But he couldn’t take the time. He checked his watch—two forty-five. He’d been in here too long already. In the lower right drawer, he found an open ten-pack of floppy disks. Four remained in the box, and with his hands shaking now, he took one out, inserted it into the A-disk slot, and copied the file from the “My Pictures” photo onto the disk.

Ejecting the disk, he put it in his breast pocket, then sat back, took a breath, and walked himself through turning the computer off the careful way, through the “Start” menu.

Keenly listening for the sound of the garage door opening, or of a car pulling up out in the street, he forced himself to wait until the terminal screen went black. Then he got out of the chair and replaced it where he hoped and thought it had been. He pushed all the desk drawers flush against their inserts. Checking one last time to make sure that he still had the disk in his pocket, he walked back up through the living room, locked the front door from the inside, looked out through the window, saw that it was safe, and let himself out.