Crosscut (19 page)

Swayze crossed her arms. “My sentiments exactly.”

Dad looked only slightly less doubting. I grabbed his arm.

“You have to believe me.”

He looked at me, hard, and then at Archie. “Call nine-one-one.”

Archie waved at me derisively. “She told me not to.”

Dad stepped toward him, pulling out his cell phone. “Then take your finger out of your nose and
shut down the building
.” He punched numbers and put the phone to his ear. “I need the police.”

He spoke rapidly to the dispatcher. My pulse was jumping and gooseflesh was pinching my arms. I glanced nervously around the lobby. Archie huffed behind the desk, looking overtly miffed. Taking a key ring from his belt, he unlocked a cabinet on the wall and pushed a series of buttons on a control panel.

“I’m shutting the garage,” he said.

His face said,
Happy now?
He trundled toward the far side of the lobby, jingling the keys in his hand, and kept calling the guard on the walkie-talkie.

Dad, still on with the police, turned to me. “What did he look like?”

“Blond hair. Slight. Pale.” I ran my hand into my hair. “I didn’t see his face, but he freaked me out, something about him . . .”

He put a hand on my arm. “Focus and remember. How tall was he?”

“Maybe my height? But not huge. Slight.” My hands were cold. “Ask Jesse. The guy grabbed him.”

Jesse looked up. “The guy who swung the paint can? I just saw the back of his head.”

“What do you mean? He shoved you into the scaffold.”

Dad stepped toward him. “For Christ’s sake, it may be the killer.”

I put out an arm to block him. “He stared you in the face for three or four seconds.”

Jesse looked as though a crushing weight had just landed on him. “No. I don’t remember seeing him.”

At the desk a buzzer went off. Dimly, we heard an alarm ringing. Swayze went behind the desk and bent over a control panel, frowning.

“It’s the parking garage elevator.”

We heard a fire door slam open. Archie came stumbling around the corner, hands out, mouth wide. The buzzer and alarm continued ringing.

“What is it?” I said.

He stumbled to the desk and grabbed a phone. His hands were shaking.

“Ramos.” He stared at the phone as though wondering how the hell it worked. “He’s downstairs in the parking garage elevator. He’s . . .”

His fingers hovered over the numbers. He was panting. He dialed 911.

Dad and I looked at each other and took off around the corner. We ran down the stairs to level one of the parking garage, pushed the door open, and looked around. The garage was an echo chamber of concrete. At the exit ramp a mesh grate had come down, sealing the way out. We ran to the elevator.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

The door was slowly opening and closing, like a pair of clapping hands. Ramos lay inside, with his head in the doorway. The doors closed, bumped his head, and slowly opened again. Dad jammed himself in the door to stop it. He hit a button inside, locking the door open. Bent down and put his fingers to the guard’s neck.

“He has a pulse.” He looked around at the garage, and back at me. “I’m sorry, Evan.”

He didn’t doubt me anymore.

 
Eighty miles east, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department helicopter hovered above the field. Two hundred feet up, rotors beating, it turned so the scene off the I-10 came into full view. Two sheriff’s cars were stopped on the shoulder, a riot of lights flashing blue and red.

On the freeway shoulder an officer was interviewing the man who’d discovered it. The man was sitting on the ground. From the radio chatter, he’d almost had a heart attack running back to the freeway and flagging down another driver with a cell phone.

Two officers were walking across the field, weapons drawn. The chopper stayed high to keep from flattening the grass with its downwash. Cutting through the yellow grass were tire tracks. They ran off the freeway and angled across the field for a hundred yards, ending at a copse of trees. From up here, the back end of the green Volvo wagon was visible. The officers approached the car.

Coyote strode down the alley behind Argent Tower, putting distance between himself and the underground parking garage. The security guard had dropped like an amateur. The mesh grate had rattled down far too slowly to keep him from running up the exit ramp.

What was going on?

The woman coming through the revolving door, she was China Lake. One of
them
. The man he’d shoved into the scaffolding as well. They were trying to stop him. He stared at the sleeve of his button-down shirt. The man had touched him. He should not have done that. His lips drew back over his teeth. He pulled off the shirt and balled it up and shoved it into a Dumpster.

He had seen the two agents striding across the plaza. They were nowhere near invisible.

This was
wrong
.

They wanted to get to Sway. He could not conclude otherwise. They wanted to interrogate her, suck out the information she could provide. And that would point them toward the mission. No. He could not allow that. Sway was
his
.

The China Lake people—they should not have been able to draw the connection between Sway and the mission. No, this was something that had to be fixed. Fast. Nobody could be permitted to stop him.

He walked down the alley. He heard police sirens. The baseball cap went into a Dumpster. Shoving his hands into the pockets of his chinos to appear unhurried, he glanced back at the skyscraper. He had been close. So close he could smell it. It was like a taste on the wind, ephemeral. He lifted the lid off a trash can and stuffed the blond wig inside.

He reached for the amulet, wanting to draw strength. His hand found empty air. He wasn’t wearing it. Mr. Hollywood Nebbish didn’t wear dog tags. A howl began rolling up his throat. He fought it and felt it continue to rise. He stared at Argent Tower.

He had been denied. He put his left hand on the rim of the trash can and slammed down the metal lid. He felt only pressure, squeezing, a twisting of the skin. He slammed the lid again. Nothing. He had no pain threshold. The vaccine had permanently removed his ability to sense, to feel.

Nobody could hurt him. He was impervious.

Breathing hard, he raised his hand and studied it. It was battered and bruised. This was his strength and power. This sacrifice was the price of invincibility. The howl tumbled deep in his throat. He could not have his own pain. He could only observe it when he took other people’s. Again he gripped the trash can and slammed down the lid, enraged at this weakness, this longing for rude physical sensation.

The sirens grew louder, keening, the sound warping between skyscrapers. He stopped and turned his face to the sun, looking east. Riverside. The child.

He began to run.

 
Dad came thundering back into the lobby from the plaza. “Nothing. No sign of him anywhere.”

Near the front desk a uniformed LAPD officer was talking to Jesse. The notes he was taking were as thin as Jesse’s voice.

“I know the guy walked past me. I turned to follow him and the paint can came swinging at my head. After that . . .”

Dad crossed his arms. “After that, what?
Think,
Jesse. You’re good at that. Come on.”

Jesse’s face was pale. Red paint striped his shirt, jeans, and the wheelchair. He looked like a Jackson Pollock canvas. He glanced from my father back to the cop and began unbuttoning his shirt.

“Tag this as evidence.” He looked my way. “Where’d the guy grab me?”

“Biceps. Both arms.” I held out my hands, showing the cop how the stranger had gripped him.

He undid the last button and took the shirt off, careful not to touch the sleeves. He held it out by the collar.

“Long shot, I know. But maybe your guys can lift a print.”

The officer called for a crime scene tech to bring an evidence bag. Jesse turned to Dad.

“Any chance I could borrow a shirt?”

Dad nodded. Jesse gave him his car keys and Dad went to get one from his garment bag. The tech bagged the shirt and asked Jesse and me to give him our prints for comparison.

Near the bottom of the curving staircase, Maureen Swayze stood chewing on her pencil. She looked shaken. I walked over.

“You believe me now, don’t you?” I said. “It was Coyote.”

“Yes. That’s not only the logical explanation, it’s”—she took off her glasses and cleaned them on the tail of her blouse—“deeply disturbing.”

“Do you know who he is?” I said.

Her eyes were distant. She shook her head. “No.”

“What about those two men who stopped by your office?”

“I have no idea.” She stuck the pencil back in her ponytail. “Excuse me, I need to alert Primacon’s security officer. Tell your dad I’ll speak to him soon.” She jogged up the stairs.

The crime tech took my prints. When I finished, one of the painters walked up, holding out a rag. He nodded at Jesse, who was pressing his fingers onto the tech’s print pad.

“He can clean up with this.”

“You can give it to him. He has ears and a voice.”

He looked stricken. I relented, taking it.

I walked over to Jesse. He finished with the fingerprinting and I handed him the rag. He thanked me and wiped it against his jeans. It only smeared the paint spatters into longer streaks.

I touched his shoulder. “You scared me. I thought, I don’t know, he—”

“Ev, for Christ’s sake.” He scrubbed with the rag. “It wasn’t the guy. It was that sound.”

“What sound?”

He looked up, eyes hot. “The glass breaking when the paint can smashed into it.”

The fractured glass sagged in the window frame. Where the can had hit, red paint oozed from a crack the size of a human head.

I lowered my voice. “You had a flashback?”

He pressed his lips white, scrubbing with the rag. I exhaled.

He hadn’t heard a paint can smashing a plate-glass window. He heard himself smashing into the windshield of the car that hit him. I knew what happened after that. The adrenaline rush ran out of control. He saw the car, the fall down the ravine, his friend Isaac lying dead. Eyes wide-open, he didn’t see Coyote.

“I fucked up,” he said.

“No, you didn’t. Jess, God—it’s PTSD, not ineptitude.”

“I had hold of him. If I hadn’t freaked, I could have kept him here.”

My stomach spun. “No. It was Coyote. Christ, look what he did to the security guard. If you’d held on to him, that could have been you.”

“If I’d held on to him, maybe the guard would be okay.”

“No.” I felt dizzy. “You can’t even think about taking those kinds of risks.”

“Goddammit, Delaney. Stop mother-henning me. I’m not a child.” His voice echoed in the atrium. People glanced at him.

“No, that’s not . . . You don’t understand,” I said. “Neither of us can take those kinds of risks.”

He spread his arms. “What risks? What are you talking about? Tell me.”

“It’s...”

I looked up. Dad was walking toward us, carrying a black golf shirt. I ran my hands through my hair. Jesse glared at me.

Dad approached, his face studiously neutral. “Here you go.”

“Thanks.” Jesse pulled the shirt on. It stretched tight across his shoulders.

Dad turned to me. “You need to tell me why you came down to the lobby in the first place. What was going on?”

“I followed two men down from Primacon. They were government agents.”

He gave me a sharp look. “You able to ID a federal agent from twenty paces?”

“These guys, yes.” I described Salt ’n’ Pepa. “So what kind of federal agent doesn’t show his badge or push his power in other people’s noses? Intelligence.”

He grunted. I took that as agreement.

A voice echoed across the atrium. “Miss Delaney.”

I glanced around. Special Agent Dan Heaney, the FBI profiler, was striding toward us.

He worked at the nearby Federal Building, so it didn’t surprise me to see him. But his pitted church-pastor face looked drawn, and that did. His blue suit looked as though he had slept the wrinkles into it.

“You heard,” I said.

He nodded toward the plaza. “Let’s go outside.”

We followed him out into the sunshine. He jammed his hands into his pockets and led us over to the fountain.

“I’ve spoken to Detective Chang and he’s in total agreement,” he said. “We go proactive.”

Dad put on his hat, adjusting the brim. “Buzzwords don’t mean a whole hell of a lot to me, Agent Heaney.”

“We try to lure the killer into a trap.”

“How?” I said.

“Couple ways. The police could announce to the press that the killer has been sighted. That they have witnesses to the attack on the guard here today.”

Jesse shook his head. “That means Evan. No.”

“And you,” I said. “And Archie and the painters. And Ramos.”

“It’s a ploy,” Heaney said. “But it can draw a killer into coming forward to explain why he was near the murder scene.”

The breeze blew my hair across my face. I brushed it back. “Coyote’s an assassin personality. You really think he’d walk into the LAPD and try to make excuses? Or would he just track down the witnesses and eliminate them?”

Jesse picked at the tacky paint on his jeans. “Evan’s already a potential target. Don’t give him an extra incentive to take aim at her.”

Dad nodded at Heaney. “Other options?”

“A sympathetic journalist could write a story about the victims. Try to bring it home to the killer, promote some guilt.” He turned to me. “Especially a journalist who could offer a personal remembrance.”

“And you think this would induce him to surrender himself?” Dad said.

“No. Lure him into the open. It might get him to visit the grave sites in China Lake. Or maybe—”