The Rule of Nine

TWENTY

I have been chasing Zeb Thorpe at FBI headquarters in Washington by phone all morning. Three separate phone calls so far. The number he gave me for emergencies several months ago rings through to a secretary near his office. I get the sense when I talk to her that I am now old news.

“What was your name again?”

“Paul Madriani. He gave me this number in case there was a problem.”

“I know. I think I told you before, Mr. Thorpe is in a meeting. I believe he already received your earlier message.”

“But he didn’t call.”

“No, he’s busy. I’m sure he’ll call you back as soon as he can.”

I have already left the information about Jenny’s murder, and the fear that it may have been Liquida sending me another message and that he may be targeting my daughter. Herman and I are unable to get any further information, as the police have dropped a curtain around everything at Jenny’s house. What news there is, and there are local reports every few minutes on cable, is offering less than we already know.

“I’ll get the message to him that you called again, just as soon as he gets out.”

“Listen, it may be a matter of personal safety, we just don’t know,” I tell her.

“If there’s an emergency, you should call the local police,” she tells me.

“I don’t know if there’s an emergency. We don’t have enough information to know. If I have to, I will. But I don’t think Mr. Thorpe would want me to call the local authorities.”

“Why not?”

“If I call them, I’m going to have to tell them why. If I have to tell them the details, your boss is going to be very upset.”

“What is this regarding?” she says.

“The attack on the Coronado naval base.”

“Oh!” she says. “Just a moment.” She puts me on hold.

I wait. Herman is grousing around out in the living room, where he slept last night. I see him scratching his chest through his tank-top undershirt, yawning as he ambles barefoot for the bathroom at this end of the hall.

“Who you callin’?”

“Thorpe.”

“He didn’t call you back?”

“Not yet.”

He steps into the bathroom and closes the door. Herman spent the night with a pistol stashed under the cushion of the couch where his head rested. While upstairs I kept watch with my unzipped fanny pack and the loaded.45 next to my pillow.

Every few minutes I would look in on Sarah. She didn’t sleep much. Each time I opened the door to her room, she was lying there wide awake. The information I gave her about Liquida, the FBI’s warning, has shaken her. She understands now why it was necessary to stay away from home for so long. Worse, she is now beginning to labor under the burden of guilt for her dead friend. She told me yesterday that if she had known about the threat from Liquida, she would never have allowed Jenny to come anywhere near our house.

I told her that for all we knew, Jenny’s death may have nothing to do with Liquida. But to Sarah it didn’t matter. The thought that she may have been putting others at risk was enough. In other words, I should have told her. I will have to live with it.

“Hello.” She’s back on the line. “Mr. Thorpe will take your call in his office. It’ll be just a moment.”

I wait on the line. I’ve begun to sense how a mobster must feel when he’s being squeezed by prosecutors with the less than subtle hint that his life is in danger. It’s the reason I have been scrupulous in keeping quiet about the nuke at Coronado. It has less to do with the threat of criminal prosecution, the fear that the government might drop the hammer on me if I talked, and more to do with the knowledge that Liquida is out there. I can’t afford to alienate Thorpe. Regarding Liquida, he is my only source of information, and if push comes to shove, to protect Sarah there is nowhere else I can go.

A second later Thorpe comes on the line. “Mr. Madriani.”

“Yes. I’m here.”

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” he says. “We’ve got a major crisis going on. I couldn’t get away. It’s terrible news about your daughter’s friend. I’m sorry to hear it. I take it your daughter was not a witness to any of this?”

“No. But they were out together that night. My investigator and I tried to provide some cover. We tried to follow them from a discreet distance. Apparently we didn’t do a very good job.”

“You shouldn’t blame yourself. First of all, you’re making a lot of assumptions. I take it you didn’t tell your daughter about Liquida,” he says.

“I have now. I know you didn’t want me to.”

“Only because it would raise questions about what happened at Coronado. Did she ask you about that?”

“No. Right now she’s too upset to think about anything.”

“I understand,” he says. “You did what you thought was best. You said you followed the two girls that night?”

“We did.”

“Did you see anything? Anyone who looked suspicious? Might have been following them?”

“No. Nothing. Not that I noticed. Of course, I’m no pro. My investigator has a better eye for this stuff than I do and he didn’t see anything either. And we were a fair distance away. We didn’t want the girls to know.”

“I understand.”

“They went to a restaurant and a club; both places were crowded. It’s possible he could have been close and we just couldn’t see him.”

“Do you have the names of these places?”

“I do.”

I give them to him over the phone. Thorpe tells me he’ll have some of his agents from the San Diego field office check it out to see if anyone who works there might have seen or heard something.

“Assuming it was him, do you think he could have made you?” says Thorpe.

“What do you mean?”

“If it was Liquida, do you think he might have seen you or your investigator and kept his distance until later?” asks Thorpe.

“The thought never entered my mind. You seemed to think it wasn’t him.”

“Have you told the police any of this?” he says.

“What’s to tell? We didn’t see anything.”

“Of course.” There’s a long pause at the other end. “I don’t know what to tell you. As soon as I got your first message, I had one of our agents contact San Diego homicide. He didn’t find out much.”

“Then am I safe to assume that the killer didn’t leave a calling card this time?”

“Not that they found. At least not yet. We checked. We told them to pay particular attention to prints. Of course, they’d already dusted the place. They’ll go back and take a second look. We told them anything they couldn’t identify to run it through our computers. We’ll authorize it to be expedited. We told them so.”

“Did they ask you what your interest was?” I say.

“They did. We told them we couldn’t discuss it unless there was evidence linking it to a couple of cases we have open. For the time being, unless they find something else, I’m afraid that’s all I can do. Unless we can make some connection, we’d be hard pressed to say it’s him.”

“What about the MO, the knife and the wounds?”

“How did you know about that?” he asks.

“Local sources,” I tell him.

“I see.” Thorpe is wondering if I’ve talked to the cops and if so whether I’ve lied to him. “There’s nothing there to connect it either to Afundi or to the kid in the apartment in D.C.,” he says. “Liquida, if he exists at all, may use a knife, but we have no record of it.”

Now, suddenly, it seems Liquida doesn’t exist at all, but is a figment of my imagination.

“I didn’t dream this guy up,” I tell him. “You’re the one who warned us about him. Remember?”

“Well, but we just don’t know,” said Thorpe.

“You have two matching thumbprints at two separate crime scenes, one of them on the back of one of my business cards. What is it exactly that you don’t know?”

“Who those prints belong to for starters,” says Thorpe.

“You can be sure of one thing. It’s not a coincidence,” I tell him.

“Of course not,” he says.

“And according to my investigator-he talked to the paramedics-Jenny’s death looked like a professional hit. This wasn’t a girl who ran with drug dealers or gangbangers any more than Jimmie Snyder did,” I tell him. “You can trust me on that one.”

“I don’t doubt you,” says Thorpe. “But without more we can’t connect your daughter’s friend to the other two cases or to the prints.”

“Do you know if the local police have any other suspects? Anybody of interest?” I ask him.

“According to our agent, at this time the answer’s no. The detective in charge told him it was too early to know.”

“So what do I do?” I ask.

I can hear him take a deep breath on the other end. “I really don’t know what to tell you,” he says.