Guardian of Lies

FIFTEEN

Unless I am wrong, the killer tied the knot. I pluck at it with the sharp point of a penknife from my desk drawer for a minute or more before I get it loose.

Slicing into the small muslin bag or cutting the string is not something I want to do, just in case there is something important inside, something beyond the simple cumulative evidence that the police already have. I’m pretty sure I already know what it is, but I want to see it for myself.

If Harry knew about this, he would tell me that it’s curiosity that killed the cat. So far he has come up with a blank as far as Pike owning any of the felines. According to the gardener and Pike’s cook, there were no animals, at least none that Pike owned. But the gardener admits to having rolled over several of the small white muslin bags while mowing the lawn in the week or so leading up to the murders. He remembers because it sounded like rocks when he hit them.

Having positioned a clean sheet of paper on the blotter of my desk, I pour out the contents of the muslin bag, the one I purloined from the bush at Pike’s house.

Inside is a mash of tiny shredded leaves, what looks like tea, and in fact is. The things we don’t know, but can learn online. Catnip is a variety of tea sometimes taken as a medicinal for ailments by humans, that is, when it’s not being used to drive the feline set crazy.

For me at the moment, however, what is of more interest is what is buried inside. I open the matted mashed ball with the point of my penknife. What I find are five metal hex-head nuts, the kind you would use to screw on bolts. I would guess them to have a three-eighths-inch inside diameter. I have no idea of their individual weight, but you can be sure that I will have someone put them on a scale before we go to trial.

Whoever made up the bag put the metal nuts inside for heft, to give it weight so that the bag would have distance when he threw it. By doing this he could get the bag inside the motion sensors before he released the cat to set off the alarm.

According to the report that Harry read, the police have five of the small bags. I have one. God only knows how many the gardener rolled over and chewed up on his mower before the night of the murders, or how many more might still be lying around the property. Whoever used them was inventive and persistent. He kept throwing the tiny bags until he got what he wanted, a security system so annoying that the owner would have it turned off.

I scoop the contents back into the bag, including the five metal nuts, and retie the top of the bag with the string. I deposit the bag, along with my penknife, in the center drawer of my desk. One more piece in the puzzle. From the beginning this has been a case of puzzles inside puzzles.

Something Katia said to me during our meeting at the jail earlier in the week has been needling me but I can’t figure out why.

I wander down the hall to Harry’s office.

As I break the plane of the open doorway, I see that Harry is behind the desk, busy working, pencil in his hand. He looks up at me. “Did you see my note?”

“About Templeton, yes. Any other bad news?”

“Not at the moment,” says Harry, “but with the Dwarf on the case, I’d stay tuned if I were you.”

Larry Templeton, aka “the Death Dwarf,” has been assigned to prosecute Katia’s case. He is, without question, the most deft death-penalty prosecutor in the DA’s office, perhaps in the state. I have lost track of the number of capital cases he has won, lacking enough fingers and toes to count them all. That a wing of the death house at San Quentin has not yet been named for him is itself a measure of injustice.

“Word is, he’s looking to settle up with us over the double-tap thing,” says Harry.

We haven’t been up against Templeton since People v. Ruiz, the murder of Madelyn Chapman, the software mogul shot twice in the head in a tight bullet pattern you could cover with a quarter. The case was coined by the press “the Double-Tap Trial.”

“That he didn’t take Ruiz down wasn’t for want of trying,” I say.

“Tell him that. I think the columns for ‘best effort’ and ‘runner-up’ are missing from Larry’s scorecard. I suspect it might have something to do with compensation for lack of physical stature,” says Harry.

Templeton suffers from a condition known as hypochondroplasia, a form of short-limbed dwarfism. He stands just over four feet tall, but you wouldn’t know it when he gets loose in front of a jury. All the mental power in that bald head comes tripping off the tongue. He has learned to turn a deficit in stature to an advantage. Jurors become riveted, and if you’re not careful, you can find yourself getting spritzed with seltzer and having your ass kicked in Larry’s circus act.

“What do we have by way of discovery in Katia’s case, besides the police reports, I mean?”

“Not much, just what we got from the public defender. Our blanket discovery request went out Friday. It’ll be a week, maybe ten days before we start seeing much.”

“I’m looking for the copy of Katia’s Costa Rican passport and the visa for her U.S. entry. I thought we had those.”

“We do,” says Harry. “The ring binder behind you on the shelf, third one down.”

I grab it, open the cover, and unlock the mechanism that allows the pages and the plastic envelopes to slide free around the two large rings.

“Actually,” says Harry, “I think I’ve got copies of those here somewhere.”

When I turn around again, Harry is reaching into the stacked letter basket at the edge of his desk, holding a fistful of papers three inches thick, stuff he’s working on.

“I contacted the State Department, trying to find out how Pike got the visa expedited. Of course, they referred me to Consular Services, visa section.” Harry is licking his thumb and picking through the top corner of the stack of papers, looking for the right ones.

“I called Consular Services, they won’t answer questions over the phone. Has to be in writing. So I sent out a letter. Federal government, we’re gonna cool our heels,” says Harry. “Here it is.” He pulls out one, two, three documents. “Copy of my letter, the visa, and the Costa Rican passport.” Harry hands them to me. “What are you looking for?”

“I’m just checking on something.” I look at the copy of the visa first. The original of the document is protected from forgery by holograms. On the photocopy these show up as ghostly shadows of Lincoln and the Capitol dome. No doubt there are also security threads in the original paper that don’t show up on the copy at all. Katia’s photo, a head-and-shoulders passport shot, is on the left. Next to it at the top is the location of the “issuing post,” in this case San José, Costa Rica. Below this is her name, surname first, given name underneath it.

I check the copy of her passport next. It’s the thing Katia told me at the jail, what’s been rattling around in my head, that the names on the two documents didn’t jibe. They don’t. The surname on her passport is listed as “Solaz-Nitikin.” On the visa it’s “Solaz.” This latter is the name on the charging documents in the criminal case as well, the criminal information filed by the prosecutor’s office, though the other, “Katia Solaz-Nitikin,” is listed as an alias, “aka.” I’d paid no attention to it before.

“What do you know about passports and visas?” I ask Harry.

“Ask me, I’m becoming an expert,” he says.

“Look at this.” I lay the copies down on the desk side by side, facing Harry.

“Look at the surname on each document.”

“Yeah, that’s typical in Latin countries, Hispanic composite names. See?” Harry points to the copy of the passport. “Here, you see the first surnames on the top line, ‘Solaz-Nitikin,’ and then here, next to it, it goes back what, looks like three, no four generations. It starts with her father’s name, mother’s maiden name, grandfather’s paternal name, grandmother’s maternal name, so on and so on, so what’s your point?” says Harry.

“Why wasn’t the last name ‘Nitikin’ included on the visa?”

“She probably dropped it when she filled out the application. Sometimes they do that, especially in the States.”

“That’s the point. Katia didn’t fill out the application. Pike did. And she called him on it. He knew that she used the surname ‘Solaz-Nitikin’ because that’s the name he found her under.”

“So what’s your point?” says Harry.

“Pike found Katia by way of a website for a modeling agency. She was listed on the website as ‘Katia Solaz-Nitikin.’ What she told me is correct. I found the site online. Pike told the agency he wanted to do some advertising in Costa Rica for his company and paid for a photo shoot with Katia. But he never used any of the shots or followed through on any advertising.”

“Maybe he changed his mind,” says Harry.

“Or maybe he already had what he wanted, a way to meet Katia.”

“You think he used the modeling thing as a con to hit on her?”

“No. I think Pike was searching for something on the Internet, but it wasn’t Katia’s picture. It was her name, and if I had to guess, I’d say it was the one he dropped from her visa application.

“Think about it. You’re trying to bring this woman into the country. You’re filling out her visa application and you’re working from her passport. Look at it.” I point to the passport copy on Harry’s desk. “There it is. She uses the hyphenated form of ‘Solaz-Nitikin’ as her surname, but Pike drops the last name. It seems to me you would use at least the hyphenated portion of the name, the one that’s on her passport, so that the two documents would conform when you checked in at U.S. immigration; that is, unless you had some reason not to include the name.”

“But if you’re right and he dropped the name intentionally and immigration flagged the difference when he came in, then they’ve got problems,” says Harry.

“Not necessarily. Pike probably figured he could finesse the passport at immigration, first because of all the other names on her passport, none of which were included on the visa. And if that didn’t work, then he’d use whatever it was he had that got her the expedited visa in the first place.”

“So you’re thinking he didn’t just pay somebody for that?” says Harry.

“I don’t know. But I don’t think he’d whip out his wallet in an immigration line at the airport with all of those cameras watching, an army of immigration officers there, and a long line of people behind him.”

“Got a point,” says Harry. “But why would he want to drop the last part of the hyphenated name?”

“That has been bothering me for two days. It kept banging around in my head, until I dropped the name ‘Solaz’ out of the middle. If you never met the woman and I told you I was going to introduce you to someone named Katia Nitikin, what would you think?”

“Russian,” says Harry.

“Look.” I take a piece of paper and a pencil from his desk. “There are several ways you might write the name ‘Kathy’ in Spanish. You could use ‘Kathia,’ or ‘Kathy,’ or ‘Katia.’” I turn the paper around for Harry to read. “But in Russian there is only one way it is generally written, and that’s ‘Katia.’”

“Okay, so her mother’s dad is Russian?” says Harry.

“And Katia’s mother was sufficiently sensitive to this that when she named her daughter, she used the Russian spelling. What does that tell you about Mom?”

“That she probably had a close relationship with her dad?”

“Bingo. Put it all together. Mom hangs out in Colombia visiting relatives that Katia has never met. A relative or relatives who, according to Katia, no one else in the family except her mother has ever met.”

“The old man’s on the lam,” says Harry.

“Uh-huh. Pike sees the photographs of the mother’s last trip, gets all excited, and immediately hustles Katia off to the States where he has her calling home every day-asking where Mama is and when’s she coming back.”

“So Pike was looking for Mr. Nitikin, assuming Grandpa’s still alive,” says Harry. “And you think Pike was killed because of that?”

“Two murders made to look like a badly botched larceny, gold coins and pawn tickets on Katia when they catch her, but none of the rest of the missing coins. The computer, the one the cops didn’t find at Pike’s house, it was a laptop,” I tell Harry. “Katia saw it. He had it with him in Costa Rica. He used it to download the Colombian photographs from her camera without her knowledge. Katia saw it on his desk the night she left, and unless she killed him, and I don’t think she did, she was right as rain to run, because she got out of that house half a beat ahead of whoever did.”

“Hand me that binder,” says Harry.

He wants the document binder from the shelf, the one I had just opened. I hand it to him and Harry riffles through it. He finds what he wants.

“Six photographic prints, eight by ten,’” Harry is reading this to me. “It’s the property inventory sheet from when they took her into custody in Arizona,” he says. “The prints she took back from Pike that night. They were in her bag when they arrested her.”

“We need to get copies of those photographs yesterday,” I tell him.