Mortal Faults

12

The air over Los Angeles was a grimy sepia tone, tinting the gridwork of buildings and streets below. Looking out the airplane window, Tess saw the Hollywood sign on a far hillside, the row of giant letters reduced by distance to microscopic text, a footnote to the city. She wondered why people made such a big deal about the sign. It was only the remnant of someone’s advertising promotion-for a housing development called Hollywoodland, as she recalled. Denver boasted the Rocky Mountains, a wilderness of trails and fishing holes and granite peaks running with clear snowmelt. L.A. had a defunct advertisement on a hill.

All right, maybe she was overstating things. But she truly hated Los Angeles. With any luck her stay would be short and uneventful. She would find out what Abby was mixed up in, make sure she wouldn’t come to the Bureau’s attention, then make a graceful exit.

The problem was, she’d found that situations involving Abby rarely proceeded according to plan.

The jet touched down with a skid of tires and made its way to the arrival gate. She’d checked no baggage, choosing to bring only a carry-on case with a few items she kept in her office for overnight stays-a change of clothes, some toiletries, other odds and ends. She had worn her gun in a pancake holster under her jacket throughout the flight, an option that was not only tolerated but required when federal agents traveled by plane. In the world after September 11, a law-enforcement agent with a gun was the next best thing to an air marshal.

Most of the flight had been occupied by her perusal of the MEDEA case report, faxed to her office just before she left. The first thing she’d noticed was that the case was two decades old. It had been reactivated only within the past few weeks, for reasons that fully explained the Bureau’s trepidation. It was hot stuff, all right. She was almost surprised Michaelson had allowed the material to be faxed to her, even over a secure phone line.

And she now knew why the case had been dubbed MEDEA. Apparently the name was not an example of FBI creativity, after all. It had been coined by a tabloid newspaper, and the Bureau had simply picked it up. There had been considerable press coverage. Tess remembered none of it, but she hadn’t been in law enforcement then. She had been a sophomore at the University of Illinois.

Back in the eighties, the Bureau’s involvement in the case had been minimal, limited to a psychological evaluation of the arrestee. Even that contribution was unusual, a testimony to the widespread media interest in the crime.

The description of the current investigation was sketchy, and there was nothing about any developments within the past week. Tess figured she would be brought up to speed on those details when she was briefed at the field office.

Outside the concourse she found a taxi and directed the driver to the federal building in Westwood. The cab headed north to the San Diego Freeway. Traffic was worse than she remembered, and eventually the flow of vehicles came to a standstill. At her urging the cabby exited at Venice Boulevard and took Sepulveda, creeping through the stop-and-go traffic. It was hot outside, the cab’s air conditioning didn’t work, and Tess was rapidly developing an animus toward the City of Angels that was almost pathological. Then she saw the church.

It was on Olympic Boulevard, east of the intersection with Sepulveda. She glimpsed the spire in the sun. She had been to that church on her last visit to L.A., taking confession there, her first confession in many years.

“Turn right,” she said. Obediently the cabby maneuvered through the clogged intersection and turned onto Olympic. She pointed at the church, and he stopped in the empty parking lot. “Just wait here. I’ll be right out.”

In the year and a half since the Rain Man case, she had thought of this church many times. Confession had helped her, though she hadn’t felt so sure of it at the time. She felt an obligation to this place, which she intended to satisfy with a donation to the poor box.

She contributed most of the cash on her person, reminding herself to stop at an ATM and refill her wallet. Having given alms, she was ready to go, but strangely she didn’t want to. Then she understood that she’d had an ulterior motive in coming here. She wanted absolution. She wanted to confess.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I broke the rules. I broke the law. I cut corners. I allowed myself to get away with behavior that I would never tolerate in a subordinate.

Something like that.

She entered the nave and walked down the central aisle. The church was empty. Her only company was a host of plaster saints and the backlit figures in the stained-glass windows, and the suffering Jesus on his cross, lifted behind the altar.

She remembered the location of the confessional. This was not the time when confession would be scheduled, but she’d gotten lucky on her last visit, and she hoped for the same luck again.

But she was disappointed. There was no priest in evidence. She really was alone.

Well, it had been worth a shot. She knelt and prayed before the altar, but it was a perfunctory prayer, and she felt nothing. She was retreating up the aisle when she saw a gray head bent low in one of the pews. An elderly woman, sitting alone. Tess hadn’t noticed her before, and there had been no other vehicle in the parking lot.

The woman felt her gaze. She raised her head and looked at Tess. Her face was wet with tears.

After making eye contact, Tess couldn’t walk away. She sat beside the woman. “Are you all right?”

“I come here every day,” the woman answered. “I’ve come for the last three months.”

Tess didn’t ask what had happened three months ago. “Does it help?”

“I don’t know. It’s supposed to.”

Tess touched the woman’s hand. “I hope things get better.” She rose to leave.

“What I want to know,” the woman said softly, “is why there is so much.”

Tess didn’t understand. “So much…?”

“Pain. How can there be so much pain, everywhere?”

It was the same question, Tess realized, that had kept her out of churches after Paul Voorhees died.

There was nothing she could say in reply. She had never found an answer. Somehow, over time, she had lost the need for one. It was just the way things were. There was no point in trying to understand. There was only the struggle to make things better.

On impulse she leaned down and hugged the woman gently. Neither of them said anything.

“Thank you,” the woman said in the tone of a blessing.

Tess nodded. She left, not looking back.

She arrived at the federal building and received a temporary ID badge from the guards in the lobby. An elevator ride brought her to the seventeenth story, where she was buzzed into the FBI suite that occupied the entire floor. The agent who greeted her was Rick Crandall, probably her only friend in the L.A. office. Though he had put on some muscle in the past year, he still looked impossibly young to be a federal agent.

Crandall had been a rookie when she met him-a first office agent, or FOA in the Bureau-speak. He was now in his second year, still at the GS-12 pay grade. The salary he was pulling down, even with overtime, wouldn’t go very far in a town like L.A.

“Rick, good to see you.” She thought about giving him a hug, decided against it because the receptionist was watching, and settled for a handshake instead. “How is everything with you?”

“Not bad.” His voice was flat, his manner distant.

“Still managing to impress your old man?” Ralston Crandall was a deputy director at Bureau headquarters in D.C.

“I guess,” he said tonelessly, not looking at her. “You can stow your suitcase behind the reception desk for now.”

He key-carded the door to a hallway and led her inside. She tried again to make conversation. “Well, your father should be impressed. L.A.’s a tough gig for a new recruit.”

“I’m not a new recruit anymore. I’ve been on the job nearly two years.”

“Right, of course. I didn’t mean…” Her apology trailed away. Crandall kept walking. She let the silence persist for a few seconds, then stopped him with a tug on his arm. “What’s the matter, Rick?”

“Nothing.” He pulled free of her grasp.

“I thought we were friends.”

“Yeah. I thought so, too.” He took a breath. “You want to know, Tess? You really want to know?”

Without waiting for an answer, he ducked into the break room, a kitchenette with a table and chairs, the air permanently infused with the aroma of coffee.

No one else was inside. Tess entered, and Crandall shut the door. He kept his voice low, but his eyes were fierce.

“Real good friends, that’s what we are, right? And friends don’t keep secrets, do they? They don’t lie. So I guess that’s why you told me all about Abby Hollister, right? Or should I say Abby Sinclair?”

Tess froze. For a moment she could think of nothing to say. Finally she asked the obvious question. “How do you know about that?”

“Because I saw her. I fucking saw her, in the flesh, alive. Not drowned in the storm tunnels.”

“I see.”

“You lied. You lied to everybody.”

“I never actually said she drowned. People made the assumption-”

“Don’t bullshit me. When we arrested Kolb, he said you two were working together. You denied it. But it was true, wasn’t it?”

Abby gave in. She hoped to God that Crandall wasn’t wearing a wire. “It was true.”

“You went outside the Bureau, hooked up with some private detective?”

“She’s not a PI. Not exactly.”

“What is she, then?”

“A security consultant.” Tess sat at the table. “You said you saw her. When?”

“Last night. Coming out of Andrea Lowry’s house.”

“You were surveilling the place?”

Crandall hesitated, then took a seat also. Some of the rage had gone out of him, but she still saw the deep hurt in his face. He had looked up to her, trusted her.

“We were surveilling Lowry’s vehicle, actually,” he said in a more subdued voice. “We mounted a GPS tracker on her car.”

Tess was familiar with the procedure. The global positioning system would log the vehicle’s movements, saving the information to a computer file.

“She parks in a carport,” Crandall went on, “so it was easy enough to get access to the vehicle. It was my job to download the data every twenty-four hours and see where she’s been. When I arrived last night to do the data dump, I saw a car parked outside the house. Later I ran the tags. The car belongs to your friend. She was visiting Andrea Lowry.”

“The car was registered under her real name?”

“Yes-assuming Sinclair is her real name. Why ask?”

“When she’s working undercover, she usually drives a car registered to an alias.”

“Maybe this time she got careless. I watched the house and saw her leave. That’s when I recognized her.”

Tess nodded. During the Rain Man case, Crandall had interviewed Abby at the field office. She was posing as an ordinary civilian, using the name Abby Hollister. It was Abby Hollister who was supposed to have died later, in the storm drains, though her body had never been found.

“Did she see you?” Tess asked quietly.

“No. I was hiding in the carport. But I got a good look.” He paused. When she said nothing, he added, “What the hell’s going on, Tess?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I’ll bet. You knew she didn’t drown.”

“I knew.”

“Did you help her arrange for her car to be found?” Abby’s Honda, registered in her Hollister ID, had turned up in the drainage system.

Tess shook her head. “It wasn’t arranged. It was… providential, I guess you’d say. It was just how things worked out.”

“So who is she, Tess?”

“You’d be better off not knowing.” She caught his mistrustful glance and added, “I mean that. Really. The less you know, the more deniability you retain.”

“Deniability? I saw her. I got her tag number. I’m already deeply into this thing.”

She hesitated, fearing to ask the next question. “Does anyone else know?”

“You mean, have I told Michaelson? Have I put it in my official report?” Crandall made a brief noise like a stifled laugh. “Do you think you’d be sitting here with me if I had? The ADIC would have had you in a detention cell by now.”

“That’s a slight exaggeration.”

“No, it isn’t. He’s been gunning for you for years. Ever since Mobius. You managed to piss him off. Frankly, you’ve managed to piss off most of the personnel in this office.”

“So no one knows?” She failed to keep the relief out of her voice.

“No one. I’m covering for you.”

“Thank you for your discretion.”

“For participating in the cover-up, you mean? Yeah, I’m real proud of myself.”

“It was a difficult situation, Rick. There were tradeoffs. Abby helped me, and I helped her. It was against procedure-”

“No shit.”

“-but it got the job done. We stopped Kolb.”

“And you took all the credit. Nice.”

“I didn’t care about the credit. I got out of town as soon as the case was closed. I didn’t exploit it.” She hated sounding defensive.

“How about Mobius? Did your secret friend help you on that one, too?”

“I didn’t know her then. She had nothing to do with Mobius.”

“And MEDEA? It can’t be a coincidence that you’re here today after she visited Andrea Lowry last night.”

“No, Rick. It’s not a coincidence.”

“Jesus.” Crandall looked away, disgusted. “You’re out of control, Tess. You’re off the reservation.”

“If it means anything, I never wanted it to go this far.”

“You know what? It doesn’t mean anything. Not to me.” Crandall stood up. “Come on. You’ve got a briefing with the case agent.”

“Not with Michaelson?”

Crandall shook his head. “He’s limiting his contact with you. Can’t say I blame him.”

That was a cheap shot. Tess didn’t respond. She followed Crandall out of the break room, aware that she had lost her only ally in the building. She was now officially alone in L.A.

Except for Abby, of course. And Abby was the exception that proved the rule.