Swift Vengeance

4

I removed my copy of Rasha’s thank-you note to Lindsey. Then told Taucher about him: acquaintance of Lindsey’s, American Saudi, father of a student of hers, widower. And about their horse-ride and sunset-appreciation moment, complete with salami and cheese and a folding knife to cut them with, and two silver goblets engraved with Arabic calligraphy.

It took Taucher about five seconds to read the note, register the signature, then hurriedly place the card next to the life-threatening letter. She leaned in. “Similar.”

“I thought so, too.”

“There’s no point system for questioned document analysis. You can disguise handwriting. It isn’t like fingerprints or DNA.” She pulled her keyboard close and went to work. Short entries — tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Username and password, I guessed. Then another. And one more. A long pause. Then a slight change of light on Taucher’s face — access granted to one small cubby within the FBI’s vast electronic citadel. She unleashed a twelve-stroke flurry followed by the slightly different clunk of the enter key. Her first grab through the ether at Rasha Samara.

“So,” I asked, just to be clear, “you wouldn’t be able to say for sure if the same guy wrote both letters?”

She stared at the screen, eyes darting, voice flat. “Forensically, no. But there are other things we can get. From questioned documents. If we had, for instance, original documents instead of copies, like the ones you gave me.” She looked up at me, flatly.

“Possibly I could help you there,” I said.

“I was hoping the originals were on your person.”

“Maybe. I’m asking you to keep Lindsey Rakes as protected as you can. From harm, and from unwanted scrutiny.”

“I can promise nothing.”

“I understand that.”

“Then consider my nothing promised, Roland.”

“Thanks, Joan.”

“And here’s what I’ll need from you.”

Her conditions: I would give her all of Lindsey’s numbers, and tell Lindsey to expect a call from FBI special agent Joan Taucher at 11:45 a.m., two hours from then. I would inform her, Taucher, of any communication with Lindsey and pass on any pertinent information, especially Lindsey’s exact location; I would suggest to Lindsey in certain terms that she would be much better meeting face-to-face with the FBI than using a smartphone or an insecure landline. I would say nothing of this interview to any person, press, media, or law enforcement agency, especially the Las Vegas FBI. I would supply her, Taucher, with all of my personal and business numbers, and a home address. I would be available to take Taucher’s calls 24/7. I would be welcome to a validated FBI visitor parking stub, available at the lobby security counter. I nodded along, ecstatic not to be employed by, partnered with, or married to Joan Taucher.

“I want one more thing, too,” I said.

“More? For holding out on me?”

“Just the basics you have on the screen in front of you. Is Rasha Samara on your watch list? Is he a person of interest? Is he violent? Should Lindsey be in a budget motel in the Vegas area, or in protective lockup?”

She rolled back again in her chair, studying me. Not far enough back to snatch and fire another dart. Though her expression was about as sharp as one. “We’re looking at him.”

A sinking of heart as I reached into my coat pocket and handed her the genuine thank-you card and the death letter, each in its envelope, all locked in a freezer bag.

“Thank you, Roland. You’ve done the right thing.”

“Lindsey didn’t realize she had evidence in her hands. I touched them, too.”

“About what I’d expect,” she muttered, with the smallest hint of humor in her eyes. We stood, traded business cards. “I can offer you a very small thank-you in return for bringing this evidence to me. But I’d need a promise of silence from you. Total and absolute.”

I considered. I rarely agree to things yet unstated. But in that moment I believed whatever Joan might offer would be in my best interest to accept. A brief nod.

“Look where the dart stuck,” she said. “Then go two faces down and two faces to the right. That’s where I was aiming.”

“Nice throw.”

“Thanks. I’m a tournament player. What do you see?”

“A dark-haired, dark-skinned guy with a pleasant face, thirty, maybe. Looks like it was taken from video. He doesn’t know he’s on camera.”

“He came to our attention through our friends at one of the mosques,” said Joan. “He’s not Arabic at all, but an American of Mexican descent. Hector O. Padilla, age twenty-eight. His behavior at Al-Rribat mosque has been striking some people as strange. My agents have their hands full right this minute. They are not welcomed with open arms at the mosques anyway. And it was you who made me think of Hector Padilla just now.”

“How did I do that?”

“He’s a regular customer at World Pizza.”

I collated this information while trying to vet Taucher’s reasons for giving it to me. I doubted that it sprung from the kindness in her heart. I didn’t believe for a second that her agents were too busy to follow up on a good lead. Why send me? There was something in it for her, but what? Just another free set of eyes and ears?

“May I shoot his mug?”

A pause, then she turned away to face a window as I took a phone picture of Hector Padilla, made sure the focus was good, shot him again. When I was done I stood beside Joan, looking out at San Diego, somehow tidy — for a city of a million three — against a silver Pacific. Christmas decorations up and a big sleigh with Santa and reindeer and boxes of gifts lifting off from the NBC building.

“You’ve moved up in the world,” I noted.

“Same world. Different window.”

I looked at the pictures on the wall again. “A few minutes ago I was thinking San Diego hasn’t changed that much. That something could happen again. Something big.”

She turned to face me. “Big? Big will absolutely happen again. I promise you that it’s being planned as we breathe. My job is to keep it from happening here. In my city. San Diego will not become my San Bernardino.”

She shook my hand. Cold as ever. Strode toward the door. “Roland, I know it’s more than late, but I’d like to give you my condolences on your wife’s death. I thought of sending flowers but decided against it. It’s not that I didn’t feel or care.”

“I understand.”

She held the door open. “Thank you.”

“When will you get an opinion on that handwriting?”

“Soon. I won’t be sharing much with you.”

“Unless you’ve got a great reason to.”

“Such as?”

“It’s my job to find things people want.”

Ocean Beach — OB in local dialect — is seven miles from the JTTF offices downtown. It’s one of California’s last truly funky beach towns — rebellious, charming, and a tad long in the tooth. It seems to me that the developers who came up with the name Ocean Beach could have used some of those brain-stimulating exercises they advertise on the radio. Under “Citizenship,” an OB report card might say “doesn’t play well with franchises.” But OBecians don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s live and let surf. Suds and board shorts. Women on wheels. Endless summer.

I sat in my truck across the street from World Pizza, watching the sidewalk patio fill up. It was almost noon. Popular place. I’d seen their billboard advertisements up and down Highway 395, halfway up the state of California: Pizza on Earth, Pizza Be with You, Wanna Pizza Me? Lately, artisan beers had exploded in popularity here in San Diego, and through my truck window I could see the big hand-chalked beer menu standing in one corner of the patio.

On one side of the restaurant was a squat antiques store with Christmas garlands framing the windows. On the other stood an oddly slender three-story building with a sun-blanched mirrored door and a row of faded flags drooping from a second-story planter box. The words International Hostel were faintly visible from where I sat.

I took a two-top inside, got a big slice of today’s special and a pint of stout made right there called Gnarly Barrel. The pizza was excellent and the stout had “notes” of tangerine and cedar in it, and tasted better than it sounds.

When the check came I counted out the bills and overtipped, as usual, having tried and failed at waiting tables in my junior year of college. I sat and looked around the restaurant again, inside and out, for Hector Padilla, but I knew the chances of seeing him were slim. I wondered what Special Agent Taucher’s questioned-documents expert would say about the similar writing on the death threat and the thank-you note. It occurred to me again that any man who signed his name on a thank-you note, then a few days later handwrote an anonymous death threat and mailed it to the same person, was certainly one of the stupidest ever born. Certainly Rasha Samara was brighter than that.

Which left me with these fragments:

An apparent Middle Eastern overlap between Caliphornia and Rasha Samara.

A threatened knife.

And a real knife, deftly wielded on a picnic.

Golf courses all over the world and a San Diego postmark.

And the fact that Taucher’s handlers were looking at Samara.

Just as Lindsey Rakes had been looking at him, though in a very different way.

Into this strange brew I tried to factor in a distant but perhaps freshly pissed-off ex-husband.

And a Mexican American acting weirdly at San Diego’s well-known mosque — weirdly enough to catch the attention of fellow worshipers and the FBI. Enter one Hector Padilla — who was also a big fan of World Pizza.

Where I now sat. It seemed more than strange that someone out there had used this very address to help deliver a death threat to a friend of mine. Maybe Lindsey’s wannabe beheader lived in OB. Or used to. Maybe he had just passed through and had a good pizza. Maybe he’d stayed at the International Hostel with the faded flags. Possible, too, that he had never set foot in San Diego and that a confederate such as Hector Padilla had mailed the letter. Maybe our beheader wanted that San Diego postmark just to throw Lindsey and everyone else off his trail.

A man calling himself Caliphornia. Had to be a man, didn’t it? Terror. Vengeance. A gruesome threat. A very personal lust to it. Intimate? Jump to a son of Saudi parents building golf courses, nimbly cutting salami with a folding knife while watching a beautiful desert sunset with Lindsey. Same guy? This was possible. I felt uneasy that the world — having once been so vast and free — now seemed so small and crowded.