The Night Crew

Chapter 27

The lights were on in the living room, and Anna called, 'Pam? Hello?'

But Glass had gone.

'Got the house all to ourselves, my little potato dumpling,' Harper said, snagging her around the waist.

Anna twisted in his hands, to face him, said, 'Potato dumpling my ass,' and he said, 'No, definitely not your ass,' and she stood on her tiptoes to kiss him.

But now Harper was looking past her, toward the kitchen, and he said, 'What's that? In the kitchen.'

His voice carried a chill, and Anna turned again, and looked toward the kitchen. She didn't see anything until he said, 'On the floor.' A stain spread across the floor, as though somebody had spilled hot grape jam and left it to coagulate.

Anna caught Harper's chill, and pulled away and stepped toward the kitchen. 'Careful,' he said, catching her, and she felt in her jacket pocket for the gun. They moved to the edge of the kitchen, and Anna reached inside and flipped on the light.

The stain was the size of a large human hand; liquid, purple.

'Blood,' Harper said. 'Don't go in. We might need crime scene.'

'Oh, Jesus, look at the window.' Harper looked at the window by the door. The plywood plug had been forced in, and only partly pushed back in place. 'He's got her,' Anna said. She grabbed Harper's jacket sleeve: 'He's got her, Jake. He thought she was me.'

'Gotta call Wyatt, and gimme the gun,' Harper grunted. Harper started going through the house, opening doors, checking everything, Anna trailing behind. As they went, Anna ran through the phone's memory, found Wyatt's home number, pushed the call button. Wyatt answered, sleepily: 'What?'

'This is Anna: have you seen Pam?'

Wyatt was instantly alert, picking up the vibration in her voice: 'No. What happened?'

'We came home, expecting to meet her here, but she wasn't here. But it looks like somebody broke in through the back and there's blood on the kitchen floor.'

'Oh, Jesus Christ, you stay right there. Stay there!'

And he was gone.

Anna punched in Creek's number at the hospital. Creek was awake, but hadn't seen Pam: 'What's happening, Anna?'

Anna explained, and Creek groaned, 'Goddammit, I can't move, I'm wired in here, I'm gonna get.'

'No,' Anna shouted. 'You stay there. Maybe she'll turn up. We gotta have somebody there. that's where she'll come.'

Two minutes later, a minivan screeched to a stop outside, and five seconds after that, a second one. Two plainclothes cops climbed out of each, milled for a second, then started for the door. Harper and Anna met them on the front porch: 'You're sure it's blood?' the first man asked.

'Pretty sure,' Harper said.

'She left here a half hour ago, ten minutes after they got back,' the cop said. He looked at Anna. 'She was driving your car, we figured it was all rightactually, we thought it was you.'

Another cop was kneeling in the kitchen. He sniffed the stain on the floor, and looked back at them: 'It's blood.'

'And there's the window,' Anna said. She'd gone to the garage door, opened it. The garage was empty.

'Maybe she's okay, maybe she went out for something,' Anna said; but she didn't believe it. She simply wanted someone else to believe.

Harper looked at her and shook his head.

'He didn't get in here,' one of the other cops said, defensively. 'We watched every goddamned car that came in here, and the only one that turned down the street was that Korean guy.'

'He didn't come in a car,' Anna said. 'He took my car, and there's no other car out here. He snuck in.'

'How? We were watching people on the street; and how in the hell are you gonna sneak around in this place? All the houses are jammed asshole-to-elbow and everybody's nervous about burglars and there's no place to sneak from.'

They were still arguing when Wyatt arrived. He was wearing suit pants and a jacket over a striped pajama shirt, and carried a rumpled dress shirt and tie in his fist.

He listened for two minutes, then said to Anna, 'I thought about this on the way over. It's gotta be somebody on the inside. Somebody here in Venice, probably on your street.'

'Inside?'

'Gotta be,' he said. He ticked off the points: 'He killed a guy who claimed to be having a romance with you. Okay: that could come from simply following you around. But then he came here, and he just vanished. Then he went after your friend Creek, right down the street, and he got away again.'

'He went into his house,' Harper said.

Wyatt nodded. 'That would explain a lot,' Harper said.

Anna was thinking furiously: God knows there were enough strange and troubled people in Venice; that was almost a qualification to owning a home there. But who?

'So you mean the whole thing was a coincidence?' Harper asked. 'That because it happened on the night my son died, and everything else. the animal raid and everything. we just made it up?'

Wyatt nodded. 'It's possibleor maybe he was following her that night, and something he saw set him off.'

Harper said, 'So have your guys check the logs and find out who came out of here after Anna.'

They worked through it, but Anna kept hearing Harper's word, 'coincidence'. None of it felt like coincidence: the flow of her life had turned the night of Jason's death. That felt like the beginning of something. To think that it had all started before thenmaybe long before then, in the mind of one of her neighborsjust didn't fit. Didn't feel right.

She stood up and said to Harper, 'I'm gonna run next door and talk to Hobie and Jim. They're up on the roof half the time, maybe they saw something. In fact, with everybody here, I bet they're out on the roof now.'

She went out the back door, looked up: 'Hobie? Jim? You guys up there?'

A second later, Hobie's voice floated down: 'What's going on?'

'Trouble. Can you come down?'

'Be right thereout the back door.'

Anna met them in the dark space between their two houses, explained what had happened. Jim whistled and said, 'I heard the garage door go up and down, but that was about it.'

Hobie said, 'I didn't even hear that.'

'I think you were making popcorn,' Jim said.

'I'm sorry, Anna. Jesus, I hope the guy doesn't do anything nuts.'

Anna turned back to the house. As she walked along the canal, just before she got to the steps on the back stoop, she unconsciously lifted her foot over a heavy formed-concrete flowerpot. She'd cracked her foot on it thirty times, had always sworn to move it someday. and suddenly realized it was gone. Nothing there.

People were fucking with her house.

And Anna's phone rang. She took it out of her pocket and was about to click it on, then stopped, looked at Harper: 'It's him. He wants me to hear her die.'

'Don't answer,' Harper said, urgently. He turned to Wyatt and said, 'Are you still set up on her phone?'

'Yeah.'

'You gotta get this one,' Anna said. 'I think he's calling like he called with China Lake. Maybe.'

'Jesus.' They stared at the phone until the tone stopped

Wyatt began setting up a neighborhood search, and at the same time, sealing the area off. Harper took Anna aside and said, 'We gotta tell them about Clark.'

'Not yet. Let's find the kid. Jake, it can't be Clark.'

'That sounds like wishful thinking. where'd he go tonight? Why'd he disappear?'

'We don't know that he did. We probably just missed him. Wyatt thinks we've made most of this upjust put stuff together and come up with fantasy. That's what we've done with Clark.'

'I still think.'

'Let's concentrate on McKinley. Please.' She was begging him.

'We don't even know where he is, Anna,' Harper said in exasperation.

Anna held up a hand. 'Got an idea,' she said. 'I should have thought of this before.'

She took the phone out and scrolled through to the Witch, and pushed the button. The Witch answered on the first ring.

'This is Anna,' Anna said.

'What'ya got?'

'A question. You know that kid that got in the fight with the animal activists? Nosebleed and all?'

'Yeah. But talk faster, I'm on a deadline.'

'You had him on a couple of talk shows.'

'Shit, he was on "Today", what do you mean, a couple talk shows.'

'All right, all right, but the day after the raid, you shot extra stuff on him. I need his address, where he lives, and a phone number.'

'Anna, I don't have any time.'

'I need the fuckin' numbers,' Anna shouted.

'Hey.'

'Listen,' Anna said, urgently now, quieter. 'Get somebody to dig the address and numbers up, and I'll give you a lead on a story that's better than the jumper. A freebie. And believe me, if you knew what it was, you'd kill your mother for it. I'm not joking: I'll feed it to you in the next couple of days.'

After a moment of silence: 'Anything to do with China Lake?'

Anna hesitated, then said, 'Everything to do with China Lake, and she's just the start.'

The Witch screeched, 'This kid is in the China Lake killing?'

'No, no, for Christ's sake, he didn't have anything to do with it, that's a different story. But I've got an inside thing on China Lakea serial killer thing,' Anna said. 'If you get McKinley's address or phone number back to me, I'll tip you the other story.'

'So what's happening with McKinley?' the Witch asked suspiciously.

'He's fucking with me,' Anna said. 'The miserable little shit. I'm gonna crucify him.'

'That sounds promising,' the Witch said. 'I'll have somebody look around.'

'Right now,' Anna said. 'This is serious. I'm calling a couple more stations. The first one who gives me the address and phone number, I'll give them the China Lake story.'

'You know, you can be a major pain in the ass.'

'Yeah, but a fairly cheap pain, considering what I deliver. So call me back.'

'Hold on, just hold on. I'm gonna put the phone down, I'll be right back.'

Anna held on. Harper said, 'What?'

'Maybe something,' Anna said.

The Witch was back: 'You got a pencil?'

Wyatt, nearing panic, was sealing Venice.

Anna, with McKinley's phone number, and Louis tracking the address, told him they were going to look for a kid they'd interviewed the night of Jason's murder.

'You've got to stay in touch,' Wyatt said anxiously. 'We'll call you if we need you: If you get one ring, then one ring, then one ring on your phone, you know, fifteen seconds apart, answer the third one.'

'Okay,' Anna said, and they were gone.

McKinley lived in a bleak cinder-block apartment in Culver City. The parking lot was beginning to break up, with weeds growing through it in patches. Harper parked in a handicapped spot and they took an exterior walkway up; the concrete corners in the stairwell smelled of urine. The walkway had steel railings, and wheelless bike frames were chained to the railings in front of half the doors.

'Students,' Anna said.

'It was three-thirty-seven?' Harper asked.

'Yeah.'

The door faced a narrow inner-courtyard, with a half-dozen concrete picnic tables scattered down its length. A half-dozen student-age men sat at one of the tables, smoking, listening to music on a boom box, talking in Spanish.

McKinley's room was dark, the door locked.

'Can't kick it,' Harper said quietly. 'Too many people, too much noise.'

'Let's see if we can find a manager,' Anna said.

The manager had a first-floor apartment facing the parking lot. A dark-eyed woman answered the door, spoke to them in a language that Anna thought might be Farsi, then waved her hands in a gesture that said, 'Wait', went back into the apartment and shouted something. Returning to the door, she made a 'come in' gesture, pointed to the back and said another word. 'I think she means somebody's in the bathroom,' Harper said.

The woman smiled and pointed a finger up: 'Bat-room. yes.'

Anna nodded, looked aroundand spotted the key board behind the open door. The woman was walking toward the back of the apartment again, and Anna said to Harper, 'Block me outI'm gonna see if I can grab a key.'

'What?'

'There's a key board behind the door.'

Harper stepped sideways, and Anna pushed the door closed a few inches. Behind it, she could see the room numbers under wire pegs, most with keys hanging from them. Then a toilet flushed in the back, and the woman called something out to them.

Harper said, 'Thank you, thank you,' and Anna, still eclipsed by his body, pushed the door another few inches.

The 337 peg held two keys.

'Can I try for it?' She muttered.

'She's looking right at us,' Harper said, turning to her. 'Hold on.'

Harper walked toward the woman, talking. 'We wanted to talk to one of your renters.'

The woman said something else, jabbing her finger at the back. Anna watched, and as Harper got close to her, with the woman looking up at him, he stepped cleanly between them and Anna lifted the key.

Dropped it. Stepped on it. Stood with her hands crossed in front of her as Harper and the woman stood jabbering at each other. Then a man's voice said, 'Hello,' and both Harper and the woman turned toward the back. Anna stooped and picked the key up, and put it in her jacket pocket. She stepped away from the door and the key board.

Harper told the manager that he and Anna were friends of McKinley's from UCLA, but weren't sure they had the right apartment complex.

'Yes, yes, he is here. Apartment three-thirty-seven,' the manager said, bobbing his head. 'He has been much on the television, yes? You see him on the television? He's a hero, yes?'

Anna, smiling. Bobbing her head: 'Yes, a hero.'

Outside.

'Get the key?'

'Got it.'

'Hope they don't notice.'

'We'd have to be pretty unluckysome of the apartments have two or three keys, some don't have any.'

'Hope the key works.'

'Hope we don't find a body.'

'Don't even think it.'

The key worked. They stepped inside, and Anna flipped on the lights. 'Hello? Charles? Chuck?' They were in the living room with a TV set, a love seat, an unmatched easy chair with a missing leg replaced by a paperback novel. An adjoining kitchen dining area was off to the right, and another door went to the left. Anna stepped quickly over to the door: A bedroom. A knot of sheets on a futon, but no blankets. The place smelled of Cool Ranch Doritos.

'Let's get through it quick,' Anna said. 'You look for a Rolodex or address book or anything. I'll just see what he's got.'

'Got a phone number,' Harper said a minute later. 'It's on a refrigerator magnet. I think he uses it.'

'Okay. We can get it to Louis.'

Anna had instinctively gone to the bedroom. McKinley didn't have a chest of drawers, and had built a group of shelves with bricks and unpainted pine boards. T-shirts, underwear and jeans were stacked on the shelves; a small closet held a couple of jackets, some oxford cloth shirts, two pairs of athletic shoes, one pair of worn-out loafers and dust-bunnies the size of softballs.

The futon was on a frame: she picked up the head end of it, looked underneath. A shoebox. She pulled the shoebox out, opened the lid, and found a half-dozen videotapes, all commercial, all pornographic.

'What?' Harper asked, sticking his head in the door.

'Porno,' Anna said. 'A couple of bondage tapes. That might indicate a fantasy thing with capturing people.'

'Yeah, well, probably a hundred thousand guys have bondage tapes. And not all the tapes are bondage.'

'All right. But something to keep in mind.' She put the box back.

Harper said, 'I hate going through a guy's stuff like this. I'd hate to have somebody do it to me.'

'You have a box of porno tapes?'

'No. But I've got letters and pictures of old friends. Nothing that I wouldn't show anyone, but I wouldn't want somebody just trashing through it.'

'Interesting, though,' Anna said. 'Get to see what people are really like.'

'Probably why you're good at your job,' Harper said. He headed back to the kitchen and a moment later, said, 'He's got an answering machine.'

Anna had found nothing at all: 'Run it back.'

The messages were all routine, most of them were from the same woman. The last one, time-stamped at six o'clock that evening, was male: 'Molly said bring some Diet Pepsi, that's all the Lees ever drink.'

'Find a Molly?' Anna asked.

'There's an address book.' Harper walked to the kitchen counter, picked up a plastic address book with a bank advertisement on the cover. He found a Molly on the first page, with a phone number. He checked, and it was the same phone number as the one on the refrigerator magnet.

'Let's go look,' Anna said.

'What're we gonna do if we find him?' Harper asked. 'We've already lost the first guy we tried to follow.'

'Screw it: We don't have any time. Let's brace him. I'll know the voice.'

Louis turned the phone number into a name and address, and the address was a small apartment three blocks from the university.

'Upscale,' Harper said.

The apartment had inner and outer doors, the inner doors locked, but a row of mailboxes showed one 'M. O'Neill' on the second floor. Anna picked up the house phone and buzzed the apartment. A woman answered, and Anna said, 'Is this Molly?'

'Yes?'

'My name is Anna Batory. I'm looking for Charles McKinley, and I was hoping he might he here.'

'Just a minute.'

McKinley came down, surprised to see her. Pushed open the inner door so they could go inside. 'How'd you find me?'

His voice was a baritone, without the gravel of the voice on the phone. But the gravel, Anna thought, could be the product of sexual excitement, or aggression.

'We've got a really serious problem,' Anna said.

The kid didn't hear her; instead, he babbled on, his hands jumping around, awkwardly, nerdlike. 'God, you can't believe the TV shows I've been on,' he said. His fair skin was going pink with excitement. 'I had a couple of agents calling me.'

'Shut up, Charles,' Anna snapped.

He stopped. 'What?'

'No more bullshit. We know you set up the whole show with Jason and the animal rights people, that the whole thing was a fake.'

McKinley seemed to pull inside himself, and the nerd positively disappeared. 'Shoot,' he said. Then he shrugged and grinned at her, and said, 'Good run while it lasted.'

Harper was off to one side, and Anna glanced at him. He shook his head, a quick one-sided horizontal move, but she read in the shake what she was thinking: Not this guy.

'You know Jason's dead?'

'What?' He was startled, and again, it seemed real enough.

'What are you studying?' Anna asked suddenly. 'Are you in theater, or something like that?'

'Yeah,' he said. 'That's how I met Jason. What happened to him? Christ, I was supposed to call him but I couldn't ever get him.'

'Because he was already dead,' Anna said. 'Murdered. The same night as the raid. We thought you might know something about it.'

'What?' He looked quickly at Harper. 'You can't. are you the police?'

'The cops'll be coming around,' Harper said. 'But the guy who did the killing is stalking Anna, here. We're trying to get a name: and your name came up.'

'My name? How'd my name come up?'

'Because whoever is stalking Anna probably picked her out that nightand the only thing she did that night was the raid, and a. suicide.'

'And I didn't talk to anyone at the suicide,' Anna said.

'Well, I'm not doing itI mean, I've been in New York.'

'New York?'

'Yeah. I was on the "Today" show. I didn't get back until this morning. That's what we're doing tonight, we're celebrating.'

'Celebrating what?'

'Well, you know.' he gestured, meaning, I'm a hero. 'They've had all these animal rights people on, and all these other weirdos, and so now they decided to get me on. I've been on like six shows. He was murdered? How was he murdered.?'

'Listen, your friend Molly. Can you buzz her, ask her to come down? How many people are up there?'

'Six. No, seven.'

'Ask them to come down.'

McKinley went to the mailbox, pushed the call button, and Molly answered.

'Uh, Molly, could you and the guys come down here? Something's come up. Yeah, we'll tell you when you get down. Right now.'

Anna was thinking furiously: 'How'd you set us up? Whose idea was it?'

McKinley shrugged: 'Jason's, I guess. I'd seen him around, and mentioned I'd gotten a job feeding the animals up there at night. And he already knew Steve Judge with the animal rights group. I mentioned feeding the animals, and like, the next day, he was back with this idea.'

'So it was you and Steve and Jason,' Anna said.

'And Sarah.'

'Sarah?'

'Yeah. You know, the Bee. She was the brains of the group; Steve was basically the jock who carried shit around for them.'

McKinley had a few more details about the raid: 'If you think somebody was stalking you, you oughta look at that guard, everybody calls him Speedy. He's a goofy sucker.'

'The guard at the medical center?'

'Yeah, the one with the crew cut. He's some kind of Nazi.'

Anna shook her head: 'Didn't even see him.'

A stairway door popped open, and a woman with deep blue hair stepped into the lobby; six more people, three women, three men, all in their early twenties, trailed behind.

'What's going on?' the blue-haired woman asked.

'Charles can tell you,' Anna said. 'We have a very serious situation: a woman's been kidnapped, and all we need to know is if Charles has been here for a while. Since eight o'clock, say.'

They all looked from Charles to Anna, then back to Charles, and then all simultaneously nodded.

'Since seven,' blue-hair said. 'Since ten after seven, I remember, I was putting the roast in.'

'Let's go,' Anna said to Harper.

Outside, Anna said, 'We're running out of time. I don't know why he hasn't called back. He'll be calling. Let's find the Bee. Maybe she can tell us.'

She was frantic: wanted to scream, she wanted to run somewhere, do something.

'Anna, this is just like when I was chasing shadows on Jacob. We're finding people, but not the guy. We've got to stop running long enough to think. And when I think about it, I think Wyatt might be right.'

'He's in my neighborhood?'

'Something like that; that's a possibility. He keeps coming to your house, fuckin' with you.'

'Fucking with my house,' Anna said. She looked at her watch: He'd had Pam for at least a couple of hours now.

'The other thing is.'

'Clark.'

'Yeah, that's the other thing,' he said.