We Know

Chapter 31

I caught Raz closing up. Stepping from the shadows, I clutched his arm and said, "Can you make a whole out of these halves?" I opened my fist and let the brass pieces glitter. "I'll pay you well."

His burly arms paused from securing the shop's front door. "You into some crazy shit, bro."

He pinched his dense mustache with a thumb and forefinger and led me back inside. I'd left Homer up the street outside the Duck Blind liquor store with a forty of King Cobra. He'd drunk it before I'd finished paying, and he'd elected to stay out back, digging through the trash cans in case anyone had left a swig in the bottom of a discarded bottle.

The shop was dark and cramped, and Raz kept the overheads off, out of respect for the illicit nature of the undertaking. Clicking on a boom-mounted light, he held up the pieces of the key and made a big show of squinting at them. "This will be tough to remake for working key. I do not have seven-pin blank, bro. I told you I must order from Canada."

"I didn't know I'd need it."

"Yes." He sighed sadly. "Yes, they never know until they need. I will use other type. I will try. I will try for you." His wide fingers fussed over a tackle box filled with key blanks. "This is illegal, to copy this key."

"Yes," I said, "it is. But I need to get into that P.O. box."

"Like other P.O. box?"

"Yes."

"What is inside these very important P.O. boxes?"

"I don't know what's inside this one."

He pouched his lips and leaned forward, appraising me. "I help you, bro. But why? I don't know what you do with this key. Maybe I should better call cops on you."

He paused for dramatic effect. Then he clamped the key bit into the milling machine, adjusting screws, gripping handles. "But I don't. That's how it work. Like for my grandfather. First they have him turn in his hunting rifle. For war effort, bro."

He bent to the task, and the cutter head revved up and bit metal. Setting the second piece of the broken key, he did his best to align the angle. He spoke between blazes of sparks, short sentences offset by the shrieking cuts. "Then they tell him he and my grandmother will be relocated. For own good. Always for own good. They were escorted. Escorted, like one of your prom date. Across

Anatolia. On the way they rape the women. Starve many to death. No water. They die in ditches. The skin, like paper over the ribs."

He ran the key along the deburring brush. More sparks flew, creating an orb of light in the dark shop that illuminated his face, his wide, firm cheeks. He did not wear eye gear. For a moment he looked like a boy. He swept his fingers over the teeth of the new key. Then he shook his head, dissatisfied, threw the key into the trash, and started over with a fresh blank. "You know this story. It is same story. Crusades, world wars, Croatia, the Sudan, Iraq. This is mankind."

Again with the deburring brush, again the sparks flew, his face a ruddy portrait in focus. "On the march, a peasant woman hide my grandparents in chicken coop. Why? I do not know. If she was discovered, she would be killed. People help people sometime. They don't know why. But this is also mankind."

He sat back on his creaking stool, stuffing showing through the split vinyl at the sides. He looked at the latest key, his mouth twitching. "I am sorry, bro. Here I go on like windbag about help, but I cannot. I cannot make working key from pieces. Not with substitute key blank. I can order proper key blank from Canada."

"I don't have time to wait."

Raz mused on this weightily, chin set on the boulder of his fist so his cheek rose in wrinkles beneath the eye. "I have idea. Way to get P.O. box open. One time only. You will have one chance. It is confidence game. You must commit. You can commit?"

I said, "I can commit."

I cased the block by the post office and found no one waiting, but given their technology, if they were hiding, I wouldn't see them. The bus stop was two blocks away, waiting to whisk me back into oblivion. I looped over to Homer, sitting on the curb in a strip-mall parking lot up the street.

"I'm gonna go. Meet me at the bus stop in five?"

He waved me off dismissively.

Tentatively, I approached the Sherman Oaks post office, moving behind trees and parked mail trucks. Every passing car put a charge into me. Finally a break in traffic. I slipped through the front doors and put my back to the wall. The lobby with the counters and registers was locked up, but the wing to the left with the banks of boxes was open as advertised, if dimly lit to discourage nighttime visitors.

A movement from outside caught my eye. Homer strolling boldly down the sidewalk. He shoved through the front doors, regarded me, and said, "What? I got bored."

I let out my breath in a hiss.

He dipped into the trash can by the door, found wrapped taco remains to his liking. "You really think if they're watching, you tiptoeing in like Sylvester J. Pussycat's gonna keep you under the radar?" He moved on to the supply table, stuffing priority-mail envelopes inside his jacket, either for insulation or just because he could.

I headed back into the banks of P.O. boxes. Crouched in the weak glow of the energy-saving fluorescents, I held the two pieces of the key in my hand and stared at the stamped numbers: 228.

I'd assumed that the P.O. box was at the same location as the last one. The sequential numbers seemed to suggest that, but if the last four days had taught me anything, it was not to expect the obvious. I'd have only one play at this, and it would be hard enough without worrying about failing because I'd taken my shot at the wrong post office.

I sat on the floor, pinching the broken tip of the key between my thumb and forefinger. A skinny run of brass, all teeth, ending on a slant at the fracture. I nosed the end into the slot and guided it in a few ticks, but didn't let go, just as Raz had counseled. I held my breath. Readying the second piece in my other hand, I brought the broken edges together until they aligned. Then I firmed my grip on the fat head of the key, counted to three, and shoved. The key purred into the lock. I held it there a moment, gripping hard, praying it had aligned properly in the channel. Then, slowly, I twisted. Miraculously, the lock turned. Keeping the pressure steady, I tugged gently. The rectangular door opened an inch. I poked a finger through the gap and pulled it open, the top piece of the key falling from the lock, clattering on the tile.

The box appeared to be empty. I reached inside, found the manila envelope taped to the roof. Mack had given up a lot before he was killed, but not this. The envelope tore free. I ripped open one end, and a stiff sheet slid out into my hand.

An ultrasound.

I stared down at the flashlight-cone illumination, the messy grays and blacks, the alien blob of a fetus head. White letters stood out from the black top margin: J. Everett 10:07:28 a.m. December 12, 1990.

To the side, beneath some technical jargon and medical measurements, a note read, 18 wks, female. No hospital, no medical group, no Social Security number.

I dug in the rucksack and removed the torn page of numerals I'd pulled from the neighboring P.O. box two nights ago. Still I could make no sense of the digits. I peered inside the manila envelope I'd just retrieved, and, sure enough, it held a strip of paper. I tugged it out, and it aligned perfectly with the torn top edge of the larger sheet.

A lab report. At the top the mother's name was listed as Jane Everett, the father, Unidentified Male. And to the right, Baby Everett. Below the names were column headings for the grid of numerals-paternity indexes and specimen numbers and probe/locus figures. Bold print announced Mother's Alleles, Childs Alleles, Alleged Father s Alleles, and, finally, Percent Probability of Paternity. My eyes tracked down beneath that final heading to the one anomalous number: 99.999.

An arm around a campaign worker. A pregnancy. And an illegitimate child, fathered by Andrew Bilton, Mr. Family Values himself Was that really enough to lead to all that had been done? In an election year, with the presidency of the world's most powerful nation at stake? Certainly.

I fought the Polaroid of Bilton with the young woman out of my pocket. Hello, Jane Everett.

The baby would have been born just before Frank's murder. She'd be a high-school senior now. Seventeen years old, the same age I was then. And the same number of years I'd lived with the aftermath. We'd been in this together, somehow, from the beginning. Like me, she carried with her a burden. Even if she didn't know the fine points of her inheritance, she contained the concealed history in her DNA, held the weight of it in her bones.

I felt how Frank must have felt, as if a live grenade had been dumped in my lap. But burning beneath the surface of my thoughts was a new consideration. Baby Everett. I'd been old enough in 1991 to make my own choices, to walk out of that house and into the jaws of the consequences. She'd been a newborn. More than anything, I wanted her to have a shot at a life different from the one I'd been dealt.

Bilton would be safer with her in the ground. And he'd have no shortage of friends willing to put her there.

Was she in hiding? Had Charlie been telling me, in his own cryptic way, that I had to save her? Was that the grave responsibility he'd entrusted me with?

I sat on the floor, gazing down at the ultrasound, waiting for the buzz in my head to subside. I thought of the buses pulling into that stop a half block away and all the places they could take me. I put the documents and the picture into the rucksack, stood, and walked past Homer. He paused, holding a wadded priority envelope in either hand, and watched me pass.

I walked out into the biting night breeze. To the right I could make out the bus-stop shelter, glass walls and soothing blue bench. I gazed at it for a moment, then turned left and found the pay phone. My hands were surprisingly steady as I dialed.

When Induma picked up, I told her what I'd found. She was silent for a long time, then asked, "What are you gonna do?"

"If they're coming after me this hard, you can bet they're trying to erase all evidence. I have to find that girl. Baby Everett. Before they do."

"Baby Everett," she repeated, as if trying out the name.

"She may not even know she's in danger."

"How do you find someone if you don't know her name?"

"Start with her mom," I said. "Are you still willing to help me?"

"Of course," she said, "but we have minimal search criteria. I'm sure there are a lot of Jane Everetts out there in the right age range, and we don't even have it narrowed down to a city. With Charlie at least I knew we were looking at law enforcement in California."

"So what do I need?"

"Someone with powerful correlation and analytics software, a shit-ton of bandwidth, a data-mining engine, and warrant power over classified hospital records."

"Hospital records for the birth."

"Right. The birth and the maternity stay. You need someone with official clearances and serious hardware for that kind of rundown."

"You can't call in another favor at LAPD?"

"They froze me out. I guess the inquiries the assistant chief made on my behalf touched a nerve. He sealed me off-no threat there-but there's not going to be any more prying in the department. At least not on my behalf. And given your relationships with law enforcement, that doesn't leave you a lot of options. At least not a lot of options you'd want to risk."

The wind whipped my face. I said, "This isn't just about Frank anymore."

"No," she said, "I guess not."

When I went back inside, Homer was lying across the counter, trying to sleep. I didn't mind the quiet. For a half hour or so, I sat and breathed the silence. Finally headlights swept through the window. The Range Rover. It kept going.

Homer woke up and watched me with sleek, dark eyes. He followed me obediently outside, and we walked up several blocks, through a park, climbed over a fence. Induma was pulled over, waiting. The Range Rover's window whirred down, and Induma glanced over at me.

"This is Homer," I said.

"Hi, Homer."

Homer twirled one hand, queen mother style, and gave a half bow.

I said, "We're gonna need him."