Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

Andrea gave a deep sigh.

“I’ll tell you what I know. Melissa left the island for a while, a couple of months back, I guess. I lose track of time. When she got back, she had a child with her. We were told he was her son, and that one of Melissa’s sisters had been looking after him all this while. No one thought anything of it.”

“Did you meet this boy?”

“Of course. He came to my classes.”

“How did he seem?”

She shrugged.

“Normal enough. He used to have coughing attacks, that was the only thing. Sometimes he seemed to find it hard to breathe. But after a couple of weeks here that stopped. Plus he used to ask when he’d see his mother and father again. Melissa told us that he’d been with her sister so long he thought she and her boyfriend were his parents.”

“And where is he now? With this bitch Melissa?”

“I don’t know. The day you arrived, he disappeared. When I asked why he hadn’t come to class, Sam warned me not to talk about it.”

“Well, I’m going to find out!”

I tried to push past her, but she blocked me with her body.

“No,” she said decisively. “I will.”

We stood there in the darkness, holding each other.

“They won’t tell you anything,” Andrea went on. “They might talk to me.”

She released me.

“You’d better go,” she said. “And be careful. If you’re seen leaving here, we’ll both be in serious trouble.”

“Do you have any children, Andrea?” I asked.

“I missed out on that.”

Her tone was flat, almost flippant.

“You must still be young enough,” I said.

“That’s not what I meant. I haven’t set foot off this island for what seems like a lifetime, and the breeding stock here doesn’t impress me. Now go. Tomorrow morning I’ll tell you what I’ve been able to find out.”

She accompanied me to the door. Outside, the darkness was now complete. I found Andrea’s hand, squeezed it one last time and slipped away toward the fringes of the clearing.

Back in my room, I began to have doubts about the wisdom of trusting her. For all I knew, Andrea might be reporting back to Sam even now. Or perhaps he had set up this meeting too, to gain time, or work on my emotions in a different way. But this, I knew, was what Sam wanted, what he stood for. He reveled in obscurities and ignorance, in dysfunctional behavior and doubt. If I allowed them to overwhelm me, he had already won. I had to have faith, not in his hallucinogenic theology but in my own experience, and in the irreducible reality of another human being. Losing on those terms would be less destructive than winning on Sam’s.

My thoughts turned to David. Was he warm enough? Had he been properly cared for? Would he recognize me again? How could I ever explain to him what had happened, and break the news of his mother’s death? Above all, I wished I could do something. I felt so helpless. Everyone on the island, except maybe Andrea, was my enemy. There was nothing to be gained by single-handed heroics. I turned off the light and tried to sleep.

I awoke shortly after dawn to find a figure standing beside my bed.

17

Kristine Kjarstad was in tears when Steve Warren brought in the fax. Oh fuck, he thought, wondering if it was too late to “eclipse himself,” as his mother used to say. She had a load of oddball expressions like that. People thought everything had been easy for Steve, that he’d been born with a plastic spoon in his mouth. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

His mother was a war bride with whom his father had spent a pleasant few days during the liberation of Paris and then returned after the armistice to discover, as he put it, that “there were two Battles of the Bulge, and we lost the second one.” The result was Steve’s oldest brother, George, with an optional s, who was born a few weeks after their marriage. Three months later, the newlyweds arrived back in Dick Warren’s hometown of Aberdeen, a logging community on the Washington coast.

The first month they were there, it rained nonstop for twenty-three days. Shortly afterward, Francoise (“Frankie”) Warren had the first of her spaz attacks. These took a variety of forms, all of them frighteningly unpredictable, from appearing at a wedding in what looked like a strapless nightgown and no bra, to serving dinner guests a boiled pig’s head with the snout and ears still on.

Steve’s siblings had dealt with this by copping out and acting weird themselves. Georges, who now insisted not only on this spelling but also the pronunciation that went with it, was a mainstay of the Blue Moon Tavern in the U District, where he gave recitations of his poetry. Annie lived in a cabin on Vashon Island, communing with the womanspirit of Puget Sound and “invoking her intercession for our sins against the environment.”

Only Steve had possessed the grit and guts to transcend his unconventional upbringing and seize the lackluster prizes which life has to offer those who do OK: a tract home in Bellevue he’d still be paying off when he was a hundred and ten, a car he could never find in a crowded parking lot because it looked just like all the others, a wife who could walk into a strange mall and locate the Hallmark store in seconds. Some men are born to mediocrity, some have it thrust upon them. Steve Warren was one of the very few who achieve it by their own unaided efforts. Despite the almost overwhelming handicap posed by his home environment, he could look back on his life and tell himself proudly, “I did it their way.”

As a result, he felt he had the right to demand the same high standards of others, and Kristine Kjarstad had never let him down before. She could be a little snippy at times, yes, but he’d never seen her in tears.

“You all right?” he said, trying for the New Man image, concerned but not wimpy, like one of those sporty house-husbands you saw jogging around Green Lake with the baby.

“All right?” she snapped, pretending to blow her nose so that she could dab the tears away. “Sure, I’m just fine. I just got through phoning the prosecutor in the Selleck case to tell him we can’t proceed after all.”

Steve Warren dimly recalled the case she was talking about, some fourteen-year-old who’d been raped while walking home from her aunt’s house. The victim had named a local kid who denied the charges, claiming that he had keen drinking with friends at the time. The friends had corroborated his alibi, but Kristine Kjarstad had been sure they would back off once the forensic results came through.

“You mean the tests showed it wasn’t him?” Steve asked in a solicitous tone.

“The tests never got done!” Kristine exclaimed. “They’ve got a backlog of hundreds of cases down at the labs. Nothing gets processed until a trial date is set. Meanwhile the swab we took from the victim’s vagina gets stored in a fridge down in the basement, right? A few months ago there’s a power failure, and pretty soon you’ve got a couple of dozen samples of assorted bodily fluids turning green, growing legs and heading back to the farm. Result, the suspect’s alibi will stand. We know he raped a fourteen-year-old, and he knows we know. And he’s going to get away with it, and there’s not a fucking thing that anyone can do. All right? Sure, I’m just fine. No problem.”

She passed a hand through her wavy brown hair and gave a long sigh.

“So what’s new with you?”

Steve Warren held up the fax.

“This just came through from SPD. I took a look at it and …”

He broke off. The whole idea suddenly seemed flaky, maybe even slightly wacko. What if he told Kristine, and she looked at him and said, “Are you feeling all right?” Steve took several deep breaths, trying to control this crise de nerd, as his mother used to say. It was so hard to be normal all the time!

“Yes?” said Kristine Kjarstad pointedly.

“Well, I just, see, OK, like, the thing is …”

“Are you feeling all right?”

Steve Warren dropped the fax on her desk.

“Just read it,” he said, and walked out.

Kristine skimmed through the fax, wondering what had produced this rare glimpse of spontaneity in a droid like Steve Warren. The fax was a standard request for a criminal record search, commonly known as a D and B after the credit check agency, Dun and Bradstreet. This one had originated in Atlanta, Georgia, and was made out in the name of Dale Watson, a.k.a. John Flaxman. It had been sent to the Seattle Police Department, and they had routinely copied it to the King County force, whose territory surrounds the city on three sides.

Neither of the names meant anything to Kristine, but she dutifully went down to the basement and ran through the files to see if there were any rap sheets lying around from before her time. There weren’t, but on her way back she finally spotted the detail which had provoked her partner’s personality attack. It was in the section dealing with the crime itself. Kristine had skipped this first time around, having discovered that it was a street incident of no interest, the kind of thing she imagined happening all the time in places like Atlanta.

Now, trapped in an elevator which stopped at every floor, she read it through out of sheer boredom. Two sentences leaped out at her: “Subject was armed with a.22 Smith amp; Wesson revolver, as was his accomplice. They were also carrying a case with religious literature, a video camera, several sets of handcuffs and a roll of tape.”

The covering note from SPD was signed Don Krylo. Thirty seconds after she got back to her desk, Kristine had him on the phone. Krylo, a harassed-sounding sergeant in Central Homicide, was delighted when Kristine offered to deal direct with the original source of inquiry.

“You got a contact name?” she asked.

“I’ll need to look it up. Let me call you back.”

“I’ll hold.”

If she let Krylo go, she’d probably never hear another thing. While she waited, Kristine tried to get a firm grip on herself. She’d only just succeeded in putting the Renton case behind her. The last thing she needed was to open up that can of worms again to no purpose.

“Here we go,” said Don Krylo. “Guy’s name is Wingate. Lamont Wingate, Homicide Task Force, Atlanta City Police.”

“Great.”

“You think you got something on this guy?”

“I don’t know. I need to check it out a little. It’s tough for us here in the county. You know how it is, Don. We make a mistake, everyone starts cracking jokes about hayseed sheriff departments.”

Krylo, who had probably made more than a few himself, indignantly denied the possibility.

“It’s just this is the second CRS we’ve received in this name,” he said. “Both out-of-state, too. I thought maybe you might know why this guy’s such a celebrity.”

Kristine Kjarstad felt her heart racing. She took a deep breath.

“This is the second one?”

“That’s what it says here. There’s a reference number to the other request, but I don’t have it right-”

“Could you look it up?”

Her tone was eager, almost peremptory.

“I guess. Might take a little time. You wouldn’t believe the mess we’ve-”

“I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes, Don. That give you long enough? This is kind of urgent.”

“It is?”

Don Krylo sounded as though he suspected that something was maybe getting away from him here. Kristine tittered girlishly.

“No, I just mean I’m going out to lunch, right? And I’d like to get this wrapped up first. You know how it is,” she finished lamely.

“No kidding,” Krylo replied in the tone of a man who knew only too well how it was. “Catch you in fifteen.”

Kristine put down the phone with a shaky hand. Fifteen minutes to fill. A thought had occurred to her while she was talking to Don Krylo, but for a moment she couldn’t track it down. Then she remembered that she’d been meaning to call Paul Merlowitz. Her lie about going out to lunch had jogged her memory.

The original idea had been to pass on the information about the Wallis house. Paul was the perfect networker for a deal like this, with a ton of contacts all over the country. If anyone could find a short-term tenant with a kid Thomas’s age, it was him. The problem was that Paul had this thing for her, and if she phoned him he would think she was coming on to him and she’d have to deal with the consequences of that.

In fact it was more than just a thing: he’d practically proposed to her. A lawyer’s proposal, phrased in such a way that if she turned him down, as she had, he could make it look like he’d never made a firm offer in the first place. Nevertheless, they both knew what had happened. She’d expected him to drop her after that. God knows he wasn’t short of other possibilities.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like Paul, in a way. But there were problems. For one thing, she didn’t want to end up as some hotshot lawyer’s trophy wife. For another, she didn’t feel physically attracted to him, or not enough to make the difference. And then there was his work. They had met in court, a case in which she had appeared as a prosecution witness of a man charged with the murder of his business partner plus his wife, child and mother-in-law who were all in the house when it burned down.

As Merlowitz had privately admitted to her after the acquittal, there was no question that his client was “guilty as fuck.” But he got him off by stacking the jury, working the ethnic angle-the accused was Korean-and plugging away at inconsistencies in the prosecution case and irregularities in the police investigation. None of these had the slightest bearing on the basic facts of the case, but they were enough to persuade at least one member of the carefully chosen jury that the accused’s guilt had not been proven beyond all reasonable doubt.

Kristine had never tried to tackle Merlowitz about the morality of what he was doing. She knew exactly what line he would take: every citizen has the right to the best defense money could buy, better let ten guilty men go free than convict one innocent one, etc., etc. She acknowledged the force of these arguments, just as she acknowledged the need for a nuclear defense capability, but that didn’t mean that she wanted to marry a B-52 pilot. Nor could she imagine letting into her life a man who earned obscene amounts of money dreaming up ways to free someone he himself admitted was guilty of a callous, premeditated murder.

Nevertheless, expediency won out in the end. Kristine had her principles, but she knew there was also a gray area where she could be bought. Whether or not she managed to come up with a vacation playmate for Thomas, she would certainly get a fabulous lunch. And if Paul Merlowitz didn’t come up to her exacting standards, there wasn’t anyone else around at the moment who did. She lifted the receiver and dialed.

After all her agonizing, Merlowitz wasn’t taking calls. Instead, she got to speak with a secretary who ran through a whole repertoire of moves from the elaborate tai chi of commercial intercourse, concluding with the statement that Mr. Merlowitz was “in conference.” Kristine left a message, and immediately regretted it. Now she would be waiting, if only subconsciously, for the phone to ring. Merlowitz had her on a string. She should have hung up and called again at her leisure, instead of handing him that power.