Orphan X Read online

  Slipping her arm through Evan’s, she led him down a back hall that smelled pleasantly of petroleum. “The poster trade, Evan, is the Wild West.”

  “Seems to be.”

  They entered a dark-walled photography room, its windows blacked out to prevent reflections during shooting. A fine excuse to have an impenetrable back room in which to conduct business of a certain type.

  “It’s been what—six months?” she said. “You came because you miss me?”

  “Of course. But not just that.”

  “You need another license? Social Security card? Travel visa?”

  “Haven’t had a chance to burn the ones I’ve got.”

  Her lips made a sly shift to one side. “You brought me a lead on a German Metropolis three-sheet?”

  Melinda’s—and every poster trader’s—holy grail, the poster went for upwards of a million dollars. There were three in the world that anyone knew about.

  “Alas, no.” Evan withdrew Katrin’s passport from his pocket and held it out.

  Melinda regarded it a moment, then took it and thumbed to Katrin’s photo. A playful tilt of her head. “Should I be jealous?”

  Setting the passport down on the workbench, she opened and closed several letterblock drawers housing customs stamps. “Do you want her to have been to India?” She removed one of the larger stamps. “Or how about the Galápagos? This is the elaborate one they give you at Baltra.” She thwacked the stamp onto a piece of scrap paper, took a moment to admire her handiwork.

  “No. I don’t need it embellished. I need to know if it’s real.”

  Her thin eyebrows lifted, but even then not a wrinkle appeared in her flawless skin. She crossed to an AmScope binocular microscope hooked into a computer for image capture. All business now, she flipped her long hair over one shoulder and bent to the wide eyepiece mounted on a boom arm. She studied the passport cover, its seams, and multiple pages under different specialized lights.

  Then she took her time on the computer, sorting through the captured images. Back to the passport itself, now with a loupe, examining the photo page square inch by square inch.

  “It’s real,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  She straightened up, deleting the images from the computer, then clearing the cache. “It is very hard to fake a passport, Evan. The paper is impossible to replicate.”

  “Even from etched and engraved metal plates?”

  She shook her head. “No way.”

  “How about if it was silk-screened from a high-detail Photoshop print?”

  “Even I couldn’t achieve this clarity in the pixelation.”

  That answered that, then.

  Melinda blew out a breath. “Look, maybe someone could re-create the embossment tool for the security images, but these holograms? No way. This is a flawless specimen.” She held his gaze a moment longer, perhaps sensing that he needed more convincing. “Not a fake. Not a good fake. Not a great fake.” She offered the passport back with an artful flick of her wrist. “It’s her.”

  26

  Unnerved

  Sitting at his personal command central in the humid semidark of the Vault, Evan sipped two fingers of U’Luvka over ice and watched the surveillance feeds of the loft. Katrin slept fitfully, stirring in the throes of an unpleasant dream. She had plenty of reason to be unnerved.

  He was unnerved himself, and this was not a sensation he was accustomed to experiencing.

  He was used to missing puzzle pieces, equations that didn’t add up in full, but something was more significantly off kilter here. He didn’t know how he and Katrin had been tracked—not once but twice. He didn’t know who wanted to kill them. He didn’t know that he could trust his client.

  He rewound the footage to confirm that Katrin hadn’t strayed from the loft. She hadn’t even left the futon. Next he called up the readings from the microchips in her system to test if he could grab the GPS signal, but none showed. Likely she was too far from her last meal, the digestive juices not stimulated sufficiently to charge the sensor particles in her tract.

  His rules required that he zero in on the people who were pursuing them. And, from there, zero in on the Vegas outfit who had hired them.

  Aside from the phone number of Sam’s killer, as untraceable as his own, his only concrete information was the nickname he’d heard spoken during the motel raid: We got two down, Slatch.

  The monitor to Evan’s left loaded results from NCIC, the National Crime Information Center computerized index, the pride of the FBI. The powerful data-mining engines of the Alias File had been churning for a while now, ever since he’d typed “Slatch” into the search field, putting to work all those tax dollars he didn’t pay.

  Three results popped up now. The first, Julio “Slatch-Catcher” Marquez, a Mexican-mafia gangbanger currently serving a dime in Lompoc for armed robbery. Beneath that, Evelyn Slatch-Donovan, a Hollywood madam with ties to organized crime. Dismissing them both, Evan clicked on the third. Only a single picture of Danny Slatcher existed on federal record, a surveillance shot of him stepping off a speedboat onto a dock, a panama hat and sunglasses obscuring his features. But his form—that vast, bottom-heavy build—was undeniably that of the man Evan had spotted in the motel parking lot.

  A pulse started up in Evan’s neck, his heartbeat quickening with the thrill of a lead putting out.

  In Slatcher’s right hand was an elongated Pelican case, the very size Evan himself used to transport sniper rifles. It seemed extremely likely that Slatcher was the man behind the scope in Chinatown who had fired the shots at Katrin. For now Evan would operate on that assumption.

  Two names were listed under Slatcher’s known associates. The first, marked “deceased,” had been a dirty banker out of Turks and Caicos, the man’s file showing about what one would expect for a deceased money launderer. Ball bearings within ball bearings.

  The next brought up a few fuzzy photos of a woman with a thick mane of hair—probably a wig—riding helmetless on a green-and-white Kawasaki. “Candy McClure.” Maybe she was the woman from the Scion, but it was hard to tell. There was no other information listed for her, just the few blurry photos and a name.

  Evan moused over to Danny Slatcher’s criminal-record history and pushed the button.

  What he saw cut his excitement off at the knees.

  Redacted file.

  Two words that carried a host of implications. Not to mention complications.

  Evan realized he was clenching his teeth. He clicked the next link, for Slatcher’s ATF Violent Felon File, knowing already what he’d find.

  Redacted file.

  And the next. And the next.

  Evan set down his highball with a clink, looked over at Vera in her mound of glass pebbles. But the plant had nothing to offer.

  Danny Slatcher was not a two-bit gun for hire. Or a high-end hit man for the mob. He was something much more lethal.

  Evan didn’t like the notion singeing the hairs on the back of his neck, making the acid crawl the walls of his stomach. He knew now that he had to get to Slatcher’s perch in Chinatown to reconstruct the shooting from the other side of the scope. Whether LAPD still had the building sealed off or not, Evan had to infiltrate the crime scene.

  27

  Cat and Mouse

  Lotus Dim Sum seemed back in working order, the windows replaced, the glass swept from the sidewalk. Two days after the shooting, the apartment across the way still remained under LAPD control.

  From beneath the glowing pagoda gate of Chinatown Plaza, peering up from the shadows, Evan took in the apartment on the top story of the building. He munched fresh-baked almond cookies, pulling them from their neat stack inside the Baggie. Though he’d covered his fingertips with a thin sheen of superglue, he could still distinctly feel the crumbly texture of the baked flour. He preferred superglue to gloves, as it was less conspicuous and left him more tactile precision. The apartment building Slatcher had used looked to be the nicest in the tigh
t row along Broadway, the neighboring complexes shabby and peeling, the balconies serving as overflow storage for bicycles and surfboards, dead plants and drying laundry.

  Evan’s previous drive-bys had clarified that Slatcher had fired not through a window, as he’d first assumed, but through the sliding glass door of a balcony. The event itself—a sniper shooting into a crowded restaurant, causing a stampede—had a terrorist-like scope, and LAPD had responded with a commensurate show of force, enfolding the building in a lockdown. Three patrol cars were in evidence, parked at intervals along the curb. Yellow and red neon glowed down from the gate, mapping patterns across Evan’s face as he waited and watched, trying to place the locations of the various police officers.

  Several remained in their vehicles. Uniformed officers screened the building’s residents at the front entrance, the garage, and the rear and side doors. Two more patrolled the interior, popping into view from time to time in the windowed stairwells. He clocked their patterns, noting that they spent disproportionate time on the third floor. One of the officers stepped into the shooter’s apartment on her rotation, appearing through the glass sliding door as she checked the rooms, the kitchen, the balcony. There was no getting into the building through any traditional means.

  A shift of the wind brought the click of mah-jongg tiles from a back room across the plaza. Evan ate the last cookie in the stack, dropped the wrapper into a trash can, and hustled across the street, nodding at the cop sipping coffee behind his steering wheel.

  Evan entered the building next door to the one used by Slatcher and rode the elevator up to the fourth floor. From the street he’d scouted the apartment at the end of the hall, noting that all the lights had been out. A plastic holly wreath, muted with dust, festooned the door. The lock was an insult to its name; he got through it with a simple zip of a credit card.

  A wheezy snore emanated through the open bedroom door off the tiny foyer. Ancient carpeting padded Evan’s steps as he moved through the apartment and onto the balcony. The chirp of the venerable sliding door in its tracks barely rose above the whoosh of the wind. Without slowing, Evan stepped over the balcony railing, pivoting and sliding his hands down the posts so he was dangling four stories above the street. A slight swing of his legs pendulumed him away from the building and back, and he let go, dropping onto the balcony below, landing in a spot of cleared space between a row of surfboards and a mini-fridge.

  Through the pollution-clouded glass of the sliding door, he could make out the dinner party in progress one room over. Wineglasses clinking over a well-set table, feminine laughter, the waft of roast chicken and leaded hot cider.

  Evan put his back to the diners and peered across the alley to the building opposite. The sniper’s building. It was too far to jump. But he wasn’t planning on jumping.

  From the stack of surfboards, he slid out a longboard and lifted it, extending it horizontally out over the alley. The tip caught the lip of the balcony across. He set the back of the board down on the railing before him, then climbed gently up onto it, preparing for his tightrope walk. The surfboard wobbled slightly as he inched out over the alley.

  One cautious step. Another.

  From below carried the sound of a car door slamming shut. He looked down at the police cruiser below him. The heavyset cop—the one he had nodded to as he’d crossed the street—had emerged from his car. Styrofoam cup in hand, he shuffled directly beneath Evan into the alley. Evan froze, his arms slightly extended, a bird debating flight. The board shimmied, threatening to topple, his calves and thighs screaming to hold it in check. The cop hurled his coffee cup into a Dumpster, the wet thunk echoing up the tight alley walls. Hitching his pants, he retreated to the cruiser. The door slammed.

  Evan exhaled.

  Then he kept on. A few more painful steps brought him to the opposing balcony. He hopped down, drew the surfboard across, and tilted it behind a tall fern, stashing it there for his retreat. Lights glowed deep in the attached apartment, but no one was in view. Evan picked the cheap lock on the sliding door, cut diagonally through the room, and eased out onto the west-facing balcony, the one overlooking Broadway. Using it as a launching point, he hopped across two parallel balconies, passing unnoticed before a make-out session in progress and then two grown men immersed in Grand Theft Auto. One last jump brought him to the sniper’s roost.

  He shot a cursory glance across Broadway. The vantage gave a nice, clear shooting angle into the restaurant, but the rest of the plaza was mostly blocked from view. Slatcher’s follow-up shots had to have been taken from higher ground. The roof.

  Evan turned to face the apartment itself. A perfect circle the size of a Frisbee had been cut into the glass door right beside the handle. The hole had been made by a circular glass cutter with a suction cup, a favorite of thieves. And snipers. Evan knew from experience how much the missing glass helped—no bullet refraction, no suspiciously slid-back door, no crack for the wind to fluff a curtain and draw the eye. The room beyond was clearly unoccupied, neatly vacuumed, prepped to show potential renters. The front door faced him directly across.

  Evan was about to reach through the hole and unlock the slider when the front door opened. He pivoted out of view just as the female cop stepped into the apartment, her flashlight sweeping the room. He kept his shoulder blades pinned to the stucco wall beside the glass, hoping she’d head for the kitchen first as on her earlier patrols. But the flashlight beam wagged back and forth, approaching.

  She was heading straight for the balcony.

  Evan jumped up lightly, grabbing the edge of the flat roof, his palms facing inward. The lever clicked beside him as the cop unlocked the door. It started to rattle open. Evan hoisted his legs up and over his grip, a variation on a gymnast’s high-bar rotation. As the cop’s boots tapped out onto the balcony, Evan slid smoothly onto his stomach on the roof and pulled his hands back from the edge. His shirt made a slight grinding sound against the graveled tar paper, and the flashlight beam shot up over the roof’s edge, a science-fiction effect. He remained motionless, not so much as breathing. The beam played along the concrete lip. He could smell the faintest trace of the cop’s perfume.

  Finally the flashlight beam lowered. The boots retreated, the door drew closed, and Evan eased out a breath. He lifted his gaze, noting the clear view into the plaza across, the unobstructed angle onto the alley where he and Katrin had jumped into the strategically parked minivan, taking fire.

  So once Evan had cleared Katrin from the restaurant, Slatcher had climbed to the roof and cycled his follow-up shots from here. Still flat on his stomach, Evan turned his head. Right beside him, a domed heating vent thrust up from the tar paper. He had a silhouette view of the vent’s flashing strip, secured by hand-twist screws. Of the four screws, two were barely twisted on at all.

  Someone had removed and replaced the heating vent in a hurry.

  Evan rolled over, spun off the screws, and lifted the vent. He pulled a small Maglite from one of his cargo pockets and directed the powerful beam down the exposed shaft.

  Sure enough, a sniper rifle was caught in a duct junction ten meters down.

  It looked to be a McMillan .308-caliber police model—easy to acquire, common enough to make it hard to track. Dumping the gun at the scene was a calling card of the elite contract killer, who knew better than to hold on to a weapon that could be tested for forensics later. A pair of latex gloves rested near the rifle barrel, a keen choice, as leather gloves left unique prints. Beside them a white, cup-shaped object had landed. Evan focused on it until it resolved as a medical mask.

  He felt the adrenaline moving through his veins quicken.

  Before fleeing the scene, Slatcher had trashed not just the rifle. Not just gloves that would have exhibited gunpowder residue. But the truly professional touch was the medical mask he’d left behind as well after he’d ceased shooting. Had he been arrested leaving the scene and given a nasal swab to detect inhaled gunpowder residue, the mask would have ensured a neg
ative test result.

  A noise startled Evan from his thoughts—the vertical access door across the roof banging open. He would have been spotted instantly were the door not facing the opposite direction. The cop had to walk around the concrete framing to bring Evan into sight.

  Reacting quickly, he grabbed the dome of the roof vent and clicked it back into place over the shaft. Already rolling for the roof’s edge, he swept the loose screws off into space with the blade of his hand. He caught the lip as he tumbled over, also catching a fleeting glimpse of the flashlight lens emerging from around the side of the open access door.

  His weight swung him neatly around the roof’s edge. He released, bending his knees to cushion his landing on the balcony. He wound up right in front of the hole cut into the sliding glass door.

  Way down below he heard the screws tap the sidewalk as they finally hit ground. Reaching through the hole, he unlocked the door and slid it open slowly, stepping inside and easing it shut just as he heard the cop’s footsteps creak the roof overhead. Now the flashlight beam played down along the balcony’s edge, though Evan was safely out of view inside.

  He was pushing his luck with this little game of cat and mouse. He had to move quickly. Tilting his head, he picked up the angle of moonlight across the neat vacuum stripes. Boot imprints from the cops trampled the space. But in one spot the carpet thread was scuffed up at three points, the corners of a triangle.

  A sniper’s tripod.

  The flashlight beam withdrew from the balcony, and he heard the cop’s footsteps moving back toward the access door.

  Evan searched the ceiling just in front of the scuff marks, and sure enough he picked up a metal glint. A staple, embedded in the popcorn ceiling. The ceiling was low enough that he could reach it when he went up on tiptoes, and he pried the staple free. Beneath it was a tiny swatch of fabric—a torn bit left pinned beneath the staple, likely when CSI had removed the screen drape. The purpose of a drape, which typically went from ceiling to floor, was to shield the sniper from view. Evan held the bit of fabric up toward the window so it was backlit by the neon glow of the pagoda gate. It was gauzy, of course, for Slatcher to see and shoot through, but not opaque enough to block the glint of a scope in direct sunlight.