Tell No Lies Page 29

  Daniel said, “I have better options, yeah.”

  “Better options, huh? Meaning when the shit hits, you can always pull the cord on your golden parachute and sail out of trouble. When your wife got sick, you didn’t have to rob no bank. You could just call your old lady, couldn’t you, Brasher?” Martin turned, speaking to the others. “That’s right. He got his wife a treatment that saved her life. By bumping my daughter out.”

  “What’s he talking about?” A-Dre asked Daniel.

  When Daniel hesitated, Martin said, “Honesty and accountability. Ain’t that what you say, Counselor?”

  “Yes,” Daniel said. “I did. I got my wife into a closed medical trial.”

  X looked devastated. “Did you know his daughter would get left out?”

  “No, he didn’t,” Martin said. “And that makes it worse. All those people. The nurse who shuffled the files, crossed out one name and wrote in another. The accountant who rubber-stamped it. The security guard who threw my woman and child out on the street when they went begging. It was so little a part of their lives they didn’t even remember it. No one thinks they did anything wrong, because that’s just how it works for them.” His muscular shoulders gathered around his neck. “So imagine my surprise after I did my time and paid my debt to society when I got out to see that Daniel Brasher was teaching Reason and Rehabilitation. Educating us crooks on how to make better choices.”

  Martin’s fuse was burning down, rage tightening the skin of his face, veins popping in his neck. Daniel turned slightly, pushing his fingers farther into his pocket. He’d just touched the edge of the phone when Martin said, “Put your fucking hands in your lap.”

  Daniel put his hands up quickly.

  “The hell?” A-Dre said.

  Martin lifted the knife into view, and an electric current ran through the chairs, jolting the others upright. He cast an eye at Big Mac and A-Dre, who’d gone rigid. “Everyone scoot your chairs back. Everyone but you, Counselor. Back up more. That’s right.”

  Daniel stared helplessly at the mounted chalkboard. Thought of Dooley just beyond it, a few feet through the wall. The noise of the chairs moving would not alert her any more than the raised voices would; she was well aware that a lot went down within these four walls. His only hope was to survive until session ended or to send a text without Martin’s noticing.

  Martin aimed the knife at the others. “First person who moves gets this in the throat, okay? So we’re all gonna just sit here. Sit here and listen. Tell them I’ll do it, Counselor.”

  “He will,” Daniel said. “So let’s just sit and listen.”

  “Oh, not you. You’re gonna have to answer, too.” Martin tapped the side of the blade against his forearm, studying Daniel. Then he asked, “Could you have shot her in the head?”

  “What?”

  “My four-year-old daughter. Francisca. Could you have taken a gun and put a bullet through her head?”

  Daniel’s throat had gone dry, turning his voice hoarse. “No.”

  “Right. That’s not how rich folks do things. Instead you make calls and pull strings and go back to your three-story house in the Heights. But it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

  “Pulling strings and shooting a little girl?”

  “No. You didn’t kill a little girl. You killed my little girl. You chose your wife over my baby’s life. Say it.”

  “You’re right,” Daniel said. “I did all that was in my power to get my wife into that trial. And I didn’t consider everything that meant. Hell, I didn’t consider anything that meant. And I’m not saying that was right or fair or virtuous, and I won’t try to justify it. But would you have done any different?”

  “Of course not,” Martin said, grief spilling into his rage. “But you got to. You got to do it.”

  Martin’s last words cored Daniel out, left him hollow. He reminded himself that this was the man who had drawn a blade across the throats of three people and poisoned a fourth. If there was a time for Daniel to feel guilt and remorse, it was not now, with his own life and five others hanging in the balance. He tried to grope his way back to his role here in this room, as a counselor. And the rules he tried to work by: Don’t force a group member. Let him lead. Wait for an opening.

  “I need to make it right for her,” Martin said.

  “And this will do that?” Daniel asked.

  Martin pressed a hand to the side of his head, the knife rising, and at the periphery Daniel heard the chairs creak as the others tensed. Martin’s face contorted, approaching a sob, but he fought away the grief, a scowl hardening his features again. He took a wary look at the others, his fist reclamping around the handle of the knife. He rocked a bit in the chair, a wrestler bouncing to keep loose on the mat. Sweat coursed down the sides of his neck.

  “You have no idea what I went through,” Martin said, rocking some more.

  Daniel pictured tears of blood draining from the eyes of Marisol Vargas, Kyle Lane, Molly Clarke. Martin had wanted them to feel what he felt. The grief. The loss. The fear.

  Martin moved the knife deftly, switching hands. He stood swiftly and took a step toward Daniel. Lil gave a faint shriek, and Fang stood up. Daniel tensed in his chair, coiled to rise, but Martin took another big stride, leading with the knife, and closed the distance in a single lurch.

  The blade was at Daniel’s throat, indenting the skin just shy of its breaking point. The room, as still as a tableau. Daniel waited for the surface tension to pop, the rush of wet heat to claim the hollow of his neck. Martin stared down at him, biceps flexing. His mouth firmed with determination, and Daniel watched the killing impulse move down the man’s bulging arm like a ripple. It had just tensed Martin’s fist when Daniel fought words out against the pressure. “Then tell me.”

  Martin paused.

  Even over the surge of panic static filling his head, Daniel could make out the heightened breathing of the others. He forced out the words, “Tell me what you went through.”

  Martin lifted the blade from Daniel’s throat, took a few steps back, and sat again in his chair. His eyeglass lenses were fogged at the bottoms. He twirled the knife in his hand.

  Everyone sat silent, on the razor’s edge.

  Though soft, Martin’s words carried a weight behind them, as if pushed out from his core. “She’d lost so much weight you could count her ribs. Like something from a war movie. Or Africa. Twenty-two pounds. And the fevers. Her head would get so hot it’d burn my hand. We had to cool her off with ice, but she hated it. The cold. And we couldn’t explain to her that it was for her … for her…”

  Daniel said, “For her own good.”

  Martin breathed for a time.

  “They took so long to change her sheets. At the last hospital. She was in too much pain to get up and go to the bathroom, and if we were late with the bedpan … Her sheets were dirty, always dirty. I couldn’t take care of her. I was her father, and I couldn’t take care of her.”

  The others listened, wan and tense and hanging on every word. A-Dre started to say something, but Daniel held up a hand, palm out, and he closed his mouth.

  “That’s why you’re doing this,” Daniel said.

  “Yes,” Martin said. “I have to make it right for her now.”

  Daniel caught the phrase coming around a second time—have to make it right for her. A desperate little plea, a fissure into Martin’s pain. Daniel sensed an underlying truth, that perhaps this whole blood-drenched pageant wasn’t merely about justice but regret.

  Daniel wanted desperately to interject, to take control, but as hard as it was, he firmed his mouth and ran the mantra: Let him lead. Wait for an opening.

  A few moments later, Martin started up again. “In her last days, she couldn’t take it. We were dead broke, but we had the money for another round of chemo. I’d gotten her that money, I’d done what I had to do, but she just said, ‘Daddy, I’m so tired. Please don’t. Please don’t make me.’ And I was so mad. I’d done everything for her. Riske
d my life even to get the money, all for her, but she was still…” He halted.

  And Daniel saw it there, the back half of the equation. “She was still going to leave you,” he said.

  That tiniest of taps seemed to knock Martin into a different lane. For the first time, tears fell, though his face stayed blank. “I was so angry with her for that. She was lying there in dirty sheets, wasting away, and I couldn’t forgive her. I couldn’t forgive her.”

  He sat motionless, tears streaming.

  Daniel said, “What do you wish you’d told her?”

  “Not told her,” Martin said. “Done.”

  Daniel tried to catch his balance after the misstep. “But you did so much for her.”

  “No.” Martin’s head rocked side to side. “No.”

  He was working his way up to something, and Daniel paused again, giving him time and runway. Martin clenched the makeshift knife so tightly that his hand had gone bloodless.

  Daniel said, “What do you wish you’d done for her?”

  Martin’s barrel chest heaved. “She wanted princess toes,” he finally said. “There was this pedicure place up the block from the clinic. Forty bucks to bring the lady in. And I told my little girl she didn’t need it. I was so angry she wouldn’t do the chemo, and she was begging me, but I told her no, that if she wouldn’t let us spend the money on treatment to save her life, she couldn’t spend it on having her fucking toes painted. My little girl was lying there sick in dirty sheets. And I told her no. That she couldn’t.” Tears dripped off his chin, pattered on the floor. “She died with unpainted toes because I was mad at her.”

  His palms went to his face, the knife clattering to the floor, then he collapsed from the chair onto his knees, hunched and weeping on the tile.

  After a breathless pause, Daniel slid the phone from his pocket and keyed a few buttons.

  A moment later the door flung open and a stream of undercover officers, led by Dooley, poured inside. Martin remained on his knees, rocking himself as if in prayer, the whittled shiv lying just beyond his reach.

  They took him without a struggle.

  Chapter 64

  After the explanations, the witness reports, the phone calls to Cris, after the hushed conversations with group members, Kendra, and an endless array of cops, Daniel found himself at Dooley’s side in the basement of Metro South, filling the doorway of Angelberto’s little janitorial office. A fan of uniformed cops waited behind them in the hall, edged into sight sufficiently to announce their presence.

  “Why’d you lie?” Dooley pressed Angelberto. “About Martin’s alibi? You told Daniel you were with Martin and his broken-down car at midnight. No—you said at least until midnight. Which is a little tricky, since at that time he was across town cutting Marisol Vargas’s throat.”

  Wearing his loose-fitting overalls, Angelberto sat on the bare wooden bench before his open locker, blinking down at the oil-stained floor. Terrified. “I did not lie. I did not.” He pointed at a plain-faced clock nailed to the wall above his locker. “It was midnight. I remember I came back upset that it was so—” His long eyelashes fluttered, and he pressed his hand to his chest, as if on the verge of heaving. “Oh, por Dios.”

  “What?” Dooley said.

  “Es noviembre.”

  “Yeah. It’s November. Speak English, hombre.”

  “The first Sunday. It was—¿cómo se dice?—the clock change?”

  It seemed impossible after the last two hours that anything would catch Daniel off guard, but there it was, another jolt. “The end of daylight saving time,” he said.

  Angelberto’s bare arms were coated with sweat. “I change the clock late.”

  “So it wasn’t midnight like you thought,” Daniel said. “It was eleven P.M.”

  Dooley smacked the doorframe with her palm. “Which left Martin plenty of time to get to 1737 Chestnut Street.”

  Angelberto looked grief-stricken. “I am sorry. So sorry for what I have done.”

  Dooley’s cell phone shrilled, and she answered and uh-huhed a few times, gesturing Daniel a step into the hall. She hung up and said, “Looks like they located Martin’s girlfriend, Viviana Olvera. Let’s go.”

  Daniel cast a glance back, wanting to offer some piece of comfort, but Dooley was already blazing away past the uniformed cops toward the garage.

  He left Angelberto there on the bench with his shoulders slumped and the wall clock looking on.

  * * *

  On summer mornings when the coastal fog blows in to shroud the land, Sutro Tower is the only piece of the skyline that rises into visibility, beaming TV reception into the folds and divots of the city. When the wind around Mount Sutro has its back up, it can knock a grown man over, and it staggered Daniel now, causing him to take a quick step off the curb behind the police barricade.

  They were up past Gardenside Drive on an impossibly steep street, embedded in the fog belt that claimed the hill. As if the incline, smothered visibility, and wind weren’t disorienting enough, the Muni line ran right past them, buses heralding their approach with strained rumbling before sailing out of the mist like ghost ships. The medicinal taste of eucalyptus suffused the air, and through breaks in the soup, Daniel could make out patches of green below and the vague outline of the buildings of the UCSF Medical Center, a bulwark to the forest.

  SWAT had geared up and filed into the apartment building a few minutes earlier. Dooley paced behind the sawhorses impatiently, radio at the ready. “The hell’s taking them so long? I thought the landlord confirmed a sighting.”

  “Maybe she’s not there anymore,” O’Malley said. “Remember, that apartment’s been checked a handful of times. Nobody saw anyone but Martin.”

  “That’s because no one was looking for anyone but Martin.” Tapping the radio to her lips, she stared at the building’s exterior. The place was Section 8, voucher-subsidized for low-income tenants, and it looked it. A stained concrete rectangle, like a domino set on its side, standing out in the otherwise well-tended neighborhood.

  An eerie screech reached them from above, the banshee howl of the wind whipping through the tower, raising goose bumps on Daniel’s arms.

  * * *

  Viviana heard the quiet scraping of boots in the corridor outside, and she knew. Tears rose to her eyes instantly. It was over, Martin either dead or captured. Even in this box of an apartment, she felt suddenly dwarfed, as if the walls were rising all around her, the ceiling growing ever distant.

  She’d prepared for this aloneness, this end, but knowing it, feeling it roost inside her chest was nothing she could have prepared for.

  First Francisca. Now Martin.

  She could sense them out there, countless men with guns and gear, readying, doing their best to be silent, invisible. All this, for her.

  She pictured Martin’s face, so clearly she could have reached out and touched it. He’d never given up. Not once.

  She rushed to the worn mattress and flung it up, exposing an open hatch in the floor that led down into the crawl space. A few cockroaches scuttled among pipes and rebar. Nestled to one side was their stash of folders. The secret plan.

  She dropped in, letting the mattress fall just as she heard the boom of a boot or a battering ram meet the front door. Darkness claimed her. Bodies stormed the room overhead. Men shouted. She was on her knees and elbows, breathing dust, doing her best to flatten her body and squirm forward. The folders slipped beneath her, tearing, their contents scattering—maps and hospital files, schedules and reports. In the darkness she felt a glossy photo bow under the heel of her hand, a prized death snapshot of One of the Responsible crying blood, either Marisol Vargas or Jack Holley.

  From above she heard someone shout, “The mattress—check beneath the mattress!”

  She scrabbled forward even harder, but the papers slipped beneath her hands, her feet, giving her little traction.

  All at once the world yawned open again, light blazing down on her from the hatch.

  �
��Here! Here! We got her!”

  She lurched for the darkness ahead, but gloved hands seized her around her ankles. As she was torn backward, bellowing, her arms slid across photos of the dead, crumpling them into the grime.

  * * *

  Outside, Daniel’s unease had reached a fever pitch when Dooley’s radio squawked. She ducked from the gale, shielding herself behind the thick gray trunk of a Monterey cypress rising up out of the sidewalk. Radio at her cheek, she plugged the opposite ear and looked up into the jagged crown of leaves. She made a fist, pumped it, stepped back into range.

  “Found her in the crawl space beneath the apartment. They’d widened out a vent so she could slip down there during searches.”

  The two of them waited tensely, watching the building. From the heavens came another moan as wind moved through the prongs of the tower.

  Finally the glass lobby door opened, Viviana stepping forth sandwiched between two SWAT officers, her hands cuffed before her at her waist. They led her down the stairs onto the sidewalk and toward the sawhorse en route to the caged squad car.

  Daniel steeled himself.

  Something was wrong with her face. As she neared, he saw that it was a patchwork of swells and bruises, the skin stretched shiny tight across one cheek, her lip dotted with a broken scab. He didn’t want to confront her but didn’t want to step away either, and as she passed right before him, she pulled to a halt.

  Her head rotated toward him. She wore torn sweats and a ragged T-shirt, and he could smell the grime of the crawl space on her. Behind him he heard the roar of a Muni bus laboring up the hill. He thought she might spit in his face, but no, she just stared into him, wearing an expression that bordered on smug.

  The ground shook with the approaching Muni bus, so her words were lost, but he read her battered lips. They said, You’ll see.

  The Muni bus emerged from the fog.

  With a violent shake of her shoulders, she twisted free of the SWAT officers and lunged off the curb. There were shouts and commotion, but already she’d scampered out of reach. For a moment Daniel thought she was making a futile escape attempt, but she halted in the middle of the street. Then she pivoted back to face them.