Tell No Lies Read online

  “Did you actually kidnap someone before group yesterday?” Daniel said. “Or was this just an excuse to get me here and spin the same record?”

  Martin tilted his chin to his chest. His shoulders shook, and Daniel thought he was sobbing until he heard the low chuckle. “Oh, I didn’t kidnap anyone.”

  “You’re full of shit.” Daniel rose to leave. “You’re wasting my time.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yeah. It’s over for you, Martin. You’re at the end of the road.”

  He didn’t move his head, but his glittering eyes pulled north. “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s just getting started.”

  Something in his tone froze Daniel halfway to the door. He turned.

  “Look at my record,” Martin said. “You have already. No kidnappings. No murders. You saw me in the room. You were right there, and I had a knife to your throat. But I couldn’t do it. And I couldn’t kidnap anyone either.”

  Daniel focused to keep his voice steady. “So now you’re not the killer? You’re innocent, that it? I’ve heard that a time or two, Martin.”

  Martin’s lips were drawn back, shaped like a grin but utterly humorless. “Oh, I’m not innocent.”

  “Was someone kidnapped or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who? Who’d you kidnap, Martin?”

  The dark smile returned. “I gave you a deadline. Thanksgiving at midnight.” His head pivoted, slowly, to take in the wall clock to Daniel’s left side.

  Daniel followed his stare—10:31 P.M.

  He felt his heartbeat as a deep ticking, a bomb counting down. He pictured again the pert little smile that Viviana Olvera wore as the bus bore down on her.

  “I made you a promise, too,” Martin continued. “I said to admit what you’ve done. Or you would bleed for it. Well…” He rolled his bottom lip between his teeth. “I didn’t say it would be your blood.”

  Heat rolled through Daniel’s body. He stepped toward the glass, knocking the chair aside. “Who?”

  Those magnified eyes took his measure.

  “Who’s been kidnapped, Martin?”

  He bit his lip again. Released it. Smiled from deep inside his own hell.

  The ammonia reek of the room clogged Daniel’s throat. He stepped back into the embrace of the stall, gripping the ledge of a desk. “What did you do? What the fuck did you do?”

  Martin’s stubbled cheeks bunched in an alarmingly youthful grin. “Thanks for driving all the way over here, Counselor.”

  Daniel punched the ballistic glass. “What did you do?”

  “Just remember to control your breathing,” Martin said. “Calm your body down. That’s the first step.”

  Dooley was through the door, pulling Daniel back. “We got two cars en route to your house now.”

  Martin kept his gaze trained on Daniel. “You made a decision before. One life for another. But this time I made the decision. Now you’ll know what it feels like not to be able to make that choice at all.”

  “Tell me what you did!”

  Dooley wrapped Daniel up from behind with surprising strength, but he knocked her away and sprang at the glass.

  Martin wiped his face on his shoulder, then turned his head. “Guard! I’m done. Guard!”

  “Tell me! You fucking tell me what you did!”

  Dooley was back at Daniel’s side, grabbing his arm. “He’s useless, Brasher. Let’s go. Let’s get to your house.”

  On the far side, two guards stormed in, took Martin by either shoulder, and hoisted him out of his chair. He kept his eyes on Daniel the whole time. As they dragged him away, he just laughed, a creaking of the chest that followed Daniel as he stumbled out into the corridor.

  Chapter 67

  The chirp of the phone was muffled inside a fold of the duvet. Rubbing lotion into her hands, Cris emerged from the bathroom, trailed by a curtain of steam from the shower. Adjusting Daniel’s Giants shirt at her shoulders, she climbed onto the bed and dug out the phone. It was slippery in her lotioned hands, but she juggled it up to her cheek.

  “Cris? Cris, listen. We’ve been calling and—Just— The cops are en route—”

  “Wait, mi vida. To where?”

  “To you.”

  She bolted off the bed, his words fading beneath the seashell rush in her ears. Leo was gone, the alarm off. The threat was supposed to have passed. They’d told her it was over.

  Daniel’s voice faded back in. “Get in the bathroom, lock yourself in, and wait. Stay on the line with—”

  Through the window, down against the dark asphalt of the street, a flash of color caught her eye.

  A yellow slicker.

  It lay flat in the middle of the road with the hood up, splayed out as if its owner had simply evanesced.

  A passing car ran it over, the street falling back into darkness as the brake lights vanished. A strangled noise escaped Cris’s throat, and she heard Daniel saying, “What? What?”

  She spun around to run and collided with a padded wall behind her where there should not have been a wall.

  Black sweatshirt.

  The phone spun from her slick hands.

  She didn’t want to lift her eyes, didn’t want the fabric to take form as a chest, a person.

  But she did.

  Staring down at her, a featureless face, little more than a dark oval. In her terror it didn’t register at first as a mask. But then it resolved—the narrow slit of an eyehole. The sharp triangle of the nose. The perfect circle of the perforations, like an alien mouth.

  Before she could react, she was seized, hands gripping her shoulders, crushing her. Screaming, she brought her knee up hard, connecting with his crotch, and the pressure at her shoulders relented.

  A cough of a grunt, carrying with it the stink of evergreen-laced tobacco. The man cringed, doubling over. Twisting away, she slashed at the face, her nails scraping harmlessly across the neoprene but catching resistance at the exposed band of neck.

  She raked.

  He reeled back, swinging for her head, and she ducked, the dumbbell fist sailing over her head, passing through the lifted sheet of her hair. And then she was flying, her bare feet gaining traction on the floorboards.

  She half fell down the steps, barely keeping her legs beneath her. Already she could hear him behind, banging into the bedroom doorway. She blazed across the second floor, shoulder-checking the wall at the top of the stairs to halt her momentum. Knocked into a quarter turn, she caught a Tilt-A-Whirl flash of the man, encased in black, gliding like a ghost, closing in on her.

  She was off the wall seconds before he smashed into it. And then she plummeted down to the ground floor, three, four steps at a time, spilling onto the foyer, rolling over her shoulders and bouncing vertical again.

  She banged into the front door, grasping for the knob, but her lotioned hands slid uselessly over the metal, failing to turn it. Yelling in frustration and rage, she wiped her hands on the T-shirt, tried again, the knob giving up a quarter turn and then slipping again.

  Boots thundered down the stairs behind her.

  Frantic, she looked around, seizing on the miniature Zen garden. She shoved her palms into the neatly combed white sand, grit sticking to the lotion. The porcelain planter slid off the accent table and shattered as she pivoted back to the front door.

  The black form reached the foyer, blurring.

  She reached for the knob, sandpaper hands firming her grip—yes—and turning it. She yanked at the door, a blast of fresh air and the distant sound of sirens flooding through the crack, but then a boot hammered the wood panel at her side and the knob flew from her hand, the door smashing back into the frame.

  She wheeled around to see a black glove clubbing through the air toward her temple, and then her head snapped and the foyer went murky. Rag-doll limp, she lolled in a powerful brace of arms, dragged backward toward the rear of the house. The drapes of her bangs swept across her eyes, but still she could dimly make out the sight of that front door shrinking from
view, step by jarring step.

  Chapter 68

  Daniel’s knuckles ached around the wheel, and sweat stung his eyes as he followed the lights-and-sirens police convoy heading north from 850 Bryant Street toward his house. From the horrifying, fragmented sound track he’d heard on his end of the line, he knew that Cris was gone. She’d be at another location soon enough, arms and ankles bound, throat bared, awaiting the midnight deadline.

  So why the hell were they blazing toward Pacific Heights, playing catch-up instead of trying to skip ahead to the Tearmaker’s next move?

  The Tearmaker. Martin was ruled out now. If he hadn’t taken her, who had? Daniel tried to focus his racing thoughts on the last group session, mentally zooming around the circle to consider each face. Fang, Big Mac, A-Dre, Lil, and X—they’d all looked genuinely bewildered, even scared, during Martin’s breakdown.

  Who then?

  He could see Dooley’s sedan up ahead, flasher magnetized to the roof, siren blaring. In the wail he heard Cris’s own scream, the crack of the phone striking the floorboards, and his hands clenched the wheel harder. His gorge lifted, and he hunched forward, thinking he might vomit or pass out or both, but the veil of static lifted from his vision and he straightened up, set his mind on the task before him.

  Which was what?

  An image sailed out of the panic spin of his thoughts—that empty tin of Skoal in the trash can.

  If none of the group members had dropped it there, who had?

  Who else had access to the building and passed through the rooms? He remembered waiting for the CSI investigator after session as the man, disguised in a janitor’s jumpsuit, had scanned the tin for fingerprints, finding nothing but useless smudges.

  A notion bubbled at the base of Daniel’s brain.

  As they neared Market, his thoughts had reached a high boil, and he peeled out, away from the others. Screeching off onto a side street, he redlined the car toward Metro South, a few blocks away. The garage gate was locked, so he slammed up half on the curb and ran for the lobby door, tugging his keys from his pocket.

  The door yawned open, and he was inside the unlit building, his pounding footsteps echoing off the high ceiling. He wound his way through the back corridors, tripping the lights at intervals, revealing one empty stretch of tile after another. Caught in the flash of illumination, a rat reared up on its hind legs, and Daniel nearly stomped it flat as he sprinted by, closing in on the janitor’s office.

  With a single kick, he almost took the door off the hinges. Not until he stepped inside and surveyed the row of rusted clothing lockers before the thin wooden bench did he realize that his phone was ringing and ringing.

  He answered, breathing hard, the gasoline reek of industrial cleaning products burning his chest.

  Dooley said, “Where the hell’d you go?”

  “Angelberto—the janitor. Rawlins told me he had an airtight alibi for the night of Marisol Vargas’s death. Who alibied him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Call Rawlins now.”

  He clicked off. Confronted the flimsy lock dangling from the hasp of the center locker. He overturned a toolbox in the corner, found a hammer, and beat at the lock. It gave way, and the tall metal door creaked open a few inches. With a knuckle he swung it further ajar, light from the hall brightening the interior by degrees.

  The phone rang again, and he pressed it to his ear as the locker’s contents came visible. That yellowed Polaroid of Angelberto with his wife and child. Wads of dirty clothes. A few crumpled balls of fluorescent yellow paper.

  And two spare pairs of familiar black work boots, speckled with paint.

  Dooley’s voice at his ear: “Martin,” she said. “Martin provided Angelberto with the midnight alibi the night of Marisol Vargas’s death. They alibied each other.”

  In the bottom corner of the locker, a paper cup brimmed with shiny, new-looking coins. Beside it, resting atop a short stack of gray interdepartmental envelopes, was a canister of rat poison.

  Daniel lifted the canister to the light. Beneath the rat skull and crossbones, a red band of a label proclaimed, WARNING: ANTICOAGULANT. DO NOT CONSUME. He thought of Molly Clarke arched like a dying fish on the floor of her town house. A hemophiliac’s worst nightmare.

  The canister slipped from his hand. His eyes ticked up. On the locker shelf staring back at him was a tin of Skoal Long Cut Wintergreen tobacco.

  “It’s him,” he said.

  Through the phone came a screeching of tires. “We’ll run down an address, call SWAT, blast in like a wrecking ball.”

  “If he’s there,” he said.

  But she’d already hung up.

  He stared down at those balls of crumpled paper. Fluorescent yellow. He reached for one, unfurled it against the thigh of his jeans.

  Across the top in bold print: “Dim Sum Lunch Special!”

  He flashed on the elderly lady in Chinatown, accosting him and Cris with fluorescent yellow flyers—Dim sum half off! Dim sum half off! She’d been no more than a block from the restaurant where Angelberto had made his appearance, where Daniel had fought for his life in the storage room.

  He dropped to his knees, paddling at the dirty clothes, teasing apart the mound filling the locker’s bottom. More and more crumpled flyers spilled out with the undershirts and socks. He surveyed them there on the oil-spotted floor. Fifteen, twenty flyers.

  As if the pushy woman handed Angelberto one every day. As if he crumpled it, shoved it into his pocket, and kept on. A routine.

  Every day. Leaving his place. Which had to be near the restaurant from the article with whatsherhead on the cover by the corner next to the joint with the guy with the mole.

  A place where Cris could be held right now, trussed like an animal awaiting midnight slaughter.

  Again Daniel heard the echo of his wife’s cry coming through the phone. The animal grunt of the Tearmaker, of Angelberto, exerting himself. The patter of light footsteps. And then heavy ones, banging in pursuit.

  Wiping sweat from his eyes, Daniel plucked the photo of Angelberto’s family from the locker and started for the broken door. Stepping over the scattered tools, he hesitated, looking down.

  Then he reached for a box cutter, weighing its heft in his palm. He extended the blade, testing it. Thumbing it back into place, he charged out.

  The clock above the lockers showed 11:23.

  Chapter 69

  Running red lights, screeching through traffic, clipping a few vehicles in the process, Daniel made it to the edge of Chinatown in twelve minutes. Dooley texted that they were still trying to run down a current address for Angelberto, and he texted back that he was searching, too. Traffic slowed, and there was no parking, so he left his car in the middle of Grant, blocking traffic, horns blaring after him as he ran up the block. Paper lanterns floated overhead, wafting on strings. Aside from the few tourists out for a nontraditional Thanksgiving meal, the sidewalks were bare. He found the corner where the elderly tout had waylaid him with her flyers, but there was nothing there except a trash can and a homeless guy with two Jack Russell terriers.

  He pulled up short, staring in disbelief. Somehow he hadn’t considered the possibility that the old woman wouldn’t be there, nailed to the sidewalk at this late hour. Closing in on the homeless guy, he pulled out the picture of Angelberto’s family, thrusting it forward. “Have you seen this guy? Anywhere?”

  “Nah, man. How ’bout a buck, something to eat?”

  Daniel spun, enraged, keeping fear at bay. A glowing yellow sign across the street caught his eye—DIM SUM HALF OFF! The lights were still on, bright overheads showing every last detail, the crumbs on the counter, the cracked vinyl booths. A klatch of elderly women rimmed a table in the back.

  He sprinted across the street, a car screeching up to hip-check him off the bumper. More horns. He kept on, leaping up onto the curb. The restaurant door was locked, and he banged on the glass, flat-palmed.

  The ladies’ faces pivoted to him
in unison, and he recognized the one at the head of the table. She shook her head and returned to the game of mah-jongg.

  He hammered the glass with a fist, and the woman rose with irritation and came around the counter, leading with her quadripod cane. She unlocked the door and threw it open, startling him with her perfect English. “You’re gonna break my glass!”

  “This man. Have you seen this man?”

  “You’re banging on my window like a crazy person!”

  The wall clock over her shoulder showed 11:38.

  “Look at this photo. Please. It’s an emergency. Have you seen this man?”

  She scowled down. “Yes. I see him every day.”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “Why would I know where he lives?”

  He looked past the owner at the three other old women who regarded him, fingers resting on their game tiles. A social meeting of the town elders.

  “Can I ask them? Please, can I…?” He gestured, stepped inside. “Have any of you seen this man? Here, in the photograph?”

  Blank stares.

  He heard the thump of the cane behind him, and the woman trudged up next to him, her head not much higher than his elbow. She spoke to the others in Cantonese, and the photo was passed around the circle. Each woman examined it with excruciating care. They spoke back and forth. The tortoise pace of the proceedings was torture; it was all Daniel could do to keep himself from shouting at them to hurry up.

  Finally a matriarch with pearl-drop earrings, liberally rouged cheeks, and a dignified bearing gave a terse nod and spoke to the woman at Daniel’s side.

  “What? What’s she saying?”

  “He rents a room from her cousin’s aunt’s friend. The woman’s named Mrs. Lai-Wing.”

  Relief was so intense it took the air from his lungs. “Where?”

  Another exchange. Then the woman at Daniel’s side lifted her cane and aimed the four rubber points through the back of the restaurant. “Waverly Place at Clay, red house with the shingles falling off. She rents out the basement in-law suite.”