“Anyway, that was good stuff you got today. It seems like everything is coming together. We haven’t even caught the guy and so much is known about him.”
“I guess. After hearing everything Brass said, do you have sympathy for him, Jack? For Gladden?”
“The man who killed my brother? Nope. No sympathy at all.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“But you still do.”
She took a long time answering.
“I think of a little child that could have been a lot of different things until that man did what he did. Beltran set the child on the path. He’s the real monster in all of this. Like I said before, if anybody got what he deserved, it was him.”
“Okay, Rachel.”
She started laughing.
“Sorry, I guess I’m finally getting tired. I didn’t mean to be so intense all of a sudden.”
“It’s okay. I know what you meant. There is a means to every end. A root to any cause. Sometimes the root is more evil than the cause, though it’s the cause that is usually the most vilified.”
“You have a way with words, Jack.”
“I’d rather have my way with you.”
“You have that, too.”
I laughed and thanked her. Then we were silent for a few moments, the line open between us, stretching two thousand miles. I felt comfortable. No need to talk.
“I don’t know how close they’ll let you get tomorrow,” she said. “But be careful.”
“I will. You too. When will you be back?”
“I hope by tomorrow afternoon. I told them to have the jet ready by twelve. I’m going to check out Gladden’s mail drop and then get on the plane.”
“Okay. Why don’t you try to go to sleep now?”
“Okay. I wish I was with you.”
“Me, too.”
I thought she was about to hang up but she didn’t.
“Did you talk about me with Gordon today?”
I thought about his comment, calling her the Painted Desert.
“No. We had a pretty busy day.”
I don’t think she believed me and I felt bad about lying.
“I’ll see you, Jack.”
“Okay, Rachel.”
I thought about the phone conversation for a while after hanging up. Our conversation made me feel kind of sad and I couldn’t pinpoint the true reason. After a while, I got up and left the room. It was raining. From the doorway of the hotel I checked the street and saw no one hiding, no one waiting for me. I shrugged off the fears of the night before and stepped out.
Walking close to the buildings to avoid as much of the rain as I could, I went to the Cat & Fiddle and ordered a beer at the bar. The place was crowded despite the rain. My hair was wet and in the mirror behind the bar I saw dark circles cut under my eyes. I touched my beard the way Rachel had caressed it. When I was done with the black and tan I ordered another.
40
The incense had long burned away by Wednesday morning. Gladden moved about the apartment with a T-shirt tied around his head, covering his mouth and nose, making him look like a bank robber from the Old West. He had sprinkled perfume he had found in the bathroom on the shirt and around the apartment, like a priest with holy water, but just like holy water, it didn’t help him much. The smell was still everywhere, haunting him. But he didn’t care anymore. He had made it through. It was time to leave. Time to change.
In the bathroom, he once again used a pink plastic razor he had found on the bathtub ledge to shave. He then took a long, hot and then cold, shower and afterward moved about the apartment naked, letting the air dry his body. He had taken a mirror off the wall of the bedroom earlier and propped it up against the living room wall. He now practiced walking in front of it again, back and forth, back and forth, watching his hips.
When he was satisfied he had it down, he went into the bedroom. The processed air chilled his naked body and the smell nearly made him convulse. But he stood his ground and looked down at her. She was gone now. The body on the bed was bloated, and had lost all recognizable values. The eyes were coated in a milky caul. Bloody decomposition fluids had purged from everywhere, even the scalp. And the bugs had her now. He couldn’t see them but he could hear them. They were there. He knew. It was in the books.
As he closed the door he thought he heard a whisper and he looked back in. It was nothing. Just the bugs. He closed the door and put the towel back in place.
41
The man we believed to be William Gladden called Data Imaging Answers at 11:05 on Wednesday morning, identifying himself as Wilton Childs and inquiring about the digiShot camera he had ordered. Thorson took the call and, according to plan, asked if Childs could call back in five or ten minutes. Thorson explained that a shipment of merchandise had just been delivered and he hadn’t had a chance to look through it all. Childs said he would call back.
Meantime, Backus monitored the caller ID display and quickly gave the number Childs/Gladden had called from to an AT&T operator standing by on the law enforcement request desk. The operator punched the number into her computer and reported that it belonged to a pay phone on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City before Thorson had even hung up.
One of the roving two-car teams of FBI agents was on the 101 freeway in Sherman Oaks, about five minutes away from the pay phone with good traffic. They gassed it down to the Vineland Boulevard exit without use of sirens, exited to Ventura Boulevard and took positions within sight of the pay phone, which was on a wall outside the office of a $40-a-night motel, porno movies included. No one was at the phone by the time they got there but they waited. Meantime, another roving team was en route from Hollywood as backup and a helicopter was circling on standby over Van Nuys, ready to move over the scene when the ground agents moved in.
The agents in place waited. And so did I, in a car with Backus and Carter a block from Data Imaging. Carter turned the car on, ready to roll if the word came over the radio that the others had Gladden in sight.
Five minutes passed and then ten. It was all very intense, even sitting blind with Backus and Carter. The backup cars had enough time to take positions a few blocks behind the first team’s cars on Ventura. There were now eight agents within a block of the pay phone.
But at 11:33, when the phone on Thorson’s desk at Data Imaging rang, the agents in place were still watching an unused pay phone. Backus picked up the two-way.
“We’ve got a ring here. Anything?”
“Nada. No one’s using this phone.”
“Be ready to move.”
Backus put the two-way down and picked up the mobile phone, hitting the preset key for calling the AT&T law enforcement desk. I was leaning over from the backseat, watching him and the video monitor on the transmission hump beneath the dashboard. It was a black-and-white fish-eye view of the whole Digital Imaging showroom. I saw Thorson pick the phone up on the seventh ring. Though both phone lines into the store were tapped, we could only hear Thorson’s side of the conversation in the car. Thorson gave the high sign on the video, raising his hand over his head and making a circling motion with his finger. It was the sign that Childs/Gladden was calling again. Backus began the same rundown with caller ID that he had done before.