Chapter 8
I don’t know if Special Agent Constantine was growing to like me or if it was just a reward for a job well done, but he spared me the bus ride and gave me a lift back to the Town Hall in the dark, black Charger.
Sure, he wasn’t my chauffeur, but I wasn’t his dancing monkey, either. He drove, and I let the Montavez case bounce around in my head. I think I’d done a good job sufficiently confusing Q the book and Q the person in Constantine’s mind, but I wasn’t confused myself.
I then knew what had gotten Vivian Montavez killed.
The second I’d heard the old women tell Constantine the reason for the $1200 charge, it’d hit me. Etymology be damned, there was some connection between the Rosicrucians, their guru’s last, encrypted novel, Geneing and the elusive, possibly mythical, Q.
Vivian Montavez had known this, and now I knew. I just hoped to God that Constantine didn’t.
The girl had been in Seattle to find Q – the source – of all these mysteries. A sly move, since taken as a whole, they were really just a single mystery all tangled up and confused.
I’d successfully climbed into her head. I was feeling closer to Vivian Montavez than I really should have. I knew why she was dead, but was still hazy on who done it. But that answer would come in time, I knew, as I dug deeper. For now, I tried not to tip my hand to Constantine and his Feds.
I wanted to catch Montavez’s killer myself and laud it over Constantine and his three C’s. Fuck him and fuck his little occupation.
That would teach him to give away my smokes to some bum.
He was right about one thing, though. Constantine. He was a boot. A boot standing on the neck of people of Seattle. He’d get his soon enough.
Constantine drove back at the door of his Command Center and scurried inside to continue his systematic erosion of America’s civil liberties. I got the Accord out of the garage and headed back up to Queen Anne.
I wanted to take another look over the girl’s apartment and specifically look at her bookshelf for that $1200 copy of Q.
Partly I wanted to find the book as evidence, but mostly I wanted to get my hands on it before some other cop figured out how much it was worth. That sort of thing didn’t last long in evidence lockers. Not in my town.
The key was still in the fake, plastic rubber plant. The apartment appeared untouched. Whatever else you could say about the Feds, their Forensic guys were top-notch. They’d turned the place over for prints and DNA and returned everything to its original place. It was like they’d never even been there.
Once again, I felt instantly home the moment I turned the key in the latch.
I’d picked up another pack of Kools at the corner store, and I dropped myself heavily down on the futon as I tapped them out on the back of my hand. I twisted and scanned the vast bookshelf of titles and thought that perhaps a cup of coffee might fortify me in my search.
I climbed to my feet and went into the kitchen, still packing my Kools tight in the pack. The percolator was on the stove where Vivian must have left it, and I found the ground coffee in the spice cabinet. Two minutes later, the coffee was gurgling, and I returned to the living room.
Q, Q, Q...I scanned the lines of books. But, of course, simply Q was not going to be on the book’s spine. It’d be gibberish. Letters all in a jumble. O’Day had once bored me to tears over beer explaining how encryption worked. There wasn’t even a one-to-one relationship in the number of characters in a text, I remember him saying. Something about salt. A ten-word title might take four or twenty characters to type out in code. But it didn’t matter, one quickly scan of the spines turned up no nonsense letters. Some French, many Spanish, but no gibberish.
I did find an old, dog-eared copy of Where the Wild Things Are on a lower shelf. I smiled and pulled it out, studying the front cover. It was a favorite of mine as child. I could remember my mother reading it to me before bed. “Wild Thing!” she’d boom, and I would reply “I’ll eat you up!” That was long before I could read the words on the page. Maybe that was something else Vivian and I had in common, other than Q and a pack-a-day smoking habit.
I returned the book to its place on its shelf and went back to the kitchen to check on the coffee.
Was I really there in Montavez’s apartment to do police work? Maybe yes and maybe no. I had nothing else to go on but the physical contents of that apartment. If there was any clue as to who had killed Vivian, it was going to be in there in that apartment, with her things.
But I had to admit that I was inextricably drawn to the place. After living rough for so long – bed hopping with whatever women I could get and sleeping the rest of the time in the drunk tanks – it was alluring to find somewhere that I felt at home. The furnishing, the odors, the taste of that coffee, all seemed oddly comforting to me.
It must have triggered some long-forgotten memory in me, something from my childhood, like Max in his wolf suit. I’ve heard of smells and tastes doing that for people. Not that I could remember living in an apartment like Montavez’s, either with my folks or without.
My father had been an attorney in Cleveland and my mother a homemaker. I remember the big house out in the suburbs. The apartment was all so...urban. I didn’t live in a town until I’d come to Seattle to work in my uncle’s restaurant, and then I’d been twenty-two. He was the one who’d hooked me up with the police gig. His campaign contributions to the last mayor had earned him some favors. And back then I’d been living with Annetta, in that house in Green Lake...
I took my cup of coffee back to the futon and sat down. I lit a Kools and took a long drag, looking around. What was it about this place?
I let my mind wander, staring at the dark TV. I was daydreaming of crazed Rosicrucians, burning books in some Neo-Nuremberg style, Nazi flag waving rally, when snatches of the War of the Planets movie popped into head. I’d only seen it once, as a kid, but I remembered being particularly terrified of the mouthless, eyeless killer drones used by the invading Galronts. How they’d left their human victims slowly dissolving into a pile of goo. The comparison to Geneing was inescapable.
Dark and Geneing. What was the connection there?
Q? I was convinced that Dark’s book and the shadowy, underworld figure were somehow connected. It just couldn’t be a coincidence. And I knew Vivian had believed the same thing before her death. She bought that first edition from the bookstore, but she’d really been looking for the man, as Constantine had suspected. Did it detail his identity in some fashion? Could she decode it? If she had a copy of it on an e-reader, why did she need a physical copy? And where was it?
I had lots of questions and not many answers.
I shook myself and reached for the TV remote. Sitting there in the empty, quiet apartment thinking about spooky, low budget aliens was giving me the heebie jeebies. I turned the television on for some noise.
It was showing a breaking news broadcast. A demonstration downtown. The Mayor was leading a protest against the Federal Wardship. Good for him, I said to myself. He was screaming into a gathered collection of press microphones as protesters waved makeshift signs behind him. He was red-faced, bellowing into the cameras, denouncing the President and the illegal actions of his administration. The crowd churned behind him, seething with collective rage. By the looks of things, it wasn’t going to stay a peaceful protest for long. I’d watched crowds working themselves up into a riot before, and they’d looked a hell of a lot like the one on TV.
My phone rang. I was slow to answer it. Riot duty was the last thing on my mind.
“Detective Fonseca?” It was Dispatch. Shit.
“Yep,” I said, taking a gulp of my coffee.
There was a long, silent pause on the phone, like the dispatcher was trying hard to phrase something correctly.
“Hello?” I asked the phone.
“Detective, we have a four fifty-one call, originating from the University of Washington Campus...”
Four fifty-one? What the hell was
that? Not a homicide, I knew that. “Four fifty-one?” I asked.
“Yes sir, an arson.”
“Arson? Was somebody killed?”
“No sir, that is not my understanding,” the dispatcher sighed.
“Then call CBRNE, those are their calls.”
“Yes Detective, but...err...” the dispatcher hedged.
“There are no other detectives on duty, are there?” I realized, resting my head on my freehand.
“I’m afraid not, sir. Only your card is listed as on active duty.”
I was it. I was the entirety of the Seattle Police Department. “Did you inform our new Federal Overloads?”
“Yes sir.”
“And?”
“And now I’m calling you, Detective.”
“Okay, okay,” I exhaled. Did I have a choice? “Give me the address.”
She read of an address on campus. I instantly recognized it.
It was O’Day’s lab.