Blackbird

  ‘And over here we have the ones you gave me.’

  On the left another column of initials flashed on, short enough that all of it fit on the monitor screen.

  ‘Now what we’ve got to figure out is how they match up, if they do.’

  ‘If the initials on the short list had showed up on the long one, you’d already know that?’ I said.

  ‘Right. Therefore we assume some kind of encryption.’

  I thought about this for a few seconds. I knew from an FBI workshop I’d once sat through that almost unbreakable codes did exist, but they were mainly research algorithms requiring complicated keys or decryption devices to read and were much too tricky and time-consuming for any ordinary use.

  I said, ‘For this kind of stuff people are going to use a system they can keep in their head.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘But nothing too simple either. Dr Gold wouldn’t have been worried about somebody like Homeland Security or the CIA – she’d know it wouldn’t take them three seconds to bust anything she could ever come up with – but she would have been serious about keeping out the casual snoopers and light-duty hackers. That gives us a ballpark idea how deep to look.’

  I said, ‘What are you doing now?’

  ‘Trying a few obvious transformations, like substituting adjacent letters in the alphabet, B for A, Q for P, and so on. Plus I’ve tried converting the initials to digits based on their position in the alphabet and then looking at the numerical positions of the patient initials on the master list, that kind of thing. I got a hit or two, but nothing above the level of chance so far.’

  ‘Okay, staying with simple but not too direct,’ I said. ‘It’s got to be something she can convert without any hassle, but tricky enough that nobody’s going to stumble onto it. Try reversing the initials and moving up a letter.’

  ‘You bet.’ A burst of keystrokes and mouse clicks. On the screen all the initials on the Cutchell list changed but nothing happened on the right-hand list.

  ‘Now try going back one,’ I said. But as I looked at the screen, thinking of cryptograms, word jumbles, acrostics and finally chess, the image of Coach Bub materialised in my mind. His expression was mischievous as he wagged his finger at me the way he always did after I’d missed a read in scrimmage or some chess ploy with the knight that he thought was obvious. It stopped me. The knight. The ‘mystic knight’. The piece that struck obliquely, moving in any direction, over any intervening man, in a combination of one and two squares at right angles to each other . . .

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Look at the keyboard, Kevin. Just the letters. Try going ahead or back one letter on the keyboard, then forward or back two letters in the alphabet from there.’

  He looked at me for a few seconds, the idea gradually coming into focus in his mind. He nodded, stared at his keyboard a moment, typed in the revised commands and worked the mouse. When he tried the first combination, two ahead on the keyboard, one back in the alphabet, the array on the monitor changed. A set of initials in the left-hand column brightened and a corresponding set on the right began flashing. He let the display scroll all the way up, then default back to the beginning of the list.

  ‘Couple hits,’ said Kevin. ‘That’s not it.’

  ‘Seven combinations left,’ I said. ‘Run another one.’

  He tried again, with no luck, then once more with the same result. On the fourth combination – two back on the keyboard, one ahead in the alphabet – the master list scrolled as usual, but now with randomly spaced sets of initials on the right flashing brightly one after another as they moved up the screen.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Kevin, letting go of the mouse. More flashes. ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’ He watched the screen intently as the display scrolled to the bottom of the list and went back to the beginning. ‘Bim-bada-boom,’ he said.

  ‘Is this what it looks like?’ I asked.

  He turned to me with a smile. ‘It’s exactly what it looks like. The flashes are hits, one on the patient list for every entry on the Cutchell list. One hundred-per-cent match. In other words, slam-dunk-a-roonie. You figured it out, sir.’

  ‘Can you print it out for me?’ I said.

  ‘I can put it on your phone if you want.’

  ‘Paper’ll work fine,’ I said. ‘Indulge me.’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ said Kevin, the printer swishing softly. ‘Dead trees coming up.’

  He handed me the sheets, LA watching me as I scanned the pages, and I felt her becoming aware of my breathing and my heart rate. Of course I knew, or at least knew of, some of these people. A car dealer. A bowling alley owner. A noisy schoolboard member. A husband-and-wife doctor team from the Hebron Clinic. Dwight Hazen, the city manager who’d canned me and was now trying to get me locked up.

  Forcing myself to continue down the list, I thought of the stylised T I’d been obsessed with, the T that turned out not to be a T, or a cross. The only meaning it had for me right now was as the seventh sign of the zodiac. The Scales, symbol of justice, the legal profession, balance and harmony.

  Ninth on the list in my hand was an encoded set of initials I didn’t need Kevin’s translation to recognise: PSF.

  The mastermind.

  FORTY-FIVE

  I drove west on the interstate under a cold, dull sky, not seeing the miles as they passed, trying not to think or remember. But of course I did think. I thought about who lives and who dies, about betrayal, and about whether anything that was good about being human could ever really be enough to offset the pain and loss and sorrow of it. I wondered how many people went on living and feeling not because life is sweet but because they believed they owed it to somebody – their loved ones, God, their karma. I remembered other autumns I’d seen, the sunlight of other times, and faces I was never going to see again. I remembered a life when I’d thought I understood the world and what to expect from it.

  Exiting at Highway 14, I crossed the overpass and turned back along the access to take Houston Road down to the house-sized red-brick office building centred on a half-acre of lawn west of the county courthouse. A dark green Suburban I knew well was parked near the front door next to an oldish grey Beemer and a white four- or five-year-old Corolla.

  Inside, I walked past the tasteful-looking furniture, generous plants and slick magazines in the waiting room, past the receptionist’s desk – .

  ‘Uh, Lieutenant Bonham, he’s – ’

  Ignoring her, I opened the heavy, brass-furnished mahogany door and stepped into Johnny’s office. He looked at me for a beat, his coat off and his sleeves rolled up, then set his pencil down at the top of the blue legal pad in front of him as if it were a blasting cap. His client, a balding middle-aged hustler with gold chains winking in the thick black hair at the opening of his collar, more gold on his wrists and fingers, blue goombah chin, the kind of guy who’d own a low-end used car lot or a titty bar, turned to get a view of me.

  ‘Excuse us,’ I said.

  ‘Just a minute,’ he said, cranking farther around in his chair, puffing up a little, starting to get dangerous.

  ‘It’s going to have to wait,’ I said, the guy looking at my eyes and subsiding after a beat or two.

  ‘Go on, Mike. It’s okay,’ said Johnny, his expression registering the terrible magnitude of the lie he’d just told.

  Physically he looked great, belly still tight, no more than fifteen pounds over his playing weight. But there was a darkness in his face, a deadness in his eyes that I now recognised for what it had always been.

  The gangster grumped out, deflated. With a weak, lopsided smile, Johnny invited me to sit. I did.

  ‘You always had brass balls,’ he said.

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘I mean, here you are empty-handed, fronting a guy who’s supposed to know ninety-nine ways to kill you with a paper clip.’

  I still said nothing.

  He drew in a deep breath and let it out. ‘Thanks for not sending somebody else, Bis,’ he said.

  ‘I’m unem
ployed, Johnny,’ I said. ‘But you’ve got to know they’re coming.’

  Johnny nodded absently and looked down at his red foulard tie. ‘Why do I wear this fucking thing in my own office?’ he said. He loosened the tie and opened the collar of his white oxford buttondown. ‘It’s all a costume drama anyway, man. You ought to be able to just dress for comfort wherever you are, worry about stuff that really means something instead of this kind of bullshit.’ He flipped the tie. ‘Hey, remember when we used to go deer hunting, back in the day? Down on White Oak? Remember how some mornings it was so quiet you could hear a falling leaf ticking down through the branches fifty yards away?’

  I remembered that, and I remembered an icy dawn when a ten-point buck, supernaturally alert, suddenly and silently appeared thirty yards in front of me, his breath pluming from shiny black nostrils as he surveyed the brown bottom-land hardwoods around him. Raising my .308 a millimetre at a time, moving only when the buck looked away from me, I finally settled the crosshairs behind his tawny shoulder and held them there for a few seconds.

  Squeezing the trigger smoothly, dropping the firing pin on an empty chamber, I whispered, ‘Bang’, and the animal bounced away through the trees, the white flag of his tail held high.

  ‘Remember those hogs that treed us that Thanksgiving?’ said Johnny.

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Tusks like fucking sabre-tooth tigers. Thought they were gonna eat us alive.’

  I watched him.

  ‘How’d you know?’ he said.

  ‘Got her casenotes,’ I said, ‘after I saw the blackmail list from her computer. Depression, PTSD, insomnia. Forty thousand a year.’

  Johnny sighed. ‘Her computer. Brilliant.’ He shook his head. ‘Ain’t it a bitch? And the forty K wasn’t all of it. She was always after something, constantly wangling introductions, pumping me for dirt on people. The worst part was having to listen to her. “You’re carrying a lot of guilt around, Johnny, you’re going to need my help. This is a long-term thing. You’ll need to keep me on retainer.”’ A short laugh. ‘For ever. My psychologist for life. I tried to wiggle out of it. I had a PI dig up some shit on her, even got her psych records from the counselling service where she went to school. According to Mark it was pretty bad, especially her MMPI. But she just laughed at me.’

  So the Welsh code LA had translated for us was Gold’s. It fit. I imagined Pendergrass jotting down the code as he and Johnny talked on the phone, on the notepaper that had been stuffed up Gold’s nose. Jewell at some point swiping the pad and adding the reference to GL Owen on the next sheet, probably after getting a lead on a job.

  ‘Was that the reason for the tongue?’

  Johnny looked away, nodded briefly. ‘Having them cut it out, yeah. I was that angry. But drying it out in their fucking jerky oven? Jesus, what pigs. The other shit was ad-lib,’ he said. ‘Lagniappe.’

  ‘There was something else, Johnny,’ I said. ‘A couple of things you didn’t do.’

  ‘Didn’t do?’

  ‘When I asked you about lawyers calling a witness a whore, you didn’t show any interest in who or what I was talking about. And when I told you I was hearing interesting things from a psychologist about what was going on at the prison, even with all your curiosity about the case you didn’t want to know which psychologist it was or what he was talking about. Or she. The only way that makes any sense is if you already knew.’

  Johnny sighed, shook his head. ‘I should’ve known I’d make a dumb slip like that sooner or later. It’s been weird, man. When you’re a litigator you think you’re good with words and stories and details, good with lies, but then when everything’s a lie there’s just too fucking much to remember.’

  ‘Why Pendergrass?’

  ‘He had to go because I knew y’all would break him down, and that’d be the end of me.’

  ‘Was it you who called the shot at LA?’

  Johnny pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘No, Bis, not that. Never. Believe it or not, I almost decided to call you and turn myself in when I heard about it. Picked up the phone, even punched in the number, but then I lost my nerve. Told myself that’d be their last move, that you’d get her and Jana and the girls clear.’ A bleak smile. ‘Fucking morons thought killing LA was gonna improve their situation? Shut you down by shooting at your family?’ He hacked out a sour laugh. ‘I can pick ’em, can’t I?’

  ‘Where’d you get them?’

  ‘Through Mark. They were all out there at the prison at one time or another and knew that Sword guy, Keets. He must have known about them having a hard-on for you over that doper that killed Bo’s wife and girl.’

  ‘What about Frix?’

  ‘He knew what Gold knew. Decided to try blackmailing me after she was dead.’ Johnny ran a hand through his hair, saying, ‘By then there was just no stopping-place for me, Bis. He had to go too.’

  ‘You sold a lot of people on the idea of the survivalists, Johnny.’

  ‘I know, man. It was a pretty good story, wasn’t it? The perfect bad guys.’

  ‘Why the coin?’

  He shrugged. ‘Smokescreen, same as the letter. Tabloids get hold of it, CNN, the net, who knows, maybe we get a California situation, the case derails, a fall guy shows up. I didn’t count on you running the investigation yourself.’ He took in a deep breath and blew it out. ‘It was actually the coin that gave me the idea how to do her. Thinking of the Romans, y’know? Money got a little tight one month, what with the payments to Gold and all, and I sold off most of my collection. Saved a few for mementos. I didn’t think you’d remember them after all this time.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Bis. About all of it. All of it except Gold. Her I’d do again. After Delta Force I didn’t think I had any killing left in me, but there’re just no words to tell you how much I hated that bitch, man.’

  ‘You know why I’m here,’ I said.

  ‘You mean other than to bust me?’

  I took the folded sheet of paper from my inside pocket and pushed it across the desk for him to read. It was a copy of a progress note from his own file, isolated at the top of an otherwise blank page. The entry, seeming to throb with malignant heat, read:

  JQT9/2

  kld bst frnds grl wh HS snr, nv cau

  Wh HS snr. When high-school senior. The year we won State. The last year of Kat’s life. Nv cau of course was shorthand for never caught.

  ‘You’re going to tell me what happened to Kat and where she is, Johnny,’ I said. ‘I’ll do anything it takes to get that.’

  A crooked smile from Johnny.

  ‘Anything?’ he said. ‘Even kneecap me?’

  After a silence I said, ‘You really think I’d stop at that?’

  Johnny gazed out the window, and in the slatted year-end light I could see the fine tracery of veins in the whites of his tired eyes, the radiating crow’s feet at their corners.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Any more than I would in your place.’ He stared blankly through the glass a while longer, then said, ‘On the field you and Daz worked together like a couple of wheels in a fucking watch, Bis. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was you and him that took us to State, pure and simple. But I don’t think you ever really understood him.’

  I waited.

  ‘He was blind-jealous of you, buddy. Jealous of the girls you got, jealous of that place you lived on. Even jealous of your folks. You know what his were like. He figured you’d have gotten picked way ahead of him in the draft, and he knew you were smarter than him too. Hell, you were smarter than any of us. And didn’t even know it.’

  ‘Why are we talking about Daz, Johnny?’

  Johnny rubbed his eyes with his fingertips, saying, ‘Why are we talking about Daz?’ He swivelled back to face me. ‘Because it was Daz who had the idea of grabbing Kat. I was there, but it was Daz who – ’ His voice failed him, and he swallowed dryly before continuing. ‘ – who strangled her.’

  A long, unmeasurable moment pa
ssed, the earth grinding silently on its cold axis.

  ‘Were you jealous too, Johnny?’ I said.

  ‘Of you? Yeah, I guess so, Bis. I finally realised you really did think you were just an orphan with nothing of your own. But back then all I saw was that great family you had, the ranch and those horses, the way you could carry a football, the way nothing ever kept you down. The way the chicks came to you like moths to a candle. But Kat was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, Bis. I have to admit I wanted her as much as Daz did.’

  ‘Did he rape her?’

  Johnny breathed for a while, his jaw tight, then nodded shortly. ‘Yeah, he raped her.’

  ‘And you?’

  Johnny hung his head. ‘Have you ever done anything bad, Bis? I mean really, truly, go-to-hell bad?’

  I didn’t speak.

  ‘It’s incredible what it does to you,’ Johnny said. ‘The way it closes in on you. It’s there every day, every minute, every second, the noose tightens a little at a time, and you know there’s absolutely no hope, no way of fixing anything. It doesn’t get better with time, it gets worse, and you know eternity could go by, and then a thousand more like it, and still nobody’s ever going to forgive you, not ever, not yourself, not even God, if there is such a thing. I got so I saw all of it every goddamn time I closed my eyes. Still do. I think that was the real reason Daz had his wreck – there was no way he could live with it any more.’ Johnny looked up at me. ‘I did my best to let ’em cap me over there, Bis, I really did, but I guess Delta taught me too damn well. The assholes would pop up with those ratty-ass AKs, I’d react before I could stop myself – ’ He shook his head. ‘Then there we’d be, man, my goddamn heart still pumping away and theirs not.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  He stared at the desk blotter for a few seconds, seeming fascinated by whatever he saw, like a biologist discovering some new form of life.

  After a while he said, ‘By that big pond on your place out there. The one that’s way the hell and gone out in that wide valley where the old cabin was, with all the willows and cottonwoods around. West side, where the big rock is, about six yards back from the water. We took her out there in Daz’s jeep after she told us about the place. We said we were going to meet you there. It just drove Daz nuts thinking about you and her. He wanted to take her out there and fuck her. I guess he convinced himself she’d go for it once we were there. She trusted us because we were your friends – ’