Lee Vance - The Garden of Betrayal

“Nope,” he said, pulling into traffic. The Meridien was only a few blocks away. “The guy with the phone came out of nowhere and disappeared into the same place. Hotel doesn’t have a camera on the street, and the doormen don’t remember seeing him. Feds didn’t get a hit on his picture. They’ll circulate it more widely, to Interpol and other international police forces, and wait to see what forensics on the bomb tell them. But right now it’s a mystery.”

“What about Staten Island?”

“I drove the area Vinny described with the search team this morning. That’s where I was when you were trying to get hold of me earlier. Whole lot of swampland and no cell service. Haven’t had any update yet, but I’m thinking it will take some time.”

“So, nothing and more nothing.”

His phone rang before he could respond. He answered it, his side of the conversation mainly grunts. I slumped in my seat for the rest of the short ride, staring out the window at Christmas lights. I was tired of being in the dark. It was past time for us to catch a break. Everybody made mistakes. We just had to figure out what mistakes the other side was making.

Claire and Kate fussed over me when I got back to the hotel room, insisting that I lie down on the couch while they pored over the home-care instructions I’d been given. Both seemed disappointed that Jell-O wasn’t mentioned, as they’d had the hotel kitchen make me an enormous tub of it. I finagled my way upright by observing that I couldn’t eat lying down and paid for my cleverness by being forced to slurp down a bowl of raspberry goop at the asymmetric breakfast table. The taste reminded me of having my tonsils out at age twelve. But it felt nice to be taken care of by them.

“So,” I said, setting my spoon down resolutely, “have we made any more progress?”

“A little,” Reggie answered. Joe had left to run errands, but Reggie was sprawled on the couch I’d vacated. “Picked up some interesting new information earlier today, although like everything else we learn, it’s hard to know what it means.”

“Tell us,” Claire said, reaching for my hand.

“I mentioned to Mark last night that I was going to take a stab at running down Munoz’s girlfriend. The detectives investigating his murder wanted to talk to her at the time, but they couldn’t locate her. Paid all her bills in cash, didn’t talk much to the neighbors, and no trail at DMV or with Immigration. Also, no match to the fingerprints they lifted from her apartment. They pegged her as an illegal flying under the radar. I figured maybe she’d been printed somewhere in the last seven years, so I had a tech I know run the fingerprints again. Still no luck. And then I started thinking about the hooker.”

He hesitated, glancing uncomfortably toward Kate.

“Hooker,” she said. “Prostitute. Whore. Call girl. Scarlet woman. Come on, Reggie. I’m seventeen.”

“Okay, okay,” he said holding his hands up defensively. “Sorry. According to the file, whoever killed Munoz wiped the room clean, but the crime-scene guys were able to lift a partial from Munoz’s belt buckle. Not enough to get a match but something they hoped to use as corroborating evidence in the event they turned up a suspect. I figured the technology might be better now, so I sent the partial from the file down to the same tech and asked if he could do anything with it. And lo and behold, he did a Rain Man for me. One look at the partial and he calls me and he says that it’s still no good for the database but that he recognizes it. There’s a loop or a whorl or whatever that’s exactly the same as one of the prints from the girlfriend.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said.

“Nope. Dead serious. This guy has a photographic memory for that sort of stuff. He estimates the odds at about a thousand to one that the girlfriend and the hooker are the same person.”

“Wait. You’re telling me it never occurred to the cops who investigated Munoz’s murder that the hooker and the girlfriend might be the same person?”

“Two biggest differences between good police work and bad police work,” Reggie said, shaking his head. “Doing your leg work and double-checking your assumptions. The guy behind the counter at the motel said the girl was a hooker, and the homicide dicks took his word for it. They must have figured he was an expert on hookers.”

“I don’t get it,” Kate objected. “Munoz sounds like a slick guy. Why would he take his girlfriend to a fleabag motel?”

Reggie looked embarrassed again. Claire intervened before Kate could get huffy.

“It’s okay, Reggie. Really.”

“Guys get turned on by all kinds of stuff,” he muttered. “Although if we’re right that the girlfriend set him up, the motel was probably her idea. She tells him she has this hot fantasy about being a streetwalker, and he hits the bait. It’s not a difficult scenario to imagine.”

Kate looked a little pink. It didn’t make me unhappy to learn that she was still naive about some things.

“You have a picture of the girlfriend that you can match up against the footage from the motel security camera?” I asked, breaking the awkward silence.

“Of the girlfriend, yes,” he said, reaching into his jacket. “Munoz had one in his desk at work. But nothing to match it to. Munoz registered for the room, and the girl kept her face turned away from the camera.”

He handed me a snapshot of a young woman in a bathing-suit top and cutoff jeans. She was wearing dark glasses and looked considerably younger than she had when I met her, but I recognized her immediately. The girlfriend was Theresa Roxas.

“Run it down for me again,” Reggie said.

I was at the chart on the wall, walking him through the connections while Claire and Kate listened. My weariness had vanished.

“Theresa was the one who passed me the Saudi information,” I said, touching one of the boxes Kate had drawn earlier. “She was introduced to me by Alex. Walter and I suspect the Saudi information actually came from the U.S. government, by way of Senator Simpson. Narimanov confirmed the government link and said that Alex had been trying to back-check the information through Washington.”

Reggie rocked backward in his chair, fingers laced behind his head.

“I like the fact that this Roxas woman is a direct link between Munoz and what’s happening now.” He gestured to the chart. “It tells me you’re on the right track with all of this. But I still got a big problem understanding the logistics of what happened to Kyle.”

“The logistics or the motive?” Claire asked.

“Both, but let’s stick with the logistics. I’m going to start by assuming that Munoz was a good guy. Anyone have a problem with that?”

I glanced at Claire and Kate, and then shrugged.

“Fine. Then I’m further going to assume that it wasn’t Munoz who moved the car. You lure a guy into a motel room to whack him, you don’t let him run out for cigarettes. All the parking-lot camera saw was a big guy in a camel-hair coat. Could have been anyone.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So, these people have got this carefully choreographed operation going on to discredit and murder Munoz, and in the middle of it, they take time out to have one of their people dress up like Munoz and drive his car all the way up to your neighborhood. And their objective is to kidnap a child who they couldn’t possibly have expected to find on the street at that time of night.”

“Maybe they were looking for my dad,” Kate offered in a small voice.

“I don’t buy it,” Reggie said. “Your schedule’s never been predictable, has it, Mark?”

“Not really.”

“And if they were there for you, what would have put them on to Kyle? They couldn’t have been expected to know what your family looked like. On top of which, why bother mixing you up with Munoz at all? If they wanted to hit you, too, why not do it another day? Why make things so complicated?”