Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

He couldn’t be certain how long she’d been gone. He estimated that at least ten minutes had passed since he’d seen her up on the landing from down below. He pieced it together in his head. The noise of the running water had to be the old man taking a bath or a shower.

He guessed that when she heard this, the woman made her move. She hadn’t lingered for long or he would have caught up with her.

Things were not going well. First the maid and now this. He was trying to figure out how he could track her down and wondering when the next flight to Costa Rica was. He was staring across the desk at her note on the other side when it occurred to him that the problem of the missing woman and the abrupt way in which she’d left might actually present its own solution.

Once the two bodies were discovered and the police were called in, it wouldn’t take them long to start counting heads and realize she was gone. Neighbors probably knew she was living in the house with Pike. The cook certainly knew it. Pike’s friends knew it. Process of elimination: two dead bodies and she is gone; either whoever killed the others took her hostage, or she did the deed herself. When they caught up with her, and they would, the fact that she was running free, they would arrest her in a heartbeat.

He considered his options. There weren’t any. The only thing serving to confirm her denials would be the note, and the police would probably claim she wrote that just to cover her tracks. The authorities would arrive at the obvious conclusion: either there was an argument and a violent struggle or she simply wanted money. Either way, she killed Pike, and ran into the maid on her way out; that’s what the evidence would show.

He got out of the chair and went around the desk. He was reaching for the note when something instinctual stopped him. It was Pike’s letter opener, the oversize dagger on top of the paper.

Even now, sitting here on the street drinking coffee and watching as the traffic coursed down the broad avenue, past the lawyer’s office, Liquida had to smile.

He realized immediately that she had to finger the dagger to put it on top of the note. He looked at the blade. It was very sharp, both edges. A woman, dainty hands, would not pick such a thing up by the blade. She would take it by the smooth bronze handle.

It was so simple, made to order. He picked it up by the blade between gloved fingers and used a heavy hardbound book to pound the end of the handle. He drove the dagger between the old man’s ribs in the upper chest area. Two good strokes and the blade was embedded almost to the hilt. He grabbed the note off the desk, flinging the light plastic pen onto the floor where it hit his foot and went under the desk. He didn’t care. He had what he wanted. He folded the note and slipped it into his pocket.

Then he searched for the documents. He found what he thought might be one of them, but he wasn’t sure. It was the right size, a glossy print. It appeared to be hidden under a magazine on the desk. But it didn’t conform to what he remembered from the description of the photos he had been given. All the same, he unzipped the front of his suit and stuffed the single photograph into a quart-size ziplock bag. He placed the bag back against his chest and zipped up the suit. He would let them decide if it was part of the deal.

He searched the desk drawers and two antique wooden filing cabinets that stood against the wall behind it. He went through every file. There was no sign of any of the other documents. He looked around the study. All of the coin drawers would have been too small to contain the photos, eight by ten inches from what he had been told.

He spent several minutes looking in the master bedroom, the only other place he could think of where the old man might have kept them. But he had no luck. He looked in the bedroom where the woman kept her clothes, some in the closet and others folded in the bureau drawers. He combed through them. He didn’t find the documents, but he did find her camera. This was on the short list of items they wanted. It was in a case with one additional storage chip and an extra battery. He took the whole thing.

He gave up the search for the documents and went back to the study. The only other item he was specifically instructed to look for was Pike’s laptop computer and any storage devices that might be hooked up to it. The laptop was on the desk with a single thumb drive plugged into it. He bagged the computer and the thumb drive. Then he went to work with his survival knife, the one strapped to his leg. He jimmied more than twenty locked drawers in the study and swept everything that looked like gold from each drawer into a large folding canvas bag that he’d brought for this purpose. By the time the bag was full, between the gold, the laptop, its cord with the power box, the thumb drive, and the woman’s small camera, he was afraid the bottom would fall out of the canvas bag. He could barely lift it.

The gold was an added perk, the freedom to take whatever he wanted from the collection of coins as long as he disposed of them in a manner that could never be traced. There would be no way for the police to know how many coins the woman took or who broke into the drawers. Now, instead of a random burglary, they would solve the crime quickly and in the process take care of the woman for him.

Down in the kitchen he washed up the chef’s knife one more time and left it on the sink. As a finishing touch, he added just a tiny trace of blood from the maid. This he picked off her body with the point of his own knife and carefully transferred to a crevice near the handle. He knew that the evidence technicians would find this and that police would conclude that the maid was killed last. He transferred smears of blood from Pike onto the maid’s clothing, this to further reinforce the order of death. A little blood smeared on the front door near the handle, with the door left partially open, and Liquida made his escape. He went out the way he had come in, out the back door, locking it behind him.

Eighteen hours later police in Arizona picked up the woman. One enterprising reporter for an Arizona paper got wind of some of the coins taken by the female suspect and interviewed the pawnshop owner where she’d peddled them. Everything was working perfectly, or so he thought.

Liquida had never been in this much trouble before on any job. The people who hired him were not happy. It is the problem when you are hired to kill people but you are not told why, which is often the case.

He had been led to believe that the woman was not critical to the job. They had told him that if she was away from the house at the time Pike was killed, that that would be acceptable. In which case he was to use his best efforts to find and retrieve the documents, the photographs if he could, and to forget about the woman. He was told that killing Pike was critical in order to separate the old man from the documents. If he could find the photographs, he was to get a bonus.

The problem was that the man and the woman seemed inseparable. One never left the house without the other. It was for this reason he concluded that he would have to take them both.

But according to his employers, allowing her to escape death was one thing, setting her up for murder was another. His plan to have her arrested had blown up in his face.

In Liquida’s business, clients were never interested in excuses, or in how difficult a job was. You commanded a high fee because you could do the work. Once you failed on a major contract, word got out. If your failure jeopardized people in high places, you could lose more than just your career.

This morning as he sat drinking his coffee he was waiting for a message. All of the machines inside the Internet café were busy. He would have to wait.