Jonathan Kellerman - Bad Love

Nuestra Raza. NR forever. The tattoos on Roddy Rodriguez's hands…

I thought of Rodriguez's masonry yard, shut down, cleaned out, and padlocked. The flight from the house on McVine prepared well in advance.

Evelyn had entertained me in her backyard, as her husband's homeboys honed their shanks.

Making an appointment for Wednesday, then going into the house with her husband and changing it to Thursday.

Twenty-four more hours for getaway.

Hurley Keffler's debacle at my house made sense now, as did Sherman Bucklear's nagging. Prison rumblings had probably told the Iron Priests what was brewing. Locating Rodriguez might have forestalled the hit or, if the deed had already been done, given the Priests instant payback.

Payback.

The same old stupid cycle of violence.

Burglary tools and a quick shove out a eight-story window.

A corpse on a garage floor, a little boy baby never to be.

Two little girls on the run.

Were Chondra and Tiffani in some Mexican border town, being tutored in Fugitive 1A with more care than they'd ever been taught to read or write?

Or maybe Evelyn had taken them somewhere they could blend in. On the surface. But, suckled on violence, they'd always be different. Unable to understand why, years later, they gravitated toward cruel, violent men.

Static dripped out of the speakers- a barely comprehensible voice announcing something about boarding. I got up and took my place in line. Six thousand miles in less than twenty-four hours. My mind and my legs ached. I wondered if Shirley Rosenblatt would ever be able to walk again.

Soon, I'd be three time zones away from her problems and a lot closer to my own.

• • •

The flight got in just before midnight. The terminal was deserted and Robin was waiting outside the automatic doors.

"You look exhausted," she said, as we walked to her truck.

"I've felt perkier."

"Well, I've got some news that might perk you up. Milo called just before I left to pick you up. Something about the tape. I was just out the door and he was running, too, but he says he learned something important."

"The sheriff who was working on it must have picked up something. Where's Milo now?"

"Out on some assignment. He said he'd be home when we got there."

"Which home?"

The question threw her. "Oh- Milo's house. He and Rick took really good care of us. And home is where the heart is, right?"

• • •

I slept in the car. We pulled up at Milo's house at twelve-forty. He was waiting in the living room, wearing a gray polo shirt and jeans. A cup of coffee was in front of him, next to a portable tape recorder. The dog snored at his feet, but woke up when we came in, gave out a few desultory licks, then collapsed again.

"Welcome home, boys and girls."

I put my bags down. "Did you hear about Donald Dell?"

Milo nodded.

"What?" said Robin.

I told her.

She said, "Oh…"

Milo said, "Nuestra Raza. Could be the father-in-law."

"That's what I figured. It's probably why Evelyn postponed her appointment with me. Rodriguez told her they had to leave Wednesday. And why Hurley Keffler hassled me- where is he?"

"Still in. I found a few traffic warrants and had one of the jailers lose his paperwork- just another few days, but every little bit helps."

Robin said, "It never ends."

"It's all right," I said. "There's no reason for the Priests to bother us."

"True," said Milo, too quickly. "They and the Raza boys will be concentrating on each other now. That's their main game: my turn to die, your turn to die."

"Lovely," said Robin.

"I had some Foothill guys drop in on them after Keffler's bust," he said, "but I'll see if I can arrange another visit. Don't worry about them, Rob. Really. They're the least of our problems."

"As opposed to?"

He looked at the tape recorder.

We sat down. He punched a button.

The child's voice came on.

Bad love bad love.

Don't give me the bad love.

I looked at him. He held up a finger.

Bad love bad love.

Don't give me the bad love…

Same flat tones, but this time the voice was that of a man.

Ordinary, middle-pitched, male voice. Nothing remarkable about the accent or the timbre.

The child's voice transformed- some kind of electronic manipulation?

Something familiar about the voice… but I couldn't place it.

Someone I'd met a long time ago? In 1979?

The room was silent, except for the dog's breathing.

Milo turned the recorder off and looked at me. "Ring any bells?"

I said, "There's something about it, but I don't know what it is."

"The kid's voice was phony. What you just heard might be the real bad guy. No bells, huh?"

"Let me hear it again."

Rewind. Play.

"Again," I said.

This time, I listened with my eyes closed, squinting so hard the lids felt welded together.

Listening to someone who hated me.

Nothing registered.

Robin and Milo studied my face as if it were some great wonder. My head hurt badly.

"No," I said. "I still can't pinpoint it- I can't even be sure I've actually heard it."

Robin touched my shoulder. Milo's face was blank, but his eyes showed disappointment.

I glanced at the recorder and nodded.

He rewound again.

This time the voice seemed even more distant- as if my memory was spiraling away from me. As if I'd missed my chance.

"Goddammit," I said. The dog's eyes opened. He trotted over to me and nuzzled my hand. I rubbed his head, looked at Milo. "One more time."

Robin said, "You're tired. Why don't we try again in the morning?"

"Just once more," I said.

Rewind. Play.

The voice.

Completely foreign now. Mocking me.

I buried my face in my hands. Robin's hands on my neck were an abstract comfort- I appreciated the sentiment but couldn't relax.

"What did you mean might be the bad guy?" I asked Milo.

"Sheriff's scientific guess. He tuned it down from the kid's voice using a preset frequency."

"How can he be sure the kid's voice was altered in the first place?"

"Because his machines told him so. He came across it by accident- working on the screams- which, incidentally, he's ninety-nine percent positive are Hewitt's. Then he got to the kid chanting and something bothered him about it- the evenness of the voice."

"The robot quality," I said.

"Yeah. But he didn't assume brainwashing or anything else psychological. He's a techno-dude, so he analyzed the sound waves and saw something fishy with the cycle-to-cycle amplitude- the changes in pitch within each sound wave. Real human voices shimmer and jitter. This didn't, so he knew the tape had been messed with electronically, probably using a pitch shifter. It's a gizmo that samples a sound and changes the frequency. Tune up, you've got Alvin and the Chipmunks; tune down, you're James Earl Jones."

"Hi-tech bad guy," I said.

"Not really. The basic machines are pretty cheap. People attach them to phones- women living alone wanting to sound like Joe Testosterone. They're also used for recording music- creating automatic harmonies. A singer lays down a vocal track, then creates a harmony and overdubs it, instant Everly Brothers."

"Sure," said Robin. "Shifters are used all the time. I've seen them interfaced with amps so guitarists can do multiple tracks."

"Lyle Gritz," I said. "The next Elvis… How'd the sheriff know which frequency to tune down to?"

"He assumed we were dealing with a male bad guy using a relatively cheap shifter because nowadays the better machines can be programmed to include jitter. The cheap ones usually come with two, maybe three standard settings: tune up to kid, tune down to adult, sometimes there's an intermediate setting for adult female. By computing the pitch difference, he worked backwards and tuned down. But if our guy's some sort of acoustics nut with fancy equipment, there may be other things he's done to alter his voice and what you heard may be nowhere near his real voice."