Джеффри Дивер - The Final Twist

“Only he had no reason to be driving that way. He’d left BlackBridge and was spending all his time in the city on some project of his. That was odd — why he was fifty miles south of the city. And then...” She took a moment to compose herself. “And then there was the mortician.”

Shaw encouraged her with a nod.

“He asked me if the police found who attacked him. I was dumbfounded. Attacked him? What did he mean? Oh, the poor man was beside himself. He thought I knew. You see, the body was badly burned but in getting it ready for the crematorium, he noticed stab wounds, deep ones. Someone had...” She steadied herself. A few breaths. “Someone had stabbed him and then twisted the knife. To cause more pain.”

Shaw pictured the SOG knife, recalled Droon’s gesturing with the blade yesterday morning.

Insert, twist...

His torture method of choice.

With her jaw tightly set, she whispered, “He said it looked like he was stabbed in the leg and the blade hit the femoral artery. That would be an accident. They wanted to keep him alive — I guess to find out where the evidence you mentioned was.”

Had they caught him at the library yesterday Shaw too would have been strapped down and the SOG knife plunged into his arm or leg.

And with each question would have come another twist of the blade.

“Did Amos leave anything here? Records, files, computers, hard drives? Maybe a briefcase? He called it a courier bag.”

She sipped from the cup and thought for a moment. “No. And near the end he didn’t come by very often. He seemed paranoid. He believed he was being watched. But he would meet a friend here. At first, I thought it was sweet. Bringing a boyfriend home to meet Mom and Stepdad. They were... well, it was easy to see they were close. He was a coworker at BlackBridge, though I think he’d quit by the time he came here. But they weren’t completely social get-togethers. We’d have a meal and then they’d go down to the cellar to talk. I think they wanted a place that was completely private and secure.” Her eyes darkened. “Maybe Amos and his friend thought their own houses were bugged.”

“Do you remember his friend’s name?”

“I do. Because it was one you don’t hear very much. A pretty name. La Fleur. Last name. It means ‘flower’ in French. I don’t remember his first.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“Marin, I think he said at dinner. Nothing more than the county. Maybe he was paranoid too. Even here.”

“And you think La Fleur had quit BlackBridge?”

“I’m pretty sure so.” A scornful laugh. “He probably had a conscience.”

“Anyone else Amos met with from the company?”

“La Fleur’s the only one I remember.” She chuckled. “If I thought Amos was paranoid, you should have seen the friend. During dinner, he asked what kind of encryption our phones used. Mort and I laughed. Heavens! We thought it was a joke. But he was serious. When we said we didn’t have an idea Amos made us shut our phones off. We thought he was humoring his friend. I suppose not. Sometimes it’s not really paranoia at all, is it?”

Again, the brothers shared a glance.

They rose and thanked her for her time. Shaw said he’d be in touch if they learned anything else.

She walked them to the door. She looked out into the front yard, a pleasant setting. A Japanese maple dominated. Some bright flowers, purple and blue, lorded over recently mulched beds. Shaw, like all survivalists, knew some plants well — those that are edible, that are toxic, that can be used as medicines and antiseptics. Of flowers that were merely decorative he was largely ignorant.

Eleanor said, “Amos wasn’t a fool. He’d know there was a chance that he’d get found out. And that means he wouldn’t hide the evidence, this bag, so far out of sight that it couldn’t be found by somebody else after he was gone.”

Which echoed Shaw’s very thought when he was searching for the bag in the Stanford library yesterday morning.

The woman continued, “You two are that somebody else.”

She looked from one brother to the other, then tugged tight the drawstring of her frilly apron, not a stain upon it. Her placid, sitcom-grandmother face grew hard. Her eyes locked onto Shaw’s. “Find it. And take those motherfuckers down.”

Sausalito is a quaint bay- and cliffside suburb north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The demographics are artists and craftspeople and, given the views, the fine scone and muffin bakeries, and the high-speed ferries to downtown, well-heeled professionals.

In Russell’s SUV the brothers were presently rocking through the winding and hilly streets, which were lined with dense foliage.

The inimitable Karin had tracked down La Fleur — first name Earnest, spelled the nontraditional way — and gotten his address but, interestingly, the group’s databases offered little other information about him.

The man was off the grid. No phone, no social media. Amos Gahl’s mother had said that La Fleur had been an employee of BlackBridge but even that assertion, which Shaw had every reason to believe, was not available for confirmation. Shaw suspected his identity had been scrubbed to vapor.

Learning this about La Fleur, Shaw reflected how his father had come up with perhaps the best form of scrubbing in existence — never entrusting a single fact about himself, his work, his family, to the digital world.

“That’s it,” Russell said, nodding ahead of them to a cul-de-sac.

The narrow street, on which there were no sidewalks, was bounded by old-growth trees and interwoven tangles of foliage. In this part of town were few houses and the ones they’d passed were fronted with short picket fences through which grew thick greenery. La Fleur’s property was different. It was protected by a solid pressure-treated stockade fence, eight feet tall, aged to gray. The slats topped with strands of barbed wire.

Russell parked and they walked to the gate, which was locked.

“No intercom,” he said.

Shaw knelt and looked through a foot-round hole that had been cut in the wood for mail. All he could see was more foliage.

Russell took a small flat object from his pocket — like a black metal fingernail file — and, after examining the crack between gate and fence, slipped the latch in with a swift move and pushed the gate open. They stepped inside and looked over La Fleur’s house. The rambling residence, an architectural mess in Cape Cod gray, was on a steep hillside, with stilts holding it aloft, forty feet above the rocks below. This entire area was subject to tremors of varying magnitude and Shaw would not have lived in a stilt house here for any money, whatever the view.

On the other hand, the building was at least three-quarters of a century old and had clearly survived various past shakings, perhaps damaged but suffering no mortal injury.

The men started toward the structure down a serpentine path, which was, curiously, interrupted every ten feet or so with oil drums filled with concrete. They were a version of what you saw in front of embassies and government security agencies overseas, to prevent suicide bombers from plowing their explosive-filled Toyota pickups straight into the front door.

“Hmm,” Russell said.

As they approached the last drum, Shaw suddenly tilted his head. Russell too.

Both men dropped fast, taking cover behind one barricade.

Nothing is more distinctive than the creaking sound of a homemade bow being drawn.

The arrow hissed over their heads and lodged in a tree to the left, fired by a figure standing just inside the front door of the house. They couldn’t see clearly but his garment appeared to be a variation on nighttime camo — various shades of blue and black. He wore dark brown leather gloves.