Jeff Abbott - No Rest for the Dead

“Now I feel better,” Jon said, lowering the dog and taking up the leash. “Let’s go for a walk, old boy.”

Hank Zacharius always knew when he was being followed, although he had never really gotten a good look at them and had only vague suspicions as to who they might be.

As a freelance investigative reporter, he was often working on as many as a dozen stories at one time. Corruption in Oakland city hall; union graft underlying the renovations of pier 41; the hedonistic society of young starlets that were catering to the wildest fantasies of selected studio executives and then using the resultant compromising photographs to blackmail their way into films. Years ago he’d been nominated for a Pulitzer for exposing the ties between higher-ups in the LAPD and the most powerful L.A. gangs.

No wonder his stories were so often blocked from publication by the crooked politicians and powermongers that were as much a part of the landscape as the Golden Gate Bridge in the City by the Bay. No wonder he was followed nearly every time he left his apartment. He knew things, lots of things, and there were always people who wanted to learn what he knew.

But tonight he needed to be certain he was alone.

Tonight he had scheduled a meeting with an informant-his best. It was hard enough to set anything up with a man who guarded his identity so closely that he’d never even given Zacharius his name. Call me Calvin , he’d say, it’s as good a name as any . Calvin was a cop, or maybe a gang member, for all Zacharius knew. He had no idea. He had guesses, but he had never been able to nail down any of them, and that was probably good. Whatever he was, Calvin was, as they said in the business, plugged in. Ask a question, come up with the cash, and the man either knew the answer or knew how to find it.

Zacharius was aware that Calvin stood to make much more money by stringing information for some of the better-known reporters, the police, or even the feds. But the informant never said no to him, and when Zacharius’s stories weren’t selling, which at the moment was most of the time, Calvin often did what he could to help.

This night Zacharius was fearful not only of exposing his resourceful snitch but of putting himself in harm’s way as well. Now after ten years, he was going to use any publicity surrounding Rosemary Thomas’s memorial to show the world that she had not killed her husband, as he had always maintained in his initial investigation and reporting. His articles had largely been dismissed by his peers and the public, but Zacharius always knew there was more to the story, and not surprisingly he’d never been able to shake this one case.

He’d known Rosemary for twenty years. He’d even known Chris. Zacharius had been to their wedding, their children’s christenings, birthday parties. Rosemary had cried on his shoulder after discovering the first of Chris’s infidelities.

Altogether, he had written four articles about the highly publicized murder. One of them had centered on the physics of the crime itself, stressing Christopher Thomas’s size and weight and the difficult logistics of getting his body into the eight-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound iron maiden. Then moving the corpse and torture device from the site of the actual murder to some sort of truck, to the Lufthansa flight that transported the body overseas. Another one traced Rosemary Thomas’s movements throughout the week prior to her husband’s murder, up to the widely heard verbal battle after Christopher had demanded a divorce. The timeline ended with her allegedly sedating him prior to killing him and laying him out in the museum’s iron maiden.

The final article was speculative, but Zacharius considered it his best. It was an in-depth investigation of Christopher Thomas’s life, focusing on his ever-changing finances, his overseas trips as gleaned from photocopies of his passport, and his relationship to an underworld thug, an art fencer, and possibly a Chinese drug lord named Roger Hong, another witness who had turned up dead.

But Zacharius was largely discredited-partly because of his friendship with the Thomases, particularly his friendship with Rosemary. It eventually got to the point where the news biggies wouldn’t even read his stuff, let alone buy it or at least check the facts.

Now after ten years, he hoped to regain his credibility among his peers and the public.

The meeting place Calvin had chosen was number six on a list of ten locations Zacharius had provided in and around the Castro, Mission, and Haight districts. Zacharius would institute a meeting by taping a small piece of paper beneath the lip of a bar on Divisadero Street at precisely 4:00 p.m. Within a few hours, a piece of paper with a number from the list and a meeting time would be taped in the same place. This evening, the number directed the reporter to a trendy, always crowded coffee shop, just a few blocks off Golden Gate Park.

“Mr. Zacharius, I presume.” They’d known one another for years, and Calvin greeted him the same way each time they met. The informant slipped into a seat directly behind him.

Zacharius turned to face him.

Calvin was a thin, African-American man in his fifties, physically unremarkable in almost every respect except for his eyes, which were dark and feral, probing one moment, scanning the room the next, always on red alert. But his averageness allowed him to maneuver in society, listening in on conversations as he passed, noting who was pausing to speak with whom.

“You look tired,” Calvin said.

“I am tired. Sometimes it’s hard-” Zacharius frowned. “I was the best, you know, the best.”

“I know. You were damn good, Hank.”

Zacharius sighed. “They tried to ruin me, Calvin. From the moment I claimed Rosemary Thomas was innocent. First they blocked the article I wrote detailing the facts of the case, and how she couldn’t have killed him. Then they set about to discredit my theories about the posse of people who each had the big three-method, motive, and opportunity-by portraying me as some whack job.”

“That’s old hat, my man. Probably true but old hat just the same.” Calvin leaned forward. “But you didn’t seek me out to whine, did you, Hank?”

Zacharius worked some of the tension from his sloping shoulders. “I’ve got a hundred and a half I can give you right now, but it’s been a little hard lately keeping the boat afloat these days.”

“When I need the money, I’ll send up a flare. What is it you want to know?”

“Thanks.” Zacharius stared down at his hands, trying to get past his embarrassment.

“So, there’ve been developments, yes?”

Zacharius motioned the waitress over, ordered a coffee light.

He then slipped the invitation out of his jacket pocket and, after scanning the coffee shop once more, handed it to Calvin. “This arrived at my place today. There’s a stamp on it, but it never was posted-just slid under the door of my apartment.”

“ The Tony Olsen?” Calvin raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. He was a friend of Rosemary’s.”

Calvin whistled. “Why do you think Tony Olsen wants to open up this old wound?”

“That’s why I’m here. I was hoping you might have some theories.”

The informant shook his head. “I don’t, but it wouldn’t take me too long to come up with some. Men don’t go from obscurity to being as rich as Tony Olsen is without mucking about in a few compost heaps.”

“And?”

The waitress arrived with the coffee. Zacharius drank half of it in a single gulp

“Maybe it’s an owed favor to that cop who went nuts after the Thomas execution. Jon Nunn. Maybe this memorial is supposed to give that washout another chance-get all the principals together, see what happens.”