15th Affair (17 page)

Knightly looked around the apartment from his seat on the sofa. He got up. Went to the large windows facing Lake Street and looked out. Keeping watch, I thought.

Dixon said, “We’ve been in contact with Muller. She was working Chan, trying to establish if he, like his wife, was in Chinese intelligence.”

“And was he?”

“Muller didn’t know. She had already left the hotel and was walking northeast on Market at the time of the incident. This is documented. She doesn’t know anything about the other victims.”

“I’d like to talk with her myself,” I said. “Officially. Once I’ve cleared her, I’ll be happy to move on.”

Julie started to fuss. I made an educated guess that she needed changing and that she was about to make this need extremely well known.

“That’s not possible,” Dixon said. “She’s undercover on a job. When her current assignment wraps up, we’ll put her in touch with you.”

Pretty much what Khalid Khan had said to me a few days ago. I pressed on.

“What can you tell me about a passenger named Michael Chan who was on WW 888?”

He was lying. But maybe he’d tell me the truth when I asked the question that was most important to me.

“Joe Molinari,” I said. “Do you know where I can find him?”

Knightly returned to the sofa and said, “I know of Molinari, but he’s ancient history. We have no current information about him, I’m afraid.”

“I just want to know if he’s alive. Can you tell me that?”

“Believe me, I would tell you if I knew,” said Agent Knightly of the CIA. “He’s not one of ours.”

Julie let out a wail. The two men put their cards on the kitchen island and let themselves out of the apartment.

What the hell had just happened?

Alison Muller’s colleagues had said she was alive.

And for all I knew, Joe Molinari, my husband, the father of my crying little girl,
that
man was dead.

AS SOON AS
Julie was asleep in her crib, I filled the tub with the hottest water I could bear and got in. But even lavender-scented bubbles couldn’t relax my mind.

Those men from the CIA had lied to me. Maybe they had been in contact with Alison Muller, maybe not. My gut was telling me they just wanted me to stop looking for her, calling attention to her, speaking to the FBI about her. As for what they’d said about Joe, I couldn’t read them. Not for sure.

I imagined Joe, working out of his home office, that small room that he could almost wear like a sweater. Those months when he was home all day with the baby—had he been working for the CIA? Had he been working with
her
?

The day of the killings in the Four Seasons, had Joe been there because he had been teamed up with Muller? Maybe while she was on the fourteenth floor killing Chan, he had been waiting to get her out of the hotel unseen.

Far-fetched? Maybe. But it was too damned much of a coincidence that the two of them had disappeared at approximately the same time.

I went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. In the light of the streetlamp coming in through the window, I stared up at the juncture between the walls and the ceiling and wondered now if Joe had been alone in his car when he looked into our camera outside the Chan house.

Had Muller been sitting beside him in the passenger seat? Had the two of them come to the Chan house—not to do their own surveillance, but to take out Shirley Chan? Had our squad car in the driveway delayed Shirley Chan’s murder?

I cannot explain why an idea suddenly jumped into my mind, but it did. I sat up straight in bed.

Joe had taken all of his electronic devices with him before he disappeared—hadn’t he? I’d gone through our bedroom and also Joe’s office. But I hadn’t gone through Julie’s room.

I got out of bed and went to the nursery next door. Martha trotted behind me. I whispered to her to sit, and then I turned on the
Finding Nemo
lamp on the white-painted dresser. The light from the lamp was pale and yellow, but I could see the whole room. I peeked in on Julie and she was breathing softly. So I began opening her drawers.

I took out folded onesies from the top drawer, baby blankets from the second, diapers from the bottom, and when I didn’t find anything of interest, I put it all back and stepped over to her closet.

I pulled the chain on the closet lightbulb and took stock. Julie had very few clothes needing hangers, but Joe and I both had stored excess clothes here. I grabbed up armloads of coats and ski outfits we never wore, putting them on the floor. Then I took boxes of shoes off the shelf.

Once I had the boxes on the floor, I flipped the lids on the dress shoes, both mine and Joe’s. And then my heart froze solid. On top of the shoes Joe had worn when we got married was a tablet. I’d never seen it before. The charger was in the box with the shoes.

MARTHA LICKED MY
face as I plugged in the charger and turned on the tablet. I pushed her away and stared at the box that was requesting a password.

I had no idea what Joe’s password would be. And then the image of a number jumped into my mind. It was the haziest kind of memory because I hadn’t thought about it when I saw it. Now I wasn’t sure if I’d seen it at all. I bolted to Joe’s office and opened the center drawer. I had put all of the contents back after I had tossed it, failing to find clues or evidence of Joe’s whereabouts.

Now I pulled the drawer all the way out. I dumped the take-out menus and pens and paper clips onto the rug, then took the drawer over to the desk lamp and looked at where the bottom met the sides of the drawer.

Something was written in pencil close to the seam, a long line of numbers and letters that added up to nothing.

Like the best kind of password.

I brought the empty drawer to the tablet on the floor of Julie’s room and typed the alphanumeric into the password box on Joe’s page. I got blocked several times. There were eighteen characters in this chain, and I blew it a few times.

The third time, I was slow and deliberate, and I was sure I’d typed in the eighteen characters perfectly.

And still the password was rejected.

I typed in a few obvious combinations of birthdays and names, but no luck.
Joe was a spy.
Triple
threat
. CIA, FBI, Homeland Security. He wasn’t using a password he’d written in his pencil drawer. He wasn’t going to use
password1234
, either. He wouldn’t use his daughter’s name to guard his secrets. Right?

Just for laughs, I typed in
JulieAnne
, and bam. I was in. Imagine that. Folders populated the little desktop.

It was immediately clear to me that this storage account was for Joe’s personal stuff. The Brooks Findlay file wasn’t there, for instance, nor any of Joe’s freelance clients. I found a file for football scores, and clips from blogs he followed. I found nothing marked
top secret.
And his contact list didn’t include Alison Muller’s info.

Before giving up, I clicked on the calendar icon, and when it opened, I flashed over the entries for the many empty days and months when Joe had worked from home.

The notes were brief and straightforward, but there were a couple of cryptic entries at the end of March. Joe had taken a trip back east to see his mother, who’d just had surgery to put in a pacemaker. He’d made notes of his flight reservations on this, his personal calendar.

But what I was reading showed me that Joe hadn’t made a round trip from SFO to New York’s JFK. He had booked connecting flights from SFO through JFK to Brandenburg, an airport in Berlin. And he’d noted the confirmation numbers for two seat assignments.

One for J. A. Molinari. And the second for a fellow traveler, Sonja Dietrich.

Joe had gone to Berlin with Alison Muller.

Who was he?
I didn’t know my husband at all.

JOAN RONAN MACLEAN
was an attractive twenty-five-year-old bartender from Palo Alto who’d come to San Francisco on her own dime to see Conklin and me. She made himself comfortable in the visitor’s chair next to our desks, flipped her sandy-colored hair out of her eyes, and said Michael Chan frequented the Howling Wolf and had been at the bar a couple of nights before he was killed.

According to MacLean, “Chan was drinking alone, and he had more than his usual two beers.”

“How did he seem to you?” Conklin asked.

“Pensive. The bar was kinda empty and he wanted to talk. I speak a little Chinese because I had a Chinese nanny, so we’re kinda friends. But I was completely unprepared for this.”

“Please go on,” Conklin said.

“Yeah, yeah. He told me he was in love with a woman, not his wife, and that they were going to run away to Canada together.”

“Did he mention the woman’s name?”

“He called her Renata one time, and the other times he called her ‘my love.’ I asked him if he was serious about running away, because he has a wife and kids, you know? And he said she was married, too. And he said this lady carried a gun. So I said, ‘She’s a cop?’

“And he said, all dreamy-like, ‘I don’t really know.’”

I asked MacLean, “As you see it, does this affair have anything to do with Chan getting killed?”

“Well. It made me wonder if his wife killed him. Or if his girlfriend did.”

More questions in a case that was nothing
but
questions. I thanked MacLean for the tip and walked her out to the gate. When I got back to my desk, Conklin was hanging up the phone. He said, “Chi has a lead on the Chinese guys who’ve been dogging you.”

Chi was Sergeant Paul Chi of our homicide squad. He was born here but speaks some Chinese and has cultivated a stable of CIs in and around Chinatown.

I said to Conklin, “What’s he got?”

Conklin tapped on his keyboard and said, “Here you go.”

I was looking at a low-res photo of a broad-shouldered Chinese man, maybe in his twenties, wearing a black T-shirt, sports jacket, and jeans. He’d been snapped getting out of a partially obstructed vehicle that might be a BMW SUV.

“When was that taken?” I asked.

“Yesterday, half past noon, near a noodle shop in Chinatown.”

“What noodle shop? Where, exactly?”

Conklin turned his head and looked up at me. “What do I look like? Google Maps?”

I laughed, went around to my desk, and threw myself down into the chair. I pawed my mouse and opened my browser.

“Name of noodle shop? Or is that too much to ask?”

“Mei Ling Happy Noodles.”

I put the name in, clicked a few times, and got a picture of a noodle shop on Stockton, a major artery through Chinatown. I swiveled my monitor so my partner could see the shop and then the wide view of the street. At midday, the stores and markets on Stockton and the neighboring intersecting streets of Washington and Jackson were fairly seething with traffic and pedestrians.

“So, this was taken noonish,” Conklin said. “Maybe this guy was stopping for lunch.”

“Uh-huh. Noodles to go.”

“I could go for some yat gaw mein,” Richie said.

I was ready to punch out and go home to my child before nightfall for once.

“You mean now?” I said. “How about tomorrow, first thing?”

“That works for me,” he said.

I thought,
Little Julie. Here I come.

IT WAS JUST
before six p.m. when I headed out to the parking lot on Harriet Street. Rain had been threatening most of the day and was now bordering on torrential. I ran with my head down and my keys in hand. After disabling the alarm, I swung up into the Explorer’s high driver’s seat, which, after ten years of daily use, fits me like my Calvins.

I turned on my lights and got the wipers going, then pulled out to my left, heading along the narrow one-lane street, which was banked by chain-link fences and parking lots. I could see my turn onto Harrison a block away when a car came barreling straight at me through the gloom, hitting its brights when it was only a few car lengths in front of me.

I had no time to think.

I swerved my wheel hard to the right and jammed on my brakes, and at the same time, the oncoming vehicle screeched to a full stop, smashing my left fender and shattering the headlight.

Freaking idiot.
Was he
insane
?

I had my hand on the door handle and was about to get in that driver’s face when another vehicle pulled up on my left, stopping right
there
. A chain-link fence was on my right, effectively blocking my exit from the passenger-side door. Then brights in my rearview mirror brought it all into sharp focus.

I was completely boxed in.
I was
trapped.

I whipped my head around to face the driver on my left and was hardly surprised to see the Asian man with the scar on his chin, the one who’d body-blocked me as I was leaving the NTSB meeting.

I yelled, “
What do you think you’re doing?
”

He grinned, lifted a handgun, and took aim at my face.

I ducked a fraction of a second before a succession of bullets shattered my window. I kept my head down at the level of the dashboard, pulled my gun from my shoulder holster, and fired back. I got off a couple of shots, but the man with the scar ducked, and I didn’t wait to see if I’d hit him.

I jerked the gearshift into reverse and stepped on the gas. I backed up hard and fast into the car behind me. Metal shrieked as the rear of my vehicle and the front of his crumpled from the impact.

At the same time, bullets from the car to my left and the one in front of me came through my windshield, spider-webbing the glass, which fell onto my dash.

I hunched down and shifted into drive, and the Explorer lunged forward. I had to avoid hitting the car that had caved in my left headlight and was still partially blocking the road. I veered to my right, scraped along twenty feet of chain-link fencing, and floored it.