Keeping Watch (30 page)

Allen shook his head to clear it of unnecessary thoughts, eased the door open, and studied his surroundings. The room was ill-lit, with illumination from the street casting thin stripes through the slatted blinds onto the ceiling. If he kept his own light pointed downward and moved it little, no chance passerby would notice.

There was a safe on the wall, poorly hidden by a painting of a windswept beach, but Allen thought he'd leave it, just for the moment: Two tricky locks in one night was pressing his luck, and the kind of thing he was looking for might not be shut behind steel, anyway. He sat down behind Mark O'Connell's desk and got to work.

None of the desk drawers were locked, although they all could be, separately or together. Two of them were nearly empty, and to Allen's eyes appeared to have been cleaned down to the dust, although the other four side drawers and the long one in the center were untidy collections of office debris, files, and innocuous papers. In the center drawer he found an address book of leather stamped with gold and crimson patterns. He thumbed it open, not expecting to find anything of use, but at the very beginning something caught his eye, and he opened it more deliberately to the front page, where someone had written a number string:
06-23-14
. Allen's gaze rose to the painting of the beach; he shrugged, and went over to give it a try.

The safe opened.

He'd have been less astonished to find the number string trigger a trap that showered him with dye or fried him with a knockout jolt of electricity, but the steel door merely swung out to reveal several slim books leaning against the right-hand side of the twelve-by-twelve space, and three leather jewelry cases leaning to the left. The cases did hold jewelry, the first a woman's diamond necklace and earrings set into velvet, the second a gorgeous creation of gold and sapphires, the third a diamond tiara. Dave was going to shoot him for leaving these behind, Allen thought: Even a fence would give him six figures. But it was the books that interested him.

Five books, all of them ledgers that communicated little information to Allen other than telling him the man had a lot of money. In the inner flap of each had been taped an envelope containing a CD. He slid out the CD from the previous year's ledger, and saw the date written on its shiny surface with a felt pen. He was tempted; if he took them away, he could find someone to peel apart the man's finances and look for fraud, but on the whole, Allen thought it unlikely that a cautious crook, which O'Connell appeared to be, would leave his real records in a home office behind a bad painting, waiting for any cop with a warrant to find them. He slid last year's CD back into its envelope, and put all the ledgers back inside the safe.

Only when he was returning the ledgers did he discover the safe's last offering, propped in the dark recess behind everything else. He felt a very slight resistance as he was sliding the final ledger into place, so he reached back and drew the object out.

Another book, smaller than the others.
DIARY
, this one proclaimed; stamped below the word was the year of Jamie's birth. Inside, January 1 had a line drawn through it, but there the writing began:
My son was born today, nearly a month prematurely.
Jamie had been born in November, but other than using the appropriate year, O'Connell hadn't been much interested in following the dates. He had used the diary as a notebook, noting the day and month of the entries (which a quick glance showed spanned a number of years) without always bothering to cross out the printed dates.

Allen slipped the journal into the shirt pocket under his sweatshirt and closed the safe. He laid the address book back into its drawer, and continued searching the room, but he found nothing else of interest aside from another provocatively clean drawer and two ornate boxes similarly scrubbed.

Back in O'Connell's bedroom, his search revealed a drawer in the bedside table that was cleaner than when the piece had left the showroom. When he knelt and put his face directly into it, however, he caught a whiff of a familiar and distinctive chemical odor: There'd been a gun in the drawer, and recently. While he was on his knees, patting the area around O'Connell's bed, Allen noticed something else he wouldn't have seen in another position. He shone the penlight to the corner of the raw silk bedcover, and saw where the delicate fabric was frayed and crumpled. Just the very corner, where it brushed the carpet—the freshly vacuumed carpet.

Allen got to his feet and hurried down the stairs to the storage closet he'd seen, switched on the light and squatted down to pop the front off the upright vacuum. No bag. He thought about it for a while: He could picture Mrs. Mendez changing the bag after each use, given a particularly demanding view of housecleaning (hers or her employer's), but there was a fresh package of bags on the shelf; why would a responsible housekeeper fail to put a new one in then and there? Turning the machine over, he saw pale threads the color of raw unbleached silk caught at the corner of the beater, which confirmed his suspicions: The machine had sucked up the edge of that expensive bedcover and chewed away at it before the person running it had found the
OFF
switch. Not something an experienced housekeeper would do, although it had happened to Allen once or twice. Here it indicated that Mark O'Connell had done a thorough, if amateurish, job of cleaning the house.

Back upstairs, the rest of the bedroom gave him nothing. There were rather a lot of empty hangers in the closet, and he had yet to find any suitcases, but then, O'Connell might have been going for a while—except that his secretary expected him Monday. Allen stood in the brightly lit walk-in closet, thinking hard. What was he missing? Not a lot of jewelry, apart from the necklaces in the safe, but then maybe O'Connell didn't wear expensive watches and diamond signet rings. And the suits: what about . . . He began to go through the clothing on the hangers, and soon found that every one of the garments had a maker's label. Not one of the suits, shirts, or jackets here had been custom-made. Which was not what he'd have expected.

He glanced at his watch, saw that it was nearly three
A.M.
, and turned off the closet light. The odd empty storage room drew him back, and he stood for a while pondering the holes in the walls on which something had hung, the stains and bashes in the floor. The light in that windowless room had burned out, but his flashlight gave him nothing but more questions. In the end, he peeled away one or two strips of stained wallpaper and put them into one of the sandwich bags from his waist pack. They looked like blood, but could as easily be wood stain from some home improvement project.

At the door to Jamie's room, Allen found himself curiously reluctant to go inside. The poor kid had been invaded enough; having another adult paw through his things seemed offensive. It was absurd, Allen knew that, but he disliked the sensation of following in Mark O'Connell's footsteps. And he was absolutely certain that the man had come in here regularly, keeping the boy under constant control. With a clench of his jaw, Allen made himself step through the mangled doorway.

Jamie's bedroom was almost as spartan as the downstairs quarters assigned to Mrs. Mendez. Narrow bed, its mattress zipped into a waterproof cover and the sheets and blankets folded at its feet; nearly bare bookshelves; a bedside table with a radio alarm on top; and a child's-size wooden desk with a lot of dramatic gouges and dents in the top. (Had that been done at the same time as the door? Allen wondered. Or was bashing up the boy's possessions a regular event?) It was hardly a child's room at all—no clutter of toys, no posters of rock groups or computer games, none of the collected treasures of a life, the beach pebbles and flattened coins, the sprung shoe boxes full of defunct games and pieces of string. Nothing but a few books (including the boxed set of
Lord of the Rings
) and a corkboard with five snapshots pinned in a neat line along its top border. Allen stepped closer to look.

The first photograph showed a pale young woman with fine bones and dark, long-lashed eyes. She was sitting on a bench under a tree, her hands crossed in her lap to show off a ring with a stone as large as the knuckle above it. She looked shyly happy. In stark contrast was the photograph beside it, showing a horribly wizened infant in a hospital nursery, tubes coming out of its old man's face, everything gone slightly yellow, as color photos do over the years: the month-premature baby referred to in the journal that was burning a hole in Allen's breast pocket. The third photo was of the young woman again, but with all her gentle beauty trodden down. She sat on a chair and her ring still hung (loosely) on her finger, but she had dark purple smudges under her dark eyes, a desperate expression on her thin face, and a squalling infant in her awkward arms. It could have been a textbook illustration of postpartum depression.

The fourth picture was of a dog, an unattractive animal with dirty white fur and nervous ears. Sitting beside it on the lawn, bony knees crossed between shorts and sandals, was a young Jamie O'Connell, recognizable even at that age (five? six?), a skinny kid with huge and compelling eyes. He'd obviously been ordered to smile for the camera, and he looked like he was trying to remember how to do it; behind the pasted grin he appeared every bit as nervous as the dog.

Last in the row was a more recent picture of Jamie with his father, dressed for the outdoors in jeans and heavy jackets. Both held guns, Jamie's rifle a diminutive version of his father's. O'Connell's right hand was resting across his son's shoulder, and the boy seemed more aware of the hand than he was of the gun, the snow around them, or the antlered buck bleeding at their feet.

Taken as a whole, the series presented a disquieting history of Jamie's family life; studying them, Allen grew more and more certain that Jamie was not responsible for the montage. Surely no sane child would have deliberately chosen those five photographs to gaze down at his desk every day. A tube-baby who had reduced his mother to a wreck, a sorry-looking dog who must have died, since he was nowhere in evidence now, and a father who killed things for pleasure—would a boy pick these? No—but a father wishing to underscore the boy's worthlessness
(Can't even keep a mangy old dog alive)
might well choose them as his constant representatives, to watch over his son.

Allen had a sudden urge to rip them down from the wall and set them alight; instead, he pulled open a drawer in Jamie's desk.

Pens and the heavily gnawed stubs of pencils, homework assignments, and a couple of school portraits of children Jamie's age, which Allen tucked into his pocket as possible future interviews. Two empty candy wrappers stuffed into the back corner and three CDs for violent games. In the back of the bottom drawer, a small stuffed monkey and a chewed rubber dog toy. Other than the discarded wrappers, everything was arranged with a mechanical precision unnatural for a twelve-year-old. Had the housekeeper or the father been through, tidying the desk and bookshelves along with the bed?

Two comic books under the mattress, no screw-off dowels in the posts where a boy might hide things, but when Allen tugged at the carpet in the back of the closet, it came up, revealing a small cache of photos, all of a young woman and baby, including a duplicate of the one he'd seen in the boy's pack. He left them where they were.

Finally, Allen removed each book from the shelf and rifled it to see if anything had been hidden in the pages. Nothing fluttered out but a bookmark. He picked up the boxed set of Tolkien, Karin Rao's complicated expression of discomfiture and professional responsibility that Jamie had mistaken for love. Without having intended to do so, Allen tucked the box under his arm. The hell with them all; nobody would notice that the books were missing. Even if they did, so what? It's not like he was taking the jewels from the safe.

The house had told him everything it could. He went through a last time to make sure the doors were as he had found them and that he had left no lights burning in the closets, then he let himself out, locking the door behind him.

Dawn was not far off. Allen crouch-trotted across the wide lawn to the wall, scrambled over awkwardly with the Tolkein stuffed into his shirt, and kicked the supporting logs back into the undergrowth. The car had not been disturbed. At the road he paused to listen for approaching cars before opening the padlocked gate; he drove through, snapped the lock shut, and was in gear before anyone came along. He stripped off the sweat-slick latex gloves and threw them on the seat beside him, wiping the paint from his face with a rag, then he leaned back in his seat, and laughed with the pleasure of release, just another innocent working stiff headed for the morning commute.

Safely back in his motel room before six o'clock, he kicked off his shoes and lay back on the bed to watch the morning drivel while he contemplated his next step: the Revista secretary, or Señora Mendez? However, in two minutes, a pair of cleaning women going past heard his snores, and giggled to each other in the morning sun.

Chapter 27

He woke three hours later with a mouth that tasted like old roadkill. He jerked upright on the sagging mattress, his brain trying desperately to reconstruct where he was and what he had been doing the night before. As it came back, he relaxed, scowled at the still-driveling television set until he uncovered the remote and silenced the talking heads, then staggered into the bathroom to stand beneath the cool shower, slowly warming it to comfort. He shaved and found a relatively clean shirt, noting that he'd have to drop into a Laundromat today, or a clothing store.

Before clean clothes, however, he required food, of the sort offered by the pancake house down the street. He bought a newspaper from the box at the door and read it with care, but found that they knew nothing more than they had the day before about O'Connell's missing plane. After three cups of what they called coffee and a large plate of greasy flour products drowned in syrup, he was ready for the day. He walked back across the parking lot to his room, and while he was stuffing clothes in a string bag, he booted up his laptop. There was one message:

G has what you asked for.

A

“Damn,” Allen said in disappointment. He had hoped Gina might dig out a lot for him, even if what she found was mostly peripheral. To have reached an end after less than twelve hours was not a good sign. He hit
REPLY
, and typed in:

Need to talk. 4 okay?

A

By this afternoon, he might know enough to be able to tell her that it was safe to bring Jamie home.

He tossed the laundry bag into the backseat of the stifling car, kicked up the air conditioner, and drove the ten miles to Gina's information headquarters. The print shop in the front was open and a delivery truck was unloading into the back, but the garage under her building had the same five cars in it, and Allen parked in the same place he'd used the night before.

The elevator door did not magically draw open for him this time. He walked around the side of the shaft and thumbed the button to open the other set of doors. Inside the cubicle, he put his foot down to keep the doors from closing and unclipped the emergency phone from the wall. After a moment, Gina's voice said, “Hello, Allen.”

“You want me to stay in this elevator?” he asked.

“The one you're in doesn't go to my floor,” she said, and hung up.

When he had retraced his steps to the other elevator, it was standing open. He rode up, got out when it stopped, gave a glance to the snarl of wrought iron as he passed underneath it, and went to the door directly ahead of him. It opened smoothly.

Gina was in her living area, making coffee. The television was playing on CNN, but before the rattle of the coffee grinder took over, the big room was silent but for the perpetual low hum of machinery. Gina rolled over to the low sink to fill the pot; her hair was spiked, the right side of her face pink. She was wearing the same black jeans, yellow high-tops, and orange sweater she'd had on when he'd last seen her.

“Did I get you up?” he asked.

“Sleep is a waste of time,” she said, which didn't answer his question—or maybe it did.

“Sorry,” he said, but she merely nodded at the stack of paper on the low table, dumped the grounds into the filter, and switched on the machine.

The pile of paper was a good two inches thick—there must have been nearly three hundred pages. Allen thumbed through it, astonished. Back in May, he'd spent two weeks and come up with maybe a tenth of this. In less than twelve hours, some of which she'd spent asleep, the woman had assembled a dossier of everything that touched on the lives of the O'Connell family, from the wife's birth certificate to the husband's latest credit report.

“Damn, girl. Have you got a dozen elves living in those machines?”

He couldn't be sure, but he thought Gina looked pleased at his response. All she said was, “You want a bagel?”

“Thanks, I ate.”

“Yeah, and I notice you brought me some.” She began to saw away at what appeared to be a very firm object.

“I'm sorry, I didn't think you'd care much for cold pancakes.”

“Makes for a change,” she said. “Don't worry about it.”

“Next time,” he promised.

She shot him a look over her shoulder. “Why would there be a next time?”

She had a point, he thought, looking at the material in front of him; there couldn't be a whole lot more she could do for him. “In order to bring you cold pancakes?”

“That's really okay,” she told him. “I'd rather have a stale bagel. Take your file and go, Allen. I've got work to do.”

“Aren't you going to offer me some coffee?”

“Oh, right.” The sarcasm grew ever thicker in her voice. “First you bring me none of your breakfast, then you guzzle my coffee.”

He stood and went past her chair, opening cabinets and looking at their contents. Without a word, he began to take down packages and search for bowls and pans. She watched, saying nothing; after a minute, she picked up her mug and disappeared behind the room's sole partition. He heard water running, and looked in the sleek brushed-steel refrigerator, taking out a loaf of rather stale bread, some eggs, and an orange. The woman might not get out a lot, but someone kept her well provided.

She came back just as the French toast hit the table, her short hair wet against her scalp, wearing a blue T-shirt above the black jeans. Because he was watching closely, he noticed the slight quirk of a smile as she saw the table, but that was her only reaction. The forgotten bagel sat where she had left it in the toaster, and she put away more food than Allen had that morning. At the end of it, she polished her plate with the last bite and said merely, “How'd you make the syrup?”

“You had sugar, so I caramelized it and watered it down. If you had any maple flavoring, it would've been easier.”

“This was better.”

He took that for a thanks, and carried her dishes over to the dishwasher.

“Tell me,” he asked. “How do you get things off those high cabinets?” It had puzzled him, since he hadn't seen any kind of reaching stick.

In response, she wheeled out from behind the table, fiddled with one of the chair's controls, and the wheels rebuilt themselves, the body of the chair elongating until her head was at the same level as Allen's. She grinned at his reaction, and said, “Watch this.”

She rolled across the floor to the raised platform on which the machinery sat, coming to rest in front of the step. More fiddling, and the chair reshaped itself again. The wheels tipped, rested on the edge of the step, and lifted her up. She pivoted to face him, and smiled at his pleasure.

“I've never seen one like that.”

“It's experimental. I'm helping the designers get rid of the bugs before they put it on the market. At first, it tended to do a little hip-hop and dump you on the floor. Pain in the ass.”

“A little more work, you could get it out on the dance floor.”

At that she actually laughed aloud, and said, “I've already given them the modifications.” She set her wheels at the platform's edge, and the chair felt its way down to the lower floor with the ungainly precision of a camel settling to its knees. She rolled over to the living area, raising the chair enough so she was more or less level with him as she handed him the thick file.

“Thank you for this,” he told her.

“Your man's hiding something,” she said abruptly, her smile vanishing. “I don't know what it is yet—nothing in that stuff gives him away—but I'm going to keep digging until I find it.”

“What kind of something?”

“Don't know that yet. But it's got to be illegal—he's way too clean. It's a well-built façade, but I can smell something rotten behind it. And I should also tell you, I got the feeling there's someone else out there interested, probably law enforcement. Nothing direct, but it's like seeing, I don't know, a broken twig or something. You need to watch your step so you don't walk into anything.”

Allen smiled at her imagery, and mused, “Jungle instincts.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing. Just, you get to know the terrain, when you've lived there long enough. Hunted there for a while.”

“Good analogy,” she said. She fiddled with one of the controls on her chair, then said, “Look—it's none of my business, but that kid, O'Connell's son. Are you keeping an eye on him?”

“Somebody else is watching out for him just now, but yes, you could say I'm responsible for him.”

“But is the other person watching
him
?” she demanded.

The urgency in her voice was clear, if the reason for it was not. “Why?”

She hesitated, then retreated with a shake of the head. “Like I said, it's none of my business. My job's to dig up information, which I've done. Take it. I suppose there'll be stuff coming in from this plane crash—if there's anything interesting, I'll send a message through Alice. But I expect that for the past history, you've got the bulk of it.”

“It's an amazing amount of work you've done.”

“It's all in the wrist,” she replied. “And knowing the right people.”

Allen left the parking garage with less reluctance than if he hadn't had the pull of all that information drawing him away. He'd liked Gina, he'd wanted to stay and talk to her, hear her story and explore her mind. But more than that, he wanted to know what she'd seen in that stack of paper to make her ask, “Is the other person watching
him
?”

He drove down the wide, busy street, past car dealerships and Chinese restaurants until the sign
WASH-O-MAT
reached out to snag the corner of his eye. He circled the block and returned to the parking area behind the low cement-block building, taking with him both the bag of laundry and the thick packet of papers.

He fed quarters into the slot of the heavy-duty machine, and began stuffing his clothes into its maw, patting pockets as he went. The last shirt out, the first thing he'd stuffed into the bag that morning, was the one he'd worn the previous night. There was something in its pocket: Allen's fingers reached in, coming out with a small leather volume stamped
DIARY
.

He held it, feeling an absolute fool. How could he have forgotten it, even for an instant?
You nearly tossed the thing into the machine,
he berated himself, but knew it was not true.
In fact,
he went on, closing the lid and sorting out change for a small carton of detergent,
the back of your brain remembered very well it was here; you just didn't want to read it.

Allen grimaced, and transferred the diary to his current pocket. He shook the soap onto the clothes, pushed in the slot to feed the machine his quarters, and settled down onto one of the plastic chairs provided for the discomfort of the clients.

Gina's material first. She had arranged it in a more or less chronological fashion, starting with the birth certificates for Jamie's parents. His mother, born Paula Janine Whitefield, had won the school science fair prize in fifth grade, played flute in the high school orchestra, and spent two semesters at a small private college in the valley east of Los Angeles before meeting Mark O'Connell at a party. His history was a little more showy, with juvenile arrests for stealing a car and for threatening a neighbor (How had Gina pried that information from sealed juvenile records? Contacts, indeed.) and later for charges of check forgery, which were dropped, and for a bar fight, which had gotten him six months. No arrests after the age of twenty-six, which meant that either his hormones had settled down or he'd gotten smart.

Mark and Paula had married the October after she had left college, when she was nineteen and he thirty-one. Jamie was born three years later. They moved often, each time to a slightly more expensive house (Gina's information included the county tax records and a string of title companies—it is indeed all in the contacts) despite Mark's middle-of-the-road reported income on his tax returns.

It was like following a trail through elephant grass. Some of the papers Gina had given him were enigmatic, needing close attention to puzzle out their relevance to the case—such as the laconic, decade-old newspaper snippet noting that the investigation against someone named Thomas Church had been discontinued, and all charges against Church dropped. It took some shuffling before Allen discovered the name Thomas Church on the bottom of the O'Connell tax returns, as the accountant who had prepared them for the family. He nodded in appreciation: O'Connell's shady financial doings went back at least ten years.

He sat on the plastic chair, his legs going numb, completely unconscious of the heat and noise, traveling through time on the paper trail left by the O'Connell family. At some point he glanced up and saw that some other patron had dumped his wet laundry into one of the wheeled baskets, so he loaded it into a behemoth dryer, threw in all the quarters he had, and went back to his reading.

Twelve years earlier, Jamie's own bureaucratic trail began with his birth certificate. Not until four years later, when he was registered for preschool, did the papers with his name on them gain any detail, but after that, Gina's research had expanded to include the buildings and teachers connected with the boy's schools, even when the teachers were not his. A letter to the editor from one of the second-grade teachers about the benefits of teaching Spanish in schools, a three-year-old newspaper photograph of a sixth-grade class trip to Washington, D.C., a laconic article about a break-in to the school's computer lab—Gina's net had swept up anything and everything to do with Jamie's environment, and she had dumped it all on him.

After he'd been in the Laundromat for two and a half hours, Allen became aware of a presence just in front of his knees. He raised his eyes reluctantly from the pages, and saw a small brown-eyed urchin, sucking on a stick of candy and studying him with undisguised interest.