… participation of Homeland Security and the FBI, but Mannie Ortega is keeping it within his department…
… Harvey doesn’t want to lose the time with his family, but he sees it as a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity…
… if I could only tell Nick, but I’ve sworn to both my boss and my boss’s boss, in writing, that this will stay quiet until…
… speculating on her motives won’t help, Harvey keeps saying, but those motives still seem important to me since we’re all taking such risks with…
… the DA thinks another week before we bring the witness home, or rather the Feebies or Homeland Security or the CIA does, but Harvey’s afraid that if they wait too long, even with all the video and audio recordings we have, it might be…
… Love? A sense of betrayal? How can someone who loves someone—two someones—so very much do such a thing to them? Ortega and Harvey aren’t interested, but the question consumes me. If I only could talk to Nick about…
… to love two men so much in such different ways is possible, but to be pulled between them the way she’s been is terrible…
… the murders would seem to me to change everything, but Ortega insists, and I think Harvey agrees, that they change nothing. It hurts me inside to watch Nick working so hard, not knowing what Harvey and I have been up to right under his nose…
… sometimes I just want to leave Nick a note—real name Kumiko Catherine Catton —and see what happens. But I can’t…
… just reading her transcripts makes me miss and love my own father more, as weird as he is. I have to give him a call tonight, wish him Happy New Year at least…
… what Ortega says just isn’t acceptable to me. Harvey’s going to go along with it. He tells me that all this sneaking around has almost cost him his marriage already and that his kids don’t recognize him when he come home, but down deep I think he agrees with me that we can’t end it like this. Not like this. I’m supposed to sneak away to spend time with Harvey tomorrow at the Denver motel where we keep the stuff and he insists it’s the last time for us there, but I won’t accept that. I’ve told him I won’t. I told him that I’d go to Nick with the whole sad, sick story unless we found a way to carry on…
Nick wiped tears from his eyes and read it through. To the last fragmented, incomplete entry, made by a woman who didn’t know she was going to die the next day.
How many of us do? wondered Nick. Know we’re going to die the next day.
Or this evening?
When his phone rang, Nick almost jumped out of his skin. He’d been watching the videos and reading Dara’s notes for forty-five minutes. Poor Leonard must think that he’d been forgotten down there at Dr. Tak’s.
“Nick Bottom,” he answered but there was no one there and the caller ID was blocked in that way that prepaid phones worked.
Well, realized Nick, setting his phone back in his jacket pocket, Leonard had been forgotten. This data on Dara’s old phone changed everything, all right. Nick felt the old gears begin to work the way they’d used to for him, in Major Crimes Unit and before… the pieces coming together, the full picture of the puzzle being assembled.
It was all there. He wiped away more tears and cursed himself for a blind fool.
It had always been there. All of it. Dara had tried to tell him without telling him. And he’d been too full of his own ambition and self-centered game of playing cop twenty-four hours a day to really listen to her, to really look at her.
The first thing he had to do, even before fetching Leonard, was to e-mail the full contents of Dara’s text notes and the video to all the people he trusted in this world.
After two minutes of thinking in the silence, he came up with five names. Then, after more hard thinking, two more, including CHP Chief Dale Ambrose. K.T. was on the list… but it also had to go to people with better connections, people beyond the reach of those who’d reached Nakamura and Harvey Cohen and Dara Fox Bottom and probably Delroy Nigger Brown by now.
The eighth name, incredibly, was that of West Coast Advisor Daichi Omura.
Do you let the murderer know, however indirectly, that you know he or she is the murderer? Nick had played that game before, for various reasons, and it had worked.
Sometimes.
But he wasn’t sure here if he’d be getting the word to…
His phone rang and vibrated again and Nick jumped again.
“Nick Bottom.”
There was a silence on the line but the connection was there. Again, no caller ID.
“Hello?”
“Come pick me up,” came a voice that it took Nick’s buzzing mind ten seconds to identify as his son’s.
“Val?”
“Come pick me up, as soon as you can.”
“Val, where are you? Are you all right? Val, your grandfather… Leonard’s had a sort of heart attack. He’s going to make it for now, but he needs to be taken care of. Do you need medical attention? Val?”
“Come pick me up.” There was something more than stress or pain in his son’s strangely aged and altered voice. Rage? Something beyond rage?
“I will,” said Nick. “Where are you?”
“You know Washington Park?”
“Sure, it’s only a few minutes from here.”
“Drive on Marion Parkway on the west side of the lake… the big lake, Smith Lake, I think it’s called… past the tent and shack village there.”
“All right,” said Nick. “Where will you be…”
“What will you be driving?”
“A rusty-looking G.M. gelding with bullet holes in it.”
“Can you be here in fifteen minutes?”
“Are you hurt badly, Val? Or in trouble with someone there? Just say ‘yeah’ if you can’t speak freely.”
“How soon can you be here?”
Nick took a breath. His phone and cubie Internet hookups might be tapped. Probably were. He’d use Gunny G.’s fancy encrypted computer set up in the security shack to e-mail the video and text diaries out to his eight people. That might take a few minutes to do right. Then he’d have to get Leonard into the car with whatever clothes, IV tubes, or other medical things he needed.
He could go to the Six Flags Over the Jews parking lot to get the getaway car before picking up Val, so they could head straight for I-70 and out of town, but it might be better to pick the boy up sooner rather than later. Val sounded weird.
“Give me an hour, Val. I’ll look on the west side of Smith Lake in Washington Park and we’ll…”
The line went dead. Val had broken the connection.
2.05
Denver—Saturday, Sept. 25
Val’s plan was to use his gun to make someone in Washington Park give him their phone so that he could call the Old Man and set up the meeting—the plan was to steal some homeless person’s phone—but as it turned out, the people he met in the park were happy to loan their phone to him. After they’d made him a good, hot lunch and given him a blanket and pillow and let him sleep a few hours.
There were various homeless in the park but the two Val ran into first were an older black couple who he soon learned were named Harold and Dottie Davison. They were older than the Old Man but younger than Leonard, somewhere in that hard-to-estimate age for Val, in their midsixties, maybe. Harold’s short, curly hair and long sideburns had a tinge of gray. Thinking that they’d be easy to intimidate, Val approached them with his hand in his jacket and fingers on the butt of the 9mm Beretta.