I remembered the cameras on the carport. “All the front doors would be off-screen,” I said.
“Yes,” said Taucher. “Unfortunate for us, but a valid privacy issue. Because from the blood, it looks like Caliphornia stabbed Bryce in the heart before he even got past the door. Before Bryce could even fire his gun. Imagine the stones it would take to do that with a porch light shining down on you. And the door open. You’re in plain sight.”
“I’m surprised Kenny Bryce opened his door,” I said. “The peephole worked well enough.”
Taucher nodded. “Here’s where the path forks. If you take the right fork to answer why he opened his door, you get the Air Force hoodie logo. Bryce would immediately register a friendly. I saw all that Air Force stuff in his office. Or maybe Caliphornia flashed a convincing law enforcement ID. Such as the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.”
“What if the ID was genuine?” I asked.
Taucher cut me a sharp look. The idea of American agents becoming murderers or terrorists does not sit well with American agents, even those in agencies who refuse to cooperate or even get out of each other’s way. I’d touched her federal nerve.
“For that matter, maybe Bryce knew Caliphornia,” she said. “Saw him through the peep and swung the door right open.”
I had thought the same, and realized that Lindsey might know him, too.
“He seems to know them,” said Taucher. “He used the word personal with Lindsey. He accused Bryce of causing death — most likely a reference to his war experience. The same with the threat to Voss.”
Consequences and calculations came at me in silence then, as we strode south down the Embarcadero. A cold breeze broke the stillness, blurring the smooth water of the bay. I heard the halyards and lanyards ringing from the yachts.
“And if you take the left fork to answer that question?” I asked. “Why Bryce opened his door to Caliphornia?”
Another unhappy glance. “Someone walked past that security camera thirty seconds ahead of Caliphornia. Headed the same way. A woman. Again — terrible video. Young, judging by her movement and posture. Dressed in layers. Like maybe a sweater and shawl for the cold. Or a full-length overcoat. Carrying something up against her left side. A package? A twelve-pack? A bundle of mail? You can’t tell. She was right at the edge of the picture. Four seconds and gone. The manager didn’t recognize her. Neighbors didn’t, either. Was she with Caliphornia? We don’t know. Did she knock on Bryce’s door? We don’t know. We can’t even say where she went once she passed out of the camera’s field of view.”
I said the obvious: “Kenny might be more likely to open his door to a woman.”
“Exactly.”
The breeze rose, rippling the bay.
“Lindsey’s with you, right?” asked Taucher. “Physically on your property? None of this motel-room-in-Las-Vegas bullshit?”
“She’s with me.”
“You think you can protect her?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You see what you’re up against?”
“I see it.”
“I hate amateurs, Roland.”
“I do, too, Joan.”
“My medical examiners say Caliphornia is a good beheader.”
“What is a good beheader?”
“It was relatively fast and clean,” she said. “Done with a long-handled, fixed-blade knife that was very sharp. They can tell by the length and depth of the cuts, and how cleanly the vertebrae were severed. ‘A sashimi-sharp knife wielded by a two-hundred-pound weightlifter’ is how one of them put it. Our MEs have such atrocious senses of humor.”
Very sharp, I thought. As a knife sharpened on a whetstone might be.
“The MEs won’t rule out two attackers, even though the crime scene people say one,” said Joan. “Two different sets of angles on the slashes.”
“Or one man with two knives,” I said.
“A ninja-style beheader?” asked Taucher. “Doubtful.”
“Maybe he’s high,” I said. I was thinking of fenethylline, a powerful amphetamine manufactured in Syria and Iraq, and sold to fighters on both sides. Fighting pills. The popular name is Captagon and it was once manufactured for profit in the United States. Coming from makeshift labs in the Middle East, Captagon is a crude brown tablet. In Fallujah we found bags full of them on insurgents. Captagon is alleged to stimulate unnatural strength, stamina, and cruelty in whoever takes it.
Taucher looked at me unhappily, as if I were adding to her problems. “Captagon?”
“Or something like it.”
“You think this guy is Middle Eastern?” she asked. “Careful what you say. They’ll start calling you phobic and obsessive. A burned-out witch on a mission.”
“Read the threats again,” I said. “The language of them. If you need reminding.”
“I don’t need reminding, and I can’t shake the image of Kenny’s decapitation. The lab said Caliphornia was able to use his victim’s weight — and gravity — to accomplish his mutilation. Really put his back and legs into it. The average human head weighs sixteen pounds.”
A surprising levity in her voice. Gallows humor? One way to deal with horror. Then shoes on the boardwalk, coming fast behind us. Taucher wheeled on the runner huffing past, eyes wide and not a little wild.
“Okay,” she said, her voice possibly one small degree more hopeful. “I’d like to thank you again for the Bryce pictures and the early heads-up. You helped me. You didn’t have to.”
I told her she was welcome and immediately asked her where Rasha Samara had been the night Kenny Bryce died.
She glanced at me, then away. “We’re working on it. We’re good at that kind of thing. But not even the FBI can watch everybody every hour. Think of all those faces on my office walls.”
I did, nodding.
“I’m sure you’ve gathered the basics on Samara,” she said. “What more do you want?”
“I want to know why you’re looking at him. He builds golf courses and rides horses.”
“Because he’s a rich American of Saudi descent who travels frequently to the Middle East, is widely known and connected, and has relationships with Saudi-Arabian political and business players. These people have money, rivers of it, all flowing down to them from oil. Rasha associates with some people whom the Bureau is this close to classifying as sponsors of terrorism.” She turned to me mid-stride and raised one hand to brandish a quarter-inch gap between thumb and forefinger. “This close. And this ends the Rasha Samara discussion we didn’t have.”
“Understood. I thank you for your help.”