“You gonna be okay with that?” I mumbled.
“More than okay, baby,” she whispered back. “More than okay.”
We stayed like that for a few minutes, just breathing each other in and finding our compasses again, then I gave her another kiss and edged back. I raised my bottle in a silent toast. Tess met my eye and, softly, clinked her bottle against mine. We each took a long swig.
“I spoke to Stacey this morning. You remember Stacey Ross?”
The name rang a bell, then it came back to me. Stacey was a psychiatrist who specialized in treating kids. The two of them had become friends when Stacey was treating Tess’s daughter, Kim, after they had both got caught up in the bloodbath at the Met the night we first met. Kim was nine at the time, and Stacey had really helped her work through the emotional fallout from that night.
“She gave me a few pointers. For Alex.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said he’ll go through the five stages, same as an adult would. You know . . . denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. But she also said boys and girls deal with these things differently. He’s likely to be more locked in than a girl would be in his situation. And it might set back his maturity a bit. That’s what we’ll need to help him with. Talking things out and not keeping it all in. But we’ll get him through this,” she insisted, a film of moisture making her eyes glisten again. “We’ll get him through. And she’s there if we need her.”
I nodded as she took another swig, and I could tell that this was hard on her. We’d talked about her fears in the past, about how the thought of something bad happening to her and leaving Kim behind terrified her—it was a major factor in her turning to writing her novels and trying to leave the call of the wild behind.
“What else did she say, in terms of right now?”
“Well, he’ll cry a lot, obviously. He’ll be prone to waking at odd hours and he’ll sleep intermittently. Maybe some bedwetting. Beyond that, she said we shouldn’t lie, which is why I talked to him about heaven. He needs to believe that she’s happy, that she’s fine, even if she can’t be here with him. She also said we needed to give him as much continuity as possible. I imagine going back to Michelle’s house is off-limits for him.”
I nodded.
“And it wouldn’t be great for him anyway, without her there. But he needs some favorite things around him, wherever he is. Transitional objects, she called them. Toys, maybe his pillow or his blanket. His favorite drinking cup. That kind of thing. Maybe even Michelle’s nightgown or something that smells of her. Would that be okay with you? I could ask Alex about what he’s missing and go there tomorrow and get them for him.”
Michelle’s house was still a crime scene, and I wasn’t too thrilled about having Tess go there, but I could see the need for it. “Sure. I’ll take you there tomorrow.”
“Great. Also, do you know if any of Michelle’s close relatives are around, people Alex was comfortable around? Her mom maybe, or a sister?”
I told Tess the little I knew about Michelle’s family, and said I’d find out what I could in the morning. She drew in again and kissed me, then kept her hand cupped on my cheek. “We’re going to help him get happy again, Sean. I promise you that.”
I gave her a small nod and a smile, and she squeezed my arm before heading back up to check on Alex. I stayed there alone, nursing another beer and spiraling back into my darkest thoughts, until my cell rang.
It was the cavalry.
Not only that, but Villaverde sounded upbeat.
He asked about Alex, but there was nothing much to say on that front. I knew it would be a while before I’d ever be able to answer that question with a cheerful and casual, “He’s fine.” Then he got to the reason for his call.
“Ballistics came back with a match for the nine-mil Michelle took off the shooters. You remember that armed double-kidnap up at that research center near Santa Barbara, about six months ago?”
My mind flashed to vague snippets from the news footage. “Some kind of medical facility, right?”
“That’s the one. The Schultes Institute. Anyway, we got a match. Your shooter was one of the crew that did the hit.”
This was solid.
I remembered that, apart from the missing scientists, people had died that day. “Was the match from a kill shot?”
“Yep,” Villaverde confirmed. “A security guard. It also matches the slug from Michelle’s boyfriend.”
I got a small uplift from the fact that Michelle had, most likely by her account, not just taken out the guy who’d shot Tom, but that he’d also killed before. It wasn’t going to bring her back, but right now, I was happy to grab any satisfaction I could get hold of, no matter how small.
“But that one’s still unsolved, right?” I asked.
“I’m waiting for some callbacks, but as far as I know, it’s cold.”
“Whose case is it?”
“It’s joint DEA-FBI.”
“LA offices?”
“Yep.”
I frowned. The inevitable beckoned. “I guess we’re definitely going to need to talk to my good old buddy Hank Corliss.”
“Yep,” Villaverde repeated. “I already put a call in. We’re seeing him in the morning.”
14
Less than three miles north of the hotel, a chartered Embraer Legacy private jet was touching down at Montgomery Field. It had taken off a little less than five hours earlier from Merida International Airport in the Yucatán and was carrying four passengers, all male.
The lone customs agent who boarded the small aircraft verified the passengers’ identities and cleared them for immigration in under two minutes.
He had no reason to subject them to any further scrutiny. The charter company was one of the most reputable around, and he’d met the crew on several previous occasions. The passengers, all Mexican, were well groomed, smartly dressed, and soft spoken. The plane’s paperwork was impeccable, and the men’s passports bore the stamps of several European countries, as well as a few in the Far East. It all reeked of quality and, more importantly, had that intangible, disarming aura of integrity.
Shortly after the customs agent’s departure, the four men disembarked and got into two chauffeured Lincoln Town Cars that had already been there long before the plane landed. Comfortable beds were waiting for them in a luxury six-bedroom oceanside villa that had been rented for them on a quiet street in Del Mar.
They would need a good night’s sleep.
They had a lot of work ahead of them.
MONDAY
15
I left Tess, Alex, and Jules at the hotel and went to meet Villaverde at his office. Our sit-down with Corliss was set for ten thirty, allowing us to dodge Los Angeles’s brutal morning rush hour traffic and giving us a chance to sample its delightful mid-morning snarl-ups instead. Tess was eager to go to Michelle’s house and collect the stuff that her friend had recommended to give Alex a measure of comfort, and Villaverde had arranged to have an SDPD squad car drive her to the house while we were away and watch over her while she did her thing.
The first half of the drive was easy enough, a straight run up the interstate with the sun at our backs and nothing but the ocean to our left and sand dunes and rolling hills to our right for a good chunk of an hour. Then we hit San Clemente and its pastoral settings helped ease us into the less attractive aspects of human colonization and the chaotic asphalt cauldron that was downtown LA.