Canning’s car was found out back, Markham said to himself. That means he had to have driven here after he went to the convenience store. But why so late at night? A private session? Could he have been two-timing Dorsey? Whatever the case, Vlad had to have known he was coming back here that night.
Or, the voice in his head countered, Vlad could’ve simply been following him. Canning could’ve come back here for any number of reasons—forgot his cell phone or some-thing—and Vlad took advantage of the situation. Pretty dark back there.
But the writing on Canning and Donovan is like a tattoo. He didn’t do that to Rodriguez and Guerrera. It started with Canning.
The voice in his head was silent, and Markham stared at the photos. He would have to get Dorsey back in here to double-check if any equipment was missing. Would have to follow up with distributors on any recent orders in the Raleigh area, too. Christ, that would be a pain in the ass—just another wild-goose chase? Was he really getting that desperate?
Markham sighed and returned the photo of the dueling ninjas to the bulletin board. The guy in the picture was bald—reminded him of an album cover he’d once seen.
What was the name of the group?
He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. Then it came to him.
Sublime. That was it. Picture of some skinhead-looking dude with the group’s name tattooed across his back.
Nineties music. Tattoos.
Markham didn’t understand nineties music—felt disconnected from it—and didn’t understand the ninties tattoo craze, either. Every stockbroker with his tribal band, every sorority girl with her “tramp stamp” sticking to the seat of her BMW.
Tramp stamp. That had been Michelle’s bon mot.
Markham smiled.
He can see her now, on the beach, rising naked from the surf like Botticelli’s Venus—her skin pristine and glistening in the sun, her hips swaying as she walks toward him.
“Where’s your clamshell, Venus?” he asks. He is naked, too, lying on the sand. Michelle kneels over him and kisses his lips. She tastes salty.
“I think it’s an oyster shell,” she says, and reaches behind him and clicks on an old-school-style boom box—Blue Öys-ter Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”
“That’s right,” he says, then kisses her again. “Seventies and eighties all the way, baby. That’s where we belong. Another world. Another time.”
“I miss you,” she whispers.
“I miss you, too.”
A wave of sadness passed through him, and he opened his eyes.
He sat there well into the night, adrift on an ocean of tattooed flesh and feeling more lost than ever.
Chapter 22
Wednesday, April 12
It was still raining, and Markham spent the morning at the Resident Agency updating Sentinel and studying the Rodriguez and Guerrera file. The FBI had already questioned Mr. and Mrs. Rodriguez about a possible connection between their son and Randall Donovan, but not about Billy Canning. Markham had insisted on handling the Rodriguezes himself. He felt he should be the one to inform them their son had been murdered by a serial killer, but more important, felt he should be the one to ask them about their son’s sexuality.
Of course, there had been nothing in the case file to indicate that the young man might have been a homosexual. However, Markham needed to exclude that possibility for himself before he could move forward with the victim profile. He also felt he had a good bead on the Hispanic culture from his stint in Tampa—and unless the Rodriguezes were an unusually enlightened family of Catholics, he had a feel- ing they wouldn’t take kindly to an implication their son might have been gay.
It was a slim possibility, Markham thought; but nonetheless, that line of questioning needed to be handled delicately. He decided Mrs. Rodriguez would be the best bet—would be the most receptive to him—but still he needed to catch her alone, while her husband was at work. The case file said she had a part-time job in the mornings, which meant she would be home this afternoon when the kids got back from school.
Besides, Markham wanted to determine for himself if Mrs. Rodriguez might be hiding something—not just from him, but also from her husband.
Markham drove first to the Rodriguezes’ old apartment in Fox Run—got a sense of the layout and gazed up through the rain at the large streetlights that peppered the parking lots. They looked out of place, an afterthought in the rundown, gang-infested neighborhood, but told Markham the property would’ve been well lit at night. Moreover, the apartment complex had too many balconies. It was raining on the night Rodriguez disappeared, but there still would’ve been a lot of people around to see the killer waiting. And there was only one entrance in and out of the place—too risky for Vlad to take him here.
Then there was the bus stop and the walk home. Not the safest area, but still well lit and well traveled. At the very least, someone would have heard the gunshots.
But the bus stop on the other end? That mysterious place from where Jose Rodriguez was really travelling on Wednesday and Saturday nights? Well, that was the big question, wasn’t it?
The police figured out early on that Rodriguez’s waitering job was bogus, but had since been unable to pin down exactly where he’d been coming from on the night he was shot. On the other hand, there was a strong possibility that one of the restaurant owners was lying; his employees could be lying, too, for fear of getting involved and being deported. That’s what bothered Sam Markham the most: that he couldn’t rule out the possibility that perhaps Jose Rodriguez might have been telling the truth all along.
But Alex Guerrera had gone somewhere on Saturday night, too. He hadn’t been seen by his roommates since the night before and had asked to use the car they shared but then canceled at the last minute. Odd, they thought, but that’s all they could tell the police. No knowledge of a connection to MS-13 or any of the other Latino gangs that had sprung up in the area. There was nothing there, Markham felt instinctively, but he would talk to the cousin and track down the roommates if he got desperate.
It had stopped raining by the time he reached the Rodriguez family’s new home thirty minutes later. The apartment complex was located in North Raleigh; typical three-floor multi-unit built in the early seventies, complete with a sign at the entrance that advertised LU URY RENTALS in faded letters and a missing x. The property had some nice tree coverage, was definitely no Fox Run—working-class, some Section 8—but Markham could tell from the cars that it was on its way down.
He drove to a building at the rear of the complex, parked in a space beside an old Malibu and emerged to find two Hispanic boys staring down at him from a second-floor balcony. The older one (Markham pegged him to be about fifteen) was leaning over the railing smoking; the younger (short, twelve or thirteen) had been fiddling with an iPod and stood up as he approached.
The complex was strangely quiet, Markham thought; only the sound of the wind in the pine trees. He looked up at the building number; watched the boys out of the corner of his eye, and pretended he was unsure he had the right place. Judging from the layout, he guessed that the balcony with the boys was most likely the balcony for the Rodriguez family’s new apartment; the taller boy, most likely Diego.