“Lourdes Rodriguez?” I said. “I know her by another name.”
Chapter 97
The ultra-luxury union Wharf apartment complex on Fell’s Point was the most expensive place to live in Baltimore, costing five times what Lourdes Rodriguez had been paying at Feiffer’s. We’d used the bank account and other information on Rodriguez’s old lease to track her to her new digs.
A small moving van was snarling traffic on South Wolfe Street. The front door to one of the apartment buildings was propped open for workmen carrying furniture wrapped in blankets. We followed them inside and up the stairs to 2E.
The door was open. Reggae music was playing. The workmen went in. So did we.
I trailed Sampson past stacks of moving boxes choking the front hallway, hearing a familiar voice saying, “Be careful with that! It was my mother’s!”
We stepped out into a living area with large glass windows that gave a sweeping and dramatic view of Baltimore Harbor. Wearing jeans and a loose-fitting pink jersey, Lourdes Rodriguez paced by the window, watching the workmen move a table into position.
She looked puzzled when she saw Sampson standing there holding his badge. Then she noticed me.
I stepped into the room, said, “You never sent me your new e-mail, Annie.”
For a second, the love junkie was so shocked, I thought she might faint dead away.
Then she croaked, “Dr. Cross? What are you doing here?”
“I could say the same, Annie. Or is it Lourdes?”
She swallowed, looked away. “Lourdes.”
“Why’d you use the fake name when you came to see me?”
Rodriguez blinked, puffed out her cheeks, and glanced at the workmen, who were leaving the room. “Isn’t this privileged?”
“Not when it comes to murder, kidnapping, and torture,” Sampson said.
That threw her. “What are you talking...” She looked at me. “Dr. Cross, I came to you under an alias because of the addiction I told you about. I don’t know anything about any torture or murder or kidnapping.”
“The van that was stolen from you when you were working for Dish,” Sampson said. “We ran tests on the interior. Whole lot of blood spatter.”
She looked down. “Blood spatter? I don’t... it was stolen. I had nothing to do with that.”
“Didn’t you?” I said. “The same van was caught on film when two blond girls from Pennsylvania were taken.”
Her jaw dropped, and she took a step backward.
“Seemed a big coincidence,” Sampson said. “Given that you left behind all those articles about the same missing girls at your old apartment at Mr. Feiffer’s.”
“And given that I saw you leaving my office in a car driven by a man posing as Alden Lindel, the father of one of the missing girls,” I said.
She shook her head as if trying to clear it. “Wait. What? The father of one of the missing girls?”
“A man who’s been claiming to be him. You got into his Nissan Pathfinder right after our one and only session. I saw you. What is going on, Annie, Lourdes, whatever your real name is?”
She threw up her hands in exasperation. “Last time I left your office? I called Uber. They sent some Uber guy. You can check. I’m sure there’s a record.”
Uber? Was that possible? The fake Alden was an Uber driver. You call for an Uber car and usually the one that’s closest responds. Which meant what? That the impostor, whoever he was, had been close by, watching my house?
“We will check Uber,” Sampson said. “What about the news articles?”
Rodriguez rubbed her neck, didn’t look at us, and didn’t reply.
“It’s going to come out sooner or later,” I said. “Courts go easier on the first person in a conspiracy to flip.”
“Conspiracy?” she said sharply. “No, it’s nothing like that. Not really.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Looking flustered now, Rodriguez wrung her hands and then held them up in surrender.
“Okay, okay, I got caught up in something a long time ago, Dr. Cross, and... I’ll tell you everything I know. Everything. The honest-to-God truth.”
Chapter 98
Two hours and forty-five minutes later, Sampson had gotten off I-95 and was driving us north on Front Street, which parallels the freeway and the Delaware River as they pass through Philadelphia. The weather was changing. Dark clouds boiled on the western horizon.
“Chalabi sounds like a first-class creep,” Sampson said.
“He won’t be the first to achieve film success that way,” I said. We went over the high points of Rodriguez’s confession for the fourth or fifth time.
A childhood friend of Lourdes Rodriguez, Casey Chalabi, had always wanted to be a movie director.
“He ended up making porn films under the name Dirk Wallace,” Rodriguez told us. “It’s all S-and-M, bondage, the hard stuff.”
She said Chalabi put aside money from the porn shoots to fund production of a horror film he’d written.
“Horror’s cheap to film,” she’d said. “Casey said you can do them for under a million. James Wan did Saw for a little over five hundred thousand, and it made, like, fifty-five million. Casey’s trying to model himself on Wan.”
Rodriguez claimed that even with the porn money, Casey’s horror flick was being shot on a shoestring. When he learned she was going to inherit her great-uncle’s fortune, he was immediately after Rodriguez to help fund his film.
“I gave him some, and I didn’t even have the inheritance yet,” she said. “I took it from my savings. Five thousand. And then another five. Then Casey wanted the van, my van at Dish. He said even with the money I’d given him, he couldn’t afford to buy or rent one, and mine was perfect. He wanted me to just lend it to him for the night.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said no. No way. But Casey can be a vindictive a-hole.”
Sampson raised his eyebrows. “You saying Chalabi stole your van?”
“I’d put money on it. And that blood you found inside? Was it human?”
“We don’t know yet,” I said.
“It’s probably pig’s blood. He uses lots of pig’s blood in the big slasher scenes in Blade.”
I thought about that for several moments. “So he steals your van, uses it in a killing scene in his movie. I’m still having trouble seeing how this connects to those newspaper articles we found at Feiffer’s.”
Rodriguez swallowed hard. “I haven’t spoken with Casey since my van was stolen, but I read his script a long time ago. It’s about these four sisters who inherit an abandoned factory and this old Victorian house. Then it’s pretty much like every other horror flick you see. Except the sisters. They’re all ethereal and blond. Every one of them. And they get killed, one by one.”
Which was enough for us to drive to Philadelphia to talk to Mr. Chalabi face-to-face.
Rodriguez had given us the last address she had for Chalabi. She said she thought it was where he shot the porn movies. We found the address, a rehabbed old school called the Emerson that had been turned into lofts and work spaces down the street from the Theatre of Living Arts.
Rodriguez couldn’t remember the exact name of Chalabi’s company, but we found C. C. PRODUCTIONS listed on a board at the entrance to the Emerson. It was on the second floor, unit 2, the address Rodriguez had given us.
We took the staircase and walked down a long hallway past the open doors of artists’ studios and the closed doors of others in the arts and entertainment fields. The place smelled nice. There was music playing.
It had a good vibe, all in all, and that bothered me as we walked up to the closed door of C. C. Productions. I couldn’t see the management letting him shoot porn or slasher flicks on the premises.