A few minutes earlier, the girl who’d seated us had placed a platter of crusty bread in front of me. She’d set a bowl of some kind of oil next to it, and the people at the tables all around us were dipping their bread into the sour-yellow lubricant and then eating it. I decided to pass.
Our server, a slim-boned man with a beak for a nose, arrived to take our order. “Sir,” he said. Then he faced Tessa. “Mademoiselle.
Would you like to hear the specials? Tonight we are offering a lovely pork tenderloin finished off with a mango and pineapple reduction-”
Tessa gave him an iron stare. “Do you have any idea what kind of conditions those pigs are forced to live in before being shipped to the slaughterhouses? Wire cages. Tiny wire cages-”
“Tessa,” I said.
“Where they’re force-fed, drugged with growth hormones until they’re too fat to stand-”
“Tessa Bernice Ellis.”
“I’m just saying-”
I gave her my best, be-quiet-right-now-or-we’re-going-to-Burger-King look. Our eyes wrestled for a moment, and at last she gave in. “OK, OK. I want a house salad.” She pointed to the menu. “And no apple-wood smoked bacon.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He turned to me, tilted his head, offered a fabricated smile. He might have been a robot. “And you, sir?”
I noticed Tessa glaring at me. “I guess I’ll have a salad too,” I said. “But I’m hungry though. Make it a double.”
“A double, sir? I’m afraid our dinner salad only comes in one size, but I assure you it’s a most generous portion.”
I’d seen some of those “generous portions” when Tessa and I had walked to our booth. “Well, I’ll take two of those, then. Just dump them into one great big bowl. That’ll work.”
He scribbled something on his notepad, although I didn’t think our order had been all that complex. Tessa cleared her throat.
“Patrick, seriously, you can order the pork tenderloin if you want, and I promise I won’t say anything about how the pigs are crammed into feces-ridden crates where they can’t even turn around, taken to a slaughterhouse where they’re hit with a stun gun that leaves them alive and squealing and bleeding to death while they’re dropped alive into the scalding water that’s supposed to remove their hair and soften up the meat so that restaurants like this can glaze them with mangos and serve them to their patrons. I promise not to say a word.”
The woman at the table beside us slowly lowered her main-dish fork to the table.
“How thoughtful of you, Tessa,” I said. Slaughterhouses. Great.
Just the thing I need to be thinking about right now.
I noticed that our server’s face had turned pasty white. “Just bring me those two salads in one big bowl and a cup of coffee-wait. What kind of coffee do you have?”
He tried to compose himself. “We serve a variety of fine espressos and cappuccinos as well as both regular and decaffeinated-”
“No, no, no. I mean like a Ruiru 11 blend from Kenya, or Costa Rican La Magnolia, or something from the Cerrado region of Brazil.
What kind of coffee? What country is it from?”
“I believe we buy it here in America-”
Oh boy. “When you get the coffee from the store, does it come in a great big metal can?”
He beamed. “Absolutely.”
That was all I needed to hear. “Tea. A cup of tea.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I glanced at the bowl of oil. “And some butter too.”
“Tea…” He mouthed the words as he wrote them on his pad.
“And butter.” Then he turned hesitantly toward Tessa. “And your drink, ma’am?”
“Root beer. And don’t put any cheese in my salad, anything like that.”
He gave her a small nod.
“Or ranch dressing. Ranch is disgusting.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Or eggs.”
One more brisk nod, and then he disappeared.
“Well,” I said. “Nothing like visiting a fancy restaurant. We should do this more often.”
“Yup,” she said, dipping a piece of bread into the oil and holding it up to the light. Globs of vomit-colored oil plopped onto her plate. “Nothing like it.”
I tried to relax and just enjoy the next few minutes. Tried to engage in a coherent conversation, tried to listen to her talk about a club she’d heard about that she wanted to visit but that I would never let her go to anyway, tried to think of clever things to say about the birdlike Tried to, but couldn’t. The image of a slaughterhouse had landed in my mind and refused to leave.
I could hear squealing coming from the inside. Sharp desperate cries. But neither this slaughterhouse nor the squealing had anything to do with pigs.
2
The last three months had been good ones for Creighton Melice, now known as Neville Lewis. He liked San Diego weather, and he especially liked living in a city with hundreds of thousands of undocumented, untraceable, easily misplaced people.
And so many of them women.
Lovely Hispanic women.
Potential girlfriends.
Creighton glanced around the warehouse office, and his eyes took in the dusty file cabinet in the corner piled high with a stack of manila folders, the swimsuit calendar that was still flipped to May 2007 pinned to the wall, and, of course, the large gray desk with his high-definition computer screen on top of it. Beside the keyboard was a stack of DVD cases.
He stepped onto a swivel chair and repositioned the right-hand camcorder centering it in the hole in the wall so he could get a clearer view of his next girlfriend when it happened. Over the years he’d found that the videos were much more satisfying when he got the camera angles just right.
And, of course, a lot depended on the quality of your equipment.
And whoever the guy was who’d shot the bottle from his hand that day in DC knew his stuff: the two professional-grade camcorders were the kind a news crew might use for a remote.
The warehouse had already been prepared for Creighton when he arrived in November. Everything was all set. Just waiting for him.
As he sat down at the desk, a large spider, ripe with babies, lowered itself onto his arm, but Creighton didn’t mind, didn’t brush it away. He’d always had an affinity for spiders.
He tapped at the keyboard to test the remote zoom capabilities.
The spider skittered up his arm and across the back of his neck. A few more keystrokes.
Yes.
Excellent.
Now, for the second camera.
The server arrived with our order. He laid a large metal bowl beside me containing my two meagerly generous servings of salad.
Then he placed Tessa’s salad in front of her and quickly stepped back. “Anything else?”
“No,” I said. “We’re good. Thanks.”
Tessa inspected her salad, probably looking for stray pieces of meat that might have fallen into it. “It looks OK.”
As our server hurried off and we began to eat, I glanced at the routes of the two dozen servers again. Made note of which tables each person was serving, who yielded to whom as they approached the kitchen. Then, in between mouthfuls of lettuce, spinach, green peppers, and black olives, Tessa and I talked about how her junior year of high school was going, the colleges she was considering, the things we were both hoping to do in San Diego, and some bands I’d never heard of who were apparently amazingly sick-meaning good. But all the while, in the back of my mind, I was still thinking about the slaughterhouse.
Then, with a big bite of salad in her mouth, Tessa asked, “So, it feels good, doesn’t it?”
A shiver squirmed through my gut.
I paused with my salad fork halfway to my mouth. “What did you just say?”
My tone must have been as harsh as the images climbing through my mind, because she blinked, and when she replied, she seemed almost intimidated. “I just mean, being in the middle of a case like this. Trying to catch this arsonist guy. It feels good. It’s what you do. It’s what you like, isn’t it?”