Joe ran a hand over his face and seemed to be back in the moment when his operation had come crashing down.
“It was all over by the time I got to the fourteenth floor. The kids were dead in 1418. Alison didn’t answer the door to 1420. I must’ve missed her by minutes, or seconds. Otherwise, she probably would have killed me, too. I learned later that Chan was dead. If my theory is right, she was shutting down her undercover job for us and cauterizing loose ends.”
“But why would she have changed sides, Joe?”
He shrugged. “I can think of a dozen maybes: payback for some long-held grudge, or she got an offer she couldn’t refuse. She’s crazy enough to have done it for the thrill.”
“She might have killed Shirley Chan,” I said.
“OK, yeah. It makes sense if she was mopping up. She wouldn’t take the chance that Chan was playing her and telling everything to his wife. Another sickening theory.”
Joe stopped talking. He turned up the heat, adjusted the airflow, and took a pull from his bottle of water.
My head was throbbing from all this information. I was trying to process it all, thinking that if Muller was a double agent—if it was true—then Joe felt responsible for everything Muller had done. Or maybe Joe, too, was readying himself to cauterize loose ends of his own.
Christ. No one knew where I was. Was I putting my trust in a man I didn’t really know? I shook my head, trying to dislodge that terrifying thought.
Joe said, “I know. It’s unbelievable, and I haven’t confronted her. Maybe I’ve got her all wrong.”
I said, “So why did she come all the way out here?”
“If she’s gone over to the Chinese, BC is not a bad jumping-off point to China. And that’s all I’ve got.”
Joe’s theory had the ring of truth, but was it true?
I asked him—actually, I blurted it out.
“Joe, are you trying to catch Muller, or save her?”
“What do you think?” he said.
CHAPTER 89
THE SIGN AT the side of the road read SQUAMISH.
What little I knew about this town came from an article I’d read in the Chron’s travel section a few years ago about the annual Bald Eagle Festival. I remembered that the area was spread out over a grid of mini-malls and woodsy homes with gorgeous scenery tucked between mountains. Heavily wooded roads connected neighborhoods, and tumbling rivers bisected them, but right now, the scenery was beside the point.
It was lights out in Squamish and there was near zero visibility at oh-dark-hundred.
As we sped through the town, I glanced at Joe’s face, lit by the dashboard lights. I wished I could read his mind, but going by what he’d said, at the center of the crisscrossing facts, suppositions, and violent deaths was Alison Muller. She was clever, manipulative, and, in my opinion, psychopathic.
Was I was finally going to see her for myself? What would happen? Who would still be standing when the sun came up in three hours? Would I see my daughter again?
I had to. I had to stay alive for Julie.
Joe drove the Audi along a two-lane road flanked by forests of black evergreens. There was a bit of a clearing up ahead on our right, and as we approached, he dropped his high beams down to parking lights. I saw a wood-shingled house with a sagging roof and the flash of our lights reflecting off taillights at the end of the driveway.
Joe said, “She’s staying there.”
He continued past the house, and fifty yards down the road, I glimpsed two vehicles parked on either side in deep shadow: a metallic Japanese two-door and a rusty Ford pickup.
“Those are ours,” he said.
Joe tapped the GPS and a new address popped up on the screen. He took a right turn down a dirt road and another right onto a highway through Brackendale. A half mile later, a lighted VACANCY sign flashed outside a Best Western to our right.
Joe turned into the motor court, pulled the car around to the back, and parked between two cars in front of the rooms.
He switched the engine off and used his phone.
“Slade, it’s Molinari. I’m outside.”
The suite was on the ground floor and looked modern and fairly new. Three men were sitting around a TV watching CBC News without sound. They were regular-looking guys of medium height and weight, one balding, another with coarse red hair, the third pale with glasses; he looked like a guy with a desk job.
Christopher Knightly, the big straw-haired man I’d met for the first time in my apartment, was in the kitchenette, popping the tab on a beer can.
He was surprised to see me and not in a good way.
Joe said, “Knightly, you’ve met Lindsay. Everyone else, this is my wife, Sergeant Lindsay Boxer, SFPD, Homicide Squad. I asked her to come because she’s intimately involved in the Four Seasons murders. She was at the crime scene. She’s also the lead investigator in that takedown op on Stockton. So this is her case, too.”
Knightly put the can down hard on the counter and said, “Christ, Joe, talk about breaking protocol. No offense, Sergeant. This isn’t San Francisco and this isn’t your homicide case. Muller’s not just a killer. She could well be a traitor, not just to us, but to the country, for God’s sake.”
“Chris. It’s my decision,” Joe told him, “and my ass if things go wrong.”
The man wearing the glasses got up to shake my hand, introduced himself as Agent Fred Munder, while the redhead got into Joe’s face, saying, “Are you serious? It’s not just about you. Our butts are on the line, too.”
“It’s done, Geary,” Joe snapped. “Let’s get on with it.”
I used the bathroom, and when I came back Agent Munder was saying to the others, “There’s been no activity for three hours. Muller is still at the house. Looks like she’s in for the night.”
“She was always a little too sure of herself,” said Knightly. “Smart, yes, I’ll give her that. But she’s arrogant and, I’m gonna say, twisted. She just loves all the attention she gets from men. Did you ever ask yourself, Joe, why she’s so eager to climb into bed with the enemy?”
It was a dig at Joe, and if he was meant to answer this question, he didn’t get a chance. Knightly’s phone chirped. He grabbed it from his shirt pocket and said, “Yeah?” He listened for a second or two, then said, “Got it. Stay with her.”
He clicked off and announced, “Muller’s on the move. Something’s gone wrong. She’s in one of three cars heading north. Was she tipped off? Who did she get to this time?”
Knightly was looking at Joe, and because I was standing next to Joe, he was also staring at me.
CHAPTER 90
THERE WAS A quick shorthand discussion between Joe and the other men in the team. Routes and a timetable were roughed out. Then the motel room emptied. Knightly and a partner drove out of the lot first. Munder and his wingman took the second car, and Joe and I took the third position out to the Sea to Sky Highway.
I could imagine that this roadway must be gorgeous in daylight, but the empty two-lane highway was unlit, and the impenetrable woods to the left and the steep, treed cliffs rising a hundred feet straight up on our right seemed menacing.
Joe’s phone was in a holder attached to the vents in the dash, and he was in ongoing communication with Knightly. Knightly was also on the phone with the two CIA cars ahead of us, the truck and the sedan that had been following Muller’s convoy from the moment they left her safe house.