Cooper stuck around for another half hour, left a five-dollar tip for the one-dollar beer he’d been sipping, and trudged out to the Taurus, thinking if he kept having to sit in that goddamned car he was going to have to get out and run a couple hundred laps on the quarter-mile beach when he got home.
27
The next time Jim left to pick up Rhonda for the night, Cooper climbed out of the Taurus and made his way up Jim’s porch. Seeing no visible sign of an alarm system, he went ahead and took the grave risk of breaking and entering a home in Kingston, Jamaica, and upon snapping open the lock was promptly assaulted by the smell of reefer. Coming in, Cooper thought that the guy had to be smoking morning, noon, and night with the odor as thick as it was in the house. Maybe he would grow dreadlocks by the time he left.
The house was poorly kept, with rumpled dirty laundry obscuring much of the floor in the front hall. Cooper moved into the kitchen, which told the same story, crumbs and half-eaten fast food on the counter, a couple weeks of crusty dishes stacked in the sink. There were no pictures on the fridge, and only American cheese, Wonder bread, peanut butter, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, whole milk, and three cans of Bud inside it. Working through a pair of closets, he found the usual Caribbean attire.
The bedroom was the center of Jim’s world, all the necessities packed in there-the weed spilling out of a plastic bag on the side table, some joints beside it, a Magnavox TV, a boom box, a full-length mirror angled against the wall. On the unmade bed he found a remote control, a dank towel, and a cigarette lighter. The dirty laundry scheme for this particular room included underwear, socks, and T-shirts; Cooper couldn’t find a single photograph of Jim, and nothing at all hung on the walls.
He went through the drawers: low on clothes, a few magazines, neatly stacked-Penthouse, Hustler, Oui-Cooper thinking the Oui must have been tough to get, living in Kingston. He found a pistol under a pair of jeans, a basic revolver, Smith & Wesson.38 Special. It was loaded. Another drawer had a box of bullets and a knife, a big serrated hunting knife in an olive green sheath. Military issue. He found no jewelry box, nor anything like one.
In the drawer of the side table, Cooper found some cash, a spare set of keys, a gold chain, some women’s hair clips, a scuffed Yankees cap-but still no jewelry box. It began to occur to Cooper that Jim didn’t use condoms, not unless he kept them hidden in one hell of a hiding place.
He opened the closet, where he found the other half of the various pairs of shoes that Jim kept distributed across the rest of the house. Sweat suits, shorts, belts, shirts, a rolled poster-Cooper unfurling it to find a Sports Illustrated photograph of Tyra Banks in a bikini-boxes stacked in the bottom of the closet, some of them shoe boxes, Cooper pulling out the most accessible one and opening it, finding the only sign of life yet, a short stack of old snapshots, mainly of Jim on the beach with different black girls. Cooper moved a pair of broken sunglasses out of the way and saw something he thought Rhonda might consider a jewelry box: a bare pine cube about six inches across, lid secured with a hook and eyelet.
Inside were some identification cards, all with Jim’s picture but under a variety of names-driver’s license, a couple U.S. passports, some local picture IDs Cooper didn’t recognize. The names on the cards were Allan Rodriguez, Robert Jackson, James Haggood-Cooper thinking that could be the real version of Jim.
He spotted the flimsy chain peeking out from under the identification cards and pulled. The U.S. Navy dog tags that came out of the rubble displayed the engraved name of TRAVIS JAMES MALLOY.
Cooper took a moment to memorize all the names and numbers on the cards and the tags. He replaced them in their original order and walked out, trying to decide whether to refer to the man as Jim the Redheaded Albino Black, or whether he should switch up and just call him by his real name of Travis.
Jim, he thought, suits the man better.
He drove back to the Crowne Plaza, slept for ninety minutes, brewed some coffee at the minibar and drank it black while he shot for and caught a wireless signal with his PowerBook. He logged on to one of the seven secure law enforcement databases to which he had access and, twenty minutes later, made the discovery that Travis James Malloy packed quite a resumé.
A three-year-old picture of Jim, or Travis, stared out at Cooper from the computer screen, where, beside the picture, there ran a list of warrants, charges, and indictments that took him three minutes to read. Malloy was wanted for murder, rape, sodomy, sexual battery, armed robbery, aggravated assault, child molestation, and absence without official leave.
U.S. Navy AWOL.
Cooper saw that until four years ago, when the authorities had quit charging him with new crimes, Malloy had been a card-carrying member of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted. He’d fallen off the list after no leads had been found. Cooper read the rest of it, noting the sites of the alleged murders and rapes, figuring it meant that Malloy’s idea of a tour in the navy was to use the various ports of call for a serial rape-and-murder spree. He wondered whether there had been a similar series of murders and rapes in Kingston these past few years, but culling through the local missing persons and homicide case files didn’t jump out at him as a productive use of his time. You’re either a serial killer or you’re not, and he figured it for a good bet Travis James Malloy was a prolific one.
Cooper was getting to the end of his rope. Camping out in a rental car in Belle Acres, watching a ten-time serial killer screw a drugged-out anorexic hooker night in, night out-Christ, enough. He decided that if this guy didn’t give him something to go on in the next few days, he’d pay a visit to the U.S. embassy, ask a couple of marines to follow him back to Jimbo’s love nest, and retire from his position as private-eye-for-the-dead.
He downed the last of the coffee, gathered his gear, and headed out for another night of sex-machine surveillance.
That night Jim was paged twice.
At least that was how many times he took off in his minivan, destined for two pay phones in separate neighborhoods. He hadn’t sent Rhonda home either time, just slipped out, made a phone call, returned, and come back out an hour later to repeat the routine. Afterward, Cooper assumed his position in the Taurus outside the house while Jim slipped back inside and things returned to normal.
Cooper checked the clock on the dash-almost midnight, and midnight in Jamaica meant either eleven or midnight in Langley, he could never remember. Depended on the time of year. Either way, when two shots with his sat phone got nothing but her answering machine on the home line, Cooper made a third call to retrieve the number he was looking for, then tapped out the digits to Julie Laramie’s cell phone.
When Laramie answered, Cooper said, “How we doing, Lie Detector?”
Cooper could hear road noise from Laramie’s end of the line.
“Hello, Professor,” she said.
Cooper thought that she had to be wondering what he meant by that, why he was goofing around with her at all, but she wasn’t asking about any of it. Laramie: cool as a cucumber.
“You couldn’t be coming home from the office this late,” he said.
“Ah, but I could be. And am.”
“You skip dinner?”
“I had a salad from the commissary, if you must know.”