“When I got home, there was a phone message that she’d left earlier. Kate wanted me to get ahold of her, no matter what time it was. There was something in her voice that worried me. She also mentioned an e-mail that she’d sent. I couldn’t find it.”
If O’Reilly thought that his last observation was significant, he didn’t show it. Instead, the detective looked Luke up and down while tapping his upper teeth with a pencil. Then he said to one of the patrol officers, “Take the cuffs off.”
A watchfulness lingered in O’Reilly’s eyes, but he seemed to conclude that one unarmed man wasn’t a threat to three armed officers.
Luke gave them no reason to think otherwise.
O’Reilly asked several more questions about Kate’s personal habits — was she the type to drive without a purse or license, how much cash did she usually carry, did she wear expensive rings or jewelry? Whoever had killed her probably took her purse, together with her license and keys. The police had staked out her address on the chance that Kate’s killer might be brazen enough to try and ransack her home.
“Anything else you can tell me?” the detective said. “Anything that I haven’t asked you about?”
Luke looked back at the house, then at O’Reilly. “Two things you should know about Kate Tartaglia. She never left a light on — ever. And she never drew the curtain over that front window that I can remember.”
The cop’s right eyebrow arched, as if Luke had just offered his first useful tidbit. If this was a simple robbery-homicide, the thug had gotten to Kate’s house before the police unit.
Had some two-bit punk snuffed out Kate’s life for a petty haul he’d sell on the street for a few hundred bucks?
For all of Luke’s disillusionment with the choices she’d made, the thought that her life had ended in this way sickened him.
“Dr. Tartaglia’s phone message,” the detective said. “Did you save it?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t erase it.” He handed Luke a business card. “And when you find that e-mail, I’d like to see it.”
Calderon’s muscles were beginning to burn from crouching in the rear of their green van. He ignored the pain and adjusted the focus of his Kowa TSN-821M spotting scope. The man in handcuffs was a block and a half away, but he filled the lens.
“Bang-bang, McKenna,” he whispered. “You’re dead.”
“You say something?” Mr. Kong asked from the driver’s seat.
“Just thinking out loud.”
It had been eleven — no, twelve — years since he’d been this close to the spineless cockroach. He could take him out now, and the cops around him, but that would draw unwanted attention.
Killing McKenna would have to wait. Besides, when the time came he wanted McKenna to know that it was he, Calderon, who was annihilating him. The right time would come, and anticipating the kill would make it all the more satisfying. After everything that McKenna had taken from him, he felt he deserved whatever small pleasures he could squeeze from the moment.
McKenna had never belonged in Proteus. He was an Annapolis boy who couldn’t stomach the work and got in the way of those who could. The shitty little coward had blindsided him — Calderon could still hear his ACL snapping, his knee a crumpled mess — all because McKenna didn’t have the spine to let him do what was necessary to pry information from one of their captives.
Just like that, Calderon was damaged goods, no longer a perfect physical specimen. After seven years of giving everything he had to the U.S. military, he was out and that was that. Thank you for your service to our country, Staff Sergeant. Now get lost and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
He had kept the incident a private matter. It seemed the smart thing to do. But then, how could he have known that two months after the cockroach ruined his military career, the ripples from McKenna’s gutless cheap shot would take the only other thing that mattered in his life — his mother, Rosa Valenzuela Calderon.
His mother, always the worrier, had taken on extra cleaning jobs when he returned home to Oklahoma with a limp and no job. She didn’t know that he already had plans to put his specialized skills to work in the private sector.
Oh, Mamácita. Calderon kissed his thumb and traced an X over his heart.
At a time in her life when she should have been slowing down, his mother had added two overnight shifts to her already exhausting fifty-hour-a-week daytime schedule. Thanks to that miserable cockroach, she was in the basement of an industrial park office building one evening when a tornado blew away half of it and brought down the rest of the structure, burying her alive under a pile of rubble.
Rescue teams had decided that it was too dangerous to attempt an extraction from her building. It was deemed “too unstable.” At least, that’s what the scrawny little government bureaucrat had told him. So they left his mother to suffocate and die in the collapsed wreckage, left her there like some piece of garbage.
Calderon rubbed his knee as he worked to control his breathing, quiet his rage. A year after his military discharge, the knee had completely healed but not his heart. Never his heart.
McKenna had killed his mother, just as if he’d stuck a knife in her.
Even after doing what needed to be done to avenge his mother’s death, the pain had stayed with him like radioactive waste. He had learned to recycle the pain, to use it in his work. He stoked it like a flame, kept it burning like a hellfire, knowing that the right time would come. He had waited twelve years to settle up with the sonofabitch. It was time.
The only reason that Calderon had taken the job of managing security for the Guatemalan project was its connection to McKenna. As soon as his client had mentioned the name McKenna during their initial discussion — albeit a reference to the cockroach’s father — Calderon had known that he would accept the assignment. Of course, the client knew nothing of his connection to Elmer McKenna’s son. Telling his client would only have raised unnecessary questions and concerns.
Calderon grabbed the cell phone. After a minute of pulsing tones and hissing, the encryption code synced and his call connected. “I have the items you asked for.”
“Good,” his client said.
“What do you want done with it?” Calderon surveyed the objects strewn across the van’s scuffed floorboard: Tartaglia’s laptop computer, a box filled with flash drives and CDs, a digital camera, and enough jewelry and stereo equipment to make it look like an unfocused robbery. While he had been busy eliminating the woman, his assistant, Mr. Kong, had swept her house. Asians were good at that sort of work.
“Save the laptop and the data files,” his client said. “I need to determine what she knew, and what she didn’t.” A pause, then, “Destroy everything else.”
“Any other loose ends?”
“None,” his client replied. “She was all alone in this. We’re sure of that.”
Calderon had come to the same conclusion while interrogating the Tartaglia woman in the final moments of her life. Her eyes never moved from the sound suppressor on his handgun, her voice choked off in fear. Her terror was complete, her honesty virtually assured. She had nodded at his reassurances — if she told the truth and gave him what he wanted, he would let her live. She probably hadn’t believed him, but people grabbed at straws in the face of death.
In any case, the truth was what he got from her. He knew the inflection of truth, its gestures, its cadence. More importantly, the information she gave him matched what he and his client already knew. She told him about her visit to the village, about the serum samples she had collected, about talking to her boss.