‘Well, let’s do it,’ I say.
Opolo looks at me, makes a face like okay.
With the appearance of the courier, the shooting at the cemetery, the longer we wait, the greater the risk that Kathy and George Merlow are going to run. My biggest fear at this moment is that we will find an empty house, the Merlows and their bags gone.
A minute later we’re up the road, cars screaming to a halt in front of the house, a small bungalow built off the ground on pilings, a corrugated metal roof. What the locals call a plantation house.
The cop cars have their light bars blazing. Opolo and the two agents are up the front steps. One of them is carrying a small battering ram from the trunk of the car.
The cops hoof it around the house to cover the back.
Opolo pounds on the door hard enough to cause it to bow in its frame. His gun isn’t drawn, but he’s holding it inside his coat by the grip.
Dana and I have been told to stay at the foot of the steps.
‘FBI. Open the door.’
No answer.
He pounds one more time and waits just a few seconds.
He tries the doorknob. It’s locked. He motions to the other agents.
They take the battering ram, a four-inch-diameter metal pipe loaded with concrete, and swing it between them. The forces of momentum send the door flying in an arc on its hinges, splintered wood and broken metal at the lock.
Caught up in the rhythm of the chase, Dana and I move to the top of the steps.
Opolo looks at us. ‘Stay here.’
He and another of the agents are inside, guns drawn.
‘FBI. Federal agents. If you’re in here, let’s hear it.’
They’re moving through the rooms, flipping on lights. Through a window on the porch I can see them edging for angles with drawn pistols in doorways. A few seconds later one of the cops comes through from the back of the house.
‘Nobody,’ he says. A lot of frenetic movement as they hit the last few cubbyholes where anyone could hide.
Opolo waves us in, holstering his pistol.
‘If they were here, they’re gone,’ he says. ‘And it looks like they left in a hurry.’
My worst fear.
He leads us into the kitchen. One of the cops has turned off the burner on the stove. A pan of rice is burned to a crisp, long grains charred the dark color of some exotic African ant.
One of the agents comes down the hall. ‘I don’t get it. If they left, why didn’t they take their clothes?’
I look at him.
‘Closet’s full,’ he says. ‘Their bags are on a shelf, up in the closet, empty.’
‘I may have the answer.’ A voice from the other room, deeper in the house, down the hall. We move toward the sound. One of the cops is in the doorway to a small room at the end of the hall, the door half open.
He steps aside and lets us through, Opolo first, followed by Dana and myself.
I hear the guy whispering to the other cops outside. ‘No bodies,’ he says, ‘but lots of blood.’
The room is streaked with it, what forensics would call spatter evidence, on the walls and the ceiling. The bed has a dark pool at the low point where the mattress is worn in the middle. This has yet to congeal, though most of it has soaked into the mattress.
At the foot of the bed is a single item of clothing, stained with blood. One of the arms is ripped, jagged tears in the upper back, like maybe it has been punctured by a knife or some other sharp implement. It is a coat of many colors.
Besides the brown hue of drying blood there are specks of pastel and dried blue acrylic on the silk kimono, the duster worn for painting this afternoon by Kathy Merlow.
Chapter 16
It was only by my plea of ignorance to things domestic in the law that I was allowed to remain on the spectators’ side of the bar in Laurel’s brawl with Jack over custody. This morning I find myself in the unenviable position of being dragged to the other side and up onto the witness stand.
The veins in my eyes look like threads of red dye that someone spilled into egg whites. I’ve been back three days from the islands, but with little time to sleep. Harry and I have been burning the oil trying to piece together a defense. It is a patch quilt of theories, what we know from my conversation with Marcie Reed, and what I can surmise from the facts as we know them.
This without the critical information that might have been obtained from George or Kathy Merlow. According to the FBI, their best guess is that the Merlows are now serving as fish food, somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific. I have been given little information other than this.
For two days Dana has been grilling me on my meeting with Kathy Merlow. Over coffee and at lunch she has been relentless, going over every aspect of my recollection of the brief conversation. The FBI has interviewed me, obtained descriptions, and had me look through endless mug shots on the off-chance of finding the courier who delivered the letter bomb. On all counts we have struck out.
Dana was not so much angry when I told of my foray to the little cemetery near Hana, as probing for an opening, something to get her teeth into on the bombing, some lead. This crime now looms big in Capital City as details have been made known in the press. She demanded to know what Kathy Merlow had told me, and at first seemed skeptical when I told her that she never had time to tell me anything. On matters pertaining to her office, Dana is dogged.
Yesterday she had a long telephone conversation with Jessie Opolo in Hawaii. She now seems more convinced than I that Jack is at the root of Melanie’s murder, and that the bombing and the fate of the Merlows are the tangled result of some witless crime, a daisy chain of inept violence, what some people do when confronted by panic. She seems so convinced of this that I wonder if Dana knows something that I do not.
‘Raise your right hand.’
‘Do you solemnly swear…?’
We do the routine and I take the stand.
Alex Hastings is on the bench, the judge of mangled marriages.
Jack’s lawyer, Daryl Westaby, is eyeing me with beady dark pupils. He is an out-of-towner from the Bay Area, a major hired gun, one of the legal thugs of family law who can transform the most rational parties to a divorce into a raging funeral pyre of domestic animosity. At this moment Jack is at the counsel table, whispering in his lawyer’s ear, pouring verbal venom like liquid nitrogen into Westaby, about to light the fuse and send him my way.
Laurel is not here for these proceedings, but she is represented. Harry is at the counsel table. The only man in Capital City who knows less about family law than I do. Still, if Harry doesn’t know the law, he has a willing fist to pound on the table and the wits to drop sand in the gears at the appropriate time.
I am subpoenaed here this morning because Danny and Julie Vega have disappeared, gone, kaput, vanished. They left with only a note to Jack telling him that they would not return until this mess over custody between their parents was finished. Between the lines Danny made it clear that he would not live with his father.
I have no idea where they have gone. My only complicity in this is that somehow Danny’s Vespa, with its locked wooden box on the back, has been left in my garage. It is a sore point since Sarah asks me about Danny each time she sees this, and has been playing, sitting up on its seat at every opportunity.
Hastings is concerned. His initial order for temporary custody seemed the only rational recourse, given that Laurel is in jail. Today the judge seems shaken by the disappearance of the kids.
Jack is frantic, not so much out of worry, as with knowledge that, somehow from her cell, Laurel has engineered this. Jack has spent a million dollars in legal and expert-witness fees to screw her, and Laurel has, with a quarter and a phone call, creamed him. If I had to venture a guess, which I am not required to do here under oath, it is that the kids are probably playing in the snow — visions of Laurel’s friend in Michigan, the one she told me about when she called on the phone that day from Reno.