An apartment that seemed to know others would arrive there looking for answers.
On the bed, on top of the pillow, lay a brown face mask with holes for the eyes and mouth. In fact it was a complete head covering, including a full head of hair. On the blanket was a pair of thin brown gloves. They lay like the hands of a person lying in the bed would have laid.
Bob picked up the mask and looked at it more closely. Shuddered as he recognised the face with the scar on the cheek. At the back the skin was cut away low on the neck and up to the crown of the head, and there was a lace woven through perforations in the skin to make it easy to take on and off.
He ran his fingertips over the gloves of human skin and across the tattooed five-pointed star. He thought of Tomás Gomez’s fingerprints they had found at the crime scenes. On the handle of the restroom. It was all beginning to make sense now. Mike Lunde hadn’t escaped up through the ventilation shaft at the shopping mall, he had simply taken off the hoodie, the Gomez mask and the Gomez gloves. Probably put them in a bag which he hid under his jacket. Dismantled the rifle to make room for it too in the bag. With practice, the routine wouldn’t have taken more than a couple of minutes. After that he’d pulled down the fan, tossed one of Gomez’s insulin syringes into the ventilation shaft and then strolled out of the restroom like a quite ordinary white man out shopping, walking straight past Kay and the SWAT team. It was a trick he could repeat time after time without ever getting caught. Bob’ s gaze fell on a paper bag in front of the closet. It was from a well-known toy store, he recognised the logo — a boy wearing a mushroom for a hat. There was a branch right next to the restroom at Track Plaza. He looked inside. Lifted the scrunched-up sheet of gift wrapping. Out fell a pair of sunglasses, the same type as they’d seen Gomez wearing in the video recordings.
Bob looked at the cell phone. It was turned off. A police voice expert would be able to confirm that the recording of the alleged Tomás Gomez who called Mike Lunde was in reality Mike Lunde himself, standing in a phone booth and calling his own cell. That that explained why the breathing seemed to sound as if it was turning itself on and off.
Bob walked into the bathroom. Clean and tidy here too. He opened the door of the cupboard above the sink. The usual bathroom stuff. Several packs of brown contact lenses from different manufacturers. Of course. Have to get the eyes right.
On the bottom shelf Bob saw a familiar-looking tray of pills. Pink. Bob picked it up and read the long and unpronounceable name of the antidepressants. He read the doctor’s signature and the date. The tray should have been empty, and when Bob counted the number of pills left he concluded that Mike Lunde must have stopped taking them and that, coincidentally, he must have done so at about the same time as he stopped taking his own pills.
He walked back into the corridor, down the stairs and stopped in the doorway of the living room.
‘Find the bullets?’ asked Emily as she poured tea.
‘No,’ said Bob. ‘He took them with him. Did he say anywhere else he might be going, apart from the store?’
‘No. Where would that be?’
‘Yes, where would that be?’ Bob looked at the steaming hot tea on the counter in front of him. ‘So did he say what he was going to be doing today?’
‘Only that he would be unveiling his masterpiece. He’s been looking forward to that.’
Bob swallowed. ‘You know what, Emily? I see Mike left his cell phone in his room and I really need to get hold of him, so that tea is going to have to wait until another day.’
She looked up at him, smiling and rather surprised. ‘Of course, Bob. Any time.’
Bob ran out to his car, the sound of the mower screeching in his ears, his pulse hammering like a speeded-up watch.
46
Enter, October 2016
Brenton Walker was looking at Kevin Patterson’s back as he stood by the opening of the drape, ready to mount the podium and be greeted by the cheers and the sunshine. He was going to be introduced over the loudspeaker as soon as the next musical offering ended. Patterson raised and lowered his shoulders, he rolled his neck like a boxer getting ready for a fight, fastened a button on his suit jacket, unfastened it, fastened it again. Walker’s seething sense of disquiet had started to abate, perhaps because there was now no way back and it was too late to do anything about anything they might have overlooked. That was a lesson Brenton’s father had taught him: the need to accept things you cannot change. It was advice his father himself never followed, and that caused his downfall as a local politician.
The band was still playing out there, the crowd singing along.
‘Ten seconds please,’ said a man wearing a headset. ‘Break a leg, Mr Mayor.’
Springer was standing next to Walker. His walkie-talkie crackled into life and a grating voice spoke: ‘Foxtrot, I see a male, white, age around fifty, about five foot nine, entering one of the private boxes.’
Walker saw Springer’s face turn pale as he picked up the walkie-talkie and spoke quietly into it: ‘Do you have a sighting on him, Foxtrot?’
‘No, he disappeared into the back of the box, into the darkness.’
‘Listen up!’ Springer shouted into the room. ‘There is someone up in one of the boxes. Does anyone know how this happened or who this person is?’
There was silence all around Walker. All that could be heard was the sound of the band and the crowd singing. And the man in the headset who was talking into his microphone:
‘Norma? Be a sweetie and see if you can get the band to do one more number. Something has, er... come up back here.’
47
Red Light, October 2016
Bob drove as fast as he dared — and as fast as the Volvo managed — along the highway to the city centre.
He drove with one hand and held his cell in the other. Yes, he wished he had a pistol. Yes, he wished he had a Kojak light. Yes, he wished he had a better brain and had deciphered the writing on the wall earlier. When she took the call he could hear she was running.
‘What’s happening, Kay?’
‘I’m headed for my car. I’ve made a few calls and done some checking and it looks like the house in the forest is owned by a group of artists who practise something they call rogue taxidermy. I just spoke with one of them and she told me that after they rented new premises in the city the place out at Cedar Creek has hardly been used. I asked about the refrigerated room, and she said a number of the artists used it, including this Emily Lunde, the woman who owns the booth with the body in it.’
‘Emily Lunde?’
‘Lives out in Chanhassen. I’m sending a patrol car out there now.’
‘Don’t do that. Not... yet anyway. She probably isn’t involved.’
‘Oh?’
‘She’s the sister of the man we’re looking for. His name is Mike Lunde. Emily Lunde is confined to a wheelchair, she can’t have been out in a forest with no tracks through it in years. Mike Lunde is the one who’s been using that booth.’
‘Who is Mike Lunde?’
‘A taxidermist. He’s been wearing a Tomás Gomez mask.’
Bob waited and let that sink in, let her brain trace the line from the flayed body and Tomás Gomez on the security videos.
‘Jesus,’ Kay whispered, as though not daring to say it out loud. ‘Are you saying that—’
‘Yeah. He’s been using Tomás Gomez’s face and hands.’
‘But... where is he now?’