CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Chen had a cousin who was a deputy manager at Chop Lee, New York’s most famous Cantonese restaurant, and he’d kindly arranged a table for the three of them at short notice.
Amid the choreographed mayhem of the busy room, they took their seats round a circular table, and swore a solemn vow not to discuss work.
A waiter came over with three Tsing Tao beers and cracked them open.
After checking with her colleagues, Chen handed the menus back and told the waiter to bring whatever was good today. He went away.
And they immediately started talking about work.
‘Bad news about our delivery-drivers,’ Kate began. ‘You remember, the upstairs neighbor LaForge picked out two possibles from the line-up?’
They nodded, Marcus doing so in mid-swallow.
‘The first one is putting himself through college. And he was at that college all day Friday from 7.00 am to 7 pm. Several witnesses.’
‘What’s he studying?’ Marcus asked.
‘Criminology.’
‘Everyone’s an expert, huh? And the other one?’
‘Had a crash riding his wheels home on Thursday night. They can rent mopeds from the company, but he had been driving his own. Whilst that was in the garage being mended, he leased a company one, for which purpose he had to go to the company’s technical base in Poughkeepsie.
He’s got a rail ticket for the outward journey, documentation for the lease, the mechanics in ‘kipsie remember him. So that’s a whole angle shut down. ’
‘Let’s call it one less thing to worry about,’ Marcus said. They drank to that. On the other side of the room, a group started singing ‘Happy Birthday’. Meanwhile, the waiter brought over a rack of pork-ribs, red as candy. It felt odd to be talking murders in this setting.
‘On the subject of mugshots,’ said Chen, ‘What are we going to do about the sculptures?’
‘Ursula Blackstone’s response was… interesting,’ Kate said. ‘Unexpected, anyway. But I don’t know how much to read into it. She seemed to recognize them, and then changed her mind.’
‘The question is: did she think they were her brother’s handiwork and then realise she was mistaken?’ Marcus pondered. ‘Or did she clam up because she realised they are her brother’s work?’
‘And if they are, does that automatically make him the killer?’ Kate added.
‘I’m still wondering if the killer and the statue-maker are one person, or a team,’ Marcus said. ‘Maybe an unwitting team.’
Stacks of giant prawns arrived, lightly fried in oil and garlic. The waiter gave them a lightning-fast demo of how they were to be eaten: wrapped in a lettuce leaf, dipped in a bowl of sweet chili sauce, swallowed in one go. They didn’t hold back.
‘Would there be a way of telling whether the crime scene sculptures are Ray’s work?’ Marcus asked, through a mouthful.
‘The Bureau’s Art and Antiques unit might be able to tell,’ Kate said.
‘They’ve got as much kit as a city hospital.
X-rays, isotope analysis, MRI scans, spectography…
But all these tests take time. We’ll need Winters to light a fire under them.
It would help if the Blackstone family had an example or two of Ray’s work, because then they could do a direct comparison with the statues left at the crime scenes. I’ll get onto that.’
‘It would help if we could establish for sure whether Ray Blackstone is alive or dead,’ said Marcus.
‘We need to get a computer-generated version of what he’d look like today, and circulate it nationally, internationally via Interpol.
Also liaise with the Mexican Feds. See what’s become of the Baja cult, or commune, or whatever it is.
I’ve got a contact based in La Paz who owes me a favour, I’ll talk to him. ’
Razor clams came next, covered in a rich black bean sauce, and scallops, wrapped in just a whisp of spring onion and ginger. Kate wondered how many dishes were still to come.
‘What’s everybody’s gut view?’ Chen asked.
‘Ask my gut when it’s stopped expanding,’ Marcus quipped.
‘Seriously, I think it’s very easy to be reminded of things or people when they matter to you.
I see one of the guys I was in Afghanistan with, once a month or so, at least. I mean, I don’t.
I know he’s dead. But because he matters to me, I. ..’
He shrugged and busied himself with his food. Marcus very rarely talked about his time with the SEALS. When he did, it was always like this: a stray fragment, followed by silence.
A whole sea bass then appeared on a china platter; the waiter expertly whipping it off the bone with nothing more than a pair of chopsticks. It made Kate, who could barely get a chunk of food into her mouth with the traditional Chinese implements, feel somewhat sheepish.
‘I struggle to imagine Ray Blackstone being alive all this time and not troubling his family,’ Kate said. ‘His own sister said that.’
'I disagree there,' Chen said. 'People can change drastically.
Like one of my uncles? He was like that: always getting in trouble, broke all the time, in and out of relationships, and the courthouse.
One day, he just met the right girl, and everything kind of settled into place for him. What if that's Ray?'
‘So then… what? He’s got his act together, but he’s become a serial killer?’ Marcus asked.
‘We’re just trying to establish whether he’s alive or dead,’ Kate said. ‘Then we can worry about his connection to the sculptures and the killings.’
Suddenly, Marcus’s phone buzzed. He looked at the screen, his expression instantly changing. Without a word to his companions, he picked up the phone and walked out with it.
‘What’s that about?’ Chen asked, as yet more dishes arrived on a trolley. There seemed to be greens in a pale, garlicky sauce, a whole duck, a staggering quantity of dumplings.
Kate shrugged. She had a suspicion about Marcus’s sudden exit, but she didn’t share it. ‘So you’re a believer in “the love of a good woman”, I guess?’
‘I think people change in relationships,’ Chen said. ‘And I think sometimes, all the stuff that’s gone on before – all the trouble they’ve been getting into – it’s because they haven’t sought out the right people to be with. Once they do… they can change dramatically.’
'I can see that,' Kate said. 'But it only ever seems to be one way. It's always some poor, exhausted saintly woman putting everything on the line to fix some messed-up guy. No one ever talks about "the love of a good man", do they? Most guys are too selfish to get involved.'
Chen gave a kind of non-commital nod; not agreeing, not not agreeing. She glanced around. ‘Speaking of… Do you think Marcus is coming back? I’m pretty darned hungry but I don’t think we can eat all of this!’
She received an answer, though not the one she wanted, a few moments later, when Marcus strode back in, his jaw set tight, his eyes troubled.
‘Guys, I hate to do this. But I’ve got to leave you to it.’
‘What’s happened?’ Kate asked.
‘I can make it back to Portland in five hours,’ he said, distractedly. ‘I’ve only had one beer.’
‘Marcus. What’s going on?’
He blinked, as if suddenly noticing Kate was there. ‘It’s Cheryl,’ he said. ‘She’s been in an accident.’
+ + + + + +
Kate actually enjoyed working Sundays. There was something almost cozy about a field office over the weekend.
There was no constant rat-a-tat-tat of keyboards, no ringing of phones, no slammed doors or tardy elevators.
If you brewed a pot of coffee, you stood a very good chance of being able to drink it yourself.
If you had a task to accomplish, then it was your fault if you didn't finish it; no one else's.
And a more uncomfortable truth: Kate didn’t really know what to do with herself when she wasn’t working.
Sundays still carried the ghosts of her childhood, that leaden feeling in the pit of her stomach as she packed textbooks and gym kit into her backpack.
She hadn’t disliked school – there’d been a couple of mean girls here and there, but nothing she couldn’t handle.
The problem had always been with leaving home.
Her mom and dad had made home such a nice place for their only daughter, so warm and safe and loving, that she didn’t ever want to leave.
Maybe that was part of the reason why she was still living there, most of the time.
But she couldn’t exactly blame her parents for that.
What should they have done: be less nice?
She sighed and returned to her tasks. She’d achieved a lot since arriving at the office two hours ago, but the list was long. Top of the pile was making contact with Marcus, but she knew she could only push that so far. First thing this morning, she’d sent him a message:
Hope all is ok. Let me know. Kx
But she had to leave the ball in his court now.
She was aware what the mind – her own, post-traumatically stress-disordered mind, anyway – got up to when there was a lack of information.
She dialled it up to eleven. Imagined the absolute worst. Cheryl was dead.
Marcus, like some latter-day Romeo, had committed suicide over her fallen body.
It was laughable the way she did this. Well, it ought to be laughable.
But whether she knew she was being ridiculous or not, all that stress still did the same damage.
It wore grooves in the surface of her brain, making it that much easier to imagine further catastrophes, the next time she found herself in a comparable situation.