Blackbird. Tom Wright
they did, it was probably on purpose – ’
‘ – so why? What’s the message? And who’s it for?’
‘If I could figure out that last one it’d probably tell me who did it.’ I told her we’d found out Gold got a call from a pre-paid phone around eight the night she was taken. The conversation had ended at 8.19 p.m. after eight minutes and a couple of seconds. Gold had then left the house and gone to her office, checking with the call centre from there at 8.44, no messages. Her purse, snapped shut and apparently unrobbed, had been left on a corner of the receptionist’s desk, the front office lights still on and Gold’s green BMW parked unlocked in front of the office door.
‘All they wanted was her,’ LA said. ‘Better bet they showed up in something like a utility van.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Nothing unusual in or close to her car. No fingerprint results yet, but I doubt they even touched it – no reason to unless they were going to steal it. All the back rooms, Dr Gold’s office included, were locked and dark when the secretary came in the next morning.’
‘What about the husband?’
‘He’s younger than her, runs a computer and data-service company that’s doing okay financially. Can you profile something like this?’
‘Not like you see on TV,’ she said. ‘Even when you can, all you usually end up with is “white male, twenty-five to thirty-five, not good with relationships”, yakkity-yak. Try getting a warrant with that.’
‘Well, with you on the case we’re takin’ our game up a notch, right?’
She was silent for a few seconds, which I spent looking at the pictures above the mantel. Then she said, ‘I’m coming to see you.’
‘Hey, great,’ I said. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘Nothing. I’m signed up for a conference in Miami, and I’m taking a week off before that.’
‘To do what?’
‘Pay you a visit, what else?’ she said. ‘Horn-in on your cases – car chases, explosions, trading quips while you cuff the perps.’
‘Where’s all that coming from?’
‘Prime time,’ she said. ‘Think you’re the only one who’s got a TV?’
‘What if I signed you on as a consultant?’ I said.
‘Well . . . ’ she said, like somebody looking a used car over, which told me two things: one, she was not going to need any more persuading, and two, she would now name her real price. ‘Okay, here’s the deal,’ she said. ‘I’ll make it a week if you’ll weld some bookends for my office – that credenza behind my desk.’
‘Weld?’
‘Yeah, with your blowtorch. Like that stuff you used to make with the ragged edges.’
‘Acetylene torch,’ I said.
‘Okay, acetylene,’ she said. ‘If that’s what flips your fritters.’
On a farm or ranch the number-two rule – number one being: never trust the weather – is that everything breaks, meaning that to be useful around the Flying S as a kid I had to learn basic cutting and welding. I still kept an oxyacetylene rig and an old Lincoln buzz-box in my backyard workshop where I sometimes roughed out odds and ends like makeshift trivets, doorstops, paperweights – even a pair of candleholders that from a certain angle looked a little like the Grand Tetons – out of scrap metal as a way of clearing my head. Jana liked them and used them for bookends, garden sculpture or just general decoration.
‘Your soul and your hands understand line and mass better than you do,’ she’d said with that quirky little smile of hers.
I visualised LA’s office and the oak credenza, directly under a skylight, where she kept the leather-bound TS Eliots Gram had left her, held up by a few other volumes stacked as bookends. Rough-cut steel wouldn’t look bad there.
‘Done,’ I said. ‘But how about saying a few psychological words, just to convince me I’m not making a mistake here.’
She snorted. ‘I’ll see what I can do with your dead psychologist, Sherlock,’ she said. ‘But meantime, how about emailing me the stuff you’ve got so far – give me a chance to look it all over before I come calling.’
When we’d said our goodbyes I thumbed the phone off and dropped it in my shirt pocket, feeling like the guy who’d just closed on Manhattan for a sack of beads.
I grabbed a can of Dos Equis from the fridge, still gloating but a little bothered by a sense that I was forgetting something. But nothing came to me, so I sat back down to think some more about Deborah Gold. I wondered if she’d felt safe in the world. My theory was that only people who were definitely good-hearted or completely evil really did – you either expected the universe to abide by the Golden Rule in its dealings with you because that’s what you’d do in its place, or, if you were bad enough, you didn’t worry about it because you just didn’t believe in consequences and expected fate to be as untrustworthy as you anyway. On the other hand, people of the middle ground, the best I could give myself credit for, were apparently doomed to a life of apprehension and doubt.
But it seemed to me Dr Gold’s exit from the mortal stage had another dimension. It was like a scenario fast-forwarded through the bloody centuries from the ironically named Holy Land, the long arm of Caesar reaching across time to punish some unknown treason –
This stopped me.
Reaching across time –
The words repeated themselves in my mind, something in them buzzing with danger, somehow bringing back the stark image of Bragg Field at the centre of an infinitely cold darkness spreading away in every direction and to the ends of the earth.
If you believe the books, a criminal always leaves something at the scene of the crime and always takes something away. In this case the trade was a Roman coin for a tongue, but I couldn’t put together any plausible explanation for either the coin’s presence or the tongue’s absence, much less figure out what the two had to do with each other.
Across time – why that? I had no idea, but all of it carried an irresistible feeling of meaning and connectedness. Vaguely remembering something I’d come across somewhere about Carl Jung and synchronicity, and putting that together with bits and pieces I’d heard about quantum indeterminacy, I wondered if it was actually possible, maybe down at the level of quarks and bosons, for causality to work differently in different situations or at different times.
Watching Mutt continue his grooming at the kitchen entry, I suddenly remembered what I’d been forgetting. Jonas. Checking the time, I decided it wasn’t too late. Mutt strolled over to make a couple of figure-eight passes against my leg as I reached for the phone and punched in numbers. He was a cruiserweight of the housecat world but he jumped to my lap as weightlessly as Tinker Bell and gave me his chronically amazed expression. I stroked his thick black fur absent-mindedly, hearing and feeling the resultant rumbling purr as I waited for Jonas to pick up.
‘McCashion,’ said Jonas’ voice.
We traded greetings, with no questions from him about Jana and the girls, then he said, ‘Got a new one for you: student of mine’s named Giles Selig.’ Jonas spelled it for me. ‘Middle name’s got three letters – what is it?’
I thought about it for a minute, listening to the busy clicking of his keyboard as he worked on something, probably lecture notes.
‘Asa,’ I said.
‘You son of a bitch!’ he yelped. ‘How the hell do you do that?’
‘Nothing else came to mind but Bob and Gig. They didn’t seem to fit.’
‘Damn,’ he sighed. ‘So what’s up, JB?’
‘I want a