Page 56 of The Drowned Woman
“What wharf? Here in Cambria City?”
“Pier three—no, no, pier four.” Luka closed his eyes, straining to remember. He’d just finished his field training, was only days patrolling solo. “Sanchez can you pull that area up on the screen?”
The tech tapped his keyboard and a Google Earth image appeared. “It was fourteen years ago,” Luka said, scrutinizing the image. “A college kid OD’d outside a warehouse on the wharf. His friends thought he was dead and ditched him. I found him, gave him Narcan, but while we were waiting for the medics, he freaked out, jumped into the water. Almost drowned. I had to fish him out.” He pointed to the spot on the image. “Here. Right here. First time I had my picture in the paper.” First time anyone called him a hero.
“Pull up any CCTV from that area,” McKinley ordered as he called his team.
“Just a few traffic cams, but they’re over a block away,” Sanchez said. “This is the best I can do.” The image shifted, revealing the street that ran along the wharf, but no clear image of the pier. “Wait. Let me scan the recent traffic.”
On the screen the man still struggled, fighting to keep his head above the water. It crept up his neck, relentless.
“How could he get a car onto the pier and dump it in the river with no one seeing?” Krichek asked. “It may be Saturday, but there are still workers down there and it’s broad daylight. Someone would have seen something.”
“Nothing on traffic cams in the area,” Sanchez put in. “No black Town Cars down there anytime this morning.”
Damn. Another wild goose chase. Luka turned away. He’d failed, just like he’d failed Cherise. All he could do was act as a futile witness.
The car lurched, the water surging. There were still three minutes on the clock when the water lapped up over the camera lens and the screen went black.
Thirty-Three
Luka couldn’t remember ever feeling so useless. McKinley and his men were out searching, Sanchez had called in his fellow techs to analyze every frame of the video as well as Risa’s electronics, while Krichek was coordinating the various warrants they’d need along with maintaining communication with all the jurisdictions now involved in the search for Dominic Massimo.
“Luka? Are they close? Any word?” Leah asked. He’d almost forgotten she was still on the phone line.
“Nothing, no sightings. They’re widening the search. I should have known he wouldn’t make it easy, use the same spot where Cherise—” As Luka glanced around the room at the men busy trying to save a stranger’s life, he realized that maybe he was the one who stood at a distance. As if a sudden chasm separated the rest of the world from him. He’d had this feeling before. After Cherise died.
“Maybe when the car lurched the water rose where the camera was but lowered on his side?” Leah suggested, pulling his focus back to the here and now. “If there was an air pocket, he could still be alive. They aren’t giving up, are they?”
“No. McKinley has his men searching here and the staties and guys over in Lewisburg will keep looking there as well. But there’s a lot of rivers, streams, lakes to cover and it’s starting to feel like he’s leading us on a wild goose chase.”
“Which means he’s loving all this. Probably has a police scanner, is following what you’re doing,” Leah said, the frustration filling her voice matching his own.
“McKinley is sending Harper over with a warrant for all of Risa’s electronics and a full search of her apartment. She’ll need to come in for an interview. Make sure she doesn’t try to play Nancy Drew and hold out on us, will you?”
“After that video, believe me, she wants to help,” Leah reassured him. “What if the killer comes after her? Can you place her in protective custody or something?”
“No. Sorry. We don’t have the budget for that. Not unless she wants to camp out in my office, since I’m not using it for the duration. How’s she doing?”
“She was sick all night—it sounds like nicotine poisoning to me. I’d like to take her to the ER to be tested.”
How the hell could someone have reached Risa last night? Luka wondered. Vogel had been long gone by then. Krichek and Harper had searched the apartment, removed the two cameras they’d found, and hadn’t found any other surveillance equipment, plus there had been patrolmen inside the Falconer all night. Maybe the poison had already been inside the apartment? He made a note to have the techs test Risa’s food once they got the search warrant. “Is she okay?”
“Yes, pretty much all the symptoms are gone now.”
“Go ahead, get her tested and checked out. But make it quick. Stay with her, document everything. I’ll talk to McKinley, see if he’ll let you take the lead with her interview. She’ll respond to you better than him.”
Leah hung up, leaving Luka with nothing to do other than to think, to try to gain perspective and see where they’d gone wrong. Sanchez and the other techs ignored him as he continued to pace the cramped cyber squad quarters, but every time he caught a glimpse of footage of the trapped man replaying on their screens, it only frustrated him more, so he finally fled outside where he’d have room to think.
It was hard to believe that a sky this vibrant and blue could also be sheltering a wanton killer, he thought as he turned his face to the sun, allowing the warmth to sink deep into his skin. When he looked down again, he noticed the secret gardener’s bedraggled attempt at inviting color into the drab surroundings. His mind racing, shifting through the various permutations of the case, he grabbed the small folding shovel he kept in the toolbox in his truck bed and carefully sifted through the debris covering the flowers. Hard work was the best way to declutter a busy mind, his gran used to tell him before setting him to work at Jericho Fields. He could almost smell the sweet-vinegary perfume of apples in the cider press even now.
The tiny flowers emerged, a few stems broken, but most of them simply bowed beneath the weight of the debris from the overflowing roof gutters. Again, that sensation of being distanced from the physical world threatened to overwhelm Luka. If Dom died… No, he couldn’t think like that. He’d done everything in his power to save the man.
But had he? Chaos obviously thought either Luka or Risa should be clever enough to unravel the riddle in his text. Maybe it wasn’t about something in their past, but something in the present? He crouched and finished with his fingers, lifting each bloom and leaf above the mud, then using the dead leaves to support the flowers. The whole job only took a few minutes, but by the time he finished it almost looked like a proper flower bed.
He returned the shovel to his truck and was walking back to the building when a glint of sunlight bouncing off a vehicle mirror caught his eye. A reflection, misdirection. What had Leah said last night? About control?
Chaos was controlling, manipulating them all now. Directing—no, misdirecting—them to look where he wanted them to look.Welcome to the endgame, his message said. As if this was a game of chess, with people’s lives sacrificed like pawns. Luka opened the door back into the building, and missed the warmth of the sun instantly.
