Ada arrived in a Mercedes S-Class, matt black with gold rims. The teenagers who had scammed me for the slushie were across the street, pacing and chatting and planning their next ingenious caper, and they stopped at the sight of the car, staring. I was surprised to see Fred and Mike slip from the back seat of the long, wide vehicle. More still when Sneak climbed out of the front passenger seat.
‘I found this dummy trying to hitch a ride on Virgil.’ Ada jerked her thumb backwards towards Sneak as the group walked in. ‘I half expected her to give Fred a hand job when she got in.’
‘I made it,’ Sneak muttered to me, coming to my side. ‘Let the record show I got into a car with Ada Maverick and got out again, alive. You sell lottery tickets?’
‘I’m here to talk to you about this,’ Ada said to me. She put a hand out and Mike passed her a large folded sheet of paper. She swept an arm across my counter, knocking cardboard displays of Chokitos and Baby Ruths onto the floor to make room for herself. Without asking, Fred took a Snickers from the shelf under the window, peeled open the top and started eating it. Ada weighed down the piece of paper at the corners. Sneak and I leaned in. It was a United States Geological Survey map of downtown San Chinto. I took a moment to examine the different levels of lines, sailing blue topographical isolines slashed through with the thin black outlines of properties and streets, red marks that could have been powerlines or gas.
‘Where’d you get this?’ I asked Ada, glancing at the parking lot to check for any incoming customers.
‘These guys found it at Officer Marcus Lemon’s apartment,’ Ada said, smoothing out the map.
‘I’m sorry.’ I blinked. ‘Where?’
‘I had them break into his apartment,’ Ada said. ‘You told me he was an interesting person for us. Turns out he was.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’ I looked at Sneak. ‘Lemon’s had his phone stolen and his apartment robbed right after. He’ll know something’s up.’
‘Forget about it,’ Ada said. ‘They trashed the place and hit three other apartments on the same floor. It will take him a while to notice the maps are gone in the mess. My guys don’t do things half-assed. Now why don’t you tell me what these are all about?’ She gestured to the map. ‘There are others.’
She clicked her fingers and Mike extracted more papers from his jacket pockets. Some were printed screenshots from the internet. I picked up one from a website called the Los Angeles Open Data portal, one from the San Chinto County website. San Chinto township was featured again on the Data portal page, crossed with lines, these ones heavier than those on the survey map and joined with little red bubbles. A key gave me the ‘data layers’. Sewer easements. Sewer flow direction. Sewer pipes.
The buzzer above the door sang and I looked up to see Jessica Sanchez walking into the crowded store with a laptop under her arm.
‘Jeez, the whole team’s here,’ Sneak said, unwrapping a Clark Bar.
‘I need to talk to you.’ Jessica strode forwards and pointed at me. ‘It’s important.’ She grabbed a bottle of water from a rack near the counter and opened it, guzzled a quarter of it. Her face and neck were reddened with some emotion I couldn’t decipher.
‘Take a number and get in line, bitch,’ Ada snapped at Jessica. ‘I was here first.’
‘What is all this?’ Jessica looked at the maps. She set her laptop slowly on the counter, thoughts obviously whirling through her, slowing her limbs. ‘Where . . . Where did these . . .’
‘Marcus Lemon had these,’ Sneak said. ‘We don’t know why.’
‘I know why,’ Jessica said. Ada came around the counter to give her space. She threw open her laptop and opened her email account. I heard crackling and noticed Fred opening a hot pocket.
‘Could everybody please stop eating things?’ I yelled. ‘I have to pay for this stuff, you know.’
‘Look here.’ Jessica pointed. There was a document open on the screen, plain text, a list of words. Under a heading that read ‘Websites last visited’ I noticed ‘Los Angeles Open Data portal’.
‘These are bits and pieces recovered from Dayly’s burned laptop,’ Jessica said. ‘Looks like she and Lemon were both researching the sewer system under San Chinto, sharing the information.’
‘Burned?’ Sneak said. ‘You found her laptop burned? Where?’
‘Oh, um.’ Jessica looked at me for help that I could not offer. ‘I didn’t tell you. I—’
‘Never mind.’ Ada slapped the countertop for attention. ‘What else was on her computer? Anything that says what they were looking at the sewer system for?’
‘No, but there are these.’ Jessica pointed to a list on the page. We all leaned in again. ‘This list comes from a document on the laptop named “L’s Recon”. L must be Lemon, so I’m guessing this is reconnaissance that Officer Lemon was doing on some houses in San Chinto.’ She read directly from the file. ‘Number 11 Redduck. Two men. No – Number 13 Redduck. Family of four. No – Number 15 Redduck. Woman lives alone. Possible. Check? – Number 17 Redduck. Hoarder house. Old man. Looks good. Check?’
Ada snatched the smaller maps away and traced Redduck Avenue on the largest map with her finger. The hairs on my arms were standing on end.
‘We were out there yesterday,’ Sneak said. ‘At number seventeen. It was a hoarder house, just like it says here. So number eleven must have two men living in it. Number thirteen must be a family of four. Fifteen has a woman that lives alone. We saw Officer Lemon go into the hoarder house, and there was a plumber there, too. These houses follow the sewer line . . .’ She shook her head. ‘But . . . I can’t work it out.’
‘I think I can,’ Jessica said. ‘Watch this.’
She opened a video file from the email inbox. I saw CDCR in the address of the sender: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. A black-and-white image filled the screen. Two people in what looked like a steel cage, shot from above. A muscular old man was sitting on a plastic fold-out chair. Almost knee-to-knee with him in the small space was a young woman I recognised immediately.
‘Dayly,’ I said.
‘John!’ Sneak gasped, pointed.
‘Who?’ Ada asked.
‘John Fishwick.’ Sneak tapped the screen. ‘That’s . . . He’s a guy I had a thing with once.’
‘It’s not a small club,’ Ada said. ‘What makes him so special?’
‘Where was this taken?’ Sneak asked Jessica.
‘It’s at San Quentin State Prison. Death row. These are the full-contact visiting cages. This is from two months ago. I went and saw John and asked him about the visit, but I knew I couldn’t trust what he said, so I had the guards send me the security footage as well.’ She hit the button on the video. The figures started moving, talking. We all listened as Fishwick told Dayly about a river near the house where he grew up in Utah. Jessica paused the video and told us about John Fishwick’s bank robberies, the massacre in Inglewood, the buried cash found by construction workers and turned over to the government. ‘I’ve watched the video. He doesn’t tell her anything about anything during the visit, or in his letters to her,’ Jessica said. ‘In the cage they discuss the possibility of him being her father, briefly, but he’s not willing to submit to a DNA test. They chat about his upbringing, her studies. And then this happens.’
We watched as John Fishwick suddenly leaped from his chair. Dayly didn’t seem to realise the contact was coming. He grabbed her and slammed her body into the side of the cage with his, forcing his mouth onto hers, his hands on her cheeks. I watched as guards rushed the cage, dragging Fishwick off the distressed girl, who slumped into the corner, crying and rubbing her face.
‘Oh my god!’ Sneak covered her mouth with her hands.
‘He attacks her. He kisses her,’ Jessica said. ‘At first I thought that was all he was doing, but now—’
‘Now you know.’ Ada smiled. ‘He passed her something.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Right there.’ Jessica rolled the video back, played the kiss again. ‘See how his hand comes up, covers their mouths? That’s in case the package slips out.’
‘What package?’
‘He’s got something in his mouth,’ Ada said. ‘I’ve seen it in prison a hundred times. It’s a kiss pass. You tongue a pill or a secret message or a paper clip or something. You go kiss another inmate, pass it to her in the kiss. You grab her face, just like that, so you can make sure the package gets across, make sure nobody sees the pass. Watch Dayly when she falls to the floor. She makes a motion as if she’s wiping her mouth in disgust. She’s taking the package out and pocketing it.’
We watched the kiss again three times. I searched my memory.
‘I saw something at the apartment,’ I said. ‘A little shred of tape on Dayly’s desk. It was sort of folded weirdly, doubled over on itself, making a tube. Maybe it was the seal. He wrote something on a piece of paper and rolled it up tight, covered it in tape to stop it getting wet in his mouth, maybe. Does that sound right?’
‘He would have had to do that.’ Ada nodded. ‘If we’re talking about a secret this big, he couldn’t put it in the letters. Or tell her on the phone. Or tell her in the cage. One of the guards would have heard it.’
‘So did she know it was coming?’ Sneak asked. ‘The message?’
‘She must have,’ Ada reasoned. ‘The exchange is pretty swift. Seamless.’
‘But how did he alert her that he’d be passing her something if the guards are watching his letters and calls?’
‘Oh, there are ways,’ Ada said. ‘You get the message out through another inmate who tells their visitor, who calls her up and tells her. Or you just show her the package during the visit. Let it poke out between your teeth. She’d have understood what he wanted to do.’
‘So, wait a minute,’ Mike broke in. His lip was curled in horror. ‘This chick willingly kissed a guy who’s probably her own dad?’
Everyone looked at Mike. I was as shocked that Mike had spoken at all as I was at what he’d said. I was used to the almost complete silence of Ada’s goons.
‘He kissed her,’ Sneak said. ‘She didn’t really do any kissing. She was kissed.’
‘Will you idiots try to focus on the issue at hand here?’ Ada snapped.
‘I thought it was weird, him attacking his own daughter like that,’ Jessica said. ‘I asked him about it. He was very convincing. He told me the whole buried cash thing is bullshit. It was just a story to lure her in so he could . . . you know. But then he told me that if he was going to do it again after he buried the first lot, he’d have devised a way to make sure that only the person he chose got the money. It sounded specific. Like he’d thought about it before. He said he’d want to choose his beneficiary.’
‘How?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Jessica said.
‘All that doesn’t matter,’ Ada said. ‘What matters is putting all this together and finding out where the cash is. Because that’s where Dayly is. Whether she’s the chosen beneficiary or whatever the fuck, that note that he passed to her tells her where the money is. It’s probably coordinates. Longitude and latitude. And that tells us where she’s going to be.’
We looked at the maps before us. At seventeen Redduck Avenue, where Ada’s finger was pressed against the small rectangle indicating the hoarder house into which I’d seen Officer Lemon disappear.
‘So what’s with the sewers?’ I asked. ‘If the cash is in the hoarder house?’
‘Maybe it’s under the house,’ Sneak said.
‘Or maybe it’s nearby,’ Ada said. ‘These houses, eleven through seventeen, they’re not far from the sewer line.’ She traced a line from the hoarder house to a blue line with red bubbles on it that streaked across San Chinto. ‘Maybe thirty, forty yards. Explains the presence of the plumber. He’d have experience working underground. Accessing the tunnels. I think they’re using the house as a way to get underground unnoticed, get into the sewer lines. That’s why they reconned the other houses.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘To see which one would best hide their activities,’ Ada said. ‘Not the house with the family of four. Not the house with two guys living in it. The hoarder house with the old man.’
‘So where does the sewer line go?’ Sneak asked. ‘Once they get into it?’
‘Well, this way heads for downtown,’ I said, tracing the sewer line on the map. ‘But look. If you follow it in this direction, it goes right under the police station where Lemon works.’
‘Who buries a wad of cash under a police station?’ Sneak asked.
‘No one move,’ a new voice said. I looked up, and over Ada’s shoulder I saw Al Tasik standing in the automatic doorway of the Pump’n’Jump. He took a step forwards, made the buzzer sound and came more fully into my view. He was holding his gun out from his hip. It was pointed at Sneak.
‘You,’ he said to her. ‘You’re coming with me.’