Koob seems to materialize in my passenger seat. I had backed the Cadillac into a space in the open-air lot on Murray. The way he snuck in means he must have cut through the privet row behind me, and then slid along in a crouch beside the car. He pops the door and jumps in without ever standing to full height. I just stare. This guy is completely terrified of his wife. It’s beyond disappointing.
He’s in his running stuff again, so that must be his excuse for going out.
He briefly returns my look, in his mute show-nothing way, then stares out the windshield toward the canopy of trees in full leaf on the other side of the lot.
“I need to say this. I really like you, Clarice.”
His declaration makes me absolutely furious.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I say, and on impulse slug him in the shoulder. Hard.
“Jesus,” he says.
“Forget junior high, goddamn it. Blanco is dead. Do you know about that or not?”
He is still rubbing his shoulder while he lays his black eyes on me. He says calmly, “You were going to explain why I’m better off talking to you than the police.”
I describe my deal with Tonya. He thinks it over while I clean up a little in the car. I still have the crumpled bag from a fast-food place in my lap, and I suspect the Cadillac is thick with fried smells. I crack a window, but in response to his immediate look of alarm, slide it shut again.
“Anything I tell you,” he says, “that cannot get back to the Ritz. If it does, he will know exactly where it came from.”
Tonya has already promised that all information I get will go no further than her, and I tell him that.
“Okay,” I say. “Is the Ritz the reason you bought a gun?”
“Basically.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“Not yet.”
“So why do you think he might?”
Koob, always slow to speak, takes even longer this time.
“I think the Ritz killed Blanco,” he says.
Whoa! I roll that over for a minute.
“Did you see him do it?”
“I saw him getting ready to do it.”
“While you were surveilling him? Had you followed him?”
Koob is the master of the subtle expression, almost as if his smooth face will allow no more. But just from the small movement of his lower lip, I know something is wrong. He pivots in his seat to face me fully.
“I work for Ritz. Worked. The Ritz,” he adds, with that sealed smile.
“What the fuck? Doing what? What is your gig anyway?”
“You know what I do,” he answers.
Furious, I slug him in the shoulder another time. He recoils and then points a finger at me. “Not again.”
“Would I ask what you do if I knew the answer? What the fuck do you do?”
“Electronic surveillance.”
“Phones?”
“Phones, computers. When I finished grad school, my Lakota buddy from Special Forces got in touch with me. He said there were a lot of people who needed the kind of services he and I could provide. It was more interesting than sitting in an office or a lab. With much better compensation.”
“And who hires you?”
“We do some government work,” he says, meaning to be vague. “Stuff they cannot do on their own. Frankly, many times I do not even know who we are working for. There’s a target. I am told what’s needed. Darnell, my friend—he gets the jobs. The less I know, the happier I am.”
“And how did the Ritz find you two?”
“I really do not know. There have been more private clients in the last several years. Somebody leaves the government and tells someone about us. The private clients pay exorbitantly, because the risks are greater.”
“And the Ritz hired you when?”
“I started around March 1, perhaps a little earlier.”
“To do what?”
“As I said.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I could. But I am not going to be. I will tell you about what I witnessed that night in Blanco’s apartment, whatever I observed. That’s what your police friend wants to know, correct?”
“Correct.”
“The rest of what I did or was doing for the Ritz is not pertinent.”
“But you needed a sight line to the Tech Park, right? That’s how you ended up next door to me?”
“To start,” he says.
“Well, was there another reason you were there?”
Again, he turns back slowly to face me. This time, I think I can detect some kind of discomfort constricting his eyes and brow.
“You motherfucker!” I say. “You were spying on me?”
“You were spying on me, Clarice. You saw a great deal more than you ever admitted to me.”
“Fuck you.” I digest that for a second and then, with my anger rising, try again to slug him in the shoulder. He’s quick and leans forward so that I barely graze him, while he pivots to grab my fist.
“No,” he says. “I asked you to stop that. You are very strong. I am going to be bruised for a week. Any more, and I’m getting out of the car.”
I just shake my head rather than apologize.
“Fuck, man,” I say. “I liked you, Koob. I really did.”
“I like you, too, Clarice. A great deal. You are a remarkable person.”
This is why I’ve generally passed on relationships, because the end always sucks—it’s-me-not-you, the standard sales pitch in reverse. I know I should ignore his compliment. But I think he means it, at least kind of. I still believe this guy. Which was probably always my downfall.
“And you were trying to pick up whatever I was learning on the Chief’s case?” I ask.
“I was simply recording what appeared on your computer. As I said, I am given an assignment and I perform it. My surmise to start was that the Ritz wanted to keep track of you because you, too, had a line of sight to the Tech Park. Of course, over time, I could see what you were doing and understood that my initial assumption was completely wrong. But it was a while before I understood why Ritz cared about your activities.”
“And how did you get into my computer?” I ask.
“I tapped into the cable connection for your Internet in the basement.”
That’s why he was trotting down there! Not to visit his damned storage cage. Ace investigator, my ass.
“And when you had lunch at Green Fruit, is that why you were always sitting behind the Ritz? To report to him? You were talking when you were back-to-back?”
“Yes. In Mandarin, by the way.”
“Mandarin?”
“He speaks well. The Ritz is very, very bright.”
“Do you like him?”
“‘Like’? He’s interesting. But no one likes him. Largely because he does not care to be liked. The Ritz is pleased to repel people. But that is a kind of freedom. It makes him very frightening.”
I try for a second to remember why I’m so shocked.
“But I saw you plant the NoDirt behind his office.”
“You were meant to. You were getting too close, Clarice. You were far more resourceful than the Ritz had anticipated when he put me in that apartment. But it would not be beneficial either to him or me if you figured out what I was doing. So we decided that the best solution was to make you think I was watching him.”
“Instead of me?”
“Instead of you. And my other targets.”
For a second, I wonder if I even have the heart for the next question. But I do. I will always claim my homeland in the harsh region of the truth.
“And you were fucking me to get information for Vojczek?”
“No!” he says sharply. He shakes his head several times, with as much outward emotion as I’ve seen today. “We assumed when you saw me plant that device that you would stop your spying, because you would conclude I was most likely a government agent or someone else who could make serious trouble for you if you got in my way. But you continued. Which was very undesirable. If you ever realized that I was at that restaurant to speak to Ritz, rather than keep an eye on him, you could go off in many unwelcome directions. So the simplest solution was to confront you and to be emphatic that there would be harsh consequences if you continued to trail me. That was the point of catching you on the street. I told Ritz only that I had delivered the message. But I kept to myself how you responded.”
“And why was that?”
He offers that secretive smile. “It was a feeling. It was none of his business to start with. But after a few hours, I realized I had found your offer quite provocative. Quite.” He glances my way for just an instant to observe my reaction. “Perhaps more so because I had no idea if you really meant it or were just making excuses. And then there was the fact that you had actually looked quite hurt out on the street. So it seemed like I owed you a visit, one way or the other.
“Yet I never should have knocked on your door without first informing my client. The minute I walked into your apartment, I felt I had entered a space where all the restrictions I normally accepted did not apply. I suppose I wanted to experience your kind of freedom on your terms. But having chosen not to tell Ritz, I was committed to that course. He learned nothing about our personal—” He hesitates. “Contacts,” he says. His little smile seems a bit more ironic. He turns to me again, as he has at critical instants, fully revealing his face so I can witness his sincerity. He is utterly calm. He could be lying his ass off, but I’m not sure I see why. “I told you not to talk about work,” he adds. “And we did not.”
I know I’m upset—it’s like somebody’s run a rototiller over my heart—but dealing with that will take a lot of time. I just breathe until I’m confident I can put my reactions aside well enough to think.
“And could you follow my laptop wherever it was, or only when I was next door?” I ask.
“Only next door. I mean, when you reconnected, of course I could see what had been added. I was following your phone with the Stingray, but I learned very little from that. I knew you were working at the Chief’s house, for example, but I had no visibility into what you were doing there. A four-terabyte drive is far too big for the capacities of my equipment.” He stops then to lift a hand. I’ve noticed before that his fingers are slender and shorter than I’d expect for his height, and he cuts his nails back. “This is more than I have agreed to tell you, but I do not want to mislead you, Clarice, and it concerns your client. But you need to promise me that it will be held as information about your client that you are not obliged to pass on to the police.”
“Tonya understands that I have to protect my client first. But if it’s about the Chief, I need to tell Rik. Only he’d never hurt Lucy.”
He nods. “I had been in the Chief’s computer for quite some time, but that had nothing to do with keeping track of you. Hacking was one of the services we had agreed to provide Ritz from the start.”
“You were in the Chief’s computer? As part of learning about her case?”
“There was next to nothing to learn there. The Ritz was concerned, frankly, with just one item.”
“On her computer?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“That picture.”
“The photograph that Blanco took?”
“Right.”
“That was on her computer?”
“Right.”
“And how did it get there?”
“As I told you, I do not tend to ask questions. Ritz thought I might find it there and I did. That was all I knew.” He nods to himself. “And I am the one who posted it on Reddit, the night Blanco testified. Ritz asked me to do that.”
“You were the one who leaked it?” I rear back to study him, increasingly perturbed by the stoical way he’s admitting to some really bad stuff. “You realize that was a completely shitty thing to do to her, don’t you?”
He lifts a hand, not quite owning it, but not fighting either.
“I am in the business of invading people’s privacy, Clarice, and seldom to their advantage. Nothing I do is ‘nice.’ That is one of many reasons it is so lucrative. Initially, to me your computer or the Chief’s were typical targets. I have no interest in the larger context. Of course, the more I came to understand how intent the Ritz was on destroying Lucia Gomez, the more I wished that I had had nothing to do with any of it. But I could hardly step away then. And the Ritz is smart enough to have figured out how to post the photo anonymously on his own, if I did not.”
I am pretty much levitating from this entire conversation. I close my eyes for a second, just so I can grab hold of myself. What else? I think. Oh. Small detail.
“And tell me about Blanco’s murder.” Despite what he said to start, there is a part of me preparing to hear Koob tell me in the same shameless way he’s been speaking that killing Blanco was another of the not-nice things he did for Ritz. I am relieved when he repeats himself.
“I did not see a murder,” Koob answers. “I already told you that. That’s merely my surmise. Around eleven p.m. that night, just as I was about to visit you, I received a call from a blocked number. I had set up that phone for Ritz—it was untraceable, but he called me rarely. I was surprised to hear his voice at that hour. He said he needed to see me immediately and gave me a crazy set of instructions, an address and an apartment number which I was supposed to enter from the fire escape. I could not imagine why until I noticed as I was climbing up that on the lower floors, the fire escape ran behind a frosted window in the bath, meaning the neighbors would ordinarily not see me or anyone else coming or going that way. When I got there, the Ritz and Walter Cornish were arguing with Blanco.”
“Was Blanco tied up?”
“Not then. Blanco was sitting in this wooden chair, and the Ritz and Cornish were on their feet. It looked like Blanco was a kid talking to the principal.”
“Any idea how long they’d been there? Did you come in at the start of the meeting?”
“No one explained. From what I heard, I think the three of them had agreed to meet at that apartment after Blanco had apparently informed them that he was not going to turn over his telephone in response to the order from the commission and the courts. Blanco had hired a lawyer and the lawyer had told him to plead the Fifth Amendment. And the Ritz was adamant Frito should not do that. Vojczek was trying to convince Blanco that there were alternatives.”
“And what were the alternatives?”
“Me, I suppose.”
“Explain.”
“The Ritz handed me Blanco’s phone and told me there was stuff there in a hidden archive that Ritz wanted me to remove, and remove in a way that a good forensic examiner would not be able to detect.”
“What kind of stuff? More images of him and the Chief?”
“I never opened them. There were definitely some JPEGs there. And a couple of apps, a VPN and Tor, which is a browser designed to leave no tracks. I knew that Blanco was cruising the dark web. Ritz kept asking why Blanco was stupid enough to put that shit on his phone, and was that not the reason he had this place?”
“‘This place’ meaning the apartment?”
“That was how I understood it.”
“And what was Blanco doing in the apartment?”
Koob turns his head deliberately from side to side. “I cannot say. Something unsavory.”
“Maybe Frito and his friend were looking at dirty pictures?”
Koob just shrugs.
“So what happened?” I ask.
“I told the three of them that it was simple enough to get rid of what was there. But I couldn’t promise that a good forensic examiner would miss the deletion. It’s much harder to mess around with the operating system on a phone—there are fewer moving parts, so to speak. A really qualified person might be able to detect that something had been removed and, perhaps, the prior activity, if they were good enough and knew where to look.”
“Okay. And what did they say when you told the Ritz that?”
“The three of them started arguing. Mostly it was just Blanco and the Ritz. They were yelling but trying to keep their voices down at the same time, if you can imagine. Blanco said he was going to plead the Fifth, and the Ritz tried to reason with him. Vojczek said that the worst that could happen if Blanco turned over the phone was that some expert might offer an opinion that material had been removed and Blanco would adamantly deny it. It would be a standoff. Blanco actually laughed at him, which probably does not happen to Vojczek often, but Blanco said Ritz was telling him to jump out a window and expect a soft landing. With the Chief against Blanco now, she could use the expert’s testimony as a basis to ask the commission to remove him from the force. Which they were likely to do.”
“Were you saying anything?”
“No. Ritz clearly had not been prepared for my answer about the phone, and at one point, he more or less cross-examined me, trying to minimize the possibility of an expert recognizing the deletions. From the other side, from the dark web side, the applications Blanco was using would make it impossible to track his activity. But on his devices, unless he had taken precautions he seemed to know less about, there would always be signs of his search history. And that is what I said.”
“How did the Ritz take that?”
“Angry. Frighteningly. He was furious with all of us. It comes straight to the surface with him. Very few humans can bring forth, unguarded, that kind of look of lethal rage. He starts working over his chewing gum and his eyes become as hard as a snake’s. Did you ever see that look?”
“I haven’t been closer to the man than fifty feet.”
“Good. Keep it that way. But I was not about to let the Ritz intimidate me. The way I do business, I do not have group discussions. One of my essential terms is that I talk only with the principal. It’s far safer for me that way. That’s why we were speaking in Mandarin at the restaurant. I was not pleased doing show-and-tell in front of Cornish and Blanco.”
“And what happened between Frito and the Ritz?”
“More agitation. Blanco said several times that Ritz had ruined his life, and the Ritz scoffed and told Blanco he ruined his own life. Blanco said—” Working to recall the words, Koob looks out above the trees and the power lines, while his filmy partial reflection hangs on the front window. “Blanco said either way, he was not taking a chance on going to prison. He had not hurt anybody. This was his own private thing, and it never involved anybody else. Ritz laughed at him and said, ‘That’s why it’s a five-year mandatory minimum, because it doesn’t hurt anybody.’”
“Meaning?”
“Again, I cannot say. Blanco said, ‘My deal with Walt and you was that I’d do what you wanted so my private life could stay private. And I did it, and now you want me to take a chance that all of this will explode anyway, that I’ll lose my job and lose my family and go to prison. And that’s not happening. I’m taking five. My lawyer thinks the way this will play out is that after I assert my privilege against self-incrimination, my testimony will get stricken from the record, and that will be the end of the hearing. Finito. So we’ll never get to the point of the commission formally ordering me to turn over the phone. But if they do, I’ll have immunity.’”
“Then Ritz said, ‘Listen, you pervert, you take five and Lucy gets away with it.’”
“‘Lucy gets away with it?’ Is that a quote?”
“That is definitely what the Ritz said.”
“Any idea what Lucy would be getting away with? Ritz and Cornish didn’t really think she’d forced Frito to have sex, did they?”
“I have no idea what they believed or did not believe.”
“Okay, and what happened then between Vojczek and Blanco?”
“Blanco said something like, ‘Look, I’m done with you guys.’ And he stood up to leave, and Ritz just shoved him right back down in the chair and said, ‘Not yet,’ and then nodded to Cornish, who had this black satchel. He took out some zip ties and they fastened Blanco to the chair by his wrists and ankles.”
“Was there a fight?”
“Not really. As I said, the Ritz is scary in those moods. Blanco kept telling them that tying him up was ridiculous and unnecessary.”
“So if Cornish had zip ties, they must have been thinking from the start that they might need to keep Blanco there.”
“Probably. Blanco was saying things like, ‘I don’t know what you think you’re going to do to me, beat me or whatever, but I’ll never be able to do what you want.’ And the Ritz said, ‘By the time I’m done with you, you’re going to be begging to make me happy.’”
“That’s when I left—after that threat, because Ritz was clearly prepared for something ugly. As I went out the window, the Ritz was yelling at me not to go, but I had been dragged into a situation I wanted no part of, and which went far beyond my agreement with Ritz. He seemed to be committing another felony in my presence every few minutes—suborning perjury, intimidating a witness, assaulting Blanco. I was much too exposed, with a virtually infinite range of bad outcomes for me. I went back to the Archer and started clearing out. The car was packed and I was gone by five a.m. I could not say goodbye to you, because I knew you would never stop asking questions.”
“You had a car?”
“It was in the lot behind Vojczek’s office. I had no need for it while I was there. Keeping the smallest footprint, avoiding interactions, remaining anonymous whenever possible—that’s always my preference when I am working.”
“And when you cut out, what were you thinking was going to happen to Blanco?”
“I had no insight into their exact intentions. But I never thought that Blanco’s life was in danger. The Ritz is much too smart to kill a cop.”
“It doesn’t sound like the Ritz had much leverage over Blanco,” I say. “Frito was going to follow his lawyer’s advice, and no matter how pissed Ritz was, it’s hard to understand what the Ritz would gain by killing him.”
“Agreed. Except for the look on the Ritz’s face. I would say that this is a person who does not react well to being told that he’s powerless.” Koob nods once as he thinks about that. “After I got back here to Pittsburgh, I read the Beacon online every day, because I was curious about whether Blanco ever turned over the phone. I was shocked when I saw the headline that he was dead.”
“Any idea how they killed him?”
“None. But Walter had that little satchel with him. As you already said, they seemed to have come prepared for various scenarios.”
I take a quick lap in my brain.
“So it’s still possible that Blanco was so terrified of the Ritz and Cornish that he had heart failure? I mean, it’s still not a murder for sure.”
Koob has clearly not considered that. His hands and shoulders rise: Anything’s possible.
“For my own sake,” he said, “I have to assume they killed him. Because if they did, then eliminating me would make sense for them. I am a witness, but one with no known connection to the case or the Ritz. Which is why I am carrying a weapon.”
“I’m not going to say I feel sorry for you, Koob. You link up with a jackal, don’t be surprised when he decides you’re the next meal.”
He smiles faintly.
“And what about what you were doing for Ritz originally,” I ask, “whatever it was that brought you to Highland Isle? There was something besides spying on me, right?”
He just offers a slow, solemn shake of his head.
“That is not up for discussion,” he says.
“Why?” I ask.
“Why won’t you tell me about what the Chief has said to you?”
I make a face. “I don’t think I ever heard of the spy-client privilege.”
“What I do professionally, Clarice, comes with a lot of risks that I try to minimize. Darnell always has a cover, including supporting witnesses and documents, innocent ways to explain why I have my equipment or what I am doing with it. I am as careful as I can be. And I never talk about what I do. It is safest for me.”
“Okay. But I’m just thinking your way. You’re gonna be looking over your shoulder for the Ritz, or Cornish, or someone they might send, for a long time. So best for you is if somebody figures out how to bring Vojczek down.”
“Best for me is if Darnell can pacify Ritz. He hasn’t been able to reach him yet. But he will remind Ritz that he violated our understanding when he brought me into that apartment. However, Darnell will make it very clear that going to law enforcement is never an option. It would put an end to our business and could quite easily lead to incarceration for both of us.
“And that is the truth, Clarice. Giving the police hints about what Ritz may be doing is not in my best interests. And besides,” says Koob, “your friend would never protect me with regard to that.”
“Because?”
“I am confident she will not.”
“If the Ritz killed Blanco, I think she’d be down for any way to get him.”
Koob takes one second and then turns his head again several times.
“You didn’t kill anybody, right?” I ask. I’ve been wanting to ask that out loud for a while now.
“Of course not.” He actually sounds insulted. “And as to this other matter, the things I came to town to help with, I know so little that the only person I can get in trouble is myself. The Ritz is very careful. He’s been doing business in cryptocurrency since long before most people heard the term. And he does not put his fingerprints on anything illegal. The fact that he was in that apartment was fully out of character. I imagine they felt a face-to-face was the only way to change Blanco’s mind and keep up the pressure to get Lucy out of her job.”
“Do you know why he wanted that so badly?”
Again, the slow shake.
“Ritz isn’t planning on killing the Chief, is he?”
“I would have bet a large sum that he would not have killed Blanco, so I will not make predictions. He hates her, I can certainly say that. I truly have no idea why.”
Neither of us speaks for a second.
“So you needed sight lines,” I finally say. “What were you watching?”
His head keeps turning back and forth steadily, even though he is smiling slightly at my persistence.
“Okay,” I say. “What if I swear I won’t tell this part to Tonya. What if it’s just between me and you? If I can connect what you tell me to anything on my own, I’ll give Tonya that lead, but she won’t hear about anything to do with you.”
“I would be taking quite a chance, Clarice.”
“I’m the woman who drove ten hours not to burn you. Come on, man. If you could take down Ritz without leaving any trail back to yourself, that would be perfect, right?”
He touches his lips with a slender finger, reflecting on what I’ve suggested, but offers no further response.
“What if you just say what you were doing?” I ask. “Nothing about Ritz. But just what I could have noticed spying on you, if I were a little better at it.”
He smiles. “You did exceptionally well.”
I have my usual squirming reaction to a compliment, but don’t want to get distracted.
“I know you were watching something, right?”
“As you say, you already know that.”
“And it was at the Tech Park, right?”
“Go on,” he says.
“But where? Northern Direct?”
“You could have seen me looking in that general direction.”
“But maybe not Direct specifically?”
“Not Direct,” he says.
“The front gates?”
“Perhaps.”
“But why does Ritz need to import a surveillance expert just to keep an eye on the front gates?”
Again that tiny smile, then he takes a minute to ponder.
“Here is what you could find out on your own, with some reading. There are very complex anti-surveillance systems around Northern Direct. Which basically means the entire section of the Tech Park where Direct is located. Highly classified communications take place between DoD and Direct, requiring extensive precautions against interception. They use signal jamming machinery near the site. If you get within one hundred yards of Northern Direct, your cell phone won’t work. There are powerful cameras watching anyone who comes close, and if you were to, say, take a photograph, you will find DSS hunting for you. They are set up there to foil any kind of surveillance, even the most sophisticated means employed by government actors. So if you ever wanted to conduct counter-surveillance of that section of the Tech Park, you would need some expertise.”
I think. “And you’d have to watch from a distance. Right? Their lens finders would pick up anything close.”
“That’s a logical deduction.”
“But you weren’t out back every day. Just like two to three a.m. a couple times a week. True?”
“Very early Tuesday and Friday.”
“And like I eventually noticed that you’d moved down a few steps so I couldn’t see what equipment you were using. But say I was a little more curious and crept closer. What would I have seen?”
“I do not believe you could have been more curious.”
“Okay, but what equipment would I have seen?”
“You might have seen me occasionally looking through a pair of specially made thermal imaging binoculars. On one side there was a photodiode that could detect infrared or ultraviolet emissions. The other lens was standard thermal, heat-sensing.”
I go through the PIBOT catalog in my head.
“But that’s way more than typical night-vision goggles. Were you watching for someone using night-vision equipment? Because you could definitely detect that with those binoculars.”
He smiles again. “As you say.”
“So you were watching for somebody who was surveilling the place from a distance. Competitors or government actors?”
“I do not know, not for sure. Nor was I told what was taking place at the Tech Park. I can only offer conjecture based on other equipment I was using regularly.”
“Which was?”
“You could not have seen that. I did not use it outside.”
He means the guessing game is over. But I’m not ready to quit.
“Were you breaking the law by using this other equipment?” I ask.
“Arguably not. But not a good argument.”
“So the binocs, they’re legal. I know that. So illegal means you were probably overhearing something.”
There’s his little smile. I’m clearly amusing him by the way I’m piecing stuff together.
“But it wasn’t stuff you could pick up with the Stingray,” I say. “Because you already said that Direct blocks cell traffic. So you were probably listening to radio broadcasts. Like with a police scanner? But that’s legal.”
“Again, by reading, Clarice, you might learn that the FBI, for example, has been finding ways to protect its high-range radio frequencies for quite some time by using a digital signal. They are very hard to penetrate.”
“So you had a digital scanner in there?”
“I might have. Backed up by some excellent software.”
“So that’s why the Ritz needed you? In case the Feds were watching him?”
“We are done with this subject, Clarice. And I am counting on you not to pass along the little I have said.”
I cross a finger over my heart. “Never,” I say.
But I understand now why he said Tonya wouldn’t protect him. Nobody gets a quick pass for thwarting law enforcement.
“And were they actually watching—the Feds?”
“I never saw any sign of that in more than four months. Frankly, once the Chief’s case was over, the Ritz was probably going to give me his thanks and send me on my way and deliver a few more bitcoins to our intermediary. But as I say, we are done discussing my activities.”
“Okay.” I flip through the files in my brain as we sit silently. The street is getting more crowded, traffic growling along and many pedestrians strolling the block. Public transportation must be nearby, because a lot of folks carrying briefcases are in line in front of a bakery. The customers who emerge are carrying white paper bags and often cups of coffee or tea.
“Can I go back to the night with Blanco?” I ask. “I have one off-the-wall question. Do you remember any of them getting a mosquito bite?”
Koob emits a light surprised laugh.
“As a matter of fact, Cornish was complaining about the mosquitoes.” He lets his eyes rise again as he recalls. “At one point, he used the bathroom and banged the wall and screamed he’d gotten the little mother.”
I can’t really think of anything else. Two women in the parking lot are shouting goodbyes. One approaches the SUV beside us, and Koob slumps and turns his face away from her, but she never gives us a look.
“And you like never even hinted to Ritz anything about, you know, us?”
He faces me again. “Never. As I said, he would be irate about the possibility of conflicting loyalties. And besides, Ritz is not a man to trust with your secrets. He would leverage anything he knows I care about. I told him nothing about my personal life, for that reason.”
I’m not 100 percent positive what Koob meant with his remark concerning the things he cares about, but it sounded like he was including me, and in response my heart has gone all squirrelly and schoolgirlish. But I’m too bashful to push, like he might take it away if I do.
“Well, I have to say, man, to me your personal life looks pretty fucked.”
“Unlike anyone else’s.”
“You talk about your wife almost like she’s a rabid dog, and then you run back here to the same house and just basically cower from her.”
“Clarice, it is a delicate situation. I take one day at a time, for my son’s sake. Thirteen months from now, he will leave the house.” He visibly sighs, then faces the windshield again, cutting off the subject. “Anything else about Blanco?”
“Not that I can think of.”
I realize that Koob has been blunt about his work, sort of for the same reason I wear the nail, so there are no illusions. And yeah, I realize it’s theoretically possible that he’s making shit up about the Ritz and Cornish as a way to blame them for a murder he actually committed or had a hand in. People can fool you, I guess, and let’s face it, Koob fooled me already, spying on me from the apartment next door. And yeah, my radar for other people fails often, but really, could it be that messed up? I know there’s a lot more to a person than you find out in bed, but you still find out quite a bit. Koob Xie does what he does because the world is a rough place, but at his core, to me he’ll always feel like a tender guy, and definitely not a murderer.
He’s taken hold of the door handle. He faces me full-on for a second and, being Pinky, I suddenly lean over to hug him, and without hesitation, he hugs me back. It lasts a moment, then he slides from the car and takes off at a run.