Swift Vengeance Page 5

  “Three and a half years,” I said. Didn’t have to think about it. Another kind of clock.

  “Any prospects, Roland?”

  I shrugged. I was coming off an affair that had started with a spark and ended in flames. Ghosts in the closet. Hers, not mine. Wasn’t inclined to get into all that with Lindsey.

  “I never liked the shrink,” she said.

  “I know you didn’t.” The shrink was Dr. Paige Hulet, another long story, part of the helicopter shootout that Taucher had mentioned. The shrink had taken a bullet for one of her troubled patients. The shrink and I had had a thing, but I’m not sure exactly what it was.

  “Have you moved Justine’s things out of the bedroom?”

  “Not really. I did the bathroom and dresser.”

  “Her closet will be tough,” said Lindsey. “Let me know if I can help. I could go through her stuff, maybe be more practical about it. Less . . . attached.”

  “That’s good of you.”

  “Maybe sometimes it’s good not to think about her.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “It’s a big old house you’ve got.”

  I pulled open a desk drawer and got out a prepaid burner phone, Walmart, $49.99, brand-new and still in its box. “No GPS on this thing, Lindsey. Set it up and give the number to Rasha and anybody else you have to talk to in the next few days. Especially Taucher, or she’ll have both our skins.”

  “You really think Caliphornia would ping me and track me down?”

  “That’s what bad people do.”

  We stood and she took the phone and gave me a look. “I like casita three,” she said. “I like those old Laguna paintings with the droopy eucalyptus trees and the sudsy waves. What’s rent, by the way?”

  “Don’t worry about rent now.”

  “I prefer worrying about it.”

  “A thousand, then, with the running-for-your-life discount.”

  “What’s with this Clevenger guy?”

  “Old friend of Burt’s,” I said. “New Orleans, originally.”

  “What’s he do for work?”

  “Documentary nature journalist, he says. TV. Award-winning.”

  “All TV people are award-winning.”

  “He’s making a show about the coyotes of Fallbrook.”

  “Plenty of subject matter around,” said Lindsey.

  “He uses drones to shoot video.”

  “You don’t do background checks on your renters, do you, Roland?”

  “I believe in privacy.”

  “That’s crazy, coming from a PI,” Lindsey said.

  “Life is contradiction.”

  “Hmmm.” Lindsey looked around my office. It’s filled with stuff I like. Books on history. Totems from the Northwest. Pottery from the Southwest. Photographs by Ansel Adams and Beth Moon. Pictures of my parents and siblings. Collars and tags belonging to the dogs I’ve had. A striking portrait of Justine by a well-known photographer, commissioned by her mother and father for her twenty-first birthday. Shots of Justine in Hall Pass. A maple stand for my fishing rods, reels, and related tackle in the drawers below. A model made from a picture of a large trout I caught in the Sierras, the fish jumping through a clear acrylic river, splashing clear acrylic water into the air. A genuine saber-toothed cat skull I accepted in trade for a job. A gun safe.

  “Any leads on the cat?” she asked.

  Tammy, the cat’s owner, had been given my number by a semiharmless sociopath I once helped out of a jam here in town. He thought I would be kind enough to help her, even though she had little money. Tammy had broken into tears in my living room. Oxley meant the world to her.

  Now Tammy reported any and all possible sightings to me, as well as helpful stories and speculations from people she had talked to. Tammy was a talker. She had raised quite a posse through the Fallbrook Friends Facebook page.

  “A possible sighting on Stage Coach,” I said to Lindsey. “Near the high school. Another on Alvarado. The best news is nobody’s found him dead on the road.”

  “I don’t like the idea of coyotes tearing apart that poor tubby thing.”

  “That’s another thing you’ve got, Lindsey. A good heart.”

  She looked at my computer monitor. “Are you going to the mosque?”

  “I need to.”

  “So if Oxley and I are your two open cases, the mosque visit must be for me. Watch your back, Roland.”

  “Always. Tell Rasha no on the horse show, but let him know you’re open to communication. On your swanky new Walmart flip phone. Call Brandon Goff, too. Tell him you’re still strongly in favor of joint custody. Tell me how he takes that.”

  “It’s not Brandon.”

  “Help me help you.”

  When Lindsey had shut the door behind her, I checked the Arabian Horse Association website events calendar. All five of their big national events had already taken place for this year, from early summer through fall. But there was a Western Region “Native Costume” exhibition coming up next week in Tucson, Arizona. Among the featured competitors in the youth division was rider Edward Samara and his mare, Al Ra’ad. A check of Arabic names revealed that Al Ra’ad means “the thunder.”

  As in The thunder is coming for you.

  7

  THE ARABIC WORD for mosque is masjid. Masjid Al-Rribat Al-Islami is on Saranac Street in San Diego, twelve miles from the San Diego Joint Terrorism Task Force building downtown.

  It is a two-story stucco structure, rectangular and off-white, with pale blue tile accents. A chest-high stucco wall with small wrought-iron archways surrounds it. The main entryway to the compound is protected by metal gates with lancet arches in the same pale blue as the tile. It is neither defensive nor welcoming. Six years since I’d been there.

  Today’s sunset prayer ended at 6:38. I watched the men exit the downstairs prayer room, a spacious, high-ceilinged, red-carpeted area with no furniture and few windows. The ceiling was stained glass, but at this hour winter’s early dark owned the colors. I smelled lamb and garlic faintly easing in from the dining room, felt my stomach approving.

  The youth activities imam was the last man out. He’d put on some weight since I’d last seen him. Early thirties, bearded in the Muslim custom, dressed in a white thobe that reached the floor and a white turban tied at the back. We shook hands.

  “A good thing to see you again, Roland.”

  “And you, Hadi. Thanks for seeing me on short notice.”

  His office was upstairs, small and warmly lit, two of the walls lined with leather-bound books. Hadi Yousef had always been open and candid with me—as far as I knew—and I had always kept his name out of larger JTTF circulation. He had been a very young imam in charge of youth activities when I first met him. He humbly dodged media and law enforcement in all of its many forms. He was my source because he had come to trust me. I’d done little to earn that trust, except state my respect and pity for the citizens of Fallujah while I was deployed there. Good enough. Yousef had been born in Iraq and thought terror was a scourge that infected not only America but also Islam. He told me once that the saddest time in his life was when the United States abandoned Iraq, leaving Islam to declare war on itself. He had told me something that rings true: that Islam is terror’s biggest hostage.

  After pleasantries dictated by respect and distance, I came to the reason for my abrupt visit. “I’ve heard about a Latino man who has been coming here recently. I’ve heard that his behavior is causing some concern.”

  “This came from Agent Taucher,” he said.

  I nodded.

  Hadi set his elbows on the desk and touched his fingertips softly. He wore heavy, black-framed glasses that looked old and unfashionable on his young face. “Hector Padilla. He has been coming for prayer and worship for two months now. Not every day, but two or three times a week. I don’t know whe
re he lives. He is in his late twenties, and not married. He introduced himself as a lapsed Catholic. He said he had spiritual emptiness. He said he had recently broken up with a Muslim woman. He had purchased a Qur’an and some booklets on Islam. One was ‘Welcome to Islam.’ He also had an Arabic language learning program on CDs. He brought them all with him in a backpack the first time he visited us. He poured them out of his pack, right onto my desk here, as if showing me proof of his devotion. During his first few weeks here, he appeared meek and inquisitive. Earnest. He was interested in meeting single Muslim women. We have informal singles activities which are supervised, and Mr. Padilla has attended some of them. I’m not here for those, generally. I guide the youth, as you know.”

  “Mind if I write some notes?”

  “If you must.”

  I slipped my leather notebook and a pen from my coat.

  “How did that go over?” I asked. “Mr. Padilla being openly interested in the women here?”

  Hadi flared his fingers and gave me a “you never know” expression. “Some of our worshipers find his interest in Muslim women to be . . . inappropriate.”

  “Do you?”

  “I try not to judge. But I find Hector himself to be annoying.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “His willingness to renounce his own faith in favor of mine.”

  “Do you sense falsehood in it?”

  “I sense weakness.”

  Hadi regarded me from behind the thick lenses of his glasses. Calm but alert, the same keen forbearance I’d seen in most of the various priests, ministers, rabbis, and other holy men I had dealt with in my thirty-nine years. It must come from being closer to God than I am.

  My relationship to God would have fallen into the “needs to improve” category until April 7, 2004, at 2:17 p.m. in Fallujah, Iraq, when a skinny boy threw a homemade bomb at my feet and it didn’t explode. Which got me thinking that God might be a lot closer than I’d thought, and maybe He even kind of liked me. I believed that until April 21 of 2015, when Justine’s custom-painted pink Cessna 182—Hall Pass—crashed into the Pacific Ocean not far from Point Loma. Mechanical failure. Fuel pump. Low hours on it. An accident. Whose accident? I was infuriated with God and am still not completely over it. I try to forgive Him. I listen and try to hear Him. The worst of my fury is gone.

  “Has anyone said anything to Hector about his behavior here?” I asked.

  “Not that I know,” said Hadi. “I think the imam is considering what to do. Of course, we are open to new believers. But not men of low quality.”

  “Are you expecting him again, on a certain day or time?”

  He sat back and folded his hands over his middle. Like many Muslim holy men, his hands were expressive and emphatic. I wondered if this was formally taught.

  “He lingers in the brothers’ prayer room during the sisters-only Tuesday Qur’an classes,” said Hadi. “To glimpse them coming and going. So, tomorrow at one thirty. He also has attended the Wednesday and Saturday beginners’ Arabic classes, after evening prayer. Please do not confront him directly here at the masjid.”

  I nodded, then wrote “Caliphornia” across a notebook page, tore it out, and handed it to Hadi across his desk. No facial reaction whatsoever.

  “I have never seen this word spelled in this way,” he said. “What does it mean? Where did you see it?”

  “Someone is using it as a name,” I said. “He signed a death threat using it.”

  “A death threat against whom?”

  “I’m not free to say.”

  Again, the patient stare. “Is Hector suspected of the threat?”

  “No. He came up in the net.”

  “He strikes me as unusual and maybe lost,” said Hadi. “But not murderous. Caliphornia. Such a strange name. Tea, Roland?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I read about the shootout at your home last year and I was glad you were not killed or wounded.” A wry smile. “You are becoming an action figure. Such as my sons see on TV. You are now famous for three things in San Diego.”

  Yes, my fame. Most recently augmented by last year’s helicopter shootout and fiery crash, as referenced by Joan Taucher earlier in the day. In this debacle, one notorious celebrity had been burned dead, and one psychiatrist wounded. On my property. My watch. Much media and speculation, and a lot of truth left untold.

  Another part of my notoriety was the fatal shooting of a young black man by a San Diego sheriff’s deputy back in 2009. The deputy was my partner and I was standing not ten feet away when he shot. I had drawn but held fire. I told the IA investigators why I decided not to shoot. My words cost my partner his job. And cost me my reputation within the department. Coverage and controversy. Lots of bad blood. My assignment to the JTTF was widely and correctly seen as a form of punishment for breaking rank, shattering the blue brotherhood, costing a good man his job.

  The third pillar in my local notoriety is the plane crash that killed Justine. Much coverage on that, too, though of a different kind. The media was actually brief and respectful of my privacy, and quickly onto the next stories. I was envious of the ability to move on.

  “It’s been a year and a half since my most recent disaster,” I said. “I enjoy the quiet life.”

  “May it continue, inshallah.”

  “And you, Hadi? How are you and Masjid Al-Rribat in these heated days?”

  He leaned forward and touched his fingertips again. “I am small in the eyes of Allah and smaller in the eyes of America. I enjoy this smallness. But the masjid? So many eyes are upon us. It is very hard to be a Muslim in America. There is some tolerance, yes. But there is suspicion, too. And beyond the suspicion there is fear. And fear can turn to hate, as we all have seen. So we worship our god and we take care of our own. There is much about this life we cannot know.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “Alhamdulillah.”

  “Yes. God be praised.”

  We stood. I looked down at Hadi’s shiny glass desktop, in which I saw a distorted reflection of his trunk and face, and decades of nicks and scratches. Followed by a sudden errant thought: “So did you say when Hector was up here he emptied his backpack on your desk? Poured the contents right out in front of you there?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why?”

  “He is impulsive. I think he wanted to display his . . . commitment.”

  “By showing you what?”

  Hadi recapped for me: a newly bought Qur’an, the Noor Foundation edition. And two pamphlets written by an Orange County imam named Mustafa Umar—“Welcome to Islam” and “How to Pray.” Hector’s pack also contained a rubber-banded stack of invitations to the “Treasures of Araby” collection at a showroom in Solana Beach.

  Hadi indicated the table beside him. “As you see, he left a few of those. He also had an Arabic language CD program still in its box. Mr. Padilla assured me that he had bought the program used online, at a good price.” A small smile.

  “That was all?”

  “No. There was also an energy drink, two chocolate donuts with peanuts in a plastic box with a top, so they wouldn’t be crushed. There was a clear Baggie of brown tablets. I have no idea what they were. And he had a sharpening stone in its box. The box cracked loudly into the glass desktop, but only made a small mark. The stone itself spilled out.”

  “A sharpening stone.”

  “Yes, Roland. A whetstone. With which someone might sharpen a knife.”

  A jump in the heart rate. “Describe it.”

  “The stone was maybe three by eight inches, with a wooden base. I can’t remember who the maker was. My impression of the box and the stone was that they were new.”

  When Hadi had finished his description, I asked him to describe the whetstone again. Patiently, he did. The scar on my forehead tingled. I wrote down his words in my
notebook as accurately as I could. I have big hands and write slowly with a pen. Finally, I rose and slipped my notebook into my pocket. “You’ve been generous with your time.”

  Hadi stood, too, handed me one of the “Treasures of Araby” flyers that Hector had given him. “I actually might go to this. It looks interesting and that gallery has a good reputation. The opening night reception is free and open to the public.”

  I glanced at the rugs and vessels and jewelry pictured there. Gallerie Monfil Presents the Treasures of Araby.

  The stairs creaked as we walked back down. The smell of food was stronger and the young Muslims were already assembling for Hadi Yousef’s class. They looked at me, some curious, some appraising.

  “You will always be suspicious here, Roland. But always welcome.”

  “Thank you, Hadi.”

  He walked me outside. “Your soul is troubled.”

  “Beheadings trouble me.”

  We stopped at the front gate. Hadi put his hands behind his back and contemplated me. “Beheading. Caliphornia?”

  I nodded.

  “So, your keen interest in Hector’s whetstone. There could be an innocent explanation for the stone.”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  “I will pray for your success in preventing violence, Roland.”

  “Help me if you can, Hadi.”

  “I will try, Allah willing.”

  “He should be.”

  8

  I PARKED ACROSS the street and three houses down from Hector O. Padilla’s home in El Cajon. The moon was a waxing crescent and a tall palm reached toward it, and for a moment I was in Fallujah in the spring of 2004.

  This was an older neighborhood with streetlights few and far between and the trees grown tall. There was a good breeze and I could hear the sycamore leaves hitting the hood of my truck. No car in Padilla’s driveway and the door of his garage was shut.

  Light came from inside the house and garage. The front yard was small and square and marked by a low wall overgrown with ivy. I raised my night-vision binoculars. The world went green and dreamy, somehow less than real. I focused through the autumn-bare branches of a liquidambar tree. A security-screened front door. Address plainly visible on the stucco house front, no mail visible in the open black wall box below the numbers. Padilla’s window blinds let out only a thin frame of light.