The Crooked Staircase Read online

  Sara seemed to want the coffee only for the warmth that the mug imparted to her hands. “So I’ve got six months to a year.”

  “Unless I kill him in self-defense or someone else kills him because of the information I’m able to pry out of him.”

  “I already agreed to help you.”

  “I know,” Jane said. “I’ve told you this only because I want you to get more serious about carrying that concealed pistol, about your security system, about your life and how fragile it remains.”

  8

  The rising garage sectional like a mausoleum door setting free those who had been thought dead and entombed, the sudden cataracts of rain against the windshield, the wild night of shaken trees and wet whirling leaves and wind-worked forms of mist galloping out of the west…All of it now became a celebration of life.

  Behind the wheel of the Hyundai Santa Fe Sport, Sanjay Shukla was intoxicated by their escape but also harrowed by the recent violence. As he accelerated toward the distant gate that would swing open automatically at his approach, he switched on the headlights.

  “Lights off!” Tanuja cried with such conviction that he obeyed without question. “They blocked the driveway with their SUV.”

  “So we pop the brake, shift it into neutral, push it aside.”

  “But there might be a fourth sonofabitch with it.”

  “Shit.” Sanjay wished he’d thought to take the poisoned man’s gun instead of his smartphone.

  Simultaneously, he and his sister declared, “The horse gate!”

  Sanjay swung the Hyundai off the pavement, left onto the front yard, and rollicked across the uneven lawn, which had been an unmown meadow of tall grass in the days when their father had kept horses.

  The equine gate on the south side of the property had been a second construction entrance during the building of the house. It was wide enough for a vehicle. A simple hinged section of fencing gave access to a riding trail that wound through the eastern hills.

  In the gloom, the great black limbs of the spreading oaks were unmoved by the storm, but the willowy branchlets whipped the night and cast off beetle-shaped leaves that skittered across the windshield and were flung into flight by the wipers.

  The land sloped down, and below them, like the sunken ramparts of some lost city, the faint white boardwork of the ranch fencing welled out of the watery darkness.

  Sanjay braked, intending to get out and release the gate, but Tanuja threw open her door—“Got it!”—and plunged into the rain.

  As Sanjay watched her ghosting through the murk, Tanuja seemed small, childlike, as though the night was shrinking her, his chotti bhenji, his little big sister. Suddenly, he feared losing her for the first time since they’d escaped the clutches of Ashima and Burt Chatterjee to become emancipated minors by order of the court. For the seven years prior to that, they had been two against the world; and so they appeared to be again, inexplicably.

  For fraternal twins, they were remarkably alike, slender but athletic, with glossy black hair and eyes darker still. Both were talented guitarists. Both were unbeatable bridge players at fourteen but grew bored with cards at eighteen, when their writing began to consume them. She would marry one day, and perhaps so would he; and while he’d be happy for her, on the day that they parted he would feel as though he’d been cleaved in half.

  The gate swung open, and Tanuja returned to the Hyundai. Sanjay drove into the rugged land where the horse trail promised adventure for the equine gentry to which their parents had once belonged. He turned downhill, toward the county road, lights still off, hoping the thousand voices of wind and water would mask their engine noise, in case a guard remained in the SUV at the main gate.

  “They were going to inject me. You, too, if they found you.”

  “I saw the syringe. But inject with what?” she asked.

  “With nothing good.”

  “With this, whatever it is,” she said, revealing two of the sleeves of silvery insulation that contained ampules, which she had evidently snatched off the table while Sanjay was crawling under it.

  He said, “It’s crazy, Linc Crossley being with them.”

  “It’s just as crazy without him.”

  The land sloped gently westward. A narrowing of the horse trail bracketed them with weeds that tapped and scraped at the vehicle, as if with brittle fingers the resurrected residents of an ancient burial ground were protesting this intrusion on sacred soil.

  “Could Ashima and Burt be part of this?” Tanuja wondered.

  “What would they have to gain?”

  “What little they didn’t already steal from us. And revenge.”

  “Not after eight years. They’re lucky they avoided prison, and they know it.”

  Out of the rain and fog and formless dark, order appeared as two parallel lines. At first pale, perhaps illusory, they acquired reality, crisp edges: the double white line defining the center of the county road.

  The slope terminated in the flat expanse of blacktop. Sanjay turned left, away from their house and the SUV that blocked access to it. He braked at once, however, because a Range Rover stood across both lanes, leaving too little room to drive past it either fore or aft. The headlights were not on, but the blinkers silvered the falling rain in front of it and bloodied the rain behind.

  Doors opened and two men got out of the vehicle, shadowy figures, solemn and methodical and unhurried, like those who had forced their way into the house.

  Sanjay shifted into reverse, backed up at speed, wheeled hard right, fishtailed the Hyundai 180 degrees, braked, shifted into drive, switched on the lights, and fled north, past the SUV blocking their driveway. The road dead-ended in a turnaround, where the fall-off from the pavement was so gentle that there were no guardrails.

  “They have all-wheel drive like we do,” Tanuja warned.

  “But maybe not nerve enough,” Sanjay said as they crossed the graveled shoulder and angled down a weeded slope, broomstraw and brambles shredding against the undercarriage.

  The mist thickened in the realm below, born out of the depths, and in its ascent was shaped by the wind into stampeding forms that flung themselves at the Hyundai and flared around it. Phalanxes of eucalyptuses stood guard against descent, penetrated by the herded fog but seemingly impenetrable to all else.

  Having walked the land for years, Sanjay knew the architecture of earth, rock, and flora. To him, this wilderness wasn’t wild, but a palace of elegant chambers and passageways. He steered between jambs of rock, across a canted threshold of stone, onto a slope of rain-jeweled ribbon grass, and toward the trees, as if the wall they presented was as insubstantial as the fog that seethed between them.

  “Sanjay, no,” Tanuja warned as he maintained speed.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jhav!” she cried, an obscenity he had never before heard her use in any language. She braced herself for impact.

  At the last moment, he thought he’d angled toward the wrong point in the tree line, but then the unbroken rampart of forest was revealed to be an illusion. The trees to the left were older growth, twenty feet downhill from the younger specimens to the right; the distance differential made them appear the same size and age, and the abrupt drop in the land hid the truth that one long phalanx was in fact two. The Hyundai plunged. Sanjay swung the vehicle hard to the right. It didn’t roll. He drove behind the younger stand of eucalyptus, which was a natural windbreak, three trees deep, rather than a full forest. He continued north along a narrow escarpment, trees to the right, a black void to the left where the land descended—more steeply now—three or four hundred feet to the canyon floor.

  They’d had no option other than an off-road escape, but he knew that this escarpment narrowed until it terminated in an out-fold of canyon wall. They needed to go down into less hospitabl
e territory.

  Twin luminous globes appeared behind them, haloed in the mist, shimmering witchily in the rain, nothing of their source revealed, like some otherworldly visitation, but of course they were the headlights of the Range Rover.

  Sanjay wheeled the Hyundai off the ridge line, into the void.

  9

  Gaining Sara Holdsteck’s trust had taken Jane Hawk much longer than she would require to get answers to the few essential questions that she had come there to ask.

  She popped a pill with her coffee.

  Sara raised her eyebrows.

  “Acid reducer,” Jane explained.

  “Taken with black, black coffee.”

  “Coffee doesn’t reflux on me. The mess the world’s in, the arrogant elitists who screwed it up, who believe in nothing but power, like your ex-husband. That’s the acid, why I need this.”

  “You have an extra one of those?”

  Jane shook a tablet from the bottle and passed it across the table. “So Simon occupies the house you used to own.”

  Sara swallowed the pill. “I hear he has a live-in hottie.”

  “I know about the hottie. But there are some things about the house I couldn’t get from research. I need you to tell me.”

  “Anything. Whatever. But…maybe it’s time I knew your name.”

  “Elizabeth Bennet,” Jane lied.

  “Like in Pride and Prejudice.”

  “Is it?”

  “Do you sometimes go as Elizabeth Darcy?”

  Jane smiled. “Not that I recall.”

  “All right, Lizzy. What do you want to know about the house?”

  A few minutes later, Jane changed the subject. “I also need some info about certain of his personal habits.”

  When a sudden acceleration of wind drove raindrops against the house with the hard snap of a nail-gun barrage, Sara didn’t startle as before or glance at the blinded windows. In a quiet, steady voice she spoke dispassionately about Simon Yegg, apparently now convinced there was a chance that some justice would be settled upon him.

  Jane’s last item concerned family. “You ever meet his brother?”

  “Simon has a brother?”

  “A half brother. Same mother, different fathers.”

  “His dad died when Simon was eight, his mom six years later.”

  “No. She divorced the father. He later died in a fire. Mother’s not dead.”

  “Damn. Did the man never say a word of truth?”

  “His tongue’s not made for it. You know a Booth Hendrickson?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s the half brother. Born in Florida. Raised in Nevada, California. Tall. Salt-and-pepper hair. Pale green eyes. Talks like he’s Boston Society. Five-thousand-dollar suits.”

  “Rings no bell.”

  “He’s very high up in the Department of Justice. Only a couple rungs below the attorney general. Through a network of associates, he seems to have a lot of power in other agencies.”

  Sara digested that revelation. Her souring expression suggested that she might be glad to have taken the pill Jane had given her. “Other agencies? Like the IRS?”

  “Not just the IRS. He’s a unique cross-agency player.”

  “What—he and Simon ruin naïve women and split the proceeds?”

  “I doubt Hendrickson wants a dime. He does it for his brother.”

  “How touching.”

  “They have different last names. They don’t advertise their relationship. Hendrickson has much bigger interests of his own that he wouldn’t want compromised by Simon. But they’re close, and I was able to link them.”

  “You said you’re after Simon because of who he hangs with. You mean Hendrickson?”

  “Yeah. I’m going to get at Hendrickson through Simon. After Hendrickson…others just as corrupt as those two.” Jane got to her feet and picked up the Heckler and holstered it. “It’ll be best for you if you never tell anyone about me or what we discussed.”

  “Who would I tell? I don’t trust anyone anymore.”

  “That’ll change if you let it. You’re smarter now about who might be rotten. Just remember the pistol rig, a new security code.”

  “Code tonight. The rig tomorrow. I won’t be going to Paris, either. Or Yosemite.”

  Jane went to the back door that led to a patio.

  Behind her, Sara said, “Oh, my God.”

  Jane turned. She saw in the woman’s face something that was disconcertingly like awe.

  “I know who you are. Black hair, not blond. Black eyes, not blue. But it’s you.”

  “I’m nobody.”

  Sara didn’t say that Jane, once a decorated FBI agent, was now at the top of the Bureau’s most-wanted list, the object of a media frenzy. She pointed to the banner headline on the Los Angeles Times. “There’s no truth in the news, is there? Not about you, not about anything. We’re living in a world of lies.”

  “There’s always truth, Sara. Under an ocean of deceit, there’s truth just waiting.”

  The woman’s weariness gave way to an earnest look, to an air of edgy enthusiasm that troubled Jane. “Whatever they’ve done, you’re taking it to them. Whatever they’re hiding, you’re digging it up.” She rose from her chair. “People, some people anyway, sense we’re being manipulated about what to think of you, but we don’t know why they want you to be so hated. I wish…wish I had what you have, could do what you’re doing.”

  “I’m nobody,” Jane repeated, though not in the interest of denying her identity. “I could be dead tomorrow. If not tonight.”

  “You won’t be, though. Not you.”

  The fervor in the woman’s voice, a shining something in her eyes, chilled Jane for reasons she could not entirely understand.

  “Yes, me,” she said. “Dead sooner than later. Or something worse than dead.”

  To discourage a response, she stepped outside with her last word and closed the door. She crossed the concrete patio, hurried alongside the house and into the street, toward the car that she’d parked a block and a half away.

  The singular chill persisted in her bones, colder than the late-March rain. She cast a shadow under the streetlamps, which was good. The sharp wind stung her face, and the blown rain blurred her vision, which was also good. The darkness—that of the lowering storm clouds and especially that of the star-shot sky fixed eternal above the storm—made her feel small and fragile, which was both good and right.

  10

  They switchbacked down the canyon slope at precarious angles more felt than seen, in a mist that curdled and became less animate as the wind diminished with their altitude and as the walls of the declivity drew closer on both sides. The special off-road tires churned through sodden weeds and sandy mud, spun and slid sideways on wet layered shale that splintered and sluiced out from under the Santa Fe Sport. Storm runoff followed ancient channels, foaming torrents that, in the crossing, surged against the wheels as though to tip the Hyundai out of Sanjay’s control and roll it into ruin. Where there was no shale or stone of any kind, he feared that the hundreds of feet of compacted soil, saturated by hours of relentless rain, would begin to move under their vehicle like an immense beast from a thousand millennia in the past, avalanching them into the lower darkness and burying them there beyond all possibility of escape or rescue.

  Despite the focus demanded of him by the terrain and weather, from time to time Sanjay glanced upslope, or Tanuja encouraged him to do so, and always above them, finding its way toward them, was the Range Rover with its sinister passengers. If their pursuers were not drawing steadily closer, neither were they falling much behind. As he could see them by the lights that guided them, so the lights of the Hyundai encouraged their pursuit.

  When the gauntlet of trees and brush and mud and rushing water had been navigated, they
arrived at the canyon’s bottom, where thousands of storm spates converged to form a temporary brown river surging and tossing southward. Sanjay switched off the headlights before turning in the same direction that the river raced.

  “Maybe they’ll think we went north,” he said.

  “They won’t,” Tanuja disagreed, although she was not by nature a pessimist. “Without headlights, we’ll have to go slower. They’ll catch us sooner.”

  “I don’t intend to go slower, Tanny,” he assured her.

  In the formation of the river, the descending water had washed debris from its banks, even objects as large as rotting sections of long-fallen trees, which tumbled and wallowed along in the filthy currents. Furthermore, over many thousands of years and countless storms, the land here had been smoothed until the banks, short of flood tide, were almost as navigable as causeways.

  Although the Hyundai could no longer be seen by those farther up the canyon wall, Sanjay was at first all but blind, the way ahead obscure. The brown water was dimly visible on their right because of its agitation and its freight of pale flotsam, but also because its churning generated lush garlands of vaguely phosphorescent foam that flowered upon it and gave definition to its sinuous form.

  “We’ll leave tire tracks in the soft earth,” Sanjay said, “but in this rain, those ought to wash away in a minute or two. And where there’s scree instead of mud, we won’t leave tracks at all. They’ll have to go slower than they want, looking for where we might have turned away from the river and gone uphill again.”

  “Suddenly you’ve got a chaska for danger,” Tanuja said.