The Crooked Staircase Read online

  26

  Considering its metal shelves packed full of everything from cleaning supplies to bibles, its wooden creche containing a swaddled baby Jesus with a bent halo wired to his head, its plastic livestock with unlikely expressions of adoration, and its life-size figures staring with realistic glass eyes, the windowless storage room was a strange place in ordinary times and downright eerie at the moment.

  When the last voices faded, when no more doors were slammed, after no further car engines rumbled to life in the parking lot, when silence endured for two minutes, three, Sanjay and Tanuja rose from their concealment behind the camels and passed among the wise men.

  Sanjay eased open the door and saw a pitch-black hallway brightened only by the light that spilled past him and imprinted his shadow on the floor, a swollen and distorted silhouette, as if it might not be just a shadow, but instead the image of some entity that possessed him, here revealed. He leaned out and looked toward the junction of corridors. The darkness and silence were complete.

  “I think we’re alone.”

  Tanuja said, “Did you notice a rectory next to the church?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “If there is, we don’t dare turn on lights near any windows. The minister or someone might see.”

  In case of an earthquake, there was an emergency flashlight plugged into a wall outlet by the door, perpetually charging. They were most likely distributed throughout the building.

  “It’s too bright,” Tanuja judged.

  “Candles,” Sanjay said. “A church can’t be without candles.”

  They found two shelves of boxed candles: long tapers for the altar, others of various sizes. Crates of china and glassware that were evidently used at church dinners. They put a fat candle in each of three drinking tumblers.

  “There ought to be some matches in the sacristy,” Sanjay said.

  “And in the kitchen,” Tanuja suggested. “The kitchen is closer, and that’s where we’re going, anyway.”

  Sanjay switched on the emergency flashlight and hooded the lens with one hand and led his sister along the hallway, past the church offices, to the kitchen, while she carried the three candleholders.

  The two kitchen windows featured blinds. Sanjay drew them all the way down. With the flashlight, he searched the drawers for matches but found a butane lighter with a long flexible-metal neck.

  Tanuja put the glasses on the kitchen table, and Sanjay lit the candles with the torchlike spout of butane flame. Then he switched off the flashlight. The amber glow that fluttered from the burning wicks was subdued and surely didn’t leak around the edges of the blinds enough to be noticed from outside.

  They had not eaten dinner yet when Linc Crossley and his two associates had come calling, and the subsequent events of the evening had stropped a sharp edge on their hunger.

  The first of two Sub-Zero refrigerators was mostly empty except for bottled water and Diet Pepsi. Among other items, the second fridge held sliced ham, baloney, various cheeses, tomatoes, mustard, mayonnaise, lettuce, and a half-empty bag of sesame-seed rolls—the sandwich-makings for one or more church-office employees.

  In one of the Sub-Zero’s vegetable drawers, a bottle of good champagne lay hidden beneath a package of romaine lettuce, as though its presence in the church kitchen must be an embarrassment. Or maybe it had been nestled there for a surprise birthday celebration, because in another drawer, under two packages of bean sprouts, were four champagne flutes.

  Sanjay said, “Grab two glasses. I’ll open the bottle.”

  “Should we?” Tanuja wondered.

  “Why shouldn’t we?”

  “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

  “Think of it as a restorative.”

  “We don’t even know whose woods we’re in.”

  He took the bottle to the sink, in case it foamed upon being opened. “If I have to eat baloney, I’m washing it down with this.”

  Tanuja said, “Maybe there’s not even a way out of these woods.”

  “The woods metaphor has been exhausted,” Sanjay declared as he peeled the foil off the wire muzzle that caged the cork. “We’re Hansel and Gretel, and you know how that story goes. They find their way out of the woods, their pockets stuffed with pearls and jewels.”

  Putting the champagne flutes on the table, Tanuja said, “We’re reversing roles again. I’m all noir, you’re Mr. Optimistic.”

  Sanjay twisted the wire off the cork. “Whoever is after us, they’re not as bad as a wicked witch. They’re not supernatural.”

  “They’re something,” she said. “They’re not just any standard-variety sociopath. They’ve got weird mojo.”

  The cork squeaked against the glass. The hollow pop, in other circumstances festive, didn’t sound so festive now. The bottle spewed laces of foam that fizzed in the stainless-steel sink.

  Sanjay poured the champagne. “We have some mojo of our own. We’ll trick them into the oven and roast them all.”

  “Chotti bhai, the Hansel-and-Gretel metaphor has been way exhausted.”

  “I’m your little brother only by two minutes, bhenji. Old enough to drink.” He put down the bottle and raised his glass. “To the indomitable Shukla twins. We are survivors.”

  Her eyes were wide in the candlelight. “No joking, Sanjay. I’m scared.”

  He was pained to hear those words, but it half broke his heart that, in truth, he could do nothing to reassure her. He could only clink his glass against hers and drink.

  After a hesitation, she sipped her champagne, too. Then she proposed a second toast. “To dear Baap and Mai, always with us.”

  He did not believe that their long-dead father and mother were always with them, but he never said otherwise to his beloved sister. “Always with us,” he agreed, and together they sipped the ice-cold and delicious champagne.

  27

  After a hesitation, the Shukla twins had walked north on the boulevard and continued to the far end of the long block. The high-definition video from the camera at the first intersection allows Carter Jergen to frame distant objects and enlarge them without a significant loss of clarity. On his laptop, he watches Sanjay and Tanuja turn right, east, and out of sight.

  With Radley Dubose aboard again, hulking in the front passenger seat and glowering like an Orc displaced from Tolkien’s Mordor, Jergen drives to the next cross street and turns east at the corner as the twins had done. Again he parks illegally at a red curb.

  When he has the name of this street and marries it with the boulevard, he is able to access the NSA-archived video from the four cameras that monitor the intersection.

  “What we’ve got here,” Jergen says, “is the only bird horror that Hitchcock left out of the movie.”

  Dubose groans. “Airborne diarrhea.”

  “Plenty of it,” Jergen confirms.

  Birds frequently perch on the cameras, and the earlier models don’t have spiked cowls to thwart them. If in the vicinity there are trees that produce berries, the droppings are so acidic that they etch the plastic bubble serving as a lens shield. Even after a heavy rain washes off the mess, the camera is peering through a cataract. Of the four traffic cams at this intersection, those aimed north and east provide only a milky blur of shadowy shapes.

  “High-tech craps out,” Dubose says. “So much for government. You see a private-sector answer?”

  “There’s sure to be one,” Jergen says.

  The next intersection to the east involves secondary streets, where there won’t be traffic cams. Carter Jergen laments that a nation drowning in debt has its priorities so woefully wrong. It struggles to maintain five-thousand-acre wind farms and in-depth research on the pernicious effects of loud dance music on the early sexual maturation of preteen girls, but is unable to install quite as many millions of high-definition video cameras as are
required to maintain surveillance and control of a large and restive population.

  Street parking is not allowed in this block. Jergen cruises slowly along the curb, surveying enterprises on both sides, enduring the horns of impatient motorists.

  “Assholes,” Dubose grumbles. “They have another lane, room to go around us, but they gotta make a statement. If only this heap had a sunroof.”

  “Why a sunroof?”

  “If I stood up and shot one of the noisy bastards, that would give the rest of them something to think about.”

  “You like those old Warner Brothers cartoons?” Jergen asks.

  Squinting through the windshield at the businesses ahead of them, Dubose says, “What shit are you talking about?”

  “Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck. I loved all that when I was a kid.”

  “Never seen them. Being a kid never interested me. Didn’t have time for it.”

  “There was this character, Yosemite Sam, he wore a big cowboy hat, always sure that shooting a problem would solve it.”

  “Had his head on straight,” Dubose says. He leans forward in his seat, his Dudley Do-Right jaw thrust at the windshield, his brow furrowed, bird-dogging a prospect. “Here’s a nice little paranoid corner grocery.”

  The last business on the south side of the block is less a grocery than a convenience store. Jergen pulls off the street and into a parking space. At the peak of the roof above the front doors, a cluster of security cameras maintains surveillance of approaches from the east and west as well as from the street directly in front of the premises. There will be an additional camera or two inside.

  “Sure as shit,” Dubose says, “something’s wrong when QuickMart has the scene scoped better than the NSA and Homeland Security combined,” and Jergen has to agree.

  28

  Although Jane didn’t expect Petra Quist to return until almost midnight, she finished touring the house, stopped in the kitchen to leave an item from her tote, extinguished the last of the lights that she’d turned on, and by 11:10 was standing in the foyer, next to one of the windows that flanked the front door. At 11:15, far earlier than she had anticipated, a superstretch black Cadillac limo turned off the street and into the circular driveway.

  Jane stepped back from the window and watched as the chauffeur came around the front of the vehicle. He opened a back door and offered a hand to help the passenger disembark.

  In a short, sleeveless dress, wearing neither a coat nor a wrap in deference to the cool weather, Petra Quist emerged from the car. Although she appeared to be all long legs and slender arms, she came forth with none of the swanlike grace that could be seen in some of her Facebook photos, but instead like a marionette whose wooden joints were in need of some oil. When she turned from the driver and started up the portico steps, however, she repressed a girls’-night-out stagger and achieved that other kind of avian elegance common to cranes and storks, moving with a studied fluidity punctuated by fraction-of-a-second hesitations, as though her limbs might lock. It was evident that she expected the driver to be watching her with barely constrained desire.

  Maybe the chauffeur was in fact riveted by her fashion-model legs and schoolgirl butt. More likely, he observed her with concern that she might fall upon the steps, bruising her face or splitting her perfect lips. In that case, he would be in deep trouble with the owner of the limousine company, who happened to be Simon Yegg, this girl’s “nuclear-powered love machine.”

  Petra negotiated the steps with her chin high, as she might hold it when bringing a martini glass to her mouth.

  Jane picked up her tote bag and backed away from the entrance, into the open doorway of the nearby study, which smelled of leather upholstery and cigars cuddled in a humidor. She set the tote aside.

  From the sound of it, the party girl had difficulty inserting the key in the lock. Then the deadbolt clacked open and the alarm sounded as she stepped inside.

  Closing the door, Petra said, “Anabel, follow me with light,” and the foyer chandelier brightened above her.

  Sara Holdsteck had failed to mention that the computerized systems of the house responded to voice commands preceded by its customized identity—Anabel. Evidently this feature had been added since her ex-husband had forced her out. Interesting. And curious.

  “Anabel, disarm security. Five, six, five, one, star.”

  A disembodied female voice said, “Control is now disarmed.”

  When Petra began to sing Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” and started across the foyer, Jane stepped from the darkness of the study. Pistol held at her side, muzzle toward the floor, she said, “Petra Quist, formerly Eudora Mertz of Albany, Oregon.”

  The party girl halted among the prismatic patterns cast on the marble floor by the immense crystal chandelier, likewise prismed herself, as though she might have been pieced together from glass. Wings of golden hair framing her face. A complexion as smooth as the petals of a cream-colored rose. Blue eyes so boldly striated that they gleamed like faceted jewels. In the short, custom-fitted dress that matched her eyes, with a Rockstud Rolling purse from Valentino slung over her shoulder, she stood with one leg before the other, as if frozen in mid-stride.

  Jane said, “Voted most popular girl in the senior class. Main squeeze of Keith Buchanan, high-school football hero. Then you’re off to New York and modeling jobs. Three years later, it’s L.A. and commercials for national brands, occasionally an acting gig.”

  If Petra was surprised or fearful, she didn’t show it. Her expression said, I’m dangerous and I’m too cool for your school, a look that was perpetually popular in the high-fashion magazines.

  “Two years in L.A.,” Jane said, “then you’re in Nashville, playing guitar and singing in the starter clubs. Eighteen months later, you’re back here, just south of true La La Land, twenty-six years old and…doing what?”

  Petra issued a sigh of impatience. “You’ve got no reason to be pissed at me. If Simon dumped you, chickee, save your ammo for him.”

  “Maybe I will. But I want you out of the way when he comes home. You and I, we’re going down to the theater.”

  “Screw that. I need a drink.”

  Jane raised the pistol. She had fixed a sound suppressor to it, not because a shot was likely to be heard beyond the walls of the mansion, but because the average person found a pistol even more intimidating when it was fitted with a silencer, announcing that the bearer of the weapon was a professional and not to be resisted.

  Either because an evening of drinking with the girls had rendered Petra incapable of discerning a threat or because even sober she would have more attitude than common sense, she said, “If you want to have a bitch contest, honey, you better go into training for a year. Then come back, and we’ll get it on.”

  She turned away from Jane and sauntered toward the living room archway, moving as seductively as when she climbed the portico steps with the chauffeur watching. No doubt, from experience, she knew that some girls coveted her no less than did most men. Perhaps she hoped that Jane was one such whose desire would make her vulnerable.

  As Petra stepped out of the foyer, lamps bloomed with light in the living room.

  In other circumstances, with the clock ticking toward Simon’s arrival, Jane would have overpowered Petra the moment the woman disarmed the security system. She would have taken her by surprise with a spray bottle of chloroform, of which she had a supply that she’d derived from art-store acetone and janitorial bleaching powder. Because she hoped to pry certain information from this woman, however, she needed her to be clearheaded, or at least no more muddle-brained than an evening of club-hopping had already left her.

  Trailing Petra across the living room, Jane said, “I’m not one of Simon’s girls, and this has nothing to do with you.”

  “Oh, good. Then piss off, why don’t you?”

  “But if you force me to it, I�
��ll hurt you.”

  “So you’ll double-cap me? Two shots in the back of the head? Why should I care? I’d never know it happened.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  Petra Quist said, “I’m best when I’m drunk. Don’t think I’m not. You hear a slur in my voice? No, you don’t. Vodka clarifies. Peter Parker is bitten, so then he’s Spider-Man and all. Ice-cold Belvedere and an olive—that’s my spider bite.”

  As Jane followed the woman through open double doors and into a hallway, a series of crystal ceiling fixtures brightened, a spectrum of primary colors burning bright along the sharp edges of the pendants.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Jane said. “Don’t push me like this.”

  “Kiss my ass. You probably even want to kiss it.”

  In training at Quantico and during her busy years in the FBI, working cases involving Behavioral Analysis Units 3 and 4, which dealt mostly with mass murders and serial killings, Jane had known all kinds of hard cases, men and women, and ultimately cracked every one of them. But there was something different about Petra Quist, something new and disturbing. The woman’s restiveness under these circumstances was not entirely related to how much she had drunk, and dealing with her successfully might require understanding the deeper reason for her mulish—and reckless—stubbornness.

  Still walking in front of Jane, Petra said, “Why don’t you grab my hair, throw me down, kick me in the teeth, bust me up? Are you all bullshit and no balls?”

  The vast kitchen—maple cabinets, black granite countertops, stainless-steel appliances, designed to accommodate a caterer with a platoon of cooks and other staff—welcomed Petra with sudden light.

  “Or maybe you don’t want to bruise my pretty body before you get a chance to use it.”

  Jane watched in silence as the woman—no, the girl, perhaps in some way even still a child—took two martini glasses and a cocktail shaker from a bar-supply cabinet. A bottle of dry vermouth from another cupboard. A jar of olives from the second of four Sub-Zero refrigerators. One by one, she placed the items on the first of two large center islands.