Five
ONE OF OURS
I’VE NEVER LIKED being told what to do.
It’s a character flaw, I know.
But it is what it is.
Now that I knew they might be letting Black go later that day, my window felt suddenly short. I knew how the release system usually worked. I also knew Nick. He’d find some excuse to keep Black there as long as he possibly could... at least until mid-afternoon. Longer if he could get away with it. They’d run him through hoops until his lawyer threw a fit. Knowing Nick, Black would get out right around the end of the workday, somewhere around five or six o’clock.
Four or four-thirty at the earliest.
So I had some time, but not a lot.
Nick finally left my office around eight o’clock. Not long after that, I saw three clients, including the one I’d blown off the day before, pretty much one after the other.
Then it was noon.
After the last one finally left––and I pretty much had to shove him out the door, since he was one of those needy, clingy types––I spent a few minutes looking over the website of one Black Security and Investigations Firm, sole proprietor, Mr. Quentin R. Black.
I didn’t learn much.
Other than a basic list of services and some impressive names on his testimonials list, his website was frustratingly vague, if beautifully designed.
Chasing down his clients didn’t yield much either.
I knew some of that had to be due to the nature of his work. Even so, I found myself wondering if he had people on his payroll who knew how to get a good chunk of his web presence blocked from regular search engines. I didn’t come across a single picture of him online, not even on his own website. I briefly contemplated calling his firm’s front desk, then decided I would rather go in person. I knew there was a good chance his office would have surveillance cameras but I was willing to risk that too.
Anyway, Black had been taunting me. Might as well return the favor.
Grabbing my keys off the hook near my office door, I only paused long enough to feed Gomey an excuse about a headache and how I’d decided to work the rest of the afternoon from home. As I battled the traffic to make my way downtown on California Street, I told myself that I needed to do this... that I had a kind of civic duty to check him out personally, given that most people would have no idea what they were dealing with in Black.
I told myself I just wanted to see his workspace.
Gather a few impressions.
I knew it would be easier to check him out in the psychic sense later on, if I got a good look at where he worked. There was some kind of weird relationship between knowing a person’s physical location and being able to see them with my mind.
I knew that was only part of it though.
If I was being wholly honest with myself, I was planning on doing something I hadn’t done in years, not since I’d gone looking for Zoe’s killer and found nothing. I was planning on actively using my psychic ability to investigate something. Mostly, I was hoping I could get enough off Black’s employees to form a more complete picture of Mr. Black himself. Maybe then I could decide if Nick was right about him.
I knew Nick very well might be right about him.
But I needed to know for myself.
I got something different off Black than what Nick did. I couldn’t yet put it into words, but I was reasonably sure it wasn’t only the psychic thing that Black and I shared. I knew it might be that, however. I knew Nick might be right about me, in thinking I just didn’t want to believe Black could be a psychopathic killer, even if my reasons were different from what Nick thought.
I just had to hope Nick wouldn’t return to my office in the next few hours.
I pulled into an underground parking structure three blocks from Black’s office building about fifteen minutes later. Taking only my phone and my purse, I walked up to the faceted, cylindrical tower and felt my throat tighten as I saw the stepped fountain standing in a sidewalk garden in front of the building. The seven-story glass-enclosed lobby I could see behind the garden looked like something out of a movie.
Even for this part of town, the building was high-end.
I recognized it, although I’d never been inside.
That feeling of unreality worsened when I went through the revolving door and found myself standing in front of a waterfall fountain coming out of one wall and decorated with hanging crystals that shimmered with pale, colored lights. Real art hung on the walls. It was like they’d made a section of the lower lobby into an adjust of the San Francisco MOMA.
I hadn’t made it halfway across the granite tile floor before I was approached by someone in a security uniform. I’d been looking down, noticing that the floor was designed like an elaborate chess board as I aimed my feet for the main bank of elevators, when the guard stepped right in front of me, forcing me to halt.
Smiling, he asked me politely which business I intended to visit.
When I told him, he excused himself to wander a few feet away and murmur something into his sleeve. I noticed he never really took his attention off me, however.
I wondered if he’d tackle me to the ground if I made a break for the elevators.
I strongly suspected he would.
He touched his ear after he stopped talking into his sleeve and only then did I notice he wore an earpiece as well. So this building didn’t have rent-a-cops... it had its own Secret Service, including the requisite toys that intimidated as much as provided function.
Just when I’d started to think I was about to be booted out that revolving door for not having an appointment, the guard’s expression cleared.
Nodding to something someone said on the other side of the line, he smiled.
Turning towards me, he winked, and widened that smile at me.
Huh, I thought.
He took his hand off his ear and motioned for me to follow him.
He looked genuinely friendly now as he escorted me off to the side and down a narrow corridor past the security desk and to the left of the main bank of elevators. I couldn’t help wondering why I got the nod, and assumed it must be because I wore a suit, was female and happened to be wearing high heels that day.
Sometimes, being a well-dressed woman didn’t suck.
Even so, I glanced back at that row of gleaming elevators as we left them behind, wondering why he wasn’t taking me to them. I suddenly envisioned myself being strip-searched in a windowless room. Pulling my jacket tighter around my skirt suit and trying not to frown, I only relaxed after I read the guy briefly and realized he was just taking me to a different set of elevators.
A few seconds later we reached the alcove I’d seen in his head when I took a quick peek at his thoughts. Only one elevator sat in that alcove, and it looked strangely smaller and older than the ones I’d glimpsed from the main lobby.
It also looked considerably more fancy, with copper-colored plating on the outside doors rather than the brushed steel of the main bank. An art deco-styled arrow pointed at only five numbers set in the wall, all of which were also fashioned of copper.
So apparently this was the express elevator. It served only floors 44, 45, 46, 47 and 48.
The guard used a pass card to open the elevator doors.
Smiling at me again, he motioned politely for me to enter, then entered after me, making me nervous all over again. But he only used his pass card to activate the button for floor 48 before he exited, nodding to me in a friendly way as the doors closed between us.
I breathed a sigh of relief once I found myself alone.
Even so, I found myself looking up, scanning the inside of the mirrored car with its brass railings until I found the God’s eye camera. Frowning up at it, I looked down at the emerald green carpet on the floor of the elevator, then at the five numbered buttons.
The elevator moved fast.
I mean, it really booked.
It climbed those stories faster than I was prepared for... not really giving me time to think through what I intended to say when I reached Black’s offices. I also had only a minute or two to think about the possible ramifications of Black definitely knowing I’d been here, and how I felt about that, as well.
But maybe he wouldn’t know.
After all, they must get walk in clients occasionally. Would they really run every face and ID by Quentin Black himself, when he owned the company?
It struck me as unlikely.
The thought made me relax, if only a little.
When the doors opened with a melodic ping a few seconds later and I walked out, I found myself in another glass-enclosed lobby. Tall windows stood to either side of the elevator’s foyer, and the ceiling directly overhead was all glass, too. Remembering we were essentially housed in the penthouse floor of the building, I forced myself to exhale after I’d looked up at a swath of blue sky and high, white cumulous clouds, taking in the view for a few seconds before I steeled myself and looked straight ahead.
A brushed copper door stood directly in front of me, a decidedly more modern version than the art deco style of the elevators. The door stood unusually wide and tall, with a long, vertical cylinder for a handle, about the width of a copper pipe.
Etched into the translucent, plate glass walls that angled back on either side of that door was the same eagle symbol that had been on Black’s business cards. The glass formed a near pyramid shape with the copper door at one end and diagonal hallways on either side. I couldn’t see through either of the long windows, or even see shapes moving inside, but the effect of all that glass made it look strangely like the prow of a ship.
This had to be the place.
Were they really the only business on this floor? Or were more offices located at the end of both of those dimly-lit, angled corridors?
Even as my mind posed the question, a door opened somewhere down the corridor to my left. I heard it rather than saw it, just as I heard footsteps coming towards me from that same hall, moving purposefully over the plush carpet.
They weren’t loud, but the sound carried, probably due to acoustics.
I reached out with my mind, but got nothing.
Silence.
Nerves slid over me, intense enough that I considered retreat. I considered walking straight into the offices of Black Securities and Investigations... then I considered just leaving, getting back in the art deco elevator and returning to the ground floor.
Before I could make up my mind, the person walking towards me reached the natural light of the lobby through the high glass walls and windows.
Once he had, I could only stare.
It was Quentin Black himself.
Moreover, he was shirtless, wearing only black dress pants. I couldn’t help staring at his bare chest and the rest of the way down his body to his bare feet before my eyes jerked back up to his face. His hair was wet, like he’d just gotten out of the shower.
He had tattoos on his inner arms... tattoos I hadn’t seen when he was covered in blood.
He didn’t have much body hair, I noticed.
“Hello, doc,” he said.
He raised a hand in a strangely dated-looking greeting.
Before I could manage to form words, he motioned with his head back down the corridor from which he’d come.
“Do you mind?” he said. “I’m not fully decent.” His sculpted lips lifted in a faint smile. “I confess, I considered just summoning you the other way... but I thought you might not react entirely well to that. From the look on your face, I suspect I am right.”
He continued to study me when I didn’t answer, that faint scrutiny in his eyes.
Then, all at once, he was done.
“Come along then,” he said. “It’s just down here.”
Without another word, he turned on his heel, moving lightly and with an unmistakable grace. I again got fighter as I followed him with my eyes. That impression strengthened as he continued to walk. I watched him retreat back down that dimly-lit corridor until I couldn’t see him anymore and it struck me that it probably wasn’t another office that lived down there.
It was his actual residence.
After another, stuttered breath of a pause, I found myself following him.
“JUST A MOMENT,” he said to me, after he’d motioned me into another high-ceilinged foyer. I found myself staring past him at a massive window on the other side of a sunken living room with plush, pale green carpet. My jaw was hanging, but he continued speaking in the same casual tone, as if I’d been there a dozen times before.
“I’d prefer if we were alone before we talked...” he added. “Give me a minute, will you?”
It took a few seconds for his words to penetrate.
Then I jerked my eyes off the view through that window, where I could see the Bay Bridge with Oakland in the background past Yerba Buena Island. I looked up at him, and a jolt went through me when I realized how tall he was.
“Alone?” I said. “Did you say alone?”
Those flecked gold eyes met mine. “Yes.”
“You mean we’re not alone now?”
He tilted his head sideways.
I guessed it was a shrug? Something about the gesture struck me as even more alien than his gold eyes. Remembering that I’d sat across from this man in chains only about 36 hours ago, I found myself noticing yet again just how tall he was, how broad his shoulders and how those muscles in his arms and chest didn’t look any smaller when he wasn’t wearing a shirt.
I felt my breath tighten as he watched me look at him.
“Meaning what?” I said.
He stepped away from me. I noticed suddenly that he held my jacket in his hands. He must have removed it while I’d been gaping out his living room window.
He took another step away from me, but those gold eyes remained on my face.
“Meaning... yes. There is someone else here. Obviously. I’ll take care of it.”
“Take care of it?” I continued to stare at him, fighting to make sense of his words. For some reason, what he was saying still wasn’t quite computing.
He shrugged more normally the second time, his expression still wholly unapologetic.
Even so, I got the strangest impression that I made him nervous in some way.
That might have been funny if I wasn’t still trying to decide if I’d just followed a real-life serial killer into his home and let him take my coat.
Looking away from me after another strangely loaded pause, he turned towards the door of a closet set into the wall near the edge of the foyer. Rather than hanging my jacket up on a hanger or even a hook, he simply opened the door and tossed it inside, then shut the door with a click.
I watched him do it, fighting a sudden, absurd desire to laugh.
A female voice rose from the back room. “Hey, sexy man! Where did you go?”
I froze.
Suddenly, I understood. Like really understood.
He had company. Not business-type company. The other kind.
My skin flushed.
Before I could think of what to say, he raised his voice.
“Hey!” he said. Hesitating, he seemed to be thinking. “...You.” He frowned, still thinking. “...Person. I need you to leave... something’s come up.”
I stared at him incredulously, fighting another insane desire to laugh. “You don’t know her name? And you’re really shouting at her to leave? From here?”
He gave me a questioning look.
Then, without a word, he walked away from me, moving silently on shoeless feet. Again, I couldn’t help but note that odd grace of his, somewhere between a martial artist and a dancer. He glanced back at me long enough to motion towards the couch.
“Sit,” he said.
It sounded closer to a command than an offer.
Staring at his heavily-muscled back and the large, stylized dragon tattoo that crawled over most of it, I folded my arms as he walked away from me and into another part of his apartment. I didn’t move from the foyer after he’d left, staring around his living room as I tried to decide what to do. I still hadn’t regained my balance from any of this. Part of me thought I should open the door and leave before he came back.
Assuming he let me go, that is, and didn’t lock me out of the elevator.
Either way, I was way past quietly checking out his background at this point, under the radar of both him and Nick. I was in his damned home.
Nick might really arrest me for this.
I was still standing roughly where Black had left me when he walked briskly back into the main room.
This time, he wasn’t alone.
One of his tanned hands clamped around the upper arm of a woman who was trying to both keep up with him and shove her foot into a four-inch heeled pump at the same time. She was muttering at him angrily as she walked. Her shirt was still halfway unbuttoned as he steered her, and untucked from the black pencil-skirt she wore under a white silk dress shirt and black suit jacket.
“I still don’t get what business would come up now, while we were––”
She glanced up to see me and came to a dead stop.
“What the fuck?” she burst out.
I couldn’t help noticing that her lipstick was smeared, her blond hair tousled.
“What the fuck is this?” she demanded, waving the high-heeled shoe at me. “Is this your so-called ‘business emergency’? You stopped in the middle of giving me head because a better offer came along?”
I winced.
Black didn’t. Instead he gave me a puzzled look, as if thinking about her question. Then he looked back at her. He looked about to answer, but she turned, hitting him squarely in the chest with the sharp end of her shoe.
“You complete dick. Is this your fucking wife? Are you married?”
“No,” he said absently. He resumed steering her towards the door and, blanching, I found myself moving into the living room if only to get out of their way.
She didn’t seem to be listening to him though. She glared at me with some of the bluest eyes I’d ever seen as they walked past me. “Your husband’s a prick. You know that? A total fucking prick...”
I could only gape at the two of them.
“He gives good head though,” she sneered, still obviously trying to make me angry. Glaring up at him next, she added, “...At least when he bothers to finish.”
He might not have even heard her, from his tone.
“Feel free to use the card I gave you,” he said, his voice polite as he continued to steer her towards the door of his apartment. “I can’t promise I’ll be available...”
She let out another incredulous snort, swinging at him again with the shoe.
She glared at me from the door, even as he reached for the handle. He opened it in one smooth move. She swung the heeled shoe at his head that time but he ducked it easily, his expression still neutral as he moved behind her. With an insistent but not really a rough push, one hand on the small of her back and the other still gripping her arm, he guided her without preamble through the opening of the door.
Then he released her, leaving her in the corridor.
Before she could turn around, he closed the door firmly behind her.
From the outside, she banged on the door with her shoe, raising her voice.
“Asshole!” I heard muffled through the wood. “Fucking asshole!”
I think my mouth was still hanging open when my eyes shifted from the door back up to his face. He now wore a shirt at least, although it still hung open over his chest. I watched as he began to button it up. Watching him dress himself, hearing the woman curse at him from outside the door, I fought another absurd desire to laugh.
“You didn’t sit down,” he said, frowning slightly as he worked the catches of his shirt.
I shut my mouth with a snap, folding my arms.
The woman continued to curse at him from the hallway.
“One moment,” he said, turning from me.
I watched as he walked to a low table in the living room, scooping up what looked like a hands-free phone from the glass surface.
He fitted it around his ear. Touching a button on one side he spoke at once.
“I have a situation here,” he said. “In the hallway outside my residence. Can you handle it? I have a meeting. And don’t interrupt me for the rest of the afternoon.”
He didn’t appear to wait for an answer but clicked the same button on the hands-free and unhooked the earpiece from his ear, tossing it on the same glass table. He looked up at me, buttoning his sleeve cuffs now that the front of his shirt was done up.
“Would you like a drink?” he said.
Again, I got the oddest feeling from him that I made him nervous.
It was such a different reaction from how he spoke to me in that interrogation room, much less how he’d talked to the blond just now, I frowned, more confused than anything.
Making up my mind in the same set of seconds, I followed him the rest of the way into the living room. Without preamble, I walked directly to a white leather chair and sat, folding one leg precisely over the other.
“A drink?” he repeated.
“Something non-alcoholic, sure.”
He nodded, once.
Even the nod looked strange on him.
When he retreated into the kitchen, which was open with long lights hanging down from the ceiling over a granite-topped bar, I turned my head, looking over my shoulder to speak to him.
“Are you going to tell me what the hell that was all about?” I said mildly.
He’d just finished gargling water and spitting it out in the sink. I looked away, grimacing when I remembered the woman’s words. When I looked up next, he met my gaze from behind the open, stainless-steel refrigerator door. His voice conveyed genuine surprise.
“You need an explanation for that?”
Thinking about his words, I felt my frown deepen.
“No,” I sighed. “I guess not.” I looked back at him, watching him pour me a glass of what looked like rose-tinted water. “What am I doing here, Mr. Black? You must know I had no intention of visiting you here...”
“Planning a little B&E, were we?” he said, giving me a faint smile from behind the bar. “I find I am doing that very same thing. Great minds think alike...”
Breaking and entering. Cute.
“Hardly,” I retorted. “I didn’t even know you lived in the building.”
He nodded absently, but didn’t seem interested in pursuing that line of discussion.
Capping the glass jug with the rose-tinted water, he stuck the container back in the door of his fridge then walked the two glasses around the bar and back towards me. Handing me one as he passed, he sank into the couch across from me, laying an arm on the back cushion and staring at me levelly. Like in the interrogation room, he didn’t hide his appraisal at all.
“You’re a P.I.,” I said finally.
“Obviously,” he said. “Why would we discuss what you already know?”
Thinking about that, I pursed my lips. “Okay.” Thinking again, I looked up. “Did you kill that girl?”
“You must know what I told your handsome cop about that?”
“I know what you told him, yes.”
There was a silence.
Then he sighed, letting out a strange sound, a kind of clicking of his tongue on the roof of his mouth. Leaning forward, he rested his forearms on his thighs, measuring me again with his eyes.
“How did you get here?” he said.
I frowned, staring at him. Taking a sip of the rose-colored water, I was surprised to find it was some kind of fruit juice, and extremely fresh.
“Pomegranate,” he said absently. “Are you going to tell me? How you got here?”
“I drove,” I said, giving him a perplexed look. “I took the elevator. Who cares?”
He made that clicking sound again. That time, he sounded openly impatient.
“Here,” he said. “How did you get here?” He motioned around us, including the view out the windows on all sides of us.
“San Francisco?” I said, still confused. “I was born here. Why? Where are you from? I can hear the accent... but I admit, I can’t place it at all.”
His frown deepened.
Before I could pursue that line of questioning, or make sense of the stare he continued to level at me, he regained his feet. I watched him walk to the long window facing the bay. He folded his arms, gazing out over the view without seeming to see it. When he turned to stare at me, his mouth was set in a harder frown.
“Can I have some of your blood?”
I froze. “What?”
Seeing my expression, he made that clicking sound again. “Not like that. I simply want a sample. With a syringe. Hygienically.”
“What the hell for?”
Before he could answer, I found myself standing as well, placing the glass of juice on his glass table with more deliberation than necessary. I saw him watch me do it, even as he turned to face me, his feet planted evenly as he refolded his arms.
“Look,” I said, waving off my own question. “Forget it. I don’t think I want to know. In fact, I think I’d better go.”
Turning, I started to make my way to his front door.
Before I could reach for the handle of his closet, the same closet where he’d tossed my jacket when I first came inside, he stood between me and it. I froze again, staring up at him as he put his muscular bulk between me and the exit to his apartment.
“Get out of my way,” I told him, my voice a low warning.
“Does that cop know you are here?” he said, narrowing his gaze down at me. “Your friend. He doesn’t know, does he?”
I felt myself tense even more. Was that a threat?
He glanced down at my arms and legs, as if sensing I was gearing up for the possibility that I might have to fight him. He exhaled in a kind of sigh, and that time, the expression on his face bordered on frustrated.
Or maybe that was still impatience I saw in his gold eyes.
“Don’t you want to know what I was really doing there?” he said, his sculpted lips still tilted in a slight frown. “At the park yesterday morning?”
“Sure,” I said, folding my own arms. “What were you really doing there, Mr. Black?”
“I was hunting,” he said at once.
“Hunting?” I said, feeling my jaw tense again.
“Yes.”
“Girls? Or serial killers?”
“Neither,” he said. Then he shrugged, as if rethinking his words. “...Or perhaps both. I was hunting one of ours.”
Refocusing on me, he frowned again, probably from the perplexed look I aimed at him.
He looked me over in a single flick of his gold eyes.
“Not human,” he clarified. When I still didn’t speak, he repeated with more emphasis, “...One of ours. Of course, I now think it’s possible they might be killing these humans for sport. I’m just not sure why. I’d hoped you’d help me find out.”
I stared up at him.
That time, I had no idea what to say to him at all.