Pushed open the door. The room was white, clean and tidy. The bed was made, the drapes parted. There was a TV on the wall. In spite of the items of personal property lying about—a cell phone on the chest of drawers, a hanger with a pair of faded jeans and a hoodie on the closet door—something about the room gave Bob the feeling that it was abandoned, and that the person who lived there wouldn’t be coming back. Just like that apartment in Jordan where Tomás Gomez had lived.
An apartment that seemed to know others would arrive there looking for answers.
On the bed, on top of the pillow, lay a brown face mask with holes for the eyes and mouth. In fact it was a complete head covering, including a full head of hair. On the blanket was a pair of thin brown gloves. They lay like the hands of a person lying in the bed would have laid.
Bob picked up the mask and looked at it more closely.Shuddered as he recognized the face with the scar on the cheek. At the back the skin was cut away low on the neck and up to the crown of the head, and there was a lace woven through perforations in the skin to make it easy to take on and off.
He ran his fingertips over the gloves of human skin and across the tattooed five-pointed star. He thought of Tomás Gomez’s fingerprints they had found at the crime scenes. On the handle of the restroom. It was all beginning to make sense now. Mike Lunde hadn’t escaped through the ventilation shaft at the shopping mall, he had simply taken off the hoodie, the Gomez mask and the Gomez gloves. Probably put them in a bag that he hid under his jacket. Dismantled the rifle to make room for it in the bag as well. With practice, the routine wouldn’t have taken more than a couple of minutes. After that he’d pulled down the fan, tossed one of Gomez’s insulin syringes into the ventilation shaft and then strolled out of the restroom like a quite ordinary white man out shopping, walking straight past Kay and the SWAT team. It was a trick he could repeat time after time without ever getting caught. Bob’s gaze fell on a paper bag in front of the closet. It was from a well-known toy store, he recognized the logo—a boy wearing a mushroom for a hat. There was a branch right next to the restroom at Track Plaza. He looked inside. Lifted the scrunched-up sheet of gift wrap. Out fell a pair of sunglasses, the same type they’d seen Gomez wearing in the video recordings.
Bob looked at the cell phone. It was turned off. A police voice expert would be able to confirm that the recording of the alleged Tomás Gomez who called Mike Lunde was in reality Mike Lunde himself, standing in a phone booth and calling his own cell. That explained why the breathing seemed to sound as if it was turning itself on and off.
Bob walked into the bathroom. Clean and tidy here too. He opened the door of the cabinet above the sink. The usualbathroom stuff. Several packs of brown contact lenses from different manufacturers. Of course. Have to get the eyes right.
On the bottom shelf Bob saw a familiar-looking tray of pills. Pink. Bob picked it up and read the long and unpronounceable name of the antidepressants. He read the doctor’s signature and the date. The tray should have been empty, and when Bob counted the number of pills left he concluded that Mike Lunde must have stopped taking them and that, coincidentally, he must have done so at about the same time as he stopped taking his own pills.
He walked back into the hall, down the stairs and stopped in the doorway of the living room.
“Find the bullets?” asked Emily as she poured tea.
“No,” said Bob. “He took them with him. Did he say anywhere else he might be going, besides the store?”
“No. Where would that be?”
“Yes, where would that be?” Bob looked at the steaming hot tea on the counter in front of him. “So did he say what he was going to be doing today?”
“Only that he would be unveiling his masterpiece. He’s been looking forward to that.”
Bob swallowed. “You know what, Emily? I see Mike left his cell phone in his room and I really need to get ahold of him, so that tea is going to have to wait until another day.”
She looked up at him, smiling and rather surprised. “Of course, Bob. Anytime.”
Bob ran out to his car, the sound of the mower screeching in his ears, his pulse hammering like a speeded-up watch.
46
Enter, October 2016
Brenton Walker was looking at Kevin Patterson’s back as he stood by the opening of the curtain, ready to mount the podium and be greeted by the cheers and the sunshine. He was going to be introduced over the loudspeaker as soon as the next musical act finished. Patterson raised and lowered his shoulders, he rolled his neck like a boxer getting ready for a fight, fastened a button on his suit jacket, unfastened it, fastened it again. Walker’s seething sense of disquiet had started to abate, perhaps because there was no way back now and it was too late to do anything about anything they might have overlooked. That was a lesson Brenton’s father had taught him: the need to accept things you cannot change. It was advice his father himself never followed, and that caused his downfall as a local politician.
The band was still playing out there, the crowd singing along.
“Ten seconds please,” said a man wearing a headset. “Break a leg, Mr. Mayor.”
Springer was standing next to Walker. His walkie-talkie crackled to life and a grating voice spoke: “Foxtrot, I see a male, white, age around fifty, about five foot nine, entering one of the private boxes.”
Walker saw Springer’s face turn pale as he picked up the walkie-talkie and spoke quietly into it: “Do you have a sighting on him, Foxtrot?”
“No, he disappeared into the back of the box, into the darkness.”
“Listen up!” Springer shouted into the room. “There is someone up in one of the boxes. Does anyone know how this happened or who this person is?”
There was silence all around Walker. All that could be heard was the sound of the band and the crowd singing. And the man in the headset who was talking into his microphone:
“Norma? Be a sweetie and see if you can get the band to do one more number. Something has, er…come up back here.”
47
Red Light, October 2016
