15th Affair Read online

  Khalid Khan pushed at the gate and came through our gray and depressing squad room. He sat down in the chair next to my desk and blew his nose into a handkerchief. I could swear he’d been crying.

  He said, “It’s hard to admit this, but when you left the house the other day, I knew I’d been an ass. I apologize for the way I spoke to you. No, you don’t have to say anything. Thanks for what you did. I’ve been deluding myself for years, and now that I’m willing to look at the truth, I don’t know where to find it.”

  “Tell me what you do know,” I said.

  Khan told me his daughter was sure that the woman in the Four Seasons security footage was Alison. Caroline had listed some of the lies Alison had told him, and he was shaken to his soles by her mendacity. Khan told me now of several times when Ali had gone on her “focus downs,” coming back a week later without telling him anything about where she’d been and what she’d done.

  “We have always said that what was good for each of us was good for the marriage,” he said now. “That made sense. Ali was never cut out to be a traditional wife, and I loved that about her. And now I’m paying the price for my incredible gullibility. Please tell me what to do.”

  I told Khan we were looking for his wife in San Francisco, that Monterey police were looking for her also, and that the FBI was involved because of the four people who were killed in the hotel.

  I said, “The crash has sucked up the time of every law enforcement officer in the state, Mr. Khan. But no one has forgotten that Alison is missing. She hasn’t called you or your daughters?”

  “No.”

  “Before the hotel shootings, had you ever heard of Michael Chan?”

  “Never.”

  “What about Joe Molinari? Is that name familiar to you?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Mr. Khan. “Who is he?”

  “A person of interest, that’s all.”

  I’m pretty sure my face colored, but Khan didn’t notice.

  “I don’t know if I want her back,” he told me with a broken voice, “but I have to talk to her. It just can’t end like this. I need to see her.”

  “We want to find her, too, Mr. Khan.”

  I was thinking, If I was any good at finding lost spouses, I would find mine. It came together then. Sure. Why the hell not? I would find them both.

  CHAPTER 59

  I WAS BATHING Julie when the phone rang.

  I grabbed it, stabbed the button, and growled, “Boxer.” It was a juggling act, pinning the phone under my chin while keeping my slippery baby in hand.

  A voice said, “Mrs. Molinari, this is Agent Michael Dixon from the CIA.”

  “Yes?”

  My thoughts were as slippery as my daughter. CIA? What the hell was this? Good news or bad? Had they found Joe?

  “We’d like to have a few words with you.”

  “OK. When?”

  “We’re downstairs.”

  “Here? Now?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, give me a second. Make that five minutes and then buzz me.”

  I rinsed Julie off, wrapped her up in a towel, and from there dressed her in PJs. She was not tired and she was not going to bed, so I put her in the playpen. I left Martha loose, but I got my gun out of the cabinet and tucked it into the waistband of my jeans.

  When the intercom buzzed, I told Dixon and his partner to put their badges up to the camera. They did it. And still, I checked them out through the peephole in my door. Satisfied, I undid the chain lock and let the two men inside.

  They introduced themselves as Agents Michael Dixon and Chris Knightly from Langley. They were both in their thirties, both in business attire, jackets and ties and well-shined shoes. They weren’t a twin set. Dixon was average height, dark hair, button nose. Knightly was large and blond with an American flag lapel pin.

  Dixon was the man in charge.

  When they were seated on the wide leather sofa, Dixon said, “I understand from John Carroll that you’re interested in locating Alison Muller.”

  “She’s a possible witness,” I said. “She may have been the last to see a victim of a recent homicide.”

  “Yes, we understand that she may well have been with Michael Chan.” Dixon went on. “We want to level with you, Mrs. Molinari. Call it interagency cooperation. But in exchange, we need you to back off your inquiries into Alison Muller.”

  Really? They didn’t have the authority to take me off my case. If that was what they wanted, they shouldn’t have come to me here. What was up?

  I said, “That’s not my call. Not yours, either. Muller is a person of interest in a quadruple homicide. Our case. SFPD.”

  “I want to assure you that Muller didn’t kill Michael Chan,” said Dixon. “Muller wanted him alive. We all do.”

  “So what happened?” I said, not promising anything.

  Knightly looked around the apartment from his seat on the sofa. He got up. Went to the large windows facing Lake Street and looked out. Keeping watch, I thought.

  Dixon said, “We’ve been in contact with Muller. She was working Chan, trying to establish if he, like his wife, was in Chinese intelligence.”

  “And was he?”

  “Muller didn’t know. She had already left the hotel and was walking northeast on Market at the time of the incident. This is documented. She doesn’t know anything about the other victims.”

  “I’d like to talk with her myself,” I said. “Officially. Once I’ve cleared her, I’ll be happy to move on.”

  Julie started to fuss. I made an educated guess that she needed changing and that she was about to make this need extremely well known.

  “That’s not possible,” Dixon said. “She’s undercover on a job. When her current assignment wraps up, we’ll put her in touch with you.”

  Pretty much what Khalid Khan had said to me a few days ago. I pressed on.

  “What can you tell me about a passenger named Michael Chan who was on WW 888?”

  He was lying. But maybe he’d tell me the truth when I asked the question that was most important to me.

  “Joe Molinari,” I said. “Do you know where I can find him?”

  Knightly returned to the sofa and said, “I know of Molinari, but he’s ancient history. We have no current information about him, I’m afraid.”

  “I just want to know if he’s alive. Can you tell me that?”

  “Believe me, I would tell you if I knew,” said Agent Knightly of the CIA. “He’s not one of ours.”

  Julie let out a wail. The two men put their cards on the kitchen island and let themselves out of the apartment.

  What the hell had just happened?

  Alison Muller’s colleagues had said she was alive.

  And for all I knew, Joe Molinari, my husband, the father of my crying little girl, that man was dead.

  CHAPTER 60

  AS SOON AS Julie was asleep in her crib, I filled the tub with the hottest water I could bear and got in. But even lavender-scented bubbles couldn’t relax my mind.

  Those men from the CIA had lied to me. Maybe they had been in contact with Alison Muller, maybe not. My gut was telling me they just wanted me to stop looking for her, calling attention to her, speaking to the FBI about her. As for what they’d said about Joe, I couldn’t read them. Not for sure.

  I imagined Joe, working out of his home office, that small room that he could almost wear like a sweater. Those months when he was home all day with the baby—had he been working for the CIA? Had he been working with her?

  The day of the killings in the Four Seasons, had Joe been there because he had been teamed up with Muller? Maybe while she was on the fourteenth floor killing Chan, he had been waiting to get her out of the hotel unseen.

  Far-fetched? Maybe. But it was too damned much of a coincidence that the two of them had disappeared at approximately the same time.

  I went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. In the light of the streetlamp coming in through the window, I stared up at the
juncture between the walls and the ceiling and wondered now if Joe had been alone in his car when he looked into our camera outside the Chan house.

  Had Muller been sitting beside him in the passenger seat? Had the two of them come to the Chan house—not to do their own surveillance, but to take out Shirley Chan? Had our squad car in the driveway delayed Shirley Chan’s murder?

  I cannot explain why an idea suddenly jumped into my mind, but it did. I sat up straight in bed.

  Joe had taken all of his electronic devices with him before he disappeared—hadn’t he? I’d gone through our bedroom and also Joe’s office. But I hadn’t gone through Julie’s room.

  I got out of bed and went to the nursery next door. Martha trotted behind me. I whispered to her to sit, and then I turned on the Finding Nemo lamp on the white-painted dresser. The light from the lamp was pale and yellow, but I could see the whole room. I peeked in on Julie and she was breathing softly. So I began opening her drawers.

  I took out folded onesies from the top drawer, baby blankets from the second, diapers from the bottom, and when I didn’t find anything of interest, I put it all back and stepped over to her closet.

  I pulled the chain on the closet lightbulb and took stock. Julie had very few clothes needing hangers, but Joe and I both had stored excess clothes here. I grabbed up armloads of coats and ski outfits we never wore, putting them on the floor. Then I took boxes of shoes off the shelf.

  Once I had the boxes on the floor, I flipped the lids on the dress shoes, both mine and Joe’s. And then my heart froze solid. On top of the shoes Joe had worn when we got married was a tablet. I’d never seen it before. The charger was in the box with the shoes.

  CHAPTER 61

  MARTHA LICKED MY face as I plugged in the charger and turned on the tablet. I pushed her away and stared at the box that was requesting a password.

  I had no idea what Joe’s password would be. And then the image of a number jumped into my mind. It was the haziest kind of memory because I hadn’t thought about it when I saw it. Now I wasn’t sure if I’d seen it at all. I bolted to Joe’s office and opened the center drawer. I had put all of the contents back after I had tossed it, failing to find clues or evidence of Joe’s whereabouts.

  Now I pulled the drawer all the way out. I dumped the take-out menus and pens and paper clips onto the rug, then took the drawer over to the desk lamp and looked at where the bottom met the sides of the drawer.

  Something was written in pencil close to the seam, a long line of numbers and letters that added up to nothing.

  Like the best kind of password.

  I brought the empty drawer to the tablet on the floor of Julie’s room and typed the alphanumeric into the password box on Joe’s page. I got blocked several times. There were eighteen characters in this chain, and I blew it a few times.

  The third time, I was slow and deliberate, and I was sure I’d typed in the eighteen characters perfectly.

  And still the password was rejected.

  I typed in a few obvious combinations of birthdays and names, but no luck. Joe was a spy. Triple threat. CIA, FBI, Homeland Security. He wasn’t using a password he’d written in his pencil drawer. He wasn’t going to use password1234, either. He wouldn’t use his daughter’s name to guard his secrets. Right?

  Just for laughs, I typed in JulieAnne, and bam. I was in. Imagine that. Folders populated the little desktop.

  It was immediately clear to me that this storage account was for Joe’s personal stuff. The Brooks Findlay file wasn’t there, for instance, nor any of Joe’s freelance clients. I found a file for football scores, and clips from blogs he followed. I found nothing marked top secret. And his contact list didn’t include Alison Muller’s info.

  Before giving up, I clicked on the calendar icon, and when it opened, I flashed over the entries for the many empty days and months when Joe had worked from home.

  The notes were brief and straightforward, but there were a couple of cryptic entries at the end of March. Joe had taken a trip back east to see his mother, who’d just had surgery to put in a pacemaker. He’d made notes of his flight reservations on this, his personal calendar.

  But what I was reading showed me that Joe hadn’t made a round trip from SFO to New York’s JFK. He had booked connecting flights from SFO through JFK to Brandenburg, an airport in Berlin. And he’d noted the confirmation numbers for two seat assignments.

  One for J. A. Molinari. And the second for a fellow traveler, Sonja Dietrich.

  Joe had gone to Berlin with Alison Muller.

  Who was he? I didn’t know my husband at all.

  CHAPTER 62

  JOAN RONAN MACLEAN was an attractive twenty-five-year-old bartender from Palo Alto who’d come to San Francisco on her own dime to see Conklin and me. She made himself comfortable in the visitor’s chair next to our desks, flipped her sandy-colored hair out of her eyes, and said Michael Chan frequented the Howling Wolf and had been at the bar a couple of nights before he was killed.

  According to MacLean, “Chan was drinking alone, and he had more than his usual two beers.”

  “How did he seem to you?” Conklin asked.

  “Pensive. The bar was kinda empty and he wanted to talk. I speak a little Chinese because I had a Chinese nanny, so we’re kinda friends. But I was completely unprepared for this.”

  “Please go on,” Conklin said.

  “Yeah, yeah. He told me he was in love with a woman, not his wife, and that they were going to run away to Canada together.”

  “Did he mention the woman’s name?”

  “He called her Renata one time, and the other times he called her ‘my love.’ I asked him if he was serious about running away, because he has a wife and kids, you know? And he said she was married, too. And he said this lady carried a gun. So I said, ‘She’s a cop?’

  “And he said, all dreamy-like, ‘I don’t really know.’”

  I asked MacLean, “As you see it, does this affair have anything to do with Chan getting killed?”

  “Well. It made me wonder if his wife killed him. Or if his girlfriend did.”

  More questions in a case that was nothing but questions. I thanked MacLean for the tip and walked her out to the gate. When I got back to my desk, Conklin was hanging up the phone. He said, “Chi has a lead on the Chinese guys who’ve been dogging you.”

  Chi was Sergeant Paul Chi of our homicide squad. He was born here but speaks some Chinese and has cultivated a stable of CIs in and around Chinatown.

  I said to Conklin, “What’s he got?”

  Conklin tapped on his keyboard and said, “Here you go.”

  I was looking at a low-res photo of a broad-shouldered Chinese man, maybe in his twenties, wearing a black T-shirt, sports jacket, and jeans. He’d been snapped getting out of a partially obstructed vehicle that might be a BMW SUV.

  “When was that taken?” I asked.

  “Yesterday, half past noon, near a noodle shop in Chinatown.”

  “What noodle shop? Where, exactly?”

  Conklin turned his head and looked up at me. “What do I look like? Google Maps?”

  I laughed, went around to my desk, and threw myself down into the chair. I pawed my mouse and opened my browser.

  “Name of noodle shop? Or is that too much to ask?”

  “Mei Ling Happy Noodles.”

  I put the name in, clicked a few times, and got a picture of a noodle shop on Stockton, a major artery through Chinatown. I swiveled my monitor so my partner could see the shop and then the wide view of the street. At midday, the stores and markets on Stockton and the neighboring intersecting streets of Washington and Jackson were fairly seething with traffic and pedestrians.

  “So, this was taken noonish,” Conklin said. “Maybe this guy was stopping for lunch.”

  “Uh-huh. Noodles to go.”

  “I could go for some yat gaw mein,” Richie said.

  I was ready to punch out and go home to my child before nightfall for once.

  �
��You mean now?” I said. “How about tomorrow, first thing?”

  “That works for me,” he said.

  I thought, Little Julie. Here I come.

  CHAPTER 63

  IT WAS JUST before six p.m. when I headed out to the parking lot on Harriet Street. Rain had been threatening most of the day and was now bordering on torrential. I ran with my head down and my keys in hand. After disabling the alarm, I swung up into the Explorer’s high driver’s seat, which, after ten years of daily use, fits me like my Calvins.

  I turned on my lights and got the wipers going, then pulled out to my left, heading along the narrow one-lane street, which was banked by chain-link fences and parking lots. I could see my turn onto Harrison a block away when a car came barreling straight at me through the gloom, hitting its brights when it was only a few car lengths in front of me.

  I had no time to think.

  I swerved my wheel hard to the right and jammed on my brakes, and at the same time, the oncoming vehicle screeched to a full stop, smashing my left fender and shattering the headlight.

  Freaking idiot. Was he insane?

  I had my hand on the door handle and was about to get in that driver’s face when another vehicle pulled up on my left, stopping right there. A chain-link fence was on my right, effectively blocking my exit from the passenger-side door. Then brights in my rearview mirror brought it all into sharp focus.

  I was completely boxed in. I was trapped.

  I whipped my head around to face the driver on my left and was hardly surprised to see the Asian man with the scar on his chin, the one who’d body-blocked me as I was leaving the NTSB meeting.

  I yelled, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  He grinned, lifted a handgun, and took aim at my face.

  I ducked a fraction of a second before a succession of bullets shattered my window. I kept my head down at the level of the dashboard, pulled my gun from my shoulder holster, and fired back. I got off a couple of shots, but the man with the scar ducked, and I didn’t wait to see if I’d hit him.