Swift Horses Racing Page 20

  “You don’t want to bet the whole race on those prints.” Sam grunted.

  Flores heard taps on a keyboard. “I have an examiner who’s taking this as a personal challenge, but I don’t think there’s enough there. I’ll get back to you.”

  “What about the plastic bag?” Flores didn’t want to sound desperate, but his voice sure sounded that way. “Anything on that?”

  “No prints. No drugs in it either, if that’s what you were looking for.”

  “Not looking for drugs. Not in this case. Any idea what was in it?”

  Sam chuckled. “There wasn’t much left of the contents, but there’s a strong smell. It brought back childhood memories for me.”

  “What was it?”

  “Cereal, man. Cheerios.”

  47

  Donut Haven looked quiet, the early morning rush passed.

  One young guy sat at the window with his laptop open, absently feeding donut holes into his mouth as he stared at his screen. Duke parked his Taurus facing the front door.

  He’d gotten here ten minutes early, probably due to anxiety. He felt the tenseness in his hands, achy and stiff, and in his chest, reminding him of the heart attack he’d had years ago, while he was still working. He got out of his car and locked it.

  He was ready to walk in and reserve the usual table, when he felt a hand grip his forearm so hard it hurt. Something hard and cold jabbed into his side. On top of his current fears, it seemed about right.

  Some punk kid who would steal his credit cards and leave his body in a dumpster. A voice inside him wondered if it would matter. He wondered who, beside his solicitous babysitter Kathleen, would give a damn. He was seventy-eight years old and frittering away with his useless daily routine, hanging on in a valley that was all about the new and improved. He was a faded token from a bygone era.

  Fingers dug into his arm, pulling him away.

  “Let’s go for a drive, Duke.”

  The man’s voice was familiar, someone he’d heard recently—at Karl’s memorial, he thought. The gun barrel was poking his back now, driving him forward. Duke nearly stumbled, trying to keep his stiff legs moving. They reached a white car with a rental company sticker.

  Rose Schuler unlocked the back passenger door and nudged him to get in.

  “Get in and buckle up.” She ordered him, then held out her hand. “And Duke—give me your phone.”

  With a shaking hand, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and handed it over.

  Rose passed it to the man—Christoph Schuler. He slipped it into the pocket of his khaki cargo vest and zipped it up.

  “Give me the journal,” Rose frowned. “I’m sure you have with you. You were going to show the gang.”

  Duke considered lying but figured it wouldn’t do much good at this point. The two people in the front seat were experts at it and would see right through it. He slid his hand into his hidden lapel pocket and pulled out the black, clothbound journal. He hesitated, trying to analyze the look on Rose’s face. He wanted to know if she’d finished it.

  “Give it to me now, Duke.”

  What was this about? He was afraid to ask, unable to think about anything now but the fact that Rose and Christoph Schuler were in the front seat and were driving him somewhere—possibly his last destination.

  “How much did you read?” He heard Rose’s voice, but she refused to turn around and look at him.

  Again, he considered lying. But he didn’t.

  “I finished it.” He heard his own voice, weak and thin.

  Rose gave Christoph a smug look.

  “Why did you think he wouldn’t read it?” She laughed harshly. “I knew he would.”

  Duke thought about the guys—Marty, Al and Alan—and hope bubbled up in him.

  “Rose, the gang will be here soon. They’ll wonder where I am.”

  “No, they won’t.” Rose snapped. “Marty told us about your get together. I saw him in his front yard when I was at my father’s this morning. I told him you called it off. You were coming down with something.”

  Christoph handed Rose the handgun calmly, as if it were a litter bag or a box of tissues. Rose slid it into the pocket of the car door. Christoph buckled up and started the car. They headed toward the street, and turned west, toward the hills.

  Rain started beating on the windshield. Christoph turned on the windshield wipers as drops fell faster. It was 10 in the morning, but as the dark clouds clustered, it looked like it was closer to late afternoon, when winter light eases into night.

  Duke knew this had to do with Karl’s journal. It was possible that someone else killed Karl—they couldn’t have done it themselves, could they? Then Rose found the journal while cleaning out her father’s home. She’d discovered her father’s confession—and the two siblings wanted to stop it from being made public. After all, Christoph was just launching his campaign for senator back in Florida. He had lots of support and a good chance to win.

  But soon the unimaginable began to take over his thoughts. What if Rose and Christoph did have something to do with their father’s death? Duke feared for himself. He’d always heard it said that killing someone made it easier to kill the next time. He was becoming surer that the barrier had been crossed.

  They followed Blossom Hill Road, the long thoroughfare through southwestern San Jose. The wooded green hills appeared before them, covered in a blurred haze of rain and fog. Christoph turned onto Camden, then Hicks Road, which wound back into the hills. At first, all Duke could think of was the waste disposal site nearby.

  They passed pink and white Mediterranean-style homes, as they headed up into the hills, where mercury used to be mined in the small Guadalupe mine. The hills in this area were known for their quicksilver mines. Years later runoff from the mines would poison the Guadalupe River and Lake Almaden, just down the expressway from him.

  “So we’re going to the dump?” Duke let out a weak laugh, trying to dispel the tension in the car.

  No response from the front seat. Christoph’s hands were clamped on the wheel. Rose looked idly out the window at the scenery, as if she were on a Sunday drive with the family.

  As they neared the gates to the waste facility, Christoph wheeled the car around sharply, pulling into the road’s hairpin turn and heading higher up the hill. The turn slammed Duke against the door. He clutched onto the handle near the armrest. Duke started to feel nauseous, as he did when he was a passenger on a twisting road.

  Christoph Schuler drove angrily, as if chasing down something just beyond the horizon, something Duke couldn’t see. He wondered how Christoph and Rose felt about their father right now. Were they angry? Disillusioned? Duke thought about all he’d experienced with the Schuler family over the past eight days. There was something wrong in the family. Something off. For the first time, he wondered if that had started with Karl.

  Karl, the glue that held their group together, the man they had all praised at the memorial service, was not who they thought he was.

  It would be one thing if Karl had cooperated with the Nazis, truly believing in their cause. He’d come of age during a time when every youth had to be in a Hitler youth program, and where schools were little more than indoctrination centers. But it was Karl’s love for technology that had changed him in the V2 factory at Kohnstein, to the point where production of the rockets overshadowed everything else for him. Duke couldn’t excuse it, but he could see how it happened.

  He had less sympathy for the lies Karl had continued to tell. He’d lied about his part in the rocket factory to the Americans who’d interviewed him after the war. He’d lied when he’d come to America, with the CIAs help, under the secret Operation Paperclip program, so his records were wiped clean of Nazi involvement. Years later Karl had lied when a man suggested Karl was been responsible for the death of his father in Kohnstein.

  They continued up the narrow road in the heavy rain, Christoph making erratic jerks to the wheel as he sped up the twisting road. The car hydroplaned once
. Duke’s stomach lurched.

  As they made a wide turn, Duke looked behind them to see the valley below, smaller and smaller through the haze as they climbed. Downtown San Jose was a tiny collection of upended building blocks, surrounded by flatness.

  As they neared the top of the mountain, Duke knew where they were.

  Mt. Umunhum. He saw the Cube, the eight-story concrete block that stood at the rim of the valley looking down.

  Mt. Umunhum’s old Air Force Surveillance station had opened in the 1950s to monitor radio signals along the coast during the Cold War. On alert for signs of eminent attack from the Russians.

  If the Russians had gotten to them first after Germany’s defeat in 1945, Hermann and Karl Schuler might have ended up in the Soviet aerospace program, working on the Sputnik satellites, the first Vostok manned flight with Yuri Gargarin and the Luna moon missions.

  From what Duke had read about Operation Paperclip, it could have gone either way for Hermann and Karl. The Americans just happened to get to them before the Russians.

  As the Cold War came to an end in the 1980s, the Cube was shut down. Duke toured the facility years ago and hadn’t been up here since Santa Clara County had recently opened hiking trails around the abandoned facility.

  The eight-story building stood monolithic, dark and foreboding over the scenic overlook and empty parking lot. Duke shivered as Christoph parked a few hundred feet from the structure. The temperature must have dropped twenty degrees as they’d driven up the mountain.

  Christoph took his hands off the wheel and sat for a moment, his head against the seat rest. His hand still gripped the steering wheel. After a minute, Christoph and Rose unfastened their seatbelts without speaking. Rose pulled the handgun out of the side pocket. She looked at Christoph for confirmation. Christoph nodded.

  Nausea roiled Duke’s stomach when he saw they were bringing the gun along. What had he done to deserve this? He was Karl’s closest friend. He’d helped Rose pack up Karl’s belongings and memorabilia. Now he wondered if Rose had wanted to clean out her father’s place quickly in order to find any other incriminating evidence of Karl’s past.

  Christoph turned around in the seat to face him. There were bags under his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.

  “We’re going to the lookout.”

  Christoph shut the door and locked the car, then came around to walk alongside Duke, with Rose on Duke’s other side, as if they were going to frog march him. Christoph held the gun loosely as the three of them headed in the direction of the Cube.

  The air was piercingly cold, and the icy wind whipped across the flat mountain top. Duke felt it through his summer sports coat. His jaw hurt from clenching against the involuntary chattering.

  Duke looked over at Rose, who avoided his eyes and pulled her wool scarf up around her face.

  “Rose—Christoph. Can’t we talk?” But his words were slapped away by the wind and he couldn’t tell if Rose and Christoph heard him. They continued walking, until they came to a deck, above a sharp drop to the hills below.

  Duke knew he was here because of what he’d read. They’d known he was going to tell the gang. They planned to shut him up—whether that meant killing him or threatening him into silence.

  He realized it was all about containment. If they killed Duke and had possession of the journal, Karl’s confession and possibly his murder stayed a secret. Christoph could go back to Florida and become a senator.

  Duke wondered what Nick and Nora Charles in the Thin Man movies would do in a situation like this. Some clever trick or diversion, maybe. He wished real life was that easy.

  The wooden platform looked down on the green, forested hills, gateway to the Santa Cruz Mountains. The deck was partially protected from the wind, so when Christoph turned to him, Duke could hear what he was saying.

  “Sit down here.”

  Christoph set the gun on the bench next to him and took a seat. He zipped his down jacket up around his neck as he looked down on the drop, as if he were checking it out for later reference.

  Rose hurried to sit on the bench next to Christoph. That left Duke with a seat nearest the edge, where rain was blowing in through the slats and puddling on the seat. Duke wiped it off with his hand. The icy water made his hand burn. He sat down on the wet bench, his chest now shuddering in the cold.

  “You k-killed Karl.” He stared across at Christoph as he tried to control his shaking. “I wondered if it could be you. Karl used to talk about how proud he was of you. F-for y-your shooting record with the army.”

  Christoph stared at Duke with his oddly light blue eyes, which reminded Duke of a wolf’s. Rose turned to him with a pleading look. She put her hand on his sleeve.

  “Not Duke. Please, Christoph—”

  “I planned it carefully, you know.” Christoph looked down at his hands, which he flexed. “I didn’t want him to feel any pain. I knew where to shoot him so there would be the least suffering possible. I loved my father very much. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to be that good. As a father, I couldn’t fault him for anything. Then I read the journal.”

  Rose began sobbing into her scarf.

  “One Saturday last month he called me for our usual talk. He told me he was ready to make a confession about something in his past. I thought, what could my dad—the great human being, Karl Schuler—have done that was bad? Maybe he cheated on his taxes. Maybe he shoplifted candy when he was a kid.”

  He shook his head and pulled out a tissue to wipe his nose. “I flew out to spend the day with him. He showed me what he’d written. He told me what he’d done in Mittelwerk during the war. I was—not prepared for that.”

  Rose’s crying subsided. “We sat down with him. He told us both. All the details. Then he said he wanted to hand what he’d written over to a journalist, someone who could tell his story.”

  Christoph cleared his throat. “We told him not to do it.”

  Rose began crying again. She closed her eyes, then waited to speak. “If my father were to come forward. He would be sent back to Germany for trial. It would kill him. He couldn’t have handled that. Then everything he’d done here, his legacy in aeronautics. His brilliant career. It would be gone.”

  Duke felt dizzy. He hyperventilated as he tried to suck breath in while his teeth chattered. He tried hard to stay focused on what Rose was saying.

  “M-maybe that’s what he wanted—to be honest for the first time in seventy-five years. W-why didn’t you let him have that?”

  Rose and Christoph exchanged looks.

  “How could he go back to a country he hadn’t seen in years? My father brought innovations to the aeronautics industry. He helped make it what it is today. He inspired generations of students. And now he’d be treated like a common criminal—just like a prison camp guard.”

  Christoph was talking with an openness Duke hadn’t seen in him before. But it was also clear that this was more about what the family wanted, than what was best for Karl. What if Karl had been able to step forward and confess what he’d done? He could have died in peace, on his own terms.

  “We didn’t feel we could handle that as a family. My father was a good man.” Christoph continued. “I still believe that. But he disregarded our advice and did things his own way.”

  Duke had been right with his suspicion about Christoph’s motives. He glared at the man.

  “If Karl published his journal, your political career would be over.”

  All Christoph had to do was pick up the handgun next to Rose. He cocked the trigger.

  Duke flinched. He shut his mouth.

  Cristoph kept the gun in his hand and walked back and forth under the wooden shelter.

  “We found a car. A big SUV. Rose’s mechanic found it on Craig’s List. I wanted this to look like a random shooting on New Year’s. We would do this as painlessly as we could for him.”

  “Tuan found somebody who was trying to sell it fast.” Rose talked as if she’d just happened
to find a bargain while out shopping.

  “How did you get Karl to go out that night?”

  Rose looked up at Duke from her spot on the bench. She’d aged years in the past week, her eyes red, her skin pale and sagging.

  “I called from a pay phone. I told him I was driving back from a friend’s with Chloe, my granddaughter.” Rose’s voice started to lose momentum. She shut her eyes. It looked like the gravity of what she’d done had just hit her. “I said I’d had a few drinks and was afraid to drive.”

  Duke had swung from the shock he felt about Karl’s revelations to the horror he felt at Rose and Christoph’s actions.

  “You made this look like a gang shooting, didn’t you?” While Christoph watched him warily, Duke stood up, forcing himself to move, to keep his body moving as he fought off sleepiness. “You tried to make it look like the killers came from East San Jose, from the students Karl cared so much about. It worked. That’s what people suspected first.”

  The cold started to fill Duke’s head with fog. Now he was Nick Charles, looking down a long dinner table of suspects, as he revealed what the killer had done to get away with the crime.

  Now it was time for the police to come in. Like Nick Charles, he would retreat, a drink in his hand.

  But Duke was afraid that wasn’t going to happen.

  He was afraid this was his final act.

  48

  Early that morning, Ruiz felt the bed move as Reyna got up to go to the gym. He heard the water run as she washed her face and brushed her teeth, as she would any other day. He smelled the peach lotion she rubbed on her face and hands.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her slip into her workout clothes and unzip her gym bag to pack clothes for the workday. She pulled her hair back with a flick of her fingers and wound a hair tie around it to keep it out of her face.

  He felt a sudden ache. These were things she did every day. Signs that everything was normal. For all he knew, nothing would be normal again. How much longer would he hear her quietly going through these motions in the morning?