Every Day Above Ground Read online

  “Aren’t I supposed to be the one cautioning you?” she said.

  “Indulge me.”

  I made two stops on my way to PNW Commercial Realty. A copy center, where I bought a couple of manila folders and used their rent-by-the-minute iMacs to print some application forms and policy examples written in very fine print off of the Safehome Insurance public website. Thick and detailed enough to glaze anyone’s eyes.

  My second stop was a thrift store. I rummaged in the racks and fished out a white button-down and some navy trousers without obvious cigarette burns. Rescued a cornflower blue tie from a serpentine tangle in a plastic tub. Finding dress shoes was tougher. My best option was a black pair of oxfords two sizes too large.

  The narrow fitting room mirror threw back a head-to-toe slice of my new ensemble. I still didn’t look much like an office worker. I tried on a reassuring smile, the one that didn’t frighten children. Better. Not great, but better.

  I left the shoes off while I drove.

  PNW Commercial was a stone’s throw off of Sylvester Road, in a two-story strip mall designed in Spanish mission style. Sport utilities and hybrids crowded the lot, thanks mainly to the mall’s top dog, a Starbucks on the lower corner.

  PNW held the first spot at the top of the stairs. I walked up, shoes flopping and manila folders in hand.

  The office was wide and glass-fronted. I could see one desk with tiers of neatly stacked files just inside, and another past a cubicle wall farther back. There were healthy-looking plants on the shelves. The carpet showed the lines of recent vacuuming. Painted letters on the window proclaimed expertise in warehousing and industrial and retail spaces.

  I knocked on the glass door and pulled it open wide enough to stick my head in. “Hello?”

  Quick steps from the back room and a slim woman with long white hair in a braid leaned into view, her angle mirroring my own. Her rose-colored polo shirt blended well with the lush plants in the room. She looked around sixty years old, and capable of running a full marathon without her tight braid unraveling.

  “Hi,” I said brightly, “I’m Jake. From Safehome?” I gave her a glimpse of the insurance policy on top of the manila folders.

  “Hello.” She nodded, all puzzled politeness, both hands wrapped around what might be her first cup of tea of the day.

  “Did Sarah from our office call you?” I said. “About the property at—” I flipped quickly to one of the pages in my hand and read her the address of the torched building.

  “Oh!” she said in recognition. “No. No one called.”

  “Well, we’ve been moving pretty fast. We hold the policy for Radius Properties, and unfortunately the sale is so new that our branch office doesn’t have all of the information we need to process the claim. You heard about the fire?”

  “Yes, of course. On the news. How terrible.” Her eyes lit up, and she came into the room and sat at the first desk, the one with the precise clutter of stacks of files and family pictures. A wood veneer nameplate, pushed aside and half-hidden by the stacks, read martina devi, office manager. “No one was hurt?”

  “No, just the building. I told my boss I’d drop by your office on the way in today, save him a long email.”

  “Well, I’m grateful.” She smiled, seemingly delighted to have permission to talk about the disaster. “When Lou and I walked in the door yesterday, it was the first thing we both said: ‘Did you hear?’ We managed that property for years. I lost a whole hour looking at the news film of the fire online, I don’t mind telling you. We’re just so grateful that none of our tenants were still in the building. Do they know what started it?”

  “There’s no official report from the investigators yet. It was your tenants I wanted to ask you about.”

  “Yes? Are they on the claim?” When Martina set her mug down, her polo sleeve edged up to reveal a rainbow band of dancing Deadhead bears.

  “No, but the fire started in one of the upper offices,” I said. “Harrison Community needs to make sure that all possessions were removed prior to the fire. In case there’s a cross-claim or a lawsuit down the road for unacknowledged or disputed losses, you understand. Could you tell me who leased the office in the northwest corner of the fifth floor? Number 501?” I showed her one of the few legit pages I had printed, a Google Maps overview of the nearby streets, with the proper corner on the building circled.

  “Oh!” Martina tapped the page abruptly, like she was capturing a gnat under her fingertip. “That’s Claudette’s office!”

  “Claudette?”

  “Claudette Simms. She leased that space for—well, at least eight years, since I started working here after my divorce. Terrible.”

  “The divorce was terrible?”

  “Well, that too, but I meant what happened to Claudette. She died, just earlier this year.”

  The stiff paper of the folders crackled in my hand.

  “I’m very sorry. Was she sick?” I said.

  Martina shook her head. “She had a heart attack. Lou and I were very upset.”

  “You knew her pretty well?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Only small talk in between taking care of the accounts. I talked her into letting me buy her lunch once—we try to get to know all of our long-term tenants—but she turned me down every time after.”

  “She wasn’t a Jerry fan?” I nodded toward Martina’s tattooed arm.

  She returned my smile. “Claudette was a very shy person. I think perhaps a bit stunted, socially. She didn’t talk at all about herself.”

  “Ms. Simms’s business must have been successful. What did she do?”

  “Trucking. Isn’t that funny? Pacific Pearl Freight Company, that was the company name. She wasn’t a driver herself.” Martina permitted herself a small laugh. “At least I don’t think so. The space she leased from us was just their business office.”

  “What happened to the space after she died?”

  “We had all the mail forwarded to their freight location in South Seattle. Claudette’s was the only name on the business office lease. I had thought someone would call us about taking it over. Then we got an offer for the building, and sold it almost immediately to Radius Properties. And honestly”—Martina pinged the rim of her coffee cup with a flick of her nail—“we had very few tenants remaining in that building. It was reaching the point where we’d have to invest heavily in renovation, or sell outright.”

  “Who was your contact at Radius? I might be able to close the books just by letting them know about Ms. Simms.”

  “I have an email address for the company. But we never worked directly with anyone, it was all very formal. Not that I minded.”

  “They offered a good price.” I said it like I already knew the answer.

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  So good that there would be no question of accepting, I imagined.

  Martina wrote down the email for Radius, and at my request the address of Pacific Pearl Freight’s shipping office.

  “Perhaps someone there can tell you more about their business,” she said.

  My thoughts exactly.

  “I’m sorry again about Claudette. And the building, too.”

  “Bad luck,” she said. “If it comes in threes, we’d all better watch out.”

  I jogged back to the truck, already typing Claudette Simms’s name into my phone. The first link was to a P-I article from April.

  Mount Baker Woman Drowns in Bathtub

  Claudette Simms, a 49-year-old woman, drowned in her apartment bathtub sometime during the weekend after being struck by an apparent cardiac arrest, the King County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release Wednesday.

  Police responded after getting a 911 call on Tuesday from the apartment manager, who had found Simms’s cat wandering the complex property in southeast Seattle.

  When Sheriff’s deputies arrived on scene, they had the landlord open the apartment door and discovered the body of Claudette Simms in the bathtub. She was taken to Pacific Medical Cen
ter, where she was pronounced dead. The King County medical examiner has confirmed drowning as the cause of death, likely as a result of the heart attack. Police are seeking next of kin.

  There was another article on KING-TV’s online blog, with an overexposed photo from what might have been a DMV shot. Claudette Simms had a broad, heavy face made wider by a mass of curly ash blonde hair pinned into rough order atop her head. She had very dark brown eyes, and wore makeup and a black blouse. She stared down the camera with an expression more suited to a mug shot than a license picture.

  The second article didn’t tell me any more than the first. There were no follow-up stories. If the cops suspected there was more to her death than an accident, they weren’t saying.

  I sure as hell suspected it. The sudden death of the tenant who leased an office with a hidden safe, followed by the immediate purchase of the same building? It had to be connected. Maybe even premeditated.

  I found Pacific Pearl Freight’s shipping location south of the stadiums, on a sparsely developed stretch where one of the old railroad lines crossed under the sleek elevated light rail track. The nineteenth century meeting the twenty-first. There was no sign to identify the company on the low-slung building, or on the fence around it. I checked the address against the map on my phone as I coasted past to make sure I was looking at the right place.

  Fifty yards down the road, a dotted line of parked cars connected a martial arts gym and a concrete paving business. I reversed into an open spot, giving me a good view of the Pacific Pearl building without having to stand out in the open.

  The freight company was a small operation. I could have tossed a baseball—without giving it heat—from one side of its property to the other. A single L-shaped building of brown cinder block squatted in the center of a fenced lot like a toad in its cage. Razor wire topped the fence in long, sagging loops.

  The long side of the L had two loading bays. A twenty-foot refrigerated Ford box truck had been parked sideways, blocking both rolling doors. An identical Ford waited flush against the western wall. The trucks were Class 4 or the low end of Class 5, fine for day runs and city deliveries but nothing like long-haul cargo. A dozen years of dings and scrapes stood out starkly on their white aluminum siding.

  I couldn’t see any other evidence of what kinds of freight Pacific Pearl handled. I had wondered if Claudette Simms might have been embezzling, slowly amassing the fortune in her safe. But this wasn’t a company that could possibly generate enough revenue to skim four million. Empty wooden pallets made a pile like a stack of splintered pancakes outside the bay doors.

  Maybe Pacific Pearl was defunct. Claudette Simms had died in April. If she were the sole proprietor, it wasn’t out of the question that their freight location might have been shuttered after her death.

  I tried to put myself in the hunters’ place, from what little I could guess about their motives.

  Claudette Simms was dead. Maybe even murdered by the hunters themselves. She had rented an office in the aging building, and she had installed a safe to hold a fortune in gold.

  And instead of simply breaking into the safe to take Claudette’s gold, the hunters had set a trap. A trap that ensured anyone who knew about the hidden safe would come running.

  So maybe the socially-stunted Ms. Simms had a partner, and the hunters wanted to catch that individual. They’d gone to huge effort to make it happen. Maybe the partner could lead them to another score, large enough to make even four million in gold kilobars look like the penny on the sidewalk Hollis had described. The hunters had been watching Pacific Pearl’s business office closely enough that they were on top of O’Hasson and me only minutes after we set off the alarm.

  Were the hunters also watching the freight yard? In case the partner showed up here? I stepped out of the truck to get a different angle on the place.

  The light rail train hissed overhead, flying toward downtown. Sweat beaded on my scalp as I walked under the elevated tracks. Two men came around the corner of the MMA gym, already drenched from their workouts. They grimaced and shielded their eyes from the sun as they hurried to the shelter of their cars.

  I looked around the squat Pacific Pearl building, and the handful of neighboring businesses. Thought about how I might keep eyes on the place, if it were me.

  It might be possible to set myself up somewhere with a direct view. The closest window with any vantage point on Pacific Pearl was nearly a hundred yards off. I already suspected the hunters had bought the office building we’d burned down. If I were right about that, then it was feasible, if improbable, that they had also bought out a nearby business, simply to watch the freight building. But the sightlines sucked.

  That left a rooftop post, or finding a way to hang around outside in the summer heat without attracting attention. Even less likely.

  Occam’s razor. If the hunters couldn’t easily watch the Pacific Pearl yard in person, maybe they had installed a little electronic help, to make it simple.

  I made another scan of the area, this time looking higher. When I’d seen all I could see, I walked another few yards down my path under the light rail track and tried again.

  When I finally spotted what I was looking for, I was almost directly underneath it. A rectangular metal box, nestled under the overhang of one of the elevated track’s octagonal support pillars. Almost twenty feet up from the gravel and directly across from the freight yard’s loading docks. The box was the size of a large loaf of bread, and painted a flat brownish-gray to match the support pillar of the elevated track. I edged out a few steps, just enough to see the smaller side of the box, the side pointed toward Pacific Pearl. Not so far that I would be exposed.

  The front end of the box wasn’t metal. A pale scrim, maybe. Enough to block dust and dirt, but not enough to obscure the camera I was sure was inside.

  It was a good camouflage job. I would bet that even regular workers could pass by every day for a year without spotting the small addition to the pillar, as high and unremarkable as it was.

  At the back of the box I could see what looked like a stubby rubberized antenna, in similar dirty beige. The camera was sending its feed somewhere. And with the office building burned to the ground, maybe the hunters were more alert than ever to what this camera showed.

  I would come back tonight. I wanted a much closer look at Pacific Pearl.

  And I had a notion on how to make one of the hunters’ clever little traps work for me, for a change.

  Ten

  It was nearing dark when I raised a hand to knock on Addy’s door. She swung it wide before my knuckles connected.

  “We need to talk,” she said, pruning every syllable with shears. She was in her habitual evening loungewear, a black cardigan over a t-shirt and black silk pants.

  “What’s going on?”

  “There’s a girl out back. A young teenager. She’d been sitting in front of your house, on those stone steps, since this afternoon.”

  A girl. I had a premonition of exactly what kid Addy was talking about. My luck was running just that thin lately.

  “In front of my house. And you invited her in,” I said.

  “Once I realized she wasn’t some addict who’d wandered too far from Broadway, I walked up the street to talk to her. The first thing out of her mouth was to ask if I knew who owned your place.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “I said that I would call you, but only if she came inside. It took a lot of convincing. My offer of food finally tipped the scales.”

  “It would have been better to let the kid sit.”

  “You didn’t see her. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days. And she’s clearly been crying.”

  “Terrific.”

  “Van, what on earth is going on? This child is so determined to see you, I think she would have stayed on those filthy steps until she froze.”

  “It’s July. Sunstroke would have got her first.”

  “Don’t joke.”

  “It’s about all
I can do anymore. Come on.”

  She led me through the small house, into the relative cool of the back porch that overlooked her plot of grass.

  Stanley was lying on the porch, panting softly. Sitting on the slats behind him, petting his thick neck, was Cyndra O’Hasson.

  Even with two years of growth on her since the photo I’d seen, Cyndra was still undersized and gangly enough to be mistaken for younger than twelve. Her bangs were gone, the remaining hair buzzed down to a stiff half-inch and dyed to match the gloss of a young raven. She had a snub nose dusted with freckles—her father’s gift—and the same blue eyes, which glared up at me with suspicion.

  Addy was right. Cyndra looked drained. The dog did most of the work keeping her vertical. Her white V-neck tee reading random gravity in huge cracked green letters looked as soiled as if she’d been wearing it for days, which maybe she had. Jeans shorts and low-top black Converse completed her grubby ensemble.

  “Cyndra, this is Van,” Addy said, as if we were meeting at a garden party.

  “Addy says you want to talk to me,” I said.

  She nodded, while her eyes examined my face from hair to chin. Not the morbid curiosity some young people had about my scars. A look that said she wondered if she knew me from somewhere.

  “I’m here.” I sat down in one of Addy’s aluminum porch chairs, the kind molded as one piece and designed to be stacked. The thin metal creaked under my weight. Stanley reached out and tapped my shin with his snout. “Talk.”

  “Do you know my dad? Mick O’Hasson?” Cyndra said. Her voice was high but not without strength.

  “Should I?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “But you know my house,” I said. “How?”

  More silence.

  “Look,” I said. “We can play Jay and Silent Bob all night. I don’t care. You’re the one who came to my doorstep. So tell me something, otherwise I’m going home and Addy will put you out for the trash pickup.”

  I caught Addy’s frown in the corner of my eye. It promised that Cyndra might not be the only one out on the curb soon.