“He’s stopping,” Lissa said. She let out her breath. “No, he’s starting up again.”
I spun my head around. The black-and-white was churning up dust at the side of the road. The clouds lay thick between us, and for a moment I couldn’t see what he was up to.
Lissa accelerated gently, as if trying to outdistance a wary predator.
The dust blew aside. The black-and-white had turned around and was heading back to Thuringia.
“He’s gone,” I said.
“Thank God,” Lissa said.
It was then that I had that weird outland hunch that had been lurking for hours, a swooping revelation that chilled me right to the bone. Fruitcake, dried fruits and nuts, shipped all over the USA, straight out of one little California town, a commercial front for . . . what?
Silk?
Spraying mind-control germs on every little prune, over every holiday fruitcake, injecting them into packages of shelled almonds and walnuts. And all the while, collecting samples from hot springs that bubbled up stinking white clouds of the Little Mothers of the World.
Rob could have come across something almost beyond belief. Screw the almost. I had to know more to even begin to believe. “Had enough?” I asked.
“Have you?” she said.
“San Jose,” I said, and shoved my finger down the rutted road.
“Aren’t you tired?”
“Let’s stop someplace for coffee,” I said.
Lissa rubbed the back of her neck.
“For Rob,” I said, and knew too late that I had pushed that button once too often.
Her face turned to marble.
“Where did you get the gun?” I asked.
“None of your business,” she said. “And don’t you tell me one more time that we’re doing anything for Rob. You’re doing it because you’re curious, that’s all. He was curious, too, and he left me, remember? He was the one acting like an asshole and traveling all over the world. He wouldn’t listen, and now, neither will you.”
I dropped the Glock into her purse. It made me nervous just looking at it. “I’m sorry,” I said.
She lifted her chin and rubbed her nose. “Forget it.”
“Maybe we should stop and get some coffee.”
“No,” she said. “I’m fine. Let’s go to San Jose and get this over with. Where’s that goddamned key ring?”
26
SAN JOSE
Lissa looked up at the glass-fronted stairwell of the Creighton Building, an early-seventies office cube on a nondescript frontage road adjoining 280, surrounded by used-car lots. Banners flapped enthusiastically at Choosy Chan’s, just a few dozen yards south, but at six-thirty, with dinner on and dusk falling, there were no customers. A tall, skinny salesman in a tight-fitting herringbone suit lounged against a Ford Explorer, picking his teeth. He ignored us.
I held the small steel ring with a paper tag on which Rob had neatly printed this address. The ring held three keys, two of the common brass variety that would fit any number of doors, and one steel, new, square, and shiny.
We pushed open the glass door and entered the lobby. Fluorescent lights came on and made us jump, but it was just a building timer. The makeshift security desk was deserted and dusty. We looked at the list of tenants in a glass case on the wall, columns of white-plastic letters against ribbed black velvet. None of the names suggested Rob.
“Maybe he moved out,” I said.
“He would have thrown away the keys,” Lissa said. “He hated old keys.”
I threw away old keys, too. The first floor was occupied by an investment firm, the third floor by a law firm. That left the second.
All but one of the twelve doors on the second floor were closed and locked. Most sported engraved Formica plates slipped into cheap aluminum mounts. Beyond the open door, a lone receptionist sat at a cheap desk, talking on the phone. “All right, Mother. I’ll work it out. Let me see,” I heard her say. “That would be four hundred and twenty-six oranges. Right? I’m sorry. Five hundred and two.” She did not look up as we walked past.
After first checking to make sure the corridor was empty, we tried the brass keys on each of the three doors that had no name plates.
No go. We paused. Lissa wanted to use the water fountain at the end of the hall, but I suggested that could be a bad idea.
“How would they know about this place?” she asked. I shook my head.
“It’s hot,” she complained, but did not drink.
I scanned the name plates, trying to get in touch with my brother’s sense of humor, his quirkiness. It took me two strolls up and down the hall, and a glance from the receptionist as I passed for the third time, before I stopped in front of a door with a plaque engraved Richard Escher Industries.
Escher, Richard. Escherichia coli, E. coli, had been discovered by a German named Escherich.
The second brass key worked, and the door opened. The office was dark. The door bumped halfway through its swing against something heavy. I made out shadowy piles of boxes. A musty smell, something old and spoiled, drifted out with the cool air; not big, not a body, I thought, but mildew or mold. Old magazines or books.
I was suddenly very reluctant to go in.
