The Hollow Ones(36)
She smiled when he ignored her comment, reading through the article again. “The information contained in this news item is actually quite promising. This ‘Baby Mia,’ she of the degenerative brain disease. Her remains may be viewed by some as magical or charmed due to how long she lived past her life expectancy. This article doesn’t give her date of birth, but the photograph of the headstone does, and if you subtract it from the date of her death, she lived for exactly seven hundred and seventy-seven days. A numerologist would consider that sum quite fortunate indeed.”
“Seven-seven-seven?” said Odessa, impressed by the speed of his arithmetic.
Hugo Blackwood stood, his tea unfinished, ready to leave. His height surprised her, yet he was trim in a way most men of modern diets are not. Vegetarian, she thought. “We must speak with the resurrectionists.”
“The who?”
“The men who exhumed this child’s remains, likely for a fee. The article references some arrests. You need to facilitate an interview for me with one or both of the men.”
“Facilitate?” she said. “Hold on. I don’t ‘facilitate’ anything. If anything, if you have a question about the criminal investigation, we should talk to the detectives who worked the case. Especially if we have information that could potentially further implicate the suspect.”
“I see,” he said. “Is that what you did when you sent me your letter?”
Odessa stood, too. She was tired of being called out by this strange man who had broken into her apartment. “Agent Solomon suggested that I contact you.”
“And you were susceptible to suggestion for two reasons,” Blackwood said. “You wanted answers to questions you had. And it is personal for you. So you took the extraordinary step of corresponding with me. How can I make you understand? If this were merely a criminal investigation, you would not require my services. This is more than a criminal investigation. And you know it.”
Persuasive yet still troubling. “It sounds like, legally, I should step back now and leave you to whatever it is you do. Is that what Agent Solomon did for you?” She pressed him further. “So you would help him with his investigations.”
“Wrong, I’m afraid. He assisted me.”
“I have a hard time picturing you and Solomon working together on anything.”
“Quite right—he also hunted me down. For a long time.” Blackwood smiled ever-so-faintly. “Unsuccessfully, I may add. You see? Some of my most rewarding partnerships started with people intent on killing me. Shall we?”
She hesitated, needing to come clean. “There’s something you should know. I’m on a kind of administrative probation from the FBI. A suspension. Pending an investigation into the resolution of the first rampage killing I wrote you about. I’m on the outs with the Bureau right now. Probably won’t be an FBI agent much longer.”
Blackwood was unfazed. “You showed me your credentials.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sure that will be sufficient.”
The elevator doors opened on a second pair of doors in the service basement of the Lexington Regal Hotel in Murray Hill. Odessa pushed through into a narrow hallway made narrower by housekeeping carts lined along the right-side wall. She walked in front of Hugo Blackwood, heading toward the sound of industrial churning and a man’s voice rapping in falsetto Spanish.
A left turn took her into the artificially warm laundry room. Four huge laundry machines sloshed and spun side by side across from four front-loading dryers, combining to perform a symphony of cyclonic droning. A woman of South American heritage wearing a brown Lexington Regal vest oversaw a chop-socky folding machine serving thin white hotel towels, which she stacked in an open-sided canvas cart. A man with his back to them rocked rhythmically to the music playing through his thick headphones before the audience of industrial washing machines.
He must have sensed their approach, because he turned, lowering his headphones to hang around his neck. “Help you?” he said.
“Mauro Esquivel?” said Odessa.
“Yes, that’s me,” he said.
She showed him her FBI credentials. “We’d like to ask you a couple of questions.”
The woman in the hotel vest said, “Okay, bye,” and switched off the towel-folding machine, walking right out of the room.
Mauro looked at Odessa and Blackwood apprehensively. “What kind of questions?”
Odessa said, “You’re not in any trouble. We want to ask you about something that went down in the past.”
The lights flickered. Mauro walked to a light switch timer and reset it for three minutes. Then he turned his head such that he eyed them almost from a profile. “How’d you find me here?”
“Your parole officer. She’s very pleased with your progress.”
“She better be,” he said. “Bustin’ my ass here.”
He looked at Blackwood strangely, as if getting a weird vibe from the gaunt man in the expensive suit. Odessa identified with that sentiment.
“I can save you some time,” said Mauro. “You trying to play me into giving up some people, rolling over for you, I can’t do it. Just take me in now, pull my parole. It’s not worth my life, my kid’s life, my family back in Argentina. Forget it.”