The john had hired a room in The Tuscan on North Point Street in North Beach, five minutes from Pier 39. Miley usually preferred to sort the room herself, charging a little extra as expenses so that she still cleared her two hundred per hour, but the guy had apologised that he couldn’t very easily leave the hotel and, when he had sensed her reluctance, had offered to pay a further fifty bucks on top to “make up for her inconvenience.” He sounded nice enough kind, speaking with a lilting southern accent that put her in mind of that guy Kevin Spacey played in the Netflix thing, and even though she had initially turned him down and hung up she stewed on it for fifteen minutes and changed her mind. She didn’t have another job booked, he had been polite on the phone and, most importantly, she needed the money. Craigslist had started charging $5 per advert and that had made it difficult to stay at the top of the list. Miley had used a JavaScript program that kept posting and reposting her ad so it was always on the first page but the new charges meant that that wasn’t an option any more. The cost of advertising was higher and the competition was tougher. She worried about all of that as she rode the bus. The driver smiled at her as she disembarked outside the hotel.

He was the last person to see her alive.

It was a small hotel that catered to travelling business people. It was a two-storey building surrounded by a parking lot. It didn’t appear to be very busy; the lot was almost empty, save for a couple of rentals and a beaten-up Cadillac Eldorado. She went around the car on the way to the lobby when the driver’s side door opened and a man got out. He was tall and skinny, dressed in a white t-shirt, jeans and a pair of cowboy boots. He said her name. She recognised his voice.

30

Cotton and Webster didn’t sit and so neither did Milton. Webster wandered absently to the window and looked down onto the street below. Cotton took a book from the shelf — it was The Unbearable Lightness of Being — made a desultory show of flicking through the pages and then put it back again. He looked around, his face marked by a lazy sneer.

“Nice place you got here,” he said.

“It suits me very well.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Smith. We get called out to places like this all the time. Don’t you find it a bit tawdry?”

“You didn’t come here to critique my accommodation.”

“No.”

“And I have things to do. What do you want? If you’ve got questions, ask them.”

The cop took out his phone and selected a picture. He slid it across the table. Milton looked at it: it was a picture of a woman, white, slender with a short cropped Elfin hairstyle. Very pretty. “Recognise her?”

Milton looked at the picture. “No.”

“You sure about that? Scroll right for the next one.”

Milton did as he was told. It was the same girl, this time in some sort of prom dress. She looked young. “No,” he said. “I’ve never seen her before. Who is she?”

“Her name is Miley Van Dyken.”

“I don’t know her, detective.”

“Where were you three weeks ago last Wednesday?”

“I’d have to check.”

“Like I say, it’s a Wednesday. Think.”

Milton sighed exasperatedly. “I would’ve gone to work in the afternoon and driven my car at night.”

“We can check the afternoon. What about the night — can anyone prove you were driving?”

“If my calls were from the agency, then maybe. If they came straight through to me, then no, probably not.” He slid the phone back across the table to him. “Who is she? Number three?”

“That’s right, Mr. Smith. We found her this morning. Same place as the other two.”

“There’s only so many times I can say it — I’ve got nothing to do with this.”

“Can I ask you something else?”

“Please do.”

“You own any firearms?”

Milton felt his skin prickle. “No,” he said.

“So if we looked around, we wouldn’t find anything?”

“Help yourself. I don’t have anything to hide.”

“Reason I’m asking, that guard at the party you put on the ground, he said you took his gun from him. Smith & Wesson. The Pro Series, 9mm — very nice gun. Then, yesterday, we found a couple of shell casings outside the gate for Pine Shores. Looks like the electricity was shot out. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

Milton concentrated on projecting a calm exterior. He had left the gun under the bed. It wasn’t even well hidden: all they would need to do would be to duck down and look. “No,” he said. “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t own a gun. To be honest, I doubt I’d even know what to do with one.”

“Alright, then.”

“Is that it?”

“No,” Webster said from the window. “There is one more thing you can help us with.”

“Please.”

“When we spoke to you before you said you came across the border from Mexico. Six months ago. July. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you cross?”

Milton started to feel uncomfortable. “Juárez into El Paso.”

“That’s weird,” Webster said. “You know, there are forty-six places where you can legally cross over from Mexico. We spoke with Immigration. We checked El Paso, Otay Mesa, Tecate, Nogales. Hell, we even tried Lukeville and Antelope Wells. We found a handful of John Smiths who came across the border around about then. That’s no surprise, really, a common name like that — but the thing is, the thing I just can’t get my head around, is that when we looked at their pictures none of them looked anything like you.”

That, Milton thought, was hardly surprising. He had crossed the border illegally, trekking across country east of Juárez into the Chisos Mountains and then Big Bear National Park. The last thing he had wanted to do was leave a record that would show where he had entered the country. He had not been minded to give the agents pursuing him any clue at all as to his location.

“Mr. Smith?” Webster and Cotton were eyeing him critically.

Milton shrugged. “What do you want me to say to that?”

“Can you explain it?”

“I was working in Juárez. I crossed into El Paso. I can’t explain why there’s no record of it.”

“Do you mind if we take your passport for a couple of days?”

“Why?”

“We’d just like to have a look at it.”

Milton went over to the bedside table and took his passport from the drawer. He could see the dull glint of the brushed steel on the handgun, an inch from his toe. He handed the passport to Webster. “There you are,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“Thank you.”

“Anything else?”

“Nah,” Cotton said. “We got nothing more for you now.”

“But don’t leave town without telling us,” Webster advised. “I’m pretty sure we’ll want to talk to you again.”

31

Milton had a lock-up at Extra Space Storage at 1400 Folsom Street. He had hired it within a couple of days of arriving in San Francisco and deciding that it was the kind of town he could stay in for a few months. The lock-up was an anonymous place, a collection of industrial cargo crates that had been arranged in several rows. Each crate had been divided into two or four separate compartments and each was secured with a thick metal door padlocked top and bottom. It cost Milton twenty bucks a week and it was easily worth that for the peace of mind that it bought. He knew, eventually, that Control would locate him again and send his agents to hunt him down. He didn’t know how he would react to that, when it happened — he had been ready to surrender in Mexico — but he wanted the ability to resist them if that was what he chose to do. More to the point, he knew that his assassination of El Patrón and the capture of his son would not be forgotten by La Frontera. There would be a successor to the old man’s crown, a brother or another son, and then there would be vengeance. They would have put an enormous price on his head. If they managed to find him, he certainly did not want to be unprepared.