Concrete Underground, Moxie Mezcal [best books to read for teens .TXT] 📗

said. "But didn't the bulk of his story later turn out to be true?"

"It didn't matter, by that time, Cobb had already been discredited and fired from the paper. The right wing lambasted him as a prime example of the liberal media agenda run amok, and the left wing turned on him to prove what good, patriotic Americans they were. The national media turned on him and vilified him. At first he tried to defend himself, saying he had been misled, but after a while he gave up and just faded away. I ran into him about four years ago. He was a drunk, doing odd jobs and unable to hold onto any steady work. He was also completely paranoid and delusional, convinced that his fall from grace had been a deliberate plot orchestrated against him."

"Orchestrated by whom?" I asked.

"He didn't say for sure," she said, then paused, as if debating whether she should continue. "It's funny you should bring him up, though. At the same time that he broke the Columbian story, he had another on the back burner. It was a piece about human trafficking, girls being brought in from impoverished countries to work in the sex industry - southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Eastern Bloc. There had been a big police raid on some brothel; all the girls working there were undocumented and basically being held as prisoners. Cobb was doing some digging for a follow up, and I remember him telling me about a few people in high places who might have been connected. One was an up-and-coming young executive whose internet startup had only been around a year or two but was already making waves in a big way. Care to guess who?"

"Fuck," I groaned, not needing to say his name out loud for confirmation.

"Why do you want to know about Cobb, anyways? Is this part of your favor for Maxwell?" she asked.

"I think I met him," I said. "Do you have a picture of him?"

Sharon stood there motionless, studying me skeptically. "Yeah," she replied. "Let's go check my files."

I followed her to her office, where she opened a file cabinet and thumbed through it, then pulled out a folder. It was full of photographs and newspaper clippings about Cobb, which she laid out on the desk and picked through to find a clear head shot.

The intervening years had not been kind, for sure, but it was unmistakably the man from the flophouse.

"That's him," I said, taken aback. "He's the guy who hit me with the baseball bat last week."

"What?" Sharon shook her head, trying to wrap her brain around the implications. "What does Patrick Cobb have to do with your story?"

She looked to me for a response, but my attention was diverted to another photo on Sharon's desk. This one showed her and Cobb lined up on a stage along with a couple others holding plaques. Another row of people stood behind them on a slightly elevated platform. It was the woman at the far right of the back row who had caught my attention.

"Who is this?" I asked, holding up the picture.

Sharon squinted. "That's Jacinda Ngo. She used to be the head of Apex Computers. This was taken when Cobb and I won Feinman Journalism Fellowships. Apex was one of the sponsors, and she was a judge."

"She's dead," I said.

"Yeah, she died in a boating accident several years back," Sharon replied.

"No, she died last week," I corrected. "They found her body in a ditch at the side of the highway."

"I thought that was a vagrant," Sharon objected. "Why do you think it's her?"

"Hang on," I said, pulling my phone out to call Nick. When he answered, I switched it to speaker so Sharon could hear. "Hey, it's me. You remember how you said someone on the force thought he recognized the woman in the ditch as the head of some computer company? Was the woman he was thinking of named Jacinda Ngo?"

"Actually, I think that was it," he conceded hesitantly. "Why?"

"Long story, I don't have time to go into it now. Do you think you can get me a picture of the body, like just take a photo of her face with your phone or something?" I asked.

"They cremated her already," he replied, "but I'll fax you some of the photos the medical examiner took."

"Yeah, that'll work," I said. "Thanks for your help, Nick. And I hate to say this, but I kinda need them ASAP."

"You always do," he groaned before hanging up.

I looked back to Sharon, who was shaking her head in disbelief. "What the hell is going on here?"

I explained in as little detail as I could manage about the body found in Max's airplane and the nature of my deal with Max, conveniently leaving out the bit about me dreaming the whole thing. I also recounted my visit to the flophouse and my run-in with Cobb. And though it wasn't immediately clear how, I was sure that the two were somehow related.

"Did anyone at the flophouse know what Cobb was doing there?" Sharon asked.

"I didn't get a chance to ask. Just as I was coming downstairs, I ran into one of Max's thugs, and he didn't really seem like he was in the mood to entertain questions."

"You should go back and check it out," Sharon said, almost absently, her eyes looking off into the distance, as if she were trying to sort something else out.

"It's strange," she added. "Whoever sent you in there to get that blue box, why didn't they just get it themselves? I mean, they knew where it was, they knew when Cobb would be gone."

I nodded. "I wondered about that, too. The only thing I could come up with was that they knew Max was after it If he showed up or had someone watching the building, they might have been recognized, whereas I could come and go without raising any alarms."

Sharon nodded, agreeing with the logic.

Just then my phone started playing the White Stripes' "Blue Orchid". It was Nick calling me back.

"I don't know how to tell you this," he started. "In fact, I'm not telling you this. Officially, I am telling you that the department requires that you submit a formal public records request in writing to view the file."

"Got it," I said. "So what about off the record?"

"Off the record - and I mean really off the record," he added cautiously, "the pictures are gone."

"What do you mean gone?" I asked.

"I mean gone. Missing. And not just like someone lost them or swiped them. There are no negatives, nothing in the electronic files. There is absolutely no evidence of what that corpse looked like."

11. She's Not Who I Thought She Was

Later that afternoon, I called up Columbine. "I've got some new info about our murder mystery. Wanna come along with me to go snoop around some unsavory elements?"

"Sounds fun, I'll come pick you up," she answered. "You are all hipster Philip Marlowe and shit."

She showed up ten minutes later in a light blue Volvo blasting Ida Maria. She wore a black trench coat, giant sunglasses, and a huge wide-brimmed hat. I assumed she was going for some kind of Mata Hari look.

I gave her directions to the Casa Salvador, and on the way there I shared with her the revelations about Patrick Cobb and Jacinda Ngo.

We walked inside and found the manager slumped in a chair behind the front desk watching a TV news report about some young hot shot lawyer who got caught breaking into the county morgue to steal the spleen from a corpse.

"Do you need a room?" the manger asked without bothering to look up from his little TV screen, his nose covered in thick bandages.

"No," I said, and took out a business card. "I'm a reporter. I was hoping to ask you a few questions."

"If you're not here to rent a room, then I don't have anything to say to you," he responded gruffly.

"Okay, we're here to rent a room," Columbine said and laid a hundred dollar bill on the counter. "That should cover it, right? So let's chat."

He snatched away the bill before I had a chance to object, then looked suspiciously between the two of us. "What do you want?"

I showed him a photograph of Cobb. "Recognize him?"

"Yeah, he stayed here. He left the same night you came by - the night that faggot in the leather pants broke my nose and you just sat their holding your dick."

"Better you than me," I shrugged.

"Do you remember anything unusual about him?" Columbine cut in. I had to keep from grinning; she was playing the part perfectly.

"And if you actually make it believable, the little lady might be willing to drop another C-Note on that room," I chimed in as I took out my notebook.

The manager snorted and looked back at the photograph. "You're lucky, you know. Most of the time I can't keep track of who comes and goes in this place; after a while they all kinda blend together. He stood out a little, though."

"What made him different?" I asked.

"Well the first time I saw him, he came in with one of the girls. Then later he came back to stay himself. That's a little weird," he said.

"Why's that?" Columbine asked.

"Because anyone who can afford to pay for one of the girl's services can usually afford to stay in a nicer place than this dump," he explained.

"Oh," she replied meekly, realizing what kind of "girl" the manager was talking about.

"Who was the girl he came in with?" I asked while.

"I dunno, some Asian chick. Like I said, they all blend together, you know."

I placed some more photos on the counter. "Was it any of these women?"

"Couldn't say," he repeated. "If you really want to know, you should talk to Stella upstairs in room 309. She knows all the girls."

I nodded. "Okay, let's get back to the man, then. About how long ago was it that he came in with the woman?"

"About a week ago. Then it was a day or two later that he checked in." He pulled out a file of index cards and flipped through. "Yeah, it was Tuesday that he checked in. He only stayed two nights. The third day, Thursday, he paid for but left early. Actually, I think he left while you were upstairs."

"Did he have any visitors while he was here?" I asked.

The manager shook his head. "Not that I noticed. He stayed in his room pretty much all day, kept to himself, and only went out after dark. I kinda got the impression that he was hiding out. I guess maybe you're who he was hiding from, huh? "

I smirked. "Could be. We'll go upstairs and see Stella now."

I knocked on the door to room 309. When it opened, I immediately recognized the woman who answered from my last visit here; she was the blonde who handed me the phone in the hallway.