Guardian of Lies by Steve Martini Page B

instead of sweating in some security line at TSA and doing the morning cattle call on the Jetway, he would be down in Cancun with a calculator and a scale trying to time the next spike in the price of gold.
    Liquida remembered something. He walked a couple of steps to his jacket, hanging from a nail on the wall. Liquida reached into the inside pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
    Using just the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, he slid the pieces of the folded paper against each other until it opened up. He looked at it, slowly weighing all the options, whether at some point in the future he might have a use for it, an opportunity to turn it to his own advantage. But he could think of none.
    He held the paper up by the bottom corner and set the torch to the top, then held it as it burned down past the letterhead with the name on it. The flame had raced almost to his fingertips before he released it. The final glowing ember consumed the last trace of Katia’s note to Emerson Pike as it lifted tiny specks of hot ash into the air. Liquida watched as the last of these cooled and fell like dust to the cold concrete floor.
     
     
     

THIRTEEN
     
     
    You say that Pike’s first meeting with you was no accident. You believe he was looking for you. Why?” This morning I am out at Las Colinas in Santee, the women’s detention facility in the county, meeting once more with Katia.
    “It was a feeling,” she says. She sits at a table in the small conference room, running her hands through her hair, which now looks knotted and stringy. The jail comb and the harsh shampoo are taking their toll. She tells me some of the other women are giving her trouble. The Latinas inside are mostly Mexican. Many of them know each other from street gangs. One of them in particular, a big Mexican woman with a scar on her face, is friends with one of Katia’s cell mates. The two of them are giving Katia trouble. Katia’s youth and good looks, the fact that she is from a different culture and has tried to distance herself, have made her the object of the usual jailhouse frictions and jealousies.
    I ask if any of them have threatened her.
    She says, “Only a little.”
    I try to explain to her how it works, the jail pecking order.
    “I don’t know what to do. I am afraid,” she says.
    “I’ll see what I can do. Talk to someone in the sheriff’s jail unit.” This will have to be done carefully, with an eye toward a housing change. Otherwise, the wrong kind of intervention will only make it worse. “But for right now, let’s talk about how you and Emerson Pike met, down in Costa Rica?”
    “I was going to school. I am a student at the university in San José. I did some modeling on the side to make extra money, mostly clothing and makeup. My photographs, a set of them with my name, were on the modeling agency’s website, in their gallery of models. Emerson telephoned the agency. He said he wanted to hire me to do a photo shoot. He said he wanted to do some local advertising for his coin company. That’s what he said.”
    “Did you do it?”
    “Of course. He was willing to pay a lot of money, so I was happy to do it. The ads with my pictures were to appear in newspapers and magazines. But I remember thinking it was a little strange.”
    “Why was that?”
    “Emerson had no idea what he wanted, so the agency set up the pictures. They had me wear a bikini and smile at the camera while I was holding a small stack of gold coins in each hand. I thought it was a funny way to sell to investors. But Emerson didn’t seem to mind, and who was I to judge?” says Katia. “Still, that was the first clue. I should have realized.”
    “Realized what?”
    “Men,” she says. “Sometimes they come to the modeling agencies, mostly Americans…” Then she looks at me. “Sorry.”
    “That’s all right, go on.”
    “They…they hire models after they look at the pictures on the website. They pay for photo shoots they never use,