The Reluctant Detective

by Finley Martin

  MacLaren held a job as a ship’s officer, but he worked smaller vessels. Maybe he’d started his career late. Maybe he didn’t have the brains to advance further. Maybe he had some character defect or personality quirk which held him back. Or maybe it was just bad luck or desperation which led had him into the Client’s clutches.

  The library and the kitchen seemed the only rooms to have any sign of life in them. So Anne returned to the library and made a more thorough search of his things. She started with the desk. She shuffled through a stack of bills and bank statements to no avail. She found no personal letters. Several stacks of manuals piled up in another corner. Technical mostly. Formulas for ship stability. Advanced fire-fighting strategies. Deck cargo safety code. Meteorology, Level 2. More manuals in the drawers below. Most of them related to certification as captain.

  He’s ambitious, thought Anne, I’ll give him that much.

  Anne formed a fragmented picture of Devon MacLaren as she rummaged through the bits and pieces of his life. He remained a pathetic character in her eyes, but he also seemed to be more of a pawn than a player, a victim of circumstance as well as human frailty perhaps. She stopped short of feeling any sorrow or compassion for him, though. She had made that mistake once already when the Client had pretended to be a victim and conned her into making that final delivery of phoney money. That wouldn’t happen again, she swore. At least she hoped not.

  She tackled the computer next. Fortunately, no password was needed when she booted it up. She opened the email program and scrolled through the deleted messages. Among the forwarded jokes and curiosities, advertisements and special offers, were some personal contacts. A few of them caught her attention because they read so oddly. They were rather short and blunt, almost businesslike, and not written with the phrasing and familiarity that an acquaintance would employ. Occasionally, the syntax was peculiar, or an idiom seemed strained. They never addressed MacLaren by name, and the subject of their interchange was ambiguous.

  She searched through his saved computer files. Nothing there of consequence. His network history showed a sprinkling of hits on internet porn sites. Nothing unusual there either, she thought, but at the same time she felt embarrassed and squeamish even staring at the listings.

  Just out of curiosity she checked the folders for saved pictures and videos. Both were empty and, given his viewing history, that did seem extraordinary.

  Anne dug deeper into a desk drawer. Her hand clutched a small box. She drew it out and opened it. It was half-full of flash drives, thumb-size devices for portable file storage. Anne had a few at the office for backing-up sensitive files, but why anyone would have fifty or more was puzzling. Anne took one and plugged it into the USB port. It opened automatically through a photo program and played as a slide show.

  Picture after picture flashed in front of her as she sat in front of the console, the glow from the screen illuminating her astonished eyes and gaping mouth. Child after child, babies even, flicked into pixilated still life and then vanished. One by one they formed a parade of deadened lives, and together they formed a spectacle of sexual horror designed to feed an insatiable lust.

  Anne was dumfounded. The images stunned her. They left her paralysed. Then for what seemed like an eternity, she could neither feel, nor think, nor move, and, when the wave of disbelief finally swept by and the shock slackened, only then did her self-awareness return. At first she felt a heave of nausea, but she drove it down. Then she felt the quiver in her lips and watched her hands strike blindly and repeatedly at the keyboard until the pictures went away and the screen went blank.

  Anne laid her arms on the desk and then she laid her head on her arms and closed her eyes. She wished the images away, but they were reluctant to leave. Even when she opened her eyes, they flashed out of dark corners in the room. Gradually, they faded and, after a great struggle, she managed to drive them away. They left her alone to reconcile her lingering thought: So many children. So many victims.

  Anne left the library. She couldn’t stand being in that room any longer. Upstairs she settled into the wicker armchair in the children’s bedroom. The wind blew in gusts. Rain beat against the panes of glass. A lamp lit the street, and the limbs of old trees wagged angrily before the weight of the storm.

  Anne fell asleep there, and she dreamed. It was a troubled dream. A branch of a tree rubbed against the siding of MacLaren’s house. In Anne’s dream the squeak of it became the sound of a child whimpering in the wilderness of her nightmare. Jacqui heard it, too. It upset her as well, but Anne couldn’t find her. Anne ran. She ran through woods that had no end, and everything in her dream world was couched in dreary greys or muddy greens, and the longer she ran through that dismal palette, the darker and eerier and more roily it became. Then the voice of the Client echoed out of nowhere. She heard Uncle Billy’s laugh, but it was far away and sounded off-key.

  The Client pulled into the parking lot of a motel on Water Street in Summerside and opened a laptop computer. He picked up the Wi-Fi signal and sailed through several screens. He typed a password to a secure site, entered the serial number for MacLaren’s cell phone, and waited confirmation of its GPS location. In seconds MacLarens’s home address appeared on the screen. The Client smiled grimly, pulled back onto the highway, and sped away.

  There was a car in front of MacLaren’s house when he drove past. He noticed a rental sticker on it. It was similar to the one on his grey sedan. He drove a few houses farther up the street and stopped. The wind had grown blustery, and the rain snapped nastily at his face when he opened his car door. His hat blew off and drifted onto the back seat of his car. He left it there, hauled the collar of his raincoat around his throat, and held it tightly.

  MacLaren’s house was dark except for the glow of a computer screen. The Client slowed, mounted the steps to the porch, and walked cautiously toward the door. In the shadows he reached inside his coat and pulled out an automatic. He screwed a silencer into the grooved barrel and pushed against the door. It was ajar.

  He moved to his left in slow increments toward the soft noises coming from the library. At the doorway he peeked around the corner. A man’s outline appeared. He levelled the gun. His finger grazed the trigger.

  “Where’s the money, MacLaren?” he shouted.

  The Client wasn’t prepared for the shadow ducking so quickly behind the desk.

  “Where’s the money? Don’t make me kill you, MacLaren.”

  “Agent Franklin Pierce, US Treasury Department. Drop your weapon.”

  “Treasury Department?” said the Client with astonishment. “I’m a federal agent as well,” he added.

  “Show yourself first. Step forward. There’s a light switch just inside the door. Turn it on.”

  The Client did as he was instructed. The room brightened. He saw Pierce crouched behind the cover of the desk, and Pierce watched him carefully over the barrel of his gun, still pointed at the Client.

  The Client smiled and lowered his weapon.

  “Now, place your weapon on that end table, and show me some ID.”

  The Client did so and reached into his inside pocket for his wallet. He pulled it out and tossed it to Agent Pierce. Pierce caught it with one free hand and examined it in several, quick, furtive looks. The photo ID was a match and it was legitimate. The badge that came with it was bonafide, too.

  “Border Patrol?! What the hell are you doing up here? And what business do you have with MacLaren?”

  “Let’s just say that the ID is legit, as you already know, but that’s for local consumption. My principal employer is a bit higher up the food chain,” said the Client.

  By this time, Agent Pierce was standing. A bewildered expression played across his face. His nine mill dangled by his side.

  The Client gave a hearty laugh and extended his right hand to Pierce.

  “Welcome to the Twilight Zone, Pierce.” Pierce shook his
hand.

  “I’ll be damned. Why didn’t the embassy give me a head’s-up that you were operating on this case?”

  “They didn’t know. Washington bypassed them… for security reasons, I suppose.”

  “So what’s going on here? What can you tell me?”

  “May I…?” asked the Client indicating his automatic on the end table.

  Pierce nodded.

  “Well, first of all, forget about everything you think you know about the case. The truth of the matter is that…”

  The Client turned, faced Pierce, and put two bullets into Pierce’s chest. His eyes bulged. His mouth twisted like he’d sucked a lemon. Then he dropped to the floor. A red stain of blood welled out of the holes in his shirt and pooled under his right arm.

  “The truth of the matter is that… none of it is true.”

  When the Client was quite sure that Pierce was dead, he flipped open his cell phone and rang MacLaren’s cell phone number.

  47

  Anne had accepted the voices she heard during her dream as just that – phantoms of a nightmare – but when some instinct within her insinuated otherwise, she jolted awake. Quickly and silently she made her way to the head of the stairs. She crouched down, but could see nothing. The voices were muffled. She recognized the Client’s; the other she was unsure of. Then she heard two muted pops and a soft rumble like someone setting down a big bag of potatoes.

  Anne suddenly felt quite vulnerable in the moments of silence which followed. She dreaded the idea of being discovered upstairs. There was no way out. No back stairs. No fire escape. She’d be trapped there.

  She hoped to God that wouldn’t happen, though, and maybe, if she kept very still, they’d leave. Maybe they’d find what they needed downstairs. Or head for MacLaren’s ship, she thought.

  Buzz buzz buzz.

  That sound seemed as otherworldly as her interrupted nightmare. Then she realized that it came from her own coat pocket. A wave of horror engulfed her. It was MacLaren’s cell phone.

  Anne’s head jerked away from the buzzing like a person who’d just walked into a spider’s web. She turned to look downstairs and saw a man raise his gun toward her.

  “You again!” he said. His weapon flashed and cut a hole in the plastered wall at the top of the stairwell.

  Anne dove for cover and scrambled down the hallway toward the nursery. She heard footsteps on the stairs behind her. She grabbed the cell phone out of her pocket – it had stopped ringing – and slid it across the room and under the door to the nursery closet. Then she eased into the master bedroom which adjoined the nursery. In addition to passage to the nursery, the master bedroom also had a door to the hallway. Anne couldn’t anticipate which route he would take – through the nursery or through the master bedroom, but, if she hugged the wall, she’d gain a few precious seconds to make a move. The back of the half-open bedroom door gave her a shadow of cover on one side, and a tall, glass, curios cabinet standing next to the nursery doorway concealed her on the other.

  Anne flattened herself against the wall between the bedroom door and the curios cabinet and waited. Nervously, she fidgeted with her wedding band. She feared to move a single step or even shift her weight. Nearly every footstep in the old house creaked, even the Client’s. She could pretty closely measure his approach, and she knew he was in the nursery.

  When her cell phone rang again, it startled her. When three pops from his automatic splintered the wooden closet door, she flinched. Then the Client drew back the closet door, found it empty, and shouted to her, “It won’t be long now.”

  Anne suspected that he would enter the master bedroom from the nursery. She had a scrap of a plan in mind, but she wanted a little more edge, something to distract him for just a second, something small. Something within reach. Anything. A faint groan of a floorboard alerted her. Too late, she thought. One of her hands clutched the other.

  Then it struck her. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Anne twisted the wedding ring off her finger and waited.

  The Client reached the doorway. Anne saw a ripple through the etched glass of the curios cabinet. At that moment Anne tossed her ring in a high arc over the cabinet and over the head of the Client. It landed with a clink on the floor. As he turned toward the sound, his back to Anne, she hurled her whole weight against the cabinet. It toppled sideways, pushed the Client off balance, and shattered on top of him.

  The cabinet downed the Client, and Anne fled the room. She flung the bedroom door shut behind her. Her first impulse was to take to the hallway and run down the stairs, but that would have made her too easy a target. Instead, she clambered up the flight of stairs to the third-floor attic.

  Anne moved swiftly and reached the top. She tripped on the last step and fell face-first through the passageway. The Client managed a wild shot, but missed. She rolled over and kicked shut the attic door. Another shot. She could hear the Client’s feet stumbling up the steps after her. Her fingers fumbled about for a key but found a slide bolt instead. She flicked it into place and locked the door. She had bought herself another few minutes at best, she thought. That was all the time she had left.

  Little light made it into the attic, just that dull nighttime illumination which two gables provided, one on each side of the steep roof. Thinking she was better off in the dark, she didn’t look for a light switch or a ceiling chain, and she still had enough night vision to make out rough shapes in the huge near-empty room that made up MacLaren’s attic.

  Near the middle was a heap of boxes and odd pieces of furniture. Anne found a heavy trunk among them and pushed it in front of the door. She pushed over two more. The Client heard them jam together in front of the door and fired a shot in the hopes of hitting Anne.

  The Client rattled the handle, pushed against the door, and then threw his weight hard against it. There was no top landing. So he couldn’t get a running start to burst through. Nevertheless he kept at it. Anne noticed that the bolt was weakening. No telling how much longer it would hold. Then something gave way, not the door itself, but a panel at the top of the door. He threw his shoulder against it again and again. Finally the panel stove in and splintered.

  Anne saw his left hand reach through the hole in the door and feel around for the key or latch or bolt or whatever else held the door so firmly, but he couldn’t reach anything. He ripped off more splintered pieces. Then he stuck his head and one arm through.

  Anne grabbed an old wooden coat rack. She rushed the attic door with the coat rack held like a lance. The Client heard her but didn’t see her until it was too late. The coat rack caught him in the face. She followed through and he toppled backwards down the stairs.

  She heard him gasp, tumble, and cry out, and slide and tumble again. He hit the hallway landing with a thud. Then there was no sound at all. He was dead, she thought. She had killed him. For a minute or more, she felt like she was holding her breath, almost afraid the sound of her own breathing would resurrect him. Then she heard him, this time more slowly, more falteringly and, she was sure, more painfully, struggling up the stairs again. He would kill her now with pleasure.

  The Client exhibited less vigour on his return, but just as much persistence. He hammered methodically at the door. He worked more fragments of wood away. Eventually he found the bolt and released it. Sheer force of weight drove back the steamer trunk and other items which had barricaded the entrance.

  Then he entered the vast open loft. He stood silently until his eyes adjusted to the dark room. He expected some counter-move on Anne’s part, but he had heard nothing from her since she had driven him down the stairs. Warily, the Client circled the accumulation of boxes and crates in the middle of the floor. Then, his eyes scoured the corners of the room.

  Rain drummed noisily on the roof. A blast of wind buffeted the house, and a draft of cool, wet air streamed through the half-open window of the east gable. The Client moved tow
ard it, his gun leading the way. He lifted the sash higher and looked out. Sheets of water raced down the steep pitch of the roof and dropped with a tinny splash into the gutters along the eaves. He looked to his left and right and up toward the roof peak. Somehow she had managed to escape out the window and down the roof, he thought. She may have gotten down, but that was a long drop. Two storeys. If she was desperate enough to take that chance, it was a good bet the fall had killed her. The Client pulled his head back inside, shut the window, and hurried to the stairs.

  Suddenly, he stopped and turned. He strode across the attic floor to the other gable and peered out. Through the rain-distorted panes, he saw her. She was clinging precariously to the roof, her body stretched out full-length and her fingertips desperately hanging onto the window sill. Only inches separated them. Their eyes met. Hers fluttered with terror. His locked in surprise. She had no choice.

  Anne let go and slid helplessly down the roof, her shoes grating against the asphalt shingles and her hands abrading against the coarseness of the surface, but neither broke the speed of her descent. Her legs shot off the roof and into the air. Her hands clutched madly at anything; they grasped an eaves trough; and they held on tight until her torso jerked to a halt in mid-air. Her body swung back. Her knees crashed against the siding with enough force to break her grip on the rain gutter. She fell backward, landed on the roof of the side veranda and nearly rolled off, but Anne recovered her footing, and she leapt from there onto the sodden lawn below.

  From the gabled window above, the Client watched Anne’s efforts to elude him with a grudging acknowledgement. After she dropped from the veranda to the ground, he lost sight of her for a moment, but she reappeared, limping diagonally across the lawn, and headed in the direction of Summerside’s waterfront.

  By then he had raised the window sash. He braced his gun. It was an easy shot.