Mind Bender

by Linsey Lanier

  “All right. Okay.” Wondering what that was about, she gave him a long look, then turned and trotted to the furniture store door.

  ###

  Parker put his hands in his pockets and stared after his wife. Then he gazed down the back alleyway of the shopping center all the way to the end.

  “Our suspects couldn’t have been here long,” he said, uttering his thoughts aloud.

  Following his gaze, Hosea came up beside him. “I take it you didn’t find any sign of activity other than this appendage?”

  “We did not.”

  So Drew and Audrey were hold up somewhere else. Could be nearby. Could be miles away. But they’d been here in Atlanta this morning. That was certain.

  Parker turned to Hosea. “I want to apologize for my detective’s behavior.”

  Erskine seemed surprised at the comment, but not angry. “It’s understandable. Apparently he was close to his ex.”

  “I’m afraid so. I want you to know we’ll keep him in check.”

  He nodded. “Seems like Steele’s the one who’s handling him.”

  Parker wasn’t going to divulge what an ordeal she thought she had on her hands. “I’ve formed a special unit at the Agency. Miranda’s in charge of it.”

  “I see.”

  Hosea didn’t seem surprised. After long years of working together, Parker felt he could read the man fairly well. They were once on the force together. Hosea had never quite forgiven him for leaving the APD to go out on his own, no matter how much he’d been able to help with cases over the years. Parker wanted a smoother relationship with him for Miranda.

  “We haven’t always seen eye-to-eye in the past.”

  “No. You don’t always play by the rules, Parker.”

  “And you always do. Nonetheless, I want you to know I’ve always respected you.”

  Brows rising, Erskine let out a long slow breath. But he dodged the remark. “Your wife has come a long way since she first came to Atlanta.”

  That was good to hear. Parker allowed himself a wry smile. “From a jail cell to head of an investigative team. I’m very proud of her.”

  “You should be. That incident in Jasper County—that took a lot of guts.”

  He was glad Hosea saw the courage in what she’d done, but he could never know the depth of it. Or of his own gratitude. She’d risked her own life, her own sanity to save his daughter that day.

  “She has that in spades,” Parker agreed.

  “Apparently.”

  “I’m glad to hear you think so. I hope you’ll give her your cooperation in the future.”

  Coming back to himself, Erskine stuck out his chin. “About as much as I give it to you.”

  Parker gave him a pat on the shoulder. “I’ll take what I can get, Hosea.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  As soon as she stepped out of the front door of the furniture store, Miranda could hear the heartrending cries.

  She found Holloway on a weathered iron bench, his head in his hands, sobbing. Her heart going out to him, she sat down beside him and waited.

  After a long moment, he raised his head and stared out across the parking lot at the lone CSI truck that had arrived a few minutes ago.

  “He’s going to kill her,” he said in a hoarse whisper filled with despair. “I know he is.”

  She might be dead already, but that was the last thing Miranda could tell him. Instead she said, “Erskine and his team are going to handle the investigation on the evidence. They’ll find something.”

  “It’ll be too late.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I can’t stand thinking about it, but it’s all I can think about. That guy. What is he doing to her? What’s she feeling? What’s she going through? I should be there. I should be rescuing her.”

  No, that wasn’t his place anymore. It hadn’t been for three years. “You’ll drive yourself crazy with thoughts like that.”

  “I can’t help it, Steele. I just can’t help it.”

  He stared out into the darkness again, rocking himself. With his disheveled hair and suit coat, he looked ten times worse than he had in Austin. His eyes were red and swollen. He was going on fumes.

  Miranda didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t offer any comfort. There wasn’t any to give.

  At last she dared to lay a gentle hand on his back. “You need rest.”

  “I can’t—”

  “You won’t be any good to this investigation if you’re exhausted, Holloway.”

  He kept shaking his head.

  She glanced toward the end of the building and saw Parker coming around the corner with Erskine and a few of the other officers.

  As the police moved to the truck, he started toward her and Holloway.

  She got to her feet. “C’mon. We’ll take you home. Drink a beer or two. And don’t come in until ten tomorrow.”

  Unable to find a reply to that, Holloway rose and followed them out to the Mazda.

  It was late, but they found a Chinese takeout place, and Parker bought a mound of food for everyone. Then they dropped Holloway off at his apartment with a sack of chow mein and crab rangoons. Watching him drag himself up the steps to his door, Miranda hoped he would eat some of it. And take her advice and get some sleep.

  Parker drove back to the penthouse, and a half hour later they were sitting at the counter of its gleaming kitchen eating what they could of the take-out.

  “We’ll have to keep Curt distracted tomorrow,” Parker said, scooping pieces of chicken onto Miranda’s plate.

  She took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. “Sorting through those messages will do it. Most will be bogus, no doubt.”

  “Yes.”

  She only hoped Holloway wouldn’t make something out of nothing and go off on his own again.

  She pushed the noodles around on her plate with her fork.

  “Let the frustration go for tonight.” Parker’s low voice soothed her like a warm bath.

  And yet, as she finished her food her mind kept racing with the details. The obituary in the Georgetown paper. The security photo at the airport. And now this—mutilation. What was the point of it?

  “I don’t know, Parker. It doesn’t add up. Something isn’t right. It feels like—”

  He reached for her plate. “Like we’re being jerked around?”

  She almost smiled at how he’d uttered her very thought. “Yeah. That’s exactly what it feels like.”

  He put the dishes in the sink and reached for her hand. “We’ll figure it out tomorrow.”

  He was right. It was all they could do. Let it go for tonight. But just as she slid off her stool, her phone buzzed.

  “What is it?” Parker asked, concerned.

  She looked at her screen and her back went stiff. “A text from Becker.” She read it to him. “Got a hit on the guy from facial recognition. Real bad dude.”

  She tapped the link he’d sent and the attached report opened. The first thing she saw was a set of mean dark eyes staring at her. A mug shot from Los Angeles County where he’d been arrested two years ago—at the age of twenty-four.

  His name was Drew Iwasaki.

  She recognized the choppy black hair hanging nearly to his shoulders, the expressive dark brows, the chiseled face full of mockery, as if he were thinking, “You assholes can’t hold me.”

  According to the report, Iwasaki had been arrested a bunch of times, but never convicted. He was suspected of running with a Japanese gang in LA, involved in the usual stuff. Extortion, prostitution, drug smuggling.

  “Never convicted,” Parker read over her shoulder.

  Her stomach tightened. “He’s connected.”

  “Most probably.”

  But to who or what? No way to find out tonight.

  “We’ll pick this up tomorrow,” Parker said.

  He was right. They couldn’t do anything with the information tonight. She sent Becker a “good job” text and stuffed the phone back in her pocket.

&
nbsp; They stuffed the leftovers in the fridge, the trash in the compactor, and made their way upstairs.

  A hot shower made her feel better physically, but did nothing for her heart. As she crawled into bed and snuggled up against Parker’s strong shoulder, the echo of Holloway’s cries came back to her.

  She closed her eyes, trying to shut them out, but her mind kept asking the inevitable questions.

  Where was Audrey Wilson? Was she still alive? And if so, what condition was she in? And most of all—how would they ever find her?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Drew Iwasaki stepped through the door at the end of the creepy cave-like hall in the underground labyrinth.

  He cantered down the ramp, and cradling two cold bottles of hard cider in the arm of his leather jacket, he pressed the button on the control panel that opened the heavy iron entrance to the lab. When it slid open, he trotted down the second ramp with a spring in his step.

  Feeling his skin start to cool at the lower temperature, he stopped to eye the huge vents running up the concrete walls that pumped in sanitized air from outside. Overhead the thirty-foot high ceiling was a tangle of humming shafts for heating and cooling, electricity from the generators, and water pumped in from the nearby creek. Huge fluorescent lights illuminated the massive thousand-square-foot space. Dug five hundred feet into underground rock, it had taken two years to build this fortress.

  All for him. Well, mostly.

  Still, this was power. He still couldn’t believe he was here. The thought made him giggle.

  There were plans to add on to the fortress, as well as promises to provide minions for getting supplies and cleaning up. But they had to prove themselves first.

  A metal framework along the walls held cages with some of the experiments. In one of the cages, rats were greedily gorging themselves on insects until they burst. In another, a white rabbit with electrodes attached to its ears jumped every time a shock was administered at automatic intervals.

  His favorite had been the gerbil they’d gotten to run backwards on the exercise wheel. It would run and run and run, never stopping to eat or drink or even catch its breath. An iconic picture of the rat race of modern society, his great-uncle would say. Run and run and run. Until it died and fell off. And then they’d get another one. They’d been through half a dozen gerbils now, each one lasting a little longer. The record now was eight days on the wheel.

  But in the center of the room was the chair.

  The chair had surpassed the gerbils in entertainment value now that they’d advanced to human experiments. Long and narrow and uncomfortable, the chair had tight leather straps to hold them down and a nest of electrodes to hook to their heads while the testing and conditioning was done.

  So far, he’d been stunned by the results. Of course, those results didn’t last without the elixir—Drew’s word for the homemade brew that was key to it all. But they had plenty of that.

  His gaze moved to the long L-shaped counter. There he was, Phineas Lee Bach, his so-called partner. This place was his brainchild, or so he claimed. But Drew thought of him as his bitch. A minion he needed to advance his status in his great-uncle’s eyes.

  Phineas was the creator of the elixir.

  Smug and presumptuous as always, he balanced his skinny frame on a stool while he hunched over a microscope.

  Buds in his ears that made him oblivious to his surroundings, he paused occasionally to peck at a laptop. He always wore that pressed white lab coat over a wrinkled T-shirt and torn jeans. Trying to make himself look important. But his sandy sheepdog-like hair, his thick glasses, and his acne sprinkled face betrayed the fact he’d just turned eighteen.

  Boy genius, they called him. Hah. He was just a kid.

  Drew strolled over and set one of the hard cider bottles next to the laptop.

  Phineas started at the movement and glared at Drew as he pulled out his ear buds. “I told you not to sneak up on me.”

  “I’m giving you a reward. It’s late, and you’ve been down here for hours.”

  His knobby nose wrinkled in disapproval as he slid the bottle away. “How’s your cougar?” he sneered in his adolescent voice.

  Drew scoffed. “She’s only five years older than me.”

  “She’s still out of your league. She’d never have fallen for you without my help.”

  Without the elixir, he meant. “What do you mean? It was because she fell for me that I was able to shoot her with your magic perfume. You know women can’t resist me.”

  On their first date in Austin, a small spray of the elixir had made her open up and tell him all he needed to know about her ex. In particular, that she was still in touch with him and had his phone number. That was when he’d come up with the idea of the bank robbery.

  Chuckling, Drew slid onto the stool across from the kid and opened his bottle. “And the side benefit is your brew makes her fuck like a rabbit. She wore me out just now.”

  Phineas rolled his eyes. The horny adolescent was jealous.

  “Is she locked securely in her room?” he said.

  “Of course, she is.”

  “You made sure?”

  “Yes, Phin. I made sure.”

  No one could escape the ten-by-twelve windowless chambers with the twelve-foot-thick concrete walls they’d had built for their experiments. Plus, the catacomb of passageways throughout the place were equipped with enough horrifying booby traps to prevent escape. He and Phineas had designed them together and overseen them while they were being built.

  So what was he worried about?

  “And you’ve been taking the antidote?”

  “Two drops under the tongue twice a day. Just like you said. I don’t want to end up with zombie brain.” He chuckled at his own joke, glad Phin knew what he was doing when it came to chemicals.

  Phineas didn’t laugh. The young man released the microscope clips and removed the specimen he’d been working on with a pair of tweezers. A moth whose nerve endings he’d been probing. He dropped it onto the counter to study its twitching a moment. Then reached for a tissue, crushed it, and wiped its contents into the trash.

  His lips twisted in a serious scowl, he returned to his laptop. “I told you we couldn’t screw this up, Drew.”

  Laughing again, Drew took a deep satisfying swallow of his drink. “You think too much.”

  Drew got up and moved over to the gerbil cage. The furry brown-and-white creature inside was still running. Its little brown eyes had a look of desperation. Kind of like the look in Experiment One’s eyes when he’d hacked off her toe.

  The wheel rattled to a stop and the gerbil fell to the bottom of the cage with a small thud.

  He laughed at the thrill the sight gave him. “Number Eight is done.”

  Phineas pecked at the laptop keys. “Noted,” he said with his usual indifference.

  Beer in hand, Drew strolled around the room studying the cages.

  There was a time when neither of them had thought much. Not beyond the next fish they would catch or the next ballgame they’d play. It hadn’t been so long ago that they’d been running around the fields of the commune where they’d been raised.

  Drew had been eight when Phineas came along. His mother had died giving birth to him, and Phineas was given to one of the concubines to nurse. Drew had been sad when they told him Mary Ann was gone. He had no idea where his own parents were, and Phineas’s mother had taken care of him. She’d fed him, told him stories, and sung him songs. Those songs had always seemed to have some hidden meaning behind them. He’d come to believe it was about his destiny, and the power that would be his someday. And so he’d had taken a liking to the little kid who was Mary Ann’s orphan. He was curious, smart, entertaining. What was more, he was the grandson of the commune’s powerful leader, Lee Bach.

  But as soon as Phineas could talk—which had been early—his grandfather had taken him under his wing for training.

  Lee Bach had worked for the government on a secret mind control progr
am in the seventies. Enraged when the program was shut down, Bach had formed the commune in southern Kentucky with a handful of followers including Drew’s great-uncle, Katsu Iwasaki.

  Over the past three decades, Lee Bach had developed the place into a thriving community where he could carry on his work. And although on the outside the commune appeared to be a group of idealistic society dropouts, in reality they were not into peace or mutual respect or the environment.

  They were into power, influence, manipulation.

  And of course, money. They lived simply on the outside, but the leaders had bank accounts with balances in the millions. From a simple hut, Drew’s great-uncle Katsu had managed the criminal movements of Asian gangs across the country for years. When he was fifteen, Drew had left the commune to make a name for himself among those gangs. Until he was recruited for this new assignment.

  His great-uncle told him of the underground lab near Atlanta that had been under construction for two years and had just been finished. Lee Bach had insisted Phineas be put in charge of the project, and great-uncle Katsu had arranged for Drew to be his partner. But Drew aimed to take control. He knew neither Lee Bach nor great-uncle Katsu had commissioned the structure. And the funds to build it hadn’t come from the commune.

  It came from someone great-uncle Katsu referred to only as “Our Benefactor.” Someone higher up. Drew was going to show this person what he was made of.

  He slid back onto his stool. “You don’t want the drink I brought you?”

  “Alcohol dulls the brain.” Phineas snatched his bottle off the counter and went to the fridge to put it away. He closed the door with a slam. He didn’t think it was time to celebrate. “Somebody’s got to do the thinking around here.”

  “We both do plenty of that.”

  “Are you crazy? This was our first real assignment. Our first proof-of-concept. Our Benefactor wanted this operation to be carried out discreetly. No undo attention. No fanfare of any kind. It was supposed to look like an accident. Now you’re on the news and those two detectives are after us. Plus the whole APD.”