Out of Time

by David Klass

  Hand in hand, they climbed to the third-floor master bedroom. It was only there, after yet another layer of security had been activated, that they talked openly, albeit in soft voices. They debriefed each other for nearly half an hour—Green Man went first and recounted every moment of his mission while Sharon asked probing questions. She had been trained as a forensic anthropologist and worked in law enforcement for nearly ten years, including a two-year stint with the FBI’s Chicago field office. She went over every step of his mission with him, and her questions reviewed his decisions and precautions in exhaustive detail.

  When he got to his encounter with the policeman in Nebraska, she asked if he was sure the cop hadn’t been wearing a body camera. “Positive,” he told her. “I checked for it in all the likely places. They’re still not that common outside big cities. We got lucky.”

  “We didn’t get lucky with the taillight.”

  “Can you believe that stupid bulb burned out, after so much careful planning? Okay, sweetheart, my turn.”

  He began with their circle of friends. Had anyone asked anything even remotely inquiring or suspicious? The kids’ friends and the family’s acquaintances in town knew that he was a businessman who traveled frequently. They were all apparently satisfied—no one had asked any specific questions about this trip or when he would return or what he was doing. He often took similar trips just to accustom everyone to his weeklong absences.

  Green Man next made sure that Sharon had covered his tracks in case someone was smart enough to search for changes in his behavioral patterns. She had logged in from his email accounts several times a day. She had used his credit cards. She had made calls from his cell. And she had driven the family car on its regular routes at the normal times. Anyone searching for Green Man by trying to identify a data trail linking him to the journey to Idaho would come up empty. Anyone checking to see if he had been in rural Michigan would see evidence of his customary behavior.

  When they were done with the debriefing, he asked Sharon the questions he dreaded most, knowing most of the answers already because he had heard them on the radio news while driving home. Twelve people had died so far because of his attack on the Boon Dam. Their photos and information were all over the Internet, and—knowing that he would insist on it—she had printed it all out for him, and it was in his bottom desk drawer. “Look tomorrow morning,” she urged, “or you’ll never sleep tonight. And you seem so tired.”

  “Fine,” he agreed, “but what were those two families doing on houseboats? The season was over.”

  “It was unseasonably warm, and an outfitter wanted to make a little extra money, so he stretched regulations,” she told him. There had been no way to foresee it.

  He sat very still for nearly a minute and then whispered, “How many kids?”

  She put her arms around him and whispered, “Five.”

  “My God.”

  She held him tighter and kissed him softly above his eye. “You’re doing something that has to be done.”

  “And I would have shot that young cop.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Shar, I had my finger on the trigger.”

  “But you held off and saved his life.”

  “Five kids.” He didn’t add “As innocent and dear as our own,” but they both knew he was thinking it.

  “There’s no other way,” she whispered, and her belief in the rightness of their actions was even more definite than his own. “Go take a shower, Mitch. You’ll feel better.” She kissed him again, this time on the lips. “Frankly, my love, you stink.”

  He took a shower that was almost scalding, six nozzles geysering hot water at him as steam filled the bathroom. He wiped the mirror in order to see himself to shave, and in the steamy glass that began to clear, a face slowly took on detail. Dark hair starting to lighten around the temples. Eyes that could appear hazel or gray-blue depending on the light. An aquiline nose that his father and grandfather had passed down to him. The strong chin that a Yale baseball coach had seized on to give him the nickname “Chisel Chin,” which had stuck for four years in New Haven. It was a handsome face and had once been carefree, but there were lines of worry stamped on the forehead and pockets of regret softening the skin around his eyes.

  Green Man entered the bedroom, and the lights were out. “Come, my darling,” Sharon said softly.

  He slid in next to her, and they kissed and touched each other and made love slowly and tenderly. Then it became more urgent, and he wasn’t entirely surprised by his sudden hunger. People who have been in the proximity of death crave life. Sharon felt his urgent need and wrapped her arms around his back, and he was deep inside her, in a place that for a few blissful moments separated him from the burdens that he carried around every second of every day. They moaned together, and then they were silent in each other’s arms.

  Two minutes later she was asleep, and Green Man lay listening to her breathe. He loved the feel of this bed that he had built himself—Odysseus-like—from a great oak that had once grown beneath the very spot where they now lay together. He savored the smells of his wife, the same lavender shampoo that she had used in her brown hair since he had first met her, the French Peony perfume he had given her last Valentine’s Day, the red wine that still faintly flavored her sleeping breaths.

  But despite his great weariness, no sleep came to Green Man. He lay for two hours holding her and then gently disengaged and got quietly to his feet. He put on a bathrobe and slippers and crossed the hall to his library and turned on the light.

  There were two desks—one for writing and a tilted drafting table for drawing. Nearly ten thousand books were arranged on shelves—many of them detailing dire environmental threats to specific areas of the world and gravely threatened species. Mountain gorillas and delta smelt, Amazon river dolphins and the South China pandas, all cried out to him desperately from the green shelves.

  He heard their silent pleas, but he walked to his desk and opened the bottom drawer. He took out the pages that Sharon had printed from the Internet. Twelve faces looked back at him.

  He sat alone in the library with them. The bright, innocent eyes of the children. Their names and personal information. All that they were and all that they could have been. From the books on the shelves, the weight of the threatened planet pressed in on him as he studied the faces of the children whose lives he had just ended, and he thought excruciatingly of Kim and Gus, who were sleeping safely one floor below and would wake up the next morning and welcome their father home from his business trip.

  NINE

  Brennan reached the campsite just after daybreak in a foul mood. The plane ride across the country had been bumpy, and he had only managed to sleep in brief stretches during the long night ride from Boise. A half hour earlier they had left the highway behind for a gravel path that soon degraded to a dirt track so rugged that in places it disappeared completely into the surrounding rocks and dirt. More than twenty vehicles, from state and local police cars to SUVs and two trailers, were parked on a flat near a bend of that rough dirt track, and Brennan’s driver stopped there.

  Earl was waiting for him beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat, looking sunburned and skeletal. “Didn’t expect you for another hour. Looks like you could use some coffee.”

  Brennan gave the gaunt agent a handshake, searching his weathered face for signs of optimism and not seeing any. “To hell with coffee. I could use some good news.”

  “Wish I had some,” Earl told him as he led Brennan around two large boulders toward a hidden ravine. “Green Man’s not exactly a sloppy camper. We’re not finding much.”

  Five blue pop-ups had been set up side by side at the bottom of the ravine, curtains all the way down to keep out the wind and sun, so that they looked like private cabanas at an exclusive hotel beach. “He couldn’t have picked the spot any better,” Earl said with grudging admiration. “No one could
see his tent from the road, and those boulders screened his van.”

  “So we’re sure it’s a van?”

  “We can guess at the wheelbase but not much else,” Earl told him. “Just a few faint grooves in hard dirt.”

  “What about the tent? Did he pound in stakes?”

  “Nope. I’m betting it was a collapsible frame. He didn’t leave much behind for us. Want to go down?”

  “Sure. In a minute.” Brennan paused at the lip of the ravine and looked around, trying to get the feel for the place as Green Man had first chosen it. Earl was right: for a remote campsite close to a dirt road for a quick getaway, it couldn’t have been better hidden. “Lonely spot, and it got cold at night,” Brennan finally muttered. “Maybe he built a small fire. I sure would’ve. And once he got it going, it would have been tempting to cook something hot.”

  “Not this guy,” Earl said knowingly. “The cold didn’t bother him, or the quiet. He cooked his dinners long before he got here. We’ve taken plenty of soil samples, and we’re not getting a hint of ash. And he has excellent table manners, or he eats in his van. The dogs haven’t found so much as a potato chip.”

  “Where did the son of a bitch relieve himself after his home-cooked meals?”

  “We’ve checked to a radius of half a mile, and there’s no sign of urine or feces. Even if he shoveled it deep, the dogs would have found it by now.”

  “So he carried everything in with him and drove it all away?”

  Earl put his hands in his pockets, and the extra weight moved his trousers an inch down his slender waist. “Every chicken bone. Every ounce of urine. Every turd.”

  “Nobody’s perfect,” Brennan said. “Let’s go down.”

  They descended into the steep ravine, where a dozen members of the team were sipping coffee outside the blue pop-ups. Brennan greeted them by name and quickly corralled Tina, a top dog wrangler. She was in her late thirties, half Cherokee, with long black hair that matched her dark jeans. “I heard you found this place?”

  “It was Sheba, sir—she’s maybe the best scent dog we’ve ever had. She first picked up the scent on the cliff above the dam, even though I’m betting he sprays his boots with Scent Killer. Green Man drove back here on a small motorcycle, and she was able to follow his scent for four and a half miles without his feet having ever touched the ground once. Which is kind of freaking remarkable, sir.”

  “Give Sheba an extra lamb chop,” Brennan grunted. He walked over to the nearest pop-up and peeked in through the clear plastic window. Three crime techs in white Tyvek suits were walking in slow concentric circles, hunched over crablike in positions that couldn’t have been good for their backs. They were wearing magnification headsets and using blue lights to cast side shadows.

  Brennan spent the next six hours sipping lukewarm coffee and receiving negative reports. No hand- or footprints had been found on the cliff top where Sheba had first picked up the scent. The shards of the drone that had been recovered thus far at Boon were so tiny, fragmented, and blistered from the explosion that they would be useless. The letter to the New York Times had already been tested in a variety of ways at the main lab in Quantico and had not yielded any secrets yet. The scent dogs continued to sweep the area around the campsite in wider circles but found nothing. Inside the blue pop-ups, the crime techs pored over the thirty-by-thirty-foot patch of dirt literally grain of sand by grain of sand and saw no shadows.

  Noon found Brennan sitting alone on a rock at the edge of the gravel-strewn bed of the ravine, looking up at the surrounding twelve-foot rock walls just as Green Man must have done after he pitched his tent. It was grim and grave-like even at midday—almost like being buried alive. What had it felt like to wait in such a rocky cleft through the afternoon and evening hours, alone, contemplating an act of murderous destruction? If Tom Smith was right and Green Man was empathic and had a conscience and truly regretted taking innocent lives, how had he spent those long, tense hours before the strike on the dam, communing with his gods? Had he experienced the almost sexual elation that most killers who stalk humans get as they prepare to move on their prey?

  Or had it been very different? Had he felt regret and even guilt? Had he battled a constant temptation to give up and go home but been kept here by a sense of . . . what? Brennan forced himself deep into the character he was slowly creating in his own mind. It was a sense of duty that drove him. Not just a duty to act but a duty to those who couldn’t act, to step forward for them and for the whole species. There was one phrase Green Man repeated in every letter: “a moral imperative to act on behalf of the human race before it is too late.”

  Earl touched Brennan gently on the shoulder, and one of the crime techs was standing there, too—the Scandinavian with the brilliant blue eyes—what was her name? Jensen. Her long blond hair was gone, wound up in a tight bun behind her head and contained safely by two layers of plastic caps. Without the softening touch of her hair, in the white Tyvek with the headset still on, she looked androgynous and almost alien.

  She was holding up a small plastic vial. Inside it, backlit by the noon sun, Brennan could see two tiny filaments that were intertwined and seemed almost to be dancing. “I think they’re glove fibers,” Jensen said. “Maybe nylon, but we’ll know as soon as we get them under the scope.”

  TEN

  On the evening before the funeral, Tom’s mother drained two gin and tonics before swallowing an Ambien. Tom and his sister both saw her stumble on the stairs and cling to the banister, and Tom ran and supported her to the second-floor landing. “Never mix alcohol and sleeping pills,” he admonished her, guiding her toward her bedroom.

  “Just wanna sleep,” she said, her words slightly slurred.

  Tom helped her into the bedroom, and she sat down heavily on the bed.

  It was a depressing, low-ceilinged bedroom with a partial view of the fifth hole of one of Boca’s less fashionable golf courses. The room held knickknacks from a forty-year unhappy marriage and was dominated by the same king-size bed the Smiths had transported back and forth across the country, from field office to field office. As a ten-year-old, Tom had practiced judo moves on this bed in Virginia, and he had been conceived on it when his father had started out as a state trooper in Texas. For more than four decades, two people who increasingly didn’t like each other and eventually could barely stand each other had somehow found comfort in each other’s arms on this bed. Tom’s mother collapsed backward onto it, alone, and buried her head in a mound of pillows.

  “Ma, you’ve got to get undressed,” Tom told her. “I’ll get Tracy.”

  “Already here,” Tracy announced. She had followed them in. “I’ll put her to bed and stay with her awhile.”

  “Go away,” their mother said, her voice muffled by the pillows. “I’m goddamn fine.”

  “You’re not goddamn fine,” Tracy told her. “Not by a long shot.”

  Tom left the two of them and headed back downstairs. He put away the gin and spotted a bottle of his father’s Jack Daniel’s on the liquor shelf. He hesitated before pouring himself half a glass. His first sip made him gag, and he nearly dumped it all out in the sink—he had always hated the smell and taste. His father would not have liked him diluting it, but Tom dropped in three ice cubes and carried the clinking glass into his dad’s study.

  Warren had been a neat freak, and everything was in its proper place—fountain pens standing at attention in an FBI coffee cup. Who still used fountain pens? His father’s prized golf clubs were in their bag by the window, the irons in club order, the driver and fairway woods with matching head covers. The books in the bookcase by the desk had been arranged alphabetically by author. His father’s reading had been restricted to American military history, and there was a thick biography of Douglas MacArthur on the desk with a playing card for a bookmark. Tom opened to the ace of spades and saw that his dad had made it to the Inchon landing.

&n
bsp; MacArthur had never been a favorite of Tom’s, and after a paragraph about Red Beach, he closed the book and began his search. What he was looking for wasn’t in any of the desk drawers, but in the bottom one Tom was surprised to discover a small album with photos exclusively of him when he was young. He turned the pages, watching himself grow up from a smiling infant, to a serious-faced Little Leaguer swinging a bat that was clearly too big, to a karate yellow belt trying to look menacing. Warren was not in any of the photos, but in a way, he was responsible for all of them—an invisible male presence that Tom had tried painfully hard from a young age to please.

  Tom lingered for a few seconds on a photo of himself at age ten, shirtless, string-bean thin, and wearing boxing gloves, and then he closed the album and tucked it back in the bottom drawer. He took a cautious sip of whiskey and sat back in Warren’s office chair with its lumbar support fastened on with Velcro. He let his eyes range around the study, and his gaze finally settled on the corner closet.

  He walked over, opened it, and surveyed the contents. There were several old golf clubs his father no longer played with but apparently couldn’t bear to throw away, a metal fishing-tackle box, a wooden tennis racket with a frayed grip, and a dozen folded sweaters from cold autumns up north. Sure enough, the black leather case that Tom remembered from his childhood but hadn’t glimpsed in more than a decade was perched on the top shelf. Tom reached up for it and carried it over to the table. He set it down carefully and swung open the two metal clasps.

  The Colt pistol his father had carried throughout his career lay on a bed of black foam. Tom had seen the gun often but had never actually touched it before. He reached down and picked it up and wondered if this was the very same pistol his father had used to save Brennan’s life thirty years earlier. Had he actually shot people dead with it? Tom slid his palm around the grip and slowly raised the pistol, pointing it at an antelope head on the wall. “Put that stupid thing down,” an alarmed voice commanded from the door.