by Steven James
Still, obviously, I was concerned.
The drive gave me a chance to think some things through.
Leeson’s grave. Ten o’clock. The donor.
Mannie’s the one who told you to be there at ten. When he was fleeing the Field Office, he attacked Thurman, grabbing his wallet.
Or . . .
Mannie’s body size and ethnicity didn’t work for him to be the one observing the suicides.
Jon’s internship . . . The quantum encryption research . . . Duane said you had no idea how deep this goes . . .
Earlier, Marcus Rockwell had given me his cell number. Now, I called it.
“Marcus, this is Agent Bowers. Did you find anything out about Duane?”
“I confirmed that he was the one behind the postings. We shut down his account, and we’re tracking all of his contacts.”
If I was thinking in the right direction, I needed to have a longer conversation with Mr. Rockwell.
“I need to see you, Marcus.”
“What is it?”
“Can you meet me at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building?”
“When?”
“As soon as possible. I have one other thing I need to take care of first.”
“I can probably make it in an hour or so. Will that work?”
I wasn’t sure, but I said yes.
“What is this concerning?” he asked.
“I just need to resolve a few questions regarding the postings.”
Then I called Senator Murray, and he agreed to meet me at the Field Office as well.
Okay, let’s see how this goes.
On my way to the hospital, I got word that Calvin had pulled through surgery alright. Then I heard from Angela that she and Lacey had come up with a match on the search for flight plans from private jets near the sites of the suicides in Seattle and Miami. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said, “but I have a name.”
“Marcus Rockwell,” I said.
Silence on the line, then: “How did you know that?”
“Let’s just call it a lucky guess.”
I reached Thurman to find out if he had more information about the donations to the charities and learned that the amount varied for the different victims, but it averaged a hundred thousand dollars.
So, that’s what it costs these days to stand by and watch someone take his or her life.
* * *
+++
Since their clothes were soaking wet, the hospital provided both Christie and her daughter with a set of scrubs to wear.
She could have told Tessa about her cancer while they waited for Pat, but, just as she’d decided while she was at the monastery, she still felt that he needed to be the first to know.
* * *
+++
I parked and hastened into the hospital, recalling Christie’s stories about the sea turtle hatchlings and the baby polar bear.
She’d been preparing to tell me something else, had put it off, and I had the sense that I was finally going to find out the significance of those two television-watching experiences all those years apart.
I made my way through the emergency room waiting area to the exam room where the nurse at admitting told me my family would be.
The death of those animals and the lies told to protect the innocent.
What did that have to do with us?
It was probably good that I was here in the emergency room wing, since I still hadn’t removed the glass from my leg. We could take care of that in due time. Right now, I needed to see Christie.
Both my wife and stepdaughter were seated on an exam bed with blankets wrapped around their shoulders. They’d changed out of whatever clothes they’d been wearing and had on scrubs.
Before I could even greet her, Christie pointed to my leg.
“Pat,” she said with amazing calm, “there’s glass sticking out of you.”
“I know. I’ll be alright.”
“That’s seriously gross,” Tessa said. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
I turned to the side so she wouldn’t have to look at the glass.
“You need to get that taken care of,” Christie urged me.
“I will in a second. I just wanted to make sure you two are okay.”
They told me the story of what’d happened with Timothy Sabian and his father, who, in truth, really had been Assistant Director DeYoung.
It was hard to wrap my mind around, but all that would get sorted out eventually.
Christie was proud of her daughter for leaping into the car to save her, and Tessa was proud of her mom for shooting her way out of the sinking vehicle. I was proud of them both.
When they were done giving me the details, Christie asked Tessa if she could wait in the next room over for a few minutes. “I need to talk with Pat alone.”
“Yeah, okay.” Then Tessa said to me, “I’ll tell the doctors to bring in a bone saw.”
“I don’t think they’ll need to amputate, Raven.”
“Whatever.”
Once she was gone, Christie said, “She likes it when you call her that.”
“When I call her . . . ?”
“Raven.”
“Oh. Right.”
An awkward silence.
Christie asked me to have a seat, and I pulled up the rolling chair, positioning myself with my injured leg straightened out to keep the pressure off where it was hurting.
“You had something you needed to tell me?” I asked without even trying to hide how anxious I was feeling.
“Pat, remember when I visited the doctor last week?”
“Sure.” I felt a deep tremor of worry. “What is it?”
“What I have to say, it’s about the test results.”
“Go on.”
“They were positive.”
“What kind of tests, Christie? What does that mean? What’s going on?”
“I love you, Pat.”
Under these circumstances, those four words did not reassure me at all. “Christie, what tests? What did the doctor tell you?”
“I have breast cancer. It’s serious. It’s aggressive.” A pause, and then she added, “The prognosis. It isn’t good.”
I felt like I was caught on a dizzy, spinning midway ride and there was no place to get my footing, nothing solid to stand on or hold on to.
I wanted to tell her not to be scared, not to worry, that everything was going to be okay, but all that came out was, “We’ll work through this, okay? We’ll do it together.”
“Yes.”
I took her hand. “And that’s why you went to the monastery?”
She nodded. “I needed a chance to think things through.” She touched away a tear. “I wasn’t sure if I should tell you.”
“Why wouldn’t you have told me?”
“To protect you. But then Dr. Werjonic mentioned that truth is always a gift, no matter how hard it is to hear or to bear.”
Yeah, that sounded like him.
And, at least in this case, I believed he was right.
Then I drew my wife close and I hugged her. And neither of us said a word.
83
It took me longer than I’d anticipated when I first told Marcus and the senator that I’d meet them in an hour, but when I informed them that I was in the emergency room, they both agreed to wait as long as necessary at the Field Office.
While I got my leg taken care of, Christie and I spoke more in-depth about what she knew and what we could do regarding her treatment options. Tessa kept coming back into the room, and Christie kept telling her it would be just a few more minutes.
Earlier, when I’d heard that Greer was dead, I’d realized that the deeper shock of what’d happened would hit me later, and I felt the same way now with Christie’s news—the facts were there, out
in the open, but all of the implications hadn’t hit me yet.
But they would soon enough.
Finally, Christie told her daughter.
Tessa listened in silence, then said, “Well, we’ll fight it, right? I mean, chemo or whatever? You’ll be okay. I know you’ll be okay.”
“Yes,” Christie said. “We’ll fight it.”
“And you’ll be okay.”
“And we’ll be okay. We all will.”
Honestly, I didn’t want to think about the investigation. I just wanted to think about my wife, just wanted to be there for her now. But she told me that she needed to spend some time with Tessa, and I arranged for a car to take them back to our apartment while I prepared to tie up the loose ends of the case.
I checked in on Calvin before leaving the hospital. He was sleeping, and I didn’t wake him but trusted the doctors when they told me that he was going to be alright.
Thank God.
At least there was one bit of good news.
On my drive to the Field Office, I heard from Ralph that the team had been able to corral Mannie into one of the police cars, and they were transferring him to the nearest precinct.
“Be careful,” I told him. “After escaping from the FBI Field Office, getting out of a local police station might just be a cakewalk for him.”
“I hear you. I’m not leaving his side until he’s locked up tight. By the way, you know those sounds we heard coming from inside the truck?”
“Yes.”
“He busted up a bunch of the mannequins and laid out the limbs and heads.”
“What?”
“Some sort of design on the floor of the semi. Filled half the truck.”
“The limbs and heads in a pattern?”
“Yeah.”
Or a code.
“Send me a picture of it.”
“We’re en route.”
“There are officers on-site, right? Call them. I need to see what Mannie left in there. If I’m right, it might be a message.”
“For who?”
“Me.”
* * *
+++
Thurman met me in the lobby. “The senator and Rockwell are waiting upstairs,” he said.
“Walk with me. Tell me everything you know about the charities and the donations.”
As we rode the elevator, he filled me in on what he’d discovered.
In the first two instances, the donations had been made before the deaths to nonprofits that the victims supported and that were doing research that would benefit a sick relative—cancer research in one case, AIDS research in another. In the third instance, the donation to a hospital was sent after the suicide.
It seemed extraordinary to me that the money alone would’ve motivated the victims to take their own lives, but their visits to the Matchmaker’s website indicated that they might’ve already had suicidal ideation and Thurman speculated that the money ended up just being the tipping point the victims needed.
Motives. What a tangled mess they were. I was just glad it wasn’t my job to make sense of them.
“And Jon Murray? Was it the gambling debts?”
“His dad’s bookie has connections to Sheldrick.”
Why didn’t that surprise me.
“How much money are we talking about?”
“Almost a quarter of a million dollars. Enough to torpedo his career if it became public knowledge.”
The senator had assured me that his debt wasn’t significant, that it was under control.
“All paid off?” I said to Thurman.
“In full. Anonymously, three hours before Jon’s death.”
We came to the conference room, excused the agent who’d been waiting there with Rockwell and the senator, and, knowing that I’d been at the hospital, they asked if I was okay.
“Yes,” I told them. “I’m fine.”
The blood on my pants might not have inspired too much confidence in what I was saying, but they left it at that.
There he was: Marcus Rockwell, the billionaire. Blonde. Wearing black skinny jeans, canvas tennis shoes, and a stylish sweater. My eyes were on his Chuck Taylor All-Stars—the same type of shoe that’d left sole impressions outside the window at Senator Murray’s house.
“Now, how can we help you?” the senator asked.
Normally, I would have cared more about propriety, but half an hour ago my wife had told me she was dying of cancer, I wanted to get back to see her, and right now I didn’t really care if I stepped on anyone’s toes.
“Marcus,” I said, “where were you on Sunday night at ten o’clock?”
“What?”
“Sunday night. We’re checking the subway and the security cameras of the businesses surrounding Trinity Church Cemetery. Will we find you on them?”
He must have anticipated that we would be successful in our search because he said, “There’s nothing illegal about visiting a graveyard.”
“And you’ve been on some recent trips, I understand, to Seattle and Miami?”
He eyed me.
“What’s going on here?” Senator Murray asked.
“Marcus,” I said, “tell the senator where you were on the night his son died.”
Senator Murray looked at me, then at Marcus, and then back at me. “Are you saying he’s the one who was in my house, watching?”
“Why don’t you ask him?” Thurman suggested angrily.
Marcus gave us a cold and unforgiving glare.
“Did you know Thomas Kewley?” I said to him.
“If you’re accusing me of something, just come out and say it.”
“Wait,” the senator cut in, agitated. “I want to know if you were in my house.”
Marcus gave him no reply.
“What do you do when you have tens of billions of dollars?” Thurman muttered. “When you have everything you could ever want? You expand your horizons.” Then he pounded the table and said to Marcus, “Who gave the victims the ideas for the ways they died? Was that part of the deal? The more creative, the bigger the donation?”
“I didn’t commit any crime.” Marcus turned to the senator. “Your son loved you. That’s why he did it. Because of your debts.”
“My debts?”
“I paid them off.”
Horrified, Senator Murray rose to his feet. “You could have saved Jon, but you didn’t?”
“He did it for you. I did it for you.”
The senator was quick.
Before Thurman or I could stop him, he rushed Marcus and landed two solid blows to his face.
It took both of us to pull him off the tech mogul.
“I didn’t break any laws,” Marcus protested, holding his broken nose. “I just watched the suicides. Just like thousands of other people did online.”
“Actually,” I said, “since you donated the money before two of the suicides, you influenced the victims—especially since they were on Selzucaine when they died. Those donations will be considered coercive to get the people to harm themselves. So will the money to the bookie. That turns them into homicides, not suicides.”
“That’ll never hold up in court. My lawyers will have a field day with this.”
“Maybe,” I acknowledged. “But maybe not.”
If nothing else, the trial would be enough to finish Marcus’s career. Perhaps it would even bring down Krazle.
Two other agents who’d heard the scuffle showed up at the door, and Thurman and I handed Rockwell off to them. “Arrest him,” I told them. “Take him away.”
“On what charge?”
“Murder, for starters. We’ll move on from there.”
* * *
+++
I knew that none of this would bring back Senator Murray’s son or any of the other victims, and all I could
say to him was how sorry I was.
“I can’t believe it was him,” he said softly. “So, he met Jon during the internship, and then what? Somehow found out about my gambling and targeted him?”
“That’s what it looks like, yes.”
We located one of the staff psychologists to speak with the senator, to comfort him, then the photo came through from an officer at the greenhouse property, the image of the inside of the semi, and I saw the code Mannie had left for me with the snapped-off limbs and heads of the mannequins:
I recalled the tic-tac-toe grid and mentally decoded the cipher: FIND HOPE.
I processed that.
Find hope?
Oh.
His wife’s name was Hope.
Is it possible that—?
“You good?” Thurman asked me.
“What?” I said distractedly. “Yeah.”
He noticed that I was staring at the image on my phone. “What’s that?”
“Mannie destroyed the mannequins in the truck and left the body parts in this pattern.”
“Is that the same code he used at the Field Office?”
“It is.”
“Does it mean something to you?”
“I think it means his wife is alive.” Then it hit me, how this was all tied together, how Mannie had managed to escape from the Field Office. Thurman was only scheduled to work half the day on Sunday. Timing and location. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re a good actor, Thurman, I’ll give you that.”
Just like Vidocq.
“An actor?”
“After Mannie got your wallet. You shed a tear for your wife and kids who were never in any danger. That’s why Mannie gave us a ninety-minute window—you were scheduled to work only half of the day, and he needed you there to help him escape.”
Thurman quietly appraised me.
“How long have you been his handler?” I said.
“You’re basing all this on my work schedule? How could that even matter?”
“Everything matters. It was no coincidence that you were right there at that key intersection in the hallway or that you sent me in the wrong direction. You helped him. And Hope, his wife, she’s alive?”
