by Vivian Barz
Jake said, “Okay, so besides the cat-killing brother, who else do you think could be responsible?”
“It could be anyone,” Bryan replied with an aggressive shrug. “All I know is that it wasn’t me. This is San Francisco—the city’s not exactly known for its safety. This place seems to breed the crazies. I mean, take your pick. You’ve got thousands of homeless transients roaming the streets—even in Sam’s swanky neighborhood, they’re sleeping on the sidewalk right outside her building. There’s her nutty DOTE friends. There’s who knows how many people pissed off at her parents for moving criminals into their neighborhood—maybe it has nothing to do with Sam at all, and it’s a revenge thing. Oh, and then there was this old creeper hanging at the bar.”
“The night Samantha was killed?” Jake asked, and Bryan nodded. “Who was he?”
“I have no idea. I’d never seen him in there before, and he came in alone. He was totally out of place, though. He was real skeevy looking—like, at least twice as old as everyone in there.” Bryan ran a hand down his cheek. “His face was all pockmarked, like he was no stranger to drugs—bad teeth too. Ratty clothes, but not so ratty that he seemed homeless. Just worn, you know. I didn’t get close to him, but he looked like he probably smelled of farts and nicotine. He had food smeared all down his front, like he’d been using his shirt as a napkin. He didn’t order a single drink while he was there, but Keira—that’s the bartender I was working with—said she thought she’d seen him pinching leftovers off tables. He must’ve gotten a couple, because he was acting like a drunk, or like he was on something. That’s why he was on my radar, at least at first, because I wanted to make sure he wasn’t stealing drinks from customers—or their wallets or backpacks or whatever. I try not to be judgmental, but I could tell there was something up with this guy from the moment I saw him. Come to think of it . . .”
Bryan paused while he rooted through his back pocket and extracted his phone. “I took a photo of him as he was hitting on a few girls. He wasn’t grabbing on them or anything, and, really, I was more worried about what they’d do to him. Some of those girls, man, they can be kind of mean when they want to be. He was keeping his distance, but acting the fool, like doing little dances and then bowing. He hit on Sam too—you should’ve seen her shut him down. I don’t know what she said, but it must have embarrassed him because he got away from her fast. She likes to think that she’s all sugar and spice, but her tongue can be sharp when the occasion calls for it.
“At first I thought it was kind of amusing, I guess you could say, because he was so ridiculous. I do what I can to keep humor about the job, or else I’d probably just end up hating everyone—it doesn’t matter how fancy the booze; all drunks are disgusting in their own way to a jaded bartender, and I can’t afford to get fired over a bad attitude. Anyway, this all went down in the time span of maybe, hmm, five minutes? Probably less. I was actually about to throw the guy out when Keira beat me to it. Guess this dude hit on some frat guy’s girlfriend, and they were getting into a brawl over it. I texted the pic to my roommate.”
Bryan brought up his text log and handed the cell to Eric. Along with the photo, Bryan had included the message: If I’m ever this pathetic, please kill me. His roommate had messaged back: Yikes. That’s embarrassing. Eric handed the phone over to Jake, so that he could get a look at the man.
Jake enlarged the photo on the screen and nodded. “Oh yah, this dude’s way too old to be hitting on college girls. I see what you mean about him looking like a junkie. And like he smells.” He handed the phone back to Bryan.
After a silence fell over the room, Eric suggested, “Why don’t you tell us more about her doter friends?”
Bryan nodded. “These doters, they became her life. They’re like members of a cult, always recruiting. They’re not just here on campus; they’ve got chapters everywhere. They encouraged Sam to cut ties with anyone in her life who might not agree with their viewpoint. I know she stopped hanging out with her best friend since kindergarten because of them.”
“Harsh,” Jake said.
“You have no idea. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were the ones convincing everyone I killed Sam. I’d tried talking her into quitting the group from pretty much the moment she joined, which they knew because Sam told them everything about us.”
“What do you mean?” Eric asked.
“I mean she told them all the things I said about them. And about the places we went, what we did on our dates, the people we talked to, the arguments we had . . . let’s just say our private life was no longer private, which I’m not okay with,” Bryan answered. “And, although I have no proof of this, I think they’re dangerous. They have a fanatical air that never sat right with me, which is the biggest reason I wanted Sam to get away from them. They’re like a ticking time bomb about to go off.”
Eric asked, “Okay, so if you’re innocent, why haven’t you just turned yourself in to the police?”
Bryan didn’t have to think long about the answer. “Samantha’s parents, they’re pretty influential people here in San Francisco. They’ve donated a lot of money to law enforcement over the years—this, on top of the cops already loving them for their felony trailer parks. They also never liked me, even when Sam and I were in high school—and they’d never approve of Sam slumming it with a bartender if we were still together now. I’m worried that they might be fueling my manhunt. For all I know, they’re even telling cops that it’d be great if I could ‘accidentally’ fall down some stairs and hit my head on the way in to the station; they’re not the kind of people you want to mess with. I’m sure they’ve already got a long list of district attorney friends calling them up to offer their services, just itching to fry me.” To Eric, he added helplessly, “This is why I need you. If you clear my name, I’ll happily turn myself in to the police. I’ll go anywhere you want.”
Eric could no longer avoid answering. “I’m really sorry, Bryan, but my brain doesn’t work that way. What I do, it’s not like a television that I can tune in to a specific channel. I don’t know why I see and hear the things I do, but I have zero control over it.” Which is why I wanted to write a book to set the record straight, Eric thought. But then the idea made Susan so mad that she suggested that we take a break from each other.
“But, if you’re innocent, you’re innocent,” Jake cut in quickly. “With the amount of scrutiny the police are under these days, they’re not just going to rough you up. Unless there’s something else you’re not telling us?”
Eric was sensing, too, that maybe the whole story wasn’t being provided.
Bryan let out a long sigh. “Okay, the knife that stabbed Samantha? It had my prints all over it. That’s what the police told my roommate when he wouldn’t give me up. They were trying to use it as proof of my guilt, so that he’d tell them where I was.”
“You might have led with that bit of information,” Jake said, casting an incredulous look at Eric.
Bryan looked sheepish. “Sorry, but I knew if I did, you’d immediately think I’d done it. But it wasn’t my knife. It belonged to the bar, so of course my prints were all over it. I must cut up a dozen lemons a night. Sometimes, too, I’ll use a knife to open beer cases when I can’t find the box cutter, which always seems to walk off on its own. Literally anyone could have taken it right off the bar—it’s not like I went out of my way to hide it. These knives, they’re just cheap things that the owner buys in bulk, and we’ve got a ton of them scattered all over behind the bar because they get dull pretty quickly and are always getting lost or accidentally thrown out. If Sam had been murdered with the end of a broken-off beer bottle or a corkscrew, my prints would be on those too. Pretty much everything there my prints would be on: glasses, barstools, other people’s credit cards that had been handed me to charge . . . everything.”
“Anything else?” Jake asked, his eyebrows raised. “Besides you being the last person seen with her and your prints being all over the murder weapon?”
�
�I kind of had an incident with the police a while back,” Bryan finally admitted.
“Go on,” Eric prompted.
“I . . .” Bryan went silent.
Somebody had come knocking. Eric and Jake exchanged a panicked look, both unsure of what to do. Spooked, Bryan ran toward the window, yanked it open with a screech, and began to climb out. Lucky for him, Eric’s office was on the first floor.
“Wait!” Jake called, but Bryan was nearly out of sight. Just before he disappeared completely, he turned back to the two men, their mouths agape, and hurled the gun straight at Eric’s head. Bryan was halfway across the quad before Jake gingerly picked up the gun and determined it was fake.
CHAPTER 3
Frowning, Susan Marlan flipped through the file on her desk, which pertained to a missing person named Chung Nguygen—frowning, because this sort of situation, a lone civilian’s disappearance, was usually not cause for federal concern. The cases she focused on as a part of a special unit team at the San Francisco Field Office of the FBI were typically larger in scale and required a fair amount of urgency; something to the tune of a child snatched from a schoolyard, or a drug-addled lunatic holding a bank full of hostages at gunpoint, was usually what it took for their small but efficient squad to get involved.
Most of the time, her job had her chained to her desk doing research on suspects. She’d look into their backgrounds, check their financial and travel activity, and interview known associates, so that she might get a better clue where and how to track them down. There was, however, occasionally some action that took her out into the field, and she liked the mix. Her instincts were keen, she was good at what she did, and certainly she saw a hell of a lot more crime than when she’d worked in Perrick as a police officer. There, she’d investigated such gripping cases as oranges stolen from fruit stands, noisy burnouts in parking lots, and toilet-papered front yards. This was, of course, barring the events at Death Farm, which had shaken her and her tiny little community to the core.
Susan’s position at the FBI, which she’d acquired about a year ago, had come with the benefit of an assistant-slash-budding agent named Keith Haines. She’d never had anyone working under her before, and it secretly gave her job an extra feeling of importance. Thanks to Keith’s neat, efficient comments on the page margins, she was able to ascertain that it was actually two individuals who’d gone missing, Nguygen and another man named Dov Amsel. While the disappearances had piqued her interest, she still couldn’t understand the need for federal attention; the files of wanted persons and suspected terrorists were typically denoted as such, and these were not.
Further inspection of the notes (thank you, Keith) revealed that Nguygen and Amsel were both employed at Gruben Dam, which instantly cleared things up. Given the sensitive information the two men had been privy to—Nguygen was an engineer and Amsel an armed guard—their jobs would have required a high level of security clearance. Susan was unfamiliar with how, exactly, dams operated on a micro level, but it took very little effort to imagine the sort of havoc the two men could wreak on the area if they were disgruntled and looking to settle a score. Nguygen would have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the dam itself: knowing how to release water being the most critical skill he’d possess. Amsel would know the ins and outs of the building and how to get them to high-security areas. Scary stuff.
She grabbed the small pad of Post-its she kept on her desk and made a note to ask the HR department at the dam if they’d had any issues with either employee: complaints from coworkers, frequent tardiness, or a generally bad attitude. It was a basic and obvious query, but a good place to start in order to learn about what sort of people the two men were. Friends and family could always be counted on to lie, but Human Resources would have no reason to fudge the truth.
Susan ran a quick internet search, Google Earth specifically, to see how the dam was situated in relation to the surrounding area. It sat right above a residential neighborhood of a hundred or so single-story homes. Beyond that was a major highway that moved a lot of traffic. She thought of a gigantic wall of water crashing down over the top of it all—roofs crushed like soda cans, cars floating away like small insects in the rain—and shivered. It was unlikely that anyone could live through such a disaster. Suddenly, locating the two missing men was feeling a lot more urgent.
Deeper in the file, she learned that the two men had gone on a lunch break together the day prior and never returned to work. She sat back in her office chair, the bones in her lower spine popping softly, and tried to think of any logical reason why a security guard and an engineer would disappear together in the middle of the day—something other than foul play. Could they have possibly been friends outside of work? If so, perhaps they’d complained about their jobs over sandwiches or tacos or whatever and then made the hasty decision not to return—a type of “sticking it to the man” sentiment.
But she didn’t think this likely. Abruptly walking away from a job would make a lot more sense if the two men were in their late teens or early twenties, single and childless, or if the job in question was menial and easy to replace. Yet both men had specialized skills for their occupations, and she imagined Gruben Dam must’ve paid well enough.
She checked their ages next. Nguygen was nearing fifty and Amsel was thirty-one. Both were married. These were men who had people in their lives they’d have to answer to if they’d abruptly made the choice to cut out a major source of income. They’d have bills, mortgages, mouths to feed.
Okay, so what could be the other possible implications of their disappearances?
As if to make her think faster, Special Agent in Charge Denton Howell, a brusque, no-nonsense man who’d acted as a mentor of sorts to Susan, materialized in front of her desk. He had a habit of doing that. “Where are we with Gruben Dam?” he asked as a way of greeting. He wasn’t being unkind; that was just his manner. He wasn’t much for chitchat, and Susan would’ve been more alarmed if he’d inquired about any fun plans she might have for the weekend.
Howell had been pivotal in Susan’s move from Perrick PD to the FBI—he had, in fact, been the one who’d sanctioned it. She held a great deal of respect for her boss, and his opinion meant the world to her. She’d never voiced as much, but she imagined he knew anyhow.
Susan continually felt pressure to perform at a maximum level on the job, for fear of disappointing Howell. Maybe some paranoid part of her supposed that she was punching above her weight, that she really wasn’t as qualified as everyone thought for the big title she held. The step up from small-town cop to member of a specialized team at the FBI had been massive, and she’d been thrown straight into the deep end. Half the time, she felt as if she didn’t know what she was doing and that it was only a matter of time before someone found out.
She’d poured all her energy into the job, sacrificing a personal life—her relationship with Eric, most notably—normalcy, and a whole lot of sleep. She’d always abided by the “fake it until you make it” mentality, so while she’d presented herself to the world as hardworking, collected, and confident, inwardly she was terrified of screwing up, letting the rest of the team down, and making Howell regret ever bringing her onboard. In a recent performance review, he’d told her that she’d exceeded his expectations by always thinking quickly on her feet. So, perhaps there was some merit to being a faker after all.
“I’ve just started looking into Nguygen’s and Amsel’s backgrounds,” she told Howell. “But there’s something else I’ve been thinking about. I have a distant cousin, Josh, in the national guard, and I remember him talking a few years back about how a local dam—he’s in South Dakota—had been on their watch list during a high terror alert. Since the dam was a major source of power, the concern was that the area would be severely crippled and vulnerable to an attack should that dam be damaged by enemies of the state. Take out the dam, and you’re essentially taking out an area’s ability to function on a basic level.”
“Are you thinking their d
isappearances might be linked to terrorism?”
Susan shrugged. “I haven’t gotten that far yet, but I think it might be an angle worth exploring.”
“Could be. It’s best not to rule anything out at this stage,” Howell said.
“My gut is telling me there’s more behind this than two guys suddenly deciding that they don’t want to go back to work after lunch, though it could be something completely unrelated to the dam. I’m going to dig into everything I can find.”
“Any theories on the terrorism angle?” Howell asked. That was one of the traits she admired most about him, that he was always open to suggestions and out-of-the-box ideas. It was the primary reason he headed up their unit, which handled a lot of cases that required unorthodox measures. For such a stern individual, he was extremely open minded. He’d taken a chance on her in the past by listening to her hunches, even when he had no reason to, and they had paid off. That was the thing about Howell; agents had to prove their competency to earn his trust, but he was always willing to give them a chance.
Susan shrugged. “It’s a stretch, but if they hold foreign passports, there’s the possibility their government might have sent them here to gather intel at the dam. I’m going to look into their residency statuses, see if anything raises a red flag.” Even after nearly a year on the job, she was stunned (if not a little tickled) that she was investigating such matters. Had she uttered anything close to the same statement back at Perrick PD, she would have been laughed straight out of the station. The closest thing they’d ever had to a terrorist situation in their small town was the time a few vendors at the farmers market had been suspected of advertising pesticide-sprayed fruit as organic. The clean-living shoppers had been outraged over what they’d deemed a mass poisoning of the public.
Here at the FBI, however, she was taken seriously, and her opinion counted. She’d be forever grateful to Howell for it. After being forced by higher-ups at Perrick PD to take a leave of absence because of a traumatic incident at Death Farm, and then subsequently becoming embroiled in a multiple-murder investigation in Clancy, Washington, while on vacation, she’d been questioning what she really, truly wanted to do with her life.
