by Vivian Barz
But Eric did not answer—could not answer. He wiped away the warm hand that had rested on his arm. A few doors down from his office now—how had he gotten there?—he could not stop. He continued trailing her down the hall, this girl nobody but him could see.
He followed her outside the building, across campus, and outside the confines of Lamount University. He heard the incensed honking and detected the cars zooming past as he walked along the shoulder of the highway. Going where, he had no clue; he only knew that he needed to walk.
Branches scraped his cheeks as he moved through a wooded area, the violent cacophony of rushing water nearby violating his ears like a scream. No, he realized, it was he who was screaming, inside his head. He wanted, so desperately, to break free of the trance that had taken over his mind, to run away from the water as far as his legs would take him.
Still, he followed the girl.
Mud squished around his shoes as he walked down an embankment toward the river’s edge. It was only at the shoreline that she stopped for the first time since their journey began to ensure that he was still behind her. She raised her hand, providing him a beckoning wave, and then she entered the water.
He waved back.
And then he followed.
His jaw fell slack and all the air whooshed out of his lungs in a single breath when the river crept into his shoes like icy fingers. The water continued to envelop him, frozen needles moving up his ankles, his calves, his thighs, his groin. His panicked heart thudded against his chest, until it, too, was swathed in water.
Please, I can’t swim! he thought frantically, though deep in his consciousness he knew this wasn’t true. He could, in fact, swim very well. Better than most people he knew.
Eric was up to his neck when he heard the two men shouting from the shoreline. He registered their voices, desperate and pleading, on some primal level. Yet, the black tide that had swept over his mind washed them away, eroding their words with each new wave that clobbered him until the only word he could understand—the only word that seemed to matter—was follow.
So he followed the girl, followed her down until he became one with the river, the water filling his mouth, his ears, his nostrils, shrouding the crown of his head. He allowed his eyes to slide closed, and then he sank into the darkness, where he knew she was waiting for him below.
And he would have kept sinking, had it not been for the muscular arms that curled over his shoulders and ripped him back into the daylight and, more importantly, back into himself. He was aware, instantaneously, that he was somehow drowning, despite sitting peacefully behind his desk only moments ago.
“You’re all right, buddy. Come with me. That’s good—swim,” one of the men coaxed, yet Eric suddenly found that he was going nowhere.
The two hands that tugged on his ankles held him in place. He endeavored to kick them away, but their grip was unyielding as the girl’s face emerged from the darkness below. She grinned up at him hideously, decaying right before his eyes, and he understood with sharp, frightening clarity that she intended to pull him down to the bottom of the river.
Panic caused him to thrash his legs involuntarily, and for a moment, he was loose.
She seized him once more and yanked hard, pulling him free of the men’s helping hands. He swallowed a gulp of bitter water as he descended down into the darkness, and through the terror he could hear her pleading as clear as if she were speaking directly into his ear above water. Please! I’ll give you everything I have—I’ll burn my notes and destroy my computer. I’ve already deleted the photos. I promise, I won’t say a word. Please, you don’t have to do this. Just let me go and I’ll leave town. Please don’t hurt me! I can’t swim! I can’t swim!
Suddenly, he was weightless, his head bobbing above the surface and his aching lungs filling mercifully with air. The man gripped his biceps, hauling him to the shore before he had an opportunity to break free again. There, he vomited until he thought his stomach might come out with the bile and then flopped down on his side in the mud, panting.
“Christ, guy, if you’re trying to kill yourself, there are easier ways,” a gasping voice said from above.
“Kill myself? No . . . I . . .” Eric trailed off with a frown, gazing dumbly at the river before him. “Where am I?”
“You mean you don’t know?” This voice sounded decades younger than the previous.
Eric glanced up at the two men, likely a father and his teenage son, who he now saw were dressed like fishermen in brown, rubbery waders. They wore near-matching flannel shirts and baseball hats with lures stuck to the bills. Their poles had been cast away hastily nearby, one sticking up from the muddy shoreline, halfway in the water and halfway out, like a fractured bone. They were gaping down at him as if he were a frightening alien form.
He shook his head. “No idea.”
“We saw you come walking up to the shore, and we thought it was weird you’d pick this place to take a midday stroll. The only reason people really come down here is to fish,” the older man said.
Eric opened his mouth to ask if they’d seen the girl he’d been following but then quickly snapped it closed. Of course they hadn’t. Not unless they, too, had the uncanny talent of communicating with the dead. As far as he knew, there were few others like him in the world.
“We saw you wave, like you were looking at someone. But there was nobody there,” the boy said.
“We couldn’t believe it when you walked into the water,” the man said, shaking his head incredulously to emphasize his statement. “And then you kept going. A few more feet, and the rapids would have swept you away. They’re strong out there.”
“I don’t remember doing any of that,” Eric said, though on some level the narrative sounded familiar, like a dream he was struggling to recall moments after waking.
“Were you sleepwalking?” the boy asked.
Eric nodded, deciding it would be easiest to let them think that he had been. He’d grown weary trying to explain the truth to strangers, and he found that it usually did nothing more than scare them anyway. “It happens occasionally. Good thing you two were here to wake me up,” he said, genuinely grateful. While he didn’t believe the dead would ever try to truly hurt him, he doubted his outcome would have been as successful had he awakened from his trance in the middle of the river with nobody to pull him to shore. He may have very well drowned out of sheer confusion. “How far are we from Lamount University?”
The boy’s mouth dropped open. “Is that where you came from?”
“That’s about three or four miles from here,” the older man said. “Did you walk all that way asleep?”
“I guess so,” Eric said lightly, though he could tell that he’d spooked them, despite his nonchalance. Once upon a time he would have lied to himself, too, about what had happened. He would have explained the phenomenon away as a hallucination brought on by too much stress and not enough sleep. Now, however, he was okay admitting to himself that he was scared—not so much for himself, but for the nameless girl who had drowned in the river before him.
CHAPTER 21
Susan received a call from Howell that Dov Amsel’s body had been found. “He washed up a little farther downstream from where we found Chung Nguygen.”
Normally, such a development would have surprised her, but on this strange case it was par for the course. She asked, “Was his time of death the same as Nguygen’s?”
“That’s something you’ll need to ask the ME. All I know is that he’s dead,” Howell said in his usual no-nonsense fashion.
“Looks like we’ve got to change our focus. I’m investigating Marcus Zelman further. There’s something about him I don’t like; he’s hiding something. I don’t know what, but he might be tied into this.” She shook her head. “Defenders of the Earth might also be involved. This case . . . it’s just all over the place.”
“Follow your gut. Sometimes, cases are like that. No two are ever alike,” Howell said, and then he ended the conversation
so that she could get back to work.
Susan wasn’t thrilled when the humorless Dr. Mikael Abbonzio picked up at the medical examiner’s office. The bright side was that it would save time, since she was already familiar with the case. Still, she wasn’t able to provide too much helpful information about Dov Amsel’s death.
“His body had gotten caught on some rocks, it appears, or else he likely would have been found at the same time as Nguygen,” the ME said.
“Cause of death?”
“It’s difficult to determine. His body was pretty beat up from the rocks. I can tell you that it doesn’t appear to be a drowning. His lungs indicate otherwise.”
Susan asked, “But homicide is still likely?”
The ME paused. “I can’t say likely, but it is a possibility. There’s something else you might want to know.”
“About Dov Amsel?”
“About Dov Amsel and Chung Nguygen. You’d asked about the toxicology report last time we spoke, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, good. I only wanted to confirm because I deal with so many law enforcement agents,” Dr. Abbonzio said, not sounding too thrilled about that fact. “Anyway, Chung Nguygen had heroin in his system.”
Susan sat up in her chair. What was the deal with this case? She thought of the call Eric had made to her about Samantha Neville. “Wait a minute. Chung or Dov?”
“Both of them.”
Dov, she could believe about the heroin, but Chung, no way. “Are you sure? Is there any possibility that there was a mix-up in the slides?”
“No, I run a very clean lab here,” Abbonzio said tartly. “Also, when we find abnormalities such as these, it’s protocol to run a second test to confirm.”
Quickly, Susan said, “I didn’t mean to imply that there had been a mistake made in your department. I guess I just wanted to double-check because it is very, very unlikely that Chung Nguygen was a habitual drug user. Is there any chance that he tested positive for opioids because of some kind of medication he was on?”
Abbonzio sniffed. “I suppose I wasn’t as clear as I could have been earlier. I’m accustomed to dealing with other medical professionals who are versed in our terminology.”
Susan couldn’t tell if she was being insulted or not, so she let the comment slide.
“In the simplest terms,” the ME explained, “heroin has a very unique biomarker known as 6-AM. This would not be found if he were merely on prescription medication.”
“I understand now. Thank you for clarifying. Do you think it was likely, then, that Dov Amsel was drugged and then hit over the head? Or, maybe already on drugs but assaulted?”
“I can’t confirm that for certain. But it’s possible he was drugged to make him more compliant. I’ve seen this sort of thing before. But there’s one other thing. I don’t usually run tox screens so quickly, but I made an exception in this case because I understand the two deaths are connected.”
“Um, thank you,” Susan said awkwardly when the ME paused. She seemed to be expecting gratitude of some sort.
“Just don’t expect it again in the future,” she replied, which might have been her way of saying “You’re welcome.”
Susan thanked Dr. Abbonzio for her time and hung up. Drumming her fingers on her desk, she thought about the strange connections in the case. Since she was a visual learner, she drew a rough diagram in her notepad. She printed the name of each person who’d come up in her investigation by name and listed the information she knew about them, the hope to find a common link:
—Chung Nguygen: works at Gruben Dam, heroin in system, disappeared with Dov, contracted by Marcus Zelman for single job, murderer unknown.
—Dov Amsel: works at Gruben Dam, heroin in system, lied to obtain job, identical birdhouse at home and work, possible ties to DOTE, possible recreational drug use, oblivious wife, murderer unknown.
—Marcus Zelman: lied about remembering Chung, refused to produce geological report, created housing development below Gruben Dam, claims to have never heard of DOTE, knows the Nevilles.
—Samantha Neville: opioids—possibly heroin?—found in system, member of DOTE, suspected murderer Bryan McDougal but possibly unknown.
—Bryan McDougal: enemy of DOTE, ex to Samantha, possible suicide / murderer unknown.
—Cindy Jenkins: lied to give Dov a job, fired from Gruben Dam, sister-in-law to Dov, rich lover (????), liar.
She let out a long, frustrated sigh and shook her head. What did two college kids, three dam employees, a multimillionaire, and an ecoterror group have in common? How were the murders and heroin linked? What was the deal with the matching birdhouses? What was the common thread she was missing? What was Zelman’s link to the Nevilles—was it merely a coincidence?
She decided to start at her most recent developments and work backward. The man at the top of her mind was Marcus Zelman. The conversation she’d had with him had continued to niggle at her mind. She felt in her gut that he was withholding the truth, but about what? He was positively lying about his claim of not remembering hiring Chung Nguygen. But why lie about something like that? She deduced it might have something to do with the survey Chung had conducted for him. And she suspected that he was also lying about never having heard of DOTE—but why conceal such a thing? Had he been threatened by the group because of toxicity levels found at his other projects, or even at Cambridge Downs, which was semiconnected to Gruben Dam through location proximity? Was that the big secret he was hiding? Damn, if she could only get her hands on that report.
Think-think-think.
Her hand shot out, and she snatched up the file on Chung Nguygen as something his wife had said occurred to her. She located the telephone number she needed and quickly punched it in. “Hello, Mrs. Nguygen? This is Special Agent Susan Marlan with the FBI.”
“Yes, I remember you.”
The line was quiet on Mrs. Nguygen’s end, so her husband’s relatives had probably gone home. Susan was curious about whether they’d absconded with the heirlooms, but she figured it would be poor taste to ask. She said, “I was wondering, remember when we were discussing antiques, and you said that your husband never got rid of anything? Does that also extend to paperwork?”
“What sort of paperwork? Do you mean his will or—”
“No, nothing like that. I’m interested in the environmental survey he did for Zelman Industries.”
“Oh, I know exactly where that is. It’s sitting right on top of his desk,” Mrs. Nguygen said. “I actually came across it earlier this morning when I was looking for some of my husband’s life insurance paperwork—I looked right at it.”
Gotcha, Zelman, Susan thought. Let’s see you try to lie your way out of whatever it is that I find. And I’m sure it’s going to be bad.
“But I hope you don’t expect me to decipher the file for you. I have a hard time understanding what it says—I think anyone would, unless they’ve got a background in environmental science or geology. There’s a bunch of jargon in it about minerals and soil—at least, that’s what I think it’s about.”
Susan kept her voice even, though she was grinning. “That’s perfectly okay. I happen to know a geologist. Would it be okay if I came by now to pick up the file?”
As Susan hung up with Mrs. Nguygen, she realized that she was both nervous and happy to call the only geologist she knew. She’d had a great time when they’d met up, and they’d left things on a high note. And, although she sometimes liked to quit while she was ahead, this she found was not one of those occasions. She took a deep breath and brought his number up on her phone.
“Hi, uh, Suze. Hi.” Eric sounded distracted, off.
“Are you okay?”
He laughed flatly in her ear. “Guess that depends on what you mean by okay.”
“What happened?”
“It’s . . . too long and complicated to get into now, but let’s just say that I’ve recently had some unexpected company.”
She knew what he wa
s getting at. He’d had one of his visions. “How bad was it this time?”
“Pretty bad.”
Eric typically downplayed his visions, so if he sounded that shaken and was admitting that it was bad, it must have been really bad. “And you’re sure it’s not from—”
“No, this isn’t a schizophrenic thing. I’m on track with my meds, and I don’t feel strange—ill, I mean,” he cut in, but not unkindly. “I saw a girl. She found me at the university.”
Susan listened as he briefly outlined what had happened, interrupting him only when he got to the part where he’d awakened in the river. “Oh my God, what if those guys hadn’t seen you. You could’ve drowned!”
“But I didn’t drown,” he said soothingly, though this did nothing to make her feel better. She imagined he was putting on a brave face, since he sounded shaken too. “The strange thing is, I think the girl might be linked to Samantha Neville and DOTE.”
Susan sat up straight in her chair. “How so?”
“When Bryan was in my office the other day, he said something about Samantha’s flaky roommate abruptly taking off last semester after receiving some artist’s grant—Tori Blakenwell was her name. But what if she didn’t disappear? What if she was murdered?”
“But wouldn’t someone at Lamount take notice of something like that? You said word of Samantha Neville’s murder was all over the place there.”
“Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe they thought Tori dropped out after leaving,” Eric said. “I called the Greater Collective, which is the artist’s retreat she was supposed to have gone to up near Portland. Guess what? She never showed. They have this program there where they provide free room and board to artists for three months, the idea being that their imaginative minds will be free to create if they’re unencumbered by everyday nuisances like paying bills and cooking meals. And this isn’t some ragtag retreat; this place is a multimillion-dollar complex set back in the forest. It’s gorgeous—I’d love to go there. The rooms are like something out of a five-star resort. Not only that; the food they serve is done up by some famous chef.”
