Wisher turned into the parking lot of a Motel Six, just another of those anonymous economy mega-chains stretching from sea to shining sea.
Wisher let them into their room. The beds hadn’t been slept in, the luggage hadn’t been unpacked. The two moved with a numb familiarity born of years … no, decades of interaction. Synchronized, but not quite alive and spontaneous.
Wisher opened a flat briefcase, and extracted a Dell Inspiron laptop computer. He connected its modem to the side of the room phone. Booting up, he opened a program called Conferex Secure.
As he did, Schott turned on the room’s air conditioning. He bent down, holding his face to the flow of cool air, enjoying the faintly metallic tang. Then he straightened, feeling the mild pain in his lower back. That was a nagging, constant companion now. Once upon a time, his body had been invulnerable, immortal, bulletproof. That was thirty years and two wars ago.
Once upon a time, also, the world had seemed much more black and white, cut and dried. He hadn’t found it to be the moral equivalent of Dr. Dolittle’s mythical pushme-pullyu. Everybody’s right, everybody’s wrong. No up, no down, everything goes sideways.
Even that slightest touch of whimsy triggered a savage longing for simpler answers. He forced himself away from such speculation and set up a compact video camera, hooking it into a port on the rear of the computer.
After about forty seconds, a box appeared on the computer screen, accompanied by a blinking cursor.
“Ready,” Wisher said blandly. Schott opened a little black book and began to read:
“Zebra, zebra, copy one seven eight.”
Wisher typed the characters in, and the computer began to beep, dialing.
Nothing.
For the first time, Wisher displayed an emotional crack underneath the reserve. “Fuckin’ piece of shit—”
Schott looked at him curiously. “Did you dial ‘nine’ for an outside line?”
Wisher stared at the computer, and then his anger evaporated into that curiously flat affect. “Oh. Right.”
He called up a command screen, and clicked the “dial 9” option. He pushed the dial box again, and this time the call went through. There was a hisss as the computer connected, a sibilance Schott had always considered disturbingly like the warning call of an angry rattlesnake.
The connection went through, and information was exchanged. News of death delivered exchanged with word of progress in other allied matters. Just information. It was impossible to treat the faces and names as belonging to real children, real human beings.
Schott knew Wisher actually had children, although he hadn’t seen them in over a year. Schott had none. Disturbingly, one of the small, smiling images across the line looked much like a blend of Schott and his first wife. What he called the Good Wife, the one he had really loved.
What was this kid’s name? Jessica Range. Cute name. Blond hair, brilliant green eyes, chubby cheeks. Twelve years old. Schott could see himself sitting across from little Jessica, eating Sugar Frosted Flakes and talking Pokémon strategy.
Please God. Keep her off the list. Keep this one off my list. I don’t know how much more—
Then Wisher ended the call. He copied a bit of information off the screen, then closed the case. “Amarillo, day after tomorrow,” he said.
Then Wisher stripped off his clothes and went in the bathroom for a shower. If he went according to pattern, he might be in there for a half hour.
Schott rolled onto one of the beds, picked up the remote and switched on the room’s television, flicking channels until he found Comedy Central, which was running a marathon of British sketch comedy. Five minutes of Benny Hill convinced Schott that it wasn’t his kind of thing, and he kept flipping until he found the Cartoon Network. Then he sighed, and watched, and laughed until his sides hurt, and never once thought about little Jessica Range, who lived in Minnesota with her alcoholic father, who, according to plan, had a little more than a month to live.
That was all right. Just not this week. And not at Schott’s personal hand.
A small mercy, that was. But sometimes, in life, that was all you got.
30
TUESDAY, MAY 29
Renny Sand wound his way through the warren of cubbyholes to his desk, angry almost to the point of exploding, but not quite certain why.
Lisa Cortez, the features reporter across the aisle, studied Renny as he fumbled through his morning calls. Finally, Lisa stood and leaned her elbows on the cubicle partitions and asked: “Hey, Renny—I never asked you how the interview went.”
He didn’t need to ask which interview. “Just great,” Sand said, and glared at her.
Sand pivoted to his desktop monitor, pulled out the keyboard and booted up. The computer screen asked for his authorization code, which he punched in above the little green glowing cursor. After a minute a menu appeared, asking his pleasure. He typed in the words “Alexander Marcus,” and a moment later was rewarded with an immense list of articles.
Sorted for date, the most prominent cluster was composed of articles about Alexander Marcus’s death.
What a week that had been. In March of 1988, en route from Alaska to California, Marcus’s Lear jet simply exploded. Some of the wreckage had been recovered, and enough of his body to be positively identified. Examination of the wreckage had revealed no explosive residue, and there wasn’t enough of the engine recovered to make a full evaluation possible. “Fuel-line malfunction.”
Even the memory of it disturbed him. At the time, he’d been just another shell-shocked face in a room full of dumbfounded reporters too whiplashed to stop their sobbing. Very unprofessional, a display like he’d never seen in a room full of journalists, as if it were 1963 and they were in Dallas, hearing the news from JFK’s cavalcade.
He closed that article window, and went on. Sand typed a second word: “Chicago.”
The list shrank, but still filled the screen.
He paused, a man about to step over some kind of invisible line, and typed: “vice raid.”
An article appeared detailing the raid of a high-level whorehouse in Chicago in 1989. He remembered that article because he had contributed to it. It was a scandal, because several political figures were implicated—none of them named in the article.
Renny drummed his fingers on his desk, and then picked up the phone, punched four keys, and waited.
A woman’s voice answered. Uncertainly at first, then with growing confidence, he said: “Hello, Madeline? How are things down in archives?”
“Renny Sand?” she asked, her voice rather cynically suspicious. “Why, I’m just simply super. Everything down here is super. And how are you?”
He ignored the wariness. “Just great. Listen, I need you to access some information for me. Ready?” He read off a list of dates and reference numbers.
She hawed as she scribbled. “Got it. Couple of years, you’ll be able to access all of this stuff right from your desk.”
“Then I couldn’t come down and flirt with you, now could I?”
She laughed at him, and hung up.
Renny threw his coat over his shoulder and hurried out, drawing the bemused expressions of his cubbyhole mates.
They had watched him for a week since the infamous interview, and it was obviously clear that something was bothering him. They were just waiting to see how long that something would fester before he exploded.
And now, just maybe, it had happened.
* * *
The research and storage facility was in the second basement of the Tower, and reminded him of nothing so much as a medieval catacomb with fluorescent lighting. One of Marcus’s innovations in the news industry was a central repository for a reporter’s research materials. In most news bureaus, individual reporters jammed their desks (and sometimes homes) with stacks of index cards, sheafs of paper, four-inch by eight-inch reporter’s notebooks, and shoeboxes filled with cassette tapes. The basement at Marcus Communications housed all of this material, moderately w
ell cross-referenced. The practice had been one part legal hedge against lawsuits and subpoenas, and another, equal measure anal retentiveness on the part of Marcus Communications.
There was an ancillary warehouse in Santa Monica, and others in London, Paris and Moscow serving the foreign branches. A million-dollar digitizing program was putting it all on-line, but until that cyber-day dawned, there was Madeline.
Madeline Lindrows was a plump woman somewhere in her forties, with wire-rimmed glasses and a healthy sensuality that fairly baked off her. She kept that aspect of her personality down to a dull roar at work, however, where she was hyper-competent and almost regal.
She led him back through the stacks, occasionally glancing at him back over her shoulder. “What article is this, Renny boy? You know, I don’t believe half the things I heard about you.”
“Thank goodness.”
“The half I do believe bothers the hell out of me.”
He couldn’t quite bring himself to meet her eyes. They were too direct, too challenging, saw too much.
“I shouldn’t believe the other half, should I, Renny?”
Sand finally managed to face her squarely. Although he had five inches on her, he felt almost as if he were looking up, as though she stole the moral high ground just by waking up in the morning.
“Just believe I’m coming back,” he said.
She sighed, as if she had hoped for another answer.
“Well,” she said, “try this desk.” She indicated a little wooden model complete with a computer terminal. She pulled a metal tray with a bulging file folder out of a shelf, and plopped it on the desk. “You say ‘hi’ on your way out, Renny.”
“Thanks, Mad.”
“Keep your facts straight, Renny Sands.”
He winced, but kept his painful thoughts to himself and began to leaf through decade-old notes, refamiliarizing himself with the sordid details. About five minutes of fishing about and he found what he was looking for.
The note was marked “kill file.” It read:
Unofficial reports consider the entire situation sensitive. The arrest took place during the 1986 Congress for Racial Harmony in Chicago, and was considered to represent police harassment of several leading civil-rights figures. Names were withheld, but it was believed that among those present at the party was Alexander Marcus—
He scanned further, finally finding an address for the party: 1608 Fountain, Chicago.
That was the crucial bit of information. Renny fired up the desktop machine, and typed it in. After a moment, a second story appeared.
Prostitution ring busted. Mr. Marano Smith, charged with operating a telephone call-girl ring that stretched over the entire Great Lakes area …
A little buzzer went off in the back of his mind. “What is it? What is it…?” he murmured.
He continued to scan, then sat back with a dissatisfied look on his face. Then he cleared the screen and typed in: “bite marks.”
A huge list of stories scrolled past. He added “Chicago” to the search. It still filled two screens. “Prostitute” was his last filter, and then at last he had a list comprising no more than five or ten entries.
The first to catch his eye was a “Mary Anne Dowling,” killed in 1989. The story listed her as having died in a wilderness area on Lake Michigan. Bite marks on her face. She was mentioned in connection with a Mr. Marano Smith’s call-girl operation.
This was ugly, and getting worse. Renny wrote “Marcus” on a sheet of paper, and drew a line linking it with “Marano Smith.” Then he drew another line linking Smith to the girl, Mary Anne Dowling.
And followed it with a large question mark. What was this? He had two girls connected with Marcus, who had died in similar circumstances. If there was a connection, what was it? Marcus had had some very rough characters around him—the bunch sometimes called the Praetorians. Ex-military, riding his coattails. To hell with what Penelope “Happy Hooker” Costanza had implied. It would be one staggering story even if Marcus had “merely” engineered a cover-up for the benefit of one of his thugs.
“Thin,” Renny said quietly. “Very thin.”
* * *
Two hours later, he stood smiling before Madeline’s desk. She doffed her wire-rims and smiled up at him tolerantly.
“Maddy?”
“Yessss?”
“Listen—who would you say had the most complete biography of Alexander Marcus? I mean a complete itinerary—speeches, appearances, vacations…”
She frowned quizzically. “Going back how far?”
“What have you got?”
“Well, there is a compiled itinerary going back as far as his early military service, then into civilian life—so many biographies and articles have been done on the man. What’s up?”
He had already considered his answer. “I don’t know. A story proposal. Embryo stage right now. Can you get that for me?”
Madeline gave him a very strange look indeed. “Sure, I guess so,” she said finally. “Take me a few minutes—you’re on terminal twelve?”
“Thirteen.”
Renny bought himself a cup of coffee. By the time he returned to the terminal the biography was shimmering on the green-tinted screen, a timeline of Marcus’s military and civilian service, with tons of meetings, speeches and vacations.
He read, and noted the reporter’s name, and went back to Maddy again and again for notes. He sorted through bundles, reading, scanning, correlating …
Two yellow legal pads later, he looked up at the clock and found that six hours had passed. His head ached and his eyes burned. Without realizing it, he had entered into one of those zones of concentration so total that the building could have burned down around him, and he wouldn’t have even heard the fire trucks.
Sand hated computer screens, and had made a printout of the bio. Working through the FBI links to local law enforcement, he’d also created a list of crimes that seemed to match the two prostitutes. Then what he had to do was cross-reference the crimes with the Praetorians. That was where the notes came in.
This was going to be a staggering job. The Praetorian core group consisted of perhaps six men who surrounded Marcus regularly, as bodyguards, executives, and assistants. If one of them was involved in something like this, Sand was going to have to cull him carefully, rule out the men who couldn’t be involved, and zero in on a pair of likelies.
First he had to see whether there was any pattern at all. After all, two cases meant nothing. What was the old saying? Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time, it’s enemy action.
So he began to check down the list, starting from scratch as if he had never heard anything about either of the girls.
There were fifty-eight profile-matching murders over the last decade of Alexander Marcus’s life. Sand selected the first one, a poor thing named Crystal Philips from Boise. He checked Marcus’s itinerary, and found that he had been in London at the time, with his coterie in full attendance. Good.
The next was Nadine Fumitomo, in Honolulu. Sand tensed a bit, but Marcus had spent that week in the Soviet Union.
The next two were a bit bothersome, because there was no listing at all for Marcus’s whereabouts, which probably meant that he was just taking care of minor business in the United States. If Sand continued to pursue this, though, he’d have to hunt that information down.
The fifth stopped him cold. Her name was Heather Albany Cross, and she had died a cold and lonely death on a road north of Salt Lake City, on July 24 of 1987.
Marcus had given a speech in Salt Lake the day before.
Happenstance.
He went down another six names before the next match appeared. Name: Fidela Braga, a known prostitute in the Hispanic section of El Dorado, Arkansas. The day following her death, Alexander Marcus had dedicated a library in Little Rock.
Coincidence. Oh, God.
He was sweating now. Four names later, that sweat went cold. Joyce Kitteridge, a runaway from Boston. The seventee
n-year-old had died north of Miami. Her body was found in a drainage ditch, face chewed until she was almost unrecognizable. Two days later, Alexander Marcus was in South Beach, addressing a minority-themed small business convention.
Renny’s stomach felt as if it were full of bleach. Marcus was there. The Praetorians were there. Who had done these terrible things? And was it even logical to protest that Marcus couldn’t have known?
In fact, a low and terrible voice whispered to him, isn’t it most likely that—
“Hey, Renny,” Madeline said, a darkly curious tone to her voice. “What in the world are you up to?”
Oh, nothing—just the complete and utter destruction of the last of my heroes. Nothing much at all.
“—We’re closing up here.”
His watch said another two hours had passed. God in heaven—he’d been here almost ten hours, and hadn’t even noticed. The entire desk was covered with printouts and scraps of paper, boxes of notes and index cards. He tried to put on his most innocent expression, knowing just how little muster it would pass. “Can you just let me close up? I’m good for it.”
She chewed on the end of a pencil. “Must be something interesting. I haven’t seen you like this in a long time.”
He curled his lips up at the corners, hoping that it was a disarming smile, but afraid that the effect was lame and shallow. “I’m hoping.”
She nodded. “Okay. Don’t get me in trouble, now.”
“Scout’s honor.”
She ran a warm finger along the back of his neck. “Don’t forget your friends,” she said, and took a step away, then paused. She turned.
“Renny,” she said, “this article is in-house? I mean, it’s for a Marcus Communications company?”
“Absolutely,” he lied without hesitation.
She sighed. “Then there’s something you should probably have.” Another pause, as if uncertain whether she should speak. “About fifteen years ago, Marcus blocked publication of an unauthorized biography. The writer had a choice of half a million dollars, or five years in prison on a burglary charge.”
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