Charisma

by Steven Barnes

  “Confidence is high that forensic investigation and Ms. Burroughs’s testimony will bring this matter to a swift conclusion,” Chief Haines said.

  48

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  It was a scene played out too many times before. Two men. A hotel room. Seventeen miles northeast of them, a mother was crying.

  But on returning to the room and hooking into their computer link, a flashing mailbox alerted Schott that one of their internet news-clipping services had struck paydirt.

  Schott read several of the clippings, and made a disgusted sound. “Oh, Christ. We’ve got a problem.”

  Wisher read over his shoulder. “Claremont? Wasn’t that where the school went bad?”

  Schott nodded, and his fingers blurred over the keys. “We laid in some extra screening there. Looks like we caught something.”

  They talked for a minute or two, and then typed a swift query, and sent it out over the Internet.

  They tried to play cards for the next hour, but couldn’t maintain sufficient focus for a decent game. Too many miles, too many hotels, too many days, too many deaths. Regardless of discipline, or their understanding of necessity, the small faces were beginning to stare at them from darkened closets, dead television screens, closed eyelids. Restful sleep had become a fevered memory.

  Within an hour, their phone rang.

  “Yes?” Wisher said.

  “I received the e-mail,” a familiar voice said. “I would say that was very sharp observation on your part. You deserve commendation.”

  Wisher’s voice didn’t change. “Thank you, sir. But what now?”

  “This man ‘Cappy.’ He’s the same one suspected of killing the Emory boy’s father?”

  “Affirmative. Questioned and then released. According to a second article, there may be links between this man Swenson and a couple of Claremont P.D. officers.”

  “A town that size, it wouldn’t take much to buy them. And the mechanism of the triggering device?”

  “Don’t know yet. But, hell, I could make a dozen timers shopping five minutes at any Seven-Eleven.”

  The man on the opposite end sighed. “Why didn’t this boy come to our attention earlier?”

  “His family situation seemed relatively stable. What do you want?”

  “Send him an invitation.”

  “And if he doesn’t come?”

  There was no hesitation at all. “Arrange an incident.”

  49

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20

  Alexander Marcus’s mother Kitty lived in a gated community in the northern end of the San Fernando Valley. If she hadn’t had her son’s millions, she would certainly have been in a nursing home, considering that she was far too frail to enjoy or appreciate the walk through the chaparral bordering her property. At ninety, Sand doubted if she could use the pool in her back yard. He hoped that she could walk, or wheel, or even drive to the top of her hill, from which she could enjoy a spectacular view of the San Fernando basin: Topanga, which was frankly spectacular. Chatsworth, Simi Valley, Agoura Hills … all the way to the Santa Monica Mountains.

  Only the slightest of lies had gotten him an appointment: as one of Marcus’s official biographers after the great man’s death, he had interviewed one of Kitty’s lawyers concerning Marcus’s vast arts endowments. The estate was still huge, still managed by the same lawyers, and a call to the firm gained him access to the grand dame herself.

  The guard at the gate was stocky, maybe Persian, the sort of guy you suspected might work a minimum-wage job during the day and study stock brokerage at night. He vanished back inside to check a clipboard or printout, and then opened the gate. “Have you been here before?” He was polite, professional and observant, his English heavily accented. The guard wasn’t overtly suspicious, but Sand knew he was being thoroughly checked out.

  “Nope.”

  “Then go up two streets, turn left and then right at Heartland. End of the street, there’s a circular drive. Pull right in.”

  Sand thanked him, silently wished him luck with his Series Seven exam, and followed his instructions to the letter. Three minutes later he was in front of a two-story mansion with a white panel truck from St. Mary’s ElderCare facility parked in the front. Two men were maneuvering a cabinet-sized piece of machinery out of the van as he pulled into the drive.

  A broad-hipped pale woman in a crisp white uniform stood at the front door, watching them. Renny parked his car and walked up to her. She seemed of fairly typical nursing stock, with a stern but pleasant manner.

  She switched her gaze from the panel truck to Sand as he approached. “Mr. Sand?” she said.

  “Yes, that’s me.” She extended a hand larger, flatter, and stronger than his own. Pumping bedpans, he reckoned.

  “I want you to understand that Kitty is very weak, and I don’t want her excited. But it soothes her to talk about Alexander, so I approved fifteen minutes.”

  “I appreciate that.” He paused as another thought occurred to him. “Did you know him?”

  “Yes,” she said. Her face was clear, but he could have sworn that something slid back behind her eyes, out of sight. If he hadn’t been looking for it, he would never have seen it at all. “I’ve been with Kitty for twenty years. It almost killed her when her son died. Before they found … larger pieces, they actually searched the house for DNA samples, to verify the remains, did you know that?”

  He grimaced. “That’s pretty raw.”

  “Imagine that. I hope you’re not a conspiracy-theorist. That would be upsetting to her.”

  “No, not at all. We just viewed one of his birthday tapes, and I thought that Kitty…” He corrected himself quickly. “Mrs. Marcus seemed so happy on that tape, and it occurred to me that it had been such a long time since anyone had spoken to her, and that is a real shame. She has so much to say.”

  That answer seemed to satisfy her, and she guided him through the house, passing vast expanses of glass and white pile rug, hardwood and stainless steel, swooping staircases leading off and away like the wings of great cranes.

  Against the living room wall were trophy cases. Seven golden cups, and several plaques, all set with images of samurai swords. Above the cups were two gleaming katana, Japanese swords. Killing tools. So those were the implements that Marcus had spent so many thousands of hours wielding.

  “Do you mind?” he asked the nurse. She smiled thinly, and led him to the case.

  Beautiful, shining, thirty-six-inch steak knives. He could almost smell the sweat, feel the focus. It was easy to imagine Marcus on a white mat, dressed in one of those karate uniforms, slashing and striking at imaginary opponents. Thirty years he had spent practicing Japanese sword. Renny’d once read that the old swordsmiths would heat and fold the steel again and again, pound it flat, fold and heat and pound, until the sword was composed of thousands of tissue-thin layers.

  Marcus had written an essay, published in the American Journal of Hoplology, a sort of esoteric kung-fu magazine. In it, he compared the process of purifying and shaping steel to that of refining human character, drawing on references as wide-ranging as Nietzsche, Musashi Miyamoto, and the unknown author of the Rig-Vedas. He spoke of his own journey, from fear and powerlessness to self-mastery, comparing it to such a process.

  For any man less accomplished, less a warrior, less a staggering success, the article would have been considered puffery. But when Alexander Marcus spoke, people listened. He had even performed a sword dance of some kind on a documentary videotape. Renny had seen a snippet of it on his A&E Biography. Marcus was fast, fluid, extraordinarily precise … all of that was true. But Renny couldn’t get past the feeling that the real secret of Marcus’s success was his detailed visualization of actual opponents before him. When Marcus thrust, Renny swore he was cleaving flesh. When he whipped the blade at the end of his demonstration, returning it to the scabbard, Renny could almost see blood droplets spattering onto the mat.

  He shook himself out of it, and let the nur
se guide him up the staircase. The men from the truck outside were wheeling the motor through the front door. “What are they installing?”

  “A special elevator rail system,” she said. “Kitty will be able to move anywhere in the house, attached to her chair. From the bed to the elevator, up and down the stairs, out into the back yard … all automated.”

  “Nice.”

  “One of the things that money can buy. It can’t buy her back her youth, or her health. Or her son.” Again, that flickering darkness that Sand had a difficult time naming.

  “So here we are,” she said. “Fifteen minutes, Mr. Sand. Please don’t make me regret this.”

  The bedroom smelled more like a flower shop than a sick room. Renny saw no scent-diffusers, but knew that they had to be there, just out of sight. Money.

  The high-canopied bed was in the corner of the room, but Kitty Marcus wasn’t in it. She was in her motorized chair, seated at a little writing desk.

  “Hello, Mr. Sand,” Kitty said. She was a large woman, impressive even in steep decline. Her bun of dark hair was almost certainly a wig, but an excellent one. She had a washerwoman’s hands, broad and flat and weathered, and broad, hunched shoulders. Her face, once full with high cheeks and sensuous lips, was as dark and wrinkled as a raisin. She wore a blue flowered housecoat over a gauzy pink blouse. Kitty Marcus wore skillfully applied makeup: just a hint of color to mouth and cheeks, enough to soften but not deny the passage of time. Once, Renny thought, this woman had been extraordinary. “Please excuse me if I don’t stand to greet you.”

  “Quite all right. It’s enough that you agreed to see me on such short notice.”

  “Would you like a chair?”

  “May I use one of these?”

  He pushed a plushly cushioned wicker-backed chair over from the other side of the room. “Your house is very beautiful.”

  “And very empty, Mr. Sand,” she said. Her voice was like an amplified whisper. “Since my son died, it’s hard for me to fill my days.”

  “I can understand that.” Careful words were the best route. “America’s lost so many heroes. Sometimes I think we’ve lost our way completely.”

  Mrs. Marcus shook her ancient head as if it was made of spun glass. “I know exactly what you mean. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, but I can still watch the TV a little. I swear that if I were a child I wouldn’t know what to think. Who to listen to. Not even the President is required to have morals today.” She seemed to go back inside her head, where she became lost in her own thoughts. Renny didn’t really want to pull her back to the present, but didn’t see his options.

  He didn’t want to lie to her. Lies had gotten him into so much trouble in his life. But this time, one more time, he was going to twist the truth.

  “Marcus Communications is spinning off a new magazine for children. I thought of writing an article emphasizing that everyone, even the greatest people, started as children.”

  She nodded soberly. Her eyes went unfocused for a moment. Perhaps she was remembering little Alexander in short pants, running though the New York projects. “A very useful thing.”

  “So if you didn’t mind, I’d like to ask you some questions about your son.”

  She didn’t mind at all. So she spent the next ten minutes talking to him about Alexander Marcus’s background. He was unusually small for his age, and the poorer sections of Harlem were somewhat traumatic for him. Although Sand didn’t ask the indelicate question, he knew that Kitty had never married Marcus’s father, and that lack of a man in the home hadn’t helped things when intellectual Alexander had become the target of several area gangs.

  “Was he beaten?”

  “Oh, yes.” Her voice was fierce. “But he learned to fight back.”

  “Did the other boys learn to accept him?”

  Her voice dropped, as if concerned that she might be overheard. “They had to,” she cackled delightedly. “He kicked their asses! But they weren’t the worst. They fought one on one.”

  “Who were the worst?”

  “The girls,” she said. “Those girls. They were like packs of rats. Always after him, hurting him. They ruled our building.” Her voice dropped. “They broke my leg once.” She stopped speaking for a moment, and her old, tired eyes were distant. “He tried to fight. He tried to run. Nothing really worked. Eventually I found a way to move.”

  “To Chicago, when he was fifteen?”

  She shifted uncomfortably, blinked several times, and then donned an uncomfortable smile. “Yes.”

  Renny inhaled deeply. That had been the first dangerous question. Watch her carefully.

  He maneuvered his way back to safer territory. “Tell me about his first newspaper articles…”

  She enjoyed recounting his days on the school paper, and his entrance into the ROTC. Her mood brightened considerably. Very carefully (he hoped) Sand selected a conversational lull to insert a few mild queries. “There are stories that your son did not run for President out of consideration for your wishes. What do you think about that?”

  Mrs. Marcus chuckled. “Alexander always made up his own mind,” she said. “If he didn’t want to run for president he didn’t run for his own reasons. He wouldn’t do that to spare my feelings. He wouldn’t have done it because of the threats.”

  “You know about the threats?”

  “Oh yes, of course I know about the threats. Alexander and I talked about everything.”

  I’ll bet you didn’t.

  “Then what do you think the real reason was?”

  “I think he believed it would be an invasion of his privacy. The older he got, the less he cared about being a public figure.” She smiled again. “You may discover, young man, as you grow older that fame and wealth are greatly overrated.”

  I’ll just bet he wanted his privacy. “Your son was surrounded by many people. Some were business associates, others were with him in Vietnam.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “The Praetorians.”

  “Praetorians?” he asked innocently.

  “Yes, that was his name for them. I don’t think they minded very much. That was Caesar’s imperial guard, you know. They were always around him. Bodyguards. Friends. I think that they reminded him where he’d come from. Thick as thieves they were.”

  “Did you like them?”

  “Most of them. There were a few who didn’t really fit.”

  “Who, for instance?”

  “Oh, goodness, I don’t remember their names.” She stopped in thought. “But you know there was one I did like quite a bit. It was the lady. The woman.”

  That startled him a little. “The Secret Service woman? Kelly Kerrigan?”

  “Yes. She was with him on that last trip to San Francisco. About four months before he died.”

  Renny paused and searched his notes. He had seen no reference to San Francisco in late 1987. San Francisco? “What was he doing in San Francisco? When was this?”

  Her voice lowered to a hush. “Some sort of health tests. He was actually rather excited about them. He said he would talk to me about them later, but he never did.”

  “But the Secret Service woman was with him?”

  She averred. San Francisco. Near Santa Cruz, where he had found reference to another dead woman with the same mutilations, the same bite marks. The same time frame. Since there hadn’t been a stop in San Francisco on Marcus’s itinerary he’d discounted it. Dear, dear God.

  Renny made a few more minutes of mindless chitchat, hoping that the conversation would cover the genuine thrust of his inquiry. Whatever her son’s sins, he was still her little boy, and she loved him and perhaps he had loved her even more than she ever knew.

  But the reporter inside him couldn’t resist asking, “In his biography, there are several mentions of hospital stays, when he was thirteen, fourteen … in that range. Were these associated with the gang incidents you mentioned?”

  Her face grew tight, and he saw something behind her eyes that suddenly startled hi
m. Behind the harmless old woman’s mask, there was something predatory, hard. There it was, there was the will that could take a fatherless black child born in poverty and mold him into one of the most powerful men in the country. That something inside her was as merciless as an eagle’s talons, and about as nurturing.

  It was all he could do to meet her gaze.

  “Yes,” she said finally. “But then, as I said, young man, he learned to deal with it.”

  “And you moved to Chicago soon after his reconstructive surgery?”

  The pink tip of her tongue flickered out, wet her lips, disappeared. “Alexander never wanted to talk about that,” she said quietly.

  “Before he died he gave a quite candid interview, ma’am. Apparently, he intended a complete biography. More complete than anything done previously.”

  She was listening! God! He fought to keep his hands from shaking. “I know that the man arrested—but not convicted—for the assault said he was protecting his wife’s honor. Would you say that was true?”

  She hissed, literally hissed as the memory was resurrected. That feral animal within her was rampant, overwhelming Kitty Marcus’s studiedly genteel persona. “That bitch,” she said. “She was his teacher. His history teacher. The slut. She’d screwed half the senior class, but Alexander was just a freshman. He was so large for his age. So bright.” Her eyes were glazed with tears, the only soft things in a face strained with hate. Hate and … what other emotion? Guilt, perhaps?

  “She couldn’t keep her hands off him, and that stupid whore didn’t know her husband was hiding in the house. Listening to them as she used him in her bed.”

  She swallowed and turned away. Her gnarled hands had drawn into knots. “He followed Alexander home. Pulled him into an alley. Pulled his pants down…”

  She couldn’t say any more. And didn’t need to. They said he had had reconstructive surgery. He was scarred, as if he had been in some horrible accident.…

  Renny tried to imagine the fifteen-year-old boy, big for his age, bright for any age, deflowered by his teacher, and then mutilated by her husband in some dark, wet alley. The pleas. The pain.