The Tower

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Travers’s forehead wrinkled with sympathetic lines. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, aren’t we all.” Jade scratched his forehead at the hairline, blocking his eyes with his wrist. “It was my fault. He was retarded. I was supposed to be watching him.” He took a step back. “Allander’s story broke the next week. His kidnapping. I remember that the outpouring of public support made me fucking ill. It was a lot … more. My brother, that wasn’t such a big deal because he was just a retarded kid.”

  Travers took a small step forward, raising her hand to Jade’s face. Just before it touched his cheek, the phone rang on the coffee table, startling her. Jade stood motionless for a moment, his eyes on hers. He walked to the phone slowly, picking it up on the fourth ring.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hello, Mr. Marlow. This is … this is Darby. I got something in the mail today.”

  Jade leaned forward, speaking intensely into the phone. “Is it a body part?”

  A nervous laugh. “Oh, no. Nothing like that. Just a broken pencil. Looks like an eyeliner. It’s probably nothing, but it came in a plain white envelope and I just thought—”

  “Did you show the agents there?”

  Darby laughed. “No. I don’t find them very personable.”

  “All right. I’ll be right there,” Jade said, hanging up the phone. He turned to Travers. “Let’s go.”

  On his way out, he grabbed the entertainment section of the newspaper from the kitchen table and jammed it in his back pocket.

  It was time.

  Pushing the gas pedal to the floor, Jade raced onto the highway heading toward the Atlasias.

  “Fuck! I should’ve known.”

  “Known what? What’s going on?”

  “Trophies. He’s mailing her trophies from his victims. It’s common, really common. Gives him a thrill, mixing his world with theirs. Allander’s linking them to the model of the monkeys. An eyeliner—has to do with the eyes. ‘See no evil.’ Family number one. I bet she gets lipstick from the second killing.”

  Travers shook her head. “Who cares? So he’s sending her trophies. We already knew she was marked. It doesn’t help. Why are we racing over there?”

  “It’s time to light the fire.”

  “What? What fire?”

  “Under Allander. The one that’ll get him moving.”

  “I already asked you—” Travers cut short her question and her jaw dropped. “No. You wouldn’t. Even you.”

  Jade looked straight ahead at the road. “Come to Mama,” he said.

  “No way. We just increased protection on them,” she said. “Everywhere they go. He’s not stupid. There’re too many men.”

  He looked over at her and groaned. “Jesus Christ, Travers. We’ll pull them off.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Believe me, I’d like to.”

  “You’re going to risk their lives to lure him in?”

  “You’re a quick study.”

  She laughed a single note, completely unamused. “Are they people, Jade, or instruments?”

  “Let’s be honest, Travers,” he scowled. “What’s the difference?”

  “Don’t you care about them? Any of them?” She shook her head and another disgusted laugh escaped her.

  “I only care about one thing right now. And that’s catching him.”

  “And you don’t care who you have to kill to do it?”

  “Risk, Travers. Don’t you mean ‘who I have to risk’?”

  “And why, exactly, is that your decision?”

  “Because no one else wants to make it.”

  They sped between two large trucks on the freeway, the noise rising as they passed them, then fading away.

  “Christ, Marlow. I thought you liked them.”

  “I do like them. What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”

  “Pull over.”

  “What?”

  “Pull over. Let me out. I’m not doing it. I’m having no part of this.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  “PULL OVER! Now.”

  “With pleasure,” Jade snarled. He yanked the car over onto the shoulder of the highway and skidded to a halt. He was off again before she could slam the door behind her.

  43

  THIS time they sat in the kitchen. Thomas prepared dinner, washing salad and whistling along with Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony. Darby sat at the kitchen table across from Jade, her elbows resting on the white tablecloth. She closed her eyes and let her head sway from side to side in time to the music.

  “I love this,” she said. “‘The Shepherd’s Song.’”

  Jade sipped his glass of water. “It is nice.”

  “Where’s your friend?” Thomas asked.

  “My partner. Ex-partner, I suppose.”

  Darby smiled. “Could have read that one from a mile away.”

  “That we didn’t get along?”

  She shook her head. “Not quite.”

  Jade let it go.

  “Have you seen The Globe?” Thomas asked.

  “Of course he has, dear,” Darby said over her shoulder. “Haven’t you, Mr. Marlow?”

  “Yeah. Yes, I have.”

  Darby looked at him, shaking her head.

  “Well, we can’t help what they print.”

  “No,” Darby said, watching him knowingly. “We can’t, can we?”

  Raising her hand, she gestured casually to the envelope on the table. Darby’s name and address were printed in block letters on the front. It was postmarked San Francisco, but Jade was reluctant to attach too much importance to that, given that Allander had already proved that he was mobile.

  “So you think he sent it? The eyeliner. Another image of repression? Makeup. Reminds me of Glenn Close smearing the makeup off her face in that movie. What was that movie?”

  “Dangerous Liaisons,” Thomas called from the sink.

  “Dangerous Liaisons,” she repeated.

  “Why do you think it has to do with repression?” Jade asked.

  “Why did you steal the carving from our bathroom?”

  The question caught him off guard. “I didn’t quite steal it,” he said slowly. “I just took it to examine.”

  “Yes, yes. Police business. I understand. My child is a killer so we no longer have the rights that ordinary citizens can expect. Freedom. Privacy. The right to our own property.” Her voice rose. “We have guards around all the time—walking through the yard, peering in the windows.”

  Thomas dropped the salad in the sink and watched her, concern spreading across his face.

  “It’s fine, Mr. Marlow. I’m used to it. About twenty years of people looking at me with … with those eyes. ‘From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept a hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death,’” she said in a purposefully deepened and dramatic voice. She was speaking loudly, louder than Jade had heard her speak before.

  She laughed, then slid her hands down around her lower stomach, giving them an emphatic shake. “‘The bed of death,’” she said quietly.

  Thomas walked over to her and placed his hands gently on her shoulders.

  “Shakespeare?” Jade asked.

  Darby nodded. “I used to read the plays to Allander when he was younger. I don’t usually remember quotations, Mr. Marlow, but I’ve learned that one really well.” Her eyes lowered to the tablecloth and she played with one of her nails.

  Thomas rubbed her shoulders, leaning over her.

  “So you took the carving.” She gestured to the room around her. “It’s okay. Everything’s public property. How I punished my child, how I talked to him, when I stopped breast-feeding. Do you know what the mothers of most murderers are like? Do you know what it’s like to have everything assessed, Mr. Marlow? Do you?”

  The sharpness of her words carried around the kitchen for a while. A tear escaped from Thomas’s eye and he wiped it away.

  Jade cleared his throat and looked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m s
orry.”

  She reached out her hand and placed it on his arm. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m sorry. That was unfair. What can we do? Just tell us what we have to do.”

  Jade couldn’t make himself meet her stare. It was a very uncomfortable feeling for him. He wasn’t used to it at all. “Well, I’ll be honest. I think he’s coming for you and I’d like to make that possibility even more likely. In fact, I want to lure him. I’d like to pull some of your protection off and see if we can get him to move in.”

  She pursed her lips and nodded, as if she had been expecting this all along. “Will you remember your promise?”

  Jade bit his lip in irritation. “Yes, but I hoped you might reconsider. I lost … he killed another family yesterday. A sixteen-year-old boy. It’s only going to get worse.”

  Darby and Thomas took this news together. Though their expressions barely changed, he could read the pain on their faces. At this point, he could only imagine what they were feeling.

  Darby tried a smile and failed miserably. “I won’t lure my son to his death, Mr. Marlow. I cannot.” She looked to Thomas for support, but he looked down at the table. “Besides, when you get close enough to capture him, it won’t save any lives to kill him.” Her eyes dropped to Jade’s chest. “You’re much bigger than he is. It’ll be just as easy for you to bring him in alive.”

  That may or may not be true, Jade thought, but he didn’t say anything. He and Darby had made a deal, and he would uphold his end of it.

  “So then will you help me get close enough to him?” Jade asked. For a moment, he hated himself for bringing this much pressure to bear on them. They looked so weary and they had already endured so much.

  The symphony ended and the room fell silent. The clock ticking across the kitchen suddenly sounded incredibly loud. Jade looked at the tablecloth and waited for their answer. He wasn’t sure what response he actually wanted.

  “Will you be there, Mr. Marlow?” Darby reached her hand across the table toward him.

  Jade grasped it awkwardly. “Yes. Of course.”

  Darby looked up at Thomas. “Then I’ll do it,” she said to her husband.

  Thomas nodded once, just down. “We’ll try, Mr. Marlow,” he said.

  “Jade. Call me Jade.”

  Darby was drumming her fingernails on the table, but she stopped and looked up at him. “Jade,” she repeated thoughtfully. “Unusual name. Because of the color of your eyes?”

  Jade nodded. “My father didn’t like the name, but my mother can be quite stubborn.”

  “Now why isn’t that surprising?” Darby said with a smile.

  “Back to business,” Jade said. “How often do you go to the movies?” He wanted to get the Atlasias out of the house. The more variables he could introduce into their environment, the more appealing they’d be to Allander as targets.

  “Well, not much at all,” Thomas replied.

  “If you’re asking me out, I prefer opera,” Darby smiled.

  “How many movie theaters would you say you go to on a regular basis?”

  Thomas thought for a while, squinting his eyes and tilting his head back. “Three. Only three.”

  “Would Allander know about them all?”

  “No,” Darby said quickly. “Two are very old—Camera 9 and The Cutting Floor. We used to take him to those when he was younger, but the other opened after he … after he left.”

  “Good,” Jade said.

  He pulled the entertainment section from his back pocket and smoothed it on the table. Camera 9 and The Cutting Floor were both small theaters, which didn’t surprise him. He had figured the Atlasias would enjoy older, more intimate theaters rather than the huge movie houses off Highway 280. He had been banking on it, in fact. There were two movies playing at Camera 9 and only one at The Cutting Floor, a revival of Orson Welles’s Othello.

  “We’re sending you to Camera 9 tonight,” he said. He looked up and saw Thomas’s startled expression. “Not really,” he said. “Just in spirit. What do you want to see? Peril or Chances Are?”

  “Peril?” Darby asked.

  “Sylvester Stallone.”

  She snorted and then covered her mouth in embarrassment. “I’m afraid to say he doesn’t do much for me,” she said. “All the grunting and what not. I’ll take Paul Newman any day.” She looked over at Thomas and smiled. “Sorry, dear.”

  He chuckled. “She’s not big on action movies, son,” he said apologetically. “Never has been.”

  Perfect, Jade thought. The choices were narrowing.

  He had Alissa Anvers on the phone in less than five minutes. He had heard her speak on TV, but she sounded different over the phone. Her voice, as haunting as her dark eyes, had a deep feminine roughness to it, as if it would be sharp if rubbed the wrong way.

  McGuire had said that Anvers’s mother was on the force. Jade noted in her personality the unforced candor typical of someone raised in a police family. They spoke for a little while, then she agreed to meet him to discuss his plan.

  “Not promising anything, of course,” she said.

  “That’s fine,” Jade replied. “Neither am I.”

  Alissa pulled up to the curb in a red Mazda and strolled up the walkway. She was dressed like someone used to being on camera, in a black skirt, black high heels and stockings, and a maroon silk blouse that accented the curves of her breasts.

  “Mr. Atlasia,” she said, taking Thomas’s hand at the door. She smiled at Jade and Darby. “You must be Jade and Mrs. Atlasia,” she said, her eyes lingering on Jade for an extra beat.

  “You must be very bright,” Darby said. When Alissa looked at her, Darby smiled and Alissa decided she was sincere.

  Jade and Alissa went into the living room to talk while the Atlasias ate their dinner. Jade had brought a file in from his car, and it sat on the antique wooden table between them. They argued for a while, going back and forth over how they would exchange information for help. He tapped the file nervously as they spoke; time was running out.

  “Is there any way you can get on the air tonight?”

  “I could,” she answered coyly. “If I needed to.”

  “Look, Ms. Anvers—”

  “Alissa,” she said. “Please call me Alissa.”

  “Whatever. For this to work, I need it on the air as quickly as possible. Your channel has had by far the most extensive coverage of this case. I think he’ll be watching, and if he is, I think it’ll work.”

  “Mr. Marlow. As I said, there are a number of professional and ethical considerations. I can’t just run any story you want.”

  “I said it’s not just ‘any story’ I want.” Jade’s voice was rising and he felt the anger and frustration coming to the surface. “It’s essential to this case.”

  “There are important considerations at hand here.”

  Jade stood up and opened the file. “You want considerations?!” He yanked out a photo of Janice Weiter’s body and slammed it on the table. He followed it with a photo of Henry Weiter’s body. Then Theodore Johnson’s.

  Alissa brought the back of one hand across her eyes, shielding her view. She turned sharply in her seat, her head angled away from the pictures, her eyes lowered.

  After a few seconds, Jade realized she was crying. He had forgotten how upsetting seeing corpses could be for people who weren’t used to them, when they weren’t part of their lives.

  “Ms. Anvers, I’m tired of hearing you regurgitate your junior year Ethics in Journalism textbook. We need to do this if we’re going to stop him.”

  She turned around slowly. “All right,” she said. “What do we have to do? Run a story on where they’re going at a certain time?”

  Jade shook his head. “No way. Too obvious. We have to give him a knot to untie.”

  Alissa pursed her lips. “For it to be realistic, we can’t have it as a main segment. It’s a people piece. Maybe I’ll see if they’ll run it as the orphan story to wrap things up.”

  Jade went to check on the
Atlasias as Alissa called her crew.

  Darby and Thomas sat on either side of Jade that night as they watched the news, all three of them showing signs of nervousness and irritation. There was the usual update on Allander, followed by a story on an earthquake in China. Then they suffered through the sports and weather.

  Jade was worried that Alissa had changed her mind and canceled the story. He had pushed her pretty hard.

  Finally Alissa came on, standing outside a big commercial theater in downtown San Jose. “People complain that there’s too much violence in the movies. But movies can also be a wonderful escape. Thomas and Deborah Atlasia have certainly found themselves to be the center of attention once again since their son, Allander, escaped from the Tower at Maingate seven days ago. But they’re teaching us all a little lesson in human dignity. They’re holding their heads high, and letting their lives go on.”

  Darby laughed loudly, then covered her mouth with her hand.

  “Tonight, the FBI continues one of the biggest manhunts in history, calling in even more men from their national headquarters. Tonight, Allander Atlasia will find himself fleeing just that much faster. Many people are holing up in their homes in terror. And what are Thomas and Deborah doing?”

  The story cut to footage of Thomas and Darby entering a movie theater. It looked like a Hard Copy shot of a celebrity who did not consent to be filmed. Although the theater sign was not in the shot, the camera panned past a coffee shop next door to the theater as it followed the Atlasias walking in. CUP OF CHEER, a neon sign announced in the window. The coffee shop had been there for over thirty years. Allander would recognize it, and know that it was right next door to Camera 9.

  The camera cut back to Alissa. “They’re at the movies,” she said. “Inside sources tell us that they’re finding that a healthier way to spend their evenings, at least until the storm blows over. What’s on the program tomorrow night is anybody’s guess. For Channel 5 Eyewitness News, this is Alissa Anvers.”

  Perfect, Jade thought. Just like they’d discussed. There was no way they could come right out and say that the Atlasias were going back to the movies tomorrow—that would have been too obvious. But Anvers had alluded to the possibility, and that, in combination with the reference to “inside sources,” would hopefully be enough to get Allander’s juices flowing.