Secret of the Seventh Sons

by Cooper, Glenn

  The answer to all these was no. Elder wanted Will to understand that his relationship with Swisher was superficial, transient and transactional. He wished he could be more helpful but plainly he could not.

  Will felt his disappointment rise like bile. The interview was going nowhere, another Doomsday dead end. Yet there was something niggling about Elder’s demeanor, a small discordant something. Was there a note of tension in his throat, a touch of glibness? Will didn’t know where his next question came from—maybe it sprung from a well of intuition. “Tell me, Mr. Elder, how’s your business doing?”

  Elder hesitated for more than an imperceptible moment, a long enough pause for Will to conclude that he’d struck a nerve. “Well, business is very good. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason, just curious. Let me ask you: most insurance companies are in places like Hartford, New York, major cities. Why Las Vegas, why Henderson?”

  “Our roots are here,” Elder replied. “I built this company brick by brick. Right out of college, I started as an agent in a little brokerage in Henderson, about a mile from this office. We had six employees. I bought the place from the owner when he retired and renamed it Desert Life. We now have over eight thousand employees, coast-to-coast.”

  “That’s very impressive. You must be very proud.”

  “Thank you, I am.”

  “And the insurance business, you say, is good.”

  That tiny hesitation again. “Well, everybody needs insurance. There’s a lot of competition out there and the regulatory environment can be a challenge sometimes, but we’ve got a strong business.”

  As he listened, Will noticed a leather pen holder on the desk, chock-full of black and red Pentel pens.

  He couldn’t help himself. “Could I borrow one of your pens?” he asked, pointing. “A black one.”

  “Sure,” Elder replied, puzzled.

  It was an ultrafine point. Well, well.

  He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a sheet of paper in a clear plastic cover, a Xerox copy of the front and back of Swisher’s postcard. “Could you take a look at this?”

  Elder took the sheet and retrieved his reading glasses. “Chilling,” he said.

  “See the postmark?”

  “May eighteenth.”

  “Were you in Las Vegas on the eighteenth?”

  Elder was palpably irritated by the question. “I have no idea, but I’d be happy to have my assistant check for you.”

  “Great. How many times have you been to New York in the past six weeks?”

  Elder frowned and replied testily, “Zero.”

  “I see,” Will said. He pointed to the photocopy. “Could I get that back, please?”

  Elder returned the sheet, and Will thought, Hey, buddy, for what it’s worth, I’ve got your fingerprints.

  After Will departed, Bertram Myers wandered in and sat down in the still warm chair. “How’d it go?” he asked his boss.

  “As advertised. He was focused on David Swisher’s murder. He wanted to know where I was the day his postcard was mailed from Las Vegas.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “No I am not.”

  “I had no idea you were a serial killer, Nelson.”

  Elder loosened his tightly knotted Hermes tie. He was starting to relax. “Watch out, Bert, you may be next.”

  “So that was it? He didn’t ask a single troubling question?”

  “Not one. I don’t know why I was worried.”

  “You said you weren’t.”

  “I lied.”

  Will left Henderson to spend the rest of the day working out of the FBI field office in North Las Vegas before his scheduled return to New York on the red-eye. Local agents had been working up unidentified fingerprints on Doomsday postcards. By cross-tabbing with prints taken from postal workers at the Las Vegas Main Office they managed to ID a few latents. He had them throw Elder’s prints into the mix then settled into the conference room to read the newspaper and wait for the analysis. When his stomach started rumbling he took a walk down Lake Mead Boulevard to look for a sandwich shop.

  The heat was blistering. Doffing his jacket and rolling up his shirtsleeves didn’t help much so he ducked into the first place he found, a quiet, pleasantly air-conditioned Quiznos manned by a crew of desultory workers. While he waited at a table for his sub to toast he called his voice mail and cycled through the messages.

  The final one set him off. He cursed out loud, drawing a dirty look from the manager. A snot-nosed voice informed him his cable was about to be cut off. He was three months overdue and unless he paid today he’d be coming home to a test pattern.

  He tried to remember the last time he’d paid any of his household bills and couldn’t. He visualized the large stack of unopened mail on his kitchenette counter—he needed this like head lice.

  He’d have to call Nancy; he owed her one anyway.

  “Greetings from Sin City,” he said.

  She was cool.

  “What’s going on with Camacho?” he asked.

  “His diary checked out. He couldn’t have done the other murders.”

  “No surprise, I guess.”

  “Nope. How was your interview with Nelson Elder?”

  “Is he our killer? I seriously doubt it. Is there something fishy about him? Yeah, definitely.”

  “Fishy?”

  “I got a sense he was hiding something.”

  “Anything solid?”

  “He had Pentel ultrafines on his desk.”

  “Get a warrant,” she said, bone dry.

  “Well, I’ll check him out.” Then, sheepishly, he asked her to help with his little cable problem. He had a spare key in his office. Could she stop by his apartment, pick up the overdue bill, and give him a call so he could take care of it with a credit card?

  Not a problem, she told him.

  “Thanks. And one more thing.” He felt he had to say it: “I want to apologize for the other night. I got pretty loaded.”

  He heard her taking a breath. “It’s okay.”

  He knew it wasn’t but what more could he say? When he hung up, he looked at his watch. He had hours to kill before his red-eye back to New York. He wasn’t a gambler so there was no tug toward the casinos. Darla was long gone by now. He could get loaded, but he could do that anywhere. Then something occurred to him that made him half smile. He opened his phone to make another call.

  Nancy tensed up as soon as she opened the door to Will’s apartment.

  There was music.

  An open travel bag was in the living room.

  She called out, “Hello?”

  The shower was running.

  Louder. “Hello?”

  The water stopped and she heard a voice from the bathroom. “Hello?”

  A wet young woman hesitantly emerged wrapped in a bath towel. She was in her early twenties, blond, lissome with a prepossessing naturalness. Puddles were forming around her perfect, small feet. Awfully young, Nancy bitterly thought, and she was blindsided by her initial reaction to the stranger—a tug of jealousy.

  “Oh, hi,” the woman said. “I’m Laura.”

  “I’m Nancy.”

  There was an uncomfortably long pause until, “Will’s not here.”

  “I know. He asked me to pick something up for him.”

  “Go ahead, I’ll be right out,” Laura said, retreating into the bathroom.

  Nancy tried to find the cable bill and get out before the woman reemerged but was too slow and Laura was too fast. She was barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt, her hair in a towel turban. The kitchenette was uncomfortably small for the two of them.

  “Cable bill,” Nancy said weakly.

  “He sucks at ADL,” Laura said, then at Nancy’s incomprehension, added, “Activities of daily living.”

  “He’s been pretty busy,” Nancy said in his defense.

  “And you know him—how?” Laura asked, fishing.

  “We work together.” Nancy steeled herself for her next r
esponse—no, I’m not his secretary.

  Instead, surprisingly, “You’re an agent?”

  “Yeah.” She mimicked Laura. “And you know him—how?”

  “He’s my dad.”

  An hour later they were still talking. Laura was drinking wine, Nancy, iced tap water, two women with a maddening bond—Will Piper.

  Once their roles were clarified they took to each other. Nancy seemed relieved the woman wasn’t Will’s girlfriend; Laura seemed relieved her father had an ostensibly normal female partner. Laura had taken the train up from Washington that morning for a hastily arranged meeting in Manhattan. When she couldn’t reach her father to ask if she could stay the night, she decided he was probably out of pocket and let herself in with her own key.

  Laura was shy at first but the second glass of wine uncorked an agreeable volubility. Only six years separated them and they quickly found common ground beyond Will. Unlike her father, it seemed to Nancy that Laura was a culture hound who rivaled her own knowledge of art and music. They shared a favorite museum, the Met; a favorite opera, La Boheme; a favorite painter, Monet.

  Spooky, they agreed, but fun.

  Laura was two years out of college, doing part-time office work to support herself. She lived in Georgetown with her boyfriend, a grad student in journalism at American University. At a tender age, she was on the verge of crossing what she considered to be a profound threshold. A small, but prestigious publisher was seriously considering her first novel. Although she had written since puberty, an English teacher in high school starchily upbraided her not to call herself a writer until her work was in print. She desperately wanted to call herself a writer.

  Laura was insecure and self-conscious but her friends and mentors had urged her on. Her book was publishable, she’d been told, so naively she sent the manuscript, unsolicited and unagented, to a dozen publishers then proceeded to write the screenplay version because she saw it as a film too. Time passed and she became acclimated to heavy packages at her door, the boomeranged manuscript plus a rejection letter—nine, ten, eleven times—but the twelfth never arrived. Finally, a call instead, from Elevation Press in New York, expressing interest and wondering if, absent a commitment, she’d make some changes and resubmit. She readily agreed and did a rewrite in accordance with their notes. The day before, she’d received an e-mail from the editor, inviting her to their offices, a nerve-wracking but auspicious sign.

  Nancy found Laura a fascination, a glimpse into an alternative life. Lipinskis weren’t writers or artists, they were shopkeepers or accountants, or dentists or FBI agents. And she was interested in how Will’s DNA could possibly have produced this untainted charming creature. The answer had to be maternal.

  In fact, Laura’s mother—Will’s first wife, Melanie—wrote poetry and taught creative writing at a community college in Florida. The marriage, Laura told her, had lasted just long enough for her conception, birth, and second birthday party, before Will smashed it into smithereens. Growing up, the words “your father” were spat as epithets.

  He was a ghost. She heard about his life secondhand, capturing snippets from her mother and aunts. She pictured him from the wedding album, blue-eyed, large and smiling, locked in time. He left the sheriff’s department. He joined the FBI. He remarried. He divorced again. He was a drinker. He was a womanizer. He was a bastard whose only saving grace was paying child support. And he never so much as called or sent a card along the way.

  One day Laura saw him on the news being interviewed about some ghastly serial killer. She saw the name Will Piper on the TV screen, recognized the blue eyes and the squared-off jaw, and the fifteen-year-old girl cried a river. She began to write short stories about him, or at least what she imagined him to be. And in college, emancipated from her mother’s influence, she did some detective work and found him in New York City. Since then they’d had a relationship, of sorts, quasifilial and tentative. He was the inspiration for her novel.

  Nancy asked its title.

  “The Wrecking Ball,” Laura replied.

  Nancy laughed. “The shoe fits, I guess.”

  “He is a wrecking ball, but so are booze, genes, and destiny. I mean Dad’s father and mother were both alcoholics. Maybe he couldn’t escape it.” She poured herself another glass of wine and waved it in a toast. By now her speech was a little heavy. “Maybe I can’t either.”

  Nelson Elder was arriving at the foot of the driveway of his home, a six-bedroom mansion at The Hills, in Summerlin, when his mobile phone rang. The caller ID registered PRIVATE CALLER. He answered and pulled the large Mercedes up to one of the garage bays.

  “Mr. Elder?”

  “Yes, who is this?”

  The caller’s voice was pinched with tension, almost squeaky. “We met a few months ago at the Constellation. My name is Peter Benedict.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t recall.”

  “I was the one who caught the blackjack counters.”

  “Yes! I remember! The computer guy.” Strange, Elder thought. “Did I give you my cell phone number?”

  “You did,” Mark lied. There wasn’t a phone number in the world he couldn’t grab. “Is it okay?”

  “Sure. How can I help you?”

  “Well, actually, sir, I’d like to help you.”

  “How so?”

  “Your company is in trouble, Mr. Elder, but I can save it.”

  Mark was breathing rapidly and visibly shaking. His cell phone was on the kitchen table, still warm from his cheek. Each step of his plan had taxed him, but this was the first requiring human interaction, and his terror was slow to dissipate. Nelson Elder would meet with him. One more chess move and the game was his.

  Then his doorbell jolted him into the next level of autonomic overdrive. He rarely had unannounced visitors, and in fear he almost bolted for his bedroom. He calmed himself and hesitantly went to the door and opened it a crack.

  “Will?” he asked incredulously. “What are you doing here?”

  Will stood there with a big easy smile on his face. “Weren’t expecting me, were you?”

  Will could see that Mark was unsteady, like a tower of playing cards trying to maintain a composure. “No. I wasn’t.”

  “Hey, look, I was in town on business and thought I’d look you up. Is this a bad time?”

  “No. It’s fine,” Mark said mechanically. “I just wasn’t expecting anybody. Would you like to come in?”

  “Sure. For a few minutes, anyway. I’ve got a little time to kill before I head to the airport.”

  Will followed him to the living room, reading tension and discomfort in his old roomie’s stiff gait and high voice. He couldn’t help profiling the guy. It wasn’t a parlor trick—he always had the knack, the ability to figure out someone’s feelings, conflicts, and motivations with lightning speed. As a child, he’d used his natural acumen to fashion a protected triangulated space between two alcoholic parents, saying and doing the right things in the right aliquots to satisfy their neediness and preserve some measure of balance and stability in the household.

  He’d always wielded his talent to his advantage. In his personal life, he used it in a Dale Carnegie way to win friends and influence people. The women in his life would say he used it to manipulate the hell out of them. And in his career, it had given him a tangible edge over the criminals who populated his world.

  Will wondered what was making Mark so uncomfortable—a phobic, misanthropic kind of personality disorder or something more specific to his visit?

  He sat down on an unyielding sofa and sought to put him at ease. “You know, after we saw each other at the reunion, I kind of felt bad I hadn’t gone to the effort to look you up all these years.”

  Mark sat across from him, mute, with tightly crossed legs.

  “So, I hardly ever come out to Vegas—this is just a onenighter—and on my way to the hotel yesterday someone pointed out the Area 51 shuttle and I thought of you.”

  “Really?” Mark asked with a rasp. “Why’
s that?”

  “That’s where you sort of implied you worked, no?”

  “Did I? I don’t recall saying that.”

  Will remembered Mark’s odd demeanor when the subject of Area 51 came up at the reunion dinner. This looked like a no-go zone. In fact he didn’t care, one way or the other. Mark clearly had a high-level security clearance and took it seriously. Good for him. “Well, whatever. It doesn’t matter to me where you work, it just triggered an association and I decided to drop in, that’s all.”

  Mark continued to look skeptical. “How’d you find me? I’m not listed.”

  “Don’t I know. I’ve got to admit it—I queried an FBI database in the local office when 411 didn’t do the trick. You weren’t on the radar screen, buddy. Must have an interesting job! So I called Zeckendorf to see if he had your number. He didn’t, but you must’ve given him your address so his wife could mail you that picture.” He waved at the reunion photo on the table. “I put mine on the coffee table too. I guess we’re just a couple of sentimental guys. Say, you wouldn’t have anything to drink, would you?”

  Will saw that Mark was breathing easier. He’d broken the ice. The guy probably had a social anxiety disorder and needed time to warm up.

  “What would you like?” Mark asked.

  “Got scotch?”

  “Sorry, only beer.”

  “When in Rome.”

  When Mark went to the kitchen, Will stood up and out of curiosity had a look around. The living room was sparsely furnished with characterless modern things that could have been in the lobby of a public space. Everything was neat, with no clutter and also no feminizing touches. He knew that decorating style cold. The shiny chrome bookcase was filled with academic-type computer and software books arranged precisely by height so the rows topped off as straight as possible.

  On the white lacquered desk, next to a closed laptop computer, was a short stack of two thin manuscripts bound in brass brads. He glanced at the cover page of the one on top: Counters: a screenplay by Peter Benedict, WGA #4235567. Who’s Peter Benedict? he wondered, Mark’s nom de plume or some other guy? Beside the screenplays there were two black pens. He almost laughed out loud. Pentel ultrafines. The little peckers were everywhere. He was back on the sofa when Mark returned with the beers.