Bitter Waters

by Wen Spencer

  “What?” It was more an exclamation than a question. “You called the Pack first?”

  “They were here when the package arrived. Kittanning’s finger was included in the ransom note.”

  Indigo made a hurt noise, like someone had struck her. “The lab will want it to test—oh, oh!” Realization had hit her. “What is it now?”

  “A wooly bear caterpillar. I’ve got to figure out what it will eat. It’s hungry.”

  “They eat weeds: grasses and broadleaf plants and wildflowers. The plants are called herbaceous. I did a paper on wooly bears in a college biology class. When I was taking care of Kitt, I—I found one and let it crawl on his fingers and told him all about them!”

  He managed to swallow down the comment of “Thankfully you hadn’t shown him a house fly.” The thought was far too macabre to deal with. “The ransom note says they’ll call at three.”

  “I’ll meet you to get the ransom note and then arrange to have a trace set up on the office line. Tell the Pack to stay off the phones. I really wish you hadn’t gotten them involved. Hmmm?” The sound muted for a moment as she covered the receiver. “We’ve got a match on the fingerprints! The perp is Adam Rudolph Goodman. He did time in San Quentin Prison for convictions of sex with minors. The last known address for him is California though.”

  “Do you have a social security number for him?”

  She read it off. “I’ll make a copy of the file. We’re putting an APB on him.”

  Ukiah told her which bank to meet them at, and hung up. He was writing down the info on Goodman when Max came to his door.

  “Ready?”

  “Indigo has a name and soc on the perp.” He held out the note to Max. “They don’t know where to find him, though.”

  “We can run a background check on him, see what we can pull up,” Max said.

  “How about I do it while you’re gone,” Sam said. “It still hurts to walk and two is already an overkill.”

  “Okay.” Max took out his PDA, noted the information into it, and then passed the note on to Sam. “Alicia is good with this type of search, and she knows how to get hold of Chino and Janey. They follow orders well, but they need to be shoved in the right direction occasionally.”

  Max did a quick pocket pat and came up with his key ring. “Here’s keys to the Volvo if you need to go someplace. Alicia knows where we keep the spare office keys, and she can show you how to work the security system.”

  “Okay, okay, okay. Go!”

  While most of the mansion’s grounds were kept immaculate by a landscaping firm, a narrow strip of land behind the garage fell into a no-man’s-land. Since the weeds stayed low from lack of sun and rain, no one cared. As Max maneuvered the Hummer out of the narrow parking bay, Ukiah plucked a handful of various leaves, making sure that none had been treated with poison.

  At the first red light, Max watched Ukiah offer up the leaves to Kittanning’s wooly bear. “If we had to, can we grow Kittanning back with just that? We can just feed it like crazy, and demand that it grows.”

  Ukiah winced; more than once he had shared Kittanning’s memories of being tortured until he changed from a mouse into a baby. Hex had simply supplied food, a desired goal, and lots of pain. Sealed in a box, there had been no escape except through compliance. Perhaps if Kittanning had been more than a fistful of cells, he could have resisted. In the end, Kittanning refocused the same mechanics of their extraordinary healing abilities into increasing body mass just to escape the agony.

  “Even if it was that simple,” Ukiah said, “I’m not sure I could stand hurting Kittanning like that.”

  Max shifted uncomfortably at that thought, but pressed on. “But can we? Or did the Pack destroy the machine that Hex used?”

  “I’m not sure what happened to Hex’s machine,” Ukiah admitted. “But it wouldn’t be hard to duplicate the effects. We could grow a baby from the caterpillar, inducing it to change to a larger life-form when the current form reached its limit, and probably in as few as three steps: caterpillar, octopus, baby.”

  “Octopus?”

  “Bones slow growth down. Soft tissue is less structured, and thus faster growing.”

  “Ahhh.” Max made a sound of enlightenment, and then confusion clouded his features again. “So why isn’t it simple?”

  “We’d never really get Kittanning back,” Ukiah warned. “Even if we broke this caterpillar down to two smaller creatures, say two ladybugs, and used one as a memory holder while we pushed the other to grow and change. Even then, it would be like Little Slow Magic and I. We were Magic Boy together; but now that we’re combined, I’m still Ukiah with Little Slow Magic’s saved memories from Magic Boy.”

  “Because of Prime’s mutation?”

  What set Prime apart from all the rest of the Ontongard was that Prime remained an individual after being infected by the Ontongard viral code. It wasn’t clear if the mutation had been a result of the host’s biology, or the Ontongard that infected him, but the resulting being seemed unique in the long history of the Ontongard. As far as the Pack could determine, the individuality was an expression of how Prime’s cells stored genetic memories. While the Ontongard basically suffixed all memories directly to their sole memory base, unable to determine where they began and someone else ended, the Pack stored “borrowed” memories separately from those they experienced firsthand. Because he and Little Slow Magic had once been one creature, Ukiah needed to stop and think which memories were his, but he could tell. With Rennie’s memories, the difference was much more distinct.

  “Yes. What we would have is a baby with memories from Kittanning, but wasn’t him.”

  “Would it matter that much?” Max asked. “I can see it being different with you and Little Slow Magic. Both of you had ninety years of memories built up, separate from one another. Kittanning was only three months old.”

  “The mouse that Hex used to make Kittanning had my hyper-condensed memories and the fresh Pack memories Rennie gave me. Even though Kittanning has forgotten much of those memory sets in the last three months, he still had his personality formed by it. He’s so headstrong that Hex probably couldn’t have used him for breeding, even after he’d forgotten everything about me and the Pack.”

  Max followed the logic. “So the new baby wouldn’t have the same scope to build on.”

  “Scope.” Ukiah nodded. “Kittanning knew Hex had made him and more importantly, because of those condensed memories, why. Nor did he forget any of that; by snarling in Hex’s face the day we found him, he changed those borrowed memories to his own. The new Kittanning would lose those memories as we forced him through shapes, and only know that we tormented him until he was the shape we wanted him to be.”

  “We’d be his torturers, not his rescuers.”

  “Yes,” Ukiah said bleakly.

  They arrived at the main office of Citizens Bank downtown minutes after it opened. Max asked for the manager and after his name had been passed on, the manager Fred Gross came out to greet them warmly.

  “What can I do for you, Max?”

  “My godson has been kidnapped.”

  “Oh, dear God, I’m so sorry.”

  “The ransom is two hundred thousand. I’ve got forty thousand here.” He tapped his briefcase. “I need a hundred and sixty thousand in twenties.”

  “Good thing you came here and early,” Fred said. “Most of our branches have a currency limit of two hundred and fifty thousand, and that includes coins, ones, fives, tens, and so forth.”

  “We only have a few hours to get this together.”

  “Well, luckily, we have four ATMs. Normally our currency limit isn’t much higher than the branches, but the ATMs are allocated up to eighty thousand each, half of which is twenties. We can raid those.”

  Max took out his laptop, sat it on Fred’s desk, and pulled up a spreadsheet. “The next question is, where am I going to pull it from?”

  “Let me get a Currency Transaction Report form.” Fred stood up.
“And have Susie start pulling together the money. A hundred and sixty thousand, right?”

  Fred left them alone, Max working through his spreadsheets. Ukiah took out Kittanning’s memory and made sure it was getting enough air.

  “The trick is going to be liquidating things that Citizens will let me tap today,” Max murmured. “I could write a check from any number of places, but they’ll want a couple days to let something that big clear through.”

  “Do you think the reason the ransom was two hundred thousand was because the kidnappers knew that was about the limit we’ll be able to get, currency-wise, from a bank in a day?”

  “Maybe.” Max leaned back and looked out the open door, where Fred recruited a second teller to help gather the ransom. “This always makes me feel like Jed Clampett.”

  “Who?”

  “A character on a TV show about rich hillbillies. It was supposed to be funny, as if somehow someone not born to wealth couldn’t learn to adapt. It’s not hard at all—people come out of the woodwork to show you how to spend your money.”

  Indigo met them in the bank lobby, the lack of sleep showing on her face.

  Ukiah folded her into a hug. “You okay?”

  Indigo nodded her head. “But if Rennie Shaw messes up this investigation, I’m going to nail him to the nearest wall.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ukiah said because he couldn’t promise that Rennie wouldn’t. “The Dogs thought it might be a trap to lure us to the Oliver Building.”

  “What?”

  “Well, it seemed sensible at the moment. The more I’ve thought about it, the more it doesn’t make sense. I was so angry this morning that I could barely think.”

  Her annoyance drained away, and she whispered, “Where is Kittanning’s memory?”

  He took the small box out of his breast pocket and lifted off the lid. She pressed a trembling hand to her mouth and held it there as she blinked away a shimmer of tears.

  “I suppose it could be worse,” she finally whispered. “At least he’ll grow that finger back.”

  He agreed to that, but, privately, he worried that it would get worse. Certainly, if Kittanning grew the finger back too quickly, he was bound to weird out his kidnappers. Unless, of course, they had maimed him knowing that he’d recover. That in itself led to horrific thoughts.

  He made sure that the memory was healthy, if not totally happy, and slipped it back into his pocket.

  “I’ve copied the files.” Indigo forced herself back to being just business. She handed him a thick folder. He gave her the ransom note, tucked in a Ziploc bag. She held it up to the light. “This is going to have fingerprints all over it, but if Goodman’s sidekick doesn’t have a record, we’re not going to have her prints on file.”

  “I’m the only one that handled it on our end. My gun permit has my prints.”

  She nodded and tucked away the bag. “I did some digging into Hutchinson, to see if he was telling you the truth.” She hesitated, obviously torn between loyalties. “The Temple of New Reason is a classic for why Homeland Security was created in the first place. The central files have reports from nearly every intelligence agency. The FBI is investigating them because of the possible kidnapping and brainwashing of their wealthier members. The ATF has files on their known weapons purchases, which are substantial. From the purchase of certain equipment, the NSA suspects that they’re carrying on wiretapping. The DEA is looking for them in cases linked to the sale of a new designer drug. There are files flagged NEED TO KNOW ONLY which seems to indicate that they’ve hacked into classified military systems.”

  “But there’s something he’s lying about?”

  “The most recent file is the John Doe, alias Zip, stopped on the turnpike. Hutchinson isn’t the agent on the report, a Glenn Chambers is. Chambers obviously saw the case as a dead end: a man dead of natural causes in a car obviously borrowed from another cult member.”

  “What about the photographs?”

  “He notes them, but states that there’s no way to identify the subjects. Apparently the photograph with Ari Johnson was the key to establishing your identity, but there’s no report on Hutchinson talking to Johnson or you. I honestly think he’s gone rogue; I’ve got a query in to his superiors to see if they know what he’s doing up here.”

  There was no sign of the Dewey Cheatum and Howe law firm at the Oliver Building. The suite listed was empty. Amazingly, the Dog Warriors had scouted the offices without unduly manhandling anyone. They had verified that the Ontongard were nowhere to be found and left the actual questioning to the FBI.

  The guard at the receptionist desk reported that a bin on the front desk saw a constant traffic of packages left for bike messengers, UPS, and Federal Express. He merely made sure no one walked off with the wrong one. He remembered the package being left, puzzled by the return address. He had been trying to find out if the suite had been rented without security being notified when the messenger arrived to take the package away.

  Indigo showed the guard the two artist sketches. “Did you see either of these people?”

  The guard studied the artist sketches. “Oh, yes, it was the girl. I guess they played me for a sucker. If this creep had left the package, I probably would have called the bomb squad. I let it ride so long because she was young and sweet. She was dressed like a temp, you know, a dress cut a little too high and a little too low for a regular secretary. I cut her slack, thinking she got the address wrong.”

  Max and Ukiah were back at the office before noon.

  Sam had set up in the keeping room office just off the kitchen. She was on the phone when they came through the back door. She nodded a greeting but stayed focused on the voice on the other end of the line.

  Whatever the voice was saying to her wasn’t good. She sighed and shook her head. “No, it was a long shot. Hang loose. I’ll get back to you. Thanks, Chino.”

  “How’s it going?” Max kept the tension off his face, but not out of his voice.

  “Not well.” Sam hung up the phone. “This is what we’ve got so far.”

  Sam kept careful notes on a flip tablet, something that probably would change if she joined the agency. “Adam Rudolph Goodman, born 1970. Father dead. Mother dead. I just put Chino on trying to find distant relations. Graduated from high school in California in 1987 and held down security guard positions into the nineties.”

  “Ouch,” Ukiah said. Security training was never good in a felon.

  Sam acknowledged that by nodding her head. “Yeah, basic knowledge of how cops catch thieves, and thus how to be avoid being caught.” Sam flipped over the sheet on her notebook. “The first job was at Disneyland, then next at an amusement park, and then a mall. I called them on the guise of needing job references. They all indicated that he quit before they could fire him, but wouldn’t say why.”

  “Worried about civil suits from both sides,” Max commented.

  “Basically.” Sam flipped to the next page. “He then got a job as a janitor at a high school.”

  “Wait,” Max said. “Didn’t Indigo say this guy was in jail for sex with minors? Amusement parks, mall, high school; work hell, they’re all hunting grounds.”

  “It’s possible,” Sam said. “In 1994 he was arrested and convicted for multiple counts of sex with a minor, sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin. He served out the sentence and was released six months ago. That’s where he disappears; he just drops off the face of the earth.”

  “Drops off?” Max echoed, sounding leery. It wasn’t the kind of comment that sat well with Max, especially in his present mood. From Janey or Chino, it would mean they hadn’t known where to take the search after the obvious failed. The madness in Oregon aside, Sam was an unknown quantity. Had they credited her with more ability than she actually had?

  Sam sighed, scrubbing her fingers through her short blond hair. “Goodman was released April second. No one picked him up. He took the transit bus into San Francisco and checked into the YMCA. He started up a bank account, ap
plied for welfare, and began looking for a job. He even got a library card. Two weeks later, he checked out, wrote out checks that took his bank balance down to zero, and disappeared. He could have stolen a car, but he didn’t buy one or rent one, nor did he fly out of California anytime in April.”

  Sam obviously had covered a lot of ground while they had been at the bank; it was not her fault that she lost the trail.

  Max relaxed, settling on the edge of Sam’s desk. “There’s the girl. She might have supplied the car.”

  Sam bobbed her head as if she was considering the girl. “She wasn’t there to meet him at the prison. He was in the dorms at the YMCA, not a private room.” She squinted, crinkling up her nose. “It’s—it’s the Pittsburgh thing that gets me. He laid out all the foundations of settling into San Francisco and then pulled up roots to come here.”

  “You don’t like Pittsburgh?” Ukiah beat Max to the question.

  “It’s not that. It’s just to leave San Francisco—for Pittsburgh? Or anyplace else in the Midwest. Cincinnati. Cleveland.” She dismissed the steel cities with a wave of her hand. “You’ve got to have a good reason to go to that extreme, but I can’t find any connection between Goodman and here. All his family was from the West Coast.”

  “He’s been here for six months,” Ukiah said. “Unless he’s staying with the girl, he got someplace to live.”

  “Working on the assumption that he’s here in Pittsburgh, I had Chino go to the”—she paused to search her memory—“Northside with the sketch of Goodman to see if he checked into the YMCA there under an assumed name.” Northside was a seedier neighborhood across the rivers from downtown. “No luck there or in the Hill District.”

  That was the call Ukiah and Max had walked in on.

  “When he opened his bank account”—Sam checked a number written on her desk pad—“he only had like seven hundred dollars. I picked up the info on the YMCA in California via his MasterCard. He used it extensively in the two weeks before he vanished, running up about five hundred dollars. The last check of his bank account that cleared paid off its balance. He hasn’t used it since.”