“Well, shit.” Manacas waved one of his massive hands. “It’s done. We just work with it. I’m more interested in how we’re going to get to Fletcher.”
“You’re sure she’s left D.C.?” Hal was relieved to get off the subject of Rae.
“I scanned every coordinate we’ve got for her haunts in D.C. She wasn’t at any of them. Any ideas where she’d stay in Lauderdale? You know her a hell of a lot better than Vic and I do.”
Yeah, Hal had a good idea. Fletcher, a creature of habit, always had a cigarette with her Cuban coffee in the morning, a hot lunch and a light supper, six hours of solid sleep, and a room with a view. “My first guess is Pier 66. A penthouse room or suite.”
“That’ll be easy to check out,” Manacas said. “If you’re right, Vic and I will keep tabs on her just so we have some idea how many people she’s traveling with, what she’s up to, where she’s most vulnerable.” He grinned, his teeth lining up in his mouth like an old, stained picket fence.
Indrio regarded Hal through a cloud of smoke. “It’d be easier if you could just, you know …” He sliced the air with the side of his spidery hand. “Fuck her head up real good, Hal.”
“I can’t reach into Fletcher. I’ve never been able to.” Except for rare times that were none of their business.
“There’s one other thing we need to consider,” Indrio said. “I picked up that the local cops are working with a psychic.”
Manacas shrugged. “So what? That doesn’t mean the psychic’s any good.”
Hal didn’t dismiss it as quickly. “You pick up anything on the psychic?” he asked Manacas.
“Yeah, a woman. She’s surrounded by books. She has a couple of big birds.”
“Books and birds?” Indrio laughed and rolled his eyes. “C’mon, man, if you’re going to take her seriously, you’ve got to do better than that.”
Manacas looked pissed at the remark. “I don’t see you picking up squat that’s useful, Vic.”
They argued for a few minutes, but Hal didn’t follow it. He tried to wade through the ramifications of a psychic helping out the cops. It disturbed him, made him feel that the investigation had taken a new and unexpected turn. But most of all, it scared him.
He had known many psychics during his years in Miami: frauds with charisma who hoped to cash in on a burgeoning business; a handful of astrologers who could predict the future through the movements of certain planets; palm and card readers who made predictions with reasonable proficiency. True clairvoyants were rare, but he suddenly felt certain this woman fell into that category. He had nothing to base this on, but he knew.
“We need more information on the psychic,” Hal said.
“And on the local cop who’s investigating the murder,” Manacas added. Then the pitcher of beer arrived, Manacas filled three glasses, and picked up his own. “Here’s to the end of the bitch on wheels, however we take her down, and to the cop and the psychic and whoever else gets in the way. Salud, amigos.” He tipped his glass to his mouth and drank it down.
Hal drank, too, but the only taste in his mouth was fear. Fear that this psychic, whoever she was, might very well be far more dangerous to him than Manacas and Indrio, more dangerous, in fact, than Fletcher.
Chapter 10
To Fletcher, the construction site resembled the ruin of some ancient city that had been abandoned long before Columbus had sailed in. The blocks of concrete and the dunes of dirt glinted in the starlight. The air smelled the way it always did in South Florida, of the rich lushness of her childhood here, part ocean, part Everglades, part something she couldn’t define.
Fletcher spotted the van, parked exactly where Jim Hood had said it would be. Hood might be eccentric, she thought, but he was dependable. They had worked enough jobs together so that he knew what she expected. Even so, Fletcher felt tense and irritable about all this. If Steele’s murder had no connection to Delphi, her presence here was a waste of her time. But if one or all of the missing three participants were responsible, then she would face the most important challenge of her career: finding them before they found her.
She pulled her rental car alongside the van and got out. She had driven straight to the hotel from the airport, checked in, showered and changed clothes, then called Hood. Since Krackett had instructed her to play it low-key initially, she would have to work behind the scenes with Hood until she could determine just what was going on.
She found the whole process enormously frustrating. It seemed more prudent to just step in and take over the investigation, thus eliminating problems with the local players. It was a more direct route to the answers she needed. But because she needed Krackett’ s continued support until her promotion was publicly announced, she would play it out until she decided it was time to seize control.
Sand seeped into her Adidas as she walked over to the van and rapped at the door. “It’s Fletcher.”
The door swung open and Hood motioned her inside. He sat on a stool in front of a complex array of electronic equipment. The headphones he wore looked like they grew out of his skull. A coffee stain bloomed on the pocket of his guayabera shirt, which looked a size too small, the buttons straining.
Hood’s greatest weakness was food and it didn’t seem to matter what kind of food. If it was in front of him, he ate it, and he obviously had been doing a lot of eating during his hours in the van. Crumpled cellophane wrappers and empty plastic bags littered the floor; the air smelled of chocolate, peanuts, old coffee. Personally, he revolted her. But she respected his expertise and reliability. Hood, if nothing else, had been an excellent foot soldier in the past.
“Where’s Laskin?” The second man in her operation.
“Taking a leak,” Hood replied. “There are two calls that concern us.” He handed her a set of headphones. She slipped them on and Hood fiddled with dials and knobs on his equipment. “One came in this afternoon and the other came in a couple hours ago.”
The first caller, a man, sounded like he had a bad cold. “… information… Steele homicide… Elbo Room… next Thursday night.” Something familiar resonated in this voice, but she couldn’t pinpoint it. “Any idea who it is?” she asked Hood.
“Nope. The call was made from a public phone in Lauderdale.”
The second conversation didn’t rouse her interest until she heard, “… see what impressions you pick up.”
“A psychic?”
“That’s what it sounds like. She’s going to read Steele’s house tomorrow afternoon.”
Good, Fletcher thought. It would be an ideal time to drop by and introduce herself.
The rear door opened and Bruce Laskin climbed in. “Hey, Lenora.” He snapped his chewing gum in greeting.
“Did you hear the tape, Bruce?” she asked.
“Yeah.” Crack, snap, went his gum. He had quit smoking a while back and now consumed gum and breath mints with enormous relish. “Guy sounds like he has major sinus problems. Maybe he knows something, maybe he doesn’t. Either way one of us should be at the Elbo Room.”
Laskin, a Miami-based agent whom she worked with by default, irritated her. But they’d worked together before and he took orders well.
Hood tore open a pack of peanuts, popped several in his mouth and pushed them into his cheek, like a hamster. “I’ll go there. Bruce looks too much like a cop.” Hood said it as though Laskin weren’t present. His cold dead eyes gazed out at her from the cherubic face of an adult Gerber baby.
“I’ll go myself,” Fletcher said. “And I want to know more about this psychic. Is she any good? And if so, how good? Does she make her living as a psychic? What’s her background? Everything.”
“I’ll do that,” Laskin said.
The psychic actually worried her more than Sheppard’s anonymous caller because she knew just how powerful a true psychic could be. At the peak of the Delphi project, Vic Indrio had been able to walk into a room crowded with politicians, read whomever she told him to read, an
d walk out with the information she’d been looking for. Or take Eddie Manacas, remote viewer. Armed with nothing more than geographical coordinates or a random set of numbers, Manacas had been able to “see” whatever was happening at the target. The ideal psychic spy. Hal Bennet, the most powerful and erratic of the three, stood in a class by himself. He could reach into most people with frightening ease and fuck with their heads.
Fletcher considered psychics of this caliber to be mutants. She suspected that Sheppard’s psychic was only mildly intuitive or, better yet, a phony. But still, it worried her and until she knew more about the psychic, Krackett didn’t need to know about this part of it.
The deputy director, despite his participation in Delphi, had never been comfortable when he didn’t play by the rules. So he tried to compensate by walking a thin line between worlds, trying to meet the requirements of both.
But to Fletcher, something was either efficient or inefficient. At the moment, the most efficient course coincided with Krackett’s directive: remain low-key. But when that ceased being efficient, she would do whatever she thought was best. And before she did anything, she would talk to Evans again.
“I’ll be in touch.” She climbed out of the van.
Her cell phone rang just as she stepped into her room.
“Lenora Fletcher.”
“It’s Richard. Can you talk?”
“Yes, I’m alone. What’s up?”
“What’ve you found out?”
“Not much yet.” She told Evans about Sheppard, the psychic, and the call Sheppard had gotten.
“After we talked, I decided I need some Florida sunshine. I’ll be arriving Monday and staying in my place over on Lauderdale beach. There’s plenty of room, Lenora.”
The offer stunned her. In the nearly twenty years she’d known Evans, she couldn’t recall him ever making this kind of gesture.
“Is this your penance or something, Rich?”
He laughed. “In some respects, I suppose. But I also have a personal interest in your success.”
Of course. Once she became deputy director, she would be privy to information that Evans might use for leverage in his dealings with his old cronies in the Agency. “Retired but not really.”
“Something like that.”
“Give me a call when you get here. If nothing else, we’ll get together for dinner.”
“Good enough. Oh, by the way, your boss called me personally to tell me about your promotion.”
“Knowing Krackett, that wasn’t his only reason.”
Evans chuckled. “Quite right. He wanted the Agency files on Delphi.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“That there weren’t any files.”
“And he believed you?”
“I don’t know. But he couldn’t very well call me a liar, even if that’s what he was thinking.”
“Thanks, Rich.”
“Don’t mention it. Talk to you tomorrow.”
As Fletcher hung up, she felt vaguely uneasy about Krackett’s call to Evans and wondered what the real purpose of the call had been.
Shortly after sunrise, Fletcher woke suddenly and sat straight up in bed. Her senses strained to detect a noise, a voice, traffic. But the penthouse’s location insulated her from traffic sounds and no sounds came from the hall.
Light seeped in around the edges of the curtains, briefly tempting her to get up, order a cup of Cuban coffee and enjoy it with a cigarette out on the terrace. But Christ, she was tired. She had slept fitfully for the last few months and it was beginning to catch up with her. Just one more hour, she thought, and eased her body back to the mattress.
But as soon as she shut her eyes, they snapped open again, darting through the incomplete darkness like terrified rats. A presence, she felt a nonphysical presence. She knew she was being scanned psychically, a focused, deliberate scan as real as a searchlight, but utterly invisible.
Sweat erupted on her skin, her heart slammed into overdrive, blood drummed in her ears. She bolted forward and grabbed the ELF device, damning herself for turning it off last night. She fumbled with the switch, turned it on, felt the difference instantly. The extremely low frequency radio waves that it emitted created a screen of white noise that blocked the scan.
Fletcher leaped out of bed, the ELF device clutched in her hand, and lurched toward the curtain that hung in front of the balcony’s sliding glass door. Air, light, fast. She threw open the door and hurried onto the balcony. The early light poured over her, a primal relief filled her. She felt like a cave woman who worshipped the flicker of a flame.
Fletcher rubbed her arms against the morning chill. The blue vastness of the sky surrounded her like some huge transparent dome. Her eyes slid down its cold smoothness to the horizon, a narrow band of violet light where sky met sea. It grounded her, rooted her. Now she allowed her eyes to move closer in, to the boats moored at docks in the intracoastal canal, to the gulls pinwheeling through all the blue. And when she felt full and calm again, she walked back into the suite.
She stood motionless in the center of the room, her muscles tight, her heart still pounding. She was fairly sure the scan had ended, but she needed to be absolutely certain so she turned off the ELF. Nothing, zip. She quickly turned the device on again and moved to the foot of the bed, deeply shaken by what had happened.
A deliberate scan. She knew of only two individuals capable of such a thing. One was dead. That left Eddie Manacas.
Manacas, the first of the three to flee Delphi, had vanished like some Houdini prop in the late eighties, while still on parole. He had vanished so completely, Fletcher suspected he’d had professional help: cosmetic surgery, a new identity, a new life. He might be right under her goddamn nose and she wouldn’t be able to recognize him. Unless he pulled a stunt like this.
Fletcher set the ELF on the oscillating mode, just in case Manacas attempted to scan her again. The device, a permutation of a prototype that had been used experimentally in riot control, was calibrated to match electrical impulses emitted by the brain. In this mode, it would alternate between theta waves—four to seven pulses per second—and delta waves, four pulses or less per second.
Most of the Delphi participants, while working psychically, had fluctuated between these two states. At home, she usually removed the device at night, a habit that had become as automatic as brushing her teeth before bed. But given what had just happened, she sure as hell wouldn’t be turning it off at night or any other time, not as long as she was here.
So what had prompted the scan? Steele’s murder? Her arrival? Her hand trembled as she lit a cigarette. This is what they do to me. She got up and paced the room, paced because it was easier to think as long as she was moving.
Go through it again, Lenora. Three men are missing. Jndrio, Manacas, Bennet. The names marched through her head with a terrible impunity, a threat to everything that she was or might become. The deadly trio of mutants, the Frankensteins she, Steele, and Evans had helped create.
Her thoughts turned toward the past, to questions she had asked herself a million times before. The lethal trio had known about each other since Delphi’s genesis, so didn’t it make sense that they had kept in touch after they had vanished? She seized on this thought and her mind ran with it, chasing it up and down the highways of the past, the mazes of probabilities.
She called Hood in the van. He sounded groggy when he answered, she was sure she woke him. “Jim, run a voice print on that call Sheppard got tonight and compare it to our tapes on Hal Bennet, Ed Manacas, and Vic Indrio.”
Hood let out a low, soft whistle. “Jesus, Lenora, you may be onto something. I’ll call you back in an hour.”
“I’ll be in my room.”
And for the next hour, she paced and smoked and thought, figuring the angles. But it all boiled down to only one question: if she was right, what the hell did it mean?
Hood called back sixty-five minutes later, the longest sixty-f
ive minutes in her life. “That voice print matches Indrio’ s perfectly.”
Fletcher squeezed her eyes shut, her emotions careening between elation that she was right, that Manacas and possibly Indrio and Bennet were in the area, and despair that her worst nightmare had begun.
Chapter 11
Light touched Rae’s face like a warm hand, but she didn’t open her eyes. She listened first. Bird songs. A breeze skipping through branches. Splashing in the lagoon. Sounds so ordinary they made her feel safe, protected, almost peaceful.
But another part of her whispered, Nothing is what it seems.
As soon as she thought it, a serene image swelled in the depths of her mind and drifted upward until it filled her: a beach at sunset, waves breaking gently against pristine sand, the sun a burning orange disk against the horizon. A postcard image.
She couldn’t explain the contradiction, couldn’t bridge it with something that lay between the two extremes. So Rae pushed it out of her head and opened her eyes enough to peer out through her lashes.
Early morning on the chickee. She didn’t see Hal, didn’t hear him. But the aroma of fresh coffee drifted in from the kitchen, so she knew he was here.
Rae lifted up on her elbows. The handcuff, still snapped around her left wrist, wasn’t attached to anything. She sat all the way up, her joints clicking and snapping, her body bright with pain in a dozen places. Her bladder ached. Nausea from whatever drug he’d given her mitigated her thirst and hunger, but overall she felt as if she’d been dissected and slapped recklessly back together.
She vaguely remembered eating and sipping at something sweet, maybe juice, but these memories burned like fireflies in a dark gray fog. She didn’t know where they fit in time.
The Hanged Man Page 10
