The Hanged Man

by T. J. MacGregor

  “What file? I’ve barely had time to take a shit, much less write up my notes on Steele.”

  “Good. Create something to give him. Then we’re going someplace where we can talk freely. And Shep, don’t make any important calls from your phone, don’t say anything in your office that amounts to a hill of cow turds. And whatever you do, don’t include anything in your report about this cabin Rae Steele supposedly went to.”

  If a cabin existed, he hadn’t found it yet. He still didn’t know the city location for Pirate’s Cove Lane.

  “Look, things are going to improve,” Young said, as if to break Sheppard’s gloom.

  “Optimist,” Sheppard muttered.

  “What the hell, Shep. After two divorces and innumerable relationships that went nowhere, it was either get some optimism or stick a fucking gun in my mouth.”

  The resignation in Young’s voice briefly distracted Sheppard from his own misery. Young rarely talked about his personal life, even in a general sense. “Weren’t you seeing someone last spring?”

  “That ended in the spring.” He shrugged, seemed deeply uncomfortable, and leaned over the water fountain, signaling an end to the personal side of their conversation.

  When Sheppard returned to his office, Ames glanced up from his bag of peanuts, a shit-eating grin on his face.

  Fucker, Sheppard thought at him, and sat down again.

  Chapter 17

  Fletcher had a special fondness for this particular Hispanic neighborhood, a crowded, bustling area south of Miami. It lay within several miles of where she’d lived for more than a decade of her childhood. Jammed into its half dozen blocks were Cuban cafés and restaurants, botánicas, clothing shops, shoe stores, and sidewalk windows where a cup of rich coffee cost less than a buck.

  Her destination, a pretty yellow restaurant on a corner lot, resembled a Spanish hacienda. It sat back somewhat from the road and dense Arica palms surrounded it on three sides and shaded the outside patio. She parked across the street and spent a few minutes primping in front of the mirror.

  Fresh lipstick. A comb through her hair. Remove the emerald post earrings and snap in a pair of braided gold hoops that were less flashy. She unbuttoned the jacket of her turquoise business suit and exchanged her flats for a pair of low heels. She felt like a young girl preparing for her senior prom, not a woman in her late forties about to perpetuate a lie.

  The crowd inside El Gringo had spilled onto the back patio, where ceiling fans whirred quietly, keeping the air cool and fragrant. The fronds of the lush palms curved over the railing, potted plants separated the tables from each other, a Spanish singer crooned from a jukebox. A gringo named John Bennet owned this slice of Cuba. Hal’s old man.

  He knew her as Lia Fraser, a business executive with IBM. He believed she’d lived with his son when he’d been released from prison and that her life had fallen apart when Hal had disappeared. She checked in with him periodically, the bereaved ex-girlfriend who clung to a hope that Hal would come home.

  She spotted him out on the patio, sitting alone, a man with a bald, very tan head, bushy white brows, and eyes as blue as the Caribbean. His bold, uneven features radiated a kind of Sean Connery charisma. In foreign ports, he would be the guy who drank the local beer, bedded the señoritas, and sailed off into a Jimmy Buffet sunset.

  It had been six months since she’d seen him and he hugged her hello like a father, then stood back, his hands still on her arms. “My God, you look wonderful, Lia. It’s been too damn long. C’mon, sit down. Would you like coffee? A guava turnover?”

  “Both, thanks.” She lit a cigarette as John signaled a waitress. “Business is still booming,” she remarked when the waitress had left.

  “I’ve got no complaints. How’ve you been?”

  They chatted amiably for a while, fiction rolling off her tongue as smooth as honey. Her promotion, lots of traveling, new computers, new software, busy busy busy. John Bennet listened raptly, his blue eyes so much like Hal’s she felt the old longing deep inside her chest.

  It disgusted her, this longing. She considered it her greatest weakness, a failing that nearly had proven to be her nemesis. Hal Bennet might still prove to be her nemesis. Fletcher hadn’t seen Hal in three years now, but her memories remained bright, vivid, rendered in excruciating detail: the long nights in the Coral Gables house, her obsession with his body, his talent, his essential difference from others.

  The physical relationship had lasted a long time, longer than Fletcher had been married to either of her two husbands. But the chemistry had begun long before that. The first job he had done for Delphi had been a kind of test and proved to be a biggie.

  At the end of 1979, Hal Bennet had reached into the mind of a suburban housewife in Virginia, prompted her to load the .357 her husband kept in a nightstand drawer, and to head into D.C. There, in a busy subway station during rush hour, she’d opened fire on the crowd. Five people had been killed and a dozen others had been injured before the cops cut her spree short with two shots to the heart. The fact that the woman had been one of the least likely individuals to do something like this had impressed Richard Evans. Not long afterward, funding for Delphi had been doubled.

  In early 1980, she and Steele had created specific targets and goals for Hal that had helped train and hone his ability. He’d failed some and succeeded at others. But from these trial runs they’d learned the parameters of his ability. He worked best, for instance, when he could see the target or had a photo or video clip of it. Strong intent and desire or any deep emotion could propel the ability faster and more powerfully.

  In one experiment, they’d given Hal photos of a primary electrical transformer in a South Florida neighborhood and told him to blow it out. He couldn’t do it. So Fletcher had driven him to the neighborhood and told him to do it with the transformer in sight. Nothing. But when she poked fun at him and threatened to toss him back in prison, he’d gotten angry and had blown the transformer in a few minutes.

  In March of that year, Krackett said he wanted something major that would topple the Carter presidency. He and the director had despised Carter for the very humanity that had made him an outstanding ex-president.

  A month later, on April 24, 1980, Hal Bennet, working with just a photo, had reached into a chopper pilot who was part of the battalion of eight that were supposed to pull off the rescue of hostages in Iran. That chopper had collided with one of the six C-130 transports. No one could trace the chopper’s crash to its source because the pilot had been killed. If he’d lived, though, he might have described the chaos in his brain as he flew his mission—the abrupt, excruciating pain in his skull, the way his eyes had begun to leak blood, the state of his intestines.

  She could still smell the sweat on Hal’s skin as he had come out of it in that miserable trailer in the park behind Manatee prison. He’d been hooked up to machines that read his every vital sign, his every brain wave, machines that told them he was approaching adrenal exhaustion, that his reach had eaten up even his reserves. He’d spent a week in the prison compound clinic.

  For months afterward, she and Steele had played it safe. No big jobs for Hal. Instead, they’d concentrated on Manacas and Indrio. Then, in early 1982, Evans had urged her and Steele to test Hal again and had provided the target: a federal building in Minneapolis.

  She’d sensed that Evans had his own agenda in mind and had argued with him about that one. But he threatened to cut the Delphi funding if she refused. So in March of that year, without advising Krackett about the new target, she and Steele had paired Hal and Manacas.

  Manacas had been instructed to find an employee within the office building who fit certain parameters. Evans wanted someone whose random act of violence, like that of the woman in the D.C. subway station, would be totally out of character. The least likely person. Hal, working from a photo of the individual, would screw with the person’s head and make him or her do something extraordinary.

  Pr
oblems had developed right from the start because Evans had insisted on an event that would grab national attention.

  The upshot had been an explosion that had killed and injured dozens of people, including children who had been touring the building on a school field trip.

  The repercussions for the FBI, which had investigated the incident, had been considerable. Despite all their sophisticated equipment and knowledge, they failed to determine the cause of the explosion or to make an arrest. It made the Bureau look very bad.

  She’d accused Evans of engineering the incident for precisely that purpose—to tarnish the Bureau’s image. He’d denied it, of course, but her suspicion remained.

  And yet, despite all this, she benefited professionally from Delphi. In the faIl of 1984, for instance, Indrio, now on parole, had been sent out to read an FBI agent who was believed to be spying for the Russians. Indrio used coordinates that Manacas had supplied and several minutes after the guy had passed documents to two Soviet emigres, Hal had rendered the man incapable of movement.

  Acting on information Hal and Manacas had supplied, she’d been a major player in cracking the Cali drug cartel, a victory that had put her in the running for the deputy director slot.

  Successes like this one had advanced her career and Krackett’s. Because of the talents these three men possessed, separately and in unison, her beliefs about the way things worked had been shattered and rebuilt. Thanks to Hal Bennet, Delphi hadn’t been just a project she oversaw. It had consumed her nearly as deeply as Hal himself.

  He’d walked out on her three years ago—three years, two months, and ten days ago, to be exact, but who the hell’s counting?—and simply vanished. Several years before that, Manacas and Indrio had also disappeared, but Hal’s disappearance had struck much deeper. He, after all, formed the very core of Delphi.

  And when he’d vanished, Evans had pulled the funding on the project, Krackett had immediately distanced himself from it, and she’d been left to clean up the mess alone. Specifically, this had meant getting rid of the other four members of the project.

  Fletcher had never thought of herself as a killer. She still didn’t, even though she’d been directly responsible for the deaths of the other four participants. The rational, ambitious part of her knew the deaths were necessary to ensure her future with the Bureau.

  But another part of her suffered enormous guilt. It surfaced from time to time, particularly when she spun her lies with Hal’s old man.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Hal,” she said, working it casually into the conversation.

  “Actually, I have. I called you at the Boca office after I got the first postcard several months back, but they didn’t seem to know who you were.”

  “I’ve been working out of the New York office and I’m not there very much.”

  “Let me get the postcards.”

  She waited impatiently, her stomach in knots. In her mind, she saw Hal’s beautiful, powerful hands against her body. She stabbed out one cigarette and lit another. John returned several minutes later with half a dozen postcards. He set them in front of her. “You’re welcome to them, Lia. I don’t need them.”

  She tried not to appear too eager as she glanced through them. They had all been mailed from Flamingo, a town at the very tip of the Everglades National Park. A chatty quality marked them—been here, done that. But several struck her as oddly pensive, written in a neat, tiny script. Hal hadn’t mentioned her, but why should he? He had no idea that she knew his old man.

  “Has he ever called?” she asked.

  “Yeah, on my birthday a couple of weeks ago. He said he’d been moving around a lot, didn’t have a mailing address or phone, but that he’d be in touch. Typical stuff.”

  Fletcher jotted her cellular number on a scrap of paper. “If you hear from him, John, give me a call. I’ll be in town for a while. I’d really like to talk to Hal.”

  John nodded, folded the paper, slipped it in his shirt pocket. “Lia, honey, you’d be better off finding yourself some nice young man and settling down. Hal’s no good. He’s never going to change.”

  She shrugged. “I just want to ask him to his face why he left.” That much was true.

  “What good is that going to do?”

  “At least I’ll know.”

  John squeezed her hand and shook his head, as if to say he would never understand the vagaries of the human heart.

  She left a while later with the postcards tucked inside her purse, weighted with the past.

  The Elbo Room stood on the corner of Sunrise Boulevard and A- 1-A, a Fort Lauderdale icon that had rocketed to fame more than thirty years ago in Where the Boys Are. It had been modernized since then, but the basics hadn’t changed: cold beer, loud music, a hot spot for tourists and locals.

  Fletcher walked through the place, memorizing the lay of the rooms. If Indrio kept his appointment with Sheppard Thursday night, she could take him into custody. Once Hood got finished with him, they would know everything that Indrio knew about Hal and Manacas and why Indrio had contacted Sheppard.

  On the other hand, she had no legal ground for taking him into custody, except as a possible link to a murder suspect. He’d done his time and completed his parole. The only crime he’d committed would never hold up in court: he’d split from a covertly funded project that had put him to work for seventy grand a year when he’d been paroled.

  She would come here Thursday night, disguised as Indrio certainly would be. If anyone approached Sheppard, she would have to determine on the spot if the person was Indrio. If so, then she would—what? Shoot him when he went to the men’s room? Drop arsenic in his beer? Blow the place up?

  Sure. And kill hundreds of tourists in the process.

  She would follow him when he left and worry about Sheppard later.

  At the height of Indrio’s involvement with Delphi, his telepathy had worked best the closer his proximity to a person. But perhaps it had developed to the point where now he only had to be in the same room with whoever he wanted to read. Or on the same block. Or the same city. She could jam his “signal” with the ELF, but maybe Indrio’s ability had expanded to the point where he could work his way around such an obstacle. If so, he might sense a tail.

  If this, if that. Her head ached with the numerous possibilities, none of them good. The Frankensteins she and Steele had created had grown well beyond her control now, maybe even beyond her knowledge of what was possible. And that terrified her.

  “Lenora, it’s Keith Krackett. Please give me a call.”

  Beep.

  “Keith again. Is your voice mail working? I haven’t heard from you, Lenora. Call me ASAP.”

  Beep.

  “It’s eleven Sunday night. I need to speak to you immediately. Call me.”

  Fletcher stood next to the phone in her hotel room, listening to the voice mail. Krackett had called a total of twelve times, each call progressively more demanding. The last call had come in about two hours ago. Relentless fucker, she thought, and deleted the messages. She would call him tonight, after she’d picked up Evans at the airport and had a chance to talk to him.

  She stripped off her Lia clothes, left them where they fell, and went over to the closet for jeans and a shirt. Casual for Evans. Florida casual. She needed to do what she did best, figure the angles, play the possibilities. Evans would help her do that.

  But she knew that if she didn’t call Krackett, he would keep calling her, leaving messages that eventually would collapse into outright threats. If she didn’t respond, he would send one of his lackeys down here or fly here himself. And that would be bad, very bad.

  Call him, get it over with, stall for time.

  She dressed, then picked up the phone, punched out his private number. He picked up on the second ring. “Keith, it’s Lenora. What’s up?”

  A brief, terrible silence, then: “What’s up?” He hissed the words. “Since Saturday I’ve left Christ know
s how many messages on your machine and this is the first call I’ve gotten, Lenora. That’s what’s up. What in the hell is going on?”

  His tone rankled her, but she managed to keep her voice calm when she spoke. “I haven’t called because there’s nothing to report, Keith. We’re working on several possibilities.”

  Keep it vague and brief, she thought. The less Krackett knew, the better off she would be. She hit the high points and none of the explosive details, like Indrio’s call to Sheppard or what she had learned from Hal’s father.

  “Tell me more about this feeling you had that you were being scanned,” Krackett said.

  “There’s nothing to tell. It was Manacas, I’m sure of it. And if he’s in the vicinity, then I’m sure Indrio and Hal aren’t too far away.”

  “I want this matter wrapped up in a few days, Lenora. I don’t care how you do it, just do it.”

  She needed more time, but she didn’t say that to Krackett. “I’ll do my best.”

  “And I’d like a progress report each day.”

  “I’ll call when I have something to report, Keith. Talk to you soon.” She hung up before he could say anything more and sat there, clenching and unclenching her fists, anger smoldering inside of her.

  Fletcher spotted Evans as soon as she entered the airport. He waited at the baggage carousel and, except for the laptop slung over his shoulder, he might be just one more elderly tourist in a cotton shirt and chinos. She thought he looked better than he had when she’d seen him several days ago in D.C.

  “I bet you thought I’d forgotten you,” she said, coming up behind him.

  Evans glanced around and smiled. “Not a chance you’ll ever forget me, Lenora.”

  She laughed and hugged him hello. “I’m really glad you came down here. I could use some help.” And, despite his retirement and illness, she still felt protected in Evans’s presence.