The Hanged Man

by T. J. MacGregor

  “I’m anxious to hear what’s been going on.” He stepped away from her to pluck his bag off the carousel. She took it from him and slung it over her shoulder. “My car’s just outside.”

  He paused in the late afternoon light, his head thrown back, his eyes drinking in the sky. “My God, it smells good here. The air in D.C. stinks in comparison.”

  “It’s the politics that stink, Rich.”

  Evans looked at her. “Now more than ever. Your boss called me early this morning and wanted to know if I’d spoken to you. He said you weren’t returning his calls.”

  “I’m not feeling very friendly toward Krackett right now,” she replied, and unlocked the car and got in.

  “He isn’t happy that the Bureau has had to take over the investigation down here,” Evans remarked once they were on the highway.

  “And he would be even less happy if Hal and his buddies got away from us again. I didn’t have any other choice. I hope you didn’t tell him you were coming down here.”

  He seemed amused. “Of course not. My calls will be forwarded. Did you find anything useful on those disks I gave you?”

  “Not really.” She’d gone through them last night, hoping to find something that would give her an idea of where Hal might be hiding. “There wasn’t anything on there that I didn’t already know.”

  “That’s going to change.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “About a month ago, I got a call from Andrew Steele. He wanted to meet somewhere. He said he had some loose ends he needed to tie up concerning Delphi.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me this the other day, Rich?”

  “Because it would open up a chapter you didn’t know about and, quite frankly, given the state of my health, I wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved. Anyway, I flew down here and we met for dinner on the beach. He said his wife had been receiving anonymous gifts in the mail and each one had a tarot card with it. He felt sure that she was being stalked by Bennet.”

  “Because of the tarot cards?”

  “Yes. Hal was the only one of three who had any interest in tarot. And in his other life as Reverend Hal, he read tarot professionally. Andrew was afraid to go to the police because he thought they might uncover something about Delphi. Anyway, he was very paranoid about everything and asked me to keep his computer records on Hal.”

  “How do they differ from what’s on the disks?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “And what’s the chapter you didn’t want to reopen?”

  “For a period of about six months, Andrew and I worked privately with Hal.”

  “Privately.” She repeated the word slowly, as if she’d never heard it before. “Privately when? Where the hell was I?”

  He ignored her question. “Turn left on A-1-A.”

  She turned, then he directed her to an older neighborhood at the south end of the county. She wanted to repeat her question, but knew he wouldn’t answer it until he wanted to. It disturbed her to think of Evans and Steele working privately with Hal; that hadn’t been part of their arrangement. But the more she thought about it, the less surprised she was. Honesty never had figured into the equation.

  They headed up a quiet road where the trees hadn’t been cut down and bougainvillea vines grew wild, their thorny stems bursting with crimson buds. At the end of the street, Evans directed her into the driveway of an old, modest apartment building on the beach.

  Tangled seagrape trees bordered it on one side and pines sprang up on the other side. It reminded her of the Florida of her childhood, old Florida before the million-dollar condos had been built. No security guard, no gates out front, an unlocked lobby door. In an odd way, it seemed fitting that Evans would use this simple place as a hideaway.

  “There are six furnished condos, all vacant now.”

  “You own the building?”

  “It’s under my wife’s maiden name. The Agency rents the condos from time to time.”

  Yeah, she got the picture.

  They took the elevator to the penthouse apartment. Except for the magnificent view of the Atlantic, the penthouse seemed as simple as the rest of the building. The furnishings smacked of this same simplicity: rattan furniture with tropical-colored cushions, Mexican tile floors, pine bookcases. Evans turned on the master electrical switch, spun a faucet under the kitchen sink that turned on the water, then opened the sliding glass doors.

  He remained in the doorway, breathing in the sea air. For moments, as he stood there against the afternoon light, he seemed almost like the Evans she remembered. Then he turned and went over to the bookcase. “You aren’t going to like what you’re about to discover, Lenora. But at this point, what you don’t know may put you at risk.”

  He removed several books from the shelf, exposing a security pad. He punched in six numbers, ran a security card through the slot. He crossed the room and knelt in front of an electrical outlet that had popped out of the wall. He reached inside, withdrew an oblong cedar box, and snapped off the lid. He brought out a pair of three-and-a-half-inch computer disks.

  “The original and a copy of the disk Andrew gave me.” He loaded the disk onto his laptop, opened a file, and patted the cushion beside him on the couch. “Take a look.”

  “It’d be easier if you’d just tell me what’s on the goddamn disk, Rich.”

  “Humor me, all right?”

  So she sat beside him, put the laptop in her own lap, and began to read. And when she surfaced two hours later, the light in the room had waned, her head pounded, her stomach rolled with nausea. She didn’t know whether she felt enraged or betrayed or both. She raised her eyes and looked at Evans, fiddling with the knobs of the TV on the other side of the room.

  “I already suspected that the Agency’s primary purpose in all this was to do things and create events that would make the Bureau look bad, Rich.”

  He came back across the room and sat in a nearby chair. “I don’t deny that anymore. With the Cold War over, we figured there would be cutbacks. We had to do what we could to keep our jobs.”

  “Look, Rich, I’ve accepted that part of it a long time ago. But my God.” She leaned forward, whispering. “You’re responsible for the death of a former First Lady. Hal made her kill herself.” Hal had pierced the mind of one of the most powerful and beloved women in the country and had cut her down like she was nothing. “For what? What did it prove?”

  “That we could do it.” A beat passed, his eyes held hers. “That we had a formidable weapon. Up to then, we knew that Hal could influence what people did, that he could even kill by causing a brain aneurysm. But this?”

  Evans leaned forward, his eyes bright. “Think of it, Lenora. To seize control of another so deeply that he could make the person go against his or her own instinct for self-preservation. Christ almighty. Imagine what kinds of possibilities this opened up. A legitimate suicide. Nothing to track down. Nothing to prove, other than the suicide itself. The perfect murder.”

  He spoke like a god who had discovered the depth of his own powers and couldn’t wait to use them. Something clicked into place at the back of Fletcher’s mind and she suddenly knew why Evans had come here. “And now you’ve got an old score to settle with someone. That’s why you want to find Hal. You’ll entice him with a deal—his freedom in return for the suicide of whoever you’re after.”

  “C’mon, Lenora. I’m too sick and old to be after anyone.”

  “Don’t feed me horseshit,” she snapped. “You could be on your deathbed and it wouldn’t make any difference if you had a score to settle.”

  The sharpness in her voice shocked her. She’d never spoken to Evans like this before. Then again, they’d never been equals until her promotion had been announced the other night. She knew that he expected to gain from her rise in the Bureau—information, favors, all the usual political machinations. In return, he would connect her to his vast network of contacts, which would make her privy to a
lmost unimagined power.

  But until now, she hadn’t considered the possibility that Hal might be part of their unspoken deal. “And just so we’re clear on where things stand with us, Rich, don’t expect me to turn Hal over to you before I take him in.”

  “I don’t expect anything.”

  With that, he moved over to the laptop, popped out the disk, and deleted the file with three clicks of the mouse. Poof, you’re gone. Had the former First Lady died that quickly? Will I?

  As she drove back to her hotel a while later, those two words bounced around in her skull like Ping-Pong balls. Will I? Will I? Will I?

  Chapter 18

  The light in the lagoon this morning deepened the green of the mangroves, the blue of the water, and darkened the stain of Big Guy in the distant shadows. The stillness imbued Hal with an odd sense of peace. He felt as if he’d crossed some invisible boundary during the night and had emerged recreated on the other side.

  He reached into the bucket of squirming minnows that separated him and Rae. She sat very still, eyes fixed on the water, her bare, shapely legs swinging slowly, like a pendulum. “You ever fished before?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “But you live on the ocean.”

  Rae shrugged. “Andy isn’t interested in fishing and it isn’t something I ever feel like doing by myself.”

  “What did you two do when you weren’t working?”

  Her eyes narrowed against the light as she raised them. “Before Carl was born, we used to travel a lot. After…” Her voice trailed off and she shrugged again. “I don’t know. Our personal lives got lost.” She looked over at him. “Like prison, I guess.”

  The minnow Hal plucked from the bucket squirmed fiercely as he tried to fit it onto the hook. He felt a little sorry for the goddamn thing, but not sorry enough to quit. He slid the hook through it.

  “That’s the reason I never wanted to fish,” she said, watching the minnow. “Maybe because that’s how I’ve felt for most of the marriage.”

  The remark revealed more than she realized. He didn’t have to read her to sense that in the five days she’d been here, she’d been mulling over her marriage. She obviously had reached some conclusions.

  Hal cast the line and scanned the periphery of the mangroves, searching for Big Guy. He’d come closer to the chickee, just his snout visible above the surface.

  “Why doesn’t the gator go for the bait?” she asked.

  “I fed him earlier.”

  She nodded, watching the gator, the line, the mangroves, then dropped her head back and peered up through the holes in the braided branches, into the sky. “Are we going to eat the fish you catch?”

  “Sure. The lagoon is loaded with bass.”

  “I thought there was mercury poisoning in the Glades.”

  “Not in my lagoon.”

  “How have you managed to live out here all these years?”

  “I just did it.”

  She turned those magnificent eyes on him again. “Yeah, but how? It takes money to buy supplies, to maintain a boat, to have what you have here. Were you working? Did you have a job? What?”

  “I saved a lot of what I earned as a psychic consultant. I also picked up a few stock tips right after I got out and a woman I knew played them for me. Now and then I go into Miami to the track and do well enough, but not so well that any red flags are raised.”

  “And all your money is here on the chickee?”

  “It’s the safest place I know of.” He stared at her knees. Most women had ugly knees. But Rae’s reminded him of sculptures, round and tan, shapes that promised something.

  “So you don’t need ransom money.”

  “I told you, Rae, this isn’t about ransom.” Something tugged at the line and Hal reeled in a clump of weeds. The minnow had vanished. “Shit. Something got it.” He started to reach into the container for another minnow, but she thrust her hand inside first.

  “Let me try,” she said.

  “They’re slippery little devils.”

  “Sort of like you, Hal.”

  He laughed. He liked the analogy, liked that she tried to figure him out. “Go for one of the larger guys.”

  She went after the minnows in earnest then, seventy or eighty that he’d scooped out of the lagoon with a net. She rolled her lower lip between her teeth as she groped in the writhing mass. “I got one!” she squealed, and brought her hand out, fingers clenched around it.

  “Okay. Good. Hold it for a second.”

  He removed the clump of weeds from the hook and showed her how to slip the minnow onto it, how to cast the line. “Now what?” she asked.

  “As soon as you feel a tug on the line, give it a quick jerk and reel it in.”

  He enjoyed just sitting here with her and hoped the earlier difficulties lay behind them. She seemed to have adapted to the situation and he intended to make sure that continued.

  He hadn’t restrained or drugged her last night, the first time since he’d brought her here. And nothing had happened. He knew she’d slept deeply and soundly throughout the night because he’d checked, reaching into her, traveling the rich ocean of her dreams and the strange landscape of her sexuality. It had invigorated him, aroused him, and he had awakened this morning with a longing to touch her, to make love to her.

  Part of his longing, he knew, resulted from what had happened a couple days ago, when he had reached into Sheppard as he and the psychic had gone at it. It had turned him on, he had pushed too hard and too deeply, and something had popped inside Sheppard’s skull. But in the seconds before he’d pulled away from the cop, he’d found the name of the psychic’s dead husband, Tom Morales, a man he had killed.

  The coincidence shocked him. But it also left him with an overpowering curiosity about the psychic. So before dawn yesterday morning he’d gotten her number from information and had called her.

  He rarely reached over the phone, but found it surprisingly easy with her, hooking into her voice as though it were a current. He had frightened her, especially when he had pushed hard, just as he had done with Sheppard. But he didn’t know if he had frightened her deeply enough so that she would back off. If she didn’t, he would be forced to push at her until a vessel in her brain popped.

  Hal knew that Steele had been aware that he could reach in this way, that if he pushed too hard he could create tremendous pressure inside the cranium, that he could pop blood vessels, squeeze organs to mush, that he could do major damage. Steele and that spook Evans had encouraged him to do this on several occasions. But the ability remained as erratic as it had been in the past. He could rarely control it. Until the incident with Sheppard, it hadn’t happened in months.

  Unfortunately, Mira had broken the connection between them before Hal had gotten the information he wanted. He suspected it would be easier with physical proximity.

  But he didn’t want to leave Rae alone here and he didn’t want to drug or restrain her just when things between them had begun to improve. Yet, he couldn’t risk her escaping, either. No matter what precautions he took, escape remained a possibility as long as she had the freedom to move around the chickee.

  “Did Andy have other spies?” Rae asked suddenly.

  “Yeah, there were others, in different prisons.”

  “How many others?”

  “Six others.”

  Something tugged on her line, she jerked it up, and reeled in weeds. Hal removed the stuff, baited the hook again, and she cast in another direction. She remained standing and his eyes slipped up her tan, shapely legs.

  “You knew them, these other six?” she asked.

  “Two of them. I was aware of the others. We were connected in a weird way.” He couldn’t take his eyes off her legs. He especially liked the backs of her knees, the soft, white skin in the crease. It made her seem vulnerable somehow, as though that crease were her Achilles’ heel. He wondered if Steele had ever kissed it.

  The th
ought made him feel like puking. He had never understood how any woman, much less Rae, could possibly find Steele attractive enough to fuck him. Yeah, he’d been good-looking, smart, he had dressed right, he had dough. But so what? He had no sense of humor, he didn’t know a damn thing about movies, and the only music he liked was Bach. He’d possessed all the sensuality of a rock.

  “Is Andy still doing it?” she asked.

  Not now. “I don’t know. I haven’t had any contact with him since I got out.”

  “I guess what puzzles me is that Andy’s the type of man who always has a specific purpose for anything he does. He wouldn’t do it just out of curiosity, to satisfy some deep intellectual yearning.”

  Hal watched beads of sweat forming on the backs of her knees, glistening like raindrops. He imagined licking them away, making love to this part of her body with just his tongue.

  He knew from reaching that sex had been absent in their marriage these last months, that she was, in fact, hungry for intimacy. He also felt there had been someone else for a while, a man she had seen on the sly. But Hal hadn’t been able to find out anything about him; she kept that memory locked up too deeply for him to plunder it.

  “Hal?”

  He realized she had asked him a question. “Yeah?”

  “Was Andy doing this work for someone else?”

  She posed the question easily, casually, following the pattern they’d fallen into out here on the platform. But Hal recognized it as a ploy to get information out of him.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Things have happened that don’t make sense.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  She shrugged and glanced back at the lagoon. “Calls in the middle of the night. Charges on the fax line to a D.C. number that Andy claimed had to do with some inmate transfer. Sudden weekend trips out of town. Stuff like that. For a while I thought he was having an affair.” Another shrug. “Maybe he was.”

  “Would that bother you?”

  “It’s sort of beside the point now.”

  Not to me. But he didn’t say it. He didn’t want her to think he was going to rip off her clothes and rape her. He didn’t want her getting any ideas that he might pull a Manacas. “You were having an affair, so it would even things up if he was, too.” Hal reached gently in the hopes that the memory would be more accessible to him now.