Unsolved

by James Patterson

  Once in the room, move quickly toward your target.

  Done. He’s by the bedside in three long strides.

  Lasso the noose around the target’s head while he’s still sleeping.

  Done. He hits the pillow with the rope and slides it down over the head in one fluid swoop before the target awakens.

  Yank it tight, while he’s still disoriented, waking from sleep.

  Roger that. His fingers grip the small knots on each end. He pulls with all his might, snapping the noose taut, and there’s one loud, wet squelch—a horrifically desperate gagging sound coming from the target, the target, not a human being, not someone you know—

  If you are quick enough, he will never gain consciousness sufficient to offer resistance. It will be over before it starts.

  But just in case—knees on the arms, if possible.

  Check. Knees pinning down the arms, now unable to flail.

  A target will do anything—arching his back, kicking out his legs—but as long as you pull that noose tight, immobilize the arms, and don’t get too close to the face, he can’t stop you. He’s helpless.

  He keeps his chin up, pulls on each end of the cord so hard that his shoulders tremble, his biceps burn, sweat drips into his eyes. His jaw clenched, he remembers to exhale through his nose.

  The target’s desperate body beneath him, torso heaving upward, but to no avail, only bucking his own body forward so his weight presses down harder still on the helpless arms, his grip on the nylon cord never wavering, his shoulders screaming out in pain, sweat blinding him, arms trembling from the strain.

  “Fight,” he whispers. “That’s right…fight.” The knots of the nylon rope dig into the flesh of his hand, but the pain disappears, replaced by a consuming feeling of euphoria, of power, coursing through him more rapidly than blood, pumping through him like fresh oxygen. No, it doesn’t matter if the target is a mother of three or a father of four or even if it’s someone you know—someone he knows—someone I know…no, that makes it more satisfying still. I have conversed with you, I have argued with you, I have watched you, and you have never known who I am or what I can do, but now you do, now I am showing you, now you are watching me take your life, now you see that I am more powerful than you and I have conquered you­—

  He opens both hands and the nylon cord drops to each side. He takes a huge breath. He got carried away. That was sloppy. There could have been blood, even a partial decapitation. That would have ruined everything.

  He steps off the bed and onto the carpet, wipes away sweat with his sleeve.

  The bedside clock says 2:32 a.m.

  So much more to do before he’s done tonight.

  91

  NOW IT’S time for a hasty exit, time to leave the past behind.

  He throws open drawers, grabs underwear and socks and T-shirts, whatever he can cram into two medium-size moving boxes. He pulls shirts and pants out of the closet and places them in a heap on the floor. From large plastic boxes in the back of the closet, he pulls out some military records, some medical records.

  Underneath the bed, there’s a long box filled with memorabilia and some personal items—birth certificate, stray photos from childhood and from the time in the service, an insurance policy, a high-school yearbook. Bringing that whole box.

  Everything on the walls will stay except for a framed photograph of a former president of the United States with an inscription in black marker: TO LT. WAGNER—I HONOR YOUR SERVICE. That will come along with him.

  He stops and listens. Slinks over to the window and carefully parts the blinds to look out. Nobody there. Not yet. So far, so good. He checks his watch, monitoring the time closely.

  Now, time to haul this stuff away. Three trips to the garage carrying boxes, clothes, documents. He dumps them in the rear of the Dodge Caravan.

  There’s plenty of room in the van’s rear compartment, even with the corpse, zipped up good and tight in a body bag he stole from an Arizona morgue a year ago.

  He goes back inside the apartment, stops, and listens to the ringing sound of silence. Looks through the blinds again. Checks his watch again.

  He takes one last glance around the bedroom, at the drawers pulled open, the stray hangers everywhere. No time or reason to clean up.

  He pats his pocket and remembers what’s inside. He almost forgot.

  In the kitchen, he lifts the lid on the garbage can, a white plastic job, and pulls out the small trash bag half full of food and dirty paper towels and rubbish, the scent of orange peels, of soy sauce, of old yogurt.

  He reaches into his left pocket—no small feat while wearing rubber gloves—and removes a Garfield the Cat watch, the same kind he used for the timer on the bomb in Chicago. He drops it into the trash and then lifts the bag and shakes it gently, allowing the red watch to settle deep inside.

  He pulls the bag’s drawstrings tight and ties them. He stops and listens for any sound. He gently opens the rear door, peeks out into the darkness to ensure he has no company. Then he walks down the ramp and over to the garbage can by the door, which is beige with the house’s street number, 407, scrawled on the side in black Magic Marker. He opens the lid and drops the trash bag in on top of two other bags, a tight fit.

  Garbage pickup is today. They usually come early to midmorning.

  He goes to the garage and gets in the disability van; the wheelchair’s already in place, secured, in front of the steering column. He turns the rearview mirror toward him and takes one last look at himself: long gray hair pulled back, his eyes dull, the crescent-moon scar by his eye a bit shinier by contrast. He moves the mirror back and places his thumb against the garage-door opener affixed to the visor.

  He imagines what he will see when the garage door lifts up—unmarked cars blocking the driveway, bubble lights on their dashboards, a SWAT team with weapons aimed at him. FBI! Freeze, Lieutenant! Show us your hands!

  He takes a decisive breath, presses the garage-door opener, and winces as the door grinds upward in the middle of the still night.

  Nothing but a dark, empty driveway and a dark, empty street.

  92

  NEVER HAS it been more important to keep his wits about him. Never has it been more critical to drive normally—to keep the van straight, obey traffic signals, and not speed, of course, but not drive precisely at the speed limit either.

  He knows the route by heart. It was part of the preparation. Avoid the highways, stick to local roads.

  Two stops. The first one, thirty-five minutes away. The second, just ten minutes farther.

  He rolls along through the local roads, hilly and curvy, dark and quiet. He makes it to the county road without incident—long stretches of pastures and farms, occasional gas stations. Some areas are more residential, and he passes mailboxes and sidewalks.

  He turns down a broken road and heads toward the fossil-fuel generating plant closed some thirty years ago, now abandoned, looking like a massive piece of gothic lore in its loneliness and decrepitude. He drives until the road dead-ends into the plant, then continues along the remnants of the parking lot, going slowly over the battered, uneven pavement. He passes the enormous first building and drives over wild grass toward his destination behind the building.

  He dug the ditch when he first arrived in Virginia, months ago; it was always part of the plan.

  He stops the van and doesn’t bother with the charade of putting down the rear-door ramp; he just climbs out of the driver’s side. He shines his flashlight over the earth and is not surprised to find the ditch precisely as he left it, heaps of dirt to one side of a large piece of plywood resting on the ground.

  He gets his hands under the plywood. It takes some effort with this heavy wood, but he pulls it toward himself and shuffles backward, revealing a gaping hole in the earth—a long, deep grave.

  He opens the back of the van and clears space down the middle. He grabs hold of the body bag and pulls it toward him, gets the corpse in his arms. He carries it over to the grave
, steadies himself so he doesn’t fall in with it, and drops the body in. It lands with a delicious whump.

  He retrieves a shovel from the van and starts throwing the dirt back into the grave, on top of the body. Lucky for him, it hasn’t rained here for over a week, so the dirt is relatively workable. Still, it takes him the better part of an hour, until nearly four in the morning, to fill the grave. He pats the earth with the shovel, tamping it down as best he can. Then he moves the large piece of plywood back over the grave and returns to his car.

  He has accomplished one of the two most important tasks of the night. Because this body must never be found.

  Now for the second task.

  Feeling considerably relieved with the body disposed of, he drives back to the county road for the next stop. It’s just a few miles up ahead.

  He follows the curves of the road. He doesn’t have GPS because he doesn’t have his phone—or, rather, he does, but it’s turned off, with the SIM card removed, to avoid tracking—and, if memory serves, it’s easy to miss this turnoff if you’re not careful. It should be only about two more miles…

  As he comes around a blind curve obscured by trees, he sees color in the sky. Flashing color. He hits the brakes, but he’s already around the curve before the van comes to a stop. His headlights are already shining forward. He’s already announced himself.

  Less than a quarter of a mile away, squad cars spread across the road—three of them, their bar lights spraying obnoxious flashes of blue light through the darkness.

  A roadblock. And it’s too late to turn back.

  93

  HIS PULSE hammering in his chest and throat, he eases the van forward, toward the roadblock. Not a formal one, he quickly realizes. They aren’t here for him. Not a DUI checkpoint either. A car accident. A sedan in a ditch to the right. An ambulance drives up and joins the three police cars. There’s a second vehicle spun sideways along the road, the front passenger side gashed open.

  A state trooper, standing amid flares set up to block the road, notices the van and puts his hand up. The trooper sizes up the van and then slowly approaches with one hand on his holstered weapon. It doesn’t seem to be a threatening posture, more likely just part of the law enforcement swagger, but it’s hard to say.

  He rolls down the window and leans out but stays quiet, letting the trooper take the lead. Hoping the officer won’t ask him for his driver’s license, though he’s ready to produce it. Hoping he won’t ask for registration, though he will hand it over. Hoping the officer won’t ask him what he’s doing on the road at this hour, though he’s ready with a cover story about early babysitting duty for nieces and nephews.

  The trooper, in his gray uniform with his badge and arm patches, his wide-brimmed hat, is stone-faced. “Morning. Where you headed?”

  He tells him where he’s headed and doesn’t mention the cover story, not wanting to seem too eager to provide details.

  The trooper gives him an appraising stare.

  Let me go, Officer. Live to see another day. His pulse is vibrating in his throat, his temples.

  “Well, I don’t think you can pass.” The trooper looks back. “The drop-off on that shoulder’s too steep.” He nods. “What you wanna do—that turnoff you just passed about a half a mile back—”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You wanna take that about a mile or so north. You’ll hit a downtown. You follow the signs there and you can hop on the interstate.”

  But he doesn’t know that town. And he can’t just “hop on the interstate.” His turnoff is less than a mile away.

  So close, and yet so far. Of all the fucking luck. “All right, Officer. Thanks much.”

  There’s no other way to access his next stop except for this county road. And if he parks his car here and waits instead of taking the trooper’s advice, he will look suspicious. To say nothing of the fact that he needs to make this next stop as soon as possible.

  This wasn’t part of the plan, wasn’t part of the plan—

  Stop. Deal with it. Do what the trooper said.

  Take a route you haven’t scouted, haven’t scouted, haven’t scouted—

  His jaw clenched, he executes a three-point turn and heads back in the direction he came from. Per the trooper’s instructions, he takes the first turnoff, follows it a mile into the downtown of the small town.

  Maybe we’ll meet again someday, Officer, and I can show you what I think of your advice.

  He keeps his breathing even and scans the area as he travels through the small downtown—real estate agent, clothing store, tailor, ice cream parlor. He sees signs for the interstate that he will not, cannot, take, then finds another road, a road he doesn’t know and never scouted but that will at least allow him to get back to the county road he’d been on when he hit the police barricade.

  It’s now 4:45 a.m. He’s lost thirty minutes. He passes a restaurant topped with a glowing neon hot dog. Then a Walmart. Then some kind of boat-repair shop.

  He reaches the intersection with the county road again. He looks to his left. No sign of the police barricade. He figures he’s about two miles west of it. Maybe three? He’s not sure if he overshot his next stop or not, so he doesn’t know whether he should turn left, east, or right, west.

  He doesn’t have his bearings because this was never part of the—

  He turns left, making an educated guess, seething with frustration.

  Yes. He guessed correctly. There it is, on his left, the second stop.

  “Let’s get this over with,” he whispers.

  He turns the van onto the gravel road and heads toward a large rectangular sign reading XTRA STORAGE, a row of sheds below it.

  He pulls up to the third shed from the end. He climbs out of the van from the passenger side, again not bothering with the wheelchair exit from the back—no cameras out here—puts the key into the lock, and turns it.

  The door lifts upward with a smooth hum. The shed is empty, or almost empty. He gets back in the van, pulls it into the shed, and shuts the door behind him.

  And releases a breath. Out of sight now, finally.

  He gets out of the van and takes a moment to appraise the situation. He looks inside the van, at the wheelchair behind the steering column. At some point soon—maybe five minutes from now, maybe five days from now—the FBI will come to Annandale, Virginia, looking for a man who cannot walk, who sits in this very wheelchair. They will go to 407 Morningside Lane and execute a search. They will quickly learn that the man they are seeking has left town, and rather hurriedly. They will issue an APB on this very Dodge Caravan. They will scour the roads and highways for this van.

  But this van isn’t going to be on the roads. It will stay here, tucked away in this anonymous shed, for the immediate future.

  It would never occur to the Feds hunting for a paralyzed, retired army lieutenant to search the highways and byways for a motorcycle.

  In a corner of the shed, a cloth draped over it, is his Kawasaki Ninja sport bike, metallic blue, 650 cc engine, used but in pristine condition. He removes the cloth.

  “Annandale? Lieutenant Martin Wagner bids you adieu.” He throws on his helmet, presses the button to lift the shed’s door, and starts up the motorcycle.

  94

  BOOKS RINGS the doorbell a fourth time.

  “It could take a while for him to get out of bed,” I say. “The wheelchair and all.”

  Books pounds on the door, his knuckles hitting it just below a plaque with the number 407 in gold.

  Morningside Lane is a quiet street off the main artery of Lathrop Avenue in Annandale, Virginia. Lieutenant Wagner lives in a row of apartments at the intersection; his unit is the end one.

  We get no answer and step off the front porch. Books, keeping his body slightly turned toward the front door—not knowing what to expect—walks over to his car, parked in the driveway. The garage door has a small window. Books raises up on his tiptoes and looks through it. “Van’s not here,” he says. “Garage is empty.�
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  “Where would he be at six forty-five in the morning?”

  “Don’t know. Come on.” All business, firmly in command, Books walks around to the side of the building, bordering Lathrop, where there are some shrubs and a small lawn. We can see a window with the shades pulled. No lights on inside.

  We keep walking to the rear of the house, which serves as a small walkway behind all the units. A wheelchair ramp leads up to the back door. There’s a beige garbage can with the number 407 scrawled on it in black.

  A noise from down the street. We both turn to see a garbage truck using a hydraulic lift to dump the contents of a garbage can into its rear compactor.

  “Wait here,” says Books, and he heads around the building again.

  There is a window by Wagner’s back door, but it’s up too high for me to see in. The lights are off, though. I knock on the back door hard, urgently. Maybe this door’s closer to the bedroom, and he’ll hear it.

  I put my ear to the door and listen. Nothing. No movement.

  “What are you doing?” Books asks when he returns, fitting his hands into a pair of yellow rubber gloves.

  “I might ask you the same thing,” I say.

  “Here.” He tosses me a pair of rubber gloves too.

  “What are we doing, Books?”

  “We’re going to take a look at his garbage,” he says.

  “We don’t have a warrant.”

  “Don’t need one. Not for garbage. It’s considered abandoned. Supreme Court said so.”

  He lifts the lid off the beige garbage can. A garbage bag—kitchen, not lawn—nearly topples out. He catches it and sets it on the ground. “The most recent stuff he tossed out,” he says. “Let’s start here. There’s two other bags inside. A treasure trove.”

  “I’ve never thought of garbage as treasure.”

  “You would if you were an investigator. You’d be amazed what it reveals.”

  He tries to untie the drawstring, but it’s too tight, so he just rips the whole thing open.