The Warning Sign

by Mia Marlowe

  Ryan ignored her and stalked to the door in just his towel.

  He threw open the door and waved Matthew and Lulu in without a word. The little dog pranced anxiously between the two men, but they ignored her, eyeing each other with obvious dislike while Sara finished packing.

  When Sara unplugged Valenti’s laptop and began winding up the power cord, Ryan signed to her.

  ‘I’m not done with that.’

  “Oh, yes, you are,” she said. “Quite done.”

  He stepped aside and watched her stow the laptop back in Valenti’s backpack. She still didn’t know if she’d give it to Matt yet, but she darn well wasn’t going to leave it with Ryan.

  A crime family would definitely find use for a program that fixes elections. She tried to remember if going to MIT in search of a laptop had been her idea or his.

  She needed to think. But everything was so muddled, she almost couldn’t form a coherent thought. Finally, she had everything packed and all that was left was for her to walk out the door.

  She squared her shoulders and started that way, determined not to look at Ryan again.

  He stopped her with a hand to her wrist.

  “Let her go,” Matthew said in a quiet tone, but even with her impairment, the menace was unmistakable.

  “This will only take a moment, detective,” Ryan said, purposely turning his back to Matthew and forcing her to meet his gaze. “Sara, whatever else you may believe about me, I want you to believe this. I love you. That hasn’t changed.”

  He reached to tuck the lock of hair that fell forward across her face behind her ear. “It won’t ever change.”

  If she lived to be a hundred, she’d remember the way he looked as he said those words. Earnest, intent.

  If only she could believe him.

  Chapter 27

  “Gotcha the top of the line in deadbolts.” Mr. Kaplan let her into her apartment and pressed the new keys into Sara’s hand. “That other young fella you sent around said to make sure you had the best. A lady should never settle for less than the best, you know.“

  The stoop-shouldered super tossed a squint-eyed look at Matthew that spoke eloquently enough, but he still launched into a muttered tirade that made Sara momentarily grateful for her hearing impairment. Back when Matthew first left her for Brittany, Mr. Kaplan had railed long and loudly against him for “taking up with a light skirt.” The old man declared that Matthew wasn’t good enough for Sara in the first place, not by half. He probably meant it kindly, but at the time, only Sara had been hurt by his words.

  “Old fool,” Matthew said once he was gone.

  “He’s all right. Now you,” Sara said, standing by the door and waving him out after Mr. Kaplan’s shuffling form. “Goodbye, Matthew.”

  Matthew shook his head. “I can’t leave you alone.”

  “You don’t have a choice. This is my place. I won’t allow you to stay and that’s that.”

  “Look, I only want to protect you,” he said, shoving his fists deeply into his jacket pockets, as he always did when he was perturbed. “I don’t mean anything by it.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “All right. I’ll admit it. I want you back, Sara. I—” He must have seen something in her face that made him hold back the rest of what he’d intended to say.

  “This is not a good time.” She didn’t budge from the door.

  “It isn’t a good time to be stubborn either,” he said. “There’s somebody out there trying to kill you, for God’s sake.”

  “The operative words in that sentence are ‘out there.’ I’ll be fine here.”

  “This is not a secure building. You need me to stay with you.”

  “That’s what Ryan said, too.”

  Matthew’s head jerked in surprise at that. “Well, he was talking sense. Right now, all I’m concerned about is your safety. If it will make you feel better, I promise I won’t press you about anything else.”

  “No, you won’t,” she agreed. “Because you won’t be here.”

  “I know you don’t want to hear this, but this attitude of yours right now is part of why we split up,” Matthew said.

  Sara laughed unpleasantly. “Funny, I thought we split because you couldn’t keep your pants zipped.”

  “Ok, I deserve that,” he said. “What I did was wrong and I have no excuse. But after you lost your hearing, you were so busy trying to prove you didn’t anybody’s help, you pushed everybody away. Even me.”

  “So now you cheated because I’m deaf.”

  “No, but if you had acted like you needed me once in a while…“

  “I did need you, Matthew,” she said. “I needed you to keep your vows. I lost my hearing. I needed you to love me anyway and you didn’t.”

  “I know you won’t believe this, but I do love you,” he said, his brown eyes glistening. “I failed you once. I don’t want to do it again. Please let me protect you.”

  “And who’s going to protect me from you?” she asked. “No one has ever hurt me more than you did.”

  He started methodically laying out reasons for him to stay, but she wasn’t buying it. Sara had a real fight on her hands, but she finally convinced Matt that nothing he could say would move her to allow him to stay. Even repeating Ryan’s surprising suggestion that she should let Matthew stay didn’t sway her. Unless he wanted her to report him as trespassing, he had to go.

  She needed to be alone. She needed to think. And she couldn’t do that with Matthew acting like they were going to pick up where they’d left off. Even if he had called it quits with Brittany, Sara couldn’t let him come home.

  At least, not now.

  She was so confused, she couldn’t be sure how she’d feel later. She’d wakened this morning in love with what she thought was a wonderful man. She was certain of her future, more certain than she’d been of anything since the meningitis. But she was poised at the pinnacle of a rollercoaster. The bottom dropped from beneath her and her stomach hadn’t caught up with the rest of her yet. Now she put no faith whatsoever in how she was feeling.

  “Anytime, day or night, if you have so much as a twitch that something’s not right, you call me,” Matthew said before she finally shooed him out the door.

  She leaned on it and breathed a sigh of relief. But once the silence in her apartment settled in, she found it no easier to think than when he was hovering over her. Her thoughts chased themselves in unproductive circles. She couldn’t deal with her personal problems just now. It was all too raw.

  “I can’t think about it now,” she told herself. Avoidance was an intimate friend, comforting and dull as an old blanket. She reached for it to cover her shredded heart. “I’ll think about it later.”

  So as a diversion, she started to pull Anthony Valenti’s laptop from the backpack. She might not be the wizard Ryan clearly was, but she might stumble across something his more methodical investigation hadn’t. She stopped when, in an inner pocket of the backpack, she found a cell phone.

  Sara had a hand-shake acquaintance with computers at the best of times. But texts on a cell phone were her lifeline and she started unlocking this one’s secrets almost immediately.

  The phone held 7 missed call messages. Those would have to wait for someone who could listen to them. Since the time-date stamp for all of them was after Valenti’s time of death, those would be of interest to the police. They would exonerate the callers. People didn’t usually try to talk to a dead guy without a medium and a crystal ball.

  But Sara was able to access Valenti’s recent text messages with ease. Most of them were totally innocuous, but one from his travel agent confirmed that Anthony Valenti was planning a vacation soon—to Buenos Aires, of all places. The e-ticket had not been used.

  He’d missed his flight. Would he like to re-book?

  Sara wondered if Argentina was one of those South American countries with such difficult extradition policies. If so, Valenti knew what he was dabbling with could land him in serious trouble and he
’d planned an escape.

  Or he was afraid of someone with even more teeth than the legal system.

  The dead gray eyes of the man in the T station rose up to haunt her. She swallowed hard.

  Maybe she should have let Matthew stay. She glanced over at her own cell phone on the dining room table.

  He was only a call away. So was Ryan. They’d both promised to come running. But off-hand, she couldn’t say which of them she trusted least at the moment.

  So she decided to trust herself.

  If she was careful. If she took precautions, she’d be fine. She was on the third floor of an admittedly semi-secure building. A key was required for entrance to the lobby, but the residents left it ajar more often than not.

  But she did have a good deadbolt on the door now. She had Lulu to warn her of anyone trying to enter unannounced.

  What could happen in her own home?

  She turned her attention back to Valenti’s cell phone.

  “Who’ve you been calling, Cousin Tony?” she asked aloud.

  She scanned his call log and found that in the last week of Anthony Valenti’s life he’d been a very busy boy. Since she couldn’t hear well enough to call the numbers to find out who he’d been talking to, she was temporarily stumped. Then she remembered her TTY.

  The Text Telephone device was for use with a land line.She didn’t use it often since most of her family and co-workers had cell phones. Even her dad, who had little use for “new-fangled gadgets,” had learned to do it.

  Fortunately, when Sara chose her TTY device at the outset of her impairment, Matthew had insisted she go with the top of the line, even though it cost him a month’s pay. He wanted her to have the one with the most features. This one had a caller ID. First of all, it allowed Sara to be sure people she called with the TTY had the reciprocal equipment needed to receive her call. And second, it offered a visual display so she could be certain the number she dialed belonged to the party she intended to reach.

  Even if the numbers showed no reciprocal TTY, she could still use it like a reverse phone directory.

  She ran through Valenti’s call log, imputing the numbers and coming up with things like Bertolucci’s Pizza and Hung Wang’s Chinese Take-Out. Then she decided not to try every number, but just concentrate on the ones with multiple calls. She punched in the number with the most hits.

  ‘Commonwealth of Massachusetts Election Commission’ glowed on the LED read-out.

  She entered the extension.

  ‘Harold Fortis’

  Surprisingly enough, the government office was not equipped with a TTY, so she’d have to learn more about Mr. Fortis another way.

  “That’s why God created Google,” she told Lulu. Sara was tempted to use Valenti’s lightning fast laptop, hoping to piggyback on the wireless network glowing from the coffee shop next to her building. But she wondered if that might also give some enterprising nearby nerd access to all of Valenti’s hard drive.

  She decided not to risk it. So she booted up her own older, much slower desk top computer and searched for Mr. Harold Fortis the old-fashioned way.

  With dial-up.

  ~

  Neville stared at his surveillance screen. No doubt about it. One of Sara Kelley’s dots had moved. He’d watched with hopefulness when one left the secure high-rise at midmorning and started along the Mystic River. Then when it turned back, he remembered the damn dog.

  Still, perhaps he could use that.

  The regular habits of his victims were his best friends. Accidents happened when people were on auto-pilot. And dogs had to pee with regularity.

  He poured himself another cup of coffee and settled in to watch, glad he’d invested in the microdot system. This was so much more efficient than an actual stakeout. Especially since he didn’t want to chance Sara Kelley catching sight of him again.

  At least not until he was ready for it to be her last time.

  Neville’s TV was on, the volume set so low he was forced to read the captions on the all news channel. It was important to keep up with the latest happenings. Never knew when something might come in useful. The ticker scrolling across the screen announced that a chunk of the Tobin Bridge fell off and hit some poor slob’s boat.

  “Serves him right for being so stinkin’ rich that he can afford throw money into a hole in the water,” Neville said with disgust.

  Then he remembered that once he became Sol and accessed the accounts in Nassau, he’d have tons of money himself. A boat to run around the Caribbean in might be just the thing.

  His gaze turned back to his computer screen. The dot that was Sara Kelley had set out again, this time trudging back toward her apartment.

  Neville controlled his breathing. She might only be picking up a change of clothing.

  The listening devices he’d planted in her apartment were still operational. He plugged in his headsets and adjusted the volume. Sara Kelley and her ex were having a disagreement, but they must have been moving around or signing some of it because he only caught one word in three. Some people should learn that fighting wasn’t as effective if you didn’t scream at each other.

  He glanced back at the TV again. A windowless old building downtown was being imploded tomorrow to make way for a new condo development. Some historical preservation society or other had protested themselves blue, but the building was coming down anyway.

  “Bunch of fags and old hippies,” Neville decided as pictures of the protesters flashed on the screen. They’d conceded defeat this time since the building was so far gone it would take the earth to restore, but it was important, they said, to remember and cherish the past.

  Screw the past. Neville was much more interested in his future. He’d probably need a nice condo on the beach somewhere once he got tired of the boat. Or maybe he’d be able to afford both.

  He let his eyes drift shut for a moment imagining a fresh breeze and soft sand beneath his feet. The French impressionist Gauguin had done his best work on a beach. Granted, the Caribbean was not Tahiti, but Neville was sure he’d find inspiration there.

  Tourists went missing without a trace with astonishing regularity, but the lure of sun and surf kept them coming. There would be plenty to go around.

  His headset squawked with static and roused him from his increasingly pleasant daydreams.

  Neville frowned. As much as he’d paid for this equipment, it should work better than that.

  He’d toyed with idea of a camera when he bought the listening devices. Could have made this more interesting, given him a chance to study his subject in different poses.

  A nice little bathroom mirror shot would have been his first choice. The thought of Sara Kelley stepping out of the shower, her skin glowing and rosy from the hot water, steam curling ghost-like around her breasts—

  No, that would smack too much of voyeurism and Neville was first and foremost an artist. He wouldn’t cheapen his work with tawdry self-gratification.

  Still, what was art, but self-expression? And if he expressed himself in sensuality…yes, that might be a fitting cap to this whole finale, this magnum opus he was planning.

  He’d killed more than a few women in the course of his business, but he’d made it a point not to become overly familiar with any of them. For one thing, his mentor warned him that no matter how satisfying it might be at the time, sex left untold bits of a body behind.

  Semen was just the beginning of the worries, even with a condom. There were hairs to consider. Epithelials—those damning little microscopic skin cells a person sheds daily, fibers from clothing.

  Blood, if things got rough. And what would sex be if it didn’t get a little rough?

  No, sex was a minefield of finger-pointing evidence and possible errors.

  Worse, it clouded a man’s judgment. A guy might actually start to reconsider the kill, Old Sol had warned. A certain professional distance was required.

  The flickering TV screen caught his eye again. The news station was showing file f
ootage of other buildings collapsing in on themselves in controlled detonations. The entire structure was reduced to a tangled heap of canting beams and fine powder.

  A body would never be found in a mess like that, Neville thought. Depending on where it was when the charges went off, there’d be nothing to find.

  And if a body wouldn’t be found later, what might have happened to it before made no difference at all.

  Chapter 28

  Neville watched with excitement as the dot that represented his target left her building and began moving at traffic speed toward downtown Boston along the I-93 corridor.

  He knew her car was still in the shop.

  “Must be taking a cab, unless the boyfriend or ex is driving her,” he reasoned. “Where are you going, Sara Kelley?”

  Without conscious volition, his hand slipped to his groin to ease his growing erection.

  ~

  No further assistance possible.

  The message, which arrived by the hand of a silent currier, was composed of letters cut from magazines and affixed to a plain white sheet of paper. Harold Fortis was sure forensic testing would reveal no fingerprints. He crumpled the paper and started to toss it into the trash. Then he thought better of it and sent it through the shredder under his desk.

  The election commissioner mopped his brow with his handkerchief for the third time in the last fifteen minutes. It was a bright August day, the sky an endless blue and November a long march of uncertain days ahead.

  This whole thing is getting completely out of hand.

  It had all seemed so easy when that little rat from MIT first approached him.

  Anthony Valenti was the consummate dreamer.

  “I worship the goddess of technology, but I am not blind to her limitations,” he had said in Harold’s office. “Some things we still cannot trust to her and an election is one of them.”

  Even though Valenti and his team of crackerjack egg-heads were tasked with designing the ALICE system, he’d effectively sabotaged his own brainchild as a matter of principle. No matter how clever a system was, no matter what security protocols were in place, Valenti insisted, there was always a person out there who was clever enough to subvert it.