by Robert Ryan
Zeke wiped his eyes, fast-forwarded through the rest of the messages and headed into the kitchen.
Leah walked in just as he finished putting the sandwiches on the table. The shower had washed away some of her hospital pallor. Her long dark hair had regained some of its luster, and a hint of color had returned to her cheeks. She wore her familiar blue terrycloth robe with the red roses embroidered over the pocket. Zeke hugged her. “God, you look beautiful.”
“You too.”
They held the embrace, then sat at the small kitchen table. “Nothing fancy,” Zeke said. “Baloney and cheese sandwiches and chips.”
“Perfect. I have been longing for a potato chip.”
“You came to the right place.”
Between bites Zeke said, “Reese left a message, offering us any help we need. Wanted to let us know him and his family love us.”
“They’re the best.” Through tear-blurred eyes she added, “I love them too.”
They finished lunch and went into the living room. Leah laid back on the sofa and used Zeke’s lap as a footrest. He gently massaged her feet.
“What day is this?” she asked.
“Tuesday. October 9. Not quite a week.”
“The week from hell.”
“More than you know.”
“What do you mean?”
Zeke regretted having said it. He didn’t want to get into all that now. “I’ll tell you all about it later.”
“Tell me now.”
“Later,” he said. “It can wait. Everything can wait.”
He rubbed her feet until she fell asleep. He began to doze, waking up periodically to stare at her, always with the same thought.
She was all he had left.
Zeke fixed an elaborate salad for dinner. When they finished eating Leah said, “Tell me what you were going to tell me, Zeke.”
“Come on. I need to show you something first.” They went into Zeke’s office. He pulled up a chair so she could sit beside him at his desk. The scroll translations lay before them on the desktop.
“The night of the shooting, you remember I went to see my old college professor, Dr. Connolly?”
She nodded.
“He was in bad shape. Dying. When I left him that night I called 911 to have someone come get him. Once you were finally stabilized at the hospital, I called them again to see how he was. It turned out he was dead when the ambulance got there.”
“Ah, Zeke. I’m sorry to hear that.”
Zeke made a slight shrug. “It’s sad, it’s always sad, but it was his time. He was pushing ninety, and it seemed like he wanted to go. Anyway, he was a genius on ancient language. These are his translations of two ancient scrolls he gave me. The scrolls themselves are in the safe. I’ve skimmed the translations. I got the gist, but my mind isn’t really up to it now. I don’t want you getting bogged down in them, either. There’ll plenty of time for that later. But you should at least look them over before we have this conversation.”
She became immersed in the translations, finally looking up at Zeke. “I know that experts pick these things apart for years, but just taking them at face value, they’re mind-boggling. A warning from God’s personal scribe. And Lot was the one whose wife turned into a pillar of salt, right?”
“Right. Let me put it all in context.”
He told her everything he and Connolly had discussed.
“So Lot’s scroll could lead to Satan and Hell?”
“Dr. Connolly thought so. I told him I’d look into it. I haven’t yet, but I will, when I’m up to it. For now, let me just tell you what’s happened since I got the scrolls. I hadn’t had them for an hour when that scumbag started shooting in the Bipartisan.”
He rushed past that raw wound to tell her the rest: the vision outside her hospital window, the voice on the phone saying “you are mine,” Michael Price calling to say he would be questioning his family’s killer. He told her about the night in the jungle so she would fully understand how bizarre that was. The Army had sworn him to secrecy, and until now he had told no one, but she needed to know absolutely everything she was getting into. No secrets.
“Dear God,” she said when he finished. “What happened at the restaurant is bad enough, but for you to have gone through something like this twice.” She cast an uneasy glance toward the safe. “You think maybe the scrolls had something to do with what happened? That this whole thing about the Devil might be real?”
“I’m trying not to, but I can’t ignore it. Dr. Connolly believed the scrolls were cursed, and a lot of bad, strange stuff has happened since I got them.”
“So you’re thinking that maybe you’ve been chosen to try to track down Satan. Is that where we’re at?”
“I don’t know. Dr. Connolly tried to make that case, but I didn’t buy it. I’ll have to read the translations more thoroughly, read his notes, do a lot of research. After that it’ll be time for some soul-searching. But all that’s for later. Right now I just want us to be together, to help each other get through this. The rest can wait.”
“That’s what I want, too.”
“We’ll just stay in, let the world spin without us for a while. I stocked up on groceries, so we’re good there.”
“Perfect.”
“There’s just one thing I need to go out for.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m meeting Michael Price tomorrow morning. After he dropped that bomb on me, I felt like I had to. After that it’s just you and me.”
She nodded. “Tonight I’d just like to get a good night’s sleep. But tomorrow night, you know what I’d like to do?”
“What?”
“Watch It’s A Wonderful Life.”
A feeble smile forced its way through his pain. “I can set up the home theater Dad gave me.”
Her grip on his hands tightened. “Pick up some Raisinets while you’re out, to go with the popcorn.”
“I will. And some Kleenex.”
CHAPTER 18
Zeke thought about “voices” the next morning as he stood in the bitter cold staring at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Michael Price claimed he’d heard one that night in the jungle. The madman at the Bipartisan said the voice of Satan made him do it. No matter how hard Zeke tried to keep an open mind, he’d always come to the same conclusion: hogwash.
Until now. Father Connolly had specifically warned about voices, and he’d heard one yesterday morning when Price called: “You’re mine now.”
But he’d been half asleep. It could have been part of that bizarre dream. It struck him that he was having a lot of bizarre dreams lately.
Whatever. He needed to clear his mind for this meeting. When he’d gotten back from Nam, one of the very first things he’d done was come here. He’d vowed that if he ever saw Price again, he’d make him come to the Wall and confront these voices. It was a day Zeke never thought would come, and now here it was.
He went to a granite bench and sat. The cold shock to his rear made him wish he’d dressed more warmly. In the wake of the murders he’d lost all track of time, but now he remembered. October. And it’s this cold.
Figuring out the day took a minute of mental gymnastics. Wednesday. The sky looked liked snow again. Jesus.
When he’d gone to his parents’ house to pick out clothes for them to be buried in, he’d taken his dad’s aviator jacket as something to remember him by. He was wearing it now, but it wasn’t getting the job done. He jammed his hands in the pockets, wishing he’d worn gloves.
Two men walked in front of the Wall, looking at the names. One was older, the right age to have been in Vietnam. The other could be his grown son. They wore dark suits under their overcoats, probably on the way to work. The older man pointed to a particular name, and the younger man nodded. In their contemplation Zeke saw a nation coming to terms with the embers of its still-smoldering grief.
He looked at his watch. Almost nine. He’d gotten there early to look around and prepare himself ment
ally.
A man came walking briskly in his direction, a large Styrofoam cup in each hand. He was well-dressed: expensive-looking black wool overcoat, dark suit, perfectly-tied tie that looked like silk, brightly shined black loafers. Was it him? He was the right size. Had the same no-nonsense athletic walk.
He’d be in his late fifties now, but the smooth, handsome face hadn’t changed much. Zeke noted the time. Nine on the dot. Michael Price sat down beside him and held out one of the cups. “Coffee?”
Zeke hesitated. He didn’t want anything from this man, but he’d been wanting a cup of coffee, had been wondering if he had time to find a street vendor and get back by nine. He took the cup.
Price reached into a coat pocket. “You liked cream and sugar, as I recall.” He laid a napkin on the bench and placed a handful of creams and sugars and a wooden stirrer on top of it.
“Good memory,” Zeke said.
“Yes.”
Zeke busied himself fixing his coffee. “This is bizarre on a cosmic scale.”
“Absolutely.”
“Of all the gin joints in all the world, you had to walk into mine.” Zeke said it utterly without humor and made no attempt to imitate the voice.
Price’s face remained expressionless. “Bogart. Casablanca. Very apt.”
Zeke put the lid back on his coffee and cradled his hands around the cup to warm them. “So. By what sadistic swipe of the Grim Reaper’s scythe do you happen to be the one called in on this case?”
“I’ve come to be considered an expert in the study of Satanic murders. This guy adamantly claims he was doing the Devil’s work. The prison doctors were getting nowhere, so they called me in to see if I can get inside his head.”
“Have you seen him yet?”
“No. I just got in last night. I’m interviewing him tomorrow morning. That’s why I called you so early. I wanted to let you know personally, before you saw it on the news. I didn’t want you to think I’d just waltz into something like that without giving you a heads up.”
They stared at one another. Price was being a standup guy about this, Zeke had to give him that. “So,” he said, “you’re an expert on ‘the Devil made me do it’ murderers. How did that come about? Other than from your first-hand knowledge of having been one.”
For the first time Price broke eye contact, looking in the general direction of his shoes. Unexpectedly, Zeke felt a twinge of remorse for making the remark. The feeling was quickly chased by anger at feeling sympathy for a mass murderer who had gotten off scot-free.
“I deserved that,” Price said. “And a lot more.” He glanced toward the Wall, then back at Zeke. “When we got out, I did a lot of soul-searching. I kept asking myself about the voice in my head that night, urging me to kill that family for lying. I couldn’t be sure I’d heard one. Or if I did, whose it might have been. For a while I told myself it was the voice of Satan, then I told myself it was Randy Stokes, my childhood friend who had enlisted when the Vietnam War was still going on. But I finally had to admit that was nonsense. It could have been me, in my own crazed mind, just yelling to shoot.”
Price looked as uncomfortable telling it as Zeke was hearing it. A few grainy snowflakes swirled past.
“What’s the story on this Randy Stokes? You yelled out his name that night.”
Price looked away again, searching for words to exhume a buried skeleton. As he told the story, his gaze kept drifting inward.
“Randy Stokes was my best friend. His family lived directly behind us. If you hopped our fence you were in their yard. We were born on the same day—July 2nd. It was inevitable that we’d become friends, I guess. We were inseparable. Our parents used to joke that we were more like twins than twins. Whenever we could, we took the same classes, played on the same teams, all of that.
“Anyway, when we graduated from high school in 1972, the Vietnam war was intense. With our birthdays being so close to July 4th, we’d practically been raised to be patriots, so naturally we decided to enlist as soon as we could. Our 18th birthdays fell on a Sunday, so we went down to the recruitment office the next day.”
He looked in the general direction of the Wall again, and Zeke could see that the bad part was coming. Price’s expression hardened, as if to dam up some painful emotion.
“Randy went into the recruiter’s office while I waited in the reception area. By the time he came out I had…changed my mind, would be the nice way to say it. Turned chicken shit was more like it. I had hung my best friend out to dry. The look of betrayal in his eyes was the most painful thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve looked into the eyes of some of the worst killers on the planet.”
Zeke’s eyes bore into him. “So you were trying to atone for what you’d done by convincing yourself he was one of the guys we were sent to rescue?”
“Yes. Shortly after he enlisted, his parents were notified that he’d been taken prisoner and was being held in the Hanoi Hilton. But then—”
“Price, come on. He enlisted in ’72. We were there in ’93. The Hanoi Hilton would have long been shut down by then.”
“I know. The POWs were released in February of ’73, but Randy wasn’t one of them. The Army could never confirm what happened. Escaped or dead, they said, and he was classified as MIA.”
“Death seems most likely, but even if he escaped, maybe he just didn’t come home. Maybe he wanted to start fresh somewhere else.”
“Randy wasn’t like that. He would have gotten in touch with somebody—me, most likely—but no one ever heard from him again. You’re probably right. Death makes the most sense. But negotiations with the North Vietnamese were touch and go, and if one of the POWs died right when they were getting released, things could have gotten ugly. Maybe they just got rid of the body. But I couldn’t live with myself without knowing. I’d already abandoned him once. I wasn’t going to abandon him again.”
Zeke was shaking his head. “It still doesn’t add up. You had no way of knowing that you’d eventually end up on such a far-fetched mission as Operation Lazarus. What was the thought process there?”
“I couldn’t let it go. I told myself that if I enlisted and made myself an expert on POWs and MIAs, I’d be able to get deeper into the records and maybe come up with something the Army had missed. I knew it was crazy, but I didn’t care. Logic didn’t have a whole lot to do with it. Because part of me knew I was also enlisting to prove to Randy that I wasn’t a coward. Funny how the mind works, isn’t it?”
He waited for a comment, but Zeke merely kept up his probing stare.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I was gung ho from day one. My goal was always to make it to Delta, because I knew that they were the ones to go on these kinds of missions if one ever came up. At the same time I made it my business to become an expert on POWs/MIAs. All that, combined with combat experience—I had been in Desert Storm—made me perfect for your team. The rest is history.”
“Very bad history. So after the Army, what? You got into studying killers?”
“I couldn’t just ignore what had happened, Zeke. I am human. I do have a conscience. I knew what I had done. I had murdered an innocent family. Nothing could change that, but…at least I could try to understand it. Maybe figure out some small way to atone for it. Not just to that family, but—” he looked toward the Wall again—“to those four guys who were left behind.” He looked at Zeke. “Because of me.”
Price was saying all the right things, striking just the right note of contrition. Zeke continued to study his face for signs that he was lying but couldn’t find any.
It didn’t really matter. None of this really mattered. He was too emotionally drained to care anymore about things that couldn’t be changed. All he felt was a gnawing emptiness. He started to take a sip from the coffee but left it sitting on the bench, sorry he’d accepted it in the first place.
Price’s expression had changed to the neutral mask of the professional psychologist. “You asked how I became an expert in this type of thing. I didn’t right a
way. I walked around like a zombie for a couple years, trying to make sense of it all. I had to make a living, so I used the electronic surveillance training I’d gotten in the Army to start my own business. But I still couldn’t get on the right side of things, Zeke. I was going to clubs a lot in New York, drowning my sorrows in the fast lane. I got to know some club owners, one thing led to another, and I starting doing jobs for some shady characters. Drug dealers eavesdropping on other drug dealers cutting in on their turf. Rich guys cheating on their trophy wives while trying to catch their wives cheating on them. I also did a lot of work for executives who had gotten busted, white collar crime. I became kind of a go-to guy in that circle. They’d hire me to try and catch the prosecutor or the cops who had arrested them doing something illegal, figuring that might get their case thrown out, or at least improve their chances of getting off. Instead of helping the cops catch the crooks, I was helping the crooks catch the cops. It was killing me inside, but I was caught up. I was making fabulous money. Evil pays better than good.”
“That’s a crock. You were trafficking in scum and you knew it. To go down that road after what you had done…how could you even live with yourself?”
“Finally I couldn’t. I shut down the business and decided it was time to get right. To face what I had done in Nam. To face myself. I decided to study cases like mine, see if I could learn anything that might help to keep them from happening. And in the process maybe find out why I did what I did.”
The grainy snow had turned into small flakes. A young couple went by, obviously in the grip of the profound sadness that emanated from the Wall. If they only knew that they’d just passed the two men responsible for one of the worst horrors that ever took place in Vietnam.
“I went back to college,” Price said. “Got a Ph.D. in what was then called Abnormal Psychology. That led to where I am now. Forensic Psychologist.”
“Interesting. I walked around like a zombie, too. Then I went back to college, like you did, looking for answers. Studied philosophy and theology, trying to see if the greatest thinkers, after thousands of years, had come up with any.”
