I took a beat of my own, looking down at the pile of papers on the desk.
You’re not going to win this argument, I said to myself. They’re going down the wrong road, but you can’t stop them. They’re going to throw everything they’ve got at this, because after 9/11 you can’t be the one person who didn’t take a threat seriously.
Which is exactly what Livermore is counting on.
“So just tell me one thing,” I said, looking him in the eye again. “What does he get out of this?”
“Whatever a psychopath gets out of anything. Revenge. Fame.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not the man I sat across the table from. He doesn’t need any of that.”
“Then what does he need?”
I took a moment to think about it. “I don’t know yet,” I finally said, looking around the rest of the room. “But none of this is real. He’s not here.”
“So where is he?”
“Somewhere else,” I said. “Somewhere he doesn’t want us to see.”
“Well, until you figure that out, we’re going to follow the evidence we actually have. Agent Larkin will take you back to the office.”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“McKnight—”
“You can go chase your terrorist if you want,” I said, taking off the gloves and handing them to him on my way out of the room. “But I’m going to go find Livermore.”
A few minutes later, Larkin and I were alone in the car. His face was red, and he was gripping the steering wheel like he was about to tear it right off its column.
“If you were him,” I said, “where would you go to be alone?”
Larkin didn’t look over at me. He kept driving.
“You need to be able to work. Maybe make some noise. Someplace clean. That’s important to him.”
Still nothing.
“A storage unit,” I said. “Think about it. Metal walls, concrete floor. Electrical outlets. Plenty of privacy. And best of all, you can pay for the place with cash.”
“We’re going back to the office,” he said, keeping his eyes straight ahead.
“Take me somewhere I can rent a car,” I said. “I’ll do this on my own.”
He shook his head.
“Or you can come with me. Actually help me find this guy.”
“Mr. McKnight, I’m already—”
“Call me Alex. I’m not that old.”
“Alex . . .”
“It’s time to decide,” I said.
He let out a breath and shook his head again.
“You either tell them I walked away,” I said, “or you tell them you helped me find out where this guy really lives. It’s up to you.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
IT WAS LIVERMORE’S personal conception of hell.
He was standing in line, in this forgotten little run-down gas station that smelled like the bottom of an old oil drum, after being on the road for seven hours straight. He was somewhere in the middle of New Mexico, trapped in this place, looking it up and down and seeing one horror after another, from the broken linoleum floor to the dust-covered vents on the stand-up cooler to the sagging yellow ceiling tiles. He had passed the bathroom door on the way in, locked up tight. You probably had to ask for the key, and when they handed it to you it would be chained to a urine-stained block of wood. Livermore would go outside and piss against the wall before he did that.
The man behind the register looked like he was eighty years old, an obsolete machine that should have been left out in a field years ago. Livermore had already waited for the man to verify that his hundred-dollar bill was the real thing, taking out his currency pen, drawing a line across the face, then holding it up to the light, the whole operation taking as much time as a U.S. Treasury agent breaking up an international counterfeiting ring. Now he was slowly counting out the change, one crumpled bill at a time, with his old, stained fingers. Livermore’s mind drifted to different ways he could persuade the man to move a little faster, maybe starting with the box cutter hanging in its plastic container on the dusty wall behind him. Start with one ear, see if that motivated the man. Then move to the other. The man was probably already mostly deaf, anyway.
“The reward’s up to two million dollars,” another man said from behind him. “Wouldn’t mind running into him, no matter how dangerous they say he is.”
Livermore came out of his reverie and listened to what the man was saying.
“I’d knock him right out,” the man said, speaking to whoever was standing in line behind him. “Throw him in the back of my truck like a goddamned buck. Go collect my reward.”
Livermore turned around and looked at him, another old man, a foot shorter and starved down to skin, bones, ligaments, and an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down as he rambled on.
“Better believe I’d give him a taste of his own medicine. Get out my tire iron, you know what I’m saying? Give him a once-over. Make him suffer, like he done to those poor women.”
As Livermore took his change and left, he overheard the same man prepaying on pump number seven.
A minute later, the man came back out to his truck and opened up the front door just long enough for Livermore to pop the gas cap. When he shut the door and turned around, he nearly jumped out of his skin. Livermore was standing right in front of him.
“Let me help you out there, sir,” Livermore said, taking the nozzle from the pump.
The man raised a hand to stop him, but Livermore was already squeezing the handle to start the flow of gasoline.
“I overheard what you were saying in there,” Livermore said.
The man just stood there, still confused.
“You really think you could do that?” Livermore said as the numbers on the ancient pump clicked by slowly. “You think you’re capable?”
“Look here,” the man said, “I don’t need you to pump my gas . . .”
“This man you were talking about . . .” Livermore said. “This man who knows all about pain . . . Who spent his whole life studying it . . . Maybe even turning it into an art form. I’m not sure how impressed he’d be by your little ‘once-over’ with the tire iron.”
The man was shifting his weight back and forth from one foot to the other, scanning the other vehicles at the pumps, as if hoping for a friendly face. Someone who might come to his rescue.
“You think it would be your cold metal against his flesh and bones,” Livermore said. “That you’d be the one in control. But you’re wrong. You’d have to meet this man where he lives. To beat him, you’d have to become just like him.”
Another man walked by then. Livermore smiled to him and gave him a friendly nod.
“I see you work in a shop,” Livermore said, reading the lettering on the side of the truck’s door. “So I’m sure you know the value of picking the right tool for the job. Let’s say you used your acetylene torch . . . Can you even imagine what that would be like? Watching parts of your own body being melted away?”
“Listen, buddy . . .” The man was licking his lips and wavering on his feet like he might get sick. His eyes kept darting to the numbers on the pump, as if willing the gas to flow faster into the tank.
“But be careful,” Livermore said as the nozzle finally hit the automatic shutoff point. “By the time you’re done, you’ll be a different man. You might even find you have a real taste for it. Then maybe it’ll be you with the two-million-dollar reward on your head.”
The man kept standing next to his truck as Livermore returned the nozzle to its place beside the pump. The entire exchange would have been a foolish move for most men. Pure insanity to draw attention to himself, to make this man remember him, here at this gas station in the middle of New Mexico. How easy it would be for him to remember Livermore, to recount all of the things that he’d said and to sit with the sketch artist and re-create t
he face that had become burned into his mind.
How easy, assuming that the man lived to see the end of this day.
“You have a good afternoon,” Livermore said, taking another look at the name of the business on the door. “Mr. Henderson of Edgewood, New Mexico.”
Livermore watched the man get behind the wheel of his truck and quickly slam the door shut. He gave a long look over his shoulder as he cranked the truck to life and put it in gear.
If you’re going in my direction, Livermore thought, then maybe I’ll make a stop in Edgewood so we can finish your education.
He got in his own vehicle and watched the truck go back to the expressway. It turned west. Livermore was going east. He put the man out of his mind and kept driving.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AGENT LARKIN made his choice. He was coming with me.
We came up empty on the first two storage facilities. As soon as I saw the third facility, I knew we had a shot.
It was at the end of the street, set back a good hundred yards once you made your way through the gate and down to the main building. I could see the large doors on the units as soon as we got close, and beyond the back fence there was nothing but the desert and the Salt River in the distance.
We walked into the office and had to wait a few minutes, until the manager peeked around the little partition and looked surprised to see us standing there.
“Help you?”
Agent Larkin showed him his badge and told him he was looking for a unit that might have been rented by a man named Livermore. The manager shook his head at the name until Larkin pulled out the photograph and showed it to him. Then the color drained from his face.
“I take it he was here,” Larkin said.
“Yes,” the man said, “but he didn’t call himself Livermore.”
The manager went through a little box of index cards, until he finally found the one he was looking for.
“Gene Lamont,” he said. “Yeah, that’s it.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What was the name? How did he spell that?”
He showed me the card.
Gene Lamont.
“That mean something to you?” Larkin said.
“He’s a bench coach for the Tigers,” I said. “Managed a couple teams, too.”
Larkin just looked at me and waited for more.
“We were teammates in Toledo,” I said. “Both catchers. My last year there, Gene got the September call-up, and I didn’t.”
“That’s either a hell of a coincidence—”
“Or he was already messing with my head when he rented this place months ago.”
“Any chance we could get into that unit?” Larkin asked the manager.
“If you want to,” he said. “But it’s empty now. I made him pack up and leave.”
“Why is that?”
“Strict rule,” the man said. “You can run power tools, anything you want, but no open flames.”
“Open flames?” I said. “What the hell was he doing?”
“He had this whole grill thing set up, with a huge pot of water. First I thought he was cooking meth or something. I mean, what do I know, right? Wouldn’t be the first time. But turns out he was just boiling water.”
“For what?”
The manager shrugged. “Hell if I know. He’d just moved everything in, all these crates and boxes, and then I notice he’s got this big pot of water going. I told him he can’t do that and he, um . . .”
The man stopped talking and looked away from us.
“What happened?” Larkin said.
“Nothing,” the man said a little too loudly, like he was trying to convince himself. “He just said some things and he left.”
“What did he say?”
“Something about rules being made for men with small minds, then something about the Air Force, how it was obviously the right place for me. Not sure how he even knew I was a veteran, let alone an airman.”
Larkin shot me a quick look. This sounded like the Livermore I had met in that interview room, a man who somehow knew your whole life story.
“Then he said something else . . .”
We both waited for him to take a moment, clear his throat, and continue.
“He said he’d read about a man who got trapped in a storage unit for nine weeks straight. Guy was lucky, he said, because he had some food and water in there. But he was still almost dead when they found him.”
The man paused for a moment, bringing it all back.
“He said, even though he was alive when they got him out of there, he never really came back from it. The heat, the darkness, the isolation . . . The man’s mind just snapped. And of course, he said, this happened in New York, so just imagine if it was Arizona, how hot it would get. That man would have been cooked alive.”
He paused again, swallowing hard.
“I told him to get the hell out of here,” he said, “but he just stood there, right where you’re standing now, and he told me that man was locked in accidentally. Because who would do something like that on purpose? And the way he kept looking at me as he drove off . . . I still think about it. Like I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he came back someday.”
“I’m going to give you this,” Larkin said, taking a card out of his wallet and putting it down on the counter. “Just in case you do ever see him again. You call me right away.”
If you’re alive to make the call, I thought. This may be the last man on this earth you’d ever want to piss off.
“What was the exact date?” Larkin said. “The day this all happened?”
“Let’s see,” he said, looking at the file card again. “It had to be, what, October thirteenth? Fourteenth, maybe?”
“If he couldn’t work here,” Larkin said, looking back at me, “he must have gone somewhere else.”
“Pretty sure most places have the same rules,” the manager said. “But why are you looking for him, anyway? Should I be worried?”
Larkin thought about his answer. “If you watch the news on television,” he finally said, “you may see his face. But he’s probably long gone by now, so don’t worry. You just keep that card by your phone and call me if you need to. There’s a reward for information leading to his capture, too.”
The manager still didn’t look like a man who’d be sleeping well that night. But we thanked him and left. When we were back outside, I saw an old Lincoln Continental parked beside the building, the dark blue paint peeling in the harsh sunlight. I looked it over until I finally spotted the sticker in the corner of the windshield. Faded by the same sunlight, the faint outline of the Air Force symbol, the star with two wings.
I never would have noticed this if I wasn’t looking for it, I thought. But Livermore does this automatically. He looks for information about everyone he meets, then uses it to his advantage. Even if his only goal is to unnerve you.
“I don’t understand,” Larkin said. “What does boiling water have to do with making explosives?”
“Whatever he was doing, he took it somewhere else. Middle of October. We could keep checking other storage units . . .”
“You heard the guy.”
“Or we could look somewhere else,” I said. “What would be his next choice?”
“Something private. Someplace he could do whatever he wanted.”
“If you’re him,” I said, “where do you find that?”
A few minutes later, we were sitting in a coffee shop. Larkin had his laptop open and was using the Internet archives to go through the Craigslist ads for October. He wrote down the contact information for half a dozen people who had advertised space for rent.
“This one looks interesting,” I said. “Five hundred square feet of workspace on a secluded road, metal building with good ventilation . . .”
“It’s miles out
of town. Almost in Maricopa.”
“Call the number. See if the space got rented.”
Larkin took out his cell phone and dialed the number. He asked whoever answered the phone if the space had been rented. He looked at me and nodded. He wasn’t even halfway into his next question when the call ended.
“Doesn’t want to talk about it,” he said.
I nodded. “Sounds like somebody we need to go see.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE SUN WAS SETTING behind him when Livermore hit the Texas panhandle. He found an electronics store in Amarillo and went to the photography counter, gave the woman the flash card from his camera, asked for eight-by-ten prints in the best quality she had. While he waited, he went through the rest of the store until he found the GPS trackers.
He settled on a SilverCloud Sync GPS with a magnetic mount. Two inches square, it would fit in any vehicle’s wheel well and operate for days at a time, at temperatures as low as twenty below zero.
When he took the tracker to the counter, the woman was looking at the prints she had made. The half dozen shots of Alex McKnight, walking out of the hotel lobby.
“Are these . . . surveillance pictures?”
She was smiling as she said it. It was obviously the most interesting thing that had happened to her all day.
Livermore put a smile on his own face to mirror hers.
“Yes,” he said. “They are.”
She was in her late twenties, maybe thirty years old. Her hair was dyed a shade of beet red that didn’t look quite natural. A shade she probably should have left behind in her teenage years, Livermore thought. She wore a lot of makeup around her eyes, and her fingernails were painted the same shade of red as her hair.
She thinks this makes her interesting, Livermore said to himself. Painting her hair, painting her nails . . .
“Why were you watching him?” she asked as she paged through them again, one after another. “Is he wanted for something?”
He took the photos from her gently, noting the fingerprints she was leaving on the glossy surface of the paper. He would have to clean them now.
Dead Man Running Page 11
