The Escape Artist

by Brad Meltzer

“And that’s all you know about her?”

  “What else is there to know? It’s just a case,” Zig insisted, his voice unwavering.

  “Ziggy, I love you, but do you have any idea why, when the corpses come in, you’re the one who gets all the facial injuries?”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Don’t play modest. If a soldier gets shot in the chest, they get assigned to any mortician. But when someone takes three bullets to the face, why does that body always go to you?”

  “Because I can sculpt. I’m good with the clay.”

  “It’s more than talent. Last year, when that Marine was hit by ISIS rocket fire, every other mortician said it should be a closed casket—that you should wrap him in gauze. You were the only one stubborn enough to spend fourteen straight hours wiring together his shattered jaw, then smoothing it over with clay and makeup, just so you could give his parents far more ease than they ever should’ve expected at their son’s funeral. But y’know what that makes you?”

  “Someone who’s proud to serve his country.”

  “I love my country too. I’m talking about your job, Zig. When you take these horrors—lost hands, lost faces, lost lips—and you make them more palatable, y’know what that makes you?” Before Zig could answer, Waggs blurted, “A master liar. That’s what every mortician sells, Zig. Lies. You do it for the right reasons—you’re trying to help people through their hardest times. But every day, to hide those horrors, you need to be a first-class liar. And you’re getting far too good at it.”

  Zig went to say something, but nothing came out. Closing his eyes, he turned his back to the body.

  There was a chime through the phone. Waggs had something. “Okay, I found Nola Brown. Twenty-six years old,” Waggs said. “Same age as Maggie, isn’t she?”

  At just the mention of his daughter’s name, Zig spun toward the body, moving so fast, and so off-balance, his elbow clipped the silver bucket that was filled with—

  Nonono! The gut bucket…!

  Zig lunged. The bucket, with its gruesome stew, began to tip.

  Zig was still reaching for it, still holding tight to his phone, as he started to yell. The bucket continued to tip, its contents sliding toward the lip.

  Pffftt.

  There was a loud, wet splat. For two decades, Zig had become accustomed to the gore that accompanied death. But as he looked down at the mess across the shiny gray floor, something caught his eye.

  “Ziggy, we have a problem,” Waggs said in his ear.

  Zig barely heard her, focusing on the gray mass that he recognized as the stomach. Something wasn’t right. There was a round lump, like when a snake swallows a rat. He leaned closer, making sure he was seeing it right. He was. There was something inside.

  “Ziggy, you there?” Waggs asked as Zig put the phone on speaker and set it down on the gurney.

  He moved even closer. Whatever was inside, it wasn’t round or smooth. It was jagged and poking at the inner wall like…like a crumpled piece of paper.

  Zig’s mouth went dry. He’d seen this before.

  During 9/11, one of the victims on the Pentagon flight knew the end was coming…and was smart enough to know that if you’re ever in a plane crash, the best way to leave a note to your loved ones is to write it down and swallow the paper. The liquids in your stomach and intestines can protect the paper, since those’re the last parts of your body that burn. Back then, Zig found the note in the victim’s intestine. He cut it open with a scalpel, then tweezed his fingers inside. It was perfectly preserved. For Fallen #227, a final private goodbye.

  “—ou hearing me? I found the fingerprints!” Waggs shouted.

  Zig still didn’t answer. Grabbing a scalpel from his work station and readjusting his medical gloves, he got down on one knee and sliced, making the hole big enough to—

  There.

  Zig pulled out the crumpled piece of paper. It was squished and soggy—easy for a medical examiner to miss—but otherwise intact.

  Slowly peeling it open and being careful not to rip it, he could see the thin gray pencil lines…with frantic, shaky letters. The ultimate message in the ultimate bottle.

  “Zig, are you listening? I ran the prints. That body you’re looking at—whoever she is—that’s not Nola Brown.”

  Zig nodded to himself, his mouth sagging open as he read and reread the handwritten note—the dying words—of the female stranger lying on the table in front of him:

  Nola, you were right.

  Keep running.

  2

  Naperville, Illinois

  For five hours, Daewon Yamaguchi had been staring at his laptop screen.

  There were worse jobs, especially for a twenty-four-year-old who’d been arrested twice for forgery and computer trespass. He could be like his pal Z0rk, who used to hack credit card numbers from an auto parts chain until he was caught by the Feds and threatened with thirty years in prison.

  Today, Z0rk was a $40,000/year employee for the US government. A few of Daewon’s other friends took their talents (and a bit more money) to work for Syria and Iran. And still others honed their skills at local hacking conventions, though Daewon knew that most of those were government fronts designed to sniff out local prospects. This wasn’t the go-go early 2000s anymore. These days, most hacking was state sponsored. But not all of it.

  Sucking on a peanut M&M and letting the candy coating melt away, Daewon settled in for his sixth hour staring at the screen. It was the ultimate irony. Hackers get into hacking because they don’t want desk jobs—but all hacking is is a desk job.

  By hour seven, Daewon was still sitting there, staring. Same at hour eight. And hour nine. Then…

  Ping.

  There it was. On-screen.

  Picking up his phone, Daewon dialed the number they made him learn by heart.

  “Talk,” a man with a woodchipper of a voice answered.

  This was what they lied about. The worst part of the job wasn’t staring at a screen. It was dealing with him.

  He never gave a name. That didn’t stop Daewon from looking for it. But what unnerved Daewon was that he couldn’t find it. And Daewon could find anything.

  “Talk,” the man insisted.

  “The site you asked me to watch… You said to call you when someone pinged it. I just…someone pinged it.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman. Amy Waggs,” Daewon replied, clicking through a few screens. “She’s FBI, just like you said. Went straight for the Nola Brown file.”

  The man went silent. “Is Ms. Waggs looking for herself or someone else?”

  “Checking,” Daewon replied, tossing back another peanut M&M as a new screen loaded. “From what I can tell, she’s on her phone right now. I’m trying to see who she’s talking to.”

  “You’re telling me you can hack into an FBI agent’s phone?”

  “Only when they’re dumb enough to use their personal one instead of a secure line. Swear to Steve Jobs, whoever invented working from home should get a big wet kiss on the mouth.”

  The man with the woodchipper voice didn’t say a word.

  “Okay, here we go,” Daewon eventually said, leaning closer to the screen. “302 phone number. Delaware. Truthfully, I didn’t think they allowed anyone to live in Delaware anymore.”

  The man still didn’t answer.

  “Jim Zigarowski. That’s who she’s talking to,” Daewon added. “Says he’s employed at the Dover Port Mortuary, whatever that is.”

  There was a long silence on the other line. “Zig,” the man finally whispered. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.”

  3

  Dover, Delaware

  It was nearly midnight as Zig rang the doorbell of the split-level home. Of course there was no answer.

  “C’mon, Guns, don’t do this tonight!” Zig called out, hopping in place to stay warm.

  The door still didn’t open.

  Zig rang the bell again out of spite, then followed the ove
rgrown lawn to his left, toward the garage.

  On cue, a chuuk and a loud whirr sent the garage door rolling upward.

  “Slapshot!” a muscular black man called from inside, swiping a hockey stick as he faced the back wall of the garage. With a punishing swing that nearly knocked the glasses from his face, the man swatted an orange puck into a net. From there, on a flat-screen TV attached to the garage’s back wall, a videogame hockey puck continued to fly, following the initial trajectory and going far wide of the computerized Russian goalie guarding the net.

  “Why does Lake Placid hate me so much?” Marine Corps Master Gunnery Sergeant Francis Steranko asked.

  “Weak players blame the field,” Zig said.

  “It’s not a field; it’s a rink.”

  “It’s a television. Now you wanna hand me the twig?” Zig asked, reaching for the hockey stick. “I’m still three shots down from our last game. My manhood’s on the line.”

  It wasn’t Zig’s best joke, but he’d known Master Guns for over a decade. They’d worked hundreds of cases, buried thousands of soldiers, and fought to stay sane in this very garage by drinking gallons of Master Guns’s homemade gin while playing drunk videogame hockey (almost always against the Russians). The joke should’ve earned Zig a chuckle, or at the very least a cheap crack about his manhood. Instead, Master Guns held tight to the hockey stick, facing the TV screen on the wall. “Ziggy, I know you’re not here to play hockey.”

  Master Guns never took long to reveal he was Dover’s chief homicide investigator.

  “You’re wearing the scent,” Master Guns said, his beefy military build practically bursting through his T-shirt and sweatpants. “I smell it from here.”

  Sometimes Zig forgot how sharp his friend was. Humans have a unique odor. For the dead, it was even more unmistakable, a mix of sweetness and rotting fish that dogs can smell for up to fourteen months after someone’s killed. Zig had taken three showers before coming here, thinking the scent of death had been scrubbed away. Most people would be fooled. Master Guns had never been most people.

  “This is about the woman in the plane crash, isn’t it?” he asked. “Nola Brown.”

  Zig stayed silent as a burst of wind sliced through the garage. The place was decorated like a bachelor pad, complete with a cheap black leather sofa that sagged in the middle. The wind sent the hockey net swaying and lifted the pages of magazines on the glass coffee table. Zig eyed the door that led into Master Guns’s house. This was a conversation that was better conducted inside. But Zig knew he’d never get there.

  It was Master Guns’s one rule: No one goes inside the house. Garage only. No exceptions. Master Guns might be Zig’s closest work friend, but the emphasis had always been on the word work. They’d had BBQs in this garage, blown out birthday cakes, and even, on a winter night as cold as tonight, toasted Guns’s dead brother-in-law, a fallen Marine whom Master Guns asked Zig to work on personally. With work like that, the only way to stay sane was to keep your work life separate from your home life. The door between the garage and the rest of the house was his dividing line.

  “How’d you know this was about Nola?” Zig asked.

  “Ziggy, it’s midnight. On a weekday. Do I look like one of your girlfriends?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “C’mon now. Melinda in Legal has a crush on you. She’s smart, good-looking, even age-appropriate, but you don’t date her. Sherry in Case Management has been divorced for a year—same thing, same age as you—and you don’t date her. And Esther in Veteran Affairs—”

  “Esther in Veteran Affairs looks like Mrs. Howell from Gilligan’s Island, if she were still alive today.”

  “All I’m saying, lovey, is that your last girlfriend—the sales rep for that energy drink company—how long did she stick around? Three weeks? A month? I know why you do it, Ziggy. Life is much easier if you surround yourself with people who will leave you. But don’t tell me you’re coming here to play hockey, then think you can slyly pump me for information without me knowing.”

  As he turned, Zig could finally read what was written on Master Guns’s Marines T-shirt: My Job Is To Save Your Ass, Not Kiss It.

  “The T-shirt’s kinda heavy-handed, even for you,” Zig said.

  “Don’t screw with me, Ziggy,” Master Guns said as the big vein swelled in his neck. “Tell me why you’re so interested in this Nola Brown case.”

  When Zig didn’t answer, Master Guns used the heel of his palm to pound a button on the wall. The garage door whirred, slowly rolling downward. Time for some privacy.

  “Ziggy…”

  “I know her,” Zig blurted. “Nola Brown. She’s from Ekron. I knew her when she was little. She saved Maggie’s life…”

  “Ah, there’s the reason.”

  “You’re damn right that’s the reason. What she did that night, for me and for Maggie—I need to pay that back—and I’m telling you, that body in the mortuary… That’s not her.” For the next few minutes, Zig laid out the rest, about what she did at the campfire, the piece that was missing from the real Nola’s ear, the swallowed note, and how this made him think Nola was still alive and in danger.

  With each new detail, Master Guns took a slow breath through his nose. It was an old investigator trick. The calmer he made you feel, the more he thought you’d talk. But Zig saw the way that Master Guns’s caterpillar eyebrows were starting to knit together. Master Guns looked annoyed. He looked disturbed. But he didn’t look the least bit surprised.

  “You knew this already, didn’t you?” Zig asked.

  “That there was a secret note hidden in her body? How could I possibly know something like that?”

  “That wasn’t what I asked, Guns. Bodies don’t get to me until DNA, dental, and fingerprints have been checked and verified. That means someone from the FBI did the match. But when I asked my friend in the Bureau, she pulled up their workboard. Guess what she found? The FBI still hasn’t sent a fingerprint expert.”

  “Make your point.”

  “My point is, without that expert, the only way for this body to get to me in the mortuary was if someone high up—like our colonel…or, say, our chief investigator—signed off on it. Now c’mon. Tell me what you’re not saying.”

  Master Guns was a decorated Marine. Zig was a civilian mortician with a knack for rebuilding dead bodies. To most, their difference in rank would be an issue. But for Master Guns, the only rank that mattered was this: Heart or No heart. They saw it every day: Do you believe in the mission of dealing with our fallen troops with honor, dignity, and respect? Or are you someone who, when you hear that a new body is coming in, looks at your watch to see if you can sneak out before the shift change? No question, Master Guns had heart. Zig? Master Guns knew the answer to that. Everyone knew the answer.

  “Ziggy, in the autopsy report… Did you see how Nola died?”

  “I told you, I don’t think it’s Nola.”

  “I heard you. Whoever she is. Did you read how she died?”

  “Plane crash. In Alaska.”

  “That’s right. And have you seen the coverage on the news?”

  “I’ve been working on the body. Why? What’re they saying?”

  “That’s the thing. They’re saying nothing. And I mean nothing. Every other plane crash, no matter how far it is—the French Alps, Malaysia, wherever—the whole world knows the instant the plane goes down. But this seven-person flight Nola was on, it plummeted forty-eight hours ago, and the news is just now hitting the airwaves. You know what it takes to pull off two days of silence? Even we didn’t hear about it until the body was on its way.”

  “Okay, so the same thing happened a couple years back when Senator Assa’s plane went down with those CIA folks aboard. Whenever the secret squirrels get involved, we only get a few hours’ notice.”

  “You’re not listening. When Nola’s body arrived, two men in crappy black suits were waiting in my office. With Colonel Hsu. They flashed IDs and politely told me that they ha
d a special interest in this case. They also said they wanted the body the moment we were done with it. As in, immediately.”

  “So they’re the ones who gave you Nola’s fingerprints?”

  “Forget the prints. The last time black suits showed up like that, two buildings had gone down in New York and we were scrambling to identify victims from the Pentagon crash.”

  When Zig closed his eyes, he still saw it so clearly. In the hours after 9/11, as the Pentagon victims started arriving, Zig was unpacking the burned body of a dark-skinned man with a missing arm. Out of nowhere, two FBI agents were standing over Zig’s shoulder, watching a bit too intently. Zig quickly realized: He wasn’t working on one of the victims. He had the pilot, one of the terrorists. Soon after, the FBI whisked the body away for their own private testing.

  “You think Nola—or whoever she really is—is the one who crashed the plane?” Zig asked.

  “I don’t care if she did. What worries me more is who we’re picking a fight with.”

  “We?” Zig asked hopefully.

  “You,” Master Guns clarified in deep baritone. “The black suits— Whatever they’re looking at, this is far beyond the world where you and I live. Our job is to bring closure, not open up more problems.”

  “Closure doesn’t exist. Not for anyone.”

  “No. Nuh-uh. Now you’re getting emotional, and when you get emotional, you get stupid.”

  “Some things are worth being stupid over.”

  “Not this,” Master Guns growled, pointing the hockey stick like a magician’s wand.

  On most nights, a threat from Master Guns might make Zig back off. But tonight, Zig wasn’t intimidated or daunted in any way. No, since the moment he realized Nola was still out there, Zig was…he didn’t have a word for it yet. But he could feel it. A need. He needed to know what happened to Nola, needed to find out if she was safe, but also…something else. Something that was tugging at him from his core—and lighting it up. Like a spark igniting a dormant fire. He needed to find the answer to this case. But he also needed the case itself.

  “You think you’re just searching for an old friend of your daughter—”