by Brad Meltzer
“I assume someone from the White House.”
“He’s chief of staff. To the President. And according to him, the leader of the free world wants personal updates on why one of his best friends went down in a plane crash—and apparently also wants to see the body when it’s ready for burial. On top of all that, we’ve got half a dozen fallen service members that need your skills. So yes, get back here. Now.”
“Francis, you said you wouldn’t— How could you tell Hsu about Nola?”
“I didn’t tell her anything,” Master Guns whisper-hissed. “She just walked in. She wants her best mortician on these bodies.” He said something else, but Zig was barely listening, plowing through the parking lot, which was shaped like an H turned sideways. Zig was on the middle bar of the H, headed straight toward the poorly lit docks.
Once again, Zig glanced to his left, toward the side of the H, which ran parallel to the water. Still nothing.
Maybe Nola stopped or turned around. Zig glanced back at his phone, at the red triangle. The RFID tags never failed, but that didn’t mean they were perfect. Especially at high speeds, they could be a few seconds behind.
On-screen, Nola’s car was still on his far left, at the top corner of the H, half a football field down, but now it was moving—and picking up speed.
Zig made a quick left, into that same row.
Nola’s car appeared from nowhere, flying toward him. Full speed. Her headlights were off.
Skrrrrrrrch!
Zig slammed the brakes. So did Nola. Tires screamed across the asphalt. Zig’s car skidded to the right, Nola skidded the other way.
There was a dull thud as Zig plowed over an orange safety pylon. His car was still moving, still turning, lost in momentum as it spun toward the boats and the water.
“Ziggy! Ziggy, you okay!?” Master Guns shouted through the speakerphone.
Zig’s car bucked to a stop, his front tires on the dock. Zig kicked his door open. If he lost her again—
“Nola, don’t move!” Zig shouted, pulling his knife, ready for—
The window of the car—an old outdated Subaru—slowly rolled down. “Y-You came out of nowhere!” an elderly man with thinning black hair insisted.
“Randall!” a female voice scolded. “Ask him how he is! You okay, sir?” an older woman added from the passenger seat. Zig saw her smeared lipstick—and the old man fiddling with his pants. “I told him—put your lights on!”
Zig looked into the backseat. No one there. He glanced at his phone. The red triangle was at dead center. Nola should be here. Right here.
Then Zig saw it. Tucked under the Subaru’s windshield wiper. A square piece of plastic, no bigger than a postage stamp. The RFID tag.
Nola found it. Of course she found it. And got rid of it.
“Maybe we can avoid calling the authorities. Y’know, for insurance purposes,” the older man said.
“Yeah, no…of course,” Zig said, the older woman giving him a thankful wave. “Drive…uh…drive safely.”
“Ziggy, talk to me! You there!?” Master Guns shouted through the phone. “What the hell’s going on? You find her?”
Zig didn’t say anything. Not for a long while.
31
At 2 a.m., walking up his front porch, Zig thought he’d be exhausted. But he wasn’t. He felt…good, which should’ve been a sign. If life taught Zig anything, it’s that the universe saves its best punches for when you least expect it.
Sure enough, as Zig twisted his key in the lock, he saw a flicker of light under his door. His mouth went dry.
Someone was inside.
Slowly, Zig edged open the door. He heard noise. A woman’s voice.
Nola…? he thought, though he quickly heard…in his living room…
The TV was on—some mindless sitcom about how men and women were so different. Zig didn’t think he’d left the TV on, but maybe he did. God knows he needed it to sleep. These past few years, silence was a crappy friend.
It was one of the main reasons Zig loved his job. When he was on a case, he was fixing things. He didn’t have problems, or at least he wasn’t thinking of them. The undertow of loss was coming for other people. Not him.
Upstairs, there were three rooms, Zig’s bedroom being the smallest—a private punishment he imposed upon himself that only he knew about.
Two minutes later, Zig was in his backyard, his ritual beer in his hand to help nurse the pain in his head and legs from today’s attacks.
“Evening, ladies. Everyone okay?” he called out to his bees.
“Mmmmmmmmmmmmm,” the bees sang as Zig sat in his rusty lawn chair, curled in his winter coat, replaying the day’s events. For a few minutes, he thought about Nola’s friend Kamille and the other victims on the plane, about the scolding he got from Master Guns, about Colonel Hsu’s sudden interest in the case, about the President and the Librarian of Congress, and about what the hell this all had to do with cover names that somehow traced back to Harry Houdini.
But more than that, Zig was thinking about today’s visit to Ekron, his hometown. His synapses were flooding with old memories stirred awake by the sights and smells where he trained as a mortician, where he buried his dad, where he fell in and out of love, and where he became a husband, a father, and eventually, a mourner. More than anything, he was thinking about how it felt good—or at least felt right—to be so close to Magpie’s grave—and how reassuring it felt just to feel that. Still, throughout it all, no matter what path he took down memory lane, he was also thinking of Nola. Not the little girl from years ago, cowering in his backseat. The Nola from today. Here. In the present.
Ten minutes from now, Zig would be upstairs, head on his pillow, hands on his chest, sleeping in that same at-rest pose he put people in every day. It wouldn’t be until that exact moment, right as sleep tightened its grip, that he’d realize he’d forgotten one ritual—he forgot to check Facebook, forgot to take a look at his ex-wife, forgot to see all the beautiful things happening in her life today. And then Zig would head downstairs, take a quick Facebook look, and think, What’s the harm in that?
32
Ekron, Pennsylvania
Fifteen years ago
This was Nola when she was twelve.
It was the night of the Girl Scout campout when the can of orange soda exploded.
Royall had pulled her from the hospital in a fiery rage, but over the long drive home, he calmed down.
In the backseat, Nola was curled in a ball, like it was her bed. Silent as ever, she had a white bandage covering her ear, with dried blood splattered across her Girl Scout T-shirt.
“Quick bump,” Royall barked as their ’65 Chevy turned into the front driveway.
Nola lifted her head off the seat, as if the bump itself might undo her forty new stitches.
“Omigod! LookAtHer! NolaLookAtYou!” cried a heavyset woman with brown hair pulled back in a strict ponytail. The car still hadn’t stopped, but she was running with it, practically bursting through the side window. Lydia Konnikova. The troop mom who did car pool for Nola so Royall wouldn’t have to drive her to school or to her meetings, which really was the only reason he let her join Girl Scouts. Too bad Lydia was also the town’s most notorious gossip.
“How’s she doing? I heard stitches!” Lydia said, still dressed in her blue troop vest, her blue-and-white Girl Scout bandanna tied around her neck. Nola noticed that Lydia always answered her own questions. “We sent everyone home. I had to come over. Y’know she saved another scout, right? She saved Maggie! We’re going to nominate her for the Scouts’ Medal of Honor!” Lydia got her first good look at the bandage. “Was it bad? It looked so bad,” she said to Royall. Then to Nola: “You look great, sweetie. Just great!”
The car stopped and Lydia opened the door, extending a hand. “Here, lemme get you inside, hon.”
From the front seat, Royall glanced back at Nola with his eyebrows raised.
Nola shot him a look, shaking her head without really moving.
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“C’mon, sweetie, gimme your hand,” Lydia offered, still leaning into the car.
“I got her,” Royall said, opening the car’s back door on the driver’s side. In one quick scoop, he lifted Nola out of the car and cradled her, carrying her to the door.
“Here, hon, let me—”
“I got her,” Royall repeated, working hard to keep Lydia at his back, curling Nola close to his chest.
He let the front door slam behind him and carried Nola upstairs, placing her gently on her bed. Then he pulled the covers up to her chin and gave her more medicine, just like the doctors instructed.
33
Dover Air Force Base, Delaware
Today
The following morning, Zig was covered in brain matter and blood.
It was on his plastic face shield; it was on his gloves, which were pulled up to his elbows; it was spattered all across his white, zipped-up Tyvek jumpsuit.
“How’s he coming?” fellow mortician Louisa asked.
Zig shook his head. There were five of them in the medical suite, each at their own gurney, each with a different fallen. Overhead, Prince played from the old iPod speaker, swearing he never meant to cause you any sorrow, never meant to cause you any pain. All the morticians knew when it was Louisa’s day for music, she played nothing but the sad Prince songs, plus her favorite fun ones.
Usually Zig got the hardest case. Or the most important. Today, he had both.
For three hours, he’d been at it, but even by Dover standards, presidential best friend and Librarian of Congress Nelson Rookstool was a mess. Fallen #2,357.
The hardest part was aligning his head back onto his broken spine, so he wouldn’t look like an abandoned marionette. Set the head wrong, and nothing else looks right.
“We’ll get you there,” Zig whispered to Rookstool’s lifeless corpse.
The back of Rookstool’s neck, the back of his arms, all of it was burned, though not as charred as Kamille’s body was two nights ago. Whatever caused the fire on the plane, Rookstool was farther away from it, sitting in the front row.
According to the medical examiners, Rookstool’s cause of death was a broken neck (pretty standard for a plane crash). But as Zig looked inside the interior wall of the ribcage, he found a shard of pointed plastic—beige—the size of a pen cap.
Zig yanked it out. It was jagged. A stray piece of the fold-down tray table, which shattered on impact, stabbing Rookstool in his seat. Happened all the time. When you free-fall four hundred feet from the sky, nothing lands gracefully.
“Broken tray table?” a voice asked behind him—one of the other morticians, Wil with one L. Zig never liked people with misspelled common names. Jayson with a Y. Zakk with two Ks. It was the same here. Wil always left work at 4 p.m. and still sometimes referred to the fallen as “stiffs.” No heart. “How bad’d it get him?” Wil added.
“Bad as it gets,” Zig said, still staring at the shard of plastic.
“Same result either way,” Wil said, forcing a dark laugh.
Zig didn’t laugh back. For the past few hours, he’d been focused on the big picture—setting Rookstool’s head, cleaning out his chest—but as with any jigsaw puzzle, once the main border’s done, you finally start looking at the rest of the pieces: the creases on Rookstool’s face, the crow’s-feet around his eyes, even the width of his fit-but-not-as-fit-as-they-used-to-be biceps. Middle age always took a toll. For Zig, it was far too familiar.
Turning toward the medical rolling cart, Zig eyed Rookstool’s ID, which was clipped to the side of the cart as a visual guide. Round face. Tired eyes. The gray hair made him look older, but— Zig rechecked the date of birth. October. Same year as Zig.
Same age.
Zig shouldn’t be surprised. These days, so many of the senior officers that Zig worked on were close to his age. But every once in a while, a body type hit a bit too close to home, leaving Zig with the same feeling you get when you find out a friend has cancer: I’m gonna start eating better, taking better care of myself. Today, though, Zig felt the opposite. Despite the throbbing in his head and the pain in his legs from yesterday’s attacks—or perhaps because of them—Zig felt younger today, younger than he’d felt in a long time.
“Ziggy, you got a moment?” Louisa interrupted.
“Yeah, no, sure.” Heading for Louisa’s gurney, he asked, “You have Vacca?” though he knew the answer. Since the moment Zig arrived, he’d been waiting to take a peek at all three of the so-called Houdini assistants: Rose Mackenberg, Clifford Eddy, and Amedeo Vacca. According to their files, they all supposedly worked at the Library of Congress. Time to learn the real story.
“Nose collapsed, everything collapsed. I hate plane crashes,” Louisa said, handing Zig a metal tool that looked like a coat hanger. In fact, it was a coat hanger, cut down to just the curve at the top. “He’s supposed to have a bump on his nose, but when I—” She stopped herself, never one to complain. On the table, Vacca’s face was pretty much intact, though his nose looked like a deflated balloon. “His parents were there today. Two sisters too. Just want to get this right.”
Zig nodded, taking a look at the ID photo of Vacca that Louisa had clipped to her own rolling cart. Vacca was a baby, late twenties at the most. Looked like a young Stallone. Hangdog eyes. Meaty face. And sure enough, crooked nose.
“You made the bump too low,” Zig said, carefully re-bending the coat hanger. On a corpse, rebuilding an arm, a leg, even a shoulder is easy as long as you have enough modeling clay. Noses and faces required a subtle touch—and to get it just right, it took an artist.
“Now you’re just showing off,” Louisa said.
“Only if it works,” Zig replied, scanning the rest of the body. Unlike Rookstool, Vacca was big, with a wide chest and muscles like a wrestler. Or a Navy SEAL. On the medical cart, Vacca’s ID photo listed him as Aide to Librarian Rookstool. Zig made a mental note. Since when were librarian aides built like bodyguards?
“What’re you staring at?” Louisa asked.
“I’m not.”
Louisa made a noise underneath her filter mask. “Seems pretty beefy for a librarian.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Well, y’know who did notice? Your pal Master Guns. Was here first thing this morning, making sure everything was just right.”
Zig twisted the coat hanger tighter around his finger. Prince was singing a new song, about how life was just a party and parties weren’t meant to last.
“Ziggy, I know you’ve got personal ties to this case—”
“That’s not even—”
“Please don’t lie to me. When it comes to caring about a case, it’s not a bad thing. In fact, it might even be a good thing.”
With an artful push of his thumb, Zig inserted the re-bent coat hanger into Vacca’s nostril, where its wire frame added new structure and lifted his deflated nose like a circus tent.
“I take back what I said. Now you’re showing off,” Louisa added. “You could’ve just—”
“Psst.”
The sound came from their left. The doors to the medical suite were closed, but even through the translucent glass, Zig knew that round silhouette anywhere.
“I think your friend who runs the vending machines is trying to be subtle,” Louisa said.
“Are you playing Prince in there?” Dino called out through the door. “I feel like that’s somehow ruining Prince for me.”
Hitting a button, Zig opened the automated doors and pulled the O2 mask from his face, but never stepped into the actual hallway. The embalming fluids had to stay in the sterilized suite. “Dino, what’re you doing here?”
“Jiminy Christmas!” Dino instinctively recoiled from the smell, holding his nose and stepping back from the threshold. “No matter how many times I’m here— Good God, man, it’s on your mask—that was by your mouth! You’re wearing glops of dead by your mouth!”
“Dino, this better be an emergency.”
“She said it was.�
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She? Zig asked with a look.
Dino nodded, still holding his nose. “Your friend. From the FBI.”
Zig knew who he meant. Waggs.
“She tried calling you. I told her you don’t carry your phone while you’re working.”
Zig glanced back over his shoulder, checking to see who else was listening. Louisa, Wil, and the other morticians were turned the other way, focused back on their respective fallen.
“She find something?” Zig whispered.
Dino gave him that look he had on that night when they met those twins at the bar.
“I need at least another hour in here,” Zig said.
“Don’t you think this might be more impor—?”
“I need another hour,” Zig insisted, pointing a thumb back into the medical suite. Dino knew better than to argue. Rookstool had a wife; two little grandkids. Zig would never leave a deceased while a family was waiting for closure. “Tell her I’ll call her in an hour.”
There was a pneumatic hiss as the doors swung shut, and Dino headed up the hallway, already dialing Waggs’s number.
“Mr. Kanalz…?” a female voice called out as Dino turned the corner.
Dino looked up, spotting an Asian woman in full officer uniform. She had the most penetrating gaze he’d ever seen.
“You have a moment?” Colonel Hsu said.
“Actually, I’m—”
“It wasn’t a question. This way, Mr. Kanalz.”
Dino stuffed his phone in his pocket and headed hesitantly to her office. “Can you tell me what this is about?” Dino asked.
“Don’t play stupid. It just insults both of us.”
34
Homestead, Florida
Eleven years ago
This was Nola when she was fifteen.
“Pencils down,” the teacher warned.
Nola kept scribbling.
“Pencils down.”
Nola lifted her chin, her eyes narrowing and disappearing in a black hole of dark eyeliner that only a fifteen-year-old could think was acceptable. She was in her usual spot, in the back row, in her usual uniform: wifebeater tank, boy jeans (secondhand, which her dad hated), and Doc Martens (brand-new, which her dad hated even more). “Me?” she asked.
