by Brad Meltzer
“You mind grabbing it for me?” Waggs had asked yesterday when she heard that an FBI colleague was headed to Dover for an errand.
“Something wrong with its scanners?” he’d asked.
“Just needs a tune-up,” she’d lied.
It was a Hail Mary for sure, but every day, Waggs pulled biometrics from terrorists’ weapons and explosive devices. That was her specialty—what people leave behind.
Standing at her desk, Waggs spread cyanoacrylate—liquid superglue—across the smoothest part of the scanner. It attached quickly to whatever moisture residue was there. A UV penlight did the rest, revealing the one thing she was hoping for, and making her feel like Sherlock Holmes with her very own magnifying glass.
A fingerprint. Two of them, actually.
Ten minutes later, Waggs was staring at her screen, waiting on the FBI’s database. Somewhere, servers whirred.
Two pictures popped on-screen. The first, as expected, was Zig. But the second…
Waggs swallowed hard.
No. That’s— Can’t be.
But it was.
Waggs whispered his name, barely hearing her own words. “Horatio’s… Oh, shit.”
78
Dover Air Force Base, Delaware
Dino always started with the plain M&M’s.
Those were his favorites. He was a purist, preferring the plain ones to peanut—and of course to those abominations with peanut butter or dark chocolate, or that blue-wrappered disaster, the pretzel M&M.
No, plain were the best. Which explained why Dino always restocked them first in the candy machine—in the moneymaker slot, third row from the top, eye level, center position.
From there, he added his full murderers row of candy: Snickers, Reese’s, Crunch bars, Twix, 100 Grand bars, Heath bars, Original Skittles, Sour Skittles, the ultra-underrated Take 5 bar, and in the very last slot on the right, white chocolate Kit Kats. Because why have the same candy machine as everyone else?
Dropping the last pack of plain M&M’s into place, Dino glanced around the breakroom. This early in the morning, Dover’s mortuary was quiet. It wouldn’t be for long.
One by one, he restocked each row, tilting each chocolate bar backward, just right. If the candy leaned forward, it’d get caught in the coil, stuck in the machine. On a military base, with the tempers here? That was never good for anyone.
Kneeling down to work the bottom row, he added extra granola and protein bars—the colonel’s favorites—humming a song to himself, Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time.” How the hell’d that get stuck in his head?
With a slam and the twist of a key, Dino shut the front of the machine and, as always, gave it a test. C5. Plain M&M’s.
Rrrrrrrr.
The coil began to spin, the plastic kicker at the end of it giving the bag of M&M’s its final shove…
Tuuunk.
Reaching into the vending machine, Dino pulled out the M&M’s. It was still early, but… C’mon. This was the best perk of being the Candyman. Actually, second-best.
Dino tossed back a few M&M’s, shoved the rest in his pocket, then quickly restocked the boxes onto his hand truck. That was the job. Every day, putting back what others took.
Heading out into the hallway, Dino opted for the long way around, toward the executive offices of the mortuary—home of carpet walkers like Accounting and Human Resources, who never saw bodies—but also where both Zig’s and Master Guns’s offices were.
Zig had already snuck onto the plane. Dino was sure of that. As for Master Guns, the light was on in his office, though based on the open door, Master Guns wasn’t there.
In the corner, Colonel Hsu’s light was on as well. Her door was shut.
This early in the day? She and Master Guns were both inside. Dino made a mental note.
By now, back at the bowling alley—at the Kingpin Café—the first pot of coffee should finally be done brewing.
Throwing back a few more M&M’s and still humming “If I Could Turn Back Time,” Dino wheeled the hand truck through the office, toward the front door. The few secretaries he passed didn’t even bother looking up.
That’s how it was, every day.
No one looked twice at the Candyman.
79
First, Waggs called Zig.
No answer.
She called him again.
Same. Straight to voicemail. Didn’t even ring. Like his phone was off.
Then Waggs called Master Guns.
Same. No answer.
She called again.
Still no answer, but it rang three times. He wasn’t picking up.
She sent Master Guns a text. “You there?”
No response. And then…those three gray dots appeared, the ellipsis that told her Master Guns was writing back.
“In a meeting. All ok?” Master Guns texted.
“No. Emergency. Call me,” she texted back.
“Can’t. With Colonel and Sec Service. Base going on lockdown. You safe?”
Waggs stood there at her adjustable-height desk, debating whether to text the words. She had no choice.
“I know who Horatio is.” She hit Send.
The three gray dots came up immediately, then disappeared as… Her phone rang, vibrating in her hand.
“You’re on speaker,” Master Guns announced as she picked up. “I have Colonel Hsu and Agent Terry O’Hara from the US Secret Service. You were saying about Horatio…”
“I know who he is!” Waggs insisted. “I found his…I found fingerprints on the Fang.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“I looked through Dover’s entrance records, checking to see when he swiped into the building. He’s there every time Zig is, leaves every time Zig leaves! He’s been watching all along!” she added, pulling up an image on her phone and hitting Send.
There was a pause and a buzz as the image popped up on Master Guns’s phone screen.
“That’s him. That’s Horatio!” Waggs said, still staring at the employee photo of the one man who had access to every building at Dover, the one man who knew everything Zig was up to.
Dino.
80
At Dover, most buildings had names. The military is tidy; it prefers names.
So officially, the mortuary was known as the Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary Affairs. The military museum where Dover stored dozens of old classic airplanes was called the Air Mobility Command Museum.
But the building Dino was currently headed to as he carried a large cardboard box with a Snickers logo on it? Building 1303. That’s what it was called on Dover’s official maps. But to those who worked on base, it had another name. The Graveyard.
A bit melodramatic, to be sure. But as Dino readjusted the Snickers box and eyed the security forces’ black SUV in the distance, even Dino had to admit, it was an apt name.
Back in 1978, during the Jonestown massacre, preacher Jim Jones asked his followers to drink cyanide-laced grape punch, killing over 900 people, including over 200 children. Since Dover specializes in mass fatalities, 913 corpses were sent here. But with a number that large, the only way to store the bodies was to convert an old 1960s-era metallic warehouse into a massive morgue. Building 1303.
“Anybody home?” Dino called out toward the warehouse’s broken windows, which were boarded up. He didn’t like coming here—no one liked coming here—not since those nine hundred Jonestown corpses were covered in white sheets and spread out across the warehouse’s concrete floor. When it happened, the then-colonel at Dover said to give it time, that people would eventually forget and the building could be put back into regular use.
It almost worked, until a decade ago, when a C-5 Galaxy, the military’s largest plane at the time (over six stories high), took off from a runway at Dover and mysteriously crashed right after it flew over this exact spot. No one on the plane was killed. Voodoo, everyone called it, blaming it once again on Building 1303—one of the few places at Dover that people actively avoided.
The military SUV was long gone. This far south on the base, there were only long, barren cornfields on one side of the building and a scattering of parked airplanes on the other.
Using his chest to pin the cardboard box to the wall, Dino reached for the rusted old doorknob and gave it a tug. He knew it’d be open. He unlocked it days ago.
“Delivery!” Dino called out, stepping inside and ignoring the metallic whiff of wet coins and rusted old pipes. It was dark inside—they shut off the electricity years ago—the only light coming from a boarded-up skylight that wasn’t boarded up as well as it should be.
“Back here,” a man’s voice called out.
Dino glanced to his left, where stack after stack of 1950s-era gurneys—at least two thousand of them—were piled one on top of another, each stack ten feet high, forming makeshift walls and an instant maze that Dino followed deeper into the wide warehouse.
After 9/11, when the Iraq invasion began, the government was keenly aware that every new war brings a massive increase in dead young soldiers. To handle the demand, Dover got $30 million for a new mortuary, filled with $10 million in state-of-the-art equipment. But as all the new items arrived, everything from the old mortuary—which dated back to Vietnam and Korea—had to be thrown away. Or at least stored somewhere no one would notice.
“You’re late,” the man’s voice called out.
“I’m doing my best,” Dino replied. He meant it. His entire life, Dino worked hard, but somehow, it was never good enough. In high school, he barely passed. In community college, he scraped by. As a valet, an ice cream store manager, a Piercing Pagoda employee, even a health club trainer, he struggled, struggled, and struggled. Even now, as he tried to pick up his pace, it led to more stumbling. Dino was a big guy, with a big gut, who lumbered when he walked.
“Wait…that’s not— Where’d you go?” Dino called out, hitting a dead end down an aisle of thirty-foot-high metallic racks that flanked him on both sides. Back during Vietnam, these casket racks held all the new caskets—six thousand at a time—when the war was at its peak. Now they were filled with old desk chairs, lamps, and leftover office furniture.
“Did I tell you this place was something?” Dino shouted, doublebacking down a different aisle, still trying to navigate the stacks of old metal desks, battered embalming tables, vintage casket carriages, fifty-gallon drums of formaldehyde, as well as metal storage racks filled with scalpels, forceps, draining tubes, separators—every mortician’s tool you can think of, all smelling like mildew and decay, all covered in rot and rust—like an entire 1960s funeral home was dumped into a warehouse and forgotten.
“By the way, you were right about Zig,” Dino called out, his arms holding tight to his cardboard box. “According to the entry records, he came in first thing this morning. Driving a hearse. That means Nola was probably in back, huh?”
No answer.
“You hear what I said?” Dino added, cutting around a huge wooden crate marked Warning: Carcinogens in bright red letters. The crate was filled with glass bottles of embalming fluid. “That means Nola—”
“What’s in the box?” a deep voice interrupted.
Dino spun toward a man with buzzed gray hair, a pitted face, and a faded scar that split his bottom lip in a pale zigzag, from where it was torn open years ago. Dressed in tan-and-green camouflage—an army combat uniform—the man stood there, arms behind his back, his greedy eyes taking Dino apart.
“Jesus on a pogo stick—don’t do that!” Dino blurted. “I hate scary movies!”
“The box. What’s in it?” the man asked.
Dino hesitated, but not for long. “It’s for my payment. You said you’d—”
“I know what I said.” From behind his back, the man pulled out a manila envelope, thick with cash. “If it makes you feel better, you did the right thing.”
Dino grabbed the money, then turned away, studying the envelope and avoiding eye contact. He took no joy in what he’d done. But at this point, he didn’t have a choice, not with all the debt he was buried under.
It started six months ago, when his old manager from Piercing Pagoda told him about an opportunity to get in on the ground floor: a brand-new PVC piping company—with the filament it used, you could make it yourself on a 3-D printer. “Miraculous!” everyone called it. “A game-changer!” Dino looked it up; it all checked out. Together, they could buy the distributorship for the entire East Coast.
This was Dino’s chance—his chance to get away from the candy machines, to get out of the bowling alley…his chance to step out of Zig’s shadow and finally build something for himself, something that Zig didn’t help him with. All he had to do was pull together the cash: his savings, second mortgage, plus the $20,000 he borrowed from his bookie. Sure, it was a risk, but what great reward came without risk? This was Dino’s chance.
Unfortunately, it was also a scam—one that took Dino for nearly $250,000. For months, he thought he could dig out. Then Dino’s car got repossessed. He told Zig it was in the shop. Then the bookie sent a guy who wore a gold razor blade around his neck. A few times, Dino was tempted to ask Zig for help, but God Almighty, he’d spent his whole life asking Zig for help.
Eventually, the banks stopped calling and instead started knocking on his door. They threatened to take his house, his wages. They even started going after the joint account his grandmother asked him to cosign so Dino could help pay her rent and bills. She was ninety-three! If they took that account, Grandma Ruth would be out on the street!
So when a man approached Dino, offering to pay Dino’s debts, Dino knew there had to be a catch. And there was. All Dino had to do was tell the man where Zig was going and what he was up to.
“Are you out of your mind?” Dino replied. No way. He’d never screw over his friend.
That is, until the man explained that he didn’t want to hurt Zig either. He just wanted information: where Zig was on base…who he was talking to. If anything, considering the people Zig was investigating, it would save Zig’s life. More important, the man explained, if Dino wouldn’t help, he’d find someone else who would.
It was that last point that Dino couldn’t argue with. At least this way, Dino could keep an eye on everything, managing the situation and keeping Zig safe. Did Dino feel bad that day when he knocked Zig in the head? Of course. He felt awful. But at that point, to grab Kamille’s items from the room and to make sure Zig didn’t spot him, Dino had no choice. Keeping Zig in the dark meant keeping Zig safe. Plus, with the influx of cash, Dino could pay off his debts, keep his car and house, and pay for Grandma Ruth. All of his financial problems would disappear. Like magic.
“You hear what I said about Zig and the hearse?” Dino asked, staring down as he clutched the envelope of money, tempted to open it. Somehow, though, it felt rude. “I’m telling you, Nola’s on that plane to Alaska.”
“No,” the man said quietly. “She isn’t.”
There was something in the man’s voice, something that made Dino want to turn around. He didn’t, though. “How d’you know?”
Those would be the final words Dino ever uttered.
Behind him, Dino didn’t see the man pull out his gun. Didn’t hear as the man cocked a bullet into the chamber. Dino was too busy dropping the envelope into his cardboard Snickers box, congratulating himself for picking such a good hiding place.
“Dino…” the man said.
Following the sound, Dino glanced over his shoulder. The gun was already at Dino’s temple, the angle just right so when they later found the gun, along with a pile of collection notices, even the best investigators would be convinced it was a suicide.
Ftttt.
A jagged black hole appeared in Dino’s temple, burn marks scorching his skin. His head whipped sideways, chasing the bullet, followed by his torso, then his body, all his weight dragged to th
e side like a toppling tree.
Thuuud.
As Dino hit the concrete floor, a single spurt of blood gushed like a tiny waterfall down his temple, across the side of his nose. Then another. That was it.
For a moment, the man with the pale zigzag scar stood there. He wasn’t looking at Dino. He was staring straight ahead, out into the warehouse.
“I know you’re here,” he called.
No one replied.
“You think I’m a fool?” the man added. “You followed Dino here, didn’t you, Nola?”
There was a noise on his left. A click. Like a gun being cocked. From behind a tall stack of 1950s metal desks, Nola just stood there, her gun pointed at the man.
“Horatio, huh?” Nola asked. “That’s what you’re calling yourself now?”
The man laughed—a soulful, hearty laugh that came from deep in his belly. The man who knew IDs better than anyone. “Don’t be so formal, Nola. I know it’s been a while,” Royall said, flashing his wolfish grin, “but you can still call me Dad.”
81
Homestead, Florida
Ten years ago
This was Nola when she was sixteen. On the day she almost didn’t make seventeen.
Royall was screaming about mayonnaise.
“Did you taste it!? It turned! Went bad!” he shouted, gripping his sandwich in a fist, shoving it toward Nola’s face.
She was trying to clean up lunch, hoping to get out of there. At the smell of the sandwich, she recoiled.
“You smell that, right!? Shit smell like that and you still served it to me?”
Avoiding eye contact, Nola stayed focused on wiping crumbs from the counter.
“Why would you serve it if it smelled like that?”
Nola stayed silent.
“Answer me!”
Nola paused. He asked again. Finally, she whispered, “It smelled fine before.”
