by Brett Adams
“By your pet tech? The guy who tried to hack my server?” He shook his head. “Man, I bounced that douche. He didn’t get anywhere.”
Except, he did, I thought but didn’t say.
“Why did you get into it? Computers.”
He flicked the fill switch off and half-turned to me. “You kidding? The world is getting eaten by software. Any idiot can see that. Netflix, Amazon, Uber, Google, Betterment. Software streams your movies, brings you dinner, takes you where you want to go, tells you what to buy, sets your thermostat, manages your money, and pretends to listen to your complaints. We don’t make things anymore. If you don’t speak the digital language, you’re a caveman.”
He turned back. “Actually, no. It started with the porn. The best stuff is always behind a wall.”
“That’s where you met Hiero, huh? Behind a wall.”
“Come on, Jack. Give me some credit.” Hiero had slipped silently behind us. I had no idea how long he’d been listening. Speaking to Ghost, he said, “You get those. I’ll pay for the gas.”
Ghost put the drinks on a disposable carrier, gave me an inscrutable glance, and left for the cashier.
Hiero watched him go. “No point trying to make a deal with that one, Jack. You don’t hold the right currency.
“It’s funny though,” he said, “that he’s more embarrassed about how we met than about his porn habit. Says a lot about our friendship.”
“Friendship,” I grunted. “Is that what you call it?”
“Partnership, then, you ol’ stickler,” and he gave me a nudge in the ribs. “But I like to think of Wheeler”—Was that his name?—“as a friend. What’s mine is his, what’s his is mine.” He moved, and I had to follow to hear what he said next. He came to rest before the plate glass looking out on the pumps. Right before us, the cop was seated behind the wheel of his patrol car, apparently engaged in a monosyllabic conversation with someone on the other end of a call.
I willed the call to be about us; for a photo of me to be dispatched to him; for him to glance up, make the match. Above all, to take responsibility for navigating this nightmare out of my hands.
But he remained on his call, eyes staring into the middle distance, unseeing.
Hiero went on. “Wheeler is a prime example of how much of life’s narrative can be driven by chance encounter. He’s a Forster curveball through and through. Pitched into my life when I got involved in a little make-believe with a girl.”
My ears perked up.
“Do you remember lonelygirl15?” he said.
A vague memory of controversy floated just beyond my reach.
He said, “Lonelygirl15, Bree Avery, a sixteen-year-old girl who appeared one day in June 2006 talking into her webcam, just one more random video amid the growing avalanche of cat videos and lip-syncing that was YouTube when Google bought it for 1.65 billion. Over the next few months we heard her teenage angst, met her boyfriend, learned her parents were part of a cult—”
“Wait. Wasn’t she a fake?”
“Fake? Oh, there was no girl named Bree—the actress was nineteen-year-old Jessica Rose of Mount Maunganui, New Zealand. She was a character dreamed up by filmmakers. Fooled everyone. The scoop was made by a Silicon Valley journalist, and his son, Matt Foremski. But fake? The creators said she wasn’t really a fiction, as she was part of every one of us. And while it lasted, that was some great story telling.
“And through all that, as the suspicion built, you know who was hanging out on the forums, a lonelygirl fanboy?” He chuckled. “Our friend, Wheeler. He wished so much that he’d been the one to make the scoop—his little dream of being a Pinkerton.
“Lonelygirl was a great idea, but it was so . . . tame. It took me a year to gather the material, the Go-Pros, a police scanner for early warning, a willing girl from a two-dog town you’ve probably never heard in Nowhere, North Carolina. The thing about lonelygirl that ultimately failed is that it didn’t interweave with the real world; it was hermetically sealed. It lacked verisimilitude. The cult Bree’s parents belonged to didn’t exist. But the fires we lit, the things we stole, they burned something, bit someone.”
A sardonic laugh erupted from Hiero. “We were small fry, though—only managed to pull off a handful of episodes. But one amateur sleuth, a would-be ‘Matt Foremski,’ set himself on our case, I think because he thought the girl was genuinely under compulsion.
“Wheeler’s first email to me began: ‘You don’t know it, but you just got owned.’ Ha! Melodramatic punk. It was too late anyway. The law had squashed us, took down the videos, slapped cautions on me, blah, blah. But I liked his style. Sent him a case of beer. Something told me—my Muse?—that he would be a good friend to have one day.”
The deep grey of Hiero’s eyes found me. He seemed to be looking into me, looking for some sign of a deeper understanding, a deeper connection.
It didn’t explain how Ghost had switched from vigilante to villain. For all his apparent candor, Hiero wasn’t telling me everything. Ghost didn’t seem like a true believer, the type to buy into Hiero’s art. Was Hiero dangling a pot of cash that I didn’t know about?
“You still don’t get it, how beautiful is this thing you’re a part of.”
Outside, the sheriff’s car backed out of its bay, and left.
Hiero followed it with his eyes. “Were you tempted? Or do you trust me?”
“I trust you.” Like I trust a leech to suck.
Ghost had been my last shot. Who ya gunna call? . . . pretty much anyone but Jack Griffen.
There was nothing left now but to take the next opportunity and gamble.
I could feel the press of cold steel on my thigh.
79
Marten wrote Jack’s phone number by hand into her notebook, leery of trusting her own phone not to explode and take the precious link to him with it.
She stood a moment on the Harlem curb like a lost tourist.
What on earth did he mean by ‘I should have guessed sooner’?
She took stock. After nearly seven weeks on the trail of first Jack Griffen, then Hieronymus Beck, then Randall Todd, her cache had expanded then dwindled to a phone number, a license plate, and a gas station somewhere on the continental US.
Even if the FBI mobilized whatever agents they had in the area, or flew them in, would it be soon enough? Hiero was just as likely to slip the noose. Or worse, if he sensed the hounds closing in, murder Jack and Tracey and disappear.
‘In cold blood,’ as Jack had said.
Weariness settled on Marten, and she moved the three feet it took to sit on the curbside. She felt paralyzed, pulled in opposite directions by choices of equal force. Call in the FBI, disregarding what Jack said; or take her scant clues and meager resources and hunt them down herself.
She ached for her husband’s embrace. Just to be near him, to have him listen and to know that whatever he said, it would be good.
With effort Marten stood. Across the street was a dime store, and out front a bench seat. A tramp sat propped at one end as if he was part of the seat. Triple checking for traffic, Marten crossed the street and went into the store. A minute later she emerged with a can of Coke and a chocolate fudge donut. She sat on the bench at the opposite end from the man and bit into the donut. She gave herself a moment to savor the sugar on her tongue, then swallowed.
Then, comfort food taken, she pulled out her cellphone and dialed her husband. The tramp grunted once, his gaze fixed on a point halfway across the street.
She held the phone to her ear, while she munched. The Coke sat beside her. Someone picked up.
“Marten?” Benjamin’s voice, slurred. “What time’s’it?”
“That’s my line,” she said, then did the mental math and worked out it was late evening. She had probably roused him from bed. “I’m sorry. I need your ears. I’ve got no one else.”
The tramp grunted again, and from the corner of her eye Marten wondered if his hand had inched toward her unopened Coke.
“You can have my ears, Honey,” said Benjamin. “I’ll mail them. But the brain isn’t a going concern right now.”
“That’ll have to do,” and she smiled despite herself.
Motion caught her eye, and this time she definitely saw the man’s hand move another inch toward her Coke.
“You want it?” she said, nodding her head at it.
“Coke,” he said, and clearly took her question for an offer, because he snatched it away, peeled open the top, and had it to his lips in one sweep of his arm.
“Coke,” Marten echoed, struck by the guy’s dexterity.
“Pepsi,” he said.
“Marten?” Benjamin’s voice was tinny in her ear. “What’s going on?”
She clutched the phone to her ear. “I’m here.”
“Doctor Pepp-ah!” said the tramp, like an old-fashioned train conductor announcing a station, then belched.
“Did Grover welcome you with open arms?” said Benjamin, seeming to want to get the conversation in some order.
“I don’t have time for that.”
“Mountain Dew!” the man bellowed.
Marten summoned her concentration in an effort to screen out the noise.
“Jack Griffen and his daughter are being held hostage, and I have two problems.”
“Oh,” said Benjamin. All attempts at levity fell away. “Line them up, hon. Knock them down.”
“First: I don’t know where they are.”
“What do you know?”
“I just got off the phone to Jack. Hiero has them, somehow. I think he’s armed.”
“Wait a minute, Marten. Armed? What are you getting yourself into? I thought this was strictly profile work.” Anger now, her husband’s cover for worry. “You’re there on a break, for heaven’s sake. The whole reason you went for the profiling—”
“It’s fine. I’m fine. Just . . .”
Marten touched the Glock in its holster. It was a legacy of her time in the US, still chambered with the larger than standard 0.40 S&W.
There was silence. Marten imagined Benjamin wrestling himself to calm. The tramp took that moment to calmly announce, “Sprite.”
“Okay, okay,” said Benjamin. “What did he say, in this phone call?”
“That he was at a gas station, with his daughter, and he should have known.”
“Should have known what?”
“Precisely.”
“Soda,” barked the man with an air of finality.
There was a rustling sound that Marten guessed was Benjamin finally sitting up in bed.
“Okay. Let’s back it up. What did he say, exactly.”
Marten repeated as much of the short conversation as she could remember verbatim.
“In cold blood?”
“In cold blood,” repeated Marten.
“Against slavery!” The man’s outburst shocked Marten.
“Amen, brother,” she said vaguely, then raising her voice to be heard over a surge of traffic on the street, continued, “Planned. Malice aforethought. And, for some reason, Jack is killing himself that he should have known that Hiero was gunning for him.”
“Tell me again who these people are, Marten.”
She sighed, wiped a lock of hair her from her eyes, and rehearsed her own profile.
“Jack Griffen, somewhat jaded and world weary academic; Hiero, young charismatic American, whose youth Jack has been feeding on, and in return giving of his experience. Perhaps Jack considered Hiero a protégé? I imagine it stroked his ego to unload his wisdom on the young man, even live a little vicariously through him. See his passion, his easy success.” She paused, listened to her own voice echoing in her memory.
“I’m listening,” said Benjamin.
The tramp appeared to be mumbling at the passing cars. His mouth was going non-stop now.
“And perhaps that picture is complete garbage. I mean, who am I kidding. This isn’t an episode of Criminal Minds.”
“I’ll be your Watson, Ms Holmes.”
“You’re a darling. But I don’t buy my own speculation.”
“What do you know for sure? Facts, Marten.”
She laid out for him again what she had pieced together from her fact-finding of those who knew Jack in Perth, what she had learned from the man himself, and more recently, what she had discovered about Hiero Beck, or Randall Todd.
“But it sounded like Jack was angry at himself for something he should have known all along, something between them, or . . . I don’t know. How could I know? I wasn’t there in Jack’s office when they were ‘chewing the fat’, talking books, reading, writing, life.”
She flicked a flake of icing and watched it arc onto the pavement, and be swept away by a passing car.
“And then he couldn’t even tell me where he was. ‘A gas station.’ Thanks, Jack.”
“The idiot.” The tramp had assumed a musing cant.
“You got it,” she said. “Maybe I’m the idiot.”
“I didn’t call you an idiot,” said Benjamin.
“An idiot to think I’d be any use here. This isn’t my turf anymore. I could do just as poor a job at home.”
“Confessions,” said the tramp.
“Well, I’d love to see you home,” said Benjamin. Marten’s eyes stung, and she angrily brushed at them. “You know,” he continued, “when you said, ‘In cold blood’, know what it made me think of? That Attenborough documentary we watched last year. You remember it? Life in cold blood. We couldn’t get over the baby turtles that deep freeze through winter and thaw out in spring.”
“Documentary,” she whispered, and in the depths of her memory, just beyond her reach, lay something Jack had said. It sparkled on the tip of her tongue.
Then she had it. And she felt elated, and horrified.
“Books,” asserted the tramp.
“Book,” corrected Marten. One in particular. One book that created the genre of true crime. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote.
She should have known.
“Ben,” she said slowly, her voice sounding like a stranger’s in her own ears. “Did you ever read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood?”
“Oh, sure.” A pause. “Oh, god.”
“Yeah. Where did that happen?”
“Someplace in the mid-west, I think. Oklahoma or Kansas. Here let me—” A muffled noise filled the silence. “Looking it up. Kansas, Holcomb. Four dead.” The sound of air sucked through teeth. “Marten, the date.”
“What about it?”
“The murders took place on the 15th of November.”
Fifty-six years ago tomorrow.
“Marten. Honey? Are you there?”
“Here.”
“So maybe that’s where they are? Or where they’re headed? But you said you had two problems. That was the first. What was the second?”
“And Ben, I love you.”
“Marten. The second. What was it?”
“Never mind”
She hung up.
“Like a Bat Outta Hell,” began the man.
Marten dropped him a twenty dollar note and left him to it.
80
The inside of the back of the Winnebago swam into view.
Only, the cabin was on its end, as if the back of the van was planted on the ground, with its headlights pointed at the stars.
Did we have an accident? I couldn’t remember.
With a shock I saw Tracey stretched out across from me, and only then did I realize we were both lying down on the cabin’s couches.
For a moment I was certain she was dead. The shock of it blasted my mind to pieces. Hiero had run out of patience and terminated the experiment.
Then I saw her chest rise and fall. She was breathing. Asleep not dead. Relief flooded me.
Her eyes were closed, and her mouth sagged in a way that spoke of more than sleep.
I tried to raise myself from the couch. The side of my face was dimpled with the pattern of its material. Its musty taste was in my mouth. As my head rose pain
lanced my neck, and nausea swept my stomach. I collapsed again on my face and took stock. That decided it; we’d been drugged.
As memory began to sift back into my awareness, I strained to listen for any sound that might help me fit the pieces back together. The tick of the cooling engine floated in from the forward cabin. The build and fade of the noise of a passing car. In the silence that followed, I heard the rumble of voices.
Something tickled the back of my mind.
Cokes. The last stop, Ghost bought four Cokes. Hiero had been the one to share them out. Both Tracey and I had wrinkled our noses a bit. They’d tasted as if the pre-mix was slightly sour, but we’d both been so thirsty we’d drunk them anyway. Hiero hadn’t allowed us a drink all afternoon, and food had been limited to salty snacks.
Rolling enough to pull my arm clear, I dragged my sleeve up and looked at my Medline. On its face a slow green light pulsed. Forty-nine bpm, a few notches above catatonic. Whatever they’d put in our drinks, that was some good stuff.
I attempted to rise again, and pain tolled in my skull. Worse than any hangover I’d ever had. I was glad Tracey was sleeping. Maybe she’d sleep through the worst of it.
While I waited for my head to clear, I strained to hear what the voices were saying. The occasional passing car blanketed the conversation, but slowly I was able to make sense of it.
My ears sifted out two voices. Their cadences revealed who they were before I could make out distinct words. They belonged to Hiero and Ghost. And they were arguing.
The thing tickling the back of my mind began to scratch like a cat wanting in.
“It’s a risk, is all I’m saying.” That was Ghost.
Hiero laughed. “Most of my fucking life has been a risk, Wheeler. Man up.”
“Call me that again, Randy, and I’ll feed you your teeth.”
A car passed, and there was silence but for a scuffing sound. For a moment hope flared, as I thought they might be fighting in earnest. But it soon sounded more like feet scuffing in gravel. When Hiero spoke again he was calm.
“You know what? You’re right. Maybe it was a risk I didn’t have to take.”
“We.” Ghost corrected, flat.
