by Brett Adams
I bolted through it.
86
From its perch atop a power line, the owl gazed out over the dark prairie.
An immense hush filled the world. Above, the last stars were yielding night to the dawn. Clouds drifted west in ranks, ponderous as buffalo, limned in moonlight. Below, the land was a mosaic of shadow and deeper shadow.
All was quiet, save for the hiss of wind in the grasses, and the skittering of a mouse, a sound only the binaural ears of the owl detected.
First one then another form resolved from the gloom. Far away, but moving fast. They ran in a line.
But the owl had no interest in these creatures.
Save only that in their flight they might scare prey from cover.
The mouse skitter erupted. A small shape bolted. The owl plunged toward the grass.
It tasted blood.
87
My lungs worked like bellows.
My breath came in with a gasp, went out with a wheeze. The cool air was sandpaper on my esophagus. Grass whipped my shins. Each footfall was a whole-body jolt.
My senses were Lego pieces. I was falling apart.
But something else was rising in their place. From below, rising like a Kraken from the deep, was the pain in my chest.
Not the normal pain, these sharp little jabs that arced off at random from a point behind my rib cage. This pain was a slow-building fire. A runaway maelstrom. A locomotive boiler fed too much coal, leaving nothing to do but to stand well back and watch it buckle steel.
And through it my legs pumped like pistons. I flew over the sea of grey grass as a glow rose in the east.
Voices spoke in my head, repeating lines. A question: “What are your legs?” An answer: “Steel springs.” Dredged from a movie the name of which escaped me. They went round and round as if stuck on loop.
And I ran.
Morning was bringing dewfall. The spicy scent of sagebrush filled my nostrils.
I felt the thump of footfalls that weren’t mine. They fell faster than mine, were gaining. A cry fluttered above the noise of wind in my ears, indecipherable.
Surprise had given me a lead, but Hiero’s younger legs were closing the gap.
The fire in my chest grew. It consumed all other senses—all the Lego pieces of Jack Griffen burned, melted, disintegrated. I was a fireball flying over the grass with one desire: go far.
“What are your legs?” Steel springs.
I ran.
I must have blacked out for a split-second, as grass suddenly reached up to embrace me. My head collided with the hard ground beneath, and sparks skittered across my vision.
I sprawled, and lay panting, burning.
Hands grabbed my shoulders and with savage strength rolled me onto my back. Hiero’s face loomed above me. Sweat glinted on his brow in the rising light.
“Coward!” he yelled. Flecks of spittle struck my face. “You coward!”
I struggled to speak. My lungs hauled air in, but couldn’t seem to get it out.
A wild determination took his eyes. He gripped my shirt and hauled me into a sitting position. “You’re coming back. You have to choose.”
At last I managed to croak, “I chose.”
Hope wiped the anger from his face in a moment. The abrupt change was childlike in its purity. It was the face I’d seen across my desk so many nights—chestnut hair and eyes that glittered with excitement over the promise of Story.
“You did?” He let me go, turned to gaze back over a low rise in the direction of the shed. “You did. You gave me your promise.”
He looked at me again, must have seen me struggling to speak. “No. You don’t need to tell me yet.”
He sat back on his haunches and gazed out at the wilderness emerging from night. When he finally spoke, it was with a quiet voice.
“Just me and you, Jack. I’m glad it’s just us, here at the end. No more masks. Everyone wears masks.”
Nausea stirred my guts. I wondered if I might vomit on the dry grass.
“God, I’m just exploding with . . .” His hands made vague gestures in the dark. “Do you have any idea how hard this has been? And I’ve had to keep it all in here.” He tapped his forehead. “No-one to share it with. No way to let out the building pressure.”
He rested against a sagebrush. Its branches crackled in protest.
“I saw you in Hong Kong, you know. At the airport. Wheeler’s flight was delayed, and we missed our handover. So I had to risk snatching your luggage, putting it on the wrong carousel. Couldn’t let you get to Li’s when there was even a chance she could be resuscitated.”
He was staring at his hands, palms open.
“You were haggard, standing staring at the empty carousel in disbelief. I saw a man desperately trying to cling to normal. As if you needed spare jocks. A girl’s life was ebbing away. And I yearned to pull you aside, take you off stage for a moment. To compare notes, savor the journey. Encourage you.”
My arms resting in my lap had begun to tingle. Felt like they belonged to someone else.
Hiero kept talking, oblivious.
“Late nights. Poor internet. McDonald’s. Just real-life shit, settling on me like dust in the crawlspace of my head. Give it time, and it’ll break you. And then the mother of all worries: I let you go. For weeks I let you roam somewhere in the UK, in Forster-space. Gave you time to surprise me, not knowing who would emerge on the other side. That worry nearly brought it all crashing down. We didn’t pick you up again until Wheeler found you poking around in yachting forums. Then, in New York, to see you on the pavement outside the café . . . I could have hugged you.”
He looked at me as if he would hug me now.
“What kept me going? The choice, Jack, the choice.”
He sat back on his haunches and appraised me.
“You’re a good man. And Tracey, she’s a lovely girl. I don’t know your wife, but from what Tracey tells me, she’s also quality. Quality family.”
He planted a hand on my chest—I marveled that the furnace beneath my skin didn’t burn him—and leaned toward me again. “But even a good man can do bad things. Even Job cussed out God. Press him hard enough. Take away his friends, his work—his health. Strip him down to the chassis, and you no longer have the same man, do you, Jack? That’s just a man that looks like your dad, but isn’t any more. It’s not your fault.”
Jesus. Pity now? After all I’d been through, my heart was going to betray me with pity for this boy?
This boy is a murderer, my mind counseled me. And he hasn’t finished. There would be time for pity, but it wasn’t now.
I lifted a hand that weighed the earth, and beckoned for him to lean closer. I whispered into his ear.
“You said choose a loved one.”
He nodded, expectant.
I said, “I did. I chose me.”
He recoiled, confusion wrinkling his brow. I twisted my wrist toward him so he could see the face of my Medline. Its crisp red light carved the hollows of his face in sharp contrast, black on red.
One hundred and sixty three beats per minute. Sustained.
“My choice was me, Hiero. What man doesn’t love himself?
“I’m having a heart attack.”
He stared at me like I was the crazy one.
My hand found the strength to grip his shirtfront.
“It. Is. Over. You can’t fix this. Can’t edit it. My girls are safe. Anything else would be melodrama, and you would hate that.”
The dawning realization that he would not get the ending he wanted, that his experiment with my soul—the abominable choice between wife and daughter—was void, was fascinating to watch. It seemed to war with his exultation, crept over his features as if his very skin resisted the idea.
Darkness was irising in from the edge of my vision. I guessed I had moments of consciousness left. With the last of my strength, I rolled the Medline toward me and strained to focus on its face. There, beside the solid red heart was a flashing symbol, a phone.
I
smiled.
“And if I were you, I’d leg it. Right now, a 911 dispatcher at the Garden City Police Department is listening to a younger version of me tell her that I’m having a heart attack. An ambulance is on its way, here. You’ve got maybe five minutes.”
Tears glinted in his eyes.
A little of that pity must have stolen back into me, because I whispered, “Your line is: The horror! The horror!”—pity because only a good student would get the reference to Conrad. But only a little; it was the villain’s line.
He let me go and I slumped back on the ground, staring into the sky. The last stars glittered, holding out against the tide of light.
My chest rumbled with a chuckle that lacked the strength to get out. I was laughing at the fact that we were both wrong about The Killing Joke. Batman suicided.
Darkness swallowed my vision. In the last moment of consciousness I remembered which movie had the line, “What are your legs?” It was Gallipoli. The heroic, tragic Australian campaign of the First World War. That man had died running too.
The very last thing I heard was the unmistakable sound of gunshots. Two, in the distance. Puck, pock. I felt a flutter of fear.
The very last thing I thought was the horrible doubt that I had somehow miscalculated.
88
Marten studied Professor Jack Griffen.
He’d come a long way from the musty halls of academia; his flesh was etched with the rigors of the journey.
He had fallen asleep in the time it took her to fetch a glass of water. She took a sip and set the glass down beside her chair. The noise woke him.
“You perving on me?” he said, slurring a little.
“Trying to decide what to make of your face. It’s a toss-up between Rocky Balboa—the fourth movie, when he gets the snot beaten out of him by the Russian—and a turnip.”
He grunted, but didn’t ask which she’d settled on.
A nurse entered the room, hovered over him a moment, scrutinizing the machine beside his bed. She left without a word, stopping only to glance at Marten with a look that said she had overstayed her welcome.
Jack seemed to notice. “If she glares at you again, just shoot her.”
“They took my gun. Standard procedure.” And I don’t want it back. “That reminds me, though. I think these are yours.” Marten placed a pack of business cards held by a rubber band on the bedside table. His eyes settled on them, and lit with recognition.
“Old friends,” he said. “Where did you find them?”
“You dropped them in the restroom at St Pancras station after you left that young officer on the toilet with a blood nose.”
“He tried to shoot me, you know.”
“I know,” said Marten. “A lesser man would relish the news that the young officer was busted back to traffic duty for leaking case details to the press.”
“His gun made it all the way to the Armpit of Kansas.”
He passed a hand over his eyes, and sucked air through his teeth.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t joke about it. I’m just . . . There I am, with the light leaking away, thinking I am done. And I hear shots . . .” His voice trailed into silence broken only by the muted piping of the machine.
Marten reached for her glass and found it empty.
“Old hand like you, Jack. Thought you would have known the difference between the discharge of different calibers—my Glock is chambered with the larger 0.40 Smith & Wesson.”
“Old hand was having a heart attack,” he retorted, irritated. Marten took it as a healthy sign. “How on earth did you find us?”
“A bit of sleuthing, with some help from Matt Price, your IT chum.”
“I owe that boy.”
“You do. He was on your side from the beginning.” Unlike me. “But the key was Mitchell Cooper.”
“Mitchell Cooper?”
“Hiero’s helper.”
“Oh,” said Jack. “I only ever called him Ghost, as in Ghostwriter. After Matt alerted me to exchanges between Hiero and another party, I figured someone was helping him orchestrate things. It explained how he knew things he shouldn’t have known, like that I took Li Min’s journal. But I didn’t lay eyes on Ghost until New York, when he confiscated the gun. Hiero only ever called him Wheeler, which I guess must be another nickname. Who is he?”
“Mitchell Cooper, twenty-three, listed address a trailer parked at the back of his parents home in Lansing, Michigan. Bought bitcoin early because it was cool, and made enough money to spend his days playing online poker badly, and nights phishing for information to blackmail schmucks. But I didn’t find that out till yesterday. I was so focused on who these kids were, I missed the obvious. Unlike Hiero, Mitchell was very much concerned with his future—about it not being behind bars. He studiously did everything possible to hide or erase his presence from the record of this affair. Hid from cameras, covered his digital tracks.”
“Tried to,” corrected Jack.
“Yeah. Turns out he wasn’t quite as good as he thought he was; Matt was better. Starting with Hiero’s blog, which was run from a server maintained by Mitchell, Matt was able to fingerprint his digital presence, which included a number of online identities.
“From the beginning, he was booking flights for Hiero and Rhianne, surveiling you—in Perth, Hong Kong, Vienna, London. Hiero was always ahead of you, but Mitchell was your shadow, constantly feeding your movements to Hiero.”
“Made me feel like an idiot, is what he did,” mused Jack.
“You? I’m the one who waited until the eleventh hour to ask the right question. I put Matt on his trail, asked him to concentrate on the US, and he discovered Mitchell nosing about in a forum—last year, mind you—asking about night tours of the Sandsage Bison Reserve. The forum was for the Kansas Outdoor Adventure Club. Kansas, the state of In Cold Blood, which was the bomb you dropped in your last call to me. I couldn’t believe it was a coincidence. Matt hunted for more digital traces in and around the area, and found transactions for one-way flights out of Garden City, Wichita, even Colorado Springs. One-way flights for two. Mitchell was working on the getaway contingencies for himself and one other.”
“Rhianne.”
“Right.”
“Do you think Rhianne knew?”
“She didn’t seem that upset Mitchell was shot. She kept asking for Hiero after she came to.”
“Came to?”
Marten smiled. “Tracey didn’t tell you?”
He shook his head.
“Your girl laid Rhianne out with a right hook a prizefighter would be proud of.”
Jack laughed and winced in the same moment.
“Best as I can arrange in my head,” she said, “Mitchell was the third wheel on this hell trolley, and put all the contingencies in place to bear away the object of his infatuation if the plan failed and Hiero got caught in his own web.”
“Makes me wonder,” Jack mused, “if Mitchell was as bad at locking his back door as Matt thinks.”
“Oh, I think he got owned fair and square. Rhianne or no Rhianne, Mitchell has a strong sense of self-preservation.”
A silence gathered. Marten wondered when the nurse would return. Next time she would probably bring security.
Jack seemed lost in his own thoughts.
“You know,” she said, “it’s a good thing it wasn’t Holcomb. If it had been, you’d probably be dead. Grover—the Assistant Director of the FBI in New York—as good as told me his agents would be gunning for you. They staked out the farmhouse in Holcomb. When you didn’t show, they setup watches on emergency traffic. Your Medline pinged their bell loud and clear. But by the time they arrived at Sandstone, you were already down. Would have been hard to explain shooting an unconscious man in the throes of a heart attack.”
His eyes found hers. They held a twinkle of mischief.
“It’s a good thing you wandered into Hiero’s novel, Inspector Lacroix. You were a complete chaos ball. Perpetrated all sorts of mischief.”
&n
bsp; Marten spoke her growing suspicion: “When did you know Hiero wasn’t taking you to Holcomb?”
“Oh, a couple of weeks back.”
“What!”
An orderly bustled into the room pushing a wheelchair.
“Physio, Mr Griffen,” he said. “Got to keep you moving.”
Marten rose, with her hand outstretched in a stalling gesture. She glared at Jack.
“You knew?”
He smirked. “Well, to be fair, I didn’t know Hiero was reprising In Cold Blood until—what day is it?”
“Tuesday,” said Marten through gritted teeth.
“I didn’t know for sure it was In Cold Blood until four days ago. But I’ve known that Hiero wouldn’t let anything happen to me before his climax; he was wrapping me in cotton wool until the very end. That meant Holcomb, or any place I might have let slip, or the police could sleuth, was out.”
“That’s a hell of a gamble.”
“No gamble. Holcomb was too pat,” Jack said, and swiveled his legs off the bed. “Too many clues pointing in that direction. So I thought back over my time with Hiero, raked over the memories. My time at a loose end on your sunny isle gave me a chance to reflect. Forster-space.” He tilted his head, and for a moment Marten felt she was being schooled. “You forget, Inspector, you’re looking at all this—at Randy Todd—with the eye of a criminal profiler. I’m looking at it as a writer. And Hiero’s narrative didn’t make sense.”
“You mean his alibis weren’t water tight?”
“No, they weren’t—and you can bet I began desperately to catalogue them so that when I got caught I wasn’t going to jail. But that’s not what I’m saying. Hiero began this odyssey with a set of notes for his immortal novel, Blood and Ink. Each held a description—not particularly enlightening before the fact, mind you—of a murder.
“And there I was stumbling along, always a step behind, while he pinned each one on me. Worried about stopping him, I missed the most important clue of all. It was winking at me in the blog entry for Annika Kreider’s murder, when Hiero wrote that Annika was always first to class, despite him never having attended my lectures—a reminder I knew this girl, unlike Rhianne or Li Min. It was blindingly obvious at Oxford, when he set Jane up telling me the next murder would be ‘closer to home’. Narrative has to have a progression, and all along it was that each murder hit closer to me.”
