by Erik Carter
Dale looked at her blankly. He felt uncomfortable.
“He convinced me not to,” she said. “Then the day after that I tried again. Then two days later I sealed the deal.”
Dale didn’t know what to say. Women’s ruthlessness stunned him sometimes. And frightened him a bit. “Damn, dude.”
Spiro shrugged. “I wasn’t going to put up with jealousy and fighting.”
“I can respect that,” Dale said, trying to see it from her perspective, trying to understand that even though the man’s actions were influenced by his condition, they still must have been very hurtful to Spiro. “I’m guessing this was a problem for you guys for a long time?”
“About a month. A little shy of a month, actually.”
“Wait, a month? This guy loved you, and you dumped him because his condition got the best of him for a month?”
“I wasn’t gonna put up with it.” She looked away from him, to the floor. Stared at the carpet. Since meeting her, Dale had observed that Spiro’s visage was permanently set on neutral. Her face was a stainless steel examination table. But right now there was something else there. In the eyes. Pain.
“You still love the guy,” Dale said.
She looked up. “Don’t presume things, Conley. And I really don’t think you should be doling out love advice, a man obsessed with his last partner, the great Jamison Zane.”
Dale just laughed at her. He was no psychologist, but he was pretty sure that what Dr. Gillian Spiro had just done would be considered deflection.
A noise at the door. Professor Lockhart entered the office.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said jovially as he breezed to his desk and sat down. “Please, have a seat.”
Lockhart was in his mid-forties. Bald on top with neat hair on the sides. He was tall and lean. He looked like a middle-aged surfer and had the affable spirit to match.
As Dale and Spiro sat down in the two chairs facing the desk, Dale saw in his peripheral vision Spiro crossing her legs. He turned his head slightly. Her skirt had moved up. The skin on her knee was smooth, supple. She was in good shape. But he didn’t look up because he could feel her return gaze boring into him. Those brown eyes were locked down hard upon his skull. She’d caught him. So he quickly looked back up to the professor.
“Do you remember Philip Vasquez and Isaac Bennet, Professor?”
“‘Pastor Rob,’ please. That’s what everyone calls me. And, of course. I remember them quite clearly. They were two of our most gifted students back then.”
“Sorry about this,” Spiro said. She reached into her attaché case and pulled out some pictures. She passed them across the desk.
“My God,” Pastor Rob said. He stared at the pictures for a long moment, saying nothing. The only sound was the clock ticking and the students on the sidewalks outside the window. “I’m sorry, this is just so sudden.”
“That’s understandable,” Dale said.
Pastor Rob looked at the photos for another couple moments. “I can’t help but think that this has something to do with their life choices.”
“Isaac hung out with rock stars,” Dale said. “That doesn’t strike me as the type of person who went to a Christian university.”
“He never finished. And neither did Philip.”
“I thought you said they were two of your most promising students,” Spiro said.
“They were.” Pastor Rob turned around, stood up, and stretched his long arms high to reach a yearbook on the top shelf behind his desk. He sat back down and flipped through the pages then turned the book toward them and showed them a picture of a group of five male students, standing casually, arms around necks, hands on shoulders, all smiles. One black, the other four white.
“We had a group of five students who were absolutely brilliant. Of course, they gravitated toward each other, became the best of friends. Isaac Bennett, Philip Vasquez, Nathan Cook, Andrew Riley, and Tyko Hautala.”
Dale’s two victims had belonged to a group of five elite students. Most interesting ...
Pastor Rob gazed at the picture fondly. “The theories they developed from the Scriptures … Just brilliant. We called them the Five Wisemen. A little joke of ours.”
“Yeah, a real knee-slapper,” Spiro said and rolled her eyes. “Religious humor.”
Dale turned on her viciously. “Will you show a little respect, Spiro? Jesus Christ.” Dale, realizing his faux pas, slowly turned back to face the pastor. “… Sorry, Pastor Rob.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“What did the other Wisemen think when Isaac Bennett and Philip Vasquez dropped out?” Dale said.
“Why, they all dropped out. All five of them. At the same time.”
Dale didn’t know what to make of all this information, but he knew one thing: he had a new potential list of victims. And the list was five people long. He looked at Spiro, and by the way she returned his look, he could tell she was thinking the same thing.
Spiro leaned forward in her chair. “Did they give a reason why?”
“They never gave an official reason. But they didn’t have to. They were on the verge of expulsion, and the whole campus knew about it.”
“Your five most promising students, and you were ready to expel them,” Spiro said. “Interesting methods around this place.”
“They were getting radical. There’s no place for that here.”
“Radical how?” Dale said.
“They considered themselves Christian soldiers. They were talking about a new Crusade, one against atheism. Bear in mind, this was the ’60s. Protest was everywhere. Their minds were corrupted.”
“Sure,” Spiro said.
“Ever hear from any of them again?” Dale said.
“I prayed for them. But I’ve never heard a word from any of them since that day. They all went on to secular universities. I’m sure they did quite well. I just hope they never acted on their ideology.”
“You said they wanted a new Crusade against atheism. What would you think if I told you that both Isaac Bennett and Philip Vasquez were known to be atheists themselves?”
Pastor Rob frowned. “I would find that hard to believe. Impossible, as a matter of fact.”
Dale and Spiro looked at each other again.
“Thank you for your time, Pastor Rob. Might we borrow this for our investigation?” Dale said, pointing at the yearbook.
“Of course.”
Dale and Spiro hurried, nearly running, down the hallway from Pastor Rob’s office, a long corridor of brick walls, a matching brick floor, and doors with blue-painted frames.
Dale held up the yearbook. “We gotta get in touch with the FBI field office.” He had kept his finger on the page with the image of the Five Wisemen. He opened to the picture. “Three other guys. What do you want to bet that someone named Nathan Cook, Andrew Riley, or Tyko Hautala has been attacked in the last couple days?”
Chapter 15
Owen stood on a street corner in downtown Portland. He had left his bum outfit in his seedy hotel room. Now he was dressed in business casual attire: a button-up shirt and corduroy slacks. And sunglasses. He was learning to adapt to situations, how to conceal himself, so he knew he had to dress appropriately for different scenarios. And now he was in the heart of the prosperous downtown region, so he had to look the part. Though he wasn’t from Portland, he had grown up in the area and was familiar with the trappings of the city: the traffic, people shuffling on the sidewalks, car horns. In front of him was a high-rise building, its glass windows shining in the sun that had momentarily peeked out from the clouds. His head panned down from the top of the building to a line of business names above the entrance, one of which read: Scarborough Advertising.
He watched the people as they went into the building. So many of them, most of them carrying briefcases. One thing about the mission that he had not been expecting was the perspective it had lent him. Pulling himself from his own day job had led him to an outsider’s perspective on the wa
y the world works, and watching everyone shuffle into their jobs made him realize how trivial it all was, how little of it was really in service to the Lord.
His eyes shifted from person to person and finally landed on a robust black man. He took a picture out of his pocket, an image that had been torn out of a book. It was the infamous photo of the Five Wisemen that had appeared in the Chinookan University yearbook. Their smiling, blasphemous faces, arms on each other’s shoulders. He looked at the black man in the photo and then at the black man entering the building. The eyes. He compared the eyes of the two. The older man was forty pounds heavier, so the eyes were an even more critical factor. But they didn’t match. This was not Nathan Cook.
More people entering the building. A different black man. Again, Owen looked at the eyes. This man wasn’t fat like the last one. This man was fit and wore well-made, if eccentric, clothes: a purple dress shirt with a bright orange tie. The eyes. Owen looked at the photo in his hand. And back to the man.
It was a match.
This was the guy. This was Nathan Cook.
As Owen watched Cook approach the building and enter through the revolving doors, a relief fell over him. Later he would do what he needed to do. This, along with the fact that he would not have to terrorize anymore innocent families, made him happy. And though he tried to deny it, knowing how God would feel, the idea of wiping this blasphemy from the earth gave him a thrill, a certain tingling to his core.
And he smiled.
Chapter 16
Pine trees stood right outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, and patchy light drifted into the building through the needles. Dale and Spiro were at a reception desk—wooden and curved with a dark, polished stone surface. Dale finished up a phone conversation. He hung up the phone and handed it back over the counter to the cute girl behind the desk, a student worker, no doubt, probably a junior or senior. Dale was holding the phone book she had let him borrow.
“Two Nathan Cooks have been attacked in the last two days,” Dale said to Spiro. “Both in their homes. Both with family members present. There are some other Nathan Cooks in the outlying towns. The field office is putting locals on them. You and I will focus on Portland. Let’s see what we got.”
Dale flipped through the phone book. Spiro stepped up behind him and looked over his shoulder. She stood close enough that he smelled the shampoo scent in her hair. He could feel her presence and just a hint of her body heat. When she had told him that his BEI profile said he had a weakness for women, there was no way he could deny it. And though she had turned him off already and she was likely only getting more comfortable with him in a professional manner—not a personal one—having her presence so close like this did raise Dale’s spirits a notch or two.
Plus, it didn’t hurt having another cute girl behind the desk.
“Looks like we have two remaining Nathan Cooks in Portland,” Dale said. He retrieved his wallet and took out a one-dollar bill. He handed it to the receptionist, who was confused. “Here. Sorry about this.”
Dale tore a page out of the phone book.
The receptionist’s eyes lit up. “Hey!”
Dale flipped through the pages of the phone book, stopped, ran his finger along the page. “No Tyko Hautalas.” He flipped to another page. “But we got two Portland Andrew Rileys.” Dale tore this page out of the phone book as well and handed it to Spiro. The receptionist threw her hands up in despair. “The field office is going to check the surrounding region, and PPB will monitor the Cooks and Rileys. For now, let’s split up. I’ll check on the Nathan Cooks. You check on the Andrew Rileys.”
“But …” Spiro said and paused. “What do I do?”
Dale pointed at the page in her hand. “Hook up with PPB and monitor those addresses. If you need to, use that badge that Taft loaned you. And if you really need to, use the gun he gave you.”
“But I don’t …”
“Don’t what?”
“I don’t …”
“You don’t know how to use it, but you don’t want to ask me how.”
Dale looked at her. There had been a considerable amount of tension between the two of them, and this new situation—her needing his assistance regarding the gun—put him in a position of power. He could exploit it, and for a dark moment, a petty part of him somewhere deep down inside considered it. To humiliate her a bit. But that wasn’t him. And she had, only moments earlier, shown that she was getting more comfortable around him. So instead of being an ass, he said, “Come on. I’ll show you.”
Dale and Spiro stood in a shady, grassy spot between a couple two-story academic buildings. An oak tree and a pair of pines loomed over them. Dale glanced around them, made sure the coast was clear. He nodded at Spiro. She reached into her purse and took out the tiny, holstered revolver that Taft had given her. She handed it to Dale.
Dale took it out of its holster and looked it over. It was always strange to him looking at a Detective Special when compared to his beloved Chief’s Special. So similar but so different. “Taft carries the Colt Detective Special. I prefer the Smith & Wesson Model 36 Chief’s Special.” Dale took his gun out and showed her. “It’s a bit smaller, a bit lighter. Plus, it just looks sexier.”
“They look identical to me.”
“The Colt came out first. And it carries six rounds, whereas mine carries five. So I’ll give it that.” Dale put his gun away. He held the Colt before Spiro and checked again to make sure no one was watching them. “This gun holds a .38 Special round, like mine. Not the biggest round in the world, but a crapload of power in such a small weapon. Now. Safety. First, always treat a gun as though it’s loaded, whether it is or not. Always point it in a safe direction, away from people, preferably at the ground. Keep your finger off the trigger. We’re doing this lesson on a college campus, but if we were at a range, I’d tell you to never go downrange.”
“Into the line of fire?”
“Right. Never go downrange.”
“Duh.”
Dale gave her a stern look. He almost never took things entirely seriously. But treating firearms with respect was something he refused to joke around about. He pointed at her gun’s cylinder. “This is the cylinder. You have a Colt, so your release pulls backwards.” Dale pulled back the release, and the cylinder came out. “Ammo goes here. Your cylinder revolves clockwise, again, since you have a Colt. My Smith revolves counter-clockwise. Turn the cylinder upside down to unload.” Dale pointed the gun upwards. The rounds fell into his hand. “Spent casings can stick, so you may need to hit this.” He tapped the ejector rod. “Squeeze the trigger to fire.” He pushed the cylinder back in, kept the gun aimed at the ground, and clicked off a couple dry fires.
“Don’t I have to pull this back first?” Spiro said and pointed at the hammer.
“No. Just pull the trigger. Double-action shooting. The trigger will be harder to pull that way, but it’ll be quicker and safer.”
Dale reloaded the Colt, put it in its holster, and handed it to Spiro. She put it back in her purse.
“Now that you’ve had the world’s fastest gun safety course, let’s get you out into the field, Agent.”
Chapter 17
Bradford peeked through the blinds in his office window that looked out upon the newsroom. The evening crew was bustling with activity. He closed the blinds, throwing the room into semi-darkness but for the glow from two monitors. He sat down in a chair across from one of the monitors, his elbows on his knees. The flickering light illuminated his face. On the monitor was a frozen image of Adam behind the news desk. Bradford pushed a button, and the footage began.
Bradford was watching it yet again. He’d watched it at least a dozen times in the last two days. Adam’s infamous meltdown.
“And it was not until later that Barrington claimed the actions seconded Fidelity International’s earlier stance on customer relations,” Brittany Smalls said. “Fidelity has yet to release an official statement. Adam.”
Adam was shown on the screen, h
ead down, mouth and eyes open.
“Adam? Adam!”
Adam woke from his daze.
Bradford pressed the button again. The video stopped. He turned to another monitor, also with a frozen image of Adam. This was from the previous night’s broadcast when Adam was flustered while talking about the murders. Again Bradford pushed play, and the video began.
“Vasquez … he died immediately, and though Bennett was alive when his neighbor arrived on the scene, he succumbed to his wounds before arriving at the hospital. Officials are … are baffled by the seemingly connected incidents. The murders’ similarities have authorities on the lookout for a serial killer, but due to the distance between the two crimes, police are not ruling out that these may be the works of two or more killers.”
Bradford stopped the video again. He grabbed a newspaper from his desk and read the main headline. Recent Murders: Serial Killer or Coordinated Executions? He put the newspaper down and leaned back in his seat. He looked at the frozen frame on the monitor, Adam Steele’s bewildered expression. Bradford didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, and he didn’t want to think that Adam was a sinister person. But he had to do what was right.
He picked up his phone and dialed. A moment later, there was an answer. “Portland Police Bureau.”
“This is Carl Bradford at Channel 16. I’d like to report some suspicious activity.” He had to stop for a moment before he could continue. “Related to the murders.”
Chapter 18
The sun was starting to go down, and pink light drifted in through the windows, illuminating the wooden dining room table in front of Adam. There were windows to the left of and behind the table, both with orange- and brown-striped drapes. On one side of the table was his son Denny, eight years old, shaggy, brown hair, wearing a ringer T-shirt with his face buried in his bowl of spaghetti. He had skipped the salad. On the other side of the table was Rachel, blonde like her mother and three years old. And at the far end of the table sat Alicia. While most of the city of Portland was in on the same joke about Adam, Alicia was the only person other than Carl Bradford who seemed worried. And while he appreciated her concern—she’d always been a caring wife, after all—he knew that it could get in the way.
