He didn’t know why he was about to say what he was about to say, but he nonetheless knew that it was right. For some reason. “I should do this.”
If she thought she’d been surprised earlier, Anne was doubly so now. Not by the words her husband spoke, but by the calm surety with which he spoke them. Before she could react, with either shock or approval, or a combination of both, Art was through the door and moving toward the guest room.
The lyrical repetition continued, even after Art pushed the door slowly open and saw Simon standing in the empty corner of the room he’d earlier stared endlessly at. Standing, hands folded together, rocking gently, and singing as though the song would make itself come true.
Art stepped into the room and said, “Simon.”
The singing ended, fading away on the word ‘Daddy.’ The rocking increased as Simon stood, silently now, in the barren corner of the room.
A few steps closer, until he was right at Simon’s side, and Art lowered to a crouch, looking up into the downcast face. The eyes flitted over his for the briefest of instants before finding haven in the inanimate anonymity of the rug.
“Did Daddy sing to you?” Art asked, notching his voice down somewhere below its normal commanding tone.
“Daddy’s gonna sing,” Simon said, the melody gone from the words.
Art nodded slowly. “What did Daddy sing?”
Simon’s head tilted away, and came back as a yawn swept over it.
“You look tired,” Art said.
“Simon is tired.” Another yawn now, manufactured this time, a gesture to please.
“Do you want to go to sleep now?” Art asked, his hands coming to rest on his knees. Without reply to the question, Simon reached with his hand and gripped the fingers of Art’s right hand. He looked long at the small white hand before standing and leading Simon back to bed. He guided him under the covers and pulled the bedding up snug over the exhausted body. Simon looked away, head sideways on the pillow, eyes dancing as the lids closed over them, and Art realized that, for the first time since his grandmother had lay dying in her bed, he had tucked someone in.
He watched Simon for a long time before he turned for the door. When he did he saw Anne standing there, watching him with wonder. He was embarrassed.
It was the first time she had seen him cry.
Chapter Seven
Process of Elimination
The lone door to the Chocolate Box swung open into the brilliant light of the early spring day, patches of snow still on the ground, and uniformed Marines staring seriously from their perimeter posts at Brad Folger. After a moment he saw their eyes track in another direction and followed the lead.
Kudrow walked slowly along the gravel bed that ringed the Chocolate Box just inside the inner fence. He knew he’d be causing havoc in the security center right then, trampling the buried motion sensors as he was, but he honestly didn’t give a damn. He needed air. He needed to walk in the open. He needed to think.
He did not, however, need Folger.
Granite pebbles grinding beneath expensive shoes brought Kudrow’s walk to a halt. He looked up and stared through the several layers of wire toward the woods beyond still more wire, letting Folger come to him. When his assistant was alongside he said, “I take it you’ve heard.”
White mist flared from Folger’s nostrils. “Nick, end this, now, before we all end up in prison.”
“I’m tiring of your resistance, Bradley,” Kudrow said, as if referring to an annoyance that could be driven off with the swat of his hand.
“Nick, the kid is with his doctor, who is married to a ranking FBI agent, who just happens to be running the investigation of Bell!” Folger glanced toward the Marines, but they were out of earshot.
“I’ll note your concern.”
“God dammit, Nick!” Folger swore, loud enough now that two Marines did look, briefly, before turning discreetly away.
Kudrow snatched his glasses off and snapped his head toward Folger. His small, myopic eyes glared at the shorter, younger man, saying much before the words came. “Bradley. I don’t have to say to you what I can say to you. Do I?”
Folger’s eyes fled first, then his face, looking off to the same woods that Kudrow had gazed at. He breathed deeply, haltingly, and felt almost like laughing, but nothing was funny. Everything, however, was quite absurd, and quite awful. “I never thought you’d do this to me.”
“I’ve done nothing,” Kudrow reminded and warned his assistant, then replaced his glasses.
Folger nodded. “Yeah.”
“I hope I don’t have to.”
Now Folger did chuckle, at himself, for being so damn naive to believe that G. Nicholas Kudrow had once saved his ass out of pure humanity. One mistake. One lousy mistake.
“You find this amusing?” Kudrow asked, mildly perplexed.
“Fucking hilarious, Nick,” Folger answered through a pained grin. “You’re good. You know that?”
Kudrow again looked off toward the trees and thought of whitetail season, the crack of the rifle, the taste of venison.
“You kept it real close, right up to the chest, making me feel like you weren’t even looking.” Folger swallowed hard. “You kept that card to play later. Right?”
“Stop worrying,” Kudrow said with irritation. “You think you’ve sinned?” His head shook slightly. He knew real sinners. “You’re a saint, Bradley.”
A saint. Folger was certain the authorities wouldn’t characterize him as such if Kudrow played his ace. “You have all the cards, Nick. The whole fucking deck. Who else do you own…or rent as needed?”
Kudrow told himself that when this was all over, when the next season opened, he was going to go into the field and bring down a magnificent buck with just one shot. Dead on. A clean kill. “You don’t want to know what I know, Bradley. You might wonder what we work so hard for.”
“Yeah,” Folger agreed with offhand sarcasm. “Yeah. That’d be a shame.”
A venison tenderloin sizzling on the grill. Kudrow could hear it, could smell it. But he could not see it. All his mind’s eye could manage to conjure at the moment was the face of the FBI agent he’d seen in a photograph transmitted from one of the field teams. A black man, a serious, hard looking man, with careful eyes and determination cut into the jaw line.
A smart man.
An uncompromising man.
“He’ll have to be removed,” Kudrow said to the distant treeline.
“As in gotten rid of, done away with, eliminated,” Folger observed. “You suggest it like it’s no harder than lighting a cigar. Do you really think it’s that easy?”
“Removal through less than lethal means,” Kudrow explained. “It is possible. Quite possible.”
“And how is that?”
Kudrow had been considering how it might be done before Folger’s interruption, and there was one, and only one, course to follow to that end.
“I’m going to run it by Rothchild,” Kudrow said. He looked to his assistant to measure his response. Folger had one hand over his quivering right eye, the other cast toward the ground. Without a word he showed Kudrow his back and walked away.
* * *
Conrad Cabral, in thirty years on the Seattle Police Department, sixteen of those working homicide, could not remember seeing an arm bent at the angle it had been on the body of this male. At least they were reasonably sure it was a male. No genitalia had been found as yet, and the face was no help, chopped and even bitten as it was. There were no breasts, but then the chest had been opened with a rough X cut from each armpit to the opposite hip bone, making certain determination doubtful until the medical examiner got a look.
But the damn arm. As the police photographer’s strobe pulsed, Cabral stared at the limb from his vantage point aside the queen bed in room 1312 of the downtown Seattle Hilton. It was the only one of the four limbs not bound, and it was twisted around at least once, wrinkling the skin and underlying tissue near the shoulder. The distorted hand at its e
nd was shoved into the bloody cavity opened across the sternum, as if reaching in for something.
“Three stooges,” Cabral said aloud, drawing the attention of his partner, Zack Norris, scratching notes a few feet behind.
“Huh?”
Cabral turned back to Norris. “The arm. Moe used to grab Curly’s arm and twist in around and around until it would look like that, you figured.”
“I thought he twisted Shemp’s arm,” the photographer interjected.
Cabral thought. “Coulda been Shemp, I guess.”
Norris put his notebook away. “You ever see one like this?”
“Nope.”
An evidence technician exited the bathroom, stepping over a pronounced blood trail. Norris looked his way and asked, “You find the dick?”
The evidence technician shook his head and held up a clear bag that contained bloody towels. “Just these. Someone cleaned up. Showered and all. Even dried their hair. Long and black.”
“Have the toilet pulled and the plumbing checked,” Cabral directed. “It could be stuck in the pipes.”
Norris came around the bed, his eyes sweeping the walls spattered with red, marveling at the amount of blood both there and on the bedding. “The mattress acted like a sponge.”
Cabral nodded and thought quietly to himself as the photographer burned through two more rolls. “Zack, does this look like some fun gone bad?”
“It looks like something bad gone bad.”
Rage, mutilation, revelry in the corpse, positioning of the body after death (God, please, after death, Cabral hoped). It was a textbook serial murder, the most important word being ‘serial’ in this case. “This wasn’t their first time.”
“Nope,” Norris agreed, pulling his notebook again, ready for his partner’s direction.
“Run the method through NCIC,” Cabral instructed as he bent forward to examine the feet. The toenails were gone. “Be real specific.”
Norris made a few notations. He would take care of the paperwork and fax the request to the National Crime Information Center as soon as they got back to the office. And considering the nature of the homicide, it was likely there’d be a quick ‘hit’ if any at all. Some killers left their signatures at crime scenes, and some crime scenes were signatures in themselves. Norris was betting on the latter.
“Give me that desk receipt,” Cabral said, and Norris fished it out of a pocket and handed it over.
“Susan Pu,” Cabral said, reading from the credit card impression.
“Long black hair,” Norris offered.
Cabral passed the receipt back, impatience welling. “Go do the NCIC paperwork now.”
“Right now?”
Cabral looked at the body. “Yep.”
Chapter Eight
The Fixmeister
Sixty feet below the Headquarters-Operations Building of the National Security Agency, in an office lost amidst a vast subterranean labyrinth, a man who did not exist sat before several computer terminals and schemed as the need arose. That was his job.
Those few who had access to him called him Rothchild.
He was a man of unimpressive features, slightly below average in height, slightly above in weight, and somewhere shy of forty in years. His thinning hair was a dark brown, and he favored gray slacks and button-up long sleeve shirts, but no tie. Ties were out. He had nightmares about being hanged from a creaking gallows while magpies stared at his swinging body. The thought of anything looped around his neck brought on cold sweats. Yes, ties were definitely out.
He had no driver’s license, no social security card, no recorded fingerprints, no information of any kind pertaining to him stored anywhere in any file cabinet or electronic databank. No pictures, no birth certificate, no medical or dental records. He was not married, had no children, subscribed to no magazines or newspapers, did not enter the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes. Once each month an envelope with 200 fifty dollar bills was delivered to his office. His ‘salary’. If he needed more, he knew how to get it. He lived in a modest apartment for which he paid the rent in money orders each month. Gas and electricity were paid for by the landlord.
He did have a phone, but not from traditional sources.
Rothchild had not ‘been’ anything traditional for seven years. Not since G. Nicholas Kudrow had had him killed.
Of course death, like existence, was little more than the manipulation of information. One could become dead at any time and continue breathing. It was simply a matter of ability, and, sometimes, resources. Death certificates could appear from laser printers and be affixed with official signatures that would never be questioned. Accident reports in the computer system of a large police department could be ‘corrected’. Rothchild, in his previous life, had once gone boating on the Chesapeake and never returned. Lost at sea, another inexperienced sailor swallowed by the waters. That was what the records said, and records didn’t lie.
And so Rothchild was now just Rothchild, either last name or first, employee of no agency, department, or entity. Rothchild existed as vapor, and performed as a tool, taken out when something needed fixing. And something again needed fixing.
There was no knock before the door opened. Kudrow entered quickly, with some haste Rothchild noted, and planted himself a few feet away, hands folded behind his back. The room was dim, the light of the displays washing it a pale blue and bringing a near black tint to the Deputy Director of COMSEC-Z’s glasses. Rothchild sipped from a can of Pepsi and swiveled his chair toward Kudrow.
“It’s Jefferson, isn’t it?” Rothchild asked with full confidence that he was right.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” Kudrow said, his voice controlled to the point of flatness. Rothchild was the only man he feared.
Rothchild grinned and whipped his eyes briefly at one of the displays. “The President did her doggie style last night. Wanna see?”
Kudrow shook his head. The Secret Service might have looked politely away, but not Rothchild. That he could look at all was no mystery. Wires especially were not mysterious. If something, be it an innocent phone call or the most intimate of digitized video imagery, traveled over a wire, or as a radio signal between stations, anywhere on the planet, Rothchild could intercept it. Uncle Sam had made sure that he could without even knowing that he was. Only KIWI vexed Rothchild, a small favor Kudrow was grateful for.
“You know, her body came back real fine after that baby,” Rothchild commented, wanting Kudrow, the ever faithful husband and father, to just sneak a peek, just one peek, so that he might seem human. But the offer found no takers. Rothchild cocked his head with mild regret, set the Pepsi aside, and pointed himself back to his main display. “So, what do we need to do with Special Agent Art Jefferson?”
Kudrow stepped behind Rothchild as his fingers began to work the keyboard. Information, the basics at first, concerning Art Jefferson scrolled on the screen. “He needs to be separated from a young man.”
“Simon Lynch,” Rothchild said. “Autistic. You know, I met an autistic guy once in a class. The prof brought him in. He could play the piano, the sax, French horn, violin. You name it, he could play it. But he never finished a song. Just couldn’t do it. Vivaldi or ‘Mary had a little lamb.’ Couldn’t finish. Strangest damn thing. That and the way his tongue hung out of his mouth like some limp dog dick.”
“What can you do with Jefferson?” Kudrow asked, forcing away the mental image generated by Rothchild’s crass description.
“I only have the basics so far,” Rothchild explained, his eyes darting left and right over the data draining down the screen. “Phone numbers, medical history, bank balances, blah blah blah. I’ll need more to work something up.”
“When?”
Rothchild thought, squinting at the screen, the data reflected as bright raindrops on his glassy blue eyes. “I’ll let you know.”
“It needs to happen soon.”
Rothchild looked up at Kudrow, the big man, the powerful man, and smiled. “
I’ll let you know.”
Kudrow turned away first, and swore he could feel Rothchild’s eyes on his back even when the door had closed behind and he was walking down the hall.
Chapter Nine
Mr. Tag and the Red Rocker
Six people stood some distance from the gravesite, five of them watching as two men with shovels began heaping dirt into the twin rectangles cut in the grass. Simon Lynch was the only not to look, his attention snatched by the squared-off peaks of the Chicago skyline.
Art, one arm around Anne while both eyes kept watch over Simon, asked her, “What’s he doing?”
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