False Flag

by John Altman

  The revenant standing over the bed smiled approvingly. You do remember.

  Already the memory was drifting apart, like dandelion seeds on the wind. Had it meant suspension for Seth? Expulsion from Young Judaea? A conversation with their parents, with the rabbi? Must have. But Michael couldn’t get it. That part was gone. But the memory of his older brother’s sacrifice was there, bright and clean and hard. That was the part that mattered.

  He closed his eyes, and the wheels stopped grinding. He felt peaceful, drifting into Christmas morning on the dark wings of a serene, dreamless slumber.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE,

  Washington, DC

  New Year’s Eve.

  Only five people had shown up. Three of them were Dalia, McConnell, and Horowitz. Even Innes had opted out today. Dalia signed the courier’s receipt herself.

  They split into two teams of two, leaving McConnell, the most familiar with Washington, to navigate on his own. Or was it Jews sticking together, reflexively if not quite consciously?

  Dalia and Horowitz took his rented Lexus to follow up a batch of leads from Northern Virginia. In a house on the banks of the Rappahannock, they spoke with an octogenarian who claimed to have seen the wanted girl in a supermarket. The old woman demonstrated a variety of facial tics and a practiced facility with racial slurs. Then they talked with a patrolman in Fauquier County who, the night before, had investigated a domestic disturbance involving a veteran from the New Way Forward—the official designation of the 2007 troop surge in Iraq. The man had given his wife two black eyes. The vet was chronically unemployed, persistently drunk, and notorious among the local cops for beating up his pretty wife. But no “failed marriage”—at least, not in the eyes of the law—and no young son to be used as leverage. Just another drunk, angry casualty of war.

  By midafternoon, Horowitz was showing signs of battle fatigue. He wondered aloud whether he might make it home in time to spend the holiday with his family. Dalia felt fatigued herself. Sitting in the passenger seat of the Lexus, she turned her attention to their last tip of the day. A missing sheriff’s deputy had been discovered a week ago, in an inlet near Manassas. The lead had come in three days ago. She bent over the GPS and programmed an address.

  The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office occupied a boxy three-story building near a stoplight off Route 15. As they parked, a distant chainsaw buzzed, climbed, fell away. Inside, Horowitz flashed his HSAP ID. He and Dalia were shown through a long room of desks, mostly empty, to a room with frost-rimed windows and a buzzing space heater. They sat waiting before an aluminum desk that needed dusting. An air freshener shaped like a pine tree hung from a goosenecked lamp. On top of a filing cabinet, confiscated bongs of various shapes and sizes had been collected, apparently as trophies.

  After ten minutes, the sheriff came in: a mustachioed and sideburned, gray-haired, pink-cheeked man of about forty-five who apologized for keeping them waiting, grumbling that New Year’s Eve brought out the crazies even as it shrank his force by half. Sitting down behind the desk, he plucked a tennis ball from the dusty chaos on the blotter and squeezed it repeatedly.

  “What brings you?”

  Horowitz showed his shield again. “Watch the news?”

  The sheriff, frowning, kept squeezing the ball. “Can’t stomach too much of it these days, to be honest.”

  “You should have gotten an attempt-to-locate from NCIC. Pretty girl, early to mid-twenties, short dark hair …”

  “Rings a bell.” He sounded as though it didn’t.

  “We’re sorry to hear about your deputy,” Dalia said.

  The hand stopped squeezing the tennis ball. “Goddamn right.” He shook his head. “Willy Teller. Good man. Good friend. Left behind three kids. I don’t know what to say. What kind of animal …”

  He put it together. Blinked.

  “We’re just fishing,” Horowitz said quickly.

  The sheriff put down the tennis ball. “Fish away.”

  “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  “Week ago Saturday. Sitting right where you are. Wanted Sunday morning off. His kid had something. I said, ‘You know, Willy, we can’t change the schedule every time somebody’s kid got something.’ So he went out. Just doing the rounds around Snickers Gap. Didn’t call nothing in. Must have taken him completely by surprise. Animals. Three times in the head. Point-blank range.”

  Natural-born killers, Dalia thought.

  “Not two houses per square mile out there. I knocked on every door. Good people I’ve known my whole life. Only one possible lead. One of the houses was rented out. We tried to track the name down, hit a brick wall. But God only knows. People use false names. DFS had a look anyway. Didn’t find shit.” His eyes darkened. “Probably, ’tween you and me, some piece of drug-addict crap down from DC. Needs a fix, comes around looking for an easy B and E. Big, rich houses. Or so he thinks. He don’t know white people got problems, too. For Willy it’s just wrong place, wrong time. Three shots, point-blank. Forty caliber. Not like the old days, either, when MPDC would kick out all the stops until we catch the scumbag. These days, cop killers just vanish into the woodwork. Too much crime, too many drugs, too few boots on the ground. Just vanish into the woodwork, like any other lowlife.”

  * * *

  When they came outside again, the air felt twenty degrees colder.

  In cities and towns around the country, New Year’s Eve countdowns were cranking up: lights, parties, balloons, champagne. Out here, driving into Snickers Gap, darkness overlay deeper darkness. The winter sky overhead seemed preternaturally clear. Pulsing satellites moved against powdered sugar on black velvet. Dalia could see the curve of the earth beyond the trees.

  A dirt driveway branched off the dirt road. Beside it, the mailbox for 143 Saw Mill Hill Road was all but lost in overgrowth. At the driveway’s end, a maroon Chevy Silverado was parked before a house of redwood and brick. Lights burned on both floors. In the silence, the crash of the Lexus doors closing made her flinch.

  Horowitz was already moving toward the front porch. But Dalia paused, feeling the frisson in the cold air. Winter sky dazzlingly clear. Forest murmuring secretly. The girl, the trees whispered … The girl had been here.

  Hurrying to catch up with Horowitz, she passed a woodshed, a toolshed, a long-disused outhouse. He was climbing the porch steps when the front door opened and a man came out. Armed, certainly, although Dalia could not see the gun—something in the bloodshot eyes, and the set of the shoulders beneath the stained, holey V-neck undershirt. He said, not unkindly, “I’ll ask you to get the hell off my property.”

  “Sheriff sent us over.” Horowitz held up his shield. “You’re Ralph Korn?”

  The man paused. From inside came voices through TV speakers: media personalities yukking it up in Times Square before the ball drop. “Let’s see that ID again.”

  Horowitz handed over the shield. Ralph Korn examined it closely, made a pushing-air sound in his throat, handed it back.

  Inside, a woman sat on a couch, holding a bowl of ice cream in her lap. She muted the TV as they came in. “Homeland,” Ralph Korn said brusquely, by way of introduction. “M’wife, Hattie. Don’t know what y’all are expecting to find. I already talked to Scotty. Boys from the lab already made a pass. Didn’t see nothing.”

  “You rented out the place.” Horowitz looking around, taking in the scene as he spoke. “The weekend the deputy went missing.”

  Dalia found herself standing near the wood-burning stove. She scuffed a grimy spot on the floor with her toe. The girl had been here.

  “Yessir. And I already told Scotty everything. Ordinary-looking guy. Fit, brown hair. Mebbe brown eyes, too. Not sure on that one.”

  “White guy.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Height?”

  “Average. And mebbe …” He
paused. Horowitz’s eyebrows rose slightly. Ralph shrugged. “Mebbe he served. I got that feeling. Served myself. Hotel two-five Weapons Platoon.”

  A flash between Horowitz’s eyes and Dalia’s. “A vet,” Horowitz said.

  “Just a feeling.”

  “Tell you why he wanted the place?”

  “Nossir.”

  “Here alone?”

  “Dunno. Cleaned up after himself real good. Didn’t find so much as a hair on the pillowcase.”

  “Bleach,” Dalia guessed.

  He looked at her with minor-key surprise. “Yes ma’am. Bleach.”

  As they walked through the house, Dalia kept quiet, letting Horowitz question the man in a lazy, unhurried rhythm. They climbed creaky stairs. So the guest had given a name? Yessir, Stuart Williams. (But of course the sheriff had already tried to track down the name, and hit a dead end.) As they peered into a bedroom, Dalia caught the fugitive scent of bleach trapped in corners and crevices. What kind of car had he driven? Little blue Japanese thing. Did Ralph get a plate? No such luck. They retraced their steps, went down cobwebbed stairs to a basement, and poked around under a bare bulb beside a rattling dehumidifier. Dalia found a scattering of gray dust, thought for a moment she had discovered something, then realized that it was magnetic powder for picking up fingerprints. All the while, Horowitz continued his laconic interrogation. Paid in cash? Yessir. And made contact via email? Yessir. (But surely, Dalia thought, he had used a public terminal or an IP switcher. They covered their tracks, yes they did. Still, HSAP would follow up, just in case.)

  They went upstairs again. Forensics went over the whole house? Horowitz asked casually. Whole house, yessir. Proverbial fine-tooth comb.

  Standing in the kitchen, by the stove again. Dalia looked through her wavering reflection in the small window above the sink. Black woods, waiting patiently for the next thousand years to go by. Her eyes focused, through her own ghostly face, on the outbuildings. “Toolshed out there?” she asked.

  “Toolshed, yes ma’am. Woodshed. And outhouse—now it’s for storage.”

  “Forensics look out there, too?”

  “No ma’am, don’t think so.”

  “Got a flashlight?”

  The woodshed was buttoned up tightly against the cold. And yet, the beam of the heavy-duty Pelican Kinglite picked out frosty wood, ice crystals glimmering like diamonds. The outhouse–cum–storage shed was not so soundly weatherproofed. Dalia had not brought gloves, and her hands were quickly turning numb. She searched anyway, taking the lead as Horowitz and Ralph Korn watched from the doorway behind her. Against these mounds of clutter, the beam seemed a thin and fragile spear. Rusty chainsaw, sagging net on a broken Ping-Pong table, coiled red and black jumper cables. The wind sliced through invisible cracks, cutting her exposed skin like a blade.

  The toolshed was less cluttered and even more open to elements. Her teeth were starting to chatter now. The light played across a sooty lawnmower, hoe and spading fork, hatchet. And something else, registered immediately but subliminally. She had to run the light back and forth several times before it clicked. Glittering on the floor. Not sooty and rusted like everything else. She knelt. Here … and here.

  Staples.

  Her gaze crawled up the wall, into shadowed ceiling corners. She saw splintery old wood. Hoary grays and browns … with a faint but distinct rind of pink, thin as a razor’s edge.

  She stepped closer. Misty, aerated pink.

  She found another staple, still clinging to the wood. Something had been stapled to the wall and then taken down. Stapled to cover an expanding mist of pink …

  She turned. Horowitz was already on the phone.

  Ellicott Street NW,

  Washington, DC

  Silas yawned, knuckling his eyes.

  He lay facedown on the floor before the TV, working on a coloring book, feet idly kicking the air. A dusting of fallen needles from the Christmas tree surrounded him. On-screen, a tracking shot whooshed over the multitudes jammed into Times Square. Jana looked at those multitudes and saw a missed opportunity. Sitting beside her on the couch, Michael watched narrow-eyed. It was impossible to tell what he was seeing, and that disturbed her.

  He felt her gaze and summoned a weak smile. “Champagne time?” he asked.

  Ten o’clock. She shrugged. “Why not?”

  “Can I have some?” Silas asked from the floor as Michael pushed off the couch.

  “You.” Jana nudged him with a stockinged foot. “You’re a funny guy.”

  Giggling, he grabbed her foot. She pulled it away, but not before he got the sock off. “Gimme my sock.”

  Laughing, they wrestled. She got the sock back and said, “Go change into your pj’s, kiddo.”

  He considered arguing. But he was already getting away with murder, being allowed to stay up so late, and he knew it. He vanished upstairs without complaint.

  Michael came into the living room holding two flutes of champagne. They sat, toasted. Again she failed to read whatever was in his eyes. Something uneasy. Something clicking back and forth, like beads on an abacus. He looked as if he might say something, and instead drank silently.

  Cheap champagne, but not the bottom shelf. Her brain immediately began to fizz. She snuggled close to him on the couch. All playacting, counterfeit fondness: teeth on edge, stomach churning.

  Twelve days.

  Outside, the wind rose to a howl. Windows set too loose in their frames rattled like castanets. Forced, lunatic merriment on the TV. A bleached blonde yelling into a microphone about the first Times Square celebration, over a century before: “Two hundred thousand people gathered here that night. We’ve got five times as many here tonight! You can feel the energy in the air …”

  * * *

  Silas brushed his teeth, rinsed, and spat.

  On his way out of the bathroom, he noticed the door to Daddy’s bedroom hanging slightly ajar. Head tilting, he paused. The grown-ups were occupied downstairs.

  Just a quick look around. Then he would slip back down lickety-split, before they noticed anything amiss.

  He leaned against the door. The lock’s tongue clicked the rest of the way from its hasp, and the door yawned open. Inside the bedroom, Silas paused again, savoring the thrill of illicit trespass. He rationed out a breath, nodded without realizing it, and moved again.

  On the bookshelf, he found grown-up books: no pictures, lots of words, scary covers. He looked inside the dresser. Half-filled drawers, rumpled folded clothes. Inside the desk, he found a screwdriver, paper clips, loose batteries, a broken wristwatch. He tried on the watch, pretended to be Daddy. Go brush your teeth, Silas. Hurry up, Silas, we’re late.

  He slipped off the watch. His eyes moved to the closet door. Tightly shut, of course. Because the most important Grown-Up Things would be hidden in there. The most secret, mysterious things; the things kids were not supposed to find.

  He eased the closet door open. Inside, he saw Daddy’s clothes: shirts and pants, jackets and belts and ties. Shoes on the floor. A few unused hangers on the rack. Behind them deep, viscid blackness. On a high shelf, folded blankets. He frowned.

  He took the chair from the desk and carefully, quietly, tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, dragged it across the floor. Climbing up, he stood on tiptoes. The chair wobbled, but he could just reach the blankets. His fingertips quested. Everyone knew that high shelves were the place to keep the most secret, important things. That was where Daddy kept the leftover Halloween candy, after all: on a high shelf in the kitchen.

  Fully extended on tiptoes now, trembling. Chair jiggling beneath him. But his fingers had touched something hard. A handle. He came very close to stumbling backward, falling off the chair, crashing to the floor. But he managed to check his balance and climbed cautiously down, holding the black case.

  He cast a furtive glance toward the door
, then set the case down on the fancy-patterned carpet. TV voices lilting from downstairs like distant music. He bent forward. The case had a latch, like on a door. And numbers—a combination lock, like the kind he used on his bike when they rode to the library. Except that this lock was rusted and dirty and looked broken. He tried the latch. A number on the lock rolled, clicked.

  The case opened. Outside, a thin winter whistle of wind rose, rattling windows, and then fell away.

  * * *

  Silas appeared, coming from the direction of the stairs.

  He held something that Jana’s conscious mind at first refused to identify. It could be a green toothbrush with a red tip. Or maybe a magic wand, the kind you found in those 1,001 magic-trick kits little kids sometimes had. Disappearing balls, weighted coins, fake dice. But it was neither of these things. On some level, she knew it, and was already standing, extending toward the boy a placating hand …

  Michael saw it, too. His flute of champagne hit the rug with a soft, fizzing plop.

  “Pow!” Silas brandished the ampoule like a toy gun. The cat, detecting that the frequency in the room had suddenly spiked, came out from beneath the couch and dashed for the kitchen. Silas followed her with the red tip of the glass tube. “Pow! Gotcha!”

  “Silas.” Pleasantly surprised by the steady authority in her own voice. Imperative but not threatening. “Careful with that. It’s fragile.”

  “Silas,” said Michael more sharply.

  The boy paused, sensing from the tone some unforeseen power.

  “Give it to me.” Michael stepped forward, past Jana, extending one hand. “No games.”

  A fraught, loaded moment. Jana noticed the boy’s red eyes and drooping lids. Well past his bedtime. Michael took another step forward. “Silas.”