by Kim Powers
“Don’t you think I know that? Do you have to keep . . . ”
She snapped around to Guillory. “When did that call come in? Let’s figure out the timeline. We’re missing something.”
“Six, six thirty.” Guillory flipped through his notes of the transcripts he’d been logging. “Here it is. Six twenty-six exactly. It was already dark by then.”
“Okay. Six twenty-six. The call. You yell at him, that’s what sets him off about the fingernails . . . ”
Zaccaro figured out where Mizell was going before I did. “You figure out the clue . . . get over to that frat house on Hennepin . . . how long’s that take?”
“I don’t know . . . maybe . . . whole thing, hour and a half? Two hours?” Mizell told him. “But by the time we get there, the clue’s already there, under the mailbox. We don’t see anybody sneak up on the porch and put it there . . . so we must have just missed him.”
Now she had me going. “You think it’s somebody in the house? One of the frat guys?”
“I don’t know, but the timing works out . . . it’s convenient. He runs downstairs, sticks all this under the mailbox, gets ready for his toga party . . . you recognize any of them?”
“Yeah, but . . . it’s a small campus,” I answered. “You see everybody around . . . ”
“But even if it’s not one of the frat guys, it’s somebody nearby. He got there in a heartbeat.” Now it was Michaelson who was snapping out orders. “Let’s get a squad out there, get a list of all the guys who live there. Drag ’em out of bed if you have to. We talk to all of them. We get a list of names, cross-reference it with anybody who’s taken a class from you . . . ”
I grabbed my jacket, ready to head out with them.
Mizell stopped me. “No. You’re not coming this time. I don’t want you around if things get dangerous.”
“Like the rest of this hasn’t been?”
“You’ve got another poem to figure out. What did he say? ‘You had the body, I had the brains?’ Prove him wrong. Use your brains now. Let us be the body.”
They all headed to the door, leaving me with copies of the photos and poem; they took the originals with them. And Wendy. She was going too.
“Wait. Stay. Rest.”
“I need . . . I need to get home. I’ve got some more medicine there I’m supposed to take. I’m worn out. I need to sleep.”
“You can sleep here.”
“I just need to . . . get home. Sleep in my own bed.”
There was something deflated in Wendy’s eyes, even though she tried to hide it. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fingernails; she couldn’t either.
“Please. Don’t blame her. It was just stupid . . . ” I said, trying to convince her.
“I know.” She started walking out, but stopped. “If I hadn’t been here, at the party, you wouldn’t have fought. If you hadn’t fought, she wouldn’t have been distracted. If she hadn’t been distracted, nobody could have taken her. Same with animals. You can’t get distracted. You have to be aware. All the time. I don’t want to distract you anymore.”
With that, they were gone. All of them. Wendy too. For the first time in what seemed like days, I was alone. No distractions, except for a riddle I couldn’t solve, on the table in front of me.
For your lessons to learn,
Make those muscles burn . . . and I do mean burn . . .
To keep Skip alive, just do number five.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
How he loved poetry, things that rhymed, and things that . . . shut up.
It hurts, it hurts.
Of course it does, you idiot. I just shot you to death.
He was alone—except for that dead body—in the room, the school, where he had spent so much of his childhood. The only escape from the “housemates” who laughed and punched and pointed and whispered and . . .
He had thought he was dying then, but he knew that he really was, now. Becker muscular dystrophy, his disease was called. Well, one of them. The first one. It didn’t show up right at birth, but it was caused by a birth accident. Being without oxygen for those few precious seconds, the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck strangling him, when he was coming out of the womb.
It caught up with him a few years later. Having to wear braces, then walk on canes, then crutches for even more support. Soon, the wheelchair would be the only way he could get around, not even enough strength left in his legs to walk upright, like something evolved. But that was just the part you could see on the outside.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!
He remembered the mnemonic his teacher Miss Moore had taught them, in this very same schoolhouse: “‘Stalactites’ have to hang on tight, to keep from falling. ‘Stalagmites’ are mighty, strong enough to rise up from the ground.” She’d looked at him then, a compliment she thought, to make her point. “Like you. You have to hang on tight, to keep from falling. You’re a stalactite.”
But now, the part you couldn’t see. Well, except on x-rays. Motor neuron disease. Maybe due in part to his muscular dystrophy, the weakening of his body over time, maybe just . . . the luck of the draw. His muscles wasting away, his lungs going, going, gone . . .
There wasn’t much time left; all the doctors had told him. The clock wasn’t just ticking away on Skip, it was ticking away on him.
What had he done? This little girl he had watched grow up, from afar, always from afar. Watching her and her father, all those family occasions. Why not just send anonymous gifts at Christmas, instead of . . . take her? Think of the money he would have saved, every dollar he’d put into this place, every lock on every door, every amp of electricity, dragging in equipment and setting up this control panel where he could call without being found, where he could watch, without being seen. Where he could hack into all the Facebook passwords he would ever need. With all the extra eyes he had, he barely needed Ethan to post his . . . activities on Facebook, but it just added to the fun. He liked the idea of there being a permanent record, something to help Ethan . . . remember.
That had always been their problem: remembering.
He remembered too much, and Ethan didn’t remember anything at all.
Well, he would remember, soon enough.
To finish the job, the kidnapper had to get rid of dead weight, as he and “Iolaus” would soon do in their van, as they buried Jeffrey’s dead body in one of the graves they’d already dug.
One less passenger to worry about, as they made room for the new one, who was next on their list.
Skip was about to get a new playmate, something he had never had.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Why these four photos, along with the rhyme?
Nothing the kidnapper had done so far had been random; there had to be some reason he’d taken these particular photos. I kept looking at them for any detail we’d missed, but there was nothing, no context. No windows, no walls, no door, nothing in the background. Just that desk. A bit of floor. And Skip. And not even all of her, just bits and pieces.
Skip’s mother had once photographed me like that, during college. The scholar/jock, and the crazy artist. Patti, the student yearbook photographer. She was always sitting up in the football bleachers, snapping photos. Not ones that told a story, but ones that suggested what was between the lines. Photos of the goalpost after a game, when the torn paper scrim the team ran through was still floating around in bits and pieces. An unsnapped chin guard or a piece of helmet where the mascot painting was flaking off. The giant stadium lights, where some of the light bulbs had burned out.
The other school photographers caught me in all my glory, racing across the finish line, but Patti shot me from the back, when I was just a blur walking away from the field house with a gym bag slung over my shoulder. She did some motion-capture thing where you could see the bag in mid-flight, leaving a streak of neon in the dark. But she’d never photographed me so you could see my face.
One night, as I was about to start one of my late runs through the
college cemetery, she came up to me and said she wanted to do a series on me, in the art building, away from the track, away from my comfort zone.
She didn’t ask me, she told me. I liked that about her. Everybody else was always asking. I was the BMOC. The star. The Olympic hopeful. They asked.
Not Patti.
That first night, she photographed me in the darkroom, with just the red developing light on, the door opened just a wedge, so a light from the hall came through and seemed to bisect me down the middle. A person, split in two. It seemed right somehow: Was I the gym stud, or the classics scholar? Could I be both? That’s what I was trying to figure out, and somehow, Patti seemed to know that, without me saying a word.
The second night, she said I want to take a picture of your feet, and I took off my shoes and socks for her. She got a shot where my big toenail on my right foot was all blackened, and half torn off. Blisters, my skin rubbed raw.
The third night she said I want to take a picture of your shoulder, where you had that surgery.
How did you know about that?
I just do.
I took off my shirt for her.
The fourth night she said I want to shoot you naked, but you can cover your junk. If you want to. But you don’t have to.
That’s when we both took off our clothes.
She showed all those photos—me in bits and pieces—in her senior art show. My foot, my chin, my shoulder, with the surgery scar. The flame tattoo on one of my ankles.
Never my face, just . . .
Shit.
Is that why the kidnapper had taken these photos of Skip? Because they were supposed to remind me of the ones that Patti had taken, all those years ago? Just fragments, not the whole thing? Not her face? He must have been there, at her show. How else would he know? Like mother, like daughter. It was the same thing he’d done with the ski lodge and the frat house. Places I knew. Places I’d been.
Patti didn’t hold her senior show in the gallery on campus that everyone else always used. She wanted the environment to be as fractured as the photographs themselves, so she picked an old riding stable that was no longer in use, a few miles off campus. Like one of those back mews in an English alleyway.
That old stable, now smack-dab in the middle of the drug dealing area in town, if it hadn’t been torn down years ago. That’s where I was supposed to sweep out the Augean stables, where photographs of me, broken into bits and pieces, had once hung on a wall. Deconstructed, Patti had called it. It was the perfect word for what he was trying to do to me now: Deconstruct me. Tear me apart.
I looked at the latest puzzle again.
I want you to go where the drugs they buy
Give it a twist, make it today
Instead of shit, sweep crack away.
For your lessons to learn,
Make those muscles burn . . . and I do mean burn . . .
To keep Skip alive, just do number five.
That was the Labor: go to that old building, and then set it on fire. Whether or not anyone was in it.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The police station felt different in the middle of the night. All you could smell was congealing cheese and garlic, from the pizzas that had been delivered. All you could hear was the hum from the fluorescent lights; the cops quiet, huddled, intense, and almost whispering as they did their work. Aretha Mizell had told them there was no money for overtime, but they didn’t care. They wanted to find Skip.
Now, something else was different. It was the first time Detective Aretha Mizell had ever taken her own daughter to the station, but it couldn’t be helped. She hadn’t been expecting to work this late—2 A.M., she’d never been there at 2 A.M., except when she’d been working Janice’s kidnapping—and she couldn’t get a babysitter. She couldn’t leave LaTrice at home by herself; she was just eleven years old. Mizell had shielded LaTrice’s eyes when they walked in, past the crime scene board that was right there at the entrance, and she’d made up a pallet in her office for LaTrice to sleep on, but still, she wondered if she was doing wrong. This was no place for a child. But looking at those four new photos of Skip—parts of Skip, her arms and legs and knees and elbows, tied to a desk—taped up on the dry-erase board, Mizell didn’t think she’d ever let LaTrice out of her sight again. For a millisecond, she thought, this was the safest place in the world for her.
Mizell and the FBI had spent the last three or four hours at the Lambda Chi house, interviewing the guys in the frat. Some of them were still in their togas. She didn’t know which smelled worse: the vomit and booze and smoke on them from the bonfire that was still smoldering outdoors, or the house itself, that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since she was in college. But they were game. They’d never been interviewed by the police about a kidnapping before. About being too loud, too late at night, yes; a kidnapping, no.
About torn-out fingernails found on their porch? No.
A professor going crazy in their own backyard? That would be another no.
But after all that, they’d come up with zip. None of them had done anything worse than parade a pig through the streets.
One of Mizell’s guys was playing and replaying a reel-to-reel recorder that had all the kidnapper’s phone calls on it, and these words from him kept spiking on a speaker in the room, from his pissing match with Ethan: “I am the one who’s had ‘enough of this shit,’ which you will be cleaning out of the Augean stables, very soon indeed.”
“Enough of this shit.”
Rewind. “Enough of this shit.”
If the shit don’t fit, Mizell thought, a throwback to another crime, one she’d only watched on TV. This one she was living, and none of it fit. Mad rhymes, no DNA hits, no fingerprints; they’d run everything and come up blank. A mechanical genius, who could thwart every trace they tried. But still—why? With everything she’d said to Holt about revenge and somebody he had kept waiting, they were still coming up blank on that one too. Some nutjob just making Ethan chase his tail—but what was the end game? Twelve Labors down, and then what? Was he really going to let Skip go free? Even if he did, what would she be like after all she’d gone through?
She had to go look in on LaTrice again, sleeping in her office, just to count her blessings.
Only LaTrice was gone.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
To keep Skip alive, just do number five.
It was the mantra playing over and over in my head, as I drove through this other neighborhood that every college town had, besides “Greek Row.” Mt. Gresh’s very own version of the Augean stables, where people bought drugs. Long ago, it had been the “historic” area of town: old riding stables for the moneyed crowd; a small river even, the Hoosatonic, separating it from the woods and mountains. Those double barn doors from the old stables were still here, but now they were covered with peeling paint and bolted from the inside to keep police away, home to squatters and dealers. The cobblestone streets were still here too, but the only cars that drove over them, this late at night, didn’t pause to pay attention to the historic details. They didn’t pay attention to anything except the quality of the drugs, and they weren’t too picky about that. Furtive handshakes, slipping baggies of pot and Adderall, meth and coke, from one palm to another; suspicious glances, especially at a scared white man like me, slinking down in the driver’s seat and cruising along at two in the morning.
There could only be one reason I was here.
No, there was another reason, even if I still couldn’t believe I was actually going ahead with it.
Fire.
A goddamn building on fire. A crack den. It all made sense. Demented sense. How else was I supposed to interpret the latest poem? Occam’s razor. Lex parsimoniae. The law of parsimony, economy, succinctness. The simplest solution.
Burn it down. The derelict building I had once been in, where Patti had had her art show. Yet another page ripped from the playbook of my life, by someone who seemed to have been following it for years. I remembered borr
owing Sig’s van to drive out here, to help Patti unload her work. Her photographs of me. We’d gone in through a side door in some alley, and I’d helped her hang the show. It was a success. We’d stayed in the place by ourselves after it, getting drunk on the cheap rot-gut wine she’d served, along with little peanut butter and banana finger sandwiches. We’d fed each other and mapped out our future together, sitting under the portrait of my flame tattoo, etched into my ankle.
How she was going to become a famous photographer.
How I was going to the Olympics.
How we were going to get married and have kids.
How we’d been followed, and someone was staring in at us.
It just came back to me now. We’d been alone in the room after the show—two of the photographs had sold, seventy-five bucks each, a fortune to us then—and someone was looking in at us through the half-moon window that was part of the carriage door. Patti saw it before I did, and screamed. I turned to the window—in that second, I saw a fractured face, just like the ones in the photos hanging on the walls. A quarter of forehead and brow and eye, and then it was gone.
“Maybe it was just another art lover,” I joked to Patti, trying to calm her down, going to the door and making sure it was locked on the inside. “You want people to see your stuff.”
I’d completely forgotten about it, until now. Had he been following me since then? Waiting for something from me?
I thought I remembered that the gallery space had been blue—slate blue, maybe, that sort of New England historic color?—but now there was no color on any of the buildings. They were all the same weather-beaten gray, at least in the dark. On one side of the street, a lot strewn with rubble; on the other side, an alleyway. That looked familiar. I slowed down to twenty miles per hour and . . .
