Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

  “I never saw him before. He said his name was Louie.”

  “That’s right. Louis Cantini. That name doesn’t ring any bells?”

  I shook my head.

  “I think you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said soothingly, even though we both knew that wasn’t true.

  Should I disavow her of that wishful thinking?

  “Why were you following me?” I wanted to know.

  “I got assigned to tail you after you visited Rosalina Marchetti.” She hesitated, clearly deciding how much else to say. “She’s part of an ongoing investigation.

  “When Louie Cantini showed up at the library, I figured, not a coincidence, so I called in some backup. The Cantinis and the Marchettis have an antagonistic history. Plus, Louie is probably lucky if he can read a soup can, much less a book. I apologize for not getting to you sooner. Louie jammed the lock behind him.”

  “It’s OK,” I said, trying to process the entry of yet another mob family into my nightmare.

  I craned my neck to look out the rear window and was rewarded with a sharp pain.

  “Where’s Hudson?” I asked. And how did he get here?

  “I told him I’d take care of you for a while. He tagged along to watch them question Louie.”

  “He’s not FBI.”

  “No, but …” She paused. “He has a lifetime of free passes, apparently. I heard it this way: Several years ago, a local Afghan interpreter opened fire on an army unit. Your friend Hudson and another security contractor ended up saving six soldiers. One of those soldiers happens to be the son of someone very high up in the Bureau.”

  Ah, the legend of Hudson Byrd. Nothing could contain it. Not deserts, not oceans, not lonesome prairie.

  My collection of injuries began to sing in chorus. My spine ached like I’d fallen off a wild bull; my concrete-grazed cheek and knees stung like the burn of multiple angry hornets; my throat felt like a night spent screaming at a TV in a sports bar. Nothing I hadn’t experienced before.

  I would live.

  More important, Maddie would live. I would make sure of it.

  When Agent Waring dropped me off in front of the hotel with two of the Chicago Bureau’s “best” rookie agents to guard my hotel room door for the night, I had to ask.

  “Is genealogy actually a hobby?”

  “When you have five hours,” she said, “I’ll tell you how I have about three-fourths of an ounce of Tom Cruise’s blood running in my veins.” She grinned. “Enough to brag about at parties but not enough to drop Jesus for Scientology.”

  She tossed off a two-fingered salute. “I’ll be in touch.”

  As nice as she had been, I knew what that meant.

  Pink Lady didn’t think I was her problem anymore.

  My temporary guard detail consisted of two nervous-looking guys in their early twenties assigned to stand outside my room. I knew that nervous and young wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It meant they’d stay alert, worried about not screwing up, and I guessed they wouldn’t mind checking my eyes for dilation every now and then.

  I slipped the keycard in the door, promised the boys hamburgers from room service in an hour or so, and stepped inside.

  How could I ever think this room felt cold?

  The lamp’s blue light stood like a welcome home beacon. Tiny chocolate truffles rested on top of the oversized down pillows, perfect fluffs of cotton candy that I couldn’t wait to mess up with my aching head. The pale gray comforter—what a soothing color!—was turned down with a military precision that my own bed could only fantasize about.

  I walked only a few feet inside before dropping my bag and stripping every disgusting bit of clothing off my body, things that he had touched. I even wanted to burn the lacy black underwear that I’d paid fifteen bucks for at Nordstrom. I can’t say that Hudson’s ripped chest hadn’t crossed my mind when I’d swiped my MasterCard in the lingerie department.

  Where the hell was he anyway?

  Instead of lighting a match to my underwear, I limped into the bathroom, knelt by the marble bathtub, and twisted the faucets all the way until the sound of the blasting water drowned out my sobs. I wrapped myself in a fetal position on the cold black tile floor, naked, head down, tears running down my legs, until I got it out of my system. By then, the tub was filled to drowning level, not that I planned to. I tipped in a generous amount of bubble bath, turned the spa jets to “gentle,” and dipped a toe in. Perfect. Then I hustled out butt-naked to the mini-bar, retrieving a supremely overpriced bottle of screwtop Chardonnay to celebrate the fact that I wasn’t being tortured or raped tonight.

  If anybody ever asked me, the psychologist, what to do in a meltdown when therapy wasn’t available, I’d tell them that I considered hot water to be the emotional equivalent and a lot cheaper.

  I slid under, closed my eyes, and counted to sixty, a habit since Sadie and I competed for best underwater time one summer at the lake. Then I barely exposed my face, my ears still filling up with water, and let the minutes tick by with excruciating slowness. I’d always done some of my most rational thinking in the bathtub.

  I sunk a little deeper in the water. Every cell in my body fought the idea that Anthony Marchetti was my biological father.

  There could not be a human being more different from the salt-of-the earth rancher who raised me. No matter what facts were placed in front of me, I still could not believe that Daddy would lie to me, especially a whopper like this one. He got on to Sadie and me for the smallest infractions of the truth. “White lies are lies just the same,” he’d say, even though most Texans found white lies pretty damn useful.

  The tub had already cooled off. I used my big toe to turn on the hot water faucet. Mama used to say I liked to poach myself. Satisfied with the temperature, I closed my eyes again and returned to a half-formed plan that I’d thought up at the library. It had nothing to do with today’s research or my family heritage. It involved a trip to Oklahoma to investigate a murder. More than anything else, those newspaper articles in Mama’s box pulled at me like a magnet. They meant something. They dated back to the days when Mama was meticulous, when she made sense.

  Two rough hands grabbed under my arms, yanking me out of my reverie and into the cold air. In that fraction of a second before my eyes flew open, I knew that Louie was back to finish the job.

  “What are you doing?” Hudson’s angry voice destroyed every bit of effort I’d made to decompress. He picked up the bottle of half-drunk Chardonnay and dumped it into the tub. The other hand gripped my elbow a little too tightly.

  “I’m trying to relax after a bad day,” I said with controlled fury, moving my hands fast to cover my breasts. But Hudson seemed not so much turned on as fascinated by the artwork of bruises that covered my body.

  “Ouch,” he said, wincing, loosening his grip.

  “The boys outside are getting hungry. I called your name at the bathroom door five times and you didn’t answer. I got worried.”

  I knotted a towel around me and changed the subject, struggling to regain some dignity. “How did you get here?”

  “The usual way,” he drawled, “in one of those big things that fly.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I made a promise to you over tequila. I always keep promises when tequila’s involved.”

  He saw the anger in my face and held up his hand. “I talked to Sadie. She told me what you were up to. She already had the impression I was protecting you. How did that happen, I wonder?”

  “Um.”

  “Yeah … um.” Hudson sat on the edge of the tub, feeling right at home while I stood clutching a towel around my naked body.

  I stalked around him to the hotel robe hanging on the door. “I can’t reach Maddie or Sadie. They aren’t answering their cell phones. I tried calling from the car.”

  “No worries. They’re on their way to your cousin’s house in Marfa for a little safekeeping. It’s a long drive. Sadie said she’d call you tomorrow
.”

  Would Marfa be far enough?

  “By the way,” Hudson said. “Louie refused to talk until his lawyer gets back in town tomorrow. His father and Anthony Marchetti were big-time rivals in the drug trade in the seventies. Maybe still are. The FBI was a little tight with me on details.”

  I reached for the robe and he turned his head. Nice, I thought grudgingly.

  “Louie threatened me.” My voice trembled a little. “He hinted that this has everything to do with the murders that Marchetti went to prison for … OK, I’m decent.”

  “You were always way more than decent.”

  I was suddenly too exhausted to carry on the banter, and he sensed my mood, following me silently into the bedroom, where my clothes were still strewn across the floor, not saying a word as I picked them up and stuffed them in the trashcan under the desk.

  “How did you know to find me at the Bean?” I demanded.

  “The bellman who directed you to a coffee shop this morning saw you Googling the library on your phone.”

  Spies, spies, everywhere.

  “From there,” he said, “I just followed the action.”

  Was he really this good at his job? Or was he one more person lying to me?

  An hour and two beers later, I almost didn’t care. I was dressed in a deliberately unsexy pair of cotton granny pajamas littered with tiny flowers, my hair dangling down my back like a wet rope. Hudson had rescheduled the flight I missed this afternoon for tomorrow night and booked himself in the seat next to me. He didn’t think I should fly until we were pretty sure a blood clot wasn’t forming in my head.

  Now he lay beside me, propped up on the bed with the best view of the TV. No touching, I’d told him, before we settled in to watch the last half of the Cubs game.

  Things were fine, until Hudson broke my rule in the bottom of the seventh. He turned on his side and ran his finger alongside a bruise.

  “Tommie, I think you should disappear for a while until I figure this out. If I know the FBI, and I do, they aren’t going to share much. I’ve got a place in Cabo. Take Sadie and Maddie. You could be a thousand miles out of danger and on your way to a nice tan by tomorrow night.”

  “I burn,” I said, unable to focus much on anything but his finger traveling up and down my arm like the tip of a hot poker. It reminded me of something else.

  “Hudson, there’s a dead girl’s finger in my purse.” My laugh sounded slightly hysterical.

  “What?” Hudson raised up, his foot knocking over the half-finished beer on the side table behind him. He hadn’t asked me a thing about my meeting with Rosalina Marchetti, whether I was or wasn’t her daughter.

  “Yesterday, at Rosalina’s house. She said she’s not my mother. But she gave me her daughter’s finger. The kidnappers sent it to her in the mail thirty-one years ago. She wants me to find her. She’s convinced Marchetti knows where she is. That she might be alive. She says my mother and I … owe it to her.” I realized I was babbling. “I haven’t worked up … the nerve … to open the box.”

  “Jesus,” Hudson said, resigned. “This is a very complicated soap opera you are living. You couldn’t have picked a more effective mood killer. Go get the finger. Otherwise, I’m not going to be able to sleep.”

  I retrieved the box, wondering why I hadn’t chucked it and its contents into the Chicago River.

  “Go ahead,” he urged, “open it.”

  I snapped up the lid and pushed down the urge to throw up.

  The finger, the size of a doll’s, rested on black velvet.

  It was dusty gray, wrapped carefully in Saran Wrap like a tiny leftover.

  I cleared my throat. “I’m going to get it tested for DNA. I have a friend from college who works in a medical lab. I have multiple DNA projects in mind for him. Including my own.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that?”

  “No,” I said.

  I snapped the box shut.

  I was about to say more, to tell him that Rosalina claimed I was the child of a liaison between Anthony Marchetti and my mother. But Hudson pulled off his sweats, revealing pale blue boxers against beautiful desert-browned skin and the most amazing calves I’ve ever seen outside of a professional baseball catcher. He yanked off his T-shirt. Everything was as I remembered, only better. Perhaps I hadn’t completely killed the mood, after all.

  “The Cubs are up by six,” he said, sliding over to the other bed and popping the mint in his mouth before punching his pillow into a hard, tidy square. I watched those legs disappear under the sheets, thinking about being entwined between them, desperately wanting to taste that mint by putting my mouth on his.

  “You need to work on your bedtime stories,” he said, turning over to face the wall. “Sleep tight.”

  In two minutes, he was snoring, leaving me to stare at the ceiling and think.

  I knew Hudson too well. Maybe the finger was a surprise, but he knew more than he was saying about Rosalina and Anthony Marchetti. Or he would have asked more questions.

  Oh, the irony. In less than forty-eight hours, I was breaking a promise to myself, about to close my eyes and leave myself vulnerable to another man of unnerving contradictions.

  CHAPTER 21

  It surprises me that Adriana Marchetti looks so much like Maddie did at that age. That fact surprises me more than her wings made out of bright green leaves and her ability to fly. I look but can’t tell if she has all her fingers. She is waving, her hands a blur of motion. She dips into a puffy white cloud and disappears. When she appears again, her mouth is moving but no sound is coming out. She’s trying to tell me something.

  I can’t hear. I can’t hear!

  She swoops nearer and nearer like a creature in a 3-D movie until all that fills the screen is her perfect pink mouth and rows of tiny white teeth. She’s opening wide, her tonsils flapping. I’m about to be swallowed.

  “Find me,” she taunts, as I slide down her throat and into the warm ocean. “Find me.”

  I sat up, soaked with sweat, my heart pounding out of my chest. I stripped off my pajamas and lay back, shivering gratefully as the air-conditioning hit my wet skin.

  Ever since I could remember, dreaming had been like stepping into a dark universe as vivid as real life. The coffin dream was the worst. Sometimes the two worlds collided and I woke up to ghostly faces at my bedside that vanished when I reached out to touch them. My eyes, wide open. My fingers stabbing the air to be sure I was alone. Granny called them night visitors. Scientists explain them away as a trick of the mind, a sleep disorder.

  Just a dream, I assured myself. The child looked about three or four. Adriana wouldn’t be three. That was just her age as a statue in a garden. She was only one when she was kidnapped. There is no proof she is dead. And there is absolutely no reason to think that I have latent tendencies to communicate with spirits, especially since that gift ran on Daddy’s side of the family and I wasn’t at all sure who my Daddy was.

  I glanced over at Hudson, breathing quietly and deeply in his soft gray cocoon, and thought how many times I had been uselessly naked in his presence today.

  The clock flipped to 3:07 a.m., casting a blue glow. My heart slowed to a normal rhythm. My nerves, however, remained lit up like a string of chasing Christmas lights.

  It seemed as good a time as any to check my email. I noticed that Hudson had brought my canvas bag, probably retrieved by the FBI in the library. My research had been picked up off the floor and was now tossed inside like a pile of trash. My laptop lay safely where I left it, inside its case on top of the desk. I threw on the T-shirt that Hudson had thrown off and sat down and powered it up. I went straight to email.

  The third subject line screamed.

  DO YOU REALLY WANT TO DIE THIS WAY?

  Madddog12296 was definitely getting more direct.

  This time I didn’t hesitate. I opened up the email. Blank space, except for an attachment labeled “The Bennett Show.”

  My virus software went to work.


  No virus detected, it told me cheerfully. I clicked “continue download.”

  The first image filled my screen from edge to edge, familiar and confusing at the same time.

  It wasn’t a virus, but it was very, very sick.

  I couldn’t take my eyes from the slick horror show running on automatic in front of me. I had only several seconds to absorb an image before it faded out to bring another. And another.

  Fred Bennett died violently in the kitchen while making popcorn. He’d put up an intense fight for his family. Every surface, every wall, every tile sprayed red like they’d battled with ketchup bottles.

  The female FBI agent fell at the back door in the laundry room, her bloody head resting awkwardly in a laundry basket of unfolded towels.

  Alyssa Bennett died with her beautiful blue eyes open. In the first picture from madddog12296, an image tormenting me since I’d opened it up on my phone at the ranch, her face had been turned away. It occurred to me now that was probably because he wanted me to imagine Maddie in her place.

  In this one, Alyssa lay on the same ugly gray carpet and appeared to be reaching for her dead mother’s hand six inches away. The blood-spattered leg of another child stuck out of a doorway behind them. The boys’ bedroom?

  I was familiar with crime scene photos. Before treating children, I insisted on seeing any tangible evidence of the horrible things they had witnessed. These pictures defacing my computer screen were definitely snapped with the aloof, detailed eye of a forensics expert.

  The crime scene photographer never knew what might wind up being important, so his job was to shoot it all, the ordinary and the unimaginable: half-unpacked suitcases, the dirty contents of the dishwasher, a worn copy of Goodnight Moon on a nightstand, the Herbal Essence shampoo bottle in the shower. And, of course, every angle of every dead body, every single drop of blood.

  About thirty pictures in all—probably not nearly everything that was shot that night, but the goriest highlights. These weren’t downloaded from a website. These were hacked from a police file or from the FBI’s photo archive.