Snake Skin

by CJ Lyons

  Until she bent over to pull her pants on, she'd never realized exactly how many muscles were involved with the mere process of dressing. Feeling a little dizzy by the time she'd finished, she sat down on a folding chair and used the privacy to call Nick from her new cell phone.

  "Hello?" His voice sounded wary as if expecting more bad news.

  "How's Megan? Any word from the doctors?"

  "Megan is currently the reigning Queen of the Dark Realm and is now proceeding to kick everyone's butt at John Madden's NFL." The background noise grew muffled she heard a door shut. When he returned on the line, there was a hollow echo and she knew he'd retreated into the bathroom. "The doctor just left."

  "Why didn't you call me?" Oh God, what couldn't he say in front of Megan?

  "Because there was nothing new. He said the tests are all normal so far, but they still need to consider doing the biopsy if they can't find out what's causing her fever and everything. Said he'll know more by tomorrow after he has a specialist review her labs."

  "What the hell good are they if they can't tell us anything?" She pushed onto her feet, the chair clattering to the floor.

  "Calm down. Megan's fine. She had a little bit of a fever but it didn't even bother her. She's more worried about you."

  Lucy sagged against wire-shelves crammed with office supplies. "That's not fair."

  "Isn't it you who is always talking about life not being fair?"

  Typical. Using her own words against her.

  "Are you going to make it back tonight?" His voice had an edge—one that she was slowly becoming familiar with. And not liking. Not at all.

  "I'm not sure when. But I'll keep my promise." Somehow.

  "I can't believe you went back to work—"

  "You know why. Ashley is still out there. Somewhere."

  He grunted—another new habit. Fourteen years together, did she know him at all? "You know the odds as well as I do. She's dead."

  "Don't say that!"

  Silence.

  "I'm sorry—"

  "I shouldn't—"

  Their words collided and they both were silent once again.

  Damn, this was hard, she wished she could see his face, watch how he was moving. Was he rubbing the back of his ear like he did when he was anxious? Or was he truly angry and was holding his arms stretched out as if pushing her away?

  "Things are happening way too fast, yet way too slow around here right now," she tried.

  Finally, he answered. Her husband, her friend, her confidante was back. "Hmmm...sounds like the same as here."

  "Yeah, well, next time you vote for a move to a desert island where we don't have to worry about the outside world, I'm definitely agreeing." This time she knew exactly the expression on his face. That boyish wistful faraway look. The same one that had made her first fall in love with him.

  A sigh escaped her and the spell was broken. "Did you tell Mom about—earlier?"

  "She saw it on the news. I told her it wasn't that bad, just a few stitches."

  "How was her date?"

  Now he had a trace of amusement in his voice. "She said thank you very much for not sicking the cops on her and she had a wonderful time."

  "Did you get the guy's name? Are they going out again? Where's he live, what's he do?"

  "Your mother is an intelligent, grown woman. Don't you have enough on your hands without worrying about her as well?"

  She turned her back to the door, burying the phone in her hands. "I think I might have fucked up. Backed this guy into a corner."

  "What happened?" She quickly gave him the highlights about Fletcher. "Hmmm...sounds like a classic malignant narcissist."

  "Gee, thanks doc, that helps a lot. I know what narcissist is, but malignant makes me think of..." They both knew what "malignant" brought to mind. Cancer. Bone marrow biopsies, little girls with no hair, wasting away and dying before their time.

  "The point is," Nick threw her a lifeline, pulling her back to Fletcher, "he needs Ashley."

  "So he wouldn't kill her?" She was relieved to have her gut feeling validated. "Why?"

  "Malignant narcissists have no self-image, no sense of self without someone else providing it. I'd bet your guy lost that someone when he started this—"

  "He mentioned his mother being sick."

  "Yeah, a dominant opposite-sex parent would definitely fit the bill. He may have first reached out to older women to fill her role but found they weren't malleable enough."

  "So he worked his way down to a fourteen-year-old he could brainwash into doing anything. Is that why she's so valuable? Because of all his time, effort? How far can I push him before that's negated?"

  "You don't understand. The time and effort make her valuable, yes, but more than that, he needs her. She's his mirror, he is the reflection in the mirror. He doesn't exist without her."

  "Okay, now you're drifting into mumbojumbo land." There was a polite tapping at the closet door and she opened it.

  "Burroughs and Taylor are back," John Greally told her.

  "I've got to go." She clung to the phone, reluctant to hang up, fearful that if she did, something bad might happen while she was absent from Megan's bedside. But the bitch of it was, something bad could happen with her right there beside Megan. And she'd be powerless to stop it. At least there was one girl she could save. Maybe. "Kiss Megan for me, tell her I'll be there just as soon as I can."

  "Don't forget your promise."

  "I won't. I love you."

  "Hey, you be careful." His voice dropped, low and imperative. "Please."

  "Always." She hung up and reluctantly returned to the outside world.

  A smattering of applause coming from the bullpen pulled Lucy and Greally from her office. Taylor stood just inside the door, a sheepish grin on his face, his arm in a cast and sling.

  Lucy and Greally added their own applause to the standing ovation. She escorted Taylor to his desk, enjoying the blush that colored his features.

  "Hoo-wah!" Burroughs shouted in a fair impression of a Marine as the clapping died down.

  "Okay, everyone back to work," Lucy said as Taylor sat down. "Glad you're back, Taylor. You feeling up to helping out around here?"

  "Definitely," he said, still beaming.

  "Yeah, you look ready to go," Greally put in. "No field assignments until the cast's off, but I'll clear you for desk duty."

  "Thank you, sir." Taylor seemed mesmerized by all the attention. "I wasn't expecting this. It's kind of embarrassing, I mean all I did was get thrown out of a window."

  Greally laughed and clapped a hand on Taylor's good shoulder. "A rite of passage. Ask Lucy about her first line of duty injury."

  Walden and Burroughs looked up at that. "C'mon, Guardino, spill," said Burroughs.

  She shot Greally a half-hearted glare. "It was my first assignment after Quantico. We were back up vehicle on a car stop of a suspected mob enforcer. When we pulled up to the curb to make the stop, I caught my foot in a sewer grate, tripped over the stock of the Remington I was carrying and landed flat on my face. Sprained my ankle and broke my nose."

  "Did you nail the guy?"

  "The lead car had him before I even hit the ground. Which I found out as soon as my partner, Special Agent Greally over there, stopped laughing." Lucy smiled with the memory. It was in the ER before they took X-rays that she'd discovered she was pregnant with Megan.

  "Hey," Greally held his hands up, "I was just glad to be alive. If you'd discharged that shotgun, I'd be a dead man today."

  Taylor grinned, bobbing his head, obviously fascinated by the war stories. "How about you, Walden?"

  "Sorry kid. Other than a paper cut filling out a FD-28, I've never been injured in the line."

  "Don't look at me," Burroughs put in. "I can't even remember the last time I had to draw my gun until I started hanging out with you guys. Think I'm going to call my union rep and ask for hazard pay."

  "He didn't hurt you any, did he? I mean—touch you?" The man's v
oice slowly penetrated the haze clouding her mind. They were riding in his SUV. She felt as if she'd just woken from a long winter's nap: exhausted yet energized, hazy yet focused.

  Why was she here? What had the man said, he'd take her someplace safe? She rubbed her torn and swollen ankle. Safe and sound—where she could lick her wounds and prepare. For what, she wasn't quite sure, that was too far in the future to think about now.

  "I'm sorry I didn't get there sooner. I was trying, as soon as I heard the Amber alert, I knew…"

  She said nothing, half unsure that he was even talking about her. If she tried hard enough she was certain she could forget everything, just wake up to a new life, new person, new world.

  Her head bounced against the passenger side window, eyes closed to slits, allowing only a small slice of the landscape to whirl past like an old time silent movie.

  "I guess you're not ready to talk. That's okay, I understand. Let me tell you my story, there are some things you need to know."

  He laid a hand on her thigh and she didn't flinch. There was nothing scary about his touch, nothing soothing either. It was as if her entire body was numb, unable to tell pain from comfort.

  "His name is Bobby, Bobby Fegley," the man said.

  He paused to clear his throat. Her pulse quickened. She'd known someone named Bobby once upon a time—hadn't she? Had it all been a dream? A lover, a comrade—until he had betrayed her. Or had she betrayed him?

  "He pretends to be a kid, plays online games, makes friends with girls." There was a weird noise, like the man was choking back tears or laughter. "One of the bodies in there was my girl. I've been looking for her, for him, for over a year. And when I heard the news about you, saw your picture, I knew he had taken you. You look just like my Vera."

  A long pause as she decided he wasn't talking about her but someone else, some other girl. Whatever he was talking about, it had nothing to do with her, she wasn't there.

  Had never even been there.

  "I wish I could take you back to your folks, but there's a problem. Bobby Fegley is a FBI agent—no one would believe us, we can't go to the cops."

  His words bounced off her awareness, registering only the faintest of impact. She frowned, surely there was something wrong with what he was telling her?

  Anxiety churned through her but she hugged herself tight, rocking in her seat, the landscape blurring through her slitted vision. The pain faded and she returned to her limbo of numbness.

  "It's just you and me, Ashley," he continued, oblivious to the fact that she was barely there, hanging on only because she needed her body to pump blood to her brain. If it wasn't for that, she'd be long gone, vanished. "Unless. Do you want to go back to your parents, to your old life?"

  His words hammered at her, breaking the wall of ice she'd surrounded herself with. She jerked upright, eyes fully open but unable to focus, darkness around the edges, only the road stretching out in front of them clear.

  "No." The single syllable was all she could manage as panic seized her vocal cords, clamping them shut. She was shivering but she didn't feel cold, didn't feel anything—didn't want to feel anything.

  "Well. All right, then. It's just you and me. I promise I won't let anything happen to you, Ashley. I mean, Vixen." The truck slowed as he turned to look at her. "My name's Jim. Jim Fletcher."

  She didn't meet his gaze, instead she closed her eyes once more, rocking herself back into welcome oblivion.

  Chapter 29

  Sunday, 3:12 pm

  "Are we sure it's Fletcher?" Grimwald, the ICE Special Agent in Charge, was saying. "Look at his record. He's fucking Mr. Clean. Maybe he has a brain tumor or something."

  "It's Fletcher," Lucy answered, resuming her pacing in front of the conference table. If she kept moving, the pain stayed steady at a level she could ignore. "What do we have on him?"

  Taylor answered. "He's thirty-four, been with ICE for eight years. Started as a GS-05, now a GS-06. Local boy, graduated from Allegheny Institute of Technology with an associate's degree in computer sciences, this is the only office he's ever worked, good fit reps, nothing that stands out. Employment application lists a mother as only living relative. No sibs, father listed as whereabouts unknown."

  "How old are the parents?"

  "Let's see. Mother would be, seventy-eight, father ninety-two." He looked up at that. "That's pretty old."

  "Yeah, mom would have been forty-four when she had him." Burroughs gave a mock shiver. "Would have been in her sixties when he was a teenager, think how gross that would be."

  "Only child, born late in life to his mother, father out of the picture," Lucy said. Sounded like the setup Nick had mentioned. She stopped, another thought hitting her. "Burroughs, work on his early medical records, school, social services—anything to let me know what was going on in that house when he was young."

  "Who cares if he wet the bed or flunked gym class?" Grimwald said. "You still don't have any proof besides an undocumented phone call. Maybe Fletcher is the victim here."

  John Greally leaned forward from his seat at the head of the table. "Shut the fuck up and let her work, why don't cha?"

  He went heavy on his Chicago accent, his expression hardened as if he'd grown up on the Southside instead of Round Lake Beach. Grimwald frowned, shot Lucy a glare, but sat back and was silent.

  "He talks about his mother constantly," she continued. "What do we know about her?"

  "Alicia Moore Fletcher," Taylor supplied. "Resident of the Golden Years nursing home last three years, prior to that resided at the same address as Fletcher."

  "The house he blew up?" Walden asked. "That surprises me, that he'd torch his history like that."

  Lucy glanced at Walden. "Good point. Did they live somewhere before that? We need a list of all known addresses. Any property in either of their names."

  Somewhere Fletcher had a hole he'd run to—and thanks to Taylor and Bobby, he was definitely on the run.

  "Here's something," Taylor put in, looking up from his computer monitor. "There's no marriage certificate for Alicia. Nothing I can find puts the father in the picture at all. He's not listed on tax records, work records, census, nothing. Just Fletcher and the mom."

  That felt right. She grabbed the rubber snake from her desk, stretching and pulling it, coiling it, using it to keep her hands occupied as she took another lap of the room, thinking, imagining Fletcher and the forces that had created him.

  "I'll bet that's been a driving force all his life—father unknown, a mystery. And mother either badgering him to live up to the expectations of a ghost or condemning him for it."

  "Now this is weird," Taylor said, eyes focused on his computer while Walden stood and began adding more info to the profile on the whiteboard. "County records list a James Madison Fletcher as deceased on October 10, 1974, cause of death homicide."

  Burroughs looked up at that. "That's our James Madison Fletcher Junior's birth date."

  Taylor continued, "His body was partially burned, but with evidence of stab wounds and a fractured skull. Along with him were the remains of an approximately twenty-year-old woman that they never ID'd."

  "Cause of death?" Lucy asked, twisting the snake into a knot. It immediately bounced free.

  "Multiple stab wounds."

  "Why didn't we find that during Fletcher's security check?" John asked.

  Grimwald flushed. "Not my department. Besides, just because his father was a homicide victim doesn't mean—"

  "The father also had a record for numerous misdemeanors," Taylor added, typing furiously. "Tons of arrests, mainly for fraud and petty theft, only one conviction for trespassing. Multiple jurisdictions. Lots of aliases listed."

  "Sounds like Fletcher Sr, was a grifter," Burroughs said.

  "Did he ever work with an accomplice?" Lucy asked, her back to the men as she stared at the board with its list of apparently random dates and facts. Fletcher the high-strung but genial computer clerk was only a façade. Finding the man behind the
mask would mean digging through his past.

  "Record goes back decades. Looks like he had a girl working with him back in the late 1940's, name of Alice, Alisha or sometimes—"

  "Alicia," she filled in for him. "Let me guess. About ten years later there's no mention of Alicia but of other women helping Fletcher instead. All young."

  "Yeah, looks that way."

  "What are you thinking, Lucy?" John asked.

  Lucy held up her hand for a moment, still absorbing the details. "We need to look at the mom before we look at Fletcher. How old was she when she was first mentioned in the record?"

  "Hmm...fourteen."

  "Look for missing girls around the same time. Last name Moore, first name probably Alice." She began pacing again, energized as the pieces fell into place. "Alicia is fourteen, hooks up with a charismatic grifter who's twice her age. Becomes his accomplice, his common law wife. The grifter, who likes his women young, tires of Alicia and drifts around. But he always returns to her, maybe even brings his girlfriends along for the ride. Uses Alicia as a safe haven when the heat is on, uses her when money's short, basically uses her."

  "This is ludicrous speculation," Grimwald protested. "You can't possibly—"

  "Hush," John told him, nodding for Lucy to continue. "Okay, fast forward, how does this help us find Fletcher?"

  "And Ashley Yeager," Walden added.

  Lucy twisted the snake around her left wrist like a bracelet, its fake plastic tongue catching in her wedding ring. She focused on the way the light sparked from the gold. "Places. Fletcher needs to be grounded. Bobby Fegley told me he was a linear thinker, saw only what he wanted to see, ignored any flaws. Said he designed Shadow World the same way—lots of meaningless bells and whistles, but a straight-forward story line. He's going to have a big complicated grand design, but it's going to boil down to familiar territory, familiar places."

  "Where? Certainly not the house he torched."

  "No. Where he grew up. We'll have to search tax records, see where Alicia lived thirty years ago, any family property. I'll bet there were only one or two places his whole life."