The Roswell Swatch

by Scott Powers

  “This is a DEA investigation. They were investigating an L.A. gang and came across her. Seems she made connections there, and then got the gang’s Detroit franchise, and moved to Detroit. She had quite a little side business going at the time she disappeared.”

  “Bullshit. Di would never do anything like that.”

  “Open the file. Open it. There’s pictures. Affidavits. Investigative reports. Transcripts of recordings. A couple depositions. Quite a case. In fact, if you read enough of it, you can see why the gang probably figured she screwed them, and that’s probably why they killed her.”

  Max ignored the file in front of him.“Fuck you,”he said.“It’s all doctored, whatever it is. If you guys can fake a DEA case file, you can fake everything in it. Right?”

  Max pushed his chair back and folded his arms.

  “I mean that as a compliment. I mean, you got the cops to try to link me to her murder. We both know that. Thank you very much, by the way. Sodon’t fucking look me in the eye and think I think something else. Faking a drug investigation against her would be child’s play for you.”

  Sal flipped through the file a bit farther and found a cache of photographs. He slid out a photograph, turned it, and dropped it in front of Max. It showed Di in a tight party dress, getting into a sedan with a white man with a goatee and a fedora.

  “Jay Kyler,”Sal said.“Just busted. Biggest dope dealer in central Detroit.

  He dropped another photograph, of Di in a dark club booth, accepting some sort of bag under a table. A third photograph of Di appearing to snort something off the same table. He still had several more in his hand when Max shoved the photographs lying on the table onto the floor.

  “They’re Photoshopped. That’s plain to see,”he said.

  Sal put the pictures in his hand back into the folder then retrieved the others from the floor. He shoved it all back into the satchel.“Maybe. Yeah, we’ve got some people who are pretty goodat that sort of thing. What difference does it make? She was a good girl when she was buried. If this gets out, she’s going to lose that. No matter what comes of it, her family, her friends, they’ll all have this to, ah, not remember her by. Right? By the way, you’re in this file too. Take a guess who introduced her to the L.A. drug lord? Kindafunny that you also were somehow involved when she got murdered and came up with this goofy story about aliens abducting her. I bet you led them to her that night, to save your own ass. What a fucking coward. That could all get out. You sold her down the road.”

  “You can fake a file but you can’t fake a whole investigation,”Max said. He studied his fingernails a moment.“The DEA, or the police, or some judge somewhere, looks at that and says,‘Hey, this isn’t our work.’Soyou’ve got nothing there but a little pleasure reading for some demented soul.”

  “Souls,”Sal corrected.“You’re right. It’s not as if we can convince the DEA that this is really theirwork. But that’s not our objective. No. This file gets mysteriously posted on the Internet. Dianne’s family and law firm and friends, maybe a couple rival firms, maybe some enemies, mysteriously get alerted to it. Word’llspread like wildfire. No one will be able to clean it up. For the record, the DEA won't comment. They never do.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. You know all about what a smear campaign can do to someone's reputation, right?”

  “For a moment, I thought you had something that would scare me. I don’t give a damn what happens to Di’s family and friends. She’s dead. It doesn’t get any worse than that. You’re going to have to do better.”

  “Now you’re the one who’s full of crap,”Sal said.“You’re scared. I’ve already got you.”

  “It’s not me you want.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “What then?”

  “Get the corner of foil back, before Eve can do something stupid,”Sal said.

  Max slammed his open palms on the table and then turned it into a drumbeat. Patty, pat, pat. Pat, pat, patty, pat, pat. He hit an imaginary cymbal. He pointed his imaginary drumstick at Sal.

  “You don’t have her yet, do you? She’s still out there. You've got most of her swatch but she's still got that little piece. And it is Roswell foil. And you’re in big trouble. Because you’re not going to ever get that back. Not until it's too late.”

  “Oh, we will. It’s just a matter of whether anyone gets hurt in the process. We don't want that. That's really unnecessary. There are preferable ways of doing things. And that’s where you can help.”

  “Yeah, that’s not going to happen. She’d shoot me if I tried to take it,”Max said. He leaned down on the table as if he were tired or bored.“I’m serious. I don’t want to help you. But even if I did, it won’t make a damn bit of difference.”

  “Well, then, we’ll just have to take our chances,”Sal said.“She’ll turn up. We know where to watch for her.”

  “And me?”

  “You might be useful as bait.”

  “Good luck with that. Really. This is your plan? I've got to dial back my assumptions and expectations of you guys. This plan sucks. How long before you give up? Because she won’t trade for me. Ever,”Max said.“Sooner or later, you have to do something else with me.”

  “Of course, if we think you’re of no more use to us, we’ll let you go,”Sal replied.

  Max now had his ear on the table.

  “That’s it? You’ll just let me stroll out of here and tell my story to the world?”

  “You won’t stroll. We’ll probably drug you again, drive you somewhere far from here, and dump you. But feel free to tell your story to the world. Feel free to say you were kidnapped by a mysterious organization that drugged you, put you in a Blackhawk helicopter—”

  “It wasn’t a Blackhawk.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know. But it wasn’t a Blackhawk.”

  “Fine. Put you in an Apache helicopter, flew you to an unknown place, questioned you, then let you go. This is a story coming from the same guy, the same crazy, heavy-metal guitar player who said aliens captured his girlfriend and murdered her. I can’t wait." He leaned closer to Max.“If you want, I’ve actually got the number for a National Enquirerreporter I’ve worked with in the past. I’ll be glad to give it to you before you leave.”

  “I’m a bass player. Ken’s Mango Bone’s guitarist,”Max said.

  “Here’s the thing. I can tell you this because I know you know it already. And we’re being honest with each other, right? We’ll let you go, but we’ll follow you. And we’ll tap your phone lines. And we’ll monitor your computer activity. We might have even have already planted a tiny GPS inside you. And you’ll lead us to Eve no matter what you do.”

  “Then I’ll just lay low a while. Eve will be just fine without me.”

  “No, you won’t,”Sal said. He leaned on an elbow and waved his arm, looking as casual as Max.“Because you know you’ve got to get in touch with her, let her know we’re after her, let her know what we want. And let her know you’re still alive. Sooner or later, you’ll lead us right to her. If you don’t, we’ll find her anyway, and she’d probably be better off if you can warn her and maybe help her. Right? Trust me, we’re looking for her. And we’re pretty goodat finding people. She’ll be better off if you lead us to her, and you can be there too.

  "Keep you for bait. Let you go. They both work. We'll try keeping you a while because it's less messy."

  Max knew all this, of course. He’d spent too many years assuming the most paranoid thoughts about the IBTT to not assume everything Sal had just said. Still, the dilemma was well stated, he thought.

  “Will there be anything else?” Sal asked.

  “Who killed Di? Did you? I mean, one way or the other, I still intend to shove your head up your ass when I get a chance. And that day will come. But I’d like to know now.”

  Sal took another file from his satchel, opened it, lifted an eight-by-ten picture to look at himself, then turned it, and placed it before M
ax.“Lovely woman.”

  The photo was of Di sitting in the same bed Max had just occupied. Her thin, bare legs dangled down, her arms supported her on either side, and her head tilted forward slightly. Her hair was completely unkempt, half-hanging across a dirty face. She wore a man’s sweatshirt that read,“Buckeyes,”and hung down so low he couldn’t tell if she wore anything underneath. She looked pale. She looked defeated. She looked ill.

  And she had bandages on the right side of her neck.

  “Taken the day she was found,”Sal said.“She was a mess. We gave her the best medical and psychiatric treatment available. She was a mess though. Almost psychotic.”

  Max fingered the picture as if he could touch her through it.

  “I heard your voice through a photograph,”he sang to her in a soft whisper.“I thought it up, it brought up the past. Once you know, you can never go back.

  “I’ve got to take it on the otherside,”he whispered, talking through The Red Hot Chili Pepper's song.

  Sal slid another picture over. Same Di, same shirt, same bed, almost the same pose, but her face was blocked by her hand, which was flipping the bird at the photographer. Max smiled.

  “Thought you’d like that one,”he said.“Nice girl. And this.”

  The third picture was the morgue shot the police had shown him. Max flipped it over immediately.

  “I have no idea who killed her,”Sal said.“I don’t. Honest. She left. When she turned up dead, I was as surprised as you.”

  CHAPTER 12

  SLOW RIDE

  Jen was in this to play. She’d always seen her brother Ted as a bit kooky—often embarrassingly so. He was a bit paranoid, a bit scary, always geeky, too often bitter, and he often made no sense. Not that she’d tell him that. Now that he had shared his plan, he’d gone over the edge. It involved kidnapping, burglary, and extortion, all to prove his conspiracy theory about UFOs and cover-ups, and maybe, he said, to win Max’s freedom. It was the type of thing his sister, his caretaker, frankly his only trusted confidant, should refuse, should talk him out of. She should stop him cold.

  She'd always managed to stay clear of his delusions and related activities. She had a life, not a great one, but independent from him. And though she'd spent many days and nights at his house, she'd managed to wall that off from all she was.

  If ever there was a time to say,“Ted, you’re out of your fucking mind, and as your sister I have tosay no,”now was the time.

  Yet maybe Ted was right. He couldn’t do it without her, not even with Eve’s help. But he would surely try, and Jen would never live it down if he did and failed without her. And there was more.

  This was the most fun Jen had had in years. She was looking forward to it with a mixture of dread and awakening. She waited as eagerly as Ted for Eve's return.

  Eve got back from Dayton around midnight. She and Jen shared a room at the motel. Ted was next door in the disability-access room. Jen went to get him but the light was off, so she concluded her brother was already asleep. She returned without him.

  Jen turned up the TV and sat on the bed. Eve told her about Dayton, the reporter, her grandparents, and the dead airmen.

  It was Jen’s turn.

  “Dr. Melnreturns tomorrow,”she began.“Ted says he’ll go straight to his office, then after lunch to his lab. We’ll start by following him to work in the morning. He gets to work at 8:30, so he probably leaves the house by 8:00. You’ll be ready?”

  Eve was beyond ready. She felt like she used to feel the night before a big operation in Afghanistan. The only thing standing between her and performance were a few bothersome hours of sleep.

  As often happened, the sleep didn’t come. Eve tossed for hours, wishing she didn’t have a roommate so she could just switch on the TV and kill the night. Finally, blessedly, she dozed. What seemed like only minutes later, the alarm clock buzzed.

  With Jen and Ted in the van and Eve in Max’s car, they drove to Meln’s street in the suburb of Upper Arlington, a few minutes away from campus. Like clockwork, the garage door came up a little after eight. Meln backed his BMW out of his driveway and headed out of the neighborhood. A Ford van came down the street behind him. A few houses up, a Camaro pulled away from the curb and got in line behind the van.

  Traffic was light on the way, since the streets near the Ohio State campus were set up to handle the crush of 50,000 students and thousands more faculty and staff, and most of them were on summer break. But as soon as Melnturned onto the campus, traffic backed up. The campus’s narrow streets weren’t designed to handle a quarter of the university’s student body and workforce, and even during the summer months, they clogged quickly. The materials engineering professor parked in a parking garage. Jen and Ted followed him in while Eve drove around the block.

  Eve found a meter a couple blocks away. She slung a large, straw bag over her shoulder. It looked like a combination purse and book bag. Very summery. As she walked back toward Meln’s office building, her cell rang. It was Jen.

  “Meln’sheaded for his lab, not his office.”

  If Melnwasn’t headed to the office first, Eve would need to find and track him. Jen had to stay with Ted, which made them too slow to keep up.

  “I don’t even know where the lab is,”Eve told Jen.

  There was a pause while Jen checked with Ted.

  “18th Avenue, just east of Neil,”Jen said.

  Eve looked around.“That’s where I am now.”

  Eve realized she wasn’t sure what an undisguised, ambulatory Meln looked like. Back in Upper Arlington, she had parked a block away, facing away from Meln'shouse. She hadn’t really seenhim well in her rear-view mirror or in the seconds it took for him to drive past. She’d need to know for sure what he looked like if she was to help track him. She asked for a description.

  But then Eve saw him. His beard and wig were gone, but she had no doubt. Walking directly toward her was Fake Ted.

  “Never mind, I see him,”she said, and put her cell in a pocket.

  Eve recognized Meln too late to avoid him. He was maybe twenty feet in front of her, pacing quickly. Within a couple of steps, maybe eight feet away on the sidewalk, he recognized her.

  He stopped, dumbfounded. There were students not far behind him, and not far behind her, and he seemed to be calculating a response.

  That gave her the moment she needed to react first. Their plan was shot now. She had to improvise. She rushed him.

  “Ian, darling!”she called, in her strongest Texas drawl.

  She grabbed his elbow with her left hand and pulled him close. He tried to pull away but she was stronger than he expected. As soon as she had a firm grip, she pulled her gun from her shoulder bag, slipped it under his jacket, and rammed it into his side, making sure he felt the blunt, hard steel in his ribs.

  “You’ve been a bad, bad boy,”she said, continuing the drawl that she normally avoided but could conjure on demand.“Last time we were together, you got me all hot, and then you left. You left me to simmer in my own juices. I could just kill you for that. How have you been, darling?”

  “I can explain,”he said.

  “I’m looking forward to it, dear.”

  With her gun pressed into Melon’s ribs, she maneuvered him behind the building, where there were fewer angles of sight.

  She could hear Jen yelling,“What’s going on?”on the cell in her pocket. It was still on. Neither of them had hung up.

  “You took my grandpa’s swatch,”she said.“We’re going somewhere we can talk about how you can get it back for me, okay?”

  “It was for your own good,”Meln said, almost in a whisper.

  Eve jabbed him hard with her gun.“Fuck you. What about the fire? Did you lock us in for our own good? I’ll bet you didn’t even know we survived, did you?”

  Meln burst into a sudden sweat, and his knees buckled momentarily.

  “That’s right, Ian darling,”Eve said.“If I had my way, I’d put a bullet in your kidney, right now.”<
br />
  Eve shoved Meln through a back door of the building, into a bustling hallway. She glanced through a small window in the first door they came upon. It was an empty seminar room. She pushed the door open, led him through, and kicked the door closed.

  “Sit down,”she commanded shrilly. She shoved books at him.“Put your hands on the table. Look busy. Smile.”

  Eve fished her phone from her pocket.

  “Jen? Still there? I got him,”she said.“We’re in that grey, two-story building. Room 116. Hurry over.”

  “What?”

  Eve glanced out the door’s window. Normal.

  “Change of plans. Just get here before he does something stupid and I shoot him.”

  Jen and Ted would drive over from the parking garage, and Jen would come in to get them. That would take a few minutes. To pass the time, Eve threatened Ian’s life every couple of minutes or so.

  “I get it,”he said at one point.“But I can explain. It’s not what you think.”

  “Oh, you’re going to explain, all right," she said back. "But not here, not now, and not without other witnesses. We’ll wait.”

  “I didn’t know the fire would spread,”he said.“I—”

  She rushed him.“Shut up! Shut up! I don’t want to hear it right now.”

  He shut up.

  Eve stayed between him and the window in the door, standing beside the table, sideways to him, so she could keep an eye on the door window. Otherwise, the little room was windowless. The long table could seat twelve. There were some shelves filled with periodicals. Melnapparently couldn’t stand being silent.

  “You can still walk away from this,”he said.“You have no idea.”

  “You have no idea,”she said. She waved her gun hand in his face so he could see, close up, the bandages on her wrist and forearm.“When you tried to kill my friend and me, you bought the whole fucking package. My arms still hurt, by the way. And your people killed my grandma and destroyed my grandpa, and you bought into that too.”

  Melnlooked confused.“What do you mean, my people?”

  Before Eve could answer, there was a door knock on the door. She slipped her gun hand into her shoulder bag.