Catalyst

by Steve Winshel

  “Hey, uh, just wanted to…” Josh hesitated because he wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t sound scared or threatened.

  “You there? What’s….”

  “Sorry, bad connection. Just wanted to check in. Everything okay?”

  “Sure. Just replanted the back 40 and I’m slicing and dicing a zillion veggies for a ratatouille I’m making for tomorrow night. You’ll be back in town for dinner, right?”

  Josh thought about it for a second. “Anything special happen while I’ve been gone?”

  “What, did you send me a present? Wanna know if it got here? No, nothing unusual. You expecting something?”

  “Nope, just checking – some papers are supposed to show up and I wasn’t sure if they would come by FedEx, or…messenger. Just in case anyone stopped by to drop anything off…”

  It was lame and Josh knew it, but it was the best he could do. Fortunately, Allison was distracted by the ducks that lived in the pool out back.

  “Okay, I’ll be home in the morning. See you then.”

  “Whoa! I thought you were getting in at night?”

  Josh hesitated again. “My morning meetings were canceled, so I’ll catch an early flight and be back sooner.” He thought about how to say the next thing without being obvious.

  “I’ll get in around 9, after you’re up and around, so you can put the alarm on tonight.”

  He wanted the house alarm on. But he couldn’t just say that. This should work – sometimes when he got in from a trip or left the house before Allison got up, she’d leave the alarm off so it wouldn’t wake her when he punched in the code and it beeped like crazy.

  “Okay. See you tomorrow.”

  After he hung up, Josh’s hands were shaking again. This time out of fury. Who the hell was this woman Helen to put him through this? He felt dirty, Helen’s scent still on his body. He went into the shower, unable to erase the image of her in this same steamy space with him just hours ago. He scrubbed his entire body twice with soap and shampooed again and again. The scent, especially on his hands, would not go away.

  Drying off, he stood wearing a towel, looking out the window onto the city. He knew he needed to do something, take some action, but he was limited in his choices. He called the airline and switched his flight to the first one in the morning, 6:15 a.m. Then he sent emails to all his morning meetings and told them to reschedule. That was the most he could do. Josh lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. He kept seeing Helen smiling at him. Was he just supposed to wait to hear from her? His mind was racing.

  Josh breathed deeply and slowed down. He needed to figure this out. He couldn’t lose control now. He calmed down and started to evaluate. Helen knew who he was, she knew enough about him to find him and his sister, contact her, and follow him to Minneapolis. So she must have been watching him for a while. He strained his memory, trying to place her anywhere in his life over the last few weeks, or the man who was helping her. Nothing.

  She had said “we” when she threatened him. Did they want money? Josh was comfortable, but not rich. Maybe it was some kind of extortion where they squeezed middle-class people for every nickel they were worth. But that seemed extreme. Why not just pick someone with a lot of money? Josh wracked his brain for other reasons. Did he have something someone would want? He couldn’t imagine what it would be. Maybe he had seen something he wasn’t supposed to, wasn’t even aware of it, and this was a way to keep him quiet. He had read too many detective novels – this seemed far-fetched. He thought about how someone would get his home address. Josh’s mind went to the newspaper he got every morning. The Wall Street Journal had a label with his name and address on it. He was a little strange about things like that. He would always tear it off, ball it up and throw it away when he traveled. Did someone go rooting around the trash in some hotel gym where he had tossed the address label? Again – why? He didn’t have anything or know anything anybody should want that badly.

  Josh could feel his jaws tensing, his shoulders aching. There was nothing special about him or his life that should lead to this. He was getting mad, and he was getting desperate. He started to pace the room, feeling trapped and helpless. Checking the clock, time dragged. The airport wouldn’t even be open for another four hours. Josh looked at the walls and finally understood, viscerally, the expression about wanting to climb them. Goddamnit.

  The hotel had a 24-hour gym. Desperate for movement, for time to pass, he changed and went down. Empty. He threw the weights around and pushed the machines to their limits. He made guttural sounds that would have embarrassed him had anyone been there to hear. When Josh couldn’t lift another weight he got on the bike and spun as fast as he could, head down and eyes closed. By the time he went back to his empty hotel room two hours later, soaked in sweat and swaying from exhaustion, he was even less sure about what he would do or where he would turn. He wasn’t asleep when the wake-up call came at 5:00 a.m.

  * * *

  Five hours later Josh got off the first flight from MSP-LAX and trotted to his car. He always parked at the closest possible lot near the terminal, no matter the price. Those few extra minutes were precious after a long grueling trip.

  The drive home this morning started out like a trip around a racetrack. Josh wanted to get home as quickly as possible, check on Allison, and see if any word had come from Helen – a note, mail, phone message, anything. He almost hit two of the Park One shuttle buses while he was still in the lot, but realized there’d be no talking his way out of a ticket if a cop stopped to ask where the fire was. He eased off the gas and got on the freeway without terrorizing any pedestrians on Sepulveda Blvd and went up the 405 at a leisurely 75 miles per hour. The traffic was light. He was home in thirty-five minutes. As he turned onto the wooded streets close to his home, he looked around the neighborhood. No unrecognizable cars with tinted mirrors and cameras with zoom lenses sticking out. Helen wasn’t strolling down the sidewalk arm-in-arm with the guy who had menaced his sister. Just a gardener with a blower who had a knack for shooting leaves and dust up under Josh’s car as it went by so the stuff came spilling through the vents. Coughing, he turned into his driveway. Josh found himself trembling, his heart beating a little too fast, like he was nervous about something. He was, not sure what he would find in the house. He grabbed his bags and fumbled for his keys as he got out of the car. He had trouble getting them into the lock on the front door. It suddenly opened and there was Allison, shoulder-length brown hair pulled back by a yellow bandanna, looking up at Josh from a height a full head shorter than him. Two rubber gloves on her hands meant she had been scrubbing something, hopefully a toilet because Josh rarely got around to that and never felt completely comfortable having a housekeeper come in and do it. She blew a wisp of hair out of her face that had escaped the bandana and smiled. Josh gave her a quick hug, not noticing he was still holding a bag in each hand. She hugged back and laughed a little.

  “Uh, yeah, glad to see you too. What’s up?”

  Josh felt a little awkward. His parents didn’t raise particularly affectionate kids, so a hug out of the blue was unusual. “Nothing, just glad to be home.” She laughed again and turned to go into the kitchen.

  “Just giving the hardwoods in the kitchen a little scraping and waxing. It’s going to smell funny for a while, so I wanted to finish while it was still warm enough to leave the windows open.”

  Josh wanted to say something funny, like remind her she’d eventually move out of this phase, so he was happy to have her scrub as much as possible, but humor wasn’t in his reach.

  “Do you have to go into the office today?”

  “No, I’ve just got a lot of calls. I’ll work from here.”

  “Okay. I’m going to run some errands later. You’ll have quiet for your calls.”

  Josh took his bag into the bedroom and unpacked. His hands quaked again and he didn’t know what to do to make them stop. Fear and anger battled one another. He waited for Helen.

  Chapter Four
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  Helen picked Crawford up at a newsstand in Studio City at 11:30 a.m. She headed east and drove through an In-n-Out Burger in Van Nuys and ordered fries, a chocolate shake, and a double-double cheeseburger animal style. That’s where they knead some mustard into the burger before they cook it, and slather on extra sauce and grilled onions. It was her favorite meal, chasing down huge bites of burger with long swallows of thick shake. Juice dribbled down her chin, caught by the dozen napkins she had arranged around her lap as they sat in the parking slot reserved for drive-thru customers who couldn’t wait until they were on the road. Crawford looked on, silent and empty-handed. Helen had never seen him eat. She knew he must, but never in front of her. She wasn’t sure if he was repulsed by her attacks on In-n-Out burgers, or turned on, or completely disinterested. She had asked him once while they were at a sushi restaurant waiting for a client what he liked to eat. He just looked at her. She smiled and popped another piece of eel in her mouth.

  The meal belied her flawless figure. Helen had one of those metabolisms. Maybe it was her general excitement about life, or her love for her work. She could eat anything she wanted. No heavy exercise – gyms were hunting grounds, not places to waste valuable down time. But Helen rarely slept. She walked incessantly, thinking, planning, day-dreaming. When she was on guard or when she was working, she could be cool as a cucumber and sit still for hours. But her nature was to be up and about, pacing or smoking. The streets, wooded paths, and sidewalks around her half-acre Studio City home were well worn by her endless wandering. But wasn’t metabolism that kept her slim and fit. It was the constant burning of calories as she moved about the world, planning her next action.

  Helen wiped her fingers on some of the napkins, still holding the half-eaten burger in her left hand, and reached between Crawford’s legs to open the glove compartment. She lightly brushed the inside of his thigh as she pulled the handle but didn’t look up. She knew by now there would be no reaction, but habits are hard to break. She was sure Crawford had a dick. In fact, she had seen it once during a particularly unusual – and violent – episode with a client. However, she wasn’t sure if he ever used it except to piss. With her clean hand, she took a small, rectangular device out of the glove compartment and sat back in her seat. She left the glove box open between Crawford’s legs. The Blackberry was still the favorite mobile device among the business cognoscenti these days. And it made it easy for her to retrieve email from her dozens of anonymous accounts. Still using just her right hand, she flicked a couple of buttons with her thumb and the screen lit up.

  Helen loved email. Full access cloaked in ultimate anonymity. Helen had used the Internet to prepare herself for encounters with clients dozens of times, learning much of what she needed just by being patient and smart and using Google. But she had also used it as a façade, a disguise allowing her to become anything or anyone. She could hide, or create a subterfuge, or protect herself from prying eyes. Helen had posed as a 76-year-old Polish immigrant name Lech, as a sixteen-year-old mid-Western high school girl, as a federal agent, and as a psychotic stalker. Each persona helped her do her work more efficiently. But each disguise also gave her a satisfaction she could not explain, letting her be someone new, someone else. She didn’t think too carefully about why this met some deeper need. She was not drawn to the internal machinations of her own psyche. She was amused by the odd list of activities that gave her enjoyment, but she did not look for underlying purpose.

  Helen pressed a few more buttons and pulled up an email account. She had created it several weeks ago using Hotmail and none of the information she’d provided could be verified or traced. She had chosen josieandkaren@hotmail.com for the address. Those were the names of the two cute little nieces of the client to whom she had given this address. It was the address to which she had instructed him two days ago to send the data by this morning. Helen had created this email account using a computer at a public library in Long Beach. Hotmail kept a log of the IP address of the computer used to create each new email account. The IP address is like a serial number. It identifies the computer uniquely and can be used to track it down if someone really wanted to. The Blackberry Helen used was a single device stolen from a large shipment of 10,000 similar devices and was using a hijacked wireless connection belonging to a businessman in Tucson who had no idea his own Blackberry had a twin in Los Angeles. Helen’s activities – email, Internet, anything done by the Blackberry – were untraceable.

  There were six new messages for josieandkaren@hotmail.com. Three were advertisements for amazing new drugs to enlarge your penis, one was a plea to purchase refurbished laser printer cartridges from Scott’s Super Surplus Store, one was a reminder from Hotmail that you could buy 100 extra gigabytes of storage for only $9.99 per month, and one was an offer to Work From Home and earn $1000/week. Just spam. No email from the skinny little guy still living with his mother and working at Boeing. Too bad. She turned the screen to Crawford, even though she knew he couldn’t read it from that distance and had no interest in technology even if he could.

  “I gave him a couple extra hours. Nothing. He needs a reminder.” Crawford gave her a small smile. She knew it meant he was happy he would get to work soon.

  Helen put the last bite of cheeseburger into her mouth and crumpled the accumulated napkins in her lap. Lowering the window, she tossed them into the garbage can put there for just that purpose, which was surrounded by paper bags of half-eaten hamburgers and used napkins and empty soda cups with straws sticking out. Most people were sloppy at best, pigs at worst, and Helen harbored special ill will for litterers and inconsiderate jerk-offs. Once in a while she freelanced and paid back tenfold the small transgressions she saw around her all the time. It kept her mind busy when things were slow and satisfied the avenging angel within her. In the back of her mind she registered this spot as a good one to pick up an offender next time she had extra time on her hands. She put the car in gear and drove off with one hand, using the other to pull up another email account. She glanced at the screen every few seconds, keeping an eye on the parking lot, then road ahead of her. This email account never had any spam. Only one person ever sent anything to it and it was always with an offer that was too good to pass up. Today, there was a single message. A few more button presses and Helen read the brief instruction:

  Lock down Boeing by 5 p.m. tonight.

  Helen deleted the message, which erased it from the server at the enormous central Hotmail facilities in Salt Lake City as well as from her Blackberry, and turned the car toward Pasadena. A tingle went down her spine, emanating from the basal ganglia, a small, dense cluster of cells deep within the oldest part of the human brain. It was a sensation Helen did not often experience: fear. The message from her boss was clear, both in what he wanted and the implied threat. She did not fear Crawford or any other person who crossed her path – but the man who employed her was different. It didn’t matter she had never met him or learned his name.

  Crawford would like the fact there was now pressure from their boss to get the client to cooperate. She looked at him and flashed her best smile. He didn’t turn his head.

  Chapter Five

  The man who hired Helen, and others like her, was named Daniel Murello. Murello watched his mother die of pancreatic cancer when he was seven. She didn’t go well. She turned from a vibrant, intellectual, loving mother to a wasted husk in less than two months. The drugs did little to lessen her suffering and Daniel observed every wince, every spasm, during the hospice care she received so she could die at home. He was there when she took her last breath and shuddered once more, a vacant look filling her eyes where just a moment before there had been deep love for Daniel, his younger sister, and their father. Daniel saw all this, recognized it as an emotional, traumatic experience, even registered its potential impact on his own well-being. But he did not feel it. Years later, taking psychology courses at Stanford, he read about a clinical disorder appearing in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Edition IV.
Sociopathy referred to an emotional dissociation certain people experienced – able to recognize many common emotions but not able to feel them. It was characterized by lack of empathy. Murello had always thought of it like watching a black-and-white T.V. show you knew was broadcast in color. You understood that the particular shade of gray you were viewing was meant to be red, but you had no experience of color or what red actually was. He accepted that he was different, that he did not succumb to the weaknesses others experienced by being soft, unduly influenced by their emotional lives. Murello experienced emotions, he just experienced them differently from other people. He refuted the label “sociopath,” which was commonly used to described heartless killers or psychos. Instead, he recognized his unique emotional outlook as a strength. He was able to accomplish more, with fewer obstacles.

  The turning point in his life came not when he first got laid or won the starting spot on the high school football team, or even with the early death of his mother. It came when he was sixteen years old, preparing for his first year of college as he was completing his combined junior and senior years of high school. Murello had taken the train to New York City from his Stamford, Connecticut home. Walking through Times Square at 1:00 a.m. to catch the last train back – this was before the Giuliani era when petty crime was virtually wiped out of the City – he was mugged. It was the kind of crime that happened all the time back then. Three young men, probably not much older than Murello and with varying degrees of skin color different from his own, saw the big kid as an easy target. They walked toward him on a quiet section of 44th street, crowding the sidewalk so he’d have to move close to the darkened building to get by. When they reached him, one of the guys pushed him hard against the brick and held him there, while the other two kept their hands in their pockets and looked up and down the street, glowering at Murello. They weren’t really anxious about getting caught; they’d done this a hundred times, and no tourist was going to step up and take them on.