by Ed Markham
“There’s Martin,” David said, nodding toward the window.
Conway smiled and said, “Should I go grab him?”
He shook his head, his eyes still tracking his father. “He’ll find his way in here.”
Conway reached into the pocket of his overcoat and brought out two pair of prophylactic gloves. He handed a pair to David. After pulling on the gloves, David moved the package aside and picked up the ragged scrap of paper beneath it.
Conway read the words over his shoulder. “ ‘Don’t tread on me,’ ” he said. “Remind me why that’s familiar?”
“It was a rallying cry during the American Revolution,” David said. “People would stitch it onto flags, along with the image of a coiled snake—”
“Snake?” Conway interrupted, eyeing the white package.
David went on, “The snake was meant to represent the American colonists. It was a warning to the British—oppress us at your peril.”
Conway nodded, but David could tell he wasn’t listening. The older agent’s eyes were glued to the white box. David opened it, and they both peered in at the section of snake. Like the others, its scales were particolored and looked almost wet.
“Is this number four?” a voice boomed from across the room.
Conway flinched, and David turned to find his father standing in the doorway of the study. It always surprised him that such a big sound could come from such an average-sized man.
“Yes,” he said, letting the lid of the package fall closed. He beckoned his father over to the desk.
Although Martin was a few inches shorter than his son, he was also thicker than David, with big shoulders and ropey forearms wide as rifle stocks. Physical proportions aside, Martin was the biggest man David had ever known.
Conway smiled broadly and extended his hand toward Martin Yerxa. “The legend,” he said. “How are you, Marty?”
Martin greeted Conway warmly and rested a hand on one of his shoulders. He squeezed the shoulder as he said, “Good, Bill. They treating you all right in Wilmington?”
“Not as good as you D.C. bucks.”
“Technically we’re Quantico bucks, but you know I’m semi-retired now. I think that makes me a pasture buck.” Martin was speaking to Conway, but he winked at David as he said this.
The joke wasn’t funny, but Conway laughed hard anyway.
Martin looked at his son for a few seconds and the two exchanged a wordless greeting.
“You know what a brilliant, crazy son of a bitch your dad was?” Conway said to David as he handed Martin a latex glove.
“What do you mean was?” Martin said.
Conway went on, “Twenty years ago we worked together on a mafia task force up in New York. Your dad was fed up with an informant who was holding out on us, so he pulled on a windbreaker with the letters FBI on the back and drove the guy to Sparks Steakhouse for lunch. Sparks was practically Cosa Nostra-central back then, and this hood knew he was a dead man if he was spotted in there with a fed. He spilled his guts before they got out of the car.” Conway laughed. “I’m still convinced Marty could have shut down the New York mob if the director hadn’t busted up our task force.”
David said nothing in response to this. All his life, he’d heard men like Bill Conway tell these types of stories—had watched them laugh louder than usual and cast hopeful, admiring looks at his father. For a big part of his life it had made him proud. It didn’t anymore.
“All right, Bill,” Martin said. “I think he’s heard enough about that. Different times, different methods.”
“That’s the truth,” Conway said, growing pensive.
Martin scanned the room, his eyes moving from the desk to the bookshelves and walls. After a few seconds of silence, he took a sip from his coffee mug and set it on the desk. He stretched the glove Conway had given him onto one hand and lifted the lid of the package. He looked at its contents without comment, and then bent down to examine the aged scrap of paper. He sniffed at it.
“Did you talk to Clarence Perkins this morning?” he asked, turning to look at his son.
David remembered the call he’d ignored from the Quantico switchboard. He shook his head.
“He called me a few minutes ago, looking for you,” Martin said. “Someone named Butch told him I was assisting.”
David watched as his father pulled his old brushed-steel Ronson from his pocket. He detected a glimmer of excitement in his eyes.
Martin slid four latex-encased fingers under the fragment of paper and lifted it off the table. With his un-gloved hand, he flicked open the lighter and raked the small wheel against the flint. A flame leapt to life.
As he brought the lighter to the paper, Conway started to protest.
“Relax, Bill,” he said, chuckling. “I won’t torch any evidence—at least not while you’re around.” He held the flame near the back of the scrap but did not join the two.
As the fire danced behind the shard’s brittle surface, David saw new words slowly materialize:
Our cause is just. Our union is perfect.
11 Days
“Jesus Christ,” Conway said under his breath.
Martin closed the Ronson and slipped it back into the pocket of his olive slacks.
David watched as the words slowly faded away.
“Bill, give us minute alone,” Martin said. He put a hand on Conway’s back and walked him to the threshold of the study. He slid the pocket door closed after Conway had stepped out.
“How are you, David?” he said, turning to face his son.
“I’m fine. What did Clarence tell you?”
Martin walked to David and put both his hands on his shoulders. He examined his son’s face for a few seconds before patting his cheek and turning back to the scrap of paper. “The ink is heat activated, as I’m sure you figured out. It’s a solution of cobalt chloride and something else I can’t remember. Perkins found it on the scraps from the other murder sites.”
“So there are more hidden messages?”
Martin nodded. “Different on each.” He grinned. “During the Revolutionary War, Washington’s men used this sort of invisible ink to hide coded messages from the British.”
“Clarence told you that too?” David asked, though he already knew the answer.
“Hell no. I told him that.”
“Any idea about the message?”
“It’s familiar, but I can’t place it.”
“What about the—”
“The eleven days reference?” Martin interrupted.
David felt a small flush of irritation, but he brushed it aside.
“Perkins told me the first two messages included seventeen days and sixteen days,” Martin said. “Some kind of a countdown.” He frowned and shook his head. “And he told me something else too.”
He tapped one hand near the ragged shard on the desk.
“This,” he said, “is dried human skin.”
Chapter 14
DAVID TURNED JUST as his father was emerging from the police tent.
Martin let loose a loud whistle of disbelief. “Jesus Christ Almighty,” he said, one hand holding his coffee mug and the other buried in the pocket of his windbreaker, flicking his lighter open and closed. A look of grim fascination had settled into the creases of his face.
He approached David, who was standing next to Conway but speaking on his cell phone to Omar Ghafari, the head of his team’s communications and IT unit.
“Keep working on the cell data,” David said to Omar, “and try to set up a link analysis.” He stepped away from Conway and lowered his voice. “Maybe we can tie an IP address to a search history that includes all four of our victims.”
“You got it,” Omar said.
David slipped his phone into his pocket and turned in time to hear Martin say to Conway, “We need to set up a search matrix back here. Find whatever shoe prints lead from the house back to that poor son of a bitch.” He gestured with his coffee mug toward the police tent.
&nbs
p; Conway nodded. “David already told me. We’ll get on it.”
As Conway left to talk to the Bureau’s forensic people, Martin walked to his son’s side and handed him the coffee mug. “Hold this,” he said. He withdrew his pen and notepad from his back pocket.
David fought the urge to drop the mug onto the ground.
“Who were you talking to on the phone just now?” Martin said as he wrote.
“Omar Ghafari.” When his father looked at him questioningly, he added, “CITU.”
“Computers,” Martin said. He scowled, as David knew he would.
As his father took notes, David looked from the tent to the back of the house. He imagined the things that had transpired there just a few hours earlier, and tried to make those things mesh with what he’d seen at the other crime scenes. He felt the same sense of disjointedness—of something that didn’t fit.
“What are you working on over there?” Martin asked him.
David turned and looked at his father.
“I can almost hear your big brain humming,” Martin said. He put away his notepad and took his coffee mug back. He took a sip from it as he eyeballed his son.
Before David could answer, Bill Conway rejoined them on the edge of the lawn. He told them their team was on their way to assemble the search grid.
“Another thing, Bill,” Martin said to him. “Have our guys take a good look for tire tracks in the woods back there.” He waved his coffee mug at the trees beyond the police tent. “Our man sure as shit didn’t build that nightmare where it stands now. He must have gotten it here somehow, and I don’t see treads anywhere on this grass.”
The two older agents stood talking for a moment, and then Martin thumbed toward his son. “Does this one seem quiet to you?” he asked Conway.
David stared at him.
Conway shook his head as though he didn’t understand. “Marty?”
“He seems a little quiet to me,” Martin said. “Even quieter than usual.”
The way David was looking at his father made Conway fidget. “Well you’re so damn loud, Marty. I think you’ve got enough volume for two people. But no, David doesn’t seem quiet to me.”
Martin nodded, his eyes on his son. “You’re right. I am a loud-mouth.”
“No, I didn’t mean that,” Conway said, fidgeting even more now.
Martin put a hand on Conway’s shoulder. That seemed to calm him.
“Probably just my imagination,” Martin said. “Anyway. Good to see you, Bill.”
Conway smiled and shook hands with Martin and then with David. As he walked away, father and son turned toward the front of the house.
A voice shouted at their backs, “So what the hell is this, guys?”
The question came from one of the local police officers. The man was standing with three more locals and one of the township’s homicide investigators, all of whom looked at David and Martin with bald contempt.
The cop went on, “We’ve got a dead guy in the stocks back here, and a piece of snake inside. This is some fucked-up shit. Are you going to let us know what we’re dealing with here or what?”
“Those aren’t stocks,” Martin said, turning to face the police officer. “That’s a pillory.” He hunched his shoulders and lifted his fists up on either side of his face, mimicking the dead man’s pose. “Stocks go around your ankles.”
The cop looked as though he’d been slapped. He opened his mouth to call out again, but Martin had already turned back toward the front of the house.
David broke away from him and walked back to the police officer and his colleagues.
“You’re right, this is some fucked-up shit,” he said, his voice calm and even. He introduced himself to each of the men in turn and explained the rough outlines of the investigation, leaving out the number of victims. When he’d finished, he asked for their cooperation in keeping the gruesome details out of the press. “A murder like this—someone’s looking for attention, and I’m not going to give him the satisfaction. I hope you’re all with me on that.”
David could tell they were looking at things from the right perspective now—as bad guys versus good guys and not a contest between law enforcement agencies. Still, he added in the same measured tone, “I want you all to know that if details of this crime scene leak, I’m going to find out who leaked them and that person is never going to work in law enforcement again.”
The detective blew air through his lips, as though this was an obvious bluff.
“Give it a shot, Boyd,” David said to him. “See how it works out for you.”
The man seemed surprised David remembered his name. He tried but failed to affect cocky indifference while his colleagues grinned beneath raised eyebrows.
David rejoined his father and the two walked together toward the front of the house.
“That was good thinking,” Martin said. “We don’t need any press on this, although it’s going to happen sooner than later.” He glanced at his son. “You’ve always been good at figuring people out. Understanding what’s going on in their heads. I think that’s why you’re so damn good at this job.” He took a sip of his coffee as they walked. “Me, I’m just an old bloodhound.”
David knew the compliment was Martin’s way of apologizing for needling him in front of Bill Conway. But knowing that didn’t change everything else that was on his mind.
When they reached their cars, Martin turned to him and put a hand on his shoulder. He squeezed it, working the muscle affectionately. “It’s good to see you, boy. I missed you.”
Staring into his father’s face, David recalled the way it had turned crimson with rage as he berated his wife’s doctors, and how it had crumpled as he stood alongside her casket. He didn’t want to think about that now. It could wait.
“We should get going,” he said. When Martin didn’t move his hand from his shoulder, he added, “Eleven days.”
He watched his father glance in the direction of the police tent behind the house.
Martin frowned and snorted air out through his nose. “That takes us to the seventeenth,” he said. “We better get our asses in gear.”
Chapter 15
THE WOMAN WAS tired. It had been a long night, and she still had another hour of driving before she would reach the motel they had agreed on.
She had spent the morning replaying the scene over and over again in her head; the man’s pathetic blubbering—his cowardice as he faced death.
To show such emotion was weakness, she’d long ago learned. And weakness disgusted her. She’d nearly become ill recalling the way Mitchell Cosgrove had pleaded for his life.
The woman knew everyone experienced strong emotion, whether hatred or pain or sadness. She herself was no exception. But what differentiated the strong from the weak was the discipline to keep those emotions concealed. To hide the weakness—to suppress the pain and the fear from the rest of the world so they couldn’t use it against you. That was strength. And she had no sympathy for the weak.
Now, as the midday sun poked through the clouds and the two-lane road meandered its way through the New Jersey countryside, the woman ran a hand through her carrot-colored hair. Her thoughts began to wander. As it had so many times in the past, her mind found its way back to that day when, as a young girl, she had first realized that she wasn’t like other people.
Every day of that long-ago spring, she had pulled on her small boots and her warm jacket and had walked out to the pond by herself before her brothers and daddy were awake. There was an old cottonwood stump near the narrow end of the pond, and she would sit on it while she waited for her friend.
The swan always came from the same direction, and it always surprised and delighted her. One minute she would be sitting alone, kicking her heels against the stump to stay warm. And the next she would see the swan swooping down over the trees. Its white feathers and orange beak had reminded her of her own pale skin and carrot-colored hair. And when the swan landed on the cloudy pond near her Virginia home, look
ing so large and so beautiful, the girl had believed that she must be beautiful too.
One particularly cool morning, she had been late getting out of bed, and so she’d worried she might have missed her friend. But as she sat waiting on the stump, she saw the swan appear over the trees. She watched it land and float smoothly across the surface of the water, occasionally dunking its head and coming up with a bit of weed in its mouth.
She was humming to herself and admiring her swan’s pretty white feathers when she heard a strange thwpp sound. Then another. The swan stopped gliding and opened its wings as though it were startled. The girl heard more thwpp sounds, and then she heard laughing. She turned and saw both of her brothers kneeling near the edge of the woods with their pellet rifles pressed into their shoulders. They shot, reloaded the lever-action guns, and shot again.
She screamed at them from her stump, “Don’t hurt my swan!”
Her brothers laughed louder and kept shooting.
The girl couldn’t see the pellets hit but she could hear them thunking into the swan’s body beneath its feathers. When the animal tried to spread its wings to escape, only one of them would open all the way. It tried again and again, but each time it failed and sank back into the water. It opened and closed its mouth, but made no sound.
When the swan slid into the shallow bank of the pond and let its head fall to the ground, the girl’s brothers yelled in triumph. The swan was dead, but they shot it a few more times to be sure.
She watched them drag its body out of the water by the neck. After whispering to each other, they sprinted back toward the house.
For a while, the girl sat crying on her stump. When she finally decided to get down, she had to turn on her belly and slide down until her feet touched the stump’s roots. The ground near the pond was damp, and she saw that the underside of the swan’s body had become muddy. The dead thing seemed enormous to her, and very wet. It had never looked wet when it was alive, but now the swan looked like one of her stuffed animals after she’d played with it outside on a rainy day.
