Right off, Kat was getting a sense of her. Kat was what other cops referred to as the new breed. She was a cop educated in psychology, something she didn’t like to talk about. She had always wanted to be a cop but her mother had insisted on college first. Mrs. Callaghan had reminded Kat of her mother. This woman had money and she knew her money elevated her above people like Detective O’Hara. Kat read it in her the moment the door had opened.
“Detective, in case you haven’t figured it out, I live in this condo because this isn’t a neighborhood. It’s where people come to be left alone. It’s private.”
“I understand.”
Kat warmed up to her task slightly. She recognized the tribe of the self-consumed, the wealthy, and played up to her slightly.
“I’m the same way at my home. I go home to be alone and don’t answer my door to anyone. Well, maybe the police. So I understand.”
“I seriously doubt that, Detective,” the woman said, looking Kat up and down. And Kat could feel the violation. She could feel the insult behind the words, but let it go. She needed Mrs. Callaghan’s cooperation and wasn’t going to leave until she got it. Even though the woman’s hospitality was briefly supplanted by bewilderment, Kat continued.
“What can you tell me about what you saw today?”
“I don’t know if I should tell you.”
“Why is that?” Kat asked patiently.
“I read books. I watch the movies. I know what will happen to me. I saw those men in black. It was like a scene from that David Duchovny movie or television show or whatever.”
“What David Duchovny movie?”
“Oh, you know the one where he’s running around with that horrible redhead that nags at him the whole time about FBI policies.”
“You mean The X-Files?” Kat asked her, somewhat exasperated.
“Right, that’s the one.”
Conspiracy and suspicion seemed to be the central ideas with which Mrs. Callaghan organized her sense of self, Kat thought.
“So you think if you tell me what happened, that men in black will come to kill you or take you away?”
“Laugh if you want, but I know the truth.”
Kat knew that she would have to tread carefully now. This woman was a conspiracy nut it seemed. Next she would be talking about ‘spring cleaning’—the illegal files the government supposedly had on all citizens. But only conspiracy nuts called it spring cleaning, and Kat could see the paranoid delusions ramping up inside this woman. It was a little sad, really.
“Okay, Mrs. Callaghan. Without being too descriptive, can you tell me if there was more than one gun shot?”
Kat had a reason for not wanting her to be overly detailed. She didn’t want the facts tainted by what was probably misinformation. She would have to break apart this case one fact at a time.
“Well…” the sheltered, rich woman began, her eyes looking around the room nervously. Her voice was so low and soft that Kat could hardly hear her.
“There were three of them.”
“So you heard a shot and ran to the balcony?”
“No… I was already at the balcony having a glass of wine and looking over the city. The shots were soft.”
Kat thought about that for a moment. Soft shots suggested a suppressor or maybe even a silencer, but in the movies a silencer or suppressor was very quiet. In actuality, the sound produced was something closer to a very small firecracker.
“Did you see the person they were shooting at?”
“Oh… No. And I’ve said too much already.”
Kat was quickly becoming irritated with Mrs. Callaghan. This was going nowhere.
“Alright, Mrs. Callaghan. If you want to talk, please give me a call.”
Kat sighed and handed her a white business card with her contact information on it.
“Good evening, Mrs. Callaghan,” Kat said wearily as she turned and walked down the stairs back to the street.
By the time she reached the market again, she was ready to get the truth out of Detective Johnson. It didn’t matter what he wanted. Kenny was going to tell her what she wanted to know. And right now she needed to know about this case. She pulled her cell phone from her pocket and for a moment, she froze in place. Kat was sure eyes were on her, but when she looked around she could see no one—just empty streets.
Chapter 34
5:30 p.m., May 6
Agent Trent Void was the perfect image of the archetypal Navy commissioned officer. At six feet tall, the only fat on his two-hundred-pound body was the curry he had had for lunch. Most people in the secure office building had seen him in the past but had never met him. In his twenty-nine years of service for his country, he had been everywhere and nowhere. He had been groomed from the moment they took him all those years ago, and now—right now—Trent, User319, was about to throw it all away.
It was to be expected that he’d be as exactly punctual as his electronic chronograph watch could make him. It seemed to Trent that he’d hardly sat down in front of his computer when the gentlest rapping startled his attention and his eyes shot to the door. There came a brief moment of confusion, normal to one deep in thought and not aware of his surroundings. Bad, he thought. All those years in the Navy had not paid off. But hard on the heels of that thought came the electronic alert announcement that the worst part of his day was still ahead of him. It was no dream, good or bad. And his eyes found the small window of his screen once more as the message came through.
Agent down. Target on the move.
The tornado of events in Seattle had swept him up into a whirring ball of anger and confusion, and the knock came on his door again. But this time louder and with more force than before.
Trent stood up and made his way to the door. As the heavy door opened, he was greeted by a rather earnest looking agent who stood before him with a blank look on his face.
“Well, do come in, son,” Trent told him and stepped away from the door with a left-handed invitation to enter his office. The agent was wearing a pistol belt under a black jacket and was holding a summons. Trent’s eyes locked onto the piece of paper as the agent outstretched a bony-fingered hand to him and Trent could see the monogram of his friend Robert on the top of the summons. Suddenly his guilt began to build once more. Trent worried what this meant as he looked at the agent he had now grown to dislike, but knew he was nothing more than just a messenger.
“Thank you. You may go,” Trent said as he took the message and watched the agent leave, strolling back down the hallway. Not until his office door had completely closed did he unfold the note.
The note was written in his friend’s own handwriting, for he would have known it anywhere. He could detect the slight impression of urgency in the angle and attack of the letters and Trent gave a sigh as he read it silently.
Trent
Please make your way upstairs to my office as soon as you can. There is a matter of some urgency that I must discuss with you. You know what brought us all here so emphatically this morning and more events have occurred. We must take care of this. Please come see me.
Robert
This was difficult for him. Difficult for Agent Void, for Trent, and for User319. This was practically painful for all aspects of him. What he was now proposing to do, this was treason. It was worse than treason—a concept that Void hadn’t thought possible until that moment. He had spent the last few hours arranging it all, setting events in motion, and as he sat at his computer, his index finger hovering over a key, it was all about to launch into effect. And the whole time, his guilt had been building in him. Guilt building about his friend Robert, the friend that had given him everything. The friend that had always been there for him. Robert had been there when they first met at school and when he returned years later from the service to his country. Robert was there when he got married to his loving wife, standing right next to Trent as his best man. Yes, as far back as he could recall, Robert had been there standing by him. And now what? Trent was going to turn his back
on his friend? Turn his back on the life that had been carefully laid out for him? Trent knew he must make a hard decision.
With a single push of the ‘Enter’ button, a program would launch. A simple enough program—one that he had personally designed to do only two tasks. The first step unlocked the east door in Lot J. The second step would result in his treason. The east side cameras would fail, allowing him to pass through unnoticed. But this supposed malfunction would be noticed soon enough and it would be discovered what he had done. And they would come after him just as they had come after Joe.
Agent Void knew what this meant for him. As he pressed the button and watched the program launch on his screen, he knew he had just ended his life. His time was short now and he could do one last good deed before they got to him. He could save Joe before it was too late.
“I’m sorry, Robert.”
The words softly passed through the tense air as Trent turned and looked at his office for the last time. The office that had been his for many years. He had done many things from that chair. Made many decisions that affected many different people, but now his last choice was about friendship and he was truly sorry.
Moments later Void was out the door and heading past a wall-mounted security camera. If Agent Trent Void had ever doubted that he had the convictions of his choices, this experience of fleeing everything he had ever known would have cured him. To his right, a guard booth sat donned with bulletproof glass and an armed soldier staring from inside. Trent swiped his ID badge at a chest level scanner next to the booth and almost immediately a lock buzzed free. A gate made of chain links and razor wire rattled and vibrated as it retracted on a steel arm.
Trent held his breath as he knew at any moment his plans could all come crashing down like so many stacks of playing cards. For no matter how good the architect, at some point the weight would be too great and the deck would collapse.
Agent Void took only a few more steps, his heart racing. Now he was past the gate and he jumped slightly as it lurched back into motion to close behind him.
Suddenly words were in his mind.
“What right moment? What plan?”
Void had thought this only weeks before. He had sent Jack to his death.
“The moment is at hand,” he had told Jack only an hour before his death, only to regret it later. But no one else had felt any remorse. Regrets were something the government did not deal in. If there was anything Void believed in, it was honor. He knew its importance unlike the other agents in that building that only respected and sought after security. Trent’s youthful conscience chafed at the frustration of knowing the importance of what was happening without knowing the outcome of his actions.
Then the words came again.
“Difficult, isn’t it, Trent?”
“Yes, sir. It is,” he had said to a friend, long dead now.
“Doing the right thing always is.”
Chapter 35
5:40 p.m., May 6
Kenny Johnson materialized in the middle of the slowly darkening street, backlit by a blaze of halogen car lights as if he had emerged from the afterlife. Just the thought of this chilled me to my core. The abandoned car was now gone and the spot that had been a crime scene only the night before could now have been any stretch of road in any country town.
Kenny walked the dark road as beacons of light flashed across his big weathered face and the unstylish glasses he only wore when looking over a crime scene. He walked tall and broad in a down jacket. Kenny seemed his usual self again. Buckets of confidence and determination came from him as he worked the scene and he seemed to be in his element once more.
The ringing was soft at first, then seemed to erupt and push back the quiet of the country. It was his cell phone. Kenny stopped and I could feel the apprehension in him as he looked at the display.
“Shit… I have to take this, Tim.”
“Johnson,” he answered his cell. And as usual he had his phone on speaker so I could hear. The irritated and fed-up voice of his new partner attacked the soft calm of the evening.
“Where are you? The Captain is screaming for you to come back,” Kat said.
“This case has turned into a kidnapping and murder investigation. O’Hara, I need to see this through.”
“Johnson, I won’t cover for you any longer. You need to check in.”
“O’Hara…”
“No, Johnson. I’m in a real shit storm here. You sent me to take that print and…”
“Not over the phone,” Kenny interrupted her. “You know the protocol about open phone lines.”
“Yeah, I know the fuckin’ protocol! Do you?”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“You’re way off the reservation on this one. You’re out there god knows where, chasing ‘kidnappers’ because of a fuckin’ receipt you found on a body. A body, by the way, that died of natural causes.”
“Not now, Kat. Not over the phone!”
“Just get back here, okay?”
“Okay.”
Kenny was still angry as hell by the time he got off the phone and came over to me. It was times like this that I felt it most. In some ways, I felt it more than I had before. There were a lot of mixed feelings between us and things had definitely changed. I thought we would always be close. I had always pictured our friendship lasting until we were old men, sitting together in a park somewhere, telling old cop stories about kicking down doors and stopping evildoers. But I could feel it now. Between now and last winter something had happened. Somehow the two of us had drifted apart and I, for one, didn’t like how it felt.
Kenny was focusing intensely on the situation, walking up and down the crime scene, looking for something, anything that could lead us to the ex-vampires. He was walking the side of the road for many more minutes until he came to a stop. His body language told its own story. He was extremely frustrated.
“Dude, we’re not going to find what we need here. We…”
“Have to go into the woods,” I said, finishing his sentence. “If there’s one place out here that seems to be coming back to me over and over again, it’s those woods. They’re out there, Kenny. I can feel them and I know you can too.”
“Yeah, it’s almost as if they’re calling out to us. Right?”
I didn’t answer his question. I just turned and headed back to the truck. It seemed to all go back to those woods and I supposed that maybe we should have checked them out when we first heard about the Collins boy, but we had had other things to worry about then. Now it seemed we needed to go. Now it seemed we were going.
Kenny and I had pulled onto a small path just off of the road that brought us closer to a tree line and to the woods by the river. We planned to hike through the woods to where the campsite was, where the brother and his friends had gone.
Robert Frost once said “Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads Diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
Well, Kenny and I were now on the road less traveled by, the difficult path, and we were about to jump head first into it.
As we trudged into the foreboding woods, the towering pines and Washington oaks began to shut out all light. A chorus of frogs and crickets began to sing in the gloom around us. The air wasn’t moving. Kenny pulled a bag of sunflower seeds from his coat pocket and began to toss them into his mouth. This was a habit I had always known Kenny to have from as far back as our Army days together. He had always had a small bag of sunflower seeds with him. And the memories of that put a smile on my face.
I could imagine I could see Tommy Collins running through those same dark woods only days before, fighting for his life. I thought of him now. I thought of his sister Harvey too, and then she was there.
There was a faded green Jeep parked between two large trees. I almost didn’t see it at first. Harvey Collins was inside pulling a backpack and flashlight out of the back seat when we approached. She seemed totally unaware of our prese
nce.
“Got room for one more?” Kenny spoke up. She spun around and the beam of her light found us. At least she was testing to make sure the batteries worked.
“Oh, you guys coming too?” Harvey asked, a smile spreading over her face.
“No, Harvey. You need to head home right now,” I told her sternly.
“You think this is funny, guys? This is dangerous country out here.”
“Please believe me, Harvey. I know how dangerous it can be. We just want to find your brother. I can’t let you go with us. I’m sorry. This is a police matter now,” I told her, trying to sound as comforting but authoritative as possible.
For a moment she did not move. It was as if she was staring us down, her eyes moving back and forth between Kenny and me. Finally she frowned and started her engine to leave.
“You’d better find him,” she said to us angrily from the open window of her Jeep as it sped off over grass and mud. I watched as her tail lights faded into the distance and the murky clouds grew thicker overhead.
“I don’t like it in these dark woods,” Kenny confessed as we passed under a thick umbrella of twisted vines and tent-like treetops. I could hear Kenny popping seed after seed into his mouth as we walked deeper into darkness.
“You’re not afraid of going through the Seattle projects at night, but a nice walk in the woods with an old friend freaks you out. I would like to say that nothing will hurt you here, but I don’t want to jinx it.”
“Riiiiiight…” Kenny came back at me sarcastically and I recognized the impression that he was doing for me. He was imitating Doctor Evil’s drawn out “Riiiight…” from Austin Powers, one of his favorite movies, and that made me chuckle.
Kenny was struggling to get his rather bulky, statuesque frame through the closely bunched saplings and blackberry vines that reached out and grabbed whatever they could. The blackberry bushes were actually like a mesh curtain in places. They seemed to grow more tangled and thicker the deeper we went into the darkness of those woods. It felt like they were reaching out for our clothes more and more frequently. There was not a sound coming from the dense forest. The only things we could hear were our shoes cracking broken tree limbs underneath us and the rustling of long blades of grass. Yet I felt that we were not the only ones out there.
The Blood Born Tales (Book 2): Blood Dream Page 18
