Blood Ties

by Nicholas Guild

  “How did you hit on Tregear?” Ellen asked. “It’s an unusual name.”

  “I got it out of a Trollope novel.”

  Tregear smiled, as if he had just made a lame joke.

  “What’s your real name?”

  “I don’t have any idea.” He shrugged and set his wineglass down on the table beside his chair. “Stephen is real, but my father has used so many aliases that I suspect there could have been a few last names before Rayne. I haven’t a clue where I was born, so I’ll never find a birth certificate. Tregear, I suspect, is going to have to do.”

  “And you’ve been hunting your father ever since you left the Navy?”

  “Even before,” Tregear answered, in a tone that suggested it was a self-evident proposition. “I’ll never be safe until he’s dead or in jail. I’ll have to go on living like a hermit for the rest of my short life because no one close to me is safe. I have to find him before he finds me.”

  “Is he looking?”

  “Always.”

  * * *

  For years, he told her, from as soon as he had figured out the reach the Internet gave him, he had been casually fishing in its waters, searching for some trace of his father. He couldn’t just walk away. Walter—he had already become “Walter” in his imagination, a stranger—Walter was out there, killing people, and Tregear was the only person left alive who knew. At first, he told himself, it was little more than a hobby.

  In those days he was stationed in New London, Connecticut. He was only a seaman first class, but the Navy allowed him private quarters on the base and considerable latitude. He had a “discretionary fund,” officially for buying equipment but in fact for any use he cared to make of it. He was not required to keep records.

  So he had himself quite a setup. He had a T-1 connection and the fastest desktop money could buy in those days, running Unix and a whole slew of tracking software he had written himself.

  Then one morning a news story popped up on his screen.

  In Norman, Oklahoma, a woman had been found dead along a jogging trail. She had sustained what the police spokesman called “savage injuries.” It was the second such discovery in as many months.

  “Savage injuries.” The phrase struck a chord. It was two or three days before he remembered Tiffany Klaff, dead in a Memphis trash bin—her injuries had been described as “particularly savage.”

  Tregear already had the police reports from Memphis. He tapped into the Norman police database and downloaded everything they had. It was eerily familiar. Was it Walter? Who could say?

  There were two more murders in Norman and then, as suddenly as they had begun, they stopped.

  He started backtracking, finding other, similar strings of homicides. Gradually patterns began to emerge. An analysis of method, using Memphis as a baseline, led to the conclusion that at least a percentage of them were the work of a single individual.

  Would the parallels hold up? He tried to remember every town he and his father had lived in during their years of wandering. But the files in some locations had never been computerized. He would have to go in person and check the paper records.

  The Navy was generous with furloughs. They were always prepared to grant him four or five days off, no questions asked. But he had to be a good boy and not try to leave the country or shake off his watchers. He covered a lot of ground and the results were interesting.

  But then, toward the end of his second tour, when he had only a few days to go and hadn’t put in for reenlistment, the Navy started to get a little nervous.

  There wasn’t much they could do about it because legally he was about to become a civilian.

  His boss, the only officer to whom he reported directly, was a Commander Renfield, who held some sort of murky position in the area where the Signal Corps and Naval Intelligence overlapped. Renfield was a nice enough fellow but a worrier. He was round-faced and bald, and whenever he became nervous the top of his head would break out in sweat. The approaching end of Tregear’s tour was almost more than he could bear.

  He called Tregear into his office for what he referred to as “a little chin-wag.”

  “We gather you’re working on something big,” he said, with one buttock resting on the corner of his desk. “And we think the Navy is the best place for you to pursue it. We have resources the private sector just can’t match. We’ll give you anything you need—anything you want.”

  So that was it. They thought he was working on some software project. They couldn’t crack his machines, so they imagined he was about to go rogue and sell out to Microsoft or somebody.

  “I am working on something,” Tregear answered. “But it has no military or commercial application. It’s private. You don’t want to know.”

  “Then why haven’t you reenlisted?”

  “I plan to. I just need time to do some field research.”

  “How long?”

  Tregear shrugged. “Thirty days. Maybe a few months. I don’t know.”

  “You have thirty days after separation to reenlist without loss of pay and rank—”

  This made Tregear laugh.

  “What will you do?” he asked, “send me back to boot camp? I’m a seaman first class, not an admiral.”

  “You could be—just about. You could write your own ticket in the Navy. You know that.”

  “I’m a high school dropout.”

  “Oh, come off it, Steve!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tregear offered a ratty grin.

  “If you sign now,” Renfield announced, suddenly very official, “I’ll grant you an extended furlough. We’ll call it ‘compassionate leave.’ And you’ll have your reenlistment bonus for expenses. The usual conditions will of course apply.”

  “Don’t push it, Sir. In three days I can walk out of here a private citizen and a taxpayer. Keep your bonus.”

  Renfield could only shake his head.

  “Steve, you’re Navy property and will be for this lifetime. We’ve got our claws into you and we’re never, ever going to let you go. We can’t risk it.”

  “Are you worried I’ll defect?”

  “It’s a thought. But we also can’t have some Third World thug snatching you off the street. Face it. You’ll be under guard, of one kind or another, until you’re old and gray and too senile to represent a threat to national security.”

  There was nothing about any of this that Tregear hadn’t figured out already. He saw the logic, even the necessity of the thing. He didn’t even resent it.

  Besides, the Navy had been good to him.

  “Okay. Where do I sign?”

  Before the ink was dry, Renfield had a question.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Frederick, Maryland.”

  * * *

  And what did Frederick, Maryland, have going for it? Two unsolved homicides.

  In late May of that year an Army corporal named Jo Anne Rudd, age thirty-two, had been found naked and dead, stretched out on a picnic table in Baker Park. There were burn marks over the whole front of her body, and the autopsy revealed that she had been systematically tortured for at least three days before she died from having her throat cut. She had been stationed at Fort Detrick, just north of the city, and had been listed as AWOL for five days.

  The usual. No fingerprints, no fiber evidence, no witnesses, no signs of sexual assault. No nothing. Just a corpse that might as well have been put on that picnic table by the hand of God.

  Then, in mid-July, just five days before Seaman Tregear had his conversation with Commander Renfield, a forty-three-year-old widow named Grace Newcomb, an apartment dweller from the west side of town, known to her neighbors as somewhat undiscriminating in her choice of gentleman friends, turned up in the Carroll Creek Canal, slightly more than half a mile from where Corporal Rudd had been discovered. The body was fully clothed. At first it was believed she might have fallen in and drowned, but then at autopsy it turned out that her spine had been neatly severed in two places.
Cause of death: suffocation brought on by paralysis. The pathologist speculated that she might have remained alive and conscious for a few hours after the injuries had been inflicted. Again, no trace of her murderer.

  Stephen Tregear arrived on the second of August. He traveled by train, from New London to New York, from New York to Washington, DC, and from DC on the commuter line to Frederick. He was wearing brand-new civilian clothes and, in addition to his suitcase, also new, he carried a briefcase full of carefully organized computer printouts and his own twenty-eight-page summary and analysis. In his innocence he imagined that the police might find all this information both interesting and useful.

  It was evening when he arrived, so he walked from the train station to the Mt. City Lodge, where he had a reservation. He had dinner and went up to his room, where he let the television lull him to sleep.

  The next morning he phoned the police department and asked to speak to a Sergeant Hill, whose name he had seen in several newspaper articles dealing with the two murders. Sergeant Hill was not available. Would he care to leave a message?

  “Sergeant Hill, my name is Stephen Rayne”—the Navy had insisted that he travel under an alias, so why not the one he was born with?—“and I am in possession of information that bears on the recent homicides of Jo Anne Rudd and Grace Newcomb. I am staying at the Mt City Lodge, Room two-five-six. I will wait for your call.”

  And he did wait. That day and the next, he hardly left his room. At two o’clock on the third day, he walked over to the police station on West Patrick Street, where they were so suspicious of his briefcase that they made him open it.

  Tregear gave his alias and made an elliptical reference to his business.

  “Sergeant Hill is unavailable.”

  “Is he in the building?”

  The receptionist, who was a uniformed policewoman, offered him a hard stare and finally, with apparent reluctance, nodded.

  “He’s here.”

  “Then I’ll just take a seat.”

  He waited until a quarter to five, when a large, bluff-looking man of about forty, wearing a plaid sport coat that was just a shade too small for him, came out into the lobby through a door around the corner from where Tregear had been sitting.

  “You Rayne?” the man asked coldly.

  “Yes.” Tregear stood up. “I’m Stephen Rayne.”

  “I’m Hill. Come with me. I can give you about ten minutes.”

  Tregear was shown into an office small enough that, with its desk and three chairs, it was hardly navigable. Hill sat down behind the desk.

  “Now,” he began, placing his hands flat on the desk, “you say you have information. Did you witness either of these crimes?”

  “No.”

  “And I gather you’re not from around here?”

  “No.”

  Hill shook his head. He was bored in advance.

  “Okay. Let’s hear it.”

  Tregear spent his ten minutes outlining six homicides from various parts of the country, drawing parallels to the two Frederick cases. Then he produced his summary.

  “If you read this, you’ll see that all of these murders are the work of a single individual. At the end I draw attention to what can be known about this person. He’s in his early forties, light brown hair, left-handed, a small purplish birthmark on his right hand. He works in the building trades.”

  Sergeant Hill picked up the summary and seemed to weigh it in his hand. Then he let it drop back to the table.

  “You know this guy?” he asked. “For instance, you know his name?”

  “I do know him, yes. But I don’t know his current name. I haven’t seen him in twelve years, and he’s used a lot of different names.”

  “But what was his name when you knew him?”

  “Walter Rayne.”

  “I see. A relative of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.” Hill stood up. “Well, I’ll look into this, Mr. Rayne. And if I need to talk to you again I’ll call.”

  He didn’t bother to ask for an address or a telephone number, so Tregear wrote them out for him on the first page of his summary.

  “I’ll be in town for at least a few more weeks,” he said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Rayne.”

  They shook hands, and Sergeant Hill smiled perfunctorily. The interview was over.

  Tregear stood on the steps of the police building, holding his empty briefcase, feeling disappointed. He had the distinct impression the sergeant thought he was some sort of mental case. All the things he should have said flashed through his mind: “I saw a dead body in his car.” “He murdered my grandparents—phone the Circleville police.” “If you know enough math to count to ten, the statistical case is overwhelming.”

  Probably every day Hill talked to somebody who thought he had the answer. “Jo Anne Rudd died for the sins of the world.” “Grace Newcomb was killed by Bigfoot.”

  Instead of going back to his hotel, Tregear headed into the center of town, where he hoped to find a decent dinner and drink way more beer than was good for him and forget the whole thing.

  * * *

  The next morning Tregear came within a gesture of getting back on the train to DC and spending the rest of his furlough curled up with the first woman who showed any interest. He actually went down to the station and checked the schedule, but it was a Saturday so the trains weren’t running. He decided he would go sightseeing instead.

  The hotel had thoughtfully provided a magazine that contained a map of Historic Frederick. Tregear, who tended to be obsessive about maps, had torn it out and stuffed it into his wallet.

  And, just to add a little something to the whole endeavor, he thought he might try to spot his babysitters.

  The etiquette was that you didn’t make life any harder than necessary for the watchers. You didn’t suddenly duck out of buildings by a side door, or cross and then immediately cross back on a busy street so that they made themselves obvious. The watchers, after all, were Navy, just like you, and rendering their lives miserable demonstrated a lack of team spirit.

  However, it was hard to follow a person on foot, wandering more or less randomly through an urban landscape, without giving yourself away.

  But these guys were very good. It was two days before Tregear was sure about even one of them, and that was almost by accident.

  Tregear found Frederick interesting. From the quantity of building that had gone on in what was now called the downtown, he concluded that the city must have enjoyed considerable prosperity in the three or four decades preceding the Civil War, and it was easy to imagine what the place must have been like when Lee’s army came marching through.

  One could still see the building where Maryland delegates would have assembled to vote for secession if Lincoln hadn’t first had most of them arrested. There was even a Museum of Civil War Medicine on Patrick Street, and its bookstore was where Tregear identified his first babysitter.

  The giveaway was his sunglasses.

  He was the sort no one noticed. Probably in his early twenties, about five ten and a hundred and fifty pounds, wearing tan shorts and a gray T-shirt, he was indistinguishable from the vast army of college kids with not much to do over their summer. He was standing well away from the front window, holding a book titled Death is in the Breeze about eight inches from his face. And he was wearing sunglasses.

  They were the wraparound kind and very dark. It was, after all, August and probably a majority of the people one saw on the street were wearing sunglasses. But this pilgrim still had them on in a dimly lit room, and he was pretending to read. It didn’t ring true.

  Tregear went outside and headed west, away from the center of town. The guy in the sunglasses didn’t follow him. In fact, Tregear didn’t see him again for another three hours, until he was standing beside the canal on the Carroll Parkway, just where the water went underground for about two blocks. There was a dog park just across the street and Mr. Sunglasses was standing beside the chain l
ink fence, talking to a man with an Irish setter.

  Over the next three days, Tregear concluded that they must have been running about a six-man team on him. He identified two more—a tall man with particularly hairy arms, wearing a straw hat, and a Near Eastern type, short with a bad haircut.

  He tried to be considerate. He stayed in his hotel room at night and he took enough time with his meals to save everyone’s digestion. He tried to go to interesting places, preferably where everyone would have a chance to sit down once in a while.

  By the end of the fifth day, a Wednesday, he still hadn’t spotted any watchers beyond the first three. They were very good.

  And he still hadn’t heard anything from Detective Sergeant Hill and had more or less decided he wasn’t going to.

  Afterward, he often wondered whether, if he hadn’t been so intent on his watchers, he might have cast his net a little wider and noticed someone else on his tail.

  Because there was, as he found out Thursday night.

  He was having dinner in front of Brewer’s Alley, a restaurant on North Market Street that, as the name implied, served beer brewed on the premises. It was seven-thirty in the evening and voluptuously hot. People were passing by on the sidewalk. The barbecue chicken salad was delicious and the beer was better. Life was good.

  Tregear was sitting alone at his table, and then suddenly he wasn’t. A man came into the little trellised patio and sat down in the chair opposite. He was in his late twenties, in such perfect physical condition that he seemed to glow from the inside, and his dark blond hair was cut just long enough to take a part. He might as well have had “Annapolis” stamped on his forehead.

  “Seaman Tregear,” he said, as if the name and rank were some sort of secret between them, “there is a car parked up the street. We’ll drive you straight back to New London tonight.”

  “I’m on leave. Go away.”

  The man reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a plastic card. He set it on the table, just in front of Tregear’s left hand.