by Dan Wells
Potash was waiting for me.
“Busy morning?” he said.
“You know how it goes.” I sat on the couch opposite him in the lobby. “The carpe doesn’t diem itself.”
“You have those backwards.”
“The eprac doesn’t … me-id … That’s hard to say, are you sure?”
Potash didn’t laugh or sigh or roll his eyes, he just stared. I relied on a very specific set of facial cues to help me figure out what people were feeling, but Potash never seemed to feel anything.
“I had a sausage biscuit on the way over here,” he said. “Three of them, actually. They’re cheap.”
I didn’t know where he was going with this. “Good … for you?”
“Just letting you know I didn’t eat them at the apartment, per your wishes.”
Aha. “Thanks.” I still wasn’t sure what we were talking about. Anyone else on the team would have bawled me out for insubordination by now.
“I know you better than you think,” he said, and lowered his voice as he leaned forward. “You take life more seriously than any seventeen-year-old I’ve ever met, but that’s never obvious from the outside. You try so hard to look like you don’t care about anything.”
“I care very much about not caring about anything,” I said. “Thank you for noticing.”
“I think the difference,” he said, “is that you only care about death. If something can kill you or someone you know, you take it seriously. With everything else, you pretend like it doesn’t matter. It’s time for you to take me seriously.”
That sounded incredibly like a threat, and I felt my throat begin to close in nervousness. I deflected without thinking. “Does someone need a hug?”
He put his hand on the coffee table between us, palm down, fingers loose, and I swear no hand motion in history has ever been so menacing. “You will take me seriously because I can and will kill you. You are a sociopathic murderer, and I’ve seen what you’re capable of, and we tolerate you on this team because you’re good at what you do, but you are not the only one who can do it. I do not share whatever maternal attachment Ostler may feel for you. I am not bound by the ethical concerns that inhibit others’ behavior. If I deem you to be a threat, to this team or to anyone else, I will kill you, and you will not see it coming.”
It occurred to me suddenly that Potash had probably killed more people, up close and personal, than any criminal I’d ever studied. Hit men were considered by many psychologists to be serial killers. Why not government operatives?
I nodded slowly. “Thanks for letting me know.”
He stood up and walked to the elevator. “I assume you’re here to talk to Brooke. Let’s go say hello before we head to the station.” I rose and followed him, saying nothing.
I keep two lists in my head: enemies and everyone else. There isn’t really a friends list, just people I can’t hurt, and people I can.
Potash just changed lists.
11
The hardest part about checking an e-mail address you know the FBI might eventually be watching is figuring out where to check it from. Whatever hotshots they had working in their cybercrimes division would be able to trace the IP address the e-mail was sent from and figure out exactly where I was and when. Using my own laptop was completely out of the question, along with all the other computers in our office or the police station—even if no one saw me using them, the fact that I was in the same building at the same time the e-mails were sent would simply be too suspicious. A public computer would be ideal, which was why I’d originally planned on a library or an Internet cafe, but now that Potash was following me more closely, there was no way to get to one without raising suspicion.
So I dropped my phone out the window the next time we drove on the freeway.
“Crap.”
“Was that your phone?” asked Diana.
“Crap,” I repeated. I was never a very emotional person to begin with, so I didn’t bother acting too bothered about the loss. I craned my neck around to look at the road behind us, but we were already hundreds of yards away.
“Why do you even have the window open anyway?” asked Diana.
“I told you,” I said, “Potash smells like dog.”
“It’s your dog,” said Potash.
“I was trying to find a spot where the sun wasn’t glaring off the screen. It slipped right out of my hand.”
“Ostler’s not going to buy you a new one,” said Diana.
“Ostler’s going to flay you for losing it,” said Potash. “That phone had sensitive information on it.”
“There’s no way it survived,” I said. “That semi behind us looks like it ran right over it.” I had, of course, waited for a semi to come up behind us before I’d dropped it. I turned back around and looked out the front window. “You think they sell phones in the hospital?”
“Probably not,” said Diana. “Not good ones, at least.”
“I don’t need another smartphone,” I said, “just something I can call you guys with.”
She shrugged. “We’ll check when we get there.”
We were going to the hospital because the two comatose Withered were “degrading.” Dr. Pearl was unclear on what that meant. It wasn’t his area of specialty, really, but to be fair, Withered biology wasn’t anyone’s area of specialty. We worked with Pearl because the FBI had cleared him when he worked on Potash, and he was the only one in the hospital we trusted. After all the weird crap we’d put him through, I can’t imagine he trusted us anymore.
The hospital gift shop had a small selection of prepaid phones, just barely smart enough to handle text-based e-mail. I bought one—cash again, of course—and started setting it up while we went upstairs. Pearl met us at the elevator with his eyes red and his thinning hair mussed.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, and gestured down the left hallway. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on now, or do you want to wait until we see them?”
“They’re vampires,” I said.
He hesitated for barely a second. “That only explains one of them.”
“The other one’s a werewolf,” I said. “Keep your nurses away, they’ll fall madly in love with—”
“He’s kidding,” said Diana. “Let’s go see what’s going on.”
Pearl nodded, then glanced at Potash. “How’s the breathing?”
“Still using the CPAP at night,” said Potash. “Don’t even need the oxygen tank during the day.”
“That’s great,” said Pearl. “Let’s hope we can cure these two as quickly.”
Gidri and Ihsan were being kept in a secured upper wing of the hospital, with police guards and a small, carefully vetted staff. Potash nodded to them as we walked by, and I wondered if they were the same ones who’d worked with him as well. How much had their lives changed, just by being on call in the ER the day we killed Mary Gardner?
I checked the dummy account I’d set up and found more than thirty messages. Not bad for about five hours. Most of them would be random people off the street, asking about the flyers or yelling at me for causing trouble; at least one of them was guaranteed to be from Pancho’s Pizza itself, demanding to know who I was so they could sue me for libel. I’d have to read each one carefully, trying to see whatever clues The Hunter had left so I could figure out which one was him. If he’d written me at all.
“In here,” said Pearl, and he tapped a container on the wall beside the locked door. “We advise masks, because whatever those guys have you definitely don’t want to catch it.”
We strapped on paper masks—they didn’t seem like they’d do much good, but whatever—and pulled on nylon gloves. There was a whole custodian’s rig outside the door as well, including a bucket of water, a mop, and an army of bottled cleaning chemicals. I wondered how often they cleaned this hallway, just out of paranoia. Pearl checked our masks and then led us inside. Gidri and Ihsan were laying side by side on parallel beds, hooked up to what looked like every machine the hospital coul
d fit into the room. The root of Pearl’s worry was instantly obvious, and I realized that the word “degraded” was both surprisingly correct and woefully inadequate. Ihsan, the big man, looked like he had leprosy; his skin was pocked and splitting and sliding off, almost like it wasn’t connected to his body at all. Gruesome as he was, Gidri was even more shocking—his formerly supermodel-worthy face had wrinkled and bloated and sagged, his limbs twisted, his bones curled like old paper in a fire. He looked not injured but deformed, so hideously I could barely imagine—even having seen him before—how his body had ever looked normal.
Potash looked at the screens as if trying to make sense of the various numbers and charts and blinking alerts, but Pearl waved him away. “Don’t bother,” he said. “None of it makes sense. Not a single one of the readings have any bearing on what we think might be happening—except for the handful that do, which only make us more confused. Their heart rates are wrong, but not in the way their conditions suggest that they should be wrong; the same goes for their temperature, their white cell count, their oxygen saturation—pretty much anything you care to name. We’ve biopsied their tissue and found all sorts of problems, just not the ones we expected, and none of our treatments create the kind of response we’re hoping for. We even took a sample of this one’s bone tissue”—he pointed at Gidri—“and it started shriveling under the microscope. I didn’t even know bones could shrivel. You told me to take care of them, but without some specialists in here to help figure out what’s wrong with them, they’re going to die in a matter of days. At the most.”
Diana touched one of Gidri’s limbs; I expected it to move when she did, like a floppy foam noodle, but it was rigid.
Potash looked at me. “You’re the expert.”
Sure, the one guy who recognizes my skills is the guy who thinks I’m a psychopath. I suppose he’s not wrong, but it still hurts.
Fortunately, I knew exactly what was wrong. “They’re malnourished.”
“We’ve got them on the best IV supplements in the hospital,” said Pearl.
“These two are nourished by a very specific set of things,” I said. “Things you don’t have, and which we are really unwilling to provide.”
Pearly looked at me intently. “If there’s something we can do to save them—”
“Can you give us a minute?” asked Diana.
“I need to know whatever it is you’re not telling me,” said Pearl.
“Just give us a minute,” said Potash. “We’ll fill you in after we discuss it.”
He shrugged and let himself out. When the door locked Diana looked at me with her eyebrows raised. “You think they need to feed on somebody?”
I nodded. “Whatever they need—skin, maybe, or beauty—Gidri looks like the kind of Withered that steals youth and beauty from people—they can’t get it while comatose. The Withered eat food, as far as I can tell, and they support their bodies with the same basic physical materials that the rest of us do. They don’t want to starve to death any more than you do. But their human shape is sustained by other things, and they can’t get those things like this, and no amount of food or vitamins is going to make up for that.”
“So what do we do?” she asked.
“And what do we tell Pearl,” said Potash. It was a question, but he wasn’t asking it—it sounded like he was correcting Diana for not having asked it. Had he always talked that way or was I just seeing problems now where I hadn’t before?
“We need to learn what we can,” I said. “They won’t live, so cut them open and figure out as much of their biology as possible. We might never get another chance at an incapacitated Withered.”
“As soon as we start an autopsy they’ll die,” said Potash. “They’ll turn to ash before we learn anything.”
“That’s why we keep them alive,” I said. “Treat it like a surgery, hook them up to every form of life support we have, and work fast.”
“I’m calling Ostler,” said Diana, pulling out her phone.
“They don’t have the facilities for that here,” said Potash.
“We don’t have doctors we trust here, either,” I said. “They’re going to have to fly the bodies to Langley and hope they survive.” I pulled out my new phone and scrolled through the list of Pancho’s Pizza e-mails, looking for a likely candidate.
Oh. How about the one that says: “Hello, FBI.”
“Agent Ostler,” said Diana, “we have a situation at the—no, I hadn’t heard. Let me ask.” She lowered her phone and looked up at us. “Have either of you heard about the pizza thing?”
So Ostler knew about the flyers. “I could go for a pizza,” I said. I tried to keep my voice even and forced myself to breathe calmly. If my face went red, they’d know I knew something.
Potash looked at me. “What pizza thing?”
Stay calm.
“Looks like the victims’ link to that pizza place got leaked,” said Diana. “Someone spread a bunch of flyers all over the neighborhood.” She looked at us, so I shrugged. She put the phone back to her ear. “We haven’t heard anything. Probably one of the cops—that station’s the most gossipy group of grown men I’ve ever met.” Pause. “I’m not being flippant about it, I’m saying this is exactly why we didn’t want to bring them in in the first place.”
Potash was still staring at me.
I raised my eyebrow. “You’re not in the mood for pizza? We could go to a different place.”
He looked away, and I went back to my phone. Was this message from The Hunter, or from Ostler?
“Hello, FBI. I must say I’m impressed with your cleverness; it’s not every day one finds a secret message plastered across an entire neighborhood. I’m disappointed there’s not a corpse, though. Maybe next time.”
That was the entire thing—no identifiers, no new information, not even a signature at the end. Whoever it was had mentioned a corpse, which was a direct reference to The Hunter’s second letter, so I knew it wasn’t just a person on the street; it was someone with inside knowledge. But who? I was still worried it might be Ostler, trying to pretend she was The Hunter in order to trap me—or to trap whoever she thought had written the flyer. She might have a suspicion it was me but she didn’t have proof. Lies within lies, in so many layers I could barely keep track.
The Hunter had always addressed his letters to me, and this one had not. That made it look like this wasn’t from him … but I wasn’t so sure. If Ostler was trying to emulate The Hunter’s style, she’d use every trick she had: she’d address it to me, she’d get verbose in her language, she’d probably throw in a mention of lions or antelopes. She’d even sign it with his name. She’d do all the things she’d know I’d notice. But if the real Hunter was trying to contact me—not just the FBI, but me personally, like I suspected—he’d recognize that this might be an attempt at a private conversation and keep my name out of it to help maintain that privacy. It might be him.
Of course, if he’d really wanted to prove that it was him, he could have told me to look for a certain keyword and then carved it into the next victim’s chest. It wouldn’t be hard to prove himself. Instead he was forcing me to trust him.
I just didn’t know if I could.
“Ostler’s calling headquarters,” said Diana. “We’ll see if they care enough to come pick these bodies up. We’re supposed to tell Pearl to keep them alive as long as he can.”
No more mention of the flyers then. Ostler was either playing it cool, or the bodies were a bigger concern. Or she hadn’t sent an e-mail at all.
How cool could Ostler even play it, even if she wanted to? The e-mail hadn’t asked for a response—if Ostler was fishing for a suspect, wouldn’t she have prompted me to write back? I wanted so hard to believe that this was really from The Hunter.
Diana walked to the door and knocked to get out. While we waited for a response, she looked at me. “Does that phone do web?”
I tried not to look guilty. “Not well, why?”
“The flyers about
the pizza place had an e-mail at the bottom. Ostler wants us to look into it, see if we can figure out who the leak comes from.”
She wouldn’t ask me to investigate myself, I thought. This probably isn’t her. “I can do better back on my laptop,” I said. “Let’s go back to the office.” Pearl unlocked the door, and I keyed in a single line response to the e-mail:
286 Penelope Road, under the third tree. I hit send.
“You going to tell me what this is about?” asked Pearl.
“Keep them alive,” said Diana. “The FBI is coming to transfer them to a larger hospital.”
“When?”
“As soon as they can get here,” said Potash.
“But you have to tell me what’s going on,” Pearl demanded. “What have I exposed my staff to? What precautions do we need to take? How can I keep them alive if I don’t even know what they—”
My phone dinged, telling me the message was sent. I dropped it in the mop bucket. The three adults all turned to me in surprise.
“Damn,” I said. “I’m really clumsy today.” I looked at Potash. “I should get more sleep.”
* * *
I bought another prepaid phone then spent the afternoon with the rest of the team, poking and prodding at the mysterious Pancho-hating e-mail address. We couldn’t determine anything and ended up sending that job to FBI headquarters as well. It bothered Ostler to send two things upstream in the same day, as if it were a sign to her bosses that she couldn’t do the ridiculous job they didn’t believe in anyway. I told her not to worry: once they got hold of those two bodies and they melted into ash right there on their operating tables, the FBI might finally be convinced. Ostler nodded gruffly but didn’t look remotely comforted.
That night, when Potash was on his CPAP and Boy Dog was snoring loudly on my floor, I used my new phone to check the e-mail address I’d buried under the tree. There was one message:
To the Esteemed John Wayne Cleaver,
I assume you’re the only one reading this. It was clever of you to build a double-blind message system, but the only reason to do so is to hide from both sides: mine and your own. You’re right not to trust them. I’ve been dealing with the FBI for years, probably since it was created. It may have been created specifically to search for me, in fact, but don’t put too much stock in it when I say things like that. When you’re as old as I am, and you’ve spawned as many kingdoms and religions, a single government agency is all too easy to claim credit for, deservedly or not.
