Firewalk

by Chris Roberson

  “It’s an elective course,” he explained. “I’m teaching them how to play konare at the moment.”

  “Konare?”

  “It’s a Te’Maroan game. Some people say it’s derived from the Hawaiian game konane, but my great-uncle always insisted that Hawaii got it from us. Either way, it’s a strategy board game played on a grid with black and white counters.”

  “Wait …” Izzie held up a finger. “Are you the sponsor of the school’s chess club? Patrick, are you a nerd?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Says the woman who spends her free time doing jigsaw puzzles and reading books about other people’s drug trips.”

  “Hey, I know that I’m a nerd,” she said, “but you’d managed to convincingly pass as someone who wasn’t.”

  The elevator chimed that it had arrived at their requested floor, and the doors began to slide open.

  “Konare is part of a rich and proud cultural heritage that I’m trying to pass down to the next generation,” Patrick said, drawing himself up straight, chest puffed out. “And besides, next semester I’m teaching them Te’Maroan stick fighting, which is much cooler.”

  They stepped off the elevator onto the second floor. This was a nicer part of the building than the hallway that housed Dr. Kono’s office, and from the size of his doorway it seemed that Dr. Aguilar’s office was considerably nicer, too. Which was only fitting, considering that he was the department head.

  Looks were somewhat deceiving, though. The door to room 210 led not directly into Aguilar’s office, but to a kind of waiting room, where an assistant fielded calls, scheduled appointments, and dealt with walk-ins.

  Just inside the doorway to the left was the assistant’s desk, atop which were piled stacks of ungraded papers, towers of doctoral theses, boxes full of research materials, a desk phone, and a computer monitor. Almost hidden behind the mess was a young woman in her late twenties, who when they entered was typing furiously at her computer’s keyboard, a pencil clenched between her teeth and a row of Post-it notes stuck to her left forearm. She would twist her head to look down at the notes, turn back to the screen, and type the noted corrections, then search for the next marked passage and start all over again.

  Patrick cleared his throat when it began to seem as though she hadn’t noticed them yet.

  “Yes?” The assistant glanced up at them from the computer monitor, her manner harried but helpful, with a brittle edge to her voice that sounded like she was one crisis away from a complete meltdown, but was for the moment managing to keep the chaos in check. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Lieutenant Tevake with the Recondito Police Department,” he answered, then added, “We spoke on the phone?”

  There was a momentary pause, as if she were having to process his words, parsing out some hidden meaning. “Oh, right. Of course. I’m sorry.” She stood up, the Post-it notes on her arm fluttering like tiny little flags as she swept her arm towards the door at the back of the room. “A million things going on, all at once. You know how it is.”

  “Believe me, we do,” Izzie said sympathetically.

  The assistant crossed the floor to the rear door of the room, put her hand on the handle, and then paused for a moment. She glanced back over her shoulder at Patrick and Izzie. “Dr. Aguilar isn’t in any kind of trouble, is he?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that,” Patrick rushed to answer. “We just have a few questions for him about an old case of ours.”

  The assistant’s eyes widened, her mouth forming a perfect “o.”

  “Is this about the Reaper?!” She pulled her hand away from the doorknob as if it might burn her, and turned completely to face them.

  “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of our investigation,” Patrick replied, as if he were reading from a script.

  “It is, isn’t it?” The assistant took a step towards them, looking from Patrick to Izzie and back again. “Is it true that Dr. Aguilar’s grandfather was close to the killer? As in, friends with him?”

  “Well, as I said …” Patrick began, noncommittally.

  “I was a grad student here when that all went down,” the assistant pressed on, “and it was all anyone could talk about. When we heard that the professor’s grandfather had left those houses in his will to the Reaper … and all that crazy Mayan stuff? Seriously, it was all anyone talked about for ages.”

  “Houses?” Izzie said. She knew about the lighthouse, but were there others?

  “Mayan?” Patrick added.

  Before the assistant could say anything further, the door behind her abruptly opened.

  “Jessica?” said the man who appeared in the doorway, a stern tone to his words. “I take it this is my ten o’clock?”

  Izzie remembered Ricardo Aguilar from their interviews with him five years before, but he seemed to have aged considerably more than that in the intervening years.

  “Yes, Dr. Aguilar,” the assistant said, spinning on her heels to face him. “I was just showing them in and …”

  “I’ll take it from here,” Ricardo said, cutting her off. He nodded curtly towards her desk. “I’m sure you’d like to get back to those edits.”

  The assistant sighed, and then trudged back to the desk, plucking a couple of the Post-it notes off her arm as she went.

  “Come in, please,” Ricardo said to them, gesturing to the door, though there was very little that was inviting about his tone or his manner.

  Izzie and Patrick filed past him into the office. It was larger than Dr. Kono’s, as Izzie had suspected, but not by much. And in every other respect it could not have been more dissimilar. Where Hayao Kono’s office had been cozy and comfortable, filled with memories and charm, Ricardo Aguilar’s office was characterless, all sterility and function.

  “Please, sit,” Ricardo said as he stepped inside and closed the door behind them. He gestured to two chairs placed at the front of the desk. The chairs were leather and chrome, the desk a slab of brushed steel atop which were neatly arranged a corded phone, a computer monitor, and a single framed photo of the professor and what appeared to be his wife.

  As Izzie and Patrick sat, Ricardo went around to the other side of the desk and lowered himself into a high-backed leather chair that looked like some modernist throne, or like the captain’s station from a starship.

  “Thanks for taking the time to meet with us, Dr. Aguilar,” Patrick said, taking the initiative. “We just had a few questions about your grandfather and his association with Nicholas Fuller.”

  The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees as Ricardo fixed them with an icy stare. He took a deep breath in through his nostrils and held it for a moment, then leaned forward, elbows on the brushed steel surface of the desk, his fingers steepled.

  “Yes, well …” He began, his jaw tightened. “Kono told me that you’d come by to speak with him, and that I should probably expect a visit. But it was my understanding that you had inquiries to make about the Undersight project.”

  Patrick glanced at Izzie before replying. She didn’t remember Dr. Aguilar being quite so combative when they’d last spoken to him five years before.

  “Well, yes, we do have questions about Undersight, as well,” Patrick said, his tone conciliatory. “But we’re also following up on some leads about Fuller’s interactions with your grandfather, and we were hoping that you might be able to provide a little insight.”

  “I see.” Ricardo lowered his hands to the desk, fingers laced together. “But why now, after all this time? I thought the matter was settled and done.” He turned to Izzie, glancing at the Bureau credentials hanging from her jacket pocket. “You’re that FBI agent I spoke with five years ago, aren’t you? You lead me to believe then that when Fuller died the investigation was closed. Has it been reopened?”

  “No, not at all,” Izzie hastened to answer. “But Lieutenant Tevake here is investigating another matter that appears to have ties to the Fuller case, and so we’re revisiting some of the relevant e
vidence.”

  “Please understand that I’m not trying to be combative,” Ricardo said, sitting back in the chair. “But when it became public knowledge that my late grandfather was associated with the Recondito Reaper, it was …” He sighed. “It was a difficult time for my family.”

  “I can appreciate that.” Patrick’s tone was supportive.

  “Can you?” The professor shot him a hard look. “Some people might crave the notoriety of being closely associated with a serial killer, but I can assure you that my wife and I are not those sorts of people. For years after it was all anyone wanted to talk to us about. We stopped going to faculty mixers and social gatherings altogether, tired of being bombarded with endless questions about that gruesome business. It put such a strain on us that it very nearly cost me my marriage.”

  “I can assure you,” Izzie said, “that’s not uncommon in these types of cases. The damage that a serial killer can cause is much more far-reaching and widespread than just the immediate harm they inflict on their victims. If your marriage has withstood those kinds of stresses, I think it’s a testament to the strength of your relationship.”

  Ricardo gave her a long look before responding. “Yes, well, thank you for saying so. But you can understand my reluctance to revisit that time in our lives.”

  “Absolutely,” Patrick said. “But please know that anything you share with us today will remain strictly confidential. And that we’ll do everything in our power to make sure that you and your wife remain out of the spotlight, should our investigation bring anything new to light.”

  Ricardo nodded slowly. “Very well. What is it you wish to ask me?”

  Patrick reached into an inner pocket of his quilted jacket and pulled out his notebook and pencil. He flipped it open and scanned the page. “Five years ago you informed us that your late grandfather had left the Ivory Point Lighthouse to Nicholas Fuller in his will.”

  “And it was that information that led to us tracking him down,” Izzie added. “But was that not the only property that your grandfather left to Mr. Fuller?”

  Ricardo scowled. “No, there was another house in the Kiev, but I understand that the executor of the Fuller estate sold it at auction after he died, and that it has since been torn down.”

  “That’s a lot to bequeath to a casual acquaintance,” Izzie said.

  “Which is exactly the point we wished to raise, Dr. Aguilar,” Patrick went on. “And it was our understanding at the time that before his death your grandfather had gotten to know Nicholas Fuller socially. But when we spoke to Dr. Kono the other day he characterized their relationship as being closer than we had previously understood to be the case. He said that in addition to spending a great deal of time in your grandfather’s private library, they often walked around the city together, as though they were ‘searching for something or for someone.’” Patrick looked up from the notebook. “Do you know what they might have been looking for, Dr. Aguilar?”

  “My grandfather was a very …” A pained expression flitted across Ricardo’s face. “Complicated man,” he finally went on. “One might even characterize him as troubled.”

  “He served on the City Council before he retired, if I recall correctly,” Izzie said.

  Ricardo nodded. “He represented the Oceanview District, yes. And he was a lawyer in private practice before that. I don’t mean to suggest that he was ever in any kind of legal trouble. But he had certain … preoccupations. Though ‘obsessions’ might be a better description for them.”

  “Such as … ?” Patrick trailed off, inquiringly.

  Ricardo pushed his chair back fractionally and laid his hands palms down on the surface of the desk, as if needing additional support. “I don’t think I fully understood the extent of my grandfather’s obsessions until after he died, when I became the executor of his estate. As you know, the lighthouse that he’d bought back in the fifties passed to Nicholas Fuller … though why my grandfather had ever found it necessary to purchase a disused lighthouse in the first place, I’ve never understood…. But the rest of the estate passed into my hands, including the contents of his private library.”

  Ricardo took a deep breath, collecting himself.

  “I had known since childhood that my grandfather had an interest in mythology and superstition, of course. And it was a subject that he and my wife—she is professor of cultural anthropology here at the university—it was a subject that they discussed often, in particular the belief systems of Mesoamerica. But it wasn’t until I was called upon to handle the disposition of his estate that I understood just how deeply his obsession ran. In my grandfather’s effects were … extensive writings on the subject of the supernatural, that at first I took to be a layman’s attempt at anthropological analysis, but which on closer examination turned out to be considerably more … involved.”

  Izzie glanced at Patrick, and could see that he was listening with the same rapt attention that she was. This was going in a direction they had not anticipated.

  “I discovered that when he was a young man, my grandfather befriended an older gentleman who immigrated to Recondito from Mexico in the nineteen thirties. From the Yucatan peninsula, to be precise. My grandfather referred to him only as ‘Don Mateo’ in his personal writings, but there is a black and white photograph of the two of them in the early fifties, posing in what I was later able to identify as a crypt in the cemetery of the Church of the Holy Saint Anthony. This Don Mateo, my grandfather claimed in his journal, was a priest of Xibalba, an adherent to a secret religious tradition that traced its origins back to the days of the Maya, though he never referred to him as a priest, as such, but as something like a calendar-keeper or daykeeper?”

  “Daykeeper?” Izzie echoed, her eyes widening.

  “Yes, something like that,” Ricardo said with a moue of distaste. “Apparently, my grandfather was inducted into this ‘faith’ by the old man, and continued to practice certain rituals and beliefs in secret for the rest of his life.” He shook his head. “He always presented himself as a Roman Catholic, though perhaps not a terribly observant one.”

  Izzie was still remembering the things that Nicholas Fuller had said that night in the lighthouse. “I didn’t understand it myself, until the old daykeeper gave me the key.”

  “He wrote extensively about the cosmology of this secret belief of his, world-trees and true places, the real and the unreal. I could scarcely make heads or tails of any of it, but my wife thought the whole thing was fascinating. So much so that she asked if she could use the journals in her research. Ultimately she decided not to publish the results, for fear of reigniting interest in our family’s connection with the Reaper murders. Just the few people here at the university who heard about her findings were enough to set the rumor mills to grinding again, and we shuddered to think what would happen if her paper were to be published in an academic journal. Which was a shame, since she found a great many references to well-documented Mesoamerican religious traditions in my grandfather’s writing.”

  “Why would publishing her research have reignited interested in that connection, professor?” Patrick asked.

  Ricardo pursed his lips. “It might be simpler to show you.” He picked up the handset of the desktop phone and punched a few buttons. “Samantha? It’s me. Do you have a softcopy of your Xibalba paper that you could email to me? I have someone in my office who I’d like to show it to.” He paused, listening. “No, I don’t think that …” Another pause. “I understand, but …” He took a deep breath through his nostrils. This appeared to be a point of contention. “I’ll explain in greater detail later, but it is an officer with the Recondito PD and an agent of the FBI, and they’ve come with questions about the … yes, you know that I agree completely.” He nodded. “They’ve assured me that our involvement won’t be made public knowledge.” A pause, punctuated by a relieved sigh. “Okay, thanks. I’ll tell you all about it later.”

  The professor returned the handset to the cradle, and then slid out a k
eyboard tray that was mounted to the underside of the desk. He tapped a few keys, scrolled down a few pages, and then swiveled the computer monitor around so that Patrick and Izzie could get a good look at it.

  “This is Ah Puch, the Fleshless, the Mayan mythological figure who my grandfather identified as the patron deity of Xibalba.” He paused, then added, “My wife would point out that technically this image is identified simply as ‘God A’ from the lunar eclipse tables in the Dresden Codex, and that the association between Ah Puch and the Mayan underworld as depicted in the Popol Vuh is a contentious one, but she is confident that the identification is correct.”

  There on the screen was a black and white reproduction of a Mayan drawing depicting a skull-faced skeletal figure that was chillingly familiar.

  “The Reaper’s mask,” Patrick said.

  Izzie couldn’t completely suppress a gasp. “The silver skull.”

  “Yes.” Ricardo nodded. “It would seem that Nicholas Fuller styled his murderous alter ego after the god that my grandfather worshipped in secret for most of his life.” He turned the monitor back around and closed the window with a look of disgust on his face. “You can see why we would prefer that this not become common knowledge.”

  Izzie and Patrick exchanged a look.

  “Why didn’t you come forward with this earlier?” Izzie asked.

  Ricardo chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment before answering. “It wasn’t until my wife began to dig deeply into my grandfather’s journals that we found the connection ourselves,” he finally answered, “and by then the case was long closed. We didn’t see that there was anything to be gained from putting ourselves back in the spotlight, especially considering how much greater the scrutiny on us would be if people believed that my grandfather somehow inspired the Reaper murders, and wasn’t simply tangentially connected to them.”

  “That’s perfectly understandable,” Patrick said, though Izzie was feeling a little less generous.