The justice system pretended to want to rehabilitate him. What a joke. He’d played by the rules all of his life until Marianne took him for a fool and ran around, sleeping with every guy she could find. Killing her was the best decision he’d ever made.
Since his arrest, he’d been in various cells. First the local jail, then the holding pen near Syracuse, New York, and after his life sentence, he’d lived in three different 8 x 10 foot cells in the Otalay Prison in New Jersey. He didn’t mind it, since he got three squares a day, all the reading material he wanted, and bits and pieces of courses that helped him learn how to use his mind. And, of course, he had lots of company.
His field of study was science, in particular, cosmology and quantum mechanics. If anyone had asked him what either of those terms meant before his prison term, he’d have stared at them with no comprehension at all.
Things change, though. Everything in his life had changed except for his feelings about his cunt of a wife, Marianne.
Brian was the prisoner who’d been in Otalay the longest, and he took that with a bit of pride. Why not?
In the twenty-six years he’d lived there, he’d had no visitors other than his lawyer, who came by every five years or so to let him know he wasn’t completely forgotten.
“Just waiting for the next parole date,” the scumbag always said.
“Whatever.”
Brian was now fifty. He was puzzled by his lawyer talking about parole. What the heck would he do if that ever happened? He had no way to make a living, no place to stay, no family, no friends on the outside. How in God’s name would he be better off out there? It’d just be a fucking mess.
Otalay was home.
No family.
That’s not completely true, he supposed, but it might as well have been. No visitations in 9,490 days sure the fuck sounded like no family to him.
He shrugged and stood to stretch his legs. It was almost exercise time.
He did miss women, though. He missed hearing their voices, touching them, making love to them. Sometimes he wondered if that was only a theoretical feeling, though. How would he react if a woman actually came to see him for some reason? Would he end up wanting to fuck her, like he expected he would, or would he just find her a boring twat who should leave him alone.
These were the kinds of questions Brian Clark thought about sometimes, in between reading about the quantum foam and string theory.
He never thought of Alannah or Savannah. It’d likely been at least a decade since either of those names trickled through his mind.
Marianne did sometimes come to him. Sometimes in the middle of the night, he’d awaken with a hard-on, remembering how she’d suck his cock. He liked that.
When that happened, he’d rub one out and then roll over and go back to sleep. She’s visited less and less, but he hadn’t noticed.
The prison stank of sweat. Most of the inmates stank, and Brian knew he did, too, but he didn’t care more than anyone else did.
The smell sometimes made him remember he was still alive. That couldn’t be bad.
He was frail, thin, and would likely lose in a fistfight with a thirteen-year-old boy, but he was still alive.
More importantly, he still had a role to play.
He just wasn’t sure yet what that role was.
Chapter 21
2018
Jeremiah Moore sat underneath an old pine tree, his back against the trunk. He was forty-two and felt every minute of those years. Every muscle was sore.
He wore a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap and a matching jacket. It was September, and the Cardinals weren’t in contention. Neither was he a fan. He just felt that he needed camouflage to blend in, not wanting anyone to recognize him.
He spent his days as an unskilled laborer, loading and unloading cargo from freight trains. Whenever he had a choice, he worked the midnight shift, because there was even less of a chance of running into anybody who might recognize him.
Before the fiasco at Caesar’s Palace, he’d been on television dozens of times, everything from Jimmy Fallon to the worst of the daytime talk shows. He’d needed to get his act in front of the American people, and now he wished they’d just all forget who he was.
For the first few months after the accident, he lived in Las Vegas, but with the story in the national headlines every day, it soon became too difficult. Not only had he lost Alannah, he’d lost pretty much everything that he cared about.
The show was cancelled, of course. He didn’t complete even a single night of the ten-year run.
The magic was gone. Nobody would ever ask him to perform again, and he didn’t blame them one little bit.
His ability to grieve in private was gone, too, because everywhere he went, people stared at him. He was the freak of the week on every news broadcast, and the city of a million tourists appointed him the newest kick-me kid.
Caesar’s sued him for the cost of building the theater plus lost income plus legal costs. He didn’t contest. It wouldn’t matter because he’d lost every penny and had no way to use his talents to earn more.
Not that he would have.
Magic was dead.
More importantly, though, by far the worst part of the whole ordeal, was the loss of Alannah.
He still loved her, even though he knew what had really happened. He still had no clue why, but he would forgive her anything.
Always and forever.
He’d always told her he’d love her always and forever. “Always” meant there would never be a single second that he didn’t. “Forever” meant it would extend into the future as long as he lived.
And he still did love her. If it was possible, he loved her more today than when the murdering saw cut through the box she was trapped in and the blood came gushing out.
He knew it made no sense, but it was true. She was his soul mate, and he would give anything to have her back.
“Alannah, I miss you.”
He whispered the words under the pine tree as he lay down his iPad. He’d just spent an hour reading the final report of the investigation. How it could have taken two years was totally beyond him, but the official Crime Scene Investigation into “Incident 2016-10320-2 at Caesar’s Palace, Jeremiah Moore Theater” was now complete and filed in the public record.
He’d known exactly what it would say from the day after it happened.
Jeremiah had been shocked when he saw the fountain of blood spilling from Alannah’s casket, just as the audience had been. Some of them might have thought it was part of the act, but he knew better.
He had frozen into immobility, his mind flooded with the similar image of the blood when Suzette had been injured badly, twenty years earlier.
This time, though, it was Alannah. He heard her screams pierce the theater, and he knew she was going to die.
To top it all off, the lights went out. Alannah’s screams stopped and he imagined hearing her last breath. Jeremiah collapsed on the stage, not wanting to believe he was responsible for killing the only woman he had ever loved.
He cried and couldn’t move. At the time he had no idea how long he’d sat there in a heap. At some point the lights came back on and the curtain was lowered to hide him and the deathtrap from the audience. The giant circular buzz saw continued to spit blood. Somebody finally found the emergency button that caused it to lift up from the gory mess and stop.
He wanted to get up and save Alannah, but he knew that was impossible. He couldn’t imagine seeing her remains.
Then somebody shouted, “She’s gone!”
Gone?
What?
Several people crowded over by the box, and one of the stage hands lifted the two sections open.
“Oh, God . . .”
Jeremiah tried to listen. If Alannah was gone, maybe she’d somehow avoided death.
But “gone” could just mean “dead.”
“So much blood,” the stage hand said. He looked at Jeremiah and shook his head. “I’m sorry. There�
��s no way she could have survived.”
Having his hope crushed was bad enough, but then the police showed up. They started asking questions about the act. Even though he was clearly an emotional mess, they helped him to his dressing room and then asked more questions.
He finally found the courage to stand and walk step by step to the box.
Her body wasn’t there. The only hint of the disaster was the flood of blood covering the stage.
After he explained to the police the basics of the trick, one cop, a tall, skinny, middle-aged guy with a pock-marked face and a grumpy attitude said, “We understand you had a problem with her. She had sex with one of the guys here and you witnessed it.”
Jeremiah wanted to deny it, but somehow they knew. He just nodded.
“And you’re known to have an explosive temper.”
“I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re asking. I loved her.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
The cop wrote some notes and then asked, “Where did her body go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was there an escape hatch in that thing? Like a trap door?”
“No. Once she was in there, there’s no way out.”
“Seems there is.”
“Somebody stole her when the lights went out.”
“Who?”
Jeremiah snapped. “I don’t know. Maybe you should fucking go look for them!”
He found himself standing threateningly in front of the cop, who stepped back a foot.
“Whoa, cowboy. Sit back down.”
Jeremiah bit his lip to try to control his temper, and eventually he did find he could sit down.
“I didn’t kill her, and I don’t know where her body is.”
The cop looked at his partner, who had just come back to the room. The partner was younger and a woman. She whispered to the other one.
They both came back to Jeremiah.
“You said there’s no trap door.”
Jeremiah nodded.
“But apparently there is.”
“I designed the box myself and inspected it.”
“Apparently not recently. The bottom opens. And there’s are trap doors in the stage floor.”
“Yes, I use those when I need to disappear.”
“She must have let herself out of the box when the lights went out and headed to a hole in the floor.”
Jeremiah stared at the cops as if they were speaking Greek.
“What are you talking about?”
“Would she know how to make fake blood?”
“Fake blood?”
“You ever use that in your show?”
He shook his head. “No, but she knows how to make it. I’ve told her before. It’s not difficult. Corn syrup, chocolate syrup, and red food coloring will do it.”
“Would you know it from the real thing?”
“Of course.”
That’s when they led him to the bloody box and he dipped his finger in gooey mess. He sniffed it and tentatively touched it with his tongue.
“I can’t believe it,” he said.
“Fake?” asked the woman cop.
“Yes!” he shouted. “It’s fake!”
He could now see the newly created trap door inside the box as well.
“She’s alive!” He shouted and smiled, not caring that his life had changed in the past hour more than he could possibly have imagined. All he cared about was that she was alive.
Somewhere.
* * *
The CSI report was 159 pages long. It took Jeremiah an hour to read the whole thing, and most of it was cover-your-ass bullshit. It detailed the process the investigators went through: who they talked to, the tests they performed, the follow-up calls they made, and, of course, how they came to their conclusions.
Once he stripped out all the crap, the actual factual information in the report consisted of only a few specific findings:
1. Alannah Clark had prepared fake blood and used it to make it appear that she was killed or badly injured as she was being cut in half.
2. She had encouraged an accomplice, Will Graves, an electrician and jack of all trades, to add a secret exit to the box.
3. Will Graves had also cut the lights for Alannah, allowing her time to escape the box, close the new exit, drop through the trap door in the stage, and leave the building.
4. Alannah might have been afraid of Jeremiah Moore due to her being indiscreet the day before.
5. Her current whereabouts are unknown.
Jeremiah closed the report on his tablet in disgust. It was such a waste of time.
Where are you, Alannah?
He closed his eyes. If only he could talk to her for five minutes. He would tell her how incredibly sorry he was that she felt so afraid of him that she had to escape.
Part of him wished he’d never told her that he had a history of having a bad temper. She’d never seen that in person, but she was so sensitive and fragile, he thought she must have built it up in her mind to be something incredibly frightful.
Maybe she was right, though.
He remembered his rage when he saw Alannah giving oral sex to that electrician. He’d avoided her for almost twenty-four hours after that, until the show began. They both had huge smiles on their faces for the audience, but inside, he was seething with anger. Her betrayal was all-encompassing, and he didn’t know how he could ever forgive her.
She probably knew that.
Now, though, he knew, there must be more to the story. Over the past two years, he’d relived in his mind every minute they ever spent together.
Something wasn’t adding up.
He had hoped the CSI report would help him understand why Alannah was the way she was, why she needed to run, and most importantly, where she was.
No answers were there, and now he needed to find them himself.
“It makes no sense that I still love you, but I do.”
Saying it out loud didn’t change things. He did still love her. He cherished her, wanted to be with her every minute of every day.
And he knew she felt the same way. She had to. No matter what he saw that day, he knew in his heart that was true.
* * *
Three months earlier, Jeremiah had tried to shake Alannah from his mind. The best way to do that, he decided, was to find another girl.
He went to a local bar and ordered a beer. As he sipped it right from the bottle, he tried to look friendly and open. It wasn’t long before he saw a shy dark-haired woman glancing at him from the other end of the bar. She looked to be about thirty-five, much closer to his age than Alannah was. He almost chickened out but finally found the courage to go to her end of the bar.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked.
“Please.”
She had a nice smile, and she was pretty by any standard.
“I’m Jeremiah.”
“Amy.”
And then he was tongue-tied. He didn’t know what else to say. He looked at her and saw her bright eyes and the beautiful smile showing lots of white teeth. She had a full glass of white wine in front of her, so he couldn’t order her another. He didn’t know if he should ask about her background, her family, her love life, or her job.
It just felt wrong.
But now he was stuck.
“What do you do?” he finally asked.
“I work in an office. Computers.”
“Oh, I see. I work at the dock. Nothing special.”
She nodded and took a drink of her wine.
“I’m sorry, I just—”
He didn’t finish, because he didn’t know how. He just left a ten dollar bill under his beer and slunk out of the bar.
She’d been a pretty girl, nice, and there was only one thing that was wrong with her: she wasn’t Alannah.
* * *
Jeremiah stood up and left the comfort of the oak tree. The sun was starting to set and it was a little chilly.
He liked St. Louis. It felt like home, but a h
ome that had invisible bars holding him in. The only escape he had was the Internet, where he searched for Alannah Clark every day. His fingers flew through Google, the main newspapers, 411.com, and all the other web sites he could think of where he might eventually find her.
Every day, he hunted for the woman he loved.
One day, he knew he would find her again.
Chapter 22
2020
Savannah Clark woke, not sure where she was. Something was sticking into her side and she rolled onto her back. Sunshine filtered down onto her from between two buildings. She licked her lips and tried to remember what she’d been doing the night before.
Nothing came to her. She pulled herself up to a sitting position and glanced around. She was in an alley between two buildings. There was a dumpster between her and the entrance to the alley. It looked like she’d staggered there to find someplace to collapse.
“Shit,” she mumbled.
She found her purse hidden behind the dumpster and was surprised to find her wallet, including credit cards and cash, intact.
“My lucky day.”
She stood and took a deep breath while holding onto the brick wall. Traffic noises came from the street.
Farther down the alley two other people slept. Both men, and again she found herself surprised she was still in good condition.
She brushed her hair back and walked out of the alley. Almost immediately she recognized her downtown surroundings and headed over to the closest Starbucks.
The clerk was a young girl, maybe eighteen, perky, with a giant smile. “What can I get started for you today?”
Savannah knew the girl was staring at her wrinkled clothes. She wore a tight blouse with no bra and a tiny skirt. Clearly she hadn’t been home to change. She pulled her coat tighter around her.
Fuck you, too.
“Just your dark. Whatever. Grande.”
“Grande Ethiopian coming right up! Can I add something to eat to go with that?”
Soul Mates Page 13
