by Chaz McGee
The other man took a long time to think before he spoke again. “I forbid you to smoke,” he said flatly. “It is forbidden.”
“You smoke,” the first man said. “Why is it you want me to pick up some of your filthy habits, but not all of them?”
“You will do as I say,” the second man ordered, his voice growing in volume. It had an instant effect on the first man—I could feel overwhelming fear, shame, and revulsion fill him. It was a conditioned response. “You will do as I say or suffer accordingly. Need I remind you why I am this way? It’s your fault and your fault alone.”
Guilt flared in the first man, a crushing, overwhelming guilt.
“Did you hear me?” the second man barked.
“Yes,” the first man said, his voice reduced to a whisper. “I heard you.”
“Now, take off the boy’s shirt and leave the room. I want to watch him alone for a while. I will call you when I am ready.”
The first man gently removed Tyler’s tiny T-shirt and folded it neatly into a square, as precisely as a soldier might fold his uniform, before leaving the room.
If there had been anything I could have done to protect the boy, I would have stayed. But I thought I knew who the man on the other end of the phone was. I prayed that the core of goodness languishing deep inside the man who was with Tyler would hold, at least for a while, and I left to find out if I was right.
Chapter 22
There are luxuries the living alone enjoy that I can no longer take for granted—picking up a phone, tapping at a computer keyboard, turning the pages of a police report. I have but two weapons left open to me when it comes to uncovering information: what I can see and what I can feel. I would need both to learn if what I suspected was true.
Robert Michael Martin was a lonely man sitting in a lonely room. He was perched on the edge of a chair in his newly clean living room, as if he was hoping for more company at any moment. The house seemed bigger than ever, the rooms even more empty. Not even Noni Bates was there to help him pass his suddenly empty hours. He was no longer welcome at KinderWatch, and his time in the sun helping Calvano and Maggie had passed. Now everyone else was frantically pursuing leads or resting at home with their loved ones, while he sat alone in a living room that had been cleaned for people who would no longer be coming. Without work to fill his hours, he had nothing.
I hated what I was about to do.
I sat across from Martin and concentrated on following the thread of loneliness that emanated from him. I followed it into his memories, memories that felt as lonely as his present. I caught glimpses of a solitary little boy, terrified of others, hiding behind his mother, peering out at the world, certain it would hurt him. I saw a pudgy boy sitting at a desk in a corner of a classroom, unnoticed by either teacher or classmates. I saw a grown man climbing the steps to a second-floor bedroom again and again, bearing food, offering flowers, administering medications, patiently adjusting pillows, doing what little he could to ease the suffering of the dying woman who lay there. I felt his certainty that, when she died, the only person in the world who loved him would be gone. Then I saw a grieving man at a graveside service, attended by few others, and then again, walking alone along the sidewalks of our town, nearly as unseen by others as I was, seeking out the noisy life of a playground to fill the empty hours of his days.
I hated the cruelty of what I was about to do even more.
Gently, I probed Martin’s mind and found the fresh wound that was born of his memories of Calvano’s treatment of him and Colonel Vitek’s accusations. They had merged into a single, painful reminder that he was a man born to lose, a man who had stepped forward to help, only to be accused of the worst crimes imaginable. I concentrated hard on the feelings of betrayal their accusations had triggered and how they had torn at Martin’s fragile ego. I felt his shock that this had happened to him give way to a sense of deep injustice, followed by outrage, recurring sadness, anger, and—finally—there it was: resentment. I fanned that resentment. I made him think of all the hours he had put into protecting children, of how he had trusted the colonel for guidance and how very hard he had worked for the colonel’s approval. I made him remember all the times the colonel had asked favors of him, the hours he had given without pay to the cause, the children he had no doubt saved with his selfless vigilance. Like a singer with only one note to offer, I planted a thought in his mind over and over: I trusted him, I trusted him, I trusted him. And he betrayed me.
Then, like a man starting a fire with a tiny mound of tinder, I fanned his outrage ever so carefully by triggering the memories of Maggie and Calvano in his living room earlier that day. “We are looking for a man who would insinuate himself into the investigation,” Calvano had said. “He would want to be of help, so he could keep an eye on what the police have found.” Once Martin had that thought firmly in his head, I brought him back to his resentment toward the colonel and, finally, I intertwined those thoughts in his mind.
He got it.
Martin sat straight up and gasped. His face grew red with fury. His heart burned with outrage that he had been accused by a man he was now certain was guilty. How dare the colonel have said such things about him? How dare the colonel have tried to ruin his reputation when his own hands were surely dirty? But then Martin’s conviction faltered. . . . The colonel was in a wheelchair. How could he have managed to . . . ? I felt Martin’s resolve wobble and stepped up the cruelty of the thoughts I was planting in his mind. He accused me of hurting children. . . . He accused me of unspeakable acts. He as much as said that he was certain I had taken the boy. . . . The things he implied I wanted to do with a child . . .
That did the trick. Martin rose abruptly and raced to his computer room, where he stuffed his pockets with those tiny computer thumb drives I had never bothered to master when I was alive. I wondered why he needed them and, for one brief moment of fear, grew afraid he would only lead me back to the station house. But no, he turned away from the direction of headquarters as he left home and strode angrily along the sidewalks of his neighborhood, leading me in the opposite direction.
I knew he was taking me to the colonel.
But then another thought rose in my own mind, one I should have considered from the start. What would happen when Martin tried to confront a man who was clearly more experienced than he was at harming others, a man who might even have a gun? What if I could not stop Martin from forcing a confrontation? The desire to hurt is easy to bring forth in the human mind; there are so many things human beings feel angry about it. But restraint? Impossible once you have set the wheels of fury in motion.
What had I done in my desire to find out where the colonel lived? Surely, pitting one man against another would not gain me redemption. What had I done?
Martin stopped in front of a small ranch house isolated from its neighbors by a large, flat lawn designed to discourage company. The front of the home was nearly obscured by an unbroken line of shrubs. The entrance door was on the left side of the house and it opened onto a low, wooden platform connected to a wide, concrete driveway by a ramp built to accommodate the colonel’s wheelchair. The driveway ended at the rear of the house, where a garage and adjoining cedar fence blocked the backyard from view.
The driveway was empty. The colonel was not home. My relief was profound. I would remember this lesson and be more careful in the future. I had no business using people that way.
Martin had been there many times before as a volunteer, and he knew the house’s weaknesses. He looked around to see if he was being watched, then quickly walked around to the far side of the house. He was completely concealed from the eyes of neighbors by the fence and shrubbery. A window had been left cracked open toward the middle of the house. Martin braced himself against the trunk of a tree, pried the window open farther, and wriggled through it with difficulty, finally dropping down into a bathroom. He waited until he was sure he was alone, lowered the window to its original position, and stepped out into the hallway of the
colonel’s house.
There was no evidence of a woman’s touch anywhere, nor was there any attempt at decoration beyond the utilitarian. The floors were linoleum and the furniture crafted in a blocky, crate design. A large-screen TV and new couch dominated the living room. The dining alcove was barely big enough to hold a plain pine table. Chairs lined the table along three sides, while the fourth was kept clear for the colonel’s wheelchair. The kitchen was big but outdated, with appliances and fixtures that were decades old. Cereal bowls and coffee cups had been washed and left to dry in the drainer next to the sink—did KinderWatch volunteers gather here for breaks, or did the colonel live with someone?
Martin knew where he was going. He headed down the hallway and passed two bedrooms. One was wheelchair accessible for the colonel; the other was as spotlessly clean and unadorned as a monk’s cell. Toward the end of the hallway, Martin entered another bedroom that had clearly been converted into the headquarters of KinderWatch. My guess was that some of its volunteers worked from their homes, but others worked here, at times, with the colonel watching over them. Counters had been built along two of the walls and were lined with computer monitors at intervals, their dimmed screens illuminating a room darkened by drawn blinds and heavy curtains. The room was cooler than the rest of the house, and the steady hum of electronics filled the air.
Martin knew where to find the main computer and, within seconds, I realized why he was there. I had underestimated Robert Michael Martin. Yes, he had been bullied and disappointed his whole life. But he had yet to embrace this fate as permanent: he was, in no way, a willing victim. Martin wasn’t just angry at the colonel for accusing him of the worst crimes he could imagine, he was determined to get even.
Martin peeked out a window, barely lifting the curtain and blind to do so, verified that he was still alone, and set to work. However awkward he was in the real world, however ill-equipped to deal with women or to live a normal life among others, he was at home on a computer. Rapidly typing in commands, he pulled up lists of files, sorted them by date, culled the ones he apparently thought of little use, and began copying the others onto the miniature hard drives he had brought with him. I didn’t know enough about computers to understand what he was copying, but soon he was working on three computers at once, copying files simultaneously from all three to speed up the time required to capture what seemed to be an endless list of files. As the status bar of each file slowly filled, the minutes ticked past. Martin no longer seemed nervous or angry or awkward or uncertain. He had a plan. When the thumb drives grew full, he took disks from a drawer in a supply closet as casually as if he did it every day and began to copy still more files to those.
It was fascinating to feel the strength growing in Martin as he moved around his electronic world. I knew there had been a time when the imaginary world of his computer had been the only one to welcome him and, somewhere along the way, Martin had become master of that world, and he felt like himself within it.
Almost an hour had passed when we both heard the slam of a car door. Without panic, Martin quickly aborted the copying of the remaining files and tapped out commands on the keyboards to return them to their screensavers. He grabbed his thumb drives, stuffed his pockets with disks, and slipped out the door to the hallway before either one of us heard the click of the colonel’s key in the entrance door lock.
Martin knew his way around the house. As the colonel entered at one end, Martin quietly eased out a back door at the far end of the hall. It was not yet adapted to accommodate the colonel’s wheelchair. It was narrow and opened onto a small back deck that held a grouping of plastic chairs clustered around a large gas grill. This was where the volunteers probably gathered to hang out, talk among themselves, and escape the colonel’s overbearing manner. Cigarette butts littered the deck, and plastic cups half full of rain lined the railings. I don’t know why, but it made me feel better to think that Martin had had some sort of a social life after all, even if it was along the edges of the occasional volunteer get-together.
Martin was fast when he put his mind to it. The backyard was completely encircled by the tall cedar fence, its corners anchored by trees with overhanging branches ripe with the buds of spring. A swimming pool had been carved down the middle of the backyard in a perfect oblong. It gleamed a pristine light blue, as if it had been newly cleaned and was just waiting for the season to cooperate. Tables and chairs had been arranged around the edges of the pool. The KinderWatch volunteers probably kept the pool and backyard clean in return for being allowed to throw parties there.
Great bait for attracting volunteers and building a respectable façade.
Ignoring everything but his need to get away, Martin slipped out a back gate. I watched him gain speed as he drew away from the house. Soon he was practically running, the impact of what he had just done fueling his adrenaline. I was certain he was headed home to review the files in hopes he would find something to incriminate the colonel so that he could return the favor of hurling ugly accusations.
I returned to the colonel’s house, my own goal satisfied. I knew where the colonel lived now. I just needed to figure out what to do with that knowledge.
The colonel had returned home angry. It radiated from him in dark pulses as palpable as sound waves from an explosion. He threw his keys onto the kitchen table and immediately wheeled back to his computer room. Switching on the lights, he took his place at the largest monitor, pushed a few buttons, and adjusted the lens of a web camera. He pressed a few more keys, bringing up an image of the house along the lake where Tyler Matthews was being held. But the monitor displayed nothing but an empty living room, and my heart soared with hope—had the second man left with Tyler?
The colonel leaned forward and spoke distinctly into a microphone attached to his computer’s base. “Come here now,” he ordered in a voice now familiar to me.
He stared at the monitor, waiting. When nothing happened, he pulled out his cell phone and made a call. Soon, the man who had taken Tyler Matthews came into view on the webcam, stumbling sleepily into the living room. “What is it?” he mumbled sullenly into his own cell phone. “I was taking a nap.”
“Alone, I trust?”
“Yes, alone. What do you want?” The first man was angry.
“Put the phone down,” the colonel ordered. “Look into the camera.”
The man instantly complied. I realized he was used to performing for the colonel on cue. “What’s wrong?” the man asked, a note of fear creeping into his voice.
“I have just spent a very unpleasant hour at the police station being interrogated about KinderWatch volunteers.”
The other man flinched.
“You were careless,” the colonel accused him. “Your name is at the top of the list.”
“They won’t be able to find me,” the man said plaintively, and there it was again: he had dropped back into a much younger persona, almost as if he were two different people. He whined in his desperate desire to please the colonel. “This house is rented under a different name. They’ll find no evidence of me.”
“We’re moving the schedule up,” the colonel told him. “It’s only a matter of time before they subpoena my records and files. I will not lose this opportunity. I have over a hundred customers willing to pay three thousand dollars each to watch.”
“The boy is asleep right now,” the other man protested.
“Then wake him.” The colonel laughed. “It goes down tonight,” he said firmly. “It’s just a matter of time before they find you. Wake the boy, bathe him, and prepare yourself. I will notify the clients.” The colonel laughed again. It was ugly. “When this night is over, you will be on your knees, only this time you will be thanking me.”
The man on the other side of the camera looked stricken, but he seemed helpless to argue. “Tonight?” he asked weakly.
“Yes. Your whole life changes tonight.” The colonel paused. I could feel the evil in the room grow thick, fed by a lust that had reared its
head deep in the colonel’s soul. His corruption of the man who was completely under his control excited him to a depth he had once thought lost to him.
This was what the colonel had been seeking.
He laughed again, more softly, then said, almost as an afterthought: “Tonight, I will make you into a man—and when it is all over, you will dispose of the boy.”
Chapter 23
I could think of only one hope for Tyler Matthews: that the man who had taken him might somehow find the strength to go against the colonel’s orders. I had sensed a fragment of goodness deep inside him, buried by years of abuse and pain and hatred. But some good was still there, and it had led him to care for the boy, if not tenderly, at least adequately, over the past few days. That same spark might lead to his, and the boy’s, salvation.
How do you save a soul? I did not even know how to save my own.
I headed to the house where the boy was being held, moving through a town that was going about its usual business without any inkling that a young boy’s fate hung in balance. People hurried, cars honked, drivers shouted, buses whooshed, trucks rumbled and roared—all the noisiness of a Saturday night suddenly seemed infinitely dear. I wished so badly that this cacophony of ordinary life was the soundtrack to my own existence, but I had moved well beyond that now. I was treading murky waters with no shoreline in sight.
Tyler Matthews was playing listlessly in a back bedroom, once again offering his soldiers to an unseen play-mate, oblivious to the horrors that awaited him. The man who had taken him stood shirtless in the living room, dressed only in jeans that sagged beneath his boney hips. He was weeping from the sting of the words being uttered over the camera system’s speakers.
“I took you in. No one else would have you,” the colonel was telling him, not in a thunderous, commanding voice, but in a quiet voice ripe with malignant confidence—and, oh, it was so much worse, that sibilant whispering that gnawed away at the edges of the young man’s soul with a power as corrosive and relentless as acid. The colonel knew he would win in the end; he was simply playing with his prey. “I took you in when no one, not even your own parents, would have you.”
