by Spencer Kope
A cold acorn rests in the pit of Barbara’s stomach. Even now she can feel it: a realization waiting to sprout, a warning in need of digestion.
* * *
The panel van’s back door groans as the latch is disengaged and a large hand pulls it open. As a huge mass steps into the opening, blocking the glare of the sun, Noah’s demon takes shape. Not a real demon, just a man with a demon’s intent. He calls himself Bear, a nickname he seemed proud to share with Marco during the drive as if it were some ancient family name and he the honored recipient. Now, as he pokes his head inside the van and grins, Bear asks, “How are things back here? Comfy?” He takes a quick look at Marco’s bindings to make sure he hasn’t managed to loosen them. “We’ll be spending the night here.”
Plucking a black garbage bag from the piles gathered on either side of Marco, Bear unknots the top and extracts two sleeping bags. Marco recognizes them. One belonged to Wade, the other to Jason. Marco catches a whiff of Wade’s cologne as Bear reseals the bag.
Marco almost vomits.
He must have told himself a thousand times in the previous days that this isn’t real, that it’s not happening. As if to repeat the phrase would make it so and land him back in his tent or his apartment, shaken but no longer part of some unending nightmare. His senses keep reminding him that it is real—beyond denial.
He can feel it.
He can see it.
He can smell it.
Blathering on about the outbuildings, the stable, and the old barn in an upbeat, almost friendly voice, Bear pulls Marco from the van with rough hands that don’t match his tenor. Placing him on his feet and adjusting his gag, he claps the congressman on the back. “Better, right? Must feel good to stretch the legs.”
Grabbing Marco by the upper arm, Bear’s fingers pinch down hard. He turns Marco away from the old barn with its weathered timbers and steers him toward a single-story cinder-block outbuilding on the other side of the van. The exterior was once a crisp white, but the paint, like everything else about Foothill Orchards, had faded into a dull shadow of its former self.
“This is my aunt’s place,” Bear rambles on as if reminding himself. “We passed her on the way in, the old bitch. Her and my mom were peas in a pod.” He cocks his head and studies Marco. “You like that saying—‘peas in a pod’? Sounds a bit hick-a-billy, doesn’t it? Some redneck-farmer saying. My aunt and uncle were farmers, and this is what they got for it: a run-down old farm that nobody cares about.”
Bear laughs. “My aunt would have sold the land off years ago, but she’s afraid I’ll kill her for the money.” He turns and nods. “She told me so herself, right to my face, the little bitch. Peas in a pod.”
He shrugs. “I spent a lot of time here as a kid, back when it was still a working orchard. They’d make me work in the field with the migrants at harvesttime. I just remember long, hot days trying to keep up with those bastards.
“It wasn’t all bad, I suppose. Smoked my first bowl with a kid named Jose, not much older than me. He stole some dope from his dad’s backpack—Acapulco Gold, he said—and we lit up in the barn loft. Stuff smelled like a skunk’s ass, tasted like it too, but it did the job. Jose didn’t speak much English, and I didn’t speak much Spanish, but we got by and were pretty tight after that.”
Bear stops in front of the building and pulls open an old door. “In here.”
* * *
The building must have been a storage room or perhaps a packaging room. A single stainless-steel table is bolted to the floor off to the left, and it’s immediately evident that four such tables once filled the center of the room, butted one against the other, left to right. All that remains of the other three are a series of lag bolts protruding from the concrete where they’d been bolted down.
The fate of those three is unclear, but some of the lag bolts appear to have been hacked off with a Sawzall, suggesting they were stolen, most likely by Bear. The jagged remnants of the bolts are now rusty spikes rising from the floor, punji sticks waiting for a careless pair of feet.
Stacks of old orange crates fill the back-right corner, occupying the exact spot they’d held when the last worker walked out the door and locked it behind him all those years ago. The labels are now faded but you can still see the words FOOTHILL ORCHARDS in sweeping letters as they flow over the image of rolling green hills and an overflowing cornucopia of oranges.
Better days.
Long ago.
Pushing Marco toward an empty spot under one of the front windows, Bear kicks debris from the area with big sweeps of his foot, then throws down one of the sleeping bags as a spider scurries for a recess in the concrete.
“You sleep here,” the big man growls. Any friendliness that had occupied his voice was now gone, and the rumble from his barrel chest hints at darker things lurking within.
He handcuffs Marco to a six-inch C bolt protruding from the wall. Unlike everything else about the room, the C bolt shines as if new. It’s attached to the cinder-block wall by a square of fresh concrete that’s four inches square.
From the back of his waistband, Bear draws a bowie knife with a foot-long blade. He twists it in the light a moment, letting the rays dance along the surface as he holds it inches from Marco’s face. No malice is in his eyes, just a deep fascination with the cold steel.
The blade is clean, but in the crease where it joins the guard, Marco notices a hint of dirty burgundy, a thin line of filth that had flowed there as liquid before hardening into a flaky crust. It survives in its crease only because Bear’s idea of cleaning a blade is to wipe it quickly on his victim’s clothes.
“I’m going to go pay my aunt a visit,” Bear says, loving the knife with his eyes. “Then I’ve got some business elsewhere.” He grins and glances at the handcuffs. “Why don’t you wait here.”
32
Sierra Inn & Suites, Wednesday, March 11—11:43 P.M.
Some days are hard; others make hard look easy.
Today was the latter.
If you spend enough time in law enforcement, such days will find you from time to time. If you spend a couple of years with the Special Tracking Unit, such days are known as Wednesday.
When I get back to the motel, the first thing I do is call Heather. When she picks up on the second ring, it’s as if a weight lifts from my shoulders, my arms, my head. The sound of her voice doesn’t exactly cheer me up, but it does soothe me, if that makes sense.
I imagine it’s much like in the westerns when you see some gunslinger with a bullet in his shoulder and they get him sotted up on whiskey before they reach in and pull it out. The whiskey doesn’t necessarily make the pain any less; it’s just easier to bear.
Heather’s my whiskey.
She talks about the wedding and some sleuthing award her website just received for crime reporting. She talks about the price of avocados at the grocery store and a condo in Hawaii that would be perfect for our honeymoon. We immerse ourselves in talk of all things common sense and nonsense and dollars and cents … and time slips by.
The minutes skirt the edge of blissful ignorance, as if the day hadn’t included the discovery of an emaciated, tortured, haunted man.
When I finally disconnect the call a half hour later, I’m tired but doubt I can sleep. I turn on the TV and search for something worth watching, settling for a home-makeover show. After only a few minutes I’m captivated. Part of me has always wanted to restore old houses, but after my experience helping Jimmy refinish his kitchen last year, I’ve decided that I need to better balance my desires against my abilities.
The show is almost finished and I’m just waiting for the big reveal when a loud knock rattles my door. Searching for the pause button on the remote and finding none, I haul myself off the bed and shuffle to the door.
Jimmy pushes through as soon as I turn the handle and charges into the center of the room. He’s got his phone in his hand, held horizontally as if he has someone on speaker. I’m just about to ask him about it when Diane�
�s voice trumpets forth.
“Are we there yet?”
“Yes,” Jimmy replies loudly—maybe too loudly. “She says she has it.” I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or Diane, but then he lifts the phone slightly, as if for emphasis, and looks directly at me. “She says she has it.”
“Has what?”
“It! The answer! She figured it out; all of it. She wouldn’t say anything until we were together because she didn’t want to repeat herself.”
“I didn’t want to repeat myself,” Diane’s voice says at the same time.
Diane figured it out.
The thought—and her voice—sends a rush of adrenaline through my system. Diane has a little more Tabasco sauce in her voice—a little more fire—when she figures something out. It has to filter through her sarcasm, but it’s always there.
It’s there now.
“Is this going to help us identify the abductor?” I ask.
“It should. Unless you’re stupid.”
I roll my eyes, knowing full well she can’t see me.
“Tell us,” Jimmy says, his pen and pad at the ready.
“I’ve been looking for the common denominators, the things tying the four men together—other than their friendship and fishing ritual, of course. In some ways, the men have a lot in common, in others, not so much. They have different lives, different goals, different values. Wade and Noah are both Masons, for example, but not Jason or Marco.
“They all learned a few things about investing while building the lure company in college, but they don’t share any joint ventures. Noah runs his massive hedge fund, Jason was mostly invested in real estate investment trusts, Wade put some of his profits from the sale of the company into index funds, and some into a nice boat and a truck to tow it.
“As for Marco, he’s more of a stock picker, and a pretty good one from what I gather. He bought into Amazon and Netflix early and took a large position in Apple when it was under ten dollars. The guy’s shrewd. Those are just a few examples. The point is, I could find no financial common denominator, which is usually the culprit in cases like this.”
“Maybe when a ransom is involved,” Jimmy points out, “but we’ve had no ransom—”
“I’m just explaining the process, dear,” Diane interrupts patiently. “But, knowing you two as I do, and taking into account your short attention spans, I’ll cut to the chase. Failing to find a common denominator, I took a closer look at the crime scenes and the circumstances surrounding them. One man with his head shaved for no apparent reason and buried alive, one man butchered, apparently by way of some Viking execution method, with part of his lung still unaccounted for, and a third man, almost dead, left strapped to a bed with poison slowly dripping into his vein.”
She pauses, letting all this sink in.
“Think about those three outcomes,” she urges, her voice almost pedantic. “Tell me what stands out.”
Jimmy and I look at each other and shrug but say nothing.
“Who is bald?”
“Old men,” Jimmy says.
“Babies,” I chime in.
“Cops,” Jimmy adds.
“Who else?” Diane presses, her voice suddenly short, borderline peeved. “Maybe the baldness wasn’t intentional. Maybe it was a consequence of something.”
“Like a fire?” Jimmy asks.
“A hot-tubbing accident,” I say.
Jimmy looks at me.
I shrug. “The suction inlet—”
Jimmy waves my explanation away.
“Honestly, how do you two solve anything?” Diane says.
“Oh, sure,” I say. “It’s so easy once you know the answer.”
Diane sighs. Loudly. “Let me give you two more clues. What if that same bald person—bald by no fault of his own—had part of his lung removed.”
She waits.
No response.
“What if they then hooked that poor man up to a slow drip of poison?” She pauses. “Have I spelled it out enough for you? Here’s another clue: it’s one of the twelve zodiacs.”
“Cancer!” Jimmy barks.
“Sagittar—Cancer!” I say, barely echoing my partner.
“Cancer.” Diane lets the word linger in the air, like an unpleasant odor. “He shaved Jason’s head and left his hair in his pocket; the coffin, no doubt, was just a symbol of where cancer might take you. A bit of theatrics, I suppose. His version of fun. So, he told us the what—that being cancer—and then he told us what type of cancer when he carved up Wade and put his lungs on display. To press the point, he cut out a large chunk from deep in the lung, the way a surgeon might. Why he chose to lay him open the way he did is anyone’s guess at this point, but I think he likes it. I think he likes bringing fear and pain. Finally, it was Noah who served time in a special kind of hell, hooked up to some perverted form of chemotherapy.”
She sighs as this settles in and then asks a pointed question: “What was Marco before he was a congressman?”
“A doctor,” I say softly. “An oncologist.”
“Correct. That means this isn’t about his politics. It’s not about Jason, Wade, or Noah. This has everything to do with his medical practice. A disgruntled and disturbed patient. Or maybe the relative of a patient.” In a softer voice, she says, “I’d start with a list of those who didn’t make it.”
Silence takes us.
The enormity of the revelation is staggering and ugly. That someone would use one of mankind’s most hideous natural foes and replicate its treatment and consequences is almost beyond belief. That someone had even conceived of this idea, let alone carried it out, is even more horrifying.
Monsters do walk among us.
They wear sneakers and carry smartphones.
“We need a list of his former patients,” Jimmy says at length.
“I was in a hurry to call you with the news, but I did take a few minutes to look at his work history. Fortunately, it’s pretty straightforward. After finishing his residency, he spent his entire career with Price-Baxter Oncology—maybe ten or twelve years. Their new office is on Eighteenth Street and they open at eight A.M. I’ll text the address.”
“Thanks, Diane,” Jimmy mutters as he jots it down.
“One more thing.” Diane’s voice is hesitant as if she doesn’t want to speak of such things. “You should know they moved out of their last office about a year ago. It was on Seventeenth Street. After the interior was gutted and refinished, it was leased out as a dental complex.”
“Wade!” I say with a gasp.
“Wade,” she echoes.
33
Thursday, March 12—Early
The night is unforgiving.
I drift in and out of sleep, but it never really takes. A little after four, Jimmy sends a text asking if I want to go to the gym with him. He’s having trouble sleeping too. I almost agree, despite my disdain for useless physical activity. Instead, I watch some late-night television—mostly infomercials.
Around four thirty I almost buy a portable urinal called the UroClub. It looks like a golf club but isn’t. If you’re on the course and don’t want to leave the green for a bathroom break, you just pee into the handle, screw the end back on, and you’re ready to go.
I want one.
I don’t even golf.
* * *
At seven, I join Jimmy at a small table next to the breakfast bar. He works on his crossword puzzle silently as I dissect a poppy-seed muffin, entertaining myself by seeing how many individual poppy seeds I can pick out and stack up.
“Thirteen down,” Jimmy says after a few minutes, still studying his crossword puzzle. “‘Drops on the ground’?”
“Body,” I say instinctively.
“Three letters.”
“Dew.”
He pencils it in and finds it fits.
Just before seven thirty, Ross joins us.
We woke him with an early-morning call around six and gave him the short version regarding Diane’s discovery. Now we fil
l in the blanks, sparing none of the details. When we finish, Ross looks as stunned as we were last night.
“Cancer?”
“Yeah,” I say.
We watch him, Jimmy and I, and wait for the same question that came to both of us late last night. Ross doesn’t disappoint. Just a few minutes into our expanded conversation, he suddenly stops, a look of mixed emotions on his face: pensiveness, fear, contempt.
“What comes after chemo?” he asks with some alarm. “He’s got another victim to put on display, right? So, what is he planning for Marco?”
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.” Jimmy tosses his unfinished crossword puzzle in the garbage can next to him. “This was about Marco right from the beginning, so whatever it is, it’s going to be something … unrivaled.”
The word is ominous, threatening.
What can be unrivaled when juxtaposed against live burial, the full execution of a ritualistic Blood Eagle, and slow poisoning? The answer must be horrific, something beyond reason and understanding.
“We need to find Marco before it comes to that,” I say quietly.
Jimmy checks his watch. “Ten minutes until the clinic opens.”
Ross rises. “Let’s go, then.”
* * *
“The cancer business must be good,” Jimmy says as we enter the marble-tiled, two-story foyer of Price-Baxter Oncology. “Sweet place they got here.”
“Nothing wrong with having a nice office,” I observe.
“Not what I was saying … just … damn!” Jimmy lets his eyes roam from right to left, taking in the waiting room, the acid-stained-concrete reception counter, the plush chairs, the marble floors, and the extrawide halls leading off in two directions. A glass-lined steel staircase leads to the second floor.
Jimmy and Ross flash their badges at the counter while I just linger in the background. I’m good at lingering. I’ve had a lot of practice.
“Special Agent Donovan?” says a woman in a white lab coat as she approaches briskly from the right hallway. Jimmy takes her hand and she introduces herself as Janet. She turns toward me and Ross, either curious or confused, so we quickly introduce ourselves.
