“It’s an amusement park. It’s supposed to be scary. For older kids.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do they want to be scared?”
“For a thrill, I guess.”
“What’s that?”
“A thrill?”
“No, that. The guy.”
“Oh. I call him Bob. He’s fake. Part of the scene.”
“What are those?”
Bell followed the direction of Lucas’s gaze to the trio of giant taiko drums suspended from the ceiling. “Those are drums. There’s a machine that hits them with big sticks to make a beat. They’re loud.”
“Oh. Don’t turn them on.”
“I won’t.”
“I don’t like it here. I want to go home.”
“Just rest, okay? Here, have some water.”
Lucas shook his head. “Are you a bad guy?”
Bell considered the question…. “I don’t know.”
“My Daddy says bad guys usually think they’re the good guys.”
“Huh.”
The boy’s smooth forehead furrowed. “Where’s my Daddy? I want him.”
Bell went to a low table against the wall where he kept a few personal items that blended in with the scene while lending it veracity: a brush calligraphy set and a few loose sheets of rice paper. He had sometimes practiced his kanji when business was slow. Now he picked up the inkbottle and unscrewed the cap—stubborn at first, it had been closed for so long. The brush was in poor shape, but he smoothed out the strands, licked his fingers, and gave it a little twist.
“Did you kill my mother?” Lucas said, sounding too much like an adult.
Bell dipped the brush in the ink and stared at the clean square of paper. No reason to wear gloves now, he thought. This would all be coming to an end soon. If there were prints, so be it, they could be part of the message. He held the paper straight with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, and stroked a line. He thought about the trigger under the floor tile, about how the execution scene played over and over, hour after hour, day after day, with only a pause for cleanup and resetting. He thought of how he too, even with all of his art, was still an automaton like the one on the mat. Someone stepped on a spring and the sequence was set in motion. He merely watched, waited for his cue, and cut.
“What are you doing?” Lucas said.
Bell didn’t answer the question until the last stroke was drawn. He blew on the ink to speed the drying, then took another sheet of rice paper and squared it under his left hand. Before drawing the same character again, he looked at the boy and said, “I’m writing to your father…and to mine. You should pray that yours finds us first.”
Chapter 20
Drelick and Pasco gave Desmond a ride home. They parked behind his car in the driveway and followed him into the house they had visited uninvited just hours earlier. Desmond put a pot of coffee on, told them to have a seat, then went upstairs to brush his teeth and put on a clean shirt. Pasco followed far enough to listen to the man’s movements, but Drelick waved him back to the kitchen table. They both looked at the ceiling and listened to the progress of his footsteps and the pause at the top of the stairs where they imagined him looking in the mirror that the landlord had just remounted over the patched hole in the wall. When Carmichael had been on the second floor for longer than it should have taken, Pasco started to get antsy. He drummed his fingers on the table and said, “Think I’ll check on him.”
Drelick shook her head. “He’ll be back.”
“You clear him already? You think there’s no chance he killed either of them?”
“It would be a hell of a coincidence,” she said. “I know he didn’t abduct his own son because he was in custody when it happened. And I know he didn’t kill anyone in Ohio last night.”
“Maybe he has a partner, someone who grabbed the kid for him. Maybe he did read about the Lamprey case and decided to use it as a cover, an opportune time to kill his father-in-law. Just because he’s not part of a larger pattern of sword murders doesn’t mean he didn’t do a couple of his own. You know that, right?”
“Yes. Look, it doesn’t help that the police botched this as badly as they did, but from what I gather since we’ve been here, there’s more evidence pointing away from Carmichael than toward him. Let’s hear him out.”
Desmond’s footsteps creaked heavily on the stairs. The two agents stopped talking as he entered the kitchen and placed a manila envelope amid some toast crumbs and spilled salt on the table. The envelope was soon joined by mismatched mugs from the cupboard and a carton of milk from the fridge. Desmond poured the coffee, waved at the milk, and said, “I’m afraid I’m out of sugar.”
Pasco raised his mug toward Desmond. “Why ruin perfectly good coffee with milk and sugar?”
Drelick reached into the manila envelope and removed a creased white paper square with bold black calligraphy on it. She looked at Desmond. He looked haggard, his eyes rimmed pink in a way that suggested something more than water splashed on his face while he was upstairs.
“Lucas found that paper in a friend’s tree house the other day. It was folded into an origami butterfly.”
“Have you had it translated?” Drelick asked.
“It says Fly. I think it was a warning, someone telling me to get Lucas away from here. But then Phil took him…and was killed the following day.”
“Do you think this was written by Phil Parsons’ killer?” Drelick again.
“Who else?”
Pasco leaned forward. “Why would someone intent on killing members of your family, someone planning to abduct Lucas, warn you to flee with him?”
“I don’t know. They’re going out of their way to give me messages, but the messages are enigmatic, even contradictory. Did Fournier tell you about the haiku someone wrote on my laptop?”
Drelick felt Pasco looking at her and avoided meeting his eyes. She knew he thought Carmichael might have written the poem himself. “Yes, I saw it,” she said. “The police thought you wrote it yourself, whether you knew it or not.” She sensed Pasco shifting in his chair, unhappy with her candor.
“Do they think different now that Lucas has been taken?” Desmond’s fingers were wrapped around each other like claws, each hand squeezing the other bloodless where they made contact.
“I don’t know what they’re thinking after you jumped on Fournier. It’s a wonder we’re not having this talk back in your cell.”
“Well, Chuck didn’t press charges because he knows he’s guilty of practically kidnapping my son.”
“That aside…they let you go, so it seems that their focus is more in line with ours now.”
“And that is?”
“I’m looking for a cross-country serial killer.”
Desmond looked down at the dirty tabletop and drew a ragged breath like a man buckled over from a punch.
Drelick said, “This can’t be news to you after your wife and father-in-law were killed, after the messages you’ve received. You must have been thinking the same.”
Desmond was nodding his head. “It’s just kind of fucked up to hear the words serial killer from an FBI agent when your son is missing. Has this person you’ve been tracking ever killed a child?” His voice broke on the words. He looked up at her desperately, his arms wrapped tight around his abdomen. He looked cold, as if he were on the other side of a glass door where the temperature was not the same that she felt in the stale kitchen.
Drelick looked at Pasco, using her eyes to keep him from talking while she chose her words. Some details of the Ohio massacre were still being kept from the media, but not for long. If he dared turn on a TV, Desmond would know everything before she had even boarded her flight to Cincinnati in two hours. “There were two children killed in Ohio,” she said. “Girls, older.”
“Christ.”
“But Lucas going missing doesn’t necessarily mean he was taken by Phil’s killer. It may have no connection to what happened i
n Ohio.”
“How could it not?”
“There’s no way that the killer in Ohio could have been in both places within that time span. You used the word they earlier. Do you have reason to believe there’s more than one person stalking your family?”
Desmond sighed. “Maybe. When I visited Harwood in prison, I asked him about his memories of the night Sandy was killed. He didn’t have much because he was a blind drunk at the time, but he said that two angels in black robes handed him the sword and told him he needed to confess what he’d done.”
Pasco snorted. “Two angels? He give you anything more descriptive than that?”
“No. But you might have better luck. You could spend more time with him.”
“Okay,” Drelick said to Pasco, “That’s two meetings for you while I’m in Ohio. First priority is Mrs. Fournier. Then follow up with Harwood. See if he has enough for a sketch.”
“He might start making shit up if he thinks there’s a chance of being acquitted,” Pasco said.
Drelick shrugged.
Desmond said, “The police used a sketch artist with Lucas to get a picture of the man who almost abducted him at the playground. Have you seen it?”
Drelick felt a quick thrill of hope that things might start moving faster. “No. I’ll have them scan it and send it to me en route. What can you tell me about it?”
“It turned out he didn’t see the man’s face, just a mask, a faceplate from a samurai suit of armor. I won’t be surprised if Harwood describes something similar.”
“I’ll be asking him different kinds of questions than what you would have.” Pasco said. “We might get height, shoes, voice type, et cetera. He probably remembers more than he knows.”
Drelick read the sick look on Desmond’s face, a face weathered with grief, now preparing itself to erode to deeper strata. A face aged beyond its years. She reached across the table and placed her hand over his forearm. “I don’t want to give you false hope,” she said, “but if Lucas was taken by the same people, if he didn’t simply run away…then it doesn’t fit their pattern to take a victim to a different location. That’s a small thing, but it’s good, I think.”
“Because they usually kill their victims where they find them,” Desmond murmured.
She nodded.
“What could it mean? What if they took Lucas somewhere just because it was too risky to do it at a cop’s house in broad daylight?”
“It’s harder to take a live person with you. Even a child.”
“I think Lucas would struggle. I think he’d make noise. That’s what I’ve taught him anyway, if he remembers. But scared, I don’t know, maybe he would go along.”
“I’m speculating here, mind you,” Drelick said against her better judgment, but the man needed something for the despair. “If we have two killers working together, then this abduction while one of them is out of state…to me it suggests hesitation, possibly a lack of conviction.”
“You think the one capable of killing children is the one in Ohio?”
“He’s probably not in Ohio any more, but I still need to go out there and investigate. The police are setting up roadblocks on all of the main roads and some of the smaller ones. We’re looking at flight records for the past few days. We will likely catch him before he can return to this area.”
“How do you know he won’t just go south, go in some random direction and leave the country?”
“I don’t.”
“Lucas is his unfinished business,” Desmond said.
“Let’s hope so, or we lose the fucker,” Pasco said. Drelick flinched. She would be talking to him later about his bedside manner. To Desmond she said, “The victims in Ohio were a family named Tibbets. Does the name mean anything to you? Have you heard it before?”
Desmond’s eyes flicked back and forth over the tabletop as he searched his memory. “No.”
“Maybe Phil Parsons mentioned the name to you? Think.”
“No. Sorry.”
“Well, please give it more thought while we search for your son.”
Desmond took his pen from his jeans pocket and wrote the name down on the manila envelope. Drelick nodded at the paper square with the calligraphy. “Can I take this with me? I’d like to have the paper and ink analyzed.”
“Please.”
She took an evidence bag from her briefcase, and dropped the paper into it. “Thank you, Mr. Carmichael. You have our numbers, and Agent Pasco will be nearby. I have a plane to catch.”
“Don’t,” Desmond said, standing up. “Don’t go to Ohio. You’re the first person who believes that we’re being stalked, and you won’t find Lucas in Ohio. Please. I can’t lose him. Not him too. I just…please. I don’t know how much time we have.” His voice thickened as he begged. He gripped the chair for support.
Drelick looked at Pasco. He looked as uncomfortable as she felt. “We’re going to do everything we can to find your son, Mr. Carmichael,” she said, and to her own ears the words sounded like the reheated assurances of a doctor who has seen too many terminal cases. She needed to get out of here and do what she was good at.
Chapter 21
Erin Drelick stared for a long time at the sketch of the samurai mask. The fact that a little boy, a boy now missing, had described this face made her shudder. It was a hot summer day, and sitting beside the wall-length airport window, dressed in her black slacks and shirtsleeves, she should have felt hot. But the thought of Lucas Carmichael looking at this mask right now in some basement or barn, the thought of the boy she had never met wetting his pants and waiting for the masked man to do to him whatever gray and indistinct abominable thing he imagined had been done to his mother chilled her in a way that seemed to glow cold and blue from her core, as if her vertebrae were a string of ice cubes.
Was she doing the right thing, flying to Ohio? Flying away from the zone in which Lucas was likely to be found, alive or dead, within the next forty-eight hours? She had seen the crime-scene photos on her tablet computer; those grim images were sleeping in the memory chip in her lap right now. What was there that she needed to see in person? The photos were bad—especially the ones of the blonde girls—but they didn’t chill her the same way the mask did because in Ohio the deed was done. It was past. The threat foretold by the mask was worse because she could still do something about it if she caught the right scent.
But going to the crime scene was what you did. There could be some detail, some bit of information that might not emerge if she wasn’t there reading the scene and the people, developing a rapport, and using her intuitive sense to ask the locals the right questions.
Possible intuitive connections. Was that enough to fly away from Lucas Carmichael for?
“He could be anywhere,” she said aloud, looking now at a photo of the boy on her screen.
Anywhere…but probably not Ohio.
Why Ohio? Why this family, Tibbets? Why Massachusetts for that matter, and Parsons?
The hours in flight would feel like being in a holding cell. Unable to connect to the web, her hands would be tied. If she was going to dig in and try to connect the dots, she had better do it here at the airport terminal before they boarded her. She drummed her fingers, tapping her nails across the glass touch-screen. She had to prioritize. An intuitive search process could take too long.
The inflamed corner of her toe was broadcasting infuriating low-level pain again, pain that thrummed below her consciousness most of the time, straddling the threshold between actual hurt and a kind of itching sensation. She wanted it to either go away or really hurt, not just flirt with hurt. She opened a search engine, typed “Tibbets + Parsons,” and ground the toe of her shoe into the dark blue carpet, reveling in the bright flare of actual pain, a sensation with conviction.
* * *
Chuck Fournier was trailing Agent Pasco through his own house, trying to interject himself into the conversation, but Pasco was only interested in talking to Ginny. Fournier had never seen his wife talk to an offi
cer before. Well, not within the framework of an interrogation, anyway, and he was horrified by the spectacle. She wasn’t guilty of anything, but she still managed to answer every question in a way that felt way too direct and incriminating to Chuck. She was a wreck, and all she had to offer was the bald, guilty, nauseating fact that she had let Lucas out into the backyard to play while she washed dishes, and when she looked up he was gone.
“Was the yard secure?” Pasco asked.
When Ginny looked confused by the question, Chuck said, “There’s only the one gate, and the latch is too high for Lucas to reach.”
“Detective, you were not at home. I’m asking Mrs. Fournier about something only she was in a position to observe.”
“I just thought that seeing as it’s my house and I’m the only one who uses that gate when I mow the lawn—”
“Don’t worry, I’ll have plenty of questions for you soon. I want to hear all about what made you think you could take the child home in the first place.”
Fournier squeezed his chin and cheeks with the fingers of his right hand like he was trying to wring a rag soaked with enraged anxiety dry and, managing to keep his mouth shut, turned to face the fridge. He wondered if making a sandwich would constitute some kind of faux pas. He was, after all, in his own kitchen, and it wasn’t entirely clear to him at the moment if he was here as a cop or as a suspect.
* * *
Erin Drelick found an immediate connection between the names Parsons and Tibbets, but not Lamprey. She knew she should turn off the tablet and put it back in her briefcase, knew she should get in the boarding line that was now moving, but she was staring at a black‐and‐white photo taken in August of 1945 on the island of Tinian.
A group of young men from the 509th Composite Group are standing in front of the riveted aluminum hull of an aircraft, a huge beast of a plane judging by the small section that can be seen in the photo. Behind them, one of the wheels and a segment of hydraulic landing gear are visible. They are dressed in what look like plain, beige Boy Scout uniforms devoid of any insignia. Only their hats vary in style. One looks like the visor cap of a Marine or an airman, another is some kind of wool skullcap, and the tall, serious man, second in from the left is wearing what she thinks of as a folded newspaper boat hat—the hat of a Navy man, and sure enough, the caption identifies the tall man who might be older than the flyboys surrounding him as Navy Captain William (Deak) Parsons.
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