by A. J Tata
“Good guess,” he said.
“Someone your size needs all the volume he can get, right?”
“I grew up surfing on Hatteras, so I’m used to taking a pounding from the waves. My mother taught me to surf, free dive, be a waterman.”
“That’s some mother you’ve got there,” she said.
He could feel tugging along the laceration, so he knew that she had numbed his scalp and was sewing up the cut. He changed the topic away from his mother, whose memory he held close. Her loss had spawned a reciprocal amount of violence and had ended up killing his father, too. He changed the topic.
“How many stitches?” he asked.
“Really? I’m losing my touch. You weren’t supposed to know.”
“I’m guessing fifteen.”
“More like twenty-five. Plus, I shaved that side of your head, so you’ll probably want me to get the other side. High and tight?”
“How do you know what a high and tight is?” he asked.
“I dated a Marine once. He went to war . . . and never came back.” The inflection in her voice changed. He sensed that they had more than dated. “Well, he came back. Just not alive.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “The wars were tough on a lot of people.”
“Marines?” she asked.
“Army. But I worked with the Marines a lot. They’re as good as they come.”
“I’m guessing a big guy like you must have carried a machine gun or the radio or something?”
“I did a little of everything.”
There was no point in talking about his Special Forces status as an operator. It was common knowledge among operators that most of the people who bragged about being in Special Forces were exaggerating their roles and usually weren’t operators at all. As he saw it, the biggest talkers couldn’t spell Delta or JSOC, much less serve there. She almost read his mind.
“It’s always the ones who talk the least who did the most,” she said. “Carver was like that. He was Force Recon, but you’d never know it.”
He felt her tie off the last stitch, lather up the other side of his head, and get to work with the razor. When she was done, she held up a mirror to his face, and he had a finely shaved head with a bit more than a Mohawk running down the middle. It was as good as any high and tight he’d ever had when he was a paratrooper, and he knew then that she had probably shaved Carver’s head once a week when he wasn’t in combat. She was tender and true, and he imagined she was reliving some of that. Before she turned away from him, he noticed her eyes were moist.
“How many years were you together?”
“Six,” she said. “Two deployments to Fallujah and Ramadi, and he comes back just fine. A little screwed up in the head, but, you know, okay. He survives, and then on the third tour to fight ISIS, of all things, an IED kills his five-man team in a Humvee.”
He reached out to her and turned her toward him. Tears were streaming down her face. And he understood why she had picked him out in the busy ER that morning. She hadn’t processed the loss, if that was possible at all.
Placing the mirror on the countertop next to the exam bed, he held her shoulders gently and said, “I lost my best friend to an IED. I killed a prisoner of war. I was kicked out of the Army. And now the daughter of one of my unit mentors is in your ER. These wars have impacted a lot of people. You need to talk to someone.”
She leaned into him, and he could feel her resolve diminish. No doubt she was a professional nurse, but every day she had to relive the loss of her boyfriend as she watched injured people come to and leave the hospital, a daily reminder of his mortality and absence. That had to be hard.
“I’m supposed to be taking care of you,” she sniffed.
“You just gave me the best haircut I’ve had in a long time.”
She pushed away and looked at him, wiping tears from her green eyes. The auburn hair had begun to work its way out of the ponytail, and he could see that she probably normally wore it over her shoulders.
“What?” she asked.
“I’m just saying thanks,” he said. “Not just for the haircut. I get the impression you don’t share much of that with anyone.”
“No one really to share it with.” She looked away and then back at him. “Not sure what got into me.”
“It’s okay. We can talk some more, off duty, if you’d like.”
She hesitated and then said, “Sure. I’d like that, actually.”
“Plus, I’ll be wanting updates on Promise, and I need some local knowledge, so it’s not all about you,” he said to take the pressure off. “You can help me figure this thing out if you’d like.”
Casey stared at him a beat and nodded. “Sounds sketchy, but I want some answers myself. Like I said, I have friends at that school—teachers and parents.”
“Maybe you can walk me by the ICU so I can sit with Promise for a minute? Then we can sneak out the back, and you can drive me to the school for my car and follow me to my place.”
“I’m not seeing what’s in this for me,” she said with a smile. “But of course I’ll let you in to see Promise. You’ll have to be quick, though. And put on these.” She handed him a pair of extra-large blue scrubs, which he slipped over his board shorts and rash guard. She gave him a hat and a mask also. “We don’t want anyone recognizing you.”
Her sarcasm was welcome, actually, as it was not far removed from the gallows humor of a combat soldier. He imagined that she had to find her own ways to cope with both her loss and the sadness that flowed through the glass emergency room doors every day.
They walked quickly down the hall and into a room with several beds. One of the curtains had been pulled all the way around Promise’s bed. He saw her name, White, written on a dry-erase board attached to a stainless-steel cart. Casey pulled the curtain back, and he stepped forward. She lifted her arm to stop him, but he continued until he knelt next to Promise, who was lying in bed, motionless. She had tubes in her chest due to what he guessed was a collapsed lung. The ventilator hissed with each artificial breath that kept her alive. Her eyes were closed, and her face was distorted from the oxygen mask. Her hair was fanned out across the pillow and in disarray. He instinctively reached up and smoothed it.
Then he lightly held her hand and closed his eyes. Summoning his thoughts of her father, he said a silent prayer for Promise to recover. He didn’t know how long he was there, but eventually, he felt Casey’s hand on his back and her breath in his ear as she whispered, “We’ve got to go.”
He stood and followed her, catching one last image of Promise over his shoulder. While he didn’t need any more motivation to find out who had done this and why, the hissing of the ventilator was a ghost whispering in his ear, Kill the son of a bitch.
While he had no aversion to talking to the FBI, he also had no desire to waste time with a bunch of suits who would be more interested in Promise or him as suspects. Things were moving fast, and he didn’t have time to have coffee with Special Agent Price and his crowd. They exited through the back entrance where Casey’s SUV was parked. He noticed she had a roof rack for surfboards or other outdoor equipment, such as a kayak. During the thirty-minute drive back to the elementary school, they said very little. He imagined she was thinking of her Marine, and he was still hearing the ventilator talking to him.
Kill the son of bitch.
As they approached the school, she turned to him and said, “You know, I’m no strategic genius, but maybe you’re better off coming to my place for a couple of days.”
He had thought of that but didn’t want to be too forward. There was the practical issue of the two sets of clothing he had with him: blue hospital scrubs and his surf wear beneath. His Vans were okay, but if he was going to fight someone related to Promise’s disappearance, he wanted a pair of boots.
“Let’s cruise by South End. I’ll grab a change of clothes, and then we can do that. Thanks, by the way.”
“No problem. I’m just on the Wilmington side of the ICWW.�
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“Not far,” he said. The fact that she lived near or on the Intracoastal Waterway, coupled with her freckled tan and highlighted red hair, fit perfectly with the outdoorsy vibe he had been getting from her.
As she pulled up to Mahegan’s gray Cherokee, a twenty-year-old Chevrolet Malibu with rusted gray paint stopped next to them. Detective Paul Patterson opened his door and pushed his mass out of the car.
“Got a minute?” Patterson said. The detective looked at Mahegan and then at Casey. “I see our hospital is full service now,” he added.
“If you’re going to be an asshole, I don’t feel up to talking,” Mahegan said. Up close Patterson looked closer to sixty years old. His bulbous, veiny nose was an indicator of a heavy drinker. Still, the man had gravitas of some sort. He could hold his scotch, Mahegan guessed, presuming the brown sack on his passenger seat contained something cheap, like Johnnie Walker.
“Just following up on what you were doing in the school,” Patterson said.
Patterson waited for him to start talking, but Mahegan said nothing. Mahegan waited for Patterson to ask him a question.
“Let me put it this way. What were you doing at the school this morning?”
“You know damn well what I was doing there, Detective. I was visiting a friend, Promise White.”
“But why then? Why in the middle of the school day, when you knew she couldn’t talk to you?”
It was a good question, one that no one else had thought to ask. No way was he giving up Patch or their Deep Web communications protocols, so he said, “I was heading out this way and just wanted to say hi. It had been a while.”
“How long since you’d last seen her?”
“A while,” he said. “Now, let me ask you something, Detective. What made you rule Roger Constance’s disappearance as a murder?”
Patterson took a step back. Mahegan had caught him off guard, which he guessed was rare for the detective.
“That case was pretty open and shut,” he said. “Blood, guts, DNA, drag marks, and an eyewitness who saw some thugs carry him onto a boat. He’s shark bait now. We even have some video.”
“So why haven’t you caught the killers?”
“I’ll entertain your curiosity. Call me a sucker for big guys with stitches in their heads, like Frankenstein,” Patterson said with an edge to his voice. “We tracked the boat down based on the eyewitness and found it washed up near Southport, with a hole in the bottom of it and no body. Still, we found some traces of DNA from Roger Constance in there, plus some of his personal effects. The boat was registered to a phony limited liability company. So while it is still an open case, I saw no reason to make Layne or Misha Constance suffer any further and certified that there was substantial evidence—DNA, eyewitness, video, and physical—to rule this a homicide. I’m sure they needed the insurance money, with Misha being autistic and all.”
He stared at Patterson a moment and said nothing.
“Plus, we’ve got four other people missing. I’ve got nothing on them, and here, at least with Misha’s dad, we had enough evidence to make a ruling.”
“Four people? Anything like this?” Mahegan asked, pointing at the school.
“Nope. Nothing like this. All just random people. Two men, two women. One dad, a female college student, a mom, and some guy who sells real estate. No connection between them. And nothing like this.” Patterson nodded at the school.
“Recent?”
“All the same day, as far as we can tell.”
Mahegan looked at the school and then back at Patterson. It was both odd and interesting, but not germane to what Mahegan had on his plate. He hoped Patterson would find the missing people, but he would spend his energy on Promise and Misha.
Mahegan nodded and turned toward his vehicle. Casey had been watching and listening to the entire conversation. He had gotten the information he needed from the detective, and he really didn’t want to talk to him anymore about Promise. He had a mission to kill or capture the people who had done this to her. Who knew? Maybe the cases were related.
“I still need to talk to you,” Patterson protested.
“Talk to the nurse. I’ve got a concussion. I’ll talk to you in a few days.”
“I’m not stopping, you know,” Patterson said.
Mahegan closed the door to his car and sped out of the parking lot. Casey followed him to the surf shop’s back parking lot, where he quickly ascended the steps into his small apartment above South End Surf Shop. He spent less than three minutes grabbing his go bag full of necessary gear, and quickly changed clothes. Then he followed her to a condo complex just across the bridge from Wrightsville Beach. She opened her garage remotely and pulled all the way in, motioning for him to follow her. His Jeep barely fit into the deep cavern, but she punched the remote, and the garage door shut behind him. Exiting his Jeep, he saw she had a quiver of surfboards on U-shaped brackets along each side of the garage walls. He counted eight in total before he retrieved his pistol and go bag and followed her into a well-appointed condominium.
“Garage came down pretty fast. Your Marine teach you that?” he asked as she threw her keys on the granite counter.
“No point in letting people see you. Carver was always a bit paranoid. He’d killed so many bad guys, he sometimes believed that they were over here looking for him. With each deployment, the concern became deeper. So, yeah, we’d do some double backs and hiding of cars and that kind of thing. Though I just moved in here a few months ago, when the unit got finished. It’s brand new.”
Her point was, he had never been here. This was a new place for a new start.
She grabbed two beers from the refrigerator and handed one to him. “You’ll need this to wash down your pain meds.”
He looked at the orange bottle she had pulled from her scrub pocket and shook his head. “Not right now,” he said. “I can feel the local anesthesia wearing off from the stitches but can suck it up for now. The beer, on the other hand, will hit the spot.”
“Okay. By the way, what was that all about with that detective guy?”
“Misha’s father was killed a month ago. He is the lead detective and was wondering what I was doing at the school.”
“What were you doing at the school in the middle of the day?”
He stared at her for a moment, and before he could say anything, she said, “Never mind. You’ll tell me when you need or want to.”
He followed her into a den and dining room combination that had hardwood floors with authentic Persian rugs. The dining room table looked like mahogany and had matching wood chairs. The sofa and recliner in the den half were white leather and faced a stone fireplace with gas logs. He could smell the pleasant remnants of a candle, like a morning sea breeze. Above the mantel was a fifty-five-inch flat-screen television.
She sat at one end of the sofa, and he sat at the other. The coffee table had a few picture books of Hawaii, France, and South Africa. On the walls he could see a variety of surfing pictures, and the mantel held a few trophies with surfboards on them.
Casey noticed his information gathering and said, “I spent two years on the Roxy pro tour. My favorite surf spot was Biarritz, where I placed third. My best finish. The money wasn’t great—the real money is in the magazines and promotions—but it was a lot of fun. I did that for a couple of years, and then . . . I don’t know.... Something started to change, where I felt disconnected from it somehow, from a lot of things, actually. There was this emptiness I couldn’t explain, and one day I realized it just wasn’t enough anymore. So I moved back to Wilmington, finished nursing school, met Carver, and thought, you know, Here’s my life unfolding before my eyes. Suddenly everything had meaning, and I was good with it.”
He nodded. A pro surfer . . . who had her life blown up by an improvised explosive device she never saw.
“You have a laptop or a MacBook?” he asked.
“MacBook Air. Why?”
“I need to plug in a flash drive.”
&nbs
p; She was gone for a minute and returned, sat closer to him this time, and placed the MacBook Air on her lap.
“Let me see,” she said.
He retrieved the flash drive he had hidden in the Velcro pocket of his board shorts and handed it to her. She plugged it into the USB port and worked her slender fingers across the keyboard and touch pad. Soon a series of images appeared on the display of the MacBook.
“Looks like heavy-duty math,” she muttered as she clicked through the images.
“Screen shots of a whiteboard. The missing girl, Misha, is a math genius. Promise was tutoring her.”
Casey looked at him and then back at the screen. “This doesn’t look like someone taking high school or college math classes a few years before her peers. I have got a bachelor’s degree and have taken organic chemistry and some other tough courses, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”
She turned the screen and scooted closer to him. Her knee was touching his thigh, and he was trying not to be aware of it. As he stared at the equations, he recognized that they were algebraic number equations. He saw mention of Heegner points and knew that Promise and Misha were out of his league mathematically.
“This is very complex stuff, obviously,” he said. “A Heegner point deals with elliptical curves and infinity, something like that.”
She kept scrolling, and all the charts looked the same, basically, until she was about two-thirds of the way through the file and stopped.
“Interesting,” she said.
“Zoom in, please.”
They both stared at the screen. Written along the middle of the whiteboard was a complex equation that had an equal sign and a supposed answer, with two underlines beneath the number.
The words written in a child’s handwriting read: The Cefiro Code.
“Any ideas?” Casey asked, looking at him.
His eyes moved from the screen to her face. She was naturally beautiful. No makeup, the end of a long, tough day, and she looked like she had just stepped out of one of the magazines she mentioned.
