The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  She forwarded the link to her regular email.

  “One more thing,” said the next text message, “and make sure you delete this as soon as you get it.” Esposito was obviously worried about getting in trouble for helping her again. The message bubble was an image, not text. She clicked on it. It was a picture of Royce, standing in line.

  “That was from a day ago. Philadelphia International.”

  Del stared. The lawyers had said Roy was with his family. Had they gone on a trip? That wasn’t impossible, maybe even likely. Eden had offices all over the world. She didn’t see anyone else she recognized in the picture.

  She whispered, “What are you doing?”

  And was it Roy or Jake Hawkins she saw in that image, looking back up at the camera?

  47

  A red and gold terminator carved the stratosphere in half. The horizon, seen from forty thousand feet up, was bent into the slightest of curves. The middle pane of the airplane’s window was frosted over in a fine spiderweb of crystallized water. Roy leaned his forehead against it, trying to soak in the minus-sixty-degree air rushing by at hundreds of miles an hour just inches away from him.

  His eyes drooped.

  “Sir, your water.”

  He blinked and turned from the window.

  The flight attendant smiled, a plastic cup balanced in her slim fingers. She had to lean over from the aisle, over the guy beside him, who was trying to pretend he was sleeping. Roy threw two pills into his mouth, took the cup from the flight attendant, and downed its contents in a gulp.

  He handed the cup back to her. His hand trembled. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” She hesitated. “Are you feeling okay, sir?”

  Were the airline staff trained to watch out for infections? People who looked unwell? He had read online about reports of another bird flu outbreak in the Philippines. Would she report him? He’d felt stinging in the back and side of his neck earlier and, taking a closer look, had found small lesions.

  “I’m fine. Flying just makes me a little nervous. I’m taking my anxiety pills. I’ll be fine.”

  “Do you need a pen to fill out the customs form?”

  He nodded, so she handed him one. “Just tell me if you need anything else.”

  She smiled again and adjusted the red and blue kerchief tied around her neck before walking back up the aisle. The deep-blue mood lighting of the Boeing 777’s cabin shifted to a brighter shade to harmonize with the rising sun.

  Roy watched the flight attendant go.

  Ten hours stuck in this coffin, sweating in this tiny seat. How did she expect him to feel? Then again, it could be worse. He felt sorry for the guy beside him, who couldn’t escape Roy’s stink.

  His seat thumped forward, and Roy gritted his teeth.

  Two assholes behind him had been drinking the whole flight. Ten hours, and they’d never stopped jabbering and ordering more drinks. When the flight attendant refused to serve them anymore, he heard them giggling as they filled their cups from a bottle of whiskey they’d gotten from the duty-free shop. College buddies, on their way somewhere.

  Ten hours out of Amsterdam, each minute an hour, and Roy’s brain hadn’t stopped circling around and around. Unable to sit still, he squirmed and fidgeted in his seat, his knees bobbing up and down. He bit his fingernails raw.

  Images flashed through his mind: of Angel, his body covered in congealed blood; of Shelby Sheffield’s insane eyes and the flash of spurting blood as a blade pierced his carotid artery; of Primrose Chegwidden—strangling her, cutting the ears from her head to get rid of those damned earrings.

  Roy’s eyelids drooped, but he balled his fists. He had to stay awake. Had to keep the monster away.

  The intercom crackled. “This is your captain. We’re beginning our descent. We’ll be on the ground in half an hour, so the cabin crew will be coming around to clean up.”

  A slight forward pressure as the airplane decelerated, the nose edging down. The sky outside the window gained color. The horizon brightened. Roy pressed his head against the window, closed his eyes, and tried to force the gory images from his mind.

  His seat bumped again.

  “You going to take that?” Jake Hawkins asked.

  Roy opened his eyes. The dead man sat in the seat beside him, clear as day. He stared straight at Roy, his face bright, every detail sharp, even the two-day-old stubble. Jake looked rested, healthy, his short blond hair combed back, his blue eyes clear.

  “We’re almost there,” Roy replied.

  Jake said, “I wouldn’t take that. I would tell them to shut up.”

  Again the back of his seat thumped forward.

  This time, Roy turned in his seat. “Hey, can you guys quit it?” He still had the pen in his hand.

  His chair jerked forward yet again. The two guys behind him were wrestling or something, horsing around. Roy unclipped his seat belt and turned to look over the back.

  “Can you stop that?”

  The guy behind him had a full, thick beard and a red plaid shirt, a drink in one hand. He said aggressively, “What did you say?”

  “I said, can you stop hitting the back of my seat?”

  “Just relax, man. Chill out.”

  “If you don’t stop hitting my seat …”

  “You’ll what?” The kid took off his seat belt, too, and stood up, their faces just inches apart.

  “Sit the hell down.” Roy shoved the kid back into his seat, but instead of just sitting, he bounced back up and swung a fist at him.

  With his left hand, Roy grabbed the kid by the shirt collar and twisted it so that it half-choked him. He gritted his teeth as a wave of rage boiled up inside.

  A crunching to the left side of Roy’s face sent his head swiveling around. He tasted blood.

  The kid’s friend had punched Roy and was winding up to hit him again. Roy reacted without thinking, the pen still in his right hand. He jammed the point of the pen right into the kid’s friend’s neck. Hot blood spurted into Roy’s face.

  The guy gurgled and clawed at the pen stuck in his throat. Screams. Someone jumped on Roy from his right side.

  He still had the first kid by the shirt collar, and literally swung him around, lifted him out of his seat, and used him as both shield and bludgeon. The fury surged. He let go of the kid and stabbed at another person trying to restrain him. More blood spattered the aircraft’s interior.

  Someone yelled for everyone to get back.

  More screaming filled the cabin as people clambered over each other to get out of the way. Everyone terrified. Everyone staring at Roy. He stood up straight and turned to find the voice telling everyone to get back.

  Ten feet away, a man stood up straight, a gun in his hand. Horns sprouted from the man’s head. He identified himself as an air marshal, told Roy to freeze or he’d shoot. Roy charged, letting loose a guttural scream. The gun went off once, twice, the bullets hitting him but hardly slowing him down.

  Roy grabbed the air marshal by the throat and jammed the pen into the side of his head.

  * * *

  The ground crew peered in through the window. They had just brought around the jet bridge to connect to the 777’s front exit. The flight crew had locked themselves inside the cockpit, refusing to come out.

  Paramilitary airport guards in flak jackets urged the airline staff back. The lead officer lowered his visor and unclipped his semiautomatic weapon from its single-point harness, raising his other arm. His fist straightened into two fingers pointing forward. He pulled on the latch to open the door.

  It slid open, and he stood back, weapon out.

  Blood spattered the cabin from floor to ceiling. Two bodies lay slumped on the deck. Cries and whimpers came from inside the cabin. The man hesitated, then inched forward. From inside came a grunting noise like a hog feeding, and then a ro
ar.

  * * *

  “Mr. Lowell?”

  Roy jumped in his seat, his fist tightening around the pen.

  “Mr. Lowell, we’ve arrived.” The flight attendant smiled nervously.

  She kept her distance while waking him.

  He blinked and rubbed his eyes. The cabin was empty, the lights on full. Bits of paper were scattered on the floor.

  “I think you fell asleep, sir. Welcome to India.”

  48

  “I’m very sorry, but there is nothing that can be done.” The little man in a suit two sizes too big for him gave a dishonest smile, his head wagging back and forth. “Now, go. Go.”

  Mrs. Achari was Tamil, and the man spoke Urdu. In Chennai, these two languages were the most common, but they were speaking in English at his request, to lend a sense of legitimacy to a process that was anything but. The man’s eyebrows twitched as he waited for her to get up from her chair, and he glanced at the man behind her.

  What lawyer needed a bodyguard? Only one who had something to fear.

  Honking cars and cries of street vendors in the alleyways two floors below echoed through the open windows, with the smell of fried food accompanying the noise. The veneer-wood-paneled office had no air-conditioning.

  She waited.

  Waiting and staying in place were about the only weapons she had. A small Tamil woman of the Harijan caste didn’t have many options. That she had been admitted into his office at all was a sign of the times, a generosity that untouchables of her generation could not have imagined fifty years ago when she was growing up here—but that was not to say they would listen. Times were changing, though, and she was determined to help them along.

  “There are elections coming, Mr. Deepak,” she said, not moving.

  “Mrs. Achari, you are squatters, nothing more. It is an illegal slum.”

  “Half the village was made legal during the navy construction.”

  “Which permits have now expired. This is prime oceanfront property which for too long has been unlawfully occupied. There will be relocation.” Mr. Deepak dabbed his bald head with a handkerchief he pulled from his breast pocket. “Kidneyvakka is a dark stain on Chennai’s history and will be cleansed away with the construction of the new World Trade Center Towers.”

  “I have seen your relocation,” she said. Even after the government outlawed the term “untouchable,” new insults were found to make her people less than human. “You are tearing these families apart.”

  “Which are not real families on real property.”

  “Have you no heart?”

  He nodded at the man by the door and waved his hand. “Go now. I said to go.”

  Mrs. Achari’s knuckles lightened as she gripped her small purse. Inside it was the demand of the villagers. “We have a lot of fight left in us, Mr. Deepak. I assure you that.”

  The man laughed and said, “All the best parts of your people have already been taken.”

  49

  “Welcome to Nissequogue State Park,” announced a weathered green sign half obscured by a patch of bayberry bushes. Del scanned left and right at the crosswalk, paused to check for oncoming traffic, and then picked up her jogging pace.

  To her right, the imposing brick facade of the Kings Park Psychiatric Center towered high over the bare branches of oak trees around it. “Insane asylum” was a more apt description. The massive complex of dozens of buildings was so ruined by time and asbestos that no one could redevelop it, despite its location right next to the river.

  The asylum had peaked at ten thousand patients in the 1950s, she had read, and was originally a farming colony complete with a piggery. It was also one of the first institutions in the world to use shock therapy and lobotomies. By the late 1980s, it had housed a ragtag collection of the criminally insane. Thirty years ago, it closed after one of them escaped—into the very woods she was running into now.

  The place gave her the creeps.

  Feeling the asylum looming behind her, she ran harder up the gravel path, between the orange-and-white-striped metal posts marking the trail entrance, slackening her pace only after she had gone a few hundred feet into the leaf-carpeted forest of naked maple, white birch, and poplar. Just a few days before New Year’s, and the temperature hovered above freezing, the air crisp, the faint smell of wood smoke from a chimney somewhere.

  Maybe it was her mother’s Creole background, but a part of Del didn’t altogether disbelieve in spirits and ghosts and such, no matter how much the analytic side of her brain tried to dismiss it as childishness. Places like Kings Park had a dark energy that was hard to dismiss, a feeling of dépaysement, as her mother would say—the French word for an emotion that had no English equivalent: a feeling of disorientation from being out of your home country, or in a place you simply couldn’t understand.

  She had that sensation all the time now.

  They had gotten a call from the medical examiner’s office yesterday.

  They had analyzed the body parts found in the storage locker. One of them matched the hiker who was last seen in these woods. The ear matched tissue samples from Primrose Chegwidden, but they hadn’t released this to the media yet. Jake Hawkins’s DNA was found all over the storage locker, along with DNA from at least half a dozen other people the FBI was trying to match.

  All this made sense, but there was a new mystery. All the rest of the body parts were from cadavers stolen from the research wing of Stony Brook Hospital the year before.

  Why?

  It didn’t make sense.

  And where had Roy gone?

  Why had no one sounded an alarm?

  And why had Roy been hanging out with a hood connected to the Matruzzi mob? She had gone over the images from when Roy went to Hell. That Fedora character had gone in with them. Shouldn’t the FBI be looking into the Matruzzis? But nobody would listen to her. She had gone and talked with Dr. Brixton’s support group, and they said Fedora was there legitimately. He had body dysmorphia issues, but no one had seen him lately.

  Maybe.

  Even small-time gangsters had mental problems—maybe more than most.

  And then there was the scribbled note that private detective Angel Rodriguez had on him when he was attacked: “Heaven all benefits, Trust all highoz.” Rodriguez was still in the ICU at Presbyterian and hadn’t woken up yet. Maybe never would. They were worried about brain damage now. She hoped he would make it. He seemed like a nice guy.

  At the center of it all was Eden Corporation and Dr. Danesti.

  How did it all tie together?

  She crested a ridge, and the trees thinned. She stopped at a sandy bluff overlooking the mouth of the Nissequogue River, emptying into Long Island Sound. Gray ocean stretched across the horizon. She bent over, hands on her knees, and took a few deep breaths, then straightened up to look again at the view.

  The sun was just near the horizon.

  This was the spot and almost the exact time of day that the hiker who disappeared here was last seen, almost two years ago. This was what the woman, the same age as Del, had seen just before she died. She closed her eyes and tried to feel the woman’s spirit.

  Speak to me, she whispered to herself. Tell me what happened.

  She opened her eyes.

  A family walked by her. A woman with three children, all of them dressed in fleece and proper hiking pants and boots. Del smiled at the woman but didn’t get a smile back. She waited a few seconds and then began to follow them along the trail at the edge of the beach. The woman glanced over her shoulder at Del from time to time.

  It wasn’t hard to understand why. A dark-skinned person walking behind them.

  Del shrugged it off. She tried to ignore little details like this, but when your job was being a detective, it was hard not to notice. Having an Irish father, straight from the old country, had drilled a stubborn pra
cticality into her, not to bother with such trivialities—and even, perhaps, a touch of melancholy about the plight of simply being human.

  The job required some of that. Maybe that was why the Irish made such good cops.

  She glanced again at the family walking away. Perhaps she was wrong. Maybe the mother was just protective of her kids, no matter who was following. Human beings were tribal by nature. Skin color wasn’t always the core issue. It could be religion, sports, or any other way people identified. Her father had told her stories of horrible bigotry between the Irish Catholics and Protestants—two visually indistinguishable groups of Caucasians.

  How did she identify?

  She was still working on that.

  For whatever mixed-up thing Del was, most people couldn’t see the beauty she saw in the world. For a few minutes, she stood in awe and watched the sun go down, her private palette of millions of hues stretching from infrared to ultraviolet, lighting the clouds in frenetic psychedelic glory.

  Roy was a monster sewn together from parts, but in an increasingly schizophrenic world, maybe everyone was a little bit like him now—except that he was a murderer and still on the loose. She had to find him. Or someone had to, and soon.

  * * *

  “Yes, hello?” said a woman’s voice.

  Del took a deep breath. There was always something more you could do, even when you thought there wasn’t. She replied, “Is this Interpol?”

  “This is the Washington Bureau Office of the Department of Justice. We interface with the Interpol organization regarding international warrants. Are you a law enforcement officer?”

  “Yes, well, no.”

  She had come back to her parents’ place in Brooklyn. It was late, and everyone else was asleep. She had the couch in her mother’s studio to sleep on, while the grandkids and her sister and her sister’s husband fit into the small spare bedroom. Her family liked to stay together over Christmas, and more than a few drinks had no doubt been imbibed tonight.