The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  The press was going to have a field day over this one—in what was already a sensational case. She wished there were some way to protect them, but Primrose was beyond all that.

  “Want to sit down?” she said to her partner. “You don’t look so good.”

  They backed up twenty feet, to a respectful distance from Primrose’s body, while forensic technicians scrambled over with plastic sheets and cameras in hand. Coleman and Del sat in the sand and stared at the ocean.

  “How did you know?” Coleman asked.

  “I didn’t, not really, not until the very end.” Del glanced over her shoulder at Samuel Phipps’s house.

  61

  Roy woke from sleep and bolted upright.

  The memory of four nights ago was still etched into his mind. Every time he closed his eyes, his brain seemed to want to relive it, to go back over every detail of the glowing monkeys in the blue vats. He turned onto his side, the new exo-suit whirring to help him, and pulled down the blankets covering him. The couch he lay on was surrounded by packing boxes.

  The two Suffolk County police officers guarding him roused in their chairs opposite the couch. One rubbed the back of his neck and said, “You sleep okay, Mr. Lowell-Vandeweghe?”

  “Roy—just call me Roy.”

  The young man smiled. “You want some coffee, sir?”

  “That would be great.”

  Outside the window of the Hawkinses’ place, Roy saw two more Suffolk County officers standing guard. They were guarding this place as if it were the White House, but still protecting Hope and Elsa from him as much as from anything outside. They didn’t quite trust him yet, but then, this would be a process for everyone to adjust to.

  Himself most of all.

  Detective Devlin had stopped him that night.

  She had screamed at him that it was Sam who killed all those people. That he was hallucinating. She’d said that it wasn’t Atticus who changed the trust documents, but Sam. Explained that it was Sam who had originally tried to kill him by sabotaging his car that night two years ago. She had told him to think of Hope and Elsa. His friend Sam’s expression had changed from leering glee to empty disappointment and then to anger as he turned to run. It was then that Roy had dropped the doctor and the machete.

  By that point, a dozen NYPD officers from the Seventh Precinct had flooded into the lab, grabbed Roy, and handcuffed him.

  Detective Devlin had insisted that the real perpetrator was Samuel Phipps. When they refused to arrest him, she had arrested him herself. It was her own father who had come up with his officers. If it had been anyone else, Roy doubted they would have let her arrest Sam.

  Danesti and Devlin had defended Roy, told the police that he needed medical attention, so instead of taking him down to the station for booking, they had taken him into Eden’s emergency center. There, with officers guarding him, they pumped him full of sedatives and antirejection drugs.

  He’d slept for two full days. When he woke up, the visions of Jake Hawkins were gone, the voices in his head quiet—or at least, quieter.

  While he was asleep, Fedora, the man who had befriended him at the Brixton support group, had come out of the woodwork. Fedora’d heard that Samuel Phipps was arrested, and he’d come forward and admitted to the police that Sam had hired him to follow Roy, to drug him with water and coffee laced with ketamine and flunitrazepam.

  That was what had induced Roy’s blackouts.

  He hadn’t been losing his mind, wasn’t slipping his grip and ceding his volition to Jake Hawkins. He’d been drugged. Each time he blacked out, either Sam or Fedora had given him a bottle of water or beer. They kept him strung out for days sometimes, with almost complete memory loss.

  It was Fedora’s confession that day—and an admission that he’d also helped Sam steal the cadavers from Stony Brook Hospital and fill the storage locker with pieces of them—that had secured the search warrants for Sam’s house. Roy picked up the newspaper from the coffee table. “Long Island Gambler Is the Real Fire Island Killer,” read the headline. It had a picture of Sam beneath it.

  Penny had always thought Sam was a creep. Roy should have listened to his wife. All those times he’d gone to visit his friend in the past months, he had a feeling of impending doom, of something wrong. It wasn’t something out there, though—it was Jake trying to tell him about Sam.

  Sam must have killed Jake Hawkins. The police found records of him calling the labs where Jake had done his blood tests for the MMA fighting circuit. When he heard they were waiting for a body donor, he did his research and found a close enough physical match to Roy. He must have found out Jake had signed his organ donor cards.

  Had Sam tried to kill Roy to begin with? Fed him drugs at the party and sabotaged his car? The man wasn’t speaking—was denying everything—so the details were emerging slowly. Who else knew about the trust? Atticus? Roy’s mother? His wife? For how long? He didn’t know yet. Didn’t want to know.

  Roy glanced through the rest of the article.

  The story detailed how Sam had changed the terms of the trust, tried to make it look as though Dr. Danesti and Eden Corporation were trying to steal the two billion dollars. Sam knew that it would never happen, that the conflict of interest would never pass in the courts. And with Atticus gone, the money would spend years in legal limbo.

  Sam would have been left as the sole administrator, able to siphon off money from it, drag it out forever while Roy and Jake were implicated as the Fire Island Killer. Sam even had some kind of rationale. The paper quoted him as saying that what Eden Corporation was doing was against God and that he had to stop it.

  Sam still didn’t admit to the other killings, even though they had already dug up twenty more bodies in the dunes in front of his house. He still seemed to think he could get away with it.

  62

  Danesti was not Roy’s twin.

  It was a delusion, part of Roy’s fever dreams. Roy had been born to a surrogate, according to testimony from his mother, but no record of it remained. Was the woman he found in Chennai really his birth mother? It was possible, but Adhira and Achari were two of the most common Tamil names. Even so, to ease Roy’s mania, the FBI did a DNA test on Danesti and Roy. It came back negative. They weren’t even remotely related. And because a surrogate was not genetically related to the child she bore, there was no way to determine whether the woman he found in India had birthed him.

  Dr. Danesti hadn’t been having an affair with Roy’s wife, either. Someone else was. They questioned her and found out she’d been seeing someone from the charity where she worked. This was another merging of reality and fantasy that Roy’s mind had invented—but even so, he had helped uncover the truth behind Jake Hawkins’s murder.

  Del explained all this to Coleman as they made their way across the dunes toward Samuel Phipps’s house. Four more bodies had been found in just the past hour.

  “So you used your trick—that thing?” Coleman said. “To figure it out? How’d you know it was Sam?”

  Del replied, “For one thing, when I met Sam, he lied about supporting my mother’s work in the seventies. It was an obvious lie, easily found out—yet he did it anyway. It’s a habit of psychopaths. They just don’t think they’ll get caught.”

  “And he invited you here, didn’t he? Tried to get you to come to his house?”

  Del literally shivered at her partner’s words. She hadn’t made the connection. She had found Sam charming, had even considered coming out here to his home—for police work, she’d told herself—and she couldn’t help feeling some attraction to him at the time. She might easily have ended up in one of these bags, buried in the cold sand.

  She said, “When Sam showed up at Eden, I told him to tell Roy it was Atticus who changed the trust documents, that Danesti didn’t know about it.”

  Samuel Phipps had repeated those exact statements to Roy. />
  She had watched his face in the blue glow from the tank beside him and saw the flicker, the telltale narrow lines of color that only she could see. Was she positive? She would have bet that he was lying, but it was still a gamble. She had seen the same flickers when he said he’d supported her mother.

  She also knew that Samuel was second in line, after Atticus, to administer the trust. They had just dug up the old lawyer’s body, fifty feet from the house. No DNA test yet, but Del had looked at that hulk of a body. It was definitely Atticus Cargill.

  When the NYPD refused to arrest Sam that night, she had taken the risk, arresting him herself and dragging him off into a cell in Suffolk County. From a strictly legal point of view, it was valid—a police officer could make an arrest in a neighboring jurisdiction if she was invited, and she had made sure, on her run over, to ask her father to invite her into Manhattan. Even so, she’d had to endure an avalanche of legal and career threats from the commissioner and a parade of lawyers, but she stood her ground.

  She hadn’t really been 100 percent sure about Sam until they got the warrant to come and dig on his property. Angel Rodriguez had finally woken up, and in his weak state, he had been able to tell the police that it wasn’t Roy who attacked him. At first, he’d thought it was, but when they showed him pictures of Sam, he changed his mind.

  It all made sense once she saw the angles and lines. Ten years ago, before he inherited this place, Sam had lived out in Long Beach—where they thought the Fire Island Killer might have lived. He’d even been interviewed by the original case detectives. He’d been under financial stress back then—from gambling, of course—before his parents died and he inherited the lavish beach home worth eighty million. His business had failed years ago. He had mortgaged the house to the hilt, and ten years later he was broke again.

  Sam had a way of hiding out in the open as only the very rich could, but psychopaths had a hard time evaluating risk. He always thought he would win. At the end, Delta had realized that if that was who he was, he wouldn’t be able to resist watching his final victory. So she called him, gambling that he would come with her to face Roy.

  “So you’re the hero,” Coleman said.

  “Nobody’s a hero in this.”

  Del surveyed the scene. Orange flags dotted the dunes, detailing the locations of all the bodies.

  She said, “The real hero is Roy. He’s the one who uncovered the clues, knocked all the apples off the tree for me to find.”

  “That guy’s nuts.”

  “Roy is the victim. He could have killed Danesti at the end, but he stopped himself despite the delusions. If he’d killed the doctor, we might never have been able to put the finger on Sam.”

  That was true. If Roy had killed Danesti, there would have been no way she could maintain any semblance of control and arrest Sam. He would have gone free that night and probably would have tracked down and killed Fedora, maybe even finished off Angel.

  Coleman muttered, “This is definitely one for the weird books.”

  The roar of the tumbling ocean waves felt soothing. The sun came out. Seagulls squawked overhead.

  “Danesti didn’t press charges,” Del said. “Roy is still Eden’s golden ticket for new customers, so the doctor downplayed the incident. Said it was simply a misunderstanding. He even asked me to officially make Sam’s arrest in Suffolk County. The doctor didn’t cancel his press conference. He still made his big announcement at midnight.”

  Coleman pulled a clump of grass out of the sand. “Somebody needs to stop what he’s doing. It’s not right. He’s guilty in this somehow.”

  Del didn’t disagree, but then, what could she do about it? She’d heard Dr. Danesti had secured billions in funding to build a platform in the Pacific, create his own city in international waters that would be free from regulations. That was his big announcement. It was beyond creepy. Frightening. The future was arriving faster than she felt prepared for.

  “So Roy’s okay?” Coleman asked.

  “I guess.”

  Once they had calmed Roy down that night at Eden, they gave him sedatives, and Danesti administered massive doses of antirejection and anti-inflammatory drugs. The poor guy had slept for almost forty hours straight, and she had learned that when he woke up, he was calm and lucid. By then, the FBI agents were on-site and explained what they could to Roy. They didn’t have anything more serious than passport fraud to hold him on, and Danesti insisted he didn’t want to press charges, so Roy had been free to go—with an escort, of course.

  And there had been only one place he wanted to go.

  Her phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number but answered anyway. “Hello?”

  “Detective Devlin?” said a voice. “I’m calling from the Washington Central National Bureau. My name is Agent Dartmouth.”

  “I’m sorry, who?”

  “We’re with the Department of Justice and interface with Interpol. We’re the ones who called to warn you about Mr. Jake Hawkins’s passport being used at JFK.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  Was she still in trouble? Were they going to tell her boss? Even after all this?

  “It’s what we can do for you.”

  “I still don’t understand?”

  “Detective Devlin, we’d like to offer you a job.”

  63

  Hope unwrapped the last of the plates and put it in the cupboard.

  The house was still full of packed boxes, but she had decided to unpack just this one. Outside the kitchen window, footprints crossed the new snow. Elsa was on the swing out back, and Roy stood behind her, leaning down to push the swing, sending her higher. One of the two Suffolk County police officers standing on either side of the swing set nodded at Hope.

  She had scarcely seen her little girl smile in more than a year and a half. On a backswing, Elsa looked over her shoulder and waved. Hope waved back, then held the hand to her mouth and fought back yet more tears.

  What a difference a day and half made. The story had broken that morning, right after the first of the bodies turned up on Samuel Phipps’s fifty private acres of beachfront sand dunes. Roy had wanted to come here, to tell them first before they heard it on the news, but he was still in poor shape. Shaking. His face was still swollen, with bandages over his sores, and his eyes were bloodshot. He looked as if he had woken from the dead, but he insisted on dragging himself out here to talk to Hope and Elsa, to make sure they heard it from him.

  He hadn’t known what to do with himself afterward, so Hope had demanded that he stay. She laid him down on the couch, surrounded by boxes, and covered him with a blanket. She told him to sleep. A doctor had come by to check on him.

  More police had arrived in the middle of the day, and more after that, but not to deal with Roy. A flood of media and television trucks had jammed the small highway and roads leading in and out of Calverton. The story had gone global. Out of respect, the Suffolk PD had sent a small army of officers over to cordon off the Hawkins house. They even had cops posted in the woods.

  The diner had called this morning to offer Hope her job back.

  * * *

  Elsa got off the swing and took hold of Roy’s hand. She led him back to the house. Hope went to the back door and opened it, shooed her daughter inside, and told her to get cleaned up. “I have to speak to our guest,” she said, and pulled on a coat to step outside.

  “I can’t stay,” Roy said as soon as the door closed.

  The two police officers in the backyard kept a respectful distance.

  “Come sit with me,” Hope said. She sat down on the wicker back-porch swing and patted the place beside her.

  Roy said, “I’m not right. In the head.”

  With a shaking hand, he lifted his baseball cap to reveal the scars in his forehead and temples. “I did that to myself. And I almost killed someone.”

 
She remained silent, unsure what to say.

  This man was a stranger to her, and yet … most of him was her husband. Her Jake. A juddering collision of strangeness and familiarity splintered in her mind. Her emotions shattered and recombined, revulsion and attraction struggling for dominance. Till death do us part—that was what she promised Jake, but was he really dead? Was a part of him still alive? She didn’t know how to rationalize it, but she could not deny what she felt.

  Roy said, “I’m not safe to be around Elsa.”

  “You’d never hurt her.”

  “How do you know?”

  She hesitated, then put a hand on the forearm of his parka. “I just know.”

  “I talked to him.” Roy’s jaw muscles flexed. “At least, I thought I talked to Jake. I was hallucinating, but Jake did stop me from killing Danesti. I felt him.”

  She couldn’t imagine what this man had been through—was scared of him even now, if she was being honest. But he had risked his life to come back here and protect her and her daughter. Moreover, he had put his sanity on the line, risking something perhaps even worse than death.

  “I can tell you that Jake loves you and Elsa more than anything. I felt him pulling me back here, no matter where I went. I can still feel him.” Roy put his hand on his chest.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I asked Penny for a divorce. This morning. Even back before the accident, she had met someone else. Our marriage has been over for a long time.” Roy looked away. “What happened to your husband was my fault—”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I’m still to blame.”

  She didn’t try to argue with him. One thing did bother her, though. Of the stories she had read online, some talked about the prodigious body count, but just as many were more interested in the cash, the trust fund. “The Two Billion Dollar Man,” they had started to call Roy. They seemed more interested in the money than the lives lost.

  “What about the trust?” Hope asked. After all, it was the reason her husband was murdered.