Scavenger

by Tom Savage

  “You’d better come inside, Mr. Farmer,” O’Hara muttered.

  He nodded and took a deep breath to clear his head. Then Mark Stevenson of New York City, formerly Matthew Farmer of Chicago, the only living member of the Farmer family, one of only three survivors of The Family Man, climbed the steps behind the former federal agent in charge of the case. The man who had once suspected him of the crimes. The man whose accusations had led to the eventual disappearance of Matthew Farmer and the birth, twelve years ago, of Mark Stevenson.

  He nearly stumbled at the top of the steps. O’Hara reached out his hand to steady him, and the two men went into the house together.

  12

  He was beginning to enjoy this.

  The man had collapsed. Fainted. That was what it had looked like, anyway. He wondered vaguely if there was something he didn’t know about “Mark,” about his general health. Perhaps he was diabetic or anemic. But nothing in the available information that had been amassed indicated any such problem. He guessed—and he was probably right—that it was simply the strain, the emotion of this meeting with this particular person from his past. Former FBI Special Agent Ronald O’Hara.…

  O’Hara. He thought about that, about the two men who had just disappeared into the house. Had this part been a mistake? It was the most questionable, in some ways the weakest element of the plan. But no: human nature being what it is, Ronald O’Hara would probably offer the next logical information, the next move in the game. He was counting on it.

  If not—well …

  He smiled, giving the pretty brownstone up the hill a last, satisfied glance before proceeding down the side street toward the rented Chevy Lumina, reaching inside his black duster as he walked. When he arrived at the car, he scanned the sidewalks and windows up and down the quiet street for possible witnesses. No, there was nobody watching him. Good.

  Popping the lock on the passenger side took mere seconds. He opened the door boldly, forthrightly, so that any casual observer would have no reason to suspect him. But no one entered the street or emerged from a building as he briefly leaned inside the car, and his task took less time than opening the door. He closed the door again, making sure it was once again locked.

  Then, with a last glance around, the tall man in the black duster glided away down the sidewalk. In a moment he had disappeared.

  13

  “Here,” O’Hara said.

  Mark took the brandy glass from the big man and sipped. The reviving warmth flowed through him as he settled back into the overstuffed armchair in O’Hara’s living room, gazing around. O’Hara went upstairs to take a shower, so Mark had a few minutes to himself.

  This was—or had been—the home of a woman. Definitely. The creamy walls and polished wood floors, the muted Oriental rugs, the heavy drapes at the big front windows, the carefully chosen furniture—everything in this room had been coordinated by someone other than the gruff, volatile man who now dominated it: O’Hara’s wife, better known as Miss Morris. Wonderful Wanda, to music lovers everywhere. But when Mark had asked after her before sinking weakly into the chair, the former agent had muttered, “She’s not here anymore.”

  Photographs, Mark thought. There are no photographs in this room, although it cries out for them. Several bookshelves and tables were bare of the expected silver-framed pictures: frozen moments of happiness in the lives of a family. Miss Morris had two grown sons by her first husband, now deceased, a jazz trumpeter as famous as she, and the two boys had been brought up in this house, by this man. Yet there were no mementos of them or their beautiful mother anywhere. Their absence was conspicuous.

  Perhaps Mark had been wrong about who owned the house. He wouldn’t ask; not now, not under these circumstances. But he wondered if Ronald O’Hara’s twenty-plus-year marriage was yet another victim of The Family Man.

  As Mark was thinking this, the big man came back into the room. He’d changed into a pair of old jeans and a faded black T-shirt with a bold message in white lettering on the front that read, STRIP SEARCH SPECIALIST. Mark blinked at the whimsical joke, briefly imagining the rowdy male colleagues on some beery, smoky, long-ago occasion, presenting their stern colleague with the entirely inappropriate gift. He could almost hear their raucous laughter, and he wondered if the man who now lowered himself to the couch across from him had so much as smiled when they presented it to him. Probably not. But he wore the shirt, had obviously worn it many times, which was interesting.

  “So, tell me about this Scavenger,” O’Hara growled without preamble. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, studying Mark’s face, waiting for the witness to give his statement.

  At least Mark was a witness now, as opposed to a suspect. Their relationship was improving. He stared at the man a moment, remembering his home in Evanston that cold, rainy Christmas Day thirteen years ago. The bodies of his parents and his brother, Joshua, and his sister, Mary, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Tornquist. And the dog, the collie Sam, which his sister had persuaded their silent, fearful mother to let her keep in the garage, despite Reverend Farmer’s displeasure. The winking tree and the garlands, and the carol that played over and over on the portable cassette player on the table in the living room. “Jingle Bells.” His father had not allowed a tree or decorations in the house, to say nothing of music, because the commercialization of Christ’s birth by the nonbelievers was an abomination. It had all been placed there, part of the staging, a theatrical set for the bodies on the couches and chairs around the room. The four slashed throats—five, counting Sam. And his father, sitting in his usual easy chair, his severed head in a garish holiday box beneath the tree several feet away from his body, staring up from the blood-soaked tissue.

  He remembered the freezing rain, and the ride in the backseat of an unmarked black car to the nearest precinct, and the spare, airless, cork-lined room where he had been interrogated for several hours by this man and four others. The popping flashbulbs from the press as he was taken in, only to walk out again nearly twelve hours later. Mark did not believe in God; not then, and certainly not now. God was something his family had believed in, and look where it had gotten them.

  He thought all of this in a matter of seconds. Brief flashes, freeze-frame images from his memory. He pushed them away again and confronted O’Hara. In answer to the former agent’s question, he took the folded printout pages from the inner pocket of the worn leather jacket that now lay across the arm of his chair. He unfolded Scavenger’s letter, smoothing out the paper, and handed it over, briefly explaining about Hackers, the coffee bar where the letter had been written. Then he sat back in the chair again, watching the man as he read, wondering what he was thinking. This was a futile speculation: he had never known, would probably never know.

  “Hmm,” O’Hara breathed at last. “Saturday. Then what?”

  Mark told him about 125 Kane Street, and the newspaper with O’Hara’s photo circled by a red marker, punctuated with a question mark. The mysterious ten thousand in his checking account. The rented car and the drive here to Washington.

  O’Hara nodded. “Describe the man.”

  Mark described him, just as Marisa Ramos and her husband had done.

  “Hmm,” O’Hara muttered again. “Not familiar.” He leaned back on the couch, and his permanently angry gaze wandered over to the front windows. “Could be an employee.”

  “Employee?” The moment he echoed the man’s final word, Mark cringed, remembering his father’s long-ago exhortation never to do that. It made a person sound half-witted. Reverend Jacob Farmer had been big on his children not sounding half-witted.

  “Working for someone else,” O’Hara supplied, as if Mark were indeed stupid. “This tall man with the scar could be legs.”

  Mark suppressed his instinct to repeat the final word again. He could figure out what “legs” meant.

  “The point is,” the former agent went on, “to find out who’s behind it. Someone connected to the case, I should think. They sent you to the last murder sce
ne, and to me. Now you and I are apparently supposed to guess the next move.”

  “I don’t want you involved,” Mark heard himself say. “He may have sent me here for a consultation, or whatever, but if you actually do anything, he may stop.”

  O’Hara shot him a look, and Mark was once more reminded of his father, the Fundamentalist minister. “I know that.” Then he leaned forward again, studying Mark. “Matthew: Mark. That’s easy enough. And Stevenson was”—he thought a moment, apparently remembering old police reports—“your mother’s maiden name. Yes. So Mark Stevenson wrote that book, and someone with a great interest in the case figured out who you were.” He examined Mark again, his dark eyes sweeping him from head to foot, like a searchlight. “You had long blond hair then. Bleached. And you had that beard and that earring. That’s how you looked in all the published pictures. You were, what? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? You’re quite different now. And you’ve lost that dazed, glazed look. You’re not on drugs anymore.”

  Mark forced a thin smile. “Thirteen years, one day at a time.”

  “Good,” O’Hara said. “You don’t look like the same person.”

  “I’m not the same person. Matthew Farmer died with—with the rest of his family.”

  “Yes, I can see that.” O’Hara looked him over once more before returning his gaze to Mark’s eyes. “The Family Man is dead. I’m certain of it. He would have—he would have continued, otherwise. Perhaps he killed himself, or perhaps it was a car crash or a barroom brawl or an earthquake. Whatever it was, I hope he died screaming. I hope it hurt a lot. But he’s gone.”

  Mark nodded, returning the gaze. “I think so, too.”

  “So why now?” O’Hara asked the air between them. “Why you, now? That’s what we have to figure out. Someone—a relative, a neighbor, one of the cops, or—or one of my people. Someone knew something about him. Has known all these years. They waited until you surfaced, until you wrote that novel, before coming forward. Which makes me wonder.…”

  Mark drained the brandy glass and set it down on the coffee table between them, coughing slightly at the unfamiliar burning sensation in his throat. He avoided alcohol, as he avoided the cocaine and pills that had once been such a big part of his life. Once. Before The Family Man. He watched O’Hara stand up and wander over to the nearest front window, waiting for him to continue.

  The big man gazed out at the darkening view, his back to Mark. He would be able to see the houses across the way, Mark supposed, but not much more than that. The darkness was entering the room. Mark reached over and switched on the standing lamp beside his chair.

  “Okay,” O’Hara said at last. “What did we have? The Tennant family in New Orleans, Mardi Gras. The Webster family in L.A., Fourth of July.” He turned to glance at Mark. “The Farmers in Evanston, Christmas.” Then he looked back out the window. “The Carlins in Green Hills, New York, the following Halloween. And the Banes family in Brooklyn, the Easter Sunday after that. Two years, start to finish. Five local forces. And us, the Bureau. I had, let’s see, about forty people working for me, one way or another, and maybe a dozen field people in each location. A hundred federal people, or thereabouts. Some were on the case exclusively, but most of them were doing several things at once. Most of those people are still with the Bureau, and none of them had any personal ties to the case. Ditto the local cops. If we cross off the professionals, that leaves three people. Well, two, actually.”

  He stopped speaking abruptly, turning around to face Mark again. He appeared to be thinking, coming to some kind of decision. After a moment he blinked, glanced at his watch, and crossed the room to the archway leading to the front hall. “Come on.”

  Mark stood up and followed the man as he crossed the hall into the dining room, switching on lights as he went. They made their way through the swinging door on the other side of the room into the kitchen. The lights were bright here, gleaming on the modern metal fixtures and the white tile and porcelain. There was a butcher-block-covered island workspace in the center of the room, with copper and cast-iron cookware suspended from a grid attached to the ceiling above it. The curtained back window above the double sink afforded a view of the rest of Georgetown. A beautiful room, a woman’s kitchen: the offstage presence that was Wanda Morris asserted itself yet again.

  He watched in fascinated silence as O’Hara reached into the refrigerator and produced an enormous, raw sirloin steak on a platter. Next came lettuce and tomatoes and onion and cucumber from the crisper compartment. A box of seashell pasta from a cabinet. A large pot was filled with water and set on the range to boil, and the broiler beneath the oven was set to preheat. The vegetables were placed on the island, followed by a big plastic bowl. Then O’Hara pulled a long knife from a rack near the stove. He hesitated a moment, glancing from the shiny blade to Mark and back again. There was a brief flash of something unreadable on his face. Then he extended the knife to his guest and jabbed a thumb at the bowl.

  Mark nodded, took the potential deadly weapon the former agent had thought twice about giving him, and began to make the salad. “So, I guess this means you don’t suspect me anymore.”

  “I never did, really,” O’Hara said as he measured coffee into a filter and placed it in the coffeemaker. “We were desperate by that point. But don’t expect an apology. I apologized formally at the time—and to the media, no less. I’m not sorry for interrogating you. You were a suspect, however unlikely.”

  Mark looked up from slicing the cucumber. “What do you mean, unlikely?”

  “Okay, you were a runaway college dropout junkie who had a hate on for your dad. And you were only twelve miles away at the crucial time, with your girlfriend. We knew that much. But we were certain it was Family Man. Besides, Ms. Barlow alibied you. And I observed you later, at the funeral.” He slid the steak into the broiler. “And I talked to your sponsor in Narcotics Anonymous. He said you were planning to reconcile with your family at the time of—well, at the time.” He glanced over at Mark as he poured pasta into the boiling water. “That’s why you went home that Christmas morning, right? You were going to bury—I beg your pardon, I mean you were going to try again with them.”

  Mark nodded, noting the other man’s discomfort at what he’d almost said: bury the hatchet. In the circumstances, it would have been a horrible thing to say. “I told you that when you questioned me.” He’d been thinking of Judy Barlow, his girlfriend and fellow former addict, when something else O’Hara had said registered with him. “You talked to my sponsor? Wow, so much for the A in N.A.…”

  O’Hara shrugged. “He was working for me.”

  Mark paused again in his chopping. “Nick was a Fed? Funny, he told me he was a heroin addict.”

  “He was.” O’Hara was getting dinner plates and silverware from various cabinets and drawers. “He’s still with the Bureau. He now has the job I used to have.”

  Mark almost asked him if he missed his job, but thought better of it. Instead he said, “Back in the living room, you said something about three people, or two, actually. What were you talking about?”

  O’Hara was checking the broiler. “How do you like your steak?”

  “Rare.”

  “Good. As soon as you finish with the salad, dinner’s ready.” He drained the pasta and added butter and parmesan cheese to it. As he worked, he said, “I was thinking about the three survivors. The daughter in New Orleans, the son in Green Hills—and you.”

  Mark tossed the greens in the bowl and took the oil and vinegar O’Hara held out to him. “Yes, that makes three of us. Why did you say, ‘Two, actually’?”

  O’Hara shrugged as he sliced the steak in half and transferred it to the dinner plates. “Seth Carlin, the guy in Green Hills, New York, is dead. I heard he did himself, with sleeping pills or something, not long after his family was murdered. And then there were two, as Agatha Christie once observed. You and Sarah Tennant.”

  He added pasta to each plate before picking them up and heading for the sw
inging door. Mark followed with the salad.

  “Sarah Tennant,” Mark said as they went into the dining room. “Tell me about her.”

  “Let’s eat first. I’m hungry, and I’m sure you are, too. Then I’ll tell you about Sarah.” He met Mark’s gaze as they sat down at the table. “You should know about her.”

  “Why?” Mark asked.

  O’Hara picked up his fork before replying.

  “I think she may be your next stop.”

  14

  Mrs. Morgan picked up her fork before replying.

  “I think she may be your next stop.”

  Tracy reached for her water glass, hoping the action would mask her grimace. This was the last thing she needed, advice from her mother. But her mother was concerned, and her argument, in this case, was legitimate. Mrs. Morgan had liked Tracy’s first husband, Alan. She had trusted him and believed him, as Tracy had, and she was as disappointed as her daughter when she learned that her trust in him was misplaced. Once burned, twice shy: Mrs. Morgan had actually used that phrase a few minutes ago, as they had sat down to spaghetti at her dinner table overlooking the East River.

  Even so, Tracy had to wonder about her mother’s advice. She would have to think about it, assess the possibilities of it. She was also a bit surprised that the perfectly simple solution had not occurred to her.

  Well, it wasn’t perfectly simple. Nothing was.

  “It’s just a suggestion,” Mrs. Morgan added, handing her daughter a warm slice of garlic toast. “I mean, how many women have your option? You’re getting married in June, committing yourself. Again. And you yourself admit that you don’t know anything about Mark. Well, what I mean to say is, you don’t know enough about him. I must say he’s charming—but so was Alan. Your father and I—”

  “I know, Mother,” Tracy offered quickly, hoping to stem the tide before the floodgates opened. “You and Dad were crazy about Alan.”