by Tom Savage
It was empty. His gun was definitely gone.
Frantically, he inspected his pockets. His change, his key ring, his wallet with credit cards and cash. But no gun.
And no key. The big, old-fashioned key to Tennant House was gone, too, along with the gun. And the dead body. And all the rest of it.
Now he was running, out of the house and across the veranda, into the bright sunlight and down the drive to his car. Yes, at least that was still there, waiting where he had parked it last night. He got in the car and started the engine, glancing briefly over at the cell phone on the seat beside him before tearing off down the curving, moss-framed drive to the main road, trying to reverse his route in his mind so he would not get lost. Time, he knew, was precious. Scavenger was out there somewhere, waiting for him. Making plans. And somewhere out there, too—with Scavenger, perhaps—was a dead body. The body was an unknown man with bright red hair.
Traffic became heavier as he neared the city. Of course: it was eight-thirty, the start of another business day. Wednesday. He maneuvered the red Taurus through the streets as best he could, arriving at last in the lane off Decatur near Jackson Square. He parked in a space reserved for patrons of Mullins Guest House, snatched up the cellular phone, and ran inside and up the stairs to his room, the room he had rented but had not slept in. He switched on the overhead light and stood in the doorway of the guest room, staring.
There, on the blue chenille bedspread, was the black-lacquered box.
He moved warily forward, regarding the box, noting its height, breadth, and depth, and the shiny black ribbons and bow that had so carefully, so lovingly been replaced. He was reaching out for it, wondering.…
At that moment, the cell phone in his other hand began to ring. He didn’t even pause long enough to allow the second thrill of apprehension to register on his brain. He flicked the instrument on and raised it to his ear.
“What?” he cried.
There was a sound on the other end of the line, a harsh intake of breath, followed by a little grunt that sounded like a laugh.
“And good morning to you, too, Mr. Stevenson!” Scavenger said. “Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed—or should I say, the floor?” Another chuckle.
“Fuck you!”
A pause now, and then the mellifluous, gratingly controlled voice continued. “Now, now, what did I tell you about being rude to me? Have you forgotten, Mark? I certainly hope not. Oh, indeed I do. Otherwise, you’ll spend the rest of your life, however long that turns out to be, wondering. Aren’t you the least bit curious? I mean, I thought Tennant House would just have you fainting with curiosity.”
As upset as he was, Mark somehow remembered not to shout; there were Mrs. Mullins and the other guests to consider. His voice was low but sharp, a furious whisper. “Who was he, you sick son of a bitch? Who was the man in the chair? Who did you murder now?”
Another agonizing pause, another sharp laugh. Then the voice again, smooth as honey. “All in good time, Mark—though why your incivility should be rewarded, I simply cannot say. Listen carefully. You have until midnight tomorrow night. Your next destination is chronological, if you remember your Family Man lore, and who remembers it better than you? Eh, Mr. Farmer? You wrote the book, didn’t you? You are looking for a word. That should be a cinch for a wordsmith such as yourself. A word, Mr. Mark-Matthew-Stevenson-Farmer. Just—a word.”
Mark was staring at the bed in front of him. “What’s in the box?”
Another chuckle. “Oh, I think you should look for yourse—”
“What’s in the box, asshole?”
Now a long, pained sigh. “Oh, dear, your manners! Honestly! The mask is in the box! The mask of the scavenger. A souvenir of your sojourn to New Orleans. Midnight tomorrow night. You’d better get a move on. But have some breakfast first, before you go. I understand Mrs. Mullins is rather famous for her strawberry pancakes. She also provides each of her guests with a complimentary copy of the morning newspaper. Bon appétit, Mark.” A final chuckle, and then the line went dead.
Mark uttered a low growl of equal parts frustration and disgust. Then he dropped the cell phone on the bed beside the box, tore off his clothes, and went into the little bathroom. A long, hot shower helped to make him feel slightly better, but he knew he wouldn’t feel completely well again until the game was over.
The game. He thought about that as he put on fresh clothes and packed everything else in the suitcase. Almost as an afterthought, he tore open the black box, removed the Mardi Gras mask, and tossed it in the bag. The box with its macabre trimmings went into the waste-paper basket. He picked up the bag and made his way downstairs to the dining room.
It was late morning, and any other guests there were had apparently already eaten and gone. Mrs. Mullins seated him at a little table by the french doors, and she smiled and asked him if he’d enjoyed his stay in the room. Not having the heart to disabuse her, Mark lied that he’d slept well. He ordered the strawberry pancakes and gratefully accepted the little pot of coffee her assistant, a young woman in a waitress’s uniform, brought from the kitchen. In minutes, the proprietress returned with the food. She lowered the heaping plate before him and placed a crisply folded morning newspaper beside it before leaving him alone in the room. He could hear clattering and running water from the kitchen as he began to eat.
He didn’t get very far. He’d taken only four bites of the delicious pancakes before he idly picked up the newspaper and unfolded it. He placed it on the table and glanced down at the front page.
He stared, and the little coffee cup in his right hand nearly fell. He put the cup down and snatched up the paper. On the top half of the front page was a large photograph of a familiar-looking African-American woman, smiling under her snowy white cap. The big headline above the picture read:
NURSE SLAIN
It couldn’t be, he thought. And yet it was. He knew it, even before he read the accompanying story, saw the name: Millicent Call, 32, a nurse at Pontchartrain Clinic …
Millie, the other nurse had called her yesterday. Nurse Call.
She had come off her shift at midnight. Twelve-oh-four a.m., according to her time card. She had said good night to two colleagues and left through the front door of the hospital, headed for her car. At approximately one-thirty a.m., a night watchman patrolling the grounds of the clinic had found her body in the farthest, darkest part of the nearly empty parking lot. She had been shot once through the heart, dead at least an hour, and a bullet had been retrieved. Preliminary investigators believed the shell to be from—
Mark lowered the paper to the table, staring blankly out the window at Decatur Street, frantically arranging a crude time line in his mind. He had arrived at Tennant House just before ten o’clock, and he had been drugged some fifteen minutes later. Ten-fifteen, plenty of time. The man with the scar had taken two things from him, the front door key and …
—a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver.
Scavenger had used his gun—his registered weapon—to murder the only witness to the scene in the dayroom of the clinic yesterday. Which meant…
No. Sarah Gammon was safe: he knew it. There was no way the man with the scar could reach her, not on the fourth floor of Pontchartrain Clinic. Nurse Call had been message enough. Nurse Call and the red-haired man in the Mardi Gras mask, whoever he was. The game had taken a turn, and the only way Mark could ensure Sarah Gammon’s continued safety was—
From nowhere, from everywhere around him, he heard the little chuckle, and the words: I understand Mrs. Mullins is rather famous for her strawberry pancakes. She also provides each of her guests with a complimentary copy of the morning newspaper. Bon appétit, Mark.
—to continue following instructions. If he did so now, Scavenger would follow him. It was the safest recourse, for Sarah Gammon as well as himself. He had received the new instruction—Your next destination is chronological, if you remember your Family Man lore—and he had understood.
Play the game, Mar
k, he told himself. Just play the fucking game.
Or more people will die.
And I will be one of them.
One hour later, Mark was at the airport. He turned in his rental Taurus at the Hertz counter and purchased a one-way ticket on the next available American Airlines flight to Los Angeles.
ARTICLE #3
WORD
29
When her telephone rang, Tracy was sitting at the table in the dining area of her Gramercy Park apartment, picking listlessly at her Japanese takeout dinner while she plowed through the latest submission from one of her authors. Another Wednesday evening: indifferent sushi and polished, professional, but ultimately indifferent romantic suspense. With a sigh, she put aside the manuscript of Passion Flowers and went to answer the phone.
Her mood improved immediately.
“Howdy!” Mark’s cheerful-sounding voice reached through the receiver to kiss her lightly on the cheek, and her living room seemed to brighten at the sound. She smiled wryly, thinking that her reaction—or, at least, her description of it—belonged not in the real world but in the heavy-breathing pages she’d just been reading. Still, she was delighted.
“Mark! Darling, how are you?”
“I’m just fine. I’m in L.A., if you can believe it. I just got here a couple of hours ago.”
“L.A.? I thought you were in, um, Washington.” She bit her lip; she’d almost said New Orleans.
“Well, I was. But I had to come out here today. I’m—I’m interviewing a couple of people here, and I wanted to meet them in person. So I’m here for a day or two.”
She noticed the slight change in his voice from buoyant and assured to a lower, more sober hesitancy. She wondered if this had anything to do with his failure to mention New Orleans as his last stop. But she decided not to comment on it. She was thinking of all the new information she had on him, courtesy of his former wife and the newspaper reports. She would not tell him about that; she would continue the charade of normality until he was back in New York, and they were once again face-to-face.
“I miss you,” she heard herself saying now.
“I miss you, too,” he said. “What are you doing today?”
She managed a laugh. “It’s ‘tonight’ in New York now. I’m eating sushi and reading Stella Verlaine’s latest bodice-ripper. A titled Englishwoman and a pirate named Jack Blood, shipwrecked together on a desert island. Need I say more?”
His laugh echoed hers. “Even so, it sounds more interesting than what I’m doing. I can’t see my contacts until tomorrow, so I’m currently deciding between room service and one of the restaurants downstairs.”
“Ah,” she said. “Decisions, decisions.” She cringed inwardly, hating this vapid conversation but uncertain how to change the subject. What could she say? So, Matthew Farmer, tell me all about your dead family … She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and said, “When do you think you’ll be coming home?”
There was a slight pause, and she could almost hear him thinking. At last he said, “Sunday. Monday at the latest. But you can do me a favor in the meantime, if you would. Could you sort of check on Jared, maybe give him a call? I don’t know that he eats regularly if someone isn’t making him do so.”
Jared, she thought. Of course.…
“Sure,” she said immediately. “I was thinking of calling him. Maybe I’ll take him out to dinner one night.”
“Good idea. Make sure he gets some solid food with his booze.”
“I will.”
“Thanks,” Mark said. “Well, I guess I’d better—”
“Mark?”
“Yeah?”
“Mark, I love you. I really do. Come home soon, okay?”
Another pause. Then she heard him say, “I will. I love you, too, Tracy. I’ll see you Sunday or—”
“Monday at the latest,” she finished for him, unable to suppress the nervous little giggle that came after it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, say hello to your mom, and get a square meal in Jared. And take care of yourself. ’Bye.”
She opened her mouth, trying to form words, to ask him what he meant by that last remark, but then she heard the little click as he hung up. With a sigh, she replaced her own receiver.
Neither of them was still on the line to hear the third click.
Tracy had to consult her Rolodex to get Jared McKinley’s number. Then she called him, fully expecting the answering machine. She knew he never answered the phone when he was writing, just like Mark. Or when he was drinking. Or when he was with a woman. Which, now that she thought about it, pretty much accounted for all of Jared’s waking hours. She was therefore surprised when the phone was answered on the second ring.
“McKinley,” the familiar, gruff voice said.
“Hi, Jared, it’s Tracy Morgan.”
“Tracy! What’s shakin’, babe?”
“Well, Mark just called, and he—he asked me to say hello to you.”
“And hello to him, too. Where is the lucky stiff?”
“L.A., doing research or something. He’ll be back in a few days. Uh, Jared, how’d you like to have dinner with me tomorrow night? I—I’d like to see you, and I want to talk to you about something.”
“Nothin’ serious, I hope.”
Tracy blinked. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. You just sounded kind of … funny.”
She wasn’t going to get into this now. “How about Dave’s Tavern, say, eight o’clock?”
“You’re on, babe. I’ll even put on a clean shirt.”
“You do that. I’m buying.”
“The hell you are!” His big laugh boomed through the phone.
Tracy smiled at the sound. “Oh, yes, I am. I’ll see you at eight tomorrow.”
“Forget the clean shirt,” he said. “If you’re buying, I’ll be naked!.”
Now she was laughing. “Just dinner, Jared!”
“Oh, all right. I’ve never stolen a friend’s girl, so I’ll be a perfect gentleman—though you do make it difficult. I hope Mark appreciates you. See you tomorrow.”
“ ’Bye, Jared.” Tracy was still laughing as they both hung up.
Again, she didn’t hear the third click.
She made her way back to the table and sat down. Another bite of sushi. Another sip of diet Coke. She was reaching for the manuscript pages when she paused, thinking.
He’d been in Washington, then New Orleans, and now he was in Los Angeles, and she didn’t know why. Research for a new novel, he’d said, and she’d accepted that. But he was in the final phases of another novel, a work in progress, that was due at his publisher soon. So why was he doing this research now, of all times, when he had something much more pressing to do? He hadn’t explained that, and she hadn’t asked.
It occurred to her that she took everything people told her at face value: she was probably entirely too trusting. That would account for what had happened with Alan, her ex-husband. She was honest, always had been, and some fundamental, naive part of her automatically assumed that everyone else was honest, too. But they weren’t.
She thought back over the two phone calls. The first had been stilted, strained, and the second had been charming and friendly. What on earth is Mark doing? she wondered. And why was I unable to ask him? Why was it so much easier to talk to a casual friend than to the man I’m about to marry? Why was he in New Orleans and—
Los Angeles.…
Then she realized. She had been hearing about his past, his personal involvement in the Family Man tragedy, the involvement that had prompted him to write his novel Dark Desire. Now she made the other connection: New Orleans and Los Angeles. They were the first two places where The Family Man had struck. Mark was going to the scenes of the crimes.
And he had a gun.
Tracy did not finish Stella Verlaine’s novel that night, nor did she sleep. She sat in her living room, unaware of the darkness giving way to dawn outside her windows, thinking about Mark. She thought
about his apparent preoccupation with the unsolved case. Most of all, she wondered whether she could accept his obsession and still be his partner in life.
“Do you love him?”
“Yes.”
“And are you going to marry him, no matter what you may learn about him?”
“Yes.”
Her replies had come so easily, so blithely, in the bar last night. She had been talking to his former wife, a very nice woman who had made the obviously painful decision to divorce him rather than live with his demons. Tracy had not yet married him, and now, for the first time, she truly wondered if she should.
She came to no conclusion, made no decision that night. She would wait until he was home and they were face-to-face. He would have to talk about it. He would have to be honest with her. If he was unwilling to do that, she would make new plans for her future.
THURSDAY
30
An empty lot. He had traveled nearly three thousand miles to stand here, staring at an empty lot.
Well, not quite empty. The broad hilltop had recently been flattened by bulldozers, and the cement block foundation of what would soon be a basement had been laid. It was going to be a complex of twelve one- and two-bedroom condominium apartments when the work was done. That would be sometime next year, according to the big billboard that faced the road in front of the property. There was a painting on the board, an artist’s rendering of the finished product: a sleek, elegant structure surrounded by fountains and lawns and lush foliage, none of which presently existed. It would be very nice, he supposed, a pleasant place to live.
But it was not what he’d been expecting. He’d been expecting a murder scene.
Mark had arrived in Los Angeles late yesterday afternoon, and the activities of the previous night and morning in New Orleans had at last taken their toll on him. Throughout the flight, he’d felt himself growing increasingly exhausted as he’d gone over every detail in his mind, from the moment Saturday when he’d received the mysterious computer diskette that had started the whole thing. Now, three cities and two dead bodies later, he was no closer to understanding this than before.
