Scavenger

by Tom Savage

  Thus the game had been born, devised mainly between Seth and O’Hara. Wanda Morris, O’Hara’s famous wife, had helped them out considerably, bringing in her movie friends to set the scenes and spill the blood. Sarah and Robert Gammon were eager to be a part of it. The only facet of the plan that had caused disagreement between the two men was Tracy Morgan. O’Hara had initially balked at the idea of abducting an unwilling civilian—particularly one who was in love with their quarry. But Seth had worn down the agent’s resistance, and everything had worked out as Seth had envisioned it.

  O’Hara had added touches to the plan, for which Seth was properly grateful. The former FBI man had come up with the “divorce” story and gotten Miss Morris away from the action completely, for her own safety should Farmer figure out what they were doing to him. O’Hara had also placed his friend and former subordinate, Millicent Call—armed with a semiautomatic under her white sweater—at the meeting between Farmer and Sarah Tennant Gammon at the clinic. And it was O’Hara who had suggested telling Matthew Farmer that Seth had committed suicide years ago, to prevent him from looking in Green Hills before they were ready for him.

  Now he finished reading, reached for the wineglass, and drained it. Then he stood up. Yes, it had been a most satisfying game, and the manuscript was going to be a good one. But now it was time for sleep. Tracy Morgan had invited him to dinner at her favorite restaurant in New York City tonight, and he would be there. He would actually make a foray out into the world. It was time to get used to humanity’s reaction to his face, and he liked Tracy very much. She was kind to him, and she never treated him in either of the two ways he hated: with pity for the death of his family—or as a freak.

  A freak. The way his parents and his brother and sister had treated him. He would never forget the Institute twenty miles from here, where he had spent most of his teen years before his family died. The freak house. He glanced over at the photograph of himself at his first and only piano recital there. His mother and father had sat there in the “musical therapy” room among the paraplegics and mental defectives, listening to him play in embarrassed silence, and then they had left him there and gone off on another world tour. His sister and brother—musical prodigies, both—had not even attended, nor had they ever visited him there. Not once.

  He looked over at the portrait of his mother, Raina Carlin, so beautiful in her satin gown and Fabergé necklace. Then he looked over at her piano, the Bechstein. She had refused to touch any other instrument.

  Now the Bechstein was his, and he thought about his mother whenever he played it.

  He picked up the pages and tucked them under his arm. Sleep, he decided, then dinner with Tracy in the city tonight. Ivan would be driving him there. Ivan had said he had business in New York that he could see to while Seth was with Tracy. Seth had smiled and nodded, wondering if Ivan was seeing a woman.

  Well, Ivan deserved a night on the town. He had played the game well.

  He smiled to himself, glanced once more at his mother’s portrait, and made his way upstairs to bed.

  Ivan delivered his employer to the restaurant near Gramercy Park. He held the door for him and and saw him safely inside with Tracy Morgan. Then he drove around the corner and parked. A few minutes later he was at Tracy’s building, ringing her buzzer. The ring was answered immediately, and he went inside and up to the second floor.

  Ron O’Hara was sitting at the dining table in Tracy Morgan’s apartment, and there was a woman with him. The woman let Ivan in, then went back to what she had apparently been doing before he arrived, crouched over some elaborate recording device, adjusting knobs. O’Hara stood up and shook his hand in greeting, then indicated the empty seat next to him at the table, across from the woman. Ivan sat down with him, and the two of them watched the woman work.

  Ivan had not seen the former FBI agent since that night two weeks ago, and he had been surprised when the man had contacted him three days ago, asking him to come here. O’Hara had told him that Tracy Morgan had set up dinner in a restaurant with Seth Carlin at O’Hara’s request, and that Ivan was to drive Seth into the city, then join him at her apartment. That was all Ivan knew, but he’d done as the agent had asked. As instructed, he had not told his employer about the rendezvous.

  There were boxes of Chinese food in the center of the table. Without a word, O’Hara handed him a plate and silverware and a cold bottle of Tsingtao beer. Ivan helped himself to sweet-and-sour pork as he watched the woman working with the machine, listening to the two familiar, disembodied voices emanating from the speaker.

  “The Cobb salad is good here.”

  “That sounds wonderful, Tracy. I’ll have that, too, and the soup.”

  “So, how have you been? How’s the book coming?”

  “Well, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve just finished the first chapter.…”

  Ivan put down his fork, looking sharply over at the other man.

  O’Hara returned his gaze. “She’s wired, and she’s not alone with him. The people at the table next to them are friends of mine.”

  Ivan stared, then took a long pull at the beer and set the bottle on the table. “Why are you spying on Mr. Carlin?”

  The former agent took a bite of lo mein, put down his fork, and leaned back, regarding him.

  “Okay,” he said, “here goes. Matthew Farmer killed the Tennants in New Orleans and the Websters in California and his own family in Chicago.”

  “Yes,” Ivan said. “I know.”

  Now Ronald O’Hara leaned forward, looking Ivan straight in the eye. “Period. That was it. Those are all the people Matthew Farmer killed. He became a serial killer so he could get rid of his own family without being seriously suspected. Once he’d done the Farmers, he moved here to New York and assumed a new identity, Mark Stevenson. Do you understand that, Ivan? He stopped.”

  Ivan stared. He was suddenly finding it difficult to breathe. The room seemed to be closing in on him.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, aware of the weakness of his own voice. It was nearly a whisper.

  O’Hara reached out with his hand now, placing it gently on Ivan’s wrist. “I now know where Matthew Farmer—perhaps I should say, Mark Stevenson—was that Halloween, and the following Easter. He was working for the Post then, and he was punching clocks. He didn’t kill your employers, and he didn’t kill the Banes family.” He leaned toward Ivan, whispering. “He didn’t kill your wife, Ivan. Seth Carlin did.”

  Ivan stared. His first instinct had been to laugh, but something in the other man’s eyes stopped him. He was trying to take it in, but his mind was not fast enough. “What?”

  O’Hara picked up Ivan’s beer bottle and handed it to him. Ivan drained it, watching as the former federal agent opened a second bottle, took away the empty, and replaced it. Ivan took a swig from the second bottle, then slumped back in his chair, the Chinese food forgotten. He continued to stare at the other man.

  “Do you have any proof of that?” he whispered.

  “Yes,” O’Hara said. “Oddly enough, it’s the same proof we had on Matthew Farmer. When Seth Carlin called me last January, he said he knew Mark Stevenson was Matthew Farmer, and he thought Matthew Farmer was The Family Man. I hadn’t read Dark Desire at that time, but he got me interested in it real fast. He told me about the music in the book, and he asked me if it had any basis in fact. Then he said an interesting thing. He said, ‘There wasn’t any music at my house, and there wasn’t any in Brooklyn.’ Those were his exact words: ‘There wasn’t any in Brooklyn.’ He never even noticed his slip. I immediately began telling him about the music at the first three scenes: it was classified, but I wanted to see where this was going. Then he told me his proposal, the scavenger hunt that would trip up Matthew Farmer. And I couldn’t resist. I had one suspect who knew about the music at the first three scenes, and another one who knew there wasn’t any music at the final two scenes. Both men knew too much—and, at the same time, not enough.”

  Then O�
�Hara told him everything he’d put together in the four months since Seth Carlin had first contacted him:

  Seth had been badly burned in a fire at the age of fifteen, a fire that had started in the basement recreation room where the family later met their fate. Last January, O’Hara went to the Lowrey Institute, the place where Seth Carlin had lived at the time of his family’s murders. He’d lived there almost constantly for six years, since the fire. What the powerful Carlins had kept secret, what even O’Hara had not discovered until now, was that Seth had started the fire deliberately in an attempt to kill himself and his entire family. The fire wasn’t his first display of violent behavior. As for the Lowrey Institute, Seth’s parents were its most generous donors, and information about Seth was not made available to anyone. His physical wounds had been dealt with as well as they could be, but his mental rehabilitation had obviously been unsuccessful.

  Seth’s actions on that Halloween and Easter, unlike Matthew Farmer’s, were unaccounted for. He had not been at the Institute on either date. Some inmates, including Seth, could come and go as they pleased, and the new director of the Institute, who did not approve of the former administration that had catered to the Carlins, had shown O’Hara the sign-out sheets.

  At the time of his family’s murders, Seth Carlin had been dismissed as a suspect, mainly because of his physical condition. But a few weeks after his family was killed, he had been interrogated by federal agents when letters were found, letters from Raina Carlin to her husband in which she told him she was afraid to visit their son at the Lowrey Institute alone, because he had repeatedly told her he hated the family, and on at least two occasions he had threatened her life. He had also threatened the lives of his brother and sister. Seth had been questioned by the FBI about his mother’s letters, but the interviews were perfunctory and inconclusive. Shortly after that, The Family Man had struck again. O’Hara and his people had gone back to their original theory of a random sociopath, and Seth was forgotten. Now, all these years later, O’Hara admitted his own error in not investigating him further.

  The change in modus operandi between the first three scenes and the last two suggested not one killer but two. Whoever had committed the final two crimes had used different knives and saws. More important, he had apparently not known about the music that had been playing at the first three houses. The final two crimes followed the Family Man pattern only generally, as it had been described in newspapers and on television.

  The last detail that had convinced O’Hara that there were two Family Men, he told Ivan now, was the market research firm in Chicago where Matthew Farmer had been employed. The director, Alice Powell, had refused to talk to Seth for his forthcoming book, but she had cooperated with O’Hara. She had shown O’Hara Matthew Farmer’s client list. It included the Tennants and the Websters, which implicated Farmer, but not the final two families. Matthew Farmer had not known those people existed.

  Ivan stopped him here. “Wait a minute. How would Mr. Carlin have found out about the family in Brooklyn?”

  In answer, O’Hara got up and went over to Tracy’s coffee table in the living room. There was a briefcase on the table from which he took two objects, a magazine and a big book that looked like a hotel register. Ivan watched in silence as O’Hara brought them back to the table and sat down again. He glanced over at the woman, who was still monitoring the conversation in the restaurant a few blocks away.

  “There’s so much I want to tell you about myself, Tracy.”

  “I’d like to hear about your family—if you don’t mind talking about them, I mean.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind …”

  It was a New York magazine from a week in January eleven years ago, two months before the Banes family in Brooklyn was killed—and one week after Seth had been interrogated by the FBI. George Banes smiled up from the glossy cover over the legend, SURGEON OF THE YEAR.

  Ivan stared. “Mr. Carlin subscribes to this magazine.…”

  “Yes,” O’Hara said. “We know. The article inside describes the Banes family in great detail, right down to the dog.” He put the magazine aside and opened the register book. “This is an old record from a hotel in Brooklyn, about four blocks from the Banes house. Last December I looked around the area again, because I figured Seth would have stayed somewhere close to the scene of the crime. He does tend to attract attention, you know. I went around to the local hotels—there aren’t many in that part of Brooklyn—asking if anyone fitting Seth Carlin’s description had stayed there that Easter. It was a long shot, but someone did remember him.” He pointed at a signature.

  “ ‘Stan Corbin,’ ” Ivan read. “That—that’s his handwriting, I think.”

  “It is,” O’Hara said. “One of the managers recognized a photograph of Seth Carlin. He was at the hotel four blocks from the Banes house from Good Friday to the following Monday.”

  Now the two men were silent, drinking their beers and listening to the disembodied voices.

  “Would you like to go to a movie after dinner, Tracy?”

  “Oh, gosh, I can’t, Seth. I’m going to meet a friend of mine. How about next week? Friday?”

  “Fine. I’ll have Ivan bring me into the city next Friday. We’ll have dinner again.”

  “That will be lovely.…”

  O’Hara grunted, a sound Ivan interpreted as a laugh. “She’s meeting a friend, all right! She’s taking Jared McKinley to an AA meeting. She’s seeing a lot of him lately. He hasn’t touched a drop since the day he heard about Matthew Farmer.”

  Ivan was barely listening. He was trying to remain calm. He had believed that he had avenged Anna’s death, but now he realized that he had not. The old rage welled up in him. And with the rage, more than the rage, was the confusion, the sheer bewilderment he’d felt since that awful morning twelve years ago when he’d walked into the basement of the house in Green Hills and found them.

  “Why?” he cried. “What was the point of all this?”

  O’Hara was watching him, an expression of sadness, of weariness on his face. He had once been in a line of work, Ivan knew, that brought him more than his share of human atrocity. Ivan had seen cruelty in his own life, more than most, but this was beyond him. It was not beyond Ronald O’Hara. He sipped his beer, rested his arms on the table, and leaned forward.

  “Suppose you are an arrogant young man,” he said, “who has decided to kill his entire family. How would you do it? Well, we have a peculiarly modern phenomenon that springs to mind: the serial murderer. Jack the Ripper was the first big star, but there have been many since: Crippen, Christie, Gein, Fish, Gacy, Berkowitz, Bundy, Dahmer. Many others. So you join them, become one of them. But you can’t start with your own intended victims; that would be too obvious. What do you do?” He shook his head. “You create a fantasy, a pattern that will accommodate the people you eventually want to kill: upper-middle-class, white, Christian. Parents, three young adult children, at least one pet.” He leaned toward Ivan. “And if there’s anyone else in the house—say, a housekeeper—well, you do them, too.”

  Ivan winced, feeling the prick of long-unshed tears at the backs of his eyes.

  O’Hara continued. “So you find likely scapegoats, a couple of other families similar to your own, and you use them for practice. A curtain-raiser, if you will, warm-up sessions. Then you simply wait awhile and do the people who were your intended victims in the first place. You might be suspected briefly—Matthew Farmer was—but you’ve already created the illusion, the idea that some lone wacko is out there doing this. And, this being the modern world, with similar stories on television and in newspapers all the time, everyone is perfectly willing to believe it. We’ve heard it all before.”

  Ivan stared at the man, mesmerized by his voice, the almost complete lack of emotion in it. He listened, wondering what this man had seen.

  “Now,” O’Hara went on, “suppose you are another arrogant young man who has decided to kill his entire family. You have the same problem as Young
Man Number One, but you have a distinct advantage. The first guy has already created the illusion for you. You follow the stories of The Family Man in the papers, and you see the remarkable similarities between the random victims and your own intended victims. Well, if you are arrogant enough, it is irresistible. You don’t have to warm up: the other guy has already done that for you. All you have to do is kill your family and make it look like he did it. So that is what you do.”

  As if sensing his emotions, O’Hara put his hand on Ivan’s wrist again. “You kill them all, including—including Anna. And nobody even thinks of suspecting you, especially if you happen to be … well, someone who’s been in a fire, someone people will automatically feel sorry for in the first place. But then, weeks later, some letters come to light, letters that make the investigators look at you, focus on you with new interest. You panic, of course. And then you do the only thing you can do.”

  He reached over now and picked up the New York magazine. The two men gazed down at the smiling George Banes, the surgeon responsible for saving and prolonging countless lives, who had lost his own so violently.

  O’Hara finished on a whisper. “You continue the illusion. You continue The Family Man. The investigators run off to the new scene of the crime, and you go on with your life.”

  Ivan nodded, and O’Hara leaned forward once more.

  “But that isn’t quite the end of it,” he said. “Now, more than a decade later, you pick up a book, a so-called novel about the long-ago killings. You read it, and you realize that you have found him. The only other person in the world who knows that you are responsible for the final two scenes. The only other person in the world who can possibly understand or appreciate what you both have done.” A grim smile came to his lips. “Well, wouldn’t you just kill to meet that man? So you devise a way: a game. A scavenger hunt. And you bring the mountain to Muhammad, as it were. You meet—and, incidentally, destroy—the only other person on earth who knows your secret.”