by Steven James
“I can take care of myself.” She handed him her card. “My number.”
He studied it. “Mourn in peace?”
“It’s my website. Photographs. It’s for mothers. Call me.”
* * *
+++
Blake entrusted Mannie with leading Julianne Springman back downstairs.
She’d exhibited admirable initiative and courage showing up here tonight, and Blake respected her for that. He decided that if he could help her, he would, in honor of his brother and the love Dylan had apparently shared with her.
“That’s enough,” he said to the escort.
She compliantly stepped away from the mannequin and eyed him alluringly.
“Come here.”
She sashayed toward him, took his hand, brought one of his fingers to her mouth, kissed it gently, and then traced his fingertip in a circle over her moist lips. Then she said softly, “Are you ready to get started now with just the two of us?”
“I’m ready.”
“Well, then.” She reached for his belt buckle. “Let the games begin.”
STAGE II
Anger
Vapour. Photos of the dead.
Barbed wire. Julianne’s proposal.
7
Saturday, November 3
Nearly all of the trees at the graveyard had already turned, and most had bare branches. Now, in the wind, dried leaves skittered before me across the ground, creating an iconic Halloween-ish feel.
The sun, as if it were anxious for winter to arrive, was crouched low against the late-morning skyline, and cold shadows draped along the north side of the gravestones.
Our team checked Jon Murray’s phone but found no indication that he was planning to meet anyone on the night he died. None of his friends knew of any plans he had to see anyone either. Over the summer he’d worked as an intern for a nearby office of the social networking and search engine giant Krazle, but no one from work was aware of him being depressed or suicidal. We were still looking into filmed suicides and homicides—ones he might have heard about or viewed online.
Bill Greer was fifty-two, but most people would’ve probably pegged him as a decade younger. With his bushy mustache and stocky frame, he’d always reminded me of the pictures I’d seen of boxers in the early twentieth century.
As we were getting our earpieces situated, he said, “You know how they sometimes talk about it being a cat-and-mouse game? Cops and criminals?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a misnomer.”
“Why do you say that?”
“To the mouse, it’s never just a game. If he loses, he dies. If he escapes, he’s been traumatized.”
“But if the cat loses, well, no big deal.”
Greer nodded. “Exactly. He just walks away. Maybe hungry, maybe not—maybe he never even intended to eat the mouse anyway. Just terrorize it.”
“You’re saying it’s really just a cat game.”
“Yeah.”
“So are we the cat here,” I said, “or are we looking for him?”
“That is the question, isn’t it?”
Because of who the victim was and since there’d been only a private viewing at the funeral home, a crowd of at least a hundred people, including the press, had already gathered near the gravesite, and more cars from the funeral procession were still arriving, pulling slowly and reverently to the curb so the mourners wouldn’t have to walk far on the muddy ground, which was still recovering from this week’s storms.
On a planet where death is a certainty, where it’s never more than a heartbeat away, a person’s passing might come to us as a surprise, but I don’t think we should ever claim that it came out of the blue.
We’re all on the train to the grave, and there’s no getting off until that final stop. The timing of our death might be unexpected, but its inevitability is never in doubt. There’s never a question mark there.
Only a period.
Or, perhaps, when it’s a brutal or tragic end, as in this case, an exclamation point.
But it’s never out of the blue.
They don’t call this world a vale of tears for nothing.
* * *
+++
I heard that a recent survey found that the percentage of the U.S. population who believe in God is the lowest it’s been in seventy years, but more people believe in heaven than ever before. Of course, this makes no sense, but it goes to show how deeply addicted we are to hope: even if we conclude that there’s no deity, we’re still apt to cling to the belief that there must be more to existence than this.
Logically, if there’s no God, there’s no afterlife. No heaven. No hell. Nothing but nonexistence after death. After all, where would consciousness go? If it’s simply the result of biological processes in a finite organism, then when that organism dies the consciousness dies with it.
Unless the unseen, the unprovable, the type of unconquerable life our hearts long for is as real as the physical world our senses tell us is here.
Is there really more to life than life?
Atheists sometimes point to the vast expanse of the universe in their quest to find hope—there must be life out there somewhere—or maybe there was, or maybe there will be. After all, the idea that God doesn’t exist and that we’re alone on an insignificant and dying planet in a vast, lifeless universe is existentially almost unthinkable.
We’ve been graced with life on this earth, a tiny speck of dust in an endless sea of stars. And we are slowly, or, if you believe the growing number of alarmed scientists and environmentalists, shockingly quickly, destroying our home.
And when we do, we’ll have nowhere to go. An outpost on the moon or on Mars isn’t going to sustain our race for the long haul. To think that it would isn’t to embrace science or to believe in human potential but to live in denial.
We will die out.
And our planet will die as well.
Without the glorious intervention of a divine being, life will cease to be a meaningful word in the universe.
Regardless of what you think about God, from all the evidence astrophysicists have collected, it’s clear that life is the exception in the universe, not the norm.
There’s plenty of speculation that life outside our solar system exists, but no evidence that it does, and in my line of work, evidence is everything and speculation doesn’t get you anywhere useful at all.
The Drake Equation, which proposes that with this many planets in the universe life elsewhere is a veritable certainty, is simply conjecture masquerading as science. However, people will cling to the merest thread of hope wherever they can find it. For some, that’s God; for others, it’s aliens. And for an increasing number of Americans, the artifice of a Godless heaven.
Someone once told me that people can live for a month without food, a week without water, four minutes without air, but not for one second without hope. From what I’ve seen, there’s a lot of truth to that.
* * *
+++
As people were gathering at the grave, among the members of the media and the other congressmen and dignitaries, I noticed Marcus Rockwell, the founder of Krazle, speaking with the senator.
Because of Jon’s internship with his company, I wasn’t surprised that they knew each other, but I was impressed that Rockwell would come to the funeral, considering all the obligations he had leading an organization that daily served more people than the population of any country on earth.
The service began with the minister reciting a Bible verse about life’s brevity. “Life is a mist,” he said. “James 4:4 tells us, ‘Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.’”
Life appears.
And then vanishes away.
Like it did for the young
man lying in that casket today.
And he saw it vanish from the bottom of a swimming pool, handcuffed to the chair he used to kill himself.
As I scanned the area, I thought of the minister’s words, and it made me think of a time when I was nine and I went hiking with my dad along Lake Superior’s shoreline in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It was early fall, and threads of mist were hanging across the water, lazy and white, tendriling their way onto land, all around us.
I kept reaching out to grab the mist, but I couldn’t quite seem to touch it.
“I want to put it in my pocket,” I told my dad.
“You can’t hold on to mist, Pat. It’s always going to be just out of reach.”
Now, that’s what I remembered. That’s the image I was left with—trying to grasp those ghostlike vapors that floated so tantalizingly close to me but never being able to wrap my fingers around them.
Time wears a bandit’s mask. It is so sly and so quick to steal away our moments, and all too often, the more we try to cling to life, the more we find it slipping right between our fingers.
“Does God even listen to our screams?” the minister asked us in what I took to be a rhetorical question. “How does a loving God remain quiet in the midst of so much pain? How is he silent in reply to the tragic wailing of so many broken hearts, the stinging despair of so many weeping children? He offers such a deafening silence. He is so conspicuously quiet for so long and in so many ways while his people suffer and beg him for relief. How could anyone consider that response to be one of love?”
Those were some pretty good questions, ones that I doubted he was going to be able to satisfactorily answer in a fifteen-minute graveside homily.
I studied the layout of the graveyard. Two hills north of me sloped down and flattened out into the area where the service was happening. Based on the time of day, I figured that the best vantage point would be on the rise to my left. “I’m going to head up to get a visual from the ridge,” I told Greer through my earpiece.
“Right.”
Easing back from the service, I made my way up the hill. When I reached the top, the force of the wind reminded me that it was November.
I zippered up my jacket and studied the area.
Greer’s voice came through: “Nothing down here. What about you?”
“Not yet.”
Apart from a swath of land southeast of me that was dedicated to soldiers and was laid out with uniform grave markers, the somewhat random positioning of the headstones throughout the rest of the property covered the gamut from small, almost indistinguishable markers to looming stones large enough for me to have hidden behind, even though I’m over six feet tall. In many cases, the tombstones were hunched over their graves like uneven teeth rising from the earth, revealing the age of the graveyard.
As I scrutinized the grounds, I saw her.
Approximately forty meters away, a figure crouched in the shadow cast by a substantial aging headstone that stood at an awkward angle from decades of leaning in settling soil. The woman was peering down at the service but was clearly trying to avoid being seen.
“I’m on the rise to the north,” I told Greer. “Someone’s up here. Keep this channel open.”
I started to approach the gravestone but only made it a few steps before the woman turned and looked at me. I was still too far away to determine her age, but she was Caucasian. Small frame.
The moment she saw me, she leapt to her feet, but when I called out, asking to speak with her for a moment, she took off in the opposite direction from the funeral.
And so did I.
8
The woman was quick.
Despite being a runner myself, I had trouble keeping up with her.
“She’s on the move,” I said into my radio. “Get to Amber Road. If she goes through the woods, you should be able to catch up with her on the other side, over by the hospital.”
The slick soles of my shoes weren’t happy on the mud, and that wasn’t helping me any. She made it to the eight-foot metal fence rimming the graveyard, clambered over it, and disappeared into the forest.
Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Greer’s SUV leaving the graveside service. However, with the graveyard’s meandering road layout and the only exit on the other side of the property, I knew it’d still be a few minutes before he could get up here. By then, she might very well escape down the other side into the neighborhood of brownstones, where it’d be easy for her to blend in, disappear, slip away.
Years of rock climbing were on my side, and I was able to scramble over the fence without any trouble. By the time I landed, I could see that I’d made up some ground on her. I called out and identified myself as a federal agent. “Ma’am, stop. I just want to talk with you.”
She ignored me and darted farther into the woods.
If a police officer pulls you over or a federal agent asks to speak with you, there are three things that you just have to do: Follow orders, respect authority, and don’t run. Never run. Don’t disrespect law enforcement and don’t act like you have something to hide.
And that’s how she was acting right now.
Because of the time of year, most of the undergrowth was withered or dead, and I could track her progress as she scampered catlike between the trees.
Despite the uneven ground, I’d finally found my stride. I was within twenty-five meters of the woman, and closing.
Tumults of leaves flutter-wisped past me in the gusting air.
She became momentarily caught in a patch of persistent dried thistles that’d refused to die away after summer. I called to her again. She shouted for me to leave her alone, then tore herself free, abandoning her jacket in the thorny vines, and bolted forward.
On my way toward her, I flung a branch aside but stumbled over a hidden root and went down hard. On impact, my hands smeared out in front of me, wrenching my left wrist as my palm smacked into a rock.
Deal with it. Go.
Back on my feet, it took me a second to reorient myself and find her again. She was nearly to the road, and a silver sedan was on its way toward her.
“I’m with the FBI,” I said. “Stop!”
The woman burst out of the forest and ran to the middle of the road to flag down the driver, but he must’ve been distracted, because he didn’t slow until the last moment when he slammed on his brakes, narrowly missing her. He cranked the car to the right, flying off the shoulder and down a steep drop-off. The vehicle flipped over on its way down the embankment and came to a smoking crunch at the base of an ancient oak.
I yelled to the woman to stay where she was. She did but eyed the neighborhood across the road from where the car had crashed.
I rushed to the vehicle to assess the injuries of the driver and any passengers while shouting into my radio for Greer to inform dispatch that we had a 10-53 and needed an ambulance ASAP.
Because of the sloping ground, it wasn’t easy to get down the bank.
Once at its base, I knelt and peered into the car.
The driver, the car’s sole occupant, was conscious, pinned upside down, and when I asked if he was alright, he coughed out in a pained voice that he couldn’t move his leg.
A piece of metal protruding from beneath the dash had pierced his left thigh, and based on the amount of blood already dampening his jeans, I guessed it might’ve severed an artery. If that was the case, it would almost certainly prove fatal within minutes—unless I could stop that bleeding.
The man started asking for help, but his voice faded as he drifted into unconsciousness.
I tried opening the door, but it was too mangled to move.
If I could have gotten something around his leg, I might’ve been able to tighten a tourniquet above the wound, but the way he was positioned, that wasn’t going to happen. I needed to get him out of that vehicle.
The sme
ll of gasoline was not a good sign.
Normally, because of the possibility of a neck or back injury, after a crash you want to support the victim’s neck and keep the spine aligned and immobilized until paramedics arrive, but in this case, the only way to save this man’s life would be getting him out and stopping that bleeding.
I checked his pulse and found it thready and weak.
Gas was dripping down and pooling onto the interior of the car’s roof.
You need to get this guy out now.
A hefty, guttural voice called out behind me: “Back away.”
I turned, only to find Blake Neeson’s hulking bodyguard towering over me. Blake was one of the most wanted men in the country. I’d been tracking them both since last summer, and I had absolutely no idea what Mannie was doing here right now.
“On your knees.” I drew my weapon. “Now!”
He didn’t move, just said, “You can arrest me after I get him out, but if you cuff me, the man in that car will bleed to death.”
“Get down!”
“You’re not listening. Do you want me in custody, or do you want him to survive? Because right now, you get to choose one or the other.”
He’s right. Don’t stall.
I didn’t like it, but time was definitely not on the side of this injured driver.
Mannie had me by at least a hundred and fifty pounds, and looking at him, I guessed nearly all of it was muscle.
“Can you get the door off the car?” I asked.
“I can try.”
“Do it.”
I moved aside and, somewhat hesitantly, holstered my weapon.
Mannie gripped the door.
I doubted that even my friend Ralph Hawkins, who was a former All-American high school wrestler and Army Ranger, would’ve had the strength to pry the door loose from the car, but Mannie was a human mountain, and though he strained mightily from the effort, he managed to twist it to the side and tilt it upward. Then he torqued it off the car and tossed it aside.