by Steven James
Of course, if necessary, Blake would be glad to take care of his demise personally—if things came to that. The office building was wooden and, with a fire started in the right place on the first floor or in the basement, the whole building would go up quite quickly.
A contingency plan. Just in case.
And after the mannequins were distributed and the jihadist was out of the way, public sentiment would be on Blake’s side.
A puzzle slowly piecing itself together.
However, the betrayer wasn’t necessarily Ibrahim, and Blake reminded himself to hold back from making unjustified assumptions.
After positioning his men throughout the grounds and telling them to contact him if there was any movement, he called Ibrahim and asked him to come to the facility. “I have some things to go over with you, and I think it would be best if we discussed them in person.”
42
Briefings almost always go on too long, people are rarely as prepared as they should be, and the whole affair ultimately ends up wasting time that could’ve been better spent actually looking for the offender or actively tracking down suspects.
My philosophy? Have a meeting when absolutely necessary. Send a memo when a memo will do.
However, in this case, a memo wouldn’t cover it—even I had to acknowledge that. Too much happening, too many connections, and too much at stake.
We had people committing suicide and posting their deaths online as they happened, all while someone was present watching them and refraining from stopping them. There was the drug connection. The Matchmaker, whoever that was. Blake and his team. The silent ladies and the chemist. Somehow all of those things were interrelated.
Our team was present, along with Collins, the cyber expert, and Jason Thurman, the agent whose wallet Mannie had procured during his escape and who worked with handling confidential informants when he wasn’t being accosted by fleeing fugitives.
DeYoung got things rolling, and after we’d made introductions all around, he wasted no time in telling Sasha that he was going to have a long talk with his counterpart at the DEA. “We need this task force to be coordinated and not splintered off with each agency doing its own thing.”
“I’ll let you discuss that with him,” she said in a clipped voice. “I’m just here to find Blake. Knowing his interests, going undercover as an escort was the best way we could come up with to get close to him.”
Sasha received permission from her supervisor at the DEA to update us on everything she’d discovered so far. After filling in DeYoung about her work, she mentioned that she’d overheard a woman who was visiting Blake on Saturday night say that she was the one who’d worked with Blake’s brother, Dylan.
“Wait,” I said. “Dylan’s partner showed up?”
Sasha nodded. “A woman named Julianne Springman.”
“Springman was a CSI tech in Detroit,” I told them. “I met her last summer when we were tracking Dylan Neeson.” I could hardly believe she was the one who’d partnered with a serial killer to help him commit his crimes, but I trusted what Sasha was telling us. Julianne’s apparent involvement just went to show how little you can actually know people or guess the evil they’re ultimately capable of.
We all have a wicked streak, even though we might normally keep it in check.
DeYoung asked Sasha, “Do you know where she is?”
“No. She was looking for someone with similar interests here in New York City.”
“Similar interests?”
“Someone to kill with.”
I processed that. “Did Blake give her a name?”
“He said he was going to, but I don’t know if he did or who it might’ve been. If he did pass along someone’s name, it was while I wasn’t there with him.”
“We need to put out a BOLO for Springman,” Thurman said, stating the obvious. “We find her, she might be able to lead us to Blake.”
Ralph put a call through.
“While we’re on it,” I said, “we should try to find this guy, Reese, in Phoenix. Let’s send a couple of agents over to have a word with him. If he is connected to Blake’s people, maybe he can give us the intel we need to locate him.”
Greer let us know that he used to work with an agent who was stationed down there. “I’ll contact her, put it into play.”
Sasha asked, “What’s the purpose of the observer if the suicides are being recorded anyway?”
“There’s a lot bigger thrill to being present when someone dies than there is to simply watching it online like any other casual observer might do,” Thurman explained.
DeYoung was going about things old school and laying out what we knew on a whiteboard, complete with arrows, boxes, and a slew of sticky notes. He included names as we discussed the known relationships between them: Blake, Reese, Ibrahim, Aaron Jasper, Mannie. Then Jon Murray, Senator Murray, Julianne Springman. He repeatedly peeled off and restuck the stickies as the briefing moved forward.
It might have been helpful for visual learners, but to me it ended up looking like a tangled mess of spaghetti with yellow square meatballs splayed throughout it.
Finally, he drew three empty boxes and labeled them (1) Julianne’s new partner? (2) The Matchmaker? and (3) The Observer?
“Thoughts on the next step?” he said.
“I want to know about the tox screenings from the previous suicides,” I told him. “I still haven’t heard the results.”
He jotted that down on a legal pad.
“Did Jon leave a suicide note?” Thurman asked.
“Not that we’re aware of,” I said.
“What about the other suicides?”
“In two of the cases, yes. But there was no indication in them that someone was going to be present to watch the deaths.”
DeYoung gave a heavy sigh. “Where does that leave us?”
“Victimology,” I replied. “What do the other suicide victims have in common with Jon Murray? From what the team has pulled up so far, it’s not past residences or schools attended. Not employment. There’s no evidence they ever called, contacted, or even met each other. Nothing in credit card receipts that match up with each other.”
“If they were all Selzucaine users, it might be their dealer,” Sasha suggested.
I wasn’t ready to make that leap. “Maybe a dealer, yes. Maybe someone else. Let’s take a step back and do a deep dive into people close to the victims: Relatives. Friends. Work associates. Social networking connections. Anything. It might not be that they have a connection to each other but a connection to an individual who hasn’t appeared on our radar screen yet. We find that link—”
“We find the Matchmaker,” Greer said.
“Yes. Possibly.”
I offered to look more closely at the victimology. Sasha agreed to leverage her resources at the DEA to find out more about the Selzucaine, ways to mold it for shipment and where else Blake’s mannequins might have been shipped around the country.
DeYoung spoke up. “Counting Jon Murray, we have four known interrelated instances of someone videotaping their own suicide while someone else is present. If that person was influencing them, how do you talk someone into doing something like that? How do you convince a person to take his own life, especially in such shocking ways?”
“Choices are rational,” Ralph noted, “not random. Even if people aren’t consciously aware of it, they’re always evaluating the cost-benefit ratio before they commit a crime: how badly do I want this thing? And usually—although not with suicide—how can I get away with this action without getting caught?”
“So, make him a promise or make him a threat,” Greer suggested. “If you’re trying to get someone to do something that drastic, you’d have to make a promise or threat big enough to convince him that it’s something worth dying for.”
DeYoung returned to his whiteboard. “
Okay, let’s play this out. Jon Murray is approached by someone who promises to reward him in some way or threatens to harm a person he loves. In order to find out why Jon might’ve killed himself or why the victims in the other videos might have done so, we need to find out who they loved the most—or anyone who might’ve benefited from their death or somehow been protected because of it.”
“I’ll take that,” Greer offered.
“Also, let’s see if the senator has any legislation before him right now that has to do with the pharmaceutical industry or laws related to regulating Selzucaine. That could be the connection with the guy in Phoenix.”
“On it,” Ralph said.
After the briefing, I glanced at my watch and decided it would probably still work for me to meet Calvin at noon for lunch, as long as we could get together close to the Field Office. Just to make sure, I cleared things with DeYoung to confirm that he was on board with me brainstorming some investigative avenues with the famed environmental criminologist.
“Werjonic’s worked with us before,” DeYoung told me. “I trust him. If he can be of any help, I’m open to bringing him on as a consultant.”
“I’ll let him know.”
Tessa had mentioned that Timothy Sabian was doing a book signing at the Mystorium tonight. The bookstore wasn’t too far from the Field Office, their deli sandwiches were pretty good, and so was their coffee. Also, they had a broad selection of teas that would appeal to Calvin. I figured that if he was anywhere in the vicinity, lunch there might be a good choice.
Calvin wasn’t a fan of texting, so I left him a voicemail asking if the Mystorium would work with his schedule. Then, while I waited for a reply, I began examining the lives of the people who’d killed themselves, looking for any connection they might have had with each other in ways that I hadn’t yet considered.
* * *
+++
Although Timothy Sabian hadn’t expected it to be easy, digging the hole in the basement’s hard-packed dirt floor was even more work than he had anticipated, and listening to Julianne the whole time was difficult—listening to her ask him why he hadn’t stopped, why he’d done this to her, why he’d killed her.
Muscle spasms and fatigue were common for someone who suffered from Timothy’s condition, and he had to stop and rest a number of times to keep from collapsing from the effort.
Once he’d burrowed out a space large enough to hold her, he carefully lifted her body and nestled her into the hole. There was barely enough room—he had to force her right arm over her chest so she would fit.
There.
Still covered with the sheet.
The bugs that burrowed under his skin chose to scuttle out from the cuts and sores and descend onto Julianne’s corpse. Timothy knew it was a hallucination, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying. He didn’t like the idea that he was seeing things, so rather than call it a hallucination, he called it a nightmare.
A waking one.
The kind he’d been having all too often lately.
When he began to fill in the dirt, he started with her face. That way, he wouldn’t have to think about her staring up through the sheet at him while he shoveled dirt over the rest of her body.
However, covering her face with the soil didn’t make her stop talking to him. She told him it was cold and that she didn’t want to be left here alone, left here in the basement with all these bugs. She asked if he could take her upstairs, let her lie on something soft and comfortable.
“No. Absolutely not.”
A bed.
“No!”
His bed.
“Why? Why are you asking me to do that?”
“Emily wouldn’t want you to leave me here, would she?” Julianne said.
“Emily’s not real.”
He stopped putting the dirt on Julianne’s body and listened to the other voice, the one that never left him alone.
You have the hole. You can bring her down here anytime. If it’ll make her stop talking to you, then take her upstairs. When she quiets down, you can bring her back down. You can bury her then.
“But what if someone finds her upstairs? What if someone comes looking?”
Just take this one step at a time. Make sure nothing else points to you. Be careful. Just like Lonnie would be.
It was getting harder and harder to sift through the real from the imaginary.
At last, Timothy eased the sheet off her, tipping the dirt that was on top of it aside.
Even though he was careful, some of the soil spilled onto Julianne’s face. He brushed it away, then gently blew the remaining granules of dirt off her cheeks and her eyelashes and her lips.
Finally, he lifted her, and she thanked him thanked him thanked him as he carried her up the stairs to his bedroom.
43
During her classes, Tessa kept the Timothy Sabian novel that Patrick had bought for her open on her desk but hidden under other papers or inside the textbook she was supposed to be reading. She wanted to get through as much of it as she could before tonight, so she spent each class venturing further and further into Timothy Sabian’s imagination.
At times it was illuminating.
At times devastating.
The lyrical call of darkness was his friend, the shackled dreams of the world his canvas.
There are so many ways to feel pain as a teenager, so many ways to be lured into loneliness, so many places to look and find only darkness. She was lonely for her foster sister, missing her mom, and wondering what to make of Patrick, and so she read. Some people sneer and call reading an “escape”—as if that’s a bad thing. But since when is it a bad thing to try to escape pain?
She didn’t delve much into fantasy, but she’d looked over some of J.R.R. Tolkien’s essays. In “On Fairy Stories,” he explained why he wrote what he did. Whatever else might have been true about him, the man had no patience with people who derisively labeled some genres of literature “escapist.” As he wrote, “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?”
Yeah.
That was a good question.
This world is full of prisons that bear all sorts of names, and the most sensible response is to try to escape them—why should that be mocked, ridiculed, or looked down on?
Seeking escape is the most rational pursuit of all.
Like that guy last week. The senator’s son. The final escape, the final choice. And he filmed it for all the world to see.
Sabian seemed to understand that. The necessity of escape, the stifling nature of life’s many prisons.
Tessa read, and every word was a way for her to put more distance between her feelings and her awareness of her feelings, as if maybe, just maybe, by gorging herself on a story, by swallowing it whole, all the squibbles and frozen black letters would quiet the nameless ache inside of her.
The bell rang, and everyone shuffled out of the room toward the cafeteria.
“Watch out,” she said as a boy brushed past her.
“You okay?” Candice asked her.
“Yeah. It’s just that I suffer from triptostupophobia.”
“What’s that?”
“The fear of stupid people tripping and falling on me.”
“I don’t think that’s a real fear.”
“It should be. I’m scared of it.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Whatever.”
On her way to the caf, Tessa checked her messages and found a text from her mom asking her to give her a call.
She felt her chest tighten. Her mom knew all about the no-cell-phone policy at school, and she wouldn’t have left a message like that unless something was up.
When Tessa tried the number, no one answered. She couldn’t remember exactly when her mom’s flight was supposed to take off, but she figured
that she was probably either in the car on her way to the airport or in the air somewhere, so she left a text rather than a voicemail telling her that she’d talk with her later, as soon as school was done.
And then, as she ate by herself in the back of the caf, she again turned her attention to the novel and the welcome, necessary escape offered to her in the delicate, haunted prose of Timothy Sabian, a man troubled so much by looking without flinching at the truth of the world that his words veritably shuddered with despair and with the desperate wish that somewhere out there, there was hope.
Yeah, this guy really seemed to understand the need for escape.
The need to leave this world behind.
And to unchain yourself from the glaring, intractable pain of daily life.
44
Half an hour ago, I’d heard back from Calvin that noon at the Mystorium would work for him, and now I arrived five minutes early.
Over the course of the morning, the lab had confirmed that the head of the mannequin was formed out of Selzucaine along with a cellulose-based starch to help it keep its shape.
The team didn’t find any more mannequin body parts at or near the grave of James Leeson.
I hadn’t been able to locate the connection between the victims on any deeper levels.
I wondered how Mannie might be connected to Jon’s death, or if perhaps there was more of a connection with the senator himself. In either case, it justified taking a closer look at the other people who’d attended the funeral and their relationship with the senator.
* * *
+++
The Mystorium specialized in first-edition and out-of-print crime novels, and there was a certain allure about the place. A rarely explored, dusty-volumed, hidden-troved mystique.
I recognized the young woman behind the counter. Rebekah had hit it off with Tessa when they first met, and from what I understood, she was majoring in English lit at Brooklyn College. They shared a penchant for Edgar Allan Poe’s writings, and today, almost serendipitously, she was serving Raven’s Brew coffee, which I was glad to see. The roaster from Washington had become more popular in the last few years, although I’d been drinking them for the last decade. They were famous for their strong brews, and I tended to gravitate toward Dead Man’s Reach.