“The problem is that I can no longer see the lines clearly. Things have become fuzzy.”
“Fuzzy?” I asked, which at the moment exactly described my thinking.
“Perhaps obscured would be a better term.” He had more to say and made us wait for it. “What happened at the high school was something I should have seen coming, only I didn’t until the last moment. It was very cleverly concealed. The bus fire I didn’t see coming at all.”
“You mean those wackos outsmarted you?” I whispered.
“No. It wasn’t those wackos.” He smiled briefly and then the serious version of Adis returned. “I am worried that someone ran interference for them, shielded them, and then when the time was right aimed them directly at me.”
“So you think someone set you up. They drew you out in the open, to what, expose you?” Leah asked.
“That’s one possibility. My greatest weapon has been anonymity.”
“How do know that you’re not being set up to keep us here?” Leah asked.
“I don’t,” he answered, with a degree of finality that signaled to both of us that he was done answering questions. I had about ten more, and he cut me off with a raised hand. “I have done all I can do to convince you. In the end it will be your decision.” He stood suddenly. He stared down at Leah, and for the first time ever I watch my wife look away from someone’s challenging stare. He looked at me and nodded slightly. A minute later Leah and I were alone.
“The photo that was left in our house was of Mia on Monday morning. It was taken from inside her school. Whoever took it got that close to her, and no one saw the bastard.” She had started to cry silently. “He took that little girl from her locked bedroom without leaving a trace. He’s a ghost. How do we protect our children from a ghost?” Leah hadn’t moved. She remained frozen in the same position she was in when Adis left. “What are we going to do? I’m afraid of staying, and now I’m afraid of going.”
“As strange as it sounds, I feel better with him than I do with the FBI,” I answered.
Leah dropped her head and wiped her eyes, slowly nodding in agreement. “So do I,” she said with resignation. She looked up and stared at me. “Where are we going to live? We can’t go home.”
In the end, Leah and the children made a show of packing up the car under the watchful eye and protection of both the FBI and APD (our son, the miniature detective, scoured the Denali for any tracking devices). Leah had already pulled all three kids from school. The year would be finished online for the older two, and Mia would get a pass. And then, for any and all who were watching, a three-car convoy left our house and neighborhood for parts unknown, presumably out of the state.
Gordon Anderson, who was driving the lead car, was anything but happy about our decision to stay local. The fact is, he was furious. He had called my hospital room earlier and berated me over the phone. He used words like reckless, ill-conceived, and the biggest mistake he had seen anyone make in twenty years of police work. I was unmoved, and as he became more strident I began to wonder if we would be better off without any sort of police or FBI involvement. When he finally realized that he had no chance of changing my mind (or Leah’s), we had a rational discussion about Plan B.
He did win a concession when he convinced Leah to leave her cell phone at home. The children, each of whom had their own phone—ostensibly for safety reasons (a situation that I had always found to be so excessive as to be bordering on the obscene, at least up until recent events had proven me wrong)—had also been forced to leave their electronic lifelines at home, which in their minds changed the whole situation from mildly scary but very exciting to tedious, boring, and very inconvenient. After driving through the city, the trio of cars turned west and disappeared, we hoped, into the wilds of suburbia. To be more specific, a small house on Lake Travis (the lake was down about fifty feet and about a quarter mile away from the back yard, which did not improve our children’s moods). The three-bedroom, two-bath house had been empty for two years, after the federal government had seized it from the previous owners who, like us, were now the guests of the federal government (only their accommodations came with orange jumpsuits, bars, guards with guns, and a twenty-year sentence). The bungalow had been sealed up for months, and it smelled like spoiled milk. It was infested with spiders and an odd assortment of other multilegged animals, which did not improve Leah’s mood. Still, she and the children were safe. Or so we thought.
I, on the other hand, got to enjoy the benefits of a clean and sterile-smelling hospital bed with periodic burn debridement and morphine drips for another week. I probably could have left earlier, but I didn’t really have a home to go back to. I talked with Leah three or four times a day via new disposable phones, courtesy of the FBI, and she regaled me with stories of exterminators, sullen children who were bored out of their minds, her new fast food diet, and the fact that it had taken almost a week for someone to get a stable Internet signal. I could have shared with her the joys of having burned skin scrubbed off, but I let her lean on me via cell phone signal.
I was saying good night to her when she suddenly told me to hold on for a moment. I could just make out a raised and excited voice in the background and then the sound of Mika screaming. Leah carried the phone and me along with it to our oldest child. Normally, Mika lives somewhere between reserved and sullen, but like her younger sister can, on a whim, demonstrate prodigious dramatic abilities. I kept whispering a prayer that this was just Mika being Mika and not some new development. God must have had his answering machine on, because the next thing I heard Leah say was Oh, no. She repeated it over and over again.
“What is it?” I screamed into the phone, but the only answer I got was the sound of Leah putting her phone down. Mika’s cries were muffled but they still managed to freeze my blood. Finally, Tom, our son, picked up the forgotten phone.
“Dad?”
“Tom, what’s going on?” Without thinking I had gotten out of bed and begun to look for something to wear.
“Mom’s on the computer. Mika found something.” His tone was even, and I could hear the strength he had inherited from his mother. “It’s a picture of Nitrox on Facebook. It says that Mom sent it. She’s all curled up and bloody.” His voice finally broke. “She looks dead.” He broke up the last word into two syllables. “The caption says, See what I did.” I could hear him swallow and try to master his twelve-year-old emotions. “There’s a little girl next to Nitrox. I don’t know if she’s asleep, but she’s wearing Mia’s slippers.” My mind flashed back to an image of Mia snuggled up next to me wearing those pink, fuzzy slippers just ten days earlier.
“Put your mother on.” I tried to sound like I was under control, that we had anticipated that something like this was going to happen, but Leah’s repeated oh, no’s were undermining my effort.
“Dad,” he paused. “This is weird and kinda scary but someone just signed in on Mika’s page using Mom’s account.” I’m not a Facebook person, but as far as I know this isn’t supposed to happen. “Mom just asked them why they are doing this.” The smart thing would have been for me to tell him to hang up the phone and immediately call the FBI, the police, or even Ghostbusters (he probably wouldn’t have known what that meant)—anyone. Only, I wasn’t being smart at the moment, and I had to know what was happening with my family.
“What did they say?” I had waited as long as I could wait.
“It takes a minute,” Tom answered with annoyance (he was at that age where it was okay to openly express his annoyance). “He’s writing.” Another pause. “He said, ‘Because I can.’ That’s all. Mom just typed ‘Who are you?’”
We waited, and waited. I looked at the clock above the door after what seemed like an hour, and then waited some more. “What’s happening?” I knew he couldn’t tell me, but I had to ask. I had to do something.
“It’s only been a minute and twelve seconds.” Tom’s annoyance in the face of these terrible events was beginning to annoy me. I was just a
bout to ask him if he had any concept of the gravity of this situation when he finally answered. “He said, ‘A better question would be What am I?’ Hold on there’s more. ‘Maybe this will help.’ It’s a picture of something. It’s loading slowly.” I didn’t need to wait to know what it would be. “Oh, shit, Dad.” He had inherited his fondness for the word shit from his mother as well. “It’s a picture of the house we’re in. He was right outside the house.”
“I’m not surprised.” I was almost resigned to the fact that whoever this guy was, or whatever this guy was, he was definitely one step ahead of us. “Put Mom on.” My voice broached no argument.
“You heard?” she said simply. I could hear the resignation in her voice as well.
“Yeah. I can’t say I’m surprised. I thought they had someone watching you,”
“They do, and they’re still out there, I just checked. It’s been clear all week except for this afternoon, and it’s raining in the picture.”
“You need to call them now. Are you armed?” In a complete role reversal, Leah is the protector of the family, at least when it comes to firearms. I have fired a gun maybe ten times in my life, but she grew up with them and is an excellent shot. To my knowledge she has never intentionally fired a weapon at another human, but if it came down to it I had every confidence that she would blow away anyone who threatened her or her family, without a trace of hesitation or regret. And it wouldn’t be the Hollywood stereotype of a single dramatic shot that ends the scene (until the bad guy suddenly, dramatically jumps to his feet). Leah would use the entire clip. And then reload.
“Yes. I have the Sig.” Years ago, Leah’s father bought her a Sig Sauer P320 for Christmas (I don’t remember what I got her that year, probably the earrings she lost). This is an intimidating weapon that is used primarily by law enforcement and made with the express intent of putting down whatever is hit. “I’ll call you in a bit.” She hung up, but through that ethereal connection long-married couples create I could imagine I felt her hand curl around the grip of her favorite gun.
Chapter Eleven
The Unyielding Future Page 10