by J. D. Barker
“Bishop!”
Anson Bishop turned only long enough to see him, then disappeared around a corner.
Porter went after him, and when another SWAT officer rushed by heading in the opposite direction, he grabbed the man by the arm. “Anson Bishop is getting away!”
If the man heard him over all the noise, he gave no indication. He shrugged out of Porter’s grasp and continued on toward the cells.
Porter turned the corner at the end of the hallway and spotted Bishop again. Further ahead now, ducking into the stairwell. Doors were open everywhere, as if someone had tripped every remote lock in the building and disengaged them. Even the fire doors stood open. All of them should have closed with the alarm.
Reaching the stairwell, that door open too, he looked both up and down but didn’t see Bishop. People were running in both directions, but most were heading down, toward the exits.
Porter ran down with them. He nearly dropped the box several times as people jostled him, pushed and shoved. Panicked, yet trying to remain calm.
On the first floor, at least a hundred people crowded the hallway, all attempting to get to the exits. They moved at a snail’s pace. He tried to push through, move faster, but it was nearly impossible. A wall of people all heading to the same place. Nearly two minutes passed before he escaped the building.
Soaked to the bone from the sprinklers, running into the arctic air was like being slapped by a blanket of ice. Snow fell all around, clung to him, the box still clutched under his arm.
Porter saw Bishop then, climbing through the passenger door of a silver Lexus. The driver spotted Porter and first frowned, then smiled. Then she waved delicate, thin fingers. It was the woman he knew as Sarah Werner—Bishop’s mother. They disappeared out into traffic as Porter reached the curb.
48
Clair
Day 5 • 2:16 PM
Clair heard the shouting, yelling, screaming, and otherwise mad mess of chaos from the hallway long before she made it to the cafeteria. Angry voices, all fighting to be heard over each other. Men and women. There were children, too—high-pitched cries unwilling to be outdone by their parents.
Officer Sutter met her in the hall. The doors leading to the cafeteria, normally open, were both closed behind him. “It’s that Barrington guy. He’s got everyone all riled up.”
Clair peered through the windows in the doors at the cafeteria beyond and couldn’t tell what was going on—arms flapped and pointed in time with the shouts. “What did he do?”
“It’s not just him. He’s got several others siding with him. They’re forcing everyone who’s sick to dress in yellow scrubs and move into the employee lounges at the back, out of gen-pop.”
“Gen-pop?” Clair frowned. “Like a prison?”
“That’s what he’s been calling the main cafeteria—general population, gen-pop.”
Clair narrowed her eyes. “If yellow means sick, what does blue and green mean? I’m seeing three colors in there.”
“Blue means symptomatic—achy bones, headache…generally not feeling well but not showing any clear symptoms. Apparently some of these people feel sick just because they’re around other sick people, but they’re not. It’s in their heads. Green means no symptoms at all.”
“Lovely.” Clair sniffled and fought back the urge to sneeze. There weren’t many people wearing green scrubs. She spotted Barrington in the far corner of the room next to a table piled high with scrubs, arguing with some other man. “If I’m not out in five minutes, come and get me.”
She pushed through the door and went straight for Barrington. As people spotted her, they crowded around, shouted, so many she couldn’t make out a damn thing. When she reached Barrington, he held a hand up in front of her face and continued yelling at the other man.
In that instant, Clair thought of at least a dozen ways she could kill this man without the use of her gun, possibly with only one hand. And then, she might still use the gun. One or ten shots to the face, that ought to do it. “Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to shush an angry black woman?” Barrington shot her an irritated glance, then turned back to the other man. “Give us a minute, Walter.”
Walter—Dr. Shanahan, according to his name tag—shook his head and walked away.
When Barrington turned back to her, Clair spoke before he could. “What the hell are you doing? You’re supposed to be calming these people, not creating some kind of ‘us versus them’ Lord of the Flies bullshit.”
Barrington held up both hands. “I’m only doing what Maltby told me to do.”
“The CDC guy?”
Barrington nodded. “He told me to identify and segregate the sick. Isolate them, if possible.”
“Wasn’t the plan to cordon off a space on the second floor and move the sick up there? Get them away from here?”
“We did that, but those beds are long gone. They brought in cots, blankets…they don’t have any more room.”
“How many people are sick now?”
“I lost track,” he told her. “Too many.” Reaching to the table, he picked up a set of yellow scrubs, still wrapped in plastic, and handed them to her. “You need to put these on.”
“I’m not wearing those.”
“You’re not even wearing your mask. You’re clearly symptomatic. Right now, you’re part of the problem.”
“I’m in charge here. People see me in that outfit and everything falls apart.”
Barrington chuffed. “Yeah, you’re doing a bang-up job. Look around. Even your own officers have deserted you.”
“Watch it.”
“Sorry. I’m just frustrated.” He leaned in closer. “People know you’re sick. Have you looked in a mirror? This isn’t something you can hide, not in a room full of doctors. They see you running all over the hospital, or ducking into your private little space down the hall, while they’re stuck out here coughing on each other. What do you expect them to think? I’ve got news for you. We’re about an hour away from these people either rushing the doors or other parts of the hospital. As more and more people present symptoms, those of us who aren’t sick will get desperate.”
“So you’re going to lead the charge, is that it?”
He shook his head. “No, that’s not what I mean. I’m on your side here, but I’m in the minority. A minority that is quickly shrinking. And I’m running out of ways to keep the peace.” He thrust the package into her hand. “Please, put these on. Lead by example.”
Clair took the package. “I’ll do it in a minute. Where is the CDC on a treatment?”
Barrington pursed his lips. “There is no treatment, not really. No cure, no antidote. All they can do is pump up the immune system of those who are infected and hope for the best. Oxygen, fluids, that helps, too. SARS is a highly aggressive virus. The strong can beat it and the weak will not. Ultimately, it comes down to that simple fact. When I look around this room, I see the truth. In another week, many of these people will no longer be with us.”
“You’re a ray of sunshine.”
“I’m a realist.”
Clair’s phone rang. Jerome Stout, head of hospital security. She answered. “Norton.”
“Detective, can you come up to my office?”
“I’m on my way.” She disconnected and looked back at Barrington. “Give these people something to cling to, give them hope.”
He only looked down at the package in her hand. “Please put those on.”
She waved to him, tucked the package under her shoulder, and made her way down the hall to the elevators, ignoring the many eyes burning a hole in her back.
When she pressed the button, nothing happened.
She pressed it again.
Nothing.
Clair pressed it a dozen more times, fast and hard, nearly pushed the button through the other side of the wall, then kicked the door and let out a frustrated grunt. That didn’t seem to work, either.
She dialed Stout back. “There’s something wrong with the elevators
.”
“We shut them down on that level, you’ll need to take the stairs.”
“Why?”
“Orders from Maltby with the CDC. He’s trying to limit traffic in the hospital. If you take the stairs to the next floor up, you can get the elevator there.”
“Wonderful.”
Clair hung up, located the stairwell, and pushed through the heavy door. She took the steps two at a time up to the next level. When she reached the door, she found it locked.
She did not have time for this.
She banged on it for nearly a minute, but nobody answered.
Back on the stairs, she went up one more floor. That door was locked, too.
In such a hurry, she nearly dropped her phone pulling it back out of her pocket.
No signal.
Double fuck.
That’s when the lights went out.
The arm that came up behind her was quick, strong, and utterly silent. She didn’t realize anyone was even there until the needle slipped into her neck.
49
Diary
From my bedroom window, I watched Tegan, Kristina, and Libby drive off. Welderman and Stocks had arrived a little after eleven that night, and as usual, they didn’t come in. Welderman tapped the horn twice, and Stocks got out for a cigarette and the two of them waited about five more minutes until the girls came out and climbed into the back of the car. Libby had looked up at my window, and when she saw me standing there, she smiled, but it was forced and did little to hide the fear and uncertainty in her eyes.
Libby looked beautiful. Tegan and Kristina had gone to work on her shortly after dinner, a primping and pampering fest behind closed doors. There were giggles and nervous laughs, hushed questions and even quieter answers. They had dressed her in a sleek, black tight little thing that fell off her shoulders on thin straps and stopped about halfway down her thighs. She wore heels, too, and I could tell by the way she made her way from the house to the car this was something new to her. One hand held onto Kristina’s shoulder most of the way, and with each stumble came more nervous laughter. They’d applied makeup. Not just on her face but over the fading remains of her bruises—they’d vanished under a thin coat of powder, liquid, or gel, or whatever it was that girls kept hidden away from the prying eyes of boys. They’d swept her hair up on one side while the other flowed down over her shoulder.
Tegan and Kristina were equally beautiful in dresses I’d never seen before. But while Kristina walked beside Libby, helping her along, Tegan hung back a little, her eyes on the backs of the other girls, and I couldn’t help but think of the night before when she noticed Libby and me holding hands.
The car was gone a moment later with the three of them inside. The knot in my stomach grew as the taillights faded away.
“Cattle to the slaughter,” Paul said quietly from the bunk below me. He hadn’t said much in the past few days. I wanted the old Paul back. When we got back from the barn, I told him about the truck and how Vincent planned to help repair it. The girls’ promise to get money. None of that had put a smile on his face.
“I think Tegan likes you,” I said in return, not sure what else to say.
Paul grunted. “She doesn’t like me. She likes you. Libby likes you. Kristina is with Vincent. Hell, even Weasel and The Kid have each other if they decide to swing that way when they eventually grow up. As usual, I’ve got nobody. Little Paul, all alone again. Maybe I’ll make a run at Finicky. She’s not half bad. I’d be open to a Mrs. Robinson thing. At least she’s got a house—all the makings of a solid sugar momma. Everyone needs a little lovin’.”
“Can I see what you’re drawing?”
He seemed to consider this for a moment, then turned the notepad toward me. It was Tegan. She was naked and smiling seductively out from the page. He had her suspended from the ceiling with a rope, the tips of her toes dangling inches above what looked like a giant meat grinder. I wanted to tell him her breasts were all wrong, her real nipples were smaller than the ones he depicted, but I was fairly certain that would do little in the way of cheering him up.
“I call it the Man-eater-eater.”
“It’s, ah…” My face was flushed red.
He seemed to take this as a compliment. “Do you want me to draw Libby for you?”
“Like…that?”
He flipped to a blank page. “No, not like that. Something nice. Tasteful. But naked. Gotta be naked.”
I thought about this for a second, then shook my head. “No thank you.”
“No thank you,” he repeated in a mocking voice. He quickly began to draw, and in under a minute, I saw the start of her—Libby, lying naked on a bed amid rumpled sheets, one finger at her lips, her other hand—
I reached over and tore the page out, crumpled it up. “I said no.”
Paul raised both hands defensively. “Sorry, buddy. I was just messing around. No harm, no foul.” He flipped back to his drawing of Tegan, grabbed a pencil, and started shading.
The crumpled drawing of Libby in my hand, I started for the door.
Paul said, “If you’re going to beat the Bishop, Bishop, I can color it in for you first.”
“I’m going to take it out back and burn it.”
“Suppression of artistic license is an offense punishable by death in several European countries.”
He said something else after that, but I didn’t hear him. I was halfway down the stairs. I would have been all the way down the stairs, but I stopped when I found my picture hanging on the wall with the others. It hadn’t been there before. It was one of the pictures Paul had taken the other day in the parlor. There was a half-smile on my face, and my back was up against the wall. I told myself I looked confident, but I knew I really looked uneasy and stiff. Not my best photograph. Not my worst, either.
The picture was at a slight angle, and when I tried to straighten it out, it fell from the wall. Luckily, the glass didn’t break. When I went to hang it back up, I noticed something written on a thin piece of white tape on the back. It said: 124. WM15 1.4k.
I removed several others and found similar messages written on the backs of those.
“What are you doing?”
I hadn’t heard Ms. Finicky come up behind me. She was standing there with a drink in one hand and a tattered paperback in the other.
“I was just—”
“Put them back. All of them. You’re a guest in my house, and I expect you to respect my possessions.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s late. You should be in bed. You’ll need your rest.” She took a sip of her drink. It was strong, whatever it was. I could smell it from across the room. “Tomorrow night you’ll go with the detectives, and I expect you to be on your best behavior.”
My stomach sank, but I said nothing.
50
Poole
Day 5 • 3:17 PM
“You saw the sweatshirt, right? In the picture?”
“Charleston Riverdogs,” Nash said flatly. “Where Porter did his rookie time.”
They were back in the black Escalade, a few minutes from Metro.
Poole scratched at the stubble on his chin. “When I first saw that box you and Clair found in Bishop’s apartment, I got the impression it was related to some kind of human trafficking. Accounting records, photographs, all of it.”
“We did too, but Kloz digitized everything in that box, compared the photos to all the missing child databases, and he couldn’t find a single match. We didn’t get far with the spreadsheets. They were too cryptic.”
“The way I see this, we’ve got one of two scenarios here,” Poole said, thinking out loud. “All the victims are connected, including the mayor. If Bishop is to be believed—”
“I don’t believe Bishop.”
Poole silenced him with a glance. “If Bishop is to be believed, Porter is somehow behind everything, attempting to cover up something that happened to him in Charleston. ‘She was there, she saw me do it, and she has to go,’
that’s what Bishop told me Porter said before he killed that woman at the Guyon.” Before Nash could object, he said, “I know, I get it, that’s if Porter killed that woman. I’m not willing to go there yet, either. I’m trying to keep an open mind.”
“Okay, I’ll play,” Nash said. “If Sam is telling the truth and Bishop is behind everything, that means Bishop is trying to point us at something that happened in Charleston, something related to the kids in those pictures. I doubt he’d kill all these people to cover it up He’d be killing them as some kind of revenge. We know Talbot was close with the mayor That could be linked, too.”
“Neither man is operating alone,” Poole pointed out. “Can we at least agree on that?”
Nash nodded. “There’s just too much for one person, and even with both under lockdown, things haven’t slowed down. My money is on Weidner. Maybe that woman Sam said was in the Guyon with Bishop. Werner. Maybe both. I don’t know.”
Poole glanced back out the window. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the virus.”
“And?”
“And it doesn’t feel right to me,” Poole said. “4MK’s kills have always been close, personal—eyes, ears, tongue—the theft of the virus, using it the way he did, it’s the opposite of personal. He wouldn’t know who would be impacted. There’s no specific target.”
“It got him what he wanted with Upchurch,” Nash pointed out. “They rushed that specialist right in.”
“I suppose there was that. But it feels…off. Remember when we were in the War Room and I told you about noise?”
“You said we needed to get rid of the noise, that it was a distraction.”
“I think the virus is noise.”
“Maybe.”
Both men fell silent for a moment, then Poole said, “If Bishop is telling the truth and Porter is behind everything, how does the virus help Porter?”
“I’m not going there.”
“You said you would keep an open mind.”
Nash sneezed three times, wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Sorry. It’s just a cold, I swear.” He sneezed again, bent over, and held a hand up. He looked like he was holding his breath, willing it to stop. When the sneezing finally did, he settled back in the seat, his eyes red and puffy. “Sam has zero reason to release a virus or go after the first responders. Especially knowing first on scene would probably be me or Clair.”