The Sixth Wicked Child

by J. D. Barker

  60

  Nash

  Day 5 • 5:07 PM

  Nash hesitated outside Porter’s apartment for several minutes before finally deciding to go in. When he came here with Clair a couple days ago, they had done so out of concern for Sam. They were worried about their friend, wanted to help. This time, Nash was going behind his back, snooping. This was a betrayal, no matter how he tried to sugarcoat it.

  No crime-scene tape marked the door. Technically, no crime had been committed. No reason for tape. Yet, Nash had that same feeling in his gut that came when he was standing outside a crime scene. A twisting, churning, stirring of things better left alone.

  He’d knocked. Several times.

  A small part of him hoped Sam would open the door, usher him inside with a smile, maybe offer him a beer, and tell him how they got all this wrong. Nobody answered the door, though, and Nash was beginning to wonder exactly what they’d gotten wrong.

  Bishop or Sam.

  Sam or Bishop.

  Both.

  It was the text from Kloz that really spooked him. Prior to that text, the bits of evidence piling up around Sam had all seemed like nothing more than smoke kicked up by Bishop, some fabricated tale to reposition the spotlight. Then the text came in when Nash was about halfway back to Metro:

  I found four cash withdrawals from Sam’s checking account—twenty-five hundred each in September of last year. Also found corresponding deposits on Upchurch’s side—same amounts, within forty-eight hours of Sam’s withdrawals. Anything over $3K would be reported to the IRS due to the Patriot Act—Sam would know that. He tried to keep this below the radar.

  This was followed by a second text a moment later:

  Facial recognition matched the images on Upchurch’s computer to the two victims found this morning. I haven’t found a way to confirm whether or not they are Kristina Niven and Tegan Savala—I’m not sure those names are even real—no matches in social security or birth records. Still digging…

  P.S. I feel like shit. You?

  “I feel peachy.” Nash rubbed his tender nose and tried to call Kloz to get more detail, but he got voice mail, same thing with Clair. That damn hospital was a giant black hole for cell service. Always had been.

  He reread the texts standing out there in Sam’s hallway before finally taking out his keys and letting himself inside.

  The air felt oddly still, almost stale, like stepping into a tomb. He remembered coming here for dinner, not that long ago, Sam and Heather rushing around to make him feel comfortable. The Bears on the television, down by seven in the second quarter. The volume was off. A radio played classic rock from the corner of the room—“Hotel California” by the Eagles—funny how music could bring you back.

  No music now.

  Light filtered in around the drawn drapes. Dust floated silently through the air.

  “Sam, if you’re here, I’m coming in.”

  He knew Sam wasn’t there, but it seemed like the right thing to say. If not for that text from Kloz, he might have turned and left.

  His eyes scanned the apartment. Not sure where to start, not even sure what he was looking for. The FBI had already done a number on the place—Sam and Heather’s books were all stacked in front of the various bookcases instead of on the shelves—every page had been flipped—nothing hidden in or around them. Half the kitchen cabinets were closed. The rest stood open, contents scattered about, same with the drawers. Nash went to the refrigerator and found nothing inside but some spoiled milk, stale bread, and slimy sandwich meats. Nothing in the freezer but ice. A crumbled piece of foil labeled ground beef was on the counter. He knew Sam hid money in there, but that had been gone before he went to New Orleans. When he retrieved the diary from—

  Nash returned to the living room. He hadn’t noticed when he first walked in, but he should have. Sam’s La-ZBoy, which Sam had flipped on its side to retrieve the hidden diary, and had still been on its side when he and Clair were here two days ago, now stood upright.

  Sam had come back at some point after escaping Metro.

  With one hand under the chair and another on the armrest, Nash turned the heavy chair back onto its side and knelt down near the bottom. The material was pulled tight and fastened, the internal workings sealed away as it should be. Not how the chair had been left.

  He grabbed a corner and tugged the velcro, peeled the black cloth aside. With the flashlight from his phone, he looked up inside the chair. A white plastic package of some sort had been duct taped against the plywood and metal frame, nearly out of reach. Nash stretched, got his fingers around a corner, pulled the package out, and set it on the floor in front of him.

  A white plastic trash bag holding square contents, tied off with black string around

  Not the diary.

  Something larger.

  Nash tore the tape from the edges, untied the string, and unfolded the plastic before he realized he wasn’t wearing gloves. He took a pair from his pocket and slipped them on, then dumped out the contents of the bag.

  And sneezed.

  It was the dust. Not the cold, or flu, or whatever, but the giant plume of dust that jumped up at him as four pieces of drywall fell to the floor. The first three contained poems, the last one a single sentence:

  You can’t play God without being acquainted with the devil.

  61

  Diary

  Welderman and Stocks exited the car, spoke to the man in the navy blue trench coat for several minutes, then Welderman opened my door. “This way, Anson.”

  I looked out at all three of them and made no effort to leave the seat. I may not have liked Welderman’s car, but I was smart enough to know whatever was coming if I followed those three men wasn’t good. They weren’t going to kill me, I knew that much—they would have killed me back at the farm where they had seclusion—but the way Stocks stared down at his shoes, the nervous glances around the parking lot from Welderman, that told me there was something else to fear. The look on Vincent’s face the other night when he returned from a similar trip was enough to confirm those thoughts.

  The man in the trench coat handed Welderman a key, nodded back at the motel, and said “fourteen” in a low tone before getting back into his white van and closing the door. He didn’t leave. Instead, he sat there, his eyes scanning the parking lot—the people moving across the street at some fast food place, an older man filling up his station wagon at the Phillips 66 next door. I knew what a lookout was. I had played the role plenty of times for Mother and Father. This man was a lookout.

  Stocks’s cigarette-stained fingers reached into the car, wrapped around my collar, and pulled me out. I let my legs go weak and fell to the ground.

  Welderman let out a sigh and made a show of pulling the corner of his jacket back just enough so that I could see the gun holstered on his belt. “Are you going to make me shoot you, kid? If you think I won’t, you’re kidding yourself. I’ve got no problem putting a bullet in you and walking across the street and grabbing a burger while Stocks cleans things up. You wouldn’t be the first. We could knock you around a little too; that’s what we had to do with Weidner. Even your little friend Libby put up a good fight until I added a bruise or two to the patchwork already there.” He knelt down next to me and looked me in the eyes. “My point is, this will end in one of two ways: either with you dead or you walking voluntarily to that room. There is no Option C. If you decide you’d like to survive the night, then the sooner you take the walk to that room, the sooner you’ll be back home tucked in your own bed, trying to convince yourself none of this ever happened. The first time is tough for everyone, but it gets easier. I can promise you that.”

  He stood back up then, glanced back across the road at the fast food place. “I’m hungry, so make up your fucking mind.”

  The man in the van was watching us, too. He didn’t appear very concerned—just another day, been there, done that.

  I stood back up and brushed the dirt from my pants. I couldn’t take
on two men with guns, definitely not three. I looked over at the motel behind us. “Room Fourteen?”

  Welderman nodded. “Yeah.”

  I started across the parking lot, with Stocks shuffling along behind me, Welderman behind him.

  Room Fourteen was on the first floor in the far right corner. The light was on inside. Most of the other rooms were dark. When we got to the door, Welderman slipped the key into the lock, twisted, and pushed the door open.

  There were two beds, both covered in matching floral print comforters. A small, round table stood inside the room to the right of the door. There was a counter and sink at the back of the room, a bathroom to the left. A television droned from a chipped dresser across from the beds. I didn’t see anyone, not at first. Then a toilet flushed and a man came out of the bathroom, glanced at us, and turned to the sink to wash his hands without a word.

  Either Welderman or Stocks pushed me into the room with a hand to my back. I couldn’t tell which. Welderman said, “You have fifty minutes.”

  The door closed behind me. The man reached for a towel to dry off. And I stood there.

  62

  Nash

  Day 5 • 5:12 PM

  Black handwriting, large block letters scrawled onto drywall over faded and chipped paint. Nash hadn’t seen these before, but he knew exactly what they were. Someone had cut them out of the walls at an abandoned house on 41st, the same house where Special Agent Diener was killed. Anson Bishop had been holed up across the street.

  Poole wrote the text from memory on one of the whiteboards back at the War Room. They assumed Bishop didn’t want the text to be found for some reason and cut them out when he killed Diener. In the video earlier today, Bishop said that Porter killed Diener, which meant he would have removed the drywall…and hid the pieces here?

  Even if Sam did take them, why would he hide them in his own apartment?

  Planted. Had to be.

  Then why would Sam give cash to Upchurch?

  Nash laid out the four squares on the floor. The first said:

  Because I could not stop for Death,

  He kindly stopped for me;

  The carriage held but just ourselves

  And Immortality.

  The second read:

  A telling analogy for life and death:

  Compare the two of them to water and ice.

  Water draws together to become ice,

  And ice disperses again to become water.

  Whatever has died is sure to be born again;

  Whatever is born comes around again to dying.

  As ice and water do one another no harm,

  So life and death, the two of them, are fine.

  And the third was shorter:

  Let us return Home, let us go back,

  Useless is this reckoning of seeking and getting,

  Delight permeates all of today.

  From the blue ocean of death

  Life is flowing like nectar.

  In life there is death; in death there is life.

  So where is fear, where is fear?

  The birds in the sky are singing “No death, no death!”

  Day and night the tide of Immortality

  Is descending here on earth.

  As Poole had remembered them, several words were underlined:

  Ice

  water

  Life

  death

  Home

  fear

  Death

  They thought they had figured out the meaning—Upchurch had placed the bodies of his victims in ice, under the water after drowning them repeatedly in a tank of saltwater in his basement. From what they learned from the two survivors, he was trying to determine if they saw anything after they died, after he brought them back. Poole felt that was why the word death was underlined twice. All the underlined words fit their theory except for home. They never did figure that one out.

  None of this explained why someone (Bishop or Porter) would take the time to cut these particular blocks of text from a graffiti-filled wall and hide them somewhere. Particularly after killing a federal agent, knowing another was just across the street.

  There was something else here, something they missed.

  Nash took pictures of each board and texted them to Clair, Klozowski, and Poole along with the message Found these in Sam’s apartment. He knew they’d ask, and at this point, he saw no reason to keep anything from them. They’d sort things out.

  A tickle crept through the inside of his nose again, and he turned his head and sneezed. Three of them, rapid fire. When finished, he stood and looked around the room for a tissue. If Heather were still around, he was sure there’d be a box in every room. Sam was slowly reverting back to bachelor status, though—no tissues and the paper towel holder in the kitchen held nothing but an empty cardboard tube.

  Even the worst bachelor kept toilet paper on hand, so Nash made his way through the apartment to the bathroom off the bedroom, turning on lights as he went.

  He didn’t see the body, not at first. If someone hadn’t taken the time to wrap it in plastic before dumping it in the bathtub, he might have smelled the decomposing flesh from the other room. The salt probably stifled the smell, too, or maybe it was just his stuffy nose.

  63

  Porter

  Day 5 • 5:21 PM

  True to her word, when the Talbot Enterprises jet touched down at Charleston Executive Airport, Emory had arranged for an SUV to be positioned at the private tarmac. They rolled to a stop less than fifty feet from where it was parked, and a man wearing Talbot Enterprises Air Service overalls met Porter at the base of the steps and handed him the keys. “She’s fueled, and there’s a prepaid cell phone in the center console should you need to place a call. Feel free to dispose of it when you feel appropriate.” He handed Porter a business card, also Talbot Enterprises. “My number’s on the back. You need anything, you call me. We’re under instructions to keep the jet here on standby for your exclusive use. Your pilots will remain on airport grounds. On average, we need about thirty minutes to prep the plane for takeoff, so if you’re in a hurry, try to phone me in advance and we can minimize your wait.”

  “Thank you.” Porter took the keys, slipped the card in his pocket, and made his way to the SUV with the backpack slung over his shoulder.

  Among every other luxury Porter could possibly imagine, the jet had several laptops equipped with high-speed Internet access. Once online, it didn’t take long to find what he was looking for. As he settled into the driver seat of the SUV, he studied the directions he’d written down, then started the vehicle and followed the signs to I-26. He pulled into the parking lot of Camden Treatment Center less than thirty minutes later.

  The building was white, single story, with a flat roof. The grounds were carefully maintained, trimmed trees and blooms that managed to provide color even during these winter months—not that South Carolina winters in any way compared to Chicago’s. He was fairly certain snow was nothing but a myth this far south. Considering the time was after five, past quitting time, there were only a couple of cars in the parking lot.

  He considered bringing the backpack, then thought better of it. He tucked it down on the floor in front of the passenger seat. If he needed the diaries, he could always come back out for them. As in New Orleans, for people to believe he was a working cop, he needed to look the part, and cops didn’t carry backpacks. They did carry guns and badges, so he left the holstered gun on his belt. There was little he could do about the missing badge. Emory had done her best with the clothing, but he had to admit, everything he wore was far beyond a cop’s salary. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror only long enough to confirm he didn’t have food on his face, then left the SUV for the building’s entrance.

  Pushing through the door, he found himself in a carpeted lobby, the walls a mix of beige and white tastefully decorated with painted landscapes. A woman in her early twenties looked up from the computer at the reception desk and smiled. “May
I help you?”

  Porter handed her one of his business cards from Metro. “I need to speak to someone about a former patient. About twenty years ago.”

  “Twenty years?”

  Porter nodded.

  “Patient’s name?”

  “Anson Bishop.”

  The woman eyed him for a moment, then picked up her phone and spoke to someone in a hushed tone. Porter couldn’t make out the words. When she hung up, she nodded toward a group of chairs against the opposite wall. “If you’d like to have a seat, our director will be with you in a few minutes.”

  The last thing Porter wanted to do was sit and wait, but he had little choice. He crossed the room and lowered himself into one of the silver and black leather chairs and glanced at the stack of outdated magazines on the table at his side. He really didn’t care what the royal family was up to or who Jennifer Aniston was dating. Johnny Depp’s financial concerns were slightly intriguing, but before he could scoop up that particular issue, he heard a male voice talking to someone behind the door at the back of the lobby. Then the door opened with an electronic buzz and a man in his late fifties, early sixties looked around the room, settled on Porter.

  At first, the man seemed to stare, a slight look of confusion on his face. Narrow eyes behind thin glasses. Porter had told himself that if someone recognized him from television or anywhere, he’d just leave. He could be on the road and gone long before they could call someone. Definitely before that someone could get here. He needed to remain mobile now. He’d lost valuable time locked up at Metro.

  The man glanced over at the woman behind the desk. “If anyone calls, tell them I’m in a meeting?”

  She nodded in reply.

  He turned back to Porter. “Follow me, Detective?”

  A statement set in the form of a question. Porter had spoken to his share of shrinks over the years, like every cop does, and this was a particular skill they all seemed to share. Nearly every phrase leaving their mouths did so in the form of a question. He found it as annoying now as he did every other time. He smiled back at the doctor, though, and followed him through the door, a sense of déjà vu rushing over him.