by Chris Mooney
We’ll kill him. How many people were involved in this? Theresa’s mind was on fire, scrambling to think. But she couldn’t, she couldn’t hold it together any more. She broke down, wailing.
‘I don’t want to kill him, Mrs Herrera. I really don’t. Your son has suffered enough. If you want him to live, we need to go back to your bedroom.’
‘Why? Why are you doing this?’
‘This is a conversation we need to have in front of your husband.’
‘Please,’ Theresa said, wiping at her face. ‘Please, I’m begging you, whatever this is about – if it’s money you want, I can –’
‘We need to go back to your bedroom. I’ll be right by your side.’ The Clouzot woman offered her a hand.
Theresa didn’t take it. ‘I want to talk to Rico again. I want to –’
‘Do you want me to bring you to your son?’
‘Yes. Yes, please, I’ll do anything just don’t … hurt him any more.’
The Clouzot woman put a hand on Theresa’s shoulder, the tender, gentle way a woman would – It’s okay, honey, everything’s going to be okay.
‘I won’t hurt him,’ Marie Clouzot said. ‘Now let’s go back to your bedroom and talk to your husband.’
Theresa didn’t move. A dim voice whispered that she was in shock. Maybe she was. She hadn’t so much as flinched when the hand touched her, and she didn’t fight back when the Clouzot woman lifted her to her feet. Theresa felt the woman gently wrap an arm around her. The next thing she knew she was being ushered forward, her legs numb and hollow.
‘That’s it,’ Marie Clouzot said. ‘One step at a time.’
3
Theresa stared at the brightly lit hall. It seemed as long as a mile, and incredulously she thought: This is what a condemned prisoner must feel like when he’s being escorted to the electric chair.
Her legs gave out as she stepped inside the bedroom. She would have fallen had the Clouzot woman not been clutching her arm.
‘It’s okay,’ the Clouzot woman said. ‘I know you’re scared. Think about Rico – how excited he’ll be to see you.’
The lamps on both nightstands had been turned on, giving the room an intimate setting. The shades and curtains were still drawn. Her husband was still dressed in sweatpants and his ratty old grey Yale T-shirt; he still lay spread-eagled on top of the white ruffled coverlet, his wrists tied to the copper-plated headboard and his ankles to the bedposts. He couldn’t speak; a strip of duct-tape was fastened across his mouth. He mumbled behind it, glaring at her, his hazel eyes wide with terror.
‘Just a few more steps,’ Marie Clouzot said. ‘That’s it, you’re doing great.’
The left side of Barry’s face was swollen. Had the Clouzot woman hit him, or had it been her partner? At five foot eight, Barry wasn’t a big man. She could have easily dragged him up here by herself, Theresa thought dimly. Sweat had soaked through Barry’s T-shirt and matted what little remained of his greying hair. She saw where the rope had cut his skin. Bright drops of blood dotted the white pillowcases. This morning’s bandage was still on his reedy and nearly hairless forearm. She had gone with him to the dermatologist’s office. A mole had changed colour. The doctor had taken a biopsy, and Barry had convinced himself that he had stage-four melanoma.
‘Almost there,’ Marie Clouzot said, edging Theresa closer to the side of the bed.
Seeing the bandage made what was happening very real somehow, as did the item that had been left on the nightstand: the heavy cook’s knife taken from the kitchen’s butcher block, the German Wusthof with the fourteen-inch blade she used to carve the holiday turkeys and hams. It was within arm’s reach.
Pick it up, that pragmatic voice screamed at her. Pick it up and kill her.
No.
You can do it, Terry. You have to do it.
I can’t. They’ll kill Rico.
The opportunity had passed. The Clouzot woman had let go of her grip and moved away. Theresa rested her thighs against the edge of the bed to keep from falling, her heart beating so fast she wondered if it was going to explode inside her chest.
Pretend to pass out, that pragmatic voice said.
She’ll wait, Theresa answered. Either that or she’ll hit me with the Taser and just walk out.
You don’t know that. Goddamnit, Terry, you have to try something.
Marie Clouzot, standing at the foot of the bed, reached into her handbag and came back with a small digital camcorder, one of those tiny Flip Video models.
‘Whenever you’re ready, Mrs Herrera.’
‘Ready?’ Theresa repeated.
‘For your confession,’ Marie Clouzot said. ‘I want you to tell your husband what you did.’
What I did? What is she talking about?
‘Don’t be shy, Mrs Herrera. You might not remember me, but I’m absolutely, positively sure you remember your former life in Philadelphia.’
Theresa felt frozen in place. A new fear bloomed in her stomach, and for a moment it replaced her thoughts of Rico and what was happening – unfolding – right now inside her bedroom.
‘Yes,’ the Clouzot woman said, and smiled – a bright and joyous Christmas-morning smile. ‘You remember now, don’t you?’
Theresa swallowed. She didn’t know what to say and she had to say something.
‘About … that. I didn’t know what –’
‘Don’t tell me, Mrs Herrera, tell your husband – and look at him when you speak. If you don’t, Rico goes bye-bye.’
The Clouzot woman brought up the video camera. Theresa forced her attention on to Barry. He gawked up at her from the bed, confused and frightened.
Theresa had been married to him for nineteen years, and not once during that time had she ever considered telling him about Philadelphia. The woman who had been born and lived in the Northeast – that person was dead and buried. Speaking about it to anyone, for any reason, wasn’t allowed. Theresa had told no one, not even Ali Karim. He could turn over every rock on the planet, and there was no way he would never find out who she really was.
And yet Marie Clouzot knew. She knew.
How? How did she find out?
‘Tell your husband who you are, and what you did,’ Marie Clouzot said. Her left hand held the camera steady as her right hand dipped into her coat pocket and came back with a compact 9-mm. ‘I won’t ask you again.’
Theresa began to talk – haltingly at first, and then her words gathered steam. Every word she spoke felt like another hot coal stockpiled in her stomach. She got past it by thinking of Rico – Rico alive and waiting for her.
When she finished, Theresa felt a hollow beating inside her chest. She still didn’t know who Marie Clouzot was, but she had an idea.
‘Is there anything else you’d like to add, Mrs Herrera?’
‘Yes.’ Theresa’s voice sounded far away, and strained. She cleared her throat and, steeling herself, spoke louder. ‘I want to apologize to you. As for what … happened, I didn’t –’
‘You have one minute to make your decision.’
Theresa blinked, confused. ‘Decision?’
‘I want you to pick up that kitchen knife and cut your husband’s throat.’
4
Theresa said nothing. She had nothing to say. That pragmatic voice had nothing to say. Her mind felt as vacant as an abandoned house.
Marie Clouzot had to raise her voice over Barry’s muffled screams. ‘Kill your husband, and I’ll bring you to your son. If you don’t kill your husband, I’ll kill you, and then I’ll leave and kill your son. Are you familiar with slow slicing?’
Theresa didn’t hear the question, still in shock by what the woman had said: Cut your husband’s throat.
‘Slow slicing is a form of execution developed by the Chinese,’ the Clouzot woman said, reaching into her pocket. ‘You use a knife to cut away portions of the body over a long period of time. It’s death by a thousand cuts.’
‘I … I can’t …’
‘Can’t what, Mrs H
errera?’
‘I can’t go through with this.’
The Clouzot woman placed the wrinkled snapshot of Rico on Barry’s stomach.
‘You have fifty-three seconds left to make your decision, Mrs Herrera.’
‘I want to help you,’ Theresa said. ‘Please, let me help you.’
‘Forty-nine seconds.’
Barry was screaming, thrashing.
‘We can come to some sort of … accommodation,’ Theresa said. ‘Let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about how I can help –’
‘Forty-three seconds.’
Theresa saw her son’s frightened gaze staring up from the photograph lying on Barry’s stomach, and she saw her son staring at her from the photographs on the walls and bureau – Rico as a baby and as a toddler, each picture showing a boy with a round, brown face and a mop of unruly black hair; a gap-toothed smile and, along the right temple, a strawberry-coloured birthmark the size of a dime.
‘Thirty-nine seconds, Mrs Herrera.’
She stared at the photograph on Barry’s stomach. Rico was alive. Her son’s life depended on her next decision – a horribly cruel, life-altering decision.
Was her husband’s life worth it?
Don’t let them take me back there, Rico had said.
‘Thirty-seven seconds.’
I can’t take it any more. Please, Mom. Please help me.
Theresa grabbed the heavy cook’s knife.
Barry screamed from behind the tape. He screamed and thrashed, the rope cutting deeper into his skin. Blood trickled down his wrists.
‘You have twenty-two seconds left.’
God forgive me, Theresa thought, turning the knife in her hands, just as a pair of car headlights flashed across the drawn blinds.
5
Malcolm Fletcher parked the Audi at the bottom of the long driveway leading up to an impressive brick-faced Colonial, the home of Dr Bernard Herrera and his wife, Theresa. It was a few minutes past seven, and a light snow had started to fall.
The lights in one of the upstairs rooms winked off. The other windows blazed with light, but he couldn’t see inside. The blinds on the windows facing the street had been drawn.
He wondered why. There was no house across the road. Each home in this upscale neighbourhood here in Applewood, Colorado, had been set up on a good amount of acreage, far apart from one another to give the owners a great deal of privacy. Fletcher killed the engine and picked up the leather Dopp kit from the passenger seat.
While he felt reasonably confident that neither Dr Herrera nor his wife would recognize him, Fletcher still needed to exercise caution. With Bin Laden dead, Fletcher had shot to the top slot as the nation’s Most Wanted Fugitive – and the most expensive. The reward for his capture was three million dollars.
Fletcher had not undergone any cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance. Instead, he relied on the tradecraft he’d learned while employed as a federal agent. From the Dopp kit he removed a plastic case holding a pair of blue-tinted contact lenses. Because he was allergic to the materials used to manufacture lenses, he always put them in at the last minute. Then he put on a pair of glasses with tortoiseshell frames.
He checked his appearance in the rearview mirror. His beard was neatly trimmed and his black hair, thick and long, had grown out over the ears. For the past five months he had been living in Key West under one of his aliases and his skin was brown from the sun. With his tan, stylish glasses and coloured contacts, he bore no resemblance to his fugitive photos.
He was, however, the spitting image of the New York licence and passport photographs he carried for Richard Munchel, a self-employed computer-security consultant who occasionally performed work for the global security company Karim Enterprises. Ali Karim had contacted him using the anonymous and encrypted email system they had set up.
Karim had recently agreed to look into the abduction of a ten-year-old boy from Colorado. Four years had passed with no developments reported by the police, and the mother believed her son was still alive. Karim thought that Fletcher’s prior experience as a profiler for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit might possibly uncover a new investigative thread to explore, an overlooked angle or piece of evidence. Fletcher agreed, and Karim scanned and then emailed the police reports. Karim, an old friend and trusted ally, had not only provided him with safe harbour on many occasions over the years; he was also one of a handful of people who knew the truth behind Fletcher’s fugitive status.
Years ago, while employed as a federal agent, Fletcher had uncovered a classified ‘black book’ research project involving the Behavioral Analysis Unit. While conducting his own covert investigation, three men were dispatched to his home to make him and the evidence disappear. Fletcher escaped with his life but not the evidence; the FBI had confiscated it from his storage facility. The research project was quickly dismantled, the hospitals shut down, every scrap of paper and piece of evidence collected and destroyed. The FBI’s bureaucratic powers, having decided he was a liability, fabricated a story for the press: Malcolm Fletcher had attacked and killed three federal agents who had been sent to his home to arrest him in connection with the murders of several serial killers – cases he had worked on while employed as a profiler.
Fletcher climbed out of the car, pleased to be wearing a suit after these longs months spent under the hot Florida sun. He was a veteran of private schools, where ties and jackets were required, and then later, as a federal agent, he had grown accustomed to good suits and shoes. They were a part of his true identity, the last vestiges of the life he had led before becoming a wanted man.
His attention turned to the area between the right side of the house and the detached two-car garage – the place where someone had used an outside ladder to climb up to the first-floor window and abduct Rico Herrera from his bed. The intruder had not left behind any fingerprints or trace evidence, but police had recovered a man’s size-nine trainer impression from the dirt.
Fletcher shut the car door and moved up the driveway.
6
When the Clouzot woman saw the headlights flash across the closed blinds, she shut off the bedroom lights. Theresa didn’t put up a fight when the woman grabbed her arm and, with a surprising strength, marched her swiftly across the room to the windows facing the street.
Theresa was standing there now, with her face mashed against the window’s crown moulding and the gun’s muzzle digging into her left temple, Clouzot behind her. As instructed, Theresa had pulled back the side of the wooden blinds just enough to allow Clouzot to see the driveway.
Theresa could see too. The man who stepped out of the black Audi had long, dark hair and wore a dark overcoat. This has to be the man Ali Karim said would be coming by tonight to talk about Rico, she thought. The man experienced in abduction cases.
Clouzot leaned in closer. ‘Who is he, and what is he doing here?’
So Barry hadn’t told her about the investigator – or Ali Karim.
Don’t tell her, that pragmatic voice said. If you do – if you tell her this man is an investigator, that he’s here because you hired someone to look into Rico’s case – she might panic and decide to kill you.
Theresa felt Rico watching her from the photographs.
I can’t take it any more. Please, Mom. Please help me.
The doorbell rang.
‘He’s an investigator,’ Theresa said. ‘I don’t know his name.’
‘Police? FBI?’
‘I don’t know. He works for someone else, a man named Ali Karim. Karim owns a security company in New York. Manhattan. I hired him to look into what happened to my son.’
‘Why? What did you find?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You found something, some piece of evidence.’ Clouzot’s voice was quiet, almost a whisper, but the calm veneer was gone. The woman was scared. ‘Tell me.’
‘Nothing. I just –’
‘Just what?’
‘I … I couldn’t live with it any
more, not knowing what happened to him. To Rico.’
‘Did you tell this Karim person your real name?’
‘No.’
‘What you did back in Philadelphia?’
The doorbell rang again.
‘No,’ Theresa said. ‘No, of course not.’
‘Lie to me and your son dies.’
‘I’m telling you the truth. I –’ Theresa cut herself off when she felt the gun muzzle dig deeper into her head.
‘Yell at me again,’ Clouzot said, ‘and I’ll kill you.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Clouzot said nothing. Theresa blinked the sweat from her eyes. The wooden blinds rattled in her trembling hand.
A moment later she saw the man move away from the front door. Instead of heading to his car, he walked to the top of the driveway and peered inside one of the garage’s bay windows.
Theresa felt the woman’s rapid breathing against her nape, heard the hitch in her throat when the man turned and made his way back to the house.
‘Let go of the blind,’ Clouzot said.
Theresa did. Clouzot released her grip and backed away. Theresa didn’t dare move.
Two beeps as the woman pressed the keys for a pre-programmed number on her cell and then Clouzot spoke into the phone: ‘If you don’t hear from me within the next five minutes, take Rico away and kill him.’
Fletcher couldn’t see inside the house. The blinds on the nearby windows had been drawn, and the front door, made of solid mahogany, contained no small perimeter windows.
No matter. Both the doctor and his wife were home. Both vehicles were parked in the garage. He rang the doorbell again, about to follow it with repeated knocking, when the heavy door cracked open.
7
When Theresa saw the man standing on her doorstep, she immediately wanted to scream for help – scream as she threw the door wide open and pointed at the sick bitch Clouzot, who was pressed up against the wall only a few feet away, listening. The owner of the black Audi was at least six foot five and as broad-shouldered as a timber beam – the kind of strong and powerful man she imagined could lift a small car or run through a wall without so much as suffering a single scratch.