by Steven James
Not the best memory.
He looked away. “So, where are they?”
“Lemme text Mimi.”
Graffiti was spray-painted on the walls, symbols Erik had never seen in any of the houses he’d been in before: upside-down crosses, goat heads. Pentagrams. He didn’t know a lot about what they meant, but he knew enough. “Man, once we find ’em let’s go to a different house. I don’t like this.”
“You don’t like what?”
“Being here. This place. There’s something about it.”
“You’re being a pussy.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Alright then, shut up and come on. Let’s go find the girls.”
As Canyon tapped at the screen of his cell to text his girlfriend, Erik noticed a phone on the kitchen table blinking to life. “Hey, it’s in there.” He stepped over a mess of filthy clothes that might have been left there by a squatter and walked to the kitchen table.
Canyon looked up from his phone. “What do you mean?”
Erik held it up so his friend could see. “This is Mimi’s, right?”
“Yeah, it is.” Canyon sounded a little uneasy. “Something’s not right.” He called for the girls again, and this time Erik heard muffled noises coming from the end of the hallway, from somewhere beyond a door that was slightly open. By the look on his friend’s face, Canyon heard them too.
A splattering of red dotted the wall where the refrigerator would have stood. It didn’t look like paint.
Canyon turned on his flashlight. “Mimi?” As he called her name there was a catch in his voice.
No reply. Just more muffled sounds.
“Come on.” Canyon jabbed the beam of light through the shadowy hallway and the boys crossed it toward the door. When Canyon eased the door open, Erik saw the basement steps leading downward.
Faint light curled up through the darkness.
Candlelight.
“Mimi?” Canyon called. “Gwen? You down there?”
The indistinguishable sounds grew more urgent.
Erik wanted to run, to get as far away from this house and this basement and those symbols on the wall as he could. Get out, get out, get back to the car—but the girls were here. And there was no way he was gonna leave without them, especially if they were hurt.
Canyon flicked out the switchblade he always carried and started down the rough wooden staircase.
As Erik followed him, he wished that he had a knife too.
About halfway down, an old wood furnace came into view, along with a looming pile of boxes, a workbench, and a shelf cluttered with mildew-covered books.
Cement-block walls.
A dirt floor.
More of a cellar, really, than a basement.
Erik was a few steps behind Canyon, and as his friend reached the bottom, Erik saw her.
A dark-haired girl he didn’t recognize.
She was seated against a thick metal support pole at the far end of the cellar, gagged. From this angle, Erik could tell that her wrists were tied behind her, around the other side of the pole. Her ankles were tied together too.
That has to be Mimi’s friend. That has to be Gwen.
A dozen or so candles were scattered throughout the basement, their flames licking and hissing faintly at the darkness like the tongues of angry snakes.
Mimi was lying on her back, motionless, near her friend. Her eyes were closed. She might have been asleep. It looked like she’d put on fresh lipstick, and it glistened wet and ready in the eerie flickering candlelight.
“Mimi?” Canyon’s voice quivered as he called to her. “You okay?”
Gwen tugged at the ropes, struggling to get free, eyes wide and frantic. She tried to say something, but because of the gag, Erik couldn’t make out what it was.
Canyon’s eyes were still on Mimi, but he hadn’t started walking toward her. It was like he’d become frozen in place, or maybe he was trying to decide if he should take another step forward at all, or go back up the stairs instead.
If he’s not gonna do anything, you need to!
Erik held out his hand. “Give me the knife.”
“What? Why?”
“I’m gonna cut Gwen free. Go see if Mimi’s okay. Go on!”
Carrying the knife, Erik hurried to Gwen’s side, then knelt beside her and slid the gag out of her mouth.
“You okay?”
“Untie me,” she gasped. “Get me out of here. Hurry! Before he comes back!”
Out of the corner of his eye, Erik could see Canyon on his knees next to Mimi, who still hadn’t moved.
Erik worked at the rope, but even though the blade was sharp, the rope was thick and wound so tightly around Gwen’s wrists that he had to be careful not to cut her skin along with the rope.
Movement caught his attention and he glanced toward Canyon again. His friend was urgently patting Mimi’s cheek. “Wake up. Come on, wake up, wake up.”
Gwen squirmed again, but that just made it harder for Erik to keep from slicing her wrist as he sawed through the bindings. “Hold still, okay? I’ll get it. I don’t want to cut you. Relax. Hang on. I’ll get it.”
As she moved, so did he, and the blade nicked her.
“Sorry!”
But she was anxiously scanning the cellar behind him and didn’t even seem to notice.
Finally, the rope’s frayed ends dropped away and her hands were free. The rope around her ankles went a lot faster and as soon as he’d cut through it, he used his free hand to help Gwen up. However, just as she got to her feet, she screeched, “Behind you!”
Erik whipped around as Canyon lunged at him, grabbing his shoulders and shouting, “Gotcha!”
The two girls squealed in delight.
They were messing with you! All this! They set everything up just to scare you!
The girls laughed hysterically, and Mimi, who was standing up by then too, said, “Erik, you shoulda seen your face. That was awesome!”
At first Canyon laughed too. But then the laughter faded. His smile faded too.
He looked down.
Erik’s eyes followed his friend’s.
Down.
To the knife that he’d used only moments ago to free Gwen. The knife he’d still been holding when she yelled and he spun around and Canyon leapt at him. The knife that was now buried all the way to the grip in the stomach of his best friend.
“No, no, no,” Erik said.
Canyon still had his hands on Erik’s shoulders and his grip tightened as he tried to steady himself. “Dude,” Canyon mumbled. “Is that . . . ?”
Erik wanted to undo everything, to make it better, to make it right.
He drew the knife back toward him as if that might help, like starting over in a video game, make it so that none of this had ever happened.
Do-over.
Redo. Redo. Redo.
Hands trembling, he dropped the knife and for some reason noticed that the blood on the blade picked up dirt as it hit the ground and rolled to the side. Dusty earth, stained dark with blood.
Dark.
With.
Blood.
Canyon’s knees gave way.
Erik tried to support him, but ended up just helping ease him to the ground.
Now the girls were beside them. Gwen was screaming and Mimi was saying over and over, “Oh my God . . . Oh my God . . . Oh my God.”
“You stabbed me, bro,” Canyon muttered. Erik expected cursing, blame, fury, but it was only surprise in his friend’s voice. Just deep and terrible surprise.
“It was an accident,” Erik said desperately. “I didn’t mean to. I . . .” But then he stopped. It seemed like no matter what he said, it would never be enough.
Canyon had his hand pressed against the place where the blade had gone in
, but despite that, a lot of blood was coming out, and had already covered half of his shirt.
A widening circle of red.
It kept coming, oozing between his fingers.
Erik fumbled for his phone to call 911 as Mimi bent beside her boyfriend and begged him, begged him to be okay.
Redo. Redo.
Start over.
Now.
8
As soon as we touched down on the tarmac, I checked my phone and found a message from Sharyn: Got another body. I’m waiting curbside. Sky blue Yaris. They’re holding the scene for us.
I replied that I would be right there.
After entering the terminal, I hastened through the crowd, tugging my suitcase behind me. Sharyn’s choice of words in her text struck me. Most people might’ve just written blue hatchback or light blue car, but with her, the car wasn’t just blue, it was the color of the sky.
I made my way outside and it took me only a moment to locate her Yaris about twenty meters farther up the curb, in front of the baggage claim area’s exit.
She stood beside the car door, scanning the crowd, but evidently hadn’t seen me yet.
Brunette. A touch of exotic beauty that she got from her Brazilian mother. At five-eleven, she was nearly tall enough to look me in the eye back in those days when we were together and she wore heels on our under-the-radar excursions to D.C.
As I approached her, I could see that she was as fit as ever. With her slim figure and model-worthy looks, she might have stepped right off the cover of a women’s fashion magazine.
In truth, Sharyn had been a model while she was a teenager, after hitting childhood stardom in Hollywood when she was ten. But her parents were as bad at managing her career as they were at getting along with each other, and after their bitter divorce right around her seventeenth birthday, they hadn’t left her with much.
She used most of that to pay her lawyers, agents, and managers, and then to cover her college tuition: a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a master’s in criminology from the University of Maryland–College Park.
She graduated debt-free, changed her name, and started a new life, leaving the Hollywood starlet life behind her. No social media. No interviews. No glamor or hype or paparazzi. In a rare move, the Bureau had helped her bury her old identity so it wouldn’t become a distraction from her work.
I’d heard rumors that she’d had a stalker and that he was part of the reason, but I wasn’t sure. She’d never brought it up, and out of respect for her privacy, I’d never asked.
Scarlett Farrow was gone forever.
And, like a phoenix, Special Agent Sharyn Weist had risen from the ashes.
Now, she glanced in my direction. “Aha. Trying to sneak up on me, huh, Pat? You need to work on your spycraft.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. It’s good to see you.”
“Ditto.” She lifted the Yaris’s hatch and then appraised me briefly. “You’re looking good.”
“So are you.” The words just came out, a compliment for a compliment. Completely innocent.
“Thank you.”
“Your text,” I said, pivoting to the case. “They found another body?”
“Yes. I’ll tell you what we know on the way.” She nodded toward my suitcase and computer bag. “That it?”
“That’s it.” I set them in her car next to a Barbie doll backpack and a clutter of coloring books.
Sharyn read the look on my face. “Olivia is seven,” she explained. “She’s at her dad’s this week. We alternate. Long story.”
It didn’t take a lot of calculating to figure out that Sharyn must have gotten pregnant soon after we dated.
Very soon, actually.
While she was closing the hatch, an SUV pulled up uncomfortably close behind us and we had to brush past each other as we shuffled toward our respective sides of the Yaris.
As she was squeezing by, she hesitated briefly, then gave me a soft hug.
I took it as her way of acknowledging that we were friends, that we’d been close.
I hugged her back. Based on our history, a handshake wouldn’t have been enough. But I kept the hug light and brief so it wouldn’t communicate more than it needed to.
When I eased back from her, she touched a wisp of hair away from her eye, then nodded once in a truncated, professional manner, and said simply, “Okay.”
“Let’s get to the scene,” I said.
“Let’s.”
9
A trickle of sweat ran down the back of Ali Mahmoud Saleem’s neck as he stood in the passport control line at the Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Relax. Be easy. No one must know why you are here.
He was twenty-four. A Muslim, yes, but not from the Middle East, not an Arab—which was one of the reasons he’d been chosen. Less of a chance of being profiled or appearing on a watch list.
There were more than a hundred and thirty ethnic groups in his home country of Kazakhstan, but Russians, Uzbeks, and Kazakhs made up the majority of the population. As a Kazakh, he looked more Mongolian than Middle Eastern, with the distinctively wider eyes, rounder face, and stockier frame than his Chinese neighbors across the border, not far to the southeast of where he and his sister lived.
Though his heritage was Muslim, he hadn’t grown up as a devout follower of Allah and the stubble on his face could barely be called a beard. His tan slacks and white oxford were more than a little crumpled and wrinkled now, after his flights from Ust-Kamenogorsk to Almaty, and then to Frankfurt, where he transferred to a direct flight to Atlanta.
Too many hours in the air.
Now, just one more leg of the trip: the final connection to Detroit.
The queue in front of the passport checkpoint was long and hadn’t been moving at all for the last ten minutes. Something had happened, some sort of security crackdown, and it looked like it might be a couple of hours—which would likely cause him to miss his flight.
Deal with that when it happens, Ali. Do not cause yourself distress by worrying about that over which you have no control.
Movement near the ceiling caught his attention.
Somehow, a bird had gotten into the terminal and was searching for a way out.
Its frantic, erratic flight reminded Ali of what he was doing here, of the possessors of the elephant, of the besieged city, of the decreed stones.
And those birds, all those birds, crossing the desert toward the Holy City.
That old story from fourteen centuries ago was still relevant today—maybe more so now than at any other time in history.
The airport’s displaced bird hovered overhead after momentarily lighting on a sign above one of the border agents’ booths.
Ali remembered his training, the soldier with the scimitar, the tests Fayed put him through, and the man kneeling there in the sand beside them, his wrists zip-tied together behind his back, the black hood over his head.
No, Ali. Do not think of such things.
The rejecter’s cries for mercy; his frantic, stuttered prayers.
No, do not!
The glint of that wicked blade in the sun.
Ali distracted himself by quietly reciting verses of the Qur’an, anything rather than allow himself to dwell on that day in Yemen when Fayed finally let him out of the room and started his training.
The sand. The sweeping arc of that sword.
Breathe.
Relax.
The wet, spurting sounds in the desert.
All will be well.
As long as he remained vigilant and alert and avoided calling any attention to himself, his sister would be safe. He tried to reassure himself with that thought, tried to quell his intractable hesitation to go through with things as planned.
Faatina, the woman watching his sister, Azaliya, wo
uld hear if anything went wrong.
He could not let that happen.
The bird finally flitted to a sign not far from him instructing passengers to have their passports ready for inspection. This time, however, one of the border agents managed to flop a light jacket over the top of it, capturing it before it could take flight again.
A few of the people in line clapped, but most did not. Perhaps, if nothing else, they selfishly wanted that bird to remain trapped in the terminal simply to provide them with a distraction during their intrepid wait.
As the agent carried the bird away, Ali could hear its muffled cries. And to him, they seemed like those of the hooded man forced to his knees: those terrified, desperate pleas for help in the dark.
10
Three teens—two girls and one boy—were huddled together outside the dilapidated house on Runyon Street when we pulled to the curb.
Dispatch had given us their names and I’d checked their DMV records on our drive from the airport, so I knew that the girl with the walnut-colored hair was Gwen Hurst. Sixteen.
Mimi Bianchi stood beside her. Seventeen. Blond.
The boy, Erik Carter, looked flushed. All three kids should’ve probably had paramedics monitoring their condition or attending to them for shock, but instead of EMTs, two stern-looking Detroit Police Department officers flanked them.
When we’d learned the other boy’s name was Canyon Robbins, Sharyn had said softly, “The medical examiner is Dr. Robbins. I wonder if they’re related.”
Three cruisers were parked in front of the house. Crime scene tape stretched only across the porch. They didn’t even bother with the rest of the house. Why waste the tape? Why, when you’re dealing with more murders per year than every other city in the country except Chicago and New York City?
A cluster of thirteen bystanders had gathered across the street and most of the people had their phones out, filming everything. With the current friction between law enforcement officers and the residents of low-income urban areas, there wasn’t anything necessarily surprising about the citizens recording things, but considering the number of vacant houses on this block, there were more people here than I would’ve expected.