Level 26

by Anthony E. Zuiker

  Then finally he stood up wordlessly and went to the phone. Tapped a few digits.

  Dark watched him calmly.

  Finally, Wycoff said, “You came to me first, right?”

  “Yes, Mr. Secretary.”

  “Good. Then you’re out, you cocky son of a bitch. Gone. Breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll have you fucking erased. Tell anyone on your team, same goes for them. Ask Riggins. He’ll tell you how easy it is. One fucking phone call is all it takes.”

  Dark paused, realizing that this man could make good on his threats.

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “Look into my eyes and tell me if I give a shit.”

  Dark looked at him.

  Then he stood up, nodded, and left the hotel room without another word.

  chapter 66

  7:04 A.M.

  Dark didn’t have the world’s easiest face to read. But even Riggins could tell something had gone very wrong.

  “What the hell?” Riggins asked as Dark walked into the Special Circs War Room.

  Dark moved to the desk he’d occupied and started gathering his things.

  “What happened?” Riggins asked.

  “I’ve been removed from the investigation.”

  “By who? That asshole Wycoff? Listen, Dark—”

  “It’s better if you don’t know. I’m going to work this on my own. If I come across anything I think can help, I’ll be in touch.”

  “No,” Riggins said, shaking his head. “If you’re out, I’m out, too. I pulled you into this. I’m not about to leave you dangling.”

  “No, I need you to stay on this,” he said. “I can’t do this without you on the inside. There’s no one else I trust.”

  Problem with Wycoff was, he had a rather extreme definition of the word removed.

  It wasn’t just about being removed from your job. It was about removing you from the face of the earth.

  “Of course you can trust me,” Riggins said. “But what are you going to do? Where are you going?”

  “I’ve tried it the old way, the by-the-books way,” Dark said.

  “But all of that is bullshit. I have to do it my way, or this is never going to end. There are a few lines left in Sqweegel’s little poem, and I want to slice his throat before he finishes.”

  Constance caught him on the way out of 11000 Wilshire. “Dark, wait a minute—I just heard what happened.”

  Dark paused in the hallway. “It was good working with you again, Constance. I know you and the team will catch this son of a bitch.”

  “No, we won’t. Not without you.”

  “If you heard the news from Riggins, then you already know. I’m out.”

  She closed the gap between them and leaned in close. Dark was struck with a flash of memory: the other time that Constance had leaned in close to him, on the couch in his Venice apartment, pushing the bottle away from his face and pressing her lips against his…

  “I know you’re not really out,” she said. “And I think I’ve caught Sqweegel slipping up.”

  “What do you have?”

  “Give me a little time to sort it out. But I think it’s the break we’ve been looking for.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to be here much longer.”

  “Well, don’t go vanishing just yet,” Constance said. “I promise you, it’ll be worth the wait. I’ll page you when I’ve got something nailed down.”

  Dark studied her eyes for a moment, then nodded and walked away.

  Constance jumped out of the driver’s seat of her rental car the moment the shop owner slid his key into the chunky silver lock on the front door. He was a short man, fidgety, and bald on top—looking as if the hair had kindly pulled away from the top of his head to give any passing birds a nice target.

  Which was appropriate, since he illegally sold them.

  And if Constance was right about her hunch, the guy deserved the crap she was about to bring down on him.

  The owner finished unlocking the door, pushed it open. The sign above read NEUROTIC EXOTICS—it was a pet shop specializing in rare, exotic animals. Mostly birds. The door hadn’t completely swung shut behind him when Constance pushed through it and entered the shop. It was claustrophobic, cluttered, and full of tiny fluttering creatures that chirped nervously, beating their fragile wings against their cages.

  “Oh,” the owner said. “We’re not open quite yet.”

  Constance smiled and closed the distance between them.

  “You don’t mind if I just look a little, do you?”

  The owner seemed flustered, so she reached out to touch his forearm. To reassure him.

  “I won’t be long,” Constance said. “I’m running late for work anyway. I’m just looking for a present for my mother—she’s a total bird freak.”

  Reluctantly, the owner waved his hand in the air, muttered something to himself, then quickly moved behind the counter and fidgeted with some papers. Constance pretended to browse, but she knew exactly what she was looking for.

  “This one here,” Constance said. “This bullfinch. Does the AZ mean it’s from Arizona?”

  The owner gulped as if he’d accidentally ingested a small field mouse. Papers dropped from his hand. “You’ll have to leave now,” he said. “As I explained, we’re not open.”

  “But it’s so cute.”

  By this point the owner had pulled the keys out of his pocket and was already nervously ushering Constance to the front door. That was fine; she already had the evidence she needed.

  On the way back to her car Constance paged Dark.

  To hear about Constance’s breakthrough, log into LEVEL26.com and enter the code: finch

  chapter 67

  Upper East Side, New York City

  Friday / 6:45 P.M.

  They say Manhattan never sleeps, but at the right time of evening, there are pockets of dead silence everywhere. Especially in the neighborhoods, where life winds down as the clock approaches the night proper.

  A neighborhood like this.

  Dark moved quietly down a tree-lined street. He was still a little surprised he’d made it here without anyone trying to detain him. Constance had managed to scrounge up the identity of a Special Circs operative who was currently on family leave (read: going insane and trying to claw his way back to normalcy with lengthy and expensive therapy). The man looked vaguely like Dark, but nobody would mistake the two for cousins, let alone brothers.

  Still, a plane carried him from LAX to Newark, and a private car had taken him here, to this block, without incident. Dark’s head was fuzzy from the travel. His body still felt like it was midafternoon; his surroundings told him otherwise. It had been a long time since Dark had traveled to New York, dealt with the jet lag.

  Now he was standing on the front stoop of a three-story brownstone, pushing the pearl door buzzer with a bare fingertip.

  Dark had started out his career this way—pressing door buzzers, hoping someone would answer. Too often, no one did.

  No answer now, either.

  Dark tried pushing the door with his fingertips. The door creaked open, allowing a few millimeters of space between it and the frame. This was not good. People hadn’t left a door unlocked in Manhattan since before they incorporated Brooklyn.

  “Mrs. Dahl,” Dark called out, then edged his way into the brownstone. “FBI!”

  Nothing.

  Inside, you could tell it was a woman’s apartment—or at least, a woman was in charge of the décor. Flowers in vases. Porcelain figurines of animals. The faint sent of freshly burned candles. The only thing masculine about the place rested in a gold frame on top of a credenza—a photo of a burly firefighter. A legend on a small tag read, THE FALLEN WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN, followed by the date—September 11, 2001.

  Deeper in the apartment were more photographs. The walls were lined with snapshots of an active life. A couple kissing at a wedding—the older bride presumably Barbara Dahl. A candid from the sidelines of an NYPD-versus-FD
NY football game. A backyard picnic with a smoking grill and a cooler of ice-cold beer. Soon Dark noticed the unifying thread: the swatches of red, white, and blue. In some photos it was a flag; in others, a streamer. But it was clear these were all post-9/11 photos, when the country was swimming in its colors, because it was one of the few things you could do.

  “Mrs. Dahl?”

  Barbara Dahl had remarried since the fall of the Twin Towers had taken her first husband. As Dark moved through the house, he could find no evidence of that earlier marriage. If she couldn’t wipe it from her memory, she’d managed to erase it from her home.

  Dark turned a corner and saw a doorway leading to the basement level. He descended quickly, quietly, down the cement stairs and into the dimly lit room. In a second he would know why she hadn’t answered.

  It was the smell that hit him first.

  He turned the corner and saw the body of Mrs. Dahl hanging from a leather belt affixed to overhead pipes. Her tongue poked out of her open mouth, as if she’d died in the middle of a sentence. Her bowels had voided themselves, which accounted for the smell. One shoe was on the floor; one shoe still clung to her foot, which was two feet above the ground.

  But Dark didn’t get caught up in the gruesome sight of her corpse. There was a sound above him—the creak of the front door opening.

  Dark swung around and pointed his gun into the darkness, then slowly made his way across the basement floor. Above him there were three steps, pressing down on the floorboards…then nothing.

  Did the person upstairs hear Dark downstairs? Is that why he stopped?

  Was it Sqweegel?

  As Dark moved toward the stairs, he heard more footsteps. But they were quiet this time, cautious, so that all you heard was the wooden floor straining a little under the weight of each step.

  Dark’s mind whipped back to the last time he had been creeping around under wooden boards—the church in Rome. Almost every night since then he’d fantasized about aiming his gun high and blasting away through the boards themselves. A full clip, emptied at random into the scaffolding above, would have more or less guaranteed that one of the bullets would find the monster. And one bullet was all he would have needed back then to prevent the nightmare to follow.

  The temptation to raise the gun and start shooting was strong. But of course Dark wouldn’t. Not until he was sure it was his quarry.

  Now Dark would just have to move as silently as possible and meet him halfway, and pray that he saw that slithering body encased in white latex….

  The footsteps ceased at the top of the basement stairs. Dark raised his gun at the vertical coffin of the doorway.

  A shadowed head leaned into it.

  “Don’t move,” Dark told the shadow.

  The shadow seemed to nod, then sniffle and clear its throat.

  “Hands up—fucking now,” Dark said, reaching up for the pull cord that would turn on the single lightbulb above him.

  The shadow complied just as light washed over him. He was a middle-aged man, still in his navy fire department slacks and white T-shirt. He stepped forward, hands in the air. There was a small piece of stationery in his raised right hand.

  His cheeks were red and streaked with tears.

  “I couldn’t touch her,” he said, voice trembling. “I couldn’t pick up the phone and I couldn’t touch her. Oh, God, Barb…”

  Dark called it in, then patiently drew the story out of the man—firefighter Jim Franks, who turned out to be Mrs. Dahl’s second husband. He’d just finished up a shift in the Bronx and had raced home to be with Barbara, who’d been having a tough time of it lately. He’d found her body, then the letter, and went into a kind of shock. Franks was a firefighter; he knew the symptoms all too well. Knew that it was happening to him. Somehow he’d made it upstairs and into the tiny courtyard behind their house to catch his breath and put his mind back together again. A lot of time went by—exactly how long, Franks didn’t even know—before he thought to look down to read her note. And then he’d gone into shock all over again.

  “Can I see that note?” Dark asked.

  Reluctantly, Franks handed Dark the letter he’d been clinging to.

  I miss my husband. I’m sorry, Jim. The money is yours.

  “What money?” Dark asked.

  chapter 68

  Brooklyn, New York

  Across the East River, in front of a hospital in Brooklyn, the four widows waited patiently in the oversized white van.

  Tonight was something new—a field trip. They’d received the calls earlier in the day, instructing them to meet him in front of the hospital instead of their therapy group’s usual space in the basement. Most of them seemed to welcome the idea. It was a break from the overly bright room that reeked of disinfectant.

  It was also a distraction from the tragedy of the horses.

  The senseless slaughter had hit them all in different ways, but none of them could just shrug it off. Symbols take on a life of their own, and when someone destroys the living symbol of someone you dearly miss, it’s almost like experiencing the original pain all over again. And once again, the city seemed to mourn with them.

  Why would someone shoot those poor horses? It went beyond the realm of a sick joke. There was no financial motive. There were only victims, no beneficiaries.

  The site of tonight’s field trip hadn’t been revealed, but some of the widows guessed it involved the mounted police stables. Their therapy mentor was all about confronting your grief head-on. Stick it in your face, he once said, and you’ll be able to put it in its place.

  Some of the widows would like to stick something else in his pompous little face….

  Still, the approach seemed to help. And as a result the widows trusted him, which was why they waited patiently for their mentor inside a stuffy white van.

  After a while a thin man—clean-cut, nondescript—opened the driver’s-side door. He pulled himself into the seat, then turned to face the women. Big smile on his face.

  “Hi, ladies. I’m Ken Martin, and I’ll be your driver. Dr. Haut asked me to take you to the site; he’ll meet us there. We all ready? Any questions?”

  No, there were no questions. They could guess what Dr. Haut had in store for them; they were steeling themselves to dive headfirst into their grief, yet again. None of them wanted to see the stables, or the plaques on the wall that would remind them of their husbands. But if that’s what eventually would make them feel better…

  “Okay, then,” said Martin, whom the FBI knew as Sqweegel, as he keyed the ignition.

  “I didn’t want the money,” Franks said. “I told her it was never about the money.”

  “What money?” Dark repeated.

  Franks looked at Dark, then sighed. “After 9/11, I was sent out by my battalion captain. A bunch of us were. We were sent to knock on doors and talk to the widows who had lost their husbands. It was meant to be a good thing. For some of us, it was a way to find some peace. For others, it was a six-month ordeal. And some of us found…”

  Dark finished for him. “You found a wife.”

  “Yeah,” Franks said.

  “Were you married at the time?”

  “Yeah, I was married. Two kids. Marriage is tough, especially in this line of work. You get a wife who doesn’t understand what the job entails, and you’re just fucked, no matter what you do. You can’t force someone else to be happy. So imagine finding someone who wanted to be happy again. Who you could make happy. That was me and Barb.”

  Dark nodded. “And the money?”

  “A lot of the wives after 9/11 got these million-dollar insurance policies. So it was especially hard to turn down a new life when the old one sucks and you spend most of your time trying to dig yourself out of the hole, you know what I mean?”

  Another piece clicked into place for Dark. Moral righteousness, yet again. Sqweegel wasn’t commenting on the institution of the police force; he was making a statement about the institution of marriage.

  �
��I know what you mean,” Dark said.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a printed list of the widows, then handed it to Franks. “Do you know these women?”

  “Yeah, I know them. They’re friends of Barb’s. They’re in some kind of group together.”

  Speaking her name seemed to send Frank close to the edge again. Dark needed him to pull back for a just a few more moments; he’d have all the time in the world to sort through the rubble of his choices.

  “We need to call them. Now.”

  chapter 69

  Debra Scott’s cell phone chimed. She dug through her purse—past her wallet, Mace, and a few small toys her eight-year-old daughter dropped inside on a regular basis to tease her. Geez, Mom, I have no idea how that stuff got into your purse…. Maybe you need a bigger one…so you can give me your old one. Debra’s “old one” was a $350 Kipling. The daughter could have that in her dreams.

  She finally found her cell and held it to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Debbie, it’s me, Jim.”

  “Oh, hi, Jimmy,” a voice replied. “Where’s Barbara tonight? We waited as long as we could, but then—”

  The woman’s voice was drowned out by an anguished cry from Jim Franks, who had broken down into tears. Dark reached for the phone, but Franks couldn’t see him through his tear-filled eyes.

  “Jimmy, are you there? What’s wrong?”

  Exasperated, Dark took the phone out of Franks’s hand, then gestured for him to be quiet.

  “Hello, Mrs. Scott? Listen to me carefully. My name is Steve Dark, and I’m working with the FBI. It’s very important that you—”

  “Working with who? Hang on, I can’t hear well. Lemme call you right back.”

  “No! Mrs. Scott, whatever you do, stay on the—”

  But then, in an instant, Dark was talking to a dead connection.

  Debra knew something was wrong the moment the white van made a sharp right after exiting the Brooklyn Bridge, turning away from the Manhattan skyline back down to the riverfront.