Black Fall

by Andrew Mayne

  A small hand grabs mine in the dark.

  “Don’t be sad,” Elijah whispers. “When Mommy comes, we can go with them.”

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Inquest

  A week later, Elijah’s words still chill me as I sit in a deposition a thousand miles away. I’m not sure how his grandparents, people whom he never really knew, will explain to him what happened. I’m not sure they can. Or should.

  The bodies in the vault aren’t the only victims of the Red Chain’s death pact. Other members, who weren’t able to make it back in time for the sealing of the vault, and didn’t show up in our driver’s license search, also committed suicide. Ezra Winter was found dead in his cell from an overdose of painkillers he’d had smuggled into prison.

  There was no note, although investigators found what may have been traces of one in his toilet. Maybe he couldn’t find the right thing to say. In the end, his silence speaks louder than words, and raises more questions. I didn’t think he had it in him.

  People can surprise you.

  Once the Red Chain was no longer around to throw gas on the fire, attempts to overthrow the world order fizzled out. People may say they want a revolution, but they also crave stability and things like pension plans and Starbucks with working Wi-Fi. You can try hitting that reset button, but all it’s going to do is change the names of the players, not their actions.

  We’re still trying to figure out the roles everyone played in this fiasco. Belinda Cole, Ezra Winter’s ex-wife, eyes me from across the table in this conference room in the Virginia district attorney’s office, probably wondering why I’ve been silent throughout her entire deposition. Her hair is neatly combed, although grayer than I recall, and she’s dressed in a jacket and skirt. She looks more like a senior executive more than the hippie librarian from the halfway house.

  I haven’t said anything because I’m watching her, studying her reactions, trying to understand what’s really going on inside her head. In the aftermath of the riots and the Colorado suicides, there have been a lot of questions swirling around, and too few answers.

  One of the victims found in the underground complex, Christof Belichick, has been identified as the de facto leader of the Red Chain for the last dozen or so years. A technical writer for the software industry, he fell in with the group at some point in the 1990s and eventually became the head of the commune.

  “And you’ve had no contact with Belichick?” asks Laney Tierney, one of the Justice Department attorneys attempting to put a case together around what happened. She looks to be in her midthirties, with short dark hair and a champion poker face. She’s burdened with the insurmountable task of trying to find out the truth even though all our chief suspects are dead.

  Belinda waits for permission from her attorney, then answers. “Not that I recall.”

  “Not that you recall?” inquires Tierney.

  “Correct,” interjects David Lee, Cole’s counsel. A senior partner at his firm, Lee had a successful career as a prosecutor before jumping the fence to the other side.

  Tierney slides a sheet of paper across the table. “Do you recall this? While you were in custody, Mr. Belichick sent you this letter.”

  Lee takes the sheet and reads it over before commenting. “My client receives a lot of unsolicited letters and communications.”

  “And your client is adamant she has had no conversations with members of the Red Chain?” asks Tierney.

  “My client is adamant that she’s unaware of any such conversations.”

  His is careful phrasing. Lee knows that the Justice Department wants to find a living suspect whom they can attach to the case. Proving Belinda Cole and a high-ranking member of the Red Chain had some kind of correspondence she’s failed to disclose could allow them to charge her with conspiracy. This could prompt her to turn state’s witness if she has more information and other names.

  Finding a connection is difficult. We’ve been going through her visitor logs from the last two decades, trying to find anyone we can tie to the Red Chain. The problem is that it would have been very easy for a member to meet with her at the halfway house, or the minimum-security prison she was in before, under an assumed identity.

  As long as Belinda doesn’t implicate herself, or talk herself into a corner, there’s not much we can do. And with Ezra dead, we can’t pit the two against each other.

  The question burning in my mind is whether she had any contact with him. Heywood. The Warlock. We asked at the beginning and received a flat-out denial. Not that I should be surprised. She would have to lie to protect that relationship, if it exists.

  The deposition continues without any revelations. Belinda’s answers are carefully scripted and she follows her attorney’s lead, not letting Tierney trip her up.

  With only a few minutes left, her inquiries exhausted, Tierney turns to me. “Agent Blackwood, have anything to add?”

  This is more of a courtesy than a Hail Mary pass on her part. Belinda Cole has been circumspect, but not evasive. The real work is going to be tracking down all of her contacts, hoping for a lead, assuming the Justice Department gives us the resources to do so. Chances are they might just be happy closing the case by saying all guilty parties have been accounted for and hope the public goes along with that narrative.

  As a cop, you hope for that TV-style, one-liner question that makes the suspect crumble. Sadly, that rarely happens unless you’re dealing with someone stupid. Belinda Cole is anything but. She’s smart, incredibly so. Much smarter than Ezra.

  If I were the Warlock, Belinda would be the one I’d want to work with, not Ezra.

  Wheels turn in my head. We’ve been approaching this as if Belinda were a potential accomplice. But as I sit across from her, watching her watch me and everyone else in the room, I’m very aware that she’s calculating everything. She’s smart enough to use her attorney as a shield, and not to be drawn into anything that might cause an emotional response.

  She also could be smart enough to position her ex-husband as her patsy. Maybe from the beginning. I nod to Tierney, letting her know I have a question.

  “Ms. Cole, when was your last contact with your ex-husband?”

  Lee answers on her behalf. “We’ve already stated the two haven’t exchanged any communication in at least two years.”

  “I’d like to hear your client say that,” I reply.

  Lee shoots a glance at Tierney. “Is this necessary?”

  “Your client is still under deposition.”

  “Fine,” he mutters dramatically.

  “At least two years ago,” says Belinda.

  “Two years?”

  “Yes.”

  I play my wild card. I look right at her and say, knowingly: “Not even a note?”

  She hesitates. A tiny gesture, but a telling one.

  I follow it up. “Would you be willing to provide us with some handwriting samples?”

  For the first time, her façade falters. She looks to her attorney before he can even respond. We’ve just moved the pieces in the middle of whatever chess game she’s playing out in her head.

  “I’m not sure why that’s necessary,” he replies, confused by the question.

  Tierney jumps in. “Is that an official refusal to comply? Will I need a court order?”

  Lee checks his watch. “It appears our time is up. Feel free to send my office any official requests and we’ll give them due consideration.”

  After that, he stands up and escorts Belinda out of the room.

  Under her breath, her face turned away from us, I hear her mutter, “Fucking idiot.”

  Tierney watches them leave, then faces me.

  “Not a good way to build trust with your attorney.”

  “She wasn’t talking about Lee,” I reply.

  “Who then? You or me?” she asks.

  “Neither. Her husband.”

  I’m going on instinct, a hunch that was reinforced when I saw Belinda again. She’s a chameleon. A very clev
er chameleon who adapts to the world around her. In the halfway house with all the tortured paintings of Jesus on the walls, she played the part of the repentant Christian. Here, in the Justice Department office, she knew to show up looking like an intelligent, competent person who easily blends in. She looked like one of us. She has far more social acumen than her husband.

  “We’ll never be able to prove it,” I sigh, frustrated. “But she was the mastermind behind all of this. I’m sure we’ll find some kind of tenuous connection, maybe an intermediary, but nothing we’ll be able to implicate her with. She’s too smart.”

  “Catch me up here,” says Tierney.

  I’ve been putting it together in my head, and speaking without much context. “The fragment of the note we found in Ezra’s cell. That was from her. She probably supplied him with the pills too.”

  “That’s why you mentioned handwriting,” says Tierney, getting it. “You wanted to see her react to the possibility that Ezra had left the note behind? Why would she handwrite it? That would implicate her.”

  “Because she knew the only way he would go through with it was if it was actually her doing the asking. She had to write him a letter. It was a risk.”

  “And unless you have some forensic magic, Lee will see through this.” Tierney shakes her head. “There’s not much to go on. I don’t know what we can do next.”

  “We can’t let it go.” What I saw in the vault haunts me. “She’s at the center of this.”

  Tierney sits back in her chair, defeated. “Maybe. But she didn’t actively do anything. Others were the ones who did. And they’re dead. There’s nobody left to point a finger at her. It’s difficult enough to build cases around mobsters with living witnesses. This . . . this may end here.”

  “It can’t.”

  It can’t end here, because I know where all this leads.

  She offers me a sympathetic look. She doesn’t understand.

  He was frightening enough when he could hack computer systems and pull off theatrical stunts.

  Now he’s figured out how to manipulate entire religious movements.

  Chapter Sixty

  Playground

  The manager of Belinda Cole’s halfway house greets me at the door.

  “She’s not here.”

  According to the terms of her parole, Belinda was due back right after the deposition. She’s not in hard violation just yet, but I was able to beat her here.

  “Mind if I wait for her upstairs?” I ask, doing my best harmless smile.

  The manager shrugs and holds the door open for me. As I pass, Jesus gives me a pained expression, woefully looking up from one of the many crosses he’s nailed to around the house.

  Belinda’s room is exactly as I remember it. Checking the hallway to make certain I’m not being watched, I slide open a dresser drawer. Her clothes are still in there. It doesn’t look like she grabbed anything to go on the run.

  If she is spooked, then I don’t think she’d come back here. She’d just get the hell away as quickly as possible. That’s assuming she actually fell for my little ruse.

  Tierney didn’t think Lee would, so I guess it’s hopeless for me to expect Belinda to either. Although her own smugness might be used against her. She has so much contempt for her ex-husband it might overcome reason.

  I check the desk and poke through her books, looking for something, anything, that would tie her to everything. I come up short. Everything is as boring as she wants it to appear.

  I take a seat at her desk and survey the room. The laughter of children on the playground carries through the closed window. In the corner of the room, under her bed, I notice a thick King James Bible poking out. I kneel down to pick it up.

  It feels lighter than it should.

  When I open the book, I see that half its pages are carved out, creating an empty hiding spot. It’s a classic ploy that wouldn’t fool a middle school math teacher, but an effective one if the book is well hidden.

  I set the Bible back down exactly where I found it. It may be nothing, but it is probably something. What?

  I stare out of the window as children take turns sending a blue kite into the air. It smashes nose first into the brown grass before taking flight to their cheers.

  A solitary figure sits at a picnic table, watching them. The streaks of gray in her hair are unmistakable. I rush down the stairs and push past the manager before she can ask me what’s wrong.

  I approach Belinda from behind. Her right hand is resting on her knee, but I can’t see her left.

  My hand is ready to go to the gun at my hip, but I’m wary of the children.

  “I know you’re there,” she says at the sound of the dry grass crunching under my feet.

  The children are at least a hundred feet away. Far, but still close.

  “Let me see your hands, Belinda,” I say calmly.

  She shakes her head. “Come sit next to me,” she says casually, not turning around.

  “Let me see your hands,” I repeat, this time more forcefully.

  “See the little one in red? The one that keeps tripping?”

  A small boy, maybe six or seven, dressed in a red jacket, chases after the tail of the kite every time it scrapes the ground. He stumbles, then picks himself up, laughing as the others run ahead.

  “My gun is aimed at him,” Belinda says coldly. “I probably won’t make the shot, but you can’t take that chance. Come.” She pats the spot next to her. “Sit next to me.”

  I approach her from the side. If I rush her, I can tackle her to the ground and probably keep the gun from going off. Probably.

  Right now, she’s waiting for me to do that.

  The smarter move is for me to distract her, making it difficult for her to aim at the children.

  “Drop your gun, Belinda.”

  “Not right now,” she replies, as if it were a polite request. She thinks for a moment, then adds, “Aren’t you supposed to ask me why I did this?”

  “I don’t care.”

  All I care about right now is the gun in her pocket.

  “Don’t you want to know how?”

  Her eyes are fixed on the children as she speaks.

  “Give me your gun and you can tell me everything.”

  “I was visiting India when the idea first hit me.”

  She sounds almost like she’s in a trance, like she’s not talking to me, but making a case to the wind. “It was the nineteen seventies. Their population was still exploding. I was with a group trying to advise them. We tried everything, even getting the Catholic Church to relent on birth control. So many people . . . I volunteered in the hospitals.” She shakes her head. “Hospitals . . . covered in blood and sickness. Flies everywhere. And people, so many people. Then I saw it.” She gazes over at me for the first time. “This was where we were heading. I saw the future. We had to stop this.”

  I step forward. “By killing people and sending letter bombs?”

  “By any means necessary. China understood. They began to realize.”

  “And now there are far more boys than girls there,” I reply.

  She shrugs. “The alternative is worse.”

  “I’m not here to debate your population doom and gloom. Give me your gun.” I take another cautious step, trying to put myself between Belinda and the children.

  “I suspect you don’t really care about anything else. You just want to know if he was involved.”

  I play coy. “Ezra?”

  Belinda makes a condescending smirk. “Ezra was useful for getting followers. He was a charismatic blowhard that lost souls liked to listen to. I could overlook his dalliances. He served a purpose. But that’s not what you want to know.”

  She’s leading me. I’m trying not to let her do it, but clearly she knows why I’m really here.

  “What you’re really wondering is how did we do it? How did a bunch of technoilliterate farmers pull this off?” she asks.

  “Belichick was a programmer,” I reply.
/>   “Belichick wrote manuals for knitting software. But, like Ezra, he was a useful idiot. People listened to him. We needed help. We needed someone who could show us how to start the fire. Fortunately, he found us.”

  Damn it. My skin burns. It’s what I knew, but what I didn’t really want to hear. Their helper, the man who made it possible, it’s him. Heywood.

  I do my best not to react. She wants to somehow use this as leverage.

  “You know his price,” asks Belinda, turning away. “You know what he wanted.”

  I hesitate before replying. “For you to kill me.”

  She nods. “Strange, though. I’m not sure if he actually wanted us to succeed.” She stares off into the distance again. “Men . . . they’re always fucking things up when they think with their—” Her hand slightly moves in her pocket, raising her jacket.

  I lunge for her, but her gun goes off before I can get close. I tackle her to the ground, pinning her left hand with my knee and drawing my own weapon.

  But it’s too late. Her bullet already found its target.

  A warm mist coats my face. My side aches and I think I’ve been shot, but realize it’s my still-sore stab wound.

  I look down. Blood gushes out of the bottom of Belinda’s jaw. Her bulging eyes stare up at me. I can feel the beat of her heart as she bleeds out.

  She thought she could get away with it, then she realized she didn’t want to.

  If you think the world is already lost, then there’s no point to trying to save it.

  Epilogue

  The man called Michael Heywood by the court, and the Warlock by the world at large, woke up in his cell after 3:00 am and noticed something about it was different. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. When they focused, he spotted the small white square resting on the metal sink.

  He hadn’t heard anyone enter his cell. He was a light sleeper. Yet he was certain it hadn’t been there when he went to bed.

  He raised himself off the cot, his fingers clinching the toothbrush shiv he’d coated with a nerve paralyzer made from cleaning agents he’d managed to steal, and walked over to the sink.