by Steven James
His eyes are closed, his lips blue, his face gray and clay-like. He’s lying far more still than a living person ever could, and this thing that I’m looking at barely reminds me of my friend at all.
People speak of their loved ones passing away, but in this case that’s not what happened at all. Emilio didn’t pass away, he was viciously murdered.
No, when you die of asphyxiation because your throat has swollen shut, you’re not just passing away, you’re dying a strangled, horrible death. And the man who did this to him managed to get away.
There isn’t always a silver lining or a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Eventually, bad things happen to all good people, and the dragon wins and death has her way. You can think all the positive, comforting thoughts in the world, extend so much love to others that it makes your heart ache and soar at the same time, but in the end everyone—everything—that has ever been born will pass from the world and end only in dust and rot and decay.
It’s only wishful thinking to say that love conquers all. It doesn’t. Death does. In the end, death even conquers love.
I feel the urge to touch Emilio’s face, and I reach out slowly, but in the end stop short.
And as I lower my hand to the ground, it happens.
It doesn’t surprise me, but still, it unsettles me and sends a terrible, oppressive chill winding down my spine.
I think of my family and what happened five hundred and two days ago when I stood on that shoreline and stared down at the three corpses, at the drowned bodies of my wife and our twin five-year-old boys, lying just as lifeless and still as Emilio does now.
Although I try to slide the memories aside, I know it won’t help.
Whenever I remember what happened on that dark day, the images root themselves inside of me all over again, and it takes hours, sometimes days, before they leave. I can feel that happening right now—the grim memories gripping me, memories of Rachel and Anthony and Andrew lined up in a macabre row at my feet.
At the time, we were living in New Jersey during a run of my show in Atlantic City. On a quiet Saturday morning Rachel put the boys in the minivan and drove to Heron Bay. She passed through the parking lot and then accelerated off the pier with our twins strapped in their car seats in the back.
A little over two hours later I watched as the divers pulled up their bodies.
In the ensuing weeks when the police and the insurance company investigators inspected the minivan, they didn’t find anything wrong with it. The truth, the heart-wrenching, terrible truth, became obvious and inescapable: Rachel did it on purpose.
There was no way she could have accidentally navigated through that parking lot, hit the pier at that angle, and guided the minivan all the way to the end where she drove off. No, it wasn’t an accident.
But why?
Why did she do it?
That question has haunted me ever since.
In the months following their deaths, I searched endlessly through my memories and through Rachel’s computer files, emails, text messages, and status updates looking for some clue as to why she took her life and took our boys with her. It was almost as if I thought that if I could find a reason, I might be able to accept it all more easily.
But I didn’t find a reason, and with each passing day I only became more bewildered and felt more and more lost in a deep, confusing maze of unanswerable questions.
I wanted to hate Rachel for murdering my sons—and for murdering herself—but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t do it. Love is a mysterious thing, and even after her unthinkable act, I never found a way to love her any less.
I should have seen something.
Should have been there to stop it.
That’s what I told myself.
These days questions and pain still loom there, staring at me coldly, perched on the crest of my past, but at least I’m starting to move on. I’m with Charlene now. We’re taking things slowly in our relationship, but at least it feels like a doorway has opened up and a new future is dawning with it.
But right now, in this cemetery with the corpse of my friend lying before me, all of the renewed hope is dimmed in the reality of his death.
Looking down at Emilio, I notice a curl of a delicate chain just below his neck, and when I pull the sheet back a little more I see that Charlene has laid her cross necklace on his chest. It’s her most treasured piece of jewelry, and it just reiterates how much Emilio meant to her, to both of us.
I spend some time there with him and find that my thoughts have shifted into a kind of prayer.
He grew up in an orphanage here on this island. He was single, never married, had no children, and honestly, as far as I know, there are no next of kin to notify. So in the end, I don’t pray for his surviving family members as much as I end up praying for myself and Emilio’s other friends.
Before attempting escapes that can end up being fatal, all conscientious escape artists make plans for the possibility that they might not succeed, and I know that in the event that he didn’t make it, Emilio desired to be buried here, near the jungle he learned to love as a child.
I’m no expert on how to talk to God, but I suppose sometimes the most eloquent prayers are those that aren’t spoken at all but that rise to heaven directly from the fractures in our hearts, the places where words become superfluous, and now that’s the kind of prayer I find myself praying.
Emilio was a man of faith, raised Catholic, but he’d recently joined a small conservative church—Baptist, I think. In any case, he was unquestionably more ready to face eternity than I’ve ever been, and that seems to bring me a small sense of peace—but it’s nowhere near the peace I would be feeling if he were still alive.
At last I cover his head again and leave to find Charlene.
As I enter the hut, I see Xavier is waiting with her. They both look my way, and when he speaks his voice is soft yet intense. “I found something in Emilio’s things.”
“Tell me.”
He shows me a scratched and well-used portable USB flash drive. It has the symbol for RixoTray Pharmaceuticals imprinted on the side.
I feel my hand forming into a fist. “Not those guys again.”
“Yeah. Those guys again.”
While She Sleeps
We first encountered RixoTray last fall while we were investigating a controversial mind-to-mind communication research program for a television show I had at the time. In each episode I would debunk the tricks of a different psychic or medium by using mentalism, illusions, and sleight of hand, then I’d demonstrate how the person faked his or her seemingly miraculous feats.
In the process of exploring how the RixoTray research might’ve been faked, Charlene and I stumbled onto a conspiracy involving the company’s CEO and an assassin known as Akinsanya.
In the end, RixoTray’s CEO was apprehended, but this guy Akinsanya was still out there somewhere. The FBI had interviewed us at the time and since then has continued to follow up with us every few weeks to see if he has contacted us.
Nothing so far.
Now, as Xavier hands me the USB drive, I ask him, “Do you have any idea what Emilio was doing with this?”
He shakes his head. “No. But I plugged it in my laptop. It’s a 4 gig drive, but no files came up and only 2.7 gigs appear as available.”
“So somehow there are 1.3 gigs of hidden data on the drive?”
“That’s what it looks like. Yes.”
I consider that. “It could be nothing.”
“True.” But the way he says that, it’s clear he doesn’t believe it. “But Emilio getting murdered with something like this from RixoTray in his things seems like an awfully big coincidence.”
I evaluate what we know. It might be a stretch, but I throw it out there anyway. “You don’t think Tomás could be Akinsanya?”
“Who knows. Maybe.” Xavier rubs his chin thoughtfully. “In either case, Emilio is brutally killed as it’s being filmed and watched by millions of people around the globe
? Someone wanted to make a statement here.”
There’s no way to tell for certain, and speculating too much right now probably isn’t going to move us any closer to finding out what happened here, but still, I find myself agreeing with him. I pass the drive back to him. “Did you find anything else in his things?”
“Nothing that struck me as unusual.”
Charlene indicates toward the first aid supplies she has set out on the table, and I take a seat. She unwraps the shirt encircling my arm, shakes her head concernedly, and takes out some antiseptic.
“We need to find out what those files are,” I say.
“Yes, we do,” Xavier agrees.
“I think it’s time to make a call.”
“To who?”
“Fionna.”
“Hmm.” He nods. “I’ll be right back.”
He slips out the door and into the night.
The adrenaline must finally be draining from my system because the more Charlene works on my arm, the more it starts to really hurt, but I do my best to hold back from letting her see how much it’s bothering me.
“How are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m good.”
“It hurts like the dickens, doesn’t it?”
“That’s one way to put it.”
She’s being gentle, but as she spreads antibiotics on the sore, another sharp burst of pain shoots up my arm, and I tighten my jaw, try to distract myself.
For the time being, though, the discomfort in my arm is keeping me from thinking too much about my banged-up leg.
So at least there’s that.
She’s finishing bandaging my arm when Xavier returns with the satellite hookup that his team was using to transmit Emilio’s escape live on the Internet. He runs the connect cord to his laptop and places a video call through to Fionna.
Fionna McClury is a single, stay-at-home mom who runs a cybersecurity consulting company out of her basement. Tech firms hire her to see if she can get past their firewalls, and she and her associates—who the companies don’t realize are really her four homeschooled kids—rarely come up short. She makes reasonably good money, but two painful divorces cost her dearly, and these days she barely manages to sock enough away for the kids’ college funds and keep the minivan filled up with gas and the fridge stocked—which is no easy task with two teenage boys.
I do my best to pay her what she’s worth, and she’s never let me down ever since she started doing projects for me a couple years ago.
Fionna answers the video chat request right away. Her frizzled red hair seems to have paused in the middle of an explosion.
Last week her five-year-old daughter Mandie informed me that her mommy’s eyes were viridian. It was an impressive word for a kindergartner—I would have just said green—but as dedicated as Fionna is to homeschooling her kids, Mandie’s vocabulary didn’t exactly surprise me.
One of Fionna’s eyes wanders, and I think sometimes she shifts which eye she’s focusing on you just to mess with you.
As far as I know, she hasn’t been in a serious relationship for over a year, which is something Xavier has mused aloud to me about more than once, wondering when I think she might be ready to date again. Just for curiosity’s sake, of course.
I fill her in about what happened to Emilio and about the chase through the jungle after the snake wrangler, Tomás Agcaoili.
Fionna’s eyes cloud as she listens, and at last she asks us to give her a minute. She turns away from the screen so we can’t see her. I think we all know she’s crying but just doesn’t want us to see.
The three of us have all had at least a little chance to begin processing Emilio’s death, and we give her some time to let the news sink in.
At last, when she gives her attention back to the screen, it’s clear she’s trying to be as detached and objective as she can, but still, her pain comes through in every word. “At first people on Twitter thought it was all part of the escape, but I could tell by your expression, Xavier, that something had gone terribly wrong.” She takes a heavy breath. “There’s still a lot of speculation online that it was all faked, that Emilio’s really okay. I was hoping . . .” Her voice trails off. “I was hoping they were right.”
It’s a long time before anyone speaks, but finally Xavier does. He’s never been good with calculating time zones, and when he asks softly if her kids saw what happened, Fionna reminds him that it’s just now coming up on 5:00 a.m. there in Vegas. “They were all in bed. Thankfully.”
Xav tells her about the USB drive, and when he holds it up she just shakes her head. “RixoTray? Really? How could they possibly be part of this?”
“That’s something we’re hoping you can help us figure out.”
“And that, I’m glad to do. Stick the drive into your computer; let me see if I can pull anything up from here.” He inserts it into the USB port and starts giving her his password to access his hard drive, but she cuts him off: “I already have it. I hashed it a couple weeks ago.”
“You cracked my password?”
“You’re a role model to my kids, Mr. Wray. I wanted to keep an eye on what sites you’ve been going to.”
“I, um—”
“Nothing illegal, nothing immoral, no porn. I’m proud of you.”
“Oh . . . Thanks.”
“But you sure visit the X-Files archives a lot.”
“I like the X-Files.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Best documentary filmmaking of the last twenty years.”
“I really hope you’re not being serious.”
While she’s talking, she’s also studying her screen and typing. At last she shakes her head. “I might be able to do this from here, but I can tell you right now whoever did this is a pro. It’d be a lot easier if I had it in hand. When are you guys coming back?”
Fionna and her kids are house-sitting for me this week at my place in Vegas, but their home is in Chicago, and when she says “you guys” it sounds endearingly Midwestern.
“By Saturday afternoon,” I tell her. I’m scheduled to perform again Saturday evening at the Arête, the newest resort and casino in Vegas. “Tomorrow morning we’ll have to look into funeral arrangements, and I’m going to see if we can get anywhere with the police or maybe the consulate in Manila to find this guy Tomás Agcaoili. Then I imagine we’ll fly back as soon as we can.”
We have tickets for a very late flight Friday night but had planned from the beginning to get on an earlier flight if possible. Switching international flights isn’t typically as hard when you’re flying first class as it is when you’re in coach.
“Alright. In the meantime I can do some checking—flight manifests, that sort of thing, see when Agcaoili arrived in the country, if he was traveling with anyone. Maybe I can find out more about where he’s from or if he’s booked any tickets to leave the country.”
“Good. And the RixoTray connection, see if you can find out what Emilio might have to do with them or with Tomás.”
“Done.”
“One more thing. Can you remotely log into Emilio’s computer?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t know why anyone would want to kill him, but he was wired into that machine like it was his lifeline to the world. If he was involved in something he shouldn’t have been or found out something someone didn’t want him to know—”
“It would be on his computer.”
“Possibly, yes. Or at least footprints leading toward it would be.”
“Hmm.” She reflects for a moment. “I’ll take a peek at his phone and iPad files too, do some searching, see if he used any kind of cloud-based backups. If he did, I should be able to access the data, download it onto a ghost drive.”
Ah, yes. One of the disadvantages most people don’t think of when they move to online backup services—you put your files on the web and anyone with a little motivation and know-how can get into them even if the devices are turned off. If people knew how easy it is for hackers to acce
ss data on the cloud, I doubt they’d be so quick to sign up for those services.
Emilio’s house lies across town from mine, but it’s within the city limits, and Fionna suggests that she contact the Vegas police.
“Why not?” I figure it’s worth getting everyone we can involved in finding out what’s going on. “Who knows, maybe they’ll be willing to get to the bottom of this.” I’m not holding out a lot of hope, though: Emilio was a Filipino citizen killed in his home country. “Okay, our plan for tomorrow—”
“Actually, for yesterday,” Xavier clarifies, “for Fionna, that is.”
“No, today,” she corrects him. “At least as far as I’m concerned, but tomorrow for you, from your perspective. Remember, for me, this afternoon is tomorrow morning for you, so your yesterday evening will still be today for me.”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
“Xavier, Maddie is better at time zones than you are. And she’s only nine.”
A pause. “She’s almost ten.”
“Well . . . you have me there, Mr. Wray.”
“So.” I bring things to a close. “Fionna, you’ll be diving into Emilio’s data files; we’ll see if we can get anywhere with the police and the American consulate in Manila and do our best to get back home by Friday night or Saturday morning.”
We’re all on board with the plan, and after ending the video chat, Xavier, Charlene, and I take off for bed to do our best to get some sleep before the police from Kabugao arrive.
2 hours 32 minutes later
Las Vegas, Nevada
7:31 a.m.
Colonel Derek Byrne, otherwise known as Akinsanya, stood beside the bed watching his partner Calista Hendrix sleep.
He liked to do this, to rise before she did and observe her when she had no idea that he was there.
Slowly, he pulled the covers away until only a single sheet was covering her.
The woman really was lovely.
She lay on her side, and he let his gaze move slowly down her body, tracing the curves of her impeccable figure outlined beneath the sheet.
He could touch her anywhere, run his hand across her arm, her back, her leg—light enough and she would never know, gentle enough and she would not even wake up.