That would be the second thing that night about which I was wrong.
The apartment phone rang and woke us at seven o’clock the next morning. We had passed out—not fallen asleep—on the hardwood floor. Ruby, who lay huddled in a fetal position, rolled over onto her back and jumped to her feet before the second chime sounded. She rose too quickly, so I gripped her shoulders to steady her. My fingers felt her bones. The fragility of her body reminded me of a robin’s egg in the springtime.
“I don’t feel well,” Ruby said.
She didn’t look well, either.
Her sallow skin and sunken eyes suggested that she had greatly downplayed her current condition. Cancer? Uretsky? Which poison was killing her fastest? It didn’t much matter. My wife, my beautiful wife, the love of my every single waking moment, was dying before my eyes.
“Just sit down,” I said. “I’ll get the phone.”
I led Ruby over to the kitchen stool and helped get her settled. My stomach tightened as I reached for the phone that kept ringing. I suspected it was Uretsky calling, but Henry Dobson, the UniSol investigator, had this number as well. Maybe he was calling with a paperwork issue, or perhaps it was a wrong number. Those were just thoughts of the wishful thinking variety. I knew the truth. I looked over at Ruby as I picked up the phone. Her hands covered her mouth. Her nervousness and apprehension seemed to equal my own.
“Hello, John,” Uretsky said. “We need to talk.” He spoke in a voice that reminded me of an upset parent’s disappointment with an unruly offspring.
“We did what you wanted,” I said.
“I sent you an e-mail, but you didn’t respond,” Uretsky said. “I figured you might have fallen asleep, so I called to wake you. Ruby must be tired. Emotional strain extracts a heavy physical toll on the body, you know.”
“Let Winnie go,” I said. “Do it now. We did what you wanted. The game is over.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Uretsky said.
“We did what you asked. You know it, too,” I said, my voice rising in pitch, pushed up by a stab of anger.
“How do you know I know it?” Uretsky asked.
I saw no reason to lie. “I found the video camera,” I said.
“You checked the room?”
“That wasn’t against your rules.”
The ensuing pause made me shudder.
“You’re right, John. That wasn’t in violation.”
It wasn’t much of a gamble telling Uretsky about the camera. I knew he operated with certain rules in place, and somehow, God help me, I was able to determine what constituted an infringement of his twisted thinking. I’d come to some other understandings about Uretsky as well. This wasn’t about revenge for my stealing his identity, and it sure as hell wasn’t about teaching me to become a real criminal. That was just an excuse for him to play his evil game.
Uretsky was a master manipulator who, for whatever reason, wanted to use and control me. He got off on terrorizing us. This was all just a game to him—a living, breathing game without any pixels or reboots or cheat codes. Our terror wasn’t manufactured by lines of code, but rather by our deeds, and he loved every single authentic minute of it. Uretsky had forced us into the ultimate test of good versus evil for the simple curiosity of seeing how far he could bend us before we broke. His game play aside, Uretsky had proven one thing for certain: we all possessed a capacity to commit acts we wouldn’t dream of.
“I sent you an e-mail,” Uretsky said. “I’d like you to watch something with me.”
With the phone pressed between my ear and shoulder, I motioned for Ruby to hand me my laptop.
“Is my mom all right?” Ruby asked me. “Is she?”
“Oh, yes, Mother is doing just fine,” Uretsky said into my ear. “But we’ve got another problem.”
“He said she’s fine,” I whispered to Ruby, covering the receiver with my hand. “But something is wrong.”
“I want to see her!” Ruby demanded. “I want to see her right now.”
“That’s an impossibility,” Uretsky said. “Tell her that, John.”
I told her. Ruby responded by shutting her eyes tightly.
I powered up my laptop, opened my e-mail, and saw a message from Uretsky time-stamped fifteen minutes earlier. The message contained a link. The link opened a Web page that contained an embedded video file, like a YouTube page.
“I’d like to watch this video with you, if you don’t mind,” Uretsky said.
“Of course I mind,” I said. “Do I have a choice?”
“For Winnie’s sake, I’m going to answer that in the negative. The link you clicked has given me control over your computer, so I’ll go ahead and press play.”
My chest tightened the moment the first frames flickered on the screen. The video, taken from inside hotel room 324, showed Ruby cajoling Drunk Drew into taking a shower.
“What is this, Uretsky?” I said. My voice came out singed with ire. “You want me to watch my wife having sex with another man?”
“I want you to watch,” was all Uretsky said.
A chill ripped up my spine.
Could he know?
The video quality looked surprisingly good—not grainy or jerky. I watched Drew stumble and trip while unbuttoning his pants on his way to the shower. The video captured Ruby closing the bathroom door and turning off the room lights, just as we had planned. Although the camera lacked motion capability, it was in fact low-light sensitive, such that I could make out the floral pattern on the bed covering before Andrew emerged from the bathroom, dressed only in a towel.
“Why are you making me watch this?” I asked, making sure I sounded shaky and wounded.
A figure stepped into the camera’s view. She wore a sheath dress from the Gap and did a perfect job keeping her back to the camera. I studied the footage closely. In the limited lighting Ruby and Jenna were virtually indistinguishable. I watched Jenna take a drink of water from a bottle set atop the night table, and then the video stopped playing.
“I hit pause, in case you were wondering,” Uretsky said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Just remember that moment,” Uretsky said. “Let’s continue.” The video playback resumed. I watched Andrew and Jenna kissing, my pulse pounding with what proved to be unwarranted anxiety that Jenna had shown her face to the camera. Andrew’s hands fumbled greedily all over Jenna’s body. Inevitably, those same hands slid up and underneath Jenna’s dress. He probed Jenna’s flesh in all the places that would have driven me to rage had he been touching my wife instead of a professional. Jenna didn’t speak as she maneuvered Andrew over to the bed. Andrew let his towel drop from his waist, flashing the camera with a full frontal assault of his fleshy midsection and tumescent penis. He got himself prone on the bed. Jenna took another sip of water, hiked her dress up waist high, and straddled Andrew’s back.
Uretsky paused the playback once again.
“Did you see that?” he asked. “Are you with me, John?”
“I see that my wife is about to give a strange man a massage,” I said.
Uretsky sighed, as if disappointed. “Let’s keep watching.”
The video resumed. The bathroom door opened a bit on its own, exposing a wider sliver of light that better lit the room. The light provided a clearer view of the action as well. I didn’t time it with a stopwatch, but if pressed, I’d guess the massage lasted around five seconds at most. Andrew flipped over onto his back. Jenna reached across the bed and took another drink of water while Andrew fumbled to put on a condom. Jenna lowered herself down onto Andrew with her dress and heels still on. I heard a soft moan escape from her throat. She arched her back when his thrusting began.
The video stopped playing.
“Did you see it?” Uretsky asked.
“See what?”
“She took three drinks from that water bottle. Three times she reached for the bottle and drank. Three.”
“So? My wife was thirsty.”
“Your w
ife is right handed,” Uretsky said. “Maybe if she drank with her left hand once, I would have believed it. But three times? No, that’s not what right-handed people do. They drink with their right hands.”
An intense wave of apprehension swept through me, as though I’d been caught in a sudden and raging blizzard, trapped on the side of a mountain. My breathing tightened. My hammering heart thundered in my ears. Ruby reached out to steady me, but her eyes were affright as well.
“I figured out what you’d done, and I followed that whore you hired to her home. Too bad for her she lives alone.”
“What have you done?” I said. My dark voice came out just above a whisper.
“I’ll show you,” Uretsky said. “Watch your laptop.”
Uretsky, who still had control over my computer, loaded up a new Web page in the browser window. The page was blank except for the words “Now I know everything.”
“Ready?” Uretsky said. “Keep watching. It’s a slide show of sorts.” An image faded into view beneath those words. It showed Jenna lying on her back on a beige-colored carpet, her face frozen in a silent scream. Ruby screamed, too. A feeling of nausea overcame me as the room began to spin. The image of Jenna faded—one picture blending into another—and up came an image of Uretsky’s bloody pruning shears.
“No. No. No,” I said, hiding my face in my hands.
I looked up just in time to see the picture of the pruning shears dissolve slowly away. In its place came another string of words, which I managed to read even though my whole body was shaking with the intensity of a seizure. The words I read were “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil.”
I positioned myself to block Ruby’s view of the laptop’s display screen. In my heart I knew what was coming next. A picture materialized on screen in the same manner as the others, fading into view beneath a grim headline.
That’s when I screamed.
CHAPTER 35
I closed the laptop and dropped to my knees. The bar stool fell sideways at the same time Ruby lost her balance reaching for me. She toppled out of her seat and landed right on top of me, cushioning her fall with my body. I clambered back to my feet, straining to reach the laptop—pawing for it—but Ruby had the better position and got there first.
“Don’t look at it!” I shouted at her. “You don’t want to see!”
“Mom!” Ruby cried out, fumbling to flip open the top cover.
I guess Ruby thought it was a picture of her mother that had made me scream and fall to the floor. I wasn’t trying to be protective of Ruby when I told her not to look. I was speaking the truth. A lifetime ago—at least that was how it seemed—I had created a mental picture of what Rhonda Jennings looked like when the police found her body, but that image paled entirely when compared to seeing the real flesh and blood thing.
The blood.
It was everywhere, but it didn’t cover the purple bruise marks on Jenna’s throat where Uretsky had choked the life out of her. Jenna’s face, moonlight white, was marked with bloody crimson streaks that appeared painted on, and with crude brushstrokes. Her cloudy eyes, open and lifeless, were partially covered by one of her severed fingers. The finger’s ragged flesh, lumpy and torn at the knuckle, appeared to have been ripped off her hand, not sheared. Two of Jenna’s fingers jutted out from her ears like heinous, bloody antennae. Another two, those a pulpy mess as well, had been set upon her pale blue lips in a purposeful manner.
See no evil.
Hear no evil.
Speak no evil.
Ruby stared blankly at the screen. A baleful scream, low at first but rising in pitch, escaped from her tremulous mouth. She threw the computer against the wall with enough force to break it open on impact. Chunks of flying metal and glass spread out like shrapnel, with a few pieces nicking me in the face and neck. Ruby grabbed hold of the apartment phone, which I had let drop in front of the kitchen island.
“Damn you!” Ruby screamed into the phone. “You monster! Let my mother go! Let her go!”
I couldn’t hear Uretsky’s reply, but Ruby let the phone fall from her grasp as though it had become too hot to hold. I watched it swing back and forth in front of the kitchen island, moving slowly like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. Ruby dropped to the floor, huddled into a protective ball. I picked up the phone, put it to my ear, and heard Uretsky’s singsong voice to the tune of “Camptown Races” saying, “Put John on, or your mother dies. Put John on, or your mother dies. Put John on, or your mother dies.”
“I’m here!” I shouted. “It’s me! It’s John.”
Uretsky stopped his singing.
“Johnny!” he exclaimed, sounding excited to hear from me, as though we were old friends newly reunited. “You hanging in there, Johnny?”
“Please . . . ,” I said, tears again stinging my eyes. “You didn’t have to do that. She didn’t do anything to you.”
“You did this to her, not me. You tried to pull a fast one on me, didn’t you? Rules are rules, and you broke ’em. Now, there’s a price to pay when you don’t follow the rules.”
“Just let Winnie go,” I said. “What can I do?”
“Not that easy. You’ve got to play a penalty round.”
“I’ll do anything.”
“I think you’re going to come to regret that statement,” Uretsky said.
“Tell . . . me . . . how,” I said, my shaky voice barely audible.
“You sure you want to keep playing? You can say, ‘Game over.’ That’s always an option. Of course, I’ll kill Winnie if you don’t play along, and I’ll probably come after Ruby next.”
“Tell me what to do to free Winnie,” I said in a low voice.
“Okay. You made the choice, so it’s game on! Thatta boy, Johnny! Now, listen to me, and listen close, because I’m not going to repeat myself.” Uretsky’s voice had dipped in volume, a return to the serious business of the game. “There’s a warehouse in South Boston, on the corner of West Third and B Street. It’s in a part of town that doesn’t see a lot of foot traffic. Across from that warehouse is a single-story brick building with a Dumpster in the back parking lot. You’re going to go Dumpster diving. Inside that Dumpster, you’ll find three five-gallon canisters of gasoline buried beneath the rubbish. You’re going to take those gas cans over to the warehouse and enter through the green door, which I’ve left unlocked for your convenience.”
I could feel my insides shriveling up into nothing. “Then what?” I asked.
“Then I want you to use the accelerant to soak a pile of wood pallets on the first floor. I suggest you save some gas to make a trail to the door. You don’t want to be close to those pallets when they go up in flames.”
“You want me to start a fire inside the warehouse?” I said.
“That’s exactly what you’re going to do. Strike a match and start a fire. I have a scanner, so I’ll know when the fire department gets the call. I have other ways of knowing you’ve followed my instructions to the letter.”
Cameras. He’s got cameras in there. No way to fake it. No way out. Do what he says.
“Escape without getting caught,” Uretsky continued, “and I’ll let Winnie go. If you fail in any way, Winnie will look a lot like Jenna, maybe even worse. That’s the deal, and it’s nonnegotiable.”
“Let her go first and I’ll do it,” I said.
“Nonnegotiable,” Uretsky repeated. “You have one hour from this very moment to become an arsonist. Best of luck.”
CHAPTER 36
Ziggy no longer had the familiar feel of just being our car. It had transformed into something sinister when it became our getaway vehicle for the Giovanni robbery. It sickened me to put Ziggy into ignoble use once again, but it was “game on” and I had to play. For Winnie’s sake, I had to play.
I plugged the address Uretsky had provided into my GPS, and soon we were on our way to the site of a future arson incident in South Boston. I had divided the allotted time into three critical sequences : thirty minutes to reach our tar
get (morning commuter traffic would still be a problem); ten minutes to get the gas canisters; twenty minutes to spread out the fuel and strike a match. I might have had a plan in place, but my thoughts were with Jenna and Winnie.
Ruby’s pale complexion and her body’s persistent trembling suggested that she was thinking the same.
“What are we doing?” Ruby said, her voice cracking from the strain. “What the hell are we doing?”
“We’re going to save your mother.”
Ruby held her head in her hands, her body convulsing. Her face flushed as she began to sob so hard, she could barely breathe. “What he did to that poor woman. How could he do that? How?”
“We can’t think about that right now,” I said. “We’ve got to think about your mom.”
“Every time I close my eyes, all I see is what he did to Jenna. That image—it’s never going to go away. Never.”
Somehow I managed to navigate my way through the barrage of traffic without getting into an accident. But Ruby was right. The image of Jenna would last us a lifetime. My eyes saw the road, but my heart saw only blackness, death, and Jenna’s bloody fingers. What I’d once thought to be our incorruptible morals turned out to have all the flexibility of a pipe cleaner—with disastrous or near disastrous consequences.
For Rhonda Jennings, who would never marry.
For Giovanni Renzulli, who almost choked to death before two million YouTube viewers.
For a redheaded prostitute named Jenna, whose mutilated body had yet to be found.
We had saved Dr. Adams’s life. How far would we be willing to go to save Winnie’s—or our own, for that matter? At what point would we be asked to do something we’d simply refuse to do? How far could we be bent before we broke?
I lost sight of myself, my morals, the moment I became Elliot Uretsky. What other crimes was I capable of committing? I wondered. I really didn’t know. That might have terrified me most of all. Uretsky didn’t know, either, but he was determined to find out.
“It’s my fault,” Ruby said, her sobs slowly abating. “I should have just gone through with it. I’m the reason that girl is dead.”
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