by Glenn Cooper
A fellow cheerleader, two years older, had moved to Las Vegas and was working as a card dealer. To Kerry, Vegas was nine-tenths on the way to California, where, as she understood it, the adult film business flourished. A week after graduation from Nitro High, she bought a one-way ticket to Nevada and moved in with her old chum. Life there wasn't easy, but her sunny disposition kept her afloat. She bopped around from one low-paying job to another until she landed, if not on her feet, on her back at an escort agency.
When she'd met Mark at the Constellation, she was on her fourth agency in three years, finally accumulating a little money. She only worked for higher-end outfits where her non-pierced, nontattooed, girl-next-door persona was valued. Most of the men she dated were nice enough fellows-she could count the number of times on one hand when she felt abused or threatened. She never fell for any of her customers-they were johns, after all-but Mark was different.
From the start she found him nerdy and sweet with no macho pretenses. He was wicked smart too, and his job at Area 51 drove her crazy with curiosity because, when she was ten, she was certain she'd seen a flying saucer one summer night, darting high over the Kanawha River, as bright as a jar of lightning bugs collected on the riverbank.
And in the past few weeks, he had dropped the pseudonym and started buying up all of her time and lavishing presents on her. She was starting to feel more like a girlfriend and less like a call girl. He was getting more self-assured by the day, and while he was never going to be Clark Gable, he was beginning to grow on her.
She was unaware that with $5 million sitting high and dry in an offshore bank account, he was feeling more confident about the accomplishments of Mark Shackleton. Peter Benedict was gone. He wasn't needed anymore.
Even the bathrooms in the suite had flat-screen TVs. Mark got out of the shower and started toweling himself. There was a cable channel on. He wasn't paying attention until he heard the word Doomsday and looked up to see Will Piper on a replay of the weekly FBI press conference, standing tall at a podium speaking into a crop of microphones. The sight of Will on TV always made his heart race. He reached for his toothbrush without taking his eyes off the screen and began brushing his teeth.
The last time he'd seen Will at a media briefing, he looked lackluster and dispirited. The postcards and killings had stopped and the wall-to-wall coverage was no longer sustainable. The long unsolved case had drained the public and law enforcement alike. But he seemed more energized today. The old intensity was back. Mark pushed the volume button.
"I can say this," Will was saying. "We are pursuing some new leads and I remain completely confident we will catch the killer."
That irritated Mark and he said, "Oh, bullshit! Give it up, man," before turning off the TV.
Kerry was snoozing on the bed, naked underneath a thin sheet. Mark cinched his bathrobe and retrieved his laptop from his briefcase in the suite's sunken living room. He went online and saw he had an e-mail from Nelson Elder. Elder's list was longer than usual-business was good. It took Mark the better part of half an hour to complete the job and reply via his secure portal.
He went back to the bedroom. Kerry was stirring. She waved her adorned wrist in the air and said something about how great it would be to have a matching necklace. She threw off the sheet and sweetly beckoned him with a finger.
At that precise moment, Will and Nancy were having the opposite of sex. They were sitting at Will's office plowing through a mind-numbing mountain of bad screenplays, completely unsure of the object of their exercise.
"Why were you so confident at the news conference?" she asked him.
"Did I overdo it?" he asked sleepily.
"Oh, yeah. Big-time. I mean, what do we have here?"
Will had to shrug. "A wild-goose chase is better than doing nothing."
"You should've told the press that. What are you going to say next week?"
"Next week's a week away."
The wild-goose chase almost didn't happen. Will's initial call to the Writers Guild of America was a disaster. They lit into him about the Patriot Act and vowed to fight till Hell froze over to prevent the government from getting its mitts on a single script in its archives. "We're not looking for terrorists," he had protested, "just a demented serial killer." But the WGA was not going to give in without a fight, so he got his superiors to sign off on a subpoena.
Screenwriters, Will learned, were a squirrelly lot, paranoid about producers, studios, and especially other writers ripping them off. The WGA gave them a modicum of comfort and protection by registering their scripts and storing them electronically or in hard copy in case proof of ownership was ever required. You didn't have to be a guild member-any amateur hack could register his script. All you did was send a fee and a copy of the screenplay and you were done. There were West Coast and East Coast chapters of the WGA. Over fifty thousand scripts a year were registered with WGA West alone, a tidy little business for the guild.
The Department of Justice had a tricky time with the probable cause section of the subpoena. It was "fanciful," Will was told but they'd give it the old college try. The FBI ultimately succeeded at the Ninth District Court of Appeals because the government agreed to whittle down its request so it was less of a fishing expedition. They'd only get three years' worth of scripts from Las Vegas and a halo of Nevada zip codes, and the writers' names and addresses would be suppressed. If any "leads" were developed from this universe of material, the government would have to go back with fresh probable cause to obtain the writer's identity.
The scripts started pouring in, mostly on data disks but also in boxes of printed material. The FBI clerical staff in New York went into printer overdrive, and eventually Will's office looked like a caricature of the mail room at a Hollywood talent agency, film scripts everywhere. When the task was done, there were 1,621 Nevada-pedigreed screenplays sitting on the twenty-third floor of the Federal Building.
Without a road map, Will and Nancy couldn't skim too hastily. Still, they quickly found a rhythm and were able to slog through a script in about fifteen minutes, carefully reading the first few pages to get the gist, then flipping and scanning the rest. They steeled themselves for a slow, laborious process, hoping to wrap up the task within one painful month. Their strategy was to look for the obvious: plots about serial killers, references to postcards, but they had to stay vigilant for the nonobvious-characters or situations that simply struck a responsive chord.
The pace was unsustainable. They got headaches. They got irritable and snapped at each other all day then retreated to Will's apartment to make cranky love in the evenings. They needed frequent walks to clear their heads. What really made them crazy was that the vast majority of scripts were complete and utter crap, incomprehensible or ridiculous or boring to the extreme. On the third or fourth day of the exercise, Will perked up when he picked up a script called Counters and declared excitedly, "You're not going to believe this, but I know the guy who wrote this."
"How?"
"He was my freshman roommate in college."
"That's interesting," she said, uninterested.
He read it much more thoroughly than the others, which set him back an hour, and when he put it down he thought, Don't give up your day job, buddy.
At three in the afternoon Will made a notation into his database about a piece of dreck concerning a race of aliens who came to Earth to beat the casinos, and grabbed the next one in his pile.
He gently kicked Nancy's knee with the tip of his loafer.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," she replied.
"Suicidal?"
"I'm already dead," she answered. Her eyes were pink and arid. "What's your point?"
His next one was titled The 7:44 to Chicago. He read a few pages and groused, "Christ. I think I read this one a few days ago. Terrorists on a train. What the fuck?"
"Check the submission date," she suggested. "I've had a few with multiple submissions. Writer changes it and spends another twenty bucks to regist
er it again."
He punched the title into his database. "When you're right, you're right. This one's a later draft. I rated it zero out of ten for relevance. I can't read it again."
"Suit yourself."
He started to close the script then stopped himself. Something caught his eye, a character name, and he began frantically paging forward, then sat upright, flipping faster and faster.
Nancy noticed something was up. "What?" she asked.
"Gimme a second, gimme a second."
She watched him make frantic notes, and whenever she interrupted to ask what he had, he replied, "Would you please just wait a second?"
"Will, this isn't fair!" she demanded.
He finally put the script down. "I've got to find the earlier draft. Could I have missed this? Quick, help me find it, it's called The 7:44 to Chicago. Check the Monday stack while I check Tuesday."
She crouched on the floor near the windows and found it a few minutes later, deep in a pile. "I don't know why you don't tell me what's going on," she complained.
He grabbed it out of her hands. In seconds he was shaking with excitement. "Good Lord," he said softly. "He changed the names from the earlier draft. It's about a group of strangers who get blown up by terrorists on a train from Chicago to L.A. Look at their last names!"
She took the script and started reading. The names of the strangers floated off the page: Drake, Napolitano, Swisher, Covic, Pepperdine, Santiago, Kohler, Lopez, Robertson.
The Doomsday victims. All of them.
There was nothing she could say.
"The second draft was registered April 1, 2009, seven weeks before the first murder," Will said, kneading his hands. "April Fool's Day-ha, fucking ha. This guy planned it out and advertised it in advance in a goddamned screenplay. We need an emergency order to get his name."
He wanted to envelop her, lift her off the ground and swing her in a circle by her waist, but he settled for a high five.
"We've got you, asshole," he said. "And your script pretty much sucks too."
Will would remember the next twenty-four hours the way one remembered a tornado-emotions rising in anticipation of the impact, the blurred and deafening strike, the swath of destruction, and afterward the eerie calm and hopelessness at the loss.
The Ninth Circuit granted the government's subpoena and the WGA unmasked the writer's personal data.
He was at his PC when his inbox was dinged by an e-mail from the Assistant U.S. Attorney running the subpoena. It was forwarded from the WGA with the subject line: Response to US Gov v. WGA West re. WGA Script #4277304.
For the rest of his life he would remember the way he felt when he read that e-mail. In complete and lawful response to the afore-referenced proceedings, the registered author of WGA Script #4277304 is Peter Benedict, P.O. Box 385, Spring Valley, Nevada.
Nancy came into his office and saw him frozen like marble at his screen.
She drew close until he could feel her breath against his neck. "What's wrong?"
"I know him."
"What do you mean, you know him?"
"It's my college roommate." The image of the scripts on Shackleton's neat white desk rushed back in, his insistent words, I don't think you're going to catch the guy, his palpable unease at his spontaneous visit and-one more detail! "The fucking pens."
"Sorry?"
Will was shaking his head in lamentation. "He had black ultrafine Pentels on his desk. It was all there."
"How can it be your roommate? This doesn't make any sense, Will!"
"Jesus," he moaned. "I think Doomsday was aimed at me."
Will's fingers danced over his keyboard as he feverishly hopped from one federal and state database to another. As he hunted, he repeatedly thought, Who are you, Mark? Who are you really?
Information started hitting his screen-Shackleton's DOB, his social, some old parking tickets in California-but there were maddening gaps and shrouds of obscurity. His photo was blacked-out on his Nevada driver's license record, there weren't any credit reports, mortgages, educational or employment records. There were no criminal or civil proceedings. No property tax records. He wasn't in the IRS database!
"He's completely off the fucking grid," Will told Nancy. "Protected species. I've seen this once or twice but it's rare as hell."
"What's our move?" she asked.
"We're getting on a plane this afternoon." She'd never heard him sound as agitated. "We're going to make this bust ourselves. Go start the paperwork with Sue, right away. We'll need a federal arrest warrant from the U.S. Attorney in Nevada."
She brushed her fingers against the back fringe of his hair. "I'll make the arrangements."
A couple of hours later a car was waiting to take them to the airport. Will finished packing his briefcase. He checked his watch and wondered why Nancy was late. Even under his subversive watch, she had retained the virtue of punctuality.
Then he heard those clicking high-heeled steps of Sue Sanchez approaching fast and his stomach tightened in a Pavlovian way.
He looked up and saw her taut, strained face at his door, her eyes off-the-chart wild. She had something to say but the words weren't coming out fast enough for him.
"Susan. What? I've got a plane to catch."
"No you don't."
"Sorry?"
"Benjamin just got a call from Washington. You're off the case. Lipinski too."
"What!"
"Permanently. Permanently off." She was almost hyper-ventilating.
"And why the fuck is that, Susan?"
"I have no idea." He could see she was telling the truth. She was borderline hysterical, fighting to stay professional.
"What about the arrest?"
"I don't know anything and Ronald told me not to ask any questions. This is way above my pay grade. Something huge is going on."
"This is bullshit. We've got the killer!"
"I don't know what to say."
"Where's Nancy?"
"I sent her home. They don't want you two partnering up anymore."
"And why is that?"
"I don't know, Will! Orders!"
"And what am I supposed to do now?"
She was mournfully apologetic, the official face of something she didn't understand.
"Nothing. They want you to stand down and do nothing. As far as you're concerned, it's over."
12 OCTOBER 799
VECTIS, BRITANNIA
W hen the baby was born, Mary refused to name it. She did not feel it was hers. Octavus had crudely placed it inside her and she could only watch her body grow heavy as its time neared and endure the pain of its birth just as she had endured the act of its procreation.
She suckled it because her breasts were full and she was required to do so, but would not look at its indifferent lips as it fed nor stroke its hair the way most mothers did when an infant was sucking at her teat.
After her violation, she was moved from the Sister's Dormitory to the Hospicium. There, she was segregated from the prying eyes and gossip of the novices and sisters and would gestate in the relative anonymity of the guesthouse, where visitors to the abbey were unaware of her shame. She was well-fed and permitted to take walks and work in a vegetable garden until the fullness of her term made her waddle and puff. However, all who knew her were saddened by the change in her disposition, the loss of her sparkle and humor, the dullness that prevailed. Even Prioress Magdalena secretly lamented the alterations to her temperament and the loss of youthful color from her formerly ruddy cheeks. The lass could never be admitted to the order now. How could she? Nor could she return to her village on the far side of the island-her kin would have nothing to do with her, a debased woman. She was in limbo, like an unbaptized child, neither evil nor graced.
When the baby was born and they all saw its bright ginger hair, its milky skin, and its apathetic countenance, the abbot and Paulinus deduced that Mary was a vessel, perhaps a divine one, who was owed nurturing and protection in much the same way the way the c
hild had to be nurtured and protected.
This was no virgin birth, but the mother's name was Mary and the child was special.
A week after the baby was born, Magdalena visited Mary and found her lying in bed, staring vacantly into the air. The baby was still, in its cradle on the floor.
"Well, have you a name for him yet?" the prioress asked.
"No, Sister."
"Do you intend to name the child?"
"I do not know," she answered listlessly.
"Every child must have a name," Magdalena declared sternly. "I shall name it then. He will be Primus, the first child of Octavus."
Primus was now in his fourth year. Lost in his own world, he wandered the Hospicium and its environs, pale as cream, never straying far, never interested in objects or people. Like Octavus, he was mute and expressionless, with small green eyes. Every so often Paulinus would come, take him by the hand and lead him to the Scriptorium, where they would descend the stairs to his father's chamber. Paulinus would watch them as he might study heavenly bodies, looking for signs, but they were indifferent to one another. Octavus would continue to furiously write, the boy would move dreamily around the room, not bumping into anything but not seeing either. The quills did not interest him, nor the ink, the parchment, and the scribbles that emanated from Octavus's hand.
Paulinus would report back to Josephus, "The boy has shown no inclinations," and the two old men would shrug at each other and shuffle off for prayer.
It was a crisp autumn afternoon with a snap to the air. The waning sun was the color of marigold petals. Josephus was gingerly walking the abbey grounds, deep in meditation, silently praying for God's love and salvation.
Salvation was much on his mind. For weeks he had noticed that his urine first turned brown and now cherry red and his hearty appetite had vanished. His skin was becoming slack and tawny and the whites of his eyes were muddy. When he rose from kneeling prayer he felt like he was floating on waves and had to hold on for balance. He did not need to consult with the barber surgeon nor Paulinus. He knew he was dying.