Shadow Man sb-1

by Cody McFadyen

  I am dumbstruck. A lump fills my throat, demanding tears. I fight it back. I glance at Alan. He's fighting too. The reasons are the same for both of us. It's not just Bonnie's pain. It's Elaina's kindness, and Bonnie's instant understanding that Elaina's arms are a safe place to be if something hurts.

  This is who she is. She is Mom.

  The moment seems to hang forever.

  Bonnie pulls away, wiping her face with her hands.

  "Better now?" Elaina asks.

  Bonnie looks at her and gives a tired smile in answer. It's not only her smile that's tired. She just wept out some part of her soul, and it exhausted her. Elaina strokes her cheek with one hand. "You sleepy, baby?"

  Bonnie nods, her eyes blinking. I realize she is falling asleep on her feet. Elaina gathers her up in her arms without another word. Bonnie's head falls against her shoulder and, just like that, she's out. It was something magic. Elaina had sucked the pain out of her, and now she could sleep. I'd slept that night at the hospital too, after her visit. The first sleep I'd had in days.

  It blindsides me as I see Bonnie there, asleep in her arms, trusting. I hate myself for the selfishness of it, but I can't help the fear. What if Bonnie got close to this wonderful woman and lost her too? I find that the thought of this possibility terrifies me, in the most Mom of ways. Elaina squints her eyes at me, smiles. "I'm not going anywhere, Smoky." Long on empathy as always. I feel ashamed. But she smiles again and sweeps my shame away. "I think we'll be fine here. You two can get to work."

  "Thanks," I mumble, still fighting that lump in my throat.

  "You want to thank me, you come for dinner tonight, Smoky." She comes over and touches my face, the side with scars. "Better," she says. Then, more firmly, "Definitely better."

  She gives Alan a single kiss and walks off, trailing that elemental love and goodness behind her. Changing everything she touches just by being who she is.

  Alan and I walk outside, stopping on his front porch for a moment. Moved and dazed and jittery.

  Alan breaks the silence with actions, not words. Those catcher'smitt hands fly up to his face in a single, sudden, desperate motion. His tears are as silent as Bonnie's were, and just as agonizing to watch. The gentle giant shakes. I know they are tears of fear, more than anything else. I understand. Being married to Elaina, it must be like being married to the sun. He's afraid of losing her. Of being in darkness forever. I could tell him that life goes on, blah, blah, blah. But I know better.

  So instead I put a hand on his shoulder and let him cry. I'm not Elaina. But I know he'll never let her see his worry and pain about her like this. I do my best. I know from experience that while it's not enough, it's far far better than nothing at all.

  As quick as it came, the storm passes.

  His eyes are already dry, which doesn't really surprise me. This is who we are, I think, sad.

  As much as we might like to break, we're really only made to bend.

  25

  E VERYONE LOOKS WORN down, with that rushed-to-get-ready look. Hair combed, but imperfectly. Shaves not as close as they could be. Everyone but Callie, of course. She's beautiful and impeccable.

  "How's Bonnie?" she asks.

  I shrug. "Hard to say. She seems okay for now. But . . ." I shrug again. No one says anything to this. She might be fine, she might never be fine . . . However you slice it, it comes up sucky. A loud ding-dong fills the air.

  "What the hell is that?" I ask, startled.

  "That means I have mail, honey-love. I have a program that checks it automatically every half hour and alerts me if something's there."

  I look at Callie, perplexed. "Really?" This seems bizarre to me. I see tolerant looks on everyone's faces. I have a feeling that I am showing myself as being behind the times.

  Callie walks over to the laptop on her desk, taps at the keyboard. She frowns, looks up at me. "I have psycho mail," she says. The feeling of lethargy that had been blanketing the room vanishes in a single electric jolt. We all crowd around her desk. The in-box listing of her e-mail is displayed, with the newest message on top. The subject is: A Message from Hell, the sender: You Know Who. Callie double-clicks to open the message full screen.

  Greetings, Agent Thorne! And Agent Barrett as well-- I'm sure you are reading this together.

  You are back at the nest now, I feel sure, plotting the pursuit. I must admit, I am becoming excited at the prospects of the days to come. The hunt is on, and I could not have asked for a better cast of foes.

  I have specific business with you here, Agent Thorne, but before we get to that, I must digress. You'll forgive me, I hope.

  I am sure you have all wondered: Why am I challenging you so directly? Perhaps you already have a team of profilers, picking apart my motivations, trying to pluck the meanings from my actions.

  "You wish," Callie murmurs.

  This isn't an idle comment on her part. "They" are showing us something important here, part of what makes them tick. The thought of us investing time and resources to figure them out is an ego trip for them. It's part of their turn-on.

  The answer, however, is not complex. Just as I am

  not complex. My motivations are not arcane, Agent Thorne and Co. They are not hidden in murky waters. They gleam with the cool simplicity of the scalpel. Sterile and brightly lit.

  I challenge you because you deserve me. You hunt the hunters, and, I feel certain, you have spent many years patting each other on the back. Filling the air with your mutual congratulations, your skill at putting those who kill into the cages you feel they deserve.

  And so you deserve me. Because if these others you have hunted are shadows, I am darkness itself. They are the jackals to my lion. You feel you are skilled? Then hunt me, Agents. Hunt me.

  I desire opponents worthy of me, Agent Barrett. Read my letters with care. Smell my scent. Catch a whiff of something deadly. You will need this, in the days to come.

  Learn to live with the assumption of being under siege. You don't know what I mean, just now, but you will. Learn it, take it into your blood. And then use it to drive you in your hunt for me. Because I promise you, so long as you leave me free to cut and tear, you will live a life of peril.

  This sends a shiver through me, against my will.

  Now, back to you, Agent Thorne. Let's make this personal, shall we? While it is Agent Barrett I challenge face-to-face, I realize that any gauntlet I throw her way is thrown at all of you. And since we have a day before my package arrives into your eager hands, let's use that time wisely.

  Agent Barrett lost her best friend. Let's see if we can use this time making sure each of you lose something equally important.

  Alarm bells go off in my head at this last sentence. I don't know my prey yet, in the way I come to know all the killers we go after. I haven't soaked them into my bones. But I have absorbed one certainty that makes that sentence a chiller: I know they do not bluff. Here is a link to a Web site for you, Agent Thorne. Visit it, and all will become clear if you look hard enough. I think you will enjoy the irony.

  From Hell,

  Jack Jr.

  There is a hyperlink embedded in the e-mail message, a line that says, Click Here.

  "Well?" Callie asks.

  I nod. "Go ahead."

  She clicks on the link, and a browser window flies open. We wait as the Web site is contacted and begins to fill the screen. The background is white. A red logo appears. RED ROSE, it says, then, below it, in smaller letters, A TRUE REDHEAD AMATEUR.

  The rest of the graphics fill in, and what I see makes me blink. Alan frowns. "What the hell? . . . Is that . . . ?"

  The picture on the screen shows a tall, beautiful redheaded woman in her early twenties, dressed in red thong panties and nothing else. She's staring directly at the camera, smiling a seductive smile, so we have a very good shot of her face. I turn to Callie. She is bone white. Blood-drained. Her eyes are filled with unending fear.

  "Callie--what does this mean?"

  We
are all looking at her. Because the young woman who calls herself Red Rose looks enough like Callie to be her sister.

  "Callie?" Alan's voice is filled with alarm, and he moves toward her as she backs away from the screen, slamming into the wall behind her. She brings a fist up to her mouth. Her eyes go wide. Her entire body is shaking. Alan reaches out a hand to her.

  And then she explodes. It's like watching a hurricane appear, full force, in the middle of a clear day. The fear vanishes from her eyes, replaced by a rage so intense that I flinch. She turns to Leo with a snarl, and he jolts backward. When she speaks, it comes out as a roar.

  "Find her fucking address now! Now Now Now Now Now!"

  Leo stares at Callie for only a split second and gets into motion, sitting down at the nearest computer terminal. Callie leans forward over the desk, grips it hard enough to whiten her knuckles. The air around her is charged. It feels like it should be crackling. James is the one who braves her rage. "Callie," he says, voice quiet.

  "Who is she?"

  She looks at him. Her eyes are lightning-filled.

  "She's my daughter."

  Then she screams and upends her desk, sending it and the laptop flying.

  We stand back, open-mouthed, in shock. Not at the destruction, but at the revelation.

  "Dead, dead, dead, he's fucking dead!" She whirls at me. "Do you hear me, Smoky?" It is a howl of agony.

  And I see myself, pointing a gun at Callie those months ago, firing on an empty chamber. Yeah, I hear her.

  "Get that address, Leo," I say, not taking my eyes from Callie. "Get it fast."

  26

  I AM IN the passenger seat of Callie's car, praying we'll survive getting to our destination in Ventura County. Callie is driving down the 101

  freeway like a madwoman, breaking the sound barrier. I can only hope that the others are behind us. Leo had found the address belonging to the registered owner of the Red Rose Internet domain, and Callie had raced out the door before any of us could react. All I could do was run after her.

  I look at her. She's terror and danger, all rolled up together.

  "Talk to me, Callie," I say as I grip the armrest on the door.

  "Look in my wallet," she growls. "It's in my purse."

  I grab the wallet and open it. I know what she wants me to find the moment I see it. It's a small picture. A black-and-white, the kind of baby photo they take at the hospital. It shows a newborn, eyes squinched shut, head still a little bit cone-shaped from having fought through the birth canal.

  "I was fifteen," Callie says as she makes a hairpin turn, tires squealing. Her voice is tight. "Fifteen and silly and stupid. I slept with Billy Hamilton because he managed to charm the skirt off me and he smelled so good. Isn't that funny, honey-love?" she says, bitter. "That's what I remember about Billy. He smelled good. Like sun and rain, mixed up together."

  I don't reply. None is needed.

  "Billy knocked me up, and it was a scandal like no other in the history of the Thorne household. Or the Hamilton household, for that matter. My dad almost disowned me. My mom went to church and stayed there for days. An abortion was out of the question--we were a good Catholic family, you know." The words are biting, full of sarcasm and pain. "The dads got together and worked it all out. That's how things went then in upscale Connecticut. Billy had a future, I might have one--though of course I was tainted now." She grips the steering wheel. "They decided I'd finish out that year being homeschooled, have the baby quietly, and it would be put up for adoption. The homeschooling would be explained with a cover story--I was going through treatment for severe allergies, which required a few months of isolation. That's what they decided, and that's exactly what happened. The timing was perfect. I had her over the summer, and I was ready to go back to school the next year like nothing had happened. Which is almost how it was. Like it hadn't happened." Another hairpin turn, more squealing tires. "I wasn't allowed to go out, and Billy was warned to keep his mouth shut under pain of death." She shrugs. "He wasn't a bad one. He did keep his mouth shut, and he never treated me badly after that. The whole thing just sort of . . . went away." She nods at the picture in my hand. "But even though I was stupid and silly, I knew it wasn't right to pretend it was just a dream. One of the nurses took that picture for me. I forced myself to look at it at least once a month. And I made some decisions." Her voice is low, earnest. I can imagine her, sitting alone in her room, taking a silent oath. "I was never going to be stupid and silly again. I was done being Catholic. And that was the last time that lifechanging decisions were going to be made on my behalf by anyone."

  "Jesus, Callie." I don't know what else to say.

  She shakes her head, once. "I never tried to find her, Smoky. I didn't feel it would be right to. I mean, I knew she had been adopted. I did know that much. Beyond that, I decided that she needed to be allowed to live her own life." She laughs, a painful laugh, like a knife cutting metal. "But I guess what they say is true, honey-love. You never get to stop being a parent, not even if you've given up your child. She runs a porn site, and she's probably dead because I'm her mommy. Isn't life a hoot?"

  Her hands are shaking on the wheel. I look down at the photo again. This is what she'd been looking at when I came out of that bathroom. Callie, crass and irreverent and quick-tongued, so full of unbreakable confidence. How many times a year did she pull out this picture, look at it, and feel the sadness I'd seen on her face?

  I look out the window. The rolling hills whip past us, along with the occasional exit sign. The day is engorged with sunlight gold, the sky perfect and cloudless. This is the kind of brightness people think of when they hear the word California.

  Fuck perfect skies and sunlight. Some part of me wants to scream right now. Because reality keeps knocking down those pins, boy: Matt, Alexa, Annie, Elaina . . . now Callie. Instead, I try to put the force of what I'm feeling into my words.

  "Listen to me, Callie. She might not be dead. They might just be screwing with you."

  She doesn't respond. Looks at me for a moment. Her eyes are filled with despair. She drives faster.

  We arrive in Moorpark about thirty minutes after we'd pulled away from the office, thanks to Callie's race-car driving. It's a small but growing city near Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, a mix of middle and upper-middle class, and we are in the center of the suburbs. We pull up to the house. It's a two-story, painted white with blue trim. Everything is quiet. A neighbor across the way is mowing his lawn. The banality is surreal. Callie jumps out of her car, gun at the ready. A redheaded death machine driven by fear.

  "Fuck," I mutter, getting out to follow her. This is all wrong. I look down the street, hoping to see Alan or James barreling after us, but the surburban quiet prevails. I follow Callie to the door. The neighbor who'd been mowing his lawn has turned off the mower and is backing away, eyes agoggle.

  Callie pounds on the front door without hesitation. "FBI!" she yells.

  "Open up!"

  There is silence. Then we hear footsteps coming to the door. I look at Callie. Her eyes are wide, nostrils flaring. I see her hands grip her weapon tighter.

  A voice comes through the door. Female. "Who is this?"

  "FBI, ma'am," Callie says, finger poised outside her trigger guard.

  "Please open the door."

  I imagine the hesitation on the other side, can feel it. Then the knob turns, the door opens, and--

  I am looking at Callie's daughter, alive, eyes wide and frightened at the sight of the guns in our hands.

  She's holding a baby in her arms.

  27

  WE'RE INSIDE, CALLIE seated in the living room, head in her hands. I'm in the kitchen on my cell phone, talking to Alan.

  "Nothing here," I say. "He was messing with Callie."

  "James and I are about ten minutes out. You want us to keep coming?"

  I look into the living room, at Callie and her daughter. The air is tense, filled with fear and the exhaustion of post-adrenaline rush.
<
br />   "Nooo . . . I think the fewer people here, the better. Get back to the office. I'll call you."

  "Got it."

  He hangs up. I take a deep breath and walk into the emotional cyclone. Callie's daughter, whose name is Marilyn Gale, is frenetic and pacing, patting the baby on the back as she stops and starts, stops and starts. Patting more for her comfort than the baby's, I think. God, she looks like Callie. Something she doesn't seem to have noticed herself yet. A tad shorter, a touch heavier, her features a little softer. But the red hair is distinctive. And the face and figure have the same model-quality beauty to them. The eyes are different. Billy Hamilton's ghost, I muse. It's Marilyn's anger that reminds me most of Callie right now. She's pissed, the over-the-top pissed that sudden fear can create.

  "Do you want to tell me what's going on here?" she shrills. "Why two FBI agents show up at my door with their guns out?"

  Callie doesn't respond. Her head is still in her hands. She looks drained.

  I'm going to have to do the talking for now. "Do you want to sit down, Mrs. Gale? I'll explain everything, but I think step one is to try and relax."