Pulling him aside, Kaya whispered, "His girls are afraid, and it's important that they believe that he's coming. Who knows? He might change his mind. If we put everybody in all the rooms, we don't leave space for him. It sends a signal."
Donovan nodded. Kaya was wise well beyond any parenting ideas he had, and he pushed aside another pestering thought of his parents and their ability to lose his brother. . .
Donovan looked at each of the kids in front of him as they shuffled in and out of rooms. He could easily imagine them as little bugs, moving their things around, setting up as it were, two of them yawning as they stretched. In a moment of insight, he pulled them together to give them a short pep talk—at least, the best he was capable of.
"Look, Eleri and I will likely not be coming to visit you. We can, if you need us to. But you can and should talk to Omar and to Lisa—Agents Shaw and Dillard. They can reach out to us if you need that. But for the most part, Agent Eames and I are going to be working our butts off to get this case solved so you can come home. So you can go back to school, sleep in your own beds, go back to work, and be yourselves again. Okay?"
He'd asked for any last questions and felt his phone buzz in his pocket again. As he headed out to the garage, he checked the messages. One was from Eleri, just lab results. The results showed the dust on Jivika Das’s pillow had been a gray cement dust. The second text, which had come more recently and buzzed his phone just now, said nothing. She’d sent only a blank, empty bubble…
Donovan frowned as he climbed into the driver's seat of the huge van. He would have to take it back to the Mazur home, check in with the agents there, and trade them this van for his car.
He waited impatiently while the garage door slowly rattled its way up, but as it did, the newly forming sensation of dread in his chest squeezed.
From somewhere behind him, he heard his name.
"Donovan!"
His head turned sharply, almost involuntarily. It was Eleri's voice, but she wasn’t there.
He would have told himself he was crazy. Like everyone, he'd had those inklings over the years, the feeling of being watched, the voice in the back of his head, almost clear enough to make him turn around, but this one had made him turn.
And it was Eleri.
In his pocket his phone buzzed at him again, and Donovan pulled it out hoping it was Eleri telling him anything else of value. Then he could put this feeling aside.
But it was Wade, instead. The words were terrifying. "Wasn’t sure if you saw the report the analysts just sent. It looks like Marshawn James is in serious debt to some kind of mob boss or loan shark. They found origination points for old debts that were paid. It turns out, they weren’t paid by Marshawn. Check your email when you can."
Donovan felt a cold sweat break out. The cement on the pillow! He knew what it was. And he’d left Eleri alone with Marshawn.
Climbing up into the car, Donovan cranked the engine and peeled out of the driveway, not even waiting for the door to come down. His chest felt tight, like he couldn’t breathe.
As he took the ramp onto the freeway at top speed, he heard her voice again, only this time it was fainter.
“Donovan.”
58
She'd missed.
Eleri couldn't believe it, but she'd shot at Marshawn and missed. She was supposed to be good at this, but her hands were betraying her. She fired two more times at Marshawn as he stood in front of her.
Though he flinched each time, and though he was afraid, she knew as well as he did that she likely wouldn’t hit him. The drugs were taking over her system and her chances of making the shot were down to luck.
She didn't hit him either time. She considered firing more and more, but figured she’d hit the point where she was more likely to injure herself than him. Her muscles were losing tone, the jerk of the gun as each bullet left the chamber jolted her arm well beyond her control. No wonder she couldn’t hit anything.
She considered pulling the gun back and striking him across the temple as he approached her. Though he was tall, she thought she could reach his head with enough force. But the fact of the matter was, as she pulled her hand back, he reached out and grabbed her wrist.
She never even got to the forward motion of her strike. She felt as if she was in a dream where she was running and never got anywhere. Her efforts at punching or kicking him yielded little to nothing, and she was frustratingly slow compared to her merely average attacker.
She was fucked.
Eleri heard the gun as it clattered to the floor. The sound alerted her that he’d squeezed it from her grip more than she’d felt it falling from her hands. She stood, swaying slightly, watching as he leaned over and unzipped the large duffel bag he'd brought with him.
It had seemed to be heavy when he showed up at the door, but she hadn’t thought about it. Now, she saw that he had not packed to go to the safe house at all. He had brought rope and a cinder block.
A cinder block.
It was all coming together, but that didn’t matter because she was barely able to stand. In fact, she swayed widely one more time before falling.
Marshawn easily caught her small frame with one large arm around her waist. This was how it was done. She understood. She had inadvertently solved the entire case. Marshawn was stealing Marat’s invention, and killing anyone who got in his way. Including her.
Eleri understood. The idea was not only worthwhile, but specifically solved a problem even she had been able to look up as one of the major robotics issues of the era. He might as well have made affordable, flying cars, or found a viable alternate fuel source.
Money was a powerful motive, and it sounded like Marshawn was in serious need of cash. He was at least concerned about his own livelihood, maybe even his safety. Those things mixed together could lead to murder.
Eleri understood.
He'd even said Marat and Johanna were older. He hadn't taken as much from them. Even Jivika hadn’t been helpful. His words and tone seemed to say that the loss to the world, or even the individual, wasn’t that great. He wasn’t that guilty.
She opened her mouth to tell him that he was. To explain what he was doing now. "If you kill me, you will have murdered a federal agent. Donovan will not stop until you're locked up or dead. And trust me, dead is the better option where either my partner or I are concerned."
But what came out of her mouth was a garbled roll of sound that she wasn't even sure resembled words in any language at all. She was hanging over his arm, her mind fuzzy and her body completely unresponsive, aside from a few twitches that she could feel in her fingers.
Her eyes opened before she even realized she'd let them slide shut, and she looked up at the ceiling. It took another moment of trying to focus, to understand that she was lying on the floor between the two couches. Rope was already tied around one wrist.
She frowned. Like with the other bodies, he wasn't splaying her out.
But why? Why had he laid her—
Oh! The cinder block. It was important that she not be able to move it.
Between the drugs and the weight, she wondered how fast his victims expired. This was certainly not the fastest method.
She started her breathing again. She'd been trying to move her limbs, or to get up—she couldn’t quite remember—when she did remember to do her shallow breaths. Once again, she needed to see if she could push the drug through her system and metabolize it just a little bit faster. Maybe fast enough to survive.
The problem, though, was that she knew she would need her muscles, and if she wore herself out hyperventilating, that would just kill her faster. Her brain wasn't quite sharp enough to hold onto the ideas and weigh the pros and cons. She was grateful she had reached into her pocket and hit several buttons on her cell phone before she’d begun firing the gun.
She'd intended to call Wade. Donovan was too far out of town to be of much help—at least not before she died. She didn't know if she'd accomplished a signal connection or not.
If she was lucky, her phone line was open right now and Wade was listening in. Still, she knew she could not count on being lucky.
“Marshawn!” she tried to yell it. Though again, it came out only as a garbled "Mmmmm" sound.
"That's okay Agent Eames," he said, offering her his kind smile again. "You won't hardly feel a thing. It's very humane."
Humane? she thought. At what point is killing me humane? Just because I'm not in pain doesn't mean. . . And the thought drifted away.
She shallowed out her breath again, breathing faster even though she remembered there was a reason she didn't want to do this. She saw Marshawn reach up to the couch and pull down a pillow. He placed it on her chest, balancing the puffy mass carefully. Had she been able to move much, she could have rolled it off. But in a moment, he pulled the cinder block out.
That had been the weight. That was what put the cement dust on Jivika Das’s pillowcase. But Eleri didn’t have time to analyze it before she felt the weight on her own chest.
Yes, she thought. She was fucked. She knew exactly what that cinder block would do. This was how his victims had died of no apparent cause. How they had suffocated in open air with no loss of lung function. They had no water or mucous in their lungs to explain it. No kind of damage. No sign of strangulation or petechial hemorrhaging.
He'd simply stopped them from being able to breathe.
Immediately, the weight on her chest was an issue. She breathed in—or tried but couldn’t accomplish much. Fighting to get as much oxygen into her system as she could, she searched for what she could remember of tidal volume in the lungs. She considered the need to breathe out to get more fresh oxygen in, versus the need to expand her lungs. If she breathed all the way out, would she be able to pull her lungs open again?
She didn't know.
The thoughts slid in and out of her grasp. So even when she had one she could cling to, she’d lost the thing she needed to connect it with.
Eleri kept her breathing shallow, partly because she couldn’t take deep breaths, or even normal ones. She tried to conserve her muscle energy. She needed to remain alive long enough for someone to get here.
How far away was Donovan again?
She didn't know.
She didn't know how long he'd been gone by this point. She didn't know how long he would stay with the families, working with them to get them settled. He had to introduce them and hand them off to the new agents who'd be watching the safe house. Ironically, the Mazurs and the James girls were as safe as they could be.
They'd been less safe at the Mazurs’ kitchen table when Eleri and Donovan had been sharing their secrets with the killer himself.
She wanted to rail against herself for not having caught this killer sooner, but this was Curie, Nebraska. And Marshawn was smart. Smarter than both of them, clearly. She knew his murder method—even while she lay there suffering from it—was brilliant.
Even the man’s money problems had been well-hidden. Then again, loan sharks didn’t keep regular bank accounts for the FBI to trace. And since Marshawn didn’t pay off the debts, it had likely taken a while to find the accounts were even related to him.
As her head lolled to one side, she saw that he'd pulled on gloves. Of course he did, she thought and almost laughed. Even his own brother would likely never believe that Marshawn was a killer.
She watched as he stood up and grabbed her bag with the FBI laptops, the notebooks, and the transcribed pages.
Fuck the damn papers! she thought. Paper was un-hackable, until the murderer just picked it up and walked off with it. At least he would have to hack his way into the FBI computers. It would set off alarms as soon as Donovan reported the computers stolen. Marshawn would be found.
But, maybe not! Those papers gave him exactly what he needed. He might never open the computers. If he was smart—and he was—he would toss them as soon as he was out the door.
She took in another breath. She could feel it. She wasn't getting enough oxygen. Though she was already drugged, she felt the sensation of her brain tingling a little as she further lost her focus.
Fuck! she thought again. This was why he tied them down. If they could just push the cinder block off, even for a moment, they could gasp like a drowning man coming up for air. Buy more time. Save themselves.
But she couldn't raise her hand to push it off. She couldn’t roll and let it fall. She couldn’t do anything except lie there and feel the oxygen leaving her system.
For a moment, she thought about slipping away. Then, she got mad.
59
Eleri was a crappy witch. Her surge of anger had produced sparks in the air around her eyes, though she couldn't be sure if that was witchcraft or merely the dying embers of her vision fading as she passed out.
Through the haze of her foggy brain, she blinked and saw she was walking in the woods. Leaves lined the trail—a path through the forest that she now knew well. She ran, bare feet crunching in the leaves, knowing time was of the utmost essence. She turned toward the little square house with the door set at a forty-five degree angle into the odd, triangular porch. She stepped up onto the stoop, which was just big enough for one person to open the door.
Turning the knob, Eleri threw herself against the door and bolted into the house. The circular design meant that going to the right would lead through the living space. Then she would enter a dining area, then the kitchen, and finally come around to a back room. But to the left, the route to the back room was faster. And that was where she needed to be.
She turned and raced through the open archway, down the short hall, and into the back room where she could already hear the creak of a rocking chair.
Eleri had once been surprised to see the goddess Aida Weddo here, but now she knew who she would see. As she dashed into the room, her Grandmere looked up from the rocking chair, up from where she was stitching a tiny poppet by hand.
"Makinde," said the old woman in a warm greeting and Eleri breathed in deeply for the first time, a huge sigh of relief.
"Grandmere." She wanted to say, “You are here! Can you help me?” But it was Grandmere who looked up and shook her head. As though she knew what Eleri wished to say but couldn’t.
"This is my house now, child. It was built by my own grandmother a long, long time ago. It is here to keep our secrets. In fact, you found it before you were supposed to, child, but I am here now, and here is where I shall stay."
"Emmaline?" she asked, wondering if her sister was available. She'd seen her sister so many times over the years. Now she realized she’d not seen her sister at all since she’d buried her. But she'd seen Emmaline in this house before, and her hopes stayed high.
Grandmere shook her head softly. "No, my child. Emmaline is free now."
Another great gulp tried to find its way into stilted lungs as Eleri felt the news hit. The pressure inside her screamed to get out. Suddenly, she felt all of the grief that she had not felt before. For she hadn’t truly lost Emmaline when she disappeared. Her sister had always resurfaced in her dreams. The girls talked, they played, and Emmaline helped her find truths. But Grandmere was telling her she had lost Emmaline now, it seemed.
"Gone?" She pushed the words through leaded lips, and Grandmere merely nodded. There would be no more dreams of Emmaline.
But Eleri shook her head to dispel the crushing sense of loss. There would be no more dreams of anything if she didn't get out from under that cinder block. In the Frank Lloyd Wright house, she was lying on the living room floor, her hands and feet tied just tightly enough to keep her from rocking and rolling the crushing weight off, to keep her from pushing at it with her hands. She was too drugged to fight anyway.
"Grandmere," she said again, and watched as her grandmother slowly set the poppet to her side and stood to her full height. Not much taller than Eleri, the old woman was definitely sturdier than her granddaughter. Certainly, she was more so here in this house, where Eleri felt like a visiting wraith and Grandmere felt solid.
&
nbsp; Grandmere looked her in the eyes. "I cannot leave this house. I can only help you help yourself."
With that, she placed both her hands across Eleri’s collarbones, her fingers creating an electric zap where she touched. She leaned back, not breaking contact, and she said, "Go, Makinde. Go with Aida Weddo!” And she pushed her granddaughter backward with a force the old woman should not have been able to generate.
Eleri felt herself pulled through time and space, jolting as she landed flat on the floor in the living room of the house in Curie. Her eyes jolted open, looking up through the window at the wash of stars outside.
She was still stuck—still tied out, ropes around her hands, the cinder block still weighing on her lungs—but she no longer felt as though she were drugged. Had Grandmere sobered her up? What could she do if she were sober?
So, using her oxygen in a way that she should not have been able to do, she screamed a loud noise that had Marshawn turning and looking at her, his eyes wide. Surely none of his victims had reacted this way before.
So she did it again.
"Shut up," he hissed at her, but Eleri refused. She rocked side to side, pulling on the ropes, exactly as she had told Donovan an alert victim would do. The rope was a rough fisherman's-type twine, and it cut at her wrists, making tiny slices in her skin. She could feel it, but the sting didn’t stop her. She screamed again.
She only needed to get her chest far enough to the side to get the cinder block to roll off, so she yanked at her left hand and then her right, and noticed as she did that she could pull the couch. Just a little, but it was enough. The tension in the rope loosened a bit, and she pulled again.
Eleri was strong, though whether it was physical strength or whatever magic Grandmere might have imbued her with, she didn't know, and she didn't care. She was not going to let Marshawn suffocate her in open air. If he succeeded, he would remove his cinder block from her dead body and then pack it to take home. He’d put the cushion back on the couch, remove the ropes, and leave her there staring at the ceiling.
The Camelot Gambit Page 32