In the morning, as Roselynne’s three children left for school and she for union headquarters, the alarm system was deactivated to allow them to move out of the house. Helman, at that time, moved in.
Ultrasonic motion detectors were not in use because the children’s cats were allowed to roam the house. The alarm system’s second perimeter was a system of pressure-sensitive mats concealed under carpeting by windows and on stairways. Helman avoided windows and climbed up banisters.
When the house was empty, Helman moved into the kitchen. The FBI listening post had shifted its attention to the union headquarters’ telephones. Helman was able to attach two devices to the kitchen telephone without alerting them.
In the refrigerator, he found the unopened carton of milk he had observed Roselynne purchase after work the evening before. His hypodermic slid easily into the top seal of the carton without leaving a visible puncture.
Helman returned to the basement. He had fasted for the two days previous to prevent the need for elimination, enabling him to stay hidden in one area for many hours.
When the children returned home and deactivated the alarm system again, Helman moved back to the window well. Later that night he withdrew through the garden past the unsuspecting FBI agents.
Again and again Helman reviewed his penetration of the house. He was convinced it was flawless. He did not know there had been other watchers in the garden that night, equally invisible to the FBI.
At three o’clock that morning, Helman placed his first call to the Delvecchio house. Roselynne answered, her voice sleep-blurred and annoyed. The FBI agents listened intently.
Drunkenly, Helman demanded to speak with Mr. Till. Roselynne was confused, she did not know anyone by that name. Helman read off a phone number. It was Delvecchios’ number with the final two digits transposed. Roselynne slammed down the phone.
The FBI judged the possibilities. The phone call could have been a coded message, an attempt to determine if Roselynne was home, or a call which activated a listening device concealed within a phone in the house. As Helman had anticipated, the FBI immediately investigated the number he had given to Roselynne. It belonged to a Paul Till. The FBI called him and yes he had received a phone call moments after the call to Roselynne from a drunk who demanded to talk to Peter Till. The FBI left the investigation there. The phone call, as far as they were concerned, had been a legitimate wrong number. Meanwhile, Helman’s listening device in the kitchen phone had been fully activated and was working perfectly.
The next morning Helman listened as the Delvecchio’s awoke and prepared themselves for another day of work and school. After he heard the sounds of the children in the kitchen eating their cereal, Helman placed his second call.
What Roselynne Delvecchio heard terrified her. What the FBI heard was unintelligible. The second device Helman had attached to the phone was a scrambling unit compatible to the one he spoke through. The garbled transmission was decoded when it reached the device in the kitchen phone. Where the FBI had placed their intercept on the outside cable however, all they heard was interference. Eventually, they would get around to reacting, but Helman knew it would not be soon enough.
Roselynne threw the receiver onto the kitchen counter. She ran towards the breakfast table and with a wild sweep of her arm sent breakfast cereal bowls and glasses to shatter on the floor. As she had been instructed she took the now almost empty milk carton into the living room and poured a few drops into the aquarium tank. From behind her, she could hear the confused crying of her youngest child as the others tried to clean up the mess. The sounds were masked by the rushing of her blood as she saw the fish in the tank begin to violently twitch and shudder and sickeningly float to the surface.
The man on the phone had told the truth. There was a nerve toxin in the children’s milk. The fish, being so small, reacted immediately. Her children had, at most, an hour.
She went back to the phone, shaking, and agreed to everything Helman told her.
The children would remain at home. If Roselynne did everything as she was told, a man would come to her house with a fruit drink. The children were to drink it. In it was the antidote.
But for the man to come at all, Roselynne must be at a certain location within five minutes. The phone went dead.
Seconds later Roselynne screeched out of her garage in a late-model Cadillac. She was leaving an hour before her regular routine. The FBI was caught without a pursuit vehicle. By the time instructions were issued to local police, Roselynne had arrived at the designated parking lot and transferred to another car. Helman was the driver. He had two conditions left to meet.
There was a storage yard ten miles away. A construction rental company kept job shacks there; offices built like mobile homes to be driven wherever they were required. They contained nothing of value and the one guard at the gate was old and slow. He was unconscious before he had a chance to think that Helman might be any threat.
Helman drove to a job shack he had already prepared. A wire stretched from it to the telephone pole outside the guard’s shack. Roselynne went first, directed by the gun Helman held.
The woman seemed oblivious to the danger she might be in. She demanded Helman order the antidote sent to her children. Helman said they had been watched in the parking lot; her children had already been treated. She had nothing to worry about.
In reality, the children had never been in danger. The substance he had injected into the milk carton was a naturally occurring poison derived from a species of sole found in the Red Sea. The Navy used it to allow divers to work in shark-infested water. It was deadly to fish yet had no affect on humans. There was no need for a second party to be involved in any of Helman’s closings. His security, he thought, was impenetrable.
He placed the phone call which would inform his clients that the deal was to be closed. They would make their calls to alert the people behind Roselynne’s actions. The phone call was brief. The clients hung up after Helmut spoke the coded message. But Helman held the receiver to his ear and pretended confusion. He held a one-sided conversation with the dead line for a few seconds before hanging up.
Roselynne looked at him questioningly.
He explained that a mistake had been made. Certain people had suspected Roselynne of directing the misappropriation of pension funds. She was to be killed because of it. But new evidence had come to light. The real thieves had been detected. Roselynne was to go free.
The dark terror left Roselynne’s face as exultation took over. She spun, still dressed in her nightgown and housecoat, to stare out the one dingy window in the shack. She had given up everything in the last hour, and now it was being miraculously restored. Freedom was her last thought, her last experience, as Helman’s knuckles drove into the base of her skull, severing her spinal cord and crushing her medulla oblongata.
Roselynne Delvecchio was dead before she fell to the floor.
In her last second, she must have been licking her tension-dried lips. The violent snap of her head had brought her teeth together, tearing her tongue tip away from her in a fine mist of blood.
It was the blood that startled Helman. It was to have been a clean closing, a simple closing. He had given her her last freedom as an act of compassion, an apology that for the successful completion of this business deal, she, unfortunately, must die.
Helman shifted on his New England tree trunk. He knew why the blood had startled him. He knew why it returned to him again and again.
It was the one element he hadn’t planned.
Everything had been meticulously organised. He had run through each step so often before undertaking the actual closing that it was mechanical. A business deal, nothing more.
But for Roselynne licking her lips, the mist of blood sprayed out in tiny droplets, beaded upon the filthy floor-boards and slowly sinking into the grooves, something new had been added. Something that did not fit into his precise plan.
Roselynne’s startled face, eyes open, still moist, st
aring lifelessly at the delicate tongue tip lying useless in the dust, framed by that dark halo of blood, made her elimination more than a closing.
It was murder.
At that moment in the job shack, Helman knew it had been his final closing. He stared transfixed by the thin trickle of life which slid from between those lips that had talked and eaten and kissed, and saw in its moist glimmer the sparkle of the snow which awaited him in his New England. His refuge, his comfort. The forty thousand he would realise was the final amount he needed to buy his own farm, a few miles from his sister Miriam’s farm. He would be rid of his profession. His freedom would be real, not the ephemeral promise made to Roselynne.
The blood focused him and his thoughts. He looked into it and saw the twenty-two others he had murdered, always calmly, sometimes proudly, telling himself he was punishing those whom the law could never touch, doing his duty for justice as he had that first time, for his sister. And Helman knew in his thoughts that it was a lie and that he was finished with it.
But it was only now, alone in the hills, enwrapped in the gentle snow with the warmth of Miriam’s farmhouse less than a mile away, that he, for the first time, felt it: that all that he had done was finished. The change burst free and his struggle stopped.
Whitened by the falling flakes, ears heavy with the snow’s silence, Granger Helman wept for the life that now was behind him.
***
Later, the tensions and realisations released, Helman stood up from the tree trunk and stared out at the blue-white hills, slowly darkening in the late afternoon sun. The old life had left him. It would be years perhaps, before the final wounds were healed, safely forgotten in the depths of unwanted memory, but for now, there were new things to consider.
The day before, he had given his deposit to the real estate agent in Goffstown. In the spring, the farm he had wanted for so long would be his. The things he had put off for so many years, telling himself that someday he would get to them, were going to fill his life.
It would be a good feeling to be able to have Miriam and Steven and Campbell, her two boys, visit him to repay them for all the love they had shown him over the years he was constantly travelling and out of touch. Helman’s life was changing today. He was happy. And for no other particular reason he shouted.
He listened carefully to see if some faint echo might come back to him. Instead he heard the rumble of a van as it drove away from the front of his sister’s house.
He stared after it as it flickered between the bare trees at the side of the road. It was too late for the Sears truck to be delivering from Concord, too light in colour to be a UPS van. Like the FBI agents who had immediately moved to check out a seemingly innocent phone call to a wrong number, Helman knew that the unusual was always something of which to be wary. A small tingle fluttered through his stomach. The van was gone. He wondered if he should return to the house.
Then the back door of the house opened and a figure came out, looked around, and, spotting Helman on the rise, began to wave at him. Helman held up his Olympus and sighted through the telephoto lens. It was his nephew Steven, not waving to him, but waving at him to come back.
The tingle grew into tautness that spread through his abdomen.
For a sickening instant, Helman knew the van had a connection to him. His lightness of only a few moments ago sped away from him as an all too familiar feeling took over: the adrenaline-honed concentration that engulfed him as it had before each closing. That awful, purposeful concentration which he had decided never to reel again, owned him.
All was as it had been. With a clear mind and unfeeling body he trudged through the snow toward the shadow-darkened house and the message from the van.
The package, slightly larger than a shoebox and carefully wrapped and sealed in heavy kraft paper and adhesive paper strips, sat on an upright firelog against a tree in the back garden.
Helman stood in the back porch, out of sight of any neighbours who might have puzzled over his walk to place the package so far away from the house, and carefully wrapped a heavy blanket around the barrel of his old Remington 722.
He was as ice.
Behind him stood Miriam. She had sent the boys inside, warning them to stay away from the windows which, if his suspicions were correct, Helman thought might shatter. Miriam, however, would not leave her brother’s side.
She was older than Helman, though he jokingly called her his younger sister. Yet she shared with him the legacy of their parents with an unwrinkled face and sharp, clear features.
But now her face was darkened with worry; her eyebrows drawn together, building shadows over her eyes. She had always carried the guilt of believing she had started her brother in his career, and now that feeling had grown to impossible tension because she had accepted the package which sat waiting for its first bullet.
It had a typewritten label. There was no postage, no return address. The courier who had delivered it had offered no bill of lading to be signed.
It was addressed to Helman, even though no one knew he was at his sister’s farm. His life was too controlled. No one knew him.
But Miriam had betrayed him in her confusion, and accepted the package, acknowledging his presence.
Helman drew careful aim, letting his years of experience with weapons compensate for the blanket’s awkwardness. He held his breath, braced himself for the explosion to follow, and squeezed off the first shot.
The package flew off the log, and fell lightly in the snow.
He fired four more times. Scattering half the package in sprays of tattered paper. Nothing.
Helman exhaled. At least it was not a bomb.
He walked back out to the package and inspected the snow around it. There was no evidence of chemical venting. No aerosol device had been triggered by the violence of the bullets.
He knelt beside the package and in the deep shadows of the sunset carefully unwrapped what was left.
The contents were quite simple, quite direct, quite terrifying.
The first was a newspaper clipping. Half of it, with a headline, had been shredded by a bullet’s impact, but enough of it was left for him to see what it was about: Roselynne Delvecchio’s murder.
The second was a small piece of electronic circuitry. It was the scrambling device he had placed in the kitchen phone.
The third was a panel cut from a carton of milk. The brand and size were the same as the carton he had injected.
All thought left him. His insides rippled like water. His dreams were threatened with collapse.
Granger Helman, the professional who had covered himself and his actions with a genius and perfection no one had ever seen through, had been completely and totally uncovered.
His world stood on the edge of destruction. He would do anything to ensure his life would not be next.
He stared at the package’s contents until the sun had set and there was no light left to see them.
He heard Miriam call him, a dark silhouette against the warm glow of the open back door.
There was a phone call. For him. The person no one knew was there.
Thoughts and emotions tumbling and warring within him, Helman entered the house, took the receiver, and heard the voice.
It was deep, sibilant, and had a suggestion for him.
Chapter Five
DR. ROBERT MASSOUD misjudged the distance in the darkness of his bedroom. The phone receiver crashed into the bedside table and slid off, taking the rest of the phone with it to clatter on the uncarpeted floor.
Beside him on the bed, his wife was finally awakened. She had stirred from time to time, trying to ignore her husband’s early morning conversation, but the crash of the phone had finally done it. She reached out for him and asked what had happened.
“The fucking rats died.”
It was four o’clock in the morning. As far as she knew, her husband’s rats were always dying of one thing or another. She was confused.
“Which rats, dear?”
> “My fucking rats back in Berkeley. The fucking computer fried them.”
Stockholm, January 15
Erica Massoud pulled herself up so she was sitting against the bed’s headboard, and reached out one hand to rub her husband’s shoulder.
“Could you try that one more time? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Robert sighed and stretched for the phone. A recorded Swedish voice was telling him to hang up and try his call again.
“That was Frank,” he explained, “at Berkeley. He went into the isolation lab this morning and all the rats, the inoculated group, the infected group, and the two control groups were dead. Every single fucking one. Two years down the tube.”
Erica was still confused. She didn’t understand her husband’s work. Sometimes he was happy when his rats died.
“I always thought that if they died it meant that you had isolated something; proved it was dangerous.” Robert lay back on the bed.
“Usually it does. But this time the rats didn’t die of cancer. The computer made an error in regulating the temperature of the isolation cages. It boosted it to over a hundred and twenty. The rats fucking cooked.”
“How does a computer make a mistake like that?” “I don’t know. Frank doesn’t know. I didn’t even know the temperature control was hooked into the lab’s computer. I thought it was just a thermostat control.”
Erica thought her husband might be in danger of crying. She had to talk him out of it. The other doctors at the Institute might mistake red eyes as a sign of too much drinking the night before. That could be a setback in her husband’s incredibly fast-rising career.
“Won’t Major Weston look after it? Get it all straightened out? He did promise you he’d see that the experiment was finished so you could take the appointment at Haaberling.”
Robert threw his hands up. “Oh Christ, I don’t know. He said a lot of things that haven’t come through.”
Erica stroked her husband’s chest, trying to distract him.
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