Chris Haviland liked to think of himself as a reasonably even-keeled person, slow to anger and thoughtful. Levelheaded. But right now, the top of his head felt as though it might explode. He could feel the blood pulsing through his skull, his temper threatening to get the better of him.
He sighed deeply.
Reined in his anger, more or less.
Said, “It’s not that simple, Frank. Maybe in your circles you can just write off the loss of an innocent life, tell yourself mistakes happen and you’ll try to do better next time. But it’s different out here in the real world. What am I going to tell the boy’s parents when they come in here tomorrow or the next day demanding to know what happened to their son?”
Toler blew out a breath, exasperated.
Good. Maybe Chris was finally getting under the research director’s skin the way Toler was able to get under his.
“People disappear all the time, Chief Haviland, especially young people. Perhaps you should try explaining that to the parents. Their precious son got tired of cooling his heels in this piece of shit little town, miles away from anything eighteen-year-olds care about, and hit the road. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing happened. In fact, it’s a very common occurrence.”
“You expect them to believe their son—I know the kid, by the way, he was a good student who was a few months away from high school graduation and who was going to leave New Quebec for college next fall—picked a cold November night to pull up stakes and drive away?”
“As I said, it happens.”
“And when it happens, is there usually a young woman involved who claims to have witnessed the killing of that person by a pack of wild wolves? Because I doubt that story is going to do much to calm the fears of Eddie Senna’s parents.”
“Don’t you worry about the girl. She won’t be a problem.”
Chief Chris Haviland pulled the telephone handset away from his head and stared at it in shock. He had seen people do exactly that in movies and television shows and had always thought of it as a ridiculous affectation, something real people in real world situations would never do.
He had just done it.
He returned the phone to his head and spoke very slowly. “Did you just say what I think you said? Did you threaten a young woman’s life?”
“My goodness, Chief, but you have an active imagination, not to mention a disturbingly strong suspicious streak. Of course I’m not threatening anyone’s life. I’m simply suggesting you calm down and stop worrying so much. This thing will blow over, as this sort of thing always does, and soon it will just be an unpleasant memory.”
“Let me be perfectly clear, you sociopathic bastard. No harm is to come to that girl, do you understand me? If anything happens her, I’m holding you personally responsible.”
Finally he had broken through Colonel Toler’s veneer of cool, and the man spit his response through the phone in a tone dripping with venom. “You listen to me, Chief. Scientific research does not come without a price. It is not clean and pretty and easy. It’s dirty and messy and even sometimes dangerous.”
“I don’t care about any of that. My concern is about keeping my townspeople safe. Obviously it’s too late for Eddie Senna, but I intend to make damned sure nobody else—”
“I wasn’t finished speaking.” Toler’s voice was cold and hard. “When Tamerlane was constructed eight years ago, I cultivated a relationship with you in anticipation of exactly this type of scenario. I personally escorted you on facility tours, so you have been aware of the kinds of things we do here for nearly a decade. None of it has ever bothered you before.”
“We’ve never had—”
“I’m still not finished, Chief. When we set up shop in this town, your police department was operating out of the town hall basement, a two hundred year old building with substandard insulation and leaky pipes. Now you have a brand-new, state-of-the-art headquarters building, paid for entirely with funding I funneled your way.”
“I don’t—”
“And let’s not forget how much you’ve benefitted personally from the Tamerlane Research Facility. Since we came to town, you’ve made more money from me than you have in salary. A lot more. And unless I miss my guess, none of it has been reported to the IRS, has it, Chief?”
Chris remained silent as a jolt of fear spiked through his intestines.
“That’s what I thought,” Toler continued. “It’s time to pay the piper, Chief Haviland. I don’t care what you have to say or what you have to do, just get through this little unpleasantness, and soon everything will go back to the way it was.”
Chris lowered his head to his desk, the telephone still pressed to his ear. He had always suspected a moment like this would come. This was what happened when you partnered with the devil. Things might start out fine, the arrangement might seem like a benign one, from which everyone would benefit, but sooner or later the evil bastard always came for your soul.
He should have known better. Hell, he had known better, but had gone ahead and gotten in bed with Toler anyway, and now the unholy alliance was coming back to bite him in the ass.
What had started out as a nice, easy Friday night—a couple of beers in his belly, a hockey game on TV, even a romp in the hay afterward with his wife—had turned unimaginably sour.
And he couldn’t ignore the nagging suspicion that things were about to get a whole lot worse.
10
The first thing Alicia Havens noticed when she woke up was how badly her head was pounding. The pain in her skull mimicked a hangover perfectly. But it wasn’t a hangover; she had simply slept like crap. She supposed that was par for the course when you watched your date get torn to pieces in front of you, only to discover nobody believes your story when you try to sound the alarm.
The trip home from the police station last night felt like one of the longest rides of her life, even though in reality it had taken less than fifteen minutes. Alicia had barely buckled her seat belt when her mother started in on her.
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
She responded with silence.
“What are you trying to get away with?”
More silence.
“Do you have any idea how terrifying it is to get a call from the police in the middle of the night?”
Still more silence.
“Do you really crave attention so badly you’re willing to stoop to filing false police reports to get it?”
With that, Alicia could no longer bite her tongue. Fielding hostility and anger from her mother was one thing. She was used to that. But the accusation that she had wandered into the police station in the middle of the night with a wild story about wolves and death and army cleanup crews because she felt neglected was too much.
“I don’t ‘crave attention,’” she snapped, her voice shaking with repressed anger, tears welling in her eyes. “You should know that better than anyone. It’s not like you ever give me any. But everything I said in that police station tonight was the truth. You’ll see. When Eddie doesn’t come home, and his parents call the police later tonight or tomorrow, they’ll have to start a search. They won’t be able to sweep it under the rug. In a day or so his disappearance will be all over the news, and the police will have a lot more interest in my story than they did tonight. And you’ll owe me an apology. I won’t hold my breath, though, don’t worry.”
Alicia didn’t think she had ever felt so wounded. She doubted her mother’s reaction to her life-and-death experience could have hurt any more if the woman had taken a knife and plunged it straight into Alicia’s heart. She had always been a good student, had never been one to get in trouble, not with the police and not in any other way. She worked hard in school and in her job at the town’s lone supermarket. She didn’t run around with a lot of different boys. She helped with the housework and tried her best to understand her mother’s pain at being abandoned by Alicia’s father.
It wasn’t like Alicia didn’t feel that particular
hurt.
She tried to empathize with her mom, and this was how she was treated when push came to shove. The one time she needed someone to believe in her she received nothing but hostility. Alicia wasn’t stupid, she knew the reaction was more about her mother’s own misery, heightened by years of prescription drug abuse, than about anything Alicia might or might not have done.
But understanding the reason for the pain didn’t lessen it.
As they approached the house, her mother had finally fallen silent. That was a blessing, at least. At the moment, what Alicia craved was not attention but silence. She wanted nothing more than to be left alone. She turned toward the passenger window and cried, tears rolling down her face, trying her best to sob quietly.
The skepticism of the police she could kind of understand. Her mother’s she could not.
Upon their arrival home, they walked into the house in silence—her mother’s accusatory and Alicia’s wounded—and Alicia went immediately upstairs to bed.
And slept like crap.
And got up with a headache.
Now she paced like a caged animal—an apt comparison given the events of last night, she thought—not wanting to run the risk of having to talk to her mother by leaving her room. She knew sooner or later it would be unavoidable, but later seemed like the far more desirable option.
She was hungry and tired and her head continued to pound, and after a while she decided to take a nap. Sleep seemed unlikely, but maybe resting her eyes would ease the unrelenting pain in her skull and her spirit.
***
Alicia had placed her cell phone next to the pillow, and its jangling ring jarred her awake, yanking her up to consciousness from an unexpectedly deep sleep.
She reached for the phone with shaky hands, wondering how long she’d been out. Knocked it onto the floor with her first stab at it. Picked it up with her second, squinting against the headache that had returned with a vengeance as she examined the caller ID feature.
She didn’t recognize the number.
She answered anyway.
“Hello?” She tried to disguise her grogginess and knew immediately she had failed.
“Hi. Is this Alicia Havens?” The voice was male and sounded youngish and kind of familiar, although she recognized right away it didn’t belong to any of her friends.
“Yes. Who is this?”
“I’m Rob Senna. You don’t know me, but—”
“You’re Eddie’s brother.”
“That’s right. Eddie’s gone missing, and I was hoping you might be able to give me some idea of where to begin looking for him. My parents have called the police, and they haven’t been much help so far. My folks are going out of their minds and I was hoping you might be able to point me in the right direction. Anything you could tell me might help.”
“Um…how did you know to call me?”
“Eddie called me a couple of days ago and asked me to get him the…refreshments…he brought on your date last night. I don’t think I’d ever heard him so excited, so I asked him who he was going out with. He gave me your name, and when he turned up missing, I asked around town until I got your cell number from friends we have in common. I hope you don’t mind me calling, and I’m sorry for bothering you, but I just—”
“Oh, no, don’t apologize! You’re not bothering me at all. I’m actually glad you called.”
“So, do you have any idea what might have happened after your date last night? Where he might have gone? Did Eddie give you any indication that something might be wrong, or that he might be considering taking off?”
“You said your parents called the police?”
“That’s right.”
“What did they say?”
“Nothing, really. They said they’d take down the information about him being missing, but since at eighteen he’s legally an adult, there’s not much they can do until he’s been gone for at least twenty-four hours. Even then, unless there’s some evidence of foul play, they have to assume he left on his own. Like I said, they weren’t much help.”
Alicia tried to process Rob Senna’s words. Granted, she was groggy and headachy, but what he was saying made no sense after the story she had told the chief of police at the station barely twelve hours ago. The Sennas’ frantic call should have been the touchstone that would prompt an immediate investigation.
“Alicia? Are you still there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry Rob. I’m not ignoring you, I’m just thinking.”
“So…can you help me?”
“You go to school at the University of Maine, right?”
“Well, yeah, but I’m home right now. I drove back when I heard Eddie was missing.”
“Can you meet me at the Dunkin’s in New Quebec in, like, half an hour? We need to talk.”
“Of course. So you think you might be able to help?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’m really, really confused, but we definitely need to meet.”
“Okay. See you in thirty.”
11
Matt Bertrand never knew what to expect when Colonel Toler offered him an assignment. All he could be sure of is that it would be something the colonel wished to keep below the radar, a task for which bypassing official channels was necessary.
The desire for secrecy was the only explanation why a United States Army colonel, with access to all the resources of the government available to a man of his stature, would hire out the occasional job to a two-bit private dick from Boston to whom making his rent payment was a monthly challenge.
Matt welcomed the colonel’s calls with enthusiasm. The specifics of each assignment were irrelevant. Toler paid handsomely, promptly, and in cash. All three qualities were rare in Matt’s line of work.
He had performed a handful of services for the colonel over the years, including orchestrating a smear job on Toler’s main rival for the Tamerlane Research Facility administrator position nearly a decade ago. Destroying someone’s career and life—the man later committed suicide—hadn’t been Matt’s proudest moment, but what the hell, he figured everyone had the right to do what was necessary to survive.
And the dude had been having an illicit affair with the teenage daughter of a colleague. Matt had done nothing more than dig up the nasty little dalliance and bring it to the right—or wrong, depending on one’s viewpoint—people’s attention.
Matt hadn’t heard from the colonel in a while, but when the caller ID lit up at five o’clock this morning with TOLER in big, bold letters, he had come instantly awake and answered immediately.
Three hours later he found himself in New Hampshire. They rendezvoused at a Denny’s outside Concord, a meeting spot that immediately piqued Matt’s curiosity. Concord was more than an hour’s drive south of New Quebec. It was obvious Toler was taking great pains to minimize the possibility of running into anyone he knew.
Toler was staring at his watch when Matt entered, the picture of impatience. He looked up and waved Matt over to his booth, at which two cups of coffee sat, steam drifting off them. One of the cups was already half empty.
No greetings were exchanged. As usual, Toler got right down to business. “Were you followed?”
Matt almost laughed out loud. He choked the response back, but couldn’t resist a little sarcasm. “Followed? Who the hell would follow me way up here?”
“Answer the question.”
“Of course I wasn’t followed.”
“Good. I need your services, and I’ll pay double your usual rate.”
“My rate’s gone up fifteen percent since we last worked together.”
Toler waved his hand dismissively. “Fine. I don’t care about that.”
Dammit. Should’ve said twenty-five percent. He tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice as he said, “What will I be doing for you?”
“We’ve had some issues recently with locals protesting outside our facility. It’s nothing serious, kids mostly, snot-nosed little brats who have no idea what it takes t
o keep this country safe.”
“Okay…” Matt couldn’t imagine what a few idealistic protesters had to do with him, but assumed Toler would get to the point eventually.
“Anyway, there’s a young girl in particular who has caused us a lot of problems. She’s broken into the facility, destroyed research equipment, and in general set back our progress and cost the U.S. Defense Department a lot of money.”
“How does any of this concern me?”
“I need to identify this girl so I can have a face-to-face meeting with her and her parents. Come to an understanding so that we can get back to focusing on our mission: accomplishing cutting-edge research.”
Matt could smell a line of bullshit a mile away, and this stank worse than the drivel spewed by the lowlifes he normally worked with. He had no idea what Toler was really up to, but it definitely wasn’t about ironing out a misunderstanding with a young protester. Toler wouldn’t drive fifty miles to meet with a private dick if that were the case; he could simply go through official channels and use the resources of the government to find out the kid’s name and then to pressure her parents into a meeting.
But again, money talks, and right now it was shouting at Matt to take some. A lot, actually, and Matt was only too happy to oblige.
“Okay. Specifically, what do you want me to do?”
“I want you to put a house in New Quebec under surveillance. Sooner or later the young lady who’s been giving us so much trouble is going to show up there. She’s working with another snot-nosed punk, a high school boy who lives in that home. I don’t care about him. I want her. When she shows up, I want you to follow her. Find out who she is and where she lives, then get back to me with that information. Simple.”
Too fucking simple, Matt thought, especially given the obvious extreme stress you’re exhibiting. “Okay,” he said. “Give me the address of the house and I’ll get on it first thing after breakfast.”
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