The fact that it would serve the son-of-a-bitch right for his smug, superior attitude would simply be an added, and extremely satisfying, side benefit.
25
Rob Senna had been friends with Jamie Chouinard his whole life. They attended the same tiny downtown New Quebec preschool at age three, played hockey and baseball and football together through middle school and high school, even dated some of the same girls growing up.
Next to his real—and now dead—brother Eddie, Rob felt a closer kinship with Jamie Chouinard than with anyone else his age in the world. So he felt confident that asking to swap vehicles with Jamie would be a no-brainer. He called his buddy before leaving the house following the excruciatingly difficult conversation with his parents, saying only that he was on his way over and needed a huge favor.
And that there was no time to waste.
Jamie was waiting at the top of the driveway when Rob pulled up. The snow continued to fall and the wind had increased in intensity, worsening the already-poor driving conditions, a development for which Rob was grateful. The lower the visibility, the less likely he was to be spotted by the driver of the Humvee if, in fact, the lunatic was still prowling the streets of New Quebec.
Rob pulled to a stop and gestured his best friend into the warmth of the Jeep. Jamie slipped into the passenger seat and slammed the door closed and without preamble, said, “Dude, what’s up? You sounded seriously stressed on the phone.”
“I don’t have time to tell you the whole story, but somehow my brother got mixed up in some bad shit going on out at Tamerlane. Now Eddie’s dead and the girl he was with last night is being targeted.”
Jamie stared at him, a confused half-smile on his face. It was obvious he thought he was being screwed with and he was waiting for the punch line. The smile disappeared as he realized there wasn’t going to be any punch line, that Rob was serious.
“I’m not following you,” Jamie finally said.
Rob spoke with a quiet intensity. “Eddie’s dead, and I nearly got killed, along with the girl who witnessed Eddie’s murder. It all went down just a little while ago. She’s in big trouble, and by extension, so am I. I need your help, bad.”
“Bro, whatever I can do, you know that. What do you need?”
“The people that are after Eddie’s girl saw her in my Jeep. They tried to run us off the road once and if they see this vehicle I know they’ll try again. With this storm, I assume you’re not going anywhere tonight and I was hoping—”
“It’s all yours,” Jamie said. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a key, then reached across the front and slapped it into Rob’s palm. “Keep it as long as you need to.”
“I owe you big-time,” Rob said.
“You’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course. You know that.”
“Then ‘nuff said.”
“Thanks, man. When this is over we’ll go out for a couple of beers and I’ll tell you the whole story, and believe me when I tell you it’ll knock your socks off. But right now I have to get back to Alicia. She’s alone in a dive motel out on Route 9 and probably scared out of her mind. And to be honest, I won’t feel right until I know she’s safe.”
“Go,” Jamie said, and started pushing his door open. A blast of cold air and snow attacked the Jeep’s interior with bitter ferocity. “I’ll help you clear the snow off my truck and you can be on your way.”
“Wait,” Rob said, and Jamie looked a question at him, eyebrows raised. “Be careful. These guys mean business. It’s unlikely they’ll drive by and see my Jeep outside your house, but if they do, you and your family could be in real danger.”
He grinned. “My mom’s car is in the shop. The minute you drive away I’m going to pull your Jeep into her garage stall. Unless your homicidal friend happens to come by and peek into our garage, he’s never going to know the thing’s here.”
“You’re the best,” Rob said. He left the Jeep idling and opened his own door, stepping into the vicious wind and the swirling snow.
***
Matt Bertrand smiled and shook his head as he squinted through the windshield’s restricted visibility. If the Senna kid was doing what Matt thought he was doing, he was one smart cookie. He knew better than to drive around New Quebec in the Jeep Toler would recognize from earlier in the evening, so he was swapping cars with a buddy.
It was a move not everyone would have thought to make, especially given the stress he must be feeling.
But unfortunately for him, he hadn’t accomplished the switch soon enough. He stashed the girl somewhere—she wasn’t at her home; Matt knew that because he had checked there immediately after taking Toler’s phone call—and then drove home in his own vehicle, spending some time there before going back out into the storm.
And that would be his undoing. The minute Matt discovered the girl’s house closed up and empty, he had driven straight to the next-most-likely location for picking up the trail of Toler’s targets: the Senna household.
He’d been surprised by what he discovered upon his arrival. If the Havens’ house had been empty, the Senna house resembled a popular nightclub on New Year’s Eve. Cars lined the driveway, side-by-side, backed almost out into the road.
One of those cars had been the white Jeep. Matt at first considered calling Toler with the kid’s location right away, but after a little inner debate he decided to wait awhile. Maybe the Senna kid would leave the house and lead him to the girl, who had been Toler’s main concern all along.
Matt peered through the windshield as his wipers struggled to keep up with the storm. The darkness and the swirling snow made seeing anything a real chore, especially from this distance. The effort required to maintain surveillance was giving him a headache.
Eventually, when it seemed as though the Senna kid was wrapping up the conversation with his buddy, Matt threw his car into reverse and backed farther away, until he could just barely make out the end of the driveway. Less than two minutes later, Senna hit the road again, now undoubtedly convinced he was completely anonymous in his friend’s ancient piece of shit four-wheel-drive pickup truck.
But if that was what he thought, he was wrong. Matt needed to be careful tracking the kid, though, because he had already proven he was sharper than the average slacker college student. And while the heavily falling snow made it easier in some ways to avoid detection, in others it complicated matters: Matt needed to remain uncomfortably close to the kid to keep from losing him in the storm.
“The snow giveth, and the snow taketh away,” he mumbled.
Matt Bertrand wasn’t familiar with the layout of New Quebec, New Hampshire; he’d spent minimal time in town on Toler’s other assignments—had never even heard of it until the boss’s first call—and if there was a God in heaven, he would never have to come back once this job was finished. But after the first couple of minutes, he thought he had a pretty good idea where the kid was headed. There was a cluster of run-down motels on the main route in and out of town, 1950s’-era relics that had outlived their usefulness but somehow continued to defy the odds with their continued survival.
Any of them would make a decent place to hide someone who didn’t want to be found, at least for a little while. The longer Senna drove, the more convinced Matt became that when he eventually stopped, it would be in front of one of those motels.
He smiled again when his guess turned out to be right.
***
Alicia Havens’ eyes were wide and frightened when Rob returned to the room he had rented in the Sleepy Logger Motel. He knocked, and then called through the closed door before entering in an attempt to reassure her, but still her terror was plain to see. Her face was chalk-white and she paced the room with a manic energy born of raw nerves and barely contained fear.
“I’m sorry I was gone so long,” he said, stomping snow off his boots and unzipping his coat.
“Oh, God, don’t apologize. I can’t believe you came back at all. How are your parents ho
lding up? For that matter, how are you doing? Telling them about Eddie must have been horrible.”
“It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. And my folks were devastated, as I’m sure you can imagine. But they’re okay for now, under the circumstances. Just as I expected, we have plenty of relatives at the house, and my folks will be well cared for. They’re definitely in shock right now.”
She shook her head miserably. “You are too, I’m sure. You should be with your family at a time like this, Rob.”
“I told you already, I’m not leaving you to face this alone. That’s not negotiable. Besides, Eddie’s gone either way. At home I’d just be moping around feeling useless. At least here with you, I feel like I’m accomplishing something by helping to keep you safe.”
“Thank you so much. I just keep thinking about your poor parents, and…” Her voice faded away and tears tracked down her cheeks as she lifted a fist to her mouth and turned away.
He crossed the room and wrapped his arms around the teenage girl. She felt small and insubstantial. He’d never had a sister, but at this moment he felt every bit as protective of Alicia Havens as he knew he would with a blood sister.
She pressed her face into his shoulder and cried, and he stroked her hair and held her tightly.
“I told you, my parents will be okay,” he whispered. “My mom has lots of support right now and my dad is making a mission of finding someone in the news media to get out the story of what happened to you and Eddie. Obviously, we’ll all need time to grieve—you included—but right now, at this moment, they’re doing as well as anyone could expect.”
She nodded and he continued. “Try not to worry about them, or about me. Let’s just concentrate on keeping you safe, and figuring out where to go from here.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry for breaking down when you’re being so unbelievably strong. It just all seems so overwhelming, you know?”
“I get it,” he said. “And there’s no need to apologize. Just take things one step at a time and you’ll get through this. That’s what I’m doing.”
“I’ll try.” She wandered into the closet-sized bathroom and a moment later Rob heard her blowing her nose. When she came back she looked resolute, if still pale and shaky. “I have a question,” she said.
“Alright. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to answer, but I’ll try.”
“You said your father is working on finding someone in the news media to cover our story. Do you think alerting the media is the right move?”
“Actually I do,” he said. Discussing specifics seemed to be helping Alicia. Already her voice sounded stronger and steadier.
“I thought you said that would be a bad idea.”
“Not exactly. I said it would be a bad idea to go to the police, but the news media’s a different animal entirely. If I wasn’t so shaken up by everything that’s happened I hope I would have thought of it myself. The media can be the ally we need if they’re used properly.”
“What do you mean?”
“If my dad can find even one decent-sized news outlet to bite, and the story gets some traction—especially your name and your part in it—the resulting attention will make you radioactive to whoever is trying to kill you.”
“How?”
“Think about it. Someone wants to shut you up because of what you saw last night, but killing a person isn’t easy. There’s a lot of risk involved. It’s only worth that risk if you remain anonymous. Once your name and face get attached to the story, and people are beginning to pay attention, the danger of trying to get to you will outweigh the potential benefit.”
“Why?”
“Because at that point, you would represent only a link for the authorities—the real authorities, not the corrupt police we have here in New Quebec—to follow back to them, whoever they are.”
Alicia stared at Rob uncertainly.
“That’s my theory, anyway.” He shrugged. “It seems logical.”
She remained silent as she considered Rob’s words. “But do you really think anyone will believe the story? I lived through it and it almost seems unreal to me. Like some kind of bizarre nightmare.”
“Once the facts come out, I absolutely think they’ll believe it. Even if some of the details seem too weird to be true at first glance, the disappearance without a trace of an eighteen-year-old high school student is something everyone can understand. Then, once the media start digging to get to the truth, the story will take off. You know there’s evidence out there, it’s just a question of someone being committed enough to find it. We found some after just a few minutes of looking.”
Alicia didn’t reply and he said, “It’s worth a shot, anyway, especially since we can’t go to the police. We have to try something, because hiding is only a temporary solution. Eventually, the people hunting you will find you, and even if that weren’t the case, I think hanging around this place would get old after a while.”
She smiled ruefully. “It already has.”
“But like I said, we have to take this one step at a time. All of this is nothing more than unfounded optimism unless and until my dad can capture the attention of the right reporter.”
“I hope he’s a good salesman,” she said.
“You and me both.”
26
A black cloak of depression settled over Jason Greeley. Its presence didn’t come as any great shock.
Watching his life’s work slowly crumble over the last few weeks had been bad enough. But now, with a young boy dead and Colonel Toler revealing the depth of his depravity, Jason felt as though he had been backed into a corner from which there could be no escape.
The immediate problem felt like the last straw. Toler had made clear he intended to find and eliminate the girl who had witnessed the death of her boyfriend last night.
Obviously, this was unacceptable. And the fact that Toler had made Jason complicit in his madness, however inadvertently on Jason’s part, only added to his resolve to stop the colonel before the unhinged administrator could end another life.
But what could he do? He was one man, a scientist with a pacifist nature. How could he be expected to take on a rough, tough character like Colonel Frank Toler, who had not just revealed himself to be a remorseless sociopath, but who could fall back on a lifetime’s military training if things came down to a physical confrontation?
How could an aging researcher, a lifelong academic, compete with that?
He sat slumped behind his desk, picturing the long strings of salivary fluid drooling from the corners of his wolves’ mouths as they gnawed relentlessly on the mesh bars of their cage. The animals worked with a feverish intensity, and as Jason had watched, standing in shock in the middle of his lab, blood began to mix with the saliva, turning it a washed-out pink as the metal mesh sliced and gashed the animals.
It hadn’t made a damned bit of difference. The animals just kept ripping and chewing at the metal.
Jason felt as though he was shedding his own blood as he watched the Lupin Project lurch toward an ignominious end. And it was the end, too, not just of this project but of his career as a serious scientific researcher.
He had long ago found himself shunned by those colleagues aware of the nature of his research, and that was when the project was flying high, back in the days when his work enhancing animal intelligence had been successful beyond all measure. He was well aware of the fact that other scientists viewed him as a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, involved in unnatural experimentation that could not possibly end well. Once the project was revealed as a failure, one that had resulted in chaos and death and destruction, Jason would be cast out of the scientific community, cut off from funding, his name and reputation irreparably shattered.
He would become a pariah, even more so than he already was.
Jason had never felt so bleak, so hopeless, so…alone. When he’d been immersed in his research, he’d not even noticed the fact that he was companionless in the world, much less
cared. But now, the prospect of the professional isolation he would soon face, combined with his complicity in the death of the boy and a crushing personal loneliness, weighed on Jason Greeley like a physical sensation.
And the situation was clearly irreversible. He had tried everything he could conceive of to turn the animals’ downward spiral around, had tested every theory, exhausted every avenue of exploration.
The scenario was hopeless, even ignoring for a moment his Toler problem.
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes and finally, fully recognized a notion that had been lurking in the dark corners of his consciousness for some time. The attack on the boy last night, a direct result of his research, was Jason’s responsibility. But that fact alone did not automatically equate to a negative value judgment. There had been no ill intent on Jason’s part. He was not evil in the sense that Colonel Toler was clearly evil.
However, if he did not now do all in his power to stop Toler’s insane determination to eliminate the one remaining witness to last night’s carnage, he would be equally responsible for the girl’s death. From a morality standpoint, there would be a value judgment attached to her death that was not attached to the boy’s. The loss of the boy was an accident, a tragic but unavoidable result of Jason’s research gone awry.
The girl’s death would be murder.
And Jason would be every bit as guilty of that murder as Toler.
Jason opened his eyes and blinked in surprise at his epiphany. Just moments ago he had thought he was a man with nothing left to live for. Now he realized the fundamental untruth of his earlier belief.
He had plenty left to live for.
He needed to save a young girl, and he needed to make amends for his part in causing the death of the young boy.
And all of a sudden he had a pretty good idea how he was going to do it.
***
Recalling the license plate number of the white Jeep driven by Colonel Toler’s intended victim out on Route 9 was a piece of cake, and not just because Jason Greeley had been blessed with a nearly photographic memory. He’d watched in horror as the damned plate grew bigger and bigger in the windshield until it appeared roughly the size of a small house. Forgetting it was going to be the problem, not remembering it.
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