by Steven James
I typed while Lien-hua relayed information to me from the phone. “We have twelve names, Pat. Ten men, two women. Plus a SEAL who left the service last year, honorable discharge.”
“Well, our arsonist isn’t a woman,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Posture. Frame. Weight distribution in his stride. So that gives us ten, eleven if you count the guy who left last year. Have Petty Officer Helprin email me the photos from their personnel files.
Let’s see if they match any of the faces on our videos.”
Lien-hua spoke into the phone again and then shook her head.
“No good. They don’t have photos on file.”
“How could they not have photos?”
Lien-hua relayed the question, then gave me Petty Officer Helprin’s answer. “Not in the medical files, just the personnel files. But that’s a whole different division.”
Of course it was. Typical military bureaucracy.
Our guy was into disguises anyhow. “OK, forget that for now, we can follow up on that later. See if she can get us the-wait a minute, one of them left the service last year?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
Lien-hua passed the question along and then said, “February.”
“The fires started in April. Do they have an address? Maybe somewhere they’re sending his commission checks?”
Lien-hua scribbled down a street address and showed it to me.
I zoomed the computer in on the street.
The man lived only two blocks outside of the hot zone.
And his name was Austin Hunter.
Creighton Melice attached the video of Cassandra Lillo to the email message he’d prepared for Austin Hunter and pressed
“send.”
Overall, Creighton thought he did an amazing job on the piece, but he doubted Hunter would appreciate the time he’d spent to get it right. Creighton opened the door that led to the main section of the warehouse to check on Cassandra. No change. She was secure.
She wasn’t going anywhere.
Then he went back to wait for confirmation that the email had gone through. While he waited, he sharpened the narrow six-inch-long metal shiv. It would need to be sharp-very sharp-in case Shade told him to switch to Plan B.
23
I needed to confirm some of my suspicions before calling Aina.
We tracked down the navy’s human services division and they emailed both Lien-hua and I a copy of Austin Hunter’s personnel files and military service records. We each pulled them up on our own computers so we could examine them at the same time.
“So,” I said. “Served for fourteen years-missions in Ecuador, South Africa, Afghanistan, even two excursions into North Korea.
Diversionary Tactics. Covert surveillance. Spent two years as a SERE instructor: survival, evasion, rescue, and escape. This guy is the real deal. But then, on a training exercise, he fractures his left fibula and-”
“Look at this.” Lien-hua pointed to the screen. “Paragraph 3-ba.
The navy covered the cost of his surgery and physical therapy, but after he recovered, they pulled him out of SEAL Team 3 and gave him administrative duty.”
I shook my head. “The guy was one of the most highly trained, elite fighters in the world, and they stick him in a cubicle to send faxes and transfer phone calls. They must have known he would resign as soon as his commission was up.”
“Which he did.” She was reading right along with me. “I guess the navy doesn’t want to worry about a SEAL’s old leg injury slowing him down on a covert op somewhere. And, of course, after his honorable discharge, he was no longer their problem. Since he didn’t complete twenty years of service-no retirement.”
“And since his leg injury wasn’t a permanent disability-no medical coverage, either,” I said. “So after spending his entire adult life as a SEAL, he leaves the special forces with nothing except for a set of nontransferable skills. I mean, what kind of job do you get after that? Night watchman? Maybe a bodyguard? Private investigator maybe?”
Lien-hua had set her computer to the side and stared introspec-tively out the sliding glass doors of the hotel room. “Not a guy with his service record.”
“Mercenary?” I said. “Or maybe work for a private security firm in the Middle East? At least then you can still blow up buildings and shoot wicked-cool guns without anyone asking a whole lot of irritating questions.”
“Did you just say wicked-cool?”
“I heard Tessa say it one time.” Then I remembered what Tessa had said to me the night before: It feels good. It’s what you do.
It’s what you like. “Or maybe,” I said to Lien-hua, “you just start burning down civilian buildings, because it’s who you are and you can’t turn it off.”
We called Aina and gave her an update on everything we’d discovered. All the evidence so far was circumstantial, but at least it was a place to start. “We’ll send a car over to Hunter’s place,” Aina said. “Have a talk with him. Good work.”
“Great,” I said. “Let us know what you find out.”
After we ended the call, I took a deep breath. “Well, it looks like we can take a little break.”
“Good,” she said. “Because you need a shower. And I need to get out of these smoky clothes.”
“All right. I’m supposed to meet Tessa at ten o’clock downstairs for brunch. Why don’t you join us? Maybe we’ll have heard something about Hunter by then.”
She accepted the invitation, left to change clothes, and I headed to the shower.
But instead of relaxing, I kept wondering what Hunter’s connection might be to the guy who started the fire last night-or if it was really a different arsonist after all.
Creighton checked his watch again.
9:00 a.m.
OK, that should be enough time.
He picked up his phone and dialed Austin Hunter’s mobile number. Shade had found a way to route the call so it would appear to Hunter that it was coming from Cassandra’s cell so he was confident Hunter would answer.
A man picked up. “Cassandra? Where are you? You were supposed to meet-”
“It’s not Cassandra.” Creighton didn’t bother masking his voice.
It wouldn’t matter in the end.
“Who the-?”
“Listen to me carefully-”
“Where’s Cassandra? Tell me-”
“Interrupt me again and I guarantee you’ll be sorry.”
“You work for Drake, don’t you? That’s what this is about?”
“We’re getting to that.” Creighton made note of the name-
Drake. Could that be Shade? Maybe. He could look into all that later, but for now, he needed to stick to the script. “Listen to me, Austin. You were supposed to meet Cassandra Lillo for breakfast three hours ago, but she didn’t show up. You waited thirty-five minutes before leaving Cabrillo’s-”
“Where is she? I swear to G-”
“Don’t blaspheme. I get impatient when people blaspheme. And when I get impatient, bad things happen. Check your email. I’m guessing you have your computer with you?”
Creighton waited as Austin Hunter fumbled around with his laptop. He heard the corny little tune as it booted up, and then the chime announcing that the email had arrived. “Play the video, Austin.” Creighton waited. The video was one minute and fifty-two seconds long. He watched the time tick by on his watch. At about forty seconds he heard a gasp. At one minute, Hunter exclaimed, “Oh, my G-”
“I warned you about blasphemy once. I won’t warn you again.”
Creighton waited until he was sure the video was over, especially the last ten seconds. “Now, listen to me very carefully-”
“You’re messing with the wrong man. As soon as I find you-”
“I said listen. All this interrupting is making me impatient.”
Another pause. “Let me talk to her. I want to know she’s alive.”
Creighton had expected that request
. He passed through the door, walked to where he was keeping Cassandra, and held the phone up to the glass. “Austin wants to talk to you,” he called.
“Austin?” Her voice was muffled but audible. She was sob-bing.
“Cassandra, where are you?”
“Please.” She struggled to spit out the words. “Please, Austin.
He’s going to kill me-”
“Cassandra!”
Creighton retraced his steps to the manager’s office of the warehouse while Cassandra continued to cry out, then he closed the door and cut her off. “Actually, I said I was going to kill her slowly. She forgot that last part.”
“Where is she? Tell me where she is, you freakin’-” This time Austin cut himself off in mid-curse. He must have realized he was making the man on the other side of the phone upset.
Good. That meant he was finally ready to hear the conditions.
“Austin, do you know the etymology of the word deadline?
It’s very fascinating. Before it came to mean ‘the time before which something must be completed,’ it meant ‘the line over which you must not pass.’” Creighton would never have phrased things like this. He would have been a lot more blunt. But for now he wanted to stay on Shade’s good side and since he figured somehow he’d be listening, Creighton recited Shade’s script word for word. “In a Civil War prison, the ‘dead line’ was a boundary line that you were not allowed to cross, and if you did, you’d be shot on the spot. No one who passed the dead line would survive. Are you following where this is going?”
“What do you want from me? Why are you doing this? Is it because of last night?” The change in tone told Creighton that Mr.
Hunter was becoming a much better listener.
“If you do what I ask of you by eight o’clock this evening, you’ll see Cassandra again. Now, take a good look at that video. If you go to the cops, the FBI, anyone, you can guess what’s going to happen to her. So, eight o’clock is your deadline as well as Cassandra’s. And do you understand how, in our case, we’ll be drawing from both the original and the contemporary meanings of the word?”
Silence.
“We’ll be watching you. We’ll know if you try anything. Got it?”
“Yes.” No fear in his voice. Just resolve. “What do you want me to do?”
And then, Creighton told him everything Shade had written down. Since the directions were specific and included rendezvous times and locations, it took a few minutes. Hunter listened quietly the whole time and finally, when Creighton was finished, Hunter said, “OK, I’ll do it. But it can’t be done by eight o’clock. Not enough time. I need to do recon, surveillance, I may need explosives… That’s on a secure military-”
“It’s enough time. You’ll find a way.”
“I’m telling you-”
“OK, then,” Creighton said sternly, “she dies right now.” He threw the door open. “I’ll hold the phone up nice and close so you can hear her screams.” “No!” cried Cassandra.
Creighton approached her. “And I’ll make it last a long time-”
“No, please!” she yelled.
“OK-” said Austin.
“And I’ll send you the video when it’s over-”
“OK! OK. Listen. I’ll do it, all right? Just leave her alone. Promise me you’ll leave her alone.”
“Here’s my promise-you do what you’re told by eight o’clock tonight or I kill Cassandra Lillo and record every second of her suffering and then post it on the Internet for the whole world to see.” Then Creighton slapped the phone shut and returned to the warehouse manager’s office.
He would still make the video of her death either way, of course, but Hunter didn’t need to know that.
Yes. Things were going to work out.
He set down the phone and stared at the door. Cassandra was just on the other side. He couldn’t think of any good reason to leave her in there all alone.
No good reason at all.
And so Creighton Melice went to spend some quality time with Austin Hunter’s girlfriend while the countdown to her death officially began.
24
Tessa rolled over in the hotel’s supposedly comfortable bed.
Yeah, right.
She’d hardly slept at all since Agent Jiang left last night. And that was a whole-nother-story-the whole deal with Patrick and Special Agent Lien-hua Jiang. Tessa didn’t know exactly what was going on between them, but she was pretty sure she didn’t like it.
Sunlight blazed through the slit between the curtains. Tessa groaned and wrapped a pillow around her face, rolled over, tried to go back to sleep.
Failed.
She tried for a few more minutes, but it was no use.
Finally, she sighed, flopped out of bed, rubbed a hand across her face, and shuffled to the bathroom. A complete zombie.
Open the shower curtain.
Water on.
Crank the dial.
Tessa liked her showers hot. Very hot. Ever since she was a kid and she and her mom lived in Minnesota for two years. Maybe that’s what did it-the cold winters and the frozen lakes that her mom was always warning her against walking across. That, or the long, bitterly cold nights when the wind sliced through the cracks beneath her bedroom window. Who knows.
While Tessa waited for the water to warm up, she took off the necklace Patrick had given her for her birthday and shed her clothes.
As she did, it struck her once again that nearly every one of her friends had at least one tattoo, but that she didn’t have any. It was kind of weird, really, that she hadn’t gotten inked yet. Maybe on this trip. It might be kind of cool to return to Denver with a tattoo from Southern California.
She splashed her hand under the faucet. Ouch.
OK, not that hot.
Tessa dimmed the scalding water back a few degrees and stepped into the shower. For a few minutes she just stood there without moving, letting the water wake her up gently. It felt really good.
She took a few deep breaths, relaxed, and smoothed some shower gel across her shoulders and then down her arm and over the series of straight ridges on the inside of her right forearm.
She’d given these scars to herself with an X-acto knife and a razor blade during the last year, trying to find a way to let out some of the pain and sadness after her mom died. The blood always grossed her out, but the cutting seemed to help. At least a little.
But ever since October when this psycho serial killer guy who called himself the Illusionist had tried to kill her, all the other stuff in her life hadn’t seemed quite as bad. So, lately, over the last couple of months, she’d stopped cutting-mostly. She guessed that Patrick knew she still self-inflicted sometimes, but he didn’t make a huge deal out of it-which was cool because if he had, she probably would have done it more.
And of course, on the inside of her other arm, she had the scar the Illusionist gave her. That scar bothered her because it brought back memories of that day.
She’d rubbed tons of lotion on it every day, just like the physical therapist had told her to. It was supposed to help the scar go away, but it didn’t work. The scar was still there, and so were the memories.
Warm water poured over Tessa’s head. She lathered shampoo through her hair and let the water rinse out, leaving her hair dripping in straight, black tendrils along the back of her neck.
Memories. Memories.
Of the killer pressing the cloth against her mouth before she could even scream… Of lying tied up as he drove her toward whatever kind of twisted psycho lair he’d built in the mountains…
She ran her fingers through her hair. Time for the conditioner.
Memories.
It all came back to her, then, in a rush. The quiver of hope when she was finally able to cut herself free, and then the satisfaction of jabbing the scissors into the guy’s thigh, and then the confusion as the world outside the windshield started spinning, skidding, and everything was turning at the wrong speed in a smooth wide circle a
s he lost control and they headed for the cliff.
Snow.
It was snowing that day.
Death and ice and space reaching for her.
Now she was in the shower, a spray of hot water cascading over her head.
Now she was spinning toward the edge of the world, a twirl of snow falling all around her.
In the bathroom.
The front seat.
Standing. Falling. Waking. Dreaming.
Back in the shower, a blanket of steam enfolding her.
Back at the cliff, feeling the impact as they punched through the guardrail. And then she was dropping, plunging into the bottomless day, the snow swallowing everything in the world.
Falling.
And then.
An abrupt smack. Slamming into that tree halfway down the gorge. A strange moment when time stopped to catch its breath, to feel out what it would be like to inch forward again.
Groans next to her. The Illusionist smiling a dark smile, yanking the scissors out of his leg. And then.
Then.
Patrick’s voice floating down to her. That’s when the killer cut her, sliced her arm. And she was bleeding. Bleeding. Fading, watching the melting snow slide down the cracked windshield. The day was crying for her. And she was wrapped in a nightmare, slipping away. Falling again, but in a different way. Falling toward forever.
But Patrick came for her.
He came for her and he saved her. Like a father would, like a hero would, he risked his life to rescue her. Rappelling down, reaching out, catching her just in time.
She’d never thought of him in those terms before that day. As a father. As a hero. But it was true. He cared about her and she cared about him and they were a family. Kind of weird. Kind of screwed up, but still a family.
But it was confusing.
Sometimes she felt like a little girl who wanted to hold his hand, to call him Daddy; sometimes she felt like a young woman getting ready to move out and live on her own.
Caught between two worlds. Drifting. Falling.
Tessa turned off the water and stood still in the warm steam, letting the water drip off her body, her memories, her scars. After a moment she stepped out of the shower stall and wrapped a thick towel around herself.