Erin Solomon Mysteries, Books 1 - 5

by Jen Blood

  “Jack,” Diggs said, pulling him from the memory. “Listen to me, okay? I lost my father to these people. I sleep beside Solomon every night, and I see her wake from dreams she won’t talk about—dreams that are ripping her apart from the inside out. Shit she won’t let me close to went down because of these people. I know what J. has done. We’ll get them, all right?”

  Jack nodded. His headache was worse now; the moonlight that made its way through the trees felt like it would crack his skull. The shock was already wearing off, though, anger settling in its place. The throb in his head receded. He glanced at Diggs. “What else did Cameron say?”

  “Not a lot. When we get back, he wants us all to sit down. He’ll give you whatever else he can then.”

  “He wanted you to get me primed, though,” Jack guessed. The anger swelled, climbing higher.

  “No. He was going to talk to you. I asked him to let me.” Diggs gripped his shoulder. The look on his face suggested he knew exactly what Jack was thinking. “You’re pissed. I get that—if someone had done to Solomon what these people did to your wife, I…I don’t know what I would have done. Chances are good I wouldn’t be around to tell the story, because I would have offed myself and taken everyone I could have with me. You’re a better man than that. We will get these guys—”

  “Cameron is these guys. He worked alongside them for how many years?”

  Diggs paused. He dropped his hand from Jack’s shoulder. He considered the statement, and nodded after a time. “You’re right. The things he’s done for the organization… There’s no coming back from that. He’s got a lot of blood on his hands. But without him, we don’t get the rest of J. Mitch Cameron is the key to this, Jack.”

  “I still don’t trust him.”

  “I don’t think you should—I don’t think any of us should. But I don’t see a way around working with him, for now. And the one thing I am sure of is that he wants to take J. down—and if you can hang on without losing your shit, he’ll make sure you find the son of a bitch behind your wife’s death. And they’ll pay for what they did.”

  It took some time before Jack finally nodded. The anger didn’t disappear, but it dissipated enough that he could get a full breath again. See clearly.

  They would find the men who killed Lucia. They would find the people behind all the other deaths. The men who had convinced his mother to take her own life in that jungle… The men who stole his history.

  And he would kill them, one by one.

  Chapter Fourteen

  While Diggs took Jack out into the woods to tell him an origin story to rival the darkest DC superhero, I took Einstein out for his evening constitutional and then followed Cameron into a little alcove he’d commandeered next to the meeting room. There were a couple of flat-screen computer monitors set up on a card table, each monitor showing half a dozen different views of the island.

  “Where the hell did you get equipment?” I asked him. “Cameras, computers…whatever you need to make cameras and computers work?”

  “Always come prepared,” he said. “I usually carry equipment with me—I thought it would probably come in handy here.”

  “So you just carry ten thousand dollars work of surveillance tech in your boat with you.”

  “It cost slightly more than that, but…yes.” He shrugged. “I told you: I come prepared.”

  “Right. Where is everyone, anyway?”

  “The shorter man—Monty, isn’t it?—went upstairs to get some sleep. The others are there.” He nodded to the monitors, and I saw Carl and Jamie go into a small, newly constructed building out near the greenhouse. In the weird green glow of the night-vision cameras, I saw Carl laugh at something Jamie had said before he shut the door behind him and they both vanished.

  Interesting.

  Cameron settled at the controls, his eyes on everything at once.

  I stepped closer and surveyed the monitors. Another of the windows showed the old Payson village, the collection of little cabins on the other side of the island. Two blurry figures sat together on the steps of one.

  “They’ve been gone for a while,” Cameron said.

  “They’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  “They do,” he agreed. He’d gone quiet. Grim. Cameron’s default. “I should have talked to him myself.”

  “If you had, I’m pretty sure you’d be dead by now, and we’d be cleaning your blood off the walls and trying to figure out how the hell to take down J. without you. This is better. Diggs can talk to him… Explain things a little better. Let Jack get his head around it, before you swoop in and give him the rest of his life story.”

  “I can’t give him the rest,” Cameron said. “I only know pieces.”

  “You know more than anyone else he’s ever known, though. For a guy whose first thirteen years is a big question mark, that’s powerful information.” I studied the other monitors, and went over everything I knew and everything I didn’t know, about my father and J-932 and Mitch Cameron and… There was a hell of a lot I didn’t know.

  “You’re thinking very loudly,” Cameron said.

  “Sorry. I have a question, though.”

  He met my eye. Half amused, half concerned. “When do you not have a question?”

  “Right.” I shrugged, conceding the point. “It’s what I do. But this one… I’ve been going over it for a while. And I was hoping maybe you could clear something up for me.”

  “What?”

  “After Payson Isle,” I said, “somehow or other, Kat got information that kept me safe for the better part of my life. But…” I stopped. That image I couldn’t shake, the one that was forever tattooed on my brain, returned: my father, lifting the gun to his head. The look in his eyes. “My father wasn’t a strong man. I mean—not strong like you.” He started to speak, but I shook my head. “It’s all right. He was what he was. But I can’t figure out how he had the guts or the ingenuity needed to get all that information on J., that would ensure we were safe. It doesn’t add up for me.”

  Cameron just looked at me with deep, sorrowful eyes. “What are you asking?” he said.

  I held his gaze. “I’m asking how you saved us. And…why, maybe.”

  AUGUST 29, 1990

  Littlehope, Maine

  She is the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, without question. Coal-black hair, porcelain skin, a hint of fire in clear green eyes. Cameron goes into the clinic a week after the fire. His hand is burned from setting the blaze. His mind is still muddy. He can’t get the sound of children’s screams, the scent of burning flesh, out of his mind.

  Mandrake is trying to get him to come back.

  Something keeps him in Littlehope, though.

  The medical clinic where Katherine works is small, cramped. Understaffed, considering the amount of work they do throughout the region. But he manages to get an appointment anyway, though he has no insurance. No address.

  Katherine leads him to an exam room in the back of the old building. A child—tiny, with red hair and haunted green eyes—follows them into the room. Adam’s daughter. He remembers her from the island, the day of the fire. Recalls the terror in her eyes when she looked back at him. The way she ran. She is older than Jenny, he thinks. Older, but not as robust. His mind recoils at the thought of his own daughter, waiting for him to come home.

  “She needs to be here?” Cameron asks.

  “She’s in training,” Katherine says. She winks at him, then turns her back on the child and focuses her full attention on him. “Unwrap the bandage. Let’s see what you’ve got under there.”

  She turns to the child again. “The first thing you do is find out what’s wrong. Ask questions. Look at the injury. Use the two together to get the whole story, but remember that people will lie. The science is what’s reliable. The medicine.”

  She takes Cameron’s hand when it is unwrapped. Her hands are cool. Steady. His burns are infected, blisters oozing noxious yellow pus. The girl shrinks from it, pale.

  “I
don’t want to see that,” she says.

  “It’s all right,” Katherine says. There is no softness to her words. “It’s just the same as you or me—just sick, now. It’s our job to restore health. How did this happen?” she asks him.

  Cameron falters. “Please get her to leave the room.”

  Katherine looks at him for a few seconds. Studies his face. “No. She stays—”

  “I can go,” Erin says. “I don’t want to be here, anyway.”

  “You’ll stay,” Katherine snaps. “You’ll learn this. Go sit over there.”

  Erin sets her jaw, her own eyes reflecting the same fire Cameron has seen in her mother’s. She takes hold of her mother’s lab coat and physically pulls her away. “He was at the fire!” she says. She hisses the words at her mother, barely looking at Cameron now. She’s on the verge of tears. “He’s what I told you. He’s the hooded man.”

  It is Katherine who pales this time. “Go wait in the office.”

  Erin holds fast to her sleeve. “You should come too. Don’t stay with him. Please—just stay with me. I’ll help you with your work—“

  Katherine crouches in front of the girl. “Erin. Go in the office, now. I’m going to be fine. I won’t leave you. I’ll be right here.”

  The girl nods reluctantly, then, agonizingly slowly, goes to the door. When she’s shut it behind her, Katherine turns to him again.

  “What’s your name?” she asks.

  “Cameron,” he says. He should kill them, he realizes. Already, he is thinking of the plan—that’s what he does. What his mind defaults to, at all times. He will strangle the woman. Get the little girl alone, and snap her neck. They saw him. They know.

  His head feels light, the space shrinking inside his chest.

  “Let me look at your hand,” Katherine says.

  She takes his hand in hers. It isn’t as though he’s never been touched—he’s thirty-five years old. Has been with many women, before his wife. And he and Susan don’t lack for sexual attraction. This, though… Katherine touches him, and paths inside his mind suddenly line up. She makes sense to him, and he doesn’t know why.

  “It’s infected,” she tells him. “Badly. You’ll need antibiotics. And you have to keep this clean. Change the bandage regularly. Do you have someone who can help you with that?”

  “Adam told you about us,” he whispers. He can’t get his heart back. Can’t make himself focus.

  “Cameron—do you have someone to take care of you? To help you with your hand.”

  “No,” he says quietly. “It’s just me.”

  “Then come here. At the end of the day—wait till the others are gone. Don’t let Erin see you again. You can do that?”

  He hesitates. He is supposed to return to the team. To his family. They’re waiting for him. There is a plan he’s supposed to follow through with.

  He thinks of the screams. The smell of people burned alive. The look in the child’s eyes. The woman who thought he was an angel. Adam.

  “Yes,” he says. “I can do that. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “Good. I’ll see you then.”

  A week later, his hand is nearly healed. He waits outside, hidden in the trees, until the last worker at the clinic is gone. He goes to the back door, and opens it a crack. Katherine is talking to the little girl. Erin. He will strangle the woman. Snap the little girl’s neck. Or poison them both, perhaps. Make them go to sleep. No blood. No flames. He doesn’t want them to be hurt. Or frightened.

  “I just want to go home,” he hears Erin say. She is crying. “You stay here all the time—why can’t I see Dad? He’s probably afraid. Probably he misses his friends. He misses me.”

  “Damn it, Erin—listen to me. It’s just us now, okay?” Katherine hisses the words. Cameron feels the desperation in them. “Your dad’s gone. He won’t ever be like he was, okay? Whatever he told you about that island, it was lies. And now it’s all gone. This is our life now. So sit down, and give me a few minutes. We’ll go home when I can.”

  They fight for a few more seconds. Cameron hears the sound of a hand slapping bare flesh—a sound he knows well. Erin stops crying. He waits by the back door. Trembling.

  He will strangle the woman.

  Snap the girl’s neck.

  It’s another five minutes before Katherine comes to the door. She’s been crying; she brushes the tears away impatiently and leads him inside. She is young, he realizes—younger than him by a few years. Carrying too much.

  He will strangle her. Bring her peace.

  Go into the lobby, where Erin will be alone.

  So easy.

  “You have any kids?” Katherine asks him when they are in the exam room. He blinks uncertainly. She smiles past the tears that still cloud her eyes. “It’s a simple question, Cam. You either do or you don’t. Unless you’re the kind of guy who’s been nailing bimbos from shore to shore without a raincoat. In which case, maybe you really don’t know.”

  “No,” he lies. The word comes out small. He clears his throat. “I don’t have any children.”

  “Maybe someday, right?” she says. She motions to his hand. He unwraps it obligingly, and holds it out to her like an offering. He wants to give her something, he realizes suddenly. She won’t take payment from him, and he doesn’t understand why. Maybe because his money is tainted.

  He searches the room—he forgot to bring anything with him. It’s his last day here, and he has nothing to wrap around her neck.

  He doesn’t want to use his hands. Her neck is small. Delicate. He thinks of the marks he would leave behind, and his stomach turns.

  “I never wanted kids,” Katherine is saying conversationally, as she puts ointment on his burns and rewraps his hand. “I knew I’d be shit at it. My mom died when I was a baby, you know. And my dad—it was always just us. He could be a little…hard. I’d be doomed—dead mom, and a dad who beats the crap out of you. Talk about shitty genes.”

  “Genetics aren’t everything,” Cameron says. Dr. Mandrake taught him that. “The human mind is powerful. You visualize your goal, and work to achieve it. Genetics is secondary to free will. Secondary even to environmental conditioning, I think.”

  He could use her stethoscope. The string that hangs from the drapes. Or hold her close, and wrap his arm around her neck until she stops gasping for air.

  His chest tightens.

  “It’s a nice thought,” Katherine says. He looks at her blankly. She smiles at him again. She is lonely; he can see that. Lonely, and frightened. But not frightened of him, he thinks. It makes no sense, but he believes it is true.

  “You’re a good listener, you know that?” she says. “Figures. The first guy I feel like I can talk to since my ex, and you’re…” She stops.

  They haven’t talked about that. He knows that she knows who he is. What he did. And she knows that he knows that she knows, like some demented situational comedy. But they haven’t talked about it.

  “Adam told you about us,” he says. Unlike days earlier when he broached the subject, he says it with a full voice this time.

  “Yes,” she says. So simple. Will she close her eyes, or will he have to close them for her afterward? He doesn’t want her to look at him, when it is done.

  “Then why aren’t you afraid of me? You know what I did. What I’ve done.”

  She looks away. He can see the pulse in her neck. Can smell faint perfume, and beneath it an even fainter note of perspiration. There are circles beneath her eyes; though he finds her beautiful, her face is drawn now, almost gaunt.

  “You are afraid,” he whispers.

  She meets his eye. Stands taller, her back straight. “I’ve never been so scared in my life, as I’ve been this week. I keep waiting for you to just…do it…”

  “You don’t need to be afraid,” he says. He doesn’t know why he says it. Where the words come from. A plan somersaults through his mind. He could strangle her now. Snap the girl’s neck. Drag them into the woods. Burn the clinic down. Sta
b them both. Poison them. Drown them in the swimming hole down the lane. So many ways to kill. “I won’t hurt you.”

  He is more surprised than she is, when the words come out.

  “Adam said you have no choice.”

  “I have a choice,” he says. The thoughts quiet in his head. They can live. He will let them live. “But I’ll have to help you, or they’ll send someone else to do the job I couldn’t.”

  ◊◊◊◊◊

  “So you were the one who gave Kat the dirt on J.,” I said. We were still seated in the surveillance cave. Neither of us had moved much since Cameron began the story.

  “I gave her what I could. What I knew would keep you and her safe.”

  I thought about the story for a few minutes, trying to remember the terrified little kid that I had been. “So you watched out for us, over the years.”

  “I tried,” he said. “I had my own life to live. But I did what I could. Tried to keep you away from J., whenever possible.” He grimaced. “If I’d realized how difficult that would prove, I might never have intervened all those years ago.”

  “You’re saying Kat and I haven’t been worth the effort?”

  He smiled at me shyly, lowering his gaze. “No. I would never say that.”

  With story time over and an impending awkward silence descending, I pushed aside the other countless questions that I had and moved on to other concerns. I studied the security monitors in front of us. Jack and Diggs had moved on; everything else looked clear.

  “Still no sign of trouble,” I said.

  “Not yet.”

  “How likely do you think it is that J. will come out here?”

  “It depends on whether or not they know we’re here.”

  “They might not. Maybe we’re stealthier than you think. Just because we weren’t trained in guerrilla warfare doesn’t mean we can’t stay under the radar.”