Black Out: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  “Who was it?”

  She gave him a quick shrug. “No idea. I knew everyone there that night, even all the servers who have worked for me before. She seemed really unsettled by it and left pretty soon after that.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying there was no one at my house who looked like that, no one under forty, and certainly no one wearing jeans and a T-shirt.”

  He remembered the night at the rest stop. He remembered how my gaze kept moving behind him as though I’d been watching someone or something. He’d seen fear on my face that night, so clearly that it had caused him to reach for his gun. “You think Annie imagined her?”

  She looked surprised for a second, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her. Then, “I don’t know. She had an expression on her face that stayed with me. I think I’d seen it before in flashes, but not like that. She looked haunted. I think she was, in some ways.” She smiled nervously, ran a self-conscious hand along her jaw. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It doesn’t help you any, does it?”

  “You were right to tell me,” he said. “You never know what helps.” After a pause he added, “Did she ever mention her doctor to you?”

  She shook her head. “No. What kind of doctor?”

  “How about an organization called Grief Intervention Services?”

  She raised her eyebrows, thought about it for a second. “No,” she said, bringing her hand to rub her temple. He’d seen Volkswagens that were smaller than the ring on her finger. “I never heard her mention anything like that.”

  “Did you get the sense that she was someone who would take off? You know, just run away from her life? Did she seem like she might be capable of that?”

  She shook her head vigorously, without hesitation. “No way. Not without Victory. She worships that little girl.” Then, “That’s not what you think, is it? That she just took off?”

  “I’m just trying to be thorough. Without a body, we need to examine every possibility.”

  “Well, that’s not a possibility. She wouldn’t leave without her daughter.”

  “Okay,” he said, giving her a smile he thought she needed. “You’ve been a big help. You really have.”

  She offered him a grateful look. “So is this a murder investigation? You showing up at the memorial like that? Isn’t that what they do on television?”

  “I’m just trying to be thorough,” he said again, purposely vague.

  She nodded, seemed to think about saying something else but then thanked him for the ride instead. Then she dashed from the car to the house as a heavy rain started to fall. He watched until she let herself in the front door and shut it behind her.

  Harrison drove up the street and parked near my house. As he watched the mourners come and go, he thought about me, about Marlowe Geary, and all the desperate things people become for love. He began to realize as the rain turned to hail, causing people to dash from car to house or house to car, covering their heads with their jackets or purses, that if he wanted to know what had happened to me, he was going to have to go back to go forward.

  I tell my father how I dropped into the earth, followed my “dive master” through a long, narrow limestone tunnel for what seemed like hours, and emerged from another sinkhole. There a man whose name I never learned and whose face I barely saw was waiting for me in a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I stripped out of my wetsuit, dried off, and put on the clothes he had for me. I checked the contents of the bag he’d retrieved from my locker with the key I gave to Gray. I lay down on the floor of the backseat and stayed there, uncomfortable and gripped by self-doubt, as we drove for hours. I drifted off, only to be jerked awake by some bump in the road, or by the thought that I’d left my daughter behind and that in a few hours everyone who knew would think I had drowned in a diving accident.

  By nightfall I had boarded a cargo ship in the Port of Miami, headed for Mexico, where I was supposed to stay until Gray came for me.

  “Whoever it is,” my father says. “They found you pretty fast.”

  “It’s true,” I say. I can’t seem to stop moving. I’m pacing the small room, my whole body electric with tension, this physical pain I’ll have until I can get to Victory. Every mother knows that feeling in her body when her child cries. It’s as if every nerve ending, every cell, aches until you can hold and comfort your child. I felt that now, but with a kind of terrified desperation underlying it.

  “Something not right about that,” my father says. I can’t help but stare at him, his skin gray-white, his beard ragged, deep lines around eyes that seem sunken in his face. His long gray hair, pulled back with a rubber band, looks dry and brittle. I wonder if he’s sick, but I can’t stand to ask that question now. I don’t want to know the answer.

  “I mean,” he goes on, “who knew where you were going? Who knew you were on the ship?”

  “No one knew—except Gray and the people from his company who were tasked with protecting me and getting me safely to my destination.”

  “Then how did that guy—the one you called the Angry Man—how did he find you like that? In a boat in the middle of the sea?”

  I don’t know the answer. “They must have been watching or following me?”

  “Possible,” he says, cocking his head. He seems to be considering something, but he doesn’t say anything else.

  It’s something that never occurred to me, how the Angry Man found me there so quickly. I wasn’t even surprised when I saw the other boat that night. It was almost as though I’d been waiting for it, so sure was I that Marlowe had returned for me.

  “I need a computer,” I tell my father.

  “In the shop.”

  He leads me downstairs, and I sit behind the reception desk and surf the Web, trying to find the identity of the Angry Man. I search for the Families of the Victims of Frank Geary and begin sifting through the entries I find. Meanwhile, I have this sense of a ticking clock, a tightness in my chest. I wonder where the Angry Man is now and how he’s tracking my progress. I know enough about Gray’s work to know that the technology is so advanced now that he or whomever is charged with following me could be blocks or even miles away and still have complete audio and visual surveillance. Still, it seems questionable that they’ve given me such a wide berth, such latitude. But maybe they know that they’ve got me by a chain connected to my own heart. I’ll do what they want; I don’t think there’s any question about that.

  But of all the places they could have left me, why did they leave me here? They must have known I’d come to my father. Was there some reason they wanted me to?

  I look for images of the man I saw, hoping to find a name attached. But I find the same old articles I’ve read a hundred times before, maybe a thousand times. I stare at the screen and resist the urge to take it and throw it on the floor, to stomp on it screaming in my rage and frustration.

  My father comes over and lays a large book on the desk in front of me. The computer screen casts it in an eerie blue glow. The book is turned to an eight-by-ten shot of Marlowe’s tattoo. The sight of it sends a cold shock through me. I have seen this image again and again in my dreams, in my dark imaginings. But to see the photograph of it on his skin reminds me that he was just a man, flesh and bone, not a monster from a nightmare I had. He is real and possibly still alive.

  I stare at the dark lines of the tattoo. I see a churning ocean crashing over jutting rocks; I see my face hidden within the image. There’s a wolf etched in the face of one of the rocks. Two birds circle above it all. It is as beautiful and as detailed as I have seen it in my memory. In my dreams of it, it pulses and moves, the ocean crashes, the birds cry mournfully. But on the page it’s flat and dead, like some map to Marlowe’s mind.

  “Why are you showing me this?” I ask.

  “Look closely,” he says, tapping the picture with his finger.

  After a few seconds of staring, I see. If you didn’t examine it closely, you’d never notice it. In the lines that
form the crags of the rocks lies a hidden image: the barn at Frank’s horse farm.

  39

  Deep in the dark, wild swamps of Florida amid the lush black-green foliage and through the still, teeming waters, wild orchids grow. Over the last century, orchid hunters, breeders, and poachers have donned their waders and raped the swamplands of these delicate flowers, filling trucks with the once-plentiful plants and shipping them for huge profits all over the world. Now they are so rare in the wild that environmentalists are struggling to rescue the waning populations, and the search for wild orchids is ever more desperate. Most legendary among them is the elusive ghost orchid. Snow white with delicately furled petals, the leafless epiphyte never touches the earth and seems to float like a specter, hence its name. In the history of Florida, people have lied and stolen, fought and died in their quest for the ghost orchid, which flowers only once a year.

  Detective Harrison always liked the idea of this, the idea of men who risked their lives in pursuit of the single fragile object of their passion. At the best of times, Harrison considered himself to be one of these men. Through the hinterland of lies, in the decaying marsh of murder, he searched for the fresh white thing that was pure, elevated above the murk, drawing its nourishment from the air.

  Like the orchid hunters, he didn’t mind the trek through the dark and shadowy spaces, his goal moving him toward places where, less motivated, others wouldn’t dare to go. He could sit at his computer until his eyes stung and his head ached; he could make a hundred fruitless calls, drive hundreds of miles, talk to dozens of surly, uncooperative lackeys, and never think of giving up. It just never occurred to him that he might not find what he was looking for.

  He felt like a hunter the evening after my memorial service and his conversation with Ella. He was alone in his office in the station house. Everyone else on the detectives’ floor had gone home for the evening. Somewhere he could hear a phone ringing, and somewhere else a radio played some hip-hop crap he couldn’t name. Someone was working out in the gym upstairs; he could hear the weights landing heavily on the floor above him.

  He didn’t have much to go on. He had a website address, the name of a murdered shrink operating without a license, the meticulous notes and collection of articles from a dead bounty hunter, a missing woman with a false identity who also happened to be the ex-girlfriend (or captive, depending on whom you talked to) of a serial killer. Then, of course, there was her husband, a former military man, now owner of a privatized military company, who for some reason had visited Simon Briggs’s motel room just an hour after Briggs’s murder.

  Harrison had made the call to his wife, Sarah, telling her not to expect him and to lock up the house for the night and that he’d see her in the morning. Then he popped up his Internet browser and began the long, lonely slog through the marsh, searching for his ghost orchid.

  He loved the Internet, loved the way you could follow a piece of information down a rabbit hole and chase it through tunnels and around bends and come up for air in a place you’d never have imagined when you started.

  He started with the website nomorefear.biz. There wasn’t much to it, just a black screen with a simple quote: “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” When he clicked on the sentence, he was taken to another page, featuring the image of a man embracing a weeping woman and a paragraph:

  Maybe you’ve lost someone to violence, or perhaps you have been the victim of a violent crime. Either way, your life has been altered and a hole has been punched open in your world. Through it comes the most malignant, destructive monster of all: FEAR. More vicious than any violent criminal, more evil than the deeds of any killer, fear will rob you of what’s left of your life. There’s only one way out of the haunted forest: You must go through. You must face what you most fear. We can show you how.

  There was a number to call, and he was surprised to see that the area code was local. He cast about for a street address but didn’t find anything listed in the online Yellow Pages or in the reverse directory and soon realized that the number he had was a cellular line. He dialed the number from his cell phone, which had a blocked ID; voice mail picked up before there was even a ring tone.

  “Congratulations. You’ve taken the first step. Leave your name and number here, and someone will get back to you. If you’re not ready to do that, you’re not ready for this.”

  “Hi,” he said, trying to make his voice sound shaky and tentative. “I’m Ray, and I’m interested in learning more about your program.” He ended the call with an odd feeling in the base of his stomach.

  After searching for more information on the organization and finding nothing, he shot an e-mail to Mike Keene, a friend of his who worked at the FBI, to see if there was anything on the radar about Grief Intervention Services. Then a couple more hours of coffee, eyestrain, aching shoulders, walking down virtual corridors and opening doors, looking for people who don’t want to be found. Around midnight his concept of himself as an orchid hunter was less appealing, less romantic.

  He remembered the thoughts he had outside my memorial service, that he’d need to go back to go forward. So he entered the name Frank Geary. As he scrolled through old news articles about Frank’s trial, conviction, and sentence to death row, about my mother’s crusade, his new trial and release, then subsequent murder at the hands of Janet Parker, Harrison thought what a nightmare my life must have been.

  The trail lead him to an old South Florida Sun-Sentinel piece about new DNA evidence proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Frank Geary was guilty of at least two of the murders of which he’d been originally accused.

  The article went on to say that other DNA evidence added a new wrinkle, that it was possible Marlowe Geary might have either colluded in or been responsible for several of the other murders. Evidence collected during Marlowe Geary’s cross-country killing spree matched evidence collected at the scenes of murders attributed to Frank Geary.

  There was a quote from Alan Parker, husband of Janet Parker and father of victim Melissa Parker: “The new evidence is disturbing. One wants justice in a case like this. One wants to face the person who killed his daughter.”

  Harrison read on that Alan Parker was the founder of the Families of the Victims of Frank Geary, the group that lobbied to have the evidence in these murders reexamined as new technology became available.

  The phone rang then, startling him. He jerked his arm and knocked his empty mug off the desk as he reached for the phone. It landed with a thud on the floor but didn’t break. The display screen on his phone flashed blue and read, UNAVAILABLE.

  He answered. “Hello?”

  But there was nothing but static on the line. “Hello,” he said again. He started to feel his heart thump; he hadn’t thought of what he’d say if the Grief Intervention people called back.

  “Harrison.” A thick, male voice on the line. “It’s Mike Keene. Just got your e-mail.”

  Harrison felt a cool rush of relief. He looked at the clock, nearly 1:00 A.M. “Working late?” he said.

  “Yeah, always,” Mike said. “You, too?”

  “Yeah,” he said, rubbing his eyes. They exchanged a few pleasantries, polite questions about wives and kids. Then, “So…Grief Intervention Services?”

  “It sounded familiar, so I did a little digging around. They’re incorporated in the state of Florida. But their address is a P.O. box.”

  “Who’s the founding member?” Harrison asked, writing down the address Mike gave him.

  He heard Mike tapping on a computer keyboard. “Someone by the name of Alan Parker. He founded the organization about five years ago. They’re listed as grief counselors. No complaints against them in the years they’ve been operating. No profit, either. They’re not on anyone’s watch list—officially.”

  “Officially?”

  “Well, a couple of years ago, there was an incident in South Florida. A man who’d been accused of molesting two boys while coachi
ng a school soccer team and served some time for it—six years—was murdered in his home. Brutally murdered, castrated, skull bashed in…you know, overkill.”

  “So the cops looked to the victims and their families,” guessed Harrison.

  “That’s right. But there was no evidence to link anyone to the scene. So no one was ever charged. It came to light, however, that the father of one of the victims was in touch with Grief Intervention Services about six months before his son’s molester was released. The father said he needed counseling to deal with his rage and fear for his son’s safety. There was no evidence to the contrary.”

  “So…”

  “The weird thing about the crime was that the break-in was a textbook military entry, that the victim was bound and gagged in the way military personnel are trained to subdue an enemy. So there was this precise entry and apprehension of the victim, followed by this out-of-control rage killing. It was just bizarre.” Mike paused, and Harrison could hear him chewing on something. The chewing went on for longer than Harrison thought polite.

  “I don’t understand. There’s some kind of military connection to Grief Intervention Services?” Harrison prodded finally.

  “Hmm,” Mike said, mouth still full. “Sorry, I haven’t eaten all day. Alan Parker was a former Navy SEAL. One of his daughters was the victim of a serial killer by the name of Frank Geary. He and his wife, Janet Parker, founded an organization called the Families of the Victims of Frank Geary, after Geary was released in what many considered to be a travesty of justice. Then Janet Parker lost it and killed Frank Geary, burned down his house.”

  Harrison could almost smell the scent on the wind.

  “The organization disbanded, but Alan Parker kept lobbying for evidence retesting,” Mike went on. “Eventually it came to light that it might have been Marlowe Geary, Frank’s son, who killed Parker’s daughter. Parker disappeared for a while after that, then reappeared as the founder of GIS.

  “Given his military background and his wife’s murder of Frank Geary, police were concerned that GIS was some kind of vigilante organization, so the FBI was informed. There was a cursory investigation that yielded no evidence to support any wrongdoing and was quickly dropped.”