City of Iron

by Williamson, Chet

  "After dousing himself liberally with gasoline," said Joseph.

  "He did confess that it was a little farfetched, but it's possible. What do you think?" she asked Tony, who was kicking at the ashes, lost in thought.

  He shrugged. "Somebody killed them, then torched the place, to cover up his tracks, maybe."

  Joseph looked up, as if he'd just thought of something. "What if somebody killed them and somebody else torched the place?"

  "What makes you think that?" Laika asked.

  "The chemical levels in some of the tissues of the bodies. If they'd been burned immediately after death, I'd expect them to have been higher. But if they were burned four or five hours after—or even later—why did the murderer wait that long?"

  "Maybe," Tony said slowly, "waiting for number twelve?"

  "That makes sense," said Laika. "Eleven is a strange number to meet, but twelve . . . especially if there was some secret aspect to their meeting—"

  "Hold it," said Joseph. "I'm talking about science, and you two are reading some cabalistic society into this. Next you'll be telling me that Judas killed the rest of the apostles, or something."

  "Nooo . . ." Tony said, still looking down at the ashes as though he could read an answer in them. "But maybe Judas got here late."

  "What?"

  "I'm talking logic, Joseph. Eleven is a number that doesn't work for anything except craps. But twelve is logical. That number reoccurs throughout Christianity."

  "And other mythologies, too," Joseph added.

  Tony didn't rise to the bait. "Suppose there were supposed to be twelve, but the last one didn't make it? There were blizzards all over the northern United States that night. So what if number twelve shows up late, after the killer's all done and gone. He sees everybody's dead. We don't know who any of these guys are, right?" He looked at Laika.

  "Not so far," she agreed.

  "So they're secretive as hell," Tony went on, "and number twelve wants to keep things that way. He takes everybody's ID, real or phony—remember, there were no burned wallets found anywhere—and sets fire to the whole thing as a cover-up. The secret's safe." Tony shrugged and spread his arms wide as if to ask, Why not?

  Joseph slowly nodded. "Maybe. Or maybe not. It's someplace to start, anyway."

  "When we get back to town," Laika said, "let's start checking out any other strange occurrences that may have happened that day or the night before. People . . . desperate to get to this area. We can use Langley's resources. Airports, bus and train stations, car rental agencies—anything out of the ordinary that happened."

  "What, through the whole country?" Tony asked.

  "Just the area that was affected by the belt of blizzards," Laika said. "God knows that's a big enough territory, but maybe something will stick out." She looked around at the barren space in which they stood. "Anything else here?"

  Both men shook their heads, and they seemed as relieved as Laika to be leaving.

  On the way back to town, Tony asked, "I wonder why they kept the bodies for so long? You'd think they'd have buried or cremated them by now."

  Laika looked out the window at the few patches of nearly melted snow. Spring had come late this year. "I already checked. They received orders from the governor."

  "And I wonder," Joseph said, "who he got his orders from."

  None of them had an answer, but Laika thought she knew.

  After two days of waiting and routine investigation, everything suddenly seemed to happen at once.

  "Bing-frigging-o," said Joseph, looking at the screen of his laptop, while the other two looked up from theirs. "This sounds mighty promising, friends. Seems there was a man named Kyle McAndrews who, on the evening of December twenty-eighth, tried to charter a plane to take him from a tiny airport in Minnesota to guess where?"

  "Plattsburgh," Laika said.

  "Precisely. The pilot won't go, so Mr. McAndrews, who, by the way, had a Scottish brogue, offers to buy the plane. The pilot won't sell, so McAndrews overpowers him and steals it. Little Cherokee, of all things, which disappears somewhere over Wisconsin. Last month they found it in the woods two miles outside of Eau Claire, but there was no trace of a body and no parachute in the wreckage. Could very well be our boy."

  "Have them run a check on car rentals or purchases on that date in Eau Claire," Laika said. "Limit it to cash transactions." After a moment, she added, "Tony, you feel like some legwork?"

  "Absolutely." She was sure he did. They were all getting office fever.

  "Do the same for Plattsburgh. See if you can find anybody who sold a vehicle for cash that day and several days afterward. He couldn't have driven all the way here. He'd probably take a train if the weather was bad. Joseph, what's the nearest major city to Eau Claire that's served by Amtrak?"

  Joseph twiddled with his computer for forty-five seconds, then said, "St. Paul, but he'd pay cash on a train ride. They don't ask for IDs."

  "Maybe he'd take a train or bus to Plattsburgh, then, but he'd need some way out to the lodge. In that weather, rentals would be unlikely, but this McAndrews might just buy another four-wheel. The Minnesota police have a description on this guy?"

  Joseph nodded. "From the pilot. Five-ten, one-eighty. Light reddish-brown hair, brown eyes, pale complexion. No identifying marks or scars on his face, which is all the pilot saw. He was wearing a camel-colored topcoat, wool fedora, and gloves, which, I'd suspect, are in some land fill by now, along with OJ's knife." He glanced at Laika and frowned. "Sorry."

  "Don't be. I think the sonovabitch is guilty, too. Just because I'm black doesn't mean I'm blind and stupid. Minnesota police make any progress?"

  "No, the guy seems to have vanished."

  "Then let's materialize him." She turned to Tony. "See what you can find."

  Several hours later they received word of a transaction in which an Eau Claire resident sold his Suzuki Samurai to a man in the early hours of December twenty-ninth. The man had received a call about the ad he had placed in a local advertising paper and told the caller the vehicle was still available. The man arrived shortly in a taxi, paid twenty-one hundred dollars for the five-year-old Samurai in a combination of fifty- and twenty-dollar bills, and drove away in it. He answered the description of the man called Kyle McAndrews.

  "So Mr. McAndrews drove off into the sunrise," said Joseph. "And there the legend ends."

  "Until something else comes in," said Laika.

  It came at six o'clock in the evening, when Tony returned. "Found it. Our boy bought a twelve-year-old Jeep from a guy who owns a local Mobil station. It was sitting in front with a 'for sale' sign on it, McAndrews spotted it, paid in cash, no questions asked. Description matches."

  "Wonder where the Jeep is now?" Joseph said.

  "Probably at the bottom of a lake," Laika replied, "or in some impoundment garage after our man dumped it at an airport parking lot. But let's get out a description of the Jeep just in case."

  They took a break for dinner, then came back to their office in the hospital and planted themselves in front of their computers. Laika heard the chirp that indicated that Tony had received e-mail.

  There was silence for a moment as he started to read it, and then she heard him whisper, "Jesus . . . ," then, again, "Jesus. . . ."

  "What is it?" Laika asked, turning toward him. Joseph had already slid his chair a few feet closer.

  "We got a match from the Sûreté," Tony said softly. "On the prints. The name is Robert Gunn, arrested at Rennes-le Château in France on suspicion of burglary." He looked up at the others, and his face was pale.

  "On October eighth, 1907."

  Chapter 14

  "It's a mistake," Joseph said bluntly. "They screwed up."

  "No," Tony said. "There's a message here from the head of their records division. He apologizes for the delay but says that their fingerprint files before 1930 were not placed on computer. He sounds more than a little pissed at the manpower it took. He's sent the complete file zipped."

>   "Unzip it," Laika said.

  Tony did so, and they all gathered around his small screen to read it. It told them little, only that a man who carried no identity papers had been apprehended by a local gendarme in the village of Rennes-le Château in the act of trying to break into the Villa Bethania, a house owned by a local dignitary. He was taken to the police station, where he was fingerprinted, photographed, and locked inside their only cell. The next morning the cell door was open and the man had disappeared. Though an alarm was put out, he was not seen again, and the case remained open until 1957.

  "And was probably forgotten in 1908," Joseph said.

  "There's a .jpg of the photo," Tony said, opening it up. It had been scanned from a yellowed photograph, cracked along the edges. The man was wearing a coat and necktie, and faced the camera. His hair was light colored and wavy, his face long and gaunt, with a prominent cleft in his chin.

  "Got a Kirk Douglas doughnut," Tony said.

  "Forward this to Langley for enhancement," Laika said. "I want it to look modern, like it was just taken yesterday. You show this picture to people and ask if they've seen this guy around, they'll say 'no, but ask my grandpa.'"

  Laika filed a full report that evening before she went to bed and sent it, encrypted, to Richard Skye. The next morning they received the enhanced photo from Langley and printed several copies, which Tony took into town, while Laika interviewed the owner of the burned lodge.

  His name was Garrett, and he owned a real estate business. He had been contacted the previous summer and asked if he had a property far from town where a small meeting could be held. He never saw the face of the man who'd rented the lodge, since all proceedings were done over the phone and through the mail, including the delivery of the key to a post office box in Los Angeles.

  "I've heard the rumors—about the teeth and all?" said Garrett, a rotund man with a gray moustache, dressed in a suit tailored as well as possible for his dumpy body. "But I know what it was really about. I know why you're here."

  "And why is that, Mr. Garrett?" Laika asked.

  "It's an organized crime thing, isn't it?" The man looked scared. "You know, I was afraid of that—I mean, a place twenty miles from town, they want their privacy, everything's done on a cash basis, leave no paper trail, you know? But I thought, hey, I don't know, these guys could be insurance salesmen, for all I know, and you can't rent lodges that far out the week after Christmas, so my greed got the better of my common sense, I guess, and then one family bumps the other family off and. . . hey," he said, looking even more worried. "I'm not gonna be charged, am I? You know, for aiding and abetting or anything like that?"

  Laika fixed the man with a cold stare. "I may be back," she said, not smiling until she was outside. "That'll learn ya," she whispered softly to herself.

  Laika met up with Tony at noon, and she was glad to learn that his visits had been more productive than hers. "Got a positive ID from a clerk at the Holiday Inn," Tony said. "Guy called himself Daniel Simpson, from New York City. Stayed there for two nights, paid cash in advance, no credit card. Checked out around the time of the lodge deaths."

  "Anyone with him?" Joseph asked.

  "No. A single."

  "What was the address he gave?" Laika said. "Three-forty-six Madison Avenue."

  Laika had to smile. "That address is Brooks Brothers."

  "Was he well dressed, did she say?" said Joseph.

  Laika didn't wait for Tony to figure out Joseph was kidding. "You run McAndrews's description by her?"

  "Yeah, but she didn't see anybody who looked like him. There were a few other singles in around that time, though. I got a list—and some paid in cash."

  He handed it to Laika, who scanned it. She recognized two of the New York City addresses as fabrications. "These two, Barnes and Robinson?"

  "She described them for me as well as she could remember. Mid-thirties, medium height and weight. Said there wasn't much memorable about them, except that they seemed very polite, to use her word." Tony's face soured. "Said they kind of reminded her of the way her grandfather used to be."

  "Courtly," said Joseph, and deepened his voice to try what Laika thought was a Rod Serling impression. "As though from another time."

  "Funny," Tony said without a smile. "We'll see how long you keep laughing."

  "Come on," Joseph said. "You don't buy this, do you? The Sûreté had to make a mistake. That's the French for you. We have no actual evidence that—"

  "Except for fingerprints," said Laika. She was tired of hearing denial when the evidence showed otherwise. "Fingerprints don't lie. And the clerk identified that photograph—a photo ninety years old. To me, that's proof that Robert Gunn and McAndrews are the same person."

  "Me, too," said Tony. "Unless we got a time machine, this is as much proof as I need."

  "But ninety years—" Joseph looked at the photograph again. "He looks thirty here—hell, he'd have to be a hundred and twenty, and nobody that old is going to look this good! It's not possible. "

  "Well," Laika said softly, "we are, after all, the Division of Special Investigations, and this is sure as hell as special as it gets. But I'm damned if I can think of how to explain all this bullshit away."

  "I say we just keep digging," Tony said. "There's got to be an answer here somewhere—even if it isn't one Skye's going to want."

  Joseph nodded. "That's for sure. We're supposed to be debunking, not proving that this weird shit is actually real. And we've been going more in that direction."

  "That's Skye's problem," Laika said. "We'll report what we find, and he can do whatever the hell he likes with it."

  They found out later that day what Skye wanted done.

  "Gather round, folks," Laika said, as the message began to come in. "God is in the house."

  They read the words as they scrolled across the screen:

  You will immediately cease your current investigation. Proceed in the morning to New York City. Lodging will be at 39 West 72nd Street. Two cases there bear more serious interest to us than the current investigation, which, you should be happy to learn, may be considered closed.

  Other agency sources, unconnected to the Plattsburgh investigation in any way, have coincidentally uncovered several documents that reveal the identities of the eleven victims found outside Plattsburgh. We have overwhelming evidence that these men constituted the total membership of an extreme right-wing religious group. Feeling that there was no place for them in this sinful world, they decided to commit mass suicide by swallowing cyanide.

  According to a letter one of these men had sent to a relative shortly before his death, one was chosen to survive the others and douse the building with gasoline, then poison himself and immediately set fire to the building. Their primitive dental practices were a result of their retreat from the world, as was the absence of any identification.

  You will receive directives on the New York City investigations when you arrive there.

  The message was unsigned.

  "Some 'coincidence,'" said Joseph. "And where did they find that convenient letter?"

  "In Skye's word processor," Tony answered, with a trace of bitterness.

  Joseph sat on his edge of his desk and crossed his arms. "Not that I hold any sympathy toward the religious right . . . or the religious in general . . . but it won't do the current administration any harm to have another example of Bible-beating extremism in the headlines. Skye is a clever man."

  "All right, gentlemen," Laika said as sternly as she could. "We are Mr. Skye's operatives, and we've been told what to do. Let's just do it without any paranoia."

  "There's something here, though!" Tony said.

  "You just read what's here."

  "But the fingerprints—"

  "Forget the fingerprints, Dr. Antonelli. We never saw any fingerprints, and if the subject ever comes up, which it won't, it was a case of misidentification."

  "I suppose we conveniently forget the chemical levels in the tissues, too," Josep
h said calmly. "What do we do with the files?"

  "You know what to do with them," Laika said. "Delete them. And see that any hard copies are shredded or burned, including the photographs of Robert Gunn, original and enhanced. That man died a long time ago." She folded up her laptop and walked out of the office, her teeth clenched so hard her head hurt.

  What the hell was Skye playing at? These dead men weren't magic. Maybe the solution was something just as pedestrian as the one Skye had provided. But it wasn't the truth, and Laika had felt that they were approaching it.

  Still, she had always walked the walk, even if she hadn't talked as much talk as she just had to Stein and Luciano. If you were Company, you did what the Company told you, no questions asked. You didn't say "But," and you tried not to think it.

  This time, however, she couldn't help herself. There was something terribly strange about those eleven dead men, and something strangely terrible, as well. They were close to it but wouldn't be allowed to continue. She felt frustrated and furious, like a dog trained for killing that had been given the scent and was trailing its quarry when it heard its master's whistle.

  She made the official farewells, and by the time she got back to the office, Tony and Joseph had finished what they'd had to do. Joseph looked glum, but Tony looked like a kid who had been told there was no Santa Claus.

  "Got another e-mail," he said. "From the Sûreté. They say that the print identification was a clerical error, that the person who made the match had been up for twenty hours straight."

  "There were similarities," Joseph said, "but when they rechecked, they said it wasn't a match after all."

  Tony shook his head sadly. "Goddamnit, we had people ID the photo, though."

  "It's not impossible," Joseph allowed, almost grudgingly, "that one guy could look like another." Then he smiled. "Coincidence," he said. "The single thing that gets people believing weird shit more than anything else. Like I said before, seeing patterns and links where there aren't any. I almost did it myself this time."