by Ed Markham
She went on, “If this turns something up, I hope you’ll bring up his suspension with the deputy director. It’s not as though Jared has fared any better.”
After a few seconds of silence, Carl said, “Call me back after you’ve gotten the ball rolling with Goodman. Tonight please, not tomorrow morning.”
David said to her after she’d hung up, “I appreciate that.”
“You deserve to be in charge of this investigation. Simple as that.”
He gestured toward the television. “Goodman was in Philadelphia. He may still be there.”
He watched as she made two more calls—one to Investigative Ops, asking them to locate Goodman, and the other to Quantico’s airfield to request a helicopter.
When she’d finished her calls, she stood and said, “I don’t know where I’m going yet, but I gotta go.”
He nodded and followed her downstairs. His mind was racing. “The public doesn’t know about all the murders, so it’s possible Goodman never recognized the pattern. Still, you should ask him about it before you fill him in. See how he responds.”
When she reached the front door, she stopped and turned to face him. She looked at him for a moment, and then she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling his face to hers. “Couldn’t you have waited another fifteen minutes to make that connection?” she asked, smiling.
“Fifteen? Maybe five.”
She laughed. “You’re more fun when we’re not working.” She kissed him again. “I’ll keep you posted.”
Her green eyes held his for another second, and then she was gone.
Saturday, September 16
Chapter 8
IT WAS AFTER one in the morning. With a television flickering at his back, the man sat in front of his laptop and stared at the only four words appearing on the white screen: The time has come.
He leaned forward, his fingers poised above the keyboard, but then he let out a long breath and sat back again. He knew he had to focus, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
“Edith,” he said out loud into the quiet room. He knew approximately where she was, and he knew that within six hours she would be dead. It made him melancholy to think of it.
He wanted to hold her and tell her what a wonderful, brave girl she’d been. No, not a girl, he told himself. She’s certainly a woman now.
He wondered at how she might have transformed since he’d last seen her. No doubt the quiet, timid thing he’d first met all those months ago in the university’s library had vanished—replaced by a being more self-assured and true to herself. Would he even recognize her after all she’d been through? Yes, he thought so. But she would be changed, just as he had been changed by the tragedy of life. He knew the price she would pay would be dear. But so would the price he and others would soon pay—unwillingly, in most cases.
He experienced a fresh wave of sadness, and for a moment he felt like laying down on the floor and burying his head in his arms. But then he thought of what they were accomplishing together, and he felt his sense of purpose restored.
He sat up in his chair and leaned forward, his mind refocusing on his task.
The hour of America’s rebirth is at hand. We hoped and we prayed that this day would never arrive, but we also prepared ourselves so that we would be ready to answer the call should it come. And it has come. One of our brothers will fall—a man who fights for our Constitution and for the principles that once made us great and free. Others will fall with him, true patriots and false patriots alike. And from their deaths must spring new life for our nation.
He wrote in silence for almost an hour before concluding with the words: Watch for the fall of our brother—our great patriot. And when you see him fall, know that the battle for the soul of our country has begun.
When he’d finished, the man stepped away from his laptop and stood silently in front of the television, watching the late replay of Philip Goodman’s program.
Chapter 9
THE TRUCK’S BURNT-YELLOW headlight beams swept along a dense tree line. As she rounded the bend, Edith felt the SUV pick up speed as the steepness of the mountainside pulled it forward. When she pressed her foot down on the brake, the vehicle shuddered disturbingly. She’d tried to go easy on the declines, but the brakes were beginning to overheat. She cracked a window and could smell the friction on the cool night air. Reluctantly, she lifted her foot and felt gravity sink its teeth into the truck’s immense weight.
Everything up to this point had worked out so perfectly, she thought. She and Levi had anticipated certain complications and had allowed for contingencies, but none of that had been necessary. Each success had reinforced Edith’s belief that she was right to trust herself and her nature—that her work was somehow predestined.
But now, when the end was so near, she worried something would rise up to block her path—to prove to her once again that she was weak and worthless, and that the past year had been a cruel reprieve meant to make her final failure more miserable.
When she recognized her fear, she grimaced and tightened her hands on the steering wheel.
As she approached another sloping curve, she tapped the brakes, hoping to slow the truck’s momentum. It did little good, and the vehicle shuddered violently. The SUV’s tires cried out as they took the curve.
But then, to Edith’s great relief, the road straightened and turned upward onto the gentle slope of a foothill. She hated to stop, but she had no choice. The brakes needed a chance to cool before tackling another descent.
With gravity on her side now, she depressed the brake lightly as the truck crested the top of the hill and came to rest. She switched off the ignition and the headlights, and sat in the humid darkness of the Pennsylvania woods. The dashboard clock told her it was 2:30 in the morning.
It had been a long day, and it was far from over. She’d spent hours navigating the country roads and meandering state routes that cobwebbed rural New York and Pennsylvania. “Crowded highways aren’t safe,” Levi had told her, indicating on a map the route she should take to avoid detection.
She’d driven west from Concord into the Berkshires, rolling the big truck down through New York State and arriving in Pennsylvania early in the afternoon. The house was as Levi had described it. He’d told her to rest, but she hadn’t been able to sleep—not when the end had drawn so close she could almost feel its black bulk pressing up against her.
Now, as the night crept toward its darkest hour, Edith knew she had only a little time left. Enough to do what she’d planned, but not much more. She had only a few minutes to stop.
She flipped off the switch that controlled the truck’s cabin lights and opened her door so she could feel the nighttime. An owl made its noise out in the blackness of the woods, and Edith suddenly felt very alone. It was as though a warm blanket had been swept away from her, leaving her body naked and exposed. She shuddered at the cold familiarity of the alone-ness, and reminded herself that she had a partner now—a man who understood her and loved her and wanted to share his dream with her.
That’s what he’d told her, and she had believed him. She still believed him, and she believed in him. She thought again of his letter, which she hadn’t yet destroyed, and she felt comforted.
Before Levi there had been nothing. No goals. No purpose. No relief save thoughts of suicide. She’d fantasized about the act night and day, at home and at work, in the months leading up to Levi’s appearance in her life. Her depression was intense, but thinking about how she would end her life had offered Edith a catharsis unlike any she had ever known.
She’d practiced on her pets.
Edith had dreamed of owning a cat since her freshmen year of college. But the school’s dormitories—where she’d lived throughout her six years of undergraduate and graduate study—would not allow animals. She’d rescued Faulkner from a shelter soon after graduation when she moved into her own small house near campus. She’d hoped she would finally have a companion to love and to care for, and one who would love her in retur
n. But the cat hadn’t show the slightest interest in his new owner. When Edith had tried to pet Faulkner, the cat would hiss and dash away from her outstretched hand. Once, when she tried to stroke him as he ate dinner from his bowl, the animal actually reared and bit her.
Edith had decided to rescue another cat. Then, a month later, another.
None of them—not a single one of the five cats she adopted—showed her any tenderness or affection. They seemed to detect in her something rancid and threatening, and found her desperation for their love repellant. This rebuke strengthened Edith’s suicidal fantasies, and with those fantasies came relief. It doesn’t matter anymore, she’d thought, feeling calmness come over her. Nothing mattered when you were going to kill yourself. The thought was like a shield against an unkind world. The only questions left were when and how.
One summer night, as she stood in her kitchen preparing dinner, Edith stopped to stare at the red flecks of tomato that had smeared the blade of her knife. She felt a kind of heat building in her stomach. And then, almost without thought, she turned and snatched at the scruff of one of her neglectful pets who was eating from his food bowl on the kitchen floor. She lifted the cat, which hissed angrily and swiped at her as he dangled. She pulled the blade across its throat.
Edith was surprised at the way the blood spurted out of the narrow opening, like juice squeezed from a ripe grapefruit. She dropped the cat, but not before some of its blood had streaked her arms and face. A few minutes later, when she saw herself in the bathroom mirror—the bright red stains on her white skin—she was transfixed. She stood looking at herself for nearly an hour and went to bed without washing off the blood, her mind and body buzzing with a strange rush of unexpected and pleasurable sensations.
During the following week, she killed each of her cats. She slipped rat poison into the bowl of one and followed it around the house, watching with awe as the animal vomited blood and eventually expired. She drowned another, holding it under the bathtub water with her bare hands and feeling jolts of pleasure as it scratched repeatedly at her wrists, drawing blood.
She observed and enjoyed each death with intense fascination. But none appealed to her so much as the first. Something about the redness of the blood on her own white skin recalled for Edith a distant, almost erotic sense of pleasure, and she resolved to slit her own wrists.
Planning her final hours kept her thoughts happily occupied for nearly a week. She intended to thoroughly wash and bleach all of her white bed linens, and she had already moved every mirror in her small home into the bedroom. She arranged them on easels purchased from the university’s arts supply store so that she could watch her own life pouring out of her, ruining the perfect whiteness of the bed linens and of her skin.
But then, the day before she’d planned to kill herself, something unexpected had happened.
Edith was working in the library on a Saturday morning when Dr. Williams, who oversaw the university’s Madison collection, had called to tell her a researcher named Levi Harney would be stopping by the following day. And from the moment Mr. Harney had introduced himself and taken her pale hand in his own, Edith had been captivated. At first she’d assumed her impending death was flooding her brain and body with strange hormones and emotions. But, after spending the day working side-by-side with the handsome stranger, she’d decided to postpone her suicide for another week. And then another. Knowing that Levi would return had filled her with a lightness and an anticipation to which she was unaccustomed.
The weeks passed, and Edith caught herself gazing longingly at the handsome visitor as he conducted his research. Something about him was familiar to her, as though she knew him somehow—an old friend, though she had no old friends. She imagined the two of them walking hand-in-hand, him smiling at her and telling her how much he enjoyed her company. She knew it was a childish, frivolous sort of fantasy. But her mind clung to it all the same, and so she clung to her life. At least for one more week, she told herself each Sunday when he departed.
Then a Sunday came, just before the start of the fall term, when Levi told her he would not be returning. “I have more information than I’ll ever use, but I’m very grateful to you for all the help you’ve given me,” he’d said politely.
Though she should have expected it, Edith felt betrayed, as though Levi had been toying with her emotions and her fantasies. It required all her strength not to snarl at him—not to reach out and sink her fingernails into his handsome face. Sitting in front of her journal log at the long research table, she’d watched him leave. And the moment he’d gone, she had attacked the paper with her pencil, letting her emotion pour out onto the page. Then she’d dug the instrument into her thigh, boring a hole halfway to the bone. She groaned in pain, but the bulk of her disappointment seeped out along with her blood.
She’d left the library a short time later, intent on opening her veins the moment she arrived home. But she’d been shocked to find Levi waiting for her in the university parking lot. He’d climbed from his car as she limped toward her own vehicle, the pain in her thigh a tantalizing preview of the final agony to come. “I know this is terribly inappropriate,” he’d said, his eyes holding hers. “But from the moment we met, I’ve felt there was something between us.”
It seemed to Edith, then and now, as though some greater power had decided to intervene—to bring her together with Levi in order to save her from a meaningless life and a solitary death.
They’d agreed to meet for dinner the following evening at his hotel room. Wary of herself and of the universe’s cruelty, Edith had been slow to open up to him. But Levi seemed to understand the nature of both her interest in him and her reticence. Though she hardly spoke a word at the start of their private dinner, he’d begun to talk to her about his own life as though they were already lovers.
He’d suffered great losses in his lifetime, he told her, and had struggled through deep ruts of depression. At times, he thought almost incessantly of killing himself. But he felt it would be a waste to do so in vain—to die without a purpose.
Edith was enthralled. The unfamiliar warmth of another human’s interest was intoxicating. No one had ever paid this much attention to her without cruel intentions. And he’d revealed truths to her—deep secrets and confessions—that made her feel she could trust him with her own.
Almost without realizing it, she’d heard herself telling Levi about her unhappy childhood. She told him about the horrible urges she’d always felt—the urges her father called “evil” and had tried to beat out of her. She told him about her cats, and she told him of her plan to commit suicide—that the knife had been on her bedside table for weeks, and that his sudden arrival in her life had been the only reason she’d wavered.
It all poured out of her. There were no secrets.
They made love that night on Edith’s white linens, surrounded by her mirrors. As he moved in and out of her, Levi had pinned Edith’s wrists above her head with one of his hands. With the other, he reached for the knife and ran its blade across her white belly and breasts, not hard enough to break the skin, but also not so lightly that Edith couldn’t feel the sharpness of the knife’s edge. As pangs of ecstasy overtook her for the first time in her life, a part of her hoped he would plunge the blade into her chest.
Afterward, Levi told her about his mission—his destiny, he called it. He realized that everything he’d done in his life, everything he’d worked for, had been moving him toward one act. He’d never intended to share it with anyone. But now he felt like they were meant to complete that act together.
“We can accomplish more as two than I ever could as one,” he told her.
As the ensuing weeks passed, Edith found herself both in love and a part of something extraordinary. For the first time in her life, she felt driven by a greater sense of purpose.
It had been easy for her to adopt Levi’s zeal—to feel his anger toward those who were destroying what so many had built. Her love for him was desperate and devouring,
and a word or two from him was enough to conjure or quell her great reserves of rage. After just a few months together, her passion for their task nearly exceeded his.
She had insisted on the first victim, and Levi had agreed. Because he loves me, she’d thought at the time. And when she dug the machete into her father’s chest—one of the same saw-backed machetes her brothers had used to murder her swan all those years ago—Levi had been with her, assuring her that her impulses were right. “Some people—most people—deserve whatever pain and suffering comes to them,” he’d said. She’d accepted this wisdom unreservedly. After all the cruelty she’d experienced in her life, his words felt true.
Now, as she sat alone in her SUV, Edith took comfort in the knowledge that she hadn’t failed him. There’d been so much to worry about, but now there was only one left—one final opportunity to prove to Levi that she was able, and that her devotion to him was strong.
The singed smell of the overheated brakes had dissipated now, and Edith pulled her door closed and turned the key in the SUV’s ignition.
Her spirits restored by thoughts of her partner, she drove the truck over the top of the hill and on into the night.
Chapter 10
AFTER LAUREN HAD gone, David sat on his staircase, listening to the quiet that had filled his house. The fresh silence was like the aftermath of a hurricane—surreal when compared to what had come just before it.
He thought about her eyes and lips, and the way her body had felt pressed against his. But old memories and old oaths he’d sworn to himself were forcing their way into his head and corrupting the warm feelings like blood in bath water. His mind leapt back to the summer, fifteen years earlier, when one night had broken his life apart and scattered the pieces.
He’d met and started seeing Christina during his sophomore year at Temple. Like David’s parents, Christina was from Philly—the daughter of a couple who owned two restaurants on the city’s south side. She had soft blue eyes and a kind, easy smile. She was into scary movies and Bon Jovi, and she was the only girl he’d ever loved.