The Nature of the Beast

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The Nature of the Beast Page 14

by GM Ford


  The sheriff allowed herself a low whistle, shifted her weight from one foot to the other a couple of times, cast a wistful glance in Audrey’s direction and then cleared her throat. “Seems like I better make a few calls,” she said. “The folks over in Collier County are going to want to get on this as soon as possible.”

  “I’m going to leave you a uniformed squad,” Craig said. “They’ll have orders to make a final sweep of the locals. Can you provide ground transport?”

  The sheriff said it would probably involve her nephew and her Dad again, but, somehow or other, she’d work it out.

  “Also the helicopter. I’ll have it make one more infrared pass first thing in the a.m. and then, providing we don’t have another miracle of some sort, it can ferry the squad back to Minneapolis as soon as they’ve completed their sweep.”

  Craig walked over and shook the sheriff’s hand, thanking her for her efforts and praising her professionalism. “Please be sure to thank your nephew and father for their efforts on our behalf,” Jackson Craig said finally.

  Jennifer Parsons pumped his hand a couple of times, assured him she would convey the message and then hustled from the room. The door never fully closed. No sooner was the sheriff on her way when the FBI crew returned en masse and began to retrieve their equipment.

  Above the clatter rising from the adjoining room, Audrey raised her voice.

  “No matter what it says about me, I’m glad it’s not Michael,” she said.

  “I don’t know what to feel,” Craig admitted. “I feel like I’ve been whip-sawed from pillar to post and back again.”

  Audrey raised an ‘Amen’ hand.

  They sat in silence for several minutes before the FBI crew shuffled back through the room carrying their gear. After the door had closed behind them and the drop dead silence had once again fallen over the room, Jackson Craig pushed himself to his feet. He stretched and rolled his neck a couple of times before pulling his Blackberry from his pocket. He checked his messages. Fifty-three of them. He stood in the middle of the room staring down at the screen and pushing buttons with his thumb.

  He sighed and asked Audrey, “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

  “Good news, bad news? That’s outright down-home for the likes of you.”

  “I’m trying to retain the common touch,” he assured.

  Audrey laughed and opted for the bad news.

  “No report from any surveillance sector.” His disappointment was palpable. “Our kidnapper seems to have vaporized.”

  “And the good news?”

  “Rebecca’s been found alive,” he announced. “They’re keeping her overnight in Flagstaff and then flying her to L.A. tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Halleluiah.”

  “And that woman we were looking for in Florida. Christine King as I recall…”

  Audrey perked up. “What about her?”

  “L.A.’s got her in custody. Apparently she’s lawyered up and is looking to cut a deal.” He pocketed the phone. “Seems she’s demanding to talk to me.”

  33

  He pulled the car up to the mailbox, leaned out the window and wiggled three Chicago Tribunes from the faded yellow tube.

  He looked around, scanning for anything out of place. After several minutes, he concluded that the only thing different was the weather. In the sun, what had been ice was morphing to slush. He checked the driveway. The tracks he’d made on his way out were the only marks in the snow.

  He wheeled into the yard through a series of narrow puddles. He got out of the car to lock the yard gate and then swung wide left, around the house, arcing between the orchard and the barren flower beds, rolling toward the big red barn doors at the rear of the house.

  He got out again and pulled both barn doors wide open. The space was the size of a high school gymnasium. While the farm equipment was long gone, the smell of heavy grease and dry straw would, no doubt, linger forever.

  He veered around his new ride and pulled all the way to the back of the barn. He left the keys in the ignition, got out and opened the back door.

  The boy was naked. His wet clothes lay heaped on the floor of the car. He bundled the boy up in one of the blankets and then carried him out of the barn, across the yard and up the stairs into the old fashioned kitchen.

  He sat the boy on the kitchen counter. “I’ll be right back,” he promised. The boy wavered and then put his hands out to steady himself. The blanket fell from around his shoulders. The kid found a corner and pulled it across his lap.

  “Right back,” he said again.

  Satisfied the kid wasn’t going to fall and break his neck, he hustled to the front of the house. To the room the Halsey’s had used as an office, where he’d planned on keeping the kid, where he’d put some of the things he’d bought on-line, things for the kid.”

  On his way back to the kitchen, he stopped at the thermostat and raised the setting to eighty. He set the bag on counter next to the boy, fished around inside until he found a pair of underpants. After removing the price tag and a couple of stickers, he handed them to the kid.

  “Put these on,” he said, grabbing him under the arms and setting him on the floor. The boy sat down, pulling the underpants over his feet and up his legs.

  He found socks and then a pair of jeans and a GI JOE pullover. Even a warm jacket. Camouflage. The kid was well-schooled. He dressed himself in two minutes flat. Nicely tied shoelaces and all.

  Everything was a little big. Serviceable for the time being but a bit baggy.

  Michael rubbed his eyes and looked around. “This is your house?” he asked.

  “This is our house.”

  Michael’s face darkened. “Nuh-uh,” he said.

  “We’re not staying long,” he assured.

  The kid darted for the door, grabbed the shiny metal handle and jerked hard. And then again and again before he realized pulling wasn’t going to work, that his store of ‘door’ knowledge wasn’t going to apply here and that he might possibly have made the strange man angry. Michael flattened his back against the door, his eyes wide awake and worried.

  “You want to go out?” the man asked.

  Michael hesitated for a moment and then nodded. When the man suddenly started his way, Michael flinched and quickly stepped to one side. He watched as the man pushed buttons on the box, watched as the light went from red to green and then heard the snap of the lock. The man pulled the door open wide. “Go,” he said.

  Michael sidled through the doorway. The moment the kid was outside, he took off running and disappeared from sight.

  He stood and listened to the sound of slapping feet until his ears could make out nothing but the hiss of the wind. He closed the door.

  Through the front window, he could see that Michael, having given up on the gate, was now checking the perimeter, running along the fence line looking for a way out. He remembered doing the same thing a long time ago when they used to come here. He remembered checking the fence, over and over, looking for a way out, but finding nothing. He remembered watching for the mail lady and hoping she would put stamps on him and send him somewhere, somewhere far away and exotic. But she never came closer than the road. Never. Not once.

  By the time he’d found himself a dry set of clothes and tidied up, Michael had been outside for half an hour. A perfunctory search of the yard found Michael folded up behind an ancient hay rake on the south side of the barn. His camouflage theory seemed to be that if he couldn’t see his pursuers, they couldn’t see him.

  The man sauntered up and stood over the boy. “C’mon, I’ll show you your bunk.”

  “What’s a bunk?’

  He gestured to follow. “I’ll show you.”

  Michael hurried along behind him. They crossed the frozen back yard together.

  “After breakfast you’ll have your bath.”

  Michael scrunched up his face. “It’s daytime,” he protested.

  “A clean recruit is a happy recruit,” the man said as h
e unlocked the door and ushered the boy inside.

  34

  The harsh glare of the overhead lights accented her Marilyn Manson eyeliner and, along her jaw line, where the make-up ended and her real skin began, she looked as if she’d been hastily spray-painted. All of which seemed rather at odds with the Prada pumps and the black Sosperi eyeglasses which, by themselves, must have set her back two grand. Obviously, a woman of extremes.

  The lawyer was a Beverly Hills land shark, Sheldon W. Spearbeck, Attorney at Law. The kind of clothes-horse you kept on retainer for DUIs and domestic violence beefs but not the sort of high-roller you’d want to go into court with. In this part of the world, however, the guys you would go into court with didn’t show up in Secret Service Interview Rooms unless your name happened to be Lindsey Lohan.

  Spearbeck did his lawyerly duty and reiterated the agreement. Twice. No charges whatsoever, no DNA samples, no official record of any kind. They would talk only about the client in question, and would willingly cooperate with the creation of a composite image of the suspect. They would walk out together when the interview concluded. No post interview surveillance. So long. Goodbye.

  Theoretically anyway. Truth was, NSA’s new ‘Exponential Variant’ software had already identified both her individual programming signature and her personal history. Nancy Burell. December 4, 1960. Mother Coleen died in childbirth. Raised by a single physicist father in Palo Alto, California. Timid and withdrawn as a child, she had grown into an unusually angry young woman whose intellectual gifts kept a borderline personality disorder at bay until 1977, when she was asked to leave Cal Tech after having been suspected of altering post-doctoral evaluations. After segueing through a series of increasingly sensitive ‘encryption’ positions in a number of think tanks and commercial settings, she completely dropped out of sight five years earlier.

  Although she wasn’t aware of it, disappearing was no longer an option. From this moment on, she belonged to NSA. The first time they had a situation from which they needed to keep their distance, something that seemed to be up her alley, they’d pressure her into providing the service. That’s how it worked. And so on and so on until she’d outlived her usefulness and was allowed to skulk off into the cyber sunset.

  Made it easy for Craig to agree. “Okay,” he said.

  She looked bored to death. “Shoot.”

  “Why me?” he asked.

  “You were the one I couldn’t get a smell of,” she said. “ And he just had to have all three of you.” She shrugged. “I told him…somebody drops off the grid like that it’s because he’s seriously connected. Whoever cleaned up after you knew what he was doing. I told him the truth…finding you was going to be a problem.” She thought about smiling but thought better of it. “He almost seemed relieved. Like he could tell himself he’d done what he could and was willing to let it go at that. When I told him you were coming back to the states it seemed to catch him by surprise. Like he’d just been going through the motions and now he was going to have to actually do something. “

  Craig paused to digest the information. “How long ago did you find Special Agents Wald and Fowles?”

  “Assuming that my client...” Spearbeck piped up. “…hypothetically speaking, of course…”

  “Four years,” she said with a smile. “But like I said, he didn’t want to do anything unless he knew where to find all three of you.”

  “My client is merely an information conduit,” Spearbeck asserted. “What the end user does with that information is not within her purview.”

  “You said you’ve met him in person?” Craig segued.

  “Three times over the years,” she said.

  “Do you generally meet your clients face to face?” Craig pressed.

  “He’s the only living client I’ve ever met in person,” she said. “He saved my life.” Big sigh. Wry smile. “In Chicago, five years ago next month.”

  “Tell me about it,” Craig said, folding his hands on the scarred tabletop.

  “I’d just gone into business for myself,” she explained.

  “What business was that?”

  “Technical Support,” she said with a smile.

  She shrugged and went on, relating how she ‘researched’ potential clients before saying yes or no to an assignment. This one was a minor mobster named Charlie Cook. Cook owned a couple of dry cleaners over in Gary, but actually paid the bills working as muscle for a couple loan-sharking operations. Had quite a record. Nothing too serious, mostly minor, but enough of them to get him a third-strike jacket if he wasn’t careful. He wanted to know if I could annex and make improvements to City of Chicago and State of Illinois court records.”

  “And you told him…” Audrey pressed.

  “I told him I could hack anything. You want me to take on the pros…that’ll cost you extra.”

  She anticipated the next question. “How he got my number I have no clue. I’d only been freelancing for a couple months. I guess somebody must have liked my work. It’s a word of mouth business. I don’t ask. They don’t tell.”

  “Anyway,” Audrey prompted.

  The woman felt a need to explain. “I was stupid. Naive. I let him talk me into meeting in person.” She took a deep breath. “I’m staying in this fleabag rental over by the convention center.”

  She sensed she was going into unnecessary detail and stopped. “Anyway, Cook shows up, I let him in, expecting to be thanked for my services and handsomely paid and the minute the door closes that son-of-a-bitch throws a silk scarf over my head and starts to choke the life out of me.” She swallowed hard, reliving the incident.

  “So?”

  “So we’re staggering all over the entrance hall, locked in this death dance. I can feel my lights going out, my head feels like it was going to explode when, all of a sudden we crash against the door, which somehow or other hadn’t latched properly when he came in and we go tumbling out into the hall together.” She caught her breath and continued. “We’re locked together, Cook on the bottom. If I hadn’t somehow gotten my hand between my throat and the silk scarf, I’d have been dead by then. And suddenly there he was! This kid standing there in the foyer gawking at us. A gangly-looking teenager in a beige trench coat.”

  “What was he doing in the building?” Craig asked.

  She laughed out loud. “Visiting his doctor. If you can believe that.”

  “Go on.”

  “So I guess Cook can sense my lights are just about out, so he lets go of the scarf and goes after the kid.” She unfolded her arms and held up a restraining hand. “I couldn’t see exactly what happened next. My vision was big time screwed up from the choking and Cook was between me and the kid but…” She paused for effect. “…like two seconds later this guy Cook is lying next to me on the floor with a knife sticking out of his eye.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that, dead as a herring,” she said. “Like some kind of street magic trick.”

  She paused again, remembering. “So the kid tows both of us back into the apartment. I’m choking and gagging trying to get some air into my lungs. That’s when I see that the kid’s got this big, deep cut running across his palm. Somehow, in the process of killing Cook he got cut. He’s got the hand pressed against his chest and he’s still bleeding like a pig.” She took a couple of shallow breaths. “That’s when he reaches over with his good hand and pulls the knife out of Cook’s eye and I just start babbling cause I know I’m gonna be next and I’m bawling and begging for my life when he spots a little sewing kit on my kitchen table.” She looked from Craig to Audrey Williams and back. “You know what he wants me to do?” She didn’t wait for an answer.

  “He wanted me to sew him up, right then and there.” She shook her head in wonder. “Never so much as blinked the whole time I was working that needle in and out of his hand. Just stood there and talked to me like nothing was going on. Asked me what I did, so I told him. Asked me if I was good at it. I told him I was.” She shrugged. “Wasn’t like I had anything
to lose at that point. I figured I was dead, so I offered him some antibiotics and pain pills I had with me. I was doing everything I could think of to stay alive and I finally get him sewed up and he looks at me and he asks me for a number where he can reach me.” She brought a hand flat against her chest. “You could have knocked me over. He calls me a couple of months later. Gives me three names. Wants me to find out where they are.”

  “And?”

  She shrugged. “I got lucky,” she said. “I find the other two right off the bat but still can’t get so much as a sniff of you. He hands me a stack of money, tells me to keep looking and to keep him posted. Then you started calling your sister…” She shrugged.

  “Describe him,” Craig pressed.

  “White. Early to mid twenties now. Not quite six feet. Medium build but strong. Dark brown buzz cut hair.

  “When was the last time you spoke to him?”

  For the first time in the interview, she hesitated. Craig repeated the question.

  “Earlier this week,” she said finally.

  “Where?” Craig asked.

  Her lawyer objected. “Not relevant,” he said. “We agreed…”

  “Arizona.”

  From six feet away, Audrey could feel the anger rising in Jackson Craig. The indignation and bitterness over Gil and Emelda. She reached beneath the table and put a clammy hand on his knee. He snapped an angry glance in her direction, but didn’t pull his leg away.

 

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