by GM Ford
“Jack.”
“Uncle Jack,” she said.
“That’s it.”
“That was before…”
He reached out with both hands and grabbed the bed’s safety railing.
“Yeah,” Jackson Craig said. “Back in the day.”
Somewhere along the line she’d heard some version of the Harry Joyce story, probably from her father, trying to explain the uprooting of the family. Craig pretended not to notice as she moved her eyes from one of his hands to the other and back, trying to ascertain which one was real and which one wasn’t.
In the silence that followed, Jackson Craig could hear the rhythmic bleep of her heart on one of the monitors, watch her breathing in the small black bellows above the bed. Hospitals gave Craig the willies, a fearful feeling so strong that, since his mother’s death fifteen years ago, he’d managed to avoid them altogether. Cards and flowers? Always! A personal appearance at the bedside? Unlikely.
Rebecca pulled her eyes from his hands and gazed out the window. He watched her eyes travel over the palm trees, the condos and office buildings, all the way to the smog-shrouded Hollywood Hills.
“They’re not coming are they?” she asked.
Craig took a deep breath and just said it. “No.”
“They’d have been here by now.”
“Yes. They surely would have.”
She shifted slightly in the bed, closed her eyes and began to weep.
After several minutes, she composed herself and asked, “Do I need to know what happened?”
“Someday.”
“Where’s my brother? Where’s Michael?”
“We’re working on it.”
“Please find him. Please?”
“I will.”
“I was supposed to…” She looked at the wall. “He’s my little brother, I was supposed to…”
She was crying again. Craig assured her there was nothing she could have done and then handed her several tissues from a bedside container.
“Did you get a look at the person who did this?” Craig asked.
She shook her head. The movement seemed to make her dizzy.
She took several deep breaths and then said, “No. It was too dark.” She hiccupped a sob. “He grabbed me by the hair…I couldn’t…” The hiccup was becoming a torrent. Craig put his hand on her arm. Her entire body was vibrating like a tuning fork. He patted her shoulder.
“Okay. Okay,” he said.
“You know what he said?”
Before Craig could respond, another bout of weeping wracked her body. Craig snagged another tissue and used it to wipe her runny nose.
“What did he say?” Craig whispered when she’d regained some measure of composure.
She pawed at her nose with the back of her hand and lowered her voice an octave. “And now…the new order begins,” she boomed.
The resonance of her voice and the strangeness of the phrase reduced Craig to silence. For a second, he wondered if she was serious.
Becky sensed his confusion. “It’s from an old video game,” she said. “Apocalypse Three. I used to play it all the time. It’s what the Avenger says whenever he kills any of the demon seed.” She waved a dismissive hand. “There’s millions of the demon seed, so, if you play the game and you’re not a complete spaz, you hear it a lot.”
Craig frowned. “Demon seed?”
“The ones who killed his father,’ she said off-handedly. “They’re like the undead. Zombies. You know like that. Cause they’ve already been dead once, they’re really hard to kill the second time. You gotta stab them over and over if you want them to stay dead.”
She pushed herself erect in the bed and peered out through the window. Craig threw his eyes in that direction. A dozen stories below, the roof of the parking garage was alive with comings and goings. “All those people out there,” she said. “Just going about their day. It’s like…you know…to them…it’s like nothing happened …like they don’t know…like nothing’s happened to them at all.”
“Your grandparents are downstairs,” he said after a moment.
“Are you going?” Her eyes said she didn’t want to be without a familiar face.
“I won’t go until they get here,” he assured her.
“Okay,” she said.
“Then, I’m going to find your little brother.”
38
The first beep, he ignored. The motion sensors sounded false alarms on a daily basis, mostly from birds taking off and landing, so the sound of the beep instilled in him no particular sense of urgency. He went back to watching the boy and pondering his next move. Perhaps he’d been expecting too much too soon. When you thought about it, they’d only been together for a few days. No wonder the kid seemed so stubborn. All he knew was that things were different and that he wished they weren’t. He’d come around. If not, they’d burn that bridge when they came to it.
The boy looked up from the video game.
Another alarm beeped. He held his breath. This wasn’t birds.
A tentative knock sounded on the front door. He listened as whoever it was located the doorbell and rang it twice. He quickly closed the door to Michael’s room and padded into the kitchen on bare feet, wondering as he walked how anyone could possibly have gotten through the gate without the code. The bell sounded again, more insistently this time. He hurried through the darkened kitchen, past the empty dining room and into his own bedroom where he lifted the pillow and picked up a small chrome-plated automatic. He released the safety and pumped a round into the chamber. He kept the gun in his hand as he walked back through the house.
The clomp of shoes told him the intruder was moving around the porch now, walking, stopping, walking again, probably peering into windows looking for signs of life as he made his way around to the north side of the house.
He tiptoed to the side door and very slowly pulled back the dead bolt. He waited until the visitor started back around toward the front, counted to five and then stepped out onto the porch. The low overhanging clouds accentuated the coming of nightfall, throwing deep shadows across the already darkening landscape. He brought the automatic to bear and sighted. He held his breath and watched the shadow turn right and disappear around the front of the house. In silhouette two things became obvious: The visitor was carrying something in both hands, and the visitor was a woman.
His sigh of relief became visible in the cold night air. He slid the automatic into the waistband of his jeans and covered it with his shirt. As he slid along the wall, the sound of an idling engine found its way to his ears.
He stepped around the corner. He had a thumb hooked in his belt. His hand was no more than a foot from the automatic. The intruder turned his way.
“Oh Mr. Brown,” she said. “You startled me.”
He recognized the voice. “Miss Lopresi,” he said.
The gate was open. Her car, one of those square Honda Elements, was idling just inside the gate. “I thought Michael might like a little treat,” she said holding out the package. “I was hoping a chocolate cake might help him feel more at home.”
He stepped forward and took the package from her hands. Unwilling to have his hands encumbered, he set the cake carefully on the rail.
“Poor little fella’s having such a hard time,” she said.
He forced himself to make small-talk. Although time and experience had taught him to approximate their meaningless drivel, he still felt a great deal of discomfort when forced to do so, as the vagaries of conversation defied enumeration.
When, inevitably, the conversation lagged, he asked. “How’d you get the gate open?” in his best conversational tone.
Harriet Lopresti grinned, took off one of her gloves, put it on top of the porch railing and reached into her coat pocket. She came out with a key card. “U.S. Postal Service Issue,” she proclaimed. “A universal Master. Opens darn near every key card latch in the world. It’s so we can deliver things too big for the mail box.”
“A
h,” he said.
She was still smiling. “Great if you lose your hotel room key.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” she recited.
He had no idea what to say, so an uncomfortable silence settled in. She was practically pawing at the dirt, wangling for an invite inside. He wanted nothing more than for her to leave.
“Well…” she began.
“Thanks,” he said, sliding past her, moving along the porch, then down the front stairs and across the grass toward her car, leaving her little choice but to follow along in his wake. Always the gentleman, he opened her door for her, once again leaving her no choice but to follow his lead. He closed the car door. She rolled down the window. The perfume smell of her nearly buckled his knees.
He thanked her again. She said it was nothing. Standing in the grass in his bare feet he watched as she drove around the circle and rolled back out through the gate. He stood without moving until even the sound of her car had faded to nothing and then walked over and closed the gate.
39
Audrey Williams slid into the booth opposite Jackson Craig. Her breathing was shallow, her face flushed. “Have you seen it?” she asked.
“Seen what?”
“The news. CNN, FOX, ABC… everybody.”
Craig frowned. “I thought you went to the loo.”
“I had to walk past the lounge. It’s on every damn TV.”
“What’s on every TV?”
“NCMAC went public,” Audrey hissed.
“You don’t say?” Craig offered.
“Not just the Colin Satterwaite DNA sample,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “About everything. Harry Joyce, the missing Fowles kids, the whole damn history of the thing. They know the whole story. Government cover-up, the whole nine yards.”
Craig met her excited gaze with a puzzled expression. “How could they possibly know about the Harry Joyce affair?” he asked. “That’s a highly classified matter.”
Audrey shrugged. “CNN’s comparing it to the Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapping stories. Rehashing everything. Showing all the old footage. The Smart family, the tents in the backyard. Everything. And get this… Colin’s mother and sister are on their way from upstate New York. Harvey Winter is going to have them on his show later in the week. This thing’s going to play out on national television.”
For the past twenty-two years, Harvey Winter had hosted a syndicated daytime TV show emanating from Chicago, wherein his guests, often as not, engaged in bouts of profane screaming and finger pointing, immediately prior to brief but spirited bouts of grappling, hair pulling and clumsy fisticuffs.
“Is that scandal-monger still on TV?” Craig asked in amazement.
“Still going strong,” Audrey assured him.
“Kinda makes you feel like a great many of your fellow citizens might not be the sharpest tools in the shed, if you know what I mean.”
“With my history,” she quipped, “I probably shouldn’t comment on that.”
She sat quietly and looked around the nearly empty restaurant. “You certainly don’t seem overly concerned about it,” she said after a moment.
He shrugged. “Who knows, maybe it will shake something loose.”
“Presuming our quarry reads the papers, and the literature suggest that he does, he’s about to discover the unvarnished truth about Harry Joyce,” she said.
“I’m more concerned about the time frame. He’s had Michael for three full days.” He took a sip of water. “Scares the hell out of me,” he added.
“Seventy-five percent of kidnap victims are dead after the first hour. Ninety percent after the first twenty-four hours. After that, the chances of getting them back alive are astronomically bad,” Audrey recited. “And I for one am not convinced that being on page one is going to help us find him.”
Craig shrugged, seemingly still unfazed. “Once it’s out, the toothpaste won’t go back into the tube.”
“And you’re not worried he might harm Michael,” she pressed. “That the true story of his life may push him over the edge. The only person we know who’s seen him in person says he appears to be in a semi-dissociative state. In all probability he’s experiencing some sort of major episode.”
“Why take the boy then? All that does is make things harder,” Craig said.
“You know what I’m thinking?” Audrey asked.
“Almost never,” Craig said.
“I think he’s trying to prove something to himself.”
“Prove what?”
Audrey considered the matter for a moment. “I think the operant emotion is shame,” she said. “Shame over what happened to him, over the things Harry Joyce made him do, over having capitulated…perhaps what he now thinks was too easily.” She raised a finger. “The only explanation I can think of is that he’s trying to prove to himself that any kid put in a similar situation would have done the same thing he did. That he wasn’t weak. That he didn’t capitulate too easily.”
Jackson Craig was still mulling the idea when the waiter reappeared. He ordered the roasted sea bass, Williams the shrimp and scallop risotto. By the time the meal arrived, however, fatigue had swallowed hunger alive, leaving neither of them with much of an appetite.
After twenty minutes of pushing food around their plates, they called for the waiter. Craig gave him ten dollars in cash and the company MasterCard for the dinner.
“Get a good night’s sleep,” Craig advised, after the waiter had once again come and gone.
“I feel like I haven’t slept in a real bed for a week,” Audrey said.
Craig pocketed the company credit card. “Now that the proverbial cat’s out of the equally proverbial bag, perhaps we can conduct a proper investigation,” he said.
Audrey Williams eyed Craig closely. Something about the formality of his tone and the sudden economy of his motions screamed of control. Like he finally had the pieces arranged exactly the way he wanted them. Audrey pretended to stifle a yawn.
40
Harriet Lopresi eased up to the front gate with her headlights off. She killed the engine and left the keys in the ignition, hoping to eliminate fumbling, thus facilitating a fast and silent getaway. Bad enough she’d forgotten something, no sense in bothering the reclusive Mr. Brown twice in one night. Lord knew that poor man was skittish enough as it was.
She used her Postal Service key card on the gate and hurried across the lawn, rising on tip toes to mount the front stairs and then to creep around to the side where she’d left her glove atop the porch rail.
As she crept noiselessly across the boards, her eyes fell upon the cake box, still sitting on the porch rail, right where he’d set it twenty minutes ago. He must have forgotten, she thought. Or maybe something had come up with Michael and he’d had to hurry off, leaving the cake behind. Nobody, after all, didn’t like her prize-winning chocolate cake. Absolutely nobody.
Her first inclination was to deliver the cake a second time, but she quickly thought better of the idea. Heck it was cold enough out here to keep it for a week. Instead, she plucked her glove from the rail, stuffed it into her jacket pocket and tip-toed back around the front of the house.
As she cat-footed past the front door, she noticed a shaft of light angling away from her, a trapezoid, glowing golden. The muted sound of voices stopped her feet. Harriet stood at the top of the stairs and strained to listen. After a moment, curiosity pulled her toward the front door like a magnet to a refrigerator. She slid over to the door and listened again. A child’s voice reached her ears, plaintive or in pain she imagined. And then again. The pull of the voice was irresistible.
She moved to the edge of the window shade, pressing her eye to the glass, trying to peek into the room. As she bent forward an alarm began to sound. Any notion of stealthy getaways immediately dissolved in the cold night air. Harriet made a mad break for the car. On shaking l
egs, she turned and ran, clomping down the stairs and across the lawn toward the safety of her Honda, sitting dark and sentinel silent just outside the gate. A high-pitched keening sound flowed from her open mouth as she stretched her legs and ran for the first time in years.
Ten yards from safety, her right leg mysteriously ceased to function, sending her sprawling face first across the icy grass. It wasn’t until she tried to rise that the pain began, a terrible burning sensation in the back of her leg, a flame searing her as she tried to force herself to her feet.
She heard his voice. “Come here,” he ordered. The boy didn’t move.
Harriet whimpered as she crabbed forward, crawling toward the safety of her car, her leg burning like an ember, as the man strode to the porch and grabbed the boy by the arm and pulled him down onto ground level.
When she looked back, the man was standing next to her on the grass; the boy stood shivering by his side. When he boy tried to turn his face away, the man used his free hand to turn the boy’s head forward.
“Watch,” he ordered.
A scream rose in her throat.
He shot her in the head three times and then handed the gun to the boy.
41
Daniel Rosen sat slumped in his chair, his tie loose, his stubby legs thrust out onto the plush carpet. He ran a hand through his wiry hair and looked over at Bobby Duggan who stood by the window gazing out over L.A. at night. Bobby’d shed his jacket, pocketed his gold cuff links, and rolled up his shirtsleeves.
“Justice is determined to fry somebody’s ass over this Harry Joyce thing,” Rosen said. “They want to know where the damn leak came from.”
“Too many agencies involved,” Bobby Duggan scoffed. “Too many big mouths. Too many opportunities for a leak.” He turned from the window and wandered back into the room. “They’re lucky Harry Joyce stayed sub-rosa for as long as it did.”
“You think it was Craig?” Rosen asked.
Bobby didn’t have to think about it. “Undoubtedly,” he said. “But I’ll tell you one thing…if it was Jackson Craig, Justice will never be able to pin the tail on him.”