The Informant

by James Grippando

  She switched off the machine and fell back against the pillows, sighing with disappointment. She reached across the comforter for the television remote on the nightstand, then stopped as she noticed his leather flight bag resting in the corner. It was still lying where he’d tossed it this morning, beside the skimpy white tennis dress he’d ripped right off her. He’d always taken the bag with him on his other trips. She wondered why he hadn’t this time.

  She slid across the bed, then knelt on the floor beside the bag. She felt a little like a snoop and hesitated, but her excitement grew as she ran her finger lightly over the leather straps. Slowly, she unzipped it and peeked inside.

  There was a razor and toothbrush and other uninteresting stuff. She smiled to herself as she sniffed his cologne. The extra pair of baggy boxer shorts triggered a smirk. He was too embarrassed to wear the bikini briefs she’d given him. Not much of a bulge for such a big man. That didn’t bother her, however. He knew what she really liked, and whenever he buried his face between her thighs he was her golden boy with the magic tongue.

  Magic, and tireless. Lustful thoughts of him putting her flat on her back brought tingles inside. His muscular body would glide over her breasts and stomach and slowly disappear below the vaginal mound. She imagined him sliding the pillow gently beneath her ass, then grabbing both cheeks with his huge hands and pulling her toward him as her body arched to receive his kiss. On impulse, she touched herself through tight designer jeans. Lightly at first, then gradually harder, rubbing back and forth in the way he liked to tease her. Her heart pounded at the first sign of wetness, but her hand quickly pulled away. The drapes were still open, she suddenly realized, and with the bedroom lamp shining brightly someone outside could easily see her.

  For a split second that possibility seemed strangely exciting. Still on her knees, she was frozen between this titillating new freedom and her old feelings of embarrassment that had always cramped her fantasies. She took a deep breath, afraid of her own feelings. No man had ever driven her so far. She’d wait, she decided. Maybe he’d come home early.

  She rose to one knee to close the drapes, then stopped. In the bag’s side pocket she noticed that self-help book again—the one he’d joked about never having read. Her eyes brightened with renewed curiosity as she slid the book from the pocket and cracked it open. Strangely, the pages felt stiff, like maybe he really hadn’t ever read it. She flipped to the page marked by the cocktail napkin. It looked used, like he’d had a drink. A message was scrawled on the back in ballpoint pen. She lifted it carefully from between the pages and read it to herself. Don’t be a stranger. Victoria…555–9511.

  Her eyes flared, and the napkin shook in her hand as she read it one more time. Tears welled in her eyes, but she looked like she wanted to scream, not cry. She threw down the book and fell back on her butt.

  “You slut,” she said in a voice filled with anger. “Keep your hands off him.”

  On Thursday morning Hannon headed through Long Island City in western Queens on his way to La Guardia Airport. Outside it was clear and comfortably cool, but with the Volvo’s heater cranked up to eighty-five degrees, he was sweating through his shirt and sticking to the leather seat. He would have liked to crack a window, but he didn’t want to chance it. His precious cargo had to stay warm.

  He stopped at the light at the busy intersection of Jackson Avenue and Vernon Boulevard, the commercial center of the neighborhood. Huge four-barreled stacks of the old Pennsylvania Railroad generating plant towered above butcher shops, diners and modest shingle homes. A steady stream of commuters rushed along the sidewalks, disappearing into the subway like rats into their holes. Rats, all of them, he thought. Like Curt.

  He turned down a side street by a deserted warehouse, scoping for a secluded place. A stretch of boarded-up buildings ahead looked promising. He slowed as he rounded the corner, then turned quickly down a narrow alley. The car came to a stop behind an oversized Dumpster filled with planks, charred roofing shingles and twisted pipes that had been yanked from the buildings.

  Hannon left the motor running and the heat blasting as he stepped from the car and closed the door. He raised his arms up over his head. The cool air felt good on his sweaty pits. He walked around back and popped the trunk.

  Rollins grimaced at the sudden burst of light; Hannon winced at the overwhelming stench. A white rat scurried beneath the blanket.

  “Where are we?” asked Rollins weakly. All that time in the trunk had taken its toll.

  “Antigua.”

  Rollins blinked hard as his eyes struggled to adjust to the morning sunlight. He didn’t even have the strength to parry Hannon’s sarcasm with a reply.

  “Sorry about the accommodations, partner,” Hannon said.

  Rollins lay on his side, hands behind his back. He looked up anxiously, then managed a semblance of a smile. “Does that mean you’ll untie me?”

  He placed his foot on the bumper, raised his pant leg and unsheathed the knife. “What do you think?” he said flatly.

  Rollins swallowed hard, his eyes nervously darting back and forth from the diving knife to Hannon’s stoic expression. With lightning speed Hannon lunged forward. Rollins squealed, then gasped at the sight of the little white rat impaled on the knife. Hannon flung the bloody rodent aside, then wiped the blade clean in the blanket.

  “Like I said, we’re partners now,” he said with a flat smile. “You and I are going to Antigua.”

  Rollins sighed so heavily he trembled with relief. “You mean it?”

  “You bet I do…Mr. Venters.”

  Rollins smiled smugly. “Pretty clever, huh? All that stuff’s first quality. I went to the Social Security office myself to get the card issued. Come on,” he said as he pointed with a nod. “Cut me loose.”

  Hannon cut the ropes from around his ankles, then from the wrists.

  Rollins extended a hand. “Help me outta here.”

  “No way,” said Hannon. “We may be partners, but I refuse to ride in the front seat with you smelling like a rat.”

  “Shit, man. I can’t stand it in here no more.”

  “Just a few more minutes. I promise. This is the last time you’ll ever have to ride in the trunk.”

  Rollins grumbled, then sighed with resignation. “All right. But if I’m in here more than five minutes, our fifty-fifty split becomes sixty-forty.”

  “Whatever you say, partner.” They exchanged smiles as he closed the trunk.

  Cautiously, he opened the rear door on the driver’s side. The wave of heat hit him in the face like a blast from the tropics. A large canvas bag stretched across the entire seat, draping partially onto the floor. The cold air from outside set it in motion—a slow, rolling motion, like lovers in a sleeping bag.

  EXOTIC PETS OF QUEENS, the bag read.

  Hannon snugged up his leather gloves, then took the knife and cut the drawstring at the near end. The motion increased, and part of the bag slid up from the floor and onto the seat. He made an opening the size of his fist, being careful to point it away from him. Out popped the head of a Burmese python.

  He grabbed it from behind. It flicked its tongue.

  “That’s it, boy. Get that tongue going. Smell the rat.” He opened the latch in the backseat that led to the trunk. This time, the strong odor pleased him. He could feel the snake pulling toward the trunk. Its tongue flicked again and again, picking up the scent. He’d handled plenty of snakes as a teenager while helping his mom at the veterinary clinic, and he could always tell the aggressive ones. It was clear now that the pet shop owner hadn’t lied: This one had been raised on live prey.

  “Dinner time, Monty. Go get the rat.”

  He released the head, and the snake speared through the opening. He watched with fascination as all thirteen feet slithered through the hole. Its skin was smooth and beautifully patterned. The body was skinny, then fat—as big around the middle as a good-sized watermelon—then skinny again.

  A bloodcurdling scream emerged
from the trunk. “Frank, no!”

  Hannon slapped the latch closed. He laughed to himself as the screams grew louder and more horrific. Lots of kicking and thrashing about, like Tarzan wrestling the giant anaconda in some jungle stream. It lasted nearly a minute.

  Then all was quiet. Eerily quiet.

  Hannon imagined the snake coiling around Curt’s body several times, pinning his arms at his sides, squeezing tighter and tighter each time its prey gasped for air. A death grip. Right about now, the distensible jaws were unlocking. Snakes, he knew, always swallowed their prey headfirst. Curt might even be alive as its gaping mouth covered his hair, slithered over his face and wrapped around his throat. It would hold him that way for hours, trying to work its mouth around his shoulders and swallow him whole. It would probably never get past his head, but it would die trying. Dinner for this carnivore was the biggest piece of meat it could fit in its mouth. To it, Curt was nothing but a big fat rat. Snakes could be so stupid.

  Almost as stupid as Curt.

  Chapter 34

  victoria and her friend Freeda Schnabel arrived at the Fairfax County sheriff’s office promptly at 10:00 A.M. They’d met ten years ago during their initial sixteen-week training session at Quantico, where they shared a dorm room. After graduation they’d gone to different field offices—Victoria to New Orleans and Freeda to Sacramento—but they’d kept in touch over the years, keeping tabs on each other’s career paths. They’d ultimately landed a relatively few miles apart, but the gap between the Training Division in Quantico and Headquarters in Washington wasn’t necessarily measured in miles.

  As Victoria had expected, Freeda did a first-rate job of convincing the boy’s father that hypnosis was the way to go. Freeda was five years older than Victoria, a mother of three who had worked as a family counselor in Los Angeles before joining the FBI. She hadn’t lost her touch.

  At 10:40 A.M., a red light blinked on over the door to the police interrogation room. It was a signal from Freeda. She’d wanted no one but herself and the father in the room with the boy while he was going under. Victoria and Sheriff Woodson quietly shuffled into a cubicle adjacent to the interrogation room. Hidden behind a one-way mirror, they could see inside the room, but they couldn’t be seen. That way, if the boy suddenly woke up, he would see only Freeda and his father—not a roomful of strangers.

  Eleven-year-old Alex Barnes was slouching in his chair, eyes shut, as if he were fighting sleep. He was a thin boy with freckles on his cheeks and a little turned-up nose. He wore blue jeans and an oversized shirt. His high-top, Velcro-strap sneakers were the expensive and cool kind that kids could pump with air for a better fit. Victoria wondered how happy it had made his mother to be able to buy them for him.

  Freeda sat directly across from Alex, with the boy’s father right at her side. He was a plain fellow, somewhat on the chubby side and lacking a chin. Alex took after his mother, thought Victoria.

  The sheriff glanced at Victoria and said quietly, “You think we’ll get anything?”

  “I don’t know. My guess is that the killer wasn’t quite sure how much ketamine to give to a child. He apparently didn’t give him enough. The boy could have heard something he wasn’t supposed to hear.”

  The sheriff reached across the table and switched on the speaker. Victoria could suddenly hear everything that was said on the other side of the one-way mirror.

  “Alex,” Freeda said in a soothing voice. “What do you see?”

  The boy just shook his head.

  “Can you see anything?”

  “It’s dark,” his voice quivered.

  “Where are you?”

  His shoulders shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Sleepy.”

  Behind the mirror, the sheriff glanced at Victoria and rolled his eyes. “Of course he feels sleepy. He’s hypnotized.”

  “No,” said Victoria. “It’s the tranquilizer the killer gave him. She’s taking him back to the closet.”

  Freeda moved closer to her subject. “I want you to think hard, Alex. Think about what you can hear.”

  He shrugged again, this time in a very exaggerated motion—like a child who is hiding something.

  Freeda paused, then asked, “Can you hear anything?”

  The boy said nothing, didn’t move.

  “Tell me what you can hear, Alex.”

  His body went rigid. “Time,” he said in a very faint voice.

  Freeda moved closer, modulating her tone. “Time for what, dear?”

  His little face shriveled into a pained expression. “Need to know…time. Tell him! Just tell him, Mom!”

  His sudden shrillness chilled everyone in the room. He took several short, panicky breaths, and then there was silence. Cautiously, Freeda pressed forward. “What else, Alex?”

  His lips quivered, seemingly with fear. “Color.”

  “You’re seeing colors?”

  “What color! What color was it!” He was shouting at the top of his lungs, squirming in his chair. In a split second he cowered and covered his ears—shaking but saying nothing.

  Freeda backed away, allowing him to recover. Victoria watched with trepidation from behind the glass.

  “What the hell kind of gibberish is this?” the sheriff muttered into Victoria’s ear.

  “It’s not gibberish,” she said quietly. “It sounds like he overheard some kind of interrogation—the killer talking to his victim.”

  “You’ve got a serial killer who wants to know what time it is?”

  “Just listen,” said Victoria.

  As the boy sobbed and sunk lower in his chair, the room filled with an uneasy silence. His face grimaced, as if he were shutting out sounds, trying not to listen. Suddenly, in spastic motion, he screamed and fell to the floor.

  “Mom!”

  His father sprang from his seat and rushed forward. “That’s enough!”

  The boy came to, roused by the sound of his father’s voice. Victoria closed her eyes as the man hugged his trembling son.

  “Well,” said the sheriff, “that was good for nothing. Unless you call a traumatized child ‘progress.’”

  Victoria didn’t feel like arguing with the sheriff about whether it was better for the boy to open up than to keep it inside. For the moment, she just wanted to be away from it. She headed out to the lobby and disappeared into the ladies’ room.

  Two minutes later, Freeda caught up with her. “You okay, Victoria?”

  She was leaning over the sink, staring at her tired face in the mirror. She glanced at Freeda in the mirror. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  She straightened up, still looking in the mirror. “You know me. I’m usually pretty stoic. But every now and then, it gets to me. Seeing an innocent child like that, emotionally scarred for life.” She paused, then turned and looked her friend in the eye. “It reminds me of a niece I used to have.”

  Freeda’s eyes clouded with sympathy. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know about that.” She moved closer. “Was it recent? Your losing her, I mean.”

  “Seems like it. It’s actually been quite a while. She was eight. She’d be twenty now. Twenty and beautiful and with her whole life ahead of her.” She blinked hard, suddenly full of memories. “Everyone used to say she looked a lot like me.”

  Freeda laid her hand on her shoulder. “You want to tell me what happened?”

  Victoria took a deep breath to regain her composure, then shook her head. “Let’s just say it wasn’t the serial killers that made me want to work for the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit.”

  She flashed a sad smile of gratitude, then headed for the door.

  Hannon left New York at noon, one o’clock Antigua time. In Puerto Rico he changed planes to the Antigua-based LIAT, short for Leeward Islands Air Transport, locally known as “Luggage in Another Town.”

  Luggage, however, wasn’t a concern. He traveled lightly with just an overnight bag. He’d burned
all his clothes back in New York, along with the big rat, the little rat and a thirteen-foot snake. By now the Volvo was in a thousand pieces, having gone to a chop shop in Queens for a quick two grand. It was his cardinal rule: Destroy all evidence. Once the deed was done, never drive the same car, wear the same shoes, or even use the same toothpaste—ever, again. True to form, his khaki slacks, cordovan shoes and navy blue blazer over a pink oxford-cloth shirt were all brand-new, purchased just that morning with cash from Rollins’s apartment. It was typical West Indies business attire.

  The plane landed in Antigua at 5:22 P.M., about an hour before sunset. Bird International Airport was a busy hub for air traffic between islands, the O’Hare of the Caribbean, but that was like calling Little Rock the New York of Arkansas. A steady stream of small one-and two-engine propeller planes took off and landed as he walked across the runway and into the terminal. Inside, the customs officer didn’t even stamp his passport. Turned out, United States citizens didn’t need one. A driver’s license and birth certificate were good enough.

  “Purpose of your visit?” asked the customs officer inside the glass booth. He had a hint of an English accent. The tone, however, was decidedly mechanical, as might be expected on a tiny island of ninety thousand people that was besieged by half a million tourists each year.

  “Business,” said Hannon. Then he smirked with an afterthought. “And pleasure.”

  He rented a Jeep at the airport and drove south across the island. The British leeward islands had a much flatter terrain than the volcano-scarred wind-wards, so the roads had fewer treacherous curves. Potholes, however, were a nuisance, and as he swerved from side to side to avoid the craters he had to keep reminding himself to drive on the left, like in England. Through the island’s dry interior he passed rolling scrub and the hollow cones of decaying old windmills. They were among the few remaining structures from the dark days of slavery and sugarcane plantations. Even then, as now, the spectacular coastline was the main attraction. Antigua boasted 366 beaches in all.