The Abbey (a full-length suspense thriller)

by Chris Culver

  “Wish me luck,” I said, taking the picture and holding it up. Susan’s eyes bored into me. Tough crowd.

  I walked into the interrogation room, and Karen immediately looked away.

  “I have nothing to say to you, Detective.”

  I put the picture and my coffee on the table and slid both to her.

  “I got you some coffee,” I said.

  She took a sip and made an ugly face before spitting it back.

  “You can keep it,” she said, pushing the coffee towards me and pulling the photograph to herself.

  “I’m guessing the baby is your nephew Feng,” I said. “Are those two his parents?”

  Karen nodded.

  “Where are they now?” I asked.

  She looked up.

  “Dead.”

  I waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t.

  “Why did you want me to go to Hong Kong?”

  She didn’t answer immediately, so I pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down to show that I was willing to wait as long as it took. Her eyes were black and hate–filled when she looked up, but I didn’t think they were directed towards me. Not solely, at least. I softened my voice.

  “Your nephew is dead, Karen, and my guess is that he died for a reason,” I said. “Don’t let him take it to his grave. What were you trying to do?”

  Karen didn’t answer. I waited a few minutes before glancing at the camera and shaking my head to let them know we needed to try another approach. She started speaking when I pushed my chair back.

  “They killed them two months after this picture was taken.”

  “Who?” I asked, settling back into the chair.

  “Soldiers. They were kids,” she said, scrunching up her face as if she didn’t understand. “Twenty years old, and they executed them for publishing a newsletter about democracy.”

  “This was in China?” I asked.

  Karen nodded.

  “So you wanted revenge,” I said.

  Karen shook her head vehemently.

  “I wanted to make sure they couldn’t do the same thing to anyone else,” she said. “You should understand that. You have a family.”

  I nodded as if I had stepped off the bus at crazy town, too.

  “But things went wrong and Rachel Haddad died,” I said, leaning forward. I glanced at the camera in the hopes that they were recording the session.

  “Miss Haddad was an accident,” said Karen. “My nephew was experimenting with alternative shipping methods, and some of our products were mixed together. We sold irradiated blood to encourage kids to join us. That blood got mixed with a shipment, and Rachel died after drinking it. It was a mistake.”

  Somehow I didn’t think that would comfort her family.

  “What about Robbie Cutting?”

  Karen sat up straighter.

  “He walked in while some of our people searched his room. Another regrettable mistake.”

  I nodded again.

  “There seem to be a lot of those going around,” I said. “So vampires were just theatrics?”

  Karen shrugged.

  “People will do anything for you if you give them something to believe in.”

  I glanced at the camera suspended from the ceiling in the corner of the room.

  “Why’d you pick Indianapolis?” I asked.

  Karen shrugged.

  “Same reason Fedex and UPS build hubs here. Half the country’s population is within a six–hour drive.”

  That made sense. I nodded.

  “So what were you trying to do?” I asked. “I know you weren’t after money.”

  She shrugged again.

  “I wanted them to feel the same pain I felt.”

  “You wanted who to feel what?”

  She looked straight at me.

  “I wanted everyone in the Chinese government to feel the pain my nephew and I feel every day. I wanted them to suffer as we did.”

  Our eyes stayed locked, but Karen didn’t say anything else for a moment. I rubbed my chin.

  “And you thought you could develop a virus that would do that for you?”

  Karen looked down at her hands, a wistful smile on her face.

  “I didn’t think, Mr. Rashid. I did. Now I need someone to deliver it.”

  As soon as Karen finished speaking, the room’s only door flew open and the two FBI agents I had seen with Bowers burst in.

  I stood quickly, but Karen hardly moved. Susan walked in shortly after, her cheeks flushed and her lips compressed to a thin line. She held up her hand, stopping me from speaking.

  “Dr. Rea, you are to go with these gentlemen,” she said, before turning to me. “Detective Rashid, you are to sit there and shut up.”

  At least Susan was direct. I waited to speak until the FBI agents and Karen were out of the room. I stood up. Susan cut me off as soon as I started to speak.

  “I appreciate the work you’ve done on this, Ash, but we don’t have the resources to handle this case.”

  “You’re kidding. Karen was confessing. What more do we need?”

  Susan looked at the officers outside.

  “Shut the door and turn off the camera,” she said. Someone complied, at least about the door. I sat on the edge of the table, putting Susan and me at the same height. She leaned into me despite the room’s privacy. “We seized more than eight million dollars in cash from Karen’s warehouse last night in a joint operation with the local FBI field office. We’re announcing that later today. What we’re not announcing is that we also found a very sophisticated lab. We’re not announcing that because I got an offer from a Deputy Director of the FBI. The federal government gets the case, we get the money. All we have to do is shut up about everything.”

  “They found something,” I said.

  Susan nodded.

  “And it scared them enough to give up a multimillion dollar seizure to make it disappear,” she said.

  I nodded again, mulling the situation over.

  “I don’t suppose I get any of that money.”

  Susan didn’t blink for about a minute and a half, but then she burst into a full–blown laugh. A simple no would have sufficed. She left the room a moment later, still chuckling intermittently. I got a ride home after that from Mike Bowers. Neither of us said anything until he pulled up to my mailbox. Hannah was on the front porch, waving at us, while Megan drew something on the front walkway with chalk.

  “That’s a good–looking family,” said Bowers, nodding. “You’re a lucky man,”

  I nodded and stayed in the car. I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to formulate the question in my mind.

  “I got an e–mail a few days ago before all this went down,” I said. “Are you a friend?”

  Bowers chuckled and rubbed his chin.

  “Don’t look too much into that,” he said. “Olivia Rhodes had been under investigation for months, but the Prosecutor’s Office had been dragging their heels about an indictment. We suspected she was fucking Jack Whittler.”

  “So you used me to get her?”

  Bowers shrugged.

  “You use the tools at your disposal,” he said. “I read your file. I knew you wouldn’t quit. I didn’t expect this, but it worked out in the end.”

  “Then why’d you arrest me and beat down my door?”

  He shrugged again.

  “I never really liked you,” he said. “And I didn’t trust you until Rea took your kids.”

  I wanted to punch him, but instead I climbed out of the car and shut the door behind me. Bowers drove off as soon as I got out. Megan ran towards me, her arms outstretched.

  “I drew the sun,” she said. I picked her up and examined her artwork on the sidewalk. It looked more like a soccer ball than the sun, but I wasn’t going to correct her. I put her down near her drawing where she promptly started drawing stick figures that I presumed would later be flaming astronauts due to their proximity to a star.

  “The mail came, and there’s a lett
er for you from the law school,” said Hannah. “How was your meeting?”

  “It was interesting,” I said, already walking toward the kitchen door. “I’ll tell you more in a minute.”

  As Hannah said, the mail had arrived, and I did have a letter from the law school. It was about as well written as the fine print that accompanied my credit card statement, so I had to read through it three times to understand it. Since the Dean hadn’t been able to get in touch with me following my outburst in Professor Ruiz’s class, the Judiciary Board met to decide my fate without me. Apparently they knew Ruiz was a dick because they decided not to kick me out of school. Instead, they dropped me from the class and requested I avoid taking it from him that winter. That was one request I could accommodate.

  I walked back outside and met Hannah on the front porch. I didn’t know if I wanted to go back to school or even if I wanted to go back to work. All I knew was that my family was safe and that’s all I cared about. I sat beside Hannah on the front porch and put my hand on her knee.

  “Anything interesting?” she asked.

  “Nothing life changing,” I said.

  Hannah slipped her hand over mine, and we watched Megan draw for a few minutes. She had been crying in my arms twelve hours earlier, and now she was playing without a care in the world. I wished everything was so easily fixed.

  “Did you call your sister yet?”

  Hannah nodded.

  “She and Jack are fine. A little surprised we weren’t home when they came home yesterday, but fine.”

  I nodded and leaned back.

  “Good,” I said. “I was thinking of taking some time off. Maybe we can go on vacation.”

  Hannah squeezed my hand.

  “I’d like that.”

  I didn’t have a drink that night; I didn’t need to. I knew that eventually I’d have the dreams again. It might be a week or even a month, but eventually they’d come back. Probably the next time I tell someone that they’ve lost the person they hold most dear in the world. I’d see their faces and share in pain so profound and all–encompassing that there is no escape. It’s my penance for the mistakes I’ve made. But I didn’t have to face it right away. For a brief while, I had been granted a peace I couldn’t earn myself.

  A note to readers

  I hope you liked the book. Ash was a lot of fun to write, and he will be showing up again in the future. (My hope is by November 2011.) In the meantime, I’ve enabled lending for this book, so if you know someone else who would like it, please share it. And if you’re feeling industrious, please consider leaving a review. Reviews help me get the word out, which is a difficult task for a debut novelist.

  At any rate, I’ve taken enough of your time. Happy reading.

  –Chris Culver, March 2011.