Redheads

by Jonathan Moore

  “Good point.”

  “For all we know, you come to him with this fork and this story, and he thinks you’re playing a sick hoax on him. So he throws it back at you, tells you an insane story of his own.”

  She bit her lower lip and shrugged.

  “Okay,” Chris said. “That’s a theory. Here’s another: what if it’s true?”

  She looked at him, considering it, but he started to answer his own question.

  “For one thing, it answers a couple questions. Namely, why he can swim so fast and why he’s still so strong after all these years.”

  “If he can really swim like that,” Julissa said. “That story might not even be true. And there’re easier explanations for the age. Like, he was seventeen or eighteen when he killed Tara Westfield.”

  “Let’s go through the report and see if we can find any holes,” Chris said. He picked up the first printed attachment.

  “You tell him about the connection to redheads?”

  Chris thought about it, replaying his few phone conversations and his face-to-face meeting with Chevalier.

  “No,” he finally said.

  “Interesting he says the man or thing we’re looking for is a redhead.”

  “You think that means anything?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  For a while they sat in silence and read the attachments. Julissa went back into the room and returned with her laptop. She balanced it on one leg and held the printout on the other and looked something up. Chris’s phone rang and they both jumped.

  “Maybe it’s Chevalier,” Chris said. “I left him a message on the way over.”

  “I’ve already left him two,” Julissa said.

  Chris picked up his phone and saw a familiar number. He answered and put it to his ear.

  “Hey, Mike,” he said. He met Julissa’s eyes and shrugged. “I’m with Julissa…yeah, she’s in Honolulu. I’m going to put you on speaker.”

  He set the phone on the coffee table and hit the speaker button.

  “You guys read it?” Mike said.

  “We’re going through the attachments now, but yeah, we read it.”

  “You been able to get in touch with him yet?”

  “No, but we both tried.”

  “So did I. Office and cell. There’s a receptionist picking up in the office but they’re saying he didn’t come in for the day,” Mike said.

  “Where are you?” Julissa asked.

  “I left Westfield to finish up in Galveston and caught a flight back to Honolulu. I’m driving home.”

  “Let’s meet at my house for lunch,” Chris said. “See if we can sort this out.”

  “Fine with me,” Mike said. “I think I got my wife’s college biology textbook somewhere. I’ll bring it.”

  He hung up.

  “Sounds like Chevalier’s keeping his head down,” Julissa said.

  “We’ll reach him,” Chris said. “Even if it means flying back there and knocking on his door at three a.m.”

  An hour later they had finished going through the attachments to Chevalier’s email. Westfield called Chris while they were midway through, and they spoke to him on speaker phone. They agreed there was no point in drawing conclusions until they talked to Chevalier.

  Julissa took their coffee cups back to the counter in her room and then they sat on the balcony together and looked out at the ocean.

  “Now what?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does it change anything?”

  “If the report’s bullshit, we might’ve just lost our best lead. Even if he actually returns the evidence, we can’t be sure he hasn’t ruined it.”

  “You think it’s true?” Julissa asked.

  Chris shrugged. “It’d explain some things. But it sounds crazy.”

  “There’s still the FBI angle,” she said. “We might get something good out of that.”

  “Where are you on that?”

  “It’s almost all on autopilot now. Assuming she clicks the link in the cloned email I’ll be sending her, I’ll be able to start monitoring her computer use. From there, I’ll pick up her passwords whenever she logs into the FBI intranet. Once I have those, I can start working my way into headquarters.”

  “And then?”

  “I’ll start checking for deleted files in VICAP. I should be able to figure out when the data was removed and track where and how the commands to remove it were made.”

  “Basically the same investigation the FBI would be doing if they tried to track you down.”

  “Yeah.”

  Chris stood, resting his forearms on the rail of the lanai. Three surfers were kneeling in the sand next to their long boards, rubbing them down with disks of wax. He watched them for a while, then watched the way the wind was moving the fronds of the coconut trees that lined Kalakaua. He guessed it would be getting windier by the evening.

  “So, for the FBI hack, you’re just waiting now,” Chris said.

  “That’s right. It’s frustrating.”

  Chris nodded. He didn’t want to tell her she might end up waiting a long time. Years. He looked at the pile of printed documents on the coffee table. They really couldn’t make any sense of them, even though they’d tried. He felt like flying to Boston and strangling Chevalier.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chevalier sat in his study and looked out the bay windows at the forest outside his house. Wind coursed through the poplar and birch trees and blasted rain against the windows. Every few minutes he closed his eyes at the electric-violet flash of nearby lightning, followed almost instantly by a long peal of thunder. He regretted his email to Chris Wilcox but was having trouble getting his computer to connect to the Internet, so he couldn’t do anything about it. It was probably the storm. He lived eight miles southwest of Foxborough, near the Rhode Island border, deep in the woods. Maybe the high winds had knocked a tree branch into something, or lightning had taken out one of the cable company’s service hubs. He still had electricity for the moment.

  He lifted his telephone and listened for a dial tone, then called his office. The receptionist answered. He told her he was at home, and if Chris Wilcox called, she should route the call to his home number. Before she could say she understood, the line went dead. So much for that. He hung up the phone and picked it up again. He still had a dial tone. When he redialed his office, he just got a busy signal. Intelligene was in the woods too—a tree must have gone down on one of their telephone lines. That had happened a few times before. He hung up the phone and swiveled in his chair to watch the storm.

  In the distance, he heard what must have been all three fire trucks from the new substation in Joes Rock racing east towards Foxborough. Even with the rain pounding on his roof, he could hear the sirens and the deep blasts of the horns for a long time. When he walked to his kitchen to get a cup of coffee, he could hear new sirens from the southeast. That would probably be the substation over in Plainsville, two miles through the woods outside his kitchen window. Thunder cracked overhead and when its sound rolled off into the distance, the plates in his cupboards were still vibrating. The sirens faded in and out with the rain as they grew farther away. He took his cup of coffee and went back to his study. He flipped through TV channels until he found a station broadcasting the weather report. The live Doppler radar showed a second storm coming in off the Atlantic.

  The bad weather hadn’t really gotten started yet.

  He looked out the windows. Even though it was barely past lunch, it was as dark as dusk outside. He thought what a great day he’d picked to stay home from the lab. He could watch the storm and catch up on his sleep. He’d left his cell phone at the office and apparently no one at the office could call him from the land lines. Chris Wilcox and his friends would just have to sit it out. He put his feet on his desk and changed the channel on the TV until he found a movie.

  After the second commercial break, during which he’d gone to the kitchen to make a bowl of popcorn
, his electricity went off. There had been no sudden crack of thunder or house-shuddering gust of wind, though it was still raining heavily outside. With the TV off and the lights out, the study was lit by grey storm light. He picked up his phone to see if it still worked. He had a dial tone when he picked it up but he heard it cut-out as he was returning the handset to the cradle. He picked up the phone again and it was completely dead. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t quite four o’clock.

  He started to the kitchen for candles, and as he was turning away from his desk and towards the door, he saw something pale glide past the window behind his desk. He whipped around. It had been at the edge of his vision; now there was nothing. The only movement was the forest itself, branches whipping in the storm. Rain pelted the window glass and ran down in sheets. A rhododendron bush grew below the window but its leaves were an olive green and nothing close to the dirty white color of the shape he’d seen move past the glass.

  He backed away from the window and stood by the door to the study, watching. He was sure he’d seen something. As he stood looking at the window, he heard a sound coming from behind him and down the hall. It sounded like it was coming from his bedroom. Or rather, it was coming from outside one of the bedroom windows. It sounded like—what? He listened to it and as he placed the sound, his skin erupted with goose bumps. He was listening to something incredibly sharp scratching against wet glass.

  Some kind of claws.

  He sprinted down the hallway to his bedroom and then stood at the closed door. For a second he considered the idea of just going for his car. His car keys were on a hook in the entry way and his BMW was parked in an open carport under the maple trees on the far side of his entrance drive. But going outside would mean being in the storm with whatever was out there. The scratching suddenly stopped. It had been insanely loud and now it was completely quiet. Every hair on his body was standing straight up. He hadn’t heard any glass break. He opened the bedroom door and dashed into the room, looking at the window as he made his way to the bed.

  There was nothing out there. He had to turn his back to the window and kneel at the edge of the bed, groping underneath the bed frame. The scratching started again and he spun around on his knees but the window was empty. The sound came from one of the bathroom windows. He had never heard anything like it. It was like someone was trying to wear down a razor blade by grinding it against a mirror. He was sick with terror and for a moment forgot why he was on his knees in his bedroom in the shadows of the storm. All the mattered was the scratching sound. Then it stopped. Rain pelted the roof. A lull of silence. Chevalier remembered where he was and why: his pump-action shotgun was under the bed. He reached again and found its stock, then pulled it out. He chambered a shell by pumping the walnut grip and the sound made him feel better. He had six shells of twelve-gauge buckshot. There was a full box of ammunition in the study. The sound was probably just a raccoon or something, terrorized by the storm. But the house was on a high foundation and the ground-floor windows were six feet off the ground. The window in the bathroom was at least ten feet off the ground.

  It started again, this time from the windows in the kitchen. There were four tall windows behind the sink and behind a long granite counter. French doors at the end of the kitchen opened onto a wooden deck that overlooked the forest. Chevalier leveled the shotgun, took off the safety, and crept to the kitchen. On his way past the bathroom he glanced inside and saw the double-paned storm window was scored deeply with five parallel lines about an inch apart. He stood staring at that for a moment, and then the scratching from the kitchen changed into a pounding. It sounded like something huge was slamming against the French doors.

  He stepped into the kitchen and rounded the corner of the oak-paneled pantry so he could see the French doors. The venetian blinds were drawn down, hiding the glass from view. Something slammed against the doors and he saw them shudder with the weight of whatever hit them. The blinds rocked back and forth as though they were in a breeze. He couldn’t see outside.

  “Who’s there?” he shouted.

  The slamming just went on, then turned into scratching again. The deadbolt on the French doors was engaged. Thank God for that.

  “I’ve got a twelve gauge shotgun and I’ll shoot through the fucking glass!”

  He shouldered the shotgun again and aimed at the center of the venetian blind on the right-hand door. When the scratching turned back into pounding, and before he started shaking too hard to keep his aim, he pulled the trigger. The gun blast was deafening in the granite and wood-paneled kitchen. The buckshot tore through the blue venetian blind and blew through the square glass panel on the other side. The shot left a hole the size of a soccer ball in the middle of the door. But the blinds were still in place and he could not see out of the remaining glass. The wind blowing through the broken window moved the blinds a bit, but he could only see shadows. The smoke detector started blaring at a skull-splitting volume from the powder smoke that filled the kitchen. He ignored it and started to move towards the door. He had to have hit it, whatever it was. If he could get a little closer, he would be able to see through the hole in the blinds. He pumped the shotgun to chamber another round and stepped towards the door.

  “I’ve reloaded, asshole!”

  The gaping hole in the door was a little higher than waist level.

  He was within four feet of it, and began to crouch so he could see out. The end of the shotgun’s barrel was about a foot from the door and aimed straight at the hole. He stole a quick glance at the windows behind the sink and saw nothing. He looked back in front of him just in time to see a flash of pale white flesh shoot through the hole in the glass and take hold of the gun barrel. Before he could even pull the trigger the thing outside yanked the shotgun from his hands. It disappeared through the hole in the doorway. The smoke detector blared on and on. He scrabbled away from the French doors on his hands and knees and pulled himself through the door to the hallway. It had happened so fast he didn’t even see what came through the door. A blood-streaked white hand? He was breathing so fast he felt his head spin.

  Now the scratching started again, so loud he could hear it over the wailing smoke alarm. He ran down the hallway and opened the door to the guest bathroom. This was the only room in the house that didn’t have windows. He shut the door, latched its flimsy lock and immediately understood he’d made a mistake. He sank to his knees next to the door and listened. First the smoke alarm stopped. Then, eventually, the scratching from the kitchen stopped. He didn’t hear any shattering of glass and he didn’t hear any door open. There was just silence, and the sound of the storm.

  And then he heard something on the roof.

  His house was shingled in fine gray slate and he could clearly hear the hard tapping of footsteps moving around the roof. Then the scratching started again, but in a different pitch—claws on stone, instead of glass. When the pounding started it was harder than before. He heard shingles breaking, the shards skittering along the steeply pitched roof. There was splintering as the plywood underneath the shingles caved and broke. He was paralyzed with fear, kneeling against the bathroom door and shaking. He wet himself.

  There was a thump and the ceiling shook. Dust drifted down from an air vent. It’s in the attic! His mind was screaming. It beat a hole in the roof and it’s in the fucking attic! The footsteps overhead stopped. His eyes were squeezed shut and he was trying to stop the shaking. That was when it spoke. Its voice was thin and strangely high pitched and seemed to come from straight within his head. It was like listening to a saw blade that could speak. It was right above him.

  “I…can…smell you.”

  His terror finally broke his paralysis. He stood up and flung open the door and tore down the hallway to his house’s entrance. He snatched the car keys off their hook, threw open the front door and barely touched the porch on his way across it. He took the five stone steps to the front sidewalk in a single leap and hit the ground running. It was normally about a hundred p
aces to the car, but he made it in twenty five. In the dusky light and sudden flash of lightning, he saw the BMW sitting on four flat tires. He stopped short and turned to look at the house.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  There it was, on the peak of the roof. In the rain and steady stream of leaves and twigs blowing from the forest behind the house, he could barely make it out. It was a crouching, naked white shape that loped at incredible speed down the slope of the roof towards the lawn.

  Chevalier turned his back on it and ran towards the road, two hundred feet away at the end of his driveway. He saw a black car parked sideways across the front of his driveway, blocking it. It was boxy and jet black with tinted windows. A Rolls Royce, maybe. At a dead sprint in the storm, he couldn’t tell whether anyone was inside. But his instinct told him to stay away. He turned towards the trees and ran through the forest instead. He could meet up with the road in five hundred feet, could run along it for an eighth of a mile, and would be at his closest neighbor’s house. Before he made it into the trees, Chevalier looked back once more and saw the thing leap from his roof and onto the grass of his yard. It came at him on all fours like a dog. Chevalier screamed and ran into the trees.

  When he next looked back he couldn’t see it. Without meaning to, he came to an abrupt stop to look. Then he saw the thing coming at him and understood how stupid it had been to stop: it was a scurrying blur, darting from tree to tree so fast it looked like something from a stop-motion film. How could it move like that? It was almost on him. Fifty feet. Chevalier turned and ran again. He tripped on roots and fell to his knees and kept moving on his hands and knees until he was back on his feet. Now he could hear it behind him. He didn’t dare look back. He could see the road ahead of him, rain swept, dark and empty. Something shoved him from behind and he went face first into a tree. He turned around and barely saw a clawed hand as it swept across his face. Claws dug into his eyes. He screamed from the pain and at the same time the thing pummeled into his stomach, slamming him to the ground and knocking the wind out of him. He was blind and breathless.