She frowned. "No."
"Did Kit know about him?"
"No. Yes, I think so." She sighed, bored.
"If she knew about him, why didn't she go to the police?"
"I thought she did."
That was a curve. Would Kit have done it, or not?
"Was he stalking both of you, or just you?"
"I don't know." She sipped again.
Brant noticed that her breathing was miraculously normal again.
He felt his patience slip away. He wanted to grab her, shake her. He held off. "Irina, this isn't a game. We don't even know if Kit's alive."
"What you want from me?"
"You were the only one there."
"I saw nothing, she just disappeared. It's what I tell you and it's what I tell police."
Her accent had thickened and her grasp of grammar slipped. Unless it was an act. Was everything an act with this chick? He changed his approach. "Where are you from, originally?"
"Kosovo."
Kosovo.
The name conjured up too much, too many images. War, refugees, massacres, sectarian violence, ethnic cleansing, genocide. It was as loaded a word as Vietnam, and he felt some sympathy for her suddenly, some understanding that perhaps she was scarred. That she might have been innocent. Maybe part of her past had followed her just as his past — the jungle, the tunnels, the death — had followed him.
He'd counseled several American chopper pilots who'd flown missions during that war. They had seen too much, and through their eyes he had seen some of what had ruined them for life. It wasn't so different from what he had seen. Now there were thousands more just like them, home from Iraq but prisoners forever. Nothing ever changed.
He closed his eyes for a second, overwhelmed.
When he opened them — it must have been only seconds later, but didn't seem like it — Irina's face was inches from his, her eyes locked with his until he blinked rapidly. He could smell her, the muskiness of her skin and the sweet scent of her make-up, and then she was smudging her lips on his, hard, and he couldn't help but respond, even though his mind knew he was simply taking more bait, and as her tongue slipped between his lips and met his, her eyes searched the depths of his and he wondered what she saw.
Still connected at the lips, she suddenly turned quickly and looked away from him, a streak of violet scarring her porcelain-white cheek.
Brant felt his arousal and knew she'd felt it, too.
"You're too old," she said, smirking.
He smiled at her game. "Yeah, and you're too cheap."
She raised her fist as if to slap him, but stopped in mid-motion. She smiled also. "I think you are right, Mr. Brant. I raise my price starting now."
He turned and headed for the door, reaching into his pocket for a pen and a scrap of paper. He placed it onto an end table as he passed it. "Here's my cell number. Call me if you hear from Kit or if you see this guy again. I'm going to want to talk to him. Or the guy from the mall."
"Which guy?"
"You know the one. Who tangled with Kit? And you'd better cooperate with the police, Irina. Sergeant Colgrave is serious."
"You like her." She wiped her cheek with one hand.
He turned away. "Call me."
He heard her soft, mocking laughter even after the Eye of Horus winked closed behind him.
SEVEN
Brant dialed his cell.
"Hey Brant." Colgrave's voice reached him before he could put the phone to his ear.
"How'd you know it was me?"
"Caller ID."
"I have a blocker on my phone."
She chuckled. "We're the cops. We have an unblocker that blocks your blocker. Kinda."
So much for his privacy. He'd need another phone, now, too. A clean one with an innocuous ID attached. He knew where to get some Trac pre-paid phones. He put them on the list.
"Nifty!" he said, smiling. "Any results from the canvass? From the roommate?" He didn't mention his findings at the apartment, or Irina's clumsy attempt at seduction. Not until he could sort it all out.
"I don't hear 'nifty' all that often." Then her voice hardened. "Nah. Talked to your Irina. Pulled her out of class. She was pissed, but she acted nice. I got nothing much there, though. I had two uniforms with me at the mall and we got nothin'. Mall PS office didn't file any reports other than the usual disturbances. Loud kids, mostly. No big fights, scuffles, and certainly no suspected kidnappings reported — wait. Oh, and the PS guy says based on what the girl Irina told me, they would have had to notice a kidnapping. That hallway she described is right in front of their dispatch office."
Brant made a mental note. It might bear checking into. "What's your impression of the kid?"
"Irina? I finally caught her on campus, like I said. She's like a wound-up spring, you know? But final exams could be the reason. Reamed her out for not calling right away, but she insists Kate — Kit? — has done this sort of thing before — disappearing act to see a boyfriend."
Brant almost stomped on the brake. "What? No. No way."
"What do you mean?"
"She wouldn't do that."
"Unless she's changed, you mean. People do change, Brant."
"You don't know Kit. It's not just that she's a goody-goody, or anything like that. But this behavior — it's just not her style. She doesn't have boyfriends — she has friends who happen to be male. Plus, you saw her father. She's been independent for years. She's a thousand times more responsible than he is. She would never have a reason to do a disappearing act. Not this way, not out of the blue."
"First time for everything, Brant."
"You sound like you've seen it all, Colgrave."
She sighed. "Danni — Colgrave is what Zimmerman calls me, and you don't want to be confused with him in my head." She paused. "Yeah, I've seen too much. Not all of it other people, you know?"
"Sorry about that. We'll have to compare stories some day. But right now, Kit's the only thing on my mind."
"Like I said, there's a first time—"
"Not this girl. I'm telling you, she's too intelligent to just want to disappear. Listen, you said Irina said Kit does it all the time. That's bullshit. Pure and simple bullshit. As fucked up as my brother is — and you can probably find that out — she's exactly the opposite. So the roommate's got to be lying."
He heard air expelled at the other end.
"Why?"
"Good question. Let's look at that angle for a second. Hiding something? Maybe she witnessed and is too scared to admit it."
"She didn't look scared when she talked to me."
"Okay then... you tell me."
She was silent. Brant heard traffic sounds in the background and a rhythmic tapping.
"What's that sound?"
"What?" The tapping stopped. "Oh, this?" The tapping resumed.
"Yeah."
"Hitting teeth with the phone."
"Sounds healthy."
She laughed, a strong throaty laugh he found amusing. "That's my middle name — Healthy. Actually I'm a walking mass of complexes and neuroses. And incipient illnesses."
"Welcome to the club. I started it, and I'm also a member."
"I'll keep that in mind." Humor lingered in her words as they faded out. Or was her signal weakening? "Hang in there for about twenty-four or thirty-six more hours and she'll switch to a Missing Persons officially. Until then, I get the feeling this is just Zimmerman being courteous, though I never would have seen it coming."
"Zimmerman? He doesn't know the meaning of the word. He's paying off a debt, that's all."
"I don't know anything about that. Hang in there, Brant, and meanwhile we're doing all we can. Check with you later?"
"Fair enough." He cut the connection and tossed the phone aside. He'd use only this one to call her from now on (and why did he suddenly look forward to it?), but for all other purposes, it was dead.
He turned into the yacht club parking lot. Pulling up to the concrete wall, he had a clear view of the gunmetal-g
ray December whitecaps on the lake and he could hear their constant roar even through his closed window. He had owned a boat once, a 32-foot teak-appointed SeaWinds ketch, but now he occasionally came here to watch the waves and think. Hardly anyone here would remember him, but he looked familiar enough that they let him be, even when he parked in the private lot. Zimmerman would remember the boat. Brant had lost it because of him.
Long, sad story.
Staring at the water always helped. That was one reason his time in-country had been so rough — no shore in sight except during rare periods of R and R in Japan, no place to reconnect with the water. Even though this was no ocean, he felt its pull and influence. Any large body of water acted like a magnet, and he let himself be gently kissed by the lake's proximity. It was a ritual he revered.
But not today.
Jesus, this thing with Kit was driving him crazy. He had half-expected to find out she really had stayed at a boyfriend's house, or studied all night in some student apartment, or even that she'd drunk too much and passed out on somebody's puke-stained bathroom floor. None of these things fit Kit in the least, but any of them would have been preferable to the alternative.
He went over Irina's story. Both her stories. And he couldn't help but conjure up her face, that lovely model's made up face paying him attention. How long had it been since Abby? But he knew there was nothing there, nothing he wanted. What was the point of seducing him?
There was something she'd said, something in her damned sexy almost-accent.
"Suddenly I became aware that Kit was not behind me any longer."
What was wrong with that?
Jesus, he couldn't think. The sound of the waves was not soothing today, and it did not give him the comfort he sought.
By the time he drove home it was mid-afternoon, and the short-lived daylight quickly waned as if somebody rode a dimmer switch.
On auto-pilot, he made mental lists of options. He didn't have many. But one was beginning to take shape.
Problem was, it might already be too late.
KIT
When she was little, her father stepped out of his marriage.
He was wild, he was on drugs, he had bad friends, he was a bad influence. Her mother had told her these things, and after a while she had come to believe them. But her mother always spoke well of her Uncle Rich, how he'd been a hero three times over in Viet Nam — she pronounced it Viet-Naam — and how he'd been so much better than her no-good father. But Kit didn't need her mother telling her all this. She'd seen how attentive Uncle Rich was. The birthdays he remembered, postcards from faraway places. She gave up thinking of him almost as her father. She gave up wishing he were her father. When her parents divorced, she had no idea why she was left with her father, Ralph, who had stepped back in when she entered her teens. She thought he'd pulled some strings to gain custody, and when her mother's terminal cancer came to light, Kit half-suspected her father had orchestrated that, too. Her mother had ended up in hospice and died while Uncle Rich was away on one of his mysterious trips. In the meantime, her father had sunk even lower, raiding her mother's estate with some sort of sleazy lawsuit. Kit had to live with him, but she'd made it clear that her uncle meant more to her. Her relationship with Ralph had stabilized at cool and impersonal, because open hostility could get her branded a problem child and it would give him more control over her.
She remembered how her Uncle Rich had cried when he'd returned and found that Kit's mother had died while he was away on whatever business he did with whatever countries he disappeared into for months at a time. She had seen the pain in his eyes and, for a second, she had seen something deeper and more meaningful than anything in the whole world, but then it had been gone, lost as if on a cold winter breeze.
She rolled over as well as she could with the chain impeding her a little. She stared at the cinderblock wall. Someone had written on it in light pencil.
I want to die.
Someone else had added: Join the club.
Kit stared at the girlish scrawls. Suddenly she felt their presence on her squeaky bunk. Who were they? What had happened to them? Did the one who wanted to die get her wish? Suddenly the thought of dying was loose in her head, turning around and around like a caged dog. The thought led to others, and now she felt a shiver work its way up her legs, through her torso and down to her fingers. It wasn't cold in the cell but she felt goose bumps rising on her arms. The thought of dying at the hands of these pathetic, soulless men led to a quick, jabbing terror she hadn't known existed until now.
She drew her knees up into herself as much as she could and closed her eyes to avoid seeing the words that now repeated on continuous loop in her head.
I want to die.
EIGHT
Grey, colorless dirt — almost like dust if you let it trickle through your fingers — loosened and fell into the hole when Sarge and Digger moved the trap door a few practiced millimeters. Brant felt the fear shiver ripple down his back along with the sweat. The booby-traps were getting better and more clever. If there was a wire, even a small movement could have stretched it and fused the detonator.
Brant nodded, looked into their veiled eyes, and trusted his men's steady hands. They would hold the thick wood and rubber trap so he could pass the "divining rod," a long, thin metal dowel, through the gap, hoping to feel a taut detonator wire before it could be stretched. At this range, if he missed it three of them would either buy it or lose a limb or two. Ringing the hole, the rest of the squad trained their M-16s on either the trap or the perimeter, in case Charlie popped up out of a secondary rabbit hole and squeezed off an AK burst or tossed a grenade.
Brant waited for his own hands to steady, then held his breath and passed the dowel between the dusty ground and the camouflaged trap door cradled so tenderly by his men. The rod cleared the trap door's area without any snags, but by now the sweat was a trickle along his nose and down the back of his fading collar. He could hear droplets slide off his nose and splatter in the dirt below. For a second he wondered if the rest of the world had gone unaccountably silent. The quiet seemed to build up in his ears, pressing on his ear drums, until he realized that his own halted breathing contributed to the illusion. He forced his breath out-in-out before passing the divining rod back toward himself, in case some bizarre circumstance had caused him to miss a filament wire. The month before another Rat squad had been decimated when their diviner had missed a thin wire cleverly channeled along the edge of a trap door, slacked enough to be missed by cursory inspection. Brant had given up all cursory aspects of his job.
If only a detonation meant certain death, he might have accepted it. But he was far more likely to suffer ruined or severed limbs and disfigurement the rest of his life, and that was out of the question.
The second pass yielded nothing more than the first, so Brant set down the rod and motioned for his sweating assistants to begin the next phase, removal of the door. He sensed rifle muzzles aimed his way and blinked away sweat droplets that found his eye and stung mercilessly. Sometimes there were two doors to a tunnel, one set further in, and Charlie would pop out with a grenade once the Rat squad had lowered their guard. The only solution was to never lower your guard.
Brant's breath slowed to a minimal stream from his nostrils. He sniffed the air. Often the best way to detect the presence of a tunnel fighter was the man's body odor. The tiny Vietnamese men — tigers, one and all — rarely bathed as they lived in the tunnels for weeks at a time, making them ripe to American noses. Recently Brant had heard that more experienced tunnel fighters had taken to rolling their bodies in the wet clay before an attack, so maybe that advantage was now gone, too. Ironically, the American obsession with cleanliness and camouflaging smells worked against them — Brant had forbidden his men from using deodorant, shampoo, aftershave, and mouthwash. He allowed only harsh local soap for their infrequent showers. They all reeked now, but at least their smell didn't immediately give them away.
He blinked away a sti
nging drop of sweat. To his eyes, the colors splashed through the clearing seemed enhanced, brightened to the point where green, the ruling color, had become an almost brilliant blue. The sky, which had been its normal shade early in the morning, had turned copper-gold wherever the canopy above allowed a glimpse. Browns were now grey-black.
Brant glanced at each of his men, all veterans of many tunnels save one, a green kid from Vermont who swore he'd hunted all his life — wasn't this the same thing? Smith, of all things. How common a name for so uncommon an occupation. Brant swallowed hard. His mind was wandering.
He wanted his mind to wander. He cast out his thoughts in radiating waves and watched them ripple around and downwards. Actually he saw no waves or ripples, but imagined that if he could see the maneuver his mind executed when he thought these images, then the image would fit his fantasy. You would have thought he needed to deepen his focus, but he had learned over the last few months that he needed to widen and almost defocus before the desired effect could occur.
It wasn't as sure a thing as cold beer on a hot day, but he'd honed whatever it was he had been given, a talent, a gift, a curse, some kind of power, to the point where he now felt he could rely on it. In the last seventeen holes, it had never been wrong.
Almost never.
Brant's focus — or defocus — slipped. He attempted to regain it, feeling as though he were swimming against a current that wanted to drag him under dark waters. Wet patches under his arms suddenly reeked of rotted garbage, the same smell as the rear of the mess hall after everyone had tossed their food remains into the metal bins. He looked up sharply, but no one seemed to have noticed. Muzzles remained frozen in mid-air, aiming death all around him, but he was isolated, left alone in the middle of the clearing, the divining rod inches from his hand, his mind trying to send out its ripples.
And then the well-camouflaged second trap door swung open beneath him and he looked deeply into the black eyes of death.
The grenade spun out of the hole and skittered away out of sight between legs even as Brant fired the cocked .38 downward six times. He inhaled the putrid stench of his armpits blended with the cordite, and then the grenade flashed and his scream was lost in the delayed flat crack. Brant looked down and saw his intestines slipping like bloody ropes onto the ground.
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