Surrender, New York

by Caleb Carr

  I studied her face for a moment, leaning on one of the square columns of the porch with my right side to give my left hip a break. At length I said, with a quiet regret to match her own, “But you think he is.”

  She blew out a strong gust of smoke and nodded, tapping her ash in a tray on the wide arm of her chair. “You saw his reactions during the various parts of our conversation, I’m sure.” I nodded. “That would be enough to confirm that he’s mixed up in it somehow. He could barely stay in the room when we were discussing the structure of this supposed ring of child users, child abusers, whatever it in fact is.”

  “I did, as you say, observe as much.”

  “Yes, but what you didn’t observe was my earlier conversation with him.”

  I took out a cigarette of my own and lit it. “I may not have needed to.” She gave me a short glance, arching an eyebrow. “Before you were alone with him, when we were in the kitchen hallway and he was studying the photos of you and Diana—something odd happened. He revealed—and I’m still not sure if he’s aware that he did it, because he seemed to go into a severely detached state—but he revealed how very separate he feels from Lucas and Ambyr, for all that they are good friends and live together as a family. And then he hinted at something particularly strange: he said, ‘One day, it’ll be my turn to go.’ I’m sure, now, that there’s only one thing that could have meant: that it will be his turn to find a wealthy new family, someday, just as the others did—but he will make his new situation work out. That belief is an unshakable rock on which his entire mental stability rests. And who knows, Mike may be right—maybe others have made it work, somehow. But if a girl as smart as Shelby Capamagio couldn’t do it…”

  Clarissa studied my face again, more steadily and critically this time. “You’re certain that’s what he said? Because he used language very close to that with me, when talking about getting out of Surrender and never caring if he saw it again.”

  “Oh, it was what he said,” I replied. “And the thing is, it reminded me of the time I first met him: he tried very hard, when discussing the matter with Lucas, to believe that the first victim who was found, Kyle Howard, had had a good life after his family disappeared. Derek needed to believe it, even when presented with a series of facts that proved that it wasn’t so; and I think what made him nervous—so nervous that he had to haul ass out of the hollow—was that, not only was I contradicting his narrative about Kyle, but so was Lucas. He didn’t go because he believed all the stories about Death’s Head, or because he was afraid of life here on Shiloh—hell, he was fine with it, earlier this evening. It was that same terrible idea that maybe things hadn’t gone for Kyle the way he believed they had. So, before dinner, he unintentionally revealed that he might be intending to find out for himself—and the only way to do that would be to follow in Kyle’s footsteps. Escape, using the same path. So, yes, while we were at dinner, every mention of the case reignited that very scared and scary conflict of his—because he seems to want and need to follow that unknown path, a path that he must know the way down.”

  “Yes,” Clarissa said, nodding again, her gaze still on me. Then she smiled, just for an instant. “You know, Trajan, it’s a good thing that you had me around as a role model—you’ve developed quite a head for these things…” But as she turned back to the horizon, her momentary satisfaction seemed to fade quickly. “At any rate…I don’t think, as you say, that he’s going to really believe your version of facts until he’s gone through that other experience himself. Yet somewhere within him he’s aware that taking that path could be very dangerous. That’s what I meant about a nervous break. He clearly needs—not so much wants, but needs—something to happen, and soon, or the conflict will cause some kind of crisis.”

  “Indeed,” I said. “All the more so because, as is typical in such cases, I don’t think his fear of any danger will ultimately make him disobey the imperative to find out.”

  Clarissa took a final drag off her cigarette, stubbed it out, and, rising to go inside, said, “Any more than anything any of us might say will stop him. It’s just a lousy, lousy situation, nephew…”

  She started into the house, hands thrust deep into the pockets of her pants; and then the sound of tires spinning into the driveway became audible. Mike halted at the base of the lawn below the house and got out, calling, “Okay, Trajan—Pete just called again, and he wants us there but now.”

  “No reason to get the cattle riled up, Dr. Li,” Clarissa said, quietly but firmly. “You two go about your business—but at a civilized pace, please. And you—” She poked a finger in my chest. “You give that girl a chance. She’s something special, nephew…” Then, at last, Clarissa turned to the house again and I said good night to her as she went, a statement she acknowledged by raising a hand. It was a movement that seemed, at that moment, to require a great effort; and I knew that the entire dinner, to say nothing of what had underlain it (not least Derek’s predicament), had brought up difficult memories for my great-aunt, as well as reminded her that these were the kind of trials that she had best been able to manage when Diana was still alive; and I felt a moment of guilt about the need to involve her at all. Yet there was no other way to do what we needed to do.

  So I stepped off the porch and moved quickly toward and into the Empress. Mike backed a little more easily out of the drive, then turned the car’s V-8 loose once we were out of sight of the house, hurtling us into something for which, we would find, even we were wholly unprepared…

  {vi.}

  As Mike and I drove first along a high, roughly north-south, and unnumbered roadway that paralleled Route 22 in the Taconic foothills, eventually leaving even patches of blacktop behind, and then started to snake our way up often-hidden hollows ever higher into the mountains—sometimes jumping onto roadways that, far from having no numbers, had not even names—we both realized without needing to say it that we were approaching no “ordinary” scene of bloodshed and sorrow. No, what we began to sense, as even the scant light of the night sky was obscured by the thickening woods, was an act or acts so outrageous that they would make one truly feel, yet again, that society as we understand it in this country is unraveling at its edges: is, indeed, beginning to fray so badly that if the process is not stopped, we as a people shall soon be utterly unrecognizable to ourselves.

  As this knowledge of where we were going sank ever further in, the only sounds in the car were my occasional instructions on what turn should be taken—provided the next road was even marked on Mike’s GPS system, as several were not. Yet Fate would not tolerate our becoming lost, that night; and when the Empress’ headlights finally began to reflect off something white and metallic, we rightly suspected that it must be the back of Pete’s cruiser. Before long we had pulled up with an angry skid beside it, Mike having raised a great cloud of dry dust into what was becoming, that night, a steadily stronger east wind.

  The house that stood before our cars, gloomily illuminated by the Empress’ headlights, was one of those hideous old A-frame chalets, built in the 1970s out of dark wood stained even darker, so that over time it had become almost black. It featured, of course, a deck with a hot tub out front: a wooden-sided monstrosity of the type euphemistically called “Swedish,” which, like most of its vintage, had come to resemble some sort of soiled cauldron in which were boiled things about which it would be wise not to know too many particulars.

  In the years since its construction, the house had evidently changed hands many times, and fallen in value with each new owner’s failure to maintain it, so that it was now nothing short of a hovel. The wooden walls, their protective treatment left unrenewed for too many decades, had begun to warp and crack in many spots, while the shingled roof had sprouted greenery. The wooden railings on the decks outside each of the two upper levels of the dwelling had rotted and fallen away and, where replaced at all—presumably outside the bedrooms, so that some sleepy drunk inside did not go wandering off the edge—had been traded out for pre-EPA-code p
ressure-treated wood, which had taken on that forbidding grey-green tint that copper and arsenic produce as they age. The shutters on the windows, once undoubtedly thought picturesque, with their orange paint and heart-shaped cutouts, were now wind-whipped and falling away, to the point that a few were simply missing, while others had been screw-gunned back onto the walls for appearances’ sake, never to swing on hinges again.

  We found Pete standing amid what had once been the hillside lawn of the place, which was rapidly being reclaimed by the forest around it. Woodland undergrowth had already performed the advance work, and now there were saplings of the same kinds of trees that had slapped at the Empress during our drive up joining the invasion. But young pine trees were also present, whose parents surrounded the house, quite probably having been planted by the builders to increase the effect of being in some European hideaway, but in the end only cutting off nearly all direct light, even the little available that night. Pete himself was bare-headed, always an odd informality, when he was working, and was wiping his brow with a bit of shammy cloth that looked to have come from his cruiser—this, despite the fact that there was nothing in that strange breeze that seemed like cause for perspiration.

  As we approached him, we caught sight of the house’s final peculiarity: a pestilential-looking little equipment shed, built entirely of more carcinogenic pressure-treated wood. I could see from Mike’s expression that his mind was racing in the same direction that mine was: whatever we had been called to see, it was inside that shed. But when we turned, we found Pete just shaking his head.

  “Yeah, that’s what we thought, at first, too,” he said. “But that ain’t it. Just an outhouse, must’ve been dug after the builders sold out. And the pump’s for water—guess the septic went a long time ago, and since the building inspector, assuming Heinsdale even has one, never comes up here, they figured they were safe. Anybody else—say, the tax assessor—likely did a real fast drive-by. Not the kind of place you’d like to go into.”

  “No, it is not…” I said, my voice barely audible over the wind.

  “So, okay, then,” Mike announced, his trace kit in his hand and his voice all business. “Where do you want to start?”

  “The basement, Mike,” Pete replied nervously. “Start and finish, right down there…”

  The interior of the house, lit by work lights identical to those Curtis Kolmback had set up in the Capamagio trailer, displayed the same level of decrepitude as did the outer shell, while at the same time exhibiting many of the bizarre priorities that dominate modern American life. The sunken floor of the very large room that we stepped into was still covered by the same vile brown shag carpet that was likely original to the house. Its color hid a multitude of sins—all save the occasional burn from a cigarette or joint, as well as the rising and permanent stench of beer and wine. The once bright yellow walls, too, had probably not been painted in forty years, based on the extent to which their fading and peeling had advanced; while the very Seventies fire pit in the center of the open space badly needed cleaning, and was clearly the main source of heat for the entire house, augmented only by a few small electric space heaters: a suspicion confirmed by enormous piles of cut and split logs—some green and covered, curing for next year, some dry and ready to be burned anytime—that were stacked in the backyard and just visible through a large window in the kitchen. That same kitchen was an adventure in itself, strewn with dirty dishes and aging takeout boxes.

  And yet, hanging on one brick-faced wall of the living room, above a DVD player, was a wide-screen television: the only thing in the whole place that seemed to have received any investment, care, or cleaning. Such was not unusual, we’d found, in such places, both urban and rural; the only thing that was unusual was that anything else that wasn’t nailed down had been dragged away by the BCI, in that way that such agencies can sweep through a habitation and leave it looking like a dust bowl. Yet the house did not feel one iota more sanitized for their actions.

  “Okay,” Mike said to Pete. “So it’s a shithole. No big surprise. And your colleagues have taken away everything that might be of any use—no surprises there, either. It also appears, from the dusting and the chalk marks, that some FIC tech has had a little party.”

  “Yeah-uh,” Pete droned. “I called you as soon as Kolmback left. And, like you say, it is, being a genuinely disgusting mess, just about what we had expected to find.”

  “Curtis worked this scene, too?” I asked; and when Pete nodded knowingly, I could only frown in disappointment: I had thought better of Kolmback than to get mixed up in something like this. “Well,” I continued, “based on the television, I’d say that the Patricks had at least one computer.”

  “Yeah,” Pete answered. “Nice one, too. Driving around a piece-of-crap old Ford that was a danger to them and everybody else on the road, but they had one nice computer.”

  “Which is now in Frank Mangold’s hands, along with the Ford?” I asked, to which Pete nodded again. “That computer likely had some interesting things on it. Things they valued. Password-protected, or actually encrypted?”

  “I don’t know,” Pete said. “The BCI computer geeks are working on it now.”

  “Oh, well then,” Mike laughed. “We ought to have an answer in a month or so.”

  “And when we do,” I added, “it will be—guess what?—exactly what Frank and Cathy Donovan were looking for. Even if they have to pull the pictures off of kiddie porn sites themselves, it’ll still be going to the Patricks’ IP address. Ah, the conveniences that the Web has brought to law enforcement…”

  “Well, that’s kind of the way that Steve and I were looking at it,” Pete replied, his face becoming quite grave. “That is, the first time we went through the place, after the BCI boys were done. Top to bottom, there wasn’t a trace of anything you could’ve found objectionable. Couple of sex toys and a bottle of knock-off Viagra from Pakistan, but that was about it—and we pretty much figured the BCI left those behind, after they examined them, just for us to find. Make us feel like we were doing something.”

  “Sounds about right,” Mike judged. “How’s it feel to be the dog getting thrown a bone, Pete?”

  “Lousy,” Pete said emphatically. “Especially when all this other crap happened…” To Mike’s and my questioning looks, Pete nodded toward a doorway off to the side of the kitchen. “Come on…” And with that, Pete switched on a large Maglite he’d taken from his belt, then led the way down into a basement that had been formed of poured concrete, much of which was now crumbling.

  We had experienced, upstairs, the better portion of a house that—quite beyond being old and decrepit to the point of unhealthiness—was devoid of the most basic amenities, which had been moved, for reasons of cost or of laziness or both, to a hole in the ground within the equipment shed outside: an environment, in short, that was in every way a testament to filth. That much, however, we could prepare ourselves for, and had; but when filth turns first to degradation and then to sickness, well…Those are the types of situations where, whether you’re in New York City or a town like Heinsdale, there’s simply no way to fully brace yourself for what you are going to see.

  A solitary work light sat pointed at the ceiling atop an old zebra-skinned barstool (an obviously forgotten piece of the original furnishings of the house) in order to diffuse as much light as possible through the bunker-like basement. Because the high windows in the concrete walls had long since been coated in dirt and overgrown by brush and vines—to say nothing of the fact that it was so unusually dark outside—this was the only source of illumination in the chamber. Due to the clinical yet insufficient halogen glow the lamp gave off, Mike and I reached the bottom of the stairs before our eyes had really adjusted to what was around us. But when they did, we could not help but be further appalled, because all that the basement had evidently been used for, since the demise of the furnace, was the disposal of large plastic bags full of household waste. It must have been the Patricks themselves who had start
ed this practice, because the bags were still not numerous enough to do more than fill the farthest reaches of what we came to see was a fairly expansive basement, one fully as large as the footprint of the chalet wonderland above. Perhaps the original owners had intended to use this space as the kind of basement den that was so popular in the 1970s; whatever the case, it was now the part of the house that was, quite literally, a dump.

  But I was at a loss to understand why Pete should have been so unnerved by this, for reasons other than the basic; until Mike, who could turn and take in every corner of a room faster than I could, began slapping and grabbing at my sleeve (much as he had when we’d first met Ambyr at the Kurtz house, although for diametrically opposed reasons) and said, “Trajan—L.T., turn the fuck around—now.”

  In a slight recess among the garbage bags—one that looked, even on first examination, suspiciously like it had been created, not by the random placement of bags, but by their careful and recent rearrangement—sat a simple, medium-backed chair, old but completely out of keeping with the rest of the house: the first sign of a manipulative hand at work. And on this chair sat the body of a child. That might have seemed shocking enough, but the greater cause for both horror and consternation was the state of the body itself: although dressed in what seemed boys’ clothing, it would have been impossible to say upon first look whether the remains were male or female, because the skin was drawn so very tightly over the skeletal structure. The eyes were open, and, remarkably, the eyeballs were hauntingly intact, although shrunken by dehydration. The nose was drawn back toward the face, the cartilage severely desiccated, and the lips had been similarly dried and recessed to reveal the grimacing teeth and the dried gums in which they were rooted. As Mike and I moved toward the sight, borrowing Pete’s flashlight to get a better look at details, we saw that the hands had been none-too-tightly bound with a very soft braided drapery cord behind the back of the chair and to several of its slats, while the ankles had been tied, in a similarly loose, careful manner, to each of the front legs of the seat. Simple jeans covered the barefoot frame, along with a plaid shirt; and the only sign of life was the hair, which had continued to grow after death, albeit in a slow, uneven manner, until it formed a jagged frame around the head.