It was obvious to both of them that Holly was dead, but Jan still placed a finger on the woman’s carotid artery to check for a pulse. Her eyes met Carrie’s and she shook her head, grimacing.
Carrie turned away, looking to the left at the sight she’d been avoiding since entering the bedroom. The Weekly Globe had not lied. There really was a rhino boy. Or there had been a rhino boy. For someone had cut off the child’s head, tossing the small, broken body against the wall, where it lay slumped at an impossible angle on the side of the dresser, and placing the head atop the bureau, where dead eyes stared sightlessly over the room through slitted apertures in the rough gray face.
Carrie felt sick. She had no idea what had happened here or why, but the insane savagery of these murders and the lengths to which their perpetrator had gone in order to disguise his true intent made her think that this was far more than just an ordinary crime.
She wondered if Rosalia and Juan were in danger, too.
Already, she could hear sirens approaching. She wondered if the police who had been involved in the confrontation down the street had finished with their business and were now on their way here or whether an entirely new set of cops had been dispatched. It didn’t matter. Either way, someone was coming to the rescue. She felt a tremendous sense of relief and realized for the first time just how frightened she was. The automatic sense of duty that had kicked in was finally starting to slip, denial and impassive detachment giving way to horror and emotional comprehension. Already her hands were starting to tremble.
‘‘Let’s wait out in the hall,’’ Jan said, her voice shaky. ‘‘I can’t take this anymore.’’
Carrie nodded, and the two of them made their way carefully back out the way they’d come, maneuvering through the apartment in an effort to cause as little contamination to the crime scene as possible.
Crime scene?
Technically, Carrie supposed, that was correct, but the description was far too prosaic. What had happened here was much more than a mere crime, and to classify it as such was to diminish it. This was something deeper, more complex and far more frightening, and she did not feel safe until the interviews were over and she and Jan were out of the building, out of the neighborhood and back at the office.
Five
The big story was still Tom Lowry. A week after his death, the Beverly Hills businessman’s epic breakdown was still front-page news in Los Angeles, and Brian desperately wished he could get in on that action. Although he hadn’t shared it with anyone, he had an angle on the story that no one else did: the crazy scrawls found in Lowry’s journal and on the blood-spattered walls of his bedroom looked exactly like the ‘‘writing’’ on his father’s letter. He had no idea what he could do with such information, but it was that connection much more than his traditional reporter’s instinct that made him want— no, need—to investigate the murder spree.
He was the low man on the totem pole, however. Despite his awards, despite the fact that the Times had actively recruited and hired him, there were other reporters with more awards and, more important, greater seniority. Brian was going to have to prove himself before any editor trusted him with a plum assignment like the Lowry killings.
Right now, he was waiting for callbacks on three different stories, and he sat in the break room with a sports columnist, a couple of feature writers and an editorial assistant. All of them were reading various sections of today’s paper. Ted Sprague, an entertainment reporter, walked in, got a cup of coffee from the machine and sat down next to Brian at the middle table. ‘‘So,’’ he announced to the room, ‘‘what do you think is the best Charlie Brown cartoon? I’m conducting a little in-house survey.’’
‘‘For what?’’ asked Mike Duskin, the columnist.
‘‘For an article I’m doing.’’
‘‘What’s it about?’’
‘‘I’m not going to play games with you. Answer the question or not. I don’t give a shit.’’
Mike laughed. ‘‘Okay, okay.’’ He thought for a moment. ‘‘Has to be the Great Pumpkin.’’
‘‘Why?’’
‘‘I don’t know. It’s the funniest. Has the best music.’’
‘‘I vote for the Christmas one!’’ Steve Hernandez shouted out.
‘‘I hate the Christmas one,’’ Max Banks said. ‘‘Charlie Brown is such a fucking whiner.’’
Everyone laughed except Ted, who seemed on some level to be genuinely offended. ‘‘He’s not a whiner,’’ Ted said defensively. ‘‘He’s just depressed because Christmas has become so commercialized.’’
‘‘He’s a loser and a whiner. Let’s look at the facts, Jack. At the beginning, Charlie Brown pouts because he didn’t get a Christmas card and no one likes him. So to cheer him up, Lucy makes him the director of the play, though he has absolutely no qualifications for the position. He becomes a complete megalomaniac, insisting that the most important thing is for everyone to pay attention to him, the director. When the other kids ignore him and have a little fun dancing, he throws a tantrum, slams his megaphone on the floor and bangs his head on the wooden arm of the chair. To placate him, Lucy sends him out to buy a Christmas tree, making a specific request for the kind of tree that would best serve the play. Charlie Brown completely disregards her instructions, thinking he knows better, and gets the wrong one. When everyone laughs at him, he cries that he doesn’t understand the true meaning of Christmas. Linus explains it to him, and when everyone is feeling good and humble and a rapprochement is possible, Charlie Brown doesn’t apologize or make up with the other kids—he takes his tree and walks out. On the way home, he steals one of Snoopy’s ornaments to decorate his tree. When it’s too heavy for the little tree and makes it bend over, he gives up, quits and runs away crying. Everyone else has to decorate it for him. After he sees what a good job they did, he finally agrees to sing with them. Like I said: a loser and a whiner.’’
‘‘Yeah,’’ Mike chimed in. ‘‘Besides, what kind of Christmas play combines the story of Jesus and some beauty contest about a Christmas queen? What’s that about?’’
‘‘Aw, fuck you,’’ Ted said, standing and picking up his coffee cup. ‘‘Poll’s over.’’
Everyone laughed.
‘‘Charlie Brown,’’ Max said, nodding toward Ted’s retreating back.
Brian smiled. He was eating a Dave’s Buttermilk Twizzle that he’d bought from one of the vending machines, washing it down with a too-small cup of uncarbonated Coke. Breakfast of champions, he used to tell his buddies at UC Brea, where a Twizzle and a Coke had been part of his daily ritual. But he must be getting old, because now the combination was starting to give him a slight stomachache, and he wished he’d chosen something else.
Returning to his cubicle, Brian called up the unpublished photos of the Lowry mansion on his computer and got out the Xerox of his father’s letter. He wasn’t sure why he’d been keeping this a secret, why he hadn’t shared it with anyone, and it was getting harder and harder to convince himself that the reason was merely journalistic competitiveness.
Because everyone might think my dad had something to do with the slaughter.
Close, but no cigar.
Because I think my dad might have something to do with the slaughter.
Bingo.
For about the hundredth time, Brian stared at the Xerox with its smudged fingerprints and indecipherable scrawl. It looked to him as though a brain-damaged child had attempted to imitate ancient hieroglyphics while under severe time constraints. He found it almost impossible to reconcile the father he remembered with this chaotic, illegible scribbling. And the idea that his dad was involved in any way, shape or form with the carnage wrought by Tom Lowry was inconceivable to him. But despite his initial skepticism, he had no doubt that his mom was right, and there was no question in his mind that the letter she had given him was from his father.
His eyes looked to the photos on the screen, examining the ragged symbols scrawled in blood on the filthy walls
of the Lowry mansion. The assumption everyone was working off was that the writing was nonsense, the random ravings of an unhinged mind. But Brian knew better. It was a language. What kind of language, he didn’t know, and that’s where he needed to start. His first step should be to find a linguistics expert and have him examine the letter, the journal and the bloody characters on the wall of Lowry’s house.
‘‘Brian?’’
He turned in his swivel chair to see Wilson St. John, one of the Times’ chief financial reporters, standing by the corner of his cubicle. Wilson had been assigned by the paper’s managing editor to help Brian navigate the confusing waters of the newsroom the first few days— for no reason other than the fact that their desks were in close proximity—and Brian found that although they were an odd couple, he and the older man were surprisingly in sync in a lot of ways, especially journalistically. The two of them had hit it off almost instantly.
‘‘Hey, Wilson,’’ Brian said. ‘‘How goes it?’’
‘‘I have a small favor to ask of you. Would you mind accompanying me to my desk for a moment?’’
‘‘Sure. Hold on a sec.’’ Brian turned over the Xerox of his dad’s letter and minimized the gruesome picture on-screen—he didn’t want any of the Lowry reporters to think he was trying to horn in on their story—then followed Wilson to his workstation two cubicles away. The other man pushed his chair to the side, making space enough for both of them to stand in front of his neatly ordered desk.
Wilson pushed the speaker button on his phone console and pressed a series of numbers on the keypad. ‘‘Listen to this message I received on my machine.’’
He pushed another button, and from the speaker Brian heard a deep voice intone in a slow, carefully modulated voice: ‘‘I have been fucking her for more than a day and my erection will not stop. Oh no, it will not stop.’’
Wilson looked around, lowered his voice. ‘‘I think it’s Bill Devine, the CEO of Oklatex Oil.’’
‘‘What?’’
The other reporter nodded. ‘‘I’m working on a story involving the merger with British Petroleum, and I’ve talked to him half a dozen times. I’m pretty sure it’s his voice.’’
‘‘When did you get this?’’
‘‘It was left last night around midnight. Eleven fifty-seven, to be exact.’’ He pressed the button again and they listened to the message once more.
Brian looked at him, shaking his head. ‘‘That’s really weird.’’
‘‘To say the least.’’ Wilson paused. ‘‘Are you busy?’’
‘‘Not at the moment. Why?’’
‘‘I’m scheduled to interview Devine in an hour. At his office in Century City. Would you like to accompany me?’’
‘‘Sure.’’
Wilson smiled. ‘‘To be honest, I’m afraid to go by myself. I’d take a photographer, but it’s a financial piece and Jimmy won’t let me have one. Your presence would be legitimate, however. You could write a sidebar, a feature on . . . on . . . well, you’ll figure something out. Let me talk to Jimmy and see if it’s all right.’’
Wilson walked into the editor’s office while Brian stood there and waited. On top of the other reporter’s desk he could see, next to the computer monitor and behind an old-fashioned pencil holder filled with pens arranged by color, a framed photograph of Wilson’s family: a handsome older woman and a stunningly beautiful teenage girl. His eyes shifted to the phone console, and he thought about the voice mail he’d heard.
I have been fucking her for more than a day and my erection will not stop. Oh no, it will not stop.
It was the robotic, mechanistic delivery of the words that seemed so chilling. Wilson was right: ‘‘Weird’’ didn’t cover it. The more he considered the message and its improbable source, the more Brian realized how completely insane the whole thing was.
Wilson emerged from the editor’s office smiling. ‘‘You are doing a piece on the effect of the merger on Bill Devine’s philanthropic efforts in LA.’’ He held up a hand. ‘‘It’s reaching, I know, so let us make haste and leave before Jimmy changes his mind.’’
They took Wilson’s car, a two-year-old white Cadillac sedan, and on the way he filled Brian in on the details of the BP merger and his impressions of the man himself. Wilson had met with Devine twice previously and had spoken to him on the phone half a dozen times more in the service of different stories over the past few years, and his image of the CEO was of a fiercely intelligent, laser-focused, detail-oriented business savant who, like most men in his position, was wary and guarded with the press.
Which was why Wilson found the voice mail so disturbing.
‘‘I wonder if he’s just cracked under the pressure,’’ Wilson speculated as he drove. ‘‘For all I know, he could be waiting for me in his office wearing a clown nose, with a spatula in one hand and a dildo in the other.’’
‘‘Or a shotgun,’’ Brian said softly.
‘‘Exactly.’’
With two of them in the vehicle, they were able to take the freeway’s carpool lane, and they arrived at the office building ten minutes early. Rather than wait for the appointed time, they decided to go straight up to Oklatex’s headquarters on the top floor. ‘‘I doubt that he’s even there,’’ Wilson said as they entered the elevator in the lobby. ‘‘I would imagine that the message he left on my machine originated from his house.’’
‘‘Then shouldn’t you have called first to see if he was here?’’
‘‘Oh, no,’’ the other reporter assured him, pressing the button for the fifteenth floor. ‘‘He could have canceled on me if he was here—which he has been known to do. I didn’t want to give him that opportunity.’’ Wilson smiled. ‘‘Besides, we might see something . . . news-worthy.’’
The elevator doors slid open. In front of them, a sculpture of freestanding metallic letters spelled out OKLATEX OIL. Brian had been expecting a corridor, but instead they were in a large, modern, expensively furnished space that seemed to take up the entire floor of the building. Green plants and skylights gave the room an open, airy appearance. Occasional segments of curved wall partitioned the floor into sections, but there were no cubicles, modular workstations, or even any individual offices that he could see.
Wilson had been there before and obviously knew where he was going, so Brian followed him past the OKLATEX OIL sculpture to a woman in the center of the room who sat typing on a computer keyboard behind a huge drawerless desk that appeared to be made of Plexiglas. ‘‘Hello,’’ he said. ‘‘Wilson St. John, here to see Mr. Devine.’’
The woman looked up apologetically and not a little guiltily. ‘‘Oh, Mr. St. John,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m sorry. I should have called you. Mr. Devine won’t be able to make the meeting today. It’s my fault. I should have let you know. If you’d like, I could reschedule you for another time. Would you like me to check his calendar for you?’’
She was talking too fast, and they both caught it. Wilson shot Brian a look. ‘‘Did Mr. Devine say why he wasn’t available?’’ he asked.
The secretary spoke guardedly. ‘‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to divulge such information.’’
‘‘Well, can you tell me whether Mr. Devine has been in today?’’
‘‘I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Devine is a very busy and important man, and he doesn’t want his whereabouts to be made public, as you might imagine. Let me just check his schedule and see if we can pencil you in . . .
Brian glanced around as the woman spoke, looking up at the domed skylight, down at the potted palm beside the secretary’s desk. His gaze settled on a dirty piece of paper lying on top of a pile of business correspondence next to her computer. His heart started to pound. Even upside down, Brian could recognize the type of characters scrawled on the page. His mouth suddenly felt dry.
The secretary saw where his eyes were focused and quickly turned over the paper. Her face reddened with embarrassment, and she looked away from him, refusing to meet his gaze, keeping her f
ocus on Wilson. Brian’s heart was pounding so loud in his chest that he was afraid everyone in the room could hear it. ‘‘Where—’’ Nervously, he cleared his throat. ‘‘Where did you get that . . . letter?’’
She pretended she didn’t hear and asked Wilson if she could reschedule the meeting for next Monday.
‘‘I’m sorry,’’ he told her. ‘‘My deadline’s today—’’
Brian took a small step forward.
The secretary nearly jumped out of her chair. Her arm shot out, trying to cover the paper on top of the pile and accidentally knocked over the entire stack. Before the top page was engulfed by the falling batch of correspondence, Brian saw dark brown smudges—
bloody fingerprints
—and what looked like a cross between simple hieroglyphics and a child’s scribble, drawn with some sort of charcoal pencil.
Just like on his dad’s letter.
The woman glared at him. ‘‘Would you please leave?’’ she asked. ‘‘I’m very busy.’’ Her eyes were angry, but her voice was frightened, and he understood that she was as lost as they were.
What he wanted to do was quiz the woman about what she did know, then go around the desk, grab the paper and take it with him. But instead he followed Wilson’s lead, and the two of them retreated, saying good-bye and going back the way they’d come, down the elevator and out of the building. They walked across the parking lot toward the car. ‘‘If we were real reporters,’’ Wilson said, ‘‘we would drive immediately to Devine’s house and see what is going on there.’’
‘‘Do you know where his house is?’’ Brian asked.
‘‘No,’’ Wilson admitted, ‘‘but with a little bit of research we could find out.’’
Brian looked at him. ‘‘Are we real reporters?’’
The older man sighed. ‘‘Jimmy won’t let us. We’re on his time here, and I don’t know about you, but I have a merger article due this afternoon.’’
Brian didn’t really have a specific deadline today, but he was still on his probation period, and he knew how it would look if he spent the rest of the day gallivanting around the city with nothing to show for his efforts. Which is probably what would happen. His position was not secure enough that he could go on wild-goose chases hoping that something would come of it.
The Vanishing Page 6