by Jack Heath
I steal a whole packet. A missing packet is less obvious than a missing pill.
Making sure the bookshelf is as I found it, I sneak back out into the corridor and go back into my bedroom, where I close the door and lock it.
The coffee has cooled down now. I slurp it up greedily and put the empty mug back on the floor. Then I take the water bottle, open the window—slow, quiet—and climb out.
I close the window behind me and run across the dry grass, past the van, over the kerb, onto the road. I reach the end of my street and turn the corner. As I get further from my house, I become less concerned about speed and silence, so I slow down to a jog, shoes slapping the asphalt. Just another night runner with a water bottle. No, officer, I didn’t get a good look at his face.
As I run, I open the water bottle, pop a roofie out of its packaging, and drop it in. Then I put the lid back on and shake the bottle until the pill has dissolved.
•
The full moon hangs directly above me, spilling a faint glow across the street. As a child, I once asked Mrs Radfield where the moon came from, and she told me God had made it so we could see at night. This sounded a lot like her answers to all my other questions, so in high school I looked it up myself at the library.
One theory is that Earth once didn’t weigh enough to attract an atmosphere. But about five billion years ago, a planetary embryo called Theia crashed into it. Theia was obliterated, but the shattered pieces added enough mass for Earth to acquire air and become habitable. The impact also carved out a chunk of our planet, which spun off into space and became the moon. The book added that we still don’t really know how many planets are in our solar system, since the area past Mercury is too bright to see and the void beyond Uranus is too dark. There could be another Theia out there.
Since reading that, I find it hard to look up without imagining a giant ball of stone hurtling down out of the darkness, ready to crush our petty little lives into ash.
The houses get taller and taller as I run. The beat-up trucks and vans fade, replaced by sporty two-seaters and gleaming minivans. Dead trees become angular hedges. Soon I’m in the right suburb. Then I’m on the right street. Then I’m staring up at the right house, wondering which room is the one I want.
The only second-floor window on this side of the house has purple beaded curtains, shut. A girl sleeps there. Wrong room.
There’s no front fence, which means no dog. But there could be a security light, so I identify a bush I can take cover behind before I start moving.
The light clicks on as I sprint towards the side of the house and dive between the bush and the neighbour’s fence. I’m careful not to break any branches. The smell of fresh fertiliser tells me that the house has an attentive gardener.
I crouch, still as a photograph, and wait. I open my mouth as wide as it goes so my breaths don’t whistle through my teeth or my nostrils.
I can’t hear anything moving in the house. The light goes off.
No windows on this side. Makes sense—if there were, they would be overlooking the neighbour’s yard. Rich people like to pretend their neighbours don’t exist.
I circle around to the back of the house, where a spacious yard hosts some big dogwood trees. A basketball hoop is nailed to the side of the garage. Two more second-floor windows. Through one of them I see a poster stuck to the ceiling inside. Not an adult’s bedroom. I’ve found what I’m looking for.
I shove the water bottle into my pocket and clamber up a dogwood tree. A few blossoms shake themselves loose from the branches. They fall as slow and silent as snowflakes. A couple of old nails are stitched into the bark, and a perfect dent runs alongside them. There used to be a tree house here.
Soon I’m high enough to step across onto the roof. The tiles are still warm through my shoes. Carefully, I walk across to the window, so I’m standing right above it. I crouch, grip the gutter, and reach down.
The hinges are on the left, so I pull the right-hand side of the window. It’s not locked. Second-floor windows rarely are. I tug it open, inch by inch, listening for any squeaks. Soon it’s perpendicular to the wall.
I take a deep breath. Turn so my back is to the edge. Then I step backwards off the roof.
For a split second I’m in freefall. Then I grab the gutter as I drop past, swinging off it like a kid on a jungle gym, and fly through the window.
I hit the floor softly, but not softly enough. I hear bedclothes shift suddenly, and a voice says, ‘What the fuck?’
I lunge towards the sound and slap a palm over Jim Epps’s mouth before he’s awake enough to scream. I hold him down against the bed. He tears at my hand, trying to pry it off, but he can’t. I’m adjusting to the dark—I can see his eyes, huge and terrified.
‘Make a sound and I’ll kill you,’ I whisper.
He lets out a muffled groan.
I grab his hair with my other hand and pull. ‘Now, what did I just say?’
His legs flail under the blankets. I let go of his hair, grab the water bottle, and unscrew the cap. I take my hand off his lips and pinch his nose shut. As he gasps for air, I shove the bottle into his mouth.
He chokes, gags, swallows, coughs, swallows some more. Tears spill from his eyes. I keep pouring until all the drugged water is gone. Then I cover his mouth again.
‘Listen close, Jim,’ I say. ‘I’m gonna let go of you. If you scream, I’ll throw you out the window and be gone by the time your parents hear the thump. But if you answer my questions, truthful and quiet-like, I’ll go back out the window and then, as far as you’re concerned, I may as well have been a bad dream. Blink twice if you understand me.’
I won’t actually kill him. If he screams, I’ll just climb out the window, and his parents will assume it was a nightmare, especially when he becomes sleepily incoherent ten minutes from now. But I really hope he believes me. I need to know what he knows.
He blinks twice.
I take my hand off his face. He doesn’t make a sound. He just lies there, shaking.
‘You remember me?’ I ask.
He nods.
‘Are you going to be more forthcoming this time?’
He nods again. He starts to cough, then chokes it back.
‘Okay. Were you and Cameron close?’
‘No.’ His voice is faint, croaky. But he’s not lying.
I rephrase the question. ‘Was anyone at school closer to Cameron than you?’
He sniffles. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Did you ever go to his house?’
‘No.’
‘You know anyone who did?’
‘No.’
‘He tell you his family was rich?’
Epps looks surprised. ‘He didn’t dress like he was rich.’
‘How’d he dress?’
He shrugs. ‘Geeky. Old clothes. Like his…’ He looks away.
I lean forwards. ‘Like his what?’
‘Like his mom dressed him,’ he said.
Something’s straining against its bonds at the edge of my consciousness. It’s been growing since I did those riddles this afternoon, and now it’s too big to ignore.
I voice the question I came here to ask. ‘Who’s Cameron’s girlfriend?’
Epps says nothing.
I grab his hand and wrap my palm around his index finger. I bend it back, like I’m going to break it off. ‘Wrong answer, Jim.’
‘Wait!’ he hisses. ‘Just wait, okay?’
I don’t let go of his finger.
‘One time I saw Cameron’s mom drop him off at school.’ Epps’s lip is quivering. ‘It was early. No one else was around yet. She got out of the car and gave him a hug—my mom hasn’t done that since elementary school. And I knew Cameron from band, so when he came up to me, I said I thought his mom was hot. Because she totally is; you should see her ass.’
‘Get to the point.’
‘I thought he’d get all defensive, but he just smiles, and says, “I know.” And then he winks.’
&n
bsp; The riddle is back in my head. Who is my son’s only sister’s only husband’s only mother-in-law’s only husband’s only mother-in-law?
‘Like he knew. Like he was hitting that, man. And I didn’t know what to say, so I just stared at him, and then it’s like he realises what he’s done, and he looks all nervous. He says, “Bro, I’m just kidding. Jesus.” But I knew he wasn’t, and he knew I knew it. And then he just walks off. He never talked to me again.’
I hit the rewind switch inside my head, re-listen to the first conversation I had with Annette Hall. Her voice chills me now. He looks so much like his daddy.
I think of that big, luxurious house on top of the hill in the gated community. Private. Safe. Separated from the rest of the world and its rules.
I’m being punished, she said.
The Bible by her bedside was earmarked at Leviticus 18. She is thy mother; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.
‘You think Cameron’s mother raped him?’ I ask.
He shakes his head miserably. ‘I think he wanted it.’
He’s too young to understand that it’s still rape. Cameron probably doesn’t understand it either.
Epps’s eyes are already becoming bleary as the drug kicks in. He’s no longer capable of lying to me. ‘I never saw him look at a girl like he looked at her that day. And the way she hugged him—it wasn’t a mom hug.’
This must be why Epps thought we were from children’s services. He figured Cameron had told someone else, and that they had informed the cops.
‘You told anybody else about any of this?’ I ask.
He shakes his head slowly. ‘I never…nobody.’
Soon he’ll be too dopey to interrogate. And I still don’t know who kidnapped Cameron. Knowing that his mother molested him doesn’t help me. Did the kidnappers find out somehow, and figure she was less likely to go to the police? Or did she have a fight with Cameron, kill him, and fake the kidnapping, with the help of a male accomplice? At first I thought she seemed truthful, but that was before I saw her recite the ransom call. She’s a hell of an actress. Most sociopaths are.
Or maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe the abuse has nothing to do with the kidnapping.
I slap Epps across the cheek. ‘Stay awake! Has anyone else been asking about Cameron?’
‘Asking,’ he slurs. ‘Cam-ron.’
Questions don’t work so well on someone who’s been roofied. They respond better to instructions.
I say, ‘Tell me who’s been asking about Cameron.’
His eyes are closed now. His breaths are slow and shallow. ‘Nobody,’ he says.
I grip his shoulders and shake him. ‘Who kidnapped Cameron Hall?’
Epps doesn’t reply. I pry his eyelids open, but the pupils won’t focus. He stares up through the ceiling like a sex doll. Lifelike, but not alive.
I wipe the tainted water off his face with his bedsheet, like a parent cleaning drool from a baby’s chin. Tomorrow he’ll be sick, but he won’t remember a thing.
It’s looking less and less likely that Cameron will be rescued and I’ll be permitted to indulge my dark urges.
But there’s a human being right in front of me, warm and defenceless.
The death row inmates suffocate before I get the chance to eat them. I haven’t had a live victim in a long time.
I find my eyes tracing the roadmap of veins beneath Epps’s skin. My hands, peeling back his blanket.
A creak from downstairs. I freeze.
A footstep. The parents are coming.
I quickly roll my sleeve across the windowsill to smudge my fingerprints, and jump out. I swing off a dogwood branch, land in a crouch on the lawn and sprint out onto the street.
Somewhere behind me, the security light clicks off.
I get a block away before I collapse in the gutter, shaking with relief—but also with disappointment so strong it feels like grief.
Deep breaths. Inhale the damp blacktop, the congealed trash. Don’t think about Epps. Don’t think about his parents, who don’t know they just saved his life.
Focus on the case. These FBI investigations feed my addiction, but they’re also my only distraction from it.
•
I jog home, listening to my footfalls and my heartbeat. Occasionally a car sweeps past—an office cleaner returning home, a drinker kicked out at closing time, a waitress on her way to the diner.
I want to know what Thistle thinks about this new information, but I can’t tell her about it. So I have a conversation with a hypothetical Thistle:
We should look at the mother again, she says. If she was abusing Cameron, she might have killed him and made up a story about a ransom demand.
You saw her, I say. She was genuinely frightened.
Maybe that was because she was being questioned by a pair of cops. Plus, she was an actress. She can fake it.
I’m not a cop.
Imaginary Thistle’s teeth gleam as she smiles. You’re smart enough to be one, she says. And brave, breaking into that boy’s house, even when you knew you could be caught. You’re handsome, too, in a rough sort of way.
I abort the fantasy, not liking where it’s going.
Johnson’s van is gone when I arrive home. He’ll be in the clubs, offering pills to twenty-one-year-old girls who don’t know any better and thirty-year-old men who want to look and feel as young as them. No need to climb back in through my bedroom window. I walk in the front door and triple-lock it behind me.
The TV’s playing an infomercial for an inflatable mattress that somehow doubles as a sofa. I flick it off, wash and dry the bottle in the kitchen, then head for my room. Now the only thing linking me to the doped-up teenager across town is the packet of pills in my pocket. With one missing, I can’t put the pills back in Johnson’s room. I’ll toss them in a dumpster tomorrow.
I unlock my bedroom door. The room has been trashed.
The pile of Rubik’s Cubes has been kicked over, the jigsaws shoved aside. The mattress has been slit open and propped up against the wall, exposing the floor. Johnson has been in here, looking for his drugs.
Riddles waltz around the floor in the breeze. The window is still open from when I sneaked out. I slam it closed and stare at the wreckage.
He won’t rat me out to the cops for stealing his Rohypnol; somehow I doubt he has a convincing prescription. But he does have guns, friends and a brain so drug-warped that killing me might seem like a reasonable option. Coke makes you paranoid and steroids make you angry. He uses both.
I grab my other outfit—I only have two—and stuff it into a plastic bag. I might need to leave in a hurry. As usual, my bank account is empty. Every dollar I own is already in my pocket, since I’ve never trusted Johnson. My body is safer than any hiding place in my house. I have enough cash for a night or two at a cheap hotel, but after that I’ll need something more permanent.
Wait. The window.
I’m pretty sure I closed it on my way out.
Did I? Yeah, I did.
Johnson wouldn’t have come in through the window. He would have smashed through the lock on the door, and he would have been waiting to attack me when I came back.
Every house I’ve ever lived in has been broken into at least once. One robber even pissed on the carpet on his way out. But this time, the intruder trashed only my room. They were looking for something specific, something of mine.
I don’t own anything worth taking. My possessions are limited to my clothes, my mattress and a ton of other people’s puzzles, which are no good to anybody.
I kick idly at another riddle as it blows past my feet. There’s a paradox here. Anyone who knows me knows that my possessions are worthless, but anyone who doesn’t know me has no motive to break in.
Perhaps it’s someone who only knows of me. A secret friend or relative of one of the people I ate, maybe. Or someone who remembers me from the group home.
Or the man in the baseball cap and sunglasses.
A finger of fear strokes my h
eart. While the SAC, Luzhin and I were all staring into the crowd looking for the kidnapper, he could’ve been looking right back at us. With his coat, hat and mask gone, he could have been anybody.
I was the only one not in an FBI windbreaker. He might have wondered who I was. But how would he find me here? And what do I have that he could possibly want? What could he think I have?
A riddle rustles past, taunting me.
Maybe he wasn’t after something I owned at all. Maybe he was after me.
Wait. I already closed the window, and I’m not moving. What is disturbing the scraps of paper?
I whirl around, but not quickly enough. A damp cloth is shoved over my face, covering my mouth and nose and eyes. Ether, or chloroform. Don’t breathe.
The slit mattress thumps to the floor, springs rattling. He must have been hiding behind it. I should have checked. Stupid.
My heart pounding, I try to peel the cloth off my face, but a hand grabs the corners of the cloth behind my skull and pulls it tight. My head is completely cocooned.
I swing a punch backwards, but the angle makes it impossible; my fist doesn’t hit anything. Then my attacker grips my elbow and yanks it back over my shoulder, holding my forearm against my bicep.
I cry out as a tendon snaps and then, purely on reflex, I breathe in. The cloth sucks inwards against my lips, and I’m overwhelmed by a pungent smell—like rotting fruit dipped in disinfectant.
My last thought is, Yep, that’s ether all right.
And then I’m gone.
CHAPTER 8
When is a door not a door?
It’s hot, dark and cramped. I’m curled up like a baby in the womb, my chin pressed against my thighs. The electrical tape which binds my hands has made them heavy and swollen. Something dry and crackly is packed into my mouth, and I can’t spit it out—tape is stretched across my lips. The air quivers and roars around me, as though a rocket is taking off with me inside.
Trunk. I’m in the trunk of a car.
I’ve barely finished that thought before my throat clenches up and my guts heave and suddenly I’m twisting desperately, pulling my feet over my wrists so I can reach the tape and tear it off and spit out the ball of paper before—