Spectrum

by Ethan Cross

  “For Stromberg, a fallen brother who deserved a whole lot better,” he said. “Gone, but never forgotten.”

  Then Nic dug in a drawer, retrieved a knife, and started cutting the cake.

  Chapter 83

  Burke sat in the passenger seat of the Firebird, his eyes closed to hold back the tears, his arms wrapped around his own body in a tight hug. He replayed every mistake from the day, every wrong word, every time he spoke up when he shouldn’t have or kept his mouth shut when he should have spoken up. It seemed that no matter what he did, his reactions were always wrong.

  In the past, that had caused him great personal pain as he had offended people and hurt their feelings, which in turn, caused him guilt so strong that it felt like there was a creature in his chest clawing its way free. But this was worse than anything he had ever felt. His actions hadn’t just earned him animosity or dislike or inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings. This time it had cost the lives of three people.

  He had insisted on seeing the bodies. He would never forget the look in their eyes. The life that had been lost because of him. Carter had left the keys in the ignition. Burke could start up the Firebird and just drive away. Maybe buy an old cabin up in the hills. Or the mountains of Colorado. Somewhere he’d never see another face beyond the occasional trip to a grocery store to stock up on the necessities. A quiet life of solitude and peace. To August Burke, that sounded like heaven.

  So why didn’t he do it? Start up the engine and go, leave everything behind. The pain, the hurt, the anxiety of feeling like a freak. He could reinvent himself, become someone else, someone who people may even like, in small enough doses. So why didn’t he go?

  That question bounced around his brain without a real answer for a few moments until the door of the car opened, the dome light blinded him, and someone pulled him out.

  He shoved the person away and assumed a fighting stance before recognizing Nic and Carter. He analyzed them both, assessing their level of inebriation.

  “Let’s talk, kid,” Nic said.

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  Nic put an arm around Burke’s shoulders and squeezed as he led him toward a small picnic table in the front yard. Burke fought the urge to shove Nic’s arm away. He didn’t like to be touched, but it wasn’t because of the tactile feeling. It was due to the intimacy of the gesture, the closeness, the invasion of his bubble. But he resisted the urge to pull away because some part of him wanted Nic to treat him like one of his police brethren, maybe even like a friend.

  Nic, with a bit more force than necessary, shoved Burke down into a seated position at the picnic table and then sat down opposite him. Carter had a bottle of brown liquid and three glasses in his hand. Nic dropped beside Burke and poured a shot of the alcohol into each of the glasses.

  Nic swirled his drink, pushed one of the glasses toward Burke, and said, “Drink with us, kid.”

  “I’m not a kid,” Burke said as he downed the harsh liquid. It tasted like lighter fluid mixed with brown sugar. He coughed.

  Nic smiled and said, “You’re blaming yourself, but it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Yes, it was. I knew that the data suggested an insider. And when we interviewed the blonde earlier, her story didn’t add up for me. My instincts told me there was something off, but I ignored it.”

  “I noticed that something bothered you at the time,” Carter said. “What was it?”

  “First, it was the scars on her neck. She said they came from a car accident, but they looked to me like an animal attack. Like she’d been mauled by a bear or a large cat. Still, that’s nothing conclusive. Then I made some small talk with her. I asked her if she liked football, or soccer for us. She said that she did. And then I asked if she was a Kaizer Chiefs or Orlando Pirates fan. She shrugged and said it would depend on who she was dating at the time.”

  “I know nothing about soccer. What does that mean?” Nic asked.

  “Nothing, really. It could have just been that she never paid close attention. But both of the teams I mentioned are from South Africa, not England. She didn’t seem confused by the names at all, didn’t correct me or say she loved Manchester United or anything. I should have known then that she was our insider.”

  Nic shook his head. “Come on, that’s paper thin, and you know it. Some of the women I’ve dated couldn’t name a single American football team. Most of my Super Bowl dates just pick a side based on which uniform they like the best. You couldn’t have—”

  “But I did. I knew that something was wrong. I should have said something, but I … I didn’t want her to be one of them.”

  Carter cocked his head and leaned forward on the table. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

  Burke used his right thumbnail to pick his left, each pick creating an audible clicking sound. “Because, she was a freak like me. People who are disabled or different or cast out, we just sense that pain in each other. I don’t know how to explain, but it’s like being part of something. Part of the unwanted.”

  “People don’t judge you because of your condition, and they certainly wouldn’t hold anything against a mute woman.”

  Burke shook his head. “You have no idea what it’s like to be different. To know that no matter what you do, you will never be the same as everyone else. You will never fit into a nice little box that normal people will be comfortable with. You’ll never truly be accepted for who you are. Most people mean well. But make no mistake, tolerance and acceptance are two totally different things. I chose to ignore my instincts and the data at hand, and now three people are dead. And who knows how things would have turned out if I would have—”

  “Save it, Burke,” Nic said. “You can’t blame yourself for their deaths any more than Carter or I can. We all did our best, and it wasn’t good enough. But second-guessing what’s in the past will only drive you crazy. Another guy with the last name Burke famously said, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’. We did something today. We were on the front lines, bleeding, dying, and protecting all that’s good in this world. They’re the bad guys. They are the ones who made the choice to take life. And you can’t hold yourself responsible for their choices. You just get up tomorrow and do something else to stop that kind of evil. That’s all you can do. All any of us can do.”

  The only light came from a distant street lamp, but even in the pale illumination, Burke could see Carter’s large smile in contrast to his dark skin. “My wife would have liked you, Nic. She used to tell me almost the same thing every time I came home discouraged, feeling that I hadn’t done enough.”

  Nic took a sip from his glass and said, “Sounds like a wise woman. Someday maybe I can find one of those.”

  “She was a white woman,” Burke said. He saw Nic’s brow furrow and his head tilt, which seemed to indicate that he had said something inappropriate. “I just wasn’t sure if you were aware of that information,” Burke added.

  Carter laughed. “Yes, she was of Italian descent actually. You would have loved her, Nic. And she would have loved both of you boys. She was my world. Beautiful, compassionate, funny, and stubborn as an old mule. But she saw the world in ways that I never could. She was a lawyer by day, but her real passion was art.”

  “Admiring or creating?” Nic asked.

  “She was a painter. Twice a year, she would complete a painting. And then we would have a dinner party to show it off. She was so talented.”

  “What did she paint?” Burke asked.

  “Whatever came from her heart. Sometimes portraits or landscapes. Sometimes she would see a woman in the park or a homeless man on the street and try to capture the emotion of that moment. Sometimes they were only colors. But the thing about her paintings was that she poured her soul into them. When you looked at them, you could feel a part of her essence resonating from the canvas. It was magical.”

  “Did she have her own gallery?” Nic asked.

  “No, actually, she burned them
all.”

  Burke blinked a few times and waited for the explanation, not sure that he had heard correctly. “Did you say she burned them?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Nic said, “She created beautiful, soulful art, pouring her heart into it, and then burned the paintings?”

  “That’s right. Every six months, she would do a painting, have a dinner party, invite everyone we knew, and then at the end of the night, for the finale, she gathered everyone around her newest work and lit it on fire.”

  “I don’t understand,” Burke said. “Why would she do something like that? That seems—”

  “Crazy? Like it doesn’t fit in a neat little box? It took me years to understand why. I tried to get her to sell the paintings. I thought maybe she didn’t believe in herself, didn’t think she was good enough, too afraid to put herself out there. Once, I even stole one of them that she finished early and sent it to a gallery. They had multiple people interested, but when she found out, she made me get it back so that she could burn it at the party.”

  “But why? Why burn them?” Nic asked.

  Carter’s smile grew. “People would often weep at the parties as the paintings went up in flames. All of that work. That piece of her life and soul, burned to ash. It broke my heart every time. I asked her about it, of course, but all she would say was ‘None of this lasts forever’. Finally, after I tried to sell one of the paintings, I made her explain. I told that I needed to know. They were her work, and she could do what she wanted with them, but I needed to know.”

  Silence hung in the air for a moment as Carter seemed lost in the memory. Finally, Nic laughed and said, “Don’t leave us hanging. What did she say?”

  “She said that it wasn’t about the paintings. They were just things that she created for her own enjoyment and for God’s. It was about the experience of the party. They were events that none of our friends and family ever forgot. They were the highlight of the season. They were sacrifice and purity and raw emotion. I don’t know that everyone understood what it meant to her, and it probably meant something different to everyone who was there. But through her art, she touched those individual’s hearts and made them part of something infinitely special. Her art wasn’t about money or fame. It was about sharing her gift with those she loved and bringing them together. I remember times when her three sisters would be feuding over something trivial, but none of them would miss the burning party. And it seemed that afterward, they forgot whatever it was they had been fighting about. She was an amazing woman. She could create one painting and one party and make it mean so many different things to so many people, accomplish so much through one act of sacrifice.”

  Tears had filled Carter’s eyes, and Nic laid a hand on the older man’s shoulder. “I wish I could have met her. None of those sisters are young enough for me, are they?”

  Carter chuckled. “Unfortunately, they’re all spoken for.”

  “All the good ones are.”

  “What about Ms. Whelan? You two obviously …”

  “No, I broke up with her because she didn’t get along with LJ, and I don’t know … She’s great. She’s gorgeous, but she wasn’t …”

  “The one,” Carter finished.

  “Yeah, I guess so. The bad part is that when I broke up with her, she didn’t take it very well and wouldn’t accept my explanations, so I kind of lied to her and told her that I had cheated on her.”

  Carter’s laughter began as a chuckle and grew into a shaking cackle that seemed to hurt his stomach, his arms pushing against his midsection. The laughter was contagious.

  “That has to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said, between snorts.

  Nic was laughing too as he replied, “You’re not the first person who’s told me that. I just froze up and said the first thing I could come up with to end the conversation.”

  That caused Carter to laugh even harder.

  Burke laughed with them. The first time he had truly done so in a long time. He was hesitant to trust them, but these men seemed like they may actually be true friends. Although, he did feel sorry for Bristol, such an admission from someone she cared about would have likely caused her a great deal of pain. But maybe the anger coupled with the pain would actually make the loss more bearable, as if she could find comfort in the fact that what she had lost wasn’t worth having. There was a sort of inadvertent genius in that, he supposed.

  As they laughed, Burke thought of Carter’s story of the burning party, and it reminded Burke of a quote from Einstein: “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

  Carter couldn’t truly appreciate his wife’s paintings, or, by extension, her, without knowing why she would destroy them. The why … He thought of Carter’s words: She could create one painting and one party and make it mean so many different things to so many people, accomplish so much through one act of sacrifice.

  Burke stared off into the distance at the sand and scrub brush, the lights of cars traversing the distant hills. But he didn’t see any of that. He saw data points on a timeline. A story playing out. A plan. One plan with multiple objectives. He felt the pieces of a puzzle sliding together inside his mind. A puzzle that he couldn’t have solved that morning, because he needed to achieve a higher level of thinking in order to do so. He needed more knowledge, more experience, more data to expound upon. But now, the pieces were starting to form together into an image, a shape, a chess board with multiple players and multiple teams, all vying for separate but interconnected objectives.

  Under his breath, Burke said, “The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom your real intent.”

  He turned back to his colleagues, who had stopped laughing.

  “It’s a quote from Sun Tzu,” he said. “The Art of War.”

  “Do you have something to share with the rest of the class?” Carter asked.

  He hesitated, needing more time to work out the problem in his head. He began to speak, but his phone vibrated against his leg, saving him from an awkward explanation. Instead, he read the text message he had just received and looked up with a smile. “Albert says that the gods of might and magic were with him on this night. He has something to show us.”

  Chapter 84

  Burke pulled up to the beautiful home of Allanon Majere, his mind only on driving as a reflex, his real attention and focus on connecting the different threads of the case. Nic and Carter had talked most of the ride, and he had monitored the conversation with the periphery of his mind, but they were mostly discussing Allanon thinking of himself a wizard.

  But now, as they pulled into Allanon’s driveway, Nic brought up a different topic. “Do you think we should be doing this?”

  The comment drew Burke back into the real world. “What do you mean?”

  “Yoshida said that if we recover anything off those drives and don’t contact him, then he would charge us with treason. He seemed pretty serious about it.”

  Carter, having lost the battle for the front seat, leaned over the console and said, “He wouldn’t charge us with treason, and if he did, I have enough goodwill built up with enough influential people to get us out of that. But the three of us would probably never work in law enforcement again. At this point, honestly, I couldn’t care less. My wife is gone, and they have me pushing papers all day, which makes me want to jam paperclips through my eyeballs. And Burke here just wants to be a mechanic. But I understand if you want to stay out of it, Nic. You have something to lose and a young lady to provide for.”

  Nic took a deep breath, looked from the house to Carter and back again, and said, “Let’s find out what he discovered and go from there.”

  “Fair enough,” Carter replied.

  Allanon met them at the door in full wizard wear. Burke heard Nic chuckle behind him, but he ignored it and greeted Allanon with a reverent bow. “Oh, great and powerful Allanon Majere, guardian of the twelve kingdoms and—”
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br />   Allanon waved his hand and said, “Don’t worry about all that right now. Just get your asses in here.” Allanon pushed Burke to the side, looked up and down the street, and scanned the night sky. “Could you have been followed? I’ll have to scan you for bugs and trackers.”

  Burke had never seen Albert like this before. There was real fear on his face, and he wasn’t even attempting to maintain character. The wannabe wizard led them into his home and down the hall to a room with a steel door that looked like it had been taken off a submarine. He grabbed what looked like a homemade version of the detection wands used at airports and scanned each of them before they were allowed to enter. Then he unlocked the door using an electronic keypad and spun the wheel in its center to unlatch the multiple steel rods holding it in place.

  Burke had seen all this before, but he suspected that his companions found it all pretty strange. He couldn’t wait to see their faces once they entered the wizard’s lair.

  Allanon pulled the hatch to the side and gestured for them to enter. Burke stepped through the opening into another world. He knew that the outer walls of the room formed a Faraday cage and had been designed to withstand EMP attacks as well as block any incoming or outgoing signals. But that wasn’t really what made the room unique.

  Burke looked back at his companions and smiled at the expressions on each of their faces. “Holy shit,” Nic said.

  The custom-built room was perhaps thirty-by-thirty with twenty-foot ceilings and designed to look like an enchanted forest, something straight out of a Disney attraction. Trees, many with intricate faces, lined the outer walls. The floor was a foam rubber, made to look like rocks and dirt. The ceiling appeared to be a night’s sky, complete with an illuminated moon and stars. But the pièce de résistance was the lifelike sleeping dragon curled in the back corner of the room.

  Allanon’s workstation rested in the center of the space and was nothing like its surroundings. Thirty-two-inch computer displays had been mounted five rows high and four rows across. Beneath the desk, a row of tall computer towers lit with blue LEDs whirred and clicked. The chair was a cross between an iron throne and a La-Z-Boy recliner.