I stayed in my hotel room the whole evening, writing most of the next day’s story and repeatedly calling Rachel. The story was easy to put together. I first talked to my ace, Prendergast, about it and wrote up a budget line. I sent that in and then started constructing the story. Though it was not going to run until the next news cycle, I already had the main components well in hand. Beginning the following morning I would gather the latest details and just stick them in.
That is, if I was given any new details. What had been a mild dose of paranoia bloomed into something larger when my hourly calls to Rachel’s cell went unanswered and the messages unreturned. My plans for the evening-and the future-hit the rocks of doubt.
Finally, just before eleven o’clock, my cell phone rang. The caller ID said Mesa Verde Inn. It was Rachel.
“How’s L.A.?” she asked.
“ L.A. ’s fine,” I said. “I’ve been trying to call you. Didn’t you get my messages?”
“I’m sorry. My phone died. I was on it so much earlier. I’m back at the hotel now and just checked in. Thank you for leaving my bag with the desk.”
The dead phone explanation sounded plausible. I started to relax.
“No problem,” I said. “What room did they put you in?”
“Seven seventeen. What about you, did you go back to your house after all?”
“No, I’m still at the hotel.”
“Really? I just called the Kyoto and they put me through to your room but I got no answer.”
“Oh. It must have been when I went down the hall to get ice.”
I stared at the bottle of Grand Embrace Cabernet I had gotten from room service.
“So,” I said, to change the subject, “are you in for the night, then?”
“Jeez, I hope so. I just ordered room service. I suppose I’ll get called back out if they find something at Western Data.”
“What do you mean, there are still people in there?”
“The EER team is still there. They’re guzzling Red Bull like it’s water and working on into the night. Carver’s with them. But I couldn’t go the distance. I had to get some food and sleep.”
“And Carver’s just going to let them work through the night?”
“Turns out the scarecrow is a night owl. He takes several midnight shifts every week. Says he gets his best work done then, so he’s cool with staying.”
“What’d you order to eat?”
“Good old comfort food. A cheeseburger and fries.”
I smiled.
“I had the same thing, but skipped the cheese. No Pyrat rum or wine?”
“Nope, now that I’m back on the bureau per diem, no alcohol allowed. Not that I couldn’t use it.”
I smiled but decided to get down to business first.
“So what’s the latest update on McGinnis and Stone?”
There was a hesitation in her response.
“Jack, I’m tired. It’s been a long day and I’ve been in that bunker for the last four hours. I was hoping I could eat my dinner, take a hot bath and we could just leave business for tomorrow.”
“Look, I’m tired, too, Rachel, but remember I let you push me out of the way on the promise you would keep me informed. I haven’t heard from you since I left the warehouse and now you’re telling me you’re too tired to talk.”
Another hesitation.
“Okay, okay, you’re right. So let’s get this over with. The update is that there is good and bad news. The good news is that we know who Freddy Stone really is and he’s not Freddy Stone. Knowing his real identity will hopefully help us run him down.”
“Freddy Stone’s an alias? How’d he get by the supposedly vaunted security screening at Western Data? Didn’t they check his prints?”
“The thing is, company records show Declan McGinnis signed off on hiring him. So he could have greased it.”
I nodded. McGinnis could have gotten his partner in murder into the company, no sweat.
“Okay, so who is he?”
I opened my backpack on the bed and took out a notebook and pen.
“His real name is Marc Courier. That’s Marc with a c. Same age, twenty-six, with two felony arrests in Illinois for fraud. He skipped three years ago before trial. They were identity theft cases. He got credit cards, opened bank accounts, the whole nine yards. His history indicates he’s a gifted hacker and vicious troll with a long history of digital breaches and assaults. He’s a bad guy and he was right there in the bunker.”
“When did he come to work for Western Data?”
“Also three years ago. It looks like he split Chicago and almost immediately ended up in Mesa with the new name.”
“So McGinnis already knew him?”
“We think he recruited him. You know, it always used to be an amazing thing when two like-minded killers would hook up. You would think, What are the chances? But the Internet is a whole new ball game. It’s the great intersection, for things good and bad. With chat rooms and websites devoted to any fetish and paraphilia imaginable, we have people with similar interests hooking up every minute of the day. We are going to see more and more of this, Jack. Where they take it out of fantasy and cyberspace and into the real world. Meeting people with shared beliefs helps justify those beliefs. It emboldens. Sometimes it’s a call to action.”
“Did the name Freddy Stone belong to somebody else?”
“No, it looks like it was fabricated.”
“Any history of violence or sex offenses back in Chicago?”
“When he was arrested three years ago in Chicago, his computer was seized and they found a lot of porn. I am told it included a few Bangkok torture films but he wasn’t charged with anything. It’s too hard to make a case because the films carry disclaimers that they’re all actors and nothing is real, even though it most likely is real torture and pain.”
“What about stuff with leg braces, that sort of thing?”
“Nothing like that on the record but we’ll look into all of that, believe me. If the link between Courier and McGinnis is abasiophilia, we will find it. If they met in an iron maiden chat room we will find it.”
“How’d you make Courier’s ID?”
“The handprint stored on the biometric reader on the entrance to the server farm.”
I finished writing and checked my notes, looking for my next question.
“Will I be able to get a mug shot of Courier?”
“Check your e-mail. I sent one before I left. I want you to see if he looks familiar.”
I pulled my laptop across the bed and logged on to my e-mail. Her message was on top of the pile. I opened the photo and stared at a mug shot of Marc Courier from his arrest three years before. He had long dark hair and a scraggly goatee and mustache. He looked like he would fit in seamlessly with Kurt and Mizzou in the bunker at Western Data.
“Could it be the man from the hotel in Ely?” Rachel asked.
I studied the photo without answering.
“Jack?”
“I don’t know. It could be. I wish I had seen his eyes.”
I studied the photo for a few more seconds and then moved on.
“So you said you had good and bad news. What’s the bad news?” “Before he split, Courier planted replicating viruses in his own computer in the lab at Western Data and in the company archives. It chewed through almost everything by the time it was discovered tonight. The camera archives are gone. So is a lot of the company data.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means we’re not going to be able to track his movements as easily as we had hoped. You know, when he was there, when he wasn’t, any sort of connections or meetings with McGinnis, that sort of thing. E-mails back and forth. It would have been good to have.”
“How did that go unnoticed by Carver and all the safeguards they supposedly have in place there?”
“The easiest thing in the world to pull off is an inside job. Courier knew the defense systems. He built a virus that navigated around them.”
“What about McGinnis and his computer?”
“Better luck there, I am told. But they started on that late tonight, so I won’t know more until tomorrow when I go in. A search team was at his house all night as well. He lives alone, no family. I heard they found some interesting stuff but the search is ongoing.”
“How interesting?”
“Well, I don’t know if you want to hear this, Jack, but they found a copy of your book on the Poet on his bookshelf. I told you we’d find it.”
I didn’t reply. I felt a sudden heat on my face and neck and was silent while I considered the idea that I had written a book that might have in some way been a primer for another killer. It was by no means a how-to book but it certainly outlined how profiling and serial killer investigations were carried out by the FBI.
I needed to change the subject.
“What else did they find?”
“I haven’t seen this yet but I am told they found a complete set of ankle-to-thigh leg braces designed for a woman. There was also pornography dealing with the subject.”
“Man, this is one sick son of a bitch.”
I wrote a few notes about the findings, then flipped back through the pages to see if anything prompted another question. Between what I knew and had seen and what Rachel was telling me, I would have a hell of a story for the next day.
“So Western Data is completely closed down, right?”
“Pretty much. I mean, the websites that are hosted at the company are still operating. We froze the colocation center, though. No data is going in or out until the EER team completes its assessment.”
“Some of the clients, like the big law firms, are going to go ape shit when they find out the FBI has custody of their stored files, aren’t they?”
“Probably, but we’re not opening any stored files. At least not yet. We are just maintaining the system as is for the time being. Nothing in or out. We worked with Carver on a message that went out to all clients to keep them informed. It said that the situation is temporary and that Carver, as a representative of the company, was observing the FBI investigation and ensuring the integrity of the files, yada, yada, yada. That’s the best we can do. If they go ape shit, then I guess they go ape shit.”
“What about Carver? You checked him out, right?”
“Yes, he’s clean, all the way back to MIT. We need to trust somebody inside and I guess it’s him.”
I was silent as I wrote a few final notes. I had more than enough to write the story the next day. Even if I couldn’t get through to Rachel, I was sure my story would lead the paper and draw national attention. Two serial killers for the price of one.
“Jack, you there?”
“Yeah, I’m just writing. Anything else?”
“That’s about it.”
“You’re being careful?”
“Of course. My gun and badge are being overnighted to me. I’ll be locked and loaded tomorrow morning.”
“Then you’ll be all set.”
“I will. Can we finally talk about us now?”
I was suddenly speared through the chest with anxiety. She wanted to get the work-related discussion out of the way so she could get to what she really wanted to say about our relationship. After all the unanswered phone calls, I didn’t think it was going to be good news.
“Uh, sure,” I said. “What about us?”
I got up off the bed, ready to take the news standing up. I walked over to the bottle of wine and picked it up. I was staring at it when she spoke.
“Well, you know, I didn’t want this to be all business.”
I felt a little better. I put the bottle down again and started to loosen the spear.
“Me, too.”
“In fact, I was thinking… I know this is going to sound crazy.”
“What is?”
“Well, when they offered me my job back today, I felt so… I don’t know, elated, I guess. Vindicated in some way. But then when I got back here by myself tonight, I started thinking about that thing you said when you were joking around.”
I couldn’t remember what she meant so I played along.
“And?”
She sort of laughed before answering.
“And, well, I think it really could be kind of fun if we tried it.”
I was racking my brain, wondering if this had something to do with the single-bullet theory. What was it I had said?
“You really think so?”
“Well, I don’t know anything about business or how we would get clients, but I think I’d like working with you on investigations. It would be fun. It’s already been fun.”
Now I remembered. Walling and McEvoy, Discreet Investigations. I smiled. I pulled the spear out of my chest and slammed it point-first into the hard ground, staking a claim like that astronaut who put the flag on the moon.
“Yeah, Rachel, it’s been nice,” I said, hoping my cool bravado masked my inner relief. “But I don’t know. You were pretty upset when you were facing life without a badge.”
“I know. Maybe I’m kidding myself. We’d probably end up doing divorce work and that’s gotta kill the soul over time.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s something to think about.”
“Hey, I’ve got nothing lined up. So you won’t hear me objecting. I just want to make sure you don’t make a mistake. I mean, is everything suddenly forgiven there with the bureau? They just gave you your job back and that’s that?”
“Probably not. They’ll lie in wait for me. They always do.”
I heard the knock on her door and the muffled voice of someone calling out, “Room service.”
“My dinner’s here,” Rachel said. “I gotta go.”
“Okay. I’ll see you later, Rachel.”
“Okay, Jack. Good night.”
I smiled as I disconnected the call. Later would be sooner than she thought.
After brushing my teeth and checking myself in the mirror, I grabbed the bottle of Grand Embrace and slipped the folding corkscrew that room service had provided into my pocket. I made sure I had my key card and left the room.
The stairwell was right outside my door, and Rachel was only one floor up and a few doors down, so I decided not to waste any time. I hit the door and started up the concrete stairs two at a time, taking a quick look over the railing and down the center shaft to the ground. I got a quick dose of vertigo and pulled back and continued up. I made the turn on the middle landing, thinking about what her first words were going to be when she answered her door and saw me. I was smiling when I crested the next flight. And that’s when I saw a man lying flat on his back next to the door to the seventh-floor hallway. He was wearing black pants and a white shirt with a bow tie.
All in a moment I realized he was the room service waiter who had earlier brought me my dinner and the bottle of wine I was now holding. As I got to the top step, I saw blood on the concrete, leaking from beneath him. I dropped to my knees next to him and put the bottle down.
“Hey!”
I pushed his shoulder to see if I could get a response. There was nothing and I thought he was dead. I saw the ID tag clipped to his belt, confirming my recognition. EDWARD HOOVER, KITCHEN STAFF.
I made another quick leap.
Rachel!
I jumped up and yanked the door open. As I entered the seventh-floor hallway, I pulled my phone and punched in 911. The hotel was designed in a wide U pattern and I was on the upper right branch. I started moving down the hallway, checking the numbers on the doors. 722, 721, 720… I got to Rachel’s room and saw the door was ajar. I pushed through without knocking.
“Rachel?”
The room was empty but there were obvious signs of a struggle. Plates, silverware and French fries from a room service table were strewn across the floor. The bed covers were gone and there was a pillow smeared with blood on the floor.
I realized I was holding my phone down at my side and there was a tinny voice calling to me. I headed back out into the hall as I raised the phone.
“Hello?”
“ Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”
I started running down the hall, panic engulfing me as I yelled into the phone.
“I need help! Mesa Verde Inn, seventh floor! Now!”
I made the turn into the central hallway and caught a split-second glimpse of a man with bleached-blond hair and wearing a red waiter’s jacket. He was pushing a large laundry cart through a pair of double doors on the far side of the guest elevators. Though it had been only a quick view, the picture didn’t add up.
“Hey!”
I increased my speed, covered the ground quickly and hit the double doors just seconds after I saw them close. I came into a small housekeeping vestibule and saw the door of a service elevator closing. I lunged for the door, reaching my hand out, but I was too late. It was gone. I backed away and looked up. There were no numbers or arrows above the door that would tell me which way he was going. I smashed back through the double doors and ran to the guest elevators. The stairwells, at either end of the hallway, were too far to consider.
I quickly pushed the down button, thinking it was the obvious choice to make. It led to the exit. It led to escape. I thought about the laundry cart and the forward-leaning angle of the man who was pushing it. There was something heavier than laundry in it, I was sure. He had Rachel.
There were four guest elevators and I got lucky. As soon as I hit the button the door chimed and an elevator opened. I leaped through the opening door and saw that the lobby button was already lit. I machine-gunned the close-door button and waited interminably long as the door slowly, gently closed.
“Easy, buddy. We’ll get there.”
I turned and saw there was a man already on the elevator. He was wearing a conventioneer’s name tag with a blue ribbon hanging from it. I was about to tell him it was an emergency, when I remembered the phone in my hand.
“Hello? Are you still there?”
There was static on the line but I still had a connection. I could feel the elevator start to drop quickly.
“Yes, sir. I’ve dispatched the police. Can you tell me-”
“Listen to me, there’s a guy dressed like a waiter and he’s trying to abduct a federal agent. Call the FBI. Send every-Hello? Are you there?”
Nothing. I’d lost the call. I felt the elevator come to a hard stop as we reached the lobby. The conventioneer pushed back into the corner and tried to disappear. I stepped up to the doors and moved through them before they had barely opened.
I stepped into an alcove off the lobby. Adjusting my bearings in relation to where the service elevator would be located, I took a left and then another left through a door marked employees only and entered a rear hallway. I heard kitchen noises and smelled food. There were stainless-steel shelves lined with commercial-size cans of food and other products. I saw the service elevator but no sign of the man in the red jacket or the laundry cart.
Had I beaten the service elevator down? Or had he gone up?
I pushed the elevator call button.
“Hey, you’re not supposed to be back here.”
I turned quickly to see a man in kitchen whites and a dirty apron walking toward me in the hall.
“Did you see a guy pushing a laundry cart?” I asked quickly.
“Not in the kitchen, I didn’t.”
“Is there a basement?”
The man took an unlit cigarette out of his mouth to answer.
“There ain’t no basement.”
He gestured with the hand holding the cigarette. I realized he was going outside for a smoke break. There was an exit somewhere close.
“Is there a way out from here to the parking garage?”
He pointed past me.
“The loading dock is-Hey, look out!”
I started to turn back to the elevator just as the laundry cart came crashing into me. It hit me thigh high and my upper body pivoted over the edge. I put my hands out to break my fall into the pile of linens and the bedspread in it. I could feel something soft but solid under the covers and knew it was Rachel. I pushed my weight backward and slid back onto my feet.
I looked up and saw the elevator closing again as the man in the red jacket held his hand on the door-close button. I looked at his face and recognized it from the mug shot I had seen earlier that night. He was cleaned up and blond now, but I was sure it was Marc Courier. I looked back at the elevator control panel and saw a floor light glowing from the top. Courier was going back up.
I reached into the cart and yanked back the bedspread. There was Rachel. She was still wearing the clothes she’d had on earlier in the day. She was facedown with her arms and legs hog-tied behind her back. A terry cloth belt from a hotel room bathrobe had been tied as a gag across her mouth. Her nose and mouth were bleeding profusely. Her eyes were glassy and distant.
“Rachel!”
I reached down and pulled the gag down off her mouth.
“Rachel? Are you all right? Can you hear me?”
She didn’t respond. The kitchen man stepped over and looked down into the cart.
“What the hell is going on?”
She was bound with plastic cable ties. I pulled the folding corkscrew out of my pocket and used the small blade designed for cap cutting to slice through the plastic.
“Help me get her out!”
We carefully lifted her out of the cart and put her on the floor. I dropped down next to her and made sure the blood had not closed off her airways. Her nostrils were caked with it but her mouth was clear. She had been beaten and her face was beginning to swell.
I looked up at the kitchen man.
“Go call security. And nine-one-one. Now! GO!”
He started running down the hall for a phone. I looked back down at Rachel and saw she was becoming alert.
“Jack?”
“It’s all right, Rachel. You’re safe.”
Her eyes looked scared and hurt. I felt a rage building inside me.
From down the hallway I heard the kitchen man yell.
“They’re coming! Paramedics and po-lice!”
I didn’t look up at him. I kept my eyes on Rachel.
“There, you hear that? Help is on the way.”
She nodded and I saw more life returning to her eyes. She coughed and tried to sit up. I helped her and then pulled her into a hug. I rubbed the back of her neck.
She whispered something I couldn’t hear and I pulled back to look at her and asked her to say it again.
“I thought you were in L.A. ”
I smiled and shook my head.
“I was too paranoid about going away from the story. And from you. I was going to surprise you with a good bottle of wine. That’s when I saw him. It was Courier.”
She made a slight nodding motion.
“You saved me, Jack. I didn’t recognize him through the peephole. When I opened the door, it was too late. He hit me. I tried to fight but he had a knife.”
I shushed her. No explanation was necessary.
“Listen, was he by himself? Was McGinnis there?”
She shook her head.
“I only saw Courier. I recognized him too late.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
The kitchen man was standing back down the hall, now with other men dressed in kitchen clothes. I signaled them to come forward and they didn’t move at first. Then one reluctantly stepped forward and the others followed.
“Push that elevator button for me,” I said.
“You sure?” one asked.
“Just do it.”
I leaned down and put my face into the crook of Rachel’s neck. I hugged her tightly, breathed in her scent and whispered in her ear.
“He went up. I’m going to go get him.”
“No, Jack, you wait here. Stay with me.”
I pulled up and looked into her eyes. I said nothing until I heard the elevator open. I then looked up at the kitchen man I had originally spoken to. On his white shirt the name Hank was embroidered.
“Where’s security?”
“They should be here,” he said. “They’re coming.”
“Okay, I want you men to wait here with her. Don’t leave her. When security gets here, you tell them there’s another victim on the seventh-floor stairwell and that I went up to the top to look for the guy. Tell security to cover all the exits and elevators. This guy went up, but he’s gonna have to try to come down.”
Rachel started to get up.
“I’m going with you,” she said.
“No, you’re not. You’re hurt. You stay here and I’ll be right back. I promise.”
I left her there and stepped onto the elevator. I pushed the 12 button and looked back at Rachel. As the door closed I noticed that Hank the kitchen man was nervously lighting his cigarette.
It was a damn-the-rules moment for both of us.
The service elevator moved slowly upward and I came to realize that so much of Rachel’s rescue had relied on pure luck-a slow elevator, my staying in Mesa to surprise her, my taking the stairs with the bottle of wine. But I didn’t want to dwell on what could have been. I concentrated on the moment and when the elevator finally reached the top of the building, I stood ready with the one-inch corkscrew blade as the door opened. I realized I should have grabbed a better weapon from the kitchen, but it was too late now.
The housekeeping vestibule on twelve was empty except for the red waiter’s jacket I saw dropped on the floor. I pushed through the swinging doors and into the central hallway. I could hear sirens coming from outside the building now. A lot of them.
Looking both ways I saw nothing and I started to realize that a one-man search of a twelve-story hotel nearly as wide as it was tall was going to be a waste of time. Between elevators and stairwells, Courier had his choice of multiple escape routes.
I decided to go back down to Rachel and leave the search for hotel security and the arriving police.
But I knew that on the way down I could cover at least one of those exit routes. Maybe my luck would hold. I chose the north stairwell because it was closest to the hotel’s parking garage. And it was the stairwell Courier had used earlier to hide the body of the room service waiter.
I went down the hallway, rounded the corner and then pushed through the exit door. I first looked over the railing and down the shaft. I saw nothing and heard only the echo of the sirens. I was just about to head down the steps, when I noticed that even though I was on the top floor of the hotel, the stairs continued up.
If there was access to the roof, I needed to check it. I headed up.
The stairwell was dimly lit by a sconce on each landing. Each floor was broken into two sets of stairs and landings in the routine back-and-forth design. When I reached the midlevel and turned to take the next set of stairs to what would be the thirteenth floor, I saw the upper and final landing was crowded with stored hotel room furnishings. I came all the way up to where the stairs ended in a large storage area. There were bed tables stacked on top of one another and mattresses leaning four deep against one of the walls. There were stacks of chairs and mini-refrigerators and pre-flat-screen-era television cabinets. I was reminded of the filing cabinets I had seen in the Public Defender’s Office hallway. There had to be multiple code violations here, but who was looking? Who ever came up here? Who cared?
I worked my way around a grouping of standing stainless-steel lamps and toward a door with a small square window at face height. The word roof had been painted on it with a stencil. But when I got to it, I found the door was locked. I pushed hard on the release bar but it wouldn’t move. Something had jammed or locked the mechanism and the door wouldn’t budge. I looked through the window and saw a flat gravel roof running behind the barrel-tiled parapets of the hotel. Across a forty-yard expanse of gravel I could see the structure that housed the building’s elevator equipment. Beyond that was another door to the stairwell on the other side of the hotel.
I shifted to my left and leaned in closer to the window so I could get a wider view of the roof. Courier could be out there.
Just as I did this, I saw a blurred reflection of movement in the glass.
Someone was behind me.
Instinctively, I jumped sideways and turned at the same time. Courier’s arm swung down with a knife and barely missed me as he crashed into the door.
I planted my feet and then drove my body into his, bringing my arm up and stabbing my own blade into his side.
But my weapon was too short. I scored a direct hit but didn’t do enough damage to bring down the target. Courier yelped and brought his forearm down on my wrist, knocking my blade to the floor. He then took an enraged, roundhouse swing at me with his own. I managed to duck underneath it but got a good look at his blade. It was at least four inches long and I knew if he connected with it, it would be a one-and-done proposition for me.
Courier made another jab and this time I parried to the right and caught his wrist. The only advantage I had was my size. I was older and slower than Courier, but I had forty pounds on him. While holding his knife hand away, I threw my body into him again, knocking him back through the forest of stand-up lamps and onto the concrete floor.
He broke free during the fall and then scrabbled to his feet with the knife ready. I grabbed one of the lamps, holding its round base out and ready to spar at him and deflect the next assault.
For a moment nothing happened. He held the knife at the ready and we seemed to be taking each other’s measure, waiting for the other to make the next move. I then made a charge with the lamp base but he sidestepped it easily. We then squared off again. He had a desperate sort of smile on his face and was breathing heavily.
“Where are you going to go, Courier? You hear all those sirens? They’re here, man. There’s going to be cops and FBI all over this place in two minutes. Where’re you going to go then?”
He didn’t say anything and I took another poke at him with the lamp. He grabbed the base and we momentarily struggled for control of it, but I pushed him back into a stack of mini-refrigerators and they crashed to the floor.
I had no experience in the area of knife fighting, but my instincts told me to keep talking. If I distracted Courier, then I would lessen the threat from the knife and possibly get an open shot at him. So I kept throwing the questions at him, waiting for my moment.
“Where’s your partner? Where’s McGinnis? What did he do, send you to do the dirty work by yourself? Just like Nevada, huh? You missed your chance again.”
Courier grinned at me but didn’t take the bait.
“Does he just tell you what to do? Like your mentor on murder or something? Man, the master’s not going to be very happy with you tonight. You’re oh for two, man.”
This time he couldn’t control it.
“McGinnis is dead, you dumb fuck! I buried him in the desert. Just like I was going to bury your bitch after I was through with her.”
I feigned another jab at him with the lamp and tried to keep him talking.
“I don’t get it, Courier. If he’s dead, why didn’t you just run? Why risk everything to go for her?”
At the same moment he opened his mouth to reply, I faked a jab at his chest with the lamp and then brought the base up into his face, catching him flush on the jaw. Courier staggered backward momentarily and I quickly moved in, hurling the lamp at him first and then going for the knife with both hands. We smashed into a television cabinet and fell to the floor, me on top of him and grappling for control of the knife.
He shifted his weight beneath me and we rolled three times, with him ending up on top. I kept both hands on his wrist and he pushed his free hand into my face, trying to break my grip by stiff-arming me away. I finally managed to bend his wrist at a painful angle. He cried out and the knife came free and clattered to the concrete. With an elbow I shoved it toward the stairwell shaft but it stopped just shy of the mark, balancing on the edge below the blue guardrail. It was six feet away.
I went after him like an animal then, punching and kicking and fueled by a primal rage I had never felt before. I grabbed an ear and tried to rip it off. I swung an elbow into his teeth. But the energy of youth gradually gave him the upper hand. I was tiring quickly and he managed to pull back and get distance. He then brought a knee up into my crotch and the air exploded out of my lungs. Paralyzing pain shot through me and weakened my hold. He broke completely free and got up to go for the knife.
Calling on my last reserve of strength, I half crawled, half lunged after him as I struggled to my feet. I was hurt and spent but I knew that if he got to the knife, I would be dead.
I threw my weight into him from behind. He lurched forward into the railing, his upper body pivoting over it. Without thinking, I reached down, grabbed one of his legs and flipped him all the way over the rail. He tried to grab the steel piping but his grip slipped and he fell.
His scream lasted only two seconds. His head hit either a railing or the concrete siding of the shaft, and after that, he fell silently, his body caroming from side to side on its way down thirteen floors.
I watched him all the way. Until the final, loud impact echoed all the way back up to me.
I wish I could say I felt guilt or even a sense of remorse. But I felt like cheering every moment of his fall.
The next morning I went back to Los Angeles for real, leaning against the plane’s window and sleeping the whole way. I had spent most of the night in the now familiar surroundings of the FBI. Agent Bantam and I faced off again in the mobile interview room for several hours, during which I told and retold the story of what I had done the evening before and how Courier came to fall thirteen floors to his death. I told him what Courier had said about McGinnis and the desert and the plan for Rachel Walling.
During the interview Bantam never dropped the mask of detached federal agent. He never said thank you for saving the life of his fellow agent. He just asked questions, sometimes five or six different times and ways. And when it was finally over, he informed me that the details regarding the death of Marc Courier would be submitted to a state grand jury to determine if a crime had been committed or if my actions constituted self-defense. It was only then that he broke the mold and spoke to me like a human being.
“I have mixed feelings about you, McEvoy. You no doubt saved Agent Walling’s life but going up there after Courier was the wrong move. You should have waited. If you had, he might be alive right now and we might have some of the answers. As it is, if McGinnis is really dead, most of the secrets went down that shaft with Courier. It’s a big desert out there, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that, Agent Bantam. I kind of look at it like if I hadn’t gone after him, he might have gotten away. And if that had happened, the chances are, you wouldn’t get any answers either. You’d just get more bodies.”
“Maybe. But we’ll never know.”
“So what happens now?”
“Like I said, we’ll present it to the grand jury. I doubt you’ll have any problems. The world’s not exactly going to feel sorry for Marc Courier.”
“I don’t mean with me. I’m not worried about that. With the investigation, what happens now?”
He paused as if to consider whether he should tell me anything.
“We’ll try to re-create the trail. That’s all we can do. We’re not done at Western Data. We’ll continue there and we’ll try to put together a picture of what these men did. And we’ll keep looking for McGinnis. Dead or alive. We only have Courier’s word that he’s dead. Personally, I’m not sure I believe it.”
I shrugged. I had accurately reported what Courier had said. I would leave it to the experts to determine if it was the truth. If they wanted to put a picture of McGinnis in every post office in the country, that was fine with me.
“Can I go back to L.A. now?”
“You’re free to go. But if anything else comes to mind, you call us. Likewise, we’ll call you.”
“Got it.”
He didn’t shake my hand. He just opened the door. When I stepped out of the bus, Rachel was waiting for me. We were in the front parking lot of the Mesa Verde Inn. It was close to five in the morning but neither of us seemed very tired. The paramedics had checked her out. The swelling was already beginning to subside but she had a badly cut and bruised lip and a contusion below the corner of her left eye. She had refused a transport to a local hospital for further examination. The last thing she would do at this point would be leave the center of the investigation.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“I’m okay,” she said. “How are you?”
“I’m fine. Bantam said I’m clear to take off. I think I’ll catch the first flight back to L.A. ”
“You’re not going to stay for the press conference?”
I shook my head.
“What are they going to say that I don’t already know?”
“Nothing.”
“How long do you think you’ll be here?”
“I don’t know. I guess until they wrap things up. Which won’t happen until we know all there is to know.”
I nodded and checked my watch. The first flight to L.A. probably wouldn’t be for another two hours.
“You want to go get breakfast somewhere?” I asked.
She tried to crinkle her lips to show disdain for the idea but the pain foiled the effort.
“I’m not that hungry. I just wanted to say good-bye. I need to get back to Western Data. They found the mother lode.”
“Which is what?”
“An unaccounted-for server that both McGinnis and Courier had been accessing. It’s got archived videos, Jack. They filmed their crimes.”
“And both of them are in the videos?”
“I haven’t seen them but I am told they are not readily identifiable. They wear masks and shoot at angles that mostly show their victims, not them. I was told that in one of the videos, McGinnis is wearing an executioner’s hood-like the one worn by the Zodiac.”
“You’re kid-Wait a minute, he’d have to be sixty-some years old to be the Zodiac.”
“No, they’re not suggesting that-you can buy the hood in cult stores in San Francisco. It’s just a sign of who they are. It’s like having your book on the bedside. They know history. And it shows how much fear plays a part in their program. Scaring their victims was part of the rush.”
I didn’t think you needed to be an FBI profiler to understand that. But it brought to mind how truly horrible the last moments of their victims’ lives were.
I once again remembered the audiotape of the Bittaker and Norris torture session in the back of the van. I couldn’t listen then. I almost didn’t want the answer to the question I had now.
“Is Angela on film?”
“No, she was too recent. But there are others.”
“You mean victims?”
Rachel glanced over my shoulder at the door to the FBI bus and then back at me. I guessed that she might be talking out of turn, no matter the deal I supposedly had.
“Yes. They haven’t looked at everything yet but they have at least six different victims. McGinnis and Courier were doing this a long time.”
Now I wasn’t so sure I wanted to leave. The bottom line was that the bigger the body count, the bigger the story. Two killers, at least six victims… If it was possible for the story to get bigger than it already was, then it had just happened.
“What about the braces? Were you right about that?”
She nodded solemnly. It was one of those times that being right wasn’t such a good thing.
“Yeah, they made the victims wear leg braces.”
I shook my head as if to ward off the thought of it. I checked my pockets. I had no pen and my notebook was back up in my room.
“You have a pen?” I asked Rachel. “I need to write this down.”
“No, Jack, I don’t have a pen to give you. I told you more than I should have. At this point it’s just raw data. Wait till I have a better handle on everything and then I’ll call you. Your deadline isn’t for another twelve hours, at least.”
She was right. I had a full day to put the story together, and the information would develop through the day. Besides that, I knew that when I got back to the newsroom, I would face the same issue as the week before. I was part of the story again. I had killed one of the two men the story was about. Conflict of interest dictated that I wouldn’t be writing it. I was going to sit with Larry Bernard once again and feed him a front-page story that would echo around the world. It was frustrating but by now I was getting used to it.
“All right, Rachel. I guess I’ll go up and pack my stuff, then head to the airport.”
“Okay, Jack. I’ll call you. I promise.”
I liked that she promised before I had to ask. I looked at her for a moment, wanting to make a move to touch and hold her. She seemed to read me. She took the first step and pulled me into a tight embrace.
“You saved my life tonight, Jack. You think you’re getting out of here with just a handshake?”
“I was sort of hoping there would be more than that.”
I kissed her lightly on the cheek, avoiding her bruised lips. If Agent Bantam or anybody else behind the smoked black windows of the FBI mobile command center was watching, neither one of us cared.
It was almost a minute before Rachel and I separated. She looked into my eyes and nodded.
“Go write your story, Jack.”
“I will… if they let me.”
I turned and walked toward the hotel.
All eyes were on me as I walked through the newsroom. It had spread as quickly as a Santa Ana wind through the newsroom that I had killed a man the night before. Many probably thought I had avenged Angela Cook. Others may have thought I was some sort of danger freak who put myself in harm’s way for the thrill of it.
As I approached my cubicle the phone was buzzing and the message light was on. I put my backpack on the floor and decided I would deal with all the callers and messages later. It was almost eleven o’clock, so I walked over to the raft to see if Prendo was in yet. I wanted to get this part over with. If I was going to give my information to another reporter, I wanted to start giving it up now.
Prendo wasn’t in but Dorothy Fowler was sitting at the head of the raft. She looked up from her computer screen, saw me and did a double take.
“Jack, how are you?”
I shrugged.
“Okay, I guess. When’s Prendo coming in?”
“Probably not till one. Are you up to working today?”
“You mean, do I feel bad about the guy who fell down the stairwell last night? No, Dorothy, I’m actually okay with that. I feel fine. As the cops say, NHI-no human involved. The guy was a killer who liked to torture women while he raped and suffocated them. I don’t feel too bad about what happened to him. In fact, I sort of wish he has been conscious the whole way down.”
“Okay. I think I understand that.”
“The only thing I don’t feel good about right now is that I’m guessing I don’t get to write the story, right?”
She frowned and nodded.
“I’m afraid not, Jack.”
“Déjà vu all over again.”
She squinted her eyes at me like she was wondering if I realized the inanity of what I had just said.
“It’s a saying. Yogi Berra? The baseball guy?”
She didn’t get it. I could feel the eyes and ears of the newsroom on us.
“Never mind. Who do you want me to give my stuff to? The FBI has confirmed to me that there were two killers and they have found videos of them with several victims. At least six besides Angela. They’ll be announcing all of this at a press conference but I have lots of stuff they won’t be putting out. We’ll kick ass with this.”
“Just what I want to hear. I’m going to put you with Larry Bernard again for continuity. You have your notes? Are you ready to go?”
“Ready when he is.”
“Okay, let me call and book the conference room again so you guys can go to work.”
I spent the next two hours giving Larry Bernard everything I had, turning over my notes and filling him in off the top of my head with regard to my own actions. Larry then interviewed me for a sidebar story on my hand-to-hand battle with the serial killer.
“Too bad you didn’t let him answer that last question,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“At the end, when you asked him why he didn’t just take off instead of going after Walling, that’s the essential question, isn’t it? Why didn’t he run? He went after her and it didn’t make a lot of sense. He was responding to you but you said you hit him with the lamp before he answered that one.”
I didn’t like the question. It was as if he was suspicious of my veracity or what I had done.
“Look, it was a knife fight and I didn’t have a knife. I wasn’t interviewing the guy. I was trying to distract him. If he was thinking about my questions, then he wasn’t thinking about putting the knife in my throat. It worked. When I saw my chance I took it. I got the upper hand and that’s why I’m alive and he’s not.”
Larry leaned forward and checked his tape recorder to make sure it was still operating.
“That’s a good quote,” he said.
I’d been a reporter for twenty-plus years and I had just been baited by my own friend and colleague.
“I want to take a break. How much more do you need?”
“I actually think I’m good,” Larry said, his manner completely unapologetic. It was just business. “Let’s take a break and I’ll go through my notes and make sure. Why don’t you call Agent Walling and see if anything’s come up in the last few hours.”
“She would have called me.”
“You sure?”
I stood up.
“Yes, I’m sure. Stop trying to work me, Larry. I know how it’s done.”
He raised his hands in surrender. But he was smiling.
“Okay, okay. Go take your break. I have to write up a couple budget lines anyway.”
I left the conference room and went back to my cubicle. I picked up the phone and checked messages. I had nine of them, most from other news outlets wanting me to comment for their own reports. The CNN producer I had saved from the wrath of the censors by heading off Alonzo Winslow’s interview left a message that he wanted me back on for the report on the latest turn of events.
I would deal with all such requests the next day, after the story had run exclusively in the Times. I was being loyal to the end, even though I didn’t know why I should be.
The last message was from my long-lost literary agent. I hadn’t heard from him in more than a year, and then it was only to tell me he had been unable to sell my latest book proposal-a year in the life of a cold case detective. His message informed me that he was already fielding offers for a book about the trunk murders case. He asked if the killer had been given a name by the media yet. He said a catchy name would make the book easier to package, market and sell. He wanted me to be thinking about that, he said, and to sit tight while he wheeled and dealed.
My agent was behind the curve, not realizing yet that there were two killers, not one. But the message made any frustration I was feeling about not getting to write the day’s story go away. I was tempted to call the agent back but decided to wait until I heard from him with significant news. I then hatched a scheme in which I would tell him I would only take a deal from a publisher who would promise to publish my first novel as well. If they wanted the nonfiction story badly enough, they would take the deal.
After hanging up the phone, I went to my screen and looked into the city basket to see if Larry Bernard’s stories were on the daily budget. As expected, the top of the budget was weighted with a three-story package on the case.
SERIAL- A man suspected of being a serial killer who took part in the killings of at least seven women, including a Times reporter, died Tuesday night in Mesa, AZ, after a confrontation with another reporter for the newspaper led to his falling thirteen floors down a hotel stairwell shaft. Marc Courier, 26, a Chicago native, was identified as one of two men suspected in a string of sexually motivated abductions and murders of women in at least two states. The other suspect was identified by the FBI as Declan McGinnis, 46, also of Mesa. Agents said McGinnis was the chief executive officer of a data storage facility from which victims were chosen from stored law firm files. Courier worked for McGinnis at Western Data Consultants and had direct access to the files in question. Though Courier claimed to a Times reporter that he had killed McGinnis, the FBI has listed his whereabouts as unknown. 45 inches w/mug shot of Courier. BERNARD
SERIAL SIDE- In a life-or-death struggle, Times reporter Jack McEvoy grappled with the knife-wielding Marc Courier on the top floor of the Mesa Verde Inn before distracting him with the tools of his trade: words. When the suspected serial killer dropped his guard, McEvoy got the upper hand and Courier fell down a stairwell shaft to his death. Authorities say the suspect left behind more questions than answers. 18 inches w/art BERNARD
DATA- They call them bunkers and farms. They sit in pastures and deserts. They are as nondescript as the nameless warehouses that line industrial streets in every city in the country. Data storage centers are billed as economical, dependable and secure. They store vital digital files that remain just a fingertip away no matter where your business is located. But this week’s investigation into how two men used stored files to choose, stalk and prey on women is raising questions about the industry that has seen explosive growth in recent years. Authorities say the bottom-line question is not where or how you should store your digital information. The question is, who is minding it? The Times learns that many storage facilities hire the best and the brightest to safeguard their data. The problem is, sometimes the best and the brightest are former criminals. Suspect Marc Courier is a case in point. 25 inches w/art GOMEZ-GONZMART
They were going all-out again. The story package would lead the paper and be the authoritative report on the case. All other media outlets would have to credit the Times or scramble to match it. It would be a good day for the Times. The editors could already smell a Pulitzer.
I closed the screen and thought about the sidebar story Larry was going to write. He was right. There were more questions than answers.
I opened a new document on the screen and wrote my best recollection of the exact exchange I’d had with Courier. It took me only five minutes because the truth was that not a lot was said.
ME: Where’s McGinnis? Did he send you to do the dirty work? Just like in Nevada?
HIM: No response.
ME: Does he tell you what to do? He’s your mentor on murder and tonight the master won’t be happy with the student. You went oh for two.
HIM: McGinnis is dead, you dumb fuck! I buried him in the desert. Just like I was going to bury your bitch when I was through with her. Me: Why didn’t you just run? Why risk everything to go for her?
HIM: No answer.
When I was finished I read it a couple of times and made a few fixes and additions. Larry was right. It came down to that last question. Courier had been about to respond but I’d used the distraction to catch him off guard. I didn’t regret that. The distraction may have saved my life. But I sure wished I had an answer to the question I had asked.
The next morning the Times basked in the glow of national news exposure and I was along for the ride. I had written none of the stories causing the nationwide media stir but I was the subject of two of them. My phone never stopped buzzing and my e-mail box over-flowed early.
But I didn’t answer my calls or e-mails. I wasn’t basking. I was brooding. I had spent the night with the unanswered question I had posed to Marc Courier, and no matter which way I considered it, things didn’t add up. What was Courier doing there? What was the great reward for such a large risk? Was it Rachel? The abduction and murder of a federal agent would certainly place McGinnis and Courier in the upper pantheon of killers whose deadly lore made them household names. But was that what they wanted? There had been no indication that these two were interested in harnessing public attention. They had carefully planned and camouflaged their murders. The attempt to abduct Rachel did not fit with the history leading up to it. And so there had to be another reason.
I started to look at it from another angle. I thought about what would have happened if I had gone to Los Angeles and Courier had been successful in grabbing Rachel and getting her out of the hotel.
It seemed likely to me that the abduction would have been discovered shortly after it occurred, when the room service waiter did not report back to the kitchen. I estimated that within an hour the hotel would have been a hive of activity. The FBI would have swarmed the hotel and the area, knocked on every door and turned over every rock in an attempt to find and rescue one of their own. But by then Courier would have been long gone.
It was clear the abduction would have drawn the bureau in and caused a massive distraction from its investigation of McGinnis and Courier. But it was also clear that this would be only a temporary shift. My guess was that before noon the next day, agents would be coming in by the planeload in a federal show of might and determination. This would allow them to overcome any distraction and put even more pressure on the investigation, all the while maintaining a suffocating effort to find Rachel.
The more I thought about it, the more I wished I’d given Courier the chance to answer that last question: Why didn’t you run?
I didn’t have the answer and it was too late to get it directly from the source. So I kept working it around in my head until it was all there was to think about.
“Jack?”
I looked over the wall of my cubicle and saw Molly Robards, the secretary to the assistant managing editor.
“Yes?”
“You’re not answering your phone and your e-mail box is full.”
“Yeah, I’m getting too many-is that a problem?”
“Mr. Kramer would like to see you.”
“Oh, okay.”
I didn’t make a move but neither did she. It was clear she had been sent to retrieve me. I finally pushed my chair back and got up.
Kramer was waiting for me with a big, phony smile on his face. I had a feeling that whatever he was about to tell me was not his idea. I took this as a good sign, since his ideas were seldom good ones.
“Jack, sit down.”
I did. He straightened things up on his desk before proceeding.
“Well, I’ve got some good news for you.”
He gave me the smile again. The same one he’d had on when he told me I was out.
“Really?”
“We’ve decided to withdraw your termination plan.”
“What’s that mean? I’m not laid off?”
“Exactly.”
“What about my pay and benefits?”
“Nothing’s changed. Same old same old.”
It was just like Rachel getting her badge back. I felt a trill of excitement but then reality hit home.
“So what’s that mean, you lay somebody else off instead of me?”
Kramer cleared his throat.
“Jack, I’m not going to lie to you. Our objective was to drop one hundred slots in editorial by June first. You were number ninety-nine-it was that close.”
“So I keep my job and somebody else gets the ax.”
“Angela Cook will be the ninety-ninth slot. We won’t be replacing her.”
“That’s convenient. Who is the big one hundred?”
I swiveled in the chair and looked out through the glass at the newsroom.
“Bernard? GoGo? Collins-”
Kramer cut me off.
“Jack, I can’t discuss that with you.”
I turned back to him.
“But somebody else is about to get the hook because I got to stay. What happens after this story winds down? Will you call me back in here and can me all over again?”
“We’re not expecting another involuntary reduction in force. The new owner has made it-”
“What about the next new owner? And the one after that?”
“Look, I didn’t bring you in here so you could preach to me. The news business is undergoing serious changes. It’s a life-and-death struggle. The question is, do you want to keep your job or not? I’m offering it to you.”
I swiveled all the way around so my back was to him and I was looking out at the newsroom. I wouldn’t miss the place. I would only miss some of the people. Without turning back to Kramer I gave him my answer.
“This morning my literary agent in New York woke me up at six. He said he had gotten me an offer for a two-book deal. A quarter million dollars. It would take me almost three years to make that here. And on top of that, I got a job offer from the Velvet Coffin. Don Goodwin is starting an investigations page on his website. To sort of pick up the slack where the Times drops the ball. Doesn’t pay a lot but it pays. And I can work from home-wherever that may be.”
I stood up and turned back to Kramer.
“I told him yes. So thanks for the offer but you can put me down as number one hundred on your thirty list. After tomorrow, I’m gone.”
“You took a job with a competitor?” Kramer said indignantly.
“What did you expect? You laid me off, remember?”
“But I’m rescinding that,” he sputtered. “We already made our quota.”
“Who? Who’d you fire?”
Kramer looked down at his desk and whispered the latest victim’s name.
“Michael Warren.”
I shook my head.
“It figures. The one guy in the newsroom I wouldn’t give the time of day and now I’m saving his job. You can hire’m back, because I don’t want your job anymore.”
“Then I want you to clear your desk out right now. I’ll call security and have you escorted out.”
I smiled down at him as he picked up the phone.
“Fine by me.”
I found an empty cardboard box in the copy shop and ten minutes later was filling it with the things I wanted to keep from my desk. The first to go in was the worn red dictionary my mother had given me. After that, there wasn’t much else worth keeping. A Mont Blanc desk clock which somehow had never been stolen, a red stapler and a few files containing call sheets and source contacts. That was it.
A guy from security watched over me as I packed and I got the feeling it wasn’t the first time he had been placed in such an awkward position. I took mercy on him and didn’t blame him for just doing his job. But having him standing at my desk was like waving a flag. Soon Larry Bernard came over.
“What’s going on? You have till tomorrow.”
“Not anymore. Crammer told me to hit the road.”
“How come? What did you do?”
“He tried to give me my job back but I told him he could keep it.”
“What? You turned-”
“I got a new job, Larry. Two of them, actually.”
My box was as full as it was going to get. It looked pitiful. Not much for seven years on the job. I stood up, slung my backpack over my shoulder and picked up the box, ready to go.
“What about the story?” Larry asked.
“It’s your story. You’ve got a handle on it.”
“Yeah, through you. Who am I going to get to give me the inside stuff?”
“You’re a reporter. You’ll figure it out.”
“Can I call you?”
“No, you can’t call me.”
Larry frowned, but I didn’t let him swing too long.
“But you can take me to lunch on the Times expense account. Then I’ll talk to you.”
“You’re the man.”
“See you around, Larry.”
I headed for the elevator alcove, the security man trailing behind me. I took a wide look around the newsroom but made sure my eyes never caught on anybody else’s. I didn’t want any good-byes. I walked along the row of glass offices and didn’t bother to look in at any of the editors I had worked for. I just wanted to get out of there.
“Jack?”
I stopped and turned around. Dorothy Fowler had stepped out of the glass office I had just passed. She beckoned me back.
“Can you come in for a minute before you go?”
I hesitated and shrugged. Then handed the box to the security man.
“Be right back.”
I stepped into the city editor’s office and slipped off my backpack as I sat down in front of her desk. She had a sly smile on her face. She spoke in a low voice, as if she was worried that what she said might be heard in the next office down.
“I told Richard he was kidding himself. That you wouldn’t take the job back. They think people are like puppets and they can play with the strings.”
“You shouldn’t have been so sure. I almost took it.”
“I doubt that, Jack. Very much.”
I thought that was a compliment. I nodded and looked behind her at the wall covered with photos and cards and newspaper clips. She had a classic headline from one of the New York tabs on the wall: “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” You couldn’t beat that one.
“What will you do now?”
I gave her a more expansive version of what I had told Kramer. I would write a book about my part in the Courier-McGinnis story, then I would get a long-awaited shot at publishing a novel. All the while, I would be on the masthead at velvetcoffin.com and free to tackle the investigative projects of my choosing. It wouldn’t pay much but it would be journalism. I was just making the jump to the digital world.
“That all sounds great,” she said. “We’re really going to miss you around here. You are one of the best.”
I don’t take compliments like that well. I’m cynical and look for the angle. If I was that good, why did I get put on the thirty list in the first place? The answer had to be that I was good but not good enough and she was just blowing smoke. I looked away from her, as I do when someone is lying to my face, and back at the images taped to the wall.
That’s when I saw it. Something that had eluded me before. But not this time. I bent forward so I could see it better and then I stood up and leaned across her desk.
“Jack, what?”
I pointed to the wall.
“Can I see that? The photo from The Wizard of Oz.”
Fowler reached up and pulled it off the wall and handed it to me.
“It’s a joke from a friend,” she said. “I’m from Kansas.”
“I get that,” I said.
I studied the photo, zeroing in on the Scarecrow. The photo was too small for me to be completely sure.
“Can I run a search on your computer real quick?” I asked.
I was coming around her desk before she answered.
“Uh, sure, what is it that-”
“I’m not sure yet.”
She got up and got out of the way. I took her seat, looked at her screen and opened up Google. The machine was running slowly.
“Come on, come on, come on.”
“Jack, what is it?”
“Let me just…”
The search window finally came up and I clicked over to Google Images. I typed Scarecrow into the search block and let it fly.
My screen soon filled with sixteen small images of scarecrows. There were photos of the lovable character from The Wizard of Oz movie and color sketches from Batman comic books of a villain called the Scarecrow. There were several other photos and drawings of scarecrows from books and movies and Halloween costume catalogs. They ranged from the benign and friendly to the horrible and menacing. Some had cheerful eyes and smiles and some had their eyes and mouths stitched closed.
I spent two minutes clicking on each photo and enlarging it. I studied them and, sixteen for sixteen, they all had one thing in common. Each scarecrow’s construction included a burlap bag pulled over the head to form a face. Each bag was cinched around the neck with a cord. Sometimes it was a thick rope and sometimes it was basic household clothesline. But it didn’t matter. The image was consistent and it matched what I had seen in the files I had accumulated as well as the lasting image I had of Angela Cook.
I could see now that in the murders a clear plastic bag had been used to create the face of the scarecrow. No burlap, but this inconsistency with the established imagery didn’t matter. The construction was the same. A bag over the head and a rope around the neck were used to create the same image.
I clicked to the next screen of images. Again the same construction. This time the images were older, going back through a century to the original illustrations in the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And then I saw it. The illustrations were credited to William Wallace Denslow. William Denslow as in Bill Denslow, as in Denslow Data.
I felt no doubt that I had just found the signature. The secret signature that Rachel had told me would be there.
I killed the screen and stood up.
“I have to go.”
I went around her desk and grabbed my backpack off the floor.
“Jack?” Fowler asked.
I headed toward the door.
“It was nice working with you, Dorothy.”
The plane landed hard on the tarmac at Sky Harbor but I barely noticed. I had gotten so used to flying in the last two weeks that I didn’t even bother to look out the window anymore to psychically nurse the plane to a safe touchdown.
I had not called Rachel yet. I wanted to get to Arizona first so that whatever happened with my information included my involvement. Technically, I was no longer a reporter, but I was still protecting my story.
The delay also allowed me to think more about what I had and to work out an approach. After picking up a rental and getting to Mesa, I pulled into the lot of a convenience store and went in to buy a throw-away phone. I knew Rachel was working in the bunker at Western Data. When I called her, I didn’t want her seeing my name on the ID screen and then answering with it in front of Carver.
Finally ready and back in the car, I made the call and she answered after five rings.
“Hello, this is Agent Walling.”
“It’s me. Don’t say my name.”
There was a pause before she continued.
“How can I help you?”
“Are you with Carver?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I’m in Mesa and about ten minutes away. I need to meet you without anybody else in there knowing.”
“I’m sorry, that’s not going to be possible. What is this about?”
At least she was playing along.
“I can’t tell you. I have to show you. Did you eat lunch yet?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, tell them you need a latte or something you can’t get out of one of their machines. Meet me at Hightower Grounds in ten minutes. Take their latte orders if you have to. Sell it and get out of there and meet me. I don’t want to come near Western Data because of the cameras all over that place.”
“And you can’t give me any idea what this is all about?”
“It’s about Carver, so don’t ask questions like that. Just make the excuse and meet me. Don’t tell anyone that I’m here or what you’re really doing.”
She didn’t respond and I grew impatient.
“Rachel, will you be there or not?”
“That will be fine,” she finally said. “I’ll talk to you then.”
She clicked off the call.
In another five minutes I was at Hightower Grounds. The place had obviously been named for the old desert observation tower that rose behind it. It looked like the tower was closed now but it was festooned on top with cell repeaters and antennas.
I went in and found the place almost empty. A couple of customers who looked like college students sat by themselves with laptops open in front of them. I went to the counter and ordered two cups of coffee and then set my computer up on a table in a corner away from the other customers.
After I picked up the two cups I had ordered, I doused mine liberally with sugar and milk and returned to my table. Through the window I checked the parking lot and saw no sign of Rachel. I sat down and took a sip of steaming coffee and connected to the Internet through the coffee shop’s free WiFi.
Fifteen minutes went by. I checked messages and thought about what I would say to Rachel-if she showed up. I got the page of scarecrow images up on my screen and was ready to go. I was down to reading the receipt that had come with the coffee.
Free WiFi with every purchase!
Check us out on the net
www.hightowergrounds.com
I crumpled it and threw it toward a trash can and missed. After getting up and putting in the rebound, I opened my throwaway and was about to call Rachel again, when I finally saw her pull into the lot and park. She came in, saw me and diverted directly to my table. She was holding a piece of paper with coffee orders written down on it.
“The last time I went out for coffee I was a rookie agent at a hostage negotiation in Baltimore,” she said. “I don’t do this, Jack, so this better be good.”
“Don’t worry, it is. I think. Why don’t you just sit down?”
She did and I pushed the cup of black coffee across the table to her. She didn’t touch it. She was wearing sunglasses but I could see the deep line of purple under her left eye. The swelling of her jaw was completely gone now and the split in her lip was hidden beneath her lip gloss. You had to look for it to see it. I had been wondering if it would be proper to lean over and try to hug or kiss her but took the hint from her all-business demeanor and kept my distance.
“Okay, Jack, I’m here. What are you doing here?”
“I think I found the signature. If I’m right, McGinnis was just a cover. A fall guy. The other killer is the Scarecrow. It’s got to be Carver.”
She stared at me for a long moment, her eyes revealing nothing through the shades. Finally, she spoke.
“So you jumped on a plane, frequent flier that you are, to come over here and tell me the man I’m working beside is also the killer I’ve been chasing.”
“That’s right.”
“This better be good, Jack.”
“Who’s back in the bunker with Carver?”
“Two agents from the EER team, Torres and Mowry. But never mind them. Tell me what’s going on.”
I tried to set the stage for what I would show her on the laptop.
“First of all, I was bothered by a question. What was the plan in abducting you?”
“After seeing some of the video recovered in the bunker, I don’t want to think about that.”
“Sorry, wrong choice of words. I don’t mean what was going to happen to you. What I mean is why you. Why take so big a risk to go after you? The easy answer is that it would create a large distraction from the central investigation. And that is true, but at best it would be a temporary diversion. Agents would start pouring into this place by the dozens. Pretty soon you wouldn’t be able to run a stop sign without getting pulled over by the feds. Diversion over.”
Rachel followed the logic and nodded in agreement.
“Okay, but what if there was another reason?” I asked. “You have two killers out there. A mentor and a student. The student tries to abduct you on his own. Why?”
“Because McGinnis was dead,” Rachel said. “There was only the student.”
“Okay, then if that is true, why even make the move? Why go after you? Why not get the hell out of Dodge instead? You see, it isn’t adding up. At least with the way we’ve been looking at it. We think grabbing you was a diversionary move. But it really wasn’t.”
“Then what was it?”
“Well, what if McGinnis wasn’t the mentor? What if he was meant to look like he was? What if he was just a fall guy and abducting you was part of a plan to secure the real mentor? To help him get away.”
“What about the evidence we recovered?”
“You mean him having my book on his bookshelf and the leg braces and porno in the house? Isn’t that kind of convenient?”
“That stuff wasn’t left lying around the house. It was hidden and only found after an hours-long search. But never mind all of that. Yes, it could have been planted. I’m thinking more about the server in Western Data we found that was full of video evidence.”
“First of all, you said he isn’t identifiable on the videos. And who is to say he and Courier were the only ones with access to that server. Couldn’t the evidence on there have been planted just like the stuff at the house?”
She didn’t respond right away and I knew I had her thinking. Maybe she had thought all along that things were hanging too easily on McGinnis. But then she shook her head like this didn’t add up either.
“It still doesn’t make sense if you’re claiming the mentor is Carver. He didn’t try to get away. When Courier was trying to grab me, Carver was in the bunker with Torres and…”
She didn’t finish. I did.
“Mowry. Yes, he was with two FBI agents.”
I watched the realization come to her.
“He would have a perfect alibi because two agents would vouch for him,” she finally said. “If I disappeared while he was with the EER team, he would have an alibi and the bureau would be almost certain that it was McGinnis and Courier who had grabbed me.”
I nodded.
“It would not only put Carver above suspicion, it would keep him right in the middle of your investigation.”
I waited only a second for her to respond. When she didn’t, I pressed on.
“Think about it. How did Courier know what hotel you were in? We told Carver when he asked us during the tour. Remember? Then he told Courier. He sent Courier.”
She shook her head.
“And last night I even said I was going back to the hotel to get room service and to go to sleep.”
I spread my hands as if to say the conclusion was obvious.
“But this isn’t enough, Jack. It doesn’t add up to Carver being-”
“I know. But maybe this does.”
I turned the computer so she could see the screen. I had the page of scarecrow images up on Google. She leaned over and looked at it first, then pulled the computer all the way over to her side of the table. She worked the keyboard and blew the images up, one by one. I didn’t need to say anything.
“Denslow!” she suddenly said. “Did you see this? The original illustrator of Wizard of Oz was named William Denslow.”
“Yeah, I saw that. That’s why I’m here.”
“It still doesn’t connect directly to Carver.”
“It doesn’t matter. There’s a lot of smoke here, Rachel. Carver connects to a lot of it. He had access to McGinnis and Freddy Stone. He had access to the servers. We also know he has the technical skills we’ve seen all through this.”
Rachel was typing on my laptop while she responded.
“There is still no direct connection, Jack. This could just as easily be someone setting up Carver as it is-I just got another hit. I Googled the name Freddy Stone. Take a look at this.”
She turned the laptop around so I could see the screen. On it was a Wikipedia biography of an early twentieth-century actor named Fred Stone. The bio said Stone was best known for first establishing the character of the Scarecrow in the 1902 Broadway version of The Wizard of Oz.
“See, it’s got to be Carver. All the spokes in the wheel come to him in the center. He’s making scarecrows out of the victims. It’s his secret signature.”
Rachel shook her head once.
“Look, we checked him out! He was clean. He’s some sort of genius out of MIT.”
“Clean how? You mean no arrest record? It wouldn’t be the first time one of these guys operated completely beneath law enforcement radar. Ted Bundy worked at some sort of crisis hotline when he wasn’t out killing women. It put him in constant contact with the police. Besides that, the geniuses are the ones you gotta watch out for, you ask me.”
“But I have a vibe for these guys and I didn’t pick up a thing. I had lunch with him today. He took me to McGinnis’s favorite barbecue joint.”
I could see self-doubt in her eyes. She hadn’t seen this coming.
“Let’s go get him,” I said. “We confront him and make him talk. Most of these serials are proud of their work. My bet is he’ll talk.”
She looked up from the screen at me.
“Go get him? Jack, you’re not an agent and you’re not a cop. You’re a reporter.”
“Not anymore. I got walked out by security today with a cardboard box. I’m done as a reporter.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s a long story that I’ll tell you later. What are we going to do about Carver?”
“I don’t know, Jack.”
“Well, you can’t just go back there and bring him his latte.”
I noticed one of the customers sitting a few tables behind Rachel turn from the screen of his laptop and look up toward the open-beamed ceiling and smile. He then raised a fist and offered up his middle finger. I followed his gaze to one of the crossbeams. There was a small black camera mounted on the beam, its lens trained on the sitting area of the coffee shop. The kid turned back and started typing on his computer.
I jumped up, leaving Rachel and moving toward him.
“Hey,” I said, pointing up at the camera. “What is that? Where’s it go?”
The kid crinkled his nose at my stupidity and shrugged.
“It’s a live cam, man. It goes everywhere. I just got a shout from a buddy in Amsterdam who saw me.”
It suddenly dawned on me. The receipt. Free WiFi with every purchase. Check us out on the net. I turned and looked at Rachel. The laptop, with a full-screen photo of a Scarecrow on it, was facing the camera. I turned back and looked up at the lens. Call it a premonition or call it certain knowledge, but I knew I was looking back at Carver.
“Rachel?” I said, not looking away. “Did you tell him where you were going to get coffee?”
“Yes,” she said from behind me. “I said I was just going down the street.”
That confirmed it. I turned and walked back to the table. I picked up the laptop and closed it.
“He’s been watching us,” I said. “We gotta go.”
I headed out of the coffee shop and she came out right behind me.
“I’ll drive,” she said.
Rachel turned her rental car through the main gate and went charging up to the front door of Western Data. She was driving one-handed, working her phone with the other. She threw the car into park and we got out.
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “Neither of them is answering.”
Rachel used a Western Data key card to unlock and enter the front door. The reception desk was empty and we quickly moved to the next door. As we entered the internal hallway, she pulled her gun out of a holster that was on her belt under her jacket.
“I don’t know what’s going on but he’s still here,” she said.
“Carver?” I asked. “How do you know that?”
“I rode with him to lunch. His car is still out there. The silver Lexus.”
We took the stairs down to the octagon room and approached the mantrap leading to the bunker. Rachel hesitated before opening the door.
“What?” I whispered.
“He’ll know we’re coming in. Stay behind me.”
She raised the gun and we squeezed in together, then quickly moved to the second door. When we came through the other side, the control room was empty.
“This isn’t right,” Rachel said. “Where is everybody? And that’s supposed to be open.”
She pointed to the glass door that led to the server room. It was closed. I scanned the control room and saw the door to Carver’s private office was ajar. I moved toward it and pushed it all the way open.
The room was empty. I stepped in and went to Carver’s worktable. I put one finger down on the touch pad and the two screens came alive. On the main screen I was looking at an overhead view of the coffee shop where I had just made a case to Rachel that Carver was the Unsub.
“Rachel?”
She came in and I pointed at the screen.
“He was watching us.”
She hurried back into the control room and I followed her. She moved to the center workstation, put her gun down on the desk and started working the keyboard and touch pad. The two monitors came alive and soon she had pulled up multiplex screens divided into thirty-two interior camera views of the facility. But all of the squares were black. She started flipping through several screens and found the same thing each time. All cameras were dark.
“He’s killed all of the cameras,” Rachel said. “What is-”
“Wait. There!”
I pointed to one camera angle surrounded by several black squares. Rachel manipulated the touch pad and brought the image up to full screen.
The camera view captured a passageway between two rows of server towers in the farm. Lying facedown on the floor were two bodies, their wrists cuffed behind their backs and their ankles bound with cable ties.
Rachel grabbed the stem microphone attached to the desk, depressed the button and almost shrieked into it.
“George! Sarah! Can you hear me?”
At the sound of Rachel’s voice the figures on the screen stirred and the male raised his head. It looked like there was blood on his white shirt.
“Rachel?” he said, his voice sounding weak over an overhead speaker. “I can hear you.”
“Where is he? Where’s Carver, George?”
“I don’t know. He was just here. He just brought us in here.”
“What happened?”
“After you left he went into his office. He was in there for a little bit and when he came out, he got the drop on us. He grabbed my gun out of my briefcase. He herded us in here and put us on the floor. I tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t talk.”
“Sarah, where’s your weapon?”
“He got that, too,” Mowry called out. “I’m sorry, Rachel. We didn’t see it coming.”
“Not your fault. It’s mine. We’re going to get you out of there.”
Rachel released the microphone and quickly came around the workstation, bringing her weapon with her. She went to the biometric reader and put her hand on the scanner.
“He could be in there, waiting,” I warned.
“I know, but what am I going to do, leave them lying in there?”
The device completed the scan and she grabbed the handle to slide the door open. It didn’t move. Her hand scan had been rejected.
Rachel looked back at the scanner.
“That makes no sense. My profile was put in yesterday.”
She put her hand on the scanner and began the procedure again.
“Who put it in?” I asked.
She looked back at me and didn’t need to answer for me to know it had been Carver.
“Who else can open that door?” I asked.
“Nobody who’s on this side. It was me, Mowry and Torres.”
“What about employees here?”
She stepped away from the scanner and tried the door again. It didn’t budge.
“They’re on a skeleton staff upstairs and there’s nobody with authorization for the farm. We’re screwed! We can’t get-”
“Rachel!”
I pointed at the screen. Carver had suddenly stepped into the view of the one working camera in the server room. He stood in front of the two agents on the floor, hands in the pockets of his lab coat, and looking directly up at the camera.
Rachel quickly came around to see the screen.
“What’s he doing?” she asked.
I didn’t need to answer because it became clear that Carver was pulling a box of cigarettes and a throwaway lighter from his pockets. In one of those moments when the mind delivers useless information I realized they were probably the cigarettes missing from Freddy Stone’s/Marc Courier’s box of belongings. As we watched, Carver calmly drew a cigarette from the box and put it in his mouth.
Rachel quickly pulled over the microphone.
“Wesley? What’s going on?”
Carver was raising the lighter to the end of the cigarette but stopped when he heard the question. He looked back up at the camera.
“You can dispense with the niceties, Agent Walling. We’re at the end of the dance now.”
“What are you doing?” she said more forcefully.
“You know what I’m doing,” Carver said. “I’m ending it. I’d rather not spend the rest of my days chased like an animal and then put in a cage. Being put on display, trotted out for interviews with bureau shrinks and profilers hoping to learn all the dark secrets in the universe. I think I would find that to be a fate worse than death, Agent Walling.”
He raised the lighter again.
“Don’t, Wesley! At least let Agents Mowry and Torres go. They did nothing to hurt you.”
“That’s not the point, is it? The world hurt me, Rachel, and that’s enough. I’m sure you’ve studied the psychology before.”
Rachel took her hand off the transmit button and quickly turned to me.
“Get on the computer. Shut down the VESDA system.”
“No, you do it! I don’t know the first thing about-”
“Is Jack there with you?” Carver asked.
I hand-signaled Rachel to trade places with me. I moved to the microphone while she dropped into a seat and went to work on the computer. I depressed the button and spoke to the man who murdered Angela Cook.
“I’m here, Carver. This is not how this should end.”
“No, Jack, it’s the only end. You have slain another giant. You’re the hero of the hour.”
“No, not yet. I want to tell your story… Wesley. Let me explain it to the world.”
On the screen, Carver shook his head.
“Some things can’t be explained. Some stories are too dark to be told.”
He flicked the lighter and the flame came up. He started to light the cigarette.
“Carver, no! Those are innocent people in there!”
Carver inhaled deeply, held it, and then tilted his head back and exhaled a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. I was sure he had positioned himself under one of the infrared smoke detectors.
“No one is innocent, Jack,” he said. “You should know that.”
He drew in more smoke and spoke almost casually, gesturing with the hand holding the cigarette, a small trail of blue smoke following it in the air.
“I know Agent Walling and you are trying to shut down the system but that isn’t going to work. I took the liberty of resetting it. Only I have access now. And the exhaust component that takes the carbon dioxide out of the room one minute after dispersal has been checked off for maintenance. I wanted to make sure there would be no mistakes. And no survivors.”
Carver exhaled, sending another jet of smoke toward the ceiling. I looked over at Rachel. Her fingers were racing across the keyboard but she was shaking her head.
“I can’t do it,” she said. “He changed all the authorization codes. I can’t get into-”
The blast of an alarm horn filled the control room. The system had been tripped. A red band two inches thick crossed every screen in the control room. An electronic voice, female and calm, read the words crossing on the band aloud.
“Attention, the VESDA fire suppression system has been activated. All personnel must exit the server room. The VESDA fire suppression system will engage in one minute.”
Rachel ran both hands through her hair and stared helplessly at the screen in front of her. Carver was blowing another round of smoke toward the ceiling. There was a look of calm resignation on his face.
“Rachel!” Mowry called from behind him. “Get us out of here!”
Carver looked back at his captives and shook his head.
“It’s over,” he said. “This is the end.”
Just then I was jolted by a second blast of the warning horn.
“Attention, the VESDA fire suppression system has been activated. All personnel must exit the server room. The VESDA fire suppression system will engage in forty-five seconds.”
Rachel stood up and grabbed her gun off the desk.
“Get down, Jack!”
“Rachel, no, it’s bulletproof!”
“According to him.”
She took aim with a two-handed grip and fired three quick rounds at the window directly in front of her. The explosions were deafening. But the bullets barely impacted the glass and ricocheted wildly in the control room.
“Rachel, no!”
“Stay down!”
She fired two more bullets into the glass door and got the same negative result. One of the ricocheting slugs took out one of the screens in front of me, the image of Carver disappearing as it went black.
Rachel slowly lowered her gun. As if to accentuate her defeat, the warning horn blasted again.
“Attention, the VESDA fire suppression system has been activated. All personnel must exit the server room. The VESDA fire suppression system will engage in thirty seconds.”
I looked out through the windows into the server room. Black pipes ran along the ceiling in a grid pattern and then down the back wall to the row of red CO2 canisters. The system was about to go. It would extinguish three lives but there was no fire in the server room.
“Rachel, there must be something we can do.”
“What, Jack? I tried. There is nothing left!”
She slammed her gun down on a workstation and slid into the chair. I came over, put my hands on the desktop and leaned over her.
“You have to keep trying! There’s got to be a back door to the system. These guys always put in back-”
I stopped and looked out into the server room as I realized something. And the horn blasted again, but this time I barely heard it.
“Attention, the VESDA fire suppression system has been activated. All personnel must exit the server room. The VESDA fire suppression system will engage in fifteen seconds.”
Carver was nowhere to be seen through the windows. He had chosen an aisle between two rows of towers out of view from the control room. Was this because of the location of the smoke detector or for some other reason?
I looked over at the undamaged screen in front of Rachel. It showed a multiplex cut of thirty-two cameras that had been turned dark by Carver. I hadn’t thought about why until now.
All in a moment the atoms smashed together again. Everything became clearer. Not just what I saw in front of me but what I had seen before-Mizzou out back smoking after I had seen him go into the server room. I had a new idea. The right idea.
“Rachel-”
The horn blast came loud and long this time. Rachel stood up and stared at the glass as the CO2 system engaged. A white gas exploded out of the pipes crossing the ceiling of the server room. Within seconds the windows were fogged and useless. The high-velocity discharge created a high-pitched whistle that came loud and clear through the thick glass.
“Rachel!” I yelled. “Give me your key. I’m going after Carver.”
She turned and looked at me.
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s not killing himself! He’s got that breather and there’s got to be a back door!”
The whistling stopped and we both turned back to the windows. It was a complete white-out in the server room but the CO2 delivery had stopped.
“Give me the key, Rachel.”
She looked at me.
“I should go.”
“No, you need to call for backup and medical emergency. Then work the computer. Find the back door.”
There wasn’t time to think and consider things. People were dying. We both knew it. She pulled the key out of her pocket and gave it to me. I turned to go.
“Wait! Take this.”
I turned back and she handed me her gun. I took it without hesitation, then headed into the mantrap.
Rachel’s gun felt heavier in my hand than I remembered my own gun ever feeling. As I moved through the mantrap, I raised it, checked the action and sighted down its barrel. I was only a once-a-year-at-the-range type of shooter but I knew I would be ready to use the weapon if necessary. I went through the next door and entered the octagon with the muzzle up. There was no one there.
I quickly crossed the room to the door on the opposite side. I knew from the website tour that this led to the large rooms that housed the power and cooling systems for the facility. The workshop where Carver and his techs built the server towers was back here, too. My guess was that there would be a second stairwell also.
I moved into the plant facilities room first. It was a wide space with large equipment. An air-conditioning system the size of a Winnebago sat in the center of the room connected to numerous overhead ducts and cables. Past this were backup systems and generators. I ran to a door on the far left side and used Rachel’s key card to open it.
I stepped into a long and narrow equipment room. There was a second door at the other end and my sense of the building’s plan told me it would lead to the server room.
Moving quickly to it, I saw that there was another biometric hand scanner mounted to the left of the door. Above it was a case holding the emergency breathing devices. It had to be a back door to the server room.
There was no way to tell whether Carver had already made his escape. But I had no time to wait to see if he would come through. I turned and headed back. I quickly moved through the plant facilities room again until I reached a set of double doors on the far side.
Holding the gun up and ready, I opened one of the doors with the key card and stepped into the workshop. This was another large room with tool benches lining the right and left walls and a work space in the center, where one of the black server towers was in midconstruction. The framework and sidings were complete but the interior shelves for servers had not been installed.
Beyond the server tower I saw a circular stairway leading up to the surface. This had to be the way up to the back door and the smokers’ bench.
I quickly moved around the tower and headed for the stairs.
“Hello, Jack.”
Just as I heard my name, I felt the muzzle of the gun on the back of my neck. I hadn’t even seen Carver. He had stepped out from behind the server tower as I had passed.
“A cynical reporter. I should’ve known that you wouldn’t buy my suicide.”
His free hand grabbed hold of my collar from the back and the gun remained pressed against my skin.
“You can drop the gun now.”
I dropped the weapon and it made a loud clatter on the concrete floor.
“I take it that was Agent Walling’s, yes? So why don’t we go back and pay her a visit? And we’ll end this thing right now. Or, who knows, maybe I’ll just end it for you and take her with me. I think I’d like to spend some time with Agent-”
I heard an impact of heavy object on flesh and bone and Carver fell into my back and then dropped to the floor. I turned and there was Rachel, holding an industrial-size wrench she had taken off the workbench.
“Rachel! What are-”
“He left Mowry’s key card on her workstation. I followed you out. Come on. Let’s get him back to the control room.”
“What are you talking about?”
“His hand. He can open the server room.”
We bent down to Carver, who was moaning and moving slowly on the concrete floor. Rachel took her weapon and the one Carver was holding. I saw a second gun in his waistband and grabbed it. I secured it in my own waistband and then helped Rachel drag Carver to his feet.
“The back door is closer,” I said. “And there are breathers there.”
“Lead the way. Hurry!”
We quickly walked, half carried Carver through the facilities room and into the narrow equipment room beyond. The whole way, he moaned and uttered words I couldn’t understand. He was tall but thin and his weight was not overbearing.
“Jack, that was good, figuring out the back door. I just hope we’re not too late.”
I had no idea how much time had passed but was thinking in terms of its being seconds not minutes. I didn’t respond to Rachel but believed we had a good chance to get to her fellow agents in time. When we reached the back door of the server room, I took on Carver’s weight and started to turn him so Rachel would be able to put his hand up on the scanner.
At that moment, I felt Carver’s body stiffen. He was ready for me. He grabbed my hand and pivoted, letting my momentum carry me off balance. My shoulder slammed into the door as Carver dropped one hand and went for the gun in my waistband. I grabbed at his wrist but was too late. His right hand closed around the gun. I was between him and Rachel and I suddenly realized that she couldn’t see the gun and that Carver was going to kill us both.
“Gun!” I yelled.
There was a sudden sharp explosion next to my ear and Carver’s hands fell away from me and he slumped to the floor. A spray of blood hit me as he fell.
I stepped back and doubled over, holding my ear. The ringing was as loud as a passing train. I turned and looked up to see Rachel still holding her gun up in firing position.
“Jack, you okay?”
“Yeah, fine!”
“Quick, grab him! Before we lose the pulse.”
I moved behind Carver so I could get my arms underneath his shoulders and lift him up. Even with Rachel helping, it was a struggle. But we managed to get him upright and then I held him under the arms while she extended his right hand onto the reader.
There was a metal snap as the door’s lock disengaged and Rachel pushed it open.
I dropped Carver on the threshold, keeping the door open to let air in. I opened the case and grabbed the breathers. There were only two.
“Here!”
I gave one to Rachel as we entered the farm. The mist in the server room was dissipating. Visibility was about six feet. Rachel and I put on the breathers and opened the airways, but Rachel kept pulling hers off her mouth in order to call out her fellow agents’ names.
She got no responses. We moved down a central corridor between two lines of servers and were lucky as we came upon Torres and Mowry almost right away. Carver had put them near the back door so he would be able to escape quickly.
Rachel crouched down next to the agents and tried to shake them awake. Neither was responsive. She tore off her breather and put it into Torres’s mouth. I took mine off and put it in Mowry’s.
“You take him, I’ll take her!” she yelled.
We each grabbed one of the agents under the arms and dragged them back toward the door we had entered from. My guy was light and easy to move and I got a good lead on Rachel. But I started running out of steam halfway there. I needed oxygen myself.
The closer we got to the open door, the more air I began to get into my lungs. Finally I reached the door and dragged Torres over Carver’s body and into the equipment room. The bumpy landing seemed to jump-start Torres. He started coughing and coming to even before I put him down.
Rachel came in behind me with Mowry.
“I don’t think she’s breathing!”
Rachel pulled the breather out of Mowry’s mouth and started CPR procedures.
“Jack, how is he?” she asked without taking her focus off of Mowry.
“He’s good. He’s breathing.”
I moved to Rachel’s side as she conducted mouth-to-mouth. I wasn’t sure how I could help but in a few moments Mowry convulsed and started coughing. She turned on her side and brought her legs up into the fetal position.
“Its okay, Sarah,” Rachel said. “You’re all right. You made it. You’re safe.”
She gently patted Mowry’s shoulder and I heard the agent manage to cough out a thank-you and then ask about her partner.
“He’ll be fine,” Rachel said.
I moved to the nearby wall and sat with my back against it. I was spent. My eyes drifted to the body of Carver sprawled on the floor near the door. I could see both entry and exit wounds. The bullet had strafed across his frontal lobes. He had not moved since he had fallen but after a while I thought I could see the slight tic of a pulse on his neck just below the ear.
Exhausted, Rachel moved over and slid down the wall next to me.
“Backup’s coming. I should probably go up and wait for them so I can show them the way down here.”
“Catch your breath first. Are you okay?”
She nodded yes but she was still breathing heavily. So was I. I watched her eyes and saw them focus on Carver.
“It’s too bad, you know?”
“What is?”
“That with both Courier and Carver gone, the secrets died with them. Everybody’s dead and we’ve got nothing, no clue to what made them do what they did.”
I shook my head slowly.
“I got news for you. I think the Scarecrow’s still alive.”