And he came apart. He pressed his fists against his eyes to keep the sadness from spilling out, but it wouldn’t be stopped. It gushed out of him in breathless, choking sobs, and suddenly, in his mind, he wasn’t in Arkansas anymore. He was with his little boy, holding him steady as he pedaled his bicycle for the first time. Then he saw the pained expression that invaded Travis’s face every time they told him that it was time to move to another town. The tenements they’d lived in, the roach-infested trailer parks. The bruises when Travis yet again refused to back down from the local kids who wanted to see what the new guy was made of.
God, Jake had tried so hard to be a good father, but in his zeal to keep his son in line, he’d never truly gotten to know the boy as a friend. The thought of it brought genuine pain. Suddenly, it was hard for him to take a breath.
And in his most heroic moment—when he was hoping to save our lives—all I could do was yell. And strip him of his dignity.
Jake wanted his family back. He wanted a group hug from the old days—a sandwich hug, where he and Carolyn were the bread and Travis was the jelly. The thought of never touching them again was more than he could bear. His mind played out a horror show, in which his only child lay trapped forever inside an airtight box, covered over by a ton of dirt, while his mother prayed for the moment when she could join him, every day suffering the torture of prison rapes and beatings.
Such a pillar of virtue, that Jake Donovan. Always willing to let women and children suffer in his place. There were words for people like him in our society: coward—the most exclusive group of villains; people who throughout history have willingly stepped aside to let others die in their place. Deserters and draft-dodgers came to mind. Or ship’s captains who take the last lifeboat while their passengers drown.
Like falling down a well, Jake found himself tumbling deeper and deeper into the blackest misery he’d ever known. And the well of misery had no bottom; just more blackness. Everything he’d ever loved was gone now, and it was all his fault. How could a man live with knowledge such as this? Knowing that he’d killed his own blood, how could he ever face a mirror again? How could he face another dawn?
“Jake!”
The harshness of the voice startled him. It was Nick, and he seemed agitated. “What?”
“Are you coming or not?”
Jake felt disoriented, mentally numbed; as if a chunk of time had passed without his notice. He checked his watch and was shocked to see that a full half hour of his life had somehow evaporated.
“Coming where?” As he spoke, his throat felt thick.
“To the kitchen,” Nick said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. His face turned grave. “Are you okay?”
Jake stood uneasily, unsure whether to trust his balance. “Yeah, I’m okay. Just zoned out.” A few seconds passed, and then his head cleared. He followed Nick into the foyer, then stopped. “What’s in the kitchen?”
Nick clearly felt uneasy. “I wanted to take a look at these remains before we ship them off to Chicago. The best place I can think of to do it is in the kitchen.” He responded to Jake’s curious glare with an offhanded shrug. “Don’t worry about it. Just something I noticed in the magazine. Probably nothing, but I thought we should check it out.”
“What is it?” Jake pressed as he followed down the hall.
Nick remained evasive. “I’ll tell you after we take a look. Like I said, probably nothing at all.”
Body language alone told Jake that it was useless to press further.
The kitchen was huge; like something that belonged in the back of an elegant downtown restaurant. Stainless-steel appliances shined like mirrors. Copper pots and pans hung from the ceiling, suspended in midair, it seemed, over a gleaming six-burner stove. The black and white tile floor was so clean that Jake found himself stepping carefully, lest he find that it was still wet.
The orange body bag lay in a heap in the right-hand rear corner, placed there with all the care and respect that one would show to a throw pillow.
“What
is
this place?” Jake asked to whoever would care to answer.
“This house belongs to a physician friend of Mr. Sinclair’s,” Thorne explained. “He offered to let us use it for a while.”
“Where is he?”
Nick smiled knowingly at the question. Apparently, this ground had been covered once before.
“Away,” Thorne said. He spoke with an annoying, sanctimonious grin, as if responding to a joke that he alone had heard. Every move the man made seemed designed to keep people on edge. This was a man to be feared.
“What about contamination?” Jake asked.
Nick shook off the concern easily. “Don’t worry. We’ve got some Saranex suits and some respirators. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Not us,” Jake corrected. “The room. This is somebody’s kitchen, for crying out loud.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Thorne advised. “You need the room, you use the room. Our host won’t mind.”
Jake shared a look with Nick, but neither of them said anything.
“The stuff you said you needed is in the boxes over there.” Thorne pointed. “Do you need me for any of this crap, or can I go sit down?”
As Thorne departed, Nick knelt to open the boxes. “Looks like it’s all here.” He lifted two sets of white, hooded coveralls out of the largest box and handed one of them to Jake, leaving ten in the box. “God, there’s enough stuff here for an army.”
“Easier to borrow by the box, I suppose,” Jake mused. He rubbed the fabric of the coveralls between his fingers and shot a curious look. “What is this stuff?”
“Saranex,” Nick said. “See what happens when you drop out of the industry for a while? It’s basically a Tyvek garment with a Saran Wrap coating. Terrific stuff for low-level dust hazards.”
Jake examined it more closely. “Feels kinda like Pampers,” he said, drawing a chuckle. He flapped the garment with a loud snap, then thrust one leg into his coveralls. He had to push hard against the stiff folds. Suddenly, he stopped, realizing he’d forgotten something. “Thorne!”
It took a while, but in his own sweet time, Thorne reappeared at the kitchen door.
“See what you can find out about Carolyn and Travis, okay?”
The big man cocked his head and planted his fists on his hips. “And how do you want me to do that? Maybe I should just call the FBI and ask.” Shaking his head with disgust, he turned and disappeared again toward the front of the house.
“Prick,” Jake spat under his breath.
“He’s all personality, that one,” Nick concurred.
Dressing for this level of protection was a far less complex task—more like dressing for surgery, but with a full-face respirator instead of a surgical mask. The respirator resembled a pilot’s oxygen mask, with the addition of a clear Lexan facepiece, which formed an airtight seal around the entire face, from eyebrows to chin. In place of an artificial air supply, the respirators used two disc-shaped high-efficiency filters to knock any particulates out of the air before they could reach the user’s nose or mouth.
With the coveralls on, and their respirators in place, Jake and Nick lifted the hoods to cover their hair and donned two sets of gloves—latex under heavier rubber—and approached the butcher-block table. The bitter sacrilege of examining a child’s body on a surface designed for cooking was lost on neither man.
The orange body bag lay in a heap under a bank of fluorescent lights, not nearly as bright as Nick might have liked, but certainly adequate to the task at hand. It took a half minute or so to straighten the bag out enough to access the zipper. Like peeling a banana, the orange layer opened to reveal the green bag, which Jake lifted just enough to allow Nick to pull the outer shroud away and lay it on the tile floor.
“So tell me,” Jake said, his voice muffled by his respirator. “What’s the big mystery?”
“We’ll see in a minute,” Nick said.
Jake noted the lack of eye contact. “What is it?”
Nick ignored him as he fumbled with yet another rumpled bag in search of the zipper. Finally, he got it open. In the glare of the overhead light, they saw for the first time just how fine a dust they’d been exposed to: the consistency of talcum powder. Jake examined the fine coating on his gloved fingers and fought away a wave of despair. The body’s natural filters were useless against so fine a particle size. Whatever Travis had breathed was free to travel into the deepest recesses of the boy’s lungs; free to do its maximum damage. He closed his eyes and took a deep, purified breath.
Calm down,
he told himself, fighting to find a ray of hope.
You’re not a doctor. Quit trying to practice medicine. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.
The bones were all jumbled together in a heap in the bottom corner of the body bag. Nick reached in, up to his elbow, and pulled them out where he could see them. One at a time, he’d lift a piece to the light, turn it over in his gloved hands, then reach in for another one.
“What do you see?” Jake asked. It had been far too long since he’d taken anatomy and physiology.
Nick’s eyes never lifted from his work. “Everything’s pretty badly degraded from the heat of the fire,” he said. “This one appears to be part of a vertebral column. See the ridge here?” He traced it with his finger.
Jake saw it. “Okay, so what do we know?”
Again, Nick ignored his question as he reached in for another piece. “Okay,” he said. “This is the one I was looking for.” He turned it over in his fingers—sort of a long
V
with some unusual ridges along its edge. Nick’s shoulders sagged visibly as he dropped his hands to the table. When he looked up at Jake, his eyes had darkened, and even through the Lexan, Jake could see the creases in his brow.
“What is it?” Jake demanded, his heart suddenly racing. “What?”
Nick lifted the bone back into the light. “It’s a jawbone,” he said, his voice barely audible through the respirator.
Jake took the bone from him and held it up to his own face. “A jawbone! It doesn’t look like . . .” Then he saw it. He dropped the relic back into the bag and grabbed the side of the table for support.
“It’s a dog, Jake,” Nick said. “Or maybe a wolf or a fox. But it’s not human.”
Jake bit his lip and closed his eyes against the conclusion that tried to force its way through his brain. “A dog? Who’d do all of this just to cover the death of a dog?”
Nick looked away.
“Bullshit!” Jake shouted. “No! We missed it, then!”
“Jake . . .” Nick moved to join his friend on the other side of the table. “Listen . . .”
“We missed it. It’s got to be there!”
“But it’s not.” He put his hand on Jake’s shoulder.
Jake slapped it away. “Oh, God,” he wailed. A sound arose from his throat that was unlike anything Nick had heard from a human being: grief, unleashed in its rawest, most bitter form, rising as an agonized scream and reverberating off the tile walls, despite the muffling effects of his facepiece.
Jake pushed himself away from the table and stumbled toward the door. Suddenly, the huge kitchen seemed impossibly small. He needed to get out. Now.
He kicked open the door, bouncing a polished brass hurricane lamp off the wall and down onto the floor with a crash. Shards of glass skittered in every direction across the inlaid wood of the hallway. This couldn’t be happening. They’d missed something. They’d had to. This was it. This was the whole plan. That skeleton was the key piece of evidence that would lead to their acquittal; that would give them their lives back!
Now, he realized, he had nothing. He ripped the respirator off his head and heaved it across the room, where it pulverized a vase that had once been supported on an intricately carved ebony plant stand.
“Fuck!”
Nick moved in behind him. “Jake, take it easy . . .”
Jake whirled on him, his eyes wild. “Fuck you, Nick! Fuck ‘take it easy’!” He ripped at his gloves and threw them one at a time against the wall. “Oh, God, no!” His grief lit a fire in his brain, and he pressed his hands against the top of his head as he sat heavily on the floor. “Oh, God, oh, God, no.”
Thorne’s big, chrome-plated .45 was drawn and ready to shoot as he charged into the hallway. “What the hell is going on!”
Nick took off his respirator and nodded toward Jake. “It’s like I feared,” he said softly. “The bones weren’t human.”
Jake’s face was a mask of anguish as he looked up to face the other men. “I killed my son,” he gasped, “and I sent my wife away to prison for the rest of her life.” He took a deep, labored breath before he could finish the thought. “For a dog.”
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-EIGHT
Travis had had some wild dreams before, but nothing like this. It was all about pain. He was floating somewhere, he thought, but every time he tried to move, he couldn’t. The more he tried, the more it hurt.
People were here in the darkness with him. They talked a lot, but they didn’t make any sense. Lots of voices, but no one had a face. They talked in jibberish; about things he’d never even heard of. That was okay, he supposed, but why did it have to hurt so much?
His dick hurt. Somewhere, in the wildest parts of this dream, he remembered one of the faceless people jamming something into him down there. Something
big.
Not right, he thought, but then lost the thread of why he should object.
Drifting . . . He felt himself spreading out, traveling somehow. Over there—what was that?
Someone had set his lungs on fire. The fire got bigger every time he took a breath. Just like blowing on hot coals. Take another breath, burn another hole in your lung. That didn’t make any sense at all.
Not when he could just stop breathing.
No more breaths for Travis, then. When they stopped, the pain would stop, too.
But he breathed again, anyway. He told himself to stop, but his lungs wouldn’t listen. They just sucked in another finger of fire; another dose of airborne razor blades.
The image of a snake filled his mind. He hated snakes. This one was big, too. It had slithered all the way up his body and down his throat, doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on him, forcing him to breathe when he didn’t want to. Hissing and biting his lungs with every breath.
I’m sorry,
he said silently to the snake.
I’m sorry for whatever I did. Just stop hurting me, and I’ll be good.
The snake bit him again, a big chunk this time, and the pain brought tears to his eyes. Maybe he should just give up. But he didn’t know how.
Jake felt drugged, like he was living someone else’s life. The others had escorted him back to the parlor and deposited him in a chair, but he was only distantly aware of his surroundings. There’d always been hope before. There’d always been that glimmer of a plan—the one they could pursue when everything else had collapsed around them. They’d always had each other.
Family first . . .
Now it all seemed a horrible mockery. They’d never been in control at all. Whoever had put all of this together had built an airtight box around them, ruined them. Killed his son. Now there was only emptiness. Now there was only guilt.
And no one else seemed to see the helplessness of it all. Nick kept asking him what they were going to do next, treating him like he was still the leader of this operation. Didn’t he understand that without Carolyn and Travis behind him, leadership meant nothing? Nick couldn’t seem to grasp the obvious fact that there was no
next.
This had been
it,
all along. This was as far as the plan was ever designed to take them. He realized now just how ridiculous the gamble had been. He’d bet everything—
everything—
on a single roll of the dice, and he’d lost.
He felt the panic building again within his gut, but this time he didn’t think he’d be able to stop it.
“Jake, snap out of it!” Nick yelled. His frustration raised his voice an octave. “You’ve got your whole lifetime to feel sorry for yourself. Right now we’ve got some planning to do!”
“He’s useless,” Thorne said from his perch in the doorway. “He can’t handle all this.”
“Oh, yeah?” Nick growled. “Well, he’d
better
handle it.” He put his hand on the top of Jake’s head and rotated his face up high enough to make eye contact. “You’re pissing me off, Jake! No one disputes that you’ve had a horrible goddamn day, but you’re not the only one waist-deep in a shit bog here. We got caught, pal. All of us. There were witnesses. I might have gotten into this for different reasons than you, but—”
Jake twitched suddenly, as if something had startled him, and his eyes cleared. He clutched Nick’s hand.
“What is it?” Nick asked, pulling away a little.
Jake was still struggling to connect the dots. “You’re right,” he said haltingly. “We . . . we got caught.
How
did we get caught?”
Nick scowled and cocked his head. “
How?
The cops found us. I guess when we snipped the fence, we made a bell ring somewhere.”
Jake waved him off. “No,” he said. That explanation wouldn’t work. “You said that the response would come from a rent-a-cop. But this was a real cop.”
“It’s not like you haven’t been in the news, ace,” Thorne scoffed. “So they increased their security. They were probably expecting you.”
They didn’t see it yet. “Exactly, Thorne. They were
expecting
us. But why? Why on God’s green earth would they ever expect us to go back there? If they really think that we blew the place up back in ’83, that’d be the last place they’d expect us to go. I mean, what would be our rationale? Christ, if I had a brain in my head, I’d be in Arizona by now!”
“I’m not getting your point,” Nick said. His expression, however, showed curiosity.
“Somebody was
expecting
us to go back there,” Jake repeated, frustrated by his inability to make them understand. “They were
waiting
for us to go back. Something we’d never do if we were guilty.”
Nick frowned. “But even if someone knew you were innocent, why would they assume your play would be to go back there—especially after all this time? Remember, the hide-a-corpse theory was all in our minds.”
“Maybe they
didn’t
see the Newark move at first,” Thorne said, thinking. “But if there was a trip wire—I mean, if they were concerned you
might
go back, maybe they took precautions.”
Jake wrestled with the trip-wire idea. “You think maybe the guy who framed us is someone local? Someone who has plenty of eyes and ears around Newark and got wind of our entering town?”
Thorne was indignant. “No way. It was a clean insertion.”
Nick was lost in thought.
A trip wire has to be tripped.
Was there something there? “Maybe,” he said at last, “we left an electronic trail of some sort.”
Jake considered it for a moment, then dismissed it. “How, though? It’s not like we bought plane tickets to get here or used a credit card for lunch.”
Nick played a word association game in his head, trying to connect “electronic” with the events of the past two days. Just recently, he’d had to search his memory for a password . . . Now, what was that for?
He remembered. “Oh, shit! The computer file!” Nick smacked his forehead with his palm. “I had to log on to the computer back in Washington to get the records on the Newark site. When I accessed it, I rang a bell. Someone heard it. Given the timing of it all, they must have figured we were coming back. Dammit!” He stomped the floor.
“That’s it,” Jake said.
Nick hung his head low and rubbed the back of his neck. “Oh, God, Jake, I’m sorry. I should have—”
Jake waved the apology off as ridiculous. “How could you have known? Who would ever suspect . . .” He stopped in midthought. His eyes grew wide as an even larger idea formed.
Is it even possible?
“Holy shit, that’s it!” he exclaimed.
“What?” Nick and Thorne said the word together.
Jake thought his heart was going to explode, and he held his hands out in front, palms forward, to calm himself down. Completely gone was the self-pity of minutes before. In its place, rising excitement. “Okay,” he said, setting himself to begin. He might as well have said,
On your mark . . .
“Let’s go back to the basic premise. Whether they were watching the roads, or they were watching a computer file, the key here is that they were watching, right? I mean they had to guard against the possibility, however remote, that we might go back to Newark—to do something that would never make a bit of sense unless we were innocent and they were trying to hide something, right?”
“Who’s the guilty ‘they’?” Thorne interrupted.
Jake shook him off. “I’m getting to that. So, whoever this person is, they have the power to tap into the EPA computer files, right? They knew that if anyone ever wanted to reenter the magazine, they’d have to tap into the file first.”
Nick shrugged, growing weary of the explanation and wanting to turn right to the end. “Right. Okay. So you’re saying it’s EPA? Somebody in my agency wants to keep you away from Newark? What the hell for?”
Jake shook him off, too. “No, you’ve got to think back further than that. When did the EPA get involved in the Newark site? Nineteen eighty-three maybe? Eighty-two at the earliest?”
Nick bobbed his head. “Okay, somewhere in there. What’s your point?”
“From that point on, B-2740 was locked up tight as a drum, right? Sure it was. I was there when we took the lock off a year later. No one could get in.”
“I think that’s right,” Nick agreed. It was tough to be definitive after so many years.
Jake paused while he mentally took the next step. “So the bad guys must have gotten caught with their pants down when the EPA threw a lock on the place. Whatever they needed to hide was locked
inside
the magazine. They had to sit on their thumbs for two years while everything was debated and paid for. First chance they got to go inside was when we opened the door for them.”
Nods all around. The logic made sense.
“So EPA is out.”
“Okay, hotshot,” Thorne prodded, his patience gone. “Then tell us who.”
Jake looked at Nick like he should already have made the connection. “Who can put a trigger on another agency’s computer files, Nick?”
“The FBI,” Nick joked, but when Jake didn’t laugh, Nick’s smile went away. “Come on, Jake, the FBI? You’re crazy!”
“Think about it,” Jake insisted. “It could probably be any federal agency—CIA, Secret Service, even IRS—but who has consummate ability to perpetrate a frame like this? Who can make a person look as guilty as they want to make them look? I mean, Jesus Christ, Nick, a note at the murder scene? Who the hell would leave a note? And who has the authority to decide that such a preposterous thing isn’t preposterous at all?”
Nick found himself nodding absently, beginning to buy into the concept. “And who was pushing for us to shut the scene down so early?”
Jake sighed as all the pieces began to fit into place.
Nick sat down heavily. “Oh, shit, this is huge. We’re screwed.”
The words made Jake recoil. “How are we screwed? We just figured it out!”
“You haven’t figured shit,” Thorne scoffed. “You can imagine any theory you want. Hell, aliens did it! Until you can figure out why—and prove it—Nick’s right. You’re screwed.”
“It’s the FBI,” Jake insisted again. “More specifically, it’s Peter Frankel.”
Jake’s conclusion, materializing out of nowhere, seemed to suck all the sound out of the room. Then, together, Thorne and Nick erupted with laughter.
“Well, now,
there’s
some fine detective work,” Nick mocked. “Peter Frankel in the library with the candlestick, right?” He laughed again.
Jake ignored the barbs. “He was in charge of the investigation back in ’83, remember?”
“Of course I remember. But Jesus, Jake, there were lots—”
“And he was the one pressing to shut down the original investigation, right, Nick? At least that’s what you told me. Every time you mentioned continuing, he just shouted you down.”
Nick didn’t want to see it. “I could have pressed harder—”
“No!” Jake shouted. “Open your eyes! He’s the only investigator with the seniority to pull it off. He stopped the investigation as soon as he had the answers he wanted, and he was sure to get those answers because he planted the evidence himself. Who’s to know? Since then, he’s had all the time in the world to build his case. He’s smart enough to know the value of those computer files if we ever decided to go back, and he’s certainly well connected enough to put a tag on them that would ring a bell, as you say, if anyone accessed them. Now he’s on the news again, every day, preening for the cameras and telling the world just how guilty we are. It’s got to be him. He’s the common denominator.” The silence from the others told him he was close to making a sale here. “Frankel’s the only one with the power and authority to make it all work.”
Nick turned to Thorne for some help. “Come on, Thorne, tell him he’s full of shit.”
But that wasn’t what the other man’s expression said at all. “You know,” he mused, “I’ve actually run into this Frankel before. The prick’s run a couple of witch-hunts against a good friend of Mr. Sinclair’s. A senator, in fact. Frankel plays rough. And he sure as hell doesn’t mind breaking the law if it suits his purpose.”