Hellbender (3 page)

“Cash, a bit of jewelry, and my license and passport.
No pills or glasses.”

“Turn off your cell phone. Better yet, take out the battery.”

She took out a pricey-looking slip of plastic, thumbing open the back and dropping the battery and the now-inert machine back into the bag’s pocket.

We went out her back door, around the tiny garden, through the gate, and up the winding stairway leading away from the water, to the place I had left the motorcycle I’d borrowed from an unwitting friend in Berkeley. On two wheels, and later four, I took my client out of the Bay Area, doubling back, going as invisibly as I knew how, spending all my attention on the rearview mirror and giving out just enough information to keep her with me. Finally, late that afternoon we went to ground in a middle-of-the-road motel in Sacramento, registering as a husband and wife, in a room with two beds.

She turned on me the instant the door was shut. “Okay, all day you’ve been putting me off about this because you needed to concentrate on our backs. So are we now, finally, safe enough that you can answer one or two damn questions?”

“Yes,” I said, “but—”

“Oh, Christ!”

“Look, Elizabeth. I’m tired and I’m cranky. Even you look like you could stomp a puppy. You go take a shower, I’ll rustle up some food, we’ll have a drink, and after that we’ll talk as long as you like.”

She wavered, but she was honest enough with herself that the call of the shower overcame her impatience.

I phoned a nearby Chinese place that delivered, and told the guy I’d add a hefty tip if he’d pick up a cold six-pack and something chocolate and girly on his way. The food and drink arrived as my client was finishing her long, steamy shower; I paid him cash, keeping my head a bit down in case someone out there flashed around a picture of my face. When she came out of the bathroom, I went in; as I closed the door, I heard the sound of a beer cap coming off.

I’ll admit it: I spend most of my life pretending I don’t feel the tightness of my skin and the sandpaper dryness of the air, but sometimes I can’t help reveling in the luxury of water. This was one of those.

I was only half dry when I heard her call my name, in a voice that had me out of there with the gun in one hand and the corners of the towel in the other.

She was staring at the television, tuned to the six o’clock news. The young reporter stood in front of a place I did not at first recognize, and only partly because I’d just seen it at night. The main reason was, the house that had been there, wasn’t.

“.
 . . called 911, but by the time the vehicles could get up the narrow hills of this community of artists and bohemians, the house was already engulfed with flames. Neighbor Alison Stanford describes the scene.”

Neighbor Alison Stanford was a petite Japanese woman of about sixty wearing artistic clothing and a thrilled expression. She earnestly described waking to sirens, seeing the leap of flames (she actually used the phrase) from the street, and was now waiting to see if the nice woman who lived there had survived. “I found her cat in my backyard,” said Ms. Stanford. “It took a while before it would let me come near, but I
picked it up and took it inside. I hope the owner’s all right.”

Ms. Stanford seemed more excited at the brush with fame than she was worried at her neighbor’s safety. I stepped back inside the bathroom to exchange the towel for my trousers and add the clean shirt, then came out and took the remote control from my client’s grip, pressing the power button. Silence fell.

Elizabeth drew a shaky breath, then lifted her eyes to mine. “Harry’s dead, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know yet. Finding that out comes second on my list of things to do. First is keeping you alive.”

“But why would anyone want to kill me?”

“Your brother’s place was searched. So was Eileen’s.” I handed her the envelope of printouts. “Harry hid these, really well.”

She pulled the pages out, fourteen printouts and three actual newspaper clippings, all news articles from across the country. It didn’t take long for her to get the gist of them, since all the stories followed the same lines: Someone died, or someone disappeared, or someone disappeared and was later found dead.

Four of the names had been on the list my client had given me in my office, the previous morning.

The stories ranged from two column inches to half the front page of a small-town paper. She read three, then read sections of the next five, and after that she just skimmed them. At the end, she folded them together and looked up at me. She looked lost—and scared. Which was good.

“They’re all
 . . . us, aren’t they?”

“
SalaMen? Hard to be sure, but I’d guess so.”

Only two of the stories said it openly, but three others described the victim as “private” (meaning: nervous about inviting people home) and five of them had quotes about the missing or dead person’s unconventional beauty: that sinuous appeal doing its subliminal work.

“But, so many? How could the police not know?”

That was the real question. The cops, I could understand not catching it, since any database of crimes needs some point of similarity to send up a warning flag, and these were just eight unrelated people, from all over the country,
who’d disappeared. The only thing that linked them was—if Harry and his sister were right—their genetic makeup. And if the feds raised that flag themselves, they were admitting that their hands-off policy toward
the SalaMan community wasn’t quite as complete as they said.

It wouldn’t be the first time a governmental agency had chosen cold-blooded self-protection over humanitarian concerns.
Especially when a lot of the population wouldn’t exactly consider us human.

My client sniffed. I looked over and saw her staring down at her beer bottle, one tear snaking down her cheek. “At least my cat is okay,” she said.

With that, I realized that I was holding the neck of my beer bottle so hard my fingers were going numb. I was mad, madder than I’d been in a lot of years. If the feds could’ve stopped this and didn’t—if the feds sat back while Elizabeth Savoy went onto some Salaphobe’s dirty little list . . .

I put down the bottle and handed my client a box of the takeaway and a pair of chopsticks. “Eat,” I ordered, and sat down to do the same.

When we had both slowed down a little, I said, “Okay. Tell me again how you know the people on Harry’s list.”

“As I said, I only know Eileen and Harry. Two of the others, Imogen and Barbara, I went to college with, although I haven’t seen them for years. And now I think about it, the guy named Hal Andrews? Imogen dated a guy named Hal for a while, and his name night have been Andrews, although I’m not sure. And the guy named Benny? Well, I vaguely remember Harry mentioning someone with that name from when he lived in L.A. The others don’t ring any bells.”

“You kept in touch with people from college, but didn’t see them?”

“Oh, we lost track of each other a long time ago, but then they joined Harry’s group on
WeWeb, and we reconnected.”

“Tell me about Harry’s
WeWeb group. “

“If you’re thinking that some hate group is targeting us through that, I don’t think so. Harry was—is—very careful. Anyone who applies for membership has to wait until they have a face-to-face meeting. He has to be sure. No, it would be really tough to crash that party.”

I pinched up a few more bites of cold kung pao beef, reflecting that, no, crashing a party wasn’t precisely what I had in mind.

I could feel in my pocket the two printouts I’d removed from Harry’s envelope before handing it to his sister.

They were both page captures from the social networking site WeWeb. One of those belonged to Eileen Jacobs and followed a discussion about a movie she’d been working on, doing set design. The other belonged to a guy named Bill Mayer, who posted mostly about a kids’ baseball team that I guessed he coached.

But the reason I’d taken them out of the envelope before handing it to my client, and the reason I thought they were in Harry’s secret collection to begin with, was not the brief chats the two
WeWeb members had posted. It was the advertisements in the two sidebars. The first one, from Bill Mayer’s page dated the previous fall, read:

SALAMAN?
$500 AN HOUR FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION IN A STUDY.

EASY, QUICK, UNOBTRUSIVE, PRIVATE, YOU CAN HELP OTHERS

AND EARN HARD CASH FAST.

The ad ended with a linked contact address. The second page, taken from Eileen’s page two months ago, had the same wording except for one thing.

The payment offered had gone up tenfold, to $5,000.

I fed my client another beer, then
the chocolate. Before long her eyelids drooped into the relief of sleep. I pulled the covers over her, dropped the empty boxes into the wastebasket, and stretched out on the adjacent bed.

“Thank you, Mike,” she said, her voice drowsy.

“Sure, honey. Hey, tell me something?”

“Hmm?”

“How’d you find me? When you came to my office?”

“Saw you in a bar, about six months ago. Someone I was with pointed you out, said you were a private investigator. One look, and I knew.”

“Took you all that time to come up with an excuse to hire me, huh?”

“Hmm,” she mumbled, and a minute later she was snoring into her pillow.

The kiss she’d given me had nothing to do with romance. I knew that. Still, I couldn’t help the memory of it on my mouth as I lay there, staring up at the ceiling, six chaste feet away from her.

The next day, my first order of business was to stash my client someplace safe. It took me twenty minutes driving in circles before I found that endangered species, a
pay phone, but once I’d made a call, it was only a matter of a few hours before one of the two guys I’d trust with my life showed up and took her away. She didn’t want to go, but in the end, she did.

Step two, a public computer.

I’m a big fan of libraries: information, comfort, and safety, all in one place. And over the years, library associations have fought hard for privacy rights, which makes them more secure from snoops than any cyber café. This library even had a coffee bar attached to it, which was good because what I was doing wasn’t going to be quick.

But before the place shut down that night, a targeted ad had popped up on the side of the shiny new
WeWeb page for my made-up SalaMan, Julio Rogers. Julio was new to WeWeb for undisclosed but hinted-at reasons (“I been away, if you know what I mean . . .”) and had lousy writing skills, some ill-disguised anger, and a considerable interest in SalaMan rights.

The targeting algorithm had caught Julio’s
SalaMan references and sent him an offer for QUICK, UNOBTRUSIVE, PRIVATE cash.

Julio’s offer had gone up to $7,500. Which could mean they had come into serious
funding, or that they were getting desperate. Either way was fine with me. It was fine, too, with Julio, who shot off an e-mail to the address.

I slept in a different motel that night, and had a dream about blue eyes.

The next morning I went to another library, logged on to Julio’s page, and sat back with a smile on my face.

Thank you for your interest in
SalaMan Research Enterprises (SRE). If you hold SalaMan heritage, welcome! Our researchers are affiliated with the University of California, Stanford, Yale, and other medical schools, and are thoroughly trained in the protection of privacy rights. Our project is aimed at helping the particular health needs of the SalaMan community, and in the preliminary stages requires only a fifteen-minute questionnaire and a simple blood test. If you are interested in hearing about our work and how you can help us, we have public meetings across the country, for which you will be paid to attend, without making a commitment to participate further.

(PLEASE NOTE: Applicants’ DNA will be tested immediately on arrival, before any payment is made. False applicants will be reported to
WeWeb.)

The form e-
ail was signed by a man with a lot of letters sprinkled after his name, and the list of public meetings included—surprise, surprise—one at two o’clock Saturday afternoon, the day after tomorrow, at a big conference hotel less than thirty miles from the library Julio had been working at.

Julio sent his acceptance of the offer, then logged off and left that library in a hurry, never to return.

I spent the rest of that day and most of Friday moving from one library to another, putting on a lot of miles between each one, as I tried to duplicate Harry’s research about the people whose names ended up in his envelope.

Saturday afternoon I was at the conference hotel, looking forward to that SRE information meeting, wondering whether they intended to pull a gun first, or just go with the tranquilizers.

I hadn’t been able to get a camera inside the meeting room itself, but the one I’d tucked behind the hallway flower arrangement worked fine. At half past one on Saturday, three men came down the hallway, their faces nice and clear in the camera, their heights marked by a tick I’d put in a picture frame on the wall. Two of them were clearly muscle, one a boss type. One of the big guys carried a notice board with a tripod, which he set up facing the other way, although I’d seen when he was moving around that it was the sort of corporate intro you’d expect to see when you came toward a public meeting room. The other big guy was carrying a carton, no doubt filled with the kind of meaningless forms and equipment that would reassure a sucker and get him inside the doors.